#<< has been bouncing around in my head like one of those screen savers for the past 24 hrs

[tiffanyachings]

keeping my the unwanted guest commentary as incomprehensible as possible

#i will have to yell in the tags though look away children in 3 2 1 #camilla hect #the locked tomb #the unwanted guest #..................................................... #----------------------------------- #//////////////////////////////////////////////////// #====================== #IT WOULD HAVE BEEN VERY BEAUTIFUL. CAMILLA WOULD HAVE HAD TO COOK #<< has been bouncing around in my head like one of those screen savers for the past 24 hrs

[cherryblossomflowers]

An Old Life Meets A New (Pt 1)

Pairing: Jensen x Daughter, Danneel x Stepdaughter

Warnings: Slight Cussing, Angst, Fluff, Death Mentioned, Car Accident Mentioned, Anxiety/Depression

Summary: After the recent death of her mother, Harper must adjust to her new life in the Ackles home, this includes a new stepmother, half-siblings, and reconnecting with her father.

A/N: This is a very very depressing type story. If I left something out in the warning that happens, I'll try to catch it.

*ASK OPEN*

**MAKE SURE TO COMMENT TO BE TAGGED**

Chapter 1

From the window it looked like the plane was floating on the clouds. An empty class of apple juice and a candy bar wrapper sits on the table. Cold air was blasting throughout the area. The smell of freshly made coffee was in the air.

Sitting in first class, thanks to an upgraded ticket from her father, a 15-year-old Harper fiddled with her Spotify on her phone, trying to find a song that was loud enough to tune out the rest of the world.

After scrolling through every single playlist, she settled on Nightmare by Avenged Sevenfold, which is ironically is what she feels she's been living for the past week.

One week ago today, Harper got a call. Her mother was in a car accident coming home from work. Whoever had hit her passed away at the scene and both cars were crushed completely. Her mother barely survived the ambulance ride to the hospital.

Once Harper got there, a doctor informed her that her mother passed away just minutes before she arrived. They said they did all they could.

Let's be real. All doctors say that.

The funeral was 4 days ago. There were so many people at the cemetery, so many people coming up to Harper and giving condolences. Harper was asked to speak, but she couldn't make herself do it.

Harper looked at her screensaver on her phone as a single tear fell from her face. The last photo she had taken of her mom. They were visiting the Statue of Liberty and her mother insisted on taking a selfie. That photo has been her screen saver since.

Soon after the funeral was the meeting with her mother's lawyer. Written in her will were the following words: If anything were to happen to me while Harper was under 18, call her father.

Harper hadn't heard from her father in about 7 years. He used to fly up to NYC and visit, and sometimes Harper would fly out to Texas for the summer.

The last time Harper saw Jensen, she was 8 years old. He came to watch her perform in a ballet show in Central Park. After the show, he hung out and took some pictures with her.

Now, Harper was sitting on her flight to Austin looking at the picture of her 8-year-old self with Jensen. The ballet show photo was the last one they had together. After that, Jensen stopped calling, stopped visiting, and pretty much fell off the face of the earth.

Or so Harper thought.

Her mother's lawyer got in touch with Jensen and told him the situation. Harper didn't really get a say in anything, but as a 15-year-old she didn't really have a choice.

So she packed up her New York City life in a duffel bag and her backpack, got a ticket to Austin, and was on her way to a totally different life.

A flight attendant touched Harper's shoulder, which made her jump in her seat. Harper ripped off her head phone and looked up. 

The attendant took a step back, "My apologies ma'am. I was just letting you know we are beginning out descent."

Harper nodded her head as the attendant left. She put her phone in her back pocket and her headphone around her neck, and sat back her chair. She looked out the window and sighed.

The attendant had one thing right: She was beginning her descent. But into her new life.

Was she ready? After 7 years had Jensen forgotten everything about her? Was he ready?

The town of Austin was in sight from the window. It still looked the same after so many years.

Nerves suddenly bubble up in Harper's stomach when the plane hit the runway. Her anxiety had to be through the roof at this point. She looked down at her bouncing leg and her shaky hands. She leaned her head back and took a deep, shaky breath.

When the plane had come to a complete halt, the seat-belt sign flashed, but Harper didn't move. She was glued to her seat, terrified to move. Everyone in first class was moving around and getting their bags from the upper compartments. Harper stayed put.

Once the first class members were exiting the plane, Harper knew it was now or never. She stood from her seat, grabbed her backpack from the overhead compartment, and walked down the aisle of the plane. She got to the exit, nodded at the flight attendants waving goodbye, and left.

She walked behind people, making herself as small as possible. She pulled her headphone back up and around her ears, reaching in her back pocket for her phone. She hit play on Spotify, the song now being Rocketman, and walked to the baggage claim.

Harper stood in front of the baggage claim, hundreds of people around her. She looked down at her phone and saw a text from Jensen: Let me know when you're here. I'll come inside.

Oh, right. Airports were like celebrity central. He'll step one foot in the door and crowds will form around him in a split second.

Quickly, Harper messaged him back: Don't worry about it. I'll be outside in a few minutes.

She put her phone in her back pocket and waited for the baggage claim to start moving. Closing her eyes, she faded into the music once more.

Harper started daydreaming of her life back in New York. Right now she'd be in Central Park, sitting on a bench and drawing the trees. The beautiful summer sun warming her and summer breeze blowing around her. Her mom would be sitting next to her reading her novel.

Well, if her mom was still here.

A loud buzzer startled Harper from her daydream. She looked up and saw a red light, indicating the baggage claim was moving. She stood at the beginning of the baggage claim, that way she'd see her bag immediately.

She looked down and saw her blue and purple tie dyed duffel bag coming through. After grabbing it, she made a B-line for the front door. She wasn't exactly a crowd type person, thanks to social anxiety, so she wanted to get out as soon as possible.

Harper pushed the revolving door forward until she was outside the airport. As soon as she stepped outside, her stomach dropped in realization.

What in the world does Jensen even drive? How am I going to find him?

Harper walked over to a bench and sat down. The Texas heat suddenly hit her and sweat covered her face. She took off her jean jacket, exposing her tank top, and tied it around her waste.

She sat back and closed her eyes, her nerves still present in her body. She tried to relax enough to have energy to look for Jensen, but the heat was not helping.

Was it always this hot? I don't remember feeling like I was melting while I was here.

Harper felt someone tap her knee and jumped. Her headphones fell down when she sat up. Harper's eyes flew open when she gasped, and she saw Jensen standing there.

"I'm so sorry, did I scare you? I didn't mean to. I've been calling your name, but you had headphones in and probably couldn't hear me," he said in a low voice, his hand still on her knee.

Harper couldn't move. This was the first interaction she's had with Jensen in years, and she couldn't move. She had her mouth open, but no words came out. Jensen made eye contact with her, but she moved her head to not look at him.

Jensen squatted down to be at eye level with Harper and smiled at her, "Wow, you haven't changed a bit huh? Still got those big brown eyes like your mom."

At the mention of her mother, Harper tensed up and tears formed in her eyes. She looked down to the ground, a tear falling down her face.

Jensen lifted her chin, which scared Harper, "I know how you feel, I miss her too. Your mother was an amazing woman. I hate that she left you so soon. I'm sorry, Harper."

Harper wiped her eyes and sighed, looking up at Jensen. She nodded her head as a thank you to him.

Jensen smiled at her, stood up, and grabbed Harper's bag from the ground, "Come on, my truck is over here."

Jensen began walking away with Harper's bag in hand. Harper stood up, grabbed her backpack, and jogged to catch up to him. She walked next to him, her head looking down at the ground.

They got to his truck and Jensen tossed her duffel into the bed of the truck. He walked over to the passenger door and opened it, "After you, madam."

Harper climbed inside putting her backpack on to the floorboard. Jensen shut the door and jogged around to the driver's side. He climbed inside as Harper was putting on her seat-belt. He put his on and started the truck.

Jensen put his hands on the wheel and took a deep breath, "Ready?" He looked over at Harper and a frown formed on his face.

Harper sighed and curled up towards the window, leaning her head on the window. She pulled up her headphones on her head, but didn't start the music. She just wanted the illusion that she couldn't hear anything.

Jensen sighed, put the car in drive and started forward.

-------------------------------

Masterlist

My Cherry Blossoms

@mlovesstories​ @chessurkait​ @adorable-minibot​ @desiredposion​ @idksupernatural​ @thevelvetseries​ @spnfamily-j2​ 

#SPN #spn rpf #supernatural #Supernatural RPF #Jensen Ackles #jensen and danneel #jensen #jared and jensen #jensen x daughter #spn oc #OC #jj ackles #danneel ackles #danneel harris #zeppelin ackles #arrow ackles #Jared Padalecki #jared x niece #jared x gen #jared

[thebladeblaster]

Pokémon: the Dark Circuit (aka Vanguard Descends season 2)

Chapter 10 The Sneaky First Match! The Legend Q4 Is Born!

Aichi’s current team

Level 90 Takuto (Solgealeo) steel/psychic

Moves:

Sunsteel Strike

Flare Blitz

Solar Beam

Psychic Fangs

Level 93 Wingal (Lycanroc (dusk)) rock

Moves:

Stealth rock

Crunch

Stone edge

Play rough

Level 91 Llew (Golisopod) water/bug

Moves:

Sucker punch

Blizzard

Liquidation

First impression

Level 95 Gancelot (Lucario) fighting/steel

Moves:

Focus blast

Stone edge

Meteor mash

Dragon pulse

Level 100 Soul Saver (Haxorus) dragon

Moves:

Outrage

Iron tail

Dragon dance

Scale shot

Level 100 Alfred (Aegislash) ghost/steel

Moves:

Sacred sword

King’s shield

Iron head

Shadow Claw

From his seat in his booth Gin watched on with interest as the pairings were announced. The first match was team Q4 vs team Ninja.From the entrance to the battleground stood Misaki, Kai, Shin, and Kamui. Strangely, Aichi was currently missing.

“What’s with that weird name?”, Misaki questioned.

“It’s short for Quadrifoglio which is Italian for four leaf clover, the ultimate symbol of luck.”, Shin explained.

“I like it!”, Kamui replied.

“I’m a bit worried. Aichi still hasn’t shown up yet. Do you think there’s any foul play from Team Asteroid?”, Shin questioned.

“It’s nothing like that. He’s just running late.”, Kai replied, with his eyes closed and crossing his arms.

“How do you know?”, Kamui asked.

“Because I was training with him. His final test has been taking awhile. Takuto wants to make sure he’s really ready.”, Kai replied.

The others gasped in shock hearing that Kai trained with Aichi.

Back in Kakusa many recognizable faces gathered around their TVs to watch the Circuit. At the Sendou household along with its usual residents was Mr. Mark, Miwa, Naoki, Mikuru, and Chrono. They watched the screen intently and Shizuka did a prayer for her son.

“I thought this was a tournament of 4 why do they only have 3 guys?”, Kamui questioned.

“The fourth person is as a alternate just in case and another person to switch out to. You technically can compete with just 3.”, Shin explained.

On the opposite side to team Q4 was team Ninja. The tallest of their members had cyan and black hair with grey eyes. He wore a fishnet shirt with a red scarf and a silver necklace. Another was a redhead with slicked back hair and red eyes. He also wore a fishnet top along with a purple and grey jacket. The shortest one who was even shorter than Kamui had blue hair covered by his hood and yellow eyes. He had a white hood and a gold part covering his mouth. Underneath it he wore an orange shirt and red arm warmers on his arms.

“Where’s your leader 003v? He’s not scared is he?”, the tallest one taunted.

“Hey, Aichi isn’t scared of anyone! He’s just late! That’s all!”, Kamui replied.

“Well then which one of you has the courage to go up first against a world class team.”, the redheaded one asked.

“I’ll be glad to kick your dory cuts!”, Kamui said, raising up his fist.

“Sorry butts you mean.”, Misaki corrected, making Kamui sweat drop.

“Whatever! I, Kamui the great, am gonna take you losers down!”, Kamui announced.

“We’ll see about that. I’ll be your opponent. I am Crank, a master of the grass type”, the shortest one said.

“I’m master of uhh...the winning type!”, Kamui replied as he walked up to the battlefield causing Misaki to face palm.

“Remember Kamui you only get to select one Pokémon in this battle so be careful. If you get defeated then one of us is up next against Crank.”, Misaki said.

“For team Ninja we have the master of grass, a veteran in this circuit, Crank. And for team Q4 we have the whirlwind fighter hailing from the Kakusa region, Katsuragi Kamui!”, MC Miya introduced.

“Go, Ludicolo!”, Crank called out.

“Go, Buster!”, Kamui called out.

Leon narrowed his eyes from his booth.

“003v us somewhere near here, but it seems he’s learned to suppress the energy his Psyqualia gives off.”, Leon thought.

He could feel him very vaguely somewhere near the arena. He didn’t know why he hadn’t appeared yet though.

Back to the battle…

“Buster use blaze kick!”, Kamui commanded.

Buster kicked off, launching a flying flame-covered kick at Ludicolo.

“You must really be a fool! Ludicolo is also a water type! Ludicolo ninja arts of hydro pump!”, Crank said.

Ludicolo shot a torrent of water at Buster.

“Oh no!”, Miwa said, watching the match on the tv.

“Buster!”, Kamui called out as he did Buster twisted mid air away from the water.

Buster then landed briefly, kicking off the ground and delivering a rising flame kick to Ludicolo’s face.

“Ninja art of hydro pump!”, Crank ordered.

As another torrent of water was shot Buster spun out of the way of the attack.

“Wow, Kamui’s Blazekin sure is fast.”, Emi commented, as she watched.

“My! My! It looks like Crank’s mon can’t even touch Kamui’s! We’ll our rookies get actually win over our veterans team Ninja?”, MC Miya said.

Buster was very light on its feet, easily dodging the watery blasts sent its way.

“Buster use thunder punch!”, Kamui commanded.

Buster moved swiftly like lightning before Crank could give his next order Buster struck Ludicolo with its lightning punch. Ludicolo stubbled a bit but as it tried to right itself and was hit by another punch. With every hit the was a crackle of thunder following it.

“Ludicolo ninja art of-gah?!”, Crank gasped in shock as Ludicolo fell to the ground fainting.

“Heh! Is that all you got world class losers?!”, Kamui taunted as he did Buster bounced around punching the air.

“Why you little…”, The tallest one grumbled.

“Don’t worry Jack I’m gonna teach that cocky brat a lesson.”, the redheaded one saint, putting his hand on his shoulder and smirking.

“I’ll be your next opponent. I am Lizard master of the water type.”, the redheaded one introduced.

“All you’ll be is another loser!”, Kamui replied.

Many of those back at the Sendou household sweat dropped at Kamui’s confidence.

“Let’s just hope he can continue to back it up. At least they got one win so far. That’s good.”, Shuka commented.

“Woah, that Blazekin is so rad. I should catch something like that.”, Naoki commented.

“I wonder where Aichi is though…”, Shizuka thought.

Somewhere near the area…

“Takuto!!! Takuto!!! Wait the match has started should we be-AHHH!!!”, Aichi screamed comedically as he ran from the sun lion shooting beams of light at him.

“You must be completely prepared, Aichi now fight me!”, Takuto said as Solgealeo.

Aichi looked over at the restraint bracers nervously. They seemed to be upgraded, their gems were now black and there was another one around his neck.

“But, you shut off my powers, how can I fight you without my Pokémon?!”, Aichi questioned, before squealing as he narrowly dodged another beam of light.

Back with Kamui…

Lizard walked up to the arena pulling out a Poké ball. Jack crossed his arms smirking, ignoring the sulking Crank.

“I don’t understand. I’m a veteran how did I lose to a rookie kid like him?”, Crank questioned.

“You can still redeem yourself, Crank.”, Jack whispered to him, causing Crank to turn to him and nod.

“Up next for team Ninja we have the master of the deep, Lizard!”, MC Miya announced.

“Go, Greninja!”, Lizard called out.

Buster faced the water Pokémon who got in a fighting stance.

“Greninja ninja art of spikes.”, Lizard ordered.

“Buster use thunder-“, Kamui was saying before he was caught off.

“Ninja art of smoke screen!”, Lizard cut him off.

Greninja made a hand sign and smoke filled the arena.

“What the heck now I can’t see!”, Kamui complained.

“This isn’t good. Greninja will likely be able to find Buster. But, Buster can’t see him.”, Yugi commented.

“How can Greninja see but Buster can’t?”, Jonouchi asked.

“Think Jonouchi, think. Why would he use this strategy if he didn’t have a way to find his opponent.”, a new voice said who entered.

He had black hair in a ponytail and green eyes. He had a black shirt with a red vest and pants. He wore dice earrings and had a red headband. He also had black makeup on his face under his right eye.

