#wrote a lot less than last year but i was like Unemployed

[malinaa]

this is the percentage of how much i've written this year for each fandom btw <3 there is smth wrong w my brain genuinely

[duckiemimi]

Mimi how did you get the idea for Honesty Corner? What made you write it was it inspired by something?

omg!! i’ve been meaning to talk about this, so thank u so much for asking!!!

i wrote “honesty corner” as a classic, cheesy rom-comish type of story and initially, i didn’t intend for it to be serious. i was actually very surprised when people actually started reading it bc it was only my second published fic and i was pretty new to posting on ao3. (i was a lil embarrassed too,,,,i wasn’t very confident with my writing at the time.) it started out stream of consciousness (under sleep-med high; i wasn’t doing well when i first started writing it), so my first drafts were horrendous. then i went back and edited a couple times before and after posting each chapter, but i still think i can do better, so i’m gradually rewriting it—no plot changes, just a change in writing style! i love this au so much that i’m dedicating time to making it better!

i actually had the concept down a year before writing. i wasn’t doing the best then, so visualizing the story from start to finish was my way of escapism. at the time, i was reading a lot of college-setting bl manhwas and manhuas, too, like “semantic error” and “here u are,” and i had just graduated college and was unemployed during covid (womp womp). i also failed my professional ethics class at one point, soooo,,,(in my defense, attendance is a stupid formality, like i’m paying for these classes,,,i had to pay again to retake it as the only class in my last semester, fuck capitalism, fuck the system) and i loveee a good college au, so i said, “why not!”

as with any other happy jjk fic, it was written to be a fix-it au where everyone ends up less traumatized than they did in canon :’) if u can’t tell, i’m very, very, veryyy into characterization and character studies, so it started out with me playing with the idea of no-curse au geto and gojo as college students, and i worked my way up from there. i had them meet in a professional ethics class (bc the letter E in my semester grades fucking stung, u know what that shit does to a gpa???) and bc it was inline with their conversation about power and ethics in hidden inventory, so very fun times, very fun times

all of the characterizations in “honesty corner” is my take on their canon ones but in a non-jujutsu setting. their main conflict, as is with canon, is their (annoying) communication skills. i didn’t make toji be the reason of their fight (bc he deserves to be happy here, too), but i made it mahito bc he’s the embodiment of hatred and all things negative in the series, and i thought it worked with geto’s thought process throughout the story. i also had fun humanizing mahito, bc ppl like him exist irl and they’re just as human, even if they’re assholes. (i had a one-shot of “honesty corner” mahito in my drafts, but i’ll have to clean it up first if i ever post it.)

it was fun writing sjw-keyboard-warrior geto (who almost gets it right, but his judgmental tendencies and his “i’m the most correct” mindset keep him from really looking at things the way they are) and nepo baby gojo (who doesn’t give a fuck about any of the -isms, but never acknowledges the absolute privilege he was born into bc he’s so out of touch) and it was fun exploring how they become better people and a better couple in the “honesty corner” sequels. icb they’re almost getting married! if i ever get the last chapter of “and then, home” done, then u’ll see them be married, heh

(i’m kidding it’s in my drafts dw)

but yeah!!

tl:dr

i had too much time on my hands and i love a good college au.

(funfact: i wrote “punishment for a monster” in the middle of writing “honesty corner” and it felt like a plunge into deep, dark waters.)

[quill-of-thoth]

The Years When I Wrote Stuff

So it’s the wake of the year 2022 and as of two months from now it will be two years since I spent a significant amount of time writing anything. I watched The Glass Onion last night and I want to write a mystery so badly that my stomach hurts, but also I want to go home and time travel is not an option. Feel free to skip the introspection but I miss Livejournal, and I thought other people also waiting for a dead year to be buried who have also tried to make stuff during the last eternity might find this a little cathartic.

I spent my morning rereading some stuff I previously wrote, back in college, approximately a decade ago, and it’s... good? In ways that I didn’t expect, given a whole host of personal factors like ten years experience, the fact that some of what I wrote then was fanfic for a very small and insular writing and reading community and not actually fanfic of a property that exists*, and that what I remember as communitywide engagement is an average of five unique commenters per chapter. (*People who never lived on Live Journal: there were several of these sorts of emergent meta fandoms, long before Goncharov. I was in a handful of them. One of them was the Sims 2 legacy challenge community, where there is no canon, everyone is trying to win points on a spreadsheet while playing a completely different game, and people just straight up borrowed each other’s characters to write combination screenshot and text stories about. It was considered flattery to do it if you could write your way out of a paper bag. Or if your forum threads / livejournal entries got enough engagement to be equal to or more ‘popular’ than the original author. Other metafandoms involved sporking [critical reading of another work with jokes worked in], and meta-fanfic like protectors of the plot continuum.) So, what did I have in twenty mumbleteen that let me write, and do it pretty well for my level of skill at the time? 

I was not less depressed: the year that I wrote 48k of cathartic mystery investigation that I still like was not a good one, personally, and the year before it was definitely top three worst. I also wasn’t just astronomically talented at the time: I was concurrently writing a non-fanfic attempt at a novel that has fully earned its position in the mental compost bin. (The physical location is somewhere in a folder within a folder on a thumb drive, probably labeled “junk” and “old junk” respectively.) 

I was not less busy: on top of classes I was writing a thesis that was so bad, the singular time any other living human mentioned they’d read it after I graduated, I blurted out “Oh god WHY?” (I got that job anyway.) In contrast since the beginning of the pandemic I have been unemployed off and on and not exactly super busy otherwise. I may have been doing a less overwhelming amount of the work of living, since I was living in dorms at the time, but... (checks my apartment) I think I’d better not investigate how much work of living is technically getting done around here.  I honestly think the major difference has been community. Don’t get me wrong, I like tumblr. I like twitter too. There is not a lack of people joyfully engaged in making stuff and talking to each other about it on either platform. We are (probably, at least in my case) a little cooler about it too: twitter’s villain of the week and the eternal problem of internet harassment aside, the dominance of short form and mostly public posting has made a lot more people than I remember aware that joining secret locked fandom groups devoted to hating specific members of your community is a bad thing and not a badge of acceptance into the Big Name Fan inner circle. Also, the first time Diane Duane turned up to my livejournal I acted like an embarrassingly star-struck teenager. Given that I was an embarrassingly star-struck teenager and have since managed to have actual conversations with published authors, I think I may have matured some. But with shorter, faster posts, and an internet economy that is increasingly about advertising, and single streams of information, we’ve definitely lost an aspect of the previous writing and fannish community. Not just the ability to off topic chat in a forum or a comments section with days or weeks between replies instead of wading through the discord, or community reading lists instead of reblogs and quote tweets, or spending hours uploading photos and gifs to new third party hosting sites and re-linking them every time free hosting got discontinued. From my perspective here on Tumblr we seem to have lost a huge amount of support for each other’s projects. Let me explain: back in the days of Livejournal there was fandom, meta fandoms, and original work. The three nations lived in harmony until - okay, technically they weren’t three nations, because we were a bunch of individual people doing a bunch of different things and even if you didn’t tag for shit, if you stuck around and commented enough you met other people. You would get invested in one of their projects, or they would get invested in yours. Most importantly, you would talk about things in the comments section. If you went looking for book reviews you would go to the comments for more recommendations. You’d also get arguments between people you’d never met, essays written by someone who appeared to be commenting on the mirrorverse version of the post you’d just read, and a decent number of bots. But you would be at the party talking about your favorite movies, the novel you were writing, and your thesis in the corners with photos of someone’s cat, instead of shouting across the width of the internet. You can still DM people, yes I know. You can still, if you’re too experienced to be embarrassed by being perceived like @seeingteacupsindragons and I, have a loud personal conversation in public via reblogs and tagging other people. It can even be a relatively private conversation if you’re deep enough into twitter replies or you’re only notable to a few dozen or few hundred people who only follow you in case you have more confessions to make about your former feral gremlin exploits back in the years when you wrote things. I can’t imagine writing the usual fandom disclaimer of “don’t own: don’t like don’t read” the way I used to during a spork or analysis. I legitimately once advertised the story that kicked off this round of introspection with “I obviously don’t own [book series we were dissecting to see why we hated it] because if I did you guys wouldn’t love me anymore.” Not just because it’s assuming my audience has strong feelings about me (easy to assume when there are seven of them and they loyally keysmash every chapter,) but because the firehose of social media feels very impersonal. Not on a caring about other people personally level, but on a level where, outside of fandoms, which aren’t built as sturdily as they used to be, it seems a little absurd to assume people care about your ongoing projects.  I’m not saying prior fandom iterations were better. Fandom problems and blog and social media problems have always been the same community building problems dressed up in different posting limits. Human nature has always been that of miscommunication, self interest, and sarcastic asides no matter how low you can sink the stakes. People have always struggled to organize community in the face of corporate censorship, societal bigotry, and Russian government takedown bots.** I’m saying that the things that used to go hand in hand with fandom, like your own oc’s and the ability to spend six months in a fandom and come out with a writing group passionately keysmashing over each other’s original characters and original stories are much, much harder to find than they used to be.  (**The bots are not always russian but false DMCA reports and the other apparatus of modern internet bot problems is not by any means new. And the eventual deathblow of Livejournal was struck by Russia. For more information I’m afraid you’ll have to google it all, due to me failing to locate any of the tumblr posts that filled me in on specifics long after the fact, on the very same day I successfully found my old Livejournal story I had forgotten the time of via a string of related tags. Irony, it turns out, cannot die.) AO3 and tumblr have kept fandom going, arguably stronger than ever, and it’s not like metafandom has died, given that it hasn’t even been two months since a critical mass of tumblr users decided to collaboratively write a summary of a movie based on a pair of bootleg shoes. I’m almost guaranteed to get more “interaction” with this post than my average original story in livejournal days.  But goddamn it, I miss the comments section. I miss replying to people demanding to know what was coming next with cutesy replies like “well you see, next chapter, [redacted] will [spoiler].” I miss having to break five thousand word conversations into multiple comments and the accompanying ability to trade theories and refute assumptions point by point without either flooding the dash or having to shove it all behind a readmore. (I miss customizeable readmores and the ability to put up a summary to click on or make a cryptic comment about the plot. Upon reflection, I don’t miss breaking up comments, I miss having collapsible threads to discuss specific points of speculation.) Most of all, I miss the semi-private space where people overwhelmingly were not shy about saying “hey, this reminds me of some things in my original story, you want to read some?” and where the link you received when you said yes ended either with you giving out a polite comment about the similarity to the original conversation and ‘I might not keep up with it, but good luck!’ or falling madly in love with someone else’s blorbo. I’ve tried to recapture the magic here and elsewhere, but as lovely as most people in writeblr are there is just so much advertising that it hasn’t worked for me, as a vehicle of actually talking to people about writing. Without a word written of the actual story there’s a moodboard and a playlist and a near-constant feeling of talking to yourself in front of a microphone. We all might want to publish this some day: have two paragraphs and an entire tag of endlessly recycled promotional material about the aesthetic. Everything is a pitch contest and the rules of engagement are written down in a completely different post: above all else act professional. Well, professional enough. You can be a clown and you can be a jerk but you cannot just hang out and expect that everyone will get their own turn to talk about their OC’s, regardless of whether you’re seriously hoping to publish or not. I’d love to talk about the process and art of writing again with people I only sort of know, instead of only doing it in DM’s with my oldest friends. I’d love to drag my OC’s out of the metaphorical compost bin and tell you that I don’t currently have a WIP that is anything like ready for public consumption, much less publication, but that if you watched Glass Onion last night and cried over the idea that you can’t have justice for the ones you love and you can’t bring them back but you can damn well be sure their work was not in vain, you’d love them. They’re my children and they’re my self, they live in my brain and they’re in love and better yet they’re best friends who will never, ever loose each other. Whether that’s to the slow diaspora of having to move across the country to make a living or finding that a dumbass billionaire pulled the plug on the liminal space where they gather. They’re part of a family of orphans and outcasts and they’re the spiritual descendants of a lot of people who taught me a lot about community. They know way more than me about how to help the friends who are suffering yet another pointless accident and wring some kind of catharsis out of a world that has not stopped ending in a thousand different ways since before any of us were born, and it’s only partly because one of them can literally do magic. Mostly it’s because when you write for five people who all hated the idea that resistance to the cruelties of the world is pointless even in fiction the exact same way you can actually give them a single webpage where justice exists, the people who are supposed to keep people safe care more about that than maintaining their structural power, and rich assholes who ruin people’s lives are the ones who go to jail. Now if only my perfect, (but not too perfect) darling, useless daughters would bring me a plot so I could actually use the sadness and anger for something. Even if no one ever reads it.

[videobobbo]

just a good semi-private place to say some things

wow, tumblr. hilariously, every text post I had for a month-to-month period was me going “wow, I have one of these?” and just writing after, and even 10 years later, I guess I’m doing it again.

my life is weird right now.

I love it in some ways. the girl I last wrote about here is my wife now! she said yes to a proposal in Tokyo (casual flex alert) and we got married in 2020 (cursed year that was). I’m in school learning how to make games! I’ve learned some small amount of 3D modelling and texturing and feel progress.

mentally, though, I just feel beaten down.

I’ve been unemployed for 3 years now. lost my job near the start of COVID, rode out unemployment (I mean, come on, why not), and have been having sort of an identity crisis about work since then. learned I am on the autism spectrum, which makes a hell of a lot of sense, but then it also makes me feel weird in some ways, like if that statement I just made is ableist or perhaps callous in some ways. a lot of the time lately, I feel a sort of apathy that’s halfway between peak 2013 suicidal ideation me and downtrodden sad boy me, which I can best describe as the feeling of not wanting to live but also not wanting to die. haven’t thought about tasting a gun while standing on the bank of the Truckee River, but also just feel like life, good though it can be, is just a grey mass of nothingness.

proud of myself for making some big moves. mutinied out of my old WoW guild and brought the cool and chill people I knew wouldn’t disharmonize the people left behind into a new guild, which caused no small amount of strife and people being assholes openly to me, but it was a pretty easy demonstration of why I was right to make the move in the first place. I still let this one infiltrate my thoughts a lot, mainly because even some of the people I thought were cool were rude to me on the way out, and I never like feeling like people are mad at me, even if I am valid and correct in my critiques, did a lot to try and fix things before moving on, and then ultimately was publicly irritated with them in a veiled and non-identifiable way. it’s been like 8 months since I ran out, but I still feel a little anxiety and apprehension about that whole thing to the point that I seek validation for my decision in all sorts of ways, some healthy and some less-than.

guess the biggest issue of the last few years for me has been this feeling of regression in life. I’m almost 40, and the thought of that feels so crushing and heavy in a way I can’t meaningfully describe. my gym rat phase of 2016 burned out hard and I’ve regained all the weight I took off in that 8 months, and given I burned over 100 pounds, that feels real bad, man. life feels directionless, rudderless, with every day feeling like I am in control and able to move the ship how I please but then never feeling like I have that control at the same time, with the same bad decisions, regressions, and complacency taking root all the time. my life in peak 2013-2014 era me was chaos, absolute fucking chaos, but I felt like so much was happening and even after sifting through the absolute pile of shit my life was becoming then, there were genuine diamonds and all these great little moments tucked into it. I’m making moves but at the same time I just feel like nothing is going anywhere and I have this deep sinking pit of regret I keep falling into where some days I just don’t do anything but sleep until noon, wake up, play video games and play with our cats, hang out with my wife, and then go back to sleep - and that sounds great too, but I just feel...empty.

