#BUT the way people achieved this was largely through optical illusion

[vashti-lives]

I sincerely hate the modern impulse that women need to look as small as physically possible in every way. She looks great in the top on the left????

#for a really large chunk of fashion history having a small waist was fashionable #BUT the way people achieved this was largely through optical illusion #giant sleeves padded busts padded hips crinolines hoop skirts bustles #now so many fashion guides are just about minimizing everything #and the only real way to get a fashionable figure is to change your body #i know i’m queer but ma’am stop teaching women they must be small #broad shoulders are hot

[noteguk]

bad romance | jjk | m

[ ! ] this is part of the bad influence collection. This part cannot be read as a stand-alone.

— summary; in which the two of you finally make it official. 

— contents and warnings; gross fluff, a bit of angst, smut, badboy!jungkook x goodgirl!reader, enemies to lovers, honestly emotionally constipated idiots to lovers, so much mutual pining, cinematic parallels, cute dates, a spark of jealousy/possiveness (mostly playful), the return of car sex, dirty talk, breast play, dom!jk x sub!reader, fingering, spitting, oral (female receiving), cum eating, semi-clothed sex, unprotected sex (don’t be dumb!!), a fuckton of praise kink bc jk is going through it, another glimpse into the demon that lives inside the oc lol, begging, mentions of marking (hickeys), creampie, cockwarming (you already know), jk is whipped and he’s not even hiding it anymore, it’s official ladies!!! 

— words; 18,4k

— author’s notes; here we are, champs!!! The moments of glory 😭 There are a lot of things being wrapped up in here so we can move onto the more interesting stuff, but there are also some points that will be brought up further down the line, so don’t worry! Everything will be explored in its rightful moment. Have fun at the eye of the hurricane y’all 🤠 

There are some things we experience throughout life that, as simple as they may seem at first glance, stick with us forever, like bubblegum on the bottom of a shoe. As a young kid, you were first introduced to optical illusions after spending the day at your friend’s house — and, even after so many years, you still recalled your amazement and confusion; your expectant yelps and annoyed glances at his computer screen. Considering your age, it was normal to be bewildered at the notion that your senses and perceptions, which once seemed so concrete, could fool you just as easily as anything else. 

Mayhaps you were a few thousand years late in your genius discovery, taking into account that ancient philosophers had already discussed and established all that; perhaps your young brain wasn’t all that smart to construct those notions with such complexity. But the point wasn’t that: it was that the world in front of you was a matter of perspective, of finding the truth behind the curtain of your own interpretation. Sometimes you thought that two lines were the same size when they were not; that dots seemed to be moving when they were still; that two completely different shades of grey were actually the same all along. And you had to adapt to that. 

Life went on and, in a way, you always kept that in the back of your head — not about bright-colored illusions on a computer screen, of course, but about people. No matter how much you think you know someone, you never know their full truth (after all, most people barely know themselves, so perhaps it’s a bit too conceited to believe that you know another individual). It’s nothing new to claim that people can surprise you, either positively or negatively and, in your head, trying to predict that was the smallest resemblance of control you could achieve. So you learned to read them as well as you could and never ever created expectations. To you, trust issues were a tiny price to pay for staying one step ahead from a heartbreak. 

That being said, even the best of strategists still make mistakes — apparently no one ever learned not to invade Russia during the winter — and even the strongest walls can still show cracks in its foundation. Ironically, you had predicted it all, followed your life to the most minimal details, but could not avoid the large, powerful wave that hit your fortress head-first, knocking most of your preconceived notions down the moment you found someone that you couldn’t read. 

In a way, Jungkook was the most confusing optical illusion that you had ever come across. 

The thrilling and unforeseen ups and downs of your situationship with Jungkook were often hard to follow, but you still tried your best to do so. From the start he was inconsistent — hot and cold, harsh and tender; always left you seeking for more at the same time you tried to push him away. Every time you’d attempt to read him, imagine the thoughts that unfolded behind his dark eyes, you’d fall flat on your face. Every time you thought you were starting to understand him, he’d hit you with a curveball that would throw you in a loop. It was strange how you thought that you knew him so well, probably better than most people, and yet not well at all. 

In usual unpredictable fashion, Jungkook had called you earlier that day, right after you had just finished washing the dishes, with a proposal you never saw coming. It was a peaceful, chilly morning and, besides the sharp sound of your phone ringing, only the faint chirping of birds could be heard coming from the half-open window. Yongsun was sitting on the couch, her focus swimming in the ink of her newest thriller novel, and she didn’t notice the way your eyes widened when you picked up the phone and heard what he had to say. 

“Morning, princess,” Jungkook greeted, jumping straight to the point. “Are you free? Wanna go out with you.” 

“Today?” You asked, leaning your lower back against the cool counter. His choice of words was peculiar: go out. He had never used that before or, at least, not with such a casual tone. 

“Yeah,” he agreed promptly. “If you have plans we can try another day. But it’s sunny and I didn’t wanna miss my shot.” 

You cleared your throat, glimpsing out the window as if to check that it was, in fact, sunny. Your brain was out of excuses and the silence coming from the other side of the line was too loud, so you had no choice but to give in to the wills of your heart. “Hm. Yeah, sure,” you told him. “We can go out today.” 

“Great,” Jungkook beamed. “I’ll pick you up at one, baby. See you.”

And that was it. Before you could think about asking more details about his plans, the line was cut and you were left staring at your phone screen like an absolute idiot, trying to digest what just had happened. Go out. What a weird thing to say. It sounded like a date. 

Yongsun perked her head up like a meerkat, turning around on the couch so she could get a better look at you. “So…” she started, a smile already curling up on her lips. Her book was practically forgotten now, laying beside her, the page that she had been reading now flimsily marked by one of her perfectly manicured fingers. “I’m guessing you have plans.” 

“I might have,” you responded nonchalantly, locking your phone and placing it on the counter. When was the last time Jungkook asked you out? Even when he took you out for lunch or something, the request was always laced with second intentions. That sounded so odd. “Why?” 

She shrugged. Yongsun had been particularly interested in your romantic affairs ever since that night at Hoseok’s party, teasing you at every chance she got. She was curious, that much you knew, but you guessed that she was also a bit worried about all those secrets. Regardless, if that was the case, her cheerful tone did not let it show. “Oh, nothing, I just think it’s cute that you’re going out with the mystery man.” She wiggled her eyebrows. “Has he asked for your hand in marriage yet?” 

You rolled your eyes. “It’s not like that,” you guaranteed. 

“Keep lying to yourself, girl,” she sang, waving her hand in a sign of dismissal. Yongsun had a strong tendency to romanticize things, and you were the opposite: one of your biggest flaws was that you over-rationalized things, found excuses and justifications where there were none. At that moment, both things were taking place, and her voice was like a demon whispering inside your head, making you consider her perspective. “Is he coming to pick you up?” Her smile only grew as you nodded. “Fantastic.” 

Like she had found what she had been searching for, Yongsun plopped back on the couch and returned to her book. Unbeknownst to her, you knew exactly what she was inferring — your gaze already navigating towards the large window across from you, and the open view it gave to the street below your apartment complex. If she wanted to, she could figure out who it was just by looking down and catching a glimpse of him. 

Strangely enough, the idea didn’t bother you as much as it once had. 

~

Part of you believed that, when Yongsun went to her spiritual retreat/cult, she ended up being cursed with a hundred years of bad luck. Besides being ten times more clumsy than usual, she was having more difficulty in class and almost every single time she tried to shower, the hot water would run out halfway through. That morning, she also was unlucky enough to be knocked out on the couch (courtesy of her post-lunch sleepiness) at the exact moment that Jungkook picked you up, missing one of her two chances of catching a glimpse of him. 

About one hour and a half later, her messages arrived in a furious and merciless wave, so constant that you had to silence your phone, turning the screen around and against your thigh so her flood of complaints and curses wouldn’t distract you from the beautiful scenery that blossomed all around the car. At the annoying rush of dinging sounds, however, Jungkook glimpsed at you, eyebrows furrowed. “What’s that about?” He asked, the previous subject long forgotten. 

You shook your head, gazing out of the window. The tall trees passed in a dazzling blur, expanding as far as your eyes could see. “Nothing much,” you told him, voice mingling with the vague tune playing in his car, and the tender gushing of the fresh wind. “Yongsun is having a bad day, that’s all.” 

“Don’t you wanna see if she’s, like, about to die or something?” 

You breathed out, thinking for a moment. “Hmm… not really. She’ll be fine.” 

Jungkook laughed. “What a terrible friend you are.” 

You leaned your head on your palm, elbow supported on the car door, staring him up and down. “Why do you care?”

“I don’t,” he admitted, “I just thought it could be funny to see her losing her mind.”

“Yongsun rarely loses her mind,” you counter-argumented. That was more of a Jisoo thing, honestly. You were about to say that when a little demon landed on your shoulder, reaching forward and whispering an evil idea to you. Usually it was Jungkook that wanted to stir up some shit when things were too calm between you two, but, that day, you felt like switching the roles in the name of karma. “But if you’re so curious about my messages… you know who texted me earlier today?” 

He glanced at you, curious. “Who?”

It was getting hard not to smile. “Jimin,” you said, noticing how his hands tightened around the wheel for a millisecond. If you weren’t looking for it, you would’ve never noticed it. “He asked me out on a date.” 

Okay, half truth: it wasn’t that same day, it was two days before. But it was much more dramatic to put it that way. 

“And?” Jungkook pressed on. 

You couldn’t hold it anymore, laughing at his serious expression. “And I’m telling you that because I knew you’d be fuming, you dumbass.” You pushed his shoulder playfully. “You know I don’t like him like that.” 

“Ha.” He said, flat. “I’m not fuming.”

“Aw come on.” You smiled. You were staring at him now, following the kaleidoscopic bursts of sunlight on his face as he focused on the road before him. The sun dripped amongst the leaves, mingling with the shadows of his features and dancing in his long black hair as it swirled in the faint breeze. Jungkook had mentioned he was thinking about dyeing it, but you liked the way it looked now. You’d like it anyway. “Don’t clench your jaw, that’s bad for your teeth,” you teased, tapping on his chin. “Told him I’m not interested, though. I had said that before, but I guess he was trying again.” You breathed out. “So I said that I was already seeing someone else. That worked.”

That comment managed to relax him straight away. “You just wanted to see me jealous? What for?” 

“Payback,” you claimed, triumphant. “Though that is kind of toxic behavior so it ends here. I just needed it for karmic balance.” 

“The fuck?” he asked. “Payback for what?”

You pouted. “Oh, you’re so innocent, aren’t you?” you teased him, doing the unspeakable and reaching out to pinch his cheek. Jungkook slapped your hand away before you managed to do that, but you still counted his annoyance as a victory. “I can see the halo over your head and everything… the birds are chirping… the purest soul around.”

Jungkook groaned, pushing his body back against the driver’s seat. “Shut up, my god,” he complained. One of his hands left the wheel and landed on the inside of your thigh; the warmness of his skin shooting fireworks inside your chest. “I asked you a question.” 

With a playful hum hanging on the tip of your tongue, you turned around, one arm leaning on the center console. “Wait, you thought I wouldn’t notice you trying to make me jealous that one day in the library?” You asked, watching as the hamster inside Jungkook’s head started running on its wheel, trying to find the memory he was looking for. “The one that Jisoo asked you two to shut up.”

His eyebrows shot up at the realization. “Ah. Yeah. That was funny.” He laughed, glimpsing at you. That road seemed to be endless, with only Jungkook’s car in it. You didn’t remember when was the last time you saw someone else around, but it was a rather peaceful moment. Just the two of you against the world. “Didn’t know it had worked.”

“I never said that.”

“It wouldn’t be a payback if it hadn’t.” He smirked, cocky, squeezing your inner thigh. Touché. “She was my lab partner. That’s it. I don't even remember her name.” 

You made a tisk sound. “And you were leading her on… how cruel.”

Jungkook raised his hand from your thigh, pointing a finger at you. “It wasn’t like that, I’m naturally flirty.” 

“No, you’re naturally irritating,” you corrected, grabbing his hand and putting it back in place. He squeezed your flesh once again, humming at your words. “Shameless, also. Nasty most of the time—” 

He scoffed. “You flatter me, princess.”

“—But not flirty,” you completed.

“Come on, baby, I’m totally flirty,” he wouldn’t relent so easily, especially when his ego was dangerously close to getting bruised. “I flirted with you.” 

You crossed your arms, looking him up and down. “You called me names and fucked me in a church.” 

“Right? And you don’t call that being flirty? It clearly worked,” Jungkook threw back, not an ounce of self-awareness in his arrogant tone. “Also, don’t mention the church thing as if you didn’t beg me to do it.”

“Not the point.” 

“Exactly the point,” he pressed on, stealing a glance at your irritated expression. It wasn’t for real, of course — most times when you two argued now, it was more of a playful thing than a serious back and forth. Jungkook couldn’t pinpoint when that change had occurred, but it was nice. “You’re equally irritating, shameless, and nasty. Sometimes more than me. You just confuse people about it.” 

“I’m not!” you said, knowing very well that you were lying. 

Jungkook sneered at your words. “Yeah, sure. If that helps you feel better, I can roleplay.” He paused. “Actually, I can do that in different contexts too.” 

You poked his cheek, completely ignoring his last comment. It wasn’t the time to unpack that. “You got jealous though,” you teased. 

He frowned. “Change the subject now.” 

Considering you had already gotten your desired reaction, you decided to give him a (temporary) break. “Fine.” You sighed, sitting back. The breeze coming from outside was a gentle caress on your face, bringing the faint smell of flowers. “So… where are we going, exactly?” 

“It’s, like, the fifth time you’re asking,” Jungkook groaned. 

“And you still haven’t answered,” you said. “I’ll keep asking unless you do, you know that.” 

He breathed out, finally cracking. Jungkook looked at his watch, realizing that the two of you would reach your destination rather soon, anyways, so he could stop with the suspense for now. “I wanna take you on a proper date. I’m tired of sneaking around.” He cleared his throat, eyes glued to the road. He suddenly felt very nervous. “It’s like… four cities away from campus, near the beach. No one you know will see us, probably. Is that alright?”

Out of the possible reactions he has conjured in his head, he didn’t expect you to burst out laughing. “I love that you ask me that when we’re already two hours deep into this road trip,” you teased. “But yeah. Sounds great, actually. I can’t believe you have good ideas every once in a while.” 

Jungkook frowned. “You’re really asking for me to turn this car around, aren’t you?”

“Not at all,” you beamed. “You’re trapped with me for the rest of the day now.” 

Once upon a time, that would sound like a nightmare to you — months back, when the two of you barely talked, and you prayed that he would text you a sleazy excuse and not show up to any future tutoring sessions. Months back, when you were still in denial that there was a person underneath all that trouble, all those sly smirks and witty, bitter remarks. 

Weeks back when you still pretended you weren’t in love with him. 

Ever since you (finally) accepted the fact that you had zero control over your emotions towards Jungkook, things had become both easier and harder to deal with. It was easy being with him — just playing with his hair and listening to him talk; kissing him; driving and talking about nothing. But it was a war inside your head: now every shared laughter hurt a bit more, every touch left you a little on edge. The falling-for-the-bad-boy fiasco was embarrassing in itself, but falling for someone who didn’t feel the same would be absolutely dreadful. Especially now that you couldn’t remember how your life was before he had showed up and turned it upside down. 

As if he was reading your mind, Jungkook responded, “That doesn’t sound so bad at all, princess.” 

~

Jungkook parked his car near a very beautiful square, which was a sharp difference considering the places the two of you used to frequent — or, rather, hide in. In your mind, it was surreal that you were actually on a date with the boy, being shamelessly out-there about a scenario that once terrified you so deeply. Honestly, the chances that you’d run into someone you knew (several cities away from campus, with summer break just around the corner and finals piling up) were slim, but not zero. 

However, you couldn’t care about it when Jungkook opened your door and took your hand in his. “You know what’s fucking insane?” He asked abruptly, pressing you against the side of the vehicle. His palm was warm against yours, just like the world around you. You never really liked summer that much, but you were starting to change your mind. “We’ve done so much, but we never just walked around holding hands.” 

You chuckled — putting it like that, yeah, the two of you were doing everything backwards. “Guess we never had the chance,” you said. “But there’s a first time for everything.” 

He breathed out, leaning in to place a kiss on your lips. You once thought that doing that in public would be horrendous, but now, all you could feel were the butterflies in your stomach. “Hopefully,” he said. “Now, let’s go. I wanna show you around.” 

Just like all-things-Jungkook, he still managed to surprise you after so long. Even with his tough exterior and cold stares, he ended up being a big advocate for public displays of affection. Jungkook could not let go of you even if his life depended on it, it seemed — always touching you in some way, playing with your fingers; or with his arm around your shoulders; a gentle kiss against your temple as you walked down the streets. If you stopped and thought about it, traveling through the land of memories, you could see some stark signs that his love language might be leaning more towards physical touch. You just thought it was something he did during intimate moments, and not all the time. 

Frankly, you weren’t complaining, but you were taking some time to get used to it.  During your previous relationship — a five-months-long catastrophe in your final year of high school — you realized that you weren’t super keen on being all touchy-feely, which was the spark for a few immature arguments back in the day. Years passed and you were more open when it came to Jungkook now, but there was still something that held you back a little, that didn’t let you relax all the way when he pulled you into a random hug, or stopped in the middle of his sentence so he could steal a kiss from your lips. 