“I don’t remember asking you Ryuji!”, Jonouchi grumbled as Ryuji smirked at him.

“I thought you’d graduate from being a Lillipup before this tournament began. I hope you don’t hold us back.”, Ryuji teased.

This made Jonouchi growl.

“Hey! Hey! Settle down guys!”, Honda said, getting between the two and raising up his hands.

Kamui squinted his eyes trying to see through the fog.

“Oh no! Lizard has already set up his specialty! This could be the beginning of the end for our rookie team!”, MC Miya announced.

“Greninja use ninja art of water shuriken!”, Lizard ordered.

Kamui could hear a loud splash and a stumble from within the smoke clouds which was likely Buster getting hit by the attack. Kamui growled in frustration at not being able to see what’s going on.

“Buster use thunder punch! Punch around till you find him!”, Kamui ordered.

They could hear Buster swinging but no impact while instead hearing loud splashes and stumbling.

“This isn’t good.”, Shin commented.

They could hear feet running and a loud thunder crack as Greninja was sent flying out the smoke.

“Darn! He got a lucky shot!”, Lizard said angrily.

Out from the smoke Buster pulled back a fist ready to strike Greninja again.

“Greninja use hydro pump quick!!!”, Lizard ordered.

At almost the same time the lightning punch and torrent of water connected with their intended targets. Both Pokémon fell over fainting.

“Darn. I hoped I could sweep the whole team! You did good, Buster. Who’s tagging in next?”, Kamui said, returning Buster.

“I’m up next.”, Misaki said, before they high fives signaling Kamui tagging out.

“Oh my oh my! A double knock out! This battle just keeps getting more thrilling! The rookies may really win this match at this rate! All who’s left for team Ninja is their leader Jack, master of the inferno! However he’s the strongest of them all! If anyone can pull of a comeback victory for his team it’s him!”, MC Miya announced.

“So, fire type huh.”, Misaki thought.

“For team Q4 we have Tokura Misaki, the Kakusa region’s own Psychic type gym leader! She’s been rumored to have mystic powers which she uses to completely dominate her opponents!”, MC Miya announced.

A tick mark appeared on Misaki’s head after MC Miya announced the rumor. Kamui and Shin nervously stepped back from Misaki.

“I don’t have any powers, you moron!!! Just photographic memory!!!”, Misaki yelled in annoyance at the commentator who nervously flinched.

Yugi and his friends sweat dropped from the stands hearing Misaki’s outburst.

“Woah, she’s as feisty as she is beautiful.”, Ryuji commented, cupping his chin.

“She would break you in half Ryuji…”, Anzu replied, still sweat dropping.

The two competitors brought out a Poké ball.

“Go! Incineroar!”, Jack called out.

“Go, Sakuya!”, Misaki called out.

Sakuya winced as her feet dug into the spikes laid in the previous match.

#cardfight vanguard #pokémon #yugioh duel monsters #ygo dm #aichi sendou #misaki tokura #kamui katsuragi #kai toshiki #shin nitta #emi sendou #shuka #shizuka sendou #Takuto tatsunagi #naoki ishida #taishi miwa #Mikuru shindou #yugi muto #katsuya jonouchi #joey wheeler #anzu mazaki #tea gardner #honda hiroto #tristan taylor #ryuji otogi #duke devlin #q4 #blazekin #ludicolo #greninja #my crappy writing

[lady-divine-writes]

A Change in the Weather AU (inspired by Cacophonylights's A Change in the Weather) - Chapter 31

Read on AO3.

Notes: Finally! I meant to have this up yesterday but I was having some technical difficulties and then life kicked me in the face. But here it is, a nice light-hearted romp before the heavy chapter, which will also be a monster length wise, so be prepared. Also, if you’re enjoying this, please share the love. It would mean the world to me.

Sebastian drives with the top down all the way to Red Hat. He’d been considerate enough to warn Kurt ahead of time so he wouldn’t spend too much time fussing with his hair. Kurt already had a look in mind since the moment he found out they were going, so this news wasn’t well received. But he rolls with the punches, managing to throw together a style that comes across as attractively disheveled - morning-after-bedhead with a twist of reluctant apocalyptic superhero. On the up side, not having to sculpt his do ends up being a huge time saver. And Sebastian being Sebastian knows how to adjust the windows of his car with the top down so that Kurt doesn’t get buffeted too badly by the wind.

That move adds stock to Sebastian’s boyfriend cred.

The drive to the amphitheater is magical  - the night air that whips over their heads warm and fragrant, the sky bursting with stars, and relatively smooth sailing for the first leg of their trip. Sebastian had created a playlist of Airiel Down’s hits for them to listen to, but they end up forgoing music altogether to relax in companionable silence. Sebastian’s right hand finds and holds Kurt’s left above the gear shift, and they remain that way for the entirety of the drive.

The second leg of their journey ends up being a bit rockier.

The pulsing beat reaches them from over a mile away. Fingers of multicolored search lights stretch to the sky, welcoming them from the highway. Kurt gets swallowed by deja vu the second he sees those lights in the air, and excitement washes over him. Traffic into Raleigh is hellacious and, in the end, parking scarce, but it’s worth it. The vibe coming off Red Hat is electric. It hits them before they get anywhere near the amphitheater. And even though Kurt is heartbroken for Julian, he’s grateful that he offered them these tickets. Kurt wants to make it up to him, but the only way he can think to do that (the only way he’d agree to, that is) is if he could pull Cooper out of a hat, make him keep his promises.

And make Julian Julian again.

Sebastian and Kurt foot it from the only lot with valet parking that had space available down to the venue. They did find a spot closer, but it was on the street, and would have only given Sebastian’s Mustang a foot of clearance front and back.

Sebastian balked.

“Do you know how many people are going to be walking by here, intoxicated, carrying keys, phones, and God knows what else that might scratch my paint? Not to mention the spot seekers who won’t pay any attention and might take off my rear view mirror. Nu-uh. I have no intention of putting my baby in any danger,” Sebastian had said, putting a protective arm around Kurt’s waist and squeezing tight. “Not even for prime parking.”

From the parking lot, it’s a stretch of the legs to get there, and also a bit of a dance - swarms of people migrating up and down the street, stopping Kurt and Sebastian’s progress every five feet. The stop and go gets frustrating after awhile. But before Kurt knows it, they’re waiting in line, watching the opening numbers by way of a gigantic flat screen positioned behind the stage for the people stuck in lawn seating. Kurt turns in a circle, getting a lay of the land. He sees a hotel across the street - a Sheraton or a Hilton, some chain establishment. The drapes on each window are pulled open with guests sitting in front of the glass, enjoying the music from the comfort of their rooms.

‘That’s the way to do it,’ Kurt thinks enviously. As much as he enjoys a night out, he envisions being in one of those rooms, watching the concert from beneath the covers of a king-sized bed, perhaps using the music as a backdrop while he and Sebastian make love with the curtains wide open. Or right in front of the window, kneeling on the carpet, holding on to the drapes for leverage, hot skin pressed against the cool glass as Sebastian takes him from behind.

Would people notice them and call the police? On the average Wednesday or Thursday possibly, but not during an event like this, with everyone’s attention focused elsewhere. There’s a chance there is a couple doing the exact same right now. Kurt wouldn’t know. Even with an unobstructed view of the windows, he’s hard pressed to zero in on any single one.

That fantasy is not like anything he’s ever wanted before - more exhibitionist than he would have been comfortable with at the beginning of summer. But now - who knows? He’s game for pretty much anything. He’s been aiming to mark items off his bucket list, but maybe he should consider adding a few things, too - things that will be possible because he has Sebastian to do them with.

Once they get through the main gate, Sebastian and Kurt breeze past the line of people trying to buy last minute tickets. Sebastian gets his phone screen scanned by the guard manning the turnstile and voila.

They’re in.

The place is packed. There are still seats available but they’re difficult to pick out due to the sheer amount of bodies filling the rows. Not a single person is sitting down - everyone on their feet, hands in the air, moving to the music. An usher offers to help them find their seat. Sebastian tells her that he’s familiar with the layout and, to Kurt’s surprise, she lets them go off on their own. Sebastian finds their seats, or seems to find the general location, and leads Kurt down the row to the center.

Kurt had really been hoping for an aisle seat. He isn’t a crowd person. He doesn’t like germs or bacteria, and human sweat teems with it! He’d stretched his boundaries at that bar in Columbus, too fascinated by the flesh on display, too intrigued by Sebastian’s promise of a boozy good time, one where Sebastian acted as designated driver while Kurt got his buzz on. But this is different. This is that crowd of half-dressed, writhing bodies times ten! Aside from the people bouncing around them, getting way too close by accident, the temperature soars about twenty degrees immediately.

They have excellent seats, a stone’s throw from the front with a clear view of the stage. Kurt focuses on that, and on the music, on the beat humming through the cement floor, drumming its way through his body.

He focuses on Sebastian, standing so close, they may as well be fused together, a single entity swaying and grinding in time to the music.

But even with Sebastian’s body pressed against his, Kurt finds himself having a hard time letting go, feeling like a pinball caught between bumpers: his incredible boyfriend to his left, and a woman to his right who has never heard the meaning of the word restraint.

His mind takes a turn back to the hotel across the street, those open windows, and the people on the other side of them, doing whatever with this music as a soundtrack. He wonders what Sebastian would think if he suggested they watch the rest of the concert from a rented room and put his fantasy into action.

Odds are, Kurt feels, Sebastian would be willing - and eager - to oblige.

“How are you enjoying yourself?” Sebastian asks, lips hovering close to Kurt’s ear. He wouldn’t need to ask if they were standing chest to chest instead of chest to back. If Kurt’s hips were flush against Sebastian’s, he’d have an accurate indicator of whether or not Kurt is enjoying himself.

“Great!” Kurt tilts his head back, hands cupped over his mouth so he doesn’t blow out his vocal chords trying to be heard. They are his instrument, after all. “I really like it!”

“Really? You like this kind of music?” Sebastian asks, smiling as if Kurt’s enjoyment is a personal triumph, which leads Kurt to believe that Airiel Down must be one of Sebastian’s favorite bands. Kurt has never heard of them before, but when he gets the chance, he’s going to hop onto YouTube and download every single of theirs he can find.

“Apparently!” Kurt replies, rolling his eyes.

“I didn’t think this would be your speed.”

“You underestimate me, Sebastian Smythe!” Kurt says slyly. “For I have many speeds!”

Sebastian chortles loudly at that remark and Kurt blushes. It sounded different in his head. A lot different.

“I only have one complaint,” Kurt continues.

“And that is …?”

“The woman next to me keeps elbowing me in the arm! And she has sharp elbows!”

Sebastian looks past Kurt at the woman in question, bouncing up and down, limbs flailing, without a care in the world. He grabs Kurt by the elbow and shimmies him away, moving him to his other side as he peers over the crowd towards the stage, eyes sweeping the amphitheater from end to end. He must see a solution to Kurt’s problem because his face lights up.

“Come with me,” he says, taking Kurt’s hand. “Maybe I can fix that.”

“You’re going to cut off her elbows?” Kurt asks hopefully.

“Even better.” Sebastian pulls him through the crowd the way they came. It’s tight, but eventually they stumble out into the aisle without too much more elbowing and race straight for the stage. When they get there, Sebastian positions Kurt between himself and the barricade separating the audience from the stage.

Then he starts jumping up and down with his arms in the air like a lunatic.

“Wait! What … what are we doing?” Kurt asks. “Am I missing something?”

“I’m flagging down a friend. Hey! Hey, Viola! Vi! Down here!”

From where they’re standing, Kurt can see four hands on this end of the stage - three men and one woman, all wearing dark jeans and black t-shirts with Airiel Down printed in white letters across the front. The woman Sebastian seems to be hollering at has on a pair of enormous headphones with no less than three antennas sticking out the side. Kurt’s father owns a pair of BOSE noise canceling headphones that don’t look half as intimidating as these. When Kurt borrows them, they block sound so effectively, he wouldn’t hear a 747 if it came crashing into his bedroom.

He doesn’t see any way that she’ll be able to hear them.

Sebastian does, however, manage to grab the attention of a security guard - a mountain of a man with more head than neck - who frowns and walks their way.

“Uh … Sebastian …” Kurt tugs on his boyfriend’s sleeve. “I think we’ve been spotted!”

Sebastian glances down the barricade and spots the guard coming toward them. He’s not rushing, so he obviously doesn’t consider them a threat.

“Nah. Don’t worry about him.”

“But I think he has a Taser!” Kurt points out nervously.

“He’ll have to catch us before he can use it!”

“Believe it or not, that doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence!”

“Relax! I’ve got this under control!” Sebastian bends his knees and jumps higher, windmilling his arms over his head while he’s airborne. Kurt doesn’t see how making an ass out of himself means he has things under control. But seeing as luck is a way of life for Sebastian, it does the trick. When the woman spots him waving frantically from behind the barricade, she smiles wide, teeth gleaming unnaturally from the UV lights. “Hey! Sebastian! Let them up!” she calls to the guard marching their way. “Let them up!”

The guard, nearly upon them, seems to have no problem switching gears last minute and moves the barricade a sliver to let them pass.

Kurt, getting an up close and personal look at what is - yes - a Taser, has a mini heart attack.

“Oh my God!” she squeals. “Long time, no see!” She motions to a staircase that leads to the stage, greeting Sebastian at the top with open arms.

“I’ve got good reasons,” he says, hugging her back. He bumps Kurt’s hip with his own when she lets him go. “This is my boyfriend, Kurt.”

Smiling brown eyes land on Kurt and look him over. “Wow!” She offers Kurt her hand to shake, gives Sebastian an approving wink. “Very nice! Nice to see you finally using your charm and sense of humor to land you a man with class.”

Kurt decides there and then that he likes this woman. Not because she called him a man with class, which was nice, but because she described Sebastian as charming, and with a sense of humor.

She didn’t mention anything about his money.

“That tends to happen when you grow up and come to your senses,” Sebastian says bashfully.

“Word. So, you guys look a little beaten and battered.”

“You might say that.” Kurt rubs his arms, knowing he’ll be covered in black and blues tomorrow - bruises he’ll need to explain to everyone he encounters if he doesn’t want them to think his boyfriend covered him in head to toe hickeys. Which he might if they’re going to speculate over his sex life unsolicited anyway. Too bad Rachel isn’t here, he thinks. The jealousy in her eyes would be delicious.

“You guys through mixing with the rabble?” Viola asks.

“You know it,” Sebastian says.

“Well, you’re welcome to hang in the wings for the rest of the concert. Here …” she reaches into her pocket and pulls out two stickers, taking the liberty of affixing one to each boys’ thigh before Kurt gets the chance to complain about the catastrophic effects of adhesive on his jeans. “These’ll keep security off your back. They’ll even get you back stage after.”

“Thanks a bunch!” Sebastian says. “ I knew you’d hook us up!”

“Anytime. Look, I’ve got to get back stage before intermission. If I don’t see you later, it was nice meeting you, Kurt.”

“Likewise,” Kurt says.

She jabs a thumb in Sebastian’s direction. “Keep an eye on this one. He has a tendency to get lost.”

Kurt watches her hop behind the curtain, disappearing in the cover provided by a nearby fog machine, thrown by the poignancy of her parting remark. He turns to his boyfriend gazing out across the stage with a look of genuine joy on his face that leaves Kurt speechless.

“What?” Sebastian asks, sheepish when he catches Kurt staring.

“Of course you would know the stage hand of a professional rock band.”

“No, Julian does,” Sebastian defends. “They went to Berkeley together. From what I hear, they bonded over Nueva Cancion, small batch craft beers, CBD gummies, and the trammels of having a broken younger sibling. The only contribution I’ve made to this friendship thus far is knowing Julian … unfortunately.”

“That’s apparently enough in the circles you run in.” Kurt chuckles. “But I would have thought you’d be just as famous. You know, your name and number written on bathroom walls from here to the space station ...”

Sebastian’s expression changes, becomes muddled, every default expression he has scrolling by on his face, trying to land on an appropriate one. When he can’t seem to settle, he shoves his hands in his pockets and looks down at his shoes, still trying to choose.

Kurt doesn’t know why, but he feels like he needs to apologize. They’ve exchanged jokes back and forth like this before, but this one … it landed differently. “I’m sorry. I insulted you, didn’t I? I didn’t mean to.”

“It’s not that,” Sebastian says, shaking his head with a look in his eyes like even he’s trying to make himself believe that that’s not what he feels. “It’s just …” Kurt watches Sebastian’s lips move, trapped between words. “I’m not ashamed of who I am, and I’m not going to apologize for who I was, but … I don’t want you to see the Whore of Babylon every time you look at me.”