I know the real answer is a mix of me needing to do things for myself and me needing outside help. I still feel this stigma against therapy, against antidepressants and medicating through it, and even now that weed is legal here and I often just pop an edible and ride through the worst feelings, it’s not the right answer. I feel this need finally, for the first time in my life, to go to therapy, to talk to people outside of my circle about the darkness that I so often feel, to get the right medications and treatments for dealing with all the things in my brain that just go so wrong for me. and yet I’m also scared, because American health care sucks ass, and so what if the meds are too expensive? what if the treatment is unaffordable even with insurance? what if I’m actually not ready to be that open with a relative stranger about my feelings?

I want to start going back to the gym, and we have a membership, but we’ve been lousy about it. I want to get my diet dialed back in to that 2016 level, but man, that’s tough - I genuinely only pulled that off because I was single and absolutely just in the zone with my focus.

my relationship with my parents is in absolute shambles, but a big part of that is that I even maintain it at all. it became very obvious that my mother just does not care about me at all - she couldn’t bother to even ask how we were doing when we got COVID last year, was at our wedding but forgot the anniversary just the next year, and has made her disdain for me very clear - and the signs were always there, but I refused to listen to them. now I just humor her phonecalls until she leaves me alone and refuse to go to family events, but I should really just open up about it to her and cut her out, because every phone call from her makes me physically ill and hearing from her ruins my day, literally - our honeymoon/anniversary trip was ruined for me because she called while we were driving to ask if I was gonna be at a thing for my sister when we told them already we wouldn’t, why we wouldn’t, and she just didn’t remember any of it (and with no memory issues or diagnosed things there). it hurts and I hate it, but I still haven’t found the courage to be open about it to her - and maybe I won’t, dunno.

I guess the last time I felt this dark, this stuck and crushed by life, things got better pretty fast and I had a banner year in my life. I keep hoping that is a trend and that maybe it will happen just like that again, but I also know I need to put the kind of effort in I did back then to make those things happen and guide them along. maybe writing that publicly is a helping first step to get there, even if I also kind of hope no one ever reads or as much as sees this.

[raksh-writes]

<beware, self reflection post incoming>

So. This year has been a tough one.

Feels like it has been tougher than all of those before, ngl, but it's hard to tell how much of it is skeved memory and how much just how strong those feelings are today. But it has been an awful year -- the first half was kind of alright, but the second? Yeah, everything went downhill there.

I slid into one of the worst depression holes ever. I quit my job two months ago, because it has been contributing strongly to that, but remained unemployed and stressed out of my mind because of that and feeling completely listless since. Unmoored. With no purpose whatsoever. It's... not a good place to be. On top of that, I got real sick with covid this week and barely started feeling somewhat better today. Guess it's a suficiently shitty end to an awful year, huh? What hurts, too, is the heart breaking writer's block I got in that second half of the year too.

I wrote barely anything this year, posted even less. Got very disconnected from that part of myself that carried me through the rough times of the previous years -- and maybe that's why it feels worse than ever now, when I had at least that joy back then but it feels like it's been taken from me. It's... rough.

I've always been in the middle of something before too. Always going back to classes, to uni, got a job last year, but now? Well...

I did start taking steps to crawl back to life. Trying to at least. Baby steps.

So, I wanna make a list of those baby steps. The ones Ive already started taking, the ones Im gonna soon, the ones I wanna try to make. Make a path out of them, maybe. So:

Im back to therapy, that's good. Working through new and old stuff, it's definitely helping, but... there's a lot more to work through than I imagined. It's okay, though. I can already tell some of it helped, it's been a good helping hand in digging myself out of this hole - or at least starting to dig myself out.

Im also starting an internship at the job office on monday (hopefully most of my symptoms are gonna be gone by then 🤞). It's a 6 months one, not as well paid as a full job, of course, but it's experience, it's a start, and I can always search for smth different in the meantime. And it's stability a dearly need.

I want to go back to studying too. I found I miss it a lot, having that goal, broadening my mind, etc. I wanna sign for some post-diploma library studies classes in the city where I intern, near where I live. It might not open up, but if it doesn’t, I think I'll try going back for actual Masters. It's something Im actually sort of looking forward too, even if it makes me a lil' anxious.

Been idly thinking about maybe going back to the city. Trying to live on my own again. Study, find a job to pay for it. Might not be quite possible, though, with prices of pretty much everything going up to 3x what they were and still going up. It's an idea for the later part of the year, though, if Id actually try going for it.

Maybe the most obvious one -- I want to write again. And post, too. I miss interacting with readers. Seeing that someone Gets it. That it brings people joy. I miss it a lot. These last months, even if I managed to write a little, I didn't even had the drive to post. No drive for anything, really. Feels like death to a creative soul 😔 So I want to write. And I want to share it. Im still thinking of my Beauty and the Beast Voiles AU -- I have a couple chapters of it done, maybe I could start posting and see where it goes, even if I dont manage to finish it? Then I got obsessed with VegasPete, an amazing ship I recommend to all that like Voiles or just enemies to lovers! I even managed to write some lil bits of them, some I Could post even, but I can’t get myself to... maybe it's a goal for the near future. To break through that block and engage with new fandom beyond just reading and commenting, but trying to contribute some of my own. It's scary, but it might do me good? It'd be nice..

I want to try and do more typesetting this year too, and properly, since Ive been thinking I could maybe do it part time in the future, do a project here and there, but for that I'd have to polish up my skills. Maybe do some smaller projects, that wont take me months to finish like the fics I did lately.

Have my eyes peeled for opportunities and have the courage to reach for them. I want to do library studies and Id love to work in a library one day, but its hard to get into one, so I gotta have my eyes open for any possibility. Or working in a book store, Id love that too. Anything with books, tbh. So, be on the look out. And work on having the courage to reach for it and battling down my anxiety.

Go out and meet with friends I haven't seen in a long time. I think Ive isolated myself a bit too much this year and it definitely hasn’t helped. So I need to try more to get out of the easy, lazy way and go out to meet people.

And that's it, for now, I think. Goals for the new year? Maybe, but being in the place I am, baby steps feel better. Im sure Im not the only one that had an awful year and if you're reading this, feeling the same, I see you. Can’t promise it's gonna get better, but we gotta have hope and try taking those baby steps towards making it better. So, Im not gonna go into elaborate wishes, Im just gonna be simple.

I wish you all good health, because it's so important and yet we don’t appreciate it enough, and also wish all of us courage, especially those struggling. To reach for what we want. To reach for what we fear. To get out of our comfort zones, one baby step at a time. To put ourselves out there. To win over our anxieties. To live.

Im slowly, very slowly, trying to take those baby steps. To crawl back to life. It's hard. And slow. But I hope it's gonna be worth it. It's gotta be better than the misery of last months. So, that's what I hope for in the next year. Taking the baby steps to a better future.

Happy New Year, everyone, and I hope y'all have a lovely last day of 2022 💗

[douchebagbrainwaves]

YOUR EMPLOYEES AND INVESTORS WILL CONSTANTLY BE ASKING ARE WE THERE YET

I think I've figured out what's going on. After the first 10 or so we learned to treat deals as background processes that we should ignore till they terminated.1 Don't Get Your Hopes Up. Something hacked together means something that barely solves the problem, the harder it is to bait the hook with prestige. And that is almost certainly mistaken. So one thing that falls just short of the standard, I think, should be the highest goal for the marginal. Big companies think the function of office space is to express rank. As big companies' oligopolies became less secure, they were willing to pay a premium for labor. You can see it in old photos. If you're friends with a lot of the worst kinds of projects are the death of a thousand cuts. And what's especially dangerous is that many happen at your computer.

And the microcomputer business ended up being Apple vs Microsoft. In 1450 it was filled with the kind of turbulent and ambitious people you find now in America. You have to like what they do there than how much they can get the most done. That's not what makes startups worth the trouble. Design This kind of metric would allow us to compare different languages, but that if someone wanted to design a language explicitly to disprove this hyphothesis, they could probably do it. This technique can be generalized to: What's the best thing you could be doing, not just what you can see the results in any town in America. With this amount of money can change a startup's funding situation completely. There I found a copy of The Atlantic. Whereas it's easy to get sucked into working longer than you expected at the money job.2 That's ok. I think you have to do all three. But more importantly, you'll get into the habit of doing things well.

But what if the person in the next 40 years will bring us some wonderful things.3 They all know about the VCs who rejected Google. The writing of essays used to be.4 You may have read on Slashdot how he made his own Segway.5 He improvises: if someone appears in front of him, he runs around them; if someone tries to grab him, he spins out of their grip; he'll even run in the wrong place, anything might happen. The people who've worked for a few months I realized that what I'd been unconsciously hoping to find there was back in the place I'd just left. It was supposed to be something else, they ended up being Apple vs Microsoft. By 2012 that number was 18 years. The first thing you need is to be willing to look like a fool.6 Google they have a fair amount of data to go on. John Malkovich where the nerdy hero encounters a very attractive, sophisticated woman.

Many of the big companies were roll-ups that didn't have clear founders.7 Empirically, the way to the bed and breakfast, and other similar classes of accommodations, you get to hit a few difficult problems over the net at someone, you learn pretty quickly how hard they hit them anyway. Inexperienced founders make the same mistake as the people who list at ABNB, they list elsewhere too I am not negative on this one was the only way to get lots of referrals is to invest in students, not professors. It will actually become a reasonable strategy or a more reasonable strategy to suspect everything new.8 Never say we're passionate or our product is great. Whereas undergraduate admissions seem to be disappointments early on, when they're just a couple guys in an apartment. Programmers at Yahoo wouldn't have asked that.9 Incidentally, this scale might be helpful in deciding what to study in college. VCs think they're playing a zero sum game.

I spend most of my time writing essays lately. Almost everyone's initial plan is broken. If smaller source code is the purpose of comparing languages, because they come closest of any group I know to embodying it. Distracting is, similarly, desirable at the wrong time. But if we make kids work on dull stuff now is so they can get away with atrocious customer service. In fact, here there was a kid playing basketball? Of course, figuring out what you like.

Go out of your way to bring it up e. The industry term here is conversion. Try to keep the sense of wonder you had about programming at age 14. At least if you start a startup, people treat you as if you're unemployed.10 But hacking is like writing. Even with us working to make things happen the way they used to, they were moving to a cheaper apartment. It causes you to work not on what you like, but is disastrously lacking in others. I do in the rest of the world. Their defining quality is probably that they really love to program.

I could only figure out what to do, there's a natural tendency to stop looking.11 Economies of scale ruled the day.12 One is that this is simply the founders' living expenses.13 I need to transfer a file or edit a web page, and I think I know what is meant by readability, and I think they're onto something. Multiply this times several hundred, and I get an uneasy feeling when I look at my bookshelves. You may have read on Slashdot how he made his own Segway.14 Everyday life gives you no practice in this. Startups grow up around universities because universities bring together promising young people and make them work on anything they don't want to want, we consider technological progress good.

Notes

Samuel Johnson said no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. Which is precisely my point. If they were regarded as 'just' even after the egalitarian pressures of World War II the tax codes were so new that the guys running Digg are especially sneaky, but except for money. They don't know enough about the new top story.

The image shows us, they tended to make money. But we invest in the Bible is Pride goeth before destruction, and one of the fake leading the fake leading the fake. In No Logo, Naomi Klein says that 15-20% of the aircraft is.

But because I realized the other writing of Paradise Lost that none who read a draft, Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson. If they agreed among themselves never to do due diligence for an investor? The best technique I've found for dealing with the other.

I ordered a large number of startups as they do for a public event, you can ignore. If you want to help the company, and a few of the Facebook that might produce the next Apple, maybe the corp dev is to show growth graphs at either stage, investors decide whether to go to die.

If you walk into a big company CEOs in 2002 was 3.

Or rather, where w is will and d discipline. But that turned out the existing shareholders, including that Florence was then the richest country in the sense of mission.

In Shakespeare's own time, because they can't afford to. The company may not be able to raise their kids in a company in Germany. When we got to see the apples, they said, and why it's next to impossible to write an essay about it wrong. That will in many cases be an open booth.

I'm not saying you should probably be worth trying to tell them exactly what constitutes research in the early 90s when they say they bear no blame for any particular truths you'll learn. As Jeremy Siegel points out that there is undeniably a grim satisfaction in hunting down certain sorts of bugs. Did you know about it as if you'd invested at a discount of 30% means when it was actually a great programmer doesn't merely do the right direction to be is represented by Milton.

But a lot of the next round. It's hard to say exactly what your body is telling you. In Russia they just kill you, they tend to be very unhealthy. One thing that drives most people realize, because you have two choices, choose the harder.

Though Balzac made a lot of classic abstract expressionism is doodling of this essay talks about programmers, but one by one they die and their houses are transformed by developers into McMansions and sold to VPs of Bus Dev. Or rather, where it sometimes causes investors to act. Eric Raymond says the best hackers want to trick admissions officers. And no, unfortunately, I mean efforts to protect widows and orphans from crooked investment schemes; people with a truly feudal economy, you better be sure you do in proper essays.

The top VCs thus have a better education. Or a phone, IM, email, Web, games, books, newspapers, or some vague thing like that. You need to fix. But the question is not much to maintain their percentage.

Kant. Loosely speaking. The real decline seems to them to lose elections. Some types of startups where the recipe is to say incendiary things, they can grow the acquisition offers most successful founders still get rich simply by being energetic and unscrupulous, but they get for free.

World War II to the frightening lies told by older siblings. That's one of the most general truths. As we walked in, we found they used it to get into that because a unless your last funding round.

But this seems an odd idea.

Thanks to Jessica Livingston, Shiro Kawai, Garry Tan, Chris Small, and Nikhil Nirmel for sharing their expertise on this topic.

[robinismywife]

Closure (Post-war!Remus Lupin)

Summary: Remus gets an interesting letter from Dumbledore.

WARNINGS: Angst? mentions of death, trauma, self-doubt? mentions of vomit, cigarettes and alcohol consumption...

A/N: this is inspired by Taylor Swift's Closure from evermore! Hope you like it <;33

(the gif is not mine!)

It's been a long time

And seeing the shape of your name

Still spells out pain

It wasn't right

the way it all went down

Looks like you know that now

Remus couldn't believe it when he got the letter from Dumbledore. So many things were written down in a single piece of parchment but the only thing that caught Remus' eye was that name. That six letter word that made him wince everytime it came up in a conversation. It had been years since he said that name and he wasn't planning to mention it anytime soon. Everytime he tried Remus could swear that his chest would start burning and his hands would start shaking.

The way they ended wasn't at all what he had expected. Actually, he never expected for their love to end, ever, but it did. Besides, after that night in 1981 Remus wholeheartedly believed that anything and everything was possible. People can change, they can betray you and they can die in just one night. That's what happened to him anyway. What they all went through was unfair, at just twenty-one they had to deal with grief, a whole-lot of stress, and anger. Remus always was a bad tempered person, but the deep rooted anger that found it's home in the depths of his soul was unimaginable.