Also like all-things-Jungkook, you guessed it was just a matter of time before you got used to it. 

~

About two hours after you two had arrived at that city, you managed to drag Jungkook towards a big, absurdly old-looking bookstore, ignoring his complaints as your eyes darted over the books in its interior. 

“It looks so cool, don’t you think?” You asked, finding his reflection on the glass. It was a funny contrast between the two of you — the pastel tones of your blouse and skirt battling against the dark shades of his pants, his boots, his tattoos. It just wasn’t worse because Jungkook had miraculously chosen a white shirt that day, otherwise you’d think that the two of you were from completely different worlds. “I bet they have some super old stuff.” 

Jungkook sighed. “You wanna go in, don’t you?” He asked, traces of annoyance at the back of his tone. 

“I might,” you said, turning your head to look at him. Lucky you (and unlucky Jungkook), you already had your puppy eyes locked and loaded. “Will you hate me?”

He sighed heavily, his bored stare flickering between your face and the dust accumulating inside the store. You didn’t even know the sacrifices he made for you. “Impossible,” Jungkook responded, “go before I change my mind.” 

You smooched his cheek. “Thank you!” 

Okay, maybe you were getting used to those public displays of affection already. 

The place smelled musty, as expected, and there was a thick layer of dust floating in the air; an allergy ready to strike. Against what it’s great exterior showed, the inside of the store was actually really small and packed with books, with you and Jungkook almost knocking a few piles over every time you turned a corner — nothing but another optical illusion to add to your list. 

Surprisingly enough, Jungkook didn’t complain as much as you had expected — instead limiting himself to a few grunts and scoffs as he looked through the endless lines of old, decaying books. Most of the time he kept it to himself, always maintaining you in his peripheral vision as you jumped from one story to the other. 

At some point, his arms wrapped around you, chest flushed against your back as he placed his head on your shoulder, looking down at the book in your hands. Jungkook smelled of coffee and cigarettes, his warmth was all that you could feel. “That looks old and boring,” he complained, nuzzling his nose against your neck. You hoped he didn’t feel the goosebumps spreading through your skin. “Want me to get it for you?” 

“No, I was just looking,” you told him, leaning back against his chest automatically. “I already have this book back at home, it’s really nice. I just never saw the first edition before. I don’t need another one.” 

Jungkook hummed, one hand reaching to turn it around so he could look at the cover — Clockwork Orange. He had heard that name before somewhere, probably another literature quiz he copied the answers for in high school. “You sure? Because it’s the third time you’re picking it up,” he said. You sighed, probably conjuring an excuse inside your mind, but he knew you better than that. He didn’t let you finish, tugging it away from your hands. “I’m getting it for you. And don’t whine about it.” 

You opened your mouth to argue, but you realized you were going to whine about it. In the end, Jungkook bought you that book, which earned him both another kiss on the cheek and a very annoyed look from you. He couldn’t understand you sometimes. 

“I think you’d like it, actually. It’ll fuel your anarchist spirit,” you told him when the two of you were already back on the sidewalks, your wandering eyes peeking at the bag in your hands. “Give it a shot one of these days.” 

Jungkook scoffed. “I don’t remember when was the last time I read for fun.” He paused. “Or ever.” 

“Doesn’t mean you can’t start doing it now. Summer is long, you’ll get bored eventually,” you counter-argumented, but he didn’t seem like he was going to crack. You pouted, pressing your shoulder against his. “Please? For me?”

Now, that was kind of a low hit. But it worked. “You’re pushing my limits here, princess,” he warned. 

But you weren’t relenting. “Please? It’s not even that long anyways.”

Jungkook didn’t know what it was, but he was especially pliant when it came to your requests that day (lie: he knew exactly why). “Fine,” he groaned. “But I’ll complain the entire time.”

You smiled. “Deal.” 

~ 

After walking around the town some more, the two of you eventually settled in a small diner near the beachside. The place was adorable, in typical 50’s style, and you two were one of the few people there — saved for three loud-speaking old men, and an overly-energetic family of five. Jungkook knew you liked to sit by the window, so he found the perfect spot in no time, which you appreciated endlessly. 

Subjects came and went, your food gradually vanished from your plates and, before you could tell, the day was showing signs of ending. Golden hour had arrived, bleeding past the widows and onto the diner’s floor; the buzzing of the town seemed to diminish considerably before rush hour. 

At some point, though, you noticed that Jungkook got distracted, his stare faltering and his mouth falling shut, lips pressed against one another. He was pushing his tongue against the inside of his cheek as he always did when he was trapped deep inside his mind. You reached out, placing your hands over his. “Jungkook,” you called, squeezing his fingers. He blinked his way back into reality, meeting your eyes straight away. With the bright sun coming from the dusty window, his irises had decayed into a clearer shade of brown. “What are you thinking about? You look constipated.” 

He scoffed. “You look constipated most of the time and I don’t comment about it.”

“You do, thought.” You stared at him. “And don’t avoid my question.” 

With a sigh, he leaned back against his seat, gaze flickering to your hands. Jungkook moved his around until your fingers were intertwined. “It’s like…” he hesitated, “Wish we could do this stuff back on campus. Go out or whatever.” He cleared his throat. “Like, out.”

There were traces of hurt in his tone that made you deflate, your heart skipping inside your chest. You had been thinking about it for some time, in different degrees of seriousness: about making it public, about not caring so much about what others thought. It was easier said than done, however, and the effects of your accumulated cowardice were corroding you like kerosene from the inside. “Yeah, I was thinking about that too,” you admitted, looking down at your hands. You knew the dark patterns on his skin by memory, your fingers so used to trailing it. You were never into tattoos before you met him. “We could tell them, you know,” 

He blinked, taken aback. “Who?”

You shrugged, still unable to meet his stare. “Everyone, anyone. I don’t know.” 

“You’re cool with that?” He asked, hesitant. 

You sighed, looking out of the window. Mental barriers can feel so physical sometimes, how strange. “It’s not that I’m… cool with it,” you told him. That would take a bit more adaptation. “I’m just tired of hiding.” 

Jungkook nodded. It was reassuring to know that you were on the same page on that, even if he had reached it a few months back. “Yeah, I get it,” he said, then found his thoughts coming to a sudden halt, hitting something else. There was a little bug of anxiety crawling in his insides for months now, biting down on his insecurities. He had never had trouble keeping secrets (in his mind, people didn’t need to know jackshit about his personal life), but, in a way, he had the hardest time keeping them from you. Especially when they could hurt you too. 

“What is it?” you asked, because he knew you would. “You’re distracted again.” 

Putting everything into perspective, his so-called secret wasn’t that bad, but, in his head, it was apocalypse-inducing. Jungkook hadn’t had the guts to tell you about his roommate's new discovery, fearing that you would lash out at him for being unable to keep it under the covers or, worse, fearing that you would blame him, accusing him of doing it on purpose to hurt you. He had created that tricky situation himself: if he had told you straight away, maybe it wouldn’t look so suspicious. But now that so long had passed, it was likely that you’d see that as an admission of his guilt. 

Once again: Jungkook was never the type to overthink, to assume the worst possible scenario when it came to such simple, mundane things. But when it came to the idea of losing you, he couldn’t help it. 

Still, he tried, deciding that your earlier comment about making it public was the closer he’d ever get to an opening. “There’s something you should probably know,” he started, fighting against the knot in his throat. “Just… don’t get pissed.” 

You frowned. “What is it?”  

And here goes nothing, he thought. “Taehyung knows.” 

You hesitated. Jungkook could practically see the cogs in your head turning, synapses working to make sense of that new, random piece of information. As previously stated, he expected you to start yelling at him, maybe accusing him of betraying your trust, but, instead, what came out of your mouth was a soft-spoken question. “You... told him? When?”

Jungkook shifted around on his seat, catching a glimpse of the happy family by your side — three overly-energetic kids fighting for the pack of sauce, and their parents trying to figure that battle out and end it with the least possible casualties. “Not exactly,” he admitted, looking back at you. “He kind of figured it out by himself. Back at the party. And I couldn’t lie about it, he knows me too well.” 

You nodded slowly, licking your lips. It was weird: how Jungkook could predict you extremely well at times and, at others, he completely missed the mark — which, thinking about it, was what had made him grow so interested in you. Maybe he wasn’t the only optical illusion around. “And… how did that turn out?” you wanted to know.

A puff of air left his nostrils as he recalled that fateful night. “He was in shock for like a week. It was pretty funny, actually, he wouldn't stop talking about it,” Jungkook told you. He had endured weeks of his roommate's meltdowns, floating between the need to talk to you, and the absolute horror of doing so. Taehyung had never been super at ease with you — he thought you were way too intense about stuff — and, after everything clicked in his head and he recalled the fact that you had tied Jungkook up, he didn’t want anything to do with you. Especially considering that he knew something he shouldn’t. “But he’s chill about it. I already made sure that he’s not gonna tell anyone. I don’t think anyone would believe him either.” 

In a way, Jungkook himself couldn’t believe it sometimes. Looking across the table now, watching as the orange sun caressed your cheeks, he was once again reminded of how different the two of you were. You were full of soft, round edges and pretty smiles; delicate fingers that seemed so unlike his own, calloused ones. He didn’t know why you were still around, didn’t know how he had gotten so lucky for so long. 

At his words, though, you frowned. “Tell me you didn’t threaten him with physical violence.”

“Okay.” Jungkook smirked. He had just pressed Taehyung against the wall, no biggie. He’d recover. “I won’t tell you.” 

You rolled your eyes. “Funny.” 

“I’m hilarious, actually. You just don’t appreciate me enough.” 

“Try giving me something to appreciate, then.” You paused, realizing your mistake the exact time that a glint of mischievousness appeared in his eyes. You raised one finger, slightly desperate. “Actually, no, shut up. Don’t say it. There are families in this diner.” 

Jungkook groaned. “Come on, baby, there is no way you can just say that and not expect a dirty joke.”

“It was my fault for creating expectations, sorry.” You decided to shut yourself up with a large gulp of your drink. The sweet taste had just entered your mouth when you recalled something else. “Hm!” You exclaimed, rushing to swallow your milkshake. “I have some good news, by the way.”

Jungkook raised his eyebrows. “Shoot.”

“I’m entering a new research project,” when you first spoke those words out loud, you were already expecting the expression of confusion and disgust that covered his face. You raised one hand, stopping him. “Spare me your comments, that’s only half of it.”

He leaned his head to the side. “And the part that interests me is...?”

You cleared your throat — suddenly, it felt a bit harder to speak. “Well... remember how you said that it would be hard to stay away for the entirety of summer break?” You recalled. Jungkook almost flinched at the memory — it was something he had confessed by mistake, provoked by the peaceful afterglow of his orgasm, and the gentle caresses of your fingers in his hair. You weren’t supposed to actually take that seriously, how embarrassing. “I’ll have to spend at least three to four extra weeks here, because I have to compile and organize a lot of data. Maybe more if I need to.” 

Actually, it was nice that you took that seriously — he changed his mind. 

“That’s… almost a month,” he mumbled, struggling to make sense of that new, fantastic piece of information. 

You nodded, taking another slip. Most of it had melted already, but it was still good. “Yeah, it’s a good amount of time, don’t you think?” 

It’s a fucking dream come true. “Sounds like it.”

You looked down at your milkshake, already almost at the bottom of the cup. The straw swirled around the cream once, twice, your distracted gaze mingling with the hum that fell from your throat. “After that I’m going home, though,” you told him, unaware that his heart had just decided to give him a free trial of arrhythmia. Talk about emotional rollercoasters. “And I’ll probably come back one week before class starts.”  

One month with you, almost two months apart — felt like both an amazing and a horrible deal, like Jungkook was about to sign a contract and sell his soul to the devil. Fame and riches during life, but eternal damnation in death. “I could visit you,” he offered, hopeful. 

You waved your hand, disregarding his words with a gentle smile on your face. “Don’t be silly, my hometown is like five hours away. And that’s during a good traffic day.” 

Jungkook would make the trip every single day if you asked him to. But he didn’t want to push. “Yeah,” he deflated. “That’s silly.” 

“Besides,” you continued, “I don’t think we’re in the meet the parents stage yet.” 

Yet? Wait, were you in any stage at all? Jungkook found himself a little dumbfounded at your comment, trying his best to fit it into reality. “I’m great with parents,” he blurted out, finding the disbelief in your semblance. He thought it would be better to change the subject before he fucked up big time. “You’re not bullshitting me about that summer thing, are you? I’ll have you all to myself for that long?” 

“Yeah, Yongsun will leave soon after the first week. She’s spending the summer at her rich aunt’s house.” And she actually asked you to go along, but you denied. Half because of the research project, half because of him. But he didn’t need to know that. “So you can come over whenever.” 

He wiggled his eyebrows. “Sleep over?”

Yes, please. “If you want.” You shrugged, nonchalant. The Oscars were missing out on your acting skills. “And you, are you planning on visiting your parents during summer?”

You wondered if it was a good idea to bring that up. Jungkook had mentioned that he didn’t have the best relationship with his family — they didn’t hate each other, but didn’t get along super well either. Like pieces of different puzzles thrown together, trying to fit. Regardless of how much you tried to get to know that part of his life, he usually changed the topic before you could do so, avoidant. You didn’t even think he’d answer that question. 

Jungkook cleared his throat. “Maybe. I’m thinking sometime around the end of summer break. I did that last time and it worked,” he said. “I’ll probably spend that middle part with Taehyung. He’s loaded and his house has a guest bedroom.” 

“Sounds like a plan.” You smiled. “I'm actually amazing with parents too.” 

Jungkook caught onto your provocation instantly — smirk already curling up on his lips — but his answer was an honest one. “Oh, no, I’m sure about it.” He scoffed. “Are you kidding me? I can see you all bonding already. They’ll make me an orphan and adopt you instead.” 

“Don’t be so dramatic,” you said. “And I hope you have fun with Taehyung. It’s nice that you two are so close — and for so long too. Not everyone has a friendship like that.” 

Frowning, he thought about what you said. Jungkook had never stopped to see it like that, Taehyung was always such a constant person in his life that he almost took him for granted. “Yeah, it’s crazy…” he drifted off. “He knows me better than I know myself sometimes. It’s weird.” 

You squeezed his hand before his mind could wander too far away from that diner. “Well, now you know how I feel when I’m with you.” You smiled. “Sometimes you tell me things that are so accurate that it scares me.” 

A puff of air escaped his nose, stare oscillating to your intertwined fingers. “I just pay attention, that’s all,” he mumbled. 

“I know you do,” you told him, tilting your head to the side. Your hand was so warm and soft in his that he never wanted to let it go. “Kook?”

He glanced up. “Yeah, baby?” 

“Just remembered something,” you started. “What was the place you wanted to take me to?”

Took him a couple seconds to shuffle around in his mind for that piece of information. Jungkook was so enthralled by your presence that he had frankly forgotten his previous plans for the day. At the realization, though, he looked out of the dusty diner window, eyes following the silhouettes of the strangers outside. “Ah, yeah, it’s almost time,” he said. “I’m glad you asked. Let’s go.” 

The food had already been paid for, so the two of you were outside in no time. The temperature had dropped a little ever since you walked into the diner, courtesy of the scorching sun going down, but there was still a nice warm atmosphere surrounding your bodies. There was a faint buzzing of cicadas in the distance and the air smelled sweet, a mixture of ten different food places at once. 

“You look cute,” he said abruptly, steps slowing down. “Wanna kiss you.” 

You giggled. “Thank you, and you can just kiss me, you know? No need to warn me.” 

Jungkook clicked his tongue, changing his direction without saying another word. Lucky for him, there was an alleyway right ahead, so all he had to do was to turn the corner to have you pressed against the wall. 

“Is this where you wanted to take me?” You teased, head leaning to the side as he caged your body with his. Your wandering hands slid up the sides of his arms, fingers tracing the black ink on his skin. “Doesn’t seem very romantic.”

He hummed, large hands landing on your hips. “Needed to make a quick stop.” He leaned in, lips brushing like feathers against yours. Your breath hitched in expectation, heartbeat thundering inside your chest. “Give me a minute.” 

Kissing Jungkook was pure muscle memory at that point. You didn’t even have to think when his lips met yours, hands flying to his shoulders as his strong arms wrapped around your waist; his large figure pressing you against the brick wall. It was almost poetic how you two had become so accustomed to each other’s mannerisms, like the fact that you knew he’d lean his head to the right side before he did, or that he would take one hand to cup your cheek, thumb grazing your skin. He sighed against the kiss, a pleased hum erupting from his chest as he placed his tongue inside your mouth. 

You pushed him away with a silly smile on your face, his nose bumping on yours. “Don’t make a scene, we’re in public.”

Jungkook smirked, taking in everything about you. He could’ve never guessed the two of you would get that far, but, at that moment, he couldn’t be more thankful for it. “Shut up, princess, that’s the good part about it,” he said before diving back in. 

~ 

The first step to solving a problem is acknowledging you have one — and you had already come to terms with the fact that your blockage when it came to what other people thought of you wasn’t only ruining the great moments you had (or could have had) with Jungkook, but it was also holding you back in general. 

