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kirbyskisses · 1 year

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happy new year! i have had serious burnout for 50+ days because 2022 was a horrible time for me mentally (esp those last two months.)

anyway, thanks for 1k!!! here’s the birthday girl maki zenin fucking you for well over 1.5k words! (+ soft aftercare) 🎊

MINORS AND AGELESS BLOGS DNI.

cw: lesbian tings, strap-ons, overstimulation, size kink, squirting, begging, maki is called “mommy” and “mistress”, crying, praise kink.

“maki, ‘t won’t fit—”

god - you sound so utterly broken, tears pricking the corner of you eyes as you watches the head of maki’s strap nudge your pussy’s entrance. it’s the thick kind - a bit bigger than the ones you’ve taken before.

her pretty lips are curved up into a delightful and utterly sadistic smile, dark green hair stuck to her face - you’d think her an angel if she wasn’t being so utterly sinful.

her scarred muscles lock you down under her - voice lilting into soft compliments that you can barely understand. your brain is effectively mush.

“t-too big ‘ki!”

“doing so good for me, baby. you can take it, can’t you? can you be a good girl for your mistress? don’t i always know what my baby can take, hm?” she’s smiling and watches you with half-lidded eyes; predator-like.

“yes, b’t…” you whimper out a cry.

“sshhh. don’t use that pretty brain to think. just let me in.”

lust and need burning into her every vein - she watches the rubbery cock slide between your core’s chubby lips, lines of slick rolling up and down as she grinds it over your clit.

fuck - a growl barely holds itself back from her throat as she takes it in - the sweetest, prettiest cunt - a tight hole made just for her to use and stretch.

you’re so good and pliant - simultaneously begging maki to let out all of her bottled rage and pain into you but m e w l i n g at the overstimulation of when she actually does - lips babbling and begging her not to out of instinct because it’s too good, and she’s so strong.

maki’d never actually do anything bad to you - she’s not her family - she’d stop the second you really wanted - the second your special word passed your lip. she knows it. you both know it.

but god does she love this little game of pretend.

“c’mon…” the swollen tip of the strapped toy edges ever so slightly onto your entrance and it’s enough to make a pathetic noise ascend through your throat.

“you can do it for me, princess… we can make it fit. just open up for me.”

you’re squirming and shivering; clit swollen and fingertips digging into her shoulders and back with utter desperation because you -

“can’t! maki - i can’t - ‘t buuurrnss.” it’s a disgustingly desperate sob as the head of the cock slips into your plump, sobbing lower lips. it really does burn - a stretch that is tightening knots in your stomach.

“oh baby, are you crying? and your little pussy is too..”

“n-no!” you lie, squelching pussy drooling.

“yes it is, angel. listen to how wet that it is for your mistress and you haven’t even taken the first inch…” her steady, loving voice teases and your face is flushed with an equally burning sense of embarrassment, unable to do anything but feel the aching stretch of the artificial cock as it burrows just another inch deeper.

and another. and another. and another - holy hell you’re so wet you barely feel it anymore - inching into you, little by little pushing past your glistening folds until the fat head of maki’s cock nudges against the deepest, most sensitive spot in your walls.

by the time a third of the big toy has bullied its way into you, maki’s slender hands have gone from fondling your breast to massaging your hips, gentle kisses on your face and neck as her green bangs fall forward and tickle your skin.

you look absolutely ruined and she can’t get enough of it.

“maki~”

“kiss mommy’s lips so she can sink into you nice and deep, baby.” she whispers, tone sweet and calm as if she’s not splitting you open with so much pressure against your chubby little cunt you feel she might rip you in two.

her lips slot against yours - her svelte hips lowering halfway into you as she swallows your broken moans. she takes sadistic delight in how you just can’t. stop. fucking. whining. the second her mouth pulls away.

“m-maki, wait—” “‘s so deep, maki —too gooood,” “c-can’t mistress, jus’ can’t—” “m-maki, maki—oh,”

“no- mistress, can’t- mistress!“ your marked throat chokes on a moan, trying to grab onto your pretty domme’s biceps in a wordless plea to slow down because you can’t handle it.

maki forces the rest into you like an animal, fucking down into your sopping pussy as those wet gasps and pretty sobs ring in her ears.

finally feeling full seems to flip a switch inside you, aided and abetted by your girlfriend’s sweet praises.

“you can take it. you did it, see! you did so good taking it all for me. such a good girl. doesn’t it feel so good, sweetheart? being stretched just how you like, hmm?”

she says, soothing her hands over your stomach to reassure you that she’s still there - hazel eyes mesmerized by the subtle bulge of the outline of the cock.

“you have the most perfect stretched little pussy, angel.” thin fingers press on the little bulge and you erupt.

“momMY!” you WAIL, torn between the throbbing pain in your tummy and the pleasure that wracks your body. you want to convulse and jolt but you can’t.

“i g’tta move, mommy!”

cursed with such enhanced strength maki’s taken to fully pinning you down - body unmoving - buried completely inside your cunt. you make a noise of utter shame as the thick head kisses your g-spot, wet juices pouring around it with an audible squelch.

this always happens and maki can’t help but let out a light giggle.

even during prep you’re so overwhelmed - squirming away until whatever cock or toy or pair of fingers she has inside you pops free from your spongy walls and you're left spasming and clenching around nothing.

“you’re so cute, baby.” she punctuates the affirmation with a kiss too your pouting lips. “but mommy’s not going to let you escape this time - not after all that effort getting it inside - you know better than that.~”

legs far too restricted to kick her away and hands attached to her shoulder like claws, you just have to feel.

and you feel like you’re floating.

she rolls her hips slowly, listening to the filthy ‘shlick, shlick, shlick’ that your poor pussy makes whenever she slides in and out and the desperate shuffle of strap fabric against the skin of your hipbones. your inner thighs are trembling, skin glossy with wetness and clit standing out between his lips, flushed and neglected.

the dam inside you feels like it’s going to burst with every passing second - maki’s pace may be slow and full of praise but it is brutal inside your pussy pressing and pressing and pressing - god why can’t she stop!

“fuuuck!” “mommy, wait- m’gonna pe e-“ “please , mommy, mistresssss” “haah maki - maki lemme move!!” “don’ wanna stop but jus’- aahn!” “w-want a second - just a second or i’ll - mistress please! don’wanna pee myself!”

your folds deliciously flutter as maki watches herself slide in and out of your hole.

“just let it happen, my angel.” her thumbs goes over your poor, twitching clit and you cry out at the drag of the thick cock in combination with the stimulation of the naked bud. wetness spurts and sprays across her chiseled abdomen but your fucked-out mind doesn’t notice the mess you’ve made between your thighs until maki pulls out and something wet splashes against your stomach.

and it happens again and again and again.

you sob and sob, still shaking while she stands and undoes straps that tied her to the rubber extension. she sits by you, golden eyes filled with softness and adoration as she rubs your face and massages your thighs.

all signs of the mistress who was greedy for your overstimulation are completely gone. what remains is your girlfriend - ever concerned and constantly proud.

“hey. hey, look at me.” she gives a smile. “you did so good for me, babe. did i go too far? was it really too much?”

you mumble, shaking your head as you squeeze whatever clean parts of the bed you can find. she chuckles - god, it’s nice to hear her laugh at something that isn’t painful or dominant.

“can’t quite hear you with your face in the pillow like that, sweetheart.” her fingers lead your chin so you meet her gaze. there are still the remnants of fat tears down your cheeks.

“wasn’t too much… i made a big mess.” your face heats up in partial embarrassment (and also because she’s mind-boggling pretty, even scratched and sweaty).

“ i can get more bed sheets. can’t get another you, babe. you just relax.” maki smiles and pulls you into her embrace.

“it was great, baby. it’s a good mess. i’m so proud you squirted for me. you took it all so well - didn’t even need to say our word.”

“yeah?” you poke your head up more, heart fluttering because the greatest woman alive is proud of you.

“yeah. you don’t even have to speak. let’s just get you cleaned up.”

“can’t feel m’legs.”

“i know.” she lets out a light laugh and just as soon as the sound leaves her lips, you’re cradled into her arms like a bride, head hidden in her breasts. you mumble again, more audibly this time.

“did i help you feel better?”

she pauses and your name stutters out of her lips - fuck, you’re so considerate. taking all of that just so she could feel a bit of stress relief from a usually cruel, uncaring world. with practically no effort, she readjusts you so her eyes meet your teary ones.

“oh, princess. i feel better than ever. you were so amazing. next time you can use me for stress relief instead, okay?”

that stirs you into instantly heating up again as she walks both of your beautiful, naked bodies to the shower.

taglist: @blkladyelle @gojutsu @imperatorkhaleesi @nymphoheretic @sailewhoremoon @mxonigirimiya @tteokdorokimain @niggette @kweenkatsuki @sems-diarie

#smut #maki zenin x reader #maki x reader #maki zenin #jjk #jujutsu kaisen #jjk x reader #makki smut #makki x reader #x reader #jujutsu kaisen smut #full fic #1k event #if you anime only’s think maki is hot NOW you’ve got a big storm coming #happy birthday queen

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nautilusopus · 2 years

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okay FIIIIIINE i'll throw my hat into the Goncharov ring

Been a while i've done a proper movie breakdown, may as well be this one.

Rather surprisingly (but perhaps not too surprisingly given the unexpected renaissance of things like the original Dracula and Breaking Bad on this website out of seemingly nowhere and with very little prompting), I'm seeing a lot of new people suddenly interested in Martin Scorsese's seminal film classic Goncharov, originally released in 1973. Obviously a movie like that doesn't make it coming up on 50 years without generating a lot of discussion about the different ways the movie resonates and why, but coming into it in 2022 there's been so much cultural cruft that's collected around Goncharov that (similar to stories like Fight Club and Scarface) it's a little hard to parse what it's actually about with all the mythologising that's gone on around the characters.

Those movies, in one way or another, are about portraying the downfall of their protagonists -- Fight Club's after ironically creating another system of control and dehumanisation and becoming what he sought to destroy, Scarface's after being consumed by the wealth and power he's amassed. A lot of people assume it's that kind of story, because aren't most well-loved movies? However, I think this is ironically an assumption made because of the genre of film it is. All the people that aren't going, "OMG Goncharov is so cool and badass and fucks bitches," are going, "WOW I can't believe Goncharov is a cautionary tale about power corrupting," and in the process people miss that Goncharov is first and foremost about loss, in all its different forms.

I'm both kind of surprised and frustrated people miss this, given how utterly pervasive the movie is with its clock symbolism -- it's the one thing everyone remembers about it, it was in all the tie-ins. I dunno, maybe that got funneled back into the theory where they're meant to reinforce how Goncharov is just a mortal man at the end of the day, which is fine I guess, but the movie overall becomes a lot clearer when you interpret it through the lens of, "These things are gone and you can never get them back; clocks don't go backwards."

One of the most fascinating things about the movie is how every character embodies a different kind of loss. I'm gonna ease into this and start not with Goncharov but with:

Rybak, who is usually associated with loss as we typically think of it, i.e. the loss of loved ones via death. This comes up all the time, either in his trust issues (why he's being such a prick at the wedding), in the card game (he never bothers to bet much money, knowing he's bad at poker, and still loses all the same). Rybak is terrified of loss, cannot manage it, and ultimately is punished by losing what few people he had left and then being spared by Lorenzo who deems him punished enough, and is forced to survive, to grapple with what his life is now without them.

Goncharov's is actually more subtle, and it's loss of small, insignificant things as a result of the larger losses he believes he's processed. This is something that's frequently contrasted against Rybak. The pawn shop going under is actually a microcosm of this whole thing. Goncharov anticipates that this is obviously going to lead to financial issues for him, plans accordingly to deal with this, and... it works! He's saved! Except that means card games can't be hosted at his place anymore, given it's burned to the ground. Does this matter, in the grand scheme of his life? No, of course not. Poker night still gets had all the same. But it is different now, and always will be. Little things like this continue to add up, until something as insignificant as a towel -- a towel that never should have been in his room, but Sofia is no longer there to drop off his laundry and chat with him -- is ultimately the final nail in a coffin built of insignificant splinters, each one an imperceptible change underneath the much more larger, noticeable story beats of things like grief.

Otto is the big obvious one I'm not gonna linger on: loss of his youth, moments in the past that he wants to redo but can't. Most people at least seem to have gotten this one.

(This is also what the clocks get associated with a lot, which again, doesn't NOT make sense but also if it were just for this one character that, while thematically important, was honestly just a side character with limited screentime and only two scenes, would they really be all over the movie before Otto's name is even mentioned?)

Sofia's a bit abstract, and is the loss of self -- of the familiar anchors we have to who we are, what we think our core principles are, our place in society, who we want to be to our loved ones -- and by the time she dies she is rendered utterly unrecognisable to herself, and is horrified by it. She grieves herself the same way Rybak grieves his wife (even gets a direct visual callback via the way her face is lit when she's burning Lorenzo's check). You see echoes of this in Goncharov as well, but while Sofia is grieving the person she used to be, Goncharov is grieving the world around him (even though really, it's the same world it always was -- time keeps ticking on, one second per second, and neither one of them can ever un-fire that gun).

Lorenzo, tragically, gradually loses his freedom (and maybe in a parallel world would actually be the protagonist of a movie where he chokes on his own hubris like everyone seems to think Goncharov is GRUMBLE GRUMBLE). As he comes into his own more and more by his family's legacy, he is afforded fewer and fewer options about what decisions he can even make. Arguably he was doomed from the start, but the further he clings to power as a means to freedom, the more it drives him to destroying everything he ever (thought he) cared about. The tragedy of his character, and what makes him a good villain, is that he can clearly see what he is doing to himself and he absolutely hates it (his walking out early at the wedding is a tacit admission of this), but his absolute refusal to accept loss, to accept grief and pain and all the awful shit that comes with the human condition, is what causes him to toss aside every out he has because if he has enough CONTROL over his situation, surely he will never have to lose anything ever again. But, really, he already has.

I dunno. Goncharov is one of those movies that is great, and everyone seems to realise it's great, but nobody ever really puts into words why, and that's how you get Fight Club fans lmao. And it sucks because the actual discussion around the movie beyond "it's another hubris story but REALLY GOOD guys" is so much more fascinating and a much more earnest emotional truth that just never gets talked about.

#goncharov #goncharov (1973)#martin scorsese #al pacino #robert di niro #gene hackman #harvey keitel #gaslight gatekeep goncharov

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fereldanwench · 3 months

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apropos of nothing and certainly not my tag rant from a few posts back

did you know that out of 150 popular video games released between 1985 and 2022, only 6% of them feature sole female protagonists?

did you know that prior to mass effect 3, female shepard was never used in any promotional material for the series?