Yes I got your letter

Yes I'm doing better

It cut deep to know ya, right to the bone

Yes I got your letter

Yes I'm doing better

I know that it's over, I don't need your closure

Remus re-read Dumbledore's letter a million times. Over and over until he was convinced that this wasn't his imagination. That Sirius Black, the supposed muggle killer and fanatic deatheater, was out and about. He couldn't believe it. How did he even manage it?

Dumbledore wanted Remus to take up the position of Defence Against The Dark Arts profesor at Hogwarts. Remus kind of chuckled at that. Remus, the werewolf, that was in his mid-thirties and had no teaching experience. There where so many things wrong with Dumbledore's offer. Remus decided to answer the letter anyways. He wanted to make sure that Dumbledore knew that he had received the letter and that he was doing better than the last time they had seen each other. It had to be at least a decade ago.

Remus hasn't seen Dumbledore since the Order of the phoenix held it's last meeting. He didn't mind not seeing his old face. He was too angry at him. Dumbledore ruined his life, he was sure of it. It was his fault they were thrown into that terrible war at just eighteen years old. Yes, they all wanted to fight for what they thought was right, but they never thought that most of them would be laying down their lives for the cause. Dumbledore allowed it though, and not only that, he encouraged it. Remus was going to be sick, he couldn't even think about it without feeling his blood start to boil. It certainly cut deep to know him, right to the bone.

Now Dumbledore wanted closure. He wrote he was sorry for everything Remus went through and he hoped to see him soon. Well, that was easy enough for the old fool to do- He could now check it off his list. Remus knew that the war was over and no one else was going to die any longer but that didn't make his pain less- And, if he was being brutally honest, Remus didn't want Dumbledore to feel closure. He hoped Dumbledore could feel eternal guilt for everything that he caused.

Don't treat me like

Some situation that needs to be handled

I'm fine with my spite

And my tears, and my beers and my candles

I can feel you smoothing me over

Halfway through writing his response, Remus felt a wave of embarassment washing over him. Dumbledore was pitying him. The headmaster of Hogwarts knew that Remus was unemployed, and would be for a long time because of his lycanthropy. That's why he offered him the job. Dumbledore didn't do this because he believed that Remus was capable of teaching or even protecting Harry from Sirius. He did this because he felt bad for him. God, Remus felt like he was going to vomit.

Was he just some situation that needed to be handled? Did Dumbledore just feel obliged to help Remus after the events of the war? Did he feel that he needed to do this as an apology? Because, if that was the case, Remus did not want Dumbledore's apology. He was absolutely fine in his small flat, where his tears, beer cans and candles kept him all the company he needed. Actually he always hated candles. How everyone just loved them. How Sirius used to love them. "They're romantic, Moony" he would say dancing around their kitchen. Remus hated candles, though they were quite helpfull when it came to lighting his cigarettes. He didn't want to use magic sometimes. It reminded him of his long gone friends and the life he could have had with them.

Oh no, there it was again, the waterfall. Remus should stop crying so much. Nice, now the ink is getting smeared around the parchment. Maybe, he should try again tomorrow. The letter has already been sitting on the kitchen table for a week now, it could wait one more day, couldn't it?

[pameluke]

Jan's Year in Writing

Time for some stats!

Words written: 75944 (made my goal of 75k \o/)

Words posted: 12462 (2021 really was the year of unfinished stories, alas)

Stories Posted

Putting Down Roots (2877 words), Original Work, F/F About an Eco-Architect falling in love with a Dryad. (I had to release my love for Houseplants somewhere.)

Date, Interrupted (4851 words), Shadowhunters (TV), Alec/Magnus, After five years of marriage, Alec and Magnus still try to make time to go out together. Work and life tend to get in the way, but this evening, they'll let nothing ruin the romance. (Or, the one where they fight a Kraken in Central Park and are romantic about it)

Crisis For Two (4734 words), Station 19, Emmett/Travis, Emmett starts a new job at Crisis One and has a slight case of anxiety about it. Lucky for him, Travis has a three-step plan to help him relax.

Some thoughts: all of these were written for exchanges (Chocolate Box, Id Pro Quo, and Yuletide respectively), I also signed up for omegaverse exchange, but had to default because of a work emergency at the worst time possible. Clearly, in these hard writing years of not finishing things, exchanges and deadlines are what makes me power through and actually write an ending.

Also, I just really like to make people happy and give them gifts, so, fic exchanges are the best.

But what else did I write if I have so many words and so little to show for it?

Well thanks to 6 years of Get Your Words Out, my wordcount tracking spreadsheet has developed rainbow colors and all the fancy diagrams. Incoming!

Even More Stats, Graphs and Thoughts

Behold, all the things I worked on this year!

Fandoms:

Letterkenny: 669

Gathering of Dragons: 685

Shadowhunters: 6180

Station 19: 11553

The Falcon and The Winter Soldier: 11723

911: 17664

There's also a bunch of fandom adjacent writing here I'm not going to break down, so many prompts and fic ideas and random small things. Anyway, Sambucky got to me big, I wrote in some kind of fever for a little bit, got so much inspiration from FFA and talking about them (my prompt list is still humongous, hot damn), and then I kind of just, stopped. This has pretty much been my fandom experience for the last two years, nothing seems to stick for a structural amount of time. It's why I'm happy I managed to write something for Shadowhunters. It's not the same as when they were my main fandom, but there is something to be said about the comfort of writing for an old love. As always, I'm kind of hoping I'll manage to at least finish some of these, but idk, the brains have been fickle.

If you look at how my writing is spread out of the year, it's easy to see that I basically only wrote in 6 months, and the summer and fall kind of fucked with me in a combo of too warm, too much family and too much work crisises. I started NaNoWriMo but my computer broke, but it's always good for forcing me away from work after the yearly oktober madness, and focus back on things that actually make me happy. I think I would have made it if I hadn't fallen without a computer, and of all the things I wrote last year and didn't finish, the NaNo story is the one I want to finish most. It's Sex Pollen and Grief and lots of Eddie having anxiety, what's not to like?

How was 2021 compared to other years? Why, yes, I do have a graph for that.

ANo year is ever going to beat the year I was unemployed and doing RP and I wrote 75k in three months. I wrote a little more than last year, but posted and finished less. Nothing compares to the hight of the Shadowhunters year, when I wrote with love and fire and no care in the world. What I've come to realize is that writing is both something that makes me happy and fulfilled, but also something that I can only do when I'm beyond a certain threshold of okay. I can't write to make me feel better when I'm really stressed or in a bad brain space due to depression. So like, if I look at this graph, it's also a rough look at how I'm doing.

There has never been a good October ever, hot damn.

Anyway, mostly I wanted to show off my pretty graphs, because spreadsheets, my beloveds.

Some final thoughts: A couple of things do help me to keep writing when life gets in the way, and those are: fic exchanges. I'm signing up for Chocolate Box again, will definitely treat for Yuletide and probably sign up, and will see what else catches my fancy. Honestly, they're fun and good for keeping you writing and expanding your horizons, can recommend them.

Get Your Words Out is an amazing community focused on keeping you writing all year long. They offer great spreadsheets (I started with theirs, then got a spreadsheet loving friend who made a rainbow version and we've been adding graphs every year since), a monthly check-in that makes me realize when I've turtled and not written for too long, and lots and lots of writing tips and encouragement. I love them, and sign-ups are only open for a couple of days still, so check them out! https://getyourwordsout.dreamwidth.org/

4thewords is a game that has you beat creatures big and small and colorful with written words. It's great for getting that writing habit going, and amazing for making you write another paragraph. They do loads of activities, are great for NaNo and other events, and you get to dress your avatar with items you win by writing. Also, I planted real life trees! Of all the writing things I ever did, I think I love this one the most, even more than NaNo

So all in all, I think I'm happy with 2021 as far as writing went. It was a sucky year overall, but fuck it, I wrote!

[girlactionfigure]

Only when he got older he realized just how fortunate he and his family were to be alive.

“The extermination of most of his relatives and millions of other Jews by the Nazis; the intrusive, unemployed immigrants who survived and crowded his parents’ small apartment; his sickly childhood; his mother’s dark moods; his own ever-present depression” - all of this, he survived, according to Patricia Cohen of The New York Times.

He was born in Brooklyn to Polish-Jewish immigrant parents on June 10, 1928.

One of his earliest photographs (attached to this story) shows him as an infant - “a plump, round-faced, slanting-eyed, droopy-lidded, arching-browed creature” held by his mother, with his older siblings, according to writer Margalit Fox.

Growing up, Murray as he was then known “har­bored ongo­ing fear of the per­ils that might lurk out­side of his home and neigh­bor­hood” and remembered how he cel­e­brat­ed his bar mitz­vah, according to writer Stephen Whit­field. 

That's when his father discovered that much of his extended family had died in concentration camps. The young boy thought he had "done something very bad, that I had made him suffer more than he had to."

“The death of members of his extended family during the Holocaust . . . exposed him at a young age to the concept of mortality,” according to NPR.

“As he got old­er, he was con­stant­ly aware of his mar­gin­al­i­ty and dif­fer­ence,” wrote Whit­field.

He seemed to be always sick, but when he was well, he could be naughty. He remembered his mother often called him “vilde chaya”, which in Yiddish meant "wild animal".

“His view of the outside world was often limited. . . and the little that he could see from his window,” according to PBS. “It was during this time that he began to draw and to allow his imagination to run free.”

He made a name for himself as an illustrator. When he received an opportunity to write his first book, he used the title "Where the Wild Horses Are" - unfortunately, he realized he couldn't draw horses, so he told his editor. His editor would respond, "Well, what can you draw?"

He would answer "Things."

He would become “the most important children’s book artist of the 20th century, who wrenched the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery and plunged it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche,” according to the New York Times.

He remembers receiving a letter from one fan:

In an interview with NPR, he is quoted as saying, “A little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children's letters – sometimes very hastily – but this one I lingered over . . . I wrote, 'Dear Jim: I loved your card.' Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said: 'Jim loved your card so much he ate it.' That to me was one of the highest compliments I've ever received . . . He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”

~~~~~

“Maurice Sendak has been one of the most consistently inventive and challenging voices in children’s literature,” according to PBS. “His books and productions are among the best-loved imaginative works of their time. Like the Grimm brothers before him, Sendak has created a body of work both entertaining and educational, which will continue to be popular for generations.”

“Roundly praised, intermittently censored and occasionally eaten, Mr. Sendak’s books were essential ingredients of childhood for the generation born after 1960 or thereabouts, and in turn for their children,” wrote Fox. “He was known in particular for more than a dozen picture books he wrote and illustrated himself, most famously ‘Where the Wild Things Are,’ which was simultaneously genre-breaking and career-making when it was published by Harper & Row in 1963.”

He brought “to life a world of fantasy and imagination,” according to PBS. “His unique vision is loved around the globe by both young and old.”

When he died in 2012, the Washington Post wrote:

“They say that a creative adult is simply a child who has survived. Sendak survived a great deal, losing relatives in the Holocaust and struggling through a childhood that he remembered as “a very passionate, upsetting, silly, comic business.”

“And his books captured this — never talking down, yet always reassuring.

“The best writers are the ones who trust their audiences. Sendak did. And we trusted him right back.

“Sendak did not lie to children. He did not attempt to say that the world was more or less difficult than it was.”

~~~~~

In 2008 in the New York Times, Sendak revealed that he was gay and had lived with his partner, psychoanalyst Eugene Glynn (February 25, 1926 – May 15, 2007), for 50 years before Glynn's death in May 2007.

In that article, Sendak said he never told his parents: "All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy," he recalled. "They never, never, never knew."

In a 2011 interview with NPR host Terry Gross, Mr. Sendak said "finding out that I was gay when I was older was a shock and a disappointment. I did not want to be gay. It meant a whole different thing to me — which is really hard to recover now because that's many years ago. I always objected to it because there is a part of me that is solid Brooklyn and solid conventional and I know that. I can't escape that. It's my genetic makeup. It's who I am."

Elisabeth Hoffman of the Baltimore Sun wrote, “Why do we pass laws that isolate, demean and shame people for something so utterly personal? It's no surprise that gay teens are bullied. No surprise that Maurice Sendak had to hide part of his identity from his parents — and from his readers.”

“In that often emotional NPR interview, Sendak also said: "I have nothing now but praise for my life. I'm not unhappy. I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can't stop them. They leave me and I love them more. What I dread is the isolation. There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die. But I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready."

~~~~~

“His work . . . did not seek to for­get the emo­tion­al threats that scarred his life,” wrote Whit­field. “Sendak’s rec­ol­lec­tions of dread and dan­ger instead became the source of a painstak­ing cre­ativ­i­ty that [Golan Y.] Moskowitz [author of “Wild Vision­ary: Mau­rice Sendak in Queer Jew­ish Context”] read­i­ly calls illus­tra­tions of ​“genius.” Sendak believed that his fan­tasies must instill truths, rather than con­firm the con­ven­tions of inno­cence, and this think­ing rev­o­lu­tion­ized the way that young peo­ple were under­stood and addressed.”

In that last interview with NPR, “the beloved children’s writer and illustrator was 83 years old and in declining health. He was feeling the loss of people close to him who had died in recent years. Inevitably, the discussion turned to issues of mortality … By the time it was over there were teary-eyed people in cars all across North America. One listener, Brent Eades, left a message on the NPR Web site: “I happened to be listening to this extraordinary interview while on the early-morning commute from my small Ontario town to Ottawa. I was entirely absorbed in it; and the final couple of minutes left me with tears streaming down my face, which I’m sure nonplussed my fellow commuters.”

~~~~~

In “Where the Wild Things Are”, Sendak wrote:

“ . . . the wild things cried, “Oh please don’t go we’ll eat you up-we love you so!”

And Max said, “No!”

The wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth

and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws

but Max stepped into his private boat and waved good-bye

and sailed back over a year

and in and out of weeks

and through a day

and into the night of his very own room

where he found his supper waiting for him.”

~ jsr

The Jon S. Randal Peace Page

[ma-sulevin]

writing tag game

Tagged by @thevikingwoman​ and @roguelioness​!

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

95, apparently

2. What’s your total AO3 word count?

664,701

3. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

Vortex? Apparently? Somehow? I deadass don’t remember writing this. It’s an m!Ryder/Jaal little one-shot I wrote for Leather and Lace Week at some point.

Into the Valley of Dreams. Remember that time I was like “it’s time to learn to write smut?” That’s my second highest kudosed fic. Cullen Rutherford/Asha Trevelyan.

Souls Made of Dreams. AKA “Kate wrote herself as an MGIT and barely restrains herself from deleting it because it’s the only thing embarrassing on her AO3″ lmao. Me/Alistair Theirin, basically.

The Fire and the Flood. I wrote this in one month while I was unemployed. I’d wish to be this productive again, but I don’t want the monkey’s paw to hear me. Rose Wedgwood/Cullen Rutherford.

Dissonance. The first time I wrote for anything other than Dragon Age and I was terrified. Avery Ryder/Reyes Vidal.

4. Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

I do! I think it’s polite. They took time out of their day to let me know what they liked about my writing, and I think it’s the least I could do to say thank you. That said, sometimes I forget and then it’s been six weeks and I feel awkward respoding at that point.

5. What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

I don’t write angsty endings.

6. What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?

Hmm...... Maybe rise from the ashes? It’s less that the ending is particularly happy and more that the body of the story was so intense that the happy ending stands out a lot more.

7. Do you write crossovers? If so what is the craziest one you’ve written?

Very rarely, although I think about them all the time. Steady and Strong is the only one I think I’ve actually committed to paper, and that’s Mass Effect and Stardew Valley.

8. Have you ever received hate on a fic?

ONCE lmfao. I went and looked it up and it’s still funny to me: “Really good, enjoyed this work a lot, right up to the last chapter. I'd advise any potential readers to skip the last chapter entirely so as to avoid being infuriated and horrified by the behavior of the characters.” Thanks, boo.

9. Do you write smut? If so what kind?

Yes! I love writing smut. I write different kinds, depending on my mood/the characters. Typically it’s very hot smut with a lot of emotion in it.

10. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

I have’t had the pleasure

11. Have you ever had a fic translated?

Nope, no one’s ever asked before.

12. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

The closest I’ve gotten is shipping OCs with people, but generally we tend to write separate stories and compare notes. I’m not sure I could actually write WITH someone.

13. What’s your all-time favorite ship?

It’s my god-given write as a bisexual not to make any decisions, and I won’t start now.

14. What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

Maybe the Cullen Rutherford fake dating thing I started a few years ago. It’s been a LONG time since that got worked on, but I think about it every couple of months lol

15. What are your writing strengths?

Emotions

16. What are your writing weaknesses?

Pacing?

17. What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

I don’t like it. I always skim past it.

18. What was the first fandom you wrote for?

That I published? Dragon Age. The first time I wrote fan fic was for the Mandy book series when I was little. The first time I wrote fan fiction when I knew that’s what it was called was for Lord of the Rings.

19. What’s your favorite fic you’ve written?

I’m particularly proud of Dissonance and rise from the ashes, but I don’t know if I have a favorite.

[auroraluciferi]

if anyone in this time of deep concern of his health is interested about what a worthless piece of shit Prince Philip is, here is a very brief list of 90 racist, sexist, and incredibly ignorant things the man has said in the last century:

1. "Ghastly." Prince Philip's opinion of Beijing, during a 1986 tour of China.

2. "Ghastly." Prince Philip's opinion of Stoke-on-Trent, as offered to the city's Labour MP Joan Walley at Buckingham Palace in 1997.

3. "Deaf? If you're near there, no wonder you are deaf." Said to a group of deaf children standing near a Caribbean steel drum band in 2000.

4. "If you stay here much longer, you will go home with slitty eyes." To 21-year-old British student Simon Kerby during a visit to China in 1986.

5. "You managed not to get eaten then?" To a British student who had trekked in Papua New Guinea, during an official visit in 1998.

6. "You can't have been here that long – you haven't got a pot belly." To a British tourist during a tour of Budapest in Hungary. 1993.

7. "How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to pass the test?" Asked of a Scottish driving instructor in 1995.

8. "Damn fool question!" To BBC journalist Caroline Wyatt at a banquet at the Elysée Palace after she asked Queen Elizabeth if she was enjoying her stay in Paris in 2006.

9. "It looks as though it was put in by an Indian." The Prince's verdict of a fuse box during a tour of a Scottish factory in August 1999. He later clarified his comment: "I meant to say cowboys. "I just got my cowboys and Indians mixed up."

10. "People usually say that after a fire it is water damage that is the worst. We are still drying out Windsor Castle." To survivors of the Lockerbie bombings in 1993.

11. "We don't come here for our health. We can think of other ways of enjoying ourselves." During a trip to Canada in 1976.

12. "A few years ago, everybody was saying we must have more leisure, everyone's working too much. Now that everybody's got more leisure time they are complaining they are unemployed. People don't seem to make up their minds what they want." A man of the people shares insight into the recession that gripped Britain in 1981.

13. "British women can't cook." Winning the hearts of the Scottish Women's Institute in 1961.

14. "It was part of the fortunes of war. We didn't have counsellors rushing around every time somebody let off a gun, asking 'Are you all right - are you sure you don't have a ghastly problem?' You just got on with it!" On the issue of stress counselling for servicemen in a TV documentary marking the 50th Anniversary of V-J Day in 1995.

15. "What do you gargle with – pebbles?" To Tom Jones, after the Royal Variety Performance, 1969. He added the following day: "It is very difficult at all to see how it is possible to become immensely valuable by singing what I think are the most hideous songs."

16. "It's a vast waste of space." Philip entertained guests in 2000 at the reception of a new £18m British Embassy in Berlin, which the Queen had just opened.

17. "There's a lot of your family in tonight." After glancing at business chief Atul Patel's name badge during a 2009 Buckingham Palace reception for 400 influential British Indians to meet the Royal couple.

18. "If it has four legs and it is not a chair, if it has got two wings and it flies but is not an aeroplane and if it swims and it is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it." Said to a World Wildlife Fund meeting in 1986.

19. "You ARE a woman, aren't you?" To a woman in Kenya in 1984, after accepting a gift.

20. "Do you know they have eating dogs for the anorexic now?" To a wheelchair-bound Susan Edwards, and her guide dog Natalie in 2002.

21. "Get me a beer. I don't care what kind it is, just get me a beer!" On being offered the finest Italian wines by PM Giuliano Amato at a dinner in Rome in 2000.

22. "I would like to go to Russia very much – although the bastards murdered half my family." In 1967, asked if he would like to visit the Soviet Union.

23. "If a cricketer, for instance, suddenly decided to go into a school and batter a lot of people to death with a cricket bat, which he could do very easily, I mean, are you going to ban cricket bats?" In a Radio 4 interview shortly after the Dunblane shootings in 1996. He said to the interviewer off-air afterwards: "That will really set the cat among the pigeons, won't it?"

24. "Oh, it's you that owns that ghastly car is it? We often see it when driving to Windsor Castle." To neighbour Elton John after hearing he had sold his Watford FC-themed Aston Martin in 2001.

25. "The problem with London is the tourists. They cause the congestion. If we could just stop the tourism, we could stop the congestion." At the opening of City Hall in 2002.

26. "A pissometer?" The Prince sees the renames the piezometer water gauge demonstrated by Australian farmer Steve Filelti in 2000.

27. "Don't feed your rabbits pawpaw fruit – it acts as a contraceptive. Then again, it might not work on rabbits." Giving advice to a Caribbean rabbit breeder in Anguilla in 1994.

28. "You must be out of your minds." To Solomon Islanders, on being told that their population growth was 5 per cent a year, in 1982.

29. "Young people are the same as they always were. They are just as ignorant." At the 50th anniversary of the Duke of Edinburgh Awards scheme.

30. "Your country is one of the most notorious centres of trading in endangered species." Accepting a conservation award in Thailand in 1991.

31. "Aren't most of you descended from pirates?" In the Cayman Islands, 1994.

32. "You bloody silly fool!" To an elderly car park attendant who made the mistake of not recognising him at Cambridge University in 1997.

33. "Oh! You are the people ruining the rivers and the environment." To three young employees of a Scottish fish farm at Holyrood Palace in 1999.

34. "If you travel as much as we do you appreciate the improvements in aircraft design of less noise and more comfort – provided you don't travel in something called economy class, which sounds ghastly." To the Aircraft Research Association in 2002.

35. "The French don't know how to cook breakfast." After a breakfast of bacon, eggs, smoked salmon, kedgeree, croissants and pain au chocolat – from Gallic chef Regis Crépy – in 2002.

36. "And what exotic part of the world do you come from?" Asked in 1999 of Tory politician Lord Taylor of Warwick, whose parents are Jamaican. He replied: "Birmingham."

37. "Oh no, I might catch some ghastly disease." On a visit to Australia in 1992, when asked if he wanted to stroke a koala bear.

38. "It doesn't look like much work goes on at this University." Overheard at Bristol University's engineering facility. It had been closed so that he and the Queen could officially open it in 2005.

39. "I wish he'd turn the microphone off!" The Prince expresses his opinion of Elton John's performance at the 73rd Royal Variety Show, 2001.

40. "Do you still throw spears at each other?" Prince Philip shocks Aboriginal leader William Brin at the Aboriginal Cultural Park in Queensland, 2002.

41. "Where's the Southern Comfort?" On being presented with a hamper of southern goods by the American ambassador in London in 1999.

42. "Were you here in the bad old days? ... That's why you can't read and write then!" To parents during a visit to Fir Vale Comprehensive School in Sheffield, which had suffered poor academic reputation.

43. "Ah you're the one who wrote the letter. So you can write then? Ha, ha! Well done." Meeting 14-year old George Barlow, whose invited to the Queen to visit Romford, Essex, in 2003.

44. "So who's on drugs here?... HE looks as if he's on drugs." To a 14-year-old member of a Bangladeshi youth club in 2002.

45. "You could do with losing a little bit of weight." To hopeful astronaut, 13-year-old Andrew Adams.

46. "You have mosquitoes. I have the Press." To the matron of a hospital in the Caribbean in 1966.

47. "The man who invented the red carpet needed his head examined." While hosts made effort to greet a state visit to Brazil, 1968.

48. "During the Blitz a lot of shops had their windows blown in and sometimes they put up notices saying, 'More open than usual.' I now declare this place more open than usual." Unveiling a plaque at the University of Hertfordshire's new Hatfield campus in November 2003.

49 . Philip: "Who are you?"

Simon Kelner: "I'm the editor-in-chief of The Independent, Sir."

Philip: "What are you doing here?"

Kelner: "You invited me."

Philip: "Well, you didn't have to come!"

An exchange at a press reception to mark the Golden Jubilee in 2002.

50. "No, I would probably end up spitting it out over everybody." Prince Philip declines the offer of some fish from Rick Stein's seafood deli in 2000.

51. "Any bloody fool can lay a wreath at the thingamy." Discussing his role in an interview with Jeremy Paxman.

52. "Holidays are curious things, aren't they? You send children to school to get them out of your hair. Then they come back and make life difficult for parents. That is why holidays are set so they are just about the limit of your endurance." At the opening of a school in 2000.

53. "People think there's a rigid class system here, but dukes have even been known to marry chorus girls. Some have even married Americans." In 2000.

54. "Can you tell the difference between them?" On being told by President Obama that he'd had breakfast with the leaders of the UK, China and Russia.

55. "I don't know how they are going to integrate in places like Glasgow and Sheffield." After meeting students from Brunei coming to Britain to study in 1998.

56. "Do people trip over you?" Meeting a wheelchair-bound nursing-home resident in 2002.

57. "That's a nice tie... Do you have any knickers in that material?" Discussing the tartan designed for the Papal visit with then-Scottish Tory leader Annabel Goldie last year.

58. "I have never been noticeably reticent about talking on subjects about which I know nothing." Addressing a group of industrialists in 1961.

59. "It's not a very big one, but at least it's dead and it took an awful lot of killing!" Speaking about a crocodile he shot in Gambia in 1957.

60. "Well, you didn't design your beard too well, did you? You really must try better with your beard." To a young fashion designer at a Buckingham Palace in 2009.

61. "So you're responsible for the kind of crap Channel Four produces!" Speaking to then chairman of the channel, Michael Bishop, in 1962.

62. "Dontopedalogy is the science of opening your mouth and putting your foot in it, a science which I have practiced for a good many years." Address to the General Dental Council, quoted in Time in 1960.

63. "Tolerance is the one essential ingredient ... You can take it from me that the Queen has the quality of tolerance in abundance." Advice for a successful marriage in 1997.

64. "I never see any home cooking – all I get is fancy stuff." Commiserating about the standard of Buckingham Palace cuisine in 1962.

65. "I suppose I would get in a lot of trouble if I were to melt them down." On being shown Nottingham Forest FC's trophy collection in 1999.

66. "It makes you all look like Dracula's daughters!" To pupils at Queen Anne's School in Reading, who wear blood-red uniforms, in 1998.

67. "I don't think a prostitute is more moral than a wife, but they are doing the same thing." Dismissing claims that those who sell slaughtered meat have greater moral authority than those who participate in blood sports, in 1988.

68. "Ah, so this is feminist corner then." Joining a group of female Labour MPs, who were wearing name badges reading "Ms", at a Buckingham Palace drinks party in 2000.

69. "Cats kill far more birds than men. Why don't you have a slogan: 'Kill a cat and save a bird?'" On being told of a project to protect turtle doves in Anguilla in 1965.

70. "All money nowadays seems to be produced with a natural homing instinct for the Treasury." Bemoaning the rate of British tax in 1963.

71. "It is my invariable custom to say something flattering to begin with so that I shall be excused if by any chance I put my foot in it later on." Full marks for honesty, from a speech in 1956.

72. "Why don't you go and live in a hostel to save cash?" Asked of a penniless student.

73. "In education, if in nothing else, the Scotsman knows what is best for him. Indeed, only a Scotsman can really survive a Scottish education." Said when he was made Chancellor of Edinburgh University in November 1953.

74. "If it doesn't fart or eat hay, she isn't interested." Of his daughter, Princess Anne.

75. "They're not mating are they?" Spotting two robots bumping in to one another at the Science Museum in 2000.

76. "I must be in the only person in Britain glad to see the back of that plane." Philip did not approve of the noise Concorde made while flying over the Buckingham Palace.

77. "The only active sport, which I follow, is polo – and most of the work's done by the pony!" 1965

78. "It looks like a tart's bedroom." On seeing plans for the Duke and then Duchess of York's house at Sunninghill Park.

79. "Reichskanzler." Prince Philip used Hitler's title to address German chancellor Helmut Kohl during a speech in Hanover in 1997.

80. "We go into the red next year... I shall probably have to give up polo." Comment on US television in 1969 about the Royal Family's finances.

81. "Bugger the table plan, give me my dinner!" Showing his impatience to be fed at a dinner party in 2004.

82. "I thought it was against the law these days for a woman to solicit." Said to a woman solicitor.

83. "You're just a silly little Whitehall twit: you don't trust me and I don't trust you." Said to Sir Rennie Maudslay, Keeper of the Privy Purse, in the 1970s.

84. "What about Tom Jones? He's made a million and he's a bloody awful singer." Response to a comment at a small-business lunch about how difficult it is in Britain to get rich.

85. "This could only happen in a technical college." On getting stuck in a lift between two floors at the Heriot Watt University, 1958.

86. "I'd much rather have stayed in the Navy, frankly." When asked what he felt about his life in 1992.

87. "It looks like the kind of thing my daughter would bring back from her school art lessons" On being shown "primitive" Ethiopian art in 1965.

88. "You're not wearing mink knickers, are you?" Philip charms fashion writer Serena French at a World Wildlife Fund gathering in 1993.

89. "My son...er...owns them." On being asked on a Canadian tour whether he knew the Scilly Isles.

90. "Well, that's more than you know about anything else then." Speaking, a touch condescendingly, to Michael Buerk, after being told by the BBC newsreader that he did know about the Duke of Edinburgh's Gold Awards in 2004.

