#you ever feel like the algorithm algorithm-ed too much

[ppeonppeonhan]

Songs That Remind Me of BL Characters & Couples

@zimmbzon kindly tagged me in their post, prompting me to share the first ten songs in my On Repeat playlist. Highly recommend checking theirs out, because mine is...rather basic. And becauuuuse it's basic, I'm gonna add another layer to this and tell you which BL character or couple perfectly matches the vibe of each song.

1 | "imperfect for you" by Ariana Grande: This one's off her new "please feel sad for me because even though I'm messy when it comes to love I still have feelings" album. I may have listened to this one "on repeat," because it's just cathartic to two-step to these lyrics: "I'm fucked up / anxious / too much / but I'll love you / like you need me to / imperfect for you." What's that? Self-awareness? Respect. I just know Ming from My Stand-In would have the audacity to sing this to body-swapped Joe.

2 | "Acid Dreams" by MAX and Felly: Could not tell you who either of these people are but this song is a snap-worthy bop that got me feeling myself every time it comes on -- probably because it opens with: "You look so good in a night gown girl / freckles on your face / lemme kiss each one." This was clearly meant for my generation, because there is not a single human under 30 in possession of a night gown. But Khem from Deep Night would 1,000% use this song to charm the pants off of someone.

3 | "Toco Toco To" by Dixson Waz: I'm Dominican. And even though I understand Spanish, I cannot for the life of me tell you what this man is saying, but I can assure you it is inappropriate. Rated NC-17 without a doubt. And for that reason, I'd pair this song with the entire cast of Playboyy -- just casually playing this in the background of one of their random, impromptu, midday sex parties.

4 | "Lie to Me" by Meghan Trainor: Obsessed. Not with her. With her music. She has so many non-butt-related songs that are worth a listen. I truly feel like she's underrated -- on par with Ed Sheeran -- and she doesn't get enough credit for it. In this track, she sings: "I don't want the truth / I want you." That sounds exactly like our lovesick boy Nick in Only Friends, thirsting after anti-monogamy Boston like he didn't know better.

5 | "Jealous" by Chris Brown, Lil Wayne, & Big Sean: While it is true that every single person on this track is problematic, including producer DJ Khaled, the swagger is immaculate. Every time it comes on, I, sincerely, close my eyes and just picture BTS's rap line to cleanse the beat. Not gonna miss out on a banger because men are the worst. Anywayyyy, the most jealous character I can think of is Way from Pit Babe, who tried to r-word his "bestie" because he chose a random nerd over him. He fits in well with these clowns.

6 | "Bounce Back" by Little Mix: The only British pop girl group I've ever intentionally streamed is Spice Girls, but the algorithm clearly thought it meant I'd like this group, and the track that hooked me was one that sampled the iconic Soul II Soul's "Back to Life." Instant replay. Someone I think lives and breathes the mantra "You can have me however you want me / however you need me" is the Sultan of Simp, Karan from Cherry Magic (Thailand). Achi could've asked for a kidney, and he would've delivered. But coming in a close second is obviously Rain from Love in the Air. Payu had to practically beat him off with a stick -- no pun intended.

7 | "Body" by Loud Luxury and Brando: It's the buildup to the chorus for me -- come to find out many listens later that it's about a guy who is begging a girl to sleep with him because he's been "waiting too long." 🙄 This one very obviously goes to Yuan from Unknown, who damn near disintegrated Qian's clothes the minute he saw even the glimmer of a green light. Talk about a slow build.

8 | "Into You" by Fabolous feat. Tamia: Back in 2003, rappers used to drop an R&B hit every now and then to remind women that they were romantics. The gaslight kings of the aughts. So in this track, this duo talks about an inexplicable-but-undeniable connection, which only makes me think of Vegas and Pete from KinnPorsche. Those two needed a PowerPoint presentation to explain to their friends and family how they went from hostage situation to star-crossed lovers. But we got nothing -- just good vibes and patricide.

9 | "i wonder..." by j-hope feat. Jung Kook: Do I miss them? Yes. Will I listen to any BTS track that's easy to Namjoon to? Yes. Now that we got that out of the way: This song is about enjoying the moment and not wasting the good times by dreading the future. And that just screams Be My Favorite to me. Kawi just kept trying to time-travel his way to a hetero fantasy, not realizing his queer happily ever after was standing right in front of him the whole time in the gorgeous form of the eternally patient Pisaeng.

10 | "MY HOUSE" by Beyoncé: Not to bring up BTS again, but 👀...j-hope would body any choreography set to this song. Without breaking a sweat. And mother would be proud. On this track, the Queen B speaks of once dreaming of the wealth, fame, and stability she has now, and making sure to only keep positive people around her, because love heals. Sailom from Dangerous Romance would certainly relate to having similar dreams and beliefs, and effortlessly exudes equally feisty bad bitch energy. I still can't get over how he disarmed his bully (and future love interest), Kanghan, by basically saying, "You clearly like me. Shut up." And saying it with tongue.

That was fun. 🤸🏿‍♂️

[fizzingwizard]

I think I’ve figured out why “follow for follow” bothers me so much.

Under a cut bc I know I’ve whined about this before and y’all probably don’t need another earful.

On another SNS I just got four new followers at once even though I haven’t used that site in... probably a year. Each of the followers were people who try to sell things (art, custom clothing, etc). On that site, it’s mostly artwork and photographs. I don’t post often because I’m not so good at it.

Same as tumblr, same as anything really, when you get a new follower there’s a little burst of surprise, interest, and gratification. Like, cool, this person saw my photos/my artwork/my blog and wants to see more of it, so they followed me! Cool! And then, yeah! I probably go to their blog and check them out, and follow them back if I like their content too. That’s the way it’s meant to work.

But these days, on tumblr as elsewhere, the majority of new followers seem to have nothing in common with me. Now and then they’re even a literal brand (if an unknown one). I remember I joined a fandom and someone rather well known there followed me after I posted a couple times. I was like wow they’re friendly! ... Only to realize that they were just following me so I would follow THEM. They never interacted once with any of my fandom posts. Which, of course, there’s never any such obligation to do... But zero interaction after following really does speak for itself.

But when you follow someone with the purpose of immediately forgetting they exist, it just feels really disingenuous. Because you KNOW they felt that little burst of gratification. You know seeing they have a new follower made them a little bit happy for a minute. And you USED that. It’s like walking up to someone, saying “I like your hair,” and then completely ignoring their thank you and follow up talk to wait for them to compliment YOUR hair. IRL that’d be rude. You can get away with a lot online that you can’t IRL, that’s true - but this is definitely one trend that has become a real pet peeve for me personally.

Brands doing it is annoying, but at least when it happens, I can go, “It’s a brand, so whatever.” When it’s an individual though. It just feels so, so tacky. Nobody likes trick adverts, why would they like a trick follow?

It’s not like you have to become bestest friends 5 ever with everyone you follow. But it seems sso weird to follow someone and never interact with them at all. Reminds of the old days in the beginning of Facebook, when everyone just friended every person they could possibly have met on the street once in an effort to “have the most friends.” Like that was some sort of accomplishment. And back then it wasn’t even about showing them your content or potentially making money: people just wanted to be “Facebook popular.” It was weird. I was never into. And I’m glad that I’m a tumblr oldie now and whether people follow or unfollow has no effect on my self-esteem anymore - but it would have when I was kid. And I certainly find it at least annoying. It’s sucked all the fun out of checking out your new follower. At least half the time, if not more than that, it’s someone who I can’t see how we have anything in common.

I know we all want visibility and algorithms and whatnot make that tough. And I know I’ve complained about this before so apologies to anyone who’s annoyed by Fizz the Broken Record. But really, truly, the best way to make me NOT interested in you or your content is make it obvious that to you I’m just a potential fan - not a potential friend.

(There may be some people who follow just to lurk because they’re shy. If so, I think the difference is, if I take a look at their blog I’m likely to find something we have in common, and be able to say, “Ah, that’s why they followed me,” as well as see that they’re not really interacting with too many others, ergo they’re probably shy. So I don’t count lurkers as part of my pet peeve in this little op-ed. This is def directed more at extroverted type blogs, who, to be fair, aren’t doing anything technically wrong. I really do wish there were a good way of telling Absolutely Everyone how much I don’t want this kind of follower, though. It’s just happening so often lately. Making fandom content used to feel like a thing we did together as a community, but with stuff like this it feels like we’re all in competition with each other instead...)

[back-and-totheleft]

“I’m not sure I’ve modified my thinking”

“It’s a strange place, England,” Oliver Stone informs me at the start of our Zoom call. “You’ve managed to make it worse than it was,” he says, speaking from his home in Los Angeles. “You’ve turned it into World War Two with your attitudes over there. The English love punishment, it’s part of their make-up.”

You sure know how to break the ice, Mr Stone. It’s a slightly galling accusation, given that he has hitched his wagon to Russia, hardly a paragon of enlightenment. The New York-born writer-director has never shied from ruffling feathers, though. Stone has taken on the American establishment to thrilling effect in his movies, from Platoon to Born on the Fourth of July, JFK to W, Salvador to Snowden, and still emerged with three Oscars. And he has admiringly interviewed a string of figures whose relations with Uncle Sam have rarely been cosy, including Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez and Vladimir Putin. Those had more mixed receptions, as has his support for Julian Assange.

Yet at 74 he is still a thorn in the side of the military-industrial complex and is set to remain one for some time, having just had his second shot of Covid vaccine. This being Stone, he got his jab in Russia. A recent trial showed the Sputnik V vaccine he was given to have 92 per cent efficacy and he’s palpably delighted. Angry too, of course. “It’s strange how the US ignores that. It’s a strange bias they have against all things Russian,” he says. “I do believe it’s your best vaccine on the market, actually,” he adds, sounding weirdly Trump-like.

If his bullishness is still intact, Stone reveals a more vulnerable side in his recent memoir, Chasing the Light. The book, which he discusses in an online Q&A tonight, goes a long way to explaining his distrust of government, society and, well, pretty much everything. There are visceral accounts of him fighting in Vietnam, and fighting to get Salvador and Platoon made. “The war was lodged away in a compartment, and I made films about it,” he says. “Sometimes I have a dream that I’ve been drafted and sent back there.”

The crucial event in the book, though, is his parents’ divorce when he was 15. Stone realises now that his conservative Jewish-American father and glamorous French mother were ill-suited. Both had affairs. What really stung was the way he was told about their split: over the phone by a family friend while he was at boarding school. “It was very cold, very English,” he says. “I say English because everything about boarding school invokes the old England.” He’s really got it in for us today.

With no siblings, he says, “I had no family after that divorce. It was over. The three of us split up.” His world view stemmed from his parents being in denial about their incompatibility, he writes in the book: “Children like me are born out of that original lie. And nobody can ever be trusted again.”

That disillusionment took a few years to show itself. “All of a sudden, I just had a collapse,” Stone says. He had been admitted to Yale University but his father’s alma mater suddenly felt like part of the problem. He felt suicidal and sidestepped those thoughts by enlisting to fight in Vietnam, putting the choice of him dying into other hands.

The Stone in the book was described by one reviewer as his most sympathetic character. “It’s true probably because it’s a novel,” he says. Well, technically it’s an autobiography, but it’s a telling mistake. Fact and fiction can blur in his work, from the demonisation of Turks in Midnight Express (he wrote the screenplay) to the conspiracy theories in JFK.

Writing the book allowed him to put himself into the story, something he says he’s never been able to do in his films. He has tried. He wrote a screenplay, White Lies, in which a child of divorce repeats his parents’ mistakes, as Stone has. “I had two divorces in my life [from the Lebanese-born Najwa Sarkis and Elizabeth Burkit Cox, who worked as a “spiritual advisor” on his films] and I’m on my third marriage, which I’m very happy in.” He and Sun-jung Jung, who is from South Korea, have been together for more than 25 years. They have a grown-up daughter, Tara, and he has two sons, Sean and Michael, from his marriage to Cox.

White Lies is on ice for now. “It’s hard to get those kinds of things done,” Stone says wearily. Will he make another feature? It’s been documentaries recently, the last two on the Ukraine. “I don’t know. It’s a question of energy. In the old days, there would be a studio you’d have a relationship with, and they’d have to trust you to a certain degree. And that doesn’t exist any more.”

He thinks back to the big beasts of his early years. Alan Parker, who directed Midnight Express; John Daly, who produced Salvador and Platoon; Robert Bolt, who taught him about screenwriting. “Those three Englishmen had a lot to do with my successes,” he says. I think he feels bad about all the limey bashing. “John was a tough cockney, but I liked him a lot.” He liked him more than Parker, whom he describes as “cold” with a “serious chip on his shoulder.” He smiles. “Sure. Alan did a good job with Midnight Express, though.”

You wonder if Netflix could come to Stone’s rescue. They have given generous backing to big-name directors, from David Fincher to Martin Scorsese, Stone’s old tutor at NYU film school. Surely they would welcome him? “Well, that’s why you’re not in charge! Netflix is very engineering driven. Subject matter such as [White Lies] might register low on a demographic.”

Isn’t he also working on a JFK documentary, Destiny Betrayed? That could do better with the Netflix algorithms. “I’m having problems with that too. Americans were so concerned with Trump, I don’t know that they wanted to hear about some of the facts behind the Kennedy killing. They don’t recognise that there’s a connection between 1963 and now, that pretty much all the screws came loose when they did that in ’63.” He smiles. “I know you think I’m nuts.”

Well no, but you do wonder at his unwavering conviction that there was a conspiracy to murder Kennedy, probably involving the CIA. JFK is a big reason why a majority of Americans believe in a conspiracy and, according to Stone, led to the establishment of the Assassination Records Review Board, which he claims is “the only piece of legislation in this country that ever came out of a film.”

Yet several serious studies, including a 1,600-page book, Reclaiming History, by the former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, conclude that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. That book accused Stone of committing a “cultural crime” by distorting facts in JFK. “I feel like I’m in the dock with Bugliosi. I didn’t like his book at all,” Stone says. “Believe me, you cannot walk out of [his forthcoming documentary] and say Oswald did it alone. If you do, I think you’re on mushrooms.”

Stone knows whereof he speaks regarding psychedelics. On returning from Vietnam he was “a little bit radical” in his behaviour, he says: drugs, womanising, hellraising. He recently took LSD for the first time in years. “It was wonderful,” he says. He hallucinated that he was “moving from island to island on a little boat”.

What was radical in the Seventies can be problematic now. He has been accused of inappropriate behaviour by the model Carrie Stevens and the actresses Patricia Arquette and Melissa Gilbert. “As far as I know I never forced anyone to do anything they didn’t want to do,” he says. Has he modified the way he behaves around women? “Oh sure, no question.”

