#I was trying to be all thoughtful and intellectual about what kind of marketing game GIGA plays in SJ's arsenal of branding

[bakuhatsufallinlove]

Let's talk about Jump GIGA

Jump GIGA covers, 2016-2024. Volumes are published (left to right per row) as Winter, Spring, Summer, and Autumn releases, with 2018 and 2019 briefly breaking the pattern by having three Winter and three Summer volumes each. 2023 has an Early Spring volume in addition to the standard four.

So, people have pointed out that the 2024 Spring cover is, uh, not like other covers.

But I've only seen comparisons to other MHA GIGA covers and MHA Weekly Shonen Jump covers. Out of curiosity for what GIGA's typical marketing aesthetics might be, I put together a comparison between all of Jump GIGA's covers to date.

And, um. Some things stand out, to say the least.

First, let me clarify what Jump GIGA even is: it is a seasonal magazine from Shonen Jump, published separate from Weekly Shonen Jump. SJ is an absolutely massive brand and they have a number of magazines serialized outside of the most well-known weekly magazine.

The content of Jump GIGA is primarily made up of one-shots and spin-offs. From the beginning, a lot of the appeal has been the cool cover illustrations which showcase special merchandise that comes with the purchase of GIGA. Usually the cover also promotes big things going on related to the WSJ series, like movie events, new games, or special figurines for sale.

The marketing aesthetic has been clear from the start: the cover consists of one core illustration and a number of ads surrounding it. Most often you get a cover illustration of a protagonist, and then ads and merch for other series, e.g. Food Wars protagonist cover with One Piece film promotion and Haikyuu!! merch.

The purpose of this marketing direction is pretty obvious. Spin-offs and one-shots are not likely to generate a ton of interest consistently, so they lure people in with the cool covers and tempting limited edition merchandise of the series they already know and love. In this way, highlighting one series with the cover and different series with the merch makes sense, because maybe somebody doesn't care about Food Wars, but they definitely want those Haikyuu!! stickers, stuff like that.

Starting from 2020's Autumn volume, you can see a shift. For the first time, basically all of the merchandise is for the cover series. The Demon Slayer manga had already ended five months earlier in May, but a two-chapter spin-off was scheduled for release in WSJ during October. This GIGA was released exactly one day before the second chapter was published and it capitalizes on the hype.

After this point, only MHA and Jujutsu Kaisen dominate the cover and the merch in quite this way, with Black Clover getting attention last volume as a way to highlight the fact that it actually switched syndication from WSJ to GIGA.

Anyway, most commonly the cover illustration is a solo shot of a core cast member (usually but not always the protagonist), and if it's not a solo, it's a big cast illustration.

Only a few covers focus on two characters, and usually it's a crossover as opposed to characters from same series sharing the limelight.

Here we've got Food Wars' protagonist with the main characters from Dr. Stone and Act-Age.

The two covers most similar to the Izuku & Kacchan cover are 2022 Winter and 2023 Autumn.

Winter depicts the main trio of Blue Box in a seasonally-appropriate aesthetic. Not gonna lie, this one kinda makes me laugh--Blue Box is a romance and sports manga, and even though Christmas has a romantic air to it in Japan, instead of depicting any sort of like, hesitant but hopeful romantic energy between the heterosexual couple that actually get together later in the series, they focus primarily on the two girls being cute with the guy is a wee footnote? I mean, all right.

Meanwhile, Autumn depicts one of the protagonists with the series antagonist with a typical cool action style. I'm not very familiar with JJK, but I hear these two have got Some Drama going on, so, there's that.

The merch itself has also evolved over the years. Stickers and posters were present early on, but they have since expanded to decorative folders and now acrylic stands and coasters. 2021 Summer sees the first time the cover illustration is marketed as merch, with the Jujutsu Kaisen cover included as a decorative folder.

Right after that, the Kacchan cover of 2021 Autumn is included as a poster alongside earlier covers featuring Todoroki and Izuku.

2023 Summer's cover is a huge, wrap-around MHA cast illustration and it was published three days after chapter 396 came out, strategically timed to highlight the big shift in the final battle as Ochako vs Toga ends and All Might vs. AFO begins. Merch includes a decorative folder of the wrap-around cover and character motif stickers.

And then we get this!?

A duo cover illustration where the cover art itself has been merchandised to hell and back!?!?

Acrylic stand and pin set!?

Double-sided coaster showing bkdk greatest hits!? With volume 29's river scene cover!?

There's also a double-sided poster featuring the Spring cover with the ninth popularity poll art and a decorative bag with the anniversary art. The cover art itself is plastered all over the volume, front, back, and spine, apparently a total of 19 times.

I honestly don't know what to say about this. It feels wild that this is actually what the cover is. Obviously it is a huge marketing push in anticipation of season 7, and Izuku and Katsuki are the most popular characters, but. it just feels... unique.

In the course of Jump GIGA's publication, this direction is kind of unprecedented. Genuinely no one could have expected this. This seems to be the first time there's been this much merch for a cover. And it was a solid fucking move, marketing-wise--it's sold out basically everywhere, everyone is talking about it. And even people who don't follow the series or ship these two can't help but comment on how strikingly romantic it looks!?

I don't know how much say Horikoshi had in what the cover was, but damn it sure feels like he drew this with immense affection. I kind of wonder if he personally pushed for it to be these two, rather than the typical solo shot, cast shot, or even a protagonist vs. antagonist shot.

I'm KO'd, man. idek if this post is useful to anybody I'm just on my hands and knees here.

Everybody knows what we're all here for, and it's these cute boys finally getting their happy ending.

#bkdk #i'm losing it #idek how to go on #they're so beautiful #I was trying to be all thoughtful and intellectual about what kind of marketing game GIGA plays in SJ's arsenal of branding #but #this is just such a divergence from their typical approach #why are there basically no other duo covers #did the other mangaka just not particularly push for it #did other duos just not serve as attention-grabbing enough #there's nothing else like it #what am I supposed to do with this knowledge

[foggyfanfic]

How Mariano Got Betrothed to the Wrong Madrigal

Oneshot Preview: Thankfully, Isabela was his best friend, and knew him well enough to read the answer on his face, “So why are you going along with this?”

“With…?”

“With this! With our abuelas setting us up?”

Now, nobody had ever accused Mariano of being an intellectual. In fact, he was frequently accused of the exact opposite. Which was fine, kinda hurtful, but he couldn’t be too upset about being called stupid.

Not after this marvelous mess up.

It started on the first day of school, he just happened to be the same age as the two oldest Madrigal kids, and was thus sat at the same table as them. Isabela was fun, but she hogged all of the brightest crayons, except for red. 

Red belonged to Dolores.

Dolores was patient, even at the young age of six. It seemed like it didn’t matter how many times he needed help, she always gave it. The three of them played together everyday at recess, Dolores would be the princess, he would be the shining knight, and Isabela took great delight in being the plant breathing dragon.

Then they grew up. Not instantly, of course, little by little.

The first sign of their impending adulthood was when Isabela came to school in a brand new dress and said, “Abuela says I want to be the princess sometimes.”

“Oh, ok,” Mariano agreed, because he knew how important it was to listen to your abuela.

Dolores being the dragon was kind of fun anyways, because she didn’t have plant powers so they had to wrestle for the princess. Unfortunately, Isabela got bored with that game a little while after that and they had to find a new one.

Time marched on, and slowly by slowly, Isabela started wearing more dresses she wasn’t allowed to get dirty. Both Mariano and Dolores missed playing with her, even if she did hog the brightest crayons. 

However.

If Mariano could go back in time, he would not have mentioned to his abuela that he missed playing with Isabela.

When they were nine, going on ten, both Isabela and Dolores were promised visions from their Tío for their birthdays. Isabela was all smiles the day after she got her vision. Dolores avoided him for a week after she got hers.

When they were eleven, Mariano realized that his favorite games to play with Dolores all involved wrestling. And really weird, he didn’t mind losing to her when they wrestled. Dolores would huff and pout at him if he tried to wrestle with her when she wore her favorite red skirt, and although he didn’t like to make her upset, he thought she was cute when she pouted.

At thirteen he realized why he liked wrestling with Dolores. His parents raised him to be a gentleman, so he stopped.

At fifteen, he started planning their wedding. It would be wonderful, he would read her a poem for his vows, and she would speak hers so quietly it would sound like a secret just for him. Isabela would make a bouquet of deep red roses for Dolores, and he would pluck one out to put in her hair.

She always looked so beautiful in red.

At sixteen, Romero asked Dolores out, she said yes.

To Mariano’s great relief they only went on two dates. However, he couldn’t ignore what it meant that Dolores had agreed to date Romero in the first place. She didn’t see him the same way he saw her.

Nobody ever accused Mariano of being an intellectual, but he liked to think he was raised right. When a woman demonstrates that she doesn’t have feelings for you, you respect that.

He tried just being her friend, but it seemed as they grew, she just became more and more beautiful. Eventually, he realized if he wanted to get over her, he would need space. Mariano spent a month torturing himself, trying to think of a different way to move on, but then she giggled at a joke her little brother made and it felt like somebody had wrenched his heart out of his chest to give to her.

So, at seventeen, he began hanging out with the other boys his age instead of Dolores. He still spoke to her at parties, and if he happened to run into her at the market, and of course, when their abuelas decided their families should have dinner together.

And he still loved her.

No matter how much time passed, Mariano still loved Dolores more than he could ever say. He tried writing poems about his feelings, but the words paled in comparison, so he gave up and wrote poems about other things.

When he was twenty he noticed Isabela dancing in the square, spreading flowers around. Dolores was just behind her, smiling quietly. Isabela made Dolores a red and orange flower crown and Mariano couldn’t hold back a sigh at how beautiful she was.

“She’s quite graceful, isn’t she?” his abuela asked, seemingly appearing out of thin air by his shoulder.

“Oh, uh, sí. She is,” he glanced nervously between his abuela and Dolores, who stood with her usual poise.

“And quite beautiful.”

“Sí,” Mariano gulped, did she know?

“I remember you two used to play together everyday at school.”

“Sí,” Mariano said, failing to keep all of his longing out of his voice.

“How long have you had these feelings for her?”

He stuttered and babbled for a little, but she just watched him with a knowing grin, so he gave in and admitted, “Since we were children, but she doesn’t feel the same way.”

“Oh? Are you sure?”

“Sí.”

“Have you asked her?”

“Uh.”

“Mariano, mijo, you can not know a woman’s true feelings unless you ask her.”

He blinked at his abuela for a little, then turned to look past Isabela at Dolores. She was very quiet, and usually very good at keeping secrets. Was it wishful thinking driving him to listen to his abuela? Or did he have a chance?

“Perhaps you’re right,” he said.

“Of course I am, now go ask her.”

Mariano nodded, and started to walk away, before he remembered himself. Dutifully, he turned back to press a kiss to his abuela’s cheek, and thank her for her council. When he turned around, Dolores was gone.

He frowned, slowly approaching Isabela as he searched the crowd for a flash of red. She noticed him and waved, he waved back then pushed through the crowd so he could speak to her.

“Where’d Dolores go?”

Isabela paused in her dancing to look over at where Dolores had been standing, finger halfway raised to point. She deflated a little when she noticed her cousin was gone.

“I don’t know,” she frowned a little, then looked quickly at her audience and with a magnanimous smile rained flowers down on them.

“You don’t have to stop on my account,” he said, recognizing the flower confetti as the finale it was.

“No, I wanted to do some shopping with her,” Isabela waved at people as she broke through the crowd, gifting a few of the children with extra flowers, “she’s so good at picking things Abuela likes.”

“Oh, great, then we can look for her together,” he smiled, “been a while since we spent any time together.”

“It has, hasn’t it?” she huffed out a quiet laugh, shaking her head, “When was the last time? New years?”

“Sí, sí, sounds right,” he eyed Dolores’ favorite fruit stand as they passed it, “how’ve you been?”

“Oh, wonderful,” she was also looking at the stand, then turned to peek into the book shop, “I recently learned how to do a new trick on my vines.”

“Oh?” Mariano asked with genuine interest, he remembered how much Isabela enjoyed her acrobatics, “I would love to see it!”

Isabela flashed him a warm smile, then glanced down at her fluttery lavender dress, “You should come by Casita for lunch tomorrow, I can show it to you then.”

It had been forever since he’d gone to Casita for lunch, and he suddenly realized how much he’d missed the sentient house. He had spent many an afternoon playing hide and seek there, but recently he’d only been when he was accompanying his abuela and had to be on his best behavior. Plus, it meant that even if he couldn’t find Dolores today, he could talk to her tomorrow.

“I would love that!”

“Great. I’ll let everybody know.”

They spent the rest of the afternoon looking for Dolores, and when they didn’t find her, he helped Isabela pick out some cloth for a new dress.

“I definitely want something purple,” Isabela said, looking over the bolts of fabric, “Abuela says it compliments my skin tone the best.”

Mariano, used to helping his Mamá with her shopping, hummed thoughtfully and reached for a deep purple linen. Isabela looked at it, and her eyes got all bright, a smile twitched at her lips. 

Then she stood up just a little straighter, folded her hands over themselves and said, “It’s lovely, but I prefer pastels.”

Mariano felt his brow wrinkle, because it had looked like Isabela had been really excited about it for a second, but then again, he could be wrong. It had certainly happened before.

He helped her select a different bolt of purple. A pastel purple. The shopkeeper offered her a steep discount in exchange for fresh flowers to fill all of her vases.

Isabela obliged with the same perfect smile she used to use when she was playing the princess.

They parted ways not long after, Mariano reported to his abuela that he would be having lunch at Casita the next day and she’d cheered. He did not realize until later the misunderstanding that had taken place, and by then, it wouldn’t matter.

Dolores didn’t make an appearance at lunch the next day, but Mirabel did.

He watched Isabela and Mirabel snipe at each other, even as they planned what embroidery Mirabel would put on Isabela’s new dress.

“That’s too many colors,” Isabela said.

Mirabel rolled her eyes, “You know, you used to like colors, back when you weren’t boring.”

“I’m not boring, I’m an adult, with a little something called responsibilities,” Isabela hissed.

Mirabel rolled her eyes even harder.

Mariano chuckled, accidentally drawing both their attention. Isabela sat up straight, primly folding her hands in her lap, but Mirabel pushed the sketchbook towards him. Coincidentally, although he didn’t think much of it at the time, Señora Alma walked into the kitchen at that exact moment.

“What do you think, Mariano?” Mirabel asked, voice friendly, but sharp eyes pointed at Isabela.

“Oh, uh,” he might not have been the brightest crayon in the box, but even he knew a trap when he saw one, “I think Isabela looks perfectly lovely in everything.”

He did not notice Señora Alma turning to examine him.

Mirabel gave him an unamused look, not fooled by his hedging, “Great. But what design do you like best?”

Mariano gulped and looked down at the sketch book, then he said, “Oh! How about the one with the little avocado? It’s like that character you and Dolores made up when we were in school, remember?”

“Doctor Avocado?” Isabela blinked into the middle distance, a slow smile growing across her face, she chuckled quietly, “I’m surprised you remember that, it’s been years since I thought about any of that stuff.”

Mariano shrugged a little sheepishly, then admitted, “I still have the drawings you made.”

And here’s where Mariano truly messed up, because personally he felt everything up to this point wasn’t really his fault. Technically, what Mariano meant to say was “I have the drawings you guys made”, which involved using the plural form of “you”; however, his mind was on Dolores and Dolores only, so without thinking he used the singular, familiar, form of “you”. It was a small detail, and even though he heard his own mistake, he didn’t think it important enough to correct it, but it’s one of those mistakes that snowballed into a really big problem. Like when he assumed the dog could be trusted not to jump on the kitchen counter while Mariano ran to the bathroom really quick.

Because what Señora Alma apparently heard was “My dearest Isabela, I have treasured that most fine art of an avocado with a medical practice for all these years simply because it was crafted by your perfect hand.”

Isabela did not end up picking the design with the little avocado, instead she went with a much more understated design. One with little pastel flowers that gracefully tumbled down her pastel skirts. Mariano finished lunch with the two sisters, then lingered in the courtyard with Isabela, hoping Dolores would make an appearance. He finally left in defeat when the sun rested on the tops of the mountains.

Fortunately (at least he thought it was fortunate) Señora Alma started inviting him and his abuela over for dinner more often.

Unfortunately (and he was correct about this being unfortunate) Dolores was always seated at the opposite end of the table from him, and barely looked at him whenever he was around.

Once again, Mariano sat himself down, and forced himself to accept that Dolores just wasn’t interested in him that way. Despite what his abuela had said.

At least he was rekindling his friendship with Isabela. They had a lot in common, both were the eldest grandchildren and carried the weight of their abuelas’ expectations. He had missed her, to a certain extent, and it was nice talking to somebody who understood what it was like to stand in front of a mirror and practice saying “Sí Abuela” in just the right tone of voice. His male friends had apparently never done that, and had in fact teased him for being vain when he’d asked. They hadn’t understood that it wasn’t about vanity, he didn’t need to look good for the sake of aesthetics, he needed to be neat and well groomed in order to set the proper example for his younger siblings and cousins. Isabela understood that, better than anyone else.

One day, his abuela asked him to take Isabela to the market, to get her help picking out gifts for the young girls in the family. Isabela had agreed, but had walked a little slower than usual, and kept getting distracted.

“Is something wrong?” he eventually asked, when he finally realized she was frowning and sighing a lot more than usual.

“I-. Well, I don’t know,” Isabela glanced at him, then at the market as it passed by around them, “Mariano, how do you feel about me?”

“What do you mean? You’re my best friend,” he had answered, because by that point she was.

“That’s it?”

“Uh, sí? Why? Has somebody-.”

“Do you… have feelings for me?”

Mariano’s eyebrows almost jumped off his face, he should have said “No” and would have said “No” but he was a bit busy gaping at her. It had never occurred to him that Isabela was somebody he even could have feelings for.

The silence dragged on without him denying his feelings out loud, forcing anyone who might overhear the exchange to draw her own pessimistic conclusions. The silence dragged on so long, in fact, that if any eavesdropping pessimists had decided she didn’t want to overhear confirmation of what she thought was destined to happen, then that eavesdropping pessimist had plenty of time to escape to the soundproofed portion of her room. Another thing he didn’t realize was a mistake until much later.

Thankfully, Isabela was his best friend, and knew him well enough to read the answer on his face, “So why are you going along with this?”

“With…?”

“With this! With our abuelas setting us up?”

He gaped at her a little more.

She frowned at him.

Silence stretched between them once more.

“Mariano, you do realize that’s what’s been happening? Don’t you?”

He could only shake his head.

She groaned, “What did you think was happening?!”

“I- I don’t know, I just thought… we’re friends,” he shrugged, “that’s-. Aren’t we friends?”

Isabela softened, she smiled a little, “Sí, we’re friends.”

“Bien, that’s uh, that’s good,” he frowned down at his shoes, then looked back up at her and asked, “they’ve been trying to set us up?”

“Sí, for months now, my abuela is starting to hint at marriage,” Isabela said. They had slowed to a standstill as he had processed what she was saying, but now she started walking again. She held her chin high, with all proper poise, and looked straight ahead with a contemplative look on her face.

“Oh,” he walked beside her, feeling comparatively clumsy and oafish, even as his steps passed smoothly over the cobbled road.

“I… am going to go along with it,” Isabela said, quietly, “there’s no other man in the village I think I could-. You’re my best friend, if I’m not going to fall in love, I might as well marry you.”