(and there's no hard data available on this, but i very distinctly recall a lot of gamerbro outrage when me3 had an optional reversible cover so you could pick between male and fem shep on your personal game)

did you know that only 18% of players chose femshep in any shape or form (default or customized) during the original release?

(anecdotally, i know a few people who didn't even realize you could play a female at all in me1 bc of how the cc is setup)

did you know with the release of the legendary edition in 2021 the percentage of femshep players didn't even double (despite jennifer hale's seemingly enormous popularity amongst the broader playerbase over the past decade) and is reported at 32%?

did you know that dragon age inquisition has the same breakdown between male and female inquisitors (68% to 32% respectively)?

did you know during the playtests for assassin's creed odyssey, it was a 50/50 split between kassandra and alexios, and ubisoft suits actually thought when the game was released, kassandra would be more popular? and yet once again, about 70% of players chose the male protag

did you know evie and aya were both supposed to have a much larger roles in assassin's creed syndicate and origins but were forced into a smaller role bc the ubisoft marketing team didn't think the games would sell well with a female lead?

cdpr hasn't released data on male vs female v, probably because the game handles gender a little differently than just two strict options like many other rpgs, but it was revealed that panam was the most popular romance, sitting at about 68%, which means at least 68% of players chose the male v body. I'm sure some players did not make that choice as a cis male v, but i would also guess that those who didn't are a small minority of this demographic, and if you factor in kerry romancers, this split is probably very similar to other games in the genre

now i realize that a lot of the male v players who are in more transformative fandom spaces (like tumblr) are not the str8 gamer dudebros of reddit angry about pores on a female character's face and whatnot. i realize that a lot of you are also on the outskirts of the perceived norm and also feel under-represented by mainstream male protags and that's incredibly frustrating and alienating and i genuinely feel for you

but female protagonists and female gamers who want to play as female protagonists and who have a few niche spaces to celebrate female protags are not the reason for your lack of representation

and frankly you don't sound a whole lot different from the angry incel gamer boys when you say shit like "fem v gets too much attention"

so maybe try advocating for male protags who don't fit the generic boring gruff white guy mold without throwing women under the bus. we're should be allies in this fight, not rivals

#t: wench.txt #leaving reblogs on as long as ppl behave #but i will come down hard with the block button on bad faith replies to this

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shadowxamyweek · 1 month

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Is Shadow being immortal canon? I thought it was just a generally accepted headcanon by the fandom

...Yes?

The pause and questionmark are not directed at you, they are directed at Sega.

I confess, I'm a bit of a stickler for what lore I consider canon. If it's in the games, it's canon to me. If it's anything outside of the games, including the game manuals themselves... then it's not.

I have such a narrow-bracket view of the story and these characters due to two things:

1: There seems to be a disconnect between the different 'branches' of the Sonic Franchise. There's the Shadow we see in games, there's the Shadow we see in marketing and social media (like Twitter Takeover), There's the Shadow we see in IDW, and then there is the Shadow we see Sega write about in character profiles like on Sonic Chanel and the official Sonic the Hedgehog website. This exists with all the characters to a degree, but I feel Shadow presents an egregious case of it. 2: Sega has a tendency to retcon things or change their language or act like stuff didn't happen and... I don't like it XD But they can't change games that have already been published and played. As such, to me, in-game dialog/play/story/etc is the crowning jewel of truth within the Sonic story.

But that these are *my* paramaters. They do not have to be *your* parameters.

So while there hasn't been any mention of immortality *in game*, there has been plenty *outside* of it. Lots of different official Sega sources say Shadow is 'immortal', but no examples or specifications have been provided in game. There's also plenty of times the whole 'immortality' portion is omitted. Most noticeably, it's not mentioned in the Sonic Channel character profile, nor the character profile provided on the official Sonic the Hedgehog website. At best, it is mentioned intermittently in game manuals and external sources.

(And I know we see Shadow in stasis in 06- I'm aware- but I'll also point out we don't know *when* he went into stasis. Furthermore, I cannot help but wonder if, much like Black Doom in SHtH, Mephiles took a portion of truth and twisted it to scare Shadow. (Also, like.... Shadow was under such heavy security when GUN put him down for an ice nap the first time. Why would they just leave him out and about like was shown in 06? I doubt the truth of what Mephiles shows Shadow.))

I actually reached out to @squid-in-a-party-hat, @fyeahsonicthehedgehog (x), and @forgottensonicfacts (x), as well as some friends of mine like @shadamyheadcanons for help collecting information to provide you with as well-rounded answer/opinion as I can. In fact, Squid has a video on this very subject XD They do a great job of weaving together all the different types of canon (comic, anime, social media, etc) so if that's how you prefer to operate, I really, really recommend them.

Anyway, Here are some game manual examples in chronological order.

SA2 (2001):

Sonic Heros (2003):

And...I want to take a moment to show something interesting between the original Japanese and the English translation. The japanese translation says 'unaging and undying' which gives us narrower guidelines, but the Heros profile is the only time I've seen that.

Shadow the Hedgehog (2005):

Which OUT OF ALL OF THEM you'd think it would be mentioned in his title game but like... *gestures*

Sonic 06 (2006):

Sonic and Mario at the Olympic Games (2020):

Then there are these online examples, stemming from both Sonic Chanel and the Sonic the Hedgehog Website. They are both officially owned and operated by Sega/Sonic Team. Note they don't mention his age or the immortality at all.

Sonic Chanel, 2007:

Sonic Chanel, 2010:

Sonic Chanel, 2022:

This is the character profile put up on the Sonic the Hedgehog website 2024, separate from Sonic Channel but still official.

(In talking to @forgottensonicfacts- I had asked about times Shadow had been called 'ageless' or '50.' Turns out the 'ageless' bit was written in a Scholastic's book and, so far as anyone has found.. there is no official mention of Shadow being listed as '50 years old.' I had been so sure it had been officially listed at one point in time. Really glad to be wrong on that one, frankly, because that would have been daft XD)

So this is what we have about Shadow's 'immortality' that has been put out by Sega themselves. Not the comics, not the media team, just Sega/Sonic Team.

Now... this is where I pick apart that word 'Immortal' and broaden the scope a bit.

Not to be 'that bastard,' but I popped on to the Oxford Dictionary just to get a concrete definition for you and they define the adjective use of the word as being, "living forever; never dying or decaying."

1- Shadow's already almost died. He *would* have died were it not for Eggman saving his sorry ass. We know this. It's a whole-ass plot point in his story because it's due to this he ends up with amnesia.

2- Even though Gerald was tinkering with immortality, that doesn't mean he succeeded. We also don't know how that immortality would look/work/act like.

3- In Sonic Battle (for Gameboy), several of the characters have a healing ability. Shadow is one of them. However, Shadow's healing ability is one of if not *the worst in the game.* Also, in the story itself, he get shot and is down for the count *for a while*.

4- We have not seen any of the characters physically change in game save for the big age up/design shift that happened when Sonic went 3d in Adventure. As such, we cannot personally test/see whether or not Shadow goes through any changes at all, be them aging or just changes to their body.

So... all in all... I feel this leaves a huge amount of room for interpretation.

Maybe Shadow isn't immortal after all. Nothing spectacular, it's just that portion of the Ultimate Life Form project didn't succeed.

Maybe the 'immortality' is his healing factor, and it needs to willfully be employed. As such, if Shadow WANTS to age, they need to intentionally and willfully allow themselves to do so by NOT employing the healing factor.

Maybe the 'immortality', being the healing factor, can wear down/slow down over time, especially due to overuse.

Maybe Shadow can live forever barring any really traumatic physical harm, but their body will physically change over time.

Maybe Shadow is immortal like how Oxford puts it, but there is a way to stop that perminantly if they so choose (like genetic therapy).

Maybe Shadow is immortal in the sense that they will never physically age, grow, or change. Ever.

Truthfully, that's pretty cool! Like, this gives people a lot of stuff to work with and play around with, compare notes, talk- that's the fun part of fandom! And no singular person is right! @shadamyheadcanons has this one that's fun. I personally like the idea that Shadow's 'immortality' wears down over time and gets weird, causing their Black Arms genetics to kick off (like a third eye ooooough gimmie gimmie gimmie.)

I don't know if this was the answer you were looking for. Perhaps I've just confused things further- I've been known to do that XD

Ultimately, what I'm trying to say is- it's whatever you want it to be, and nobody can stop you <3 So go have fun!

#shadow the hedgehog #shth #sonic #sega #anon #ask #op rambles #lore #thoughts #I'm sorry it took so long to get back to you #There's been a lot going on- but I really wanted to give you as well rounded an answer as I possibly could

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sonicreferencephotos · 5 months

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Why I Dislike Sonic Speed Simulator

I sometimes see people in the notes of Speed Sim refs saying that maybe they should start playing it/get back into it. I want to ask, for your sakes, that you do not. The only reason I still play it is for this blog. I would love to stop. I keep going so that no one else will have to play to unlock characters for references. I will also be adding a disclaimer to future Speed Sim posts. Maybe this is a bit excessive, but this game is starting to break me.

I understand that some people like the game, and you all control what games you choose to play. In my opinion however, playing Speed Sim is really, really not worth it.

If you want a specific explanation of the problems, you can read it below the cut

Problem 1: Gameplay

The gameplay of SSS is simple, to put it kindly. There are a few different aspects of the game, each of which has only the bare minimum amount to do.

You can run around the world. This lets you collect rings and experience. You can also destroy badniks, which exclusively consists of doing repeated homing attacks until you destroy them. They can technically hit you, but all that does is knock you back.

You can do time trials. Actually somewhat fun. Not much more to say about them.

You can enter races. PvP races which are fine. Fun at first, get boring when you have to grind for race tickets.

You can fight bosses. By "bosses" I of course mean "Eggman" and "Eggman but with more health." It is almost exactly the same fight. You run around breaking shield generators, dodging the same two attacks, and then deal a set amount of damage to him before the shield returns. Repeat. Your prize is spins on (one of) the gacha wheels.

You can complete quests. Actually decent! At least until you run out of quests. Good thing there are daily quests to keep you "entertained" with their repetitive tasks. Also, ignore the fact that the tasks for quests are just engaging with the rest of the mediocre game.

All of the above mechanics grow dull and grind-y very quickly. Soon, every part of the game becomes a chore. The game itself even seems to have realized this, and thus includes an auto-run feature, so you can collect rings and xp without needing to do anything!

I am generally of the opinion that it's a bad sign if a game is un-fun enough it needs to add in the ability to skip the gameplay, but that's just me (that's part of why I stopped playing Star Rail).

Problem 2: Skins

We all know the real reason people play SSS isn't the game itself: it's the cool outfits! 95% of which are only available during limited events and/or by spending actual money. You can also expect to do a lot of boring grinding if you don't spend money. Speaking of spending money...

Problem 3: Microtransactions

Time to talk about the true "heart" of the game: Robux. Now, I will give Speed Sim itself half a pass on this one, as from what I've seen, Roblox as a whole has what I would consider an unsavory emphasis on microtransactions, especially for a game with a playerbase of 50% children aged 12 or under, and another 15% between 13 and 16 (Statista: Roblox user distribution worldwide 2022, by age group). With that being said though, Sonic Speed Simulator doesn't seem to have any qualms about asking for money wherever they can.

I could make a whole other post about all the ways this game offers for you to spend money. You want more spins on the gacha wheels? Spend money! You want to get three gacha eggs for the price of one (certain vending machines only)? Spend money! You want to skip the animation you have to watch every time you buy an egg from said gacha machines? Spend money! You want to do less grinding for xp/race tickets/event objectives/candy/whatever? Money, money, money!!!

The game has a lot of the trademark warning signs for a cash grab gacha game:

Several different kinds of currency, most or all of which can be purchased with premium currency

Many different skins to unlock, using the assorted currencies mentioned above (including ones that are specifically only purchasable with premium currency)

Gacha wheels. Many, many gacha wheels. (Not counting the dozens of vending machines, I can think of at least four)

Grindy gameplay that can largely be skipped by spending money

Again, if a game is un-fun enough to have an option for players to spend real money to skip the gameplay, that's a bad sign.

Problem 4: Crunch

I haven't done much looking into it myself, but I've seen many people say that GameFam (the company that creates Speed Sim) treats its employees very poorly. The game advertises its weekly updates, which requires a lot of crunch in order to get content out quickly. This is obviously bad for the people involved, and also has negative effects on the game.

Many features are clearly rushed, and there's a general lack of polish. From glitching through the map, to races starting several seconds before or after the countdown ends, to untextured models, to many small bugs, it's clear that the developers are not given enough time to clean things up before they have to move on to the next week's content.

Thank you to anyone who actually read this far. This was a long post, but I wanted to be thorough in my explanation. This is probably the last dedicated post I will make about this, since this is really not what this account is for, but I still think it's an important one.

You are welcome to ask questions about any of this — preferably in the replies so as not to clutter the sonicreferencephotos feed — but otherwise the disclaimers are all I'll be saying on the topic for the foreseeable future. Take care of yourselves.

#not references #sonic speed simulator #roblox #microtransactions

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raven-at-the-writing-desk · 1 year

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Hello, a question, due to the reactions of the boys,.... perhaps Valentine's Day does not exist in their world? :00

I was thinking that was a possibility 🤔 It would certainly help explain why we’ve never really had a Valentine’s Day event. Not to mention that it's off that of the 28 letters we've been getting for 3 years now, not ONE has ever mentioned a "valentine" or a special occasion of the sort. (Maybe Christmas and various other winter holidays don’t exist either, since we’ve never had a Christmas themed event…? Or perhaps they’re under different names like how the Star Sending is basically TWST’s take on Tanabata.) I know Twisted Wonderland has Halloween, but that doesn’t necessarily mean all holidays in our world translate over to their world.

On the “Valentine’s Day doesn’t exist in TWST” theory, we’ve never heard the name mentioned or a holiday like it vaguely referenced in passing. Also supporting this is the fact that many of the Valentine Gift letters (which are only called “Valentine Gifts” in the real world, not in the context of the in-game universe) don’t make mention of the day being particularly remarkable. In fact, it can be argued that some letters imply the sender is giving a character a gift on some random day of no particular importance. For example, Floyd 2021: Hey, thanks for the gift! I don’t think it’s my birthday though, so what gives? It’s a little weird just getting something out of the blue/Floyd 2022: Is it a thing for land-dwellers to just randomly gift each other stuff?, and Ace 2021: Thanks for the present. But what’s up with the sudden gesture?/Ace 2022: I was floored when I got a gift from you out of nowhere!, just to name a few! This is, of course, assuming the characters are not teasing, playing ignorant on purpose, or actually forgot what day it was (which, given which characters these are, that’s a 50-50 chance). It's not clear if the letters actually indicate consecutive years or not (ie 2021 letters are one year, 2022 letters are the consecutive year in the TWST timeline, etc.), otherwise I would say that Floyd being confused about the gifts he receives as an indication that Valentine's Day isn't a thing for those in Twisted Wonderland. Alternatively, maybe it isn't a holiday for merpeople???? (Just because Floyd mentions in his 2022 letter that he thinks it's a tradition for land-dwellers.)