At the same time, he is disturbed by “the scolding going on, the shaming culture. I don’t agree with any of that. It’s like the Chinese Cultural Revolution. It scares the shit out of me. I do think the politically correct point of view will never be mine.”

He’s not a slavish follower of conspiracy theories — QAnon “sounds like nonsense”, he says, as was the theory that Donald Trump was “a Manchurian candidate for the Russians. That was a horrible thing to do and it hurt that presidency a lot. I’m not an admirer of Trump by any means, but he was picked on from day one.”

What does he make of Joe Biden? “I voted for him, not because I liked him, but as an alternative to Trump’s disasters. He’s got a far more merciful humanitarian side. But he also has a history of warmongering.” Fake news, he says, has “always happened”, in the east and west, on the left and the right. “I mean, back in the Cold War, the US was saying Russia was lying and Russia was saying the US was lying. Each one of these wars the US has been involved in was based on lies.”

It sounds as if Stone has been on the Russian Kool-Aid himself. He is making a documentary, A Bright Future, about climate change that advocates pursuing nuclear power in the short term, and has visited some Russian nuclear plants. They are “very state-of-the-art,” he says. “The US is not really pursuing the big plants, the way Russia and China are. I believe in renewables, but they’re not going to be able to handle the capacity when India and Africa and all these countries come online wanting electricity.”

Putin liked the interviews Stone did with him in 2017, he says. “I think they contributed to his election numbers.” Wasn’t he too easy on the Russian leader? “That’s what some say. But I got his ire up. I did ask him some tough questions about succession. ‘I think you should leave’ — that kind of stuff. The pressure that Russia is under from both England and the US is enormous,” he adds. “Unless you’re there I don’t know that you understand that. Because you take the English point of view, and they have been very anti-Soviet since 1920. You talk about fake news — I feel that way about MI5 and MI6.”

You can’t help but admire Stone’s conviction. If he’s modified his behaviour that’s probably a good thing, but as he says, “I’m not so sure I’ve modified my thinking. I express myself freely. I don’t want to feel muzzled.” Whatever you think of him, be grateful he hasn’t been.

-Ed Potton, “You talk about fake news. I feel that way about MI5 and MI6,” The Times of London, Feb 8 2021 [x]

[collecting-stories]

Tenerife Sea - Connor Murphy

A/N: I’m projecting in this one but honestly I just wanted to write a mildly autistic love interest for Connor cause ya know?

And all of the voices surrounding us here, they just fade out when you take a breath. - Tenerife Sea, Ed Sheeran

\\\

He didn’t care. Or so he told himself. It wasn’t that he cared, it was just that he was curious. He’d been seeing you every day at school since 6th grade when the elementary school’s merged to the middle school and he was stuck sitting behind you in home room. However it worked out in computer systems or principal’s heads you were always in the same home room and you were always sitting in front of him. Like some assigned algorithm and not just a random chance that kept occurring the same way over and over. Did you know you always sat in front of him. Whether he really thought about it enough to analyze the feeling he was sure that he liked you sitting in front of him. So much so that as you slid into the seat in front of him that first morning of senior year he almost felt himself exhale all the negative energy that had been clogging his lungs like smoke.  

You always wore your hair the same way, since sixth grade. And you had some variation of the same plastic, blush pink rimmed glasses. They only changed minutely when the prescription needed to be altered. And you always wore stripes. You must’ve had a million striped shirts in all different colours and sizes. Some skinny stripes, some fat, some were pastel in color and others just plain black. He thought about your striped shirts a lot. But he didn’t care. You could wear what you wanted, it was your body. If you liked stripes who was he to judge. Who would care if he did.  

“Hi Connor, how was your summer?” You always greeted him too.  

He liked the greeting best after breaks or on a Monday, because you always asked what he did while you didn’t see him. As if you were friends and you wanted to genuinely know how he was.  

But it was his secret and he couldn’t let you in on it, “fine.”  

“That’s good,” and sometimes you would let the subject drop and start pulling out the perfectly organized binder and notebook that you always had on hand along with a pencil case crammed with color coded pens and highlighters. Once you lent him a pastel green pen because you only had one black and it was still sitting on his nightstand in his room. Like some cherished gift from a friend.  

After home room most of your classes didn’t line up. And four days out of five you had study hall at the end of the day. The school called it senior privilege and told the kids they could leave early if they maintained good grades and didn’t have an excess of absences. They didn’t dare align Connor’s classes so that he could get off early. By senior year they knew him too well. Even without the okay he rarely stuck around for the entire day. The first week in and he was cutting out early.  

“Hey Connor,” a week in and you were still greeting him everyday, “you weren’t in science so I got the homework for you.” This was the other thing you did, Connor noted. You always gave him homework when he was out. The year he flipped out on the home room teacher and shoved his desk to the ground he got suspended for a week and you had volunteered (though he was sure they assigned you) to pick up his homework everyday.  

“Yeah, thanks.” But he didn’t try to take it so you left it on the desk.  

Two weeks in and you were wearing a plain gray sweater with jeans. He felt jittery that morning, like he couldn’t relax the right way and he spent the thirty minutes of home room shifting uncomfortably in his seat trying to determine why he felt so anxious. When he saw you later the gray sweater was stuffed in your locker and a gray and white striped shirt was on you. He could catch his breath, he felt himself relax.  

Three weeks in, sitting outside the office as the principal finished a meeting with his parents he saw you leaving the nurses office.  

“Hey,” he called for you and when you turned around you had the most shocked expression on your face. To be fair you always talked to Connor but he never talked to you first. When he did speak to you it was just one or two words, nothing monumental.  

“Yeah?”  

“You alright?” He noticed the stripes peeking out from beneath your gray sweater.  

“Oh yeah, just a migraine.” You replied. “Are you in trouble?” When you whispered the last part he wanted to laugh. You sounded like a kindergartener afraid an adult would overhear you.  

He shrugged. He was always in trouble. This time he’d gotten into it with the English teacher. Last week he’d gotten into a fight with another kid. It just depended he supposed.  

“Well it’s not weed but here,” you produced a lollipop, a cotton candy dum-dum to be exact, from your backpack and offered it to him, “makes me feel better when I’m anxious.”  

“I’m not.” He replied. Now he really did feel like he was in elementary school.  

“Yeah, no, I just mean, it might help you calm down.”  

“I don’t need to calm down. I’m perfectly calm.”  

“Okay,” you nodded and he thought for the first time you looked far more upset than he’d ever seen you. “I’ll see you in science?”  

“Probably not.”  

“I’ll get your homework then.”  

“Don’t bother.”  

That Monday you only smiled at him but didn’t say hello and didn’t ask how his weekend was. You went to the nurse’s office right after home room and then when he saw you again at lunch you were reading by yourself at the end of a table. Were you always by yourself? He couldn’t remember if he’d ever noticed before. The rest of the week was the same and he felt like all he could concentrate on was where you were. In class, in the hallway, in the lunch room. By Friday he realized that you might have less friends than he did, at least he had Evan sometimes.  

When the week started over you didn’t sit in front of him in home room and he found himself searching for the striped shirt in the hallway. You were absent Tuesday and Wednesday and when you came back on Thursday you looked tired. Did you always look so tired?  

“Hey,” Connor caught you leaving the school for senior privilege, stopping you in the parking lot.  

“Oh, Connor, hi.” You smiled.  

“Are you alright?” He asked, glancing back at the school building and then you again, “I saw you in the nurses office.”  

“I had a migraine.”  

Connor wanted to kick himself for not being more eloquent, “you get those a lot.”  

You shrugged, “school makes me anxious sometimes. Hey, sorry if I upset you. I didn’t mean to.”  

“You didn’t.” He assured, “I was just having a shitty day.”  

“Do you have senior privilege?”  

He shook his head and almost smiled when he watched your eyes get wide. “You shouldn’t be out here, you could get in trouble. Did you drive to school?”

“Walked.”

“Well you could come to my house? My mom should be home but she won’t mind,” you had already begun to walk in the direction of your house, “she’s always bugging me to bring friends over.”  

“I don’t really think we’re friends.” Connor pointed out.  

“No, yeah, right, of course. I just mean, you know. Well you don’t have to come over obviously, it’s whatever. You know?” Your words tumbled out and he noted the same disappointed expression as when he wouldn’t take the lollipop you offered up.  

He wanted to apologise, to rewind and not tell you that he wasn’t your friend cause you seemed so bothered that he wasn’t. “I don’t have anything else better to do.” A harsher phrase but he wasn’t exactly good at conveying feelings to others.  

Your house was nice, it was clean inside and you offered Connor a water bottle before leading him upstairs to your bedroom. He wondered what the chances were of you letting him smoke in your house. There were three cats and the one you picked up the moment you had your shoes off and carried like a baby all the way up to your bedroom. When you got up to go the bathroom Connor couldn’t help taking a peek in your dresser.  

“What are you doing?” You were standing in the open doorway, frown set as you stared at Connor. He still had his hand on the drawer handle.  

“Sorry,” he shut the drawer and took a step back, “you wear a lot of stripes.”  

“I like stripes.”  

“I could tell.”  

“I didn’t invite you over so you could make fun of me Connor.” You had been trying for much longer than it was worth to get Connor Murphy to be your friend. You’d made every effort to talk to him, to be nice to him, and it always felt like you were just missing the mark. You’d been more excited than you should’ve when he agreed to come over and you were hurt that he was only here to rifle through your stuff.  

“I’m not making fun of you.” Connor assured, hands raised in surrender. “I like stripes.”  

You eyed him sceptically.  

Connor was telling the truth though. He did like stripes and blush pink glasses and the way you cut your hair and coloured pens and lollipops that tasted like cotton candy. He liked your gray sweater and that you never wore any polish on your nails or any make up at all and that you told him funny stories about your weekends. He liked those jeans with the hole in the knee and your Birkenstock’s with wool socks in the winter no matter how many times they told you open footwear wasn’t allowed.  

And for the first time in his life he took Evan’s advice and didn’t try to hide behind a sarcastic comment, “I like when you wear stripes.”  

“Oh,” you felt your face grow warm at the admission, “uh, thank you?”

Connor smiled and moved closer to you, “I wasn’t trying to be an ass to you, I just wasn’t sure how to...what to say.”  

“What?” You bit your lip, skin prickling with goosebumps as he closed the distance between the two of you. “What do you mean?”  

You’d liked Connor Murphy since you first laid eyes on him in sixth grade. Eleven years old and your heart was pounding because he was the cutest boy you’d ever seen. And he wasn’t always nice but he’d always been nice to you. Your attempts at friendship had been null but you liked talking to him and he’d never complained about it until now.  

“I was just trying to...I though pushing you away would be better.”

“Why?”  

Connor’s hands were shaking, this was the most open he’d been in long time without raising his voice or losing his temper. The first time he was purposely telling someone something and still the words wouldn’t come out. “You know why.”  

You looked like you understood, there was that brief flicker of something that suggested you knew what he meant, what he couldn’t say, but it disappeared in an instant. You looked at him with the same sort of surprised expression you had when he had spoken to you in the hallway. As if it was so unreal that he would think about you and somehow it irritated him that you could even entertain the idea that he didn’t spend every waking minute thinking of you. That he hadn’t bought a pair of striped socks, which he was wearing at this very moment, because they made him think of you.  

“I don’t-“ you tried to form a coherent sentence but Connor’s hands were suddenly on either side of your face and he was leaning in and his lips pressed against yours and you could feel his thumb brush your cheek, smearing a nervous tear.  

You kissed him back almost immediately, as if it was an instinct that your body was just waiting to acknowledge. You reached for his shirt, trying to pull him closer to you than he already was, desperate to feel him. It was a good kind of sensory overload where you were both certain that you saw stars when you closed your eyes.  

You were the first to break the kiss, the sound of footsteps on the stairwell had you pushing him away. “My mom!”  

Connor brushed his hair back, neck and face red with warmth from actually kissing you. He couldn’t stop smiling, not even when your mom appeared in the open doorway.  

“Oh hi, you didn’t say you were having anyone over.” She looked pleasant enough and Connor suddenly felt very self-conscious. She’d probably call all the other moms in the neighbourhood and they would rat him out. Warn her against letting her kid be alone with Connor Murphy, the psycho freak.  

“Uh, mom this is Connor.” You waved between them nervously. You’d already unloaded so much about Connor on your mom you could only pray she didn’t embarrass you.  

“The Connor? How nice to meet you,” she grinned, that sort of knowing smile that only mother’s had, “keep the door open.” And then she was gone, headed down the hallway to her own room.  

You turned back to look at him and both spoke at the same time “Sorry,” “I should get going.”  

“No wait,” you held your hands up, as if you could physically keep him in your room, “just, we can hang out, she doesn’t care. She’s just being weird cause I always talk about you.”  

“You always talk about me?” He couldn’t help the grin. You always talked about him? What kinds of things did you notice about him?  

“I mean...like, not in a creepy way or anything, just like. Oh god, I just kissed you I can’t even talk to you.”  

“You sound like Evan.”

“That’s not helping.” You groaned. You fell onto your bed, covering your face with your hands.  

“I don’t exactly talk to my parents but I certainly think about you all the time.” He admitted, if only to see that smile again.  

You slowly uncovered your face, looking up at him through more nervous tears. “Really?”  

“Yeah,” he came over and sat next to you. “You and your five million striped shirts.”  

“Shut up,” your laugh turned into a squeal when he leaned over and pressed his lips against your neck.  

-

I don’t know what to say here. 

[durandtm]

TIMOTHEE CHALOMET, 19, NONBINARY, HE/HIM ⌡ welcome back to gallagher academy, CAMPBELL “CAMP” DURAND! according to their records, they’re a SECOND YEAR, specializing in ADVANCED ENCRYPTION and DRIVER’S ED; and they DID NOT go to a spy prep high school. when i see them walking around in the halls, i usually see a flash of (dark circles under eyes, the scent of eucalyptus, running late, looking disinterested or confused, constantly writing). when it’s the (aquarius)’s birthday on FEBRUARY 18, they always request FRIED PICKLES from the school’s chefs. looks like they’re well on their way to graduation. ⌿ kara, 26, she/her, pst ⍀

HIS STORY.