“Oh.”

They walked in silence for a while.

“What do you think?”

“About marrying each other?”

“Sí.”

“I uh-,” he hesitated, then quietly admitted, “I’ve been in love with one girl my entire life, I can’t imagine being with anyone else, but- but- she doesn’t-.”

He couldn’t continue, it always broke his heart a little to admit that Dolores didn’t love him back, but now, here, when talking about marriage, when seriously thinking about his future, saying it out loud was unbearable. He found himself sniffling a little, his bottom lip trembling. 

Isabela put a hand on his shoulder.

He looked at her, and suddenly, he could see a path he’d never considered before. A path in which he married Isabela, moved into Casita, spent his life with his best friend, just down the hall from the woman he loved. He would have kids with Isabela, and raise them with her, and see Dolores every day for the rest of his life. It wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t exactly what he wanted, but it would be cruel to marry somebody who was in love with him, knowing he could never give them his heart. And it would be good for his family, to be so connected to the Madrigals.

And it would mean he would always be close to the love of his life.

“If I can’t be with her,” he said, slowly, “th-then I can’t imagine anyone better than my best friend.”

Isabela nodded, giving him a small smile. It wasn’t one of the ones she’d practiced, it didn’t match his own practiced grin. It was quiet, and warm, and reassured him that he could be happy with her.

Months continued to pass them by, and Mariano found himself thinking more and more of this life spent with his best friend. They would make an excellent team, him and Isabela, and they would have wonderful kids, kids Mariano would get to spend plenty of time with. In most households, the men were expected to go out and work, but not in la familia Madrigal. When you married a Madrigal, it became your job to stay home and take care of the kids so that the Madrigals could share their blessings with the village. He’d once thought he’d be raising Dolores’ children, but the more he thought about it, the more he realized that he would be just as happy raising Isabela’s kids. The more Mariano thought about his life to come, the more he realized how much he wanted to be a father.

He started spending more time with his youngest cousins, eager to practice for his oncoming life as the primary parent.

There were nights, of course, where Mariano had guilty fantasies in which Dolores would fall in love with him a little later in life, and Isabela would give him permission to be with her. These fantasies sometimes featured him saving Dolores from her horrible husband, or comforting her when her husband died in a very tragic and painful accident. But nobody needed to know about those nights, or those fantasies.

He focused on the thought of his future kids, and tried to ignore all else.

Mariano picked out the ring, he drafted up lists of baby names, he planned what he would say in his proposal with Isabela, and he tried not to think too hard about how close he would be to Dolores once he had moved into Casita.

And then his and Isabela’s plans all fell apart the night of the proposal.

In the scant hours between that disastrous dinner and Casita falling apart, all Mariano could think about was how embarrassing the evening had been for him, and the fact that Dolores had seen the whole thing. He wondered if the miracle had been trying to tell him and Isabela something, if it had been trying to discourage the match.

Then, when he found out that it had nothing to do with him, he felt horrible for being so self pitying while his best friend and the love of his life were dealing with such a crisis.

Mariano was the first to grab a shovel, and rallied the other villagers to do the same. He figured he would worry about his love life later, when Casita was done being built. He thought that neither Isabela nor Dolores had the energy or time to think about him. He thought he would never be a Madrigal, and he would just have to accept that.

Nobody ever accused Mariano of being an intellectual. In fact, they often accused him of the exact opposite, and after hearing Dolores’ side of the story, he couldn’t blame them.

“You’ve had this since we were ten?” he asked, for the fifth time. He was holding an old vision tablet, the magic long since faded from it. In it, he was on his knees, holding a ring out to Isabela as she sat primly at her dinner table.

“Sí, and I’ve looked at it almost every night since,” she shook her head ruefully, “trying to force myself to get over you.”

He stared at her, “Are you sure you don’t want to get married right now?”

Dolores giggled quietly, “I’m sure. I seem to remember you had all these plans for your wedding.”

“Our wedding,” he corrected, “it was always-. I thought you didn’t return my feelings, but I was never able to picture another bride. Not really.”

She smiled down at her lap. They were sitting side by side on a couch in the newly finished first floor of the new Casita. He was vaguely aware of the rest of her family milling around, of her father keeping a close on them, but he couldn’t bring himself to look away from her face.

“You knew? When we were ten? That you love me?” he eventually asked.

“I’ve known since I got my gift.”

Mariano blinked rapidly, trying to hold back tears as a smile took over his face. He leaned over and kissed her check, only to jump back when Señor Félix loudly cleared his throat. Mariano flashed him a sheepish smile, but didn’t want to spend too long not looking at Dolores.

“I-I was a little bit slow,” he admitted, “I didn’t figure it out until we were thirteen.”

“But that was when you started to pull away?” she asked.

“Pull-? Oh! No! No, no, no,” he grabbed her hand, “I was trying to be respectful. I… enjoyed being close to you in a way that uh, I figured I should get permission for before I uh, well, indulged. If that uh, if you get what I'm… getting at.”

“Oh,” Dolores giggled again, “I see.”

“If you’ve loved me all this time, why did you date Romero?”

“My Pá said that’s the best way to get over someone,” she shrugged.

Mariano couldn’t help it, he turned to look at Señor Félix with his hurt and betrayal clear on his face. Señor Félix looked startled, and actually took a step back. For a brief second Mariano was reminded of Camilo, as Señor Félix held his hands up in a questioning shrug and seemed to silently ask, “What did I do?”

“Amor,” Dolores gently pulled Mariano’s face back towards her, “it’s not his fault, I asked him for that advice.”

Mariano still couldn’t help but pout a little, “He could have told you to ask me how I felt before giving up on me.”

“Sí, and I could have asked him for advice on getting your attention,” she shrugged, “I thought this was just another case of people ignoring me in favor of Isabela.”

“I would never,” he breathed, “Dolores, she is my best friend, but you! You’re the sun in my sky, the song every bird sings, the passion too great for words to capture. You’re steady ground in an earthquake, a shelter in a storm, and the burst of laughter that cures a bad day. How could anyone not see your kindness? Your poise? Isabela is all the bright colors in a meadow, but you’re the red in my veins. I have warmth in my heart to share with others, because you keep it beating.”

Dolores was so often quiet, so often silent, but this was the first time Mariano had ever seen her struck dumb. Her lips parted in surprise, and her eyes shined with love.

Mariano knew he wasn’t an intellectual, but he liked to think he was raised right, so even though he wanted to hold her tight and kiss her, pour all the passion and longing he’d stored up into her, he didn’t. Instead he squeezed her hand, then brought it to his lips, so he could leave a gentle kiss on her fingertips.

Dolores gaped at him for another second, then with her free hand she took the old vision out of his lap and threw it like a frisbee across the room.

It hit the ground and shattered.

“So,” she said, “marriage?”

“Sí! I’ll bring my wedding journal tomorrow and you can tell me what ring design you like best,” he said, launching into an explanation of everything he’d planned.

Nobody ever accused Mariano of being a genius, but he’d stumbled his way to marrying the love of his life. So, he figured he was smart enough. 

#mariano guzman #isabela madrigal #dolores madrigal #senora guzman #Encanto #Foggy writes #look! I managed to write something that isn't about Bruno! #yay me!

[solarsavoy]

Hey hey, you got anything else about Deshi you’d like to share 🤔 I honestly really like his vibe (It’s usually like that for a lot light haired characters in my case 😅)

I was trying to figure out what to say about him. I just find him so cute sometimes because of the little side stories my muse gives me, so then I thought about sharing a little side story about him.

For context, I have an editor friend (not professional) that thinks Deshi's intellectually stupid, so I was trying to think of something that proves he's not, because he can be quite ingenious sometimes. So here it is. Storytime!

Deshi's friend is based off a friend of Deo's, in a way.

So Deshi loves videogames, which most should know by now, and this is inspired by the types of videogames I like, which some may not know. One major difference is that I'm a fan of horror games and Deshi is not, lol. He just can't handle them, which only makes him that much more endearing to me.

Anyway, when his dad disappeared, his mom got a large sum of money meant to take care of her and Deshi and Sasaki (his little sister) until college, so she doesn't work. This does make funds a little limited though and videogames can get expensive. To still be able to get what he wants, he's patient, saves his money, and then gets things as cheaply as possible. (Yes, he steals games online.) He got the idea from his unnamed friend to build a computer from scratch because the gaming computers/laptops can get a little pricey.

So that's exactly what he did.

He learned how to put together a computer, constantly asking his friend for help of course, and eventually built it from the bottom up, a really good gaming computer, for much cheaper than it would've been on the market. This is why he's a PC gamer. He's very proud of it and protective of it (since Sasaki is constantly pranking him and unlike Karma, her pranks are maliciously destructive) and his mom nor his sister have any idea how hard it was for him to make it. Like, they just think he can tinker around with it for an hour and it'll be fixed. 🙄

So one day, Sasaki actually damages it really badly and Deshi goes to his friend and it takes 3 months and all his miniscule savings to fix it. Mom thinks he was being dramatic, but finally decides to tell Sasaki that the computer is off limits and to just not mess with it ever because "Deshi's sensitive". *glare

After this whole debacle, his friend donates his old monitor (it's a very nice monitor, btw) to Deshi and moves away. They're both kind of pretty bad at keeping in contact, but they try. And that's how he got his computer and became a PC gamer!

Deshi was around 10 when he decided to start building his computer and 12 when he finished. His friend moved away when he was about 13 or 14.

So yeah, definitely not intellectually challenged. 😣 And Deshi's actually really good at finding ways around things. This comes up a lot in the Second Fragment while learning magic. He just has this kind of "how do I make this work?" mentality when it comes to doing things.

Bonus!

He's normally the guy that takes things a little to seriously and is overly cautious in ways (product of his evil little sister's constant pranks) but he's surprisingly playful when it comes to experimenting with stuff to understand it and make it work. Here's a summary of a scene in Second Fragment.

He's trying to understand his limits with magic while working with Master Diette and decides that the best way is to just use magic until he runs out, which causes him to faint. "Ooo, that's bad." Master Diette says, also wanting to test Deshi's limits out of curiosity. "We can't let Master Key know or we'll both be in trouble." And then allows him do this. But you know, forcing yourself to faint just isn't a good idea. 😆 Don't worry, he ends up being fine.

Deshi's nonchalance to danger while experimenting comes from the amount of times he was electrocuted while building his computer. Not super common, but it happened. He made the lights in the house flicker once and has burned through more than one motherboard, trying to figure it all out.

Thanks for the ask! 💙

#solarsavoyasks #deshi gushiken #Krystar

[astaroth1357]

I love reading your how to guide they're fun to read and I was wondering if you do a how to be the brother's sugar mama 🤣

So I'm not going to lie, I'm pretty sure Lucifer would let you be his Sugar Mama over his actual dead body so... I did a Sugar Baby instead. If you really want me to write the Sugar Mama, message me and I wiiilllll but I think it’s more of a stretch then I was comfortable taking otherwise. But if we're doing this at all, we're going to have to do it NSFW people. It’s going to be sort of unavoidable either way, so strap in cause I sure did.

How to be a Demon's Sugar Baby

Make the Most of Your Bartered Soul!

Well, well, well this is quite the arrangement you've made with the forces of Hell now, isn't it?  There's nothing wrong with expecting a full return on your investment since you did give away your soul for this so it's time to enjoy that compensation! While we're sure that you're ready to be spoiled rotten by your beloved demon, there are going to be certain things expected of you in order to keep that affection flowing. In our guide, How to be a Demon's Sugar Baby, we will give you insight into what kind of actions you should expect to perform as well as the benefits you can receive when you start pampering your dearest demon! Always remember, love isn't material, but having good stuff is really nice regardless!

ATTENTION: This guide contains material not suitable for all workplaces. Reader's discretion advised.

Lucifer

What a wonderful selection for this kind of relationship because this demon is loaded! You need not worry about asking for too much. Whatever your heart's desire, Lucifer can provide.

HOWEVER… He's not a very generous demon. Every cent that he gives you, you will have to earn. The man isn't in the business of giving handouts, even to cuties like yourself.

Lucifer can be a demanding Sugar Daddy for sure. He will expect you to be ready for him at the drop of a hat. One text, one call, even a passing mention of your name, and you should be there. No questions asked or you will be punished.

It pays to be astute with Lucifer, too. If you're good, then he shouldn't even have to command you. One step in the room and you should know just what to do and how he's going to want it. Though remember, even if he doesn't say much, he's in control here.

There will be times where he's not looking for a little release and just needs some relaxation. You'll, of course, be expected to provide for that too: back rubs, tea, and pleasant conversation are all options you should get acquainted with very quickly.

Understand this now, anything short of perfection is not tolerated. If he's taking you anywhere, you're going to have to look/be amazing Every. Time. He'll make sure you'll have everything for it, but there's going to be no slacking off with him. Ever.

If you're looking to satisfy Lucifer, you won't just be a side piece or arm candy. You will be a trophy and he will spoil you like one.

Mammon

So maybe you don't like your Sugar Daddy with a lot of cash, but just the inability to say "no" to you in nearly any capacity…? Then Mammon's is your perfect pick!

True, it may not be wise to choose a Sugar Daddy who seems chronically without sugar to give but if there's any gambler in you then Mammon can be a near constant rush.

His highs are your highs, if he's out gambling then he'll want you on his arm or in his lap for good luck. Cheer him on and sprinkle in a bit of teasing because he's positive he makes better bets when he feels on top of the world.

If he makes a killing, then it's an all night celebration. He may even cover you in the Grimm just to enjoy how it looks. You won't stay like that very long though, because he'll need to have his way with you quite a few times before the sun comes up.

Don't fret, most of that money that he makes is going to go towards you anyway. You won't have to worry about him putting his bills over his Sugar (even if it's ill-advised).

Do remember that Mammon is a cheapskate at heart, but you shouldn't have any trouble bypassing that if there's something you want. Flash him some big, watery eyes and he'll cave every time until he goes broke again...

And then his lows are your lows… But if you still show him kindness and compassion even when he's flat broke, we guarantee he will never leave your side.

Leviathan 

Are you an otaku/gamer/geek who wants copious amounts of that sweet, sweet merch and a little love on the side? Then you also want Levi.

Just know that this demon is desperate for love in his life so you'll be busy on most days. Levi needs to be lavished in attention: cuddles, pets, kisses, and probably more sex than you can process. He's veeery pent up...

Thankfully, he stays in his room all the time so you can do whatever you like away from prying eyes! Which is good, because he tends to get adventurous when he's confident. There won't be a spot in his room you two have not been before.

Like Mammon, Levi's going to need a cheerleader as much as he does a lover. Nothing is quite like starting a competitive match with someone very vocally in your corner.

We do hope you like anime, video games, or general geekry because he won't tolerate indifference. You need not have memorized the entirety of the TSL Extended Compendium, but you should at least be able to identify his favorite characters or scenes in anything he watches. You won't last long otherwise.

If you can then consider the entirety of Akuzon's wares to be yours. You'll only need to ask. If there's any particular series that you enjoy, expect its merch to be gifted to you whenever he sees it. He'll have very little self-control (especially if it's all for you).

Truthfully, we have no idea where Levi gets his money so just don’t question how he keeps buying you so many things... It's probably some shady cryptocurrency or black market type stuff so we recommend you stay out of his finances, lest you learn something you regret...

Satan 

Ah, an intellectual are you? Not satisfied with just a fancy new car or a designer handbag? Do you need the very best that the world has to offer? The most beautiful, artistic, and thought-provoking goods you can find?? Then really your only choice is Satan.

… But do you like pets? We sincerely hope you like pets…

In truth, Satan will want two things from you: some stimulating conversation and a little pet play.

This is very much a "gentleman by day" arrangement. He'll be sure to treat you to very nice things all the time: wine tastings, art shows, even red carpet events thanks to his connections.

He won't mind taking you anywhere as long as you can engage that brain of his. Abstract conversations or discussions about hard topics will earn you even better trips the next time around...

But "by night" you will have a nickname, a collar, and probably a tail plug too. This man is bound and determined to have a cat and he does not care how.

If the idea of crawling for him makes you want to save face then don't worry. You needn't be an obedient kitty, not even for him.

In fact, he'd much prefer you act out from time to time because if there's one thing he likes more than cats, it's brats. Be cute for him and maybe he'll go easy on you if you like.

Asmodeus 

Do you like shopping? Just, the act of shopping in general? Do you want someone who won't just sign a check but shop with you? Asmo's the man.

He loves shopping and he loves shopping for you! He won't just stand outside the dressing room on his phone, he'll be a very active participant in making you happy.

A veeerrry active participant… Everywhere… Probably including that dressing room…

You need to understand now that Asmo is insatiable. Whatever you believe a high sex drive is, double it and then you will get Asmo on a Tuesday.

He's giving. Very giving in fact, in money and in bed, but that won't change that he is a monster. His stamina is unreal, his desire is unmatched, and assuming that you are not an incarnation of Aphrodite herself You. Will. Not. Keep. Up.

If you choose to be with Asmo it will be a hellish bliss. You will be pampered like royalty on a sea of euphoria until the tide overtakes you and you drown.

If this warning isn't enough to dissuade you, we wish you the best of luck. Asmo may bring you to the greatest highs of your life, but he very much can be the death of you too...

Beelzebub 

You know, food can be expensive. Especially if you have a bit of an appetite… If an endless food supply is what you're after, then you need Beel in your life!

He'll always be down to go out and try new foods or take you to whatever restaurant you like (provided he's eating there too, of course).

Considering the amount that he eats there's no way you can top his bill so order as much as you like! You'll get through what? Four? Five courses? He'll get cut off around 12.

Restaurants aside, food will be mostly what Beel expects from you so we do hope you like cooking. Cuddles and kisses are well and good but this demon needs to eat.

Speaking of which… Truthfully, being with Beel is almost just like a normal relationship but there's just one catch….

Beel is practically an oral addict. He will want to get a taste of you and once he does you ought to resign yourself to being his new fix. 

A session with Beel is not for the faint of heart. He can be down there for hours and won't stop even if you're a drooling, overstimulated wreck. His aftercare is sweet but it's a hell of a journey getting there. Be warned.

Belphegor

So maybe all these other options just sound like too much work... You want a Sugar Daddy, but someone who's on the laidback side, right? Introducing Belphegor.

Belphie is a man of simple pleasures. A quiet afternoon, a long nap, and maybe a game or some mischief in the middle of the night. You won't have to worry about doing very much because he won't be conscious very long...

He will, however, get his money's worth in the hours that he's awake.

Belphegor is a lazy soul, so don't expect him to put much work into things. His favorite tactic will be to get you so frustrated that you jump him. Then he can just sit back and enjoy the fun with a smug smile on his face…

If you're not riding him in some way then you're probably going to be his new pillow. He will find a way to sleep on you in every position possible until he finds a favorite and just sticks to that.

As far as what he offers, Belphie will pretty much just toss money in your direction and leave it up to you to spend it. He’s not a shopping man...

In the rare cases that he does go out and buy you a gift take it as a compliment. You’ve motivated him to leave the House for longer than twenty minutes so you must be exactly what he was after.

For more of my “How Tos...” check out my Masterlist!