There are also various lines you could interpret as “oh, the character is just surprised that you consider them a good friend and gifted them something (regardless of it’s a special day or not)”. For example, Deuce 2021: Thank you for the present. You surprised me a bit with that since we don’t often get chances to give our classmates gifts (the bolded part implies that today is somehow a special day designated for gift-giving?), and Jamil 2021: Thank you for the gift. To think I would receive something from you… Well, it caught me off guard (the bolded part would be interpreted as Jamil being shocked you consider him a friend worthy of a gift, or it could be his general shock at being thought of since he's used to playing support to others; it does not imply a special day).

I think the letters could also be interpreted in those ways as well, especially since not all Valentine’s Day gifts in Japan are meant to be romantic. (There are different phrases to denote gift meaning in Japan; “tomo choco” are given to friends, “giri choco” are given to coworkers/teachers/family, etc.) Sometimes there are lines which imply a "return of the favor" (via gifting, sharing their sweets, or just hanging out together(, and while this is definitely in-character for the boys who say it (coughAZULcough), it also implies a custom that is similar to Japan's version of Valentine's Day (ie if you have similar feelings (again, these feelings DON'T need to be romantic in nature), then you reciprocate by giving a gift in return). However, this doesn't occur with all the characters so it seems inconsistent. The inconsistency can be considered either as 1) it's not a holiday, so they don't feel like they have to return the favor for a random gift they got for no particular reason, or 2) the character does not return the sender's feelings (implied to be at least respect or friendship). It’s also possible that the characters just feel like they should do something nice for the sender in return as a general “thank you”.

That could, of course, also have to do with the joseimuke design of the game (meaning that while it is marketed to a predominantly female demographic, the content is not explicitly romantic in nature like it would be for an otome). This allows a wider audience to be cast in TWST’s net, since not all fans are interested in romantic relationships with the characters.

In any case, until TWST gives us confirmation of Valentine's Day or some twisted equivalent of it, then I don't see why the "Valentine's Day doesn't exist in Twisted Wonderland" headcanon can't be true 😂 They left it juust ambiguous enough for everyone to have whichever headcanon they want!

#twisted wonderland theories #twst #twisted wonderland #twst theory #twst theories #twisted wonderland theory #disney twisted wonderland #notes from the writing raven #question #spoilers #Floyd Leech #Jamil Viper #Deuce Spade #Ace Trappola #Azul Ashengrotto

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felassan · 2 months

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I was sent a link to an ‘interview with Mark Darrah about BioWare and games’ video that I hadn’t seen before. it’s called “INTERVIEW | Former BioWare Dev Mark Darrah On Crunch, Electronic Arts, Unionization, & More" and [here is the source] link. the interview took place in 2022, so bear that in mind when listening, but it still has interesting insights and things in there. the video description reads as follows:

"Former BioWare developer Mark Darrah joins us for a talk about crunch, workplace culture, accessibility, Elden Ring, and much more." Timestamps: 1:31- Why did you get into game development? 4:12- Crunch 14:05- On Activision-Blizzard & corporate culture overtaking studio culture 15:50- Crunch continued 21:06- Toxic workplace cultures at game studios & why they’re tough to fix 29:13- Unionization in the games industry 36:36- Rising game budgets and why they’re getting bigger 48:00- Elden Ring and game budgets 52:59- Accessibility in games 1:10:38- Relationship between the creative and business sides of game development & corporate directives 1:14:43- Anthem 1:22:16- EA doesn’t understand what BioWare is 1:28:20- Indie development & being bought out by larger companies [source]

the rest of this post is under a cut due to length.

this post is just some notes and transcribed quotes of interest from the video, in case that’s of any use to anyone, for example for accessibility.

Dragon Age: Dreadwolf / 'current or recent general BioWare’

“The culture around crunch has been changing dramatically at BioWare for the last 7 or 8 years, but I would actually think that it’s maybe not the, I don’t believe that it’s the reporting [increasing reporting on crunch in the industry in recent years] that’s causing the changing culture at the studios. And the change in reporting is caused by something, there’s another cause for both of them. And I think it might be that we just have a development, people are getting more experienced, older, and I think that might be what it is. But I don’t believe that we were trying to improve crunch culture because Kotaku was talking about it or Jason Schreier wrote an article about what happened on Anthem. I don’t believe that’s the cause. I think that those are both symptoms of another cause, which is causing the change. And maybe it’s older people in game development, but actually, now that I say it out loud, maybe it’s actually the opposite. Maybe it’s Gen Z coming into the workforce with very different expectations of what work looks like that are causing the change.”

“I think BioWare may have abandoned it, but something that I was working on in sort’ve, the last couple of years at BioWare was Pile of Sand. And the idea of Pile of Sand is to focus the team on a single point or at least as small of a point as you can, and then use that focus to kind’ve cause things to come into being around that. And I know that there are people at BioWare who hate Pile of Sand, but it definitely causes Completion Urgency. In a way that nothing short of crunch or E3 has done very successfully.”

“I’d like to think that.. well. For sure BioWare’s culture today is way better than BioWare’s culture was in 1997 when I started. Or even see it like, you can even see it in the games. But, I mean, it’s not perfect, and there are people in more senior roles, or there have been people in more senior roles that are problematic, and as someone who worked to remove people who were problematic, it could be incredibly difficult to do, because usually there’s no smoking gun. Usually it’s reports or innuendo, or you know it’s, everyone kinda knows, but to actually have something actionable is really hard. And that sounds so terrible because it is terrible, because it is really hard – I’ve burned massive amounts of political capital in some cases to get rid of people who were toxic, but who were in very senior positions.” “I think what’s happened is [in the industry generally] the level of what’s being treated as acceptable has become way lower. Way less is acceptable, and that, I think, is a net good. Does that, is that how you want improvement to happen? No, this is not, you don’t want it to work this way, you want it to be a constant steady state towards better and better culture. And I think, you know, BioWare’s been trying to do that, but I think when other studios don’t do that and then a giant light gets shone on them it actually helps with other studios to say, you know, we also have to take a look at ourselves and think about what’s going on and look at our processes and our culture and our hiring practices and all of these things.”

The host asked how you go about setting that culture where you say, ‘these kinds of things aren’t okay’. “Are there techniques, rules, seminars?” Mark: “I mean, all of those things exist and, don’t get me wrong, I do think that BioWare, I do think that EA has done a better job of this than some of the other publishers and studios have done. So all of those things I do think help, but I do think that honestly the single thing that you can do that helps the most is to get someone of the group that is under-represented at a high enough position to have a voice be heard.”

The host asked about Keywords attempting to unionize recently. Mark: “I’m curious as to some of the details with the Keywords union, because back in 2020, when I was still at BioWare, which, where they’re saying like, they were forced into the office. I wonder if that was a BioWare, I don’t believe that that was actually a BioWare interaction, that it was a BioWare contract. Because at the time, at that time, early Covid days, I was trying to get into the office and it was like locked down, we couldn’t get in to the office, I couldn’t get into the office, I was the Vice President, I couldn’t get into the office. So I’m curious as to the details of that. They are contractors so it’s possible that they were working on something else and they were being forced into an office, I don’t know, it’s possible that something was happening that I’m not aware of. But that specific thing that they were talking about is, just caught me by surprise because we were actually, I was trying to violate the rules and I couldn’t even do it for myself, so.”

On the relationship between the creative and business sides of game development and corporate directives: “[direct orders from corporate], actually, it does happen. There are directive things. I mean, Joplin, the thing that was Dragon Age 4, was cancelled because it was perceived that the next Dragon Age needed to have an online component, it needed to have live service, it needed to have an online component, it needed to be live service, live service. That was, so it was like, there was essentially a decision made at a corporate level about what the game needed to be. And whether that was real or not, I don’t know, but I have my own thoughts on that front, but that’s what was said. And, but sometimes it’s even stupider stuff, like there were people that were like, ‘in DA:I, you NEED to be able to fly a dragon!’ and it was like, this was a dictate, and I judo’d that out of, into us not actually doing it. But that was a dictate that came down. So there are reviews, so with EA there are gates, so you have like numbered gates up to actually, I think there are more gates now. But basically you have a concept gate, a vision gate, a pre-production gate, a production gate, a post-production gate, and like alpha, and things like that. Some of those gates are formal gates, you have executives gather in a room and a presentation is made to them and then they say ‘I don’t like that, do something different’ and that could be anything from ‘I don’t like that your character has a frog for a head’, to ‘this entire-’, especially in the early days, ‘this entire concept is flawed, we shouldn’t make this game at all’. At EA, once things cross a certain threshold they tend to continue, but in the early days games do get cancelled because they don’t get through those gates. So they do have influence because there is, they are seeing the game during development and they are very important people who are expressing their opinions and it’s not entirely clear. I mean, I report to someone who reports to someone who is providing this feedback. So the presumption is they get to say what goes. And I guess they probably do. It’s not actually clear that they do, but the presumption is the reporting line is literally, person reports to person reports to this person who is saying this thing, I suspect they probably get to decide, if they say this needs to be a certain way, it’s gonna be a certain way. Maybe I’m wrong on that but that’s certainly what seems to be the case.”

On Anthem and why it got made: “I wasn’t on Anthem in the early days, but there was a, with some of the executive, EA’s never really understood what the heck BioWare is, but in the early days of Anthem, or let’s say, the days after ME3, there was a sentiment with some of the executives at EA that storytelling games were over. They were done. That we needed something different. So there was a lot of language that was being pushed at Casey, and at Aaryn, that was essentially to that effect, of, ‘don’t you think that the days of storytelling games are over? Maybe it’s time to do something different. And I don’t know, because I wasn’t in the room, I don’t know if that just fed into exactly the kind of game Casey wanted to make anyway, or if they just sort’ve lined up, so yeah. They weren’t, no one at EA was saying ‘Make Anthem’ or ‘Make Dylan’, which is what it was at the time, but there was pressure around, like, ‘probably if you’re making another thing and it’s not another Mass Effect, you shouldn’t just make another story-driven RPG. We don’t want another one of those, we don’t think’. So there was a push towards something different. Some of the early things that Casey was pitching were still, you know, they were multiplayer story-driven things, they were different, but yeah, there was definitely a push from corporate to do something that wasn’t ME, that wasn’t DA, it was something else.”

“It’s definitely frustrating, I did a ‘dear executive, you’re being managed’ video. As an Executive Producer, a big part of your job is managing executives so they feel like you’re listening to them even when what they’re saying is stupid, so it can be incredibly frustrating. I feel like BioWare’s left a lot of money on the table because of the purse strings that are held at the corporate level, like I feel like, porting SW:TOR to the consoles would make a ton of money for not very much investment, and it’s not been, it could’ve been done 3, 4, 5 years ago. The remasters, it’s a frankly, a miracle that they ever got made for ME. The thing that most studios within EA seem to do is they seem to do one thing at a time. Dice makes a Battlefield, then they fix it, then they make a new Battlefield. That makes corporate interaction, I think, a lot more clear [for them]. When Battlefield 4 comes out and it doesn’t do well, they’re given not just the ability, they’re given the mandate to fix it. BioWare’s always had a lot more plates spinning. But I think the consequence of that is, when something goes wrong, it means that there are a lot of potentials that could be spinning, and it means when something goes wrong, it’s less obvious what to do. When ME:A launches and has problems, unlike with Battlefield 4, EA doesn’t say, ‘fix it, I don’t care what you were gonna be doing next, fix it’, what instead happens is the resources get taken away and put onto other things. Anthem fought to have resources to fix itself, but ultimately was always fighting with Dragon Age, to be frank, for those resources, for some of them at least. I mean maybe that’s just an indication that BioWare has stubbornly held on to a structure that is incompatible with EA’s corporate culture, but I do think that having so many plates spinning means that BioWare’s always short of resources. And I think that’s given EA a lot more ability to influence what BioWare’s doing at any moment, because, like, ‘well why don’t you just put those people, we don’t want to keep trying to fix ME:A, why don’t you just put those people onto Dragon Age? Or we’ll take them away and put them onto EA Montreal.’ Whereas if you’re just one studio in Sweden or you’re Sims 4, same thing, is, they got nothing else do, I mean, they do, they absolutely have things to do, but it’s not obvious, there’s not an equal priority, there’s the next thing, which is a lower priority. Whereas at BioWare, there’s always something else they could be doing. And I think it’s been, it’s allowed EA, I think, more control over what BioWare does, maybe, than they’ve had in other studios possibly. I dunno. Probably someone from Dice is gonna angrily tell me I’m an idiot in your comments.”

Other BioWare things

“At least at EA, the executives, the corporate-level executives, the C-suite people, don’t really set culture at the individual studios. But they do control the purse-strings. And because they control the purse-strings they ultimately kind’ve do control everything. So I do think that public companies, or at least, all the public companies that I have worked for, are obsessed with short-term results. You know, ‘your game is supposed to come out in this quarter, and it should’ve come out in this quarter, and if it doesn’t come out in this quarter, it better come out in this fiscal year’. And moving across, so BioWare has a history of sliding games, but the reality is that EA, you can slide from quarter to quarter, but sliding outside of a fiscal year – it’s happened, but it’s really hard, and there are usually really terrible consequences involved in doing so. And I think what is happened to some degree is, corporate culture will eventually infect and take over the cultures of the studios, I believe. So if you look at BioWare in 2008, 2009 and 2010, it was BioWare’s culture with [inaudible] culture kind’ve on top, dictating things at a very macro level. But then if you fast forward ten more years, that EA culture, that sort’ve fiscal, that fiscal culture has sort’ve bled into BioWare’s culture to some degree. So I think actually, to some degree actually I think what EA really wants is they want studios like BioWare to be like, ‘it’s all about the art, man! We don’t care when it ships, we don’t care how many copies it’s gonna sell, we don’t care, we don’t care!’, and they provide the rigor to force that. But instead I think what’s happened, what naturally happens is, you realize ‘that this is a corporation, we need to care about profitability and release dates and all of these things’, but by doing that, that resistance has gone away. And while before, in like DA:O and ME1 [inaudible] the balance was over here, it starts to shift more towards a corporate-focused way, so I think that the thing that probably, the central, the C-suites need to do is, figure out how to give back the studios back that resistance, that willingness to say, ‘you know, the game’s not ready, it’s not gonna hit the fiscal year’. And they say they do, but they really don’t, because it’s, the culture’s just eroded away over time. It’ll be interesting to watch Respawn because it’s EA’s newest acquisition, and right now, just culturally, that resistance just there, just like BioWare in 2008, 2009, but let’s see what’s happened with Respawn in 5 or 6 years. I hope they can keep that up, but I don’t even think it’s, it’s not like ‘Evil EA’ infecting on purpose, I just think, naturally being within a bigger organization, it just happened through osmosis over time.”