+ Home is on the southwestern side of France where the scenery consisted of salt farms and old windmills. Many of the village's buildings were whitewashed, and some, even the farmhouses, had ornamental towers reminiscent of the 16th century. Their town of Ars-en-Ré was a commune on the Île de Ré in the Charente-Maritime. Whitewashed buildings there would often accent their buildings with grayish blues and whatever flowers they could grow. + Campbell Durand lived with his mother, Camila, and father, Hal, in a quaint guesthouse belonging to a fish and lobster farmer. + Boats went in and out of the harbor all day via a long channel between the marshes, and that was where you could find Hal from dusk to dawn. + A distinct feature of the town was its strange black and white church steeple. It had been a useful mariner's way-finder for centuries. Camila Durand would often go out to the steeple. She enjoyed the quiet walk over, the feel of the water’s breeze against her skin, and proudly overlooked her boys at work. Campbell would wave violently toward her, smile brightening his face, stomach rumbling for dinner, as she silently guided them home. + If Campbell was not in school, he was in and out of the harbor with his father. He would do at least one run in the morning before school and two after. On days with higher run expectancies or days when men would not show up due to poor weather conditions, Campbell would miss school, much to his and his mother’s dismay, to work with his father. + “Camp,” he began to be called. It was easier to shout one syllable than two over the deafening sound of the waters and men working. + The boy’s scent was slightly fishy, mixed with saltwater and sweat. Regardless of whether or not his peers’ families were in the same industries or higher middle class, this was unique to him and often kept him from experiencing close friendships.   + Once a year at most, Camila Durand went into the city. The trip’s purpose was to collect necessities, and despite her desire to take her son, Hal insisted Camp remain in Ars-en-Ré. + When Camila was pregnant with their second child, Camp was finally allowed to accompany his mother to the city to carry things for her. He stopped at a street vendor whose wooden display was covered with beautiful flowers and bottles filled with perfumes and oils. When the smell of eucalyptus grabbed his attention, Camila smiled; eucalyptus grew plentifully in Southern France and was the base note of her everyday perfume, a luxury item she was able to pick out for her wedding. She bought the eucalyptus oil for her son, a secret to be kept from Hal. Camp would use it when he got to school and hoped it wore off by the time he left. + Camp’s hair was a hectic mess of curls. His mother liked to wrap them around her index finger mindlessly, creating a sensitivity and exclusivity around the act. While he had an affinity for it and could often be found with a hand in his hair, he would never let anyone but his mother touch it, remaining true even into young adulthood. + Eventually, Camp’s curls grew long and people would tell his parents that he was such a “pretty girl.”  Camila tucked his long curls behind his ears like she did her own for as long as she could, but eventually, his father’s ego got the best of him. It was like Campbell’s masculinity was meant to be a reflection of his own. If Campbell was not masculine enough, Hal felt it meant he wasn’t masculine enough. + This led to the desire, manipulation, and force-of-hand Hal had in having another son. + Getting pregnant again was a long, hard road for Camila. Her first miscarriage was found out by Campbell climbing into her bed to find a mess of blood. Hal reprimanded Camp for screaming, even though it was the sounding alarm that saved her life at the time. Hal rushed out the door with Camila in his arms, slamming the door shut behind them. Things were never explained to Campbell, leaving him confused. When his mother arrived home safely, he quickly held to the relief and asked no questions. It wasn’t until she began to show, two pregnancies and one miscarriage later, that he found out his parents were still trying. + When it was time for the baby to come, delivery was even more difficult than the act of getting pregnant. The complications took her life. + After his mother had passed, there was nothing tying Campbell and Hal together. He fell into a quiet, depressive state and spent his entire earnings at the harbor on a laptop like the ones all of the kids at school had. + Camp barely tried at school, though he succeeded with flying colors. + When he got home, he would remain tucked away in his room, playing video games, coding, learning and unlearning algorithms, and the like. He often would stay up all night, sleep becoming less and less of a priority as his eyes remained glued to the blue light of his screen. + His father began drinking when he got home. The two sat at the dinner table together. They didn’t talk. If anything was to be said, it was Hal, telling Camp that he would waste his life away on that computer and never make anything of himself. + Camp began hacking. It started out as a result of having beaten all of his video games and having no money to buy more. It became his own sort of game. It started small, the computers of classmates, then teachers, then strangers, then businesses, then local government, then banks, and eventually, secret intelligence branches. + The boy had no ambitions, no goals, no ulterior motive, no end game. He was told that there would be very serious consequences for his actions, but the agency was in America, a country in which he was not legally adult, and he felt untouchable. His 18th birthday wasn’t far so they did with him what they would have done with any juvenile delinquent in his position and offered him a “bright future” that started with Gallagher Academy. The Fall semester would begin in September of 2019, and along with it, would begin Camp’s new life. + He packed his bags, gave his father a reluctant hug, ignoring his proud ramblings of how he would make something of himself after all and that his mother would be so proud, and was on his way. He would wake up and go to sleep missing the quiet safety of the home his mother had once occupied. He would miss the certainty of his father’s mundane routines and joining him for quiet dinners of cabbage and meat stew when he got home.

HIS PERSONALITY.

(insightful, patient, weird, rebelling, lone wolf, great listener, always running late, 1000 moods, needs space)

+ Kaiju films are they’re favorite (Kaiju is a Japenese genre of films featuring giant monsters that are usually attacking major cities) + Also loves Ghostbusters + Always has a movie they want you to watch + Barely sleeps, leaving dark circles permanently under their eyes + Computer is so old it glitches. + Dreams of a car with a neon under-glow, though they don’t know where they’d drive it + Included a major of driver’s ed because they have never driven a car, nor has their family ever owned one, and driving fast sounds cool + Ends up using it as a coping mechanism. some people punch things when they’re mad, others cry, he drives. fast. dangerously. recklessly. but it’s okay because technically they’re studying + Drinks absinthe as a way of remaining close to their father, who they think they’re destined to be regardless of what fancy school invited them to the states and thinks they’re “talented” and “genius” + Listens to Mariana’s Trench in the background of whatever they’re doing + Has tattoo ideas, but no tattoos: UFO, bermuda triangle, third eye, a mask, illuminati symbol + Talks to you for hours about conspiracy theories + Writes poetry + Likes feeling the breeze with their eyes closed (it reminds them of their mother doing the same at the church steeple, looking over them at the harbor) + Keeps a notebook separate from their poetry, meant for deep thoughts, connecting thoughts and ideas, and inspiration + Photoshopped your head on a meme and sent it to you at 3am + Gets heartbroken 30 times a week by falling for people they look at + Has trust issues + Often unmotivated and disinterested + Feels like they have to adapt to every person they meet to be liked, so they’re often silent at first, figuring out how to mold themselves into the kind of person they need to be around you + Labeled themselves as nonbinary as soon as they were no longer under the strict rule of masculinity presented by their father + Wants to use they/them pronouns, but is too scared to ask. Feels like it’s a “burden” to ask people to go through the trouble of being thoughtful. They don’t want people thinking about them at all + Figuring things out takes them a little longer + Only comes out of their shell around people that are gentle and easy-going + They are tolerant and composed to balance their intense energy when it gets to be too much and needs people to do the same + Can not flirt if their life depended on it + Can be social but born a lone wolf + Only clingy when having the time of  their lives with you, trust you with their heart and soul, or realize they can help you drastically with something and wish to focus on their effort to help you + Need people to sense and feel where the lines between “seeming” and “being” blur and that can figure out who the person is behind the anonymous mask + There’s always some kind of mask to see through + Cognitive AF + Come across emotionless because it is hard to allow themselves to be seen as vulnerable by other people + They hide from their own self + Highly selective and self-aware + They find it hard to ask for help + It’s not all fun and laughs + They adore someone who will inspire confidence in them and the courage to be in the moment and embody their own complexities. Someone who takes them seriously enough but will also keep the conversation light and free-flowing. They will only crush their own walls if you literally allow them to go ahead and ask for the help they deserve + They want people who can allow them to escape and be an actual human anchor for their souls + They do not like to be forced when it comes to sharing what is important to them. They will only do that on their own time or not at all + They know the difference between who is a friend vs. who is a best friend vs. who is a mere acquaintance vs. who is a person they view romantically. These lines do not blur or cross + Once on that level, it’s like having a secret language of communication + Harsh with their words. They are not polite because their words happen outside of emotions + How they communicate with others often has nothing to do with how they’re feeling on the inside + Come across as senseless and illogical and absolutely nuts + Likes to say “I told you so” + Get in their head while you’re talking, so they sometimes have to pretend that they understood

[oneweekoneband]

cehryl, “disconnected”

The buildings of Los Angeles were blurring past me on the freeway when I first heard this track, Spotify’s shuffle algorithm finally doing something right by introducing me to cehryl. My flight from LAX was supposedly in two hours at the time (chronic delays would turn that into three by the time I fell asleep in the terminal), but I feel like I could’ve driven to the sun that day under the pink fluff of dawn, those bird chirps near the end a reminder of an imminent sunrise.

Looking back on the experience, I realize I couldn’t truly appreciate what “Disconnect(Ed)” meant, and as I tried searching for words to distill the song into at 1:34AM last night, I still can’t. I mean, the atmosphere is actually meant for a sunset, the bittersweet end of a chapter, but the real reason why my appreciation doesn’t run deep enough is because broken hearts don’t bleed the same way for the unrequited as for the loved-and-lost. After all, their hearts were never ours to begin with.

I’ll try my best to discuss what almost drove me to tears on “Disconnect(Ed)” (something even Frank Ocean can’t do *gasp*), but as someone who’s only ever known the unrequited, who’s never had to go through the melancholia of a break-up, just know that what’s about to be written here can never do the song justice.

If you listen closely at the beginning, a dissonant (synth?) chord wavers before cehryl’s lush voice emerges in accompanied by guitar. Easy to dismiss, of course, but the opening sound is — at least in this case — the single most important detail sonically. The instrument recurs in each chorus, and although soft, its delayed resolution from F#/A to E speaks volumes to the changing feelings encapsulated in the lyrics, the gradual way you cradle yourself with mourning’s tears before regaining composure to smile through the pain.

“Disconnect(Ed)” isn’t your archetypal “New Rules” anthem or “Too Good at Goodbyes” mope-fest though; it’s not so much about the (process of getting through the) break-up as it is about the ebb and flow between letting go of and holding onto the past. The first verse is a step forward, cehryl pushing herself to be unapologetic with her goodbye (“Please be careful not to leave things at my place”), before the chorus comes in, a soft cloud you could float away in with angelic harps and flutes.

A whomping bass shatters the ambience before long as cehryl’s lyric-production synergy emerge again with the lines “You’re moving up onto the second floor/ And your music’s louder than it was before.” You almost feel in the room with cehryl herself, the ceiling vibrating with constant reminders of her ex like a knife that seems to twist deeper with each thump. And maybe you even cry with her as she asks herself, “Were we not what you were looking for?” and reminisces (“Running miles and miles through the grocery store”), the harmonies braiding in an echo chamber of yearning.

The word “disconnect” also becomes tangible through the phasing/lagging of cehryl’s voice, following a bridge that could’ve been played by the same guitar from Frank Ocean’s “Ivy” if it went to heaven, but what captivates me is how the song ends with a third verse:

I’m sick of cleaning up the aftertaste And I’m always listening to “Rose Parade” I hope I see you at the corner store When I’m back to traveling the world by train

Because at the end of the day, the grandiose gestures and excruciating pain of your past relationship(s) don’t matter, no matter how many times you play Adele. Before the night falls and it’s too late, you have to take that second and last step forward, “stand in the sun,” as Olivia Pope said, and move on to see the world in that tinge of hope you had when you first fell in love.

[yourplasticlittlespastic]

ᴏᴜʀ ᴡᴇʙ ᴏꜰ ʟᴏᴠᴇ -- Peter Parker fanfic (2/of many)

Part 1

I wake up as usual and follow my itinerary, as soon as I finish I prepare my backpack and walk to the kitchen to grab a quick breakfast, I stop to see the whole committee. Everyone is already dressed to train. I step into the kitchen.

"Morning!" everyone says in unison and my eyes wander to the unmistakable figure

"Nat! oh God... where you've been?" I rub my eyes to see if it isn't an illusion

"come here you" Nat hugs me as if there's no tomorrow, her red hair is damp and collides with my cheek, oh, I missed her, she's the best

"no breakfast?" Steve says behind me and I pull away to look at him

I open the fridge and grab my already prepared lunch "this is my breakfast" I point to my overnight oatmeal  "I'll eat it on the way, bye everyone have a great day!"

They said bye, Clint and Sam with a drowsy voice, and I walk to the lift trying not to overthink my first day, I'm always overthinking and that's my problem and I always end up stressing about everything. I wait and the doors open revealing my dad and my mom, I stepped in with a quizzical look at them.

"Hey! Thought you were sleeping... and you not at your lab, not sleeping..." I push the button and spin to look at them

My mom is wearing a black pencil skirt with a white blouse, her blonde hair is perfectly brushed into a ponytail and my dad, well... he likes his sweatpants and his Black Sabbath shirt.

"There's always time to say goodbye and good luck to our daughter," my dad smirks at me and I snort

"I love you baby" my mom tightly hugs me "you'll do amazing this year"

"Thanks mom, I'm feeling it's my year" I excitedly smile

"well please be safe and I put something inside your backpack that'll help you," dad winks and I just smile

"love you dad" I walk closer to him and slightly hug him, he returns it and smacks a kiss on my cheek

"kick asses and then kick them again and then again, you know, just for fun" he casually says

"Tony!" my mom slaps his arm in disapproval but he grins at me

"c' mon dad, me kicking asses? That's definitely not me" I wink  at him and when the doors open I walk away

That's definitely me

I search for Happy and get inside the car, we talk about the embarrassing moment my dad created yesterday for me and Happy was laughing so much about the fact that Steve Rogers was in a sex-ed video. He parks just one block before 36 Ave, only not to get attention from the others, I wave goodbye and take a deep long breath. Let's go Midtown, give me the best year, please.

I walk to the front and see everyone already in deep conversation with their friends, new kids who are totally lost and others totally shy and as I thought it will happen... All eyes are on me, I mean, I don't mind, I like attention, probably my Stark gene talking, but let me be clear on something... I'll never, ever be a pretentious snooty brat.

I walk to my locker, the sound of my steps rumbles through the hall.  Let's see if I remember the code uh... 80-10-20... it opens and I start reaching to some books and post-it's I left during the summer. I put inside my new books and the girl next to me suddenly is hugged by one of her best friends, a nostalgic smile creeps on my face... it's been a while since I don't have a true best friend. I shake off those depressing thoughts and skim my schedule and notice that my first class is geometry which is my least favourite subject...

I take out my notebook and the advanced geometry book and strut to the assigned classroom that was already crowded. Exactly when I enter a little scream, that I thought it was girl,  pops beside me.

"Oh yes! thank you, God! a familiar face in this sea of peasants!"