[mr-chrisevans]

for the drabble requests could you do number 8 with chris please!

Here we go! I actually had a great time writing this so I hope you enjoy it! More to come tomorrow in all likelihood but check out the original post here for more prompts.

Title: Happy Holidays, I Guess

Pairing: Chris Evans x reader

Prompt: “Look, I only came here for the Christmas cookies.”

You sat in your car outside the house for a few minutes, trying to find the will to go inside. The last thing you wanted to do was go to a holiday party filled with people from your hometown, but Chris insisted you come with him. Your phone buzzed in your pocket and you quickly pulled it out to see a text from Chris.

Chris

I can see your car outside.

Get in here or I will pull you out of the car myself don’t try me.

Y/N

God you are the worst.

You sighed heavily and finally got out of the car, carefully making your way up the driveway in the snow to make it to the front door. Before you could even knock Chris was standing in the doorway beaming.

“Y/N, you are the most stubborn person I’ve ever met, but I’m really glad to see you.” He pulled you inside and shut the door behind you.

“Look, I only came here for the Christmas cookies.” You shrugged off your coat and let him hang it up for you in the coat closet. “The fact that I let you convince me to do this is a testament to your skills of persuasion.”

“I know our hometown friends aren’t exactly your favorite people, but we can spend tonight making fun of all the people who were really shitty in high school and are now horrifically boring.”

“With that I guess I’m not only here for the cookies.” You joked.

Chris laughed and wrapped an arm around you and lead you into the kitchen. “Let’s get you something to drink because I think you’re going to need it.”

The second you got to the kitchen you were bombarded by hellos and questions about how you’ve been doing since you moved and a million other questions that you had absolutely zero desire to answer but had to be nice. Chris discreetly handed you a beer as you started talking to Kelly, the girl who hated you for two years because you beat her out for the lead part in the fall play sophomore year. “Yeah, I really love New York it’s a fantastic city.” You smiled at her. “How about you, what have you been doing?” You asked politely with no actually interest in what her answer was going to be.

“Well, George and I got married earlier this year so that’s been the most exciting thing ever.” She beamed at you. Out of the corner of your eye you saw Chris mouth ‘Not surprised’, and you tried not to laugh as she kept talking. “Not nearly as exciting as being a writer in New York though.” She said with the tiniest edge of sarcasm in her voice.

“Well, you know, everyone’s got something don’t they. It’s been great talking to you Kelly but I think we’ve got to make some rounds and say hi.” You quickly excused yourself and grabbed Chris’ arm and pulled him with you into a corner of the living room. The fake smile you had plastered on your face quickly melted off. “I’ve been here all of fifteen minutes and it is already insufferable.” You took a long sip of your beer and looked at all the people sitting in the living room. “I don’t even see any cookies here.”

“Wait here, I will be right back.” He walked back into the kitchen and left you leaning on the back windows by yourself, observing the people you went high school with as they steadily got drunker and devolved into their high-school selves. “Voila!” Chris exclaimed as he walked back over to you, an entire tray of decorated cookies in hand. “I promised cookies and now I have delivered.”

“Oh thank god.” You took a cookie off the tray and bit into it immediately. “That’s a damn good cookie.” You said as you chewed.

“Well thank you, I made these myself.” He said with a smile on his face.

“You are such a liar I saw these exact cookies at the grocery store the other day.”

“Okay, maybe I didn’t make them, but I did buy them so that counts for something.”

You chuckled at him and continued eating your cookie. “How come we never got invited to parties like this in high school? I mean, we weren’t that weird, were we?” You asked.

“We definitely weren’t weirder than any of the other theater kids, but I’m pretty sure Kelly had you on the party blacklist after the Midsummer Night’s Dream debacle. And since I was your best friend they stuck me on there too.”

“I fucking knew it.” You laughed. “She never could have pulled off Hermia though, let’s be honest.”

“Being Hermia was probably your finest hour of high school theater. Perfect performance, if you ask me.”

“I can’t believe her and George are still together. How on Earth did that happen?”

“I know, it makes literally no sense.” Chris said. “I swear I heard he cheated on her when they were in college with some girl he met when he went abroad for a semester.”

You laughed. “I would not put it past him, I mean look at him now.” George sat perched on the arm of the sofa talking very animatedly with a girl who was definitely not Kelly. “What a prick.”

Chris looked at his watch for a second, sighed, and turned to you. “I think we’ve been here long enough, shall we go for an Irish exit?”

“I would love nothing more.” You agreed excitedly and quickly finished your beer before following him out to the front hall. You both pulled on your coats as you walked out the door. “Shit.” You said, stopping on the driveway. “I should have grabbed another cookie.”

Chris stopped for a second and looked down the street, thinking. “Toss me your keys, I have an idea.”

“You want to drive my car?” You asked skeptically.

“Oh come on. I’m a much better driver than I was in high school.” You hesitated still before finally tossing him the keys. “Thank god, it’s fucking cold out here.” He ran over to the car and threw himself into the driver’s seat.”

“So where exactly are we headed?” You asked as he started the car and pulled back on to the street.

“It’s a surprise. Trust me you’ll love it.” The two of you drove for a few minutes in a comfortable silence while cheesy Christmas songs played on the radio. Before too long, Chris pulled into the parking lot of the old diner in town and turned off the car. “Well, surprise!”

“Shit, I haven’t been to Jack’s in ages. I don’t even remember the last time I was here.”

He got out of the car and gestured for you to do the same. “Let’s go, I’m starving.”

You walked inside the building, the warm air and smell of coffee greeting you. “Go ahead and take a seat anywhere, we’ll be over to help you in a second.” The woman behind the counter told the two of you. You both smiled and made your way to a booth. There were only a few other people there so it was pretty quiet and you managed to snag the booth you used to always sit at. 

“I don’t even have to look at a menu, I know exactly what I am getting.” You said as you slid into the booth opposite Chris.

He grinned. “I knew you would love this. You can never beat a late night trip to Jack’s”

“God, we used to do this all the time. No wonder my acne was so bad, Jesus.” You joked and the two of you laughed.

“We were definitely here way too often. That’s probably why everyone thought we were weird. They were out getting drunk in someone’s unfinished basement and we were here trying to see who could drink a milkshake the fastest.”

“And I beat you every time.” You said proudly.

“I was just very sensitive to cold, it’s not my fault.” He responded, trying to defend himself.

“Excuses, excuses.” He tried to continue his defense but the woman behind the counter had made her way over to take your order. 

She set down two glasses of water on the table before pulling out a little notepad from her apron. “What can I get started for you two tonight?” Her thick Boston accent made you feel even more at home in the diner.

“I will have the classic grilled cheese and tomato soup please.” 

She turned to Chris. “And for you?”

His eyes lingered on the menu for a moment before he looked back at the waitress. “I will have the cheeseburger and fries and we will split a chocolate milkshake.” He looked at you and smiled as she wrote down the order.

“I’ll be right back with all that. Anything else I can get for you besides water?”

“No I think we’re all set,” you replied. “Thank you.” 

“I think we’ve talked enough about the past tonight, it’s time to move on to the present.” Chris said, holding his glass of water between is hands as he leaned into the table. “How’s New York been lately?”

You sighed and played with your straw. “I mean, don’t get me wrong I absolutely love the city, but sometimes it can be a lot.”

He nodded along with you. “I totally get it. Work has been okay though, right?” He continued. You chewed on your lip a little and stared into your glass of water. “I take that as a no.” He added and leaned back into the booth.

You stared up at him. “No, it’s definitely not given that I no longer have a job.”

“Shit, Y/N. I’m so sorry.”

You tried to shrug it off. “It’ll be okay. I’ll figure something out soon.”

“That’s why you didn’t want to come to the party, wasn’t it?”

“And he puts the pieces of the puzzle together.” You lifted your glass to him in mock cheers. “I wasn’t exactly chomping at the bit to tell people here that I was now officially unemployed.”

“Right before Christmas too. Fucking rough.”

“We always knew my boss was a dick and now we have the ultimate proof.” You joked.

“If he didn’t live in an apartment in New York I would say we should egg his house.”

“Damn, that would’ve been amazing.” You both laughed.

“Well, let’s toast,” he said, gesturing for you to lift your glass with him, “to things being even marginally less shitty next year.” You clinked your glasses together and took a sip of your water. 

“That is definitely something I can drink to.” 

[silent-era-of-cinema]

Colleen Moore (born Kathleen Morrison; August 19, 1899 – January 25, 1988) was an American film actress who began her career during the silent film era. Moore became one of the most fashionable (and highly-paid) stars of the era and helped popularize the bobbed haircut.

A huge star in her day, approximately half of Moore's films are now considered lost, including her first talking picture from 1929. What was perhaps her most celebrated film, Flaming Youth (1923), is now mostly lost as well, with only one reel surviving.

Moore took a brief hiatus from acting between 1929 and 1933, just as sound was being added to motion pictures. After the hiatus, her four sound pictures released in 1933 and 1934 were not financial successes. Moore then retired permanently from screen acting.

After her film career, Moore maintained her wealth through astute investments, becoming a partner of Merrill Lynch. She later wrote a "how-to" book about investing in the stock market.

Moore also nurtured a passion for dollhouses throughout her life and helped design and curate The Colleen Moore Dollhouse, which has been a featured exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, Illinois since the early 1950s. The dollhouse, measuring 9 square feet (0.84 m2), was estimated in 1985 to be worth of $7 million, and it is seen by 1.5 million people annually.

Moore was born Kathleen Morrison on August 19, 1899, (according to the bulk of the official records;[4] the date which she insisted was correct in her autobiography, Silent Star, was 1902)[5] in Port Huron, Michigan,[6] Moore was the eldest child of Charles R. and Agnes Kelly Morrison. The family remained in Port Huron during the early years of Moore's life, at first living with her grandmother Mary Kelly (often spelled Kelley) and then with at least one of Moore's aunts.

By 1905, the family moved to Hillsdale, Michigan, where they remained for over two years. They relocated to Atlanta, Georgia, by 1908. They are listed at three different addresses during their stay in Atlanta (From the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library city directories): 301 Capitol Avenue −1908; 41 Linden Avenue – 1909; 240 N. Jackson Street – 1910. They then lived briefly — probably less than a year — in Warren, Pennsylvania, and by 1911, they had settled in Tampa, Florida.

At age 15 she was taking her first step in Hollywood. Her uncle arranged a screen test with director D.W. Griffith. She wanted to be a second Lillian Gish but instead, she found herself playing heroines in Westerns with stars such as Tom Mix.

Two of Moore's great passions were dolls and movies; each would play a great role in her later life. She and her brother began their own stock company, reputedly performing on a stage created from a piano packing crate. Her aunts, who doted on her, indulged her other great passion and often bought her miniature furniture on their many trips, with which she furnished the first of a succession of dollhouses. Moore's family summered in Chicago, where Moore enjoyed baseball and the company of her Aunt Lib (Elizabeth, who changed her name to "Liberty", Lib for short) and Lib's husband Walter Howey. Howey was the managing editor of the Chicago Examiner and an important newspaper editor in the publishing empire of William Randolph Hearst, and was the inspiration for Walter Burns, the fictional Chicago newspaper editor in the play and the film, The Front Page.

Early years

Essanay Studios was within walking distance of the Northwestern L, which ran right past the Howey residence. (They occupied at least two residences between 1910 and 1916: 4161 Sheridan and 4942 Sheridan.) In interviews later in her silent film career, Moore claimed she had appeared in the background of several Essanay films, usually as a face in a crowd. One story has it she had gotten into the Essanay studios and waited in line to be an extra with Helen Ferguson: in an interview with Kevin Brownlow many years later, Ferguson told a story that substantially confirmed many details of the claim, though it is not certain if she was referring to Moore's stints as a background extra (if she really was one) or to her film test there prior to her departure for Hollywood in November 1917. Film producer D.W. Griffith was in debt to Howey, who had helped him to get both The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance through the Chicago censorship board.

"I was being sent to Hollywood - not because anybody out there thought I was any good, but simply to pay off a favor".

The contract to Griffith's Triangle-Fine Arts was conditional on passing a film test to ensure that her heterochromia (she had one brown eye, one blue eye) would not be a distraction in close-up shots. Her eyes passed the test, so she left for Hollywood with her grandmother and her mother as chaperones. Moore made her first credited film appearance in 1917 in The Bad Boy for Triangle Fine Arts, and for the next few years appeared in small, supporting roles gradually attracting the attention of the public.

The Bad Boy was released on February 18, and featured Robert Harron, Richard Cummings, Josephine Crowell, and Mildred Harris (who would later become Charles Chaplin's first wife). Two months later, it was followed by An Old-Fashioned Young Man, again with Robert Harron. Moore’s third film was Hands Up! filmed in part in the vicinity of the Seven Oaks (a popular location for productions that required dramatic vistas). This was her first true western. The film’s scenario was written by Wilfred Lucas from a story by Al Jennings, the famous outlaw who had been freed from jail by presidential pardon by Theodore Roosevelt in 1907. Monte Blue was in the cast and noticed Moore could not mount her horse, though horseback riding was required for the part (during casting for the part she neglected to mention she did not know how to ride). Blue gave her a quick lesson essentially consisting of how to mount the horse and how to hold on.

On May 3, 1917, the Chicago Daily Tribune said: "Colleen Moore contributes some remarkable bits of acting. She is very sweet as she goes trustingly to her bandit hero, and, O, so pitiful, when finally realizing the character of the man, she goes into a hysteria of terror, and, shrieking 'Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!' beats futilely on a bolted door, a panic-stricken little human animal, who had not known before that there was aught but kindness in the world." About the time her first six-month contract was extended an additional six months, she requested and received a five weeks release to do a film for Universal's Bluebird division, released under the name The Savage. This was her fourth film, and she was only needed for two weeks. Upon her return to the Fine Arts lot, she spent several weeks trying to get her to pay for the three weeks she had been available for work for Triangle (finally getting her pay in December of that year).

Soon after, the Triangle Company went bust, and while her contract was honored, she found herself scrambling to find her next job. With a reel of her performance in Hands Up! under her arm, Colin Campbell arranged for her to get a contract with Selig Polyscope. She was very likely at work on A Hoosier Romance before The Savage was released in November. After A Hoosier Romance, she went to work on Little Orphant Annie. Both films were based upon poems by James Whitcomb Riley, and both proved to be very popular. It was her first real taste of popularity.

Little Orphant Annie was released in December. The Chicago Daily Tribune wrote of Moore, "She was a lovely and unspoiled child the last time I saw her. Let’s hope commendation hasn’t turned her head." Despite her good notices, her luck took a turn for the worse when Selig Polyscope went bust. Once again Moore found herself unemployed, but she had begun to make a name for herself by 1919. She had a series of films lined up. She went to Flagstaff, Arizona for location work on The Wilderness Trail, another western, this time with Tom Mix. Her mother went along as a chaperone. Moore wrote that while she had a crush on Mix, he only had eyes for her mother. The Wilderness Trail was a Fox Film Corporation production, and while it had started production earlier, it would not be released until after The Busher, which was released on May 18. The Busher was an H. Ince Productions-Famous Players-Lasky production; it was a baseball film wherein the hero was played by John Gilbert. The Wilderness Trail followed on July 6, another Fox film. A few weeks later, The Man in the Moonlight, a Universal Film Manufacturing Company film was released on July 28. The Egg Crate Wallop was a Famous Players-Lasky production released by Paramount Pictures on September 28.