“DA:O is about 7000 staff months to make, so it was a huge game at the time. Most of that was done before BioWare was owned by EA. Salaries went up dramatically, way higher than inflation after BioWare was acquired by EA, so that made a big difference. But DA:I was more staff months than DA:O by a fair amount and, so, a couple of things. The entire code base for DA:O was, I think, about two million lines of code. Frostbite is like 20 million lines of code. So that is, there is development cost of just holding that together, but things are just more complicated. As games get bigger, they get expensive.”

“When KOTOR put in voice-acting for all the conversations apart from the player. That changed the industry. At that moment it became no longer acceptable to not have voiced conversations in AAA games.” “DA:I has a horse because at the time it was seen that you had to have a horse in a fantasy RPG. I don’t think that’s true anymore, you’d get away with not having a horse today.”

“I would argue that a consistent problem of a lot of BioWare games is we try so hard to explain to you in the first three hours what’s going on, how everything works, all the mechanics, everything, we’re just dumping so much on the player that they’re overwhelmed and bored, probably bored. But also overwhelmed, if you throw too much at me you’ve actually reduced my ability to learn it, so you’ve actually made the game, in your effort to make me understand, you’ve actually made me understand less, potentially.”

“I think we made the wrong decision on DA:I. I think the crafting system in DA:I is completely inaccessible. It’s a very complicated system, there are no recipes, it’s all based on, like, combinations of different things giving you different materials and then there’s an appearance system layered on top of that which adds an additional layer of complexity. I think as a result, we have a system that is basically not engaged with by most players, by the vast majority of players, do not engage in crafting because it is inaccessible.” “Something that’s come up a couple of times in BioWare’s history is the idea of story-mode difficulty, so the ability to play through the game on essentially, you can’t lose combat. ME3 has such a difficulty, but we didn’t do that in DA:I. And the reason is not because I don’t think, given what BioWare games are, which is a lot about the interaction of different characters and engaging in the story and that, I don’t think that a story-mode difficulty is inappropriate for a BioWare game. But the problem is if you play ME3 on that difficulty, combat’s kind of awful, like it actually kind’ve makes the game, it damages the game in the process because combat is easy but fast, so it’s kind’ve just this weird morass you have to dig through. So I think when you’re thinking about accessibility, something like that, you have to think about, how does the more accessible version still allow the game to be good.” “A common example in a lot of BioWare games is puzzles. So you’d put a puzzle in, and then the game is broken and you’re going along and then the level comes together and it’s weeks or months later and then QA start playing it saying, ‘I can’t figure this puzzle out’. And you’re like, but it’s obvious in my head! Says the puzzle designer. And then you have to decide what you’re gonna do. You can pull the puzzle out completely, which has happened a lot in BioWare games, you just end up pulling it out. Or you put the answer on the wall, which you can see in tons of BioWare games, where it’s like, figure out this puzzle! Oh really? ‘Cause the answer is literally written on a giant poster right beside the puzzle, which I think just undermines the whole puzzle, what’s the point? Or you just say, forget it, we’re just gonna leave it. And the way that we’ve typically made the decision at BioWare for things like that is, if it’s on the critical path, the expectation is it should be accessible to every player, so you should be able to get through the main line of the story even if you can’t figure out any of the puzzles. So we might put a puzzle on the critical path to introduce the concept of puzzles to you, but the answer is on a poster board right beside it. If you’re off the critical path, if you’re on the optional content, then, all bets are off. If you can’t figure it out, then you can’t figure it out. But that comes from a belief that we want most people to finish the story, which I think might actually be a mis-placed belief. Maybe 2008, 2009, I had this feeling that, you know, Bethesda’s got a big problem. People don’t finish their games. You play their games and your last experience of a Bethesda game is always ‘ehh I guess I’m done’. But what I realized more recently is, actually, in a lot of ways, that’s maybe the best experience you can get from a player. Because if you think about how you experience a ME or a DA, your last experience is one of two things. Either it’s, what the fuck was that, I hate that ending, I am angry. Or, it was, that was the greatest ending I ever experienced! Now I’m disappointed that it’s over. And in both cases the actual last emotion is actually negative. It’s either a positive followed by disappointment, or it’s a negative right off the bat. I’m guilty of the obsession of, we want people to finish our games, but actually, maybe we don’t? Maybe we just want people to have their last experience not be negative and lots of positive experiences in the middle. I dunno.”

“Ray Muzyka was always certain that one of BioWare’s competitive advantages was replayability. But actually I would argue – there are people that have played DA:I thirty times, but most people, they don’t do that. Most people go through, you experience the story through a particular viewpoint, and then that’s the viewpoint. You might go and you know, make a Qunari just to see what it’s like, but what you see in the data is, if a person finishes the game, usually they finish the game once and then maybe they might have a few little ‘I played for 45 mins or an hour just to goof around’. But very rarely do you get people that are like, I played through the entire game like 10 times. It happens but it’s not common. I think replayability in these story-driven games is actually kind’ve an illusion.”

On EA not understanding what BioWare is: “I think there’s a lot of things, but I think fundamentally EA is a company that understands sports games. They understand how to make sports games which come out every year at a very high quality, monetize very well, they understand, they know how to market those, they know what production for those looks like, they know how to keep that team moving forward and proving their quality, they know how to do lots of things there. They know how to put processes in place to make the risk go down. I think when you apply those processes to shooters I think they actually work pretty well, though maybe they don’t work anymore. But I think they did work pretty well. You can kind’ve market a shooter like a sports game and it basically works. I think that one of the huge advantages that sports games have is, you already know if you like soccer or not, so I’ve already, so now I’m selling you the product, not the concept of the product. Shooters you can kinda do the same thing. You kinda know if you want a shooter or not, now I’m just selling you on this specific shooter, not the concept of shooters in general. RPGs aren’t like that, you can’t, because RPGs are so different from each other that you can’t sell me on the concept. Like, I don’t know if I just like RPGs, I need more than that to know if I can make a decision, which makes marketing them different. Also, for whatever, for a variety of reasons, RPGs are the most expensive genre you can make because they have, in theory, all the complexities of a shooter plus you have to tell an engaging, interactive story that branches on top of that, plus you need progression systems that are more complicated than your shooter on top of that. And that all needs to work together into some sort’ve combinatorial mass, to be frank. So I think that what EA wants from all their studios is they want things that can sell 10 million copies or 20 million copies, I mean that number changes. And the truth of the matter is, is, that maybe is just never BioWare. I mean, I say that, DA:I sold more than 10 million copies, but I mean, I think that what you have with BioWare is, maybe, you have the Oscar studio. Do the Oscar movies make three billion dollars? No, but they win you the awards. If you want that, do you want the studio that wins you the awards? But maybe, it makes money. I’m not saying that EA should just let BioWare lose money, that’s stupid, but do you want something that’s less profitable, but earns you acclaim? And if you do, then you need to measure in a different way. Do you want something that can build new IP? BioWare can build new IPs, and then maybe you take those IPs and you do other things with them. Not that EA has done that, and maybe EA doesn’t need to because they own like 40, 50 IPs that they’re currently not doing anything with, so. But, I mean, like building an IP is incredibly expensive, and incredibly difficult. Does EA want new IPs? Maybe, but again I don’t know that they, so what they have with BioWare is they have a company that gets into the conversation at award season, that can push culture, that can build new IPs. But, you know, be in the conversation at award season, push culture, and build new IPs, are those characteristics that EA wants or do they want ‘can sell 25 million copies and make a billion dollars’? And probably you can’t have those first three things and get that fourth thing. You can be profitable, but you’re probably not selling 25 million copies and making a billion dollars. I mean Skyrim did, but that’s. But I think honestly Skyrim just proves how hard it is. It’s the one in the RPG space that you talk about, and that’s from 2011. It’s the exception that proves the rule. That’s the RPG that was culturally relevant, relevant at awards season, but also made a ton of money.”

At the end of the interview, they had tech difficulties, so they transcribed the last segments of the audio to post for folks to read. This can be found pinned in the comments of the YouTube video.

[source and watch link]

#dragon age: dreadwolf #da4 #the dread wolf rises #dragon age 4 #bioware #mass effect #mass effect: andromeda #next mass effect #sw:tor #anthem #video games #covid mention #long post #longpost #(ty for sending this link!)

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leonsliga · 3 months

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At the request of the wonderful @realmadrider, here’s some of my comfort footy vids 😁 happy watching!

All things DFB and Bundesliga:

Bayern Summer Games 2022 (especially the Guess the Song challenge)

Agility Challenge • Kimmich vs. Goretzka (AKA Kimetzka being an old married couple for nearly 7 minutes)

Wer kennt mehr? Leon Goretzka & Joshua Kimmich

Stadt, Land, Fußball - Thomas Müller and Leon Goretzka

Thomats Challenge: Bundesliga Edition

The big FC Bayern quiz with Manuel Neuer and Sven Ulreich

Google Autocomplete Challenge with Serge Gnabry and Leon Goretzka

Servus, Leon Goretzka!

Leon Goretzka vs. Julian Brandt: Buzzwire Challenge

Bundesliga Stars Try to Draw Their Team Logos - Witsel, Goretzka, and Co.

Mats Hummels vs. Thomas Müller: Me or Him Challenge

Pro vs. Pro:Direct with Thomas Müller

Read My Lips: 🇩🇪 vs. 🇫🇷

Close-Up with Leon Goretzka

60 Seconds Challenge: 🇩🇪🆚🇫🇷

Neuer, Müller, and Lahm making fun of Kramer’s memory loss during the 2014 World Cup final

One gotta go with Marco Reus and Julian Brandt

Manuel Neuer and Bastian Schweinsteiger dancing on the beach

Don’t get distracted! With Julian Brandt and Marco Reus

Müller & Co. Decorating the Christmas Tree

Hummels & Brandt: Which of You…

FC Bayern Teammate Insights

Neuer, Martínez, and Hernández Carpool Q&A

EURO Taxi with Thomas Müller and Mats Hummels

Manuel Neuer vs. Thomas Müller

New Season, New Berni ft. Müller, Neuer, Sané, and Davies

So feiern die Bayern das Triple

Neuer, Piszczek & Co. Try to Draw - Who is the Best Artist

Take it easy | BVB-Challenge with Marco Reus and Julian Brandt

Kimmich vs. Gnabry | Copy the Penalty Challenge

Chunkz vs. Neuer | YouTuber vs. Pro Keeper Penalty Shoot Out Challenge

Manuel Neuer im Interview

Who am I? BVB-Challenge with Mats Hummels and Marcel Schmelzer

Manu lifting up a jar of Nutella like it’s Simba

DFB Nutella Commercial

Will Grigg’s on fire! Is Mats Hummels terrified?

Bayern Summer Games 2021

Thomats Christmas Challenge

Serge Gnabry: Unlocked feat. Yung Filly

Who knows more? Marco Reus vs. Mario Götze - 2018 edition

Who knows more? Marco Reus vs. Mario Götze - 2019 revenge

Netradio Newcomer with Marco Reus and Julian Brandt

Best of Radio Müller

Thomats dieses Mal olympisch - eng subs

Don’t get distracted! With Mats Hummels and Marcel Schmelzer

Cow-Milking and Welly-Throwing | Team-Building Fun at FC Bayern

Shell Game w/ Manuel Neuer

Pantomime w/ Manuel Neuer

Drawing w/ Manuel Neuer

Marco Reus vs. Mats Hummels - Buzz Wire Challenge

Manuel Neuer reveals the results of his doping test (spoiler alert: it was urine)

Thomats Basketball Challenge

Thomas Müller “JAAA” compilation

A Spanish Lesson for Neuer with Thiago - Repeat after Me Challenge

Fußball-Dart: Goretzka gegen Burgstaller

You Have to Answer - Marco Reus

Bayern Team Photo Vlog

Who knows more 2.0: Brandt vs. Hummels

Thomats Tangram Challenge

FC Bayern wish you a Merry Christmas

Mario Götze’s Most Famous Picture

Mats Hummels pranks Gio Reyna

DFB Water Polo Teambuilding

Erling Haaland being a funny guy for 3 minutes straight

Bromance: Manuel Neuer & Leon Goretzka

Manuel Neuer, Per Mertesacke, & Arne Friedrich - Sky ad

Neustädter vs. Reus

Literally anything else:

50 most shocking moments of the 2010 World Cup

Jose Mourinho explains football to a baffled Ted Lasso

Timo Werner being the funniest German for 2 minutes (because he’s an adorable bean)

Lingard and Rashford | Roommates

Ney…freezin innit

Wingmen: Bruno Fernandes and Jesse Lingard

Manchester United x Stone Roses

I am Jose Mourinho 😎

Sergio Ramos drops the Supercopa under the bus

Marcelo, Bale, Ramos, & Co. joking around on a plane because why not

Lies | Toni Kroos & David Alaba

Kroos & Modrić | Teammates

Toni Kroos’s fantastic interview after RMA beat Liverpool in the UCL final

Luka Modrić taunting Gerard Piqué like the girlboss he is

Real Madrid x NFL with a heavy dose of Modramos

Roy Keane’s angriest moments discussing Manchester United - very validating as a United fan in the modern era tbh 😭

THE Kunessi stream - eng subs (55 minutes in all its glory)

When Kun met Leo

Kun calling Leo on stream

Sergio Agüero interviews Lionel Messi

Honestly every episode of the Champions

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tokusaatsus · 1 year

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HOW YOU END UP ON A DATE WITH THEM

ft. kiryu kuro, sakuma rei, shiina niki

warnings: none

You’re set up on a blind date, except it starts out terribly–with you getting stood up. You are going to be having words with your friends about this later.

Kuro sees you sitting alone and ends up pretending to be your date in an attempt to save you from the crushing embarrassment he can see you stewing in. When he strolls over to you, the relief in your eyes is palpable and he doesn’t have the heart to brush you off after that.