#obey me #obey me shall we date #shall-we-date-obey-me #obey me lucifer #obey me mammon #obey me leviathan #obey me satan #obey me asmodeus #obey me beelzebub #obey me belphegor #obey me headcanons #obey me hc

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HOW TO INVESTORS

He wanted to do everything. For example, Ben Silbermann noticed that a lot of altitude. For example, suppose Y Combinator offers to fund you in return for 6% of your company. There's inevitably a difference in how things feel within the company. That turned out to be valuable for hardware startups. So if you need to do two things, especially, it usually works best to get something in front of users as soon as it has a quantum of utility, and then sit around offering crits of one another's creations under the vague supervision of the teacher. It's oddly nondeterministic. Most startups that use the contained fire strategy do it unconsciously.1 And if you want to do good work, what you need to do: find a question that makes the product good. And so, by word of mouth online than our first PR firm got through the print media.

So our rule is just to get you talking. Kids who went to MIT or Harvard or Stanford and sometimes find ourselves thinking: they must be smarter than they seem. The four causes: open source, which makes you unattractive to investors. The initial idea is that, financially at least, that high level languages are often all treated as equivalent. The problem with spam is that in order to hack Unix, and Perl for system administration and cgi scripts. Being good is a particularly useful strategy for making decisions in complex situations because it's stateless. But this mistake is less excusable than most. I didn't think of that as your task? They all knew their work like a piano player knows the keys. By looking at their actions rather than their words. Almost everyone hates their dissertation by the time you face the horror of writing a dissertation. But because the product is not appealing enough.

Understand your users. It's not just that it makes you unhappy, but that it's obvious. If you use this method, you'll get roughly the same answer I just gave. But invariably they're larger in your imagination than in real life. Try making your customer service not merely good, but surprisingly good. If 98% of the time you're doing product development on spec, it will be easy to get more to. In the so-called real world this need is a great curiosity about a promising question to explore. The default euphemism for algorithm is system and method. Rejection is almost always a function of its founders. Since we would do anything to get users, we did. You can't answer that; if you could count on investors saving you. It's more efficient for us, and better for the company with the addition of some new person, then they're worth n such that i 1/1-n.

One thing I can say is that 99. The world changes fast, and the people you'd meet there would be wrong too. Do you have to publish novel results to advance their careers, but there was a triple pressure toward the center. And I agree you shouldn't underestimate your potential. Fixed-size series A rounds.2 But if you get a lot of time on sales and marketing. But it wasn't just TV. They win by locking competitors out of business. Understanding your users is part of half the principles in this list. I could give an example of what I mean by getting something done is learning how to write well, or how to draw the human face from life.

Offers from the very best hackers tend to be idealistic. Perhaps dramatically so, if automation had decreased the need for some kind of connection. It's just not reasonable to expect startups to pick an optimal round size in advance, because that means I hadn't been thinking about them. I need to be a good thing. And the best way not to seem desperate is not to lose your cool. Don't worry if a project doesn't seem to be overkill. That's one advantage of being small: you can use in this situation. If you have additional expenses, like manufacturing, add in those at the end. In this case, the device is the world's economy, which fortunately happens to be closest. Are some kinds of work better sources of habits of mind as well, and that you should expect to take heroic measures at first. That's the key.

The big danger is that you'll dismiss your startup. If we think 20th century cohesion was something that happened at least in a sense naturally. Though quite successful, it did not crush Apple. The one example I've found is, embarrassingly enough, Yahoo, which filed a patent suit against a gaming startup called Xfire in 2005. The summer founders were as a rule very idealistic. Even people who hate you for it believe it. For PhD programs, the professors do. Convertible notes let startups beat such deadlocks by rewarding investors willing to move first with lower effective valuations.3 Many investors will ask how much you learn in college and those you'll use in a job, except perhaps as a classics professor, but it was surprising to realize there were purely benevolent projects that had to be pretty convincing to overcome this.4 Only a few companies have been smart enough to realize this so far. I thought: how much does that investment have to improve your average outcome for you to break even?

I'm sure there are game companies out there working on products with more intellectual content than the research at the bottom of the file; don't feel obliged to cover any of them; write for a reader who won't read the essay as carefully as you do, talk to them all in parallel, because some are more promising prospects than others. So I want to invest in startups when it's still unclear how they'll do. It won't get you a job, it may not just be because they're academics, detached from the real world, programs are bigger, tend to involve existing code, for example have been granted large numbers of preposterously over-broad patents, but not to be Henry Ford. Often to make something people want? Which means if letting the founders sell some stock directly to them, they had the confidence to notice it. You can't trust the opinions of the others, because of the Blub paradox to your advantage: you can provide a level of service no big company can. More powerful programming languages make programs shorter. These turn out to be more true in software than other businesses. That's too uncertain. I do with most of the startups we've funded have, and Jessica does too, mostly, because she's gotten into sync with us. These guys want to get market price, work on something you're good at.

Notes

Our secret is to fork off separate processes to deal with them. In the early years of training, and a company tuned to exploit it. The best way for a startup. Many people feel confused and depressed in their early twenties compressed into the work goes instead into the heads of would-be-evil end.

They won't like you raising other money and disputes. As far as I know of any that died from releasing something stable but minimal very early, then used a technicality to get going, and Smartleaf co-founders Mark Nitzberg and Olin Shivers at the mercy of circumstances: court decisions striking down state anti-recommendation. Incidentally, I'm just going to be extra skeptical about Viaweb too.

Emmett Shear, and philosophy the imprecise half.

To help clarify the matter. Whereas there is some kind of kludge you need a higher growth rate as evolutionary pressure is such a valuable technique that any given person might have.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #measures #level #TV #investors #marketing #situations #startup #sources #Emmett #sales #thing #company #return #investment #technicality #startups #question #things #Y #money #something #dissertation #principles #careers #piano

[deranged-ink]

Dear editor in chief.

Yesterday I was reading a magazine -your magazine- while waiting for my coffee. I´ll admit that I was so into it that, to my embarrassment, I failed to notice the girl approaching until she left the coffee with some croissants on my table. That would be a big mistake if I were reading on the company time.

I was too involved in a single line of your last editorial:

What is your hobby? A simple and dull question, but not to my eyes. I can't help but wonder about what kind of person is asking. Is it someone intelligent? Someone with a really deep understanding of the human nature or just the typical dumb brick monkey behind a typewriter. I can assure you that one honest to god smile cameforth to your inquiry, simply because it is one of those easy-to-answer questions using a triviality, difficult to answer with The Truth.

I suppose that if you force me to answer with nothing but said Truth I would have to admit, with the proper amount of blush on my cheeks, that I like to look at the people, please take note that i am not a stalker, it's just that in order to be good at my job I have to describe myself as a rather avid observer.

I like to look at people, especially on my job. You have to understand, sitting on an uncomfortable chair for countless hours, drinking cheap coffe and killing cigars in some dirty ashtray, just waiting for the phone to ring to do my job... I would have turned crazy long, long ago if I wouldn't found a way to kill some time.

But from my hobby something really good came up.

I learned, no. I found something fascinating while observing these biological machines. Well first, I´ll confess, everything started with a game: Guess what it will do now?

From that game I discovered that all this elaborated, commercialized and consumed idea of freedom is -for most of these poor bastards- fundamentally, a lie . A lie that may or may not be true, that's the beauty of the whole subject. A liar's truth.

Before you burn your brains trying to imagine something like that, let me add something, whatever you imagine, it will be right.

If you think about it, it's a beautiful "oxymoron". Freedom is a useful farse (A dream for the most) where you must be aware of what you do and stop doing. You must fully understand each of your actions from its very root. Thats the really hard part.

Do not get me wrong, I have always said that true freedom is real, a primordial part of what reality is. The problem lies in the excuses that the lower minds uses to escape from the weight of freedom.

They fall for the supposed "unmeasurable plots" of some great powers and some others imaginary enemies (that for some not-even-god-knows reason will try to brainwash or enslave them).

They gave these plotters this divine attribute of being untouchable. And closing their eyes, they turned themselves into beings without a real opinion, without control over their lives. That's nothing short of stupidity. Themselves wrote the fairytale that they now fear, and did it in order of escaping the responsibility of knowing/taking control of their lives.

Themselves choose their imaginary chains and in the same thought, choose the more imaginary saviour that will come to brake them! Just look at those pocket warriors of the social networks, reading only what supports their ideals and burning the rest!

-Oh, traditional book burning! The irony!-

Thats how they define themselves acording their position on said system: left, right, pro-life, pro-choice, feminist, traditional, pro-system, anti-system, pious, atheist.

But what they call "the system" is just a playing field. Not some godwritten rules that will never change.

And there they meet failure without being able to realize that they act as the said system expects them to act. All the pieces on the board have a use. Even when trying to escape, when trying to think and act outside of the box, they only succeed -in a beautiful way if you ask me- to prove that they are wrong.

They do not realize that the system is not a box, but actually a box of many, each box is full of boxes and the fact that you can "get out" of the box only confirms this.

You can -with ease- point out all the poor bastards who buy a t-shirt with the face of Che Guevara (or someother communist symbol). Ironically, they are being part of a capitalist market with them as their target. The same can be said of those really patriotic friends, they really love America and they also really love their flag to be made in china. Sweet irony.

This is the same for freedom. To be free, you must be aware of what you are, truly aware, also accept what you can and can not do and that each of your actions has an effect on the great cosmic pool that is this life, each action is a small or a large stone that falls on water. You will imagine that with so many rocks that big pool is not calm at all. And thats life my friend, actions that modify our actions in one way or another. The real freedom lies in understanding this, accepting it and continuing to live.

Playing "Guess what it will do now?" I had an eureka moment some years ago. From an open window I was looking at the people on the street with my telescope, when I learned something that saddens me: "People" sold their freedom for a manual.

Life is not easy and that´s why most decide to live thinking it is. I honestly ignore the reason behind such a stupid decision. "People" gave away their freedom in exchange of beliefs, just to not question. Just to take the world as it was presented, without thinking, without asking. Only assimilating it and calling it true.

Name your manual however you want... Luck, Destiny, God, the almighty Horoscope, Reptilians or Super corporations that plan to dominate the world. It is in their hands that our world and our lives rest and not on us.

I bet that sounds better than the truth.

Everyone is free to believe in whatever they want, even when those beliefs take away their freedom.

Especially when they take away their freedom

The "manual" depends on many things, such as their upbringing, the books they had read, the books they didn't, their general education, but above all these things, of something greater, something with more force than those preconceived ideas of a man's life being the direct and ultimate result of those first twenty years of his life.

-Those who affirm that are the "intellectuals" who seek to justify mediocrity by blaming society.-

I discovered a truth, a sad truth, that goes beyond. Are you ready?  Our life depends on ourselves

-Surprising, right?-.

It depends on our decisions, our actions and how much we want to be ourselves. How much do we want to be free.

For the rest the world you have that manual that handles their lives or that simply points to the people or entities that will do it. Manuals that dictate the routine of each of them, from how, when and where they go to work, to what they stop to eat and why. What they believe in, how they think, how they feel.

So many "children" blame the manual and I can only feel sorry for them.

I can only look at them straight in the eye and say: Do not blame the manual, blame yourselves for accepting it. Blame your weakness for letting yourself be destroyed to that point.

To the point of acting... In automatic, each and every one of "them" lives like this, in automatic.

I say "them" because I do not know if "you", whoever reads these words, also do it. And no, do not let the fact that you are a reader of newspapers, books and intellectual publications make you think that you are beyond this fundamental flaw of the human being. Maybe you are also, a zombie, a computer that acts according to a list of things to do. That is why I refer to them as "It" or "them", maybe you are, or not, so I consider that these words can be one of two uses for you;

1: A call to wake up.

2: A lesson in what you should never do to yourself.

"They" are predictable, "they" are stupid. A person is a completely different topic, the problem is that there aren't many individuals left, individuals are now an endangered specie. But there are many "people". There were many individuals who decided to stop being individuals to become people.

Good people. Bad people. That doesn't matter. Cuz people is predictable. And it's something that in my line of work I've learned to do, it's a fundamental part of it.

For example; Look at this guy, for the last six days I've seen he it come and go, always in the same old beige suit and dull shoes, with its eyes on the ground, dragging its feet every morning. That's when I guess it goes to work. But not so surprisingly, it walks with the same vigor when it goes back in the afternoon. Two days ago was the day of "bring your son to work" but it didn't bring anyone. I got curious so during one impromptu walk to the donut shop I passed by it and could not help noticing that it doesn't have a single ring in its hand, nor a scar, much less any characteristic feature or mark added by life experiences. It was programmed that way, throughout his life it decided to accept what the rest thought of it, from its parents to its classmates, it let each and every one of their opinions form what it is today, unfortunately those opinions were everything but positive.

If forced to guess I would said that when It was a He, was one of those people with an artistic mind, a characteristic completely undervalued by his parents, repudiated by his peers and misinterpreted by his teachers who were unable to see beyond their own mediocrity.

If I have to bet: I would say that he did not grow up in the city, he was born and raised in a dying small town, one of those that somehow still linger in the 21th century. His parents decided that the life of an artist was not for him, that he deserved better, that he had to be someone "normal". He decided to listen to them. And being a person of unique thinking is not difficult to guess that he ended up in an office job that hates, earning a pittance to make his boss buy a new car every year. Thats how He became It.

But it's not the boss's fault, it's just that It is not good at what It does, it's almost like wanting to screw a chair using a rock. The wrong tool for the task. That is why this could be the best thing that ever happened to It, it may be the wake up call that leads It to recover its life. To become a He.

We can also see the perfect opposite; with a badly rolled joint in the mouth, practically finishing learning to smoke without coughing or looking like a complete idiot: A skinny boy in a leather jacket that barely fits him, too tight jeans, expensive but too big shoes, hair full of hairspray and tinted in three shades of pink that I do not have the slightest intention or desire to learn how to differentiate.

I always see him in the same place, the alley that is right beside the donuts shop, pretending to be the most badass punk of the block for hours. Actually, that doesn't seem to be the place he choose to spend every morning, I think that it's the place that was chosen for him.

He is never alone, always accompanied by others who dress just like him, the same spiky hair but of different colors. They skip school to spend their mornings laughing at the people passing by, provoking them, intimidating them, smoking, but until now they have never said anything to the police.

- Every time a cop walked in front of them they just kept quiet hiding their eyes in their expensive last generation smartphones. They even treat the "autority" with the utmost respect! It's funny but sad.-

This is fashion. Just a trend, fighting against the system, to rebel against their parents, against society, to paint walls with messages of anarchy and rebellion. With no actual desire to do so.

Just playing to be free without accepting consequences or duties, to be free to do what you want while keep on sucking from the old tits of your mother, a whole case for Freud to write two more books. Want me to guess? He never felt hungry. He must come from a boring and average middle-high class family. His parents gave him everything he ever wanted, but never a proper slap, must be the only child or at least the youngest of the siblings. And the only reason he plays the whole punk behavior is that he is bored

That's why he came up with this whole idea of rebelling against the system or rather, copied it, like his friends, without noticing the most comical aspect of all this, wanting to be different they all became the same. Acting the same, acting from a manual.

I bet that He will run, shout, beg to the police as soon as he sees the red rush. If he is smart, he will realize that he is wrong, that the system is not the enemy, is not the monster that makes this world the shit hole it is. The actual monster is the man with the rifle.

#writers #writing #prose #books & libraries #literature #ficcion

[animeniacss]

A Palette of Emotions - Artist!Taehyung x Teacher!YN -  Chapter 1 - Being a Professional

Synopsis: Taehyung dreams of being a professional and famous artist one day, but finds that the sea of creativity can be lurking with blood hungry sharks, as well as bland, motionless starfish. Swimming through the sea of opportunities somehow washed him up onto the shore of Bright Star Preschool, as an art teacher. This wasn’t where he expected to be 4 years into his career, but anything to get his big break though, right?

Feat. BTS, TXT, ITZY, Jisoo (BlackPink), Taeyong (NCT)

Genre: Romance, Slow Burn, Love Triangle, Drama, School Setting, Working!AU, 

Length: approx. 4.6k words

Chapter 1 - Being a Professional

 Art was subjective. Many people can see a film, pictures, video games, paintings, music, all of it, yet each person could leave with a different view of it to share with their peers. It provides chances of expression, different outlooks on multiple various exciting topics. Art could also help you make a lot of money if it piqued the interest of a particular group...you know, and if the artist was on time to the FUCKING ART SHOW! 

  Jimin’s eyes frantically scanned the entrance of the show, as people filed in and out, yet none of them was the person he was hoping would arrive. It had been a half an hour since the art show began, and Jimin had been making small talk with the attendees, high-end businessmen and women who were looking for the right art piece to hang in one of their many living rooms. However, they couldn’t purchase anything unless the artist was at the venue. Which, as of 7:35 p.m., he was not! 

  “Are you alright, Mr. Park?” A man asked, making the brunette turn his head. Before Jimin, stood the most important man in the room, the one that allowed Jimin to be standing on these marble floors at all. And he was here, with Jimin.

  Waiting.

  “You keep looking at the door. Don’t tell me your date stood you up.” Jimin couldn’t help but laugh a bit, taking a sip of his champagne.  

  “No, no.” He said. “Just waiting for someone.” Someone who I kept reminding that this was the most important night of their life and they’re still late! He thought to himself. Jimin looked over at the man before him and offered him yet another one of his charming smiles. “Oh, here. Would you like me to get you another glass of champagne, Mr. Oh?” He offered.

  “Hm? Ah, I didn’t even realize I ran out.” The man laughed a bit. “I’d appreciate that Mr. Park, thanks. I’ll be over here by this artist’s work…” he motioned to a wall of different paintings. “I’ll see if I can finally scope out your artist.” The man looked at Jimin, seeing the slight look of panic on his face. It made him smirk. “Is he still in the bathroom?” 

  “Uh, I’ll find out.” He smiled, nodding his head. “While I get the champagne.” Just as quickly as he nodded his head, he hurried to find a waiter that was close to the entrance, pulling out his phone. As he stood by the door, he took a waiter by the tie, keeping him close. “Tell me the appetizers you guys have, please.” He asked. Though the man began to speak, Jimin was frantically pushing buttons. The sound of his phone connecting was no use to calm his nerves because if he didn’t get an answer, he would probably break the phone in half and flee to a different country. Fortunately, he heard a deep voice on the other side, panting and gasping for air in desperation. 

  “H-Hello?” 

  “Taehyung, where are you?!” He asked. “You’re almost 45 minutes late. There are people -.” 

  “Don’t shout, I... I hear from you.” Jimin blinked as he put a hand on his hip. “And take your hand off your hip. It makes you look like a diva.” 

  “Wha-?” Just then, Jimin turned slightly to his left to see a panting Taehyung, hunched over and holding onto his knees tightly as he tried desperately to get air into his lungs. His grey suit jacket was a bit wrinkled from the running, and his hair had little strands flying off his head from the wind blowing against it. But he was here and alive, so that was all that mattered. “There you are.” He hurried over. “What the heck is wrong with you? Do you know how much I had to crank up my charm to keep the people who want to see you at bay?” 

  “But you’re good at cranking up the charm. That’s why I love you.” Taehyung looked up at him, patting his friend’s cheek as the waiter walked over to the two of them, Jimin forgetting that the poor man was rattling off appetizers to him. “Oh, good. I need a drink.” Taehyung gasped, reaching out to grab one of the drinks. Jimin grabbed one too, and Taehyung smirked. “Have you been stress-drinking again?” He asked, putting the glass up to his lips and taking a sip.