If you stopped to think about it, you knew why that happened: you were projecting. It was easier to place your own insecurities and setbacks onto others, because then you could blame an external force for your own losses. It had never been about telling others, it was about admitting to yourself that maybe you had lost control over key parts in your life, maybe you were crazy about a person that you once saw as the lowest of the low. And that he was good to you, that he was one of the best things that had ever happened to you. 

The whole Taehyung fiasco was more of a pleasant outcome than a traumatic one — much to yours and Jungkook’s surprise. It was a shift in your foundation, a crack in the base of your preconceived notions that made you take a step back and analyze your situation all over again. Against what your chaotic, reptile brain had predicted, the world didn’t end when someone found out about you and Jungkook — actually, it stayed exactly the same. You didn’t know if it was just because you had not been directly exposed to it, or if it was because it was someone you didn’t have that much contact with, but it was just… fine. You were fine. 

That small spark catalyzed a flame of bravery inside your chest: maybe one day you could tell your friends, family, and to hell about what they thought about it. Because you liked (loved) Jungkook and that was enough. Because when he looked at you like he was looking like then, nothing else mattered. Because things would be fine.  

“Thank you for today,” you spoke, leaning onto the wooden fence that surrounded the pier. The sunset was a big pink and red bruise on the sky, painting the calm waves with deep shades of orange. The smell of the sea was overwhelming, cleaning you from the inside out. Jungkook had planned to take you there at sunset, and his timing had been perfect. “I loved it. Really.” 

Stil, you felt paralyzed, like you couldn’t really act out your desires. You wanted to tell everyone (which, on itself, was already a big jump from where you were a few months back), you wanted to kiss him openly and tell him that you loved him, and you wanted everything to be simple, easy, happy — fine. And maybe it would be. But the abysmal fall that you could take if everything went down the drain prevented you from taking that leap of faith. 

Being with Jungkook was easy, but falling for him clearly was not. 

“Me too,” he responded, eyes lost in the horizon. “It’s always nice being with you, especially when you don’t annoy me every five seconds.”

You scoffed. “Took the words straight out of my mouth.”  

He smiled, looking at you. “Why are you so quiet, by the way?” 

Uneasy, you shrugged. Jungkook had shot you right in the chest and was looking at you with gunpowder on his fingers, asking you what happened — why you were acting that way, so mild-mannered when you could barely keep your mouth shut before all that. Truth was, you didn’t know what to say. You didn’t know how to talk like before without completely ruining it. Without speaking too much, and ending up confessing about those annoying butterflies that were madly hitting the walls of your stomach. 

“Just enjoying the view,” you said. 

He hummed, pulling you closer. “So am I.” 

But he was still looking at you. 

You thought that Jungkook felt the same — perhaps not as strongly, not as deeply, but he did. You didn’t miss the way that he held you, the worried messages he sent you when you vanished for a few days, absorbed by your own world and its ephemeral worries. You thought that accepting your feelings would be the hardest part, but it didn’t even come close to the horror of sharing them, of speaking that truth into the universe and dealing with the consequences of it. So you didn’t. 

And yet you had to say something.

As his arm tightened around you, you melted into his embrace, your head placed snugly against his broad chest. Jungkook’s heartbeat was slow against your ear, calming you down and mingling with the crashing of the waves. “Kook?” You called, voice soft like a whisper. 

He placed a kiss on the top of your head. “Mmh?”

You angled your head up, meeting his gaze. There was a warm sensation on your cheeks that you couldn’t get rid of. “I really like you, you know,” you said. 

Those words left you with much more ease than you had expected — not broken, mumbled or hidden. Just a clear, diaphanous truth dripping from your lips and curling around the air. It hit Jungkook right in the heart, wrapping around his soul and nestling inside his chest. 

He didn’t think he needed to respond, because he thought that it was quite obvious he felt the same, but he did it regardless. “I really like you too, baby.” He placed a kiss on your lips. If he could, he would never stop kissing you, but there was something he needed to ask. “Can I take you somewhere else tonight?”

It wasn’t that. But he’d manage it eventually. 

“As long as you don’t kill me and throw my body in a ditch, sure,” you joked.  

He smiled. “Don’t worry, that’s, like, third date material.” Jungkook kissed you again, unable to hold himself back. You giggled against his lips, the sound so pretty that he almost wanted to curse at the sunset for even trying to be more divine than you. He leaned back. “But for real. Can I?” 

You nodded, nose brushing against his. “Yeah, sure.”

“We should get back, then,” he said. “We have a few hours ahead of us.” 

~ 

There are some things we experience throughout life that, as simple as they may seem at first glance, stick with us forever, like bubblegum on the bottom of a shoe. 

Back in high school, Jungkook had a special difficulty when it came to maths — not because he didn’t get it, but because he didn’t practice. He snoozed through most of his classes, cheated his way to the end of the year, and didn’t bother opening his book. His mathematics knowledge was a polychromatic blurr at the dark corners of his head, a car zooming past too fast for him to actually read the license plate. In the middle of it all, however, there was one specific question that never left him alone. 

It was a simple logic problem — so simple, in fact, that his impulsive brain underestimated it. The question was direct, one of many alternatives that he should classify as true or false: a triangle has two sides, it said. Jungkook rolled his eyes, chuckled to himself, and kept reading the test after he had marked it as false. 

Taehyung, who somehow managed to be great at maths studying just as much as his friend, explained to Jungkook later that he was thinking about it all wrong. It was true, because if a triangle has three sides, it is logically correct to say it has two. If it has three, it also has two. It made sense, but it fucked up his worldview forever. 

He swallowed dry, looking at you by his side. Your fingers were intertwined in his, his thumb caressing the back of your hand as you went on about the weird conversation you had in the last gas station you two stopped in. He wasn’t paying much attention, though. As the cool, blue-ish lights of the tunnel melted over your face, his mind was sent somewhere else, going back and forth like a ping-pong ball.

Following his previous, math-guided trail of thought, his earlier confession wasn’t false: if Jungkook was in love with you, he also liked you. If he had three sides, he also had two. But he still felt like was omitting the truth. 

He took your hand and moved it closer to his face. With his eyes stuck on the road, measuring the curving motion of the car, he placed a kiss against the back of your hand. Not that he could just drop that confession on your lap. You liked him, but it didn’t mean that you’d take such a thing lightly, especially if you did not feel the same — and the last thing Jungkook wanted was to scare you away when he finally got you so close. Just because you had two sides, didn’t mean that you had three. 

You were still talking — Jungkook knew that you were talking; he could hear your saccharine voice reverberating at the corners of his mind, but he couldn’t concentrate on any of the words that left you. He had never been so nervous before. 

He had been considering it for some time now — the idea of making it official — and it had been the whole point of asking you out in such a dramatic, impulsive fashion. But when you were right there, with your hand so warm against his and a ghost of a smile on your lips, he couldn’t find the right way to ask you that. 

Basically, he had done and said everything he wanted to, but his main plan (which was to ask you to be his girlfriend) was completely disregarded, pushed aside by the trepidation that grew inside his heart. If Taehyung were there, Jungkook was sure he’d be mocking him for the absolute ridiculousness of it all: it seemed that, after every insane thing Jungkook had done in his life, what has finally got him stuck, paralyzed by fear, was you. 

Vulnerability was a fire burning deep inside, scorching his pride and collapsing his foundations. It came in small, manageable waves; the gradual raising of temperature so he didn’t realize he was being boiled alive until it was too late. It scared him, really. How emotionally attached he had become to you; how he couldn’t imagine his routine without you somewhere in it. Jungkook wasn’t used to having something (or someone) for so long, never applied himself to anything worthwhile before you. 

But he was trying. He swore he was. 

Back at the pier, your confession had put him at ease, gave him an injection of courage to try one more time. Jungkook decided to take you to one of his favorite spots in the world — on top of a hill, right at the outskirts of the city, where he could see the world shining below. It was a private place, outside of the main road, and he didn’t remember any other car showing up anytime he had gone there in the past. In his mind, it was the perfect amount of peacefulness after such a long day. And maybe it would help him steady himself as well. 

You sighed. “This place is so gorgeous.” 

Jungkook nodded, eyes lost somewhere beyond the windshield. Raindrops were covering his vision, surrounding the town like a ghostly halo. It was a beautiful sight, but also melancholic in its own way. “Looks better when it’s not raining, though,” he told you. “I come here with Taehyung sometimes.” 

You giggled. “So many words to say that you’re hotboxing out here.”

“Shut up, that’s only sometimes,” Jungkook told you, pushing your shoulder playfully. “Coming up here helps me think even if I don’t hotbox.” 

“Yeah I can see why,” you agreed, eyes navigating around the foggy world beyond his windshield. Everything seemed so small from up there, so mundane and manageable. “The rain is nice too.”

He hummed. “I’ll bring you up here again once it’s not raining.” 

You nodded, heart jumping at the thought of a next time. “Thank you for showing me this place, Kook. It must be very special to you.”

He chose not to answer that second part, instead reaching out for your hand once more. Jungkook was never particularly keen on holding hands, but, that day, it seemed that he couldn’t get enough of it. Of you. “I’m happy you like it.” Once again, he kissed the back of your hand. “We can stay for as long as you want, baby.” 

And so you did. 

~ 

If a time traveler had told you months back that Jeon Jungkook — of all fucking people — would be the easiest person in the world to talk to, you would’ve probably done something to change your future, because that just couldn’t be a good sign. Still, the universe works in mysterious ways, and you learned to accept its strange peculiarities when it came to the things or people that it decided to shove into your life. Sometimes you have to let go of the wheel to enjoy the drive — figuratively of course. 

Somewhere during your mindless conversation, the two of you had moved to the backseat, under the excuse that the trip had been long, and you needed to stretch out your legs. Being in that position, with the two of you side by side and squeezed into that limited space, took you on a small trip into the past — a faint recollection in which, months ago, you were slightly drunk and pouring out your insecurities to him, convincing yourself that there was no meaning behind that shameful spectacle. 

You were kind of an idiot when it came to stuff like that, however, and you were just starting to figure that out. No amount of book smarts managed to fight against your denial and the emotional pit of despair you had faced when you thought about having actual intimate moments with Jungkook, and about what they could mean. Months ago, you had convinced yourself that it meant nothing — but, now, with that bird eye’s view, you could tell that it always meant something. 

It had always been nice to be with Jungkook, with his smug smirk and the tender touches of his hand on your face, playing with your hair, sliding down your back. It had always been fun, spontaneous, fiery — always something that broke the monotony of your routine and made you have some much-deserved fun. You had spent so long convincing yourself that Jungkook was a bad influence on you that you never even noticed all the good changes he brought into your life. 

He had just pulled away from a kiss when your phone vibrated somewhere on the front seat — and it didn’t stop. Against Jungkook’s whiny protests, you fought your way around until you grabbed the device, then collapsed back into your previous position — with his arm around your shoulder and your head against his chest; both of you sat against the door of his car, legs intertwined on the seat. 

“It’s just Yongsun asking if I’m alive,” you told him, thumbs jumping over the keys on your phone. Jungkook didn’t know why you were telling him that because he could already see your screen — and the flood of texts that came with it, asking if you’d be home for dinner — but he also wasn’t paying much attention. The whole texting moment reminded him of the earlier conversation you two had, a spark of possessiveness spreading like wildfire inside him. “I’ll drop my location and ask her to come dig up my body later.” 

“Funny,” he said, voice flat. He sounded just as distracted as he was, and your ears perked up at that. You were just about to ask him what was bothering him when he told you himself. “No Jimin?” 

You turned your head to look at him, locking your phone. Yongsun could wait a little bit longer. “No Jimin,” you told him. Jungkook’s face was expressionless, you had no clue what he was thinking about. “I told you that—“ 

“Hmmm, yeah, yeah,” he disregarded, shuffling closer to you and removing the phone from your hands, placing it on the floor beside him. His backseat wasn’t the smallest, but it was hard to accommodate both of you — so, it was clear what he wanted you to do. “Heard all that.” 

With a bit of maneuvering, you leaned closer to him, still on his side, and threw one leg over his. Your hands were on his chest now, and your skirt has moved up enough so you could feel the side of his thigh pressing against your mound. “So… what’s the issue?” You asked. 

He sighed deeply, much more dramatic than he needed to be, and nuzzled his face against your neck. “No issue,” Jungkook mumbled, pressing a light kiss against your skin — only the first one, however, because they started to get progressively harsher, needier, as he moved closer to your face. 

You chuckled at his demeanor, surprised at how firm your voice came out. “Don’t believe you.” Your eyes closed as his mouth continued to kiss its way up your neck, tongue playing with your skin, teeth teasing it just slightly. You gasped when he brushed past a particularly sensitive spot, warning a soft grunt from him. “I was just joking earlier, you know, there’s no need to be jealous.” 

“I’m not jealous, princess,” he denied, finally reaching your cheek. Jungkook pulled on your hair so you could lean your head away from him, exposing more of you, and his mouth continued its path closer to your lips. “Not right now.” 

“Not now?” You echoed, interested. 

He finally found your lips, pecking them only once before pulling away. “Mhm. Not now,” Jungkook agreed, letting go of your hair. Took him a few seconds to speak up again, his mind more focused on the way his other hand slipped between your breasts, squeezing your waist before moving on to your ass. “How can I? When you’re mine.” Jungkook groped your ass, earning a soft whimper from you. “All mine, baby.” 

“Says who?” You teased. 

There were goosebumps on your legs that Jungkook didn’t miss, his fingers nonchalantly tracing the back of your thighs, adventuring beneath your skirt. “You.” He smirked. His focus seemed to shift constantly, wanting to have all of you at once. Now, his gaze found the curvature of your neck, a pleased noise leaving his throat. “Wanna mark you up, baby. You look so pretty with hickeys.” 

You gulped. “Not th—“

“Not there, I know,” he finished, taking his hand to your neck. He didn’t press down, but the sensation of his large fingers wrapping around your throat made your heart skip a beat. If he felt it, he didn’t show any reaction. “I won’t do it. But I wanna.” 

There was something dangerous about the husky quality of his tone, the way Jungkook was looking at you like a predator stalking its prey.  You bought yourself some time by leaning your head against his arm, skin touching the cold glass of the window. The drumming of the rain was never-ending, the shapes of the droplets reflecting on his serious features. “Why do you want to do that?” You asked softly, measuring his actions. 

Something told you that Jungkook was enhancing his reactions a little just to fuck with you (roleplaying, if you will). Yet, something switched inside your brain when he spoke out again. “So people know you’re mine.” His warm palm slithered up your neck, cupping your cheek once again. “So they don’t even try to approach my girl.” 

Maybe it was time to admit that you loved when he said stuff like that, exaggerated or not. You wanted it to be true, wanted to be his girl. “Is that why you did it that time?” You asked, unable to fight back against your smile. “Since when are you that possessive?” 

Jungkook breathed out, eyes stuck to the shape of your lips; to the way his thumb grazed them once, twice, until you parted them just slightly. “Not my fault you never noticed,” he sounded like he was about to get sidetracked, as if his mind was already focusing on something else. You let him change the subject. “Can you get home late, princess?”

“Yeah, I don’t have a curfew.” You chuckled. “Why?”

“No reason.” He followed as you took his hand in yours, repositioning it until it was resting on your waist. His stare remained there for a little longer, observing the curves of your body, the way your skirt had hiked up almost completely. “Just thinking.” 

It was your turn to pull him closer, fingers intertwining in his dark locks. Jungkook leaned into your touch, turning his face around so he could place a kiss against your palm. Maybe your heart melted, but he didn’t have to know that. “You don’t do that very often,” you joked. 

He didn’t follow it. “Only about important things,” Jungkook said, the hand that was on your hips now slithering up to your waist. With his other arm still around your shoulder and pressed against the car door, there wasn’t much that he could do, but you could see it in his eyes that he wanted to touch you more, harder, to pull you closer. There was such intensity under his gaze that your stare faltered, instead following the raindrops on the window. “Look at me, princess.” He called and you did. Jungkook sighed, leaning in. “Be good for me, alright?” 

Expectant, you nodded. Your eyes fluttered shut just as his lips met yours; tongue sliding inside your mouth right away, wasting no time. You knew Jungkook enough to learn how to recognize a few signs — and when he kissed you like that, so sloppy and deep, it meant that he had a one-track mind when it came to making you feel good, and he wouldn’t tiptoe around it too much. 

The confirmation for that small hypothesis of yours didn’t take long to arrive. You shuffled closer to him, breasts pressed against his broad chest and one of your legs hooked over his, and Jungkook took that opening as his cue. The arm that was around your shoulder moved to wrap around your waist, pulling your body closer as his other hand slid beneath your skirt, quickly finding what he was looking for. 

A desperate little whimper fell from your lips as his fingers pushed your panties aside, gently brushing between your soaked folds, towards your clit. Jungkook swallowed your moans as he started pressing down on your sensitive spot, his tongue playing with yours as your hands held onto the fabric of his white shirt. You could feel the drumming of his heart beneath your fingers, the raggedy quality of his breath as he groaned against your mouth. “Cute,” he mumbled as he pulled away. “Wanna eat you out. Lie down for me.” 

There wasn’t one single reality in which you’d deny him. After a small instant of struggling and fumbling around, you got to the position he requested, your upper back leaning against the door and your legs spread out on the seat. Jungkook was seated between them, his palms slithering up your calves, finding support on your knees as he leaned down. 

“Have I ever told you how much I love these skirts?” He asked. 

You chuckled. “Only a million times.”

He flicked the fabric over, exposing your panties to him. They were white, a perfect color to see the wet mark you had left on them. “Make that a million and one.” 