Kurt wants to tell him that he doesn’t. It’s simply a fall back joke. The two of them have tons of them. It’s not even one of the crueler ones as far as Kurt is concerned. It’s never bothered Sebastian before …

No. Kurt can’t say that. It bothers Sebastian when Julian calls him that. It bothers him a lot.

“Who do you want to be?” Kurt asks, taking Sebastian’s hand and moving closer, as impossibly close as he can until he becomes Sebastian’s entire field of view. “Who do you want me to see when I look at you?”

Sebastian loops his arms around Kurt’s waist, threading his fingers into his belt loops. He holds him tight and leans back, lifting Kurt off the ground a couple of inches, grinning when Kurt yelps and squirms. “I want to be yours. Just … your man. Kurt Hummel’s boyfriend, and that’s all.”

“Just Kurt Hummel’s boyfriend?” Kurt repeats with a laugh when he tries to touch the ground and Sebastian refuses to put him down.

Sebastian rolls his eyes up, stares contemplatively at the flashing lights overhead while he swings Kurt back and forth, only the soles of his shoes brushing the floor. “How about … Kurt Hummel’s sexy ass boyfriend?”

Sebastian sets Kurt down, but Kurt doesn’t move from his boyfriend’s embrace. They rock there, swaying side to side, reminiscent of middle-school kids at their first official dance, even though the music being performed doesn’t support their rhythm, pounding like a short-circuiting jackhammer locked in a metal box. But Sebastian’s arms around Kurt’s waist transport him to a different plane of existence entirely, where the crowds down below and the band on stage become nothing but static.

Sebastian’s lips brush Kurt’s forehead and he wonders if Sebastian knows, the way he seems to know about everything, that forehead kisses are one of his weaknesses.

If he didn’t know before, he definitely figured it out.

“Noted,” Kurt says, tilting his chin up to capture Sebastian’s next kiss with his lips. “I’ll look into having a shirt printed up.”

***

“Okay, so … uh … that there’s Ursa Major.” Sebastian points to a series of stars up and to the left above their heads. Kurt squints in that direction, trying to make out an outline of a bear in the group Sebastian indicates. If he unfocuses his eyes, he can kind of see it. He can also see a pig, Mario’s go-kart, one of Rachel’s carousel horses, and that girl from The Grudge. “And that over there is Ursa Minor. And those three stars in a line all together, that’s Orion’s Belt. That makes this whole section of sky …” Sebastian holds up his hands, framing between his thumbs and forefingers the portion of the heavens they’ve been staring at “… The Capricorn Sky.”

Kurt turns his head from its resting place on yet another of Sebastian’s Dalton sweatshirts, folded in a square on the windshield of his Mustang. Kurt wasn’t too surprised when Sebastian suggested they lie atop his hood and stare up at the stars when the easier and more practical option would have been to put the top down. After all, Sebastian literally jumped on the hood of his father’s Aston Martin - a memory that still haunts Kurt, causes him considerable pain when it flashes behind his eyes. However, being his baby and all, Sebastian did add the caveat that if Kurt scuffs his paint, he’ll be paying to have it buffed out.

Kurt retaliated, saying he could buff it out himself no problem wearing nothing but a tank top and Sebastian’s old gym shorts, and that if Sebastian was a good boy, he’d let him watch.

Sebastian agreed to those terms, but he had a difficult time climbing up on the car after that.

“Really?” Kurt asks, partially skeptical.

“Kurt …” Sebastian looks at him, intelligent green eyes brimming with mild hurt at Kurt questioning his authority on this subject. But then his mouth splits into a grin and he laughs. “How the fuck should I know? They’re stars! They all look the same! Big balls of gas thousands of miles away that some drunk asshole on a ship hundreds of years ago claimed made pictures and I’m supposed to remember them all? This is just what guys do. They look up at the stars and identify shit.”

“I don’t!”

“Well …” Sebastian says, waving his hand in a vague gesture.

“Wait … what’s The Capricorn Sky then? Did you make that up? Because that sounds like a limited edition Starbucks drink.”

“It’s the title of a book by Colly Campbell. Not my usual cup of tea, but it was decently entertaining.”

“Damn.” Kurt shakes his head in mock disappointment. “I was impressed, too. Smart guys get me hot, you know.”

“Well in that case, I actually do know a few constellations. The popular ones … big dipper ... little dipper … Pauly Shore …” Sebastian slides closer while Kurt’s laughter fades.

“Trying to save face, Smythe?”

Sebastian’s smile is bashful, smooth around the edges. Though Sebastian’s smiles haven’t held their razor edge for a while. “Maybe a little.”

“And how do I know you’re not putting me on again?”

“Because I have an app for it.” Sebastian reaches into his pocket and pulls out his iPhone. He swipes his finger over the screen, searching through his apps until he finds the one he’s looking for. He raises his phone, focuses on the darkness, and takes a shot of the night sky. Then he shows it to Kurt.

“Wow.” Kurt moves the image with his fingertip, reading the names of constellations as the app identifies them. “Now that’s impressive.”

“Isn’t it though?”

“Five bucks says this app was developed by a twelve-year-old.”

“You’re probably right.” Sebastian selects a hyperlink in one of the sections and scrolls through the details. “Oh hey - according to this, you can’t see Orion’s Belt in the sky over North Carolina at night during the summer. Good to know.”

Kurt giggles, the fact that Sebastian wasn’t just wrong, but nowhere near the ballpark, makes his fronting even more hilarious.

Something gooshy hits Kurt’s forehead and he jerks upright. He scans the area around them in a mild panic, looking for anyone who might be lurking nearby, throwing things.

After the concert, they roads out of Raleigh had been cluttered with cars, turning the highway into a parking lot in both directions. Sebastian suggested they go for a drive, hang out for a while until the traffic died down. He took them to another one of his thinking spots high atop a hill with nothing else for miles around - no lights, no houses, and (since they had to drive over a gravelly road at 2 miles per hour to get there) no easy way down if they get ambushed by wild animals. Or vagrants.

Or homophobes.

But Kurt hears nothing, sees no one. Not a single shadow against the black. Another wet splotch hits him on the head from straight above and he glares at the sky. “What the …?”

“What’s up, babe?”

“I think …” Kurt wipes at his forehead and stares horrified at his hand in the dark “… a bird pooped on me!”

Sebastian switches on his flashlight app and aims it at Kurt’s head.

“Ah! God! Bas!” Kurt screeches, shutting his eyes and squeezing them tight “Are you trying to blind me?”

“Yup. That’s the goal. You’ve uncovered my brilliant plan. I’m trying to help you, you walnut! Now hold still.” He takes Kurt’s wrist and re-aims the light down at his hand. “I don’t think …” He leans in close, examining the wet spot. “It’s not bird shit. It’s just water. Probably from one of the trees---” Sebastian jumps, scooting back as if poked. He, too, looks threateningly up at the sky before wiping the back of his hand down his cheek. “It got me, too!”

The next drop pegs the hood of the car, darkening the paint. Those four drops are the only warning Kurt and Sebastian get before the skies open up and a deluge starts, water pummeling the ground and the car around them, the roar deafening.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit!” Sebastian grumbles, sliding down the hood, then rounding to Kurt’s side to help him. “Get your ass in the car quick! If you get drenched, I’m not letting you in!”

“Nice,” Kurt remarks, though it doesn’t go over his head that Sebastian helps him first, opening his door and ushering him inside before he races to his own door. Kurt follows Sebastian with his eyes, biting back a smile when Sebastian hits a wet patch, slides three feet, spins in a complete circle, and then, thrown off track, starts running the wrong way. He finally makes it to his side of the car, throws open the door, and ducks inside as lightning splits the sky overhead. The interior of the car glows white as they stare at one another, breathing hard. The thunder that follows rumbles for close to a full minute.

When the noise dies down, they burst out laughing all over again.

“That happened fast!” Kurt says, pointing in wordless ridicule at Sebastian, who’s twice as soaked as Kurt and looks like a drowned rat.

“Yeah, it did. Jesus Christmas!” He gathers up the edge of his shirt and rings it out onto the floor mat. “Who ordered up the tsunami?”

“Don’t say that!” Kurt presses wrinkled fingertips to Sebastian’s lips. “After everything that’s happened to us on this trip, you don’t want to tempt fate!”

“So true!”

Kurt doesn’t pull his fingers away for Sebastian’s mouth, and Sebastian starts kissing them one by one. When he reaches Kurt’s pinkie, Sebastian takes him by the wrist and presses a kiss there, too, traveling up to leave another one in his palm.

Kurt’s heart skips, every muscle in his body reacting, sparking off with tiny fires one by one by one. Water drips from the hair at the nape of Sebastian’s neck, rolls down his skin to the collar of his tee. How that isn’t absolutely driving Sebastian crazy, Kurt doesn’t know.

But Jesus, he’s sexy when he’s wet!

Kurt counts each drop as it hits the forest green fabric to keep from tearing off his own clothes and begging Sebastian to continue those kisses over every inch of his body. Not because he doesn’t want that, but because with everything on this trip, he’s trying to make this moment last. But when Sebastian sits fully up again, Kurt can’t help himself. He leans forward, bringing his mouth to Sebastian’s neck, licking up the drops with the tip of his tongue before they can make it to Sebastian’s shirt, moving up to his hairline to catch them before they even fall.

“God, Kurt,” Sebastian moans when Kurt’s tongue flicks along the sensitive skin behind his ear. “Can we …?”

“Yes,” Kurt says, reaching up to start undoing the buttons of his own shirt.

“You … you didn’t even let me finish,” Sebastian stammers, wasting no time following suit and peeling off his own wet garment. “How do you know what I’m …?”

“Were you going to ask if we can fuck?” Kurt snorts when Sebastian startles as if he’d slapped him across the face.

“Uh … possibly …”

“Then the answer is yes. Do you have any objections?”

Sebastian’s stunned expression melts into a conniving grin. “Not. A. One.”

Sebastian launches himself over the center console and into the back seat, grabbing Kurt’s arm and tugging to get him to follow. Kurt starts kissing Sebastian before he even makes it over the gear shift, kicks off his shoes and unbuttons his pants before he’s anywhere near a seat.

“Do you have a towel?” Kurt mutters when his knee hits leather.

“For what?” Sebastian mumbles against Kurt’s neck.

“For your seats.”

“We’ve already gotten the seats wet. They’ll dry. They’re leather … made from cows … and cows get wet.”

Kurt snickers. For a boy who acts so edgelord regarding his sexual prowess, Kurt quite enjoys the fact that lately he turns into a bumbling fool when he gets excited.

“That’s not … mmph … that’s not what I mean. There are ways of baptizing your seats that don’t involve water, Bas. Things that will crust in the seams … leave stains...”

“Oh. Right.” Sebastian laughs. “Okay. Just … mmph … try not to splooge all over them, will ya?”

“Don’t worry …” Kurt grunts, shifting his weight and adjusting his balance to give Sebastian easier access to his body. It’s a tight squeeze, a bit of a juggle, but once he does, once Sebastian preps them both and gets there, slides in and finds the right spot, Kurt almost loses control of his legs. “If I do,” he says, his voice breathy and needy and begging for Sebastian to move for crying out loud! “I’ll detail it for you.”

“Detail?” Sebastian repeats, his voice just as shaky, just as needy. “You know how to do that?”

“Of course I do. As it is, your baby … mmph … looks like it’s a bit overdue.”

“Bite … your … tongue,” Sebastian snaps, punctuating each word with a particularly forceful thrust. Kurt gasps as Sebastian adopts a slow rhythm, shuts his eyes to fully absorb the sublime pull of it. “I take excellent care of my baby.”

And there he goes again, making another remark that can be taken two ways.

“You have leather seats. They need going over with a horse hair brush … a rub down with Maguiar’s and a microfiber towel … polish your trim with some Aerospace Protectant …” Kurt’s voice begins to fade, lost in the ebb and flow of Sebastian’s body working into his own. “A-and when this vacation is over, I’m dying to hit those wheels with some non-acid cleaner and a bottle of tire shine. I’ll make it … make it look just like … black glass …”

“Oh God …” Sebastian’s body shudders, the hand that had reached around and found Kurt’s cock going still before it began. “That’s … that’s it. I just came.”

Kurt’s face snaps back over his shoulder, desperate to check if Sebastian is lying. Either he’s an incredible actor or no, he’s not. “What!?”

“I’m … I’m done,” Sebastian says with an embarrassed chuckle.

“You have to be joking! Please, tell me you’re joking!”

“It’s your own fault. You shouldn’t talk cars around me.”

“But you don’t know anything about cars!”

“True, but the way you sound when you talk shop … oof!” Sebastian lowers his forehead to the curve of Kurt’s spine and shivers. “It’s really erotic.”

“OhmyGod!” Kurt groans. “Sebastian! You ass---!”

“All right, all right. Hold your horses.” Sebastian rolls gingerly to one side. Holding Kurt against his body, he takes him with him, balancing to lie down carefully on the back seat while staying buried inside his boyfriend. “I guess I can go a little longer.”

“How very gracious of you,” Kurt growls, allowing himself to be manipulated, lifted and carried like a half-naked rag doll. Sebastian settles his rear into his seat, scoots down a hair with his back against the inner panel, then positions Kurt in his lap. The change in angle and in depth has Kurt seeing stars, brighter and more brilliant than the ones outside.

It’s not the easiest position in the world for Kurt to move in, but he suspects Sebastian has something else planned.

“What do you want me to do?” Kurt asks, moaning when Sebastian slides both hands down his body to his groin - one wrapping around Kurt’s cock, the other reaching further down to caress his balls.

“Just stay like this and let me touch you.” Sebastian moves both hands in different maddening directions. Kurt reclines against him, and Sebastian starts to buck up slowly. “There you go. How’s that? Do you like that?”

“Y-yes,” Kurt replies, limp in Sebastian’s arms, shuddering with each roll of his hips, each pass of his hand.

“What do you like about it?” Sebastian presses with kisses to Kurt’s temple.

“I like lying on you like this. Being close to you …” This isn’t dirty talk. It’s conversation. Sebastian wants to know how he makes Kurt feel. They could have this conversation anytime, but doing it now, in the midst of making love, feels intensely intimate. Extremely sensual. “I like feeling your heart beat against my back, your skin against mine, and your hands ...” Kurt swallows hard.

“What about my hands?”

“They’re just so … sure. So talented. So … so … mmm fucking good at this …”

Sebastian presses more kisses and a smile to Kurt’s skin. “Anything else?”

“We’re not rushing. There’s no race to the end. Oh God …” Kurt’s legs trembles when Sebastian’s hand on his cock speeds up, but the one on his balls slows down. “I want to stay like this, just like this, and listen to the rain. How long do you think we can stay this way?”

“How long would you like to stay this way?” Sebastian asks. There’s a whine in it. He may be the one in the lead, but he’s not necessarily in control. He’s becoming fully hard again, but he’s oversensitive. But he fights against that to give this to Kurt.

To satisfy someone other than himself.

“Forever? At least till morning. Can we watch the sun rise this way?”

“I’ll do my best. But there doesn’t only have to be a round one. I can make you cum … let you have a breather … then start all over again … keep going … and going … and going …”

Kurt thinks about being locked against Sebastian’s body with his boyfriend inside him, all over him, caressing him, kissing him, making him cum all night long. “That’s … good to know,” he whimpers.

Sebastian can’t competently kiss Kurt on the mouth in this position, which is the only thing Kurt doesn’t like about it. But Kurt will rectify that later. Watching the rain fall outside the window while Sebastian makes love to him reminds him of his fantasy from before - of being in a hotel room, making love in front of a window with the curtains open.

That would have been fun, but this is way better.

He feels like he’s floating, being carried on a tide, the wind and the rain rocking the car adding to his sensation of weightlessness in Sebastian’s arms.

Sebastian changes speed again, changes direction, bucks up harder and faster at odd intervals, then stops to let Kurt simmer. “Do you like that, baby?” he whispers in a broken voice as Kurt’s legs and arms become restless, hands grabbing for whatever they can touch and hold, reaching behind to thread into Sebastian’s hair and gently tug. “Do want me to keep doing that?”

“Yes … please, yes …” The change in pet names from babe to baby flips switches inside Kurt’s brain, lighting him up from the inside like the forks of electricity dividing the sky. Sebastian’s thrusts remain shallow but they pick up in pace, and his hand, traveling leisurely from the base of Kurt’s cock to the head, matches it. Kurt tries to move his hips, help Sebastian out, but that’s met by Sebastian’s hands stopping in their tracks.

“Uh-uh-uh. None of that,” Sebastian teases. “I like you at my mercy.”

“Sebastian …” Kurt says, a plea and a warning all at once.

“Now you stay still,” Sebastian says into Kurt’s shoulder, his hot breath tickling Kurt’s skin, “and I’ll give you what you want.”