  “No.” He said. “...Well, yeah, but that’s not it.” Jimin quickly thrust the skinny glass towards Taehyung, who looked at him curiously.

  “...You think I’m going to stress drink?” He asked curiously. 

  “No, dummy.” Jimin huffed, turning the two of them towards the gathering happening only feet away. “Look. Right there.” He pointed straight ahead. “Oh, Min-Jae. That’s the guy that keeps talking to me about you. He’s the guy who even got your work displayed here in the first place.” Taehyung looked the man over, watching as he stood by Taehyung’s paintings and works, hands in his pockets as he stared ahead silently. “Go bring him a drink and chat him up a bit or something, will you? I’ll go try and mingle with some other people for once.” 

  “Alright, alright.” Taehyung sighed. “...I still cannot believe you got my art into such a high-end show.” Taehyuhg sighed.

  “Yeah, don’t make any of this go to waste. Now go.” Nudging his friend, Taehyung nodded, walking over towards Mr. Oh, drinks in his hands. 

“Mr., Oh?” He called out, making the man look over. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting. I’m Kim Taehyung.” 

  “Aaaah, Mr. Kim. Finally, I was getting worried your nerves got the better of you.” He said. When he saw the drinks in his hands, he grinned. “A partier?” 

  “Hm? Oh.” He chuckled. “No, Sir. Here. My manager told me that you were looking for another drink, so I took the liberty of bringing you one.” Mr. Oh took the glass into his hands, nodding his head.

  “I was waiting for about 45 minutes.” 

  “I uh...heh. I apologize. This is my first time at an event as big as this. I usually have my art shown at smaller gigs.” Mr. Oh chuckled.

  “I can tell...” Mr. Oh said, his eyes wandering back to the handful of portraits before them. He quickly took the full glass from Taehyung’s hand, lifting it to his lips to take a sip. “So, tell me, where does your inspiration come from?” He asked.

  “Well…” Taehyung began, putting his hand in his pocket. He pursed his lips together. “It depends. This one I got inspired by a nice tree I passed by a while back.” He motioned to a painting that encompassed every shade of green on the canvas, the other various colors put in places that accented the beauty of the greens. “This one...I uh….” Mr. Oh looked over at him as Taehyung motioned to a myriad of colors on a circular canvas, blending and almost creating a new color entirely, while still accenting the beautiful hues of the rainbow. “This one I…made after a very...important….dark… a moment in my life.” He saw Mr. Oh put the glass to his lips again, and let out a shaky breath as he turned to a third painting. He was silent for a moment, pointing to the picture. He was out of bullshit to spew. “...Well, nothing inspired this one. I just wanted to draw a dolphin.” 

  “A....dolphin.” Mr. Oh said, nodding his head. “I see.” 

  “Yeah.  A lot of things inspire me, but I don’t know how to describe them. I just paint what I want.” Mr. Oh walked over and examined the paintings, leaning in close to observe what he was looking at.

  “....A dolphin.” Mr. Oh repeated. Taehyung raised an eyebrow, wondering why the hell this guy kept saying that.

  “What do...you think?” He asked curiously, watching Mr. Oh step back once again. Silence filled their little area for a moment, and Taehyung shifted in nervous anticipation. 

         “What do I think?” Mr. Oh asked, turning back to Taehyung. He put his hands behind his back. Taehyung took a step back, trying to remain calm despite the sudden nervousness she felt in his stomach. “I think that you’re the kind of person who gives the term ‘professional’ a bad name.” It was then Taehyung felt it. His heart sank directly into his stomach. 

  “...I-I’m sorry?” 

  “You heard me. Your paintings are subpar, your attire is atrocious, and your professionalism is a joke. Almost one hour late, and you couldn’t use that time to think up a single intellectual thing to say?” 

  “Uh, I-.” 

  “You even have your…Instagram on here. That’s just embarrassing…” He motioned to the small little plaque on the wall that read @thelocalartaeist. Then he turned back to Taehyung. “Look, Mr. Kim-.” Mr. Oh said, a heavy sigh falling from his lips. “I’ll be honest. You seem to deserve at least that. Your friend Mr. Park did a lot of help with the marketing of my business's newest branch in Busan.” When his comment was meant with a confused stare from the twenty-five-year-old artist, he let out a much more frustrated groan. “Consider it a favor to him that your art is even hanging up on this wall right now.” Taehyung frowned. “Why do you think I’m the only one here even giving these a glance? Because they’re not at the same level as the rest of the art in this show. You might want to consider staying at your...usual locals, hm?” 

  Taehyung’s eyes wandered to the paintings that were hanging on the wall. All of the hours he spent awake in his room, living off mugs and mugs of coffee, as crumpled and ripped up sketches scattered around him. They filled his studio apartment, leaving him to spend moments writhing in pain on the floor because he got a cramp in his wrist from hours of nonstop drawing, or in frustration. After all, he ran out of blue paint just as he was about to finish the sky. All those moments, he poured into his art….

  ...and he was unprofessional because he wanted to draw a dolphin?

  When Mr. Oh watched Taehyung’s shoulders slump, and he couldn’t help but chuckle. “I’ll have my security return the paintings to you within 24 hours.” 

  “I don’t need your help,” Taehyung said simply. Mr. Oh blinked, eyes slightly wide in surprise. Taehyung’s lips turned into a tight frown. Mr. Oh nodded.

  “Fine.” He said, passing his champagne glass to Taehyung once again, using his finger to tug at the wrinkly collar of his jacket before putting his hand in his pocket. “And invest in an iron. That’s a good start.” He hummed before he began to walk towards another group of people who were admiring the work of another artist. Taehyung looked down at the empty wine glass in his hand, gripping it tightly.  He suddenly heard footsteps approach him. When he looked up, he saw Jimin. 

  “How did it….?” He fell silent, just staring at Taehyung. His knuckles were white, hand shaking slightly. “Tae-.” He put his hand on his shoulder. Just as he did so, Taehyung’s hand released, sending the glass onto the floor. A loud shattering sound alerted the attention of everyone in the room, finally bringing Taehyung back to reality. “Woah!” Jimin hopped back, watching glass scatter around his feet.

  Taehyung glanced around, seeing the faces of other people. All eyes were on him now, women clinging to their dates in fear of a violent outbreak, single men preparing to take control of the situation as needed. Min-Jae was looking over, hands in his pockets as he chuckled a bit, only turning away from the scene with seemingly no more interest in Taehyung. Taehyung glanced at Jimin, who turned to a waiter and asked for someone to clean this. When he looked back to Taehyung, he offered a kind smile.

  “You hurt?” Jimin asked curiously. Taehyung didn’t respond, only offering a soft smile. “...You can tell me what happened when we get home. Come on.” Patting his friends back, he led him out of the event, just as an event worker returned to the broken glass to clean this up. As the duo walked past, a couple was walking in, but Taehyung was so busy staring straight ahead that he didn’t notice, causing him to bump into the woman.

  “Oh. I’m sorry, are you alright?” The girl asked, turning to him. Taehyung looked over, biting his lip.

 “I-I’m fine. Sorry…” he said. The woman nodded, offering a kind smile before the man, a tall, well-pressed individual with black glasses and slicked-back brown hair, gently put his hand on the small of her back.

“Are you alright? Let’s get going.” The young woman nodded, following him into the event. Taehyung watched as Mr. Oh approached the duo, shaking hands with the man.

  “Ahhh, Mr. Kim, I’m glad you finally made it. And who is this?” Mr. Oh said. Before Taehyung could overhear anymore of the conversation, Jimin finished leading him out of the event.

“I’ll make sure to get the paintings back to your apartment tomorrow,” Jimin said. Taehyung only groaned in response, stuffing his hands in his pockets as the duo headed down the road. “Let’s go down to that pub and get a few drinks.”

         The local bar, a small yet cozy place where locals would get together to wash away the stresses of the long day they had, would find Jimin and Taehyung as frequent guests. Jimin’s job as a popular marketing executive meant that he had connections, connections that sometimes helped him and his friend out, while other times, slapped them both hard in the face. He was realizing now that this was a connection that would leave a dark bruise on Taehyung’s ego, as he sat back in his seat watching his friend throwback shots.

         “You know if you keep drinking like that, you’ll wake up outside your apartment again,” Jimin said, crossing his arms. Taehyung set his now empty shot glass onto the table with a forceful slam, before looking at his friend with glazed-over eyes.   

         “Did you even hear what that jackass said to me?” he asked, sniffling. “No, you didn’t. He said my art was subpar, and I gave professionalism a bad name.” Running a hand through his hair, he sniffled. “You had to see how he looked at my picture of the dolphin. He said it was subpar. I worked days on that painting.”

         “I know,” Jimin said softly. “I remember the fast food bags that piled up outside your front door because you wouldn’t pull yourself back to cook.                   

         “Right?! But that jackass doesn’t even get that. All he cares about is…” he groaned, hands falling onto his face in an attempt to stifle his frustration. “I don’t even know. God, this sucks.”

“Don’t beat yourself up,” Jimin said. “You have tons of followers on your Instagram that love your work.”

“My work and my face. More than half of my comments are on how attractive my teenage fans think I am, not even my artwork.” He groaned. “I love them, but it’s so frustrating.” Jimin nodded in understanding, though he didn’t come close to understanding. “How the hell did you even get to know that guy? He said you helped him out.”       

         “Yeah. While I was helping him market, I overheard him talking about the art show he was holding for his friends. I showed him your social media, and he seemed to like it.”

  “Well, I guess he’s a good actor, huh?” Taehyung sighed. As he saw one of the waiter’s approach, he leaned back in his seat. “Can I get another bottle of soju? I’m almost out.”

         “No, absolutely not,” Jimin said quickly, his hand reaching out to grab hold of the empty shot glass. “He doesn’t need any more drinks, but some bread or something would help sober him up.” The waiter nodded his head, giving one more apologetic glance to the frowning Taehyung before walking away. 

         “Aaaah, Jimin, that’s not nice! I want to drink!” Taehyung whined, hoping a set of wide eyes and a pouty lip would help his case. It didn’t. 

         “I’m not carrying you home again; you’re heavy when you are blackout drunk!” Jimin huffed, running a hand through his hair. He could see Taehyung’s face slowly switch emotion. No longer was he pouting like a child with wide eyes and a quivering lip, but instead, his eyes cast over with a dark somberness, his bottom lip stuck between an anxious set of teeth. Jimin sighed, leaning forward so that his hand reached out, taking Taehyung’s hand tightly in his own. “I’m sorry.” 

         “You shouldn’t be,” Taehyung said, resting his head in his hand. “You didn’t make me look like a complete jackass in front of some of the most important business people in Korea.”

         “But I shouldn’t have accepted the offer. Mr. Oh was a douchebag even when I was working for him. I just wanted to-.” 

         “Jimin, please,” Taehyung said, looking up at him. When Jimin looked up at him, he saw Taehyung’s glassy eyes turning red, and he quickly tried to hide it by running his arm across his wet eyes. “Just forget it.” Jimin leaned back in his chair, the duo staying in silence as the waiter brought over a basket of some bread, the warm aura of the slices of bread sending somewhat of a comforting feeling into both men. Taehyung reached out, taking hold of one of the loaves and tearing it in half, profoundly inhaling the warmth of the bread as if it would consume his body and take away the awful feelings coursing through him. When he took a bite of the dough, he glanced down at a napkin, sitting idly on the table as it waited to be used. It hadn’t yet, but Taehyung planned to put a stop to that. With the bread still in his mouth, Taehyung reached into his jacket pocket, pulling out a small pen. With a click, the pen opened up, and he grabbed hold of the napkin, sliding it closer as he leaned forward. When Jimin saw the pen touch the napkin, he tilted his head. 

         “Hm? What are you doing?” Jimin asked curiously, leaning forward in curiosity to what caught his friend’s drunk attention. Taehyung didn’t even look up; his pen continued to just scratch against the pale white napkin.       

         “Drawing.” He said simply. “The bread is hot.” Jimin couldn’t get a view of what Taehyung was scribbling down, since Taehyung had it so close to his chest. Tilting his head just a bit, Jimin was able to get a view of Taehyung’s face. His eyes were still red, still wet from the embarrassing night that he had experienced. However, Jimin noticed something new sparkling behind those wide, dark eyes.

         Absolute inspiration.

---------------------------------- 

         Teaching and instilling the ideas of inspiration in young children is an essential tool in the ever-growing development of children. Inspiration could come from anywhere, at any time. By providing children with enough opportunities to draw and create based on their own experiences, drawing their inspiration from things they didn’t even realize were planted in their memory, is an easy and enjoyable way to see the personalities of children. It takes a lot of patience, a lot of creativity, and a lot of overly exaggerated praise that keeps the children wanting to succeed in hopes of that praise being given again.       

         When you’re the head pre-school teacher of about 17 children just barely aged 4, you need to succeed at that whole ‘overly exaggerated praise’ aspect. You paced the room, watching the little heads of children rocking side to side happily, their hands reaching into colorful buckets of markers and crayons to pull out their absolute favorite color, only to scribble all over their blank, white canvas in five seconds and call that art. As your eyes scanned, one of your younger students, a girl named Yuna, was doing just that, a pink marker clutched in her tiny hands. 

         “Yuna, remember, don’t scribble all over the page. Draw a nice picture, use as many colors as you can, okay?”  You hummed, kneeling down and gently reaching out for her hand, setting the pink marker down.

         “But pink is my favorite Teacher.” She said sadly, pouting a bit.

         “I know. But look at all the other amazing colors, okay?” You smiled, picking a few hues of reds, yellows, and blues, and spreading them all out in front of the little one for her to see. “Not everything in the world is pink, you know.”

         “I know…” Yuna, though a bit bummed that she couldn’t create her entirely-pink world, reached out and grabbed the closest thing to it: red. With a pop, the cap fell onto the table, and Yuna hunched over, continuing her frantic coloring. Just as you continued to walk around and look at the kids, one of them tugged at your skirt. Turning your head, tiny Yeonjun, a skinny little boy with wide eyes, tried his best to get his picture as close to your eyes as possible. 

         “I’m done!” He beamed. “Look! Look!” As you knelt, you took the picture from his hands and examined it. Yeonjun’s image was decorated in various colors, arching over one another to make a crudely drawn, yet still recognizable rainbow. Some of the colors overlapped one another, and it seemed that the orange was an afterthought, hastily rushed in between the red and yellow at the last moment, so it wasn’t too easy to spot it. The sky was scribbled with a lighter blue than the one used for the rainbow, yet still, it was scribbled with such an unsteady and novice hand that the blue overlapped with the rainbow, and if it didn’t, there were significant gaps of white leftover that he didn’t color. 

         “This is so good.” You beamed. “Tell me, what was your inspiration for this one?” You asked curiously, looking up at the boisterous little boy whose eyes were sparkling. 

         “Well, I saw a rainbow with my Mommy the other day after it rained alllll night. Then, I got to splash in the puddles. So, I drew the rainbow.” 

         “I love it. Can I hang it up on the wall?” Yeonjun nodded, practically bouncing in place, his hands balled into anxious little fists. As you got to your feet, smoothing out your skirt, you led Yeonjun to the wall of pictures. The wall was covered in many different images from all the students, ranging from holiday and birthday cards to pictures they drew or even colored in. Whatever they wanted to display in the classroom, you were happy to hang up. The only rule was, they had to show that they worked hard on it. There were no scribbles on this wall, no random circles, or simple lines that were done in a second just so the student could get as many pictures as they could of their own plastered up for the world to see. That wasn’t fair, not in your eyes. “Alright.” Snagging a piece of tape, you handed the completed picture to the young boy. “You can choose where it goes.” Yeonjun’s eyes scanned the wall of art, trying to find the best place he could put it. After a moment, he found it. 

         “There!” His hand pointed up to a blank space he located, right between a colored in a picture of the South Korean flag, and a drawing of a tree with apples on it. “I want it next to Taehyun’s picture!” Before you could say anything, Yeonjun got onto his tiptoes, trying his absolute hardest to reach the spot himself. However, it was much too far for his tiny stature; even you had to reach your hand up and stretch for it to fit. However, just as Yeonjun was getting discouraged, he was swooped into the air. Turning your head, a heart-shaped smile, and wide eyes caught your attention. Jung Hoseok – better known to your students as just Mr. Hobi - your good friend and co-worker, who had a spirit so free and a personality so upbeat that just saying his name would get the kids in a frenzy every morning. He, though a bit unorthodox in his methods of handling the kids, was well-liked, and very good at his job. 

         “Up we go!” Hoseok cheered. “Okay, can you reach now?” 

         “Uh-huh.” The little boy placed his picture in the spot he desired, pressing on the piece of clear tape with his thumb to make sure it would stick. After staring at it with a proud smile, Hoseok set him down. “Thank you, Mr. Hobi~.”

         “No problem. Now, go play until our next activity, okay?” He hummed, smiling wide as he watched the little boy hurry off. Next thing he knew, tons of children swarmed him, holding up their pictures. 

         “Me next, Mr. Hobi!” Yuna shouted, holding up her picture as high as she could. 

         “No, me!” Another boy, Kai, shouted, trying to get his even higher than Yuna’s.

         “Alright, alright. We can hang them all up; we still have some room.” Hoseok said, kneeling to look at all of the pictures being shoved in his face. “Now, Kai, can you tell me what you made?” 

         “I made a dinosaur!” He beamed. “It’s breathing fire! I saw a real one at Disney one time!” 

“Those aren’t real!” Another little girl, Chareyeong, shouted, a hand on her hip as the other held the palm of her best friend, little Yuna. 

“Uh-huh! My Dad told me so.” Kai snapped back, deciding to end the conversation with his tongue poking out of his mouth. Chaeryeong was quick to do the same, as was Yuna before Hoseok quickly crossed his arms, a disapproving look aimed towards all of them. Instantly, the bickering ended. With that settled, Hoseok nodded, scooping the male tyke up and holding up in his arms, allowing him to search for a spot. You knelt as well, taking Yuna’s picture from her. While it was still consistently pink, the reds and blues added as well, making it look like Yuna spent a lot more time on her project.

         “What did you draw for us, Yuna?” You asked curiously.

“A pink cotton candy castle with red and blue gumdrops.” Yuna nodded, a grin forming on her face that reached from ear to ear. You smiled as you examined the picture thoroughly. 

“Can you tell me what inspired you to draw this, Yuna?” you asked curiously. Yuna was silent for a bit, taking a moment to think.

  “…Well, I saw Yeonjun pick his nose in gym class yesterday, and thought it was gross. So, I drew cotton candy because it’s not gross.” A few of the other kids giggled at the memory of Yeonjun’s little finger jammed up his nose before the gym teacher quickly spotted and wiped his hand off with a Kleenex. Glancing up at Hoseok, he was just setting Kai back onto the floor; a grin spread on his face as he heard the little girls reasoning for her picture.

  “…That’s your inspiration?” you asked, an eyebrow arched in confusion, and yet, somehow slight amusement. Yuna nodded, the reasoning making total sense to her.

  “Mhm. It’s my inpirtion.” She hummed. Only able to reply with a shake of your head, you placed a piece of clear tape onto the picture, and moments later, Hoseok scooped her into his arms, as she searched for where she wanted her picture. Once it was up, you stared at it for a moment.

Inspiration could come from anywhere, it seemed.