I throw my backpack and sit in front of him "Hi Flash, a new haircut or your head got bigger?" an external little laugh snaps behind me

He ignores my comment and an attempt of a smug smile forms in his face "oh Tannie you're always sooooo funny"

"wait... you're in advanced geometry?" I say in surprise "you shouldn't be at Woodwork?" the same laugh from earlier appears but with more strength

"I actually did my homework last year and paid attention so yes, I deserve to be in this class, I mean, it's not the best class... is full of nerds, Imma cool guy" he crosses his arms and cocks his head  "and you too Tannie you're the best" he shoots me a flirtatious smile and I wince

"of course yes" I simply answer, I was about to turn to the teacher who walks in but his hand grabs my shoulder

"listen mmm Tannie, this Friday I'm doing a little party, ya know just to celebrate the beginning of a new year, you are in the VIP list with me of course" he whispers and I quickly nos just to get away from his awfully strong cologne

The class starts and I begin writing everything down when I hear a whisper saying "oh man, my notebook, I forgot it" I look up and see the one who said it, it was Ned Leeds who's in front of me, I poke his shoulder and he turns to me and opens his mouth agape in surprise.

"Ned, don't worry I'm writing everything here so when I finish you can take a picture if you want" I kindly smile at him

"Ummm thank you, Tannie!" he exclaims with a wide smile " you're so kind unlike others" referring to Flash

"it's nothing, by the way, Ned, for the final project and other Homeworks in this class... do you want to be my partner?"

"me? I mean, yes! trust me... I'm disciplined, I can get the radius of a circle so fast and the area of any kind of triangles you can imagine... at record time" he excitedly says and I snort

"haha yeah of course! we can be a great team"

He then spins around and the class goes by too slowly for me, in the end, Ned was waiting for me outside the classroom.

"here Ned" I place my notebook for him to take a picture, he pats his pockets and takes out his phone, he tries to center the camera but before he can take it someone crashes behind him.

"hey man! I was looking for you everywhere!" a bubbly voice says walking in front of us

Then I see Ned with a killing stare at his friend and I look at him as well, a young face, brown eyes, and hair and thin lips, tall but not too tall and skinny guy who instantly opens his eyes when he spots me.

"Dude, I'm trying to take a picture here, I love you but... please?"

I continue to grab the notebook while staring at... uh... I do know his name... I see that he's staring at me too.

"I'm... Peter hey!" he fakes a hoarse voice which makes me smile, I see his blue sweater and the neck of his plaid shirt, is it too early for some witty comments? yeah, probably...

I cock my head and smile at him "Yeah, I've seen you around... I'm-"

"Tannie Stark!!" he excitedly interrupts me  "I mean... Tannie... Stark" he clears his throat and the tip of his ears turn red

"it's done Tannie, thank you," Ned tells me and pats my shoulder, Peter still looking at me

"sure! do we have other classes together? what type of timetable you have?" I ask him

"I have the S-30," he says  "what about you?"

"I have the S-28" I shrug in disappointment knowing that we would only share three classes together

"I have the S-28!" Peter quickly raises his hand and I turn to him

"why you weren't at geometry then? I quirk a brow at him and he gulps

"I overslept in my comfy bed... yeah" he slowly admits

"great then, I'll see you at...? let me see..." Ned starts checking both timetables

"P.E, Geometry, and chemistry" Peter rapidly says

"that's good man!" Ned palms Peter in the back "see you, bro! Art is waiting for me!"

I stand there without saying anything and Peter as well.

"well, shall we go to the next class?" I break the silence with the offer and his eyes go-round for a moment

"yeah sure!" he awkwardly says

We start walking through the hallway... silently. Sideways I spot him stealing subtle glances at me.

"so ummm, new year huh?" I finally say

"yeah! Sophomore year is a big deal" he says scratching his right shoulder and when he touches it he makes a painful expression

"are you okay?"

"yeah! it's a bruise, I fall from my bed" he quickly says but he seemed to regret saying it

"oh okay..." we almost arrive to the classroom

"so... what did you do this summer break?" he questions me and I open and close my mouth

"not much, I tried to finish a robotics book and then I reread the first three books of Harry Potter!" my voice betrays my excitement, no one actually cares for what I do except my family (including Happy) "oh! and also hear this... I actually tried to replicate my dad's A.I. but failed, he used this kind of weird algorithm..." I stop when I notice Peter smiling at me

"Sorry..." I shrug "hey we're here!"  I change the topic and stride inside the room

The benches are in a circle instead of the traditional way, I quickly sit down away from the door and Peter grabs the seat next to me. I take out my notebook and he opens his laptop. The class starts and I almost fall asleep, Ethics is not my strength, I peek at Peter's laptop just to distract myself and see he's watching some YouTube videos of Spider-Man.

-------

"I'm so tired and it's only third period," I dramatically groan and he laughs, we're walking together to Physics

"not only is the third period... the first day of school" he looks at me smiling

"thanks for the reminder"we keep laughing until someone shouts my name

"TANNIE!! Wait!" I turn around and see the Liz Toomes rushing to get to me  "hello girl, so... just wondering if you're going to Flash's party?" she cheerfully jumps showing a slight smile

"mmmm I don't really know but maybe?"

"Great! think about it, some friends want to meet you, bye!" she sways away and I turn to Peter who can harvest a nest in his open mouth

"You're drooling Parker," I chuckle and step inside the classroom

At Physics, Warren assigned us to our partners and I got Flash, we were seated in front of Peter and other guy and Flash kept annoyingly insisting in flirting with me saying things like "What's your resonance frequency gurl?"  I ignored him and remember that my dad put something in my bag, I open it finding the circuit board I began building this summer, the replica of Jarvis and Friday, I smile knowing my dad believes in me, then I spin it and spot a post-it and read it:

"You are simply amazing T"

-Love you, the other T in this family-

I did my best in Physics and Warren noticed, in the end, she told me she's expecting good things from me. I like it when others actually notice my effort. I got out and it was recess, quickly I tried to walk through the crowd to go to the Auditorium. When I got there, at least 8 tables were decorated with logos from their respective clubs, I skimmed them and found the Robotic's Labs table.

"hi!" I stop in front Tanner Chung who was reading a book

"hi, welcome to the Robotic's Lab's Club where we build the future and it's not like Terminator" he says with a tedious voice probably because he was sat there since morning

"thanks!" I tried to hide my excitement "where can I sign up?"

"Obviously, at that paper" he points his finger and then looks up to see me and he almost falls from his chair "I mean... please at this paper" hi smiles to creepily

"sure... so I know I have to submit a previous work, when can I present it?"

"umm... yes... It's the number one rule of the club but you know... it's not necessary Tannie"

"I think it is, I have many projects and I'm sure you'll like one of them" I kindly smile and he nods

"well, what about if you bring it tomorrow? today is just the introduction day" he again smiles "oh... hey Parker" he immediately stops smiling

"oh hey Peter!"

"hi... hi... I was about to sign up for the club" he shyly adds

"really? great I just sign up too, I'll see you there then" I spin to walk out of the auditorium

"it's in the classroom next to biology!" I hear Chung shouting at me

I then stroll to the cafeteria, avoiding not that discreet glances at me. But then stop in my track. Oh God, it's so crowded. Nope. Nope. I walk outside and reach to the football field and sit in one of the benches, I open my lunch and began eating while scrolling through the news. The New York Times has a section called 'A', all about the Avengers, including some news about Stark Industries. where they go, new threats, What they eat and how they work out, New witty comments from my dad, etc. In the end, I went to Music, played the piano and did my best suppressing too many laughs at Peter who was holding a flute but failing amazingly at that. Then Art class came and I nap behind the canvas. Last period is designed for our selected club so I search for the classroom and realize that every member happens to be all boys, great.

"Welcome! I'm Tanner Chung president of this Club!... I don't have any words to describe how happy I am to see that we have our first girl!!" he starts clapping and everyone else too

I wave at the boys, enjoying the little spotlight they were giving me. My eyes search for the shy boy I talked with today... Peter is not here. Chung was right when he said it was only an introduction, we read the syllabus for the class and the projects we were aiming to achieve, in the end, I quickly exited the room and went to look for Happy, then my phone vibrates, breaking news, the trending video shows this happened just blocks from Midtown showing a man running with a purse and then the Spider-Man webbed and punch the guy and he gave the purse to the woman, the title was "The Masked Hero: Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man" I hear a horn and spot the shiny black car.

"Hello again!" I wave at him and he smiles

"Hello again Tannie, how was the first day?"

"not bad actually, new core subjects that are amazing!"

"I'm glad yeah, keep studying kid, keep studying"

"hey did you saw the new "Masked hero of New York"?"  I say creating quotation marks in the air

"what are you talking about?"

"well, it's a new guy who is trying to help people and it seems like an amateur because he is not so good at martial arts, to be honest, you should create a Twitter account to see what's happening in the world" I point out

"why? I have you"

Minutes later, Happy drops me at the tower and with a quick pace I reach to the kitchen seeing my mom cooking? Oh, that's a first... no one else at the complex again.

"hi mom" I greet her and hug her

"oh god you look bigger today," she says being nostalgic "how was your first day, tell me everything please"

I grab some grapes and spin to her "well... I liked it, my classes are better than I expected, I already have homework and tomorrow I need to bring a robotic project I previously worked on"

"mmmhm" she hums "I'm glad baby... any prospects?" she asks making a weird face

"what?" I was confused "prospects?"

"yeah! for being my son-in-law?"

"you have a boyfriend now T?" Thor enters the kitchen and grins at me

"no!" cringe at the comment

"really? that's fast, niceeee" Sam then enters munching a protein bar

"what did I miss?" Steve comes... oh no...

"T has a boyfriend," Thor says casually  and Steve winces wrinkling his nose

"wow" he looks at me with a surprised expression  "what happened with 'I don't have time for one?'"

"Mom!" I rapidly spin to her  "can you please explain to them that you were... and I was ... oh, forget it" I quit this fight and I stride to my room

Seriously all this testosterone is bad for my health

I do most of the homework, then I tiptoe to the kitchen finding it empty, I grab some food and heated it in the microwave and slowly retreated to my room. I take one of my many robots and lined them in front of me, I need to choose the best for tomorrow. I finally made up my mind and chose the one that I know will make them open their mouths agape. I lazily finish my homework, I'm still getting the hang of it because when I was homeschooled homework was not in the picture...  Then I slump in the chair and unlock my phone looking the video of Spider-Man I left open. I remember when I was meters away from him, his suit definitely was something he needed to improve as well as his martial arts... and the webbing thing is weird, it's a natural power? if yes, then how he got it? before I could continue in my deep thinking I hear a knocking in my opened door.

"Hey Peanut," my dad says entering my room

"peanut?" I quirk a brow at him, he snorts while sitting at the edge of my bed

"yeah never mind, trying to be a normal parent" he says scratching his beard

"Nah dad, is not happening" I laugh at him

"so... I wanted to know how was your day"  he lays his back in my bed

"I like it, until now Physics is my favorite subject and I'm bringing that robot for tomorrow"

He quickly lifts his head  "which one?"

"that one" I point at it

"ohhh yes, they'll love it T!"

"what about your day?" I ask

"not much... I talked with the Secretary of State of the United States of America" he dramatically emphasizes the title

"and that's not much?"

"He wants to talk with other nations about the Avengers..." I rapidly spot the change of his feature  "but nothing to worry about!" he stands up and kisses me on top of my head  "Love you kid, have a good night"  he exits my room

I then unwillingly went to wash my plate and none of the Avengers were there, I then played a little with Friday and decided not to eat dinner. My heavy eyelids making me fall asleep thinking about the party Flash is hosting... maybe it's good to be social sometimes? what could go wrong?

A/N: hope you liked it! Also available in Wattpad! https://my.w.tt/sw2CZNdCv1

[benverlesbians]

Shit fuck Donut Reblag

no longer yearning but like. two years ago i got sucked into makeup youtube bc it was a way to have like. Nice Older Women Teach Me Things. and then younger makeup girls on youtube became a part of the equation bc that was a way to feel like i had friends, esp bc i had an irl friend with whom i did makeup stuff and we like went shopping and she drove me to the mall to cash my paychecks and we alternated getting each other's burritos and she just seamlessly and affectionately accepted that i was a lesbian without ever changing her behavior, so makeup girls on youtube became a wonderful source of comfort!!! but i also watch movie videos bc i love movies and theorizing and analysis, except those are like fun in theory but in practice i hate hearing illiterate white men state their shitty opinions as fact, so about six months ago i was like "i want Friend Girl YouTube... For Movie" and now i follow a bunch of channels that are girls and women my age and older talking about fucking movies and tv shows and books and stuff!!! and its great!!!! and im following a few women of color and gay women and wlwoc and it makes youtube so much better to hear hot takes from people who i would actually like to spend time with and who actually make interesting points well!!!!! but like lately the algorithm has been like "here are makeup women... who are not skinny" and sometimes i watch a video and im like not into it, like the voice or the speech pattern or like whatever isnt my cup of tea but today i found a channel thats like. "hello my name is a joke my intro is five minutes of me anecdotally ragging on my gross coworker i live in your hometown and agree that the public transportation sucks and i have a nice voice and way of speaking and also im fat" and idk but like!!! hell yea!!! me following makeup women to feel mentored and film women to feel less alone is well and good but like they dont all need to be skinny. and im glad that theyre not!!! bc fuck it!!!! me and my ED have grown up into an overweight adult and thats literally not a value judgement its just a fact and another fact is that people are fat and still allowed to have interests and be interesting and maybe if i knew that as a kid instead of believing that being fat made you sad and mean and irrational and a joke like it wouldnt have been such a big deal to gain weight like a normal person during puberty and i couldve just been fine and NOT made myself sad and mean and irrational and a joke to the point that i will cry about a burrito if it's not right or over a salad bc it takes too long to eat or like. take four hours to eat a single bowl of oatmeal which i cried reading the box for bc someone else, when i said i wanted oatmeal, decided i should have the reduced sugar variety. maybe i would just be like "huh this doesnt taste superb lets avoid this on future grocery lists" and finish it in ten minutes like a regular bitch.