He ends up taking you to a nearby fair. You stroll past various game stalls, where he makes multiple attempts to win you the plushies you’d been eyeing. He feels a sense of accomplishment when your eyes brighten at the sight of the cuddly soft toy in his arms, but there’s still that underlying guilt. He feels as though he’s somehow having taken advantage of you, even when you clutch the plushie to your chest. It intensifies when you insist on buying him a snack as thanks. Later, when he walks you home hand-in-hand under the stars, he can’t take it anymore, and it’s right there at your doorstep that Kuro confesses that he’s not your actual date.

You admit, a little embarrassed, that you knew all along–your friends weren’t foolish enough to leave you without a few descriptors of your supposed date–but you were having so much fun with him that you felt there was no right moment to let him know. You bow and tell him you’re sorry for taking advantage of him, keeping your gaze fixed on your feet.

There’s a moment of silence where you avoid eye-contact, when you hear a low chuckle.

“If ya liked this one so much,” Kuro gives you a crooked smile. “Then how ‘bout we go on another one. This Saturday work for ya? I’ll pick ya up at 8?”

You nod, a little flustered. Just before he leaves, he presses a quick kiss to your cheek and adds, “Oh, and this time? I’m your actual date~”

You and Rei get set up on the same blind date, something which was clearly Kaoru’s fault. After all, he’s the only point of contact between your friend group and Rei’s. You will be getting him back for this.

It’s a little awkward at first, when you sit at Café Cinnamon bored out of your mind, and look up to see the Sakuma Rei, ½ of UNDEAD’s main attractions, lowering himself to sit in the seat opposite you.

At your flabbergasted look, Rei lets out a nervous chuckle and says, “I think this might be my seat, Y/N-kun?” which answers absolutely nothing of the 50-plus questions swirling around in your brain.

However, as the date does go smoothly, despite your reservations. The two of you are able to have conversations, about work, about life after graduation, about your hobbies, and it ends up showing that you two have quite a lot in common! It’s actually–dare you say it–fun. Talking to Rei is nice. He’s an interesting conversation partner, filled with anecdotes about abroad, and you can tell he feels the same way about you.

You end up staying much longer than you were expecting. The Rei of UNDEAD differs quite a bit from the Rei you’ve come to know over the course of these few hours, and it’s interesting, learning where they overlap and where they separate. Who can blame you for wanting to stay longer? When a pretty boy gives you his undivided attention and listens to you ramble on about your latest hyperfixations, well…that kind of thing can make anyone’s ego swell.

The date comes to a close with a brief argument over who pays for the date, which you win, of course. Hesitantly, you turn to Rei as you add that, “You can pay for the next one, ‘kay, Sakuma-kun?” which is followed by a blink, and a goofy smile spreading across the self-proclaimed vampire’s face.

“Kukuku, but of course, Y/N-kun. It would be this old man’s pleasure to take you out again~”

It isn’t an uncommon occurrence for you to be invited to go out on a date with Niki, except neither of you realise it’s a date. You call it a ‘friendly outing’, both inside your head and to others, and are treated to a lot of skeptical glances from your friends who aren’t quite certain if you’re pulling a fast one on them or if you’re just that stupid.

You’ve been on many of these ‘outings’ before, usually consisting of the two of you going window shopping where you hold hands and point out cute things that you think he’d like–or that you wish you could buy–followed by a date at a cook-your-own-meal restaurant where Niki takes the reins and conducts the meal with the skill of a chef. He feeds you the food he’s grilling, and it’s cute, honestly. You give off the vibes of a domestic couple, what with the way you eagerly light up as Niki holds his chopsticks to your mouth and how naturally you hold Niki’s hair out of his eyes so he can better see what he’s doing.

You go on like that for quite some time, actually, until some old lady chances upon the two of you strolling past and comments on what a “cute couple you two make”. She coos over you for a bit longer before going on her own merry way, oblivious to the bombshell she’s just dropped.

It’s then you start to realise that, yes, this does qualify as a date and the two of you have basically been dating already for the past few weeks.

After you get over the initial embarrassment, you realise there’s no need to act like this is your first date because, it’s not. You’ve basically been speedrunning the date process. At this point, you’ve practically been dating for over a month, which explains all the raised eyebrows from your friends. Oh, you’re never living this down, are you…?

notes!

WC: 1k words

reze txt i’ve been procrastinating on this for. over a week now? i kinda hate myself tbh i was Supposed to write more but i Could Not bring myself to. i miss niki… anyways enjoy!! and stream honeycomb summer y’all <3

#✒️...scribbles!#kiryu kuro x reader #sakuma rei x reader #shiina niki x reader #enstars x reader #kiryu kuro #sakuma rei #shiina niki #akatsuki #undead #crazy:b #enstars

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whatstruthgottodowithit · 1 year

Text

Hide and Seek

Fandom: RPF, Elvis Presley, Elvis Movie 2022

Pairing: Elvis Presley x Reader

Characters: Elvis Presley, Reader, Original Male Characters, Original Female Characters

Word Count: 3225 // Rating: Explicit

Summary: The first rule of hide and seek? Make sure to check your surroundings.

Tags/ Warnings: Requests, Requested Fic, Oral Sex, Blowjobs, Family Dinner, Established Relationship, Kissing, Love, Caught Having Sex, Facials, Elvis Doesn’t Wear Underwear, 50s Elvis, Old Fashioned Parenting, This is very Eric and Laurie from that 70s show, Awkward Family Dinners, Sibling Rivalry, Siblings,

Notes: I’m working on my main series’ but this was hot and I had to write it. Thanks @elvispresleyisfit12

Updated 8/23

Request: Could you do one where y/n is like choking on elvis’ cock and her big brother walks in and elvis is at his climax when he comes all on her face and her brother tells the parents

Tags: @elvispresleyisfit12 @caitlin1996 @literally-just-elvis-fics

'Maybe he's under....here!' Elvis said, elongating his voice as he dropped to his knees only to find that under the bed was empty. As he clambered back up with a pout I chuckled, shutting the door behind me as I walked over to where he was now standing and wrapped my arms around his neck. 'Unlucky baby,' I said with a smirk as his frown deepened as he leaned down to kiss me quickly. 'I'll give it to him, that kid sure is good at hide and seek,' he mumbled making me giggle as I noted the genuine upset on his face. We were looking for my younger brother Charlie, who after begging us all day had finally gotten us to play hide and seek with him. I say begged us though it was more begging me than anything. Anyone would think that having your girl's younger brother come and interfere when you were trying to spend time with her would annoy a man. But not Elvis. Elvis was just as eager to join in as Charlie was. After all, he was just a big kid at heart and not having any siblings of his own made him love spending time with mine (though admittedly with Charlie rather than my older brother Jack). In fact, Elvis usually got so into the games we played that not five minutes earlier I had had to coax him out from the hall closet where he had forced himself into the tiniest space to remain undetectable and beat Charlie’s record.

'Nah he's not,' I smirked, making him raise an eyebrow, 'Mama saw him tucking himself into one of the kitchen cupboards.' 'So why are we waiting?' Elvis said excitedly ready to continue his winning streak. 'Because,' I said leaning up to kiss him again, 'he's oh so good at hide and seek which means it could take us what, ten, fifteen minutes to find him?' 'Ah,' Elvis said, cottoning on to my meaning as his hands caressed my sides before landing on my ass which he squeezed roughly. 'We could do a lot in ten minutes,' I said. 'Make it fifteen,' he said as he started peppering kisses down my neck making an excitement settle in between my legs.

As he pulled me to him I could already feel him taught against his trousers and I moved my hand to unbutton his pants making his breathing hitch. 'You're all excited,' I said. 'Have been all damn day,' he said breathily as his hands moved, caressing every inch of my skin they could find. 'You should've said,' I pouted, 'I know he gets all achey without being touched.' 'Couldn't find a moment,' he panted against my neck as his hand ran over the top of my clothed breast making my nipple harden underneath his touch, 'I had to stand and talk to your mother for twenty minutes more than I planned to because I was scared if I came out from behind that kitchen counter she’d see.’ 'Oh baby,' I frowned, pulling back to look at him. 'I need ya honey,' he said. 'What do you need?' I said as my finger trailed along his length gently which made him groan. I loved seeing him like this. He was an attentive man and he always made sure my needs were met but he was always ready to go. A stiff breeze could whip him into a frenzy and whenever something took his fancy he was like a man possessed. In those moments nothing mattered, he needed me and I loved that.

‘Your mouth,’ he said, ‘I need that pretty little mouth of yours wrapped around me.’ ‘Do you want me on my knees?’ I asked looking up at him doe-eyed. His blue eyes were almost black as he looked down at me before he nodded. I sunk to my knees and looked up at him my hand gliding over his cock until I could swipe my thumb across his oozing head. ‘I bet your pants are ruined,’ I tutted noting the damp smear along his flies. ‘Always are when you’re around,’ he said making me smile. Then I leaned forward and kissed his tip making him shiver.

‘Jesus,’ he said as his hand flew to my hair, knotting in it gently. I moved my mouth to his base kissing up his shaft until I was back where I started and could begin to envelop him. And though he was hard to get my mouth around and usually made my jaw ache I didn’t care. I loved the way he tasted. And I loved the way he couldn’t stop squirming under my touch. I inched down as deep as I could and then pulled back my hand replacing my mouth near his base as I pumped him, swirling my tongue around his tip.

‘Baby I ain’t gonna be able to take it much longer if you keep working me like that,’ he said as I pulled my mouth off, my hand keeping a steady pace. He was breathing heavily with his fingers in my hair as I moved my other hand so I could caress his balls. That made him groan loud enough that he had to move a hand from my head so he could put it in his mouth and bite down to keep from making too much noise. Then I changed tactics and put my mouth back on him but instead of devouring him, I lapped at his head my hand coaxing him towards the finish line.

‘Keep going,’ he said in a panted whisper making me hum in agreement, ‘fuck you’re a devil you know that? Humming against me driving me insane.’

I looked up at him my eyes locking with his as I tried to hide a smirk. In most aspects of our relationship Elvis was in control, but right now? Now it was all me.

‘That’s what you want, isn’t it? Me to be all crazy so you can get what you want,’ he said making me hum again, ‘this what you want Mama? Want me to cum down the back of your throat?’ ‘More than anything,’ I said pulling him off him with a pop. I didn’t move my head away though. Instead, I looked up at him open-mouthed with his tip just breaching my lips and oozing salty precum onto my tongue waiting for him patiently as he threatened to spill over any moment. ‘Who knew my innocent girl was so cock hungry huh?’ he smirked. ‘Just for you,’ I counted. ‘Well brace yourself,’ he grunted as his hand clasped over mine and he started to move us in rhythm, ‘cos I’ve got something for ya.’

He was frantic now. As he used my hand to jerk him my other went to his balls cupping them gently.

‘Fuck honey-‘ he said with a groan but his voice was no longer the only one in the room. ‘Mom said are you two ready for dinner because-‘ my brother Jack said as he came into the room and froze. I turned my head catching him standing at my door watching us his eyes wide and his mouth agape. But I couldn’t look at him long as my attention was torn away as Elvis groaned, ‘baby I can’t stop.’

And before I could do anything hot, thick ropes of cum spattered my chin and cheek. As I looked up at Elvis I heard the door slam shut though I could barely register anything and instead I sat there watching him in shock. Elvis was breathing heavily though he broke out in laughter as he took in my horrified expression.

‘Oh my god,’ was all I could mutter as I pulled back and clambered off my knees and stood up. ‘I thought I was supposed to be saying that,’ Elvis chuckled as he tucked himself back into his pants and grabbed a Kleenex off my dressing table so he could wipe my face with it. ‘It’s not funny,’ I snapped taking it off him and cleaning my face looking in my mirror as I did so. He came up behind me and circled his hands around my waist pulling me up to stand flat against him as he kissed my temple. ‘It’s a lil funny,’ he countered making me scowl at him in the mirror. ‘He just saw us Elvis! That’s traumatic!’ I said picturing my brother's horrified face once more. ‘He’ll get over it. It’s natural,’ he said, ‘besides he should’ve knocked.’ ‘And if he doesn’t get over it?’ I questioned, ‘if he runs to tell my mother then what?’ ‘He wouldn’t,’ Elvis said though his face looked nervous. ‘Wouldn’t he?’ I said, ‘he loves getting me in trouble and he won’t be able to hold his water! Oh god, what if he tells my dad.’ ‘He’s not gonna get you in trouble,’ Elvis said, ‘not with something like this.’

I turned around to face him and allowed him to hold me and move a strand of slightly damp hair off of my face as I frowned, ‘I say this with love but honey, you’ve never had siblings. It’s an all-out war zone sometimes.’ Just as he went to speak there was a call from my mother beckoning us for dinner. ‘Just a minute!’ I shouted before my gaze met his again. Elvis sighed, ‘looks like we’re headed to war.’

When we left my bedroom my life went into slow motion. I could feel Elvis’ hand in mine as we went through the motions of sitting down for dinner but I couldn’t function. Elvis didn’t seem to be having the same problem as he spoke with my mother about dinner and our game of hide and seek but I kept my eyes fixed on the table not even bothering to look up as my father and brothers joined us. I couldn’t. I was sure my face would betray me if I dared.Yet my respite didn’t last long though as my father said my name.

‘Huh?’ I said looking at him and then glancing at Elvis who was watching me nervously. I felt his hand squeeze my thigh reassuringly under the table. ‘Do you want to say grace?’ he asked but as he did my eyes drifted to Jack who watching me closely a look of disgust on his face. I couldn’t speak, my words caught in my throat and I couldn’t force them out. Fortunately, Elvis cleared his throat and said, ‘may I Sir?’ ‘Well isn’t that nice,’ my mother said offering Elvis a kind smile. My father seemed to contemplate it for a moment and then nodded interlacing his hands with Elvis and then my brother who were sitting on either side of him. Elvis took my other hand and I watched as they all bowed their heads. Jack didn't though. He was watching me closely so much so I had to drop my gaze feeling the heat in my cheeks. I was mortified.

‘Lord, thank you for the food we are about to receive. Bless the hands that provided it for us and bless the hands that so lovingly prepared it. Amen,’ Elvis said. When I opened my eyes my mother was smiling as she said, ‘oh Elvis you’re such a sweetheart!’ ‘Yes, thank you, son,’ my father said. ‘It’s no bother,’ Elvis shrugged, ‘I’m just happy I get to stay for dinner.’ ‘Well we can’t say no to a polite guest like you now can we?’ my mother said, ‘now boys you could learn a lot from Elvis. I can only hope you’re as polite when you go over to other folks' houses.’ ‘Oh I’m sure I’m just as polite as Elvis,’ Jack said with a scowl that made a pit form in my stomach.