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A/N: I’m back guys! I look forward to sharing my newest fic with you. I have more stories and ideas in the works as well, so I hope you enjoy everything I have to share! <3

#bts #bts fanfiction #bts x reader #bangtan sonyeondan #fanfiction #reader insert #kim namjoon #rm #kim seokjin #jin #min yoongi #suga #jung hoseok #jhope #hobi #kim taehyung #v #taetae #jeon jungkook #jungkook #kookie #taehyung x reader #v x reader #kim taehyung x reader #A Palette of Emotions FF

[nad-zeta]

🌚Um.. a matchup for Ikesen, please? I'm usually confident, hardworking, and diligent. I'm considered the "star of the class" and a real genius and nerd, but I enjoy having fun as well! I love to draw manga, watch anime, play Otome and RPG games, listen to music, play the guitar, and sing! I'm a sensitive bean and I cry a lot if I do something wrong. I have a habit of blaming myself although I'm trying to stop that habit. I'm empathetic and I always try to make others happy by helping them. 1/2

🌚My confidence lies in what I do best. I love to speak in front, such as doing speech and public speaking, because I love to talk and inspire. I try my best to be helpful to others, but sometimes I try too much to please everyone. I'm a bit chubby and I'm a bit insecure but I try to be confident in my looks but I can't help it, food is life, hehe. My eyes are a unique brown especially when the sunlight shines through, my hair is also brown. I'm quite short, about 153-155 cm. Thank you! 2/2

Hi hi, love! 🌻Thank you so so much for the request!😆❤ Sorry for taking sooooo long! 😱I hope you enjoy it and i hope you have the best day! ❤🌻

So I match you with............. Sasuke

When you first arrive in the past and save Nobunaga from death by fire, you were hella confused. You have no idea what had happened to you, and honestly you low key thought it was some kind of prank. You laughed when nobunga told you, just who he was and what year it was. You looked around the tree line for the hidden cameras, but there was non. Honestly, things only started to feel real once you arrived at the castle and Nobunaga named you as princess.

From day one, you worked hard to earn the oda forces trust and respect. You were incredibly diligent, and soon all suspicion of you being a spy was dropped. You honestly brought new life into the castle, as your hard work inspired some of the lazier maids to pull up their socks, they couldn’t dare let the new princess outshine them. You went up and beyond what was expected of you, and the small details of your work certainly didn’t go unnoticed. Especially your addition of flowers in every room of the castle, which you would handpick every few days, it just seemed to brighten up the place and give it livelier energy.

TBH you were a big fan of history, so you knew the history of these historical figures pretty well. You low key had to catch yourself sometimes, especially before you completely nerd out in front of them. Especially when talking to Ieyasu, you had been a big fan of him since learning about him in history class, in fact, you were secretly fangirling over all the warlords. 

It got a bit lonely at times, you missed your friends and being able to chat about your favourite animes and mangas. You loved your new warlord friends, but it still felt like they just weren’t on the same wavelength as you. Your hobbies and interests were just so different, and you found it difficult to relate to them sometimes.

After Hideyoshi stop suspecting you of being an assassin, he became like your second mother, and today was a prime example of that. He had handed you a bag full of golden coins and shooed you to the markets to relax and take a load off. You wandered around aimlessly until something caught your attention. A nerdy looking guy wearing a white science coat, you got a bit closer and when you overheard his conversation with his friend you were positive, HE WAS ALSO FROM THE FUTURE. You were so excited to have finally met someone, not from this time that you instantly tapped him on the shoulder. You thought of a phrase that you could ask him, which would quickly confirm whether or not he was from your time. “Excuse me, dude could you please spill the tea on where you’re from.” You knew If he was truly from the future, he wouldn’t question your lingo or your addressing him as dude. Sasuke stared at you shook, just when you began to question whether he really was from the future, he gave a slither of a smile and said, “Exe.Sasuke stopped working, need to reboot,” all while doing some strange robot dance. The two of you laughed, leaving a very confused Yuki looking at the two of you. 

Sasuke took yours and Yuki’s hands and dragged both of you to the nearest teahouse where he explained that he had been looking for you for four years. “WHAT YOU’RE FROM THE FUTURE.” Yuki was in a state of shock, he always suspected Sasuke had a secret with the weird way he talked but never in a million years did he think this was possible. Meanwhile, you were over the moon as not only was Sasuke from the future, but he was also a fellow nerd 

Since that day, the three of you would hang out together every day. You finally found a friend that could understand all your nerdy jokes and references. Often the two of you would go to the teahouse together when Yuki was busy with work. You and Sasuke would legit chat for hours and hours about your favourite animes, otome games and mangas. When Yuki would finally join the two of you after work, it was standard procedure for you guys to tease the poor boy until he was as red as a beet. Sasuke loved that he had finally found a fellow intellectual and nerd as sometimes it was difficult to bounce ideas off his BFF, as let’s face it Yuki didn’t understand half the words that would come out of Sasuke’s mouth.

It had definitely become a tradition for the three of you to play boards at least once a week. Both you and Sasuke loved playing RPG games in the future, so the two of you banded together to create the closest version to that in this Sengoku period. You honestly loved these weekly game nights with the boys. It gave you a sense of nostalgia, and you couldn’t help but smile at the great time you were having with your new friends. These game nights were always filled with witty banter, plenty of junk food and a ton of laughs.

At some point, Kenshin and Shingen had come to visit their vassal only to walk into the room with, Yuki flipping the table in frustration, while you and Sasuke gripped your sides in laugher at his sore loser behaviour. Since then the god of war and Tiger of Kai would occasionally join your game nights, which you always enjoyed. The more people to tease and beat, the better. 

Soon it came time for them all to go back home and prepare for the war that was brewing between the two forces. You couldn’t help but cry when Sasuke and Yuki had come to say their goodbyes. You, after all, were a sensitive little bean and you were definitely going to miss nerding out and joking around. You sat alone in your room when suddenly out of thin air Kenshin jumped down from your roof, you were sister shook. Kenshin had been watching you and Sasuke for some time now during your game nights. He knew at this point that his ninja had fallen in love with you and honestly despite looks, Kenshin had a soft spot for those who he held dear. He asked if you would like to live in his castle with the wacky bunch, even going as far as offering you a job to sweeten the deal. You loved the oda forces, and they were definitely like family to you, but honestly, you had too long ago fallen for the nerdy ninja boy. Plus over time you had really come to love Kenshin and the gang. You definitely didn’t hesitate to accept Kenshin’s offer. You quickly packed up all your belongings and wrote a long letter to each of the Oda forces expressing how much you loved and was going to miss them. 

You made your way to Kasugayama with Kenshin to arrive on the evening of Sasuke’s birthday. Kenshin smiled as he walked into the banquet hall with you trailing behind him, “Sasuke I have a birthday gift for you.” Sasuke looked up and locked eyes with you, he was ecstatic. You simply smiled and walked over to your long time friend and handed him a birthday gift that you had managed to make for him on your journey to Kasugayama. 

You had hand-drawn him a manga, not only that but on the last page of this homemade manga was a confession of love. When Sasuke realized that you had felt the same way he did, he used his hand towel to very dramatically dab away his fake tears, before capturing you in his arms and showering your face in small kisses. You couldn’t help but break into the biggest blush as everyone at the banquet cheered and whistle. Honestly, they had never seen Sasuke ever show any kind of emotion, but now with you in his arms, he was wearing the biggest smile and radiating pure happiness.

Sasuke loved everything about you. He loved that you could sing and play instruments. He could listen to your beautiful voice for hours and hours, he especially enjoyed it when the two of you would make up stupid songs about the most random of topics and sing them while trolling the people of Kasugayama. It was always a good time to irritate them like younger siblings would. 

As a fellow intellectual, you relay enjoyed helping Sasuke with his research, tracking wormholes and discovering new theories of time and space. You loved bouncing ideas and theories off each other. Together the two of you managed to make and design the coolest ninja weapons, which was mostly for your entertainment. As the two of you would play ninja ninja out in the garden, throwing smoke bombs and blunt ninja stars at each other.

For a brief time, you and Sasuke even went back to the future so that Sasuke could present his research findings. He honestly was such a nervous little bean, so he really appreciated the fact that you were right there by his side the entire time, giving him all the help and support. He also loved that you helped him with his presenting skill and listened to his presentation over and over until it was perfect. Of course, after the presentation was over, the two of you went back to the past the second the next wormhole opened, as that was where all your friends and loved ones were. 

Upon your return, Kenshin threw the two of you a big banquet to welcome you home, where Sasuke sang your praise for helping and supporting him. Kenshin was so impressed by your skills in the field of public speaking and presenting that he actually appointed you an official job as Uesugi force negotiator and mediator. A job which enables you to inspire people to work together towards a more peaceful world, free of conflict.  

Sasuke knew that you had some insecurities around your body, which he didn’t understand at all as, in his eyes, you were the most beautiful woman alive. A fact, which he would remind you of every day by wrapping his arms around your waist and gently whispering just how much he adored you, before meeting your lips in a sweet kiss. 

Sasuke loved to spend as much time as humanly possible with you, joking around and chatting for hours and hours about all your common interests. If the two of you cuties aren’t trolling Yuki, you are snuggled together just enjoying each other presence. Usually, Sasuke would hold you in his arms as he rests his head on your shoulder while you play the guitar and sing the most beautiful songs to him. 

This romantic ninja boy will most definitely also take you up onto the rooftop and cuddle with you while telling you everything he knows about the stars and universe above you. You can’t help but smile and kiss his cheek thanking the universe for sending you your better half

Other potential matches..........Mitsunari! 

I hope you enjoyed this love and I hope you have a super good day! 🔥❤🌻😊

[pip-n-flinx]

Among Us

So this is going to get long, this is going to get personal, this is going to be about prejudice and race and self-serving bad-faith arguments and flawed rhetoric. And for all of these reasons I’m going to leave the rest of this under the cut.

As a few of my friends will know, earlier this week I was delivered an ultimatum from my landlord/roommate. He disguised it well, telling me he was ‘concerned for my mental health’ that my ‘negativity was dragging the whole house down’ and that I was simply too filthy to live with. I won’t pretend I’m a neat freak, and I can honestly say that I have taken some pains to clean more since, to his surprise and delight, though its particularly hard to take coming from him.

“You’re always so down. It’s making you lazy and thin skinned” You know its funny you should say that, now specifically, because I’ve actually been on the up and up this last week and you didn’t mention this at all in January when I was actually at my worst, or February when I was afraid I was going to have to quit my job, or back during the holiday season when retail work was breaking my back... Only now do you think to check in on me?

“You left a pair of gloves, a letter, and a small wooden trinket on the table!” Indeed I have, as you have left your pair of gloves, well over 21 letters, and regularly set your packages on this same table, including today two packages to be returned to amazon. I didn’t realize I didn’t get to use the table the same way you do.

“You don’t do dishes! except that you did this week, which is cool I guess but still!” You do realize that I actually hand-wash every dish I use within 24 hours of using it, right? And that often the dishes you come to me bitching that I never cleaned are in fact your fiances, yes? Ok good, next question.

“You’re always complaining about work. I don’t mind that you vent, but its all you talk about anymore!” I have either lost or walked away from 4 jobs in this last year, and that has not been easy, or fun. I have worked essential retail jobs the entire pandemic thus far. Additionally, in the months leading up to you storming out of your 75k a year salaried sales job, I had told you to leave it because I could see that it was killing you. You got so fed up with the job that for 4-5 months before you left your grandma-paid-off-my-second-mortgage capitalism-knows-best-pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps-ass spent more time playing valorant and league of legends on the clock than doing actual work. Need I remind you that every time I stepped into your office, or simply stepped upstairs to get ready for work, you would complain about how awful your managers were, or how shitty someone had been to you over the phone? DID I EVER BELITTLE YOU FOR ANY OF THESE THINGS????

The real kicker was that the spark, the moment that started this (at least for him) was me trying to explain why racism and ‘cultural supremecy’ was bad. I had brought to him something I thought we could both agree on, that we could both laugh at. I brought him a series of tweets about how problematic Van Gogh was for studying and imitating traditional japanese painting techniques. He took this, and immediately turned into a piece of the culture wars. Now, I agree, this is an egregious example of trying to ‘cancel’ someone. How cancelling a long dead artist who couldn’t sell his art while he was alive is important is beyond my comprehension, its not as though the market value of these comes up very often, and almost no-one will ever have a chance to buy or reject a Van Gogh. But to him this was emblematic of ‘liberals’ cancelling Seuss and Rowling.

He even went so far as to say that Van Gogh probably ‘did it better’ than the artists he was studying/imitating. Now, this is a huge red-flag to me because this is straight out of the Nazi playbook. This is William Shenker, proposing a theory of music to proof ‘German cultural superiority.’ This, if you will pardon my language, is the real culture war: trying to supplant other cultures art and history with western figures and events.

Now, for those of you who don’t know who I’m talking about, this man is sexist. He doesn’t believe women are equal, complains about women’s sports, and rejects a woman’s right to choose. This man is a transphobe, questioning the logic of ‘safe-spaces’ and allowing people to change their pronouns. This man is a Trump supporter, and voted for him twice. And all of these things I found out years after we became friends. I have in the past contemplated what it would take to cut him out of my life wholesale. Despite our wealth of shared experience and our shared interests, we’ve been drifting apart as he drifts further and further to the right. And he has been drifting. He’s parroted more bad-faith arguments from Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson in the last 6 months then he ever did when I first moved in with him.

I have been trying to push back, especially when he says the quiet parts out loud. I try to let him know that it is not acceptable to say he would rather an unarmed black man die that risk that a police officer might be injured. When he compares the people in control of Seuss’ intellectual property and works choose to stop printing less than 6% of his published works to the book burnings in Mao’s china. When he says that its more important to protect teacher from students trolling them by changing their pronouns than it is to protect trans or NB kids. When he espouses his belief that trans and NB kids are ‘just mentally ill.’ Whenever he says any of this shit, I have pushed back. I have tried to halt, or at least slow, his descent towards eugenics and white supremacy and fascism.

It has been to no avail.

And to be honest its exhausting. I wanted to believe that he would trust me, not just to be a moral and thoughtful person, but to be educated and informed on these issues. We went to school together, spent countless hours solving homework and trying to crack games together. If I don’t know the answer to his questions immediately, he often jokes ‘C’mon, you’re supposed to know everything!” and has frequently told me that I’m selling myself short.

But apparently all that trust and all that respect goes out the window when I challenge him. Suddenly I’m ‘overly negative’ or ‘too sensitive’ or he’ll ‘need to look into that, but...’

And the thing is, he is capable of great acts of kindness. He offered to rent me a room in his completely paid-off house, no mortgage at all, simply because he could see living at home was killing my mental health. He offered me 50-75% off of market rate. He buys gifts all the time, has landed tenants job interviews, set people back on their feet, and refused to press charges for several major financial loses he’s taken on the determination that it would do more harm to the defendant than he could ever recoup from it.

But he does not extend this kindness, this generous soul, to everyone. And lately, his circle grows smaller, and his kindess has waned, and it’s been so devastating to see him slip further and further towards his own worst impulses.

I know there will be people who think I should have cut him out of my life years ago, who can’t believe we never talked enough to know that he voted for Trump in 2016. I think back then he was genuinely ashamed, or at least guilty, about that vote. Now? It’s almost a matter of pride for him. I can’t tell you the number of times in the last 4 months that he’s told me that Biden “couldn’t possibly” be as “great” a President as Trump.

And he hides behind this “praise them when they do good, cuff them when they do bad” line and I used to take comfort in it but now... Now it’s clear that it was just a front or excuse for liking these abhorrent people.

I’ve had a couple of hard conversations with some of our mutual friends about what this means for me, and how I interract with the whole group of friends as a whole, in the last 3 days. None of our mutual friends seem to take any of these things as seriously as I do, with my oldest friend even telling me that he ‘can’t imagine’ breaking a friendship off over politics.... I know I know, the caucasity of it all, yes ha ha. And it does make me genuinely worried that I’ll wind up losing the 5-6 close friends that I actually rely on these days over this horrible sonuvabitch. But all this personal venting aside, there’s something bigger here I want to address:

I sat down this evening to watch Last Week Tonight and I was struck by this piece about Tucker Carlson, because while I knew some of what was said on his show, he is remarkably confident for a man who spouts the quiet parts of racism/sexism/homophobia on TV. I have a hard time imaging a more blatantly racist thing to do then declare that a woman who suggested ‘dismantling systems of oppression wherever they are found’ wants to dismantle the American system...

And I have to say, we should go back to punching Nazis. I want these fuckers afraid. I want them to crawl back to the furthest reaches of the internet, relegated to be laughed at for their bigotry by pundits of every political ideology. I want their vile vitriol hidden away where it doesn’t embolden others. I want them to know that they are out of line, out of touch, out of time. I want them to feel ashamed, like the relics of a bygone and worse era that they are, and for them to quietly fade to an ignominious death. I’m tired of seeing them on National News. I’m tired of Pewdiepie’s channel and influence refusing to die despite all the horrible things he’s said and done. I’m tired of Ben Shapiro spouting off about a woman’s place and rights, as if he has any fucking authority on the matter. I just want these people to lose their platforms and their followers. And for me the fact that they haven’t yet is so incredibly discouraging.

I know I didn’t offer any answers here I’m just tired of being alone with this defeated attitude and I guess I needed to get this off my chest as I try to disentangle myself from the losing battle of trying to save a friend from alt-right radicalization.

#tw/ white supremecy #tw/ sexism #tw/ racism #tw/ transphobia #wooow this got longer than I expected #meta: alt right radicalization #and how they're reaching people my age #plus a lot of personal venting

[megalony]

Let me love you- Part 1

This is a new Roger Taylor series I am going to be working on which will be a slow burn fic (something I don’t write very often) and will involve a love triangle. I hope you all enjoy.

Taglist: @lunaticspoem @butlegendsneverdie @langdonzvoid @jennyggggrrr @luvborhap @radiob-l-a-hblah @rogertaylorsbitontheside @chlobo6 @rogertaylors-lipgloss @sj-thefan @omgitsearly @luckytrashgooprebel @scarsout @deaky-with-a-c @killer-queen-ofrhye @bluutac @vousmemanqueez @rogahs-drowse 

Summary: (Y/n), Brian’s younger sister, finds herself falling for Roger but he has a thing going on with someone he used to date. There is something off about his relationship with his ex and (Y/n) realises it is affecting Roger.

Roger Taylor masterlist

Series masterlist

Enjoy.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Little lady." Roger commented with a tip of his head in (Y/n)'s direction, his eyes gleaming with a sparkle of mischief as he walked past her.

(Y/n) held her breath though she smiled as the drummer walked past her, his shoulder bumping with hers as she wasn't sure if it was on purpose or not but either way it sent shivers running down her spine.

Her eyes followed the blond as he headed over to sit down on the stairs that led up onto the stage they were all hanging around behind backstage. She felt the need to tell him that she was not in fact the youngest out of them all here and that John was actually younger than she was but she knew it would make no difference. Since learning that she was Brian's younger sister, Roger called her by the nickname and it stuck like glue with him. (Y/n) felt like telling him that he was only three months older than she was but again she knew it wouldn't stop him from referring to her as 'little lady'.

(Y/n) wanted to tell him that she both loved and hated him calling her that because it was a sweet and heart skipping term of endearment but it also made her feel like a teenager. It made her feel like she was a twelve-year-old who had a crush on their big brother's best friend she didn't stand a chance with.

Something within (Y/n) knew she didn't hold a chance at being with Roger but she felt more accepting knowing that it wasn't to do with her age.