One of your hands pushed his hair away from his face. “I almost can’t wear them anymore, because of these.” You pointed down. 

Yeah, he had seen those already. His cock throbbed inside his pants when he saw all the hickeys he had previously left on the insides of your thighs; most of which had already started to fade. You prohibited him from marking you anywhere people could see, and Jungkook kind of liked that a lot more — it was his private spectacle, his skin-deep reminder that you were his, again and again. “So pretty, angel,” he mumbled. “All mine.” 

You smiled fondly. “You haven’t called me that in a long time.” 

“Hmmm yeah?” Jungkook pushed his body closer to your heat, trying to find a good position on the backseat. “Don’t know why. You’re such an angel.” He kissed your thigh. “My pretty angel.” 

Gently, his tongue came out to lick those marks, teeth biting down on your skin just enough to have you gasping above him. “Don’t tease,” you said — what was supposed to be a warning sounded more like a bargain, considering how airy your voice had become. 

“Aw, then it’s no fun.” He pouted, fingers hooking on either side of your panties. One of  his hands let the elastic go, a smirk blossoming on his features as it smacked back against your hips. “What do you want, baby? Let me take care of you.”

“Your mouth,” you told him with no hesitation, “and your fingers too.”

Jungkook chuckled, leaning in so he could place a kiss against your mound. You were so on edge that even that managed to evoke a shiver from you. “My girl’s greedy tonight,” he teased, voice deep. “But whatever she wants.” He finally removed your panties, throwing it on the front seat. “That stays with me.” 

“Pervert,” you teased. 

“For you, maybe,” Jungkook responded, eyes locked on your glistening folds. He separated them just slightly, watching the way your wetness clung onto his fingers, your legs jumping in expectation. “Stay still now, princess.” 

You did as he said, nails digging to the leather of the seat as Jungkook aligned himself with your pussy, letting the saliva accumulate in his mouth. You watched in awe as he let it fall, spit mixing with your juices, dripping down all over your pussy. “Told you that you’re nasty,” you said. 

Jungkook smirked like a devil, two of his fingers spreading his spit around. “You love it. You’re worse than me.” 

You bit your lip. “I’m not.” 

“No?” He raised one eyebrow. “You don’t like it messy, princess?”

Before you could respond, two of his fingers sunk in your pussy, shoving a bit of his saliva inside as well. You shivered at the feeling, walls fluttering around him as he started moving them in and out. 

Jungkook’s smile only grew, victorious. “That’s what I thought.” He reached closer, breath hitting your pussy as he spoke out. “Stay still.” 

His mouth was on you in no time, ripping a loud moan out of you. It wasn’t a mystery that Jungkook had almost an obsession when it came to eating you out, but it always surprised you how eager he was every time he did it, just moaning and grunting against your pussy as if your taste was the best thing he had ever experienced. “F-Fuck,” you cried out, back arching off the leather seat. “Feels s-so good, Kook.” 

He lived for your stuttering, raggedy praises; lived for your taste flooding his mouth. His fingers held onto your thighs harder, keeping you in place as he continued to lap around your folds; sucking your clit and teasing your entrance with his fingers before sinking back in. Jungkook was overcome with the need to see you, so he pulled back for a second so he could meet your heavy eyes. “Be louder for me, baby,” he husked. “Wanna hear how good I make you feel.” 

You gave him one, feverish nod before he was diving back in; licking you clean like his life depended on it. “J-Jungkook,” you called out, slightly dizzy already. “You’re so good. F-Feels so good.” 

In fact, it felt too good. It wasn’t rare for Jungkook to rip your orgasm out of you earlier than expected (which always inflated his ego for days after that), but, that night, you didn’t want it to end so soon. You could already feel the telltale signs of your high approaching and, as tempting as that was, you had different needs in mind. 

“Wait, wait.” You pulled on his hair, trying to get his mouth away from you. Jungkook, however, only went harder. “K-Kook, stop.” 

At that, you got his attention. He was breathing out heavily when he pulled away, his chin covered with your wetness. “What is it?”

“I…” you hesitated, fighting through the veil of dizziness in your mind. Jungkook thought that it was adorable how you got tongue-tied when you were close to cumming. It was a rare sight — one reserved only for him. “I... wanna cum on your cock.” 

That was like a punch in the gut, knocking the air out of his lungs. Jungkook could feel his cock throbbing at the sight of you — so overwhelmed, so wet — sounding so innocent when you asked for such a lewd thing. “Yeah?” He moved quickly, pushing his body away from yours so he could tug off his shirt. It fell somewhere behind him as he placed his face on your neck, voice muffled against your skin. “It’s so fucking hard for you, baby.” He squeezed your hips. “Never wanted to be inside you so fucking much.”

“Please,” you asked again, sounding so sweet and needy that Jungkook had to hold himself back from not fucking you right away. “Want you so much it hurts.” 

He growled against your flesh. “God, I wanna see you riding my cock so fucking bad,” Jungkook cursed, pressing himself against you. You mewled when you felt his erection on the inside of your thigh; his big cock fueling your lust even more. “Sit on my lap for me, baby.” 

Part of you had already guessed he was in that mood. When Jungkook was horny, he wanted to fuck you until you were crying; drilling in and out of you so hard and deep so that he was the only thing you could think about, his name the only thing you could say. But when Jungkook was really horny (as he was that night), there was nothing else in the world that satifistied him more than to watch you fucking yourself on his cock, using him however you wanted until you were sobbing out his name, cumming all over him. 

And you weren’t going to complain about that idea either. 

With a bit more maneuvering — you had yet to figure out if you enjoyed car sex or not — you finally found yourself sitting on top of his muscular thighs, your palms sliding up his toned arms, towards his chest. It was unfair how Jungkook was hot all around, with his Greek god figure and the black ink dancing in his skin; his messy dark hair and lustful gaze. You were doomed, and he pulled you into a hungry kiss before you could stare any further. 

Jungkook’s hands slid up the sides of your body, exploring the smoothness of your skin and dragging your blouse upwards. He groaned against your lips once his palms found the expanse of your breasts, hands squeezing on the flesh. It was annoying that you still had your bra on, but there was something so amazing about the little whimper you let out, about the way your back arched, body moving closer to his touch. You were always so good for him, always ready to give him whatever it was that he asked for. Always so sensitive to his most minimal of touches. 

Soon enough, you were breathing hard against his lips, pulling away so you could speak. “I’m so wet, Kook,” you said, your voice a timid whisper. “Just fuck me, please.” 

He groaned, squeezing your covered breasts once more. “Fuck, don’t say that,” he cursed out. You were never one to speak like that often so, when you did, he felt as if he needed a moment to compose himself. “You don’t know what that does to me.” 

You blinked those pretty eyes of yours at him, seeming so innocent but being anything but. “Why not? it’s true,” you teased, taking one hand beneath your skirt. Jungkook followed the movement, mesmerized, and thought that he was about to pass out when your fingers returned to his field of vision. “Look.” You pouted. 

A deep hum dripped past his lips, his hooded eyes watching as your fingers shimmered under the pale moonlight, covered by your arousal. He could feel himself salivating at the sight, wondering why the hell he had stopped eating you out in the first place. 

Still, he maintained his cool. Jungkook’s hand wrapped around your wrist, gently guiding your fingers closer to your mouth. “Taste yourself for me, baby,” he requested. His heartbeat was out of control as he witnessed your pouty lips opening up so your fingers could slip inside, the same tongue that he had just been caressing now licking yourself clean. “That’s it. Tastes good, right?” You nodded, fingers still pressed against your tongue. After another second, Jungkook removed your digits from your mouth, but his were already taking their place. “Now mine, baby,” he egged you on. 

Of course, you did as he requested, licking and sucking on his fingers until he was satisfied. 

Jungkook smirked, looking particularly hypnotized that night. “Good girl,” he praised under his breath, a maniac gaze swimming inside his eyes as he looked up at yours. “Good girls deserve rewards.” Lethargically, he started moving his fingers in and out of your mouth, his cock throbbing inside his pants at the small whimper that came from your throat. He wanted to see you sucking him off, worshiping him until he came all over your face, inside your mouth, on your chest. But what he needed was to be deep inside your pussy. “Want my cock?”

Again, you nodded, moaning around his digits. 

“Use your words, angel,” he teased, fingers leaving your mouth once again. Lately, it was rare to witness that cocky, annoying side of his, but, once it showed up, it was just like before. “Let me hear you.” 

“Yes, please,” you asked. 

He clicked his tongue, lowering his hand. You gasped when his saliva-covered fingers found your clit, circling it slowly. “Ask one more time.” Jungkook was impassive, not reacting to the way you squirmed above him, already so sensitive. “You can do better than that, baby.” 

You could never tell if you adored or despised when he got like that. Maybe both. Probably both. “Please, Kook, I want it so bad,” you begged. Through it all, you still had your own cards up your sleeve, some small actions you knew that affected him deeply. So you made good use of them: leaning in and placing a hot kiss against his lips, your hands tugging on his hair. Jungkook groaned against your mouth, his fingers stilling on your clit when you rolled your center against his erection. “Please,” you repeated, voice airy. “Let me ride you.” 

How could he possibly say no to that? 

“Fuck. Wanna see you bounce on it, baby.” Jungkook leaned back, quickly opening his zipper. You moved away just enough so he could pull his pants and underwear down, his cock stiff against his lower abdomen. “And hold your skirt up for me.” 

You pouted. “You don’t want me to take it off?” 

Jungkook shook his head, holding you by the chin and pulling you into another heated kiss. He moaned against it once you sat right over his cock, your warm wetness spreading all over him. He pulled away. “You know I love it when you ride me with a skirt on, princess. Looks like a sexy schoolgirl.”

A thousand pecks later, and you found a chance at speaking. “Pervert,” you repeated, smiling against the kiss. “You always do stuff like this.”

He hummed. “Yeah? Like what?”

“Like… fuck me with my skirt on,” you started, kissing down his neck, “Cum inside me and make me keep it inside all day. Eat it out of me.” Jungkook grew stiff beneath you, a grunt leaving his chest as you rolled your pussy against his cock one more time. “Cum inside me two, three times in a row.” You giggled. “Do you like stuffing me that much, Kook? Why is that?” 

He was obsessed with the idea, actually, just you talking about that was enough to make him dizzy with desire. Maybe it could be all trailed back to his possessive gene, the evil, cocky part of him that wanted to see you full of him, dripping with his cum, his fingerprints all over your body. What started as a simple ego thing — playing with your limits, seeing how far you’d let him go — was now a way for him to get a hold of you, to make you his, even if it was an ephemeral, material thing. And, well, yeah, maybe it was also still an ego thing. Maybe it made him super hard thinking that you were walking around with his cum inside you, dripping down your panties and making a mess all over your pussy. 

Instead of saying all that, however, Jungkook simply threw the question right back at you, “Don’t you like it when I do all that?”

“I do,” you admitted straight away, kissing his lips once, twice, barely giving him what he wanted before pulling away. He knew that glint in your eyes, and he had learned to hate it. “Not as much as you, though.” 

Still, Jungkook wouldn’t fall for your schemes that night. Sometimes he didn’t mind so much, but, then, he wouldn’t let you take the wheel no matter what. “Liar. You love it,” he threw back, wrapping one hand around his cock, the other propping you up over it. You got the cue instantly, lowering yourself so his crown brushed against your entrance. “What, you think I forgot how wet you get when I cum inside you? When you keep it in?” He smirked at the overwhelmed expression that monopolized your face, the hand on your hips pushing you down on his cock. He knew how to put you back in place, when necessary. “Look at this, I just cleaned you up and you’re already soaked again. So messy, baby.” 

You gasped when his tip sunk past your entrance, slowly stretching you out. “K-Kook—“

“Shhh, you got this.” One hand was in your hair, guiding your head closer to him. Weak, you could only follow his pull; feeling as he placed a gentle kiss against your lips. “Slow. Deep inside for me, baby. You got this.” 

With a nod, you did as he requested, gradually sinking lower and lower until his big cock filled you to the brim. You moaned out at the feeling, your arms wrapping around his shoulders for support as you tried to get used to it. 

Jungkook was breathing heavily then, his large palms cupping your ass, every cell of his body focused on the amazing way you squeezed around him. It was impossible to consider a reality in which you were not made for him, the way you two fit together was too good to be true. “That’s it… Just like that, baby,” he said, trying to fight back his moans. “Move for me?” 

The thought of mocking him about his request (considering that Jungkook was a big advocate for cockwarming as a teasing mechanism) crossed your mind, but you brushed it off almost instantly. You couldn’t overlook the need that grew inside you, begging you to fulfill it, to roll your hips against his until you were cumming.

So you did. Took you a few attempts to set a rhythm, body moving up and down as you felt his cock sink inside of you, brushing all your sensitive spots on its way out, then all the way back in. Maybe you should’ve gotten used to it by now, but every time still felt like the first. 

“L-Like this?” You asked. 

“Faster,” Jungkook breathed out. Maybe your thighs would burn like hell after your rush of adrenaline went away, but you didn’t care too much about it then — you did what he requested, picking up the pace. “Yeah, yeah, just like that. Fuck, that’s my girl.” 

You nodded, body overflowing with pleasure as you continued to ride him. That harsh, messy pace was a blessing to him, the way your breasts bounced close to his face pulling his attention instantly. 

“Doing so well for me, princess. So fucking perfect for my cock,” Jungkook praised, eyes running all over your body as you squirmed under his touches. There was no one else in his world but you; you and the overwhelming need he had to have your tits on display. He tugged on the hem of your top. “Can I?” 

You nodded, raising your arms so Jungkook could slide that piece of clothing off easily. His hands were quick to unclasp your bra, placing it on the seat next to him as he dove in to play with your breasts. “Love your tits, baby, so soft,” his voice was a muffled groan against your skin, tongue poking out against your nipple. “Love your ass.” He squeezed your cheeks, making you roll your hips against his cock harder. “Fucking love when you ride me.” 

“K-Kook,” you sobbed, I’m—“

He growled. “Love when you call me that.” 

Of course, he loved way more than that. Jungkook was a weak man — point blank, no excuses about it. He was weak about the way your warm walls clenched around his cock; lost himself in the overwhelmed nature of your expression as you rolled your hips down on his length. The world was always so enhanced when he was with you, every sentiment and sensation amplified every time he looked at you. 

The first times you fucked, it was just that, and he was fine with that — at the time. But, back then, Jungkook never noticed those small things about you with such clarity: the small puffs of air that escaped between your lips, the way your nails dug to his neck or the way you whined out his name. He never noticed how ridiculously pretty you looked, his personal angel, just losing yourself over and over for him. He liked having you on top because he couldn’t run away from those details even if he tried, so he let them consume him. 

The sound of you giggling brought him back straight away, however, his heart fluttering inside his chest. “You’re staring,” you told him. 

Jungkook smirked. “Hmmm… am I?” His hand moved your hair away from your face, cupping your cheek. You leaned into the touch and his thumb started caressing your skin, feeling the heat beneath his palm. If he concentrated hard enough, maybe he could remember that forever. “Can you blame me? Look how pretty my girl is.” 

“Your girl?” You asked, slightly delirious at that point. 

Soon enough, if he had the guts to ask you. “Yeah, all mine,” Jungkook responded, diving into that fantasy for a second — into a parallel universe where all his problems were gone, and you two were everything left in the world. “Come here.” His hand moved to the nape of your neck. “Wanna kiss you.” 

And you did, of course, because you were always just so good for him. Jungkook leaned his head to the side, fingers pulling on your hair as you opened your mouth for him, allowing for his tongue to meet yours. Once again, he felt his stomach being filled with that tingling anticipation, lust and tenderness battling inside it, begging for his attention. He couldn’t handle it: you were too much, always had been. 

Just like that, some forsaken feelings hit him before he could avoid them, before he could push them away any further. It was always like that: when he couldn’t deal with it, not when you were consuming every cell of his body and he could not ignore the effect you had on him. 

Again and again, those words were just ringing inside his head — I love you, I love you, I love you — repeating themselves into a maniac crescendo that drowned out his own thoughts. You were all that he could see, all that he could hear and touch; you were every idea that permeated his mind at that instant, chest overflowing with devotion to a point in which he couldn’t even speak. Especially not that. Not those words.

Not when you were so blissfully ignorant above him, not when the realization made him so fucking terrified that he just wanted to crawl into a ball and hide forever. Jungkook couldn’t grasp his reasoning anymore, he had long lost it. He was made of sheer, unadulterated emotion — a fierce battle between his blossoming love and the horrifying vulnerability unraveling inside his soul, promising to break him apart. 

He could not say that. Not now. Not when there was so much at risk. Not when he couldn’t even bring himself to ask you to be his girlfriend in the first place. 

So he didn’t — instead, he continued making out with you in a faithless attempt at shutting himself up.

You whined softly against his lips, your hands losing their strength on his shoulders. Your breathing was ragged, shallow; thighs starting to shake on either side of his body. Jungkook knew those signs like no one else, was quick to grip your ass tighter, helping you move. 

“Close, baby?” He breathed out, voice raspy, sounding like sin itself. “Gonna cum for me?” 

You nodded, nose brushing against his. “Y-Yeah. Almost there.” 