Whilst my younger brother Charlie adored Elvis, Jack didn’t always. It didn’t help that my parents like to compare the two as they were so similar in age. And now without noticing my mother had rubbed him up the wrong. Everyone started eating but I couldn’t. I picked up my fork and started to push things around my plate taking tiny bites here and there as the conversation started.

‘So how’s the new job treating you?’ my father said looking at Elvis. ‘It’s good,’ Elvis said placing his fork down, ’I can work better hours now I’ve graduated.’ ‘Still doing your fair share though?’ my father asked. ‘Yes Sir,’ Elvis said. ‘Because I wouldn’t want you to be one of those types that shirks his responsibilities for an early dart and a good time,’ he said glancing at Jack whose face now looked as if he was sucking on a lemon, ‘because I know a few boys that work there, good guys.' ‘They’re great but even if they weren’t that’s not me. I’m a team player. It just means I can work my hours and have time and cash to treat my girl,’ Elvis said looking at me with a smile. I smiled weakly back at him though I could feel the irritation from across the table. ‘Good because if there’s one thing I can’t stand is that no one seems to want to put in a day's work. They just don’t know how to share the load,’ my father grumbled causing a snort to come from Jack which in turn forced the pit in my stomach to turn into a chasm.

‘What’s funny?’ my father asked making Jack shrug. ‘How about the game last night?’ Elvis said quickly changing the topic. ‘Turned it off halfway through,’ my father said, ‘there was no cohesion on that field.’ ‘I thought the bears did good though,’ Elvis said, ‘they’ve got a better defence this season.’ ‘That maybe but they’re still relying on the same old tactics. Can see them coming a mile away,’ my father said sipping his drink. Elvis and I watched as Jack’s smirk grew deeper at my father’s words, the meaning behind them lost to him. Before Elvis could reply though my mother spoke.

‘Aren’t you eating sweetheart?’ she said noting my plate which was decidedly fuller than everyone else’s. ‘Yeah mama,’ I said, ‘just not that hungry is all.’ ‘Are you okay?’ she said, ‘not ill are ya?’ ‘No, just not much of an appetite,’ I lied. I was hungry but my stomach was in knots just sitting there. ‘You didn’t have anything to eat before dinner did you?’ she frowned making my brother snort again. ‘No!’ I protested. Jack smirked and since no one pulled him up on his amusement he grew more confident and leant forward to tease me as he said, ‘you sure Y/N?’ ‘I’m sure,’ I said vehemently hoping he’d not want to torture me too badly but he didn’t let up. ‘Sure you didn’t sneak off and scoff something?’ he continued, ‘how about you Elvis?’ ‘What about me?’ Elvis asked irately glaring at my brother. ‘You didn’t catch her doing something she shouldn’t right?’ he said with a coy smile. ‘Stop being ridiculous,’ I said snappily. ‘Am I being ridiculous? What do you think Elvis?’ Jack said. ‘Oh whatever it is the two of you are bellyaching about will you just quit it!’ my mother said exasperatedly catching all our attention. She shook her head and took a bite of her food with a sigh.

‘Mama I wasnt-‘ Jack protested but she scowled at him making him pout and put his eyes back on his plate. ‘Every damn day you two are arguing about something,’ she said. ‘You okay hun?’ my father said watching her with concern. ‘Fine,’ she said, ‘just wish these kids would grow up sometimes.’ ‘Sorry mama,’ I said placing my hand on the back of hers. Jack didn't say anything else but he did start eating again signalling he was letting the subject drop which allowed my nerves to settle as did the fact Elvis placed his hand on my thigh again and squeezed it reassuringly. Tentatively I reached for my fork, finally feeling my appetite creep back in.

‘Are you okay mama?’ Charlie asked finally. He had been lost in his own head, picking at his food with his fingers though he had looked up as the dinner conversation started to get heated. My mother turned and smiled at him. ‘I’m fine baby,’ she said, ‘your siblings are just being silly is all.’ ‘They’re always silly!’ he giggled. ‘Must be playing with you all day,’ I giggled, my worries melting away as he grinned at me. ‘I’m not silly!’ Charlie protested. ‘I don’t know Charlie you might be the silliest of us all,’ I chucked. ‘Nuh-uh Elvis is the silliest!’ he said. ‘Oh yeah lil man?’ Elvis chuckled, ‘why’s that?’ ‘Because you put your wiener in Y/N’s mouth,’ he said with a grossed-out expression. Silence fell on the table. I could feel my heart in my stomach and my parent's steely gaze on me and Elvis as well as Jack's smug grin.

‘Charlie,’ I said nervously feeling the corner I was painted into closing in on me by the second, ‘what are you talking about?’ ‘Yes Charlie what are you talking about?’ my father said in an icy voice. ‘I think you’ve got mixed up there kiddo,’ Elvis started making Charlie pout even harder. ‘Nuh-uh I saw it. You thought I was hiding in the kitchen but I was in the closet and I saw you,’ Charlie said as he continued to eat his dinner proudly though I suspected it was more to do with his spectacular hiding spot than outing us. Jack looked as if he was going to burst into laughter.

‘Mr Y/L/N I can explain,’ Elvis stammered looking to my father who held a finger up to silence him as he turned to Jack whose amusement was suddenly gone. ‘Did you know about this?’ he asked. ‘Dad I-' ‘And you said nothing? Just decided to tease your sister at the dinner table like a child? Huh?’ he said sternly. ‘How am I on the hook for this?!’ Jack asked. ‘Daddy-' I started though I didn’t know who I was trying to defend my words were shot down by his icy glare. He placed his elbows on the table and interlaced his fingers. I could still feel the heat on my cheeks and the sweat pumping off of Elvis who was sitting so close to the firing line.

‘Now,’ he said calmly, ‘since everyone wants to act silly we’re gonna play a little game.’ ‘Darlin’ come on let’s just eat dinner,’ my mother said forcing a smile at him though her expression was one of disappointment as it landed on me. I longed for the ground to swallow me up. Unfortunately, I didn’t get my wish as my father ignored her and continued. ‘I’m gonna count to ten. And whoever lied to me in my own goddamn house tonight better have found a helluva good hiding spot by the time I’ve finished. Understand?’ ‘Daddy-' I started but he cut me off with the commencement of his countdown. ‘One.’

The sentence was no sooner uttered before the only people left at the table were two very angry parents and an oblivious Charlie who was contently chewing down his spaghetti blissfully unaware this his crown for best hide and seeker was about to be snatched away.

#My writing #elvis presley #Elvis #elvis x reader #elvis fic #Elvis Movie #Elvis Presley Fic #elvis presley smut #elvis presley x reader #hide and seek

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ottonevermore · 4 months

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hi I like music and have NRB brainrot so I made a playlist of (almost) every song named, referenced, or sung in a Board Game Club episode.

DISCLAIMER- the playlist is (of course) imperfect and incomplete, since I'm only one person with limited musical knowledge and googling capabilities. The NRB Wiki helped a lot- the articles included some references that I might not have known and saved me a lot of research!

If any of yall can identify anything I couldn't, or know of any references I missed altogether, please check out my spreadsheet for this project, and feel free to comment on that or reply to this post! For anyone who's curious, the guidelines I set for myself are also on there, if you scroll to the right.

Links to the playlists are under the cut!

I made one huge playlist and also smaller playlists separated by year (besides 2020 and 2021, which i put together). Also, I didn't include any duplicate references, even between the different years. They feature everything from 90s/2000s pop, to 70s/80s rock, to classic music from the 50's and earlier, to old children's' nursery rhymes -- truly an Experience. Enjoy!

ALL (2020-2024) - Lag Warning - 488 songs

2020-2021 - The One With Crowded House - 106 songs

2022 - The One With The Beatles - 198 songs

2023 - The One With Christmas Carols - 184 songs

2024 - TBA

I also made a Motörhead playlist for Chaotic Neutral, which is unfortunately incomplete.

thanks for reading and enjoy the music! - otto :)

#YES ik this is a wild thing to do but you have to understand. i currently have no life. and my brain loovess making lists and googling stuff #i rest my case <3 #btw posting to tumblr is my beta test #before i post it on the subreddit lol #no rolls barred #nrb #genuinely idk how else to tag this im gonna be honest #BGC playlist project #the smooth grooves of BGC #<- thats been my unofficial name for the playlists cause of the “smooth grooves of crowded house” bit

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weepingfromacedartree · 6 months

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Ten Milestones (Interlude): The Usual Spot

Hi friends!

The last interlude is live 🥳

May 9th, 2022

Monday

This morning, like most Monday mornings over the last twelve or so months, Colin is standing outside a coffee shop in Central London. He’s waiting for Penelope to arrive, which only happens about 33.33% of the time on mornings like this; usually, she beats him here.

She mouths “Sorry” from across the street at 8:34 AM — approximately seven minutes later than she usually arrives. Colin gives her a thumbs down and a sarcastic scowl in response. For about 30 seconds, he watches as she stands there, an unwitting smile rising then fading on her face; the passing traffic between them cuts up her movements like frames of an old movie.

Inside, she orders a croissant and a coffee with cream and sugar. He orders a sandwich and a drink with a silly name and a composition of at least 50% sugar. They leave the shop at 8:44 with their breakfasts in hand. As they start on a familiar route, they pick up a familiar conversation.

“So… What’s your pitch for today?”

“Ithaboutuh,” Penelope mumbles, still chewing on her pastry. She swallows, then clarifies, “About the Premier League.”

“Really?” Colin chuckles. “That doesn’t sound like a typical topic for a Penelope Featherington column.”

“Well, it’s less about the club itself and more about the effects it has on local tourism. You know — fans flying in from around the world, hotel rates skyrocketing, local businesses bringing in more cash, drunk Americans getting mugged at increasing rates, et cetera.”

Colin snorts.

“Sounds like something Danbury would like.”

“That wasn’t my reason for choosing the pitch — but Danbury’s approval always helps Monday mornings go smoother.”

When they halt at a crosswalk, Penelope sips her coffee while Colin thinks over her pitch. Just as the little green man lights up and signals for them to continue forward, he clears his throat.

“If you want to do some on the ground research on crazed football fans, I bet Michael could get us two tickets to the Arsenal game on Friday.”

“Friday?” she echoes, her brows stitching together. She sounds confused, like the two syllables don’t fit together correctly in her mouth.

“Um. Yes?”

“Friday night?”

“Yes,” he confirms, slightly more assured this time.

She takes another sip of her drink before saying anything else. From the way she tilts her head back, it appears to be the last sip.

“That’s a great idea, but I —” She takes a breath. “I’m busy on Friday night. Unfortunately.”

“Oh, that’s —”

Fine, is what he was about to say. Objectively, it is fine. Penelope is a busy person with a full life. She doesn’t have to come running whenever Colin wants to hang out with her. (Which is just about always, these days.)

It is fine. But Penelope’s sudden change in demeanour…

“Is something wrong, Pen?”

“No!” she answers quickly. “I just — I have plans.”

Colin takes a sip of his own drink. He uses those few seconds to mull over her words. He doesn’t want to pry, but he also knows there is something under the surface that Penelope isn’t saying.

“Do you already have tickets for the Arsenal game? If so, I promise I won’t be offended. Well, not too off—”

“No, I just have a date.”

She says those words casually, as if they would have no impact on him, past clarifying the nature of her plans on Friday night. Objectively, this makes sense, seeing as Colin has never said anything that would make her believe otherwise.

They do have an added impact, though. Even if Colin knows that’s ridiculous. Even if he knows that Penelope can and does date people who are not him. Even if they’ve discussed this subject in the past. Even if he knows they could put it to rest once and for all, if only he weren’t too scared to —

“A non-football related date,” Penelope clarifies with a soft chuckle, only after Colin doesn’t respond for several seconds.

“Oh! That’s —”

He searches his brain for something logical to say. He has trouble doing so, though; his brain is too busy focusing on one particular image, instead.

A pale blue envelope. One that arrived at his own flat yesterday and is currently sitting unopened on the counter in his kitchen.

“Does this have to do with Ben’s Save The Date going out? That’s over five months away. You have plenty of time to secure a da—”

“No, Colin,” Penelope interrupts, her tone suddenly defensive. She throws her empty coffee cup into a nearby trash can; he can practically hear it rattle against the metal basin as it drops to the bottom. Then, beneath her breath, she delivers him the most devastating insult he’s ever heard.

“You sound like my mum.”

“Woah! I —”

“I do date, you know. And not just to ‘secure’ a date for a wedding several months from now.”

“I know,” Colin claims, sounding just as defensive as her. He tries to tone it down as he continues, “I know that, Pen. The timing just made me think the two could be related.”

“Well, they’re not.”

When she offers no further details — when she doesn’t say anything at all — Colin can’t help but ask the question currently weighing heavily on his mind.

“So, uh… Who with? I didn’t know you were — uh — seeing anyone at the moment.”

Penelope swallows, then looks up. They’re a few steps away from her office.

“A coworker. We aren’t ‘seeing’ each other, he just asked if I wanted to get dinner with him after work on Friday.”

Stupid fucking wanker.

“That’s great, Pen,” Colin says through a smile and gritted teeth. Then, despite his better judgement…

“What’s his name?”

“Sam Debling,” Penelope says, still looking straight ahead. “You don’t know him. He’s, um, new to the city.”

She’s right. The name doesn’t sound the least bit familiar to Colin. He sounds like a right prick, though.

“That’s —”

“Oh!” Her voice goes up nearly an entire octave. She’s looking down to her phone. “I have to run — I can’t be late for this meeting. I’ll talk to you later!”

Before he can return the goodbye, Penelope turns on her heel and disappears into the lobby of Queenmaker Magazine.

Once alone, Colin raises his drink to his lips and whispers one word into its half-empty interior.

“Fuck.”

꙳ ꙳ ꙳

On Monday mornings, after dropping Penelope off at her office, Colin usually goes to the gym. Sometimes he visits Anthony at the firm. Sometimes he heads to Mayfair. Sometimes he gets work done at a park or a library or anywhere that isn’t his usual office. (His bed.)

On this Monday morning, Colin goes straight home to his flat.

The walk from Central London to Bloomsbury is long and bothersome. He spends most of that time swatting away the first flies of summer and unwittingly recalling Penelope’s words from earlier. Each step only sharpens the sting of annoyance in his gut.

A coworker. Sam Debling.

As he cuts through Russell Square (annoyingly over-populated with happy couples this morning), the irony of the situation does not escape Colin’s notice. For the first 25 years of his life, at least he was ignorant to his ever-growing feelings for Penelope. But what’s his excuse now? Timing? Fear? A lack of a sign?

I do date.