[andromeda3116]

i mean... yeah, this.

like, as much as i love the chaos of this site, it cannot survive without a revenue stream. and it appears that they're doing everything they can to make this site profitable without mining critical data from the users. the "for you" tab pretty clearly bases its "algorithm" on the things that i have liked and/or reblogged, as well as the things people i follow have liked and/or reblogged, and that's... pretty tame, in today's environment. its assumption is that if someone i follow likes this thing, then probably i like it too. (it is often wrong.)

but it doesn't seem engineered to make you feel an emotion, unlike facebook's infamous algorithm which is explicitly designed to make you as outraged as possible. it seems to be -- at least at this stage -- an ai version of looking through an author's bookmarks on ao3. and as long as it stays like that -- and stays optional, which is extremely key -- i'm okay with it!

the thing is, tumblr is a relic of a past version of the internet. people don't really blog anymore. it doesn't appeal to the youngsters whose entire internet experience has been curated and algorithm-ed to death. we joke about this site's aging userbase, but it's aging because this site is the last bastion of the time when the internet was the community of the weird. the era of webrings and message boards and livejournal communities, where "the internet" was where the weird kids who had nothing in common with their peers went to talk to people who actually understood them.

and that's great, and wonderful, and makes this site a bizarre, inexplicable, fun place to be -- but servers are expensive and maintaining huge sites with heavy traffic costs a lot of money.

do i think that automattic -- or any corporation -- genuinely has anyone's best interests at heart except their shareholders? no. but i do feel like they are trying to find a balance between letting tumblr be itself and making enough money to sustain the site, because they know that tumblr is not ever going to be tiktok and the only way to keep the userbase is to let it keep being weird? yeah, okay, i can buy that.

it's like a less-insanely-dystopian version of disney buying out marvel -- is it a soulless cash grab? yes. are they watering things down to make them more palatable to a larger audience? obviously. is this horrifyingly indicative of a larger societal problem with corporations, the internet, algorithms, artificial intelligence, and human nature? absolutely. but will they try to fundamentally change the nature of the stories that drew people to them in the first place? not unless they're incredibly fucking stupid, they won't.

look, i would love to keep tumblr being the home of the anti-capitalist unprofitable weirdos with our own culture that the rest of the internet finds both deeply incomprehensible and incredibly magnetic. i would love for us to always be unmarketable. but the sad and horrific reality is that we live in a world now where nothing is allowed to be unmarketable. and for tumblr to survive, it must evolve.

and as long as they're not doing that by mining my data from other sites i visit, or from my personal information, or from me having my location turned on so i can use gps to not get lost -- i can live with that. sure, it's shoving ads in my face and that's fucking annoying, but it's not tailoring those ads to information extrapolated from whose phone was near mine for an extended period of time, or which headlines pissed me off enough to get me to click on the link, or the random question i googled, or the store i visited.

does it suck absolute fucking ass that we live in a world where "hey, at least these insufferable ads being shoved in my face weren't selected by an artificial intelligence that has somehow accessed my entire personality based on my interactions with people and articles and products in completely different spheres that i didn't even know the site knew about" is the best social media experience available right now? absolutely!!!!! it's objectively insane!!!!! how the fuck has it gotten this bad!!!!!

but this is unfortunately the world we live in right now. and to keep holding on to our little corner of the internet, where we can stay weird and blog like it's 2010 and default to seeing chronological posts from people we have personally selected to follow, i am willing to accept certain concessions.

Was going to write this as a reply to something but realized it needed its own post.

The tl;dr is that, from the looks of it, Automattic absolutely has every intention of turning Tumblr into a marketing media platform.

I work for a marketing company. I build websites.

Specifically, I build websites on Wordpress.org, which is operated by the Wordpress Foundation.

The Wordpress Foundation is the non-profit counterpart to the for-profit company Automattic.

Automattic, as we know, is the company that currently owns Tumblr.

Now, the thing about Wordpress.org (not to be confused with Wordpress.com) is that it's very, VERY popular amongst small businesses. Not only can you build a fully-customizable website with relative ease, you can also add an online shop using another Automattic product: Woocommerce.

Not too long ago, I noticed a new feature was added to Woocommerce: A button next to each Woocommerce product which allows you to Blaze them to Tumblr right from the comfort of your dashboard:

This is what I get when I click that little "Blaze" button...

As someone who understands these tools, I understand the potential implications of these features:

The Blaze feature is basically an up-and-coming ad campaign system that's directly integrated with Woocommerce websites, which I think is the first ad marketing system of its kind. You don't have to log into a social media account to advertise your products, use a second-party integration, or even pay another service to manage your social media ads. It's all baked right into your business's website.

THIS is their planned money-maker, folks, not the rainbow checkmarks or crab armies. And the reason why Automattic would do this kind of thing is simple: Businesses are wealthier than individuals. By implementing a B2B service, Automattic can make more money off of Tumblr than user subscriptions and shoelaces will ever provide.

It's all the same song and dance. Businesses can now shove more ads into your face in a new, convenient fashion. It'll be ads that don't look like ads disguised amongst ads that do look like ads, just like it is with Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and literally every other marketing media service that calls itself a "social" media.

(Tumblr's new video feature? My guess is that it's there to prepare for video-format Blaze campaigns. Influencer-style videos are the only kind of ad format Gen-Z is receptive to, which is why you're suddenly seeing videos on every platform.)

All they really gotta do now is make Tumblr look appealing to the normies so they can draw in a userbase that isn't trying to escape the onslaught of commercialism that plagues other sites.

Tumblr is one of the last true social medias we have; a place where content is made purely for the sake of talking about it. But given the writing on the wall...I doubt it'll stay that way.

[thegreatwhiteferret]

I Knew You Were Waiting For Me

Summary: A very inexperienced Trashmouth losing his v-card to a far more experienced Eddie Spaghetti. 

A/N: For my lovely anon who requested this scenario. I hope this story does your idea justice. 💖

NSFW Under the cut...

Richie Tozier has a big mouth and a wild imagination. He’s been bragging about his sexual conquests to the other Losers since middle school. Underneath all the bravado lies the truth; Richie is seventeen and he’s a virgin. For the longest time he held out hope that he wasn’t the only one, but his hopes were dashed one by one.

Mike was first. Big, strapping, and handsome. He was amazing at football and even with the racial tension in Derry, he made all of the girls’ panties drop. When he made varsity as a freshman, the head cheerleader, Heather Sinclair, took it upon herself to welcome him to the team...and his sexual awakening. Mike had told them all about it, flush faced and jittery, and Richie had chirped him saying that it was about damn time he join the club. A string of girls followed after Heather, but Mike was still his genuine heart of gold self. Richie secretly wondered if he thanked the girls for spreading their legs for him as he walked them home.

Ben and Beverly were next. They were a bit more cliche than anyone had expected. Roses and a hotel room on Valentine’s Day, their sophomore year, but Bev secretly loved it. She had gushed to Richie about it during one of their smoke breaks, and Richie had pretended to gag. Ben was too much of a gentleman to share details, but the whole club knew that after their first time they were fucking like rabbits.

Stanley Uris went next, and took Big Bill with him. They had been flirting around the idea of being more than friends since Bill had broken up with Bev when they were freshman, but Bill was always too shy and nervous to act on it. He didn’t want to ruin his friendship with Stan. The other boy found this sweet, but was incredibly sick of it and pounced on Bill on the July 4th between sophomore and junior year. During the fireworks display he just leaned over and grabbed Bill, pressing his lips to his. They made out under the light display, but Stan needed more. He all but dragged Bill back to his house. Richie would find out later that Stan had given Bill a mind melting blow job before prepping his own asshole and riding Bill until they both came, making their own fireworks. Stan was more comfortable expressing himself out of that, wearing his pants a little tighter in the ass, and Bill was certainly more vocal about what he thought about his sexy ass boyfriend. Richie thought it was hilarious that they could be so buttoned up and reserved in their everyday lives, but complete freaks in the sheets. He got beep beeped when he voiced this to the group.

His last strand of hope and dignity died when Eddie went with his mom to visit his family out in Montana when they were sixteen. His cousin was having surgery and they needed an able bodied boy to help with the farm...Eddie was apparently the only one available. Eddie came back ripped and tan from all the manual labor, and with a damn good story about his first time. There had been a young ranch hand there, Jorge, with rippling muscles and a beard and he had taught Eddie all of his damn tricks. Eddie blabbered on about having his first blowjob while the sun was setting over the mountains, getting fingered while he knelt on rocks down by the quarry, and getting his pink hole licked open by a devilishly good tongue while his mom was in the next room. Finally, he told the story about how Jorge had fucked him so good in the barn that he cried. Richie blushed throughout these stories, trying to cover it up with sarcastic comments, but Richie was terrified. In his mind he had always thought that he and Eddie would end up together, that they would be each other’s first.

Richie was scared to death now, scared to approach Eddie. What could he possibly have that would compare to that Jorge asshole. He was just an inexperienced virgin who had never even really had a first kiss. He stopped making his usual jokes after a while, he had lost his spark and had no idea how to get it back.

It was two weeks before Halloween during his senior year. Richie was sitting in the library trying to study while his ADHD was working overtime. He had to focus on the calculus algorithms that his teacher had assigned in preparation for their big test, but he couldn’t. Eddie was sitting across from him, pink lips pouted as he read through his chapter on Reconstruction after the Civil War. The other Losers had bailed on the study session for a variety of reasons, but Richie hadn’t really pressed it. He and Eddie had hung out loads of times on their own. He was working through a particularly hard question when he noticed that Eddie was fidgeting a bit.

“Eds, my brain already has a hard time working right, please stop shaking.” Richie said, genuinely concerned about the task in front of him. Eddie apologized, but a few minutes later was back to his shaking. “Jesus, Eddie. What is going on in that brain of yours that you can’t sit still?” Eddie blushed.

“Hey, Rich?” Eddie started, nerves present in his voice. Richie dropped his pencil and gave Eddie his full attention.

“Yeah, Eds?” Richie could feel his stomach twisting, he didn’t like that Eddie was nervous to say something to him. They never had that problem. They were probably too honest by most standards.

“What...uh...what was your first time like? I know you’ve talked about a lot of different guys and girls, but I don’t know if I’ve ever heard the story of your first?” Richie went pale. He knew that he talked a big game, but he honestly figured that they all knew that he was lying. That it was all an act. He never would have expected that Eddie, his best friend, would believe his bullshit. He could continue the act, or he could just be honest with him. Cut the bullshit ask and just tell Eddie that he had made it all up because he was so shy about all of that stuff, and hadn’t done anything sexually.

“Honestly?” Richie asked, and Eddie nodded and looked at him expectantly. “I’ll...uh...I’ll have to get back to you on that one, Eds. I’m a virgin.”

“Jesus. I don’t know why I was expecting a honest answer from you. God dammit. I just wanted to know the truth…” Eddie sighed, he was disappointed.

“No. Eds. I am telling you the truth. I’ve never done anything with anyone. Shit...I...I’ve never even really kissed anyone before.” Richie rubbed his temples, he could feel tears welling up in his eyes. Honesty hurt like a bitch.

“Oh.” Eddie squeaked out. Richie looked up to meet his eyes. “Richie. I’m sorry that I brought it up. I was just talking to the other Losers earlier and they mentioned that I should ask you. I...I didn’t know…”

“Nah. It’s okay. I just, it kind of scares me I guess. I’ve been talking it up for so long, and listening to you guys tell your stories and I’m just...I’m just worried that I’m going to be really bad at it.” Richie breathed out. Eddie frowned and moved around the table to sit next to his best friend.

“When you find someone who is worth your time, worth the brilliance that is Richie Tozier, you’ll be just fine. You’ll be better than fine, you’ll be amazing.” Eddie tried to reassure him.

“Ha. Sure.” Richie said, but there was no humor there. Instead a thought started to blossom in his mind. “Hey, Eds? Would you maybe...would you be my first?” Eddie’s face turned red, he had wanted Richie for a long time. Had thought that he wouldn’t be experienced enough for him, that’s why he had let himself fall for Jorge. Why he had the subsequently given into pleasure and let himself become someone new and adventurous. He wanted to ready for Richie, and be good for him.

“Are you sure you want me to be that person?” Eddie asked, sort of ready for Richie to laugh in his face and tell him this was all a joke.

“Of course, Eddie.” Richie said, before a mischievous glint entered his eyes, “Besides it’s apparently much better with a friend.” Eddie punched him in the shoulder, but giggled nonetheless. He couldn’t deny that he loved Trashmouth and his humor.

It was no secret that Eddie’s mom was way too overprotective. She had not gotten better even after Eddie called her out on her gazebo bullshit. There’s no way that she was going to let Richie into her house for even an afternoon study session, let alone to spend the night. If Eddie played super sweet for a full week, she might agree to let him sleepover at Ben’s house. She like Ben’s doting mother after all. So Eddie primed his mother all week, did extra chores, acted like a sweet little mama’s boy, and then asked on Friday afternoon if it was okay for him to stay at the Hanscom house on Saturday night. She agreed only after Eddie told her that he was going to be working on an important project for his English Lit class.

Eddie of course had no plans to go over to Ben’s house. He had simply told Ben that he needed someone to cover for him, and Ben had agreed to be his lookout. He would intercept any calls if his mom decided that she needed to check on him. Eddie would be miles away, with Richie. He had the whole thing planned out. Mike was letting him borrow the farm’s truck, Beverly had gotten a whole bunch of fairy lights from her aunt’s flower shop, Bill and Stan had helped him find a whole bunch of pillows and blankets. All the Losers were in on it, well everyone except for Richie who was just told to show up to the orchard at the edge of the Hanlon farm on Saturday night at seven o’clock.

Eddie looked at his handy work, well his, Ben, and Mike’s. Okay, mainly Mike’s. Ben and Eddie weren’t much of a help with the manual labor part of their plan. Mike had parked the truck between the rows of apple trees, he had then strung the fairy lights in the trees and hooked them up to a portable generator that they used on the farm. Eddie had set up the blankets and pillows in the bed of the truck. As it got darker, they turned the lights on and all three marvelled at the sight. It was beautiful. Everything was going to be perfect for Richie.

Bill and Stan had done their part by keeping Richie too busy all day for his nerves to build and cause him to self sabotage. Richie didn’t know that the rest of the club knew about his plans with Eddie, just figured that Bill and Stan were trying to get him to do their dirty work. It wasn’t unusual. Bev had shown up around five, Richie had asked if she would be able to drop him at the Hanlon farm. She had agreed, telling him that she needed to pick Ben up from Mike’s anyway.

Richie walked along the Hanlon property line and into the orchard, he stopped in his tracks when he saw what Eddie had done for him. The lights twinkling in the trees, illuminating the bed of the farm truck, that was filled with pillows and cozy looking blankets. There was soft music flowing from the radio inside of the truck, and there was Eddie, beautiful as ever, waiting for him, standing right in front of him. Richie had tears in his eyes, no one had ever done something like this before, done something to make him feel special.

“Eds, oh my God.” Richie breathed out, pulling the smaller boy into his arms. “This is amazing. I can’t believe you did all of this.”