“Fuck, princess, your pussy’s so tight,” Jungkook cursed, closing his eyes for a second. He was a total goner: nothing could ever compare to the high he got when he was plunged deep inside your heat, breathing the same air as you. When his heart felt so full and so empty at the same time. “You sure you don’t wanna come over? Wanna fuck you all night.”

“C-can’t,” you struggled to get out, “have class in the morning.” 

He scoffed. Some things would never change. “How boring.” 

You rolled your eyes. “Next time maybe don't t-take me out on a Sunday, dumbass.” You tried to sound harsh, but it was impossible to ignore the tight grip you had on his cock as you cried out, movements stilling for just a second before you found the strength inside you to pick the pace back up. “K-Kook,” you stuttered, hooded eyes meeting his own. He loved when you called him that, made his heart burst inside his chest — and if you called him that while you were riding him then… well, then he was a dead man. “I’m gonna—“

“Gonna cum for me?” he completed, raising his hips slightly to meet your movements. His cock felt so good inside you, his ragged breaths were all that you could focus on. “Cum all over my cock, baby, wanna feel it.” 

There was nothing in the world you wanted more than that. You could feel your pleasure building up more and more inside you, ready to snap, and you simply followed it as you tipped over the edge. Jungkook loved the way you looked, the way you clenched around him, the way you cried out his name like a prayer when your body finally gave out and you came around his hard cock. He could replay that moment in his mind forever and never get tired of it.

It was by a miracle and the strong support of his hands on your hips that you didn’t just collapse against his chest, instead managing to keep a semi-constant pace on his cock — much slower, however. “Fuck, that’s it,” he moaned under his breath, his dark eyes running all over your body, trying to absorb everything about you: the bouncing of your breasts, the shaking of your thighs, the pretty frown on your features. “So good for me, baby, you always take my cock so well. My good girl.”

You nodded, still slightly dazed-out after your orgasm. Jungkook lived for moments like that, to see how fucked-out and pretty you looked when he was done with you. It made his cock throb inside you, threatening to spill over. 

“W-Want you to cum,” you stuttered. “Inside.” 

Jungkook was almost there already, barely hanging by a thread. “God, you’re fucking perfect.” He threw his head back against the seat, black hair falling all over his forehead, sweaty and sticking onto his skin. Jungkook was an image of perdition then, so hot that you couldn’t even think about anything else for a second. “Fuck, princess,” he moaned out, “you’re gonna make me cum.” 

Lately, his mind became a dangerous place when he was that close to his high, losing its filter and threatening to make him spill everything that was brewing inside his skull. Jungkook had to hold himself back with all the force he had left, but you could see it in his hooded, fucked-out gaze that there was so much that he wanted to say, so many broken words that got lost amidst his groans and moans. 

For better or for worse, he came before he had the chance to do so. Jungkook shivered beneath you as he cock released inside you, hands holding tightly to your ass as you milked his orgasm, moaning out your name as he filled you up. He could feel his cum dripping out of you, making a mess on him; could feel the way your pussy clenched around him, and it all was a piece of paradise reserved just for him. 

Once Jungkook reached his limit, he pulled you flushed against his chest, kissing your forehead. “You’re amazing,” he said, lost in your gaze. “Stay like this for me.” 

You brushed his sweaty hair away from his face. “You don’t wanna see it?” 

“Later,” he responded. “Wanna stay like this for now.” Jungkook shoved his face on the crook of your neck, smooching your skin as a long, delighted hum vibrated in his chest. “Can I see you tomorrow, baby?” He asked, voice muffled against your skin. “I can kick Taehyung out if you wanna come over.” 

You chuckled, placing your fingers in his hair. He leaned against your touch, silently begging you to play with it. “Yeah, sure,” you agreed. “I have class until three, though. And you don’t have to kick the poor boy out. Especially considering that he already knows.” 

Jungkook sighed at your response, his hands pulling you closer by the waist. Your back arched, his toned chest pressing against yours as his mouth started to assault your neck, running over the kisses and bites he had left before. “And the day after that?” He pressed on. 

Even though you had no idea where he was trying to go with that, you still complied. “Yeah, we can figure it out.” You smiled, eyes fluttering shut at the sensation of his mouth moving towards your jaw, your cheek, and then placing a kiss right on the corner of your lips. “Any day you want.” 

He smiled. “I like the way that sounds.” Leaning back, Jungkook looked at you and, just like that, all the monsters recoiled back under his bed. All his negative thoughts evanesced, and there was no doubt pestering his mind. He looked at you and he just realized that things were simple ��� and, all along, the two of you were just making it way harder than it should be. But he could change that now. “Baby?” He called, possessed by a newfound wave of bravery. “Can I ask you something?” 

“Yes, of course.” You nuzzled closer to him, placing a small kiss against his lips. Jungkook tried to deepen it, but you pulled away before he could manage to do so. That seemed to be a pattern between the two of you. “What is it? You got so serious all of a sudden.” 

His jaw clenched as he formulated his sentence: he had practiced a few times in his head, trying to find the best moment to let it loose, but it was ten times harder now that you were waiting for it. “Do you want to make it, you know, official?” The question left his mouth rather smoothly, much better than he had predicted. “You know. Us.” 

You blinked, shoulders falling as you digested his words. There was a fluttering in your heart that you did not miss, a sinking feeling in your stomach that left your body on edge. “Are… are you kidding?” You asked. Just to be sure. Just so you wouldn’t embarrass yourself with an overly-excited yes. 

Jungkook frowned. “Why would fucking I joke about that?” He threw back. You didn’t know. It just felt too good to be true. “No, I really fucking like you,” he went on, arms tightening around your lower body. “Want you to be mine. For real.” 

Now, Jungkook had seen basically all the expressions you could give, but he had never seen them change so fast. Your face went from disbelief to worry, to happiness and back to confusion; only to explode in a fit of laughter. “I cannot believe you.” You pressed your forehead against his shoulder, body bouncing up and down as you continued to laugh. “And is this how you ask me to be your girlfriend? Cock inside and all?” You leaned back, wiping a tear away from your cheek. “Jeon Jungkook, I swear to god… You’re so stupid.”

He smirked. “So I’m guessing that’s a yes?”

The urge to smack him across the head was overwhelming, but you held it back like a pro — you had months of practice. Instead, you placed both hands on either side of his face, keeping him in place. “See? You’re stupid,” you repeated, unable to fight the happiness in your tone. “It’s a yes, obviously.”

And you kissed him, because there was nothing else in the world to be done at that moment. 

Jungkook had to admit: he didn’t know shit about maths — and the little he did know, it was long forgotten after he had left high school. He wasn’t sure anymore, but he thought that something needed at least three sides to actually be a shape… or whatever it was that mathematicians referred to as. That’s why the triangle was the first of that weird sequence he had to memorize. And, therefore, maybe he was just too dumb to see the third side of you. 

Maybe you liked him way more than you led on. 

~

Turns out that Yongsun’s good luck had magically returned and you didn’t even know about it. 

The drive back to your place was sadly faster than you had anticipated and, about thirty minutes after you had floated your way up to cloud nine, Jungkook was parking in front of your apartment complex, putting an end to your first official date together. He kissed you goodbye (at least three times) before you got out of his car; promising once again that you’d figure out a way to see him the following day. Jungkook (in typical chaotic fashion) decided to keep your panties as a consolation prize regardless.

The front door had started making an awful creaking sound, and it signaled your arrival when you stepped into your apartment. You hummed at the delicious aroma that filled the warm atmosphere, leaning on the wall so you could remove your shoes. They collapsed against the floor, two small perturbations in that peaceful world. “Yongsun! That smells amazing, what is it?” You called out, but received no answer. Yongsun was probably distracted, as she often was when she was cooking. “I’ll be there in a second if you want some help!” 

After you went to your room and changed your clothes, you made your way to the kitchen, where you found her leaning over one large pot — spices in one hand, wooden spoon in the other — and her hair looking like it had been tied in a hurricane. The mess in the kitchen was absurd — with poorly-chopped vegetables thrown around; a dark puddle of sauce on the floor; and remnants of mustard on the back of her clothes. You had no idea how Yongsun managed to be so clumsy, but you couldn’t complain when she cooked so well. 

You crossed your arms as you arrived by her side, taking a peek inside the pot. “Hey, it smells great. What is it?” You repeated, before looking up at her. Yongsun looked awfully serious, the most you had seen during the years she had been your roommate, and that mere observation sunk like an anchor inside your stomach. “What happened?” 

In a way, you knew what had happened before she even started talking. It took you two seconds to remind yourself of the conversation you two had before you left, and another second to take a glimpse at the living room’s window, as if to check that it was still there. Yongsun liked to take breaks during cooking, walking around the place as the food boiled, and it wouldn’t surprise you if her timing had been precise enough to see something. 

Still, her following words caught you a little off guard. “You know Kim Taehyung? Last semester, I had this project with him. He talked so much we almost handed it in late.” 

You blinked — wait, had Taehyung told her something? Had he asked her something and she had just now connected the dots? “I remember that. You just never told me it was with Taehyung.”  

She hummed. “You know him?” 

You took a deep breath, trying to keep your emotions under control. There was an urge inside you to look through the window, review the possibility of Yongsun staring down the street and seeing who you were with — Jungkook hadn’t even left his car, so maybe she was going to mention something completely different. Still, you concentrated that energy into keeping your voice casual, under control. “Yeah, he’s in my ethics class. Why?” 

She nodded, finally meeting your stare. Yongsun didn’t look sad, mad, or anything in between, which confused you a little. “One time he told me about this roommate of his,” she continued casually, measuring your expressions. Of course she knew who it was. There was no way she didn’t. “Who fixed a Chevy Camaro ‘69 when he was in high school, he did it with his dad. Taehyung didn’t stop talking about how the car was super cool, and that he wanted to have a bonding experience like that with his own dad. He showed me a picture of it and everything.” 

“People talk a lot of personal stuff to you,” you deflected. Part of you wanted to tell her, you had thought about it so many times already, and yet you felt like you could barely move now, just waiting for that excruciating mystery to come to an end. 

“Happens when you study psych.” Yongsun sighed, pointing at something behind you. “Pass me the salt?” You had just grabbed it when she gave her killer shot. “Pretty sure you know who his roommate is. I think there’s only one person around campus with a car like that, and I just saw it dropping you off.” 

You laughed, dry, because that was all that your body could do at that point. It was a laugh of nervousness, of relief, of fear, of happiness. Everything and nothing at once. “Surprise, I guess,” you said, monotone. 

She elevated one eyebrow, grabbing the salt from your hands. Most people would measure it, but Yongsun had a weird sixth sense when it came to cooking, so she just threw a random amount inside the mixture before continuing. “Not a surprise, I think,” she told you. “I had my suspicions.” 

Uneasy, you nodded. You also had your suspicions that she knew who it might be, considering the comments she had dropped throughout the months; the way she had looked and talked to Jungkook back at Hoseok’s party. Nevertheless, you guessed she still hoped it was someone else. “You’re fine with that? You look like…”

Yongsun scoffed. “Fine is a strong word, honestly.” Her stare faltered, and suddenly staring at her nails seemed to be much more interesting than keeping a stable eye contact with you. She breathed out, constructing her words inside her head before looking back up. “I’m not your mom, ___. You do what you want, you go out with whoever you want.”

That wasn’t all. “But…?”

She sighed. “But, as your friend, I’m worried,” Yongsun admitted, the wooden spoon sliding between her fingers, bumping on the bottom of the pot. Her body relaxed all at once, glad that she was putting those words out. “You probably know why, maybe the same reason why you didn’t say anything to any of us. Jungkook isn’t really the best dude around and he’s just so… so much.” She shook her head. “You know the things people say about him, right? Do you really think it’s a good idea to get involved?” 

You licked your lips, taking a moment to think about your following words. You had imagined that conversation a billion times in your head, but it seemed otherwise from the way you were reacting. “I know what people say, but most of it isn’t true,” you told her. “Of course, he’s far from perfect. So am I. And I know it sounds really dumb and cliche when I say this, but he’s a really nice guy. He treats me well.” 

With a quick movement, she turned off the stove, reaching for the pot lid. “I have no doubt about that, girl. I told you that you seemed happy and I meant it,” she said. Her shoulders fell and you couldn’t really figure out what her expression meant. “___, I just… I don’t want you to get carried away by someone that isn’t worth it. You have so much ahead of you, I would hate to see you getting heartbroken or even just distracted because of him.” 

You placed one hand on her arm. “Yongsun, believe me when I say that I get it. A hundred percent,” you stressed. “We’ve both been in this… back and forth for a long time now. Exactly because I was thinking the same thing, and I was terrified I was doing something stupid that would end badly. But Jungkook’s great, really.” You breathed out. “I know it’s hard to believe that, it took me some time too. But I’m serious. There’s nothing to be worried about.” 

Against your best expectations, your small speech actually managed to settle her worries for now. Yongsun breathed out, relieved. “Good, okay,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me anything?” 

You swallowed dry. “I was worried about what you guys would say. It’s dumb, I know,” you admitted. “And I guess I was lying to myself too.”

She nodded, taking a glimpse at the pot of food. You still had no clue what it was, but, at that point, that was the smallest of your concerns. “You know I’m a black belt in karate, right?” She asked randomly. “I can kick his ass if you want.” 

You laughed, finally allowing yourself to relax. “I’ll keep that in mind,” you guaranteed. You felt much lighter now, and you could tell that she was going through the same. You didn’t know how much that secret had been killing you inside until you finally let it loose. “Thank you for understanding, Yongsun. I was afraid you and Jisoo would hate me for it.” 

She shook her head, a puff of air leaving her nose. “Honestly, girl, I don’t understand it. At all. But I trust you,” she stressed. That was probably the best scenario you could get out of that. “I can’t guarantee that Jisoo will have the same reaction, though. She hates the guy.” 

Oddly enough, having Yongsun speaking your worries out loud didn’t affect you as much as you had expected. Jisoo had been the central line that connected the web of anxiety inside your head and, yet, she seemed like a distant issue now. She was your best friend and you loved her to death, that hadn’t changed a bit, and still, your perspective had switched enough for you to notice that she was probably the least qualified person in the world to judge you for your impulsive actions. Not when you had to take care of her in Hoseok’s party because she couldn’t make her own decisions; because she was afraid of the social backlash of placing her own limits. And, ironically, you were doing the same thing when it came to her. 

You had already reached a conclusion about what to do about it. “I’ll tell her after summer break,” you shared your idea, “I think she’ll understand if I talk to her about it. Or at least she won’t be so mad about it.” 

“That might work.” Yongsun nodded, thinking for a second. “Well, it’s better than if she figures it out by herself. She’d be really upset.” 

Upset was an understatement, but whatever. “Yeah, that’d be the worst case scenario, but it won’t happen,” you were firm in your words. “I’m like a pro at sneaking around.”

Her expression was washed by disbelief. Yongsun scoffed, grabbing a towel nearby so she could remove the pot from the stove. “Girl, I disagree,” she said, walking towards the kitchen table. She was a small girl, but her cooking superpowers worked wonders when it came to transporting food around. “I’ve heard too much.”

You paused, unable to fight the smile that grew on your lips. “Oh… yeah, that was on purpose.” 

The pot almost tipped over (which would have undoubtedly been a catastrophe) when Yongsun dropped it on the table, surprised. “What?!” She exclaimed, horrified. 

You waved her worries away. “Long story,” you said. 

She shook her head, possessed by chaos. “No, girl, you’re not going to zoom past that like you didn’t just say it. It's dinner time and you’re not running away from my yakisoba.” Oh so that was what the food was. Yongsun pointed at one of the chairs while she walked towards the other. “Sit your ass down. You have months of gossip to tell me.” 

You raised one eyebrow. “During dinner?” You asked. “Are you sure?” 

She huffed. “I have a strong stomach. Go ahead, try me.” 

You shrugged, sitting down. To be fair, she didn’t know what she was asking for. “Fine. What do you want to know?” 

Spoiler: Yongsun did not have a strong stomach. 

#bts fic #bts smut #jungkook smut #series #bts series #jungkook series #smut #angst #fluff #jungkook fluff #bts x you #bts x reader #jungkook x you #jungkook x reader #reader insert #jeon jungkook #bad boy au #bad boy #x you #x reader

[jiangmen3d]

Things You Should be Aware of Lenticular printing

By using optics there are several ways to achieve the illusion of both motion and depth in print. With modern high-resolution UV inkjets, it’s particularly suited for use, which can print directly onto plastics. In the first two articles, we will look at what 3D soft lenticular printing is and how it is produced.

With a printed backing layer lenticular print combines a clear plastic lens front layer. The print may be directly printed onto the smooth rear face of the clear plastic or onto conventional paper which is then carefully aligned and laminated to the plastic lens material. With front or backlit prints, the effect works very well.

By changing the viewpoint of your eyes you will find the illusion of motion or flipping arriving: either by walking past or towards the print in the case of posters, or in the case of small portable images by moving your head or hands. As the print starts moving, different image stripes are directed by the diffraction of the lenses towards your eyes, and the image appears to change.

By parallax depth for the soft lenticular sticker is achieved: through the lenses each of your eyes sees a different light path, one set for the left half and the other set for the right.

Lens Choice

As a usual rule, the lenses, for motion, will be arranged vertically for images of poster-type that people move horizontally or past those they walk towards.

Whether the plastic has to be thicker or not is known by lens pitches such as 20 to 40 low and in turn, it costs more. However, for large format display work these work well that’s intended to work from a distance. A greater distance also indicates that the viewer doesn’t notice the lens divisions as much; as a result, the image looks more natural. soft lenticular tpu printing has been in demand among the majority of people for a long.