As he rounds the final corner to his flat, Colin thinks over those excuses. The ones he has gripped onto and subsequently lost sight of over the last four years. In truth, he doesn’t fully know why he remains quiet. It’s difficult for him to put into words. But still, there’s a block.

You sound like my mum.

A shiver runs down his spine as he steps into the air conditioning. He wonders how today got off to such a tremendously terrible start. Monday mornings are usually his favourite —

“Morning, Bridgerton.”

His footsteps stop short. It takes him a second to realise where they had led him to.

He’s in the middle of his lobby, about four paces away from the lift ahead. His name had been called out from the left. From the mailroom.

It takes him another second to realise who had called it.

“Morning, Cordelia.”

Cordelia Patridge lives in the flat directly below his. She moved in about a year ago, but due to London’s perplexingly tight social circles, he’s known her from afar for most of his life.

Over the past twelve months or so, the two of them have formed a routine of sorts. When passing each other in the stairwell, lift, mailroom, etc., the two greet, engage in about 30 seconds of playful banter, then go their separate ways.

That last part is crucial. Hypothetically, a stranger could walk into this lobby and perceive their “banter” as “flirting,” but Colin doesn’t see it that way. It’s not flirting if you have no intention to turn those words into action.

Today, Colin doesn’t have the energy for the words alone. After throwing her a polite nod, he turns back to the lift ahead.

“Running off anywhere special?” Cordelia asks, quickly falling in step with him. Her mail items remain tucked away beneath her armpit.

Colin hits the button with the upwards facing arrow.

“Not especially.”

“Just a boring day at the office, then?”

“Well, my office is typically just my bed, so —”

“Ooh.” She snickers. “Naughty.”

Colin clears his throat. Before saying another word, he listens to the creaking of the old metallic lift as it descends the floors. It sounds close.

“‘Lazy’ would be a more accurate term for it, I think.”

With that, the lift doors creak open. Inside, Colin pushes the “2” for Cordelia and the “3” for himself.

“Is that it for today, then? Wasting your hours writing in bed?”

Colin considers the question.

“Account for several trips to and from the fridge and… Yes, that sounds about right.” As Cordelia giggles, he asks, “And you? What of your day?”

“Working. But not from my bed. Or anyone else’s, for that matter.”

Perhaps on a different morning, Colin could muster up a halfway decent retort to that. Today, he thanks god that the lift doors open when they do.

“Toodles, Bridgerton.”

When those metallic doors screech shut again, an odd feeling washes over Colin. The stinging annoyance from before is still there, but it’s now mixed up with confusion after that interaction with Cordelia.

Objectively, it was not all that different from their usual random bouts of banter in the halls. It just felt… more than it usually does. Like, for the first time in twelve months, he doesn’t feel so confident in his distinction between “banter” and “flirting. (Even though his intentions were no different than they ever were.)

He doesn’t spend too much time thinking over the interaction, though. Once the lift opens to the third floor, the matter leaves his mind entirely. Annoyance takes over once more. It sticks with him as he walks down the hall to 303. It grows stickier when he enters his kitchen and sees the unopened blue envelope on the counter. It only lets up once he returns to his bedroom and opens the dresser, searching for something more comfortable to don before climbing back into his office for the day.

On top of the pile of clothes lies a burgundy jumper. The one Penelope wore on her last morning living in his flat. The one she wore most mornings during that awful, blessed month. When he lifts it to his nose, the fabric still smells of honey.

Objectively, Colin knows this is impossible. He knows that, two years later, even the faintest hints of honey are nothing more than phantom smells from a time he wishes to return to.

Pulling the fabric over his head, he doesn’t give a shit if the honey smell is real or fake. The jumper feels good around his body, regardless.

꙳ ꙳ ꙳

Tuesday

It’s not fair to say that Penelope’s date with Sam Fucking Debling was the only matter on Colin’s mind for the past 24 hours. It would be fair to say it was the most recurring, though.

On his way home from the gym Tuesday morning, remnants of their conversation are still coming back to him — as much as he wished they wouldn’t.

You sound like my mum.

You sound like my —

With a long-suffering sigh, Colin forces his gaze to lift from the pavement below him. When it does, he sees a familiar face.

Cordelia isn’t looking at him. She’s leaning on the wall outside their building, a phone in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She’s smiling down at whatever it is that’s on her screen.

Desperate for any sort of distraction from the date he won’t be attending later this week, Colin chooses to see this as a sign.

“Morning, Cordelia,” he calls out, slinging his gym bag further over his shoulder.

“Good morning, Bridgerton!” She smiles brightly as she looks up to meet his eye. “What can I do you for?”

After one millisecond of hesitation…

“Are you busy Friday night?”

꙳ ꙳ ꙳

Friday

Colin Bridgerton has not been on a date in London in over seven years. When he first began travelling, his time at home became too limited and otherwise-occupied to allow for non-essential activities like dating. And though he’s been grounded (mostly) in London for the past two years, this trend has not changed. Still, he only goes on dates when he’s far away from home.

Until tonight, that is.

He and Cordelia are standing outside of a Chinese restaurant in Central London. They’re waiting to be seated. She’s smoking a cigarette. He’s chewing on a mint and watching traffic pass by.

“Beautiful night,” he comments, unsure of what else to say.

“Every night looks beautiful through a puff of smoke, I think.” She laughs lightly as she offers Colin her cigarette. After thinking better of it, he pinches the little white paper and takes two drags before passing it back.

He’s about to ask Cordelia about her plans for the weekend, but then the hostess pops her head into the night air and informs them that their table is ready. Once inside, they order their drinks, then look down to their menus.

Colin doesn’t really like first dates. (A fact that’s coming back to him with startling clarity tonight.) He’s always found them to be too unfamiliar at best and dreadfully awkward at worst. His travels only exacerbated this issue; when you spend so much of your professional life making small talk with strangers, the prospect of dedicating an entire night to doing much of the same becomes rather unappealing.

Since his realisation in Catalonia four years ago, the prospect of a first date has only become less appealing. (The prospect of a second date has ceased to exist.) Now, he only goes on them when he finds himself so lonely or bored or desperate for connection that a night of endless small talk doesn’t seem so bad, in comparison.

That’s another reason why Colin never dates in London. If he’s bored here, he’ll just hang out with Penelope. Excluding nights when she’s on a date with stupid fucking wankers like Sam Fucking Debling, of —

“Are you two ready to order?”

Colin says yes to the sudden apparition of their waiter, despite having spent not a single second reading the menu in front of him. He blindly orders Kung Pao Chicken and a side of fried rice. Cordelia gets the Sesame Jellyfish.

“Any plans for the weekend?” he finally asks.

Cordelia shakes her head lightly.

“Just travelling north on Sunday. I have a conference in Manchester next week.”

“Oh. Right, you’re uh —”

Colin’s mind briefly short circuits. He thinks over the countless 30-second interactions they’ve had over the last year. He desperately attempts to recall any concrete details Cordelia has shared about her personal life through all that talking. When he comes up with minimal factual information, he realises just how much of a stranger Cordelia Patridge is to him.

“You’re in finance, right?”

“Sort of. I’m in marketing, but I work with a lot of pricks who work in finance.”

“Right.” Colin chuckles. After a beat of silence, he asks, “And you enjoy doing that?”

Cordelia shrugs.

“It’s a job,” she remarks unenthusiastically. As she picks up her drink, she laughs lightly. “I suppose when you’re a travel writer, your job isn’t ‘just’ a job.”

He considers her question.

“I suppose so. But if you do anything long enough, there will come times when it feels like a chore more than anything else.”

As he delivers those last few words, he feels a buzzing in his back pocket. When he pulls his phone out discreetly and checks who’s calling, his heart nearly skips a beat.

pen 💛

A millisecond before picking up, Colin remembers that he’s currently sitting across from a woman who is not Penelope, who he did ask out on a date tonight.

“I’m sorry,” he tells Cordelia just as her mouth opens to say something new. He’s careful to keep his phone screen pointed away from her as he continues, “It’s my mum. She’s, uh — It’s sort of an emergen—”

Before he can get through the lie, Cordelia smiles and gestures for him to take it.

Outside the men’s restroom, Colin picks up just in time to save Penelope from being transferred to voicemail.

“Hey, Pen.”

“Hi! By any chance, do you —” Her sweet voice stops short. “Sorry. Are you busy? It sounds a bit loud on your end.”

“No.” Colin is almost shocked by how quickly the bullshit falls from his lips. “I’m just, uh — I’m picking up some takeaway. Chinese. Why? What’s up?”

“Oh!” She chuckles nervously. “Nothing. I was just bored. Thought I’d see if you’re free and want to hang out.”

Colin’s grin grows even wider. He can’t help it.

“Well, we’ve already established that I’m free. And you know I always want to hang out, so…”

As Penelope laughs softly on the other end of the phone, Colin is suddenly hit by a fact that’s been haunting him for the past four days.

“So I take it your date didn’t go well?”

Moments after, Colin can’t believe those words left his own lips. Penelope sounds disbelieving too, her laughter cutting off just as quickly as it came.

“Oh. It was, um —”

She clears her throat. She laughs again — just a little.

“I’m surprised you remember that.”

Desperate to find his footing in this conversation again, Colin audibly gasps and says, “Pen, I’ve known you nearly three decades. By now, I would hope that you are aware of what an exceptional memory I possess. You should be careful what you say around me.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she says — mostly beneath her breath. Colin can practically hear her eyeroll through the phone. “Regardless… You want to meet at the usual spot?”

“Yes.”

And he does. He really, really does. But he also happens to be on a date right now.

“Okay, gr—”

“But is it okay if we meet in like —” He checks his watch. “An hour? Sorry. But I’m downtown and this place is an absolute madhouse. I don’t want to keep you waiting.”

“Right. Yes, of course.” She laughs softly. “Is there any way you could pick me up an order of dumplings while you’re there?”

“Of course. I’ll see you in an hour.”

“Perfect. See you soon, Colin.”

With that, Penelope hangs up. It isn’t until the line goes silent that the concept of guilt reintroduces itself to Colin’s brain.

“Fuck,” he mutters beneath his breath, turning on his heel to return to the date he left behind. The food is waiting for him when he gets back.

“This looks delicious,” Colin remarks, taking his seat again.

“Quite.”

After chewing a single bite of her jellyfish, Cordelia asks if everything is okay with his mum. Colin briefly considers saying “No” and that he has to rush to the hospital asap, but ultimately thinks better of it. Instead, he nods and returns to their previously scheduled awkward small talk.

Approximately seventeen minutes later, they both finish their meals and Colin signals for the waiter to bring the check. After such an awkward night, he assumes they’re under the shared assumption that they will go their separate ways as soon as the check is paid, but…

“So…” Cordelia smiles and brushes a piece of hair off her shoulder. “Our living situations certainly make it simple to share a cab home. And eliminate the need to ask questions like ‘Your place or mine?’ Although,” she laughs, “if we’re choosing, I would say mine. Save you a flight of stairs until the morning.”

Colin doesn’t know what to say. In the end, he goes with…

“Could I take a raincheck? I, um —”

His voice momentarily falters. He searches his brain for the lie that will cause the least amount of damage.

“I actually wasn’t planning on taking a cab back. I think I’m going to walk home, actually. My lungs could use the fresh air.”

Cordelia’s face tells him that may not have been the best lie for the current circumstances.

“You want to walk four kilometres in the middle of the night to get some ‘fresh air?’”

Colin nods — a poor attempt to appear convinced by his own statement.

“And does this ‘fresh air’ have anything to do with what your ‘mum’ said before?”

Fuck.

“I —”

“Save it.”

With that, she stands from her chair and starts pulling out cash to cover her half of the meal.

“Oh, you don’t have to —” Colin starts, determined not to be a complete arsehole tonight, but…

“You’re an arsehole,” Cordelia informs him. She throws the money on the table and swiftly takes her leave. It isn’t until she disappears outside that he realises their waiter has returned.

“Your check, sir,” he says, thankfully pretending he had not just witnessed Colin being so brutally, deservedly put in his place. Colin nods in thanks, pulling out his wallet. But just before he can hand the man his credit card, he remembers Penelope’s request from earlier.

“Sorry.” He clears his throat. “Can I add another item to go?”

꙳ ꙳ ꙳

The “usual spot” is Mondrich’s, a bookshop by day and pub by night. It’s located on the north end of Mayfair and just so happens to fall on the exact midpoint between Colin’s flat in Bloomsbury and Penelope’s in Hyde Park; it’s an approximate 19-minute walk from either end. The establishment also happens to be owned by Will Mondrich, an old friend of Colin’s; though the bookshop portion isn’t open at night, when accompanied by his “responsible friend Penelope,” Will lets them hang out upstairs after hours.

The two of them are sitting on a couch between the romance and true crime sections. There’s a little plastic container of dumplings precariously placed on the cushion between them.

“Why did you go all the way downtown for takeaway?” Penelope asks. Thankfully, she sounds more curious than she does accusatory. “They have Chinese in Bloomsbury, don’t they?” She giggles. “Or delivery, at least?”

Colin shrugs, plopping another dumpling in his mouth.

“Needed the fresh air.”

Thankfully, the lie works better on Penelope than it had on Cordelia. She doesn’t press the issue any further. Instead, she leans over, takes a sip of her cocktail from downstairs, and allows for a comfortable silence to sit between them for a moment. Unfortunately, Colin uses that time to fester on a subject that has been eating away at him for most of the week.

As soon as Penelope puts down her drink, Colin pushes away the voices in his head screaming “This is dangerous territory!” and asks her about it.

“So, how was your date with —” He facetiously stops short. “What was his name? Dan?”

“Sam,” she corrects, initially throwing him a suspicious look. “It was fine, just…”

Her eyes flick towards the true crime shelf, seemingly racking her brain for the right word.

“Awkward.”

“Awkward?” Colin echoes. Despite his consternation over the subject this week, he’s suddenly eager to hear more.

“Yup. I get along with him fine in the office, but I don’t think we’re meant to hang out outside of it.”

“Why’s that?” Colin asks casually, his gaze settling lazily on the romance shelf behind her head.

“I don’t know. I suppose it felt like we were both putting far too much effort into making the conversations flow naturally.” She wrinkles her nose before saying, “Like, he kept calling me ‘Penny.’ He never calls me that in the office.”

Colin snorts. Penelope hates when people call her “Penny.”

“And I don’t think we had much common ground to discuss, outside of office conversations. Like —” She laughs suddenly, bracing a hand across the back of the couch. “I asked him what his favourite type of food is. He said ‘crunchy.’”

Colin laughs, too.

“Sounds like a sociopath.”