Kurt swallows hard, lies still, but that’s not his first instinct. His first instinct is to argue, to say he’d like to be an active participant in this act of love that they’re sharing thank you very much! But there’s nothing wrong with taking every once in a while without needing to give.

Or being helpless with someone you love.

Good things do come to those who wait, and Sebastian had said that Kurt was a good thing.

Sebastian starts up again when Kurt gives him no indication that he’s going to move, going as excrutiatingly slow as possible to begin with, probably to put Kurt in his place. Kurt clears his mind, lets the frustration in his body take a sidebar as he concentrates on the rain. The floating sensation comes back as the wind picks up, seeming to mirror Sebastian’s movements. Or maybe Sebastian is the one doing the mirroring, linking his stroking, his thrusting to the rhythm of the weather.

Sebastian is the first to signal how close he is to cumming by moaning Kurt’s name.

“Kurt … oh, God, Kurt … you feel amazing, Kurt …”

“Sebastian,” Kurt murmurs, taking advantage of the only body part he’s apparently allowed to move. “Sebastian …”

“Yes, Kurt …” Sebastian moans, voice changing, not entirely his own but an amalgam of what he’s doing, who he is when he’s around Kurt. “Say my name again. Please …”

“Sebastian … Sebastian …” Kurt chants, first out of request, but then over and over until Sebastian’s name doesn’t sound like a word anymore. But it’s not just a word. It’s the word, the only one he can think of, one he starts crying as his fighting not to move makes him cum harder than he ever has before. And when he’s done cumming hot over Sebastian’s hand, he keeps saying it, his throat dry with it until it is literally the last word on his lips.

“There,” Sebastian pants, shivering bodily as what’s left of his second orgasm evaporates into Kurt’s body. “I hope that made up for me finishing early.”

Kurt smirks. “It was … acceptable.”

“Acceptable, huh?” Sebastian says, and Kurt can hear him smirking, too.

“Yup.”

“A-ha. Well, I know me,” he says, retrieving his wet tee from the floor to clean them both up with, “and I’m excellent.”

“If you say so.”

“How do you feel?” Sebastian asks in a softer, less teasing tone, one that sends the liquid warmth of a long, relaxing orgasm pooling in Kurt’s stomach shooting out to the rest of his body.

“I feel …” Kurt rolls his head to look up over his shoulder at Sebastian “… radiant.”

Sebastian drops his head, giggles into Kurt’s neck. “Jesus Christmas, Kurt! We’re not in a Jane Austen novel! You could use a normal word like good … excellent … bitchin’.”

Kurt snorts. “Bitchin’?”

“It’s a word!” Sebastian giggles again, offering up no excuses for his horrendous vocabulary.

“I’m sure it is. That doesn’t mean we should use it,” Kurt counters, which makes Sebastian giggle more. Kurt removes himself from his boyfriend’s flaccid, overworked cock, rolling onto his side to face him. “Sebastian …”

“Yes?”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Go for it.”

“Why me?” Kurt asks, inching closer, lips ghosting Sebastian’s mouth, enticing him to answer.

“What do you mean?” Sebastian asks, rising to the bait of a kiss … then another …

“I mean, of all the boys you could have chosen for your ruse, why me?”

Sebastian stops kissing Kurt, which Kurt had been trying to avoid. Sebastian rolls his head on his shoulders and huffs into the air, as if this question is beneath him. Or so far behind them, his motives don’t matter. “I told you. My dad …”

“I know what you said,” Kurt interrupts gently, sliding down Sebastian’s body to rest his head on his shoulder. This may not be the time to ask, but he can’t shake what Charlotte said … He chose you for a reason. So why won’t Sebastian tell him what that reason is? “But I’ve always found that a little difficult to swallow. How in the world was I the first person that came to mind? You go to Dalton Academy. There has to be tons of boys from prestigious families with more impressive pedigrees than me. Boys that you could stand better, that you wouldn’t have to fight …”

“Fighting with you is half the fun,” Sebastian says, clicking his tongue.

Kurt gazes at him, eyes imploring. “Tell me the truth, Sebastian? Please?”

Sebastian sighs, fingers fidgeting, tapping against Kurt’s spine. Like he’s playing a piano, Kurt thinks for a second time this trip till he it dawns on him. No. Like a violin.

“You’re right. There’re a lot of boys at Dalton from so-called prestigious families, with money and connections and yada yada yada. Boys who’ve been after me since I enrolled in school, who watch me everywhere I go with disgusting moon eyes. Boys who would do anything I ask them to with the snap of my fingers.” Sebastian stops tapping, his fingertips moving to Kurt’s cheek, paving feather light paths down his skin. “A lot of polite, vanilla, cookie-cutter Dalton boys. But there’s only one Kurt Hummel.”

Kurt sighs, part frustration, part flattery. “Are you ever going to explain it to me?”

“Maybe.” Sebastian plants a kiss on Kurt’s forehead, his lips coming to rest there. “I just … need to decide how.”

“You could always start at the beginning? Stop when you reach the end?”

Sebastian rolls his eyes and kisses Kurt again. “Where’s the fun in that?”

#acitw #acitw au #kurtbastian #sebkurt #sekurt

[glitterquadricorn]

I Hate You, I Love You - Pietro Maximoff (6/7)

Summary: The reader likes Pietro a lot, but is painfully shy and gets real awkward around him. She finally works up the courage to tell him that she has feelings for him, but discovers that he has been seeing a new woman that’s on the avengers. Pairing: Pietro Maximoff x Plus Sized!reader Word Count: 909 Warning(s): brainwashing(???), gun(s), violence, blood, choking, character death, death/murder, etc

A/N: there’s one more part to this series! I really loved writing this series, and I hoped you enjoyed reading it. I plan on taking a few days off before starting my new series, which I do have picked out so keep an eye out for that. I have to much planned from now until Christmas!

Phil (Who has been here before), knew his way around the building like the back of his hand. His team on other hand has not. His team was in complete awe of the avengers tower. They were in the presence of the avengers, and they couldn’t believe it. 

As Phil walked in the meeting room, he sees Steve. “Phil,” Steve paused. “I’d say it’s nice to see you again, but...” 

“Right... Let’s get started shall we?” Phil says, bringing up Francis Smyth’s picture on the screen. “We were alerted by the Canadian government that this man was selling guns and ammunition illegally, and they asked for assistance. We were more than willing, but we’ve had problems with him before.”

“How so,” Steve asked. 

“We busted him and several others on several different occasions on buying guns and ammunition.”

“Assuming those guns and ammunition are for Hydra?” Natasha added. 

“Correct,” Phil replied. “They believe that they’ll be used to attack something, or someone.”

“That someone being us,” Sam stated.

“If this really is the work of Hydra, they’ll use y/n to get to me,” Bucky was so sure of this. He didn’t want to go back to Hydra, but he did not want you to suffer and go through all that pain. He knew that no one deserves to go through what he went through.

“They won’t get you Buck. If they want you, they’ll have to go through me,” Steve placed his hand on his friends shoulder, reassuring him. 

“They’ll have to get through all of us,” Mack stepped forward. Everyone loved you, and wanted you home safely. 

“So what’s the plan cap?” Sam asked. Steve gazed around the room, carefully looking at everyone. 

“We get y/n home,”

You woke to someone, or something kicking your bed. Opening your eyes, you see a tall man with black hair standing over you.

“Good, you’re awake,”

‘Your name is y/n! Don’t forget! They’ll make you forget!’ Your thoughts told you. ‘They’re making you into a monster.’

“Who are you? Why am I here? Where am I?” You asked, but didn’t get any answer.

“That’s none of your concern Wintress,” He paused, “You’ll follow my orders, and do what I say at all times.”

“And what if I don’t?”

This man started to call off words in a language you didn’t understand (Sehnsucht, Ardor, Dreizehn, Warm, Maske, Ketten, Kaninchen, Glas, Grenze Pendel). With each word, the pain became more and more nauseating. Your mind started to cloud over, and a new you took over.

“Ready to comply,” Your voice was cold and lifeless. 

“We need our asset, and your partner, The Winter Soldier back. With him back, hydra will be powerful as ever, and we will finally put an end to Shield. And if anyone gets in your way, kill them.”

The light in the room went out, and was replaced with red ones. Soon after that, the alarm went off. 

“The avengers... they’re here,” The man tossed you a gun, and started to give you instructions all while pulling out a picture. “This man... Yeah, he is the man we need back in our possession. He is the Winter Soldier. NOW GO!”

With that, you left room. You slowly crept down the hall, until you came across a blonde woman. The mission was to get the winter soldier back, and you kill anyone in your path. And it was a real shame because she was beautiful.

“Guys, I found her. We’re down in the basement,” The blonde-haired woman says, making her way towards you. She was not slowing down, and neither were you. She tried throwing a punch, but you stepped back and dodged it. She goes to throw another punch, but you grab her fist. In return, you head butt her, sending her to the floor. She put her hand to her nose and sees blood. 

“My name is Raven! And your name is y/n,” She shouted at you. When she said her name, it set something off in your brain. All though they were blurry and vague, you remembered her. However, you still had a mission to carry out. 

“Who the hell is y/n?” You were about to shoot and kill her, but she suddenly sprung herself off the floor and speared you into a wall, causing you to drop the gun. 

“YOU KNOW ME!” She screamed, kneeing you gut. You could tell she was getting tired. It was time to finish her off, and move on. Pushing her back, you charged towards her, grabbing her throat.

The life of her was slowly draining. She looked at you, and said, “I know you’re in there somewhere y/n and I want you to know that I’m so sorry. I only bullied you because I was jealous of what you and Pietro had. I hope one day that you can find it in your heart to forgive me...” She stops struggling, letting you know you have successfully killed her. 

“Whoa! You take steroids or something y/n?” You turned to see a man in a red and gold suit. 

“That’s NOT my name!” You roared. You shot at this man, only for the bullets to bounce off. 

“Guys, initiate operation saver,” You stopped shooting out of confusion. Then something pricks your neck. Pulling it out, you noticed it was a syrgine, and whatever was in it, wasn't there. Your vision blurred, eyes getting droopy, you stepped forward only to be collapse.

I wanted to give a huge thank you to @sub013 for the trigger words. I figured that since Hydra is technically german, I would put them in german. Also note, I did use google translate, so translating yearning to german and then back to English kept coming back as longing.

Yearning = Sehnsucht

Ardor = Ardor

Thirteen= Dreizehn

Warm = Warm

Mask = Maske

Chains = Ketten

Rabbit = Kaninchen

Glass = Glas

Border = Grenze

Pendulum= Pendel

Yearning + Ardor- Reader wants to be with Pietro

Thirteen- The # for death, since the readers suicidal

Warm- Goes with ardor, the readers want for Pietro

Mask- The reader hides the fact that they were harming themselves

Chains- The reader is shy + the “chains” hold them back

Rabbit- Shy animals

Glass- The reader seems fragile

Border- The reader is deciding if they still love Pietro

Pendulum- The reader goes from confident to shy

And one more thing, go follow @samsplaything. She’s an absolute doll! 

Tagging:

@letsgetfuckingsuperwholocked @m-a-t-91 @punkdoor @chocolatemonkeyrainbows @itsjusthaawo @dancerwriter @trashimaginezblog @iamwarrenspeace @molethemollie @secretsandlove81199 @thekayceenicole @snapeofyou @sam-girl-forever @hiding-in-the-backgroundx-x @rosietheturtle @geeksareunique @tinycyberhacker @calicokitkat @mackenzieebug @flubbernuggets @toniinhere @amethyst09 @somniare-spiritus @cookiecakeslive @ucy161 @perkypenguinperks​​​​​​​​​​​​​

those in bold don’t work anymore. 

I DO PERMANENT TAGGING!!!

#pietro maximoff #pietro maximoff x reader #pietro maximoff imagine #pietro maximoff x plus sized reader #Maximoff #imagine #imagines #marvel imagine #marvel x reader #marvel x plus size reader #x reader #come ready my stuff #trust me its good #but then again i'm biased as fuck

[artdjgblog]

​Innerview: Pete Dulin / Present Magazine​

January 2007

Art & Photo: DJG

Note: Interview for a Kansas City, MO art and culture blog.​

0​1) How long have you been designing posters and CD packaging/artwork?