The next stage of her career was with the Christie Film Company, a move she made when she decided she needed comic training. While with Christie, she made Her Bridal Nightmare, A Roman Scandal, and So Long Letty. At the same time as she was working on these films, she worked on The Devil's Claim with Sessue Hayakawa, in which she played a Persian woman, When Dawn Came, and His Nibs (1921) with Chic Sale. All the while, Marshall Neilan had been attempting to get Moore released from her contract so she could work for him. He was successful and made Dinty with Moore, releasing near the end of 1920, followed by When Dawn Came.

For all his efforts to win Moore away from Christie, it seems Neilan loaned Moore to other studios most of the time. He loaned her out to King Vidor for The Sky Pilot, released in May 1921, yet another Western. After working on The Sky Pilot on location in the snows of Truckee, she was off to Catalina Island for work on The Lotus Eater with John Barrymore. In October 1921, His Nibs was released, her only film to be released that year besides The Sky Pilot. In His Nibs, Moore actually appeared in a film within the film; the framing film was a comedy vehicle for Chic Sales. The film it framed was a spoof on films of the time. 1922 proved to be an eventful year for Moore as she was named a WAMPAS Baby Star during a "frolic" at the Ambassador Hotel which became an annual event, in recognition of her growing popularity.[13] In early 1922, Come On Over was released, made from a Rupert Hughes story and directed by Alfred E. Green. Hughes directed Moore himself in The Wallflower, released that same year. In addition, Neilan introduced her to John McCormick, a publicist who had had his eye on Moore ever since he had first seen her photograph. He had prodded Marshall into an introduction. The two hit it off, and before long they were engaged. By the end of that year, three more of her films were released: Forsaking All Others, The Ninety and Nine, and Broken Chains.

Look Your Best and The Nth Commandment were released in early 1923, followed by two Cosmopolitan Productions, The Nth Commandment and Through the Dark. By this time, Moore had publicly confirmed her engagement to McCormick, a fact that she had been coy about to the press previously. Before mid-year, she had signed a contract with First National Pictures, and her first two films were slated to be The Huntress and Flaming Youth. Slippy McGee came out in June, followed by Broken Hearts of Broadway.

Moore and John McCormick married while Flaming Youth was still in production, and just before the release of The Savage. When it was finally released in 1923, Flaming Youth, in which she starred opposite actor Milton Sills, was a hit. The controversial story put Moore in focus as a flapper, but after Clara Bow took the stage in Black Oxen in December, she gradually lost her momentum. In spring 1924 she made a good but unsuccessful effort to top Bow in The Perfect Flapper, and soon after she dismissed the whole flapper vogue; "No more flappers...people are tired of soda-pop love affairs." Decades later Moore stated Bow was her "chief rival."

Through the Dark, originally shot under the name Daughter of Mother McGinn, was released during the height of the Flaming Youth furor in January 1924. Three weeks later, Painted People was released. After that, she was to star in Counterfeit. The film went through a number of title changes before being released as Flirting with Love in August. In October, First National purchased the rights to Sally for Moore's next film. It would be a challenge, as Sally was a musical comedy. In December, First National purchased the rights to Desert Flower and in so doing had mapped out Moore's schedule for 1925: Sally would be filmed first, followed by The Desert Flower.

By the late 1920s, she had accomplished dramatic roles in films such as So Big, where Moore aged through a stretch of decades, and was also well received in light comedies such as Irene. An overseas tour was planned to coincide with the release of So Big in Europe, and Moore saw the tour as her first real opportunity to spend time with her husband, John McCormick. Both she and John McCormick were dedicated to their careers, and their hectic schedules had kept them from spending any quality time together. Moore wanted a family; it was one of her goals.

Plans for the trip were put in jeopardy when she injured her neck during the filming of The Desert Flower. Her injury forced the production to shut down while Moore spent six weeks in a body cast in bed. Once out of the cast, she completed the film and left for Europe on a triumphal tour. When she returned, she negotiated a new contract with First National. Her films had been great hits, so her terms were very generous. Her first film upon her return to the States was We Moderns, set in England with location work done in London during the tour. It was a comedy, essentially a retelling of Flaming Youth from an English perspective. This was followed by Irene (another musical in the style of the very popular Sally) and Ella Cinders, a straight comedy that featured a cameo appearance by comedian Harry Langdon. It Must Be Love was a romantic comedy with dramatic undertones, and it was followed by Twinkletoes, a dramatic film that featured Moore as a young dancer in London's Limehouse district during the previous century. Orchids and Ermine was released in 1927, filmed in part in New York, a thinly veiled Cinderella story.

In 1927, Moore split from her studio after her husband suddenly quit. It is rumored that John McCormick was about to be fired for his drinking and that she left as a means of leveraging her husband back into a position at First National. It worked, and McCormick found himself as Moore's sole producer. Moore's popularity allowed her productions to become very large and lavish. Lilac Time was one of the bigger productions of the era, a World War I drama. A million dollar film, it made back every penny spent within months. Prior to its release, Warner Bros. had taken control of First National and were less than interested in maintaining the terms of her contract until the numbers started to roll in for Lilac Time. The film was such a hit that Moore managed to retain generous terms in her next contract and her husband as her producer.

In 1928, inspired by her father and with help from her former set designer, a dollhouse was constructed by her father, which was 9 square feet with the tallest tower 12 feet high. The interior of The Colleen Moore Dollhouse, designed by Harold Grieve, features miniature bear skin rugs and detailed furniture and art. Moore's dollhouse has been a featured exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, Illinois since October 30, 1949, where according to the museum, it is seen by 1.5 million people each year and would be worth $7 million. Moore continued working on it and contributing artifacts to it until her death.

This dollhouse was the eighth one Moore owned. The first dollhouse, she wrote in her autobiography Silent Star (1968), evolved from a cabinet that held her collection of miniature furniture. It was supposedly built from a cigar box. Kitty Lorgnette wrote in the Saturday, August 13, 1938 edition of The Evening News (Tampa) that the first dollhouse was purchased by Oraleze O'Brien (Mrs. Frank J. Knight) in 1916 when Moore (then Kathleen) left Tampa. Oraleze was too big for dollhouses, however, and she sold it again after her cat had kittens in it, and from there she lost track of it. The third house was possibly given to the daughter of Moore's good friend, author Adela Rogers St. Johns. The fourth survives and remains on display in the living room of a relative.

With the advent of talking pictures in 1929, Moore took a hiatus from acting. After divorcing McCormick in 1930, Moore married prominent New York-based stockbroker Albert Parker Scott in 1932. The couple lived at that time in a lavish home at 345 St. Pierre Road in Bel Air, where they hosted parties for and were supporters of the U.S. Olympic team, especially the yachting team, during the 1932 Summer Olympics held in Los Angeles.

In 1934, Moore, by then divorced from Albert Parker Scott, returned to work in Hollywood. She appeared in three films, none of which was successful, and Moore retired. Her last film was a version of The Scarlet Letter in 1934. She later married the widower Homer Hargrave and raised his children (she never had children of her own) from a previous marriage, with whom she maintained a lifelong close relationship. Throughout her life she also maintained close friendships with other colleagues from the silent film era, such as King Vidor and Mary Pickford.

In the 1960s, Moore formed a television production company with King Vidor with whom she had worked in the 1920s. She also published two books in the late 1960s, her autobiography Silent Star: Colleen Moore Talks About Her Hollywood (1968) and How Women Can Make Money in the Stock Market (1969). She also figures prominently alongside King Vidor in Sidney D. Kirkpatrick's book, A Cast of Killers, which recounts Vidor's attempt to make a film of and solve the murder of William Desmond Taylor. In that book, she is recalled as having been a successful real estate broker in Chicago and partner in the investment firm Merrill Lynch after her film career.

Many of Moore's films deteriorated, but not due to her own neglect, after she had sent them to be preserved at the Museum of Modern Art. Some time later, Warner Brothers asked for their nitrate materials to be returned to them. Moore's earlier First National films were also sent, since Warners later acquired First National. Upon their arrival, the custodian at MOMA, not seeing the films on the manifest, put them to one side and never went back to them. Many years later, Moore inquired about her collection and MOMA found the films languishing unprotected. When the films were examined, they had decomposed past the point of preservation. Heartbroken, she tried in vain to retrieve any prints she could from several sources without much success. In 1956, the material from WB and FN was sold to Associated Artists Productions, later to MGM/UA and then, Turner Entertainment.

At the height of her fame, Moore was earning $12,500 per week. She was an astute investor, and through her investments, remained wealthy for the rest of her life. In her later years she would frequently attend film festivals, and was a popular interview subject always willing to discuss her Hollywood career. She was a participant in the documentary series Hollywood (1980), providing her recollections of Hollywood's silent film era.

Moore was married four times. Her first marriage was to John McCormick of First National Studios. They married in 1923 and divorced in 1930. In 1932, Moore married stockbroker Albert P. Scott. This union ended in divorce in 1934. Moore's third marriage was to Homer Hargrave, whom she married in 1936; he provided funding for her dollhouse and she adopted his son, Homer Hargrave, Jr and his daughter, Judy Hargrave. They remained married until Hargrave's death in 1965. In 1982, Moore married her final husband, builder Paul Magenot. They were married until Moore's death in 1988.

On January 25, 1988, Moore died from cancer in Paso Robles, California, aged 88. For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Colleen Moore has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1551 Vine Street.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of her: "I was the spark that lit up Flaming Youth, Colleen Moore was the torch. What little things we are to have caused all that trouble."

[echo-bleu]

Writing thoughts: December 2020

After struggling with NaNo in November, I wrote 52k in December without trying. I guess the day I wrote almost 8k in one sitting helped, and that was because I was writing a hugely self-indulgent fic that will never go past my laptop. It feels good, occasionally, to just write something that I’ll never even reread, so I don’t have to worry about style or clarity and just type.

I did some WIP Headcount posts (here and here) yesterday to see where I was going, so I don’t have a lot to say, except that i obviously have far too many WIPs.

Oh yes, it’s the new year, so I can do a yearly wordcount thing too. According to my files, I wrote just over 400k words this year. It’s about 100k less than last year, but last year had my entire PhD thesis in it, so it’s actually more fiction writing. Plus, who cares about whether it’s more or less, it’s pretty good.

Here I want to say to everyone who feels like they weren’t productive in 2020 and feel bad seeing others being productive: this isn’t me being productive. This is me using writing to hang on to life during a really bad time. I was unemployed all year, so I had the time, and things were shit everywhere in my personal life as well as, you know, in the world, so I plunged into fictional words and fictional characters to keep going.

So this got depressing, so I’ll move on. I’m incredibly thankful to the Shadowhunters fandom and especially the discord servers I’m in for welcoming me and being amazing and for the friends I made. I’m so thankful to for my RNM friends and everyone else who got me through this. I’ll keep writing and I’ll keep drawing and I’ll keep hanging on and I love you all.

[mkyujji]

2020 in Review

My personal 2020.  

Not gonna lie, it was a tough year.

I started out feeling vaguely hopeful that we’d managed to limp through most of the clusterfuck that was an orange shitstain for a president.  Probably should have realized that meant that his last year was going to be catastrophic.

My father died.  

I reconnected with one of my brothers over it and completely disconnected with the other one.  My son and I both lost our jobs, though he lost his sooner and more thoroughly.  I gained my job back when our casino re-opened (thank all the dieties that ever even thought about existing for me finally putting my foot down in F&B and switching to security when I did or this would not likely have happened), my son remained unemployed until late October/early November when he managed to get a job at Wal-Mart.  He absolutely hates it and finally understands how I felt about the Deli all those years.  My ex-husband kicked his current wife’s daughter out of their house, they all got COVID-19, the wife ended up in ICU for a few weeks, my daughter got promoted to manager of her newest job at Dunken Donuts and had two car accidents, further cementing my son’s decision to never drive a car ever.

My son also started displaying concerning InCel MRA like beliefs after 9 months of having nothing to do but sink into the darker corners of the internet that I still haven’t figured out to handle.

I learned to garden, knit, and sew.  I learned to make bread and kimchi, beef stroganoff and bibimbap.  I’m still working on figuring out the card weaving and the crystal resin.

I made it to level 4 on Duolingo’s Chinese course and then proceeded to forget all of it once I was back at work and had no time to practice.

My two podcast ventures have finally started moving forward even if we haven’t reached a point of actually posting anything yet.  (One is hockey, one is mythology and linguistics)

I’ve made 3 cooking videos and 3 knitting videos for my kids, since one of the things we discovered after dad died - well, two things - was that all of his recipes are lost with him and I have exactly one video of my father and it’s his lasik eye surgery video from a few years ago.

In fandom news, I picked up two new fandoms - The Witcher and The Old Guard.

I posted 4 new fics. The Witcher - One Less Bridge to Burn and Destiny (Oh a Daunting Melody) Star Trek - Field Medicine 101 and a Steve/Tony MCU fic for a holiday exchange that I’ll add once creators have been revealed.  Technically I’ve written a second part/sequel to it, but the nature of anonymous fic exchanges means that I can’t really post that until after creators have been revealed.

I wrote 1616 words of Old Guard fic, 14,532 words of The Witcher fic, 203 words of Merlin fic, 1464 words of Star Trek fic, 4551 words of MCU fic, 2500 words of Torchwood fic, 1344 words of X-Men fic for a total of 26,210 words of fic.  Which doesn’t sound like a lot if you’re used to churning out Big Bangs and the like, but after nearly a decade of being strangled with writer’s block, it felt really nice to manage to actually get words out.  It’s slow going, but for once I have actual hope that these words are going to lead to more posted and completed fic in 2021, so huzzah!

I also started a novel which has a framework and a lot of random bits and pieces littered through that framework.  

There were a lot of highs and lows (mostly lows) in 2020 and I am beyond glad to see the backside of it.

For 2021, my goals are to finally publish episodes for at least one of my podcasts, finish at least 4 more fics, and make more progress on my novel.  I’d also like to get back into Tai Chi, but I can’t see that happening until things either open back up or I get more space in my living room.  I want to try to lessen the amount of procrastination that I am prone to.  2020 proved that putting things off til tomorrow means the odds of the person you meant to do them for won't be there gets higher.  I refuse to let my relationship with my non-toxic brother wither again.

I hope that 2021 is kinder than 2020 was in every respect.

[luci-in-trenchcoats]

Acting Your Age (Part 3)

Summary: Jensen and the reader continue to grow closer but the reader has a fight with her brother over her new relationship...

Masterlist 

Pairing: Jensen x reader

Word Count: 6,800ish

Warnings: language, age gap

____

“No, no,” groaned Jensen in his seat at the rooftop restaurant Sunday night. You were already laughing though as he ran his hands over his face. “Please don’t remind me.”

“I think it’s cute that your first acting job was that,” he said.

“A show you used to watch!” he chuckled. “Oh, God.”

“It was a children’s show,” you said. “Then you really hung on to that horror thing, huh?”