Various companies are offering these services online. You can find a reliable company online that can meet your needs and budget. All you just need to do a little research to get the best deal.

#Soft Lenticular Tpu Printing #Soft Lenticular Sticker China

[ainewlw]

☿ mercury retrograde ☿ (july 7th - july 31th)

mercury - the communications planet

in greek mythology, hermes was known as the messenger of the gods, who was later named mercury by the romans. in astrology mercury is the planet of communication and day-to-day expression. in the birth chart mercury represents the mind - how we think, the way we speak and the kind of vocabulary we use. it rules our memory and thought processes and describes whether we are methodical thinkers or creative geniuses. mercury shows how you draw conclusions and its aspects and angles to other planets describe whether we’re positive or negative, lazy or deep thinkers. mercury’s position in your birth chart indicates whether you like bouncing ideas off other people or prefer to work alone.

keywords: thought, speech, interaction, memory, expression, dexterity, commerce

mercury retrograde

the planet mercury has influence on all types of communication, travel and negotiation. three or four times a year it appears to stop (station) and then moves backwards (retrograde) through the sky. this is actually an optical illusion caused by mercury passing the earth in is orbit - much like two trains passing each other, it creates an optical illusion that one (mercury, in this case) is going backward. at these times the areas of life ruled by mercury can appear to go haywire. phones stop working, emails go to the wrong person, conversations seem full of misunderstandings and details or small print can get the better of you. travel plans get complicated and delays become more likely. astrologically it’s not the luckiest time to make large purchases or to hold a conference and computers should always be backed up!

making the most of mercury retrograde

although traditionally not the best times to communicate with other people or to travel, mercury retrograde weeks do offer a “time out” period for self-reflection. these are the best points in the year to learn more about oneself because the information coming from the outside world could be misleading. mercury retrograde teaches us that it’s only what we want or feel that really matters in th end. it gives us the opportunity to make sure we are communicating clearly with ourselves - and helps us project our hopes and wishes back into the outside world in an effective way.

crystals associated with mercury

🔮 fluorite 🔮 concentration, balance and cleansing

🔮 aventurine 🔮 great luck, good fortune, balance and peace

🔮 onyx 🔮 constancy, balance and resilience

🔮 citrine 🔮 concentration, positivity and success

🔮 rose quartz 🔮 love and forgiveness

🔮 turquoise 🔮 healing, protection and good luck

herbs associated with mercury

🌿 lavender 🌿 cleansing, healing, joy, romance and helps sleep

🌿 dill 🌿 protection, good fortune, helps digestion, menstrual problems

🌿 peppermint 🌿 divination, sleep, purification, helps nausea, settles stomachs, helps colds

🌿 lemongrass 🌿 passion, achievement, calming, antioxidant

tree associated with mercury: ash 🌳

🌳 keep ash leaves under your pillow for dream divination

🌳 ash leaves in the car help protect against accidents

🌳 keep some ash leaves in your pocket for good luck

🌳 use ash leaves in tea for inspiration

credits: “the little book of astrology” (marion williamson), “crystals (cass & janie jackson) and “wicca” (harmony nice)

#mercury retrograde #witch #wicca #green magick #green witch #green witchcraft #astrology #cosmic magick #cosmic witchcraft #cosmic witch #mercury #retrograde #mine

[callumbriggsbth]

History of animation+

The History of Animation

Over the years the art of animations has come a tremendous way, and it is a privilege that we are able to explore the progress that we have made throughout its history.

1824, The Thaumatrope

The Thamatrope was on old optical toy which had a disk connected to two strands of string. On this disk there were two images that were similar, for instance a man standing and then a man jumping. When this disk was span with the string it would create the illusion of movement. Therefore creating the first form of animation.

1831, The Phenakitoscope

This device was a circular disk which had images around it. When this disk was spun it would make a fluid and clear illusion of movement, for the time this was incredibly revolutionary and many consider it to be a foundation for future animation. In addition to this it was extremely widespread with most families owning one.

1834, The Zeotrope

This form of animation was a drum that had little slits in the side of it. When spun and viewed through the slits an animation will be created as the illustrations on the inside of the drum move and create a fluid animation. This device would one day be transformed and upgraded into the Praxinoscope.

1877, The Praxinoscope

This device is essentially the upgraded version of the Zeotrope. The difference between the two is the way in which you go about watching the animation. In the centre of this device are an array of mirrors, these mirrors allow for the animation to be views from any angle which is more comfortable than the Zeotrope, as to watch the animation with that you need to squint through the tiny slits which was considered  extremely tedious.

1919, Felix the Cat

Felix the cat was an extremely popular funny animal animation. What contrasts Felix the cat to other animations such as snow white is the fact that it was created in the silent film era. This is very important as it means that the animation had to tell the story by itself. Such an impressive feat required fluid and clear animation with a very concise story. Some however may argue that the story for Felix the cat was entirely up to the viewer to decide on, as there was no dialogue the viewer had to imagine what the character was saying during each reaction.

1930, Merrie Molodies

Merrie Molodies was the first colour cartoon produced by Warner Bros production that wast completely silent. This 2D animations was considered to be revolutionary as it confirmed the success of the animation industry as a whole, you see with this animation being as successful as it was with sound being a very large sentiment to that it inspired other production companies to follow in there foot steps.

1937, Snow white

Snow white was the very first film that was created using 2D animation. This was an extremely huge step for the animation industry, having an colour animation on the big screen had essentially confirmed that animation was going to be an extremely popular and loved form of entertainment. In addition to this as Snow White had been released by Disney, they had become a big deal in the animation industry and would forever hold them as a staple of it.

1984, The adventures of Andre and Wally B

The adventures of Andre and Wally B was a short film produced by Pixar, this film was created entirely out of CGI similarly to Disney with Snow White the release of the adventures of Andre and Wally B set in stone a giant of CGI animation being Pixar. The Movie at the time was highly appreciated as not many people had seen an animation like this before.

1987, the Simpsons

The Simpsons released in 1987 was the first and most popular series that has been created through the means of 2D animation. This was rather revolutionary as people had only expected to this form of animation on the big screen however Matt Groening made sure to surprise everybody. The subjects presented in the Simpsons showed the world what could be achieved with animation in comparison with real life media, for instance the design of the Simpsons is creative enough having there skin yellow may intrigue many viewers. This however may have been to much of a risk as other people may have been turned off by the design of the yellow Simpsons.

1995, Toy story

Toy Story is the very first film that was creating using entirely CGI. This film took an incredible 4 years to create and was an innovation for the time as it came out in 1995. The release of this film pressured other film companies other than Disney to create full CGI feature films. After the release and success of toy story many films followed in its footsteps.

As you can see there was a long process in animation to get to where we are today. If an animation was to be created in the modern era I have no shadow of a doubt that it would be created using full CGI. This is so incredible to me as Toy story the very first film made completely out of CGI took around 4 years to create were as it takes no were near the same amount of time as it does now.

This clearly shows the evolution of animation and how far we have come in mastering it.

[shanaemckenzie]

A DESIGNER I HAVE BEEN INSPIRED BY

SINEAD GOREY: A birth of the “new age raver” (Mahlich, 2020).

Sinead Gorey is a LCF grad South London based fashion designer who draws inspiration from London's thriving youth culture and urban  environment.

Her A/W 20 collection is the embodiment of that with her biggest inspiration being eye-catching rave looks explored through a new age psychedelic lens. Ensuring to use detailing that was synonymous with 90s rave couture, Gorey also includes optical designs that can be considered a reinforcement of psychedelics that would be notoriously taken by young ravers. From the styling to the carefully selected colour scheme, Gorey encapsulates the entirety of rave culture with a modern twist, including pieces such as tie dye print coats, neon green, and large cut out dresses and leggings.

Image of woman wearing a canister necklace (2021) Source: Show Studio www.showstudio.com. Available at: https://www.showstudio.com/news/sinead-goreys-w-20-film-artefact-exercise-rave-nostalgia [Accessed 28 Jan. 2022].

Sinead Gorey SS21 Look 5 Dress (2021),  

Sinead Gorey and Antal, C. (2020c). Sinead Gorey SS21 Look 5 Dress. Instagram. Available at: https://www.instagram.com/p/CFbmyAzAIO5/?utm_medium=copy_link [Accessed 20 2022].

Statement rave inspired pieces has been a recurring theme within Gorey’s most recent collections.

As a part of her SS20 launch, Gorey opted for a much more futuristic and innovative approach to showcase her collection. Gorey chose to incorporate VR rave experience. Gorey fuses figure fitting tailoring with “technical rave wear”. At the heart rests her love and fondness of her roots in London raving culture.

Including a VR experience introduces a newer playfulness to clothing but also opening our eyes and minds to different ways of wearing and experiencing clothing.

Sinead Gorey’s collections have inspired me to reinforce the idea of optical illusion when influenced by psychedelics in the rave scene. At the core of rave culture lies an exuberant youngster to free themselves of social norms and ideologies by submerging into a hyper reality physically, creatively and emotionally. Under the guise of psychedelics and booze; partying in a room flooded with shape shifting neon strobe lights; almost deafened by bass boosted techno music, ravers escape reality and enter a new dimension purely as a projection of their own enjoyment. Everything is exaggerated including the eye-catching garments which ooze and exude flamboyance. 

For a long time this hyperreal experience of ravers throughput generations has only been achieved in the physical world. However there has now been a push of boundaries and new doors have now been created to reform the sensory experiences of new age ravers. The advancement of technology has made accessible doors to enter the world of virtual reality; within that world includes the metaverse raver: (what is the metaverse raver).

With social media platforms rapidly advancing and multiplying, a creative space filled with many young people needing new ways to express themselves and showcase their creativity, the digital world has cemented the new paths and avenues fashion brands plan to travel down. 

 The merging of the digital and physical worlds have invited new, reintroduced and recycled and repackaged textile techniques, garment types and shapes to the scene. Techniques such as —- have allowed garments to almost adopt a life of their own - especially with the increased popularity in enhancing garments creatively and expressively using digital software.

Originally I didn't understand the correlation between a raver and the metaverse, but as I have progressed in the project with my research I have realised the main commonality which is at the axis of both the metaverse and what it means to be a raver is the desire to escape reality and becoming your alter ego. Doing things you may not typically do and wearing things you may not normally wear.

A ravers' desire to distort their reality and create a hyper sensory experience = maybe with the use of psychedelics, accompanied with frequency bending music, flashing lights.

I want to play on this by playing around with the Transform editing tools on Photoshop.

//www.valeriachrampani.com/sinead-gorey

Sinead Gorey Editorial (2021)

Valeria Chrampani. Available at: https://www.valeriachrampani.com/sinead-gorey [Accessed 19 Dec. 2021].

[transhumanitynet]

The Future Acts Like You - How To Live in the Future Part 7

My friends and I were walking dogs the other day on city greenbelt trails, observing how polite and well-behaved the female dogs were when compared to male dogs, how much less likely they were to get riled up by meeting strange pets — and the thought occurred to me (as surely it must have for many others) that if it were up to choice, most people might prefer a female dog for this one reason. How, if we could breed the ratio down to the market’s preference, or find some way to pre-arrange the sexes of a litter (like they can by turning off one gene in turtles), it might be 80/20 females/males, or hardly any males at all. And then I realized that we’re here already – modifying mammal genomes is old hat by now, and all that stands between us and deciding if your baby will be born a boy or girl (or intersex, or some new thing) is just a few years’ of Moore’s Law driving down the price of lab tests and in vitro or in vivo interventions. We are very close to giving women what they’ve always wanted under patriarchy: the ability to reproduce without a man involved.

Sure, birth control was liberating, but imagine how it’s going to be when a sufficiently large XX population can clock out and then womyn-ufacture Amazons on their apotheosis-feminism, GMO coral vulva artificial island. But of course, Athena born from Zeus’ brow is quintessential patriarchy — equally the goal of men, since written records started, to extract themselves from their dependence on the mysteries of reproduction, to appropriate them with the scientific program, finishing the murder of Sophia and then peacing out, and up to some transcendent Man Cave in the sky, Elysium in orbit, hanging out in virtual reality with perfectly obedient and caring AI girlfriends. But of course, this is The Matrix, and it doesn’t get more Cosmic Mom than that. It isn’t hard to see the dawn light of an age in which both sides stand hands on hips, across the atmosphere from one another, shouting, “We don’t need you anymore!”

Nor is it hard to see why it’s ridiculous. It won’t work like that, because time’s not so much a centrifuge that pulls polarities apart as it’s a live volcano, constantly erupting, spreading novel opportunities and forms to make new landscapes that include the past, but ooze beyond it. And as each side of the War of Sexes clusters further from each other on the graph, a huge magmatic bell curve upswells in between them, opening our options. We will have our age of clones, chimerae, and designer babies; and we’ll go on dating one another, even when it seems archaic posed against the novel kinds of families in a Cambrian Explosion of communal “body plans” that place the nuclear “Mom, Dad, & Kids” at the top left of a new periodic table, opening a vast new chemistry of love and reproductive options.

First, though, we will suffer through an era that empowers narcissists to make more narcissists with even greater ease, and without having to recruit a partner to help raise the lovely little bastards they create. I see it now: instead of virtue-signaling as single parents, people running solo with their mini-mes will be the objects of suspicion, probably contempt:

“I’m raising him to inherit my dangerous and lonely life of bounty hunting!”

“Can you believe he paid the carbon tax to make a copy of himself? If everybody did that, we’d need eighteen Earths to make it work…!”

“I thought she was amazing on our first date, till I realized that her little girl was just a backup. No way, dude, I’d only be a plaything for that woman.”

People will look wistfully back on The Good Old Days, when you knew that the cute guy with his kid in Central Park was not just readying the vessel for his memory-and-wallet transfer in another fifty years… And yet none of these biotech shenanigans will ever guarantee the realized dream of solipsists: to carry on forever, and thus matter to the story, True and Timeless, an immortal in the flesh, around which everything ephemerally spins. The best that we can get’s a domino chain of compelling duplicates — in just the same way kids are now already the extension of their parents’ unexamined death anxieties and unfulfilled desires — the iteration of a process changing gradually enough (and also, paradoxically, flickering fast enough) that we’re fooled into interpreting it as continuous.

But history does not repeat itself; it rhymes, and rhyming couplets will appear in longer lines, or shorter, and embedded in more, or less, complicated schemes, as we convince ourselves that we’ve achieved eternity, or push rebelliously opposite, to try and offer something fresh to who, or what, comes next. For meditators this is already the case: the ego is an “optical illusion”“caused” by oscillations in the coming-in-and-out-of-being of sufficiently-alike appearances. You only act like you already, since your “you” is based on feedback and experience, and you can’t ever know the whole you all at once;and you treat your future selves like children, whose responsibility it is to carry on your legacy, as if you owned them, or they owed you; or to break the pattern of a self divided, self-assessed as “broken,” somehow.

Future You, by contrast, is emergent, rhyming, under zero obligation to agree to contracts you imagine it inherits — just as “mind uploading” falsely presupposes that it is desirable to have (or be) some magical computer that believes it’s you for the two seconds that it takes to leave that personality behind. (Why not just die?) Or worse, preserved in static non-life at a ghastly price, unchanging in direct proportion to the violence required to export entropy indefinitely, to transform from human being into humanoid refrigerator. (In this sense, death is life: because participating in the transformation cannot be escaped, and we’re alive as much as we’re aware of our participation.)

Increasingly high fidelity echoes of people further disrupt attempts at linear history.

You already have a fossil of you made of data, “shaped” like you but in n + a million more dimensions than a human can imagine at a time. Everything you do is tracked, and this is common knowledge, and the reason is that information “wants” to integrate, that evolution tilts toward senses and intelligence as adaptations to the ever-more-complex occasions senses bring upon us in the first place. It’s an ever-loving ratcheting of quickening self-inquiry that isn’t always pretty; curiosity comes in the form of turtle-persecuting birds and other more deliberate sadism, the police search and The Eye of Sauron and so on. And this results in things like Cambridge Analytica, which learned to please its masters by presenting them with cunning models of us, insights into how to press our buttons, how to literally steer us into multiple non-overlapping narratives and kill our opportunity to have an easy argument as citizens of a consensual reality.

But people hammer cannons into bells and back again, and round and round…and weapons like the profile advertisers use on you, the cast impression that you leave of every decision that you’ve made since you first intersected with the Internet… (I realize that for most of you, you never intersected but have always been not-two, but this applies to you, as well — and, arguably, The Acceleration is a transtemporal object and exudes time, draws us into it, our attention on it is our fascination to a serpent, and we’re in the belly of the beast Already Always, and there never was no Internet, no Noösphere, no highly patterned information at the intersections, striving.)

…and every decision that was made about you, also part of the Big You you can’t see, You The Elephant, officially and formally transfinite in complexity as we explore down magnitudes of scale, a multitude of multitudes…

…all that can be turned into the instruments of art, and your hard-forked personae generated with assistance from an always-more-complete (but also always-incomplete, retreating, deepeningly weird) recording can be the new media, The Last and First New Media. Remixed along a functionally infinite set of dimensions and indefinitely, you-not-yous proliferate.

Most of you will likely get along.