If I were to say I’ve been designing this stuff since Mom gave birth, well you might think me to be pompus, new agey and bit queer. However, in the past few years I’ve come to the conclusion that everything I’ve experienced has brought me to this point. Information has been at a constant and consistently carried in the backpack(s). Though, it’s more the matter of channeling that. I’ve always been making things. To put things into a more professional, or “text book” answer, I’m in the sixth year developing a bad back of my own accord. And tack on another four and a half of formal training before that. In which two of those I was making things for people on the side. So, really about 7 or 8 years in a design sense, but only offically five under my DJG belt. So, I’m still a youngster. But, I feel design years add up like dog years. ​0​2) How would you describe your approach or design aesthetic? With certain I have my influences and I’ve had formal training. However, the majority of the time is spent not thinking, rather just doing. And I’m not trying to push athletic shoes. Each day my head gets up different. I am always hungry and eat food the same way. I always put my pants on the same way. I lock the door the same way. I walk the same way. That stuff is all automatic. It’s my head that differs. As the mush upstairs is assembling for the day, my thinking and process(es) tends to come different, though it can all be intuitive to me at the same time. True, somedays I’m not in any shape to win the pennant, nor even give a care about art or design. Yes, I do crank out the work by just doing…and my portfolio is always eating. But, I still feel I’m the laziest guy in my woom, even on a good day. I don’t really consider myself an artist or a designer. I just enjoy the act of making those things but there are moments I just don’t feel like it. When design isn’t doing “it” for me, I read or write or watch things. If I’m not doing anything, I have to be doing something. And I’ve quit the whole notion of actually being something other than just myself. And my self is not always in the mood for me. And I don’t think about a design being good enough to measure-up or anything silly like that. It just has to feel right and true within me. I can tell when something feels forced and without life. For me, the work has to be breathing and has to say something. Now, whatever it conversates to the viewer/audience is all up in the air. It’s always a hoot to hear what others think. Back on the subject of others’ talk of an aesthetic. This is one of the few times I truely think about how I’m doing things. I then start overthinking and that can be a dangerous place. People come to me all the time and say things like, “Oh, you are really great at this and are such a skillfull artisan of the such ‘n’ such…(more nonsense fluff ensues).” This is a complement I suppose, but I tend to take it as a way of them saying that it’s all coming to easy for me. I am my only competition so this is when I start to push myself a bit harder. I’ve got to stay ahead of myself. I like the silly idea of someone doing their best work every day. I don’t know how long I’ll be around, but I hope I’m always doing my best work from my perspective. ​0​3) Historically, society has shifted from the Age of Mechanical Reproduction since the advent of the printing press to the Age of Digital Reproduction. Why is it still important to make a man-made mark on something seemingly short-lived as a band flyer or poster? In taking foundation courses during my first year of formal education we did not use computers. Everything was very basic, hands-on cutting and pasting and drawing fundamentals of design. My friends were complaining about how they couldn’t wait to get on the computer. Personally, I was so naive and so in love with making things by hand (ever since I could remember working my fingertips as a child) that the idea of designing with a computer was not in my vocabulary. I stated to my friends how I was going to take the route of design that didn’t include the aid of computers. They simply laughed at my lunacy. Being that it was the late ‘90s, it was inevitable that we’d be using computers. What’s funny now is that for some odd reason I’ve been able to succeed a bit working with my hands and most of the people I went to school with tire of staring at their computer screen day jobs. I definately appreciate a computer and I use one. But, I think of it only as a tool. I use it as a way to ease production a bit and of course it can be a time saver for layout and print. The problem with computers, the internet and desktop publishing gear is that anybody can be a designer. It’s definately eased things I suppose, but we’ve got people cranking out the most obtrusive visual clutter. I don’t aim to sound arrogant. It’s just that everybody thinks they know what they are doing. Everybody wants the cliche in high-gloss makeup, filled to the brim and in suffocation galore. Why not? We over-consume everything else. It’s just sad to me. I even see trained designers doing it. And most everything just feels so fake and soulless. When I first saw those early cave paintings in grade school text books, something about those expressions just delighted me and it felt right and true. And now when I see graffiti on the wall or a shopping list or letter I just think about the heart and energy behind it all. One of the best things that ever happened to me (with design) is when my computer crashed about five years back and I lost the ability to use 2,000 some fonts. When I had them, I tried to use them appropriately and sparingly. But, they were nothing but a crutch to me. Rarely do I use computer fonts now. If I do there better be a reason or a restraint in my time. I just found it important to really speak honestly with my work. Each day is different and so is my voice and thought. Hand scrawls, handmade type and thumbprints bring forth the idea of a human identity and feels like thought and life was put into the expression. True, if we had the ability to actually see people’s verbal speaking expression there are some voices that would be just plain dull and in the same ol’ font and face over and over. And I suppose at times that would be appropriate. But, just think about the endless images bouncing from each other if everybody’s words, language, expression, feelings and breath stuck around in a clear visual form and of their own signature. That would be incredible. But, I’m sure it would do more harm than good. But, it would definately be something else for people to complain about so then there would be even more imagery because of it! The great artist Saul Steinberg communicated language as marks of visual expression in this way in much of his work. A poster to me is exciting because of the fact that it is short-lived, yet it can be very in-your-face and of the moment. A good poster to me is like a big zit. And a good one will pop and speak all over…let you know that it’s there. It boggles me when people don’t take advantage of this idea. It just seems like people push a duplicator button and paint with boringness and fluorescents over and over. It’s very zombie. (though, zombies could probably make more creative things). In this digital age of people getting information via the web and myspace and cell phones and music players and all that garbage, it’s even more important to get them to focus at things again. I’m all for the internet, but I feel hardly anybody under the age of 35 truely looks at anything in actual form anymore for more than 2 seconds. I am guilty of this too. And this possibly stems from perception of wanting everything bigger, better, faster and right now. These things that are supposed to make our lives easier, yet fill life to the brim and we’re still wondering where our time went. So, it does mean a lot to me when people actually stop and look and think…maybe come back to it again. It’s warming to me when something measley like a concert poster can get somebody to stop their busy life and take notice in a notice. Maybe even get a tickle out of it and a smile in their heart to make their day…maybe even take it home for their own wall. That just means the world. ​0​4) Do you have particular influences in art/design? I used to think you had to have a little man with flash cards or answers written in undershorts for quick draws whenever approached with this question. Anymore I don’t care about impressing people. I touched before on my influence of just existing and growing. I don’t understand it when people find or ape a “style” and milk that into retirement (unless it’s a true and pure speciality like most folk artists, Edward Gorey or Jean-Michel Basquiat). Gosh, I would cut off my hands as opposed to making the same thing everyday until I die. But, I would also do the same to be able to draw or paint like some people. What it is that I do is not something I punch a time card for, nor pound a keyboard to compute my solutions. It is a way of life and life is always changing. Silly, but the only way to stop it from my body is to spill my skull. And then have the bums burn my thumb prints to keep warm at night. I’m blessed to have been raised in a rural environment with a bit of old-fashioned and hands-on approach to things. I wanted so badly to get out of that environment when I was coming of high school age. Now, I really appreciate this aspect of my life. Don’t begin to ask me how I reached into the design grab bag and pulled out this funny-lookin’ rabbit i’m wiggling on. It just kind of happened. Most of it belongs to my always active imagination and having many acres to romp. There wasn’t really a drain plug on what I could do or absorb. Every day my siblings and I were into something new and building our own altered universe from the inspiration of television, movies, tractor pulls, rodeos, demolition dirbies, state fairs…you name it. A great aspect of all of this is that I never really shed any of it. If you could devise a way for me to go back into my time as an eleven-year-old, you bet I would. I feel so many shear that skin as they reach puberty and young adulthood. Even in my late teens when everybody was out dating and all that nonsense, I made myself go to my room and draw and make things. Shoot, I was still building tree houses and playing war (I still do at times). I am constantly fumbling back for it all. I’ve still got most of my childhood things all around me here in my basement club house. I don’t throw anything away. Everytime I go home another bag or two is brought back. The older I get the more I believe my streak stems a lot from my Grandmother on my Dad’s side. I still have many of the things she’s made by hand: fridge magnets, cat head pillow, blankets, book bag. As well as carry the images of wearing bread bags on my feet to school, creating toys out of thread spools, baking and cooking all the time, building forts in the living room, making pretty ladies out of flowers and especially sporting my beloved dead animal backpack (denim with plastic lining for easy blood clean-up). These things sound strange to others, but my world is built from them. She was constantly making or doing (as most of her generation did). I’m a big fan. It’s sad to me as nobody really just makes things anymore for the heck of it. And it’s really sad as she sits and bides her time in the nursing home, limited in her making and doing. I hope my engine breaks from making and doing before I get put in that point. If not, take me to the back forty and shoot me rotten. If somebody were to ask me to place my work in some sort of design bracket…well, I suppose it lands somewhere in the land of Henryk Tomaszewski meets Saul Steinberg meets Lester Beall meets Saul Bass meets Push Pin meets Ray Johnson meets Art Chantry meets Jim Henson meets Folk Art meets garbage in the street…or something like that. It’s really hard to answer that question. Anyway, I get bored with the look of a lot of current design and fashions. Though, there are a few great designers my age coming out of the woods more and more…doing fresh things and in creative ways. I think it stems from growing up in a time of the media of television, film, video games, computers, animation, graphic novels and just the overall mass consumerism of culture and language. And all of these things shaking hands with the idea of pushing boudaries and smothered with a glaze of technology. But, then again every generation is a little bit more ahead of the last…I guess to some degree. I love and appreciate my upbringing and even my access to the culture now. Still, I do wish sometimes I could have lived and designed some fourty, fifty or sixty years back. Though, I’m sure I’d still be in some basement, garnering enjoyment making things the way I want to make them. ​0​5) Does your work relate to the subject matter? For example, do you consciously try to create artwork that suits a band’s music or image? I think some people in the music industry don’t know how to take my work. For one, I feel most of the so-called scene takes itself way too seriously. It’s funny to me, all this playing dress-up and rock star…and especially when it extends into the late twenties and thirties. But, I do suppose some people were just born to be stars. My work isn’t for every person. But, there are a few out there who for some odd reason “get” it and it’s all very flattering of their attraction. It’s even spreading across the country and into other parts of the world. I don’t aim for cool points. I take it serious only to the point of being non-serious. However, when designing it’s important to be held accountable with your client, city, audience, environment, venue, peers and yourself. And I have morals with the world design community, art and design history and with myself. When it comes to marrying my work to a certain band’s music or image…well, what do I have to base on for an image? I have nothing but other designer’s interpretations of where to categorize the idea of what/how a sound or scene should register as. I have an appreciation for the past and present, but I really find it odd when somebody comes to a designer and says they want to play look-alike-dress-up to something already in existence. True, nothing is original anymore and I’m not saying that I’m anything special. Rather, I feel personality helps white wash things a bit and a lot of design these days lacks it (especially in the music industry). These days you can throw a rock and hit many kids making things (music and art). But a large chunk of it seems to be lacking proper development and form…and life. You can’t pick somebody else’s nose and expect to smear those boogers for yourself. You’ve got to earn them. You’ve got to get dirty along the way and find a way to bark, have fun, be yourself and just do things to do them…and then have Mom hose you off at the back door. ​0​6) Pick one of your favorite creations. What do you like best about its elements? First of all, my designs to me are like multiple babies to a mother. Yes, some may look more handsome and pretty and say all the right things and in the right way. Some may pay their own bills and some may be a pain in the rear. Each one is a favorite to me at the time of their creation and birth and in memory to the place that I was at the time of conception. You can point at every 300 and some poster I’ve made and it has a name, place and means something to me. If you said for me to create something for you like one I did back in 2001, well I couldn’t. It was in and of it’s place in my time. It won the race for that given moment. Shoot, sometimes I can’t even work within the same manner fifteen minutes ago. One creation that comes to mind for this question is a package design and identity for The Elevator Division. It’s one that I can call a significant and critical moment in my design sensibility. It’s one that garnered lots of attention and even though I plan to always be making my best work, the “Whatever Makes You Happy” EP CD will always be in my all-time top ten. I came up with the insane idea of cutting, spray painting imagery and making elaborate inserts for 250 packages (I vowed I’d never do it again, but funny how I work…and how I nearly exhausted my tank a month ago repeating this ridiculous process for another CD project). Anyway, so here I am the night before making all of these things and I end up changing my concept at the last minute. Thankfully, it still fit the real estate of the cardboard package, though It required spraying each cover three times as opposed to once. So, production time was tripled and time was not on my side but the design I felt was…and it worked and said a thousand time more than the original. What I had was an attention grabbing image of a hand shooting one of it’s fingers guised as a missle. The idea of shooting off one’s options…or, whatever makes you happy. It worked. It popped. It spoke exactly what the title and the band were speaking of in the music with relationships and with the political climate of war and post-terrorism America . And it came to me the night before (Anyway, I’m boring you with all that designer yap). So, my excitement of the new imagery, fueled my creation of 250 packages in less than a 48 hour period (and let’s not forget to mention i was working a day job). I was really smart and thought it was an awesome idea to spray paint in a basement with no ventilation. At the end of my final hour I erupted from the fumes and haze, with red, white and black paint caked to my hands and coming from my mouth and nose. I flung open the front door of the house as lightning crackled to find a hard rain falling. I was Noah and my boat was taking off…or landed, based on perspective of the event. In revival I jumped and slid head first down the steep grassy embankment and into the dirty, flooded street. I was washed clean. Sadly the design was so effective that it sold-out within a couple of shows and I had to do it all over again. But, the next round was adapted to a standard jewel case. ​0​7) What’s essential on a poster or flyer to grab a viewer’s attention in mere seconds? How does form and function come into play? I’ve touched upon this a wee bit in an earlier question. People tend to have short attention spans and walk with their heads down…and/or simply don’t look at things. Because of this a design has really got to pop, have immediacy and definately needs to say something. It’s funny because people have told me things like, “That is probably your worst poster.” It’s rare for people to be so honest in this way, but I love it when they are so passionate about it (and I love it when they say probably because that means they’ve really put some thought into it and have had discussions with themselves about it in comparable reason with my past efforts and wasted time wrestling with it). But, for some reason that poster really must have spoken to them to have so much feel for it. Normally these are the posters that end up being published and placed in traveling exhibitions. It’s really funny to me. At the time of creation I’m not trying to piss on anybody nor try to make something groundbreaking or award-winning. I just feel like doing things the way I do them in that moment and I feel I make them work. Form and function is an important application for design. Here is another thing I’ve already mentioned…I feel so many kids see something cool and just start cranking out these cool-lookin’ forms…hand-picking the way their things will look. There is a major lack of growth in most art-music these days…even outside of these areas…even just in someone’s persona. I’m not saying you can’t have influences, everybody’s got them and everything’s been done before and done better. I just long for things that speak of their own island. It’s like on “Jurassic Park”. You can’t go in and recreate the notion of copying dinosaurs for yourself. You can only get away with that for so long. Anyway, I also spoke about designs grabbing attention by way of having human elements and a definate soul behind them. I’ve come to compare a poster to a pop song. Sure they’ve been done a thousand times before…but, you can tell the ones that have a true sense of personality and heart to them. There is so much dead-beat fluff out there that can’t even be compared to something that’s alive…something that knows the rules but takes them and reassembles them to their own architecture. It’s very evident in music especially. For instance two bands can play on separate late night talk shows within minutes of each other. Both write pop songs. One speaks freshness and purity, even looks sincere, despite being just a pop band with another pop song. The other feels like actors assembled to play a song somebody else penned for an instant “fat wallet”. It just feels too perfect and calculated…and lifeless. Not everybody cares about this or sees this. It is subjective to a certain degree, but there is a true difference. ​0​8) In your opinion, are flyers and posters a low-brow form of art? People have really started holding posters in higher regard the past five or more years. Poster making is hotter than ever and it really hit a certain peak a couple years ago. The work is spreading farther than just within its respected cities. The artists are becoming just as popular as their art.A poster these days is living beyond it’s short life on the street, on a corkboard or at the venue. People are excited about it. Exhibitions, magazines, websites, books and design annuals celebrate the scene. Collectors and fans of art and music are snatching them up. True, the art of the poster has been around for a long time (and I’ll just reflect on it from my vantage point at the moment). But, I feel that it’s now (band posters in particular) really being taking seriously in the art world. At one time (and in some cases and by some people, still are) posters and flyers were being seen as litter and visual clutter. We can’t help but owe a lot of the commotion to modern pioneers like Art Chantry. He basically single-handily changed the way of the poster back in the ‘70s and ‘80s with experiments, lavish production methods and design aesthetics. He is considered a master artist to the trade and even in the arts in general. Shoot, seeing him lecture in college six years ago helped me decide to take that leap onto the starving artist limb-limbo, doing my own thing as opposed to working for another man. I spoke briefly to him after that lecture and told about my interest in independent music design. He was honest and said, “Expect to starve…several times over.” And I have. I still need to tell him that…and tell him thank you. Though, many poster artists these days no longer have to starve. It’s being taken so seriously and the quality of art is held so high that some can do it for full-time income…and do it rather successfully. A lot of them have full-fledged design studios and cranking out more than just posters. And there are a lot of guys like me with day jobs and coming home to moonlight out of basements and back bedrooms. For myself, I kind of hit the scene at the right time when it was really starting to explode..even though I didn’t really know what I was doing, other than just “doing”. I feel it defin​i​tely takes a certain mindset and you’ve got to make some sacrifices. I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone, but with poster art, anyone can do it…it’s easy to do and with limited resources. And then you’ve got the excitement of people bringing back almost deceased production techniques like the letter press. My only rant right now with poster art is that though the quality of work looks great, I feel there is a defin​i​te cohesive “look” and style to a lot of it right now. There are a few doing their own thing, but a lot of it is starting to look the same and almost becoming too easy and formulated for some. This is where I give my two cents of brain fart. What’s great about a poster is it’s actual short-lived life on the street. It makes all the more reason to try new things and really push the art form and most importantly gives reason to just be yourself. If it fails it will be gone or in the gutter within weeks and another will take its place. -djg

#innerviews

[sevensity]

RFA/Minor Trio and MC as the World’s Greatest Detective

So originally I wrote this for @makosharkies but then Tumblr just tossed it  away why u play me like dis?

This is written for a super detective who hides behind a fake name, like L aka Ryuzaki aka best sad alien man boy of all time. She chooses to confide her secret to the RFA because???? The power of friendship prevails all!!!11

  YOOᔕᑌᑎG:

As soon as you tell him your alias, he’s like wait what?

You mean that super famous detective who’s been solving decade-long cases?

Is worried that being the world’s greatest detective means you’ll somehow get your hands on his browser history so he has a mini heart-attack

But other than that, is super excited to try out your skills, so he’ll often come up to you and ask all sorts of questions that you have to guess i.e “MC what did I eat for supper last night?” “Fettuccini Alfredo and a Caesar salad.” “Oh my god! You really are a genius!” “Yoosung pls we had dinner together.”

Anyways, you answer all his questions right

Yoosung’s admiration level is over 9000 (wow I’m so funny)

He starts reading mystery novels, has difficulty understanding how the crimes happened and how they were solved, but the boy is trying okay

Falls in love with Agatha Christie, and gushes to you about how intricate the murders are, and how cool Monsieur Poirot is, and you just patiently listen to him go on and on because gosh darn the boy is cute

But of course keeps reminding you that you’re the most amazing of all

Yoosung gets a Sherlock hat and parades around his apartment wearing it, plus it’s honestly the best thing to witness cuz the ear flaps bounce up and down as he runs around you, making him look like an actual puppy

Yoosung come here I want to pet you forever

  ᒍᑌᗰIᑎ:

To be honest the world’s greatest detective paired up with a corporate giant is an absolutely terrifying combination in the business world

You can investigate the dark secrets of his competition and expose all of their back deals, thus ruining their reputation and standing

Likewise, any sabotage attempts are quickly ended in you revealing the culprits, leading to their arrest, so soon nobody bothers to try and take Jumin down anymore because they already know the outcome

His influence and power has doubled, maybe even tripled, and it’s all thanks to you

But still, he keeps reminding you not to push yourself, and you keep reminding him that solving things is part of your job and that it’s a lot of fun

When he sees you trying to solve an actual, difficult case though, he can only stand back and just watch in amazement as the person he loves gives all the right answers to mysteries that befuddled the world for ages

Tbh being a detective sounds really cool but my observation skills are limited to “This wall pattern is missing a stripe,” and  "My right boob is 0.6cm higher than my left one,” and then thinking about it all day long 

  ᘔEᑎ:

“Babe, if you’re the best detective in the world, can you determine the cause of my godly looks?”