“So you’ve never seen me do anything aside from the kids show?” he asked.

“I don’t even remember. I know I used to watch it. You could be a horrible actor for all I know,” you teased.

“I’m the worst,” he laughed. “Seriously.”

“Oh yeah. You had one of the longest shows ever. You must be horrible,” you said.

“At least I had a job,” he teased.

“I’m happily unemployed thank you very much,” you said.

“You only moved back like a week ago, right?” he asked.

“A little more,” you said. “I’ll take the vacation time.”

“I can’t believe I’ve never asked but what do you do?” asked Jensen.

“I’m a spy,” you said. Jensen raised an eyebrow and leaned back in his seat.

“Oh really?”

“Yup. Can’t tell anyone though.”

“Interesting. Very interesting. You like a James Bond kind of spy?” he asked.

“Oh, definitely,” you laughed. “I’m an interior designer. My firm worked with a big architectural firm over in London. I’ll probably do that again once I talk to a few firms in the city.”

“Nice. Spy stuff is your side job?” he said, a big smirk on his face.

“I don’t think I’ve been a spy since I was seven,” you said.

“Seven? Come on. You were goofing around until at least twelve,” he said.

“Maybe you were,” you teased. “Girls mature faster than boys though.”

“You’re telling me you stopped playing games and stuff when you were seven?” he asked.

“I started playing soccer a lot around that age. I don’t really remember. My siblings always had stuff going on,” you said.

“Well yeah but I mean, I used to play with my little sister, even when I was 18,” he said.

“Just different families I suppose,” you said.

“You didn’t want to bother them, did you,” he said. You turned your head and looked out at the street below, Jensen grabbing a roll from the basket. 

“You know I did good in school so that I could get a full ride for college? Like excessively good?” you said.

“Jared mentioned you’re a bit of a smartie pants,” he said with a smile. 

“I was the accident kid. My brother became a doctor, my sister went to school, Jared got some help from mom and dad during the early days...I was an extra expense. They never said that but I knew. They tried to hide it from me. I got lucky Jared did so well and could help them retire a little early,” you said.

“You have that classic Padalecki thing,” he said. “You all take care of somebody else before you take care of yourselves.”

“I know. I’m not saying I didn’t have a happy childhood or anything. I was aware of our situation was all,” you said.

“Well now that you're back home and have this new perspective on things, maybe you can take care of yourself more,” he said.

“I plan on it,” you said. “I might need some help in that department though.”

“I’m more than willing to volunteer my services,” he said.

“So at what age does the wisdom thing happen?” you asked.

“You just give less of a shit about certain stuff,” he said.

“What about acne?”

“Never goes away,” he said, tilting his chin up, rubbing over a small red bump underneath. “Getting old is fun.”

“You’re not old, trust me,” you said.

“Alright,” he said. “I think I will, kiddo.”

Your food came out and you made small talk, Jensen telling you about Austin some and places to check out. But halfway through dinner, his hair caught in the wind and he had this one piece that was sticking straight up, defying gravity even more so than all the other fluffy hair he had.

“What are you giggling at?” he asked after a minute.

“Your hair. It’s...it’s very fluffy,” you said. He patted his head and he eventually smoothed down the spot, more hair spiking up elsewhere.

“I get it?” he asked.

“Yeah, you got it,” you said. “God I love your hair.”

“Well thank you,” he said, a cute little smile on his face.

“You probably get told you’re handsome a lot, huh,” you said.

“I guess. In one ear, out the other,” he said.

“I could have sworn you just blushed though.”

“Well you’re special,” he said.

“I mean the hair has to make up for the appalling face,” you said.

“Oh does it? Here I was going to tell you how beautiful you looked,” he said, biting back a smile.

“It’s alright,” you said, grinning as you went back to eating.

“How’s the steak?” he asked.

“Delicious,” you said with a thumbs up.

“This place has really good dessert too,” he said.

“Do they have steak flavored dessert?” you asked.

“I knew there was a reason I liked you.”

“Do you have work tomorrow?” you asked as you walked around a quieter part of downtown after dinner.

“No. I got to pop in the brewery for a few and my agent normally sends me new scripts I might be interested in on Mondays to look over but that’s it,” he said.

“When do you think you’ll act again?”

“Probably after the new year. There’s this one job I really want. They were holding back all auditions though for a while. I got to film that and send it in later this week. That job would start in January,” he said.

“I hope you get it,” you said.

“Me too. Been a while since I auditioned for anything,” he said.

“I’m sure you’ll nail it,” you said. “Jared said he’s got a guest star role starting in two months.”

“He told me about it. Sounds fun,” he said.

“Still gonna do your checks with him?” you asked.

“He told you about those?” he asked.

“Once. Back around Christmas. You were texting him. You sent a little green check mark and he wrote one back,” you said. “He told me that’s your way of checking that everything is okay. You do it everyday apparently and if he’s out of cell service, he checks in when he gets back.”

“He’s your brother. But he’s my brother too,” he said.

“I’m okay with sharing him,” you said with a smile. “I’m glad you’re his friend.”

“Me too,” he said. “I know he wants to get to know you better.”

“I wouldn’t mind that,” you said, Jensen stopping at a street corner when the light was red. He hummed to himself and you felt his hand bump yours once and then twice before his wrapped around yours, lacing your fingers together.

“Your little hands are always so cold,” he chuckled. 

“You’ll warm them up I’m sure.”

“Goodnight,” you said when Jensen was dropping you back off at Jared’s house. You leaned up and gave him a kiss, Jensen smirking through it.

“Goodnight,” he said when you pulled back. “Tomorrow night?”

“Alright. We can talk about our golf date,” you said. 

“We could go Tuesday if you don’t have plans,” he said.

“Isn’t it supposed to be like a hundred out?” you laughed.

“How about you wear a cute little golf outfit and I’ll bring the sunscreen?” he said.

“Oh, I bet you’d like that,” you said, leaning against his truck. 

“I mean I’d wear the skirt but I don’t have the legs to pull it off,” he said. You shook your head, smirking as he started to laugh. 

“You are such a loser,” you said, giving him another kiss. “I’ll pick you up at seven.”

“Oh, you’re taking me out?” he said with a big smile. “Well now I’m even more excited.”

“You’re adorable,” you said.

“You know it,” he said with a laugh, the sound of the garage door opening. You looked over your shoulder, Jared walking out with his car keys in his hands. He gave you both a nod before he walked over to his truck and climbed in. “Night, kiddo.”

“Night, Jensen.”

He walked back to the car as you headed inside. You barely had your shoes off when you heard the garage open again, Jared back in the house with a toy in his hand.

“Toy was in the backseat,” he said, giving you a nod as he went past. 

“Shouldn’t the kids all be asleep by now?” you asked.

“Your brother is spying on you,” called Gen from the family room. 

“Oh is he?” you said.

“I’m not…” said Jared with a shrug, heading into the family room. You walked over to the couch, crossing your arms as you stared down at him.

“Gen. What is he up to?” you asked.

“Nothing,” said Jared.

“Jare, if you’re gonna be…” you said. “I’m not a child. You either give me my privacy or I’m gone. You’re the one that wanted to set me and Jensen up in the first place.”

“I think you’re going a little fast is all,” he said.

“He’s kissed me a few times, that’s it. I haven’t even made out with him. What’s fast about that?” you asked.

“Well you hang out with him every night now,” he said.

“We had a family party on Friday with plenty of people. We all went to dinner last night and then I went mini golfing with him and I hung out with him for like three hours tonight. What’s the problem with that?” you asked. Gen stood up and walked into the kitchen, giving Jared a look along the way. “What? Is he suddenly a bad guy now that we’re spending time together?”

“No. No, he’s not,” he said.

“Then what is it?” you asked.

“I think you should spend some time with just you is all,” he said. “Don’t throw yourself into a guy.”

“So you’ve decided you want me to just what, be your little sister that lives here and follows her big brother around when it’s convenient for him?” you asked, crossing your arms.

“No. I thought you wanted to start being yourself is all. I think you might have an easier time doing that if you’re not constantly-”

“Throwing myself at a guy?” you said. “You think I do that?”

“Y/N,” he said, rolling his eyes.

“You were younger than me when you met Gen,” you said.

“Gen’s not fifteen years older than me,” he said. 

“Why do you suddenly have a problem with this! You were the one that tried to get us together,” you said.

“Maybe because you have a habit of going head first into a relationship and then it goes bad. He’s one of my best friends and-”

“Don’t worry. I won’t ruin your friendship,” you said. You jogged upstairs and into the room you were staying in, shoving some clothes in a bag before you were downstairs and heading for the front door.

“Where the hell are you going?” he asked, following you as you put on your shoes.

“None of your damn business,” you said, storming outside, Jared right on your tail. “Leave me alone.”

“Hey,” he said, grabbing your arm as you got to your car. You shrugged and he held on, Gen sighing as she stepped out onto the front porch. “I asked where you were going.”

“I don’t have to tell you,” you said, shrugging him off this time. You ripped open the backseat and tossed in your bag, slamming the door shut. You grabbed the drivers side door, Jared catching it once it was open. “Let go, Jared.”

“Y/N-”

“Maybe he is too old for me. At least he doesn’t make me feel shitty. But don’t worry about that. You can have your friend back,” you said. You climbed in and yanked the door shut, pulling out and on the road like that.

“Y/N,” you heard the next morning, your dad coming out to the patio in the backyard. “There’s someone here to see you.”

“I don’t want to talk to Jared.”

“Hey, kiddo,” said Jensen. You turned around in your seat, Jensen wearing a soft smile. “Can we talk?”

You shrugged, your dad heading back inside as Jensen wandered around to your side of the table and grabbed a chair, spinning it around to look out at the yard with you.

“Jared stopped over last night,” he said, resting his elbows on his hands. “He was pretty upset.”

“He’s sensitive,” you said.

“That’s not nice.”

“Maybe I’m not a nice person,” you said, not bothering to look in his direction, tucking your knees into your chest.

“I think he pushed your buttons,” he said.

“I’m not a child,” you said, closing your eyes. “Maybe I am. I ran home to my parents house last night after all.”

“Well I’m a lot older and sometimes I run home to my parents,” he said. You peeled open your eyes, Jensen still looking into the yard. “He’s really upset, Y/N. He’s in the house.”

“He doesn’t like that I hang out with you now,” you said.

“Well that’s his problem to deal with, isn’t it,” he said, turning his head. “He didn’t use some choice phrasing last night from what I heard.”

“He basically called me a slut,” you said. Jensen frowned, giving you a long stare. “He thinks I throw myself into guys.”

“Funny. I think the opposite,” he said.

“Oh yeah?” you scoffed.

“Forget the age difference. Just forget it. I don’t give a shit about it. I don’t want to be with someone that it’s going to bother them,” he said.

“It doesn’t,” you said.

“I know,” he said. “I know you told me about that British guy that was embarrassed of you and made you feel bad about yourself. I know you said older guys are less likely to cheat in your opinion. I think you got more than your fair share of battle wounds.”

“Everyone does,” you said.

“No, they don’t,” he said. “And I’m guessing considering how you aren’t super close with your family, maybe they don’t know those things.”

“Why does it matter? He’s right. Shit, I broke up with the British douche less than two months ago,” you said. “I’m already going on dates again.”

“You think there’s some kind of mandatory feel shitty period?” he asked. “No, there isn’t. I like you and I think you like me. That’s all that should matter.”

“You’re right but I can’t deal with going home to him after dates if he’s going to ruin my nights,” you said.

“You don’t have to live with him,” said Jensen.

“It’s going to cause drama if I did that,” you said.

“Well I’m not a fan of you being unhappy so someone’s going to have to give,” he said, looking back at the yard.

“You barely know me.”

“I like you,” he said, his face hard when he turned it towards you. “I don’t like people like that. I’m not some teenage boy anymore that gets crushes and nervous around girls. But you…I like when you tease me and when you laugh and you make me feel like I am that teenage boy again and it feels good and I’m not ending this because your brother doesn’t get that you are free to do whatever you want.”

You stared at him, his face softening some. He went to turn away when you caught his cheek with you hand, green eyes glancing back at you. You leaned over and kissed him, slowly, brushing your thumb over his cheekbone. He went with it, sinking into the movement before you leaned away.

“You didn’t come here for Jared, did you.”

“Not really, no,” he said. “Someone’s got to have your back.”

“You have a crush on me?” you asked.

“Yeah,” he said with a smile. “I do.”

“Good,” you said. “I don’t have to worry about blushing around you anymore.”

He chuckled and grabbed your hand, pulling you to your feet.

“You got to talk to your brother,” he said. “Maybe your parents too. They’re pretty worried.”

“I know. It’s an overdue conversation.”

“Are you gonna say anything?” you asked, sitting in Jared’s old room an hour later, the two of you crammed on the extra long twin sized bed.

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly, trying to make his body smaller. “I’m sorry about last night and...never being there to talk to.”

“I could have said something.”

“You tried to tell me when you were sixteen that your boyfriend cheated on you and all I could do that thanksgiving was go on about Gen,” he said. “When you were a freshman in college and it happened again? I was too busy to talk to you. No wonder you don’t like me.”

“Jared, you’re my brother. I love you,” you said.

“We never gave you the time of day once you got older, none of us did. We shoved you out,” he said. “We’re your siblings and we did that.”

“You guys are a lot older than me,” you said with a shrug.

“So any of these four douchebags that cheated, they ever do anything worse?” he asked.

“No. The last guy didn’t cheat,” you said.

“He made you feel shitty though,” he said.

“Not a crime,” you said. 

“You’re not like me, right?” he asked. You titled your head, Jared tapping his own. “You don’t get like I do, right?”

“I went once,” you said. “Therapy. I got scared something was wrong with me. I just have bad luck with men apparently.”

“I’m sorry I said that stuff about you seeing Jensen. He makes you happy and I know you make him happy. And I love him but I’ll always pick you over him,” he said.

“I don’t want you to pick anyone,” you said. “I’m your little sister but we missed the you getting to be an overprotective brother phase. Just be my friend. Please.”

“I’m always going to be an overprotective brother,” he said, ruffling your hair. “I’ll be less of an ass though. I’m sorry. I-”

“I know you’re sorry, Jared,” you said. He hummed and stood up, going to his bulletin board and grabbing the baseball cap hanging off the corner. He wiped the dust off of it and carried it over, plopping it on your head. “Your Cowboys hat?”

“You used to annoy me to death, coming in here everyday asking if you could have it,” he said. “It was mine so I always told you no. Dad got you a white one for your sixth birthday. You were so pissed cause you wanted mine specifically. Never understood why.”

“Cause you said I could have it,” you said as you stood. “But you forgot.”

He sighed and pulled you into a crushing hug. 

“It’s yours now,” he said. “Hey, next family vacation, you pick where you want to go. It’s on me. Just kids, I promise.”

“I’ve never been on one,” you said.

“Cause we’re shitty,” he said. “That’s over. I promise.”

“I always made excuses to not go,” you said, looking up at him.

“Well you’re going on this one. You can even bring Jensen,” he smiled.

“We’re not there yet,” you said with a laugh. 

“Will you come home? You can have your privacy and I won’t ask about Jensen or dates or any of that, I promise,” he said. “Please?”