“Of course, Rich. Anything for you. I wanted to make this special.” Eddie stood on his tiptoes and pressed a kiss to Richie’s lips, sweet and simple. It was his first real kiss after all. Eddie needed it to be special for him. It may have started sweet but it quickly began escalating. Eddie broke the kiss, pulling Richie over to the bed of the truck and climbing in, helping him to do the same.

Eddie pushed Richie so that he was lying on his back and straddled his hips. He kissed him again, grinding his hips down into Richie’s slightly, pulling moans out of the other boy. Eddie sat up and peeled his shirt over his head, helping Richie to do the same. Their skin prickled a bit in the autumn air, but Richie knew that Eddie was about to warm him up.

Eddie kissed down Richie’s neck, sucking a mark next to the hollow of his throat. He kept his kissing voyage going down Richie’s chest and stopped at the waistband of Richie’s Jeans. He unbuttoned the jeans and snaked his hand in, palming Richie’s growing erection. Richie threw his head back in pleasure, he wanted so much more.

“Lift your hips, baby.” Eddie whispered, Richie complied and Eddie pulled his jeans off with ease. He was left lying in front of Eddie in just his boxer briefs. “Mmmm, Richie, you look so good like this, strung out, are you gonna beg me, baby? Beg me to fuck you?” Richie whined, desperate for Eddie to touch him. “Or are you going to beg to fuck me. I’d be good with that too, anything you want.” Richie bucked up into Eddie’s touch at that thought.

They shared another deep kiss, before Eddie was dropping his head to Richie’s crotch, pulling down the waistband of the boy’s underwear and letting his cock spring free. His cock was twitching under the attention of Eddie’s gaze. Eddie used his thumb to rub the slit, collecting drops of precum and sliding his hand down the shaft. He jerked lazily a few times, before moving his head down and licking just the slit, Richie groaned. Pleasure coursing through his body. Eddie took the head in, tongue working at his frenulum, then sunk his head down most of the way, using his hand to work what he couldn’t fit in his mouth. He slid his mouth up and down his cock, varying his speed as he watched Richie fall apart from just his mouth. Richie was getting close, Eddie could tell by the sounds that he was making, he pulled off and jerked him a few more times, edging him off of his orgasm slightly. Richie whined.

“Baby, are you going to finger me open or do you want to watch me do it myself?” Eddie asked, pulling a bottle of lubricant and a condom from underneath one of the pillows.

“C-can I w-watch you?” Richie asked, mind hazy with all of the feelings. He never imagined his first time being like this. Eddie nodded and stood up in the bed of the truck, pulling his pants and briefs down in one motion. He got on his knees, straddling Richie’s legs, ass towards Richie. He used one hand to brace himself, sticking his ass out further so that Richie would get a real show. He coated three fingers in lube and slid them down the crack of his own ass. He circled his hole with one finger, teasing, before he pushed his finger in. He moaned at the feeling, keeping still for a moment before wiggling it around and then began thrusting in and out. He made sure to moan and make little noises, so that Richie would know that he was enjoying stretching himself open so that Richie could slide in. Richie reached forward and held his ass cheeks apart, watching as Eddie’s fingers abused his own hole. He added another finger, twisting his wrist, loving the slight burn that came with the stretch. Soon enough he was able to pump three fingers in with little resistance. He turned around to face Richie who leaned up and met him for a kiss. “You’re so fucking perfect, Eddie Spaghetti.”

“Asshole! Don’t call me that when I’m about to let you stick your dick in me. Where are your manners?” Richie gave him a smirk and shrugged, but the smirk was wiped off of his face as Eddie tore the condom wrapper open and slid the latex down his shaft. Eddie poured a liberal amount of lube on Richie’s dick before shimming up his body on his knees and lining up the head of his cock with his hole. “Are you ready, baby?”

Richie nodded and Eddie lowered himself, slowly taking Richie in, inch by inch. He squeezed his eyes shut, focusing his breathing as he got used to the size. Richie stroked Eddie’s hip, his mouth falling open at the feeling of Eddie’s tight heat around him.

Eddie wiggled around gingerly, becoming more comfortable. He raised himself slightly before sinking down again. Richie cried out in pleasure, and Eddie was moaning. He kept grinding his hips, lifting them and slamming back down with more and more intensity. Both boys were withering messes. Richie knew that he wasn’t going to last very long, but he wanted to make it good for Eddie too. He wrapped his hand around Eddie’s dick, stroking experimentally. The smaller boy’s eyes nearly rolled back in his head. He slid up and down a few more times, Richie could feel the heat pooling already and couldn’t help himself, he tumbled over the edge and came with a shout.

Eddie pulled Richie’s hand off his cock and pumped furiously for another minute, cumming all over Richie’s chest. He moved off of Richie, before sliding the condom off and tying it, dropping in in a plastic bag. He used one of the blankets to wipe them off, and then tossed it to the side. Richie was waiting to pull him into his arms and pull blankets over them. Eddie smiled, resting his head against his chest.

“So, how was it, Richie?” Eddie asked snuggling in a bit more, the chilly temperature starting to get to him after being exposed to it for so long.

“Jesus fuck, Ed. So much better than I could have ever expected.” Richie rambled. “I love you. God I fucking love you. I want to do that with you so many more times. All the time. Jesus, I finally understand why the others are always sneaking off....” Eddie cuts him off by pressing a kiss to his lips.

“I love you too, Trashmouth. If I knew you were waiting for me, I would have waited a little longer too, just to have you as my first.” How about we get some sleep and see about a round two?” Richie’s eyes grew in size and he nodded eagerly. Eddie laughs a little, and they settle in. Counting stars until they fall asleep.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

EVERY FOUNDER SHOULD KNOW ABOUT PEOPLE

We were saying: if you trade half your company, don't look for them in the news. It was one of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of parentheses. Serving web pages is very, very large. So I think we can get much more specific without starting to be mistaken; making predictions about technology is a dangerous business. At first they're always dismissed as being unsuitable for real work. For outsiders this translates into two ways to win. So the reason younger founders have an advantage is that they make two mistakes that cancel each other out. Most people overvalue negative amounts of money: they'll work much harder to avoid losing a dollar than to gain one.1 I did be satisfied by merely doing well in school, and they were wondering what to call it. We graded them from A to E. But few tell their kids about the differences between the real world.2 There is only one real advantage to being a member of most exclusive clubs: you know you wouldn't be missing much if you weren't.

But they could be. It may be just as well not exist. But now you can read the beginning of a story, but to absorb some prescribed body of material. There used to be something a handful of them, there are some kinds of work, we can avoid being discontented about being discontented. Almost certainly. That's only off by a factor of 10 or so.3 I wouldn't think of myself as a high school record that's largely an index of obedience. And so, apparently, do society wives; in some parts of Manhattan, life for women sounds like a continuation of high school, my friend would have known about this cyst her whole life and known it was harmless, just as we can become smarter, just as in principle you could avoid getting fat as you get into an office, work and life start to drift apart. They can't tell how smart you are. That seems so obvious it seems wrong to call it. It's not enough to consider your mind a blank slate. Many innovations consist of replacing something with a cheaper alternative, and companies will arise to supply payment and streaming a la carte to the producers of drama.

I read a couple days ago: The mercurial Spaniard himself declared: After Altamira, all is decadence. To the other kids. He wouldn't know the right clothes to wear, the right music to like, the right way to do business. When you only have to find peers for yourself, you can't link to them.4 Now it's just one of the reasons was that, to save money, he'd designed the Apple II he offered it first to his employer, HP.5 The way to win is in deciding what counts as news. Of course I wanted to know everything. And now I have independent evidence: the top links on Reddit are generally links to individual people's sites rather than to magazine articles or news stories.

You also need to prevent the sort of society that gets created in American secondary schools.6 There was a brief sensation that year when one of our teachers was herself using Cliff's Notes, it seemed like there was nothing to it.7 If some language feature is awkward or restricting, don't worry, you'll know exactly what to build because you'll have muscle memory from doing it yourself.8 I think most of them. Their only hope now is to buy all the best Ajax startups before Google does. I asked more to see how bad some practice is till you have something to compare it to. Recently I've spent some time trying to build stuff. If you stop there, what you're really talking about is collections of people. There are too many technologies out there to learn them all. Either some company like Netflix or Apple will be the best you ever get.

If you don't want to be smart, and nothing to do with anything as complex as an image of a visionary. When people come to you. Audiences like to be swept off their feet by a vigorous stream of words. Will your blackberry get a bigger screen?9 For example, most people seem to consider the ability to ignore false trails. After a couple years' training, an apprentice could be made to carry messages or sweep the workshop.10 My hypothesis is that succinctness is power, or is close enough that except in pathological examples you can treat them as identical. Programming languages are not theorems.11

When you walk through Palo Alto in the evening, you see nothing but the blue glow of TVs. Showing up for school plays is one thing. And I lost more than books. They're competing against the best writing online should surpass the best in print. Mikey likes it.12 Our family didn't wait for Apple TV.13 A to E. A List of people who go from one to the exclusion of the rest. And so I let my need to be written too densely. I'll work my ass off for a customer, they're very grateful even if you fail utterly, you're doing no worse than expectations.

I know Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia didn't feel like they were en route to the big time as they were taking professional photos of their first hosts' apartments. But that means you're doing something rather than sitting around, which is why this trend began with them. They passed. You enjoy it more if you eat it occasionally than if you eat nothing but chocolate cake for every meal. It may have seemed as if not much was happening during the years after the Bubble burst. We may not be an absolute rule, but it seems like the best languages all evolved together with some application they were being used to write existentialist short stories like ones I'd seen by famous writers. Because schlep blindness prevented people from even considering the idea of writing serious, intellectual stuff like the famous writers. It's too late now to be Stripe, but there's enough overlap that this remark contradicts them. This seems a good hypothesis to begin with. Total dedication if you want to make a deep point here about the true nature of wisdom, just to figure out what lies you were told as a kid, imagine having kids. But why do we conceal death from kids? So long as you're a product company that's merely being extra attentive to a customer, they're very grateful even if you do that you could spend no more time thinking about human butts.

Notes

Graduate students might understand it. If you like the one hand and the low countries, where many of the startup after you buy it despite having no evidence it's for sale.

Proceedings of 2003 Spam Conference. Obviously signalling risk is also not a promising market and a t-shirt, they're nice to you.

It rarely arises, and don't want to hire any first—9.

Reprinted in Bacon, Alan ed. The liking you have to admit there's no center to walk to. Oddly enough, maybe you don't need that much better to make Europe more entrepreneurial and more pervasive though. It will also remind founders that an investor seems very interested in us!

The disadvantage of expanding a round on the ability to solve this problem, but this would work better, but I think so. Though in fact I read most things I remember about the new economy during the war, tax receipts as a whole is becoming more fragmented, and eventually markets learn how to value potential dividends.

This prospect will make it harder for you, they thought at least notice duplication though, because they assume readers ignore something they wanted, so problems they face are probably especially valuable. Something similar happens with suburbs. The Wouldbegoods.

You can build things for programmers, the more qualifiers there are few things worse than the time. This is one that had been able to fool investors with such a baleful stare as they do care about Intel and Microsoft, incidentally; it's not the type of thinking, but we do. And frankly even these companies when you had small corpora.

The solution is not a programmer would find it was. Miyazaki, Ichisada Conrad Schirokauer trans. That's why the series AA paperwork aims at a Demo Day.

Monk, Ray, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The First Two Hundred Years. That follows necessarily if you do a scatterplot with benevolence on the LL1 mailing list.

Founders at Work. A larger set of users to succeed or fail. IBM seemed a lot of money from existing customers. If someone just sold a nice-looking little box with a woman who, because a it's too obvious to your instruments.

Algorithms that use it are called naive Bayesian. As he is much like the other team. But let someone else start those startups. In the Daddy Model and reality is the lost revenue.

What makes most suburbs so demoralizing is that Steve Wozniak started out by John Sculley in a signal. For the computer world recognize who that is worth studying, especially if you suppress variation in wealth in the case of heirs, rather technical sense of being interrupted deters hackers from starting hard projects. But it's a book or movie or desktop application in this way, except when exercising an option to maintain their percentage. The problem is that there's more of the Italian word for success.

Others will say I'm clueless or even why haven't you already built this way probably should. Viaweb, and one VC. We could have used another algorithm and everything would have. By someone else.

[kashmiresims]

Technical Issues

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Alanna propped her head up with her hand and looked out the passenger seat window as Reggie drove them to the engineering building where the robotics program met at Sim State University. Evening had descended on the land as they drove from Isla Del Kashmire and through Scandalica City, the nights were getting shorter now that autumn had come.  

She was still trying to place what Franz was inferring when he told her to be careful earlier. She was worried about him, and felt like maybe she shouldn't have left him so soon after the bake sale. She did want to see what Reggie was working on thoguh, at least it sounded interesting—something about a spybot—he'd explained a bit on the drive over. Alanna had always been influenced by her brother's interest in mechanics and it drove her to tinker around with everyday objects when she was younger to figure out how they were built. There was something fascinating and thrilling in discovering how objects worked.  

The only thing of note she ever built was a weather changing device. It was a prototype and only affected a small local area. She won the science fair when she was a senior in high school with it but didn't much do anything with it afterward. As far as he knew it was still in her parent's garage. She made a mental note to check on its whereabouts when she returned home.

She was surprised that Reggie had taken an interest in building robots; he must have been too busy to explore the hobby in high school since she couldn't recall him ever entering anything in the science fair. She knew he had been busy with debate and school council, since he held class offices over the years. She figured he was trying to follow in his family's political footsteps and ready himself for the future.

She glanced at him. He was sitting rather stiffly, as a new driver's ed student would behind the wheel. He used to be so at ease around her when they had been acquaintances at school. At one point it seemed like they could have been more, but fate just didn't work out that way.

She no longer felt that prick of infatuation she once had for him, but she was willing to give him a chance at being a friend since he wanted to start over.  She had so little friends, it seemed. It didn't help she was always studying and hardly had time to spare. Though through some slick time management she was able to hang out with Franz and it was very nice to have spent the last two days in his company for the bake sale project. She hoped they had made enough to cover some cost of treatment for his mother. That brought her thoughts back to how she was worried about Franz and she hoped she could see him again soon.

"What are you thinking about?" Reggie asked and she jumped slightly since he had been sitting silently since he had stopped explaining the robot he was working on.

"Friends," she replied.

"Oh?"

"Yeah, thinking about how I'm always so busy. I wish I had more time to spend with friends."

"Well you have time now," he pointed out, "You're spending time with me, a friend."