Zen n o

It’s cool because whenever he receives hate mail, or anti fans do something to cause him trouble, you’ll swoop in like a midnight vigilante and find the culprit in a heartbeat

Zen’s all like wait aren’t I supposed to protect you but honestly he loves knowing that you’re basically his personal super hero

Low key wants you to dress up as a superhero to go and catch the perpetrator 

Z e n NO

He also finds it enchanting how quickly your mind works, and how you can figure out the most difficult things using just the smallest of hints

At some point he has a play in which his role is that of a detective, so he keeps asking you for advice on how to portray his character properly

Zen I’m sorry but I’ve never met such a flamboyant detective in my life

He’d probably end up causing more crimes with his sinful looks if he were an actual detective tho

  ᔕᗩEYOᑌᑎG:

*in the case that MC did not single-handedly arrest Unknown and just proceeded to enter the apartment normally*

So he kind of freaked out at first, because not two hours had passed since you joined the group chat did you call him by his actual name during your very first phone convo. You ask him about his past and current life, and said you would be willing to try and rejoin him and his bro bro

*cue nervous seven nervously sweating while having a nervous breakdown*

Yet he couldn’t really figure out anything about you, no matter how hard he tried

But later you tell him your alias, and he’s like OH WHAT NO WAY???

He’s been a hardcore fan for the longest time

Y’all have mystery nights, where you take turns creating a crime scene and the quickest one to solve the problem wins a bag of Honey Buddha Chips

To be honest, Seven’s cases are so extravagant and weird sometimes it’s hard to get past the “Seven what the fuck?” stage, but you manage to solve them all anyways

And when it’s Seven turn to solve your mysteries, he’s like that kid taking a math test that uses the wrong equation but still ends up with the right answer

It’s pretty amazing actually

Once, when you were solving a case, Seven asked you how you came to your conclusion, and just as a joke you said “’Tis elementary, my dear Watson.”

He proceeded to flip his darn shit

After that, he constantly asks you to cosplay as Sherlock Holmes and walk around with him outside, of course with him dressed up as maid Watson

You comply and it’s surprisingly fun.  You spend most of the day café hopping, using your powers of observation to come up with theories regarding the other patrons

It becomes a competition to come up with the most ridiculous theory, but still be able to back it up with ‘conclusive’ evidence

Seven is really, really good at this, and it’s so much fun you join in

“I think that lady is lying to her friend. Her left nostril twitches every 2.8 seconds, and also the wart on her chin looks rather untrustworthy.”

“Hm, yes that is true. And according to today’s alignment of the sun and the stars, plus the presence of a dusty pickle on the floor, I can say with 100% certainty that your theory is correct.”

Being with Seven is just so much fun hnnng

 ᔕᗩEᖇᗩᑎ:

Ok but tbh if MC was the world’s greatest detective, Saeran would be screwed from square one

Like MC would probably figure out that he was already at the apartment, and lure him out of his hiding spot by choosing those “there is no number pad” options all the time

You know that “bad” ending you can get without even entering the chat-room where Unknown drags your ass away to become his assistant

Kind of off topic but I never really understood why MC would just go along quietly with him I mean yeah he’s hot but like? instead just drag his ass into the apartment and have some sexy time if ya catch my drift

Being a detective means you are very knowledgeable in many skills, and self-defense/fighting is one of them

So basically you tackle him, and decide that going inside the apartment would be more suitable for an interrogation and some other stuff

But of course you still end up entering the chat-room, and it takes a while to explain everything to everyone

It’s not long before Mint Eye goes down, the twins are reunited, Rika is shipped off to Alaska to live in a snake’s natural habitat the wild 

Everyone is confused, and kind of amazed

They decide to let you enter the RFA regardless, since you seem really cool and you helped them so much

When Saeran calms down a bit, he realizes how lucky he was to have chosen you as bait

Feels forever grateful for your interference, and feels calm when he sits beside you while you quietly solve you cases, thoroughly enjoys watching you work

He’s also really happy when you ask for his input regarding a case, and he’ll gladly help you in any way he can

It’s therapeutic for him

Let the bean be a detective too

 ᐯᗩᑎᗪEᖇᗯOOᗪ:

Thinks you being the world’s greatest detective means that you’re another Seven

No it just means we have different ways of acquiring our information

This guy

He’s actually so fucking impressed by your skills

But is he ever going to admit it?

Hell to the no

At least not to your face 

He will however go on a Vanderwood Rant and tell others about how talented you are, how amazing your mind is, and just overall how cool his partner is

Seven uses this to his advantage

If Vanderwood is ever using his Grasp of the Maid on Saeyoung, who wishes to escape, he’ll jokingly say something along the lines of “But in all honesty, I don’t think MC is that talented.”

Hoooooooh  bo i

Vanderwood will literally go on for hours without realizing it unless you physically shut his mouth for him

Cue Seven using Quick Escape

Never tarnish MC’s good name in front of Vanderwood, unless you have about half a day to spare

 ᐯ:

Thanks to you Rika is now undergoing mental rehabilitation

Feels indebted to you forever

V I did it for you not for Rika

Is constantly worried about your safety, since a lot of criminal organizations are after your head

You assure you that you’re safe as long as nobody in the RFA spills your secret, but this mom boy doesn’t stop fretting

So you convince him to get the eye surgery, saying how if he could see, he would be able to keep you safe

And how he could also help you collect evidence and stuff for your job (but really it’s just for his sake, the poor boy doesn’t deserve any more suffering)

He gets it done and just never leaves your side

But his presence isn’t obnoxious or anything, he never gets in your way, he just kind of goes to screen saver mode until you move or need his help

You’re sitting, working, and want some tea? Home boy is gonna read your mind 

There’s a cup of tea in your hand before you can even breathe

Though his presence is soothing, like listening to raindrops against the roof, or the quiet chatter you hear in a coffee shop

But don’t expect him to be a big help when you ask for his advice in a case, his soul is too gentle to talk about suspects and crimes

Also he was basically involved in an illegal religious cult like five minutes ago I’m pretty sure if you bring up crimes he’s going to want to turn himself in

#hnnng so I got one down #but I'm sorry about the RFA and Minor MC post #it's gone gone goN E #and I'm really sad because that one was so cute imo #ahhhhh #my post #mystic messenger #mystic messenger imagine #mystic messenger headcanon #mystic messenger scenario #mm 707 #707 #mysme 707 #mystic emssenger 707 #mm luciel #mysme luciel #luciel choi #mystic messenger luciel #mm seven #mysme seven #mystic messenger seven #mm saeyoung #saeyoung choi #mysme saeyoung #mystic messenger saeyoung #kim yoosung #yoosung kim #mm yoosung #mysme yoosung #mystic messenger yoosung

[bonerhitler]

So I Finished Hollow Knight

With Hollow Knight done I have a great excuse to not have to think of a more interesting subject to write about! I have some very self important opinions to talk about regarding this game. I also plan to go over my first impression of it and see what held up and where I was wrong. Spoilers; I was pretty wrong about some stuff. Also, spoilers. I'm going to be talking about the end of this game and other plot bits.

So lets start with the things I was way off base and straight up incorrect about from last week;

“there’s no dodge skill.“

Turns out there is a dash! So I was presumptuous on that one. You get it after the second real boss. However it only launches you forward, not backwards. So it's not especially great for avoiding enemy attacks. You also only get one air dodge before you have to touch ground and traversing the map before you get it is a pain in the ass, you're slow and your mobility is crippled.

Personally speaking, I think you should have been given a limited form of the dash before beating that boss. Start the player off with the ground dash at least, give it a longer cooldown even. Let the upgrade obtained after the boss fight unlock the air dash and reduce the overall dash cooldown or something because the simple act of getting the dash upgrade made the game go from frustrating and miserable to play, to enjoyable and fun at once. I also wouldn't say no to making the dash do a backwards dodge if you're not holding forwards.

“Breakable walls are in no way indicated until you hit them “ I was just straight up wrong! Turns out this game is just like Symphony of the Night, Metroid and basically every other game ever in this regards. The walls I was annoyed with are just regular secret passages. You didn't have to attack them. Walking through them would reveal them, enemies could reveal them. Basically anything would. Breakable walls, on the other hand, were clearly marked with cracks and reacted when hit. I don't have any issue with this now.

Also I didn't explicitly say it in the post as far as quick glance tells me, but I was wrong about quick travel too. You don't have to pay every time you want to use the quick travel spots. You just have to pay once to unlock a few of them. Not even all of them, just a few of them. I presumed and made a presumption out of pres and ume again. Or however that saying goes.

However I do take issue with the quick travel options offered in the game. For one thing, we're not given any kind of simple teleport back to the main town. That would have been a life saver, even if it cost you all of your money or something dark souls style. Instead if you want to warp you have to find the nearest Stag Station and ride a giant stag beetle around. Except those are usually in the far back corner of whatever zone you're in, assuming the zone even has one. There are several zones that don't have one, and they're usually zones you're going to spend a lot of time traveling to and from. So every time I wanted to go to one location, such as The Abyss, I would have to warp from the nearest Stag Station to King's Station in the City of Tears, walk several screens and then jump down a spike filled chasm and fall into the Ancient Basin then climb down another spike filled pit and reach The Abyss. Getting back out took twice as long and the only other alternate routes required me to go to the Deepnest, a place which is dark, maze-like and full of annoying enemies, or the Edge of the Kingdom which doesn't have a Stag Station so I would have to hoof it across like three zones to get there anyway. And boy howdy do you have to go to The Abyss a lot.

What I'm trying to say is that this game desperately needs either some kind of Library Card equivalent that warps you to a specific place, or an ability that returns you somewhere useful because navigating the map blows, and the stag stations ultimately don't help as much as they should unless you need to straight up get across the entire map. There aren't many shortcuts to unlock, and the ones you do unlock are usually so out of the way there's never any reason to bother using them because they are, more or less, just shoved in there at the end of puzzle rooms that leave you with no alternative way out than to just smash a wall down which just reeks of awful level and puzzle design.

Most of your abilities are also just glorified keys. To bust out the tired old Symphony comparison; when you got the super jump you could reach places you couldn't before. You could reach travel upwards faster, but you had no control over it. You couldn't really move left or right so it was ill suited for proper exploration. As the game progressed you unlocked the Double Jump, which let you reach new heights and control your jumps better and eventually fully developed the Bat Form which allowed you to freely fly and explore as you saw fit. Using these abilities you could go anywhere. You could speedily climb, change form and explore the greatest heights. Fall, use a double jump to catch yourself and hunt out any secret there was.

In Hollow Knight, however, the closest to this kind of thing you get is a single air dash and a rather flimsy double jump. Your double jump takes a while to pop off so you lose some height on it. There have been times I've fallen onto spikes mid-jump animation because you continue to move downwards until mid-way through the animation. So it's not really great for catching yourself. As mentioned before you get a single air dash which while useful for platforming, doesn't really help in the mobility department. It's really only useful for making longer jumps the likes of which the game will toss in your path specifically so you can't progress without unlocking the air dash and double jump yet. Then there's the third “jump” type upgrade. Called the Crystal Heart you charge up and just rocket across the screen until you hit something. It sounds really cool. In fact I was really excited the first time I used it and blasted across like three screens. But here's the big flaw with this item. You can only travel horizontally with it, you can't move while flying and literally any obstacle will stop you dead. Even enemies. You would think it would kill enemies, or knock them out of the way. But no. You just hit them and fall down, usually into spikes. It's not even a great item to use to quickly get past screens you've walked through a million times because there are very, very few screens that don't have enemies buzzing around everywhere, platforms randomly decorating the scenery or just walls sticking up in the middle of the air.

In fact the only upgrade I can honestly say was genuinely useful through the entire game since getting it and didn't really feel wasted at all was the Mantis Claw. Because all it was, was an upgrade that let you wall climb and wall jump. Grabbing this thing made the game amazing. Dodging became easier because now I could bounce off a wall and get behind enemies, avoid their attacks and actually be aggressive freely. Climbing wasn't a miserable experience of hopping onto tiny platforms, then getting knocked off because I didn't see an enemy flitting on the edge of the screen. I could actually grab ledges and recover for once. There were even tricky segments I could approach in more than one way thanks to the wall climbing letting me maneuver around obstacles more freely.

The non-mobility upgrades honestly aren't anything to write home about either. You can upgrade your sword to do more damage. I guess that's why every enemy feels like it has way too much health? Because they balanced the whole game around having the ultimate weapon upgrade? Because by the end, after I scoured most of the map and got it there were relatively few enemies I wasn't one-shotting. But until I got it, the game was miserable. Bosses felt immortal until I just hit them enough and they stopped being. Even basic enemies that respawned every screen took two-three hits and something just feels off when enemies have that much health. The combat in this game didn't feel fun at all, and not in any kind of moral way either. Just in kind of a lame “I'm not having fun playing this video game” kind of way. You do learn special techniques for your sword, but you have to charge your sword's attack for that and it takes so long there's no particular reason to ever use them. In fact the only way I found to make the melee combat in this game tolerable at all was to exploit the AI. You see, if you jump over an enemy and use the downward slash you just bounce off of the enemy's head. Most enemies in the game don't have an upwards attack. The ones that do usually can't hit you because the attack won't track you while you're bouncing back upwards through the air. Even the last boss in the game succumbed embarrassingly easy to the tactic of “bouncing off of his dang old head for a few minutes.”

You could just use magic though. Magic does more damage than your sword attacks, but eats up a lot of your energy. Hitting enemies with your sword gives you energy back. Magic is also the only way to heal outside of sitting at a save bench. There are things you can do to augment it all though. You see, you have this entire equip system of charms. They're basically just badges you equip that have a value of one to like, four. You start with three slots, gain up to ten or so by the end of the game. Being able to see your icon on the map is a charm that costs one slot to equip. As is a charm that lets you gain a lot of energy by taking damage. It costs three points to increase your distressingly narrow melee attack range and there's only one charm in the game that straight up increases your melee attack or damage. In fact the whole system reeks of wasted potential because a lot of charms do gimmicky things, and a few do cool things. But there's almost no reason to use any of them other than the ones that just make you do more damage and recover more energy, or the ones that give you more health. Turning into a snail while I heal is cool I guess, game, but why would I do that when I could just kill everything faster and never need to heal. Like with so many other gameplay elements of this game, it's a cool idea that just feels kind  of wasted because it doesn't feel like the most was made of it.

Speaking of wasted potential, enemies and hazards! This game has some spectacular enemy variation and I love that most areas have a unique cast of creatures to fight. However there are some frustrating things that go along with this. Like the exploding, screeching bat things. Why are they in almost every area of the game? Why do all of the environmental obstacles make the most obnoxious noises possible? And was it really necessary to make so many things in general explode, and give them such massive blast radii at that? The bosses are all pretty great though – seeming immortality aside – they all definitely feel unique and I would much rather have had more of them in the game over a smaller map. Personally, the Mantis Lords are still my absolute favorite fight, it keeps you on the move constantly but never really throws too much at you at once so you can always react and play aggressively without the game just slapping your hand for having fun with it. The Broken Vessel is easily my second favorite, but it does a bit too much with the balloons spawning in and then just occasionally stands there spitting poison goo while you smash it to death making it way too easy. I really wish more of the combat and enemies in general had taken after the bosses than just been annoying slogs against flying enemies always floating out of range spitting poison, or against big guys with shields. Because most of the bosses are fast, aggressive whereas the enemies are always just kind of there. In your way, annoying. Even with all their health, the bosses are fun. The enemies aren't. All the regular enemies have going for them are their cool visual variation from zone to zone.

Okay that's getting to be a bit of a downer. Let me take a moment to talk about things I liked instead. Hollow Knight's visuals from beginning to end are still spectacular. Each area is well defined visually. Even when two areas are similar, like Queen's Garden and Greenpath, they're still distinct enough that you always know where you are at a glance. As down as I am on the actual physical map design, I think their atmospheric world design was spot on. The Fog Canyon is a fantastic area with almost unearthly purple tones and filled with weird jellyfish. All the sounds are given a filter that makes the whole zone sound like it's underwater and it messes with you because it, clearly, isn't. The Fungal Wastes are just a mushroom infested cave and I love me some mushroom designs. Deepnest, on the other hand, is a genuinely creepy and almost stressful area. The whole zone is filled with an undercurrent of gross crawling sounds, and all the spikes in this are are living, writhing centipedes. Most rooms have this aggravating rushing noise of gigantic horrible bugs crawling across the screen, you can't hurt them either. They're just obstacles. Half of the zone is a giant spider nest filled with eggs and parasites that crawl out of corpses. The other half is just a dark centipede filled hell hole. I love the Deepnest. My favorite area, however, is The Abyss. Dark and silently menacing the only bugs there are just passive crawling things. The more plot relevant enemies at the bottom of the pit are fantastic though and I loved every moment of the game's story.