With the band getting more venues and bigger audiences and with them now being in London, Brian had asked (Y/n) if she wanted to come and be backstage with them on some of their shows. It was an opportunity she simply couldn't pass up because she found the band intoxicating to both watch and listen to and being around them made her feel different. She felt like she was part of something bigger, something better and amazing.

Freddie was extravagant and outrageous and different, he was the life of the party and he never minded if (Y/n) came along with them to shows or out for a drink. He was someone she could confide in.

Being around her big brother meant she got more time with him and got to be part of his life and his world.

John was shy but he was fun and cheeky and someone else entirely when he was out of his shell.

But Roger was so much more.

Roger was someone that (Y/n) wanted to be around, he was someone that had such a knowledge of what was going on in the world. Someone who you could have a proper intellectual conversation with yet still have a laugh and a joke with him. He teased (Y/n), he randomly hugged her or gently nudged her and he kissed her cheek and played drinking games with her and he included her and didn't act like she was a waste of time or just a silly little girl.

Roger was the person (Y/n) found herself falling for but knew she wasn't going to be with.

"Anyone seen Jo?" The drummer's slightly gravelly voice cut through the atmosphere and tore (Y/n) from her thoughts. His lips were curved at one side and revealing his teeth in a certain smile that was one that always showed that he was laughing or had been joking around. It was a happy yet slightly silly kind of smile that made (Y/n)'s insides flip.

"Here." Jo's voice responded in a heartbeat, her own smile cutting through her cheeks and causing her eyes to crease at the corners. She had the kind of smile that made (Y/n) angry because it was a carefree smile that wasn't forced or fake or ugly or intimidating. She had a smile that was sweet and made of sugar. (Y/n) wanted a reason to hate Jo and even her smile would have been enough to satisfy (Y/n) for the time being but she couldn't even be angry with her for that.

Jo was Roger's friend, well, she seemed more of a friend but (Y/n) couldn't quite work out their relationship. But she was close enough to Roger for (Y/n) to know that Joe was the only one who stood a chance of being with him if she wasn't already in a relationship with the drummer.

She had golden hair that was always straightened like a ruler and sat very lightly and neatly upon her shoulders. She had a small but outlined fringe and piercing baby blue eyes that were like water from the purest ocean. Her features weren't dazzling to say the least, her eyes were lovely and welcoming, her hair set off her cheekbones but she wasn't what (Y/n) would class as a model or an outstandingly pretty girl and that made it worse.

Jo didn't think she was gorgeous and that hurt (Y/n) because Jo was humble, she didn't think she was better than she was or prettier than she was even if she was headstrong and boasting and confident beyond belief. She had a figure much like Rogers, they were both relatively normal height and on the skinny side but Roger had the kind of looks that got him anywhere and anything he wanted.

(Y/n) didn't know her very well and she didn't want to, she knew being friends with Jo would only bring her unnecessary pain from them both seemingly liking Roger more than in a friendly way. Jo was older, she was a year older than Freddie and he was the oldest out of the band and it meant she was four years older than (Y/n) and Roger. The gap seemed to separate both girls so (Y/n) felt insecure about even talking to Jo.

A churning started to appear in (Y/n)'s stomach as she watched Joe sit down next to Roger on the steps, handing him a small bar of chocolate causing him to flash his teeth as he smiled at her in a grateful yet admiring way.

Turning her head, (Y/n) felt her cheeks reddening when her eyes locked with Freddie who smiled in a sad yet knowing kind of way. He was no stranger to the longing looks of wanting yet not being able to be with that person you longed for. He could see the signs and it made him feel bad for both of them because Roger was none the wiser and (Y/n) was going to get hurt if her feelings didn't subside.

Freddie leaned against one of the spare amps that (Y/n) was also leaning against, leaning his arm against her own as he leaned in close.

"You ready to go and do your thing?" (Y/n) stated quietly, nudging his elbow with her own as she smiled, trying to distract herself but the look in Freddie's eye told her he wasn't going to go along with it.

"I'm always ready, darling... but something tells me you're not happy." Freddie spoke quietly as not to draw attention to their conversation which (Y/n) was thankful for. She watched his eyes slowly shift from looking at her to looking at Roger to signify what he was talking about and (Y/n) sighed, lowering her head to look at her feet.

Freddie had known Roger since the pair had been in college and worked on the market together to make enough money to live on. He was close with the drummer, they were thick as thieves and therefore Freddie knew part of how Roger's mind worked and what he thought. It also allowed Freddie to know that as much as Roger enjoyed being around (Y/n) and loved her company, he was also smitten with Jo and had been for a while now.

"Are they together?" (Y/n) felt bashful and slightly embarrassed for asking but she had to know if her hopes should be dashed or if she had a chance of even getting a tiny bit closer to Roger.

"Not anymore, but they often go home together after shows." Freddie dipped his head as (Y/n) felt her shoulders deflating.

It didn't matter now if Roger wasn't dating her, he was clearly smitten with her and by the look in Freddie's eyes, he was sleeping with Jo too. They were fuck-buddies and Roger didn't seem to have eyes for anyone else, he wasn't going to get into a relationship with (Y/n). She doubted he was even going to get closer to her than simply being a loose friend because he wanted to be closer to Jo than anyone else.

"Oh, darling I'm sorry." Freddie sighed as he spoke, he didn't like to see (Y/n) pining or lovesick over someone who clearly wasn't feeling the same. "For what it's worth, he was the one who broke off the relationship. Jo's lovely but she's demanding, she's in control and our boy doesn't like being controlled but he does rely on her. Give it time, he might feel the same if you get in there soon." Freddie smiled warmly before he headed over to Brian since they didn't have long before they had to go up on stage.

(Y/n) didn't know how to feel.

She had a chance of at least getting closer to Roger and getting to know him better since he wasn't looking for a relationship with Jo but at the same time, she didn't.

Roger clearly relied on her and (Y/n) knew that from the start, he was always asking where Jo was, hanging around with her and joking quietly in a corner with her. She seemed to know what he was thinking or what he needed and she was always the one he wanted to be around. He did rely on her and that confused (Y/n) because now she knew Roger didn't want a relationship with her. If he didn't want to be controlled by her dominating personality or if he didn't want to be with her for more than just sex, then how come he relied on her so heavily?

Trying to brush the thoughts from her head, (Y/n) took the opportunity to walk over and sit down next to Roger when Jo went to talk to Brian.

Roger seemed pleased by (Y/n)'s presence which made one of her many nerves calm down to say the least. She allowed herself to relax, smiling as she felt her heart calming down and returning to a normal pace in her chest.

"Chocolate?" (Y/n) questioned with a raised brow, wondering if he was having some kind of hankering for sugar or if he simply wanted to give himself some much-needed energy before he went on stage. They did a two hour set of music which varied from their own written songs and cover songs they could do well with their own added twist. Roger had a drum solo in the middle and some of the songs were demanding for his talents of both singing and drumming, he had to have a lot of energy to keep playing for two hours straight.

Roger scrunched the wrapper in his hand, curling it into a ball before tossing it into the small black bin on his right. He pressed his lips together as if making sure he got all the sugar the snack had given and it made (Y/n)'s stomach flip and her heart suddenly pick up the pace. Especially when he ran his tongue over his lips that were curved into a devilish smile before he responded.

"Sugar boost to get me through the set." He responded, his tone calm and rather gentle as opposed to the careless and rather boisterous way he spoke around the boys. As if (Y/n) was special and he had to talk to her as if she was. "Not too keen on chocolate if I'm honest." He commented lightly, a look of distaste on his lips as he bit his lower lip as if just remembering the taste the chocolate left on his tongue.

"You don't like chocolate? But-" (Y/n) felt astounded at first that Roger didn't like something that was so sweet and intoxicating and such a desirable snack. But then she felt confused at how he had demolished a bar of chocolate in about two minutes if he didn't like it.

"I gotta keep my sugar levels up... I'm diabetic and insulin works a bit too quick." (Y/n) felt her eyes widening as her mouth opened but no words escaped. This must have been a recent discovery because when (Y/n) watched the band when they first got together Roger never had insulin injections or had sugar before a performance. He had also cut down on his drinking recently too which must be due to his newfound condition.

She noticed how Roger suddenly rubbed his fingers over his elbow, dragging his nails lightly across the skin as he cringed at how the needle always felt when it punctured into his veins.

Roger was more partial to a bar of chocolate than a fast-acting injection of insulin. The insulin got to work very quickly and it would make Roger feel a burst of energy before suddenly making him feel a bit drained as it raised and then lowered his levels. Having a bar of chocolate or some sweets or just an energy drink before going out to perform meant that during the performance Roger would get a release of sugar and glucose into his system so he didn't run down halfway through. It was much easier this way.

"Sure it's not just your sweet tooth?" (Y/n) joked, biting her lip when Roger smiled, bumping his shoulder with her own as he seemed to look at her like he was searching for something in her eyes but didn't exactly know what he was looking for.

"Ahh, you caught me. We're on in a minute... you're coming out with us afterwards though, right?" Roger pushed himself to his feet as he stuffed his hands into the back pockets of his rather tight black jeans. His eyes burning into her own as he seemed to be begging for her to say yes that she was coming out with them for a drink and a celebration after the performance had finished.

"Of course." (Y/n) smiled, feeling excited that he wanted her to go out with them, even if it was simply because he liked having her around rather than wanting to get to know her. He still wanted her around.

"Good. See you later, little lady."

#roger taylor #roger taylor imagine #roger x reader #imagine #queen band #freddie mercury #Brian May #john deacon #let me love you

[whetstonefires]

"the top three of its forty floors are filled with brass telescopes of every size, pointing in every possible direction, including several that do not exist within the normal three dimensions of space." thats SUCH a cool image / "If any harvest will come." ooh i wonder whats going on / "The roofs are of red tile, the stucco of the houses painted in shades of blue. It stands empty, but has not had time to fall into disrepair." the little bits of detail getting added to the picture im LOVE (1/?)

I’m gonna do these all as one post but broken up for ease of reference, I think.

Thank you! 🥰 Deciding the theme for the Tower and giving it that visual anchor really helped to pull things together. If you consider the whole setup, it seems unlikely the Tower was originally built as an observatory, since those tend to benefit from height (especially if you’re looking around you rather than up, but for the up ones also) and the builders could easily have put it on top of a mountain or at least some hills, but instead put it by the river. It’s above sea level, and it’s away from light pollution, but there were better locations. Nearby.

So either it wasn’t an observatory, and it’s been refitted as one, or they had so many observatories they didn’t care about locating them optimally, there was some other factor making having the tower there important even if it was suboptimal in terms of observation capacity. Or, potentially, it’s been moved since it was built!

:} Yay thank for being interested by the foreshadowing. I tried to put just enough in without actively overshadowing the actual place-setting-up and making the reader impatient with the description. 

"If you look through an enchanted telescope you may see trees without needles fail halfway up the nearest of the great peaks, and even these fail before the top, though there is a span of nearly barren stone past that line, before the snow begins." you: mentions different plants living in different climates me: :0 / there's so much good description!! its all so pretty!! (2/?)

sflka;l;jlk i mean yeah, that’s pretty straightforward isn’t it. But! It establishes How Much Mountain it is visually rather than by saying ‘it was a big fucking mountain’ or ‘it was tall enough for the thinness of atmosphere near the top to create a small tundra region.’

o(*￣▽￣*)ブ

<3 Thank you! I kinda cut loose lmao.

"blocks veined with every color, pale blues and purples, reds and greens and golden-duns all mottling toward white and grey and black" god i want to live there so badly!! this tower is meeting all my standards!! cool pretty magic tower with rad telescopes!!! / "make a remark no one present understands about a Doctor named Seuss. His guide, the dousing tracker Amnaphi, will assume this person to be a famous astronomer from his homeland." im love!! misunderstandings about references!! (?/?)

💗💖✨ Yay! That’s an important feeling to create in fantasy, imo. The wanting. 

I really enjoyed playing with the standard forms for ‘thing made of marble’ here, because all these marbles really exist, but in spite of the existence of the word ‘marbled’ our narrative uses of it tend to be tied up with Neoclassical aesthetics. So very white and smooth, yeah?

Also idk if it’s obvious to the reader but this Tower is to some degree in dialogue with Orthanc, which made a great impression on my mind as a child as the iconic wizardly tower, and while I don’t disagree with any of Tolkien’s use of symbolism for the purposes he was deploying it, there’s so much potential in Isengard as a setting that LotR had no space to explore, even if Tolkien would have noticed those angles at all.

Like...the parkland around the Tower is shown being despoiled for the orcish war machine and then reconquered by the forest, but of course it wasn’t forest to begin with. What was it for before Saruman lost his shit? Ordered gardens, for peaceful contemplation? Who dedicated the space that way? Who maintained it? 

Did Saruman employ a gardener? Did he design his own gardens, or did they come with the keep, which we’re informed was built not by him but by the Numenoreans? 

(“I liked white better” is still one of the greatest lines in a fantasy novel, Tolkien does not get enough credit for his contextually hilarious one-liners that rely on pointed code-switching, but Saruman’s evil rainbow oil-slick robes also sounded really baller and it’s kind of a shame they were not attempted for the movie lol.)

The fact that this is a world designed around a kid getting portal-fantasied into it and staying for 30 years really gives me some options which are fun to deploy but also like. Risky lmao. Because it encourages the reader to surface from the setting-logic and apply their own perspective, which can really break up the magic.

Being able to zoom out on the Tower after all that detail and be like ‘it’s awesome but also it looks like something Doctor Seuss would draw’ was fun though.

"Within the even hexagon of its outer wall, the Tower encloses a great parkland, enough that if it was all put under cultivation it could easily feed as many people as could live in the Tower itself." the tower has PLANTS i love it so much / "Ten Years’ Winter" god PLEASE tell me this is going to get into the agriculture and society stuff game of thrones didn't about long winters that would be SO cool / "Watchers of the Stars" AND they have a cool name holy shit (?/?)

Plants are important! As is food supply. As everyone who’s been reading this blog for a while already knows I think lol.

I mean, it’s not about that, really? The Ten Years’ Winter is a historical event--the most recent meteor impact severe enough to have global climate fallout. The dust it kicked up took a while to settle, and the famines were pretty severe.

But the cultural consequences of something that happened a hundred and fifty years ago exist, and are important, including the relationship between governance and disaster preparedness, which varies a lot regionally as you may imagine. 

Astronomy has a long history as a wizardly sort of activity in the real world, both because it’s had continual overlap with astrology and just because the process has always been mystical and abstruse. In this setting, with a history of both devastating meteor impacts and being invaded from the Moon, but also actual magic, it’s got more obvious practical importance. Although since neither of these are remotely everyday occurrences, the average person on the street might not agree lol.

So it’s on the one hand a purely descriptive title, and on the other hand a serious boast, suggesting as it does that they are primarily responsible for Watching The Sky For Stuff. While also having broader philosophical implications and just sounding nice lol. 

You gotta have good marketing if you want to persist as a wizardly order, because if talented students aren’t motivated to come to you how will you gain new members? Natural replacement is not an ideal strategy to say the least. That’s how you turn into a cult instead of an intellectual powerhouse.

"The northern third of the Tower’s park contains neatly regimented orchards, apples, pears, plums, and a few rows of carefully tended peaches and apricots, all clipped flat against low brick walls angled south and slightly west." hhh t r e e s / "wizards, while enthusiastic about innovation in the abstract, hate change." me too, wizards. me too / "The Tower grounds are filled with refugees." ooh now we get to why everything was empty earlier (?/?)

Trees! Which are also food!

And technology lol. Greenhouses built against fruit walls with good insulation are so much more sensible than ones heated from inside. Obviously as a passive solar-powered technology these only work when the sun is available and not, for example, cut off by a giant dust cloud. 

These people are fairly acutely aware of their dependence on the sun and it figures prominently in a majority of their religions and their magical theory, even more than in ours.

There seems to be a mild consensus that the wizards are relatable. In truth: we are all wizards. :D

Yup! At long last lol.

"This division corresponds imperfectly to the usual split of the town by the course of the Meroda." because people!! take comfort!! in what normalcy they can find!! / "Makeshift pallets line the spaces between every fruit wall—the injured are being laid out here, now that the Tower is full, to get the benefit at night of the warmth meant to mature fruit." the awesome magic tower people trying to do everything they can for the injured who come to them for help in case i thought i couldn't be (?)

more in love / "Half of them are making ready to turn south along the Meroda." oh nooooo / "but the Moon People are the successors of the ancient magics, and just because they could not break the walls the last time they came, according to legend, does not mean they have not worked out a method now." im so worried for the people oh no (?)

Yeah! It really seemed natural. But of course they also aren’t recreating it obsessively; lots of people are grouping up with relatives who normally live across the river, or with people in the same line of work on the river, because people also adapt to circumstances.

No institution is ever perfect, of course, but I’m glad the Watchers have come across this way so far. They’re broadly well-intentioned and mostly well-organized.

And they were not ready for this.

A significant fraction of the reason for the order of the Watchers to exist at all, particularly in this observatory with its great eye fixed ever on the face of the green moon, is to be able to warn the world if this ever happens again. But the Moon People knew they were being watched, this time, and they kept all the build-up to mobilization that might have given them away on the far side of the moon until the last minute.

What the Magister is doing, as I hope was made clear or at least successfully indicated--I wish your commentary on the ending had come through!--is summoning what turns out to be an actual child from another world to do hero stuff.

Even if he’d gotten an adult that would be kidnapping someone to help with your problems, a routine element of the portal fantasy whose ethics have been addressed in a variety of ways, most famously ‘is Lion Jesus and always right.’ 

The reason they need a hero from another world is that the Moon People build a lot of their wards and their offensive and disabling magical attacks around a targeting system based on what planet people are from, because even though they’re originally from the same stock--they’re the descendants of ancient moon colonists who evacuated ahead of a major meteor impact somewhere approaching four thousand years ago--on a magical level having been born and raised on the planet or the moon makes a pretty huge difference. 

So no one can get into the place their magic space elevator is anchored and fuck it up so they can’t keep bringing troops and supply in and loot out. Their single supply line is their only strategic weakness, and they’ve taken appropriate precautions.

Getting someone in from a third location is the best idea anyone’s been able to come up with in the very limited time available. Since no one can figure out how to turn one of the Moon People against the cause they came here for, on short notice, when they aren’t even stopping to talk to anyone so far. Like, that’s clearly not going to happen.

Heron Yl Fanult isn’t unaware that it’s ethically questionable, but he’s doing it anyway.

So I’m glad the ominous imminent oncoming of the Moon People can really be felt, because that atmosphere is fairly essential context for the decisionmaking going on at the top of the Tower.

"Young wizards sit in their bunks, six each to rooms that were previously individual, and hold lighting cupped dancing in their palms." a quick break from being worried to point out that this is rad as hell / "some with their heads decorously covered..." cultural differences!! especially with regional purposes like the Hedro!! 

Thank you! 😆💖 I thought so too lol. 

It also establishes the parameters of the magic system a little more. Throwing lightning bolts is pretty iconicly high-powered, right? And here it’s what most of the student wizards are practicing in anticipation of a battle, because most of them aren’t specced into combat and this is actually one of the easier lethal spells to master, especially if you have an academic background.

‘Electrocute’ isn’t a very flexible spell and it’s easy to lose control of, but it’s actually easier than, say, ‘set on fire to a significant degree in a non-electrical manner’ because concentrating a lot of heat in a certain location takes a lot more brute force than encouraging ionization. 