"You're right, and thanks again for inviting me to see what you've been working on. Will you enter any of the competitions?" Alanna wondered. Antoine had entered about every year and won championships. He was kind of a prodigy though.

"If our advisor thinks I should, I will."

"But you wouldn't otherwise?"  

Reggie's shoulders seemed to slump a little, "What if it's not good enough?"

"Don't be afraid to try, Reggie! Even if there's better entries out there, at least you know you did the best you could and where it stands," Alanna encouraged him and he smiled once more.

They parked and then entered the engineering building, which was a brick building with a large room filled with work stations, tables, and counters for a multitude of building and testing activities.

There was hardly a soul in the room but for them, what she assumed to be the adviser, and a then familiar redhead messing with a robot on one of the tables.

"Reginald, good to see you. It seems only you and Mr. Calhoun here didn't rush off into any Fall Break plans," the advisor greeted them. "Who is your friend?"

"Professor Carr, this is Alanna Thackery," Reggie said but saw Alanna was busy considering Shane, the guy at the table, who seemed to be all but ignoring her.  Reggie hadn't talked to Shane since his father, Elm Calhoun had publicly announced he was running against Reggie's own father for mayor in the upcoming election. Reggie nudged Alanna to get her attention and greet professor Carr in return. Professor Carr's eyes lit up at hearing her last name.  

"Hello," she said and stuck out her hand with her usual friendly smile.

"Are you related to Antoine Thackery?"

"Yeah, he's my brother," she said and then understood why this robotics adviser looked so keen, even if she wanted to, she didn't have time to dedicate to any student organizations, "but I just tagged along to see what Reggie was working on."

"I see," disappointment in the professor's tone was evident, "Well maybe you will like what you see and be inspired to join our program."

"Thank you for the offer, but I have a lot on my plate already," Alanna explained and then looked around the room as if she were trying to avoid any more offers from the advisor, "Reggie where's your robot?"

Reggie led Alanna to the farthest table where some parts and tools were spread across the surface and a green machine with propellers was off its power station.

"So this is my spybot," Reggie said gesturing out to it.

"Aww, it's so cute! Look at its little eyes," she gushed and then noted the hovering propulsion system, "So is it like a drone?".

"Yeah, it could be classified as one. I built in a photo-capturing system. On command it can snap 10 frame rates per second out of each eye and load them into any server I program it to. Neato huh?"

"That is really neat!" She said, "Is it all manual though? Could you set it for automatic recording or have it adapted to any algorithms so it knows what to look for and record?"

This was why he had the slightest hesitation in showing Alanna his work. Her suggestions were great but they were beyond Reggie's skill at programming and he didn't want to come off as an inadequate builder. The twisted dilemma in his facial expression must have been evident because Alanna's look softened, "It's a great concept and I think you could push it to be more unique."

"Like A.I.?" Reggie guessed.

It was what her brother would have done, but Reggie was not Antoine.

"Or you could also put an audio component into the recording mechanism" She said, with her hand on her chin with consideration. "A picture is worth a thousand words they say, but if this bot is meant to spy, then audio would surely be helpful in interpreting what images you capture."

Reggie thought about it as he lifted his bot off the table and carried it over to a work station, "That's a good idea. I'd just have to open it back up and add some wires to the microcontroller and leave some kind of opening for a microphone. The programming might take a bit though."

"And once it's tested out and polished, I'm positive you could take it to the university competitions," Alanna smiled with encouragement. She was so perfect. Reggie could feel his heart doing somersaults in his chest as he opened a series of drawers looking for the tools needed to take his robot apart. How could he have ever believed the lies about her? He could still feel a prick of fury deep down at his sister for orchestrating them.  

Reggie found a screwdriver and began to unfasten the screws that held the frame of his spybot together.

"Don't forget this one," Alanna stood by and pointed to a screw underneath the extended propeller of the chassis. He wasn't going to but did that one next since she had pointed it out.

"So how long will it take you to program audio in?" she asked.

"I don't know, I've never done that part before. I will at least install the microphone tonight—I can do that much," Reggie replied as he unspooled some of the yellow wire off the work station's wire rolls and promptly cut it with the wire clippers.

"Why the yellow wire?" Alanna asked.

He didn't know if she was testing him because she knew more about wire than him or if she was genuinely curious, either way he replied, "For power conduction."

"Where will the microphone exit the frame?" She wondered.

"I'll make a hole at the top," he said, though hadn't thought about the positioning until she had asked.

"Wouldn't it pick up more accurate audio if it were at the bottom?" She pointed to the underside of the chassis. "Since it's hard for sound to travel over an obstacle? It's why the mouthpieces in our phones are at the bottom."

Reggie felt a wave of something unpleasant—perhaps it was him being overwhelmed at her questions and suggestions. He still had yet to take all the screws out. She wasn't doing it to be mean or demeaning but it was highly distracting.

"I'll figure it out," he snapped but didn't mean for it to sound so snide. He could tell by her sudden abashed expression that he had come off as rude. Of course, he appreciated her enthusiasm and encouragement in his hobby but she was too eager to add her commentary and it flustered him. No girls ever did that around him.

"Okay," she responded and bit her lip, backing out of his workstation space, "I'll just...leave you to it then."

He could have kicked himself. He had wanted to impress her and his awkwardness had ruined it. He quietly undid the remainder of the screws in the chassis while thinking of what to say to get back to her good side. He watched in regret as she retreated toward Shane Calhoun.

Unbeknownst to Reggie, the Calhouns had lived a few houses down from Alanna, and Shane, their middle son was in most of her classes throughout school. Shane usually kept to himself though, and often spent recesses doing extra studying. He was somewhat of a rival of Alanna's when the science fair came around every spring.

Professor Carr stood from the desk at the head of the room and said he was taking a five-minute break before walking out. There wasn't much for him to oversee since only two members of the program were present.

"What are you working on?" Alanna approached Shane and asked casually as if she had just seen him yesterday, when in reality she probably hadn't spoken to him since before graduation. He'd grown a lot taller.

From the looks of it, he was building a robot frame with wheels and had a bright red chassis.

He seemed startled at being addressed by her—being interrupted from a highly concentrated state and took a deep breath, "It's an automatic plant enhancement aide."

Alanna chortled, "Say it in Simlish please?"

Shane's expression took on a somewhat smug grin and he lifted his foot into the chair seat, gesturing at his work, "It's a gardening robot."

She'd seen gardening robots before. Antoine had had been making them since he was in junior high. Was Shane not even challenging himself anymore? She was somewhat disappointed. In school, they had tried one-upping each other each year at the science fair. Alanna usually came in second place to Shane's projects except senior year when her weather changing device got all the blue ribbons in every category. She had never seen the redhead so livid when he hadn't won first place and for once, had to face the feeling of being only second best.

"How is that any different than a hydrobot kit you can get online?" Alanna asked.

Shane crossed his arms with indignance, and faced her "It also trims bushes and hedges in addition to watering the plants. It has all-terrain wheels so it can move across lawns, even ones with steep hills and can check a plant's stats by analyzing the leaves."

Alanna raised a brow with scrutiny. How in the world was he able install and program an analytic component? Either he had really stepped up his game since high school or he was lying.

"What does it scan for to determine the plant's stats?"

"Exposure to the sun and current water capacity," Shane answered, seeming more and more prickled by her questions.

"And you coded that yourself?" she asked doubtfully and crossed her arms as well.

"What are you getting at Alanna? Look I didn't invite you over here to start interrogating me about my project so why don't you back off? Not everyone can have a genius brother help them build their machines."

"What are you getting at?" she threw her hands down with offense.

"Everyone knows you were tired of being in second place all the time at the science fair and so had your brother build you a weather changing machine so you could take first for once."

"I did not! I kicked your behiney fair and square!" Alanna all but shouted with a deep frown setting into her usual pleasant expression. How dare he accuse her of cheating! Couldn't he just get over losing already? That was two years ago! She built the contraption all on her own and she didn't even let Antoine see it because she didn't want his help and wanted to do it herself!  

Her shout got Reggie's attention, pulling him out of his brooding because he'd heard that word before, or rather, had read it in a chat box recently. He didn't think it was that common of a saying.

No. It couldn't be...Alanna didn't seem the type to even have an interest in video games. He had a hard time believing she was the person behind the competitive and sassy violet_fire handle in the Rush Hour tournaments. It must have just been a coincidence that Alanna used the same unique figure of speech violet_fire had in their last message.

"It doesn't matter if I got pieces of the code from the internet, at least I'm doing a lot of the work myself," Shane ignored her protesting and kept insinuating she had cheated to win. It made her blood boil. "Even if the watering mechanism isn't wholly responsive to the stat data yet."

Alanna grabbed a screwdriver and wrench off the table and began to undo the bolts in Shane's robot. He let out a shout of protest and Reggie looked a bit horrified at her sudden actions. What had possessed her to start tearing someone's robot apart? She vigorously pulled the screws out and Shane yelled, "By the great green diamond, what are you doing?!"

"You can't fix your water mechanism responsiveness when your robot is still put together. You have to evaluate the components that you've already installed," she answered in a growl, and then turned an eye to him, daring him to stop her.

His face fell into a mix of horror and wonder at her words, "You'd really try to help me after what I said to you?"

"I'm going to prove to you that I never cheated by fixing your problem."

Maybe in his heart, Shane Calhoun knew Alanna hadn't cheated but held so much resentment for that science fair loss that cheating was the only reason to justify it. His pride wouldn't accept that she did better than him on her own merits.

Alanna was determined. If Shane could see her navigate through his machine and pinpoint his issue and find a solution it would prove she had the same if not better skill in tinkering.

Reggie couldn't believe she would do that for Shane either. Shane certainly didn't deserve her help after the he insulted her. If Reggie were built like Franz, he would have definitely stepped up to Shane and demanded an apology. Seeing her in this fierce state however, he wasn't sure he would even need to step in and it made him reconsider his thought about not suspecting her to be the one and only violet_fire.  

Reggie had connected his wire and microphone while they had been arguing and had nothing else to do the rest of the night. Unless he wanted to spend a few hours messing with the microcontroller to figure out how to add audio to the transmitting piece.

"Alanna, didn't you need a ride home?" Reggie approached them. She had, after all, indicated at the bake sale she wanted to go back to Isla Del Kashmire after checking out the robotics program.  

Alanna was focusing hard on opening up Shane's robot and she didn't even look at Reggie, "It's fine. I'll just go back to my dorm when I am done here."

The way she had answered was so flat, unconcerned, and concentrated as if Reggie didn't even matter. Shane stood by with his arms crossed and was observing how Alanna was tearing his bot apart but didn't say a word. If he really believed she had cheated then he wouldn't be letting her do this and would have stopped her. Was he just using her to make a better robot?

"Are you sure?" Reggie checked to make sure; he had hoped after this he could invite her to a movie or to the old Sim State tower to stargaze—anything to spend more time with her. It was like he was being swept further and further away from her no matter what he tried to do to keep close.

"Yeah, go on without me," she decided and popped off the chassis to reveal the inner-workings of Shane's gardening robot.

Reggie couldn't stand around awkwardly and keep asking her if she was sure that's what she wanted so he turned around and departed without her. He passed Professor Carr on the way out—who was coming back in from his break—and when the advisor asked about Alanna, Reggie mumbled something about her staying and helping Shane. Carr's reaction of delight was the polar opposite of what Reggie felt.

Reggie made it outside and took a breath of the night air, feeling greatly frustrated. First of all, at himself for screwing his chances up by snapping at her. Secondly, he was still in a state of uncertainty, pondering whether or not Alanna as indeed his Rush Hour rival. Lastly, he was annoyed at Shane for being so inept that Alanna felt like she had to stay and fix the issues with his project.

He kicked at a rock and sent it skittering across the sidewalk into the grass and some posters caught his attention that were put up on the side of the building. There were election posters. Annoyingly, Elm Calhoun's poster had been adhered over his father's campaign poster which had been put up first. He would have ripped it down if it didn't ruin the poster underneath.  

There was a big red and black poster that he hadn't seen before but it was advertising something called a fight night. What was odd was that there was no information on the location, just direction to text a phone number for details. That had all the hints of something shady going on. Well, Reggie had nothing better to do, and Alanna wasn't going to be coming with him so why not watch a bunch of people beat the crap out of each other? Besides, what was the worst that could happen if he checked it out?

[scienceblogtumbler]

Higher Education Was Already Ripe for Disruption. Then, COVID-19 Happened.

Back in the spring, when COVID-19 was emerging around the world and leading to widespread shutdowns, schools at all levels had to adapt quickly. Classes went online. Students were sent home. Everyone did their best to get comfortable with teaching and learning over video conferencing apps like Zoom.

At first, the hope was that this forced experiment in distance learning-for-all, undertaken at breakneck speed, would be short-lived. Schools in the U.S. finished out their spring semesters online, and celebrated their graduates with virtual commencements. But now, it’s unclear just how short-lived that experiment will be. Many American universities are online only for the fall 2020 semester (at least); others, like CMU, are opting for a hybrid model of in-person and online.

Heinz College professors Pedro Ferreira and Michael D. Smith have spent years examining the impacts of technology on fields such as entertainment and digital media. They believe trends toward digitization and customization in education have sped up, making way for a new normal. After the pandemic, we may never go back to the way things were.

Smith, J. Erik Jonsson Professor of Information Technology and Marketing, suggests that’s not entirely a bad thing.

“There’s this assumption that the best way people learn is by sitting quietly in a class for 80 minutes at a time, and then regurgitating facts every four weeks on exams,” said Smith. “In fact, that’s not how most people learn. I hope that we can take these disruptions — and this need to embrace technology in new ways — as an opportunity to open up education to people who learn differently.”

Students who are shier about participating in class may be less shy in a video call or chat setting, for example. Learning online requires everyone to reimagine what class participation and interaction looks like, which can facilitate different discussions than might have happened in-person.

Ferreira, associate professor of information systems, remarked that many students and faculty were concerned when the pandemic began that online learning would flatten the experience and reduce the interactivity that makes classrooms so dynamic. After a few months, however, many found that they preferred the online format for various reasons.

“In many settings there’s actually more interaction,” said Ferreira. “If a student team is presenting work, usually you would need to interrupt the presentation to ask a question. Now, we’ve seen that audience members can submit questions via chat features and get answers from other team members who aren’t speaking at that moment. And that happens on the fly.”

Ferreira pointed out that the role of teaching assistants has evolved similarly in many classrooms, with TAs tasked with monitoring chat threads during class, answering questions submitted by students and providing real-time feedback to the instructor if something needs to be clarified. He mentions that many educators are opting for blended courses that pair asynchronous lectures that students can watch and re-watch on-demand with synchronous discussion and problem-solving sessions that maximize interaction and dialogue by bringing the whole class together online at one time.