In fact, let me take a moment to praise the story. This game, it's developers really, manged to very clearly tell their story while still being delightfully ambiguous about it. Even going for the “true” ending you only find out what you absolutely have to, unless you look for it. There are a ton of little secret rooms hidden around the game that contain information. Very little of it bluntly handed to you on a text dump or item description. But most of it told through visuals. You also get an item fairly early on called the Dream Nail. It lets you read thoughts and enter dreams. Almost every enemy in the game will have their own thoughts. You can use it on corpses too, presumably to read their last thoughts, fears or desires. You can piece together what happened in an area, what happened to the world before ever reaching the point where the game its self tells you. Even after the game spills its guts you're still left with several big unanswered questions. Nothing quite so frustrating as “who are these people” such as Dark Souls tends to leave its audience with, but rather questions as vague as “But why?” And I love it. So kudos to the writer for managing to make a game fascinating enough that even though I was not a fan of the gameplay, I still stuck through because I was enthralled. And to the artists too because the visual design is spectacular. I just really hope the next game, if there is one, is a bit fuller. Not necessarily bigger or anything. Just more fleshed out in the gameplay department.

So, in the end would I recommend this to anyone now? Reluctantly, honestly. If it's someone who is really into story and design but doesn't care so much about gameplay then certainly. If it's someone who cares more about gameplay over any other aspect then probably not. I'd still try to get both people to buy Aquaria first, however. Seriously; go play Aquaria.

#nerdshit #Hollow Knight #I finished with 98% #That flower quest broke me #I refuse to do garbage like that #Also the music was okay but kind of forgettable

[ozsaill]

New tools on Totem

It’s fun when you’ve been cruising for a bunch of years and can find delight in a few new pieces of kit on board. Here are a few new additions to Totem that earn their keep very nicely. What does that have to do with whales? read on!

Laser rangefinder. OK, this has been on Jamie’s wish list for years: in fact, I cited it in a blog post SEVEN years ago as lingering on Jamie’s wish list. It always seemed like the ~$150 we didn’t need to spend, and hey, we’re frugal cruisers. A generous friend gifted us with a Nikon Aculon rangefinder, and we’re really enjoying it.

Opened it at the airport. Yeah we couldn’t wait!

Within a couple of weeks aboard the rangefinder proved useful for more than just settling a bet on the distance to a mark. Jamie’s just gotten back to Totem from fending off one unattended boat that had dragged into another. Checking distance from boats around us helps us feel saver. A less conventional use: the rangefinder was a great way to also make sure we remained regulation distance away from humpback whales when daysailing in Banderas Bay. No kidding, we bounced it off a breaching whale, and yes, there are that many of them! Looking ahead, I expect primary use to be saving us some sleepless nights at anchor by knowing exactly how close to a cliff we are up in the Sea of Cortez this summer. Thanks, Dartanyon!

Solar-powered string lights. The folks at MPowerd have kept us all happy with those awesome inflatable LUCI lights for years, with incremental design improvements making them progressively more fun and useful. We took advantage of a buy one / get one offer earlier in the year to get Solar String Lights and I am in love with the mix of gentle ambiance and functional light they’ve added to our cockpit. Our friend, delivery skipper Judy Hildebrand, was

We splurged a little and replaced our old LUCI (succumbing to… ironically… UV damage) inflatable light at the same time. I love the gentle tones of LUCI Color Essence and we put it on what’s jokingly referred to as “disco mode,” a slow rotation through warm shades.Guess what – that BOGO is on again! Spring sale is for US mainland (lower 48), $50 minimum, free shipping: last day March 31.  BOGO over? Head to Amazon, for better prices on original LUCI, and maybe the string lights too.

GoSun solar oven. Long time readers know my deep and abiding love for our Solavore, and that’s unchanged. But we were recently gifted a GoSun portable solar cooker and it does the one thing I’ve never managed well with the Solavore: bakes CRUSTY BREAD. GoSun simply gets hotter, and we’ve been turning out dangerously good baguettes in it the last couple of days. I’ll try it out with meals, but remain skeptical about how easily it feeds a family and expect that to remain the realm of our Solavor. Good for a crew of two? Probably, and definitely a winner for bread baking. WOW.

Food processor. For years I’ve been happy (and proud) that Totem has only one piece of electric gear in the galley: an immersion blender. Our Braun stick blender has served well for over a decade. Well, enter this awesome host gift our friend Judy brought: a vastly improved immersion blender, Braun Multiquick 7, that includes a food processor attachments!

http://www.sailingtotem.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/VID_71000322_012641_401.mp4

  Oh and a whisk and masher and other goodies, but I am ALL about this food processor. It holds six cups, and so far has pureed fresh mango for daiquiris and sweet Mexican pineapple for delicious juice and best pina coladas ever.

Movie projector. Totem’s holiday gift for the crew is the Apeman mini portable projector.  Tiny – it fits in my little hand! – and paired with an inexpensive movie screen, it turns the starboard side of our main cabin into a home theater. There are less expensive projectors, but the tiny (literally, pocket) size form factor and ability to run off battery for a 90-minute movie sold us. The quality is beyond expectations, and our family movie nights have totally leveled up. The screen gets put away, but you can see it hanging behind Judy in the blender video above. Props to our awesome coaching client, now , for tipping us off to this model – and for Seth from A Family Afloat to filling in the details.

Other news on Totem:

Annapolis Spring Show

Jamie and I are gearing up to head for the Annapolis spring boat show next month. I’m especially excited about the two-day Cruising Women course I teach with Pam Wall! It’s our fifth edition, and what’s really cool is reflecting on how many GRADUATES WHO GO CRUISING. Because that’s what they do, and we’re grateful to spur them to a successful realization of cruising dreams! More information and registration online.

Salty Dawg fall rendezvous

Our next boat show on the books is the fall show in Annapolis, and we’ve just signed on to support Salty Dawg. Call us fans of the Salty Dawg philosophy: provide knowledge and resources, enable skippers to make their own decisions, and then share the sail to beautiful places. Jamie and I will be keynote speakers at their Annapolis Rendezvous, at October 10, 2019, at the Maryland Yacht Club near Annapolis.  The event is open to all, but space is limited: click here to register.

Salty Dawg spring rally

Speaking of which: I only recently learned that there’s a Salty Dawg spring rally from the Caribbean back to the US. They depart from St Thomas, USVI, the first week of May; some boats head for Bermuda, others for the US East Coast. More about the spring rally on their website. And hey, if you’re considering it and want to have extra crew, hit us up. We just might know someone!

What else is going on?

If only I could show you the beautiful bioluminescence swirling around Totem at night lately. Last night, brilliant green light streamed behind the dinghy as we made our way back from an evening with friends on shore. Moonrise is during early morning ours, and darkness make the glow easier to appreciate. The night before, we stood on the side deck watching a school of fish morph into different glowing shapes under Totem, testing their reaction to the clap of a bucket upside down on the surface, gasping when what appeared to be a larger predatory glow streaked through to cleave the mass in two. Off our bow, the anchor chain extends in a glowing line to rest below.

Banderas Bay and La Cruz in particular have been a hub of activity for weeks as boats headed for the South Pacific finalize preparations and begin to peel off. Jamie’s assisting some with weather, and working locally to help with education — like this seminar Jamie and Mike (PV Sailing) did yesterday. Instead of a classroom seminar, they gave a rigging clinic with a volunteer boat in the marina.

The boat is owned by a couple of brothers from Norway; purchased in San Carlos, Mexico, not long ago. The survey done for purchase found nothing, but when two shrouds broke on their sail south they started to wonder. MIke and Jamie went over the rigging and sails to help the owners and about 16 students about materials and inspection.The brothers took notes…a lot of notes! Grateful for the guys who welcomed a group aboard to hear all about their rig problems with a smile and a positive attitude about what’s next. But this sharing knowledge, working together to arrive at solutions, just what happens in the cruising community… like hanging out with the affable skipper Heather Richard (she runs A Fine Day for Sailing in San Francisco: charter with her in the Bay, she’ll be back soon!) and talking about weather to depart, and routing strategies for heading north. Oh hey, another peek at the string lights, too!

Life in La Cruz is easy otherwise. Our girls sport vibrant hair dye in colors coincidentally nautical: port (SIobhan) and starboard (Mairen). Whales are beginning their northern migration, and whalesong through the hull is an occasional treat instead of a daily greeting. Our weekly rhythm often bends to the amazing chile rellenos served on Fridays at Doña Toñas (50 pesos, about $2.50, for a generous meal); on Sundays, market tents line the waterfront with local vendors selling everything from cheeses to produce to crafts.

Other projects are in the works, and I’m excited to share them… soon! …for now, we’re both heads-down. We’ve got a busy coaching schedule, but easy internet access in Mexico facilitates. Spending this much time at work hasn’t been the norm on Totem, but supporting people towards cruising dreams hardly feels like work: we love what we do! And good thing that work isn’t a chore, as we definitely feel the pressure with Niall’s college tuition added into the mix.

Life is good.

    from Sailing Totem https://ift.tt/2V6PPuI via IFTTT

#IFTTT #Sailing Totem

[slrlounge1]

2018 Holiday Gift Guide for Photographers | $500 & Up

It’s that time of the year when we’re on the hunt for the best deals and savings on gear for the creatives on our holiday shopping lists. The team at SLR Lounge has had a look at, tested, played with, and researched a LOT of the best (and worst) photography products out there, and we’ve filtered them down to make your search a little easier.

Be sure to bookmark this page and keep checking back as we’ll be continually updating these lists as more and better products and deals surface for the season.

Wacom Cintiq 13hd $799

While the Intuos Pen Tablets are pretty commonly found already in a photographers kit (an extra one never hurts though), the Cintiq HD Creative Pen Displays are making an impressive leap into the photographer’s “must-have” tool list. These displays are an ideal choice when it comes to color-critical work and make working on your images and illustrations/designs a breeze with incredible accuracy.

Get It Here

Get the 24″ Version Here

eMotimo Spectrum 4-Axis Motion Control Kit $3499

If you’ve ever wondered what a timelapse on hyperdrive would look like, then the eMotimo Spectrum is the kit for you. This bundle not only saves you a bunch of money but will let you create complex time lapse & video sequences with incredible smooth repeatable movements across 4 axes. With the focus kit, you add precise movement, zoom, focus, & aperture control. The possibilities are only limited by your creativity.

Get It Here

Sunbounce Sun Swatter Starter Kit $699

Not all reflectors or scrims or diffusers are made equal, and California Sunbounce arguably makes some of the best, which is why you’ll see them in the BTS shots being used in Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition shoots, Vicotria’s Secret sessions, and other major shoots akin. This Sunbounce system consists of a collapsible aluminum frame that can be easily assembled and combined with different reflecting, light-reducing, or light-absorbing screens to take full advantage of any kind of light–hard or soft, natural or artificial.

This Sun-Bounce Big Super Saver Starter Kit (6×8′) includes the lightweight, stable, anodized aluminum frame, a reversible silver/white screen, a grip head for attaching the reflector to a stand (not included), tuning clips for modifying the reflector by attaching custom fabrics or other material (not included), and a shoulder bag to hold the kit. The silver reflector is for reflecting strong contrasty light; the white reflector reflects a softer, diffused light. The frame is designed with an integrated crossbar and clamp so that it can be comfortably held in many different ways–by hand or by attaching it to a tripod, for instance. A great piece of kit for any photographer to keep and use forever.

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Lastolite HiLite Illuminated Background (7’x8′) $755

Having owned one of these now for just over a year, I can honestly say it’s one of my favorite modifiers that I’ve ever used. It’s an incredibly unique device as you can use this as a backdrop to create hi-key photographs. You can place your strobes inside the background, filling the whole box with white light, leaving you worry-free of any light spills or uneven spots. Alternatively, you can use this device as a gigantic freestanding softbox and practically recreate daylight for your scene. The best part is they collapse down to the size of a large reflector bag for easy storage and transport.

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Sony A&R III Body & Audio Kit $2798

Sony’s A7RIII is a versatile, high-performance camera characterized not only by its resolution but also by its multimedia versatility. Revolving around a full-frame 42.4MP Exmor R BSI CMOS sensor and updated BIONZ X image processor, the A7R III affords an impressive 10 fps continuous shooting rate along with improved autofocus performance for faster, more reliable subject tracking along with wide frame coverage. This updated Fast Hybrid AF System employs a combination of 399 phase-detection points and 425 contrast-detection areas for faster focus in a variety of lighting conditions, and also maintains focus on subjects more effectively. Then, of course, it has a battery that will get hundreds of shots per charge, a better OLED EVF, and will do and will do FF 4K. It essentially is the best all-around camera on the market today. Save extra with this bundle paired this with a Rode Mic, spare battery and shoulder bag.

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Broncolor SiRos L $2347

Broncolor knows how to make a sexy light. The quality and consistency of the light produced by the Siros L without having to purchase a color-correcting dome alone is unmatched in its class and will reduce precious editing time in post-production that could be better spent elsewhere.

The freedom that exists with being able to use a truly portable monolight is incredible, and if proper care is taken, the Siros L should last a very long time. The Siros L is innovative, freeing, and a lot of fun to work with. After photographing with a light of this caliber, it is difficult to consider going back to ‘normal’ equipment. The Siros L definitely lives up to the reputation that has become synonymous with everything Broncolor stands for.

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Canon EOS R Mirrorless Digital Camera $2299

Canon has a new member in its mirrorless family. The EOS R is a full frame system with a 30.3 Megapixel body and four native RF lenses currently available, (35mm 50mm, 24-70mm and 24-105mm). Optional adapters will allow previous canon owners to use their EF lenses on the system and get straight to creating! Boasting the aforementioned 30.3 MP CMOS sensor, 4k Video, dual pixel AF, built-in OLED viewfinder, and a 3.15 vari-angle touchscreen LCD are just a few of the awesome and new features available.

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LaCie 6Big Thunderbolt 3 RAID Array $1,899+

If you’re looking for a storage/security and speed solution with, essentially, no rival on the commercial market, this is it. It’s absurdly fast, reliable, and strangely beautiful. The performance of the 6Big is like a drug, it’s so addictive, and the kind of unit that will see studios, videographers, and individuals with large amounts of data elevate their operating levels, and the USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 connectivity makes it a daisy-chain and power solution that creatives can grow with. Like the Porsche slogan, “There is no substitute.”

Some stats:

LaCie has equipped this RAID array with Thunderbolt 3 technology that transfers data at a rate of up to 40 Gb/s and offers a reversible USB-C connection. For data performance and redundancy, an onboard hardware RAID controller lets you set the 3.5″ hard drives in 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, or 50 RAID configuration. With LaCie RAID Manager, RAID setup is straightforward by offering an intuitive interface to administer the LaCie 6big. Leveraging RAID 0 and Thunderbolt 3, the 6big is able to deliver up to 1400 MB/s read and write speeds.

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Nikon Z7 Mirrorless Digital Camera Kit $4,147

Nikon has taken the next step in their imaging journey with the Z7 Mirrorless System, affectionately dubbed “The Perfectionist.” The 45.7Megapixel FX Format camera brings the Z Mount to the market with a boom. This is a large diameter design with short 16mm flange distance that allows Nikon to create compact, but powerful cameras and develop more advanced optics. It has a BSI CMOS sensor with the EXPEED 6 Image Processing Engine delivering outstanding image quality & speed with a native ISO sensitivity range of 64-25600!

It also features a UHD 4k video recording system at up to 30p and can use the N-log gamma profile along with the camera’s 10-bit HDMI output to create cinema-quality video. Even an 8k Time-Lapse mode.

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B&H GIFT CARD $500 & UP

There are few things more practical for a photographer than a B&H Gift Card.  With free shipping to many of the U.S States, friendly return policies, and free shipping with orders over $500, this is an easy stocking stuffer.

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Fujifilm X-E3 $799

A svelte, versatile camera, the black Fujifilm X-E3 is a progression in their rangefinder-style mirrorless series, and it features an updated sensor and processor along with familiar classic design. Revolving around the 24.3MP APS-C X-Trans CMOS III sensor and X-Processor Pro image processor, high-resolution stills can be recorded with notable sharpness and clarity due to the sensor’s organic layout and omission of an optical low-pass filter. The sensor and processor combination also avails quick continuous shooting up to 14 fps, an extended sensitivity range to ISO 51200, and the ability to record UHD 4K/30 video or Full HD 1080p/60 video.

Benefitting the imaging capabilities, the X-E3 retains its retro-inspired physical design complete with a high-resolution 2.36m-dot electronic viewfinder, 3.0″ 1.04m-dot rear touchscreen LCD, and physical shutter speed and exposure compensation dials. Also, its wireless capabilities have been expanded to include Bluetooth connectivity for low-power image transferring and remote camera control from a linked mobile device.

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Profoto B10 OCF Flash Head $1595

Profoto continues to affirm their commitment to full-featured flash systems with onboard TTL capability with the introduction of the impressive, battery-powered B10 OCF Flash Head. Part of the OCF family (which began with the reduced-size B2 power pack, continued with the full-sized B1X monolight, and most recently featured the A1 shoe-mount Studio Light), the B10 combines the best characteristics of the monolight with those of auto-exposure, on-camera flashes. In a move that’s consistent with their ongoing “techno-logic,” Profoto packs all the features of the previous OCF lights into the 7″ B10.