“I don’t know about that,” Penelope says, laughter slowly leaving her system. “It just wasn’t a good match.”

Colin could have told her that on Monday, but he doesn’t say that now. He decides they’ve wasted enough time discussing Sam Fucking Debling as it is. Besides, his mind has moved on to another topic that has been plaguing him all week.

“So,” he murmurs, quickly taking a sip of his beer. “Does this mean you have yet to secure a date for Benedict’s wedding in the fall?”

“Jesus Christ,” Penelope murmurs into her own drink. Thankfully, she doesn’t seem quite as annoyed as she did when he first brought up the subject on Monday. She does appear a little annoyed, though. “I told you that’s not why I went out with Sam tonight.”

“I know. I just wanted to —”

“I’ve had one ‘secured’ for several weeks now.”

“What?” Colin says, unable to hold the syllable in. If Penelope notices just how quickly he lost his cool, she doesn’t let on. She shrugs, then takes another sip of her vodka cranberry.

“El asked me to be her date within five minutes of your brother becoming engaged.”

Silently, Colin wills his cool to return. “Oh,” he says, smiling in a way that hurts his cheeks as much as it grates on his nerves. “How proactive of her.”

Without much effort, their conversation returns to a natural, un-awkward flow after that. Colin retrieves them another round from Will downstairs. Penelope tells him about the progress she’s made on the Premier League piece. Colin spends the rest of the night listening and laughing and loving each moment he gets to share with her.

What Colin does not do tonight is consider if now is the right time to tell Penelope the truth. To tell her what he’s been holding inside himself for the last four years. Six months from now, though, he’ll look back on this Friday night at the usual spot and wonder, “What if?”

#im posting this early enough in the night that im not actively fighting off the delirium of insomnia #that's growth baby #polin #fanfiction #bridgerton #weepingfromacedartree #fanfic #ao3 #ten milestones #penelope featherington #colin bridgerton

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cafecitowriter · 2 years

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The Right Partner - Steggy Netflix Series

Steggy Week 2022 Day 1: Inspired By (@steggyfanevents)

Tried my hand at a more complex edit! Template made by @seungnm

This series is inspired by:

1. The story structure of the 45-50 minute 22-episode season arc (particularly a la season 1-3 of Agents of SHIELD where the events that lead to the mid-season finale cause a cataclysmic-type event that launches the plot of the second half of the season.)

2. The style of a Mike Schur Comedy (The Good Place, Parks and Recreation)

3. The fact that we deserve a full, well-written series based on Steve and Peggy’s life post-Endgame goddammit

Full Episode List and Summaries for the “Continue Watching” Shows under the cut! (Be warned, it is a lot)

The Right Partner Episode List

S1 E1: Hello Darling

It’s the year 1949 and Agent Peggy Carter is hard at work at the SSR. That is, until a familiar face appears on her doorstep, changing the course of her life.

S1 E2: Househusband

Peggy and Steve face scrutiny from their nosy neighbours for their unorthodox lifestyle. Jack Thompson returns to the SSR after an extended hiatus.

S1 E3: Fondue

As Steve and Peggy adjust to their new dynamic and former’s new secret identity, the latter struggles to find a proper work-life balance while Howard gives Steve unsolicited advice.

S1 E4: The Secret Life of Agent Carter

Suspicious of Peggy’s good mood recently, Phillips and Jack try to figure out the reason behind it. Steve takes up a new hobby with the help of Edwin.

S1 E5: Signed, Sealed, Delivered

When a mission goes awry, Edwin is unwittingly tasked with keeping it a secret from Steve while Phillips, Jack, and Howard work frantically to get Peggy out of a sticky situation.

S1 E6: Girls Go Wild

Angie, Ana and Peggy’s weekend getaway doesn’t go as planned. Steve gets in over his head when he volunteers to help out with the school musical.

S1 E7: The 107th

When old friends reunite, new tensions are created as Steve and Peggy must decide whether to reveal the secret of Steve’s return in the wake of a new threat emerging.

S1 E8: Understudy

Steve and Peggy’s date night gets interrupted when they run into one of Peggy’s old flames. Jack, Howard, Edwin and Ana attend a performance of Angie’s newest theatre show.

S1 E9: Corner

Howard’s latest invention forces Peggy and Jack together - literally - right before an important meeting. Steve helps Phillips with an interrogation.

S1 E10: To Peggy, with Love

Edwin and Angie help Steve pick out a six month anniversary gift for Peggy, who is out on a mission with Jack and Agent Ramirez to investigate a disturbingly familiar pattern of criminal behaviour.

S1 E11: Growing Pains

Steve and Peggy’s relationship is put to the test as a sinister force returns.

S1 E12: Don’t Be Late (Mid-Season Finale)

In a desperate attempt to save their friend, Steve and Peggy partner with an untrustworthy ally despite Edwin’s reservations.

S1 E13: Bucky

Reeling from the events of the last four years, Bucky struggles to adapt to his homecoming while Steve agonizes over how to help his friend with the lack of resources that were available in the 21st century.

S1 E14: Darling, Dearest

Peggy’s concern for Steve grows as he pushes himself to his limits. Ana and Angie conspire to get Edwin to take it easy.

S1 E15: Punk/Jerk

Steve and Howard call in a favour to help Bucky while Peggy hatches a plot with the aid of Angie, Ana, Edwin and Jack.

S1 E16: My Brother’s Keeper

As he relearns who he was and who he wants to be, Bucky takes a keen interest in Steve and Peggy’s relationship while Edwin plans the latest Stark Gala Extravaganza.

S1 E17: I’ll Show You

Steve and Peggy both attempt to hide their personal struggle with the yearly anniversary of the Valkyrie crash from each other. Meanwhile Angie mediates a dispute between Howard, Jack and Bucky.

S1 E18: Breaking Bread

Peggy and Jack bond when they go undercover. Ana and Edwin invite Steve over for tea.

S1 E19: The Handcuff Games

Peggy keeps hitting a wall in her hunt to end Leviathan until she gets help from an unexpected source.

S1 E20: The Enemy of My Enemy

Peggy confides in Howard about her feelings toward her future at the SSR while Jack begrudgingly asks Steve for help.

S1 E21: Now or Never

With the gaps in Bucky’s memory returning at a steadier rate, the SSR team puts their plan to dismantle both Leviathan and the Red Room for good into action.

S1 E22: A Second Chance (Season Finale)

On the one-year anniversary of Steve’s return, Peggy receives some unexpected news. Phillips and Howard reveal the details of a top secret project.

“Continue Watching”

The 107th

Follow the elite team known as Howling Commandos as they traverse Europe on various post-WWII missions in this thrilling series.

Featuring appearances from Steve Rogers, Peggy Carter, Howard Stark, and plenty of “wahoo’s".

All Day: A Tale of Two Captains

After the climactic battle with the Red Skull, the Tesseract sends Captain Carter almost 70 years into the future… and into another universe altogether, where not only Steve Rogers was the one who received the serum, he’s still alive. With the help of Captain America and the rest of the Avengers, Peggy tries to find her way home.

But where is home in the multiverse when your heart seems to be right in front of you?

When Bucky Met Sam

After meeting each other on a double date gone wrong with their two now-engaged best friends, Bucky and Sam must re-evaluate their own contentious friendship when they are asked to be the Best Man/Man of Honour respectively for Steve and Peggy’s wedding.

Confessions of an (Ex)-Widow

Reunited following the events of Endgame, Natasha and Yelena pick up the work that was stalled after the Blip. But their ghosts still haunt them as they learn just how deep the roots of the Red Room still go.

Mr. and Mrs. Stark

After finally tying the knot after years of a passionate on-again, off-again relationship, Pepper Potts Stark and Tony Stark find out that despite knowing each other for over a decade, there are still things to discover about the other.

Ghost Rider

In this action-packed series, Robbie Reyes continues his vigilantism while grappling with what it really means to be a brother when he owes a debt to the Devil inside him.

Featuring appearances from Daisy Johnson, Elena “Yo-Yo” Rodriguez and Melinda May.

#steggy #steggyweek22 #steggyweek2022 #steve rogers #peggy carter #post-endgame #first edit of this size #please be gentle

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years

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Citizens United and the FTX meltdown

The collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and its affiliated businesses has left a million creditors holding the bag for a chaotically managed, corrupt enterprise that created vast personal fortunes for the conspirators who ran it, even as it stole the life’s savings of retail investors who bought into its lies.

Could the unsuspecting public have been shielded from the FTX Ponzi scheme? Hindsight is 20/20, but there’s good reason to believe that FTX could have been brought down in a controlled glide, rather than a nose-first crash landing and ensuing fireball.

Earlier this year, the SEC sent a letter to FTX seeking answers about its business practices — a letter that sought to determine whether FTX was as scammy as it appeared. The SEC never got the answers it sought, thanks to the intervention of eight Members of Congress — the “Blockchain Eight,” four Dems and four Republicans — who wrote to Chairman Gary Gensler demanding that he back off:

https://emmer.house.gov/_cache/files/0/c/0c7fc863-7916-4b19-bc44-52bef772287e/9B0B9D1CA9B3C215DDC762DF5B0F6864.3.16.22.emmer.sec.letter.pdf

Five of Blockchain Eight received substantial cash contributions from FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) or his employees or affiliated businesses and PACs. Bankman-Fried is widely characterized as a Democratic super-donor, but his political spending is basically 50–50:

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/recipients?id=D000073694&cycle=2022

SBF held himself out as a philosopher king, a devotee to esoteric ethical precepts and a concerned billionaire who was committed to saving the world from ugly political currents; after the collapse, he confessed that this was all marketing nonsense (“this dumb game we woke westerners play”):

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-cryptocurrency-effective-altruism-crypto-bahamas-philanthropy

SBF and his co-conspirators gave money to politicians to further their own ends, not to save the world. They understood that if they gave money to politicians, that politicians would intercede to keep regulators from keeping them honest.

The questions in the original SEC letter went to the heart of the FTX fraud, seeking to establish that FTX was marketing unregulated securities disguised as a “rewards” program, and that FTX was stealing from depositors and handing their money to its hedge-fund affiliate Alameda to gamble with.

Hedge-fund managers are notoriously bad at their jobs, generally underperforming a low-load S&P 500 index fund, but even by those low standards, Alameda was a very bad hedge-fund, losing $3.7b in a “raging crypto bull market.”

https://twitter.com/GRDecter/status/1595065298771656704

SBF’s reputation as a boy-wonder genius investor wasn’t the result of the returns to Alameda, but rather, the seemingly limitless funds that Alameda could tap into for more failed investments. Those funds, we now know, were stolen from FTX’s retail customers. This is exactly the kind of thing that an SEC investigation could have revealed.

The vast sums of (real) money the crypto industry pumped into electoral politics is closely related to its bull run — campaign contributions muzzled finance watchdogs, which let the industry defraud the public, which gave it more money for campaign contributions.

This is a completely foreseeable outcome of unlimited campaign finance, especially the “dark money” finance that the 2010 Citizens United decision unleashed. CU removed the final barrier to massive influence campaigns by the ultra-rich, who poured money into the political system:

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/reports/a-decade-under-prsns-united

The irony here is that the same wealthy people who argued that “money was speech” and campaign finance was merely a way for people to exercise their First Amendment rights are also the foremost proponents of a political ideology whose central tenet is “incentives matter.”

These are the same people who say that every visit to the doctor should cost money, lest we create a “moral hazard” that invites people who aren’t really sick to go bother the doctor for shits and giggles (it goes without saying that these co-payments are titrated to keep poor people from visiting the doctor, while the rich never feel the sting) (that’s because rich people don’t suffer moral hazard).

This belief in incentives as the final arbiter of all behavior is the fundamental tenet of economism, and it underpins all our cruelest policies. For an economismist, anyone espousing a sense of duty or mission is merely “virtue signalling”:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

This slavish belief in incentives is why would-be aristocrats like Sam Walton prohibited his executives from taking so much as a glass of water from vendors’ salesmen, lest they become tempted into favoring the salesman’s commissions over Walmart’s profits.

But these exact same people profess a belief in unlimited political spending as a means to better governance. Somehow, a glass of water will corrupt a corporate buyer, but a $100m super-PAC donation will have no impact on the judgment of an elected official.

Covering the Blockchain Eight bribery scandal for The American Prospect, David Dayen hearkens back to the Keating Five scandal of 1987, when five senators wrote to the Federal Home Loan Bank Board to insist that they lay off Lincoln Savings and Loan:

https://prospect.org/power/congressmembers-tried-to-stop-secs-inquiry-into-ftx/

Lincoln’s chairman, Charles Keating Jr, had donated $1.3m to the Keating Five between 1982–7, and their letter convinced the FHLBB to close its investigation, whereupon Lincoln promptly collapsed, sticking the American public with a $3.4b bailout bill.

Like the Keating Five, the Blockchain Eight set out to stop regulators from investigating a company that was engaged in a titanic fraud. Like the Keating Five, the Blockchain Eight benefited from sizable campaign contributions from the industry they caped for.

Unlike the Keating Five — who faced a Senate ethics inquiry and sanctions — the Blockchain Eight are completely unrepentant. The Eight’s ringleader, Rep Tom Emmer (R-MN) has even accused SEC Chairman Gensler of secretly being in the tank for FTX:

https://twitter.com/RepTomEmmer/status/1590717374801809409

Just last week, Emmer told the Blockchain Association, “You are here to stay…[nobody should] rush in and put a huge wet blanket of regulation atop this industry just because something didn’t go right.”

https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/11/16/newly-elected-us-house-whip-emmer-downplays-ftx-meltdown-cheers-crypto/

Emmer is on the House Financial Services Committee, along with five other members of the Blockchain Eight: Ritchie Torres (D-NY), Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), Jake Auchincloss (D-MA), Warren Davidson (R-OH), and Ted Budd (R-NC). This is the committee charged with investigating the FTX fraud.

The great irony of the right’s incentives exceptionalism and its belief in unlimited political bribes is that it leads to the creation of a larger state. Allowing companies to bribe politicians and capture regulators fuels both corporate growth and corporate corruption.

https://doctorow.medium.com/regulatory-capture-59b2013e2526

If the state is to counter that corruption, it must be as powerful as the companies it oversees. The bigger those companies are, the bigger the state has to be. If you truly want a less intrusive, less muscular state, the first step is reining in corporate power.

Image: Cointelegraph (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sam_Bankman-Fried.png

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A vintage trustbuster cartoon depicting John D Rockefeller holding the Treasury building in the palm of his hand, peering at it through a watchmaker's loupe. Rockefeller's head has been replaced with Sam Bankman-Fried's. His collar bears the Alameda Research wordmark.]

#pluralistic

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