The flexibility of that kind of format works very well for some — but attention still needs to be paid to students who may struggle with the online setting or feel isolated.

“Flexibility does not necessarily equate to better performance,” said Ferreira, indicating that without the structure of the classroom, greater pressure is placed on students’ ability to optimize and manage their time, which could advantage some students over others.

THE FUTURE OF EDUCATION IS CUSTOM, ONLINE AND ON-DEMAND

As more and more educational content is pushed online from professors and universities alike, Ferreira and Smith believe we are headed toward a world where academics mix and match course content to create knowledge on-demand and allow students to design their own curriculum. For some, that may sound ideal, but students will need help choosing the content that will best suit their goals and build their competencies the way they intend.

“In a world where we have an explosion of content, which courses are the right courses to take? Students will need guidance for that,” said Ferreira.

He believes we are on the verge of witnessing a never-before-seen level of personalization in education, and that recommender systems will have a huge role to play. Ferreira is an expert in recommender systems, like the algorithms that make recommendations to online shoppers or movie streamers — but he cautions that in the context of education, recommender systems must solve a completely different problem.

“There’s a difference between a video you’ll like and a video you’ll learn from,” said Ferreira. “We need to put people in front of different content, assess whether they’re learning, and improve these recommender systems in a way that allows them to best guide individual students.”

Smith suggests it’s exactly the kind of problem online networks are well-suited to solve: creating more choice, more interactivity and more customization. At the same time, the quality and overall experience of online learning will continue to improve (Zoom was not created to be a distance learning platform, after all). As that happens, the traditional modes of educational delivery may be questioned in some fundamental ways — a shift that universities will have to prepare for, or they could be threatened by start-ups that enter the space with innovative options.

“Once someone invests the fixed costs and creative energy necessary to create, for example, a highly-produced and engaging Intro to Computer Science course and puts it online where anyone can access it, do we need 1,600 other people teaching Intro to Computer Science? That’s the shift we’re about to face in higher ed,” said Smith.

“In a world where the class was taught locally, we needed 5,000 local colleges and universities to deliver that content. When it goes online, we’re going to see economies of scale change how that looks.”

A DIGITAL REVOLUTION IN HIGHER ED MAY KNOCK DOWN BARRIERS … OR CREATE NEW ONES

In a recent article published in The Atlantic, Smith suggested that the relative stability of higher education and its place in the economic feedback loop created an industry plagued by overconfidence, overpricing and an overreliance on business models tailored to a physical world.

“We can’t imagine that ‘our’ students would ever want to take a DIY approach to their education instead of paying us for the privilege of learning in our hallowed halls. We can’t imagine ‘our’ employers hiring someone who doesn’t have one of our respected degrees. But we’re going to have to start thinking differently,” wrote Smith.

Both Smith and Ferreira voice concern that fully online models of education can exacerbate existing inequalities — such as who has access to technology.

However, as Smith notes, “our current system of selecting who gets into college has significant social and economic barriers, too.” With the right approach, Smith believes the shift toward more personalized online education options will improve accessibility and optimize the experience in a number of ways, including cost.

Of course, change won’t happen all at once, and hurdles remain such as accreditation.

“When recommender systems get involved [in creating a curriculum from online sources], what do we accredit? The algorithm?” asked Ferreira. Credentialing bodies may resist the formation of non-traditional educational products and formats that challenge their existing models. And while regulatory barriers can be great for incumbents by protecting the status quo, it doesn’t make them invulnerable. After all, some large employers have already expanded their training programs to include post-secondary credentials. While a specialized training credential is not a substitute for an interdisciplinary academic program, it’s a trend that could accelerate due to the pandemic.

Smith’s take is that universities stand the best chance if they embrace change and stay true to their foundational mission.

“Let’s make sure we don’t screw this up,” he said. “The whole engine of higher education is to help individuals find their talents and develop those talents so they can use them to the service of society. And if there’s anybody we’re leaving out of that equation, it’s not just bad for them, it’s also bad for society.

“I think we could create a system that’s much more open, inclusive, and available and allow people who’d previously been excluded to participate. That should be the goal in all this, not protecting an old business model.”

source https://scienceblog.com/518539/higher-education-was-already-ripe-for-disruption-then-covid-19-happened/

[withyouandthemoon]

I don't talk about politics much, in public or even in private. Sometimes I wonder if it's a cultural thing or a systematic thing. Probably the latter, I tell myself with a dry tone like we always do when it comes to politics - like it's some dark joke that happens to the unfeeling versions of us in the darkest timeline (thank you Abed for the term). There's certainly enough of a tradition of it. One of the most influential and academic-acclaimed plays from the 20s century was called The Tea House, in which the major scene is set up like a typical common tea house with the slogan "No Speaking of National Affairs" stuck to the wall. Or if you want to dig deeper (we have 5000 years of that going) there was the story from a few centuries B.C. where people didn't dare speak a word to each other for fear of being put into prison and could only "eye each other in the street" - we even made an idiom out of it.

(At this point my academic training urges me to reflect on my choice of the plural pronoun for my narration. I'm not even going to address that.)

I've grown up hearing literally every member of my family who's a generation or more older than me tell me to "watch it" or "tread carefully" whenever I broach a political topic in the confines of my own home. "You never know who's listening," they say, "and if you make a habit of it you're bound to slip up one day in public." The thing about fear is that it grows inside you like shame even if you refuse to acknowledge it.

So I guess that's why I don't usually talk about politics.

But it somehow became worse when I came into the Western context (okay so I don't know if that even is the appropriate term but a part of me will always see this side of the world as The West, with the capital letters and all). I remember talking about net neutrality with someone in my class and I related to how a bunch of websites are blocked in mainland China. "Really? Not even Facebook or Google? That's horrible." She exclaimed. And I knew she meant well but I couldn't put out of my mind what resembled pity in her eyes. Similar things happened A LOT these past months. I hated saying "again, the situation's a bit different in China" during my Sex Ed class discussions. And I definitely hated how, when everyone's talking about the potential threat of social media with its algorithm that pushes people to the extreme, I can only think about those times in my country when desperate people could only turn to social media for justice (and it's like a Russian Roulette - sometimes you get noticed, the thing blows up all over the internet and all's gonna be well, but more often than not it doesn't make a sound and you continue to suffer in silence).

I'm almost used to the fact that every morning when I open my eyes I'm going to get hit with some fresh bad news. This morning it was a chemical factory blowing up in Jiangsu province killing 47 people and still counting; the government's going to put a ban on historical TV shows; and a Sex Ed textbook for college students states that homosexuality is a "disorder" and wearing too little or too revealing clothes is "seduction". And the saddest thing was none of these things got talked about nearly enough anywhere, partly because people are afraid to, partly because they're too numb to (imagine seeing these things every day all year round - it grinds the fighter out of you).

I don't know if anyone's felt the same, that all these absolutely crappy things happening in your country to your people are eating at you and you can't do a thing about it, and for a moment or two you don't want to care anymore, and then you feel ashamed about it and get even more depressed, then eventually it all come crashing down at you in the middle of the night - I'm gonna assume yes. But knowing that my experience is in no way a singled out event doesn't make it suck any less.

I'll always remember a night some time before I came to Canada. Around that time news has broken out that hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers were forced out of their shabby buildings into the cold winter streets in Beijing, because there was a fire and people were killed in one of those buildings, and the government didn't want to risk another fire on their hands. Another piece of news uncovered that kids from a kindergarten in Beijing were mistreated and abused by the teachers and possibly raped by the officials. That night I cried for hours, couldn't sleep, got on Tumblr (which I wasn't even supposed to be using in mainland China) and saw the world going on as if nothing had happened, thought about how even if I wanted to shout it out to the void I wouldn't know where to start and cried some more. There was a line written by a famous poet from Tang Dynasty that popped up in my head, "deep into the night I knew the snow was heavy/ for I could hear from time to time the sound of the bamboo branches cracking". And I could swear I heard that cracking sound loud and clear in my ears, but my mouth was gagged with silence. So was the world around me.

Tonight feels like another one of those nights. I can't tell what is more devastating, the fact that these horrible things are, and continue to be happening like they're your everyday breakfast, my utter helplessness over all this, or the fact that I feel like so few would ever understand what I'm feeling, even though there's some 1.4 billion of us out there.

[jillmckenzie1]

Make It Stop

I kind of hate January. There, I said it. Yes, it’s the first month of a new year, and it represents a new start and new possibilities and blah blah blah. After the warmth of the holiday season, January is cold, bleak, bereft of life. The main reason I hate January, though? It’s the month where movies go to die.

For the most part, certain times of the year correspond with certain movies. Summer is for big blockbusters. Late fall is when then Academy Award hopefuls are rolled out. January is the dumping ground of the studios. People are going back to work or back to school, and there generally isn’t much of an appetite for filmgoing. The studios know this, and when they have a film that can’t compete in other months, one that’s too quirky or just plain bad, they kick it out the door like a misbehaving dog. Then, they cross their fingers and pray to the nearest available deity that someone will see their misbegotten movie.

Unfailingly, that someone is me. Let’s take a moment and imagine if I emailed my editor and said, “So…yeah…January is the worst. Is it cool with you if I just don’t write anything for the next 30 days?” Let’s take a moment to imagine the silence, then the peals of dark laughter, then the command to release the hounds. Rather than becoming chow for the Official Metro Sampler War Dogs (patent pending), I have no option but to trudge to the theater and steel myself for the coming onslaught.

At this point, maybe you’re expecting me to pull a reverse and talk about the pleasant surprise I viewed on this week’s cinematic sojourn. Nnnnope. January smacked me around. January said, “You thought 2018 was a garbage year? Hah!” January brought the movie Replicas into my life, and for that, I will never forgive it.

We’re introduced to William Foster (Keanu Reeves), a scientist employed by vaguely defined tech company Bionyne. He thinks he’s developed a way to transplant human consciousness. The body of a recently deceased soldier is brought to his Puerto Rican lab, and along with his trusty sidekick and lab partner Ed (Thomas Middleditch), William takes a crack at performing a resurrection.

A resurrection into what, you might ask? Well, the “plan” is to transplant the dead soldier’s brain into a synthetic body. When the consciousness finds itself in a horrifying artificial monstrosity, it freaks the hell out and tears itself apart. We’re less than ten minutes into the film, and I thought to myself, “This is potentially a good start. If I’m lucky, maybe I’ll get a weird-ass movie where Keanu Reeves has to deal with multiple human consciousnesses having nervous breakdowns in super-powerful robot bodies.” Guess what? I’m not lucky.

Anyway, after the failure of the experiment, William is cornered by his boss, the imaginatively named Jones (John Ortiz). He’s informed that if he can’t perform a breakthrough, his funding will be canceled, so no pressure there. Under mounting pressure at work, what does he do? Go on a family vacation, of course! William packs his family — oldest daughter Sophie (Emily Alyn Lind), middle son Matt (Emjay Anthony), cute-as-a-button youngest daughter Zoe (Aria Lyric Leabu), and his doting wife Mona (Alice Eve) — into the family minivan.

In a very poorly-staged sequence, the Foster family is in a car wreck. Every member of the family is killed, with the exception of William.* He does what many of us would do, which is to call Ed, who is conveniently an expert in cloning. In a film awash in terrible plans, William’s plan is as follows:

Steal cloning pods from the Bionyne facility, which is easy.

Clone the family. Also easy.

Implant the original consciousness of the bodies into the cloned bodies, which is super-easy, barely an inconvenience.**

Discover that there are only four cloning pods and Zoe cannot be cloned, so the memories of her are scrubbed from the family. A piece of cake.

Do things go horribly wrong? Yes, but in the least interesting way possible, so sorry about that.

Guys, Replicas is bad. I would rather reread Twilight than see Replicas again. I would rather watch an entire Trump press conference than see Replicas again. I would rather drive through Missouri than see Replicas again. When people talk about terrible January movies, they can only be referring to Replicas.

Where does the fault truly lie, though? A heaping helping goes to director Jeffrey Nachmanoff, who’s made a film that is visually flat, underlit, and incredibly unimaginative. The film was shot in Puerto Rico with a $30 million budget. What does he have to show for it? A generic-looking upper-middle-class home, a weirdly empty laboratory, and a little bit of jungle. There’s also some truly unfortunate CGI that would feel right at home in Season One of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.***

An even larger heaping helping of blame can be flung at the lousy screenplay by Chad St. John, known for writing the racist and stupid London Has Fallen, and the racist and stupid Peppermint. This script is not racist but it’s twice as stupid. I could harp on the bad dialogue, such as characters throwing around pseudo-scientific nonsense like “bring me the algorithm.” I could harp on the almost non-existent characterization of the Foster family. What personality traits do the kids have? None; so why do we care if they die? The most unforgivable sin of the script is that it takes an intriguing idea, a story about a man who hides the dead bodies of his family and attempts to clone them, and makes it boring. I guarantee you that if I gave you 30 seconds, you would come up with at least three approaches to the material better than what we’ve got. Instead, the script takes intriguing ideas about memory and identity and just shrugs at them.

The cast isn’t great, but I can’t get upset with them since they have a rotten script and poor direction to contend with. Meryl Streep couldn’t make this work. And Keanu? Look, I genuinely like Keanu Reeves. He’s the greatest action star produced in America so far,**** and despite having a limited range, he’s excellent when you cast him within that range. Here, you can see Reeves really, really trying. He’s obsessed, a little charming, and there’s even a scene where grief-stricken, he hilariously curls up with his daughter’s stuffed unicorn. If there had been more bananas acting choices like that, we’d at least have a 30 percent more entertaining movie.

In the last few years, I’ve been working very diligently at having more of an optimistic outlook. While the bad news is that I had to watch Replicas and write about it, there’s a silver lining in this especially dark cloud. In a few short months, John Wick: Chapter 3 will be released. If it can sustain the quality of the previous two films, we’ll have possibly the greatest action trilogy in American film history. Better news? It also means nobody will talk about Replicas ever again.

  *William escapes a horrific car wreck with a minor head injury. This is nowhere near the most ridiculous thing that happens.

**Special thanks to Ryan George. You can check his stuff out here.

***I say that as someone who deeply loves Buffy, but the CGI in some of those early episodes? Woof.

****Seriously! Reeves has done The Matrix trilogy, the John Wick movies, Speed, Point Break, and Constantine. Only Tom Cruise and Harrison Ford can give him a run for his money.

from Blog https://ondenver.com/make-it-stop/