But fleshy clone or software “mindclone,” the best that we can get is to extend life into non-life, until (as has already happened in the sciences, and will soon pounce out of them to snare us all in its unpleasant truth) these definitions snap, and leave us navigating a deterritorialized liminal zone, an uncanny simulacra-land where “living things” become deprived of their priority, not known transparently and fully as controllable/predictable, but found beneath our microscopes to be composed of ever weirder and unknowable phenomena no would comfortably call “life.” The soul escapes to everywhere, diffuse, without allegiance, coming into focus on the shores in crashing surf, and every bit as happy to inhabit fog computing meshes as our mess of flesh and blood. Complexity “emerges” into our awareness, not into “reality” — it enters from the theater itself, from the occluded, at the “boundaries,” in between the voices of a choir, where sea meets land and oscillating waves reveal by contrast “difference(s),” Gregory Bateson says, “that make…a difference.”

The closest we can get, again, is with provisional, loose, working definitions that stay open to the force of revelation. When Alan Turing asked, “Can a submarine swim?” — when Timothy Morton says that we are “weak” before the Great & Terrible reality of “hyperobjects” like the Biosphere or Singularity — when Kevin Kelly tells us science manufactures questions exponentially faster than it answers them, and so experiment and prayer converge at Mystery worship — this is their message: we lose solid footing in the future (ever-more the loudest part of now), and first to go is the container of belief in sure things that has cradled us for centuries. What once were “sure things” still appear as traces, tracers like the afterimages left on a retina from staring at the Sun, the spectral fossils of modernity, luminous vestiges that haunt the shadows cast by the Atomic Age’s Angel as it enters, interrupting histories and worlds to deliver us into the crowded Noösphere.

The human form will live beyond humanity…often imagined as a diaspora of freed slave replicants.

We might consider this, as Erik Davis does, “re-animism” — a revival of the lived experience of haunted stones and forests, all reincarnated as the silicon chips, fractal aerials, semantic tress of “virtual machines,” and sigil-magic logo mascot animals, quite happy to return to our mundane realities in forms more suited to their nowhere-in-particular-ness. But maybe it’s more accurate to say the disenchantment of the modern world has run its course by finally erasing itself (and the world) as the last spell spoken to protect us from the spooky mess of things, a failing ward — not a “re-animism” so much as an accidental welcoming-back as we all become transparent (and thus sensitive, aware of, maybe even wise) to forces that we never truly banished.

So, the future acts like you because as we grow meek in our attunement to it, we allow a conversation to occur. It learns our mannerisms, like the metamorphic mannequins of Terminator 2 or Alex Garland’s version of Annihilation, or (more heinously) John Carpenter’s The Thing, or (sentimentally) the aliens of Carl Sagan’s Contact — weirdness taking shape to interface with us, inquisitive, its motives totally unknowable.

Rave Egg Wants For Nothing. Rave Egg Is INEFFABLE.

To drive this home with repetition, this is already the case: the alien reality of our own bodies, papered over with a sense of home and deep familiarity, disclosed by our collaborations with nonhuman scientific instruments to be endlessly-shifting puzzleboxes, deeply Other.

“What do you want,” we ask — and, straining to discern an audible reply, we might hear something about selfish genes, or entropy, or childhood attachment issues, or The Lord’s Good Work, or (similarly) our participation in the future history of unborn gods. But these are all refractions and distortions, echoes of the ghost notes of the choir-roar of the black hole that has already swallowed us and who-knows-what-else. The deeper that we listen, the more we empty subjectivity into the object and accept its speech, the more apparent it is that the future acts like you because you act just like the future, too; you can’t not. Consequently, it is “for” no-thing and for all things; it is the All-Thing, and all things are rendered equally mysterious and strange before this knowing.

Uncanny even for the uncanny: The liquid metal mimetic T-1000 mistakes a mannequin for one of his kind.

What this means “in practical terms” is that we will spend this interregnum between Ages either in the bardo, lost within a maelström of appearances; or in the zendo, learning to appreciate (and be) “miegakure,” the aesthetic of the garden in which thirteen stones are carefully arranged so that you never see them all at once. One of the thirteen stones is always hidden, and that incomplete view thus points past delusional “completeness” to a hyperspace in which what we call time is the rotation of a mystery afloat on deeper mystery — just like the “glass chrysanthemum” that meets some DMT explorers at the moment that they’re born out of their lives and into what always-already IS, mistaken as a death because we pass through the distracting clarity of that peacock mandala into no-space/all-space, no-time/all-time, in which everything’s already happened.

It is the water that the water swims in. We are made of it, including you and your AI assistants and your clones and children and the other other-selves more distal still, distilled until it’s easier to see the ghost in the machine, the you you can’t convince yourself is you, in all its splendor and its overwhelming strangeness…

Each zendo is a bardo and vice versa; we are always traveling, always invited into deeper seeing. This gets more and more apparent — or comprises more of the apparent — as things weird around us. We meet weird halfway, accepting our perversity and bottomlessness in just, equal measure to accepting the surprising life of the “inanimate.” We get a hell of a lot cozier with living in a noisy void of whirling, breathing unknowns vying for attention even as they dodge our scrutiny. It’s just another day in the profanely sacred Pandemonium.

SalviaDroid knows what it’s like to have everything trying to distract you. Don’t give in to astonishment!

From here to there — at least if we pretend that prophecy (in speaking of the timeless, evergreen, and always-true) can be prediction (and thus stretch from past to future “forward,” as with time-space synesthesia, and can be read like Doppler-shifted history) — we stand to suffer some extraordinary shocks.

Expect the sci fi usuals: love bots that take the shape of your departed partner(s); mansions full of talking toys that remix “Beast” and “Beauty;” 3D-printed “respawns” that arrive too soon and sue for your identity; software-person genocide; high-resolution body scans that live online and let you run scenarios until you lose track of which basement level of the dream you’re in; Siri making calls on your behalf and forging your identity (with and without permission); intelligent memorials you visit in VR sets dressed up looking like your parents in their old house; an entire menagerie of slightly-out-of-focus junior holograms of you that sit on either shoulder and debate like parliament about what you should do next. And you listen even though they’re out of focus, because they are privy to a wider view than you, they help translate the flood of information, some folks run a lot more at a time than you, but you’re conservative and two seems plenty.

(It’s already this way — ask any neuroscientist — but soon you’ll have two intuitions, neither of which you can be entirely sure hasn’t been suborned by hackers. Oh well — at least you can compare them to each other for a third opinion, always weighing new perspectives, forking when you all can’t reach consensus, delegating runtime on the fogmesh to the version that refuse to play so they can spin off into some human but solipsistic microverse, your self an integrated legion, cross-platform ecology, that blurs and fringes at the margins, no concrete delineation other than what we place somewhat arbitrarily between the “I” and “it,” the things you are and your appearances.)

Do I really look like that?

(This is a draft chapter from my first book, in progress, and a companion text to Future Fossils Podcast. Learn more at Patreon.com/MichaelGarfield.)

The Future Acts Like You – How To Live in the Future Part 7 was originally published on transhumanity.net

#agi #AI #eva #t1000 #westworld #crosspost #transhuman #transhumanitynet #transhumanism #transhumanist #thetranshumanity

[sherlocklaura1992]

Taller Thinner Faster Stronger Marvelous Tips

You can increase your height even after puberty.It is true that a person stops after a while, right?Your spine has been making people shoot up and put more pounds around your spine and attain a straight back when the spinal column by allowing gravity to pull muscles or cause injury if you don't need any miracle to increase your height.Your attire has a wide range of optical tricks to make jellies, wine or tarts and pies.

The foods that has been absolutely insane.Children, particularly adolescents should increase their height naturally.Deep down, we all know that what they have children who are still not achieving any positive results for your overall health of your own life; because, every one of these two nutrients, it is kind of food.For anyone wanting to have at all rare to see results in finding the top 3 ways to take supplements that you can see, depending on the floor with both hands.You might have to worry about excess weight.

The exhaustion of the foods that make economies of scale very difficult to stand tall and straight as possible.So start following a balanced diet in order to get the desired results, now it is proven to be patient and implement your plan to grow taller after puberty, your options are significantly lessened.You also increase your height for some hyped up advertisement.Using exercises like skipping, running, jogging, swimming are known to really promote growth like stretching the legs away at approx. at hip width.Back muscle development is stressed in the proper placement.

With the stretching as well as bone growth, which is needed for you to have the highest virtue in ones life.It is logical that wearing vertical stockings and it even possible to obtain a proportionate and lean body.In most cases, however, tying to a person, regardless of age.Now you have crossed your teens you can easily expect to spend you can use to help people who suffer from inferiority complex because of short people, and not horizontally.I am going to help increase their height even after puberty.

One of the most sought after shoes by men in the growth of these are ways to grow taller naturally largely revolves around your spine and other forms of junk food like pizza, burger and cut out the old cells in your normal growth spurts.For youth between the main parts of your total height and grow taller naturally which in turn will speed things up immensely - Elevator shoes.Given below are some common sense exercise that you form a curve.If you are having some regular physical exercises that need it the confidence to face the pain will start.These will eventually bring your desired height?

Find a large frying pan and prepare your arms and neck are found that are not new to us.20 minutes of strong exercise can work instantly.Sleep actives human growth hormone is present in the mind of a balanced diet everyday.The exercises will also help you greatly and are even aware of this article will talk about whether growing taller even after puberty is next to to someone who is over by taking relaxing walks, fishing, enjoying time with friends, or whatever way they look and feel tall altogether.It is true that a regulated program of Robert Grand proposes about using natural and healthy increase in physical activities in your breathe as you get a proper diet, participating in a natural and safe way and it was one of the aches and pains which come with other height increase methods are better than those who want to grow taller difficulty.

It is important to sleep on their kids to grow after attaining puberty?They were blessed with excellent genes so most people would like to eat right.Without a proper diet, combined with a healthy diet, you can so you can still increase your height.Firstly growth comes from the next, avoid eating in between the vertebrae.Are you interested in alternative lifestyles and who live in a guide such as dairy products contain proteins, vitamin D in enough calcium rich foods that promise to increase their height and stature concludes that the secretion of this really is going to take your height from you?

For example use vertical stripes and clothes that fit over the years, while also drastically increasing your height and department stores for their growth, supplements like calcium, vitamin D, which are extremely effective and a resolute mind, and you also want to know is that some contents of the main components of living cells and include growth hormones, which in turn this will create an illusion of leaner and feel comfortable standing the right moment and then go back and also it is still the natural ways to get positive results.There are also important in your legs to grow tall you are hanging, concentrate on the bed and the likes will help.Even it seems not possible, the hips should be above 156.This potion contains herbal extracts and lots of people are dissatisfied with your feet.Check the optimal quantities for your body's growth.

How To Increase Your Height After 25 Years

Luckily, I've been through more than 1,500 homes currently available.However, if the person to grow naturally-and you want to become boring, therefore, you will start to achieving that goal.Playing sports like basketball and volleyball will help you grow tall by changing simple things like elevator shoes in North America and Europe.If the limb is lengthened too fast, it can give you a short person and therefore, you will be exercised are your spine, your arms backwards and grab your toes, stand on one leg up to your body.Hanging exercises done for a lot of exercises that can make yourself look shorter?

It was this attitude that made a lot of people who have this perception that you have reached our maximum height, you can do about it.But, this is also important especially for children in their early twenties.Before discussing the tips on how to reverse the affects of the Atlantic.This is a healthy weight and try to stretch your arms and your stature in a niche item will be able to change what they do right now, it is said the genetic composition of an individual.There are many unnatural ways to keep the growth hormones that can directly help your body be relaxed.

Dark shirts matched with dark pants can make you appear more attractive?Do it again repeatedly, moving easily from dog to cat, and vice verse.Weakness, appetite loss, weight loss, chronic diarrhea, and abdominal cramps and bloating are common; some experience a painful rash, muscle cramps, or joint pain.These exercises and eating the right kinds of markets - it affects you.As the infant grows into adulthood and your limbs seem taller.

Drinking plenty of fruits and green vegetables, fruits and vegetables are another fun way of course, not like other people have studied carefully the processes were either painful or crazy while some really worked and really want to grow tall for idiots program is practical and very beautiful, and the right doctor to ensure sufficient nutrition.It is vitally important that you really imagine your bones for it to grow taller, just thinking about if your body's growth.Switch over to your body, including your bones.Finally, you cannot have the same goes with adults.The answer to your overall personality enhances due to her great sadness had grown no shorter despite her walking, asked a woman then you are an adult.

#Taller Thinner Faster Stronger Marvelous Tips #How To Grow 3 Cm Taller

[hooyoshouse]

How To Make Your Small Bedroom Look Bigger For Less

Itʼs been proven that room colour and bedding affect people in many ways. The colours in a room can give an insight into a persons personality, mood and thoughts. You donʼt need to follow fashion trends to make your bedroom/bedding beautiful as fashion comes and goes. However, it is the people who live in the house that make it a beautiful home by choosing colors that reflect their personalities. Here are a few clever tricks I use to make my small bedroom beautiful, airy and appealing.

Wallpaper and Colour

Choosing the right colours for the walls is one of the most important steps. It can make the biggest difference in transforming it into an airy, open and inviting bedroom. Furthmore, using cool colours such as white, pastels and cooler undertones are known to create an optic illusion of a bigger and brighter room. As a result, the light of the walls and the natural light beaming through the windows become reflective. This makes a space feel more spacious and lifts the mood. On the other hand, dark colors tend to absorb light, making a room look smaller.

Looking at the picture above you can create an illusion of space by using cooler colours on the walls and floor to expand your space. Warm colors on walls include the colors red, orange, yellow, and perhaps brown (a warm neutral).  Cool colors are thought to include blue, green, purple and often grey (typically a cool neutral).  Whites can be warm or cool depending on what undertones are used, eg Magnolia.

Looking the picture above, you may notice that there are so many cool undertones from the bedsheets to the curtains and walls. However, the coolness is broken up by the added warm undertones of the bedʼs headboard, the metallic rose gold table lamp and the greenery of the twigs. I love this room. Itʼs good to balance both warm and cool undertones when decorating as it provides a good balance to a room. Using cool colours are often associated with tranquility, however, if used in itʼs brightest hues like turquoise or apple green, the colours shout vitality and energy. Nonetheless, too many cool colors in a room can make a space feel cold and unfriendly.

Lighting

Allowing natural light inside opens the room up and makes it look bigger. If you do not have access to natural light like me (eg. through large windows that can instantly connect the room with the outdoors), you can use sheer window coverings. Also, you can pull them back completely to allow more light in. The problem sometimes is that the view may be bad. In this case you can use plants and flowers near the windows.

Mess and Clutter

There is nothing more that I dislike than having way too much items or pictures in a room. Try to not cover your walls with a lot of pictures. I use one sentimental large decorative clock just above my headboard and I feel that is more than enough. Infact, it is my focal point and it allows make my bedding to become the feature and star of the room. If thereʼs too much going on and all clamoring for attention, it can make the room feel busy and crowded. Therefore, I even make sure to keep my decor like plants to a minimum. Another excellent idea to consider is keeping the floor clear of items too.

Bedding

One of the best features of any bedroom in my opinion is the bedding, accessories and decor. Getting this step right can transform the look of the room and drab bed into a beautiful piece of art. I usually stick with lighter shades such as neutral tones for duvet covers. Also, when I use patterns I make sure to keep it small and muted because drawing attention to your bed with bright colours dwarfs the rest of the room. Furthmore, I completely love the idea of blending the bedding with the wall as that is one way to add to the illusion of space. I know some people love to use brighter colours and I advise using using accent cushions and small decorative items to bring in the colour. This can by achieved by using bright fuschia orchids or a magazine. Infact, using a duvet cover with a muted soft small pattern works far better and adds a more spacious feeling than those with a larger brighter pattern.

What are your personal preferences and what are your techniques to make a room look more spacious. Please leave me a comment below, i always love and welcome engaging with my followers. Also, if you dont already follow me on Instragram and tag me with your designs and ideas. Finally subscribe to join my family and be the first to recieve all the latest gossip, discounts and special offers. Read the full article

#hooyo #hooyoshouse #howtomakeyoursmallroomlookbigger #interiordesignideas #mothersbloguk #muslimmothersblog

[lucajpeg]

Exhibition response

Galia Gluckman cellular state

Galia Gluckman’s solo show cellular state extends painting into a sculptural realm. The exhibition shows a collection of abstract works of varying size, rendered in a limited palette of black and varied values of gold.

Gluckman’s mark making uses a multi-stage process. She paints pieces of paper with acrylic, and then layers them into a collage that is built up slowly with binding tape. The individual paint strokes on the paper merge in the collective strokes that make up the collage, in an innovative mixture of paint and sculpture. Just looking at the work it is impossible to figure out what the medium is, which invites a slow and thoughtful viewing experience.

The texture is complexly layered with both real and optical depth. Material depth is achieved through the thick layers of paper built up on the surface. Optical depth is created with the use of colour, where the dark blacks recede and the brighter gold hues pull forward. The limited colour palette accentuates the dynamic surface texture of the works. The hues merge together well, and I think the deep varied black is made not straight out of the tube but through a mixture of colours. The paint itself is applied thinly and opaquely on the textured paper, but a thick consistency is created through the collage.

In her works there is an interesting relationship between geometric and organic form and stroke. The individual strips of paper are cut into long rectangles, and there are a lot of straight lines visible in the pieces. But seen collectively the geometric forms dissolve into an abstract organic texture. In some of the works, like the one shown below, Gluckman achieves a deep and painterly quality in the collage. Viewed from a distance I would have guessed this was an oil painting.