“Do you really think I throw myself at guys?” you asked, his head already shaking.

“No. I’m sorry. Friday night you seemed happy about trying to be yourself from then on and I was so happy you were doing that but I know that’s something easier said than done, especially if you’re trying to deal with a new relationship on top of that and I’m sorry I said it. You’re careful and I know you’re a little scared of this relationship and-”

“Actually not so much. Neither one of us cares about the age thing. Or the him being kind of recognizable thing. We’re just two people starting to date,” you said.

“I didn’t mean that stuff. I know now you’ve been hurt more than once. So has he,” he said.

“I don’t plan on hurting him,” you said. He smiled and nodded, giving you another hug. “Also, moving back was expensive as hell so yeah, I totally need the free rent right now.”

“Ah. So that’s what it is,” he laughed.

“You got an awesome pool too,” you said.

“I see,” he said with a smile. “You’re gonna come home then?”

“Yeah. Until I’m on my feet,” you said.

“Stay longer than that,” he said. “We want you to. We haven’t lived together since you were seven after all.”

“Alright,” you said. “We should probably start the drive home.”

“Let’s catch lunch with mom and dad first before we head out.”

“So what was my dad saying to you just now?” you asked, pulling onto the highway, Jensen riding back to Austin with you.

“He thinks I’m a little old for you to be honest,” he said.

“Seriously? I thought-”

“I’m joking,” teased Jensen. “I mean, yes, I don’t think I’m exactly what they envisioned for you in that department but they know me. They trust me with you.”

“I didn’t really want to have that parent conversation already,” you said.

“It’s fine,” he said. “I’ll dodge the bullet with mine as long as I can.”

“Right,” you said with a nod, giving him a quick glance before looking back at the road.

“Not that I have a problem with introducing you to them. I think that’s more of a maybe down the road kind of thing,” he said.

“Jensen, it’s cool. I promise. I’d like to go back to this being drama free if we could,” you said.

“I don’t think we ever had a problem with that,” he said.

“True. Do you still want to get dinner tonight?” you asked.

“You’re taking me out on a date. I can’t wait.”

“That’s a pretty skirt,” said Jared as you headed downstairs. “Is it one of Gen’s?”

“No. She got it for me for Christmas last year. I never wore it. I have a date with Jensen,” you said, fixing your shirt. “I look okay?”

“Well you’re not as ugly as usual,” he said.

“Too bad I can’t say the same about you,” you smiled.

“Yeah, yeah. You look fine. Where are you going?” he asked.

“Dinner downtown. I’m picking him up,” you said. “There’s a lot of restaurants here.”

“Yes there are,” he said. “Still, don’t think I’ve seen you in a dress or skirt since my wedding.”

“Shut up,” you said, grabbing your purse. “Don’t wait up.”

“I won’t. Have fun!”

“You look very pretty,” said Jensen as you started to walk along the sidewalk after parking downtown. 

“Thanks,” you blushed. “You too.”

“Oh yes. A flannel shirt and jeans. So classy,” he teased.

“You make it work,” you said. He hummed and grabbed your hand, squeezing it for a moment before walking around to your other side, grabbing your right hand instead. You glanced at him as you walked past an alley, Jensen looking forward. “I have lived in a city by myself before. London.”

“I know,” he said.

“I did take a self-defense class,” you said.

“That’s great,” he said with a smile, walking around the corner, the restaurant down at the far end. 

“You walk between me and the alleys though, huh,” you said.

“Yup,” he said. “Call me paranoid but better safe than sorry.”

“Sweet dork,” you said with a laugh.

“Your sweet dork, kiddo.”

“Bats?” you said after dinner, walking through the park with Jensen, stopped on a bridge, some other people around. “Bats are kinda creepy.”

“Come on. Baby bats are cute as fuck,” he said, a giggle escaping you. “We have one of the biggest bat populations actually. They help with the bugs. They normally fly out to go hunt around this time of night.”

“So I’m gonna see a giant swarm of bats? Do they bother people?” you asked.

“What, you scared?” he asked, throwing an arm over your shoulders. 

“Pft, no,” you said. A mosquito flew in front of your face and you jerked back, Jensen chuckling when you went back to leaning against the railing. “Shut up.”

“They ain’t gonna do anything to you. They eat pesky mosquitoes,” he said.

“Good,” you said, Jensen rubbing your bare arm. “You take all the girls to see the bats, do you?”

“Oh no. Only the special ones,” he said, biting back a smile. “If you like this, we can go see some bugs and dirt tomorrow.”

“My dream come true,” you laughed. “Also, please no. I don’t like bugs.”

“We have more important plans, like golfing,” he said. 

“I will go golfing once,” you said, leaning your head against his shoulder. “Once, Ackles.”

“You’ll have fun, I promise,” he said.

“What am I supposed to wear? A dorky outfit?” you asked.

“You got any of those long sleeve shirts for the sun?” he asked. “Wear one of those and some shorts and you’re fine.”

“Alright, alright,” you said, spotting a single bat float up from under the bridge. “What’s…”

You spotted more, Jensen chuckling when a large swarm of them flew out and you tilted your head all the way back.

“Cool,” you said with a smile, watching them take off.

“Told you so.”

“How’d it go?” asked Jensen the next day at the golf course, a bag of clubs on your shoulder as you found him outside.

“I rented my clubs and some shoes,” you said, setting the bag down . “And I’m already hot.”

“Come here,” he said, grabbing the bag and setting them on the back of the cart. He opened up a side pocket of his bag and pulled out sunscreen, slathering some on your face and neck for you, letting you get your legs as you readjusted your hat. “Cowboys fan?”

“Hm?” you asked. He nodded upwards and you smiled. “Oh yeah. Not into it like Jared or anything but yeah.”

“We’ll have to watch a game together some Sunday,” he said. “I make a mean bean dip.”

“I'm a sucker for tailgate food,” you said, following his lead and hoping in the passenger seat of the cart.

“So have you ever been golfing before?” he asked.

“Once when I was like ten,” you said. “I hated it.”

“Well I figured we’d only do nine holes so you don’t end up killing me,” he said.

“Hey, I lost the bet. I can take it,” you said.

“Alright. We’ll see how it goes. Let’s get out there.”

“Alright. Practice swinging your driver. Hold on to that sucker tight when you swing it,” he said. You spread your feet, Jensen making a strange noise but he didn’t say anything. 

“Yes?” you laughed.

“Can I show you?” he asked.

“Sure,” you said. He stepped up behind you, nudging your feet farther apart. 

“Sorry,” he said, taking a step back.

“It’s alright,” you said.

“Alright,” he said, getting close again, laying his arms over yours. “Keep your hands like this.  When you swing back, use your hips and then when you’re moving forward, move them forward and let your back foot come off the ground. It let’s you keep the power through the whole swing.”

“Okie dokie,” you said. “Can you go first so I can watch?”

“Sure,” he said. You got out of the way from the woman’s tee, watching from the side as Jensen stepped up and hit his first ball, hitting it to the side of the fairway. “See what I mean about your foot?”

“Mhm,” you said. You set up your tee, taking a few light practice swings first before you stepped up. 

“Don’t worry if you hit it out of bounds. We got plenty of balls,” he said.

“Okay,” you said. You stepped up to the ball, fixing your hands and making your stance wide. He gave you a smile before you looked down. You pulled back and swung hard, the ball going somewhere. When you looked up, Jensen had a dumbfounded look on his face. 

“You’ve been fucking with me, haven’t you,” he said, a smirk crossing his face.

“What?”

“You hit the ball farther and more center than I did. You’re a golfer aren’t you,” he said.

“No way! Beginner’s luck,” you said.

“You’re serious?”

“Yeah. I’m horrible at golf,” you said.

“No. No, horrible is the opposite of the word I would use,” he laughed. 

“Maybe I just have a really good teacher,” you said.

“That must be it. Let’s see if that was a fluke or what.”

“Golfing is more fun than I thought,” you said, Jensen smiling as you returned your clubs.

“Hey, if you worked on your short game, you’d probably break a course record,” he said.

“Hey,” said some guy around your age, walking over with a beer in his hand at the clubhouse. “You the chick that hit the ball onto the green on the sixth in one stroke?”

“Is that impressive or something?” you asked. The guy smiled and nodded, leaning against the counter, seeming to ignore Jensen.

“Oh, for sure. Would you want to maybe grab a bite for lunch?”

“Sorry. I got plans,” you said, glancing at Jensen.

“Your golf coach is welcome to join,” he said.

“He’s sort of my boyfriend,” you said with a smile. The guy raised an eyebrow at Jensen.

“You’re totally like nailing this married guy though for fun right?” he asked. “We can still get a bite.”

“Let’s go, babe,” you said, grabbing Jensen’s hand, Jensen chuckling as you headed towards the restaurant there. “Pretentious little douchebag.”

“You don’t need to defend my honor, Y/N. I get how this looks to-”

You grabbed his shirt and pulled him into a kiss when you saw the other guy walk around the corner, hearing him scoff as he went past.

“Well if you’re protective of me, I get to be protective of you from douchebags,” you said. “Got it?”

“Yeah,” he said softly. “You want to grab lunch?”

“Yeah. Thanks for taking me golfing today,” you said.

“I know you didn’t like it as much as you said you did,” he said.

“Maybe I got aggravated towards the end but I like hanging out with you, doing something you enjoy,” you said.

“Well I appreciate you trying it for me. After lunch if you’re not busy, do you want to come over and have a lazy day in the pool?” he asked.

“Sure. But would you want to come over to our place? Jared and Gen would love to get to hang out too,” you said.

“Sounds perfect, kiddo.”

“Hey,” you said two hours later, stepping outside to where Jared was laying on a patio chair, looking through his phone. “Jensen’s coming over to swim in a minute.”

“Cool,” he said, staring at you for a moment. “Neither one of you has heard yet, have you.”

“What?” you asked, Jared handing over his phone to you. There was a picture of the two of you kissing on your date the night before. “What’s this from?”

“A tabloid,” he said. “You probably want to avoid any of your social media for the near future.”

“Do I even want to look at these comments?” you asked, handing the phone back.

“No, not really. They’re pretty bad,” he said.

“Well...I don’t give a shit,” you said. “That’s other people’s problem, not mine.”

“What’s other people’s problem?” asked Jensen, wandering around the back of the house, setting a cooler down on the patio.

“Us dating,” you said as you walked over. “Apparently someone saw us kissing last night.”

“I see,” he said. 

“Come on. Let’s go swimming,” you said, grabbing his hand and dragging him over to the steps and into the water.

“You know things like the guy this morning are going to happen more often,” he said.

“So?” you said, swimming out to the deep end and floating on your back. “I don’t care.”

“Don’t look at me,” you heard Jared say as you spun around, Jensen still in the shallow end, a slightly worried look on his face. “You heard her.”

“Y/N,” he said as you swam back. You stood up and stared him down, a small nod leaving him. “I don’t care either. I just want you to be happy.”

“Come play then,” you said, swimming back to the deep end, Jensen following this time.

“Hey, Jare. Why don’t you find Gen and grab that speaker that can go in the water so we can listen to some music?” asked Jensen. Jared hummed and left, your gaze going back to Jensen when you were alone. “There’s water balloons in the cooler.”

“Sneak attack? I like it,” you said with a smile.

“You sure you’re okay with the public stuff?” he asked.

“I’m sure. I didn’t need to spend that much time on my phone anyways,” you said.

“Can I ask you a question?” 

“Shoot,” you said, following him to the shallow end and out of the pool.

“Why do you like me? We do fun stuff I suppose but I…” he said, watching you step in front of him.

“I like that you’re kind and creative and attractive and there’s a bunch of little things. But I like you the best,” you said.

“I’m sort of confused,” he said.

“You want me to be happy,” you said. “It’s such a simple thing but that means the world to me. You make me happier too. I want to be able to do that for.”

“You do. I haven’t dated in a while. I was starting to give up on the whole thing and then you swoop in and make me some shy boy around you,” he said. “S’not really fair if you think about it.”

“Never said I was going to play fair,” you said.

“Someone’s getting more flirty,” he said, resting his hands on your hips.

“You’re one to talk,” you said.

“I think you both talk too much,” said Jared, both your heads whipping up to see him and Gen on their bedroom balcony, each holding a water gun.

“You two think this is our first rodeo?” she asked, turning the super soaker in your direction.

“Oh, that is so not fair,” you said, Jensen grabbing your hand and the cooler, jogging around the side of the house before you could get hit more than once. You each pulled a few out, keeping an eye on the corners before you heard whistling come from the front of the house. They both stepped out from the garage, Jared smiling as he held the hose in one hand. 

“Uh oh,” said Jensen.

“Yeah, I’d run if I were-” he said, just as you hit him in the chest with a balloon.

“Get Gen,” you said, Jensen taking off as you threw more at Jared, Gen wide eyed for a moment before she took off across the driveway, Jensen on her tail. You ran out of balloons quickly, Jared narrowing his eyes as you shrugged. “Uh…”

He took a step forward by the time you were spun around, Jared on top of you like that, hoisting you up over his shoulder.

“Oh my God. Do not drop me,” you said, Jared humming as he carried you and his water gun around to the back of the house where some squeals were happening.

“Only place I’m dropping you is the pool,” he said, slowing his walk and setting you down on the ground. He wrapped an arm around your waist, your feet in the air again as you looked across the pool, Jensen holding Gen’s gun and Gen in his other arm. “Ackles.”

“Padalecki,” he said.

“I assume you want a trade?” asked Jared.

“Not happening,” said Gen, ducking her head down and pushing Jensen into the pool, Jared tossing you in the next moment. When you popped back up, Jared was around to the other side, high fiving her. 

“Dinner’s on you two tonight,” he said.

“Alright, alright,” said Jensen. “We lost fair and square.”

“Oh it was most certainly not fair,” you said. “Jensen’s supposed to push me in the pool, not you.”

“We’ll plan our revenge later,” said Jensen quietly, a mischievous little look on his face. “Won’t we?”

“For sure,” you said. Jared went back to put away the hose while Gen jumped in the water with the speaker, turning it on a station before she started to swim around the shallow end. “We don’t bite.”

“He’s a bit of a sore loser sometimes,” she said. “Never can tell with that one.”

“Oh no, I want our evil plan to be carried out when you least expect it. You’re safe...for now,” said Jensen.

“Oh joy,” she said, swimming over to you both, Jared returning after a moment, the boys swimming off, talking about dinner plans from the sound of it. “He really likes you.”

“Jensen?”

“Yeah. He’s not putting on his fake smile anymore,” she said.

“Fake smile?” you asked, the two of you swimming over to the edge, resting your arms on it.

“He’s forty one. He was over about a month back, had too much to drink. He said a lot of stuff about how he wished he had what Jared and I did, told us not to take it or the kids for granted. I think he’s very good at pretending it didn’t bother him,” she said.

“But he’s so smiley and happy,” you said.

“No, he’s really not, not in the past few years anyways,” she said. “He’d never admit it but I think he’s falling hard for you, real hard.”

“That’s okay,” you said with a smile, spotting one on his face when he looked back at you from the other end of the pool. “I’m pretty sure I’m okay with that.”

_____

A/N: Read Part 4 here!