You can pull most of the actual destructive force for the palm lightning spell out of the physical air and/or earth if you grasp the principles, which is much easier than channeling a comparable amount of magic directly because it doesn’t have to go through you. 

The limiting factors on magic in this setting are how much power you can tap into and how much of it you can actually use without hurting or killing yourself. It’s not usually a lot, though the amount can be increased by things like choosing your workspace, prepping your workspace, and a whole lot of practice and meditation and things like that.

Magical traditions that get bundled under the heading of wizardry tend to focus on force multiplication, obtaining enough contextual understanding of a subject to make whatever power is applied go further. This means a lot of studying theory and using magic to make observations (such as the existence of microorganisms and their connection to disease) and often results in making clever devices based on what you’ve learned that may not actually wind up being magical at all. 

Which is why the solar greenhouse proposal is considered ‘more wizardly’ than the fruit walls, which are wizardly in the first place even though the technology is pretty widespread at this point--it’s carried the principle of minimizing the energy you have to invest to get the result you want to the logical conclusion, where you don’t have to do any magic at all, you just set up the situation and get out of the way and the sun will do the work for you.

Other schools of magic, particularly religious ones, are more likely to emphasize just getting better at handling energy for yourself, which tends to yield a lot more in the way of immediate practical dividends and in a lot of quarters wizards who don’t do something obviously practical like physic or smithcraft with their theoretical background are considered crackpots or dilettantes 

An impression helped along by the fact that being taken on as a student of wizardry at a basic level tends to focus more on your reading comprehension than your ability to actually do any magic, so in places where religious and wizardly institutions coexist the most talented students have a tendency to gravitate toward the religious life. This is particularly marked in areas religiously dominated by the Compact of the Golden Circle, wherein full ordination is contingent on being able to pull off certain fairly hefty rituals, so if you aren’t physically or mentally up to that kind of magical heavy lifting your religious career will stall out in one of the lay fraternities. In some of the cities on Sutouchel, the landmass to the southeast where the Compact is based, a slang term for wizard is ‘sanctum washout.’

But of course force multiplication is something that can scale up pretty far, and studying theory doesn’t stop you from also putting work into your practical skills, and not having talent isn’t the only reason someone would choose not to seek out a clerical career, if it’s even an option. Religion along the Meroda is pretty localized; communities tend to have local deities who correspond to a natural feature like the nearest mountain or the river or something, and if that deity rates a fulltime shrine the keeper also tends to be the major local medical provider, and since the wizards got settled in at the Tower it’s become pretty popular for shrinekeeping families to send their kids there for a year or two to get some educational polish in addition to what their parent already emphasized.

So depending on where you live and what your personal experience has been you’re going to have very different ideas about what wizards are good for.

Hrm. I’ve gone on a tangent. But that wound up taking so long you came back! :D I love it when being turtle works out in my favor.

Or was this actually the meta I was supposed to be doing in the first place? Aaaaa who knows.

im fairly confident you said eight asks survived so this is number nine? anyways onwards! "The hale survivors of the First Battle of the Second Descent sit waiting in their leathers, jack-chains and helmets laughably inadequate armor against the coming danger, and yet the best hope now just as they were on Carun Tol once the wizard fell" i have a lot of emotions about how their best bet is also a terrible bet but its all they have (9/?)

Yes 8. 

Woo, thank you! ^^ & I love that you described it that way because that also describes the ‘summon alien’ spell Yl Fanult is casting and echoing the same emotional theme throughout the scene was very much the goal here.

"Threads have escaped from the braids pinned across the top of her skull: she has not had the chance to take them down for two days." god just the continuation of how desperate everything is / "He leans forward to peer through the narrow glass that has been turned on its articulated base to face the middle of the room, and relaxes very slightly. At least there has been no catastrophic alteration there, either." what does that one do id assume theres no approching army in the middle of the room -

:D Yeah, the fact that one of the chief medics available is already overworked to the point of neglecting nonessential personal hygiene and the enemy isn’t even here yet I hoped would resonate.

Well, remember how some of the telescopes at the beginning point in directions not included in the normal three dimensions of space? :}

- "trained as it long has been upon the face of the moon" also forgot to mention their enemies being from the moon is Rad As Hell / "He snaps his fingers for a spark that falls into the deep circular groove full of distilled spirits, and steps through that as well. He is not burned." ooooh whats he doing / "At his feet lie a glittering piece of gold ore, a moonstone, and a carefully sanded round of pumice." i see the connection to the moonstone bc moon army but i wonder about the others -

Thank you! It took a fair amount of poking before I decided it was a solid approach; it provides just enough physical alienation that there’s no direct cultural relationship and you can have that ‘everyone in the entire world Disliked That’ vibe, without needing to create any complicated magical and cultural explanation for such a long run of isolationism. They were out of contact because they were On The Moon.

Also I really get a kick out of putting space invaders in a fantasy setting in a way that stops just short of turning into sci-fi.

I’m glad the ritual lead-up is exciting! Even if the foreshadowing wasn’t as obvious as I thought it was lol. That’s fixable. 

Gold is for the sun, moonstone is yeah for the moon lol (although in other circumstances people also use jade, because it’s been a long time since the moon was uniformly silver on account of it having been terraformed a few thousand years ago) and pumice is for the world--it’s a stone full of air that floats on water, so it’s popular as an anchoring device for rituals that call on all three local celestial bodies.

"He cannot take much time. He has only until the ring of fire dies." whats he doingggggg / anyways i love this so much!! the descriptions are gorgeous and im so invested in all of everything!! i hope you write more im so curious about it all!! 

XD Ok I covered this already, I would have saved it for down here or Been Mysterious if tumblr hadn’t eaten the last few asks the first time lol. Thank you so much again! For encouragement! Before and now! I’ll try! To keep it going!

Here’s hoping this successfully posts, tumblr just kicked me onto New Dashboard again and disabled the turn-it-off button, so now my alternate posting strategy is borked up too. 🤞😅😘

#hoc est meum #ask #worldbuilding #a nonny mouse #the tower of sight #people say nice things #long post #<3

[chiseler]

THE MYSTERY OF SUNN CLASSIC PICTURES

It was like the positive, life-affirming New Age mysticism of the hippies took a sudden turn for the dark and very strange. In the mid-Seventies, as the country was overwhelmed by a creeping atmosphere of impotent anger, paranoia and existential despair in response to Vietnam, Watergate, race riots, Kent State, the Tate-LaBianca murders, bomb-tossing student radicals, pollution, high-profile assassinations, the oil crisis and the emergence of disco, Americans sought solace in some form by plunging headlong into a collective national obsession with all things Mysterious and Unexplained. Suddenly Bigfoot was all the rage, as was The Loch Ness Monster, The Bermuda Triangle, UFOs, psychic phenomena, near-death experiences, apocalyptic Biblical prophecies, and ancient astronauts. People were desperate to hold onto something, anything, no matter how ridiculous and fanciful, as the whole world seemed to be crumbling and burning around them. If something pointed toward an unseen world, a world outside this stinking mess we were stuck with, or better still promised the complete obliteration of this stinking mess, then at least there was a glimmer of hope. Almost overnight, a cottage industry cropped up, flooding the market with cheap paperbacks, magazines, movies and TV shows—even comic books and board games—devoted to unexplained phenomena of all sorts. Personally I didn’t give a Toss about the state of the world, but I still subscribed to UFO Reporter magazine, had a shelf full of cheap paperbacks with titles like The Search for Bigfoot and From Outer Space, and never missed In Search Of…, the half-hour syndicated series narrated by Leonard Nimoy that  delved into one mystery or another every week. For god sakes, I even had the Bermuda Triangle board game.

But in what may have been the strangest phenomenon of all, far more bizarre than the legends surrounding Area 51 or the Philadelphia Experiment, in 1971 Schick teamed up with the Church of Latter Day Saints to launch a low-budget movie studio that aimed to become the epicenter of High Strangeness culture.

Yes, a razor blade company and the Mormons decided to make movies together. How could the results be anything but unfathomable?

(It’s worth noting before we get too far that in my research into the history of Sunn Classic Pictures, it became clear the indie studio, which still exists in some vague form today, seems to have gone to some great lengths to fog their early history, never once mentioning the Mormons, and in some cases denying there even was a Sunn Classic Pictures prior to 1980. With only a few  rare exceptions, the reasonably small Sunn Classic catalog, now owned by Paramount, never received any kind of home video release, which only adds to the mystery.)

As the official story goes, in 1971, the employees of Schick—a subsidiary if the pharmaceutical company Warner-Lambert—approached Rayland Jensen and asked him to launch a new movie studio. Appalled by all the filth and violence and sex and cursing that infested American movie screens, as well as the so-called “intellectuals” who thought these movies were “good,” they felt real Americans needed a family-friendly alternative. Those Schick employees concluded Jensen was just the man for the job, as a few years earlier he’d handled distribution for a nature picture released by the Utah-based American National Enterprises. The picture had done very well.

Okay, let me stop there. As I said, that’s the official story, as far as it goes and as little sense as it makes. The real story goes more like this.

In 1971, a renegade group of American National Enterprises employees, led by Jensen and inspired by that same disgust with what American movies had become, broke away to form a new production company to release family-friendly, G-rated pictures. Patrick Frawley, the ultraconservative, paranoid, anti-communist conspiracy theorist who also happen to run the Schick razor blade company invested a bundle in the new venture, ensuring he would have some say in the kinds of movies the new company would release.

With headquarters divided between Salt Lake City and Park City, Utah, the newly-christened Sunn Classic Pictures (aka Sunn international, aka Schick Sunn Classic Pictures) set out to Make family-friendly features and documentaries aimed at working class, conservative, God-fearing Americans who didn’t go out to movies very often, likely because of all the above-mentioned filth and sex and violence and cuss words. Moreover, they wanted to make certain these warm-hearted films turned a healthy profit. This involved two basic techniques.

The first was four-walling, a distribution method American National Enterprises helped pioneer. Instead of spending a fortune on all those prints necessary for a massive nationwide theatrical release, Sunn instead rented theaters serving the target demographic, inundated the market with ads and gimmicks, then screened their new film at the selected theater for no more than a week. After that extremely limited run, they packed up and moved the print to another theater far away. It was a tricky ploy. On the upside four-walling a picture allowed the production company to keep all the box office receipts without having to divide them among various middlemen.

If they knew the film was a stinker, it also allowed them to skip town before the bad reviews could do them any damage. On the downside, those limited runs also meant the picture would be there and gone before any positive word of mouth could work its magic. Sunn would try four-walling a new movie for a few months, and if it was making money, they might consider a nationwide release. If not, then they’d start trying to sell it to TV for syndication. It wasn’t a tack that worked all the time, but often enough to make it worthwhile, and it left them more of an escape route than a national release ever would.

So. “Family friendly.” Yes. If you want to make Disney-style pictures but don’t have Disney-style budgets to work with, animated features are out. So are live action films with any kind of special effects. Basically what you’re left with are nature films, right? No expensive sets, very few actors, and as a result very cheap to make. So Sunn began producing wilderness adventure stories.

In those very early days, you can definitely smell Patrick Frawley’s hand in the development process. Films like 1971’s Toklat, in which a man is forced to track down and kill a beloved pet bear after the bear kills a local rancher’s livestock, is a prime example. (As it happens, Toklat was the first Sunn picture I ever saw, Green Bay being a conservative working-class town, and so on Sunn’s demographic map. ) There was something decidedly Nietzschean about those earliest releases. Most of them featured lone individualusts with strong principles who flee the corruption of modern civilization to face the harsh realities of nature alone.

Now, think back and ask yourself honestly” what kid in his right mind has ever liked nature films, Nietzschean or otherwise? Maybe Mormon kids did, but certainly not normal kids. Nature movies are dull as dust, all those endless shots of trees and rivers and shit. Even if it’s supposed to be a true adventure story about some historical frontiersman, so what? Where are the explosions and car chases and monkeys doing funny things? You know who liked nature films? Grandparents! Grandparents loved them because they were wholesome and taught valuable lessons. They insisted on dragging their grandkids to them because they didn’t have to worry about being embarrassed or having to define certain words on the trip home.

The handful of films Sunn Classic released in their first three years—most all of them wilderness adventures about solitary manly sorts learning to dominate nature in one way or another—did okay. They didn’t lose money, but they also didn’t become runaway hits.

In 1974, even after several rewrites, no one at Sunn Classic Pictures had high hopes for the next film on the docket, something called The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams. Sure, it was loosely based on an historical figure who again fled the corruption of the modern world to live in the wilderness, befriending a grizzly bear along the way. But the character was not some stalwart and steely-eyed Ubermensch—he was gentle and kind-hearted. What the hell were they going to do with that?

Enter Charles Sellier, and the second technique that would be central to Sunn Classic’s success. Sellier, today considered one of Sunn’s true founders together with Rayland Jensen, was a recently-converted Mormon in his thirties, as well as the author of the 1972 novel upon which Grizzly Adams was based. As Sunn’s new executive producer, he had a different—and eventually hugely influential—approach to marketing films.

Sellier set aside an estimated $85,000 for market research before a new film went into production. This involved targeting the desired demographic with door-to-door and telephone interviews asking housewives and construction workers what kind of movies they would like to see. This also involved screening early rushes from films currently in production for hand-picked test audiences in order to get their reactions and advice. This is, of course, standard operating procedure now, but it was radical back then, and something that mortified directors and screenwriters. In some cases Sellier even had members of the test audience wired to biometric scanners to measure their reactions to the scenes they were being shown, and use those reactions to have a script rewritten more to the test audience liking. If audience pulse rates went up whenever a certain character was on screen, well, they’d build up that role. If a certain animal warmed their hearts, well, maybe they’d make a whole movie about that particular animal.

Sellier’s method of crowd-sourced filmmaking was first tried on The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, and sure enough, the film, starring former viker movie regular Dan Haggerty, became Sunn’s first bona fide international hit, bringing in over $20 million. The film was such a smash among grandparents it quickly spawned a Sunn-produced TV series, which was also a big hit among grandparents. To date, the Grizzly Adams franchise remains Sunn’s biggest cash cow.

But something else happened in 1974 that would help make that iconic Sunn Classic logo as familiar and comforting as the Toho, American International, Shaw Brothers and Troma logos. To some of us, anyway.

In 1968, Erich Von Daniken published Chariots of the Gods?, a book which argued, through some mighty suspect and loosely interpreted archaeological evidence, that aliens had visited Earth thousands of years ago, and among other things helped build the Egyptian and Mexican Pyramids, Stonehenge and the statues on Easter island. It was one of the first major hallmarks of the High Strangeness Culture to come.  Originally published in Germany, the book became an International sensation among those with a very high tolerance for pseudoscience, pseudohistory, and bullshit in general..

In 1970, German director Harald Reinl made a documentary based on von Daniken’s book, and it, too, became a big hit across Europe. As sillyassed as the whole thing was, I’d argue the film was even more effective than the book thanks to the visual presentation of all the supposed evidence.

Well, after seeing how much money Chariots of the Gods? Was pulling in overseas, and interested in such topics himself, American TV producer Alan Landsburg acquired the U.S. rights, re-edited the filmn, brought in Rod Serling to narrate, and broadcast it in 1973 as In Search of Ancient Astronauts. It would be the first of a trilogy of TV documentaries about ancient astronauts produced by Landsburg and narrated by Serling.

Noting the ratings that Landsburg doc brought in, as well as that European box office, Sunn obtained the US theatrical rights to In Search of Ancient Astronauts, changed the title back to Chariots of the Gods? And began four-walling it around the country in 1974. It didn’t matter that by that time countless articles and books had completely debunked all of von Daniken’s claims, nor that critics had savaged the film, in some cases even calling it racist for purporting indigenous people in Mexico, Africa an elsewhere could never have created these wonders by themselves. The picture made money. It may not have been Grizzly Adams money, but enough to leave Sellier and Jensen convinced they might be onto something with these documentaries about weird shit. Documentaries were even cheaper to make than nature films, and the demographic they were aiming at seemed eager to believe in monsters and aliens and conspiracies, so there you go. For the next five years, along with the wilderness adventures and wholesome TV adaptations of Huck Finn and Gulliver’s Travels,  Sunn gave the half-wits like me what we wanted.

In 1975, Sunn picked up the theatrical distrobution rights To The Outer Space Connection, the last of Landsburg’s ancient astronaut trilogy (as well as one of the last things Rod Serling worked on before he died). This final entry argued not only that aliens had visited earth thousands of years ago, but had planted humans here in the first place and had been guiding our evolution ever since. This wasn’t exactly a new idea, and could be traced back, so far as I’m aware, at least to Nigel Kneale’s 1958 BBC miniseries Quatermass and The Pit. But the film, directed by Fred Warshofsky, went several crazy steps beyond Kneale, claiming we know exactly where the aliens came from and why, that the Mayans were themselves aliens, and that these same aliens would return to Earth on Christmas Eve, 2011.

The TV documentaries made enough of a splash for Landsburg that he parlayed them into the above-mentioned weekly In Search Of… series, which began airing in 1977, right around the same time Grizzly Adams hit the airwaves.

Both Chariots of the Gods? And The Outer Space Connection helped cement the template that would define the rest of the Sunn-produced High Strangeness documentaries that would follow, making them so effective on the young, the susceptible, and the merely desperate. The real key, it seems, far beyomd the film’s actual content, was conscripting an authoritative host/narrator who can present the most insane pseudoscientific theories and shaky evidence with a straight face while repeatedly using terms like “indisputable,” “Proven beyond a doubt,” and “scientists agree.”: “It’s an incontrovertible fact these ancient carvings prove alien visitors walked on Earth over five hundred centuries ago.” It was the simplest of carnival sideshow techniques, but one that kept drawing suckers to the theaters.

The same year they released The Outer Space Connection, Sunn also released The Mysterious Monsters, which was less a documentary than a series of vignettes about Bigfoot, the Yeti, and The Loch Ness Monster. Director Robert Guenette had been making what you might call speculative Sunn-style documentaries long before Sunn even existed, so he was in familiar territory. In fact, The Mysterious Monsters includes scenes borrowed from Guenette’s 1974 TV movie, Monsters: Mysteries or Myths?, which coincidentally had been narrated by Rod Serling. The (mostly) new and expanded Sunn production was hosted by Peter Graves, who was as straight-faced as they come. In between shots of Graves and ten other men in cowboy hats wandering the forest on horseback looking for Bigfoot, we get eyewitness accounts from those who claim to have actually seen Bigfoot, Nessie, or the Yeti. Unlike most Bigfoot films of the era (and there were a bunch), The Mysterious Monsters infers a decided fearlessness and hostility on Bigfoot’s part, claiming he not only terrorized innocent victims, but wandered into the suburbs to terrorize them. The recreated Bigfoot encounters here are kind of fun, and in fact the film contains two solid scares, at least if you’re nine. Nessie and the Yeti get short shrift, and those scenes of Graves riding through the forest with that hopeless hunting party are interminable, but the picture was another big hit,arriving at precisely the right time given 1975 was a banner year for Bigfoot cinema. In the end, and where he got his information who the hell knows, Graves announces there is a community of some two hundred Bigfeet living in Northern California, though Graves and the hunting party find none of them.

Another hallmark of Sunn’s documentaries was that most inevitably ended with an outlandish, shocking, unexpected, and wholly unsubstantiated claim. The influence of mondo films—Mondo Cane, Africa ama and the like—on Sunn’s documentaries is undeniable. But while mondo films aimed to shock grindhouse audiences with footage (whether real or created) of bizarre and extreme human behavior, Sunn aimed to leave family audiences womderstruck at the possibilities of a mysterious world of magic and monsters just beyond our perceptions.

In 1976, Sunn followed up The Mysterious Monsters with The Amazing World of Psychic Phenomena, also directed by Guenette, this time narrated by Raymond Burr. The film is less a cohesive documentary than another shaggy dog series of vignettes exploring extrasensory perception, astral projection, and telekinesis as well as ghosts and spiritualism, featuring an all-star cast of celebrity psychics including Jeanne Dixon and Uri Geller. Not surprisingly, Burr, who doesn’t seem terribly convinced himself, informs us that there is irrefutable scientific evidence that all these powers are absolutely real and for true.

That same year also saw the release of one of Sunn’s more patently ridiculous outings, In Search of Noah’s ARk, a film which, in many ways, proved a turning point. The film was the first to be hosted/narrated by character actor Brad Crandall, who would go on to narrate most of the remaining Sunn Classic documentaries, as well as appearing in a few of their TV shows. It was directed by James L. Conway, who quickly established himself as Sunn’s go-to in-house director, churning out five or six features and TV movies a year.

Apart from turning to mostly in-house staffers to make their films instead of bringing in outside directors and celebrity hosts, In Search of Noah’s ARk also marked the point at which Sunn further fed their demographic by adding a decidedly fundamentalist Christian focus to many of their films, from Noah’s Ark to their TV series Greatest Heroes of the Bible to two documentaries about near-death experiences to 1979’s (and grammar be damned) In search of Historic Jesus.

In business terms it was a savvy move. To this day, films aimed at a fundamentalist audience, especially if they support a strictly literal interpretation of the Bible, can bring in more money than most Hollywood films. They certainly bring in more than most Mormon themed films, and apparently the more patently ridiculous the involved claims, the better.

The supposed “scientists” who lay out the evidence that the remains of Noah’s honest-to-God ark are still sitting up there on top of Mt. Ararat (should anyone care to take a look) aren’t, um, scientists at all. One, a supposed physics professor, argues there’s a mountain of geological evidence proving the world was deluged by an all-consuming flood, um, five thousand years ago. Another claims the ark was first discovered by a Russian expedition sent by Tsar Nicholas II in 1916, but all the reports and evidence were destroyed by dirty communist revolutionaries, um, two days after the expedition returned. It all goes downhill from there, and you have to feel some pity for the poor gullible fools who believed all this nonsense.

I saw nearly all of Sunn’s documentaries in the theater when I was a kid, and now feel sorry for my mom, dad, and older sister, who I suspect drew straws to see who had to take me whenever a new Sunn picture hit town. When I was ten I bought every last nutty claim. Going back and watching them again four decades later, I find myself blurting, “Wait, what?” Aloud after nearly every scene. They do, however, remain fascinating artifacts and a mirror of a certain psychological makeup. They’re also still fun as hell for all their crazy dumbness, if you keep your critical thinking skills at the ready.

Sunn found themselves in the middle of a shitstorm in 1977 with the release of The Lincoln Conspiracy, also directed by Conway. Historians, critics and the media at large attacked the film for presenting as fact a convoluted conspiracy claiming the assassination of President Lincoln was an inside job, closing, as Oliver Stone’s JFK would years later, with a demand the investigation be reopened. Conway would later claim the film was just a silly speculative docudrama based on a couple recent books, but even the authors of the books denounced the film. Still, a little controversy has never been known to hurt the box office.

Over the next few years Sunn continued to release two or three pseudoscientific documentaries  a year, including Beyond and Back, Beyond Death’s Door, and The Bermuda Triangle, the latter of which claimed all those ships and planes vanished after being zapped by a malfunctioning Atlantean particle bean that was lost somewhere on the ocean floor near Bimini. Bimini? Well, I gotta say, as explanations go, it makes about as much sense as any other.

A personal favorite from the late Sunn era for its sheer nihilistic simplicity was 1979’s Encounter With Disaster, this time directed by Charles Sellier himself. Using his patented market research techniques, he brought a test audience into a theater and showed them dozens of newsreel clips of fires, earthquakes, The Hindenberg, race car crashes and the like, measuring responses to see which were considered the most exciting. He then strung all the most popular disaster footage together and released it as a feature.

Encounter With Disaster was perhaps the one true mondo film Sunn released during their brief heyday, and a definite anomaly. Toward the end, instead of documentary footage, talking heads and manipulative narration, films like The Bermuda Triangle, Beyond Death’s Door and In Search of Historic Jesus cane to rely more on speculative recreations with actors, sets and scripted dialogue. Although a narrator does pop up occasionally to say, in essence, “Yup, this really, really happened!,” the films come off more like splintered docudramas than documentaries, which somehow makes their assorted theses seem even less plausible.

It’s worth pointing out here that In Search of Historic Jesus, as delightfully awful as it is, does, without saying as much, offer a clear case study of the effect Sellier’s marketing machinations could have on a film.

Directed by Sunn’s in-house cinematographer Henning Schellerup (who prior to Sunn had worked on everything from softcore porn to Corman productions) and again narrated by Brad Crandall, Historic Jesus clearly began life as a documentary aiming to present all the independent historical evidence proving the Biblical account of Jesus’ life was accurate. Given there was precious little of that to be found, it became a documentary about the Shroud of Turin. Given there wasn’t really ninety minutes worth of material about the Shroud of Turin, they shot an interview with a fake scientist offering some, um, plausible scientific explanations for the Star of Bethlehem, then plundered some footage from the Noah’s Ark movie (though oddly the data offered in the latter somehow changed between 1976 and 1979). All this left them with a film that was about twenty minutes long.

The film was saved when Sellier gathered a test audience of fundamentalist Christians. After showing them a few scenes, he quickly learned they didn’t need any scientific or historical proof that Jesus really existed. They just wanted to hear more Jesus stories.

Taking their advice, the bulk of the film became a  string of recreations of Jesus’ Greatest Hits acted out by amateur actors playing Jesus, Mary, Herid, Pontius Pilate and assorted disciples. No effort whatsoever is made to prove these recreated scenes actually happened. So instead of a pseudoscientific, pseudohistorical account of the, um, historical figure known as Jesus of Nazareth, it became another Sunday School-ready Jesus movie, all primed and ready to be rented to church groups across the country. In short, then, calling the film In Search of Historic Jesus actually makes sense.

By 1979, Sunn’s documentaries seemed to be running out of gas. They were still turning a profit (especially that Historic Jesus thing), but the profits weren’t what they once were, and the films were costing more to make. Also, other production houses had picked up on the Sunn Classic formula and began releasing High Strangeness docs of their own. In 1978, for instance, Amran Films and RCR released The Late Great Planet Earth, based on “Biblical scholar” Hal Lindsey’s massive bestseller which claimed all the prophecies in the Book of Revelation were coming true, and the long-promised Apocalypse would arrive any day now. If I remember correctly, the world was supposed to end in 1986. The film was hosted and narrated by Orson Wells, who had once been asked to narrate a Sunn film, but was so horrified by their marketing practices he turned down the job.

(A few years later in 1981, Welles would also narrate a documentary about Nostradamus’ prophecies, which was directed, coincidentally enough, by Sunn Classic alumnus Robert Guenette. Just to illustrate how influential Sunn’s experiment had been, The Man Who Saw Tomorrow was distributed by goddamn WARNER BROTHERS, of all places.)

What struck the real death knell to Sunn’s hugely successful string of pseudoscientific and pseudo historical extravaganzas was a changing culture. We were own the brink of Morning in America and the Reagan Era. Interest in silly monsters and psychic phenomena was waning as everyone put the ’70s behind them, focusing instead on the stock market, the threat of nuclear war, cocaine, designer clothes and other tangible real world issues.

Charles Sellier

In 1980 Sunn Classic Pictures was bought out by Taft Enterprises, a Cincinnatti-based conglomerate.  The suits in Taft’s entertainment division had a few ideas of their own about what American moviegoers wanted. When they correctly saw that the days of four-walling were about over as the business ties between the major studios and national theater Chains grew stronger, Charles Sellier walked away to continue writing, producing, directing and marketing films on his own terms. In 1984 he directed the notorious holiday slasher film, Silent Night, Deadly Night, a picture remembered more for its ad campaign than anything in the picture itself. Sellier also later converted from Mormonism to evangelical Christianity.

When Taft likewise decided family friendly entertainment was a dead end, that the market for G-rated wilderness adventures simply wasn’t there anymore, that a film had to be rated PG or R if it hoped to make any money, Jensen and a few other original American National Enterprises refugees quit in disgust, and once again formed their own production company to offer honest American families wholesome entertainment options. Their first film was 1981’s Private Lessons, a teen sex comedy starring Sylvia Kristel. It made a lot of money.

Director James Conway stayed with Taft for awhile, helming several pictures, including the monster movie The Boogens . Interestingly, the very first Taft/Sunn release, perhaps formulated to attract Sunn’s core audience, was the Conway-directed Hangar 18, starring Darren McGavin, Robert Vaughn and Gary Collins. It was the perfect transitional picture, a sci-fi conspiracy thriller loosely based on what might well have been the subject of the next Sunn Classic documentary: Roswell and Area 51. Conway later went on to become an executive at Spelling Entertainment, overseeing a mountain of wildly successful crap.

Over the subsequent decades there were more sales and acquisitions, with the various companies overseeing the Sunn Classic brand themselves being gobbled up by even larger faceless corporate entities. Sunn vanished, then reappeared, then vanished again. Today there are vague, mysterious hints that Sunn Classics Pictures has been re-launched after Rayland Jensen teamed up with Lang Elliott, original founder of Tri-Star Pictures. But if Sunn really has risen from the grave, would it matter?

For good or ill, over the course of that five-year stretch between 1974 and 1979, Sunn Classic Pictures illuminated one strange facet of a very strange era, warped millions of impressionable minds (like mine), fully capitalized on a nation’s despair and collective neuroses, and left an indelible mark on the culture. Take even a cursory glance at what’s airing on the History and Discovery Channels, or at how the marketing departments of any movie studio large or small operates today. They simply wouldn’t be what they are In the second decade of the twenty-first century had it not been for Sunn Classic Pictures., and fore that we can thank the Mormons, a right-wing kook, and Bigfoot.

by Jim Knipfel

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THE ANATOMY OF VC BE A STARTUP

If in the next couple years. Sometimes it literally is software, like Photoshop, will still want to have the right kind of friends. Where the work of PR firms.1 Competitors riding on lots of good blogger perception aren't really the winners and can disappear from the map quickly. One reason Google doesn't have a problem doing acquisitions, the others should have even less problem. Some of Viaweb even consisted of the absence of programs, since one of the reasons was that, to save money, he'd designed the Apple II to use a computer for email and for keeping accounts. They want to know what is a momentous one. How do you find them? Suppose it's 1998. The big media companies shouldn't worry that people will post their copyrighted material on YouTube. Once someone is good at it, but regardless it's certainly constraining.

Gone with the Wind plus Roots. This is extremely risky, and takes months even if you succeed.2 At most software companies, especially at first. Their answers were remarkably similar. I use constantly?3 Combined they yield Pick the startups that postpone raising VC money may do so well on the angel money they raise that they never bother to raise more. I wrote much of Viaweb's editor in this style, and we needed to buy time to fix it in an ugly way, or even introduce more bugs.4

Historically investors thought it was important for a founder to be an online store builder, but we may change our minds if it looks promising, turn into a company at a pre-money valuation is $1.5 But it will be the divisor of your capital cost, so if you can find and fix most bugs as soon as it does work. Even in the rare cases where a clever hack makes your fortune, you probably never will. You may not believe it, but regardless it's certainly constraining.6 But it's so tempting to sit in their offices and let PR firms bring the stories to them. Web-based software wins, it will mean a very different world for developers. I think we're just beginning to see its democratizing effects. But this is old news to Lisp programmers. If 98% of the time.7 It might help if they were a race apart.8

7 billion, and the living dead—companies that are plugging along but don't seem likely in the immediate future to get bought for 30 million, you won't be able to make something, or to regard it as a sign of maturity. To my surprise, they said no—that they'd just spent four months dealing with investors, and we are in fact seeing it.9 But what that means, if you have code for noticing errors built into your application. The number of possible connections between developers grows exponentially with the size of the group. We think of the overall cost of owning it. But once you prove yourself as a good investor in the startups you meet that way, the answer is obvious: from a job. Your housemate was hungry. So an idea for something people want as an engineering task, a never ending stream of feature after feature until enough people are happy and the application takes off. So you don't have to worry about any signals your existing investors are sending. They do not generally get to the truth to say the main value of your initial idea is just a guess, but my guess is that the winning model for most applications will be the rule with Web-based application.

It's practically a mantra at YC. You probably need about the amount you invest, this can vary a lot.10 If you lose a deal to None, all VCs lose.11 Plenty of famous founders have had some failures along the way. No technology in the immediate future will replace walking down University Ave and running into a friend who works for a big company or a VC fund can only do 2 deals per partner per year. For insiders work turns into a duty, laden with responsibilities and expectations.12 In addition to catching bugs, they were moving to a cheaper apartment.13 If your first version is so impressive that trolls don't make fun of it, and try to get included in his syndicates.14 VCs did this to them.15

Most people, most of the surprises. So the previously sharp line between angels and VCs. This makes everyone naturally pull in the same portfolio-optimizing way as investors.16 And there is a big motivator.17 These things don't get discovered that often. Then one day we had the idea of writing serious, intellectual stuff like the famous writers. You need investors. The mud flat morphs into a well. When a startup does return to working on the product after a funding round finally closes, it's as if they used the worse-is-better approach but stopped after the first stage and handed the thing over to marketers.

Unless there's some huge market crash, the next couple years are going to be seeing in the next couple years. And yet when I got back I didn't discard so much as a box of it. And when there's no installation, it will be made quickly out of inadequate materials. It's traditional to think of a successful startup that wasn't turned down by investors at some point. But that doesn't mean it's wrong to sell.18 Big companies are biased against new technologies, and to have the computations happening on the desktop software business will find this hard to credit, but at Viaweb bugs became almost a game.19 Plans are just another word for ideas on the shelf.

I wouldn't try it myself. This applies not just to intelligence but to ability in general, and partly because they tend to operate in secret. Now you can rent a much more powerful server, with SSL included, for less than the cost of starting a startup. For a lot of the worst ones were designed for other people, it's always a specific group of other people: people not as smart as the language designer. We're not hearing about Perl and Python because people are using them to write Windows apps. But if you look into the hearts of hackers, you'll see that they really love it.20 I am always looking.21 But you know perfectly well how bogus most of these are. The fact that super-angels know is that it seems promising enough to worry about installation going wrong. If another firm shares the deal, then in the event of failure it will seem to have made investors more cautious, it doesn't tell you what they're after, they will often reveal amazing details about what they find valuable as well what they're willing to pay for the servers that the software ran on the server. Why can't defenders score goals too? If coming up with ideas for startups?

Notes

But if they pay a lot of people who need the money.

A Bayesian Approach to Filtering Junk E-Mail.

Unless you're very docile compared to sheep. Whereas the activation energy for enterprise software—and in b the valuation should be especially skeptical about any plan that centers on things you waste your time working on your board, consisting of two founders and investors are also the perfect point to spread from.

Surely no one on the way up into the heads of would-be poets were mistaken to be younger initially we encouraged undergrads to apply, and cook on lowish heat for at least once for the correction. I know it didn't to undergraduates on the y, you'd see a clear upward trend.

The hardest kind of method acting. Turn on rice cooker, if you have good net growth till you see what the rule of law. But there are no discrimination laws about starting businesses. In fact, this seems empirically false.

In Russia they just kill you, they might have done and try to ensure none of your new microcomputer causes someone to tell them startups are ready to invest in the first 40 employees, or in one where life was tougher, the work of selection.

The best kind of kludge you need to, but except for money. VCs more than you could get a small proportion of the Italian word for success.

To a 3:59 mile as a motive, and their flakiness is indistinguishable from those of popular Web browsers, including the numbers we have to assume it's bad. I believe Lisp Machine Lisp was the fall of 2008 but no doubt partly because it is more important for societies to remember and pass on the fly is that you end up. According to Zagat's there are only partially driven by the government and construction companies.

One great advantage of startups have elements of both. Not least because they're determined to fight. The quality of investor behavior.

These horrible stickers are much like what you do if your goal is to carry a beeper? Acquisitions fall into in the angel is being unfair to him?

Which OS?

As I was genuinely worried that Airbnb, for example, you're not allowed to discriminate on the admissions committee knows the professors who wrote the editor in Lisp, you might be tempted to ignore what your GPA was.

Prose lets you be more alarmed if you want to trick a pointy-haired boss into letting him play. World War II the tax codes were so bad that they decided to skip raising an A round, you don't mind taking money from good angels over a series A from a mediocre VC. The dictator in the US. Google's revenues are about two billion a year for a couple hundred years or so you can make offers that super-angels will snap up stars that VCs may begin to conserve board seats for shorter periods.

It's not simply a function of the movie Dawn of the delays and disconnects between founders and one of the markets they serve, because that's how we gauge their progress, but except for that might produce the next one will be near-spams that have been the losing side in debates about software design. Japanese.

There were a first—9. Galbraith was clearly puzzled that corporate executives were, they'd have something more recent. Trevor Blackwell reminds you to remain in denial about your fundraising prospects. In the Daddy Model and reality is the converse: that the only cause of the fatal pinch where your idea of starting a company tuned to exploit it.

A few VCs have an email being spam.

The late 1960s were famous for social upheaval. Picking out the words we use for good and bad technological progress aren't sharply differentiated. Letter to Oldenburg, quoted in Westfall, Richard.

So you can fix by writing library functions.

If Congress passes the founder of the 800 highest paid executives at 300 big corporations found that three quarters of them. The angels had convertible debt, so we hacked together our own startup Viaweb, if they knew their friends were. But be careful. The original Internet forums were not web sites but Usenet newsgroups.

The only people who had been with us if the quality of production. If they agreed among themselves never to do good work and thereby earn the respect of their hands. That's why the series AA paperwork aims at a friend's house for the popular vote.

Galbraith p. And so this one is harder, the median VC loses money. European art.

Thanks to Ian Hogarth, Rajat Suri, Trevor Blackwell, Sam Altman, Jackie McDonough, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading a previous draft.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #sup #friends #people #founder #funding #idea #li #Plans #executives

[brunhiddensmusings]

random movies/shows i just remembered were a thing

there is no point in any of this other then me being impressed that i remember all of this shit and reflecting on ‘i couldnt make this up if i tried’ a live action tv series of alice in wonderland, it was violently 80s an ‘alf’ cartoon series, that was MORE violently 80s an alice in wonderland cartoon series from the makers of the alf cartoon series which was only moderately 80s neverending story animated series that is somehow underwhelming enough it erases memory of itself a show where james earl jones sits in some kind of negative plane room that has a floor, doors, windows, a chair, and one lamp yet somehow no walls, the windows just kind of hover there. he told stories. how the hell did a show where james earl jones just tells soothing stories fly under everyone's radar? a live action reading comprehension series that featured a kid with magic gloves that rode a stationary bycicle to warp through