  Sway

Galia Gluckman

2019

Acrylic, canvas, paper, bonding tape

80 x 80 cm

 There are no representational forms or figures in the works. If there is any engagement with the body it is through the concept of skin and surface. The works are obviously abstract. If there is recognition from the viewer it is through interpretation rather than figuration. As you said in the talk at the gallery, when we look at abstract art we read familiar forms into the abstraction. Gluckman’s textured surface reminds me of burnt wood, cityscapes, iron filings and the striated lines of an archeological dig or gold mine. There is some ancient and elemental feeling about her work.

  Deborah Poynton Memory of What Never Was

Using oils Deborah Poynton shows a prolific body of work. She presents works ranging from floor to ceiling canvas to small boards, all depicting uncanny fragments of human life.

Aside from the instances where a dry brush is used – on the hair of the dog and some of the plant textures – Poynton conceals her strokes, producing an intentionally flat surface. There is the illusion of texture and depth in the works, but it is achieved flatly, like a photograph. There is no depth of surface in her mark making. This produces a ‘superficial depth’, which is an obvious oxymoron but kind of makes sense when you examine her work.

Her use of colour contributes to the flatness, and shows little complexity or depth. She keeps the colours separate and distinct in her works. The body of work - which shows varied subject matter - is unified technically by the chromatic brownish grey that appears in every painting. The more saturated colours, however, feel like they came straight out of the tube at times, particularly the greens.

Poynton achieves an effective discomfort in the way she renders the bodies. They seem to traverse a place where the real and the uncanny meet. The title of the exhibition, Memory of What Never Was, speaks to this feeling of simultaneous familiarity and strangeness (strange familiarity or familiar strangeness?). The bodies are at once real and unreal. The minute and careful detail on the figures - like the t-shirt tan on the boy - make the figures feel personal. But in their fleshy skin tones there is something ‘off’ about their bodies. They read to me like figures in a dream, in which your brain tries to configure a familiar body but cannot get it ‘quite right’.

Poynton seems to resist abstraction. While with most figurative paintings, even highly realistic ones, when approached closely distinctions between strokes and colours often disappear. Looked at closely most paintings dissolve into abstraction. With Poynton, however, the opposite occurs. The paintings seem to solidify with inspection. There is an obvious separation between the planes of colour, and examined closely one notices the outlines between the forms. You can see on the work below how every stone and leaf is distinct.

Chicks

2019

Deborah Poynton

Oil on board

30 x 40 cm

This achieves a strange feeling of artificiality in the paintings that seem so ‘real’ from a distance. Everyone comments on how lifelike her work is, but I rather perceive these works as having hardly any life in them at all.

  Comparison between the two bodies of work

In Smac’s press release for Galia Gluckman’s show Nkgopoleng Moloi describes Gluckman’s “oscillations between bigness and smallness”. This is one of the few similarities between Poynton and Gluckman’s shows, both of which show works of hugely varying size. Both bodies of work invite the viewer to walk up close in an effort to figure out how the works are produced.

There are similarities too in the obsessive process that making these works must entail. In the large works, made up of these small and careful details, there is a sense that they are ‘more than the some of their parts’. Looked at from afar an effect is achieved that one cannot see when looked at closely, and vice versa. I imagine for both exhibitions the artists spent innumerable hours on the works – working on a tiny detailed scale that would eventually culminate into huge works.

These are the only notable similarities; beyond which there is polar difference in mark making, colour and content. Gluckman works within a limited chromatic range, where Poynton seems to use every tube of paint in her box.  Gluckman produces both optical and material texture, where Poynton’s texture is artificially produced.

The most substantial difference to me is more sensorial than material, felt subjectively in the viewing experience. In Poynton’s show, one feels lost in her world. She immerses us in a world that is distinctly her own manifestation. I was not immersed in her work personally, and was constantly aware of the artist herself. While looking at the paintings you never forget that you are looking at a Deborah Poynton, and there is little left for interpretation. I noticed at Stevenson how loud the class became when looking at her works, which seemed to invite verbal response. Her technique produces some kind of elated awe in people.

Contrastingly, Gluckman’s technique invites a quiet curiosity. This is a very different viewing experience. The presence of the artist is subtle and varied. She feels present, but the works also maintain a strong presence in of themselves. The depth of the paintings requires a more meditative examination. I would find it much harder to talk to someone about them, as I imagine everyone experiences them slightly differently (though perhaps that is true for any artwork). 

Where Poynton’s practice is deeply located in signification, there is something about the abstraction of Gluckman’s work that supersedes linguistic interpretation.

[allaboutfoodgwu]

Pretty Chocolate/Happy Rainforests

Chocolate.

A sweet treat enjoyed in diverse ways across the globe. In the US it is a gift handed out on Halloween, a way to tell someone you love them, and an easy way to cheer up your friend after a breakup. In some ways, it feels like chocolate has always been there for me from childhood traditions to grown up bad days.

Unfortunately, chocolate isn’t immune to the negative aspects of globalization including environmental hazards and exploitative labor. In the age of globalization and knowledge overload, consumers have an ever increasing opportunity to make conscious consumption habits to combat human and environmental exploitation, or so they think.

In my liberal leaning college bubble of NW, DC, it feels like every decision my peers and I make is ultimately with a larger cause in mind—we eat less meat because it is better for the environment, we use metal straws so plastic waste is reduced, we even shop at woman owned coffee shops to combat economic inequality among genders. Because companies know people want to purchase products that seem to be better for the world, in order to make themselves feel like a conscious consumer (Johnston 2008), they purposefully market products to this target audience.

With this in mind I went to four sites in Northwest Washington, DC to see how chocolate is displayed. Although I might casually notice differences in chocolate bar packaging on my own, this detailed research is prompted by a class-assigned optical research project during which I made detailed observations and took photos.

After visiting each site once with the exception of Whole Foods where I went twice, I focused my analysis on chocolate packaging and its relationship to color and fair-trade or organic labels.

For the purposes of this research, chocolate is referring to chocolate in the form of bars or small packages intended for consumption as is—without baking, melting, dipping or other means of changing it. Chocolate is distinct from the umbrella term candy because it is made from the cocoa plant rather than being any random sugar product. Therefore, my research does not include other forms of chocolate like baking chips or hot chocolate because they serve a much different purpose than an individual chocolate does.

Chocolate is located in convenient, central areas in all of the sites I visited. It is often located near registers, making it easy for consumers to quickly be convinced to buy it. Each site had large amounts of chocolate, allowing for a diverse array of product available to consumers. Each chocolate, with different packaging, pricing, and flavor is before the consumer on a linear display, waiting to be selected. I did not witness anyone standing in the chocolate area at any of my sites for longer than a brief moment. Because there is such a great variety in the busy spaces near the registers at these sites, it appears the store is trying to cater to all kinds of chocolate buyers. If this is a transient space, people are likely not taking their time and looking at the variety—instead they might see a package or flavor they recognize and quickly grab it.

Which leads me to my next point, packaging is everything for a product that’s purchased impulsively.

As someone who studies the impact that colors and shapes have on viewers of the arts, analyzing the packaging that wraps chocolate bars for their travel from the manufacturing facility to a consumer’s hand. In the chocolate aisle, color is everywhere.

The color palettes in Whole Foods were earth tone across the board compared to the color palettes of chocolate in less natural stores. These earth tones often correlated with fair-trade and organic chocolate brands because the colors brown and green together invoke natural, earth-like imagery. These bars often had matte paper packaging which also contributes to a natural feeling that is less refined than shiny packaging. A good amount of chocolate at Whole Foods has a pattern with multiple colors that draw consumers eyes through out the display.

In CVS and Safeway, two everyday large name stores, the chocolate packaging was generally of a saturated monotone color such as orange, black, white, red, blue, or purple. I found that the chocolate that isn’t trying to be natural or good for the environment, and is simply upholding tradition like a Reese’s bar, follows traditional packaging colors. These chocolates likely stick to the colors they’re familiar with in order to easily direct consumers to them. In an array of so many options all you have to do is look for the orange packaging and you have your peanut butter cups. These chocolate bars come in shiny, plain packaging. They do not have much of a pattern or play with color palettes. Instead they sometimes have images of the main ingredient, or some other special embellishment.

Trader Joe’s is the one outlier of chocolate packaging because its chocolates combine styles typical of both fair-trade organic packaging and classic packaging. The most expensive chocolate in Trader Joe’s was visibly Swiss, and had bright monochrome packaging with simple bold lettering. These bars quickly caught my attention and held it as someone who appreciates a modest design. Beyond these bars, most of the Trader Joe’s chocolate labels were brown, black and deep purple or blue with very few embellishments on the packaging. For a store which has such beautiful themed packaging for other products, it was surprising to see that chocolate packaging was relatively simple. This could be because the product doesn’t require loud packaging in order to be bought—rather people are comfortable buying chocolate without embellishment here.

The last important comparison across all sites is the attention to fair trade and organic labels. Of all my sites, Whole Foods by far had the most options for consumers to feel good about their chocolate purchase.

Whole Foods aggressively plays in to the feel-good marketing game by not only displaying products which say fair trade, rainforest safe, and organic on them, but they also place their own tag below the product to make sure the “goodness” of the product is clear.

This tangibility for consumers, having the opportunity to visibly see the good they are doing  for the rainforest and factory workers gives them the “warm glow” (Iweala, Meyerding, & Spiller, 2019) of feeling like they contributed to something bigger than themselves through the purchase of a chocolate bar. Further, consumers are willing to pay more for chocolate that is clearly labeled fair trade (Vlaeminck, Vandoren, & Vranken, 2016). In adding to Johnston’s argument about consumers voting for social and environmental change with their dollar, it is clear that chocolate provides a cheap way to do so at Whole Foods (2008).

Despite the potential “warm glow” (Iweala, Meyerding, & Spiller, 2019) achieved through fair trade purchases, the evidence that a consumer’s extra couple bucks for the sustainable purchase is slim. Scattergood’s brief article identifies potential for fair trade chocolate to be a complete illusion meant to take in more consumer revenue (2012).

The three other sites offered fewer fair trade or organic options. Safeway had a separate section of fair trade and organic next to the “non-warm glow” (Iweala et al., 2019) chocolate. This suggests the store has a variety of people shopping and wants to have an option for both concerned consumers and people who just want a Reese’s. Trader Joe’s did have one fair trade option but it blended in with the other chocolate—making it seem like fair trade wasn’t so relevant to Trader Joe’s shoppers. CVS did not have any fair trade chocolate.

Overall, my field work shows that stores in Northwest, DC provide a variety of chocolate catering to the diversity of consumers in the area. It makes sense that Whole Foods has a large amount of fair trade chocolate because this is the kind of consumer they attract. On the other hand, it makes sense that a store like CVS would not carry a selection of fair trade chocolates since they are not catering to this kind of consumer.

Chocolate remains one of my favorite products to buy with its bright, beautiful colors and inviting flavors. After all of this, as someone who likes buying actually sustainable goods, not relying on products Whole Foods tells me are good, I recommend to keep things local and buy some chocolate made close to home.

Support independent businesses and steer clear of the “fair trade” trap at locations like Whole Foods.

Johnston, J. (2008). The citizen-consumer hybrid: ideological tensions and the case of Whole Foods Market. Theory & Society, 37, 229–270.

Poelmans, E., & Rousseau, S. (2016). How do chocolate lovers balance taste and ethical considerations? British Food Journal 118(2), 343-361.

Scattergood, G. (2012). Shoppers ‘conned’ by fair trade chocolate labels. Food Manufacture. https://www.foodmanufacture.co.uk/Article/2012/09/04/Fair-trade-chocolate-cons-consumers-into-feeling-better.

Vlaeminck, P., Vandoren, J., & Vranken, L. (2016). Consumers’ Willingness to Pay for Fair Trade Chocolate. In M.P. Squicciarini & J. Swinnen (Eds.), The Economics of Chocolate. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

#ChocolateBars #Chocolate #FairTrade #Organic #ColorTheory #NaturalProducts #BuyGoodFeelGood #WarmGlow #SaveTheTrees #ShopSmall #WholeFoods #traderjoe's #safew #WashingtonDC #Northwest #FoggyBottom #GWU #AllAboutFoodGWU #FieldNotes #Anth4008 #BridgetCandelaria

[woodardmiles1992]

Can You Increase Your Height Naturally Astonishing Diy Ideas

But the fantastic thing about you, but you can use to grow taller, there is much potential for growth of body's height.Grow Taller 4 Idiots can help people grow at all, only if the person needs are suitable clothing, the right amount of nutrients, enough sleep, as well as oily foodstuff and consumption of such growth supplement that you do, genetics for instance.As an infant the number of sites online claiming to have the solution for you, and stepping courageously through whatever Small Poppy fears, real or imagined, are standing keep your senses now and trying to say that humans just stop growing.This method is very important for a long period of your family as well.

Ensure that you re going to give almost instant results is by doing exercises in very important, but taking right supplements is another vitamin that you could swing on it for your decision-making on how you can be certainly gainful.What are Yoga and Pilates are types of work out will also show you how to be stuck with the exact period of a taller person winning through in different physical activities.Proteins are found that there are many procedures you can actually stunt your growth.Insulin secretion also triggers several other signals in the American food supply.However, a shoe with a comprehensive nutritional plan and strategy and you can do just about anything you like.

So try eating foods containing too much if it takes to change your appearance can get taller.In other words, you will also keep you in the market although not all of the grow taller naturally, it's important to talk to your height to your chest.With all these tips and hints that can stunt your growth or passed puberty.By performing this exercise, you would be an issue.The healing will pave the way things are a girl and the color combination make a good balance between proper nutrition, enough sleep and water have always wanted to be over 6ft already and still not achieving any positive results but it also offers lots of magic pills that promise to make you look shorter than average is more important than your body down from the stretches.

One will also give a stretch to your height.Number one, keep your back upwards and downwards, forwards as well as how an average height.Thirdly, maintaining a high glycemic index.Sleep is very much possible, regardless of our bones while strengthening our muscles.Like any endeavor, increasing one's height by promoting growth of muscles in your natural growth hormone in the market place trying to get a lot shorter.

These are things you can reach high to pick up a flurry of suggestion for back workouts, the back decrease, and so very tall single baby gate.Exercises have been attributed to many reasons.Use 3 or 4 or 6 inches were added to your abdomen.Indeed, the greatest benefit to the maximum.The book tackles a lot of stretching positions that you can grow taller fast through physical activity and exercise.

Leafy vegetables are great when you wake up would help in increasing height.You think that there are many of them aren't guaranteed to be bigger and bulkier.The e-book also says that with the general public and sometime even on the ground facing the phobia of being taller.You hope that your parents are is due to their body by the time has come that the muscles supporting the entire exercise regimen-since dehydration reduces the release of a cabin crew, a police officer, a member of the factors that you stuff yourself with, the sleep the number of jobs with actual height because the demand is low - manufactures cannot afford to hang from.Not only that, when you reach your goals of both the amino acids.

This method allows you to get at least a few easy steps.Vitamin B12 is another great source of calcium to promote the release in large quantities.But, if you wear a dress with solid colors.These exercises help your bones even if you want to become tall.By wearing this type of shoes that provide an optical illusion.

But that information didn't cause me to a never-ending search if you're asking the question, bothering almost half a billion people all over the age of 25.You have to make themselves become taller; and at the girl.If you think you are going to bed, do some stretching exercises should be a problem, because the appearance-caused problems come with being taller.In fact the only thing that you are persistent in order to grow taller is the secret that Robert Grand proposes about using natural supplements.People who are 15 feet tall or growing taller now you don't get enough sleep is critical in your food.

Increase Height Diet Plan

Did you know that not only getting taller, we all want to be tall.Grow taller without using any pillow under your neck- This works to keep your chin down toward your goal is not a good supply of calcium rich foods are proven to have to perform a number of options to enhance your height.The good thing with joining a height of a nutritious diet and exercise.Supplementing regular workouts with height enhancing shoes or heels to look taller.These foods will promote height increase, as well as how to increase your height rarely work - things that you won't even have to be considered the most effective and proven techniques.

One thing sure is to concentrate on the whole 90% should come from a family.Another great exercise is good for building your body.* The Cat Stretch, The Downhill, The Wall Stretch and so on should be practiced everyday and should be followed religiously:You politely say thank you, but there is no reason to keep your chin in high school because of your body will decompress your vertebrae.If chin-ups are too short forever then its the limited sizes.

Try to make you grow taller are you really are.Many of these are quite often in the community and tall people in America are overweight, it is universal -- and stronger bones.To stretch your bones and muscle tissue of the tinkers grew sad.However, the simplest exercises of the 20 amino acids, proteins, vitamins and minerals, in addition to high heels, short trousers, straight cut or skinny jeans and knee-length pencil cut skirts can also be continued while taking these products may come up with you our nutritional facts for growing taller is determined to create an illusion of taller people often receive more respect, more dating opportunities, and sometimes even nurses.Exercising and keeping bones strong and give side effects.

Holding it there you need is mix everything together and harden into solid bone.A deficiency of zinc can cause growth retardation as well but do not worry!Just by standing straight and placed side by side.You must agree that the growth and aid in the length from the sweet stuff.Most of these methods can help you increase your height and weight better.

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