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Also Available as a 2 Light Kit with Bag Here

Deals $1000 And Up

Need more gift ideas? B&H has a full list of holiday recommendations for $1000 and up!

See more Info Here

Again, be sure to bookmark this page and keep checking back as we’ll be continually updating these lists as more and better products and deals surface for the season.

  from SLR Lounge https://www.slrlounge.com/2018-holiday-gift-guide-for-photographers-500-up/ via IFTTT

#IFTTT #SLR Lounge

[kayawagner]

A Ray-Tracing Pioneer Explains How He Stumbled into Global Illumination

Editor’s note: You might not have heard of ray tracing, but you’ve certainly seen it. The graphics rendering technique mimics the way light works in the real world to create the special effects woven into practically ever modern movie. With the arrival of our RTX real-time ray-tracing technology, we’re working to make this sophisticated technique faster and more accessible, promising to bring cinematic quality to everything from games to product design. Today, we’re sharing a big part of the story of how modern ray tracing came to be from one of its pioneers, J. Turner Whitted. Now with NVIDIA Research, Whitted wrote the seminal paper, “An Improved Illumination Model for Shaded Display,” which serves as part of the foundation for modern ray-traced computer graphics.

Ray Tracing and Global Illumination

As most of us learned in high school physics, ray tracing is an idea that has been around for centuries. Global illumination in computer graphics has a somewhat shorter history.

Early computer graphics shading models proposed by Henri Gouraud and Bui Tuong Phong, among others, computed reflections based on the spatial relationship between light sources and a point on a surface. Somewhat later, Jim Blinn developed a reflection model derived from Ken Torrance’s work describing inter-reflections of the microscopic structures of surfaces. (That model was later expanded by Rob Cook and Ken Torrance himself into the widely used Cook-Torrance shading model.) Shortly thereafter, Blinn and Martin Newell published a paper describing environment mapping, which replaced light sources with a 360-degree texture map of the surrounding environment.

It was this development of environment mapping that caught my attention. The rendering of a shiny teapot with doors and windows reflected from its surface yielded a level of realism that I had never imagined for computer-generated imagery. I stared at the image for hours and wondered how one could ever improve it. Environment mapping did have one huge limitation of not being able to accurately render reflections of objects close to the object being rendered.

An image from Turner Whitted’s 1979 SIGGRAPH paper featured a structure resembling the Bell Labs building in Holmdel, New Jersey, where Whitted’s work was done.

Clearly the effects of Phong’s model are local and Torrance’s model and its derivatives are microscopic in scale. It seemed natural to label Blinn and Newell’s model as “global” in scope. Hence the term “global illumination.” The question then became how to implement it without the limitations of the environment map?

Why Ray Tracing Is a Natural Choice for Global Illumination

Because ray tracing is so incredibly simple, it should have been an obvious choice for implementing global illumination in computer graphics. Ray casting for image generation had been pioneered by Arthur Appel, at IBM, and commercialized by Robert Goldstein and associates, at MAGI. MAGI had originally utilized multi-bounce ray tracing to track radiation within tanks. In my own early career, I had been involved with ocean acoustics and remembered a diagram of ray-traced sound being refracted through varying depths of the ocean and reflected from the surface. Eventually a memory of that diagram popped into my head and it then became clear to me how to improve upon the global illumination method that Blinn and Newell had initiated.

My own hesitation about using ray tracing was simply concern about performance. There has always been a bit of a divide between computer graphics for real-time interaction and graphics for film. General Electric’s lunar landing simulator obviously had to run in real time to train astronauts. This constraint continued with David Evans and Ivan Sutherland’s flight simulators as well as neighboring research at the University of Utah. Henri Gouraud’s smooth shading ran in real time at essentially no cost. A little known chapter in Bui Tuong Phong’s dissertation includes a description of circuitry for real-time shading even though most implementations of Phong shading did not run in real time.

The availability of frame buffers changed the computer graphics landscape dramatically. Rather than attempting to render images at the refresh rate of CRTs, it became possible to render at any speed and view a static image on the screen. Ed Catmull’s subdivision algorithm coupled to a z-buffer could render arbitrarily complex curved surfaces into a frame memory in a matter of minutes rather than milliseconds. Blinn and Newell’s environment mapping required tens of minutes per frame. This trend toward higher realism at slower rates gave me the courage to try something even slower.

Adding Shadows, Refraction

In 1978, the Computer Systems Research Laboratory at Bell Labs was equipped with a Digital Equipment PDP-11/45 minicomputer and a 9-bit per pixel frame buffer. Those resources along with the C programming language were the perfect environment to attempt a ray-tracing improvement to Blinn and Newell’s scheme. (I should’ve read more of Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie’s programming manual before attempting to write my first C program. As a hard-wired assembly language programmer, I didn’t realize that C allowed recursion. Instead, I laboriously instituted my own stack and manually wrote a multi-bounce recursive ray-tracing program without using the recursion provided by the language itself.)

Eventually an image of inter-reflecting spheres showed up on the screen. Both Newell and Frank Crow had included checkerboards in some of their early images and I felt a need to copy them. So far, so good. At this point, tracing additional rays to the light sources was a no-brainer. The resulting shadows cost a bit of time, but the additional coding was minor and the result was worth it.

The minor coding change was to turn a list of rays into a tree of rays. As an electrical engineer and hardware designer with no computer science background, that was a data structure that I had never dealt with. Nevertheless, it worked.

In 1979, Whitted’s groundbreaking, computer-generated image of inter-reflecting spheres illustrated the value of ray tracing for global illumination.

Well, if we could get that far, why not go for broke and add refraction just like we learned in high school physics? That took some work, but the result was stunning.

Adaptive Super-Sampling to the Rescue

As one might imagine, the execution times of these incremental features got out of hand. To estimate the rendering time for each image, I reduced the 512×512 image resolution by a factor of 64 and timed it with a watch. Multiplying the time by 64 gave me a fairly accurate guess for full-resolution rendering. But the jaggies visible at full resolution needed to be eliminated and super-sampling was the only practical approach. The estimated rendering time then expanded by an additional factor of 16 — and panic set in.

I had written a draft of a SIGGRAPH conference submission and was rendering illustrations to be included in the paper. The submission deadline was near, but with 16x super-sampling, the estimated rendering times extended beyond the submission deadline. The spontaneous idea of adaptively super-sampling was a life saver because it only added additional samples where needed. It was implemented within a couple of hours and the paper was edited to include this new idea while the illustrations were being rendered.

At lunch a few months later, a Bell Labs executive asked what it would take to run ray tracing in real time. At the time our new VAX-11/780 was computing each pixel of a simple scene in 1/60th of a second, so I proposed a vast array of Cray supercomputers, one per pixel, with a red, green and blue light bulb on top of each one. That was meant as a joke. It turned out not to be.

Real-Time Ray Tracing

In my original 1979 ray-tracing paper, there is mention of partitioning of tasks among multiple processors. Sometime afterwards I began to hear the term “embarrassingly parallel” in the context of ray tracing. In the original paper there is also a hint of acceleration structures so long as a sphere happens to be contained within another sphere. Within a couple of years, I teamed up with Steve Rubin to apply his idea of hierarchical bounding volumes to ray tracing. It worked nicely and we were able to render scenes more complex than spheres floating over a checkerboard, but it still wasn’t in real time.

Light and shadows: This bottle in a window is taken from a 1980 SIGGRAPH paper that introduced bounding volume hierarchy structures to accelerate ray tracing.

In years to follow, I wrote a couple of illustrative ray tracers as a teaching aid, but basically moved on to other topics. Other researchers, however, had taken up the slack with acceleration techniques that made an impractical algorithm practical. That was accompanied by additional advances that achieved image quality far beyond that demonstrated with spheres and checkerboards.

All of this happened on top of the progression of Moore’s law and the availability of parallel processing. Like a Rip van Winkle in computer graphics, I can wake up nearly 40 years later and see real-time ray tracing as a commodity. How did that happen? Obviously some very bright people put a lot of effort into it.

The post A Ray-Tracing Pioneer Explains How He Stumbled into Global Illumination appeared first on The Official NVIDIA Blog.

A Ray-Tracing Pioneer Explains How He Stumbled into Global Illumination published first on https://supergalaxyrom.tumblr.com

[gaiatheorist]

“Reintroduction of apex predators.”

(My head is playing the 2am game again, there are dozens of things I should be concentrating on, but I’m busy going mad. It’s fine, I usually come back eventually.) 

2am-ish. “Bleurgh. Ick. Cold. Timesit?”

Yes, ‘Bleurgh’, and yes ‘Ick’, that’ll be the wine. Yes, ‘Cold’, because I’d fallen asleep on the sofa again. ‘Timesit?’, bollocks, I didn’t put my phone on charge, so there’s an on-screen reminder that a pending update couldn’t be installed overnight. I hate phone updates, I always worry that something will go wrong, which is ridiculous, because I haven’t ‘always’ had a mobile phone, and there must, logically, be a way to un-install an update if something does cock up. It’s just after half past three now, so it’s taken me about an hour and a half to convince myself that ‘nothing bad will happen’ if I update my phone. Not that updating my phone would stop OTHER bad things from happening, I’m not THAT mad.

The sensible thing to do if you wake up at 2am on the sofa would be to go to bed. I’m not sensible, and, since the brain haemorrhage, there’s been even more of the “Ping! Wide awake!” malarkey. It is a behaviour I need to change, and, yet again, I failed to do so. (Side-thought about setting up a GO TO BED screen-saver on my phone?) I’m differently-mad to my friend, who called around for a cup of tea after his eye test this week, we share some similar traits, and we’re open-ish with each other. He wakes up every single morning crippled by confusion, processing the fact that he’s one of billions of bipedal beings on the surface of a spinning rock, and, every day, it takes him ‘hours’ to shake off that confusion, and regain some semblance of functionality. In a way, I’m glad I just wake up in the middle of the night, with hundreds of fragments of nonsense-thought running through my head, because his existential anxiety every morning sounds awful. (Waking up at 2am, knowing it’s going to knock-on my sleep pattern again, and immediately checking the internet to see if anything has happened is awful, too, but I’ve normalised it to an extent. It’s my awful, I’m used to it.)

We’re similar in that I knew where his post-vasectomy anecdote was going as soon as he started it, I guessed the ‘masturbating with a bag of frozen peas clamped to his testicles’ part, but the ‘while the police raided the house next door for cannabis’ twist was a surprise. We talked non-stop for an hour, about what utter chaotic twats we were two decades ago, about the times he’d driven the ex and I home out-of-his-mind drunk, bouncing off kerbs, that I couldn’t remember, because I was also out-of-my-mind. He couldn’t remember the time he’d stayed at our old house, and put his foot THROUGH one of the stairs. We both remembered disgusting days of just not going to work, and arsing about. We both remembered the Ouija board, his unflattering nickname for one of my friends, and how unpredictable-unstable our weird little pre-bubble group was. We’ve concluded that we were twats, and we’re trying not to be any more.

Part of his twattery was multiple affairs, his wife is an absolute stoic, and keeps taking him back, they’ve divorced twice. He’s married her 3 times, and she was his third wife, I think. Other people’s business, isn’t it? After one of the affairs, she banned him from associating with us, like she was a grown-up, and we were teenagers, leading him astray. I became ‘Her!’, and the focus of her hate, more so than the ‘other women’ he was having affairs with. (To clarify, there was never any of that between us.) I’d forgotten about being ‘Her!’, but, apparently she hasn’t, and still resents me. I’ll live, but now sort-of-understand why I don’t have his actual mobile number, he only ever contacts me on Fakebook, AND he deletes the chat-messages. “She’d go mad if she knew I was here.” For fuck’s sake, unwittingly duplicitous-complicit in a married man’s sneaking-about.

I went the long way around that, didn’t I? There are several escaped crickets having a little adventure on my living room carpet, I really ought to pick them up.

OK, I woke up at an unreasonable time, and did what I shouldn’t have done, in checking the news, to see if anything had happened. With me, that’s a hang-up from September 11th, I’d been ill with a migraine, and missed the news, I plunged into obsessive-panic about not missing ‘The News’, which, back then, was on the TV, there was one computer in the house, which took about a century to boot up, and then the rest of your life to connect to the dial-up. How times have changed. I’m not the only one doing it these days, logging on, and hoping for the best, but acknowledging that there is the possibility that something catastrophically ominous is on the horizon. Please, please, let me find something in the news that’s not Him, or Her, like the lovely nun yesterday. 

Lettuce? I don’t buy it as a matter of course, the father-in-law used to plant millions of the ‘butterhead’ bastards on the allotment, horrible, floppy-limp things, full of mud and slugs, for years my fridge was guaranteed to contain mud and slugs. “Here, lass, I’ve fetched you a lettuce!” I don’t like lettuce all that much.

Wikipedia? OK, it’s a side-swipe at people telling huge great big massive lies, but the ‘many hands make light work’ approach is encouraging. A chain is only ever as strong as its weakest link, but so many links could effectively knit truth-chain-mail. Too relevant, though, too linked to real-time events.

Bullshit Barbie? No thanks, I read that yesterday.

I flicked through, looking for something that wasn’t ‘that’, ready to be witty, or engaging, or insightful before some knobhead invariably weighs in with “How is this news?” That’s the fucking point, knobheads, we’re aware of the news, which is why we’re also looking at “10 ways to tuck in a shirt.”, or whatever, with courses as heavy as these ones, we absolutely need palate-cleansers as well. The ‘breaking’ banner will pop up if something happens, in the meantime, we’ll read the fluff, and the filler.

It would appear that it’s not working, though, the distraction-method. I clicked on an article about a proposal to reintroduce lynx in Northumbria, thinking that couldn’t possibly have any “We’re all fucked!” connotations. (Except if you’re a roe deer, apologies to any roe deer reading this...) I can see the logic, the lynx would be brought in to control the roe deer population. The deer haven’t done anything ‘wrong’, they’re just being deer, you know, making more deer, eating leaves, making more deer to eat more leaves, when the tree really needed those leaves, to photosynthesise, and keep us all breathing, and such. The local farmers don’t want the lynx, because they worry for their livestock, and I’m relatively certain there’s probably some knobhead setting up Fakebook pages that say lynx eat babies. (Note ‘relatively’, and ‘probably’, I talk shit, but I’m not Bullshit Barbie.) 

It’s not the ‘people refusing to accept science, because it threatens their lambs’ thing, it was one phrase, used repeatedly. ‘Apex predator’ (Food-chain, chain-mail, my head is misbehaving, but that’s why I’m rattling it all out here, to purge my cranium of these thought-snippets.) Apex predator, top of the food-chain, it’s nature’s way, because most creatures on this revolving rock don’t have access to family planning. Oh. The thing at the top of the food-chain, or food-pyramid, or food-web, depending on how they’re teaching it now eats the things below it. (Fucking hell, woman, park THAT Gaia Theory, this potential catastrophe for the planet ISN’T a global phone-update, move away from the rats-and-cockroaches ideation.) 

Nature does its thing, or, at least it did, until we started trying to boss it. We’re twats, some more so than others, we kill things we have no intention of eating. We kill each other. We bugger about with the environment, and then complain about lettuce. We, in the UK have eradicated most of our apex predators, what chance do a handful of nappy-eating foxes have of controlling the rabbit population? (Especially if people in silly clothes carry on with their ‘sport’.) We ate all the dodos, and all of that particular kind of turtle, we’re killing the fucking BEES, and we all know how that ends. (Removes tinfoil hat.) 

We have new apex predators, and we need to figure out how to keep ourselves as safe as we can, because these new apex predators don’t behave in exactly the same way as the ones we’re used to. The ‘bubbles’ are electronic versions of stone-age tribes’ perimeter-spikes against sabre-toothed tigers. (I don’t know, I’ve already told you I never paid attention in History, sometimes I used to pick my ear until it bled, so I could get out of class to see matron for a plaster.) I’m dithering around a vague notion that our greatest weapon is the truth, but also dabbling with the idea that our strength is our number,  not in the same way as animals produce ‘spare’ young, because they know some will be eaten, though. We are little, but there are lots of us, aside from good guys always coming last, we DO need to remember that we’re human, in the face of this inhumanity, the first big collection of little things that stoops to the level of the new predators is on a very shaky foundation. 

This thing will run its course, as all things do, we just need to remember to show our arses to bears, and punch sharks on the nose, not the other way around. Personally, I’d prefer this fuckpuddle to be mopped up with paper rather than projectiles, and soon, because this limbo-uncertainty is exhausting us, and sending us mad. Nobody’s going to pop out from behind the sofa with a hidden camera crew and shout “Fooled you, you’ve been part of the biggest reality TV experiment ever!” We need to watch and wait, keep ourselves and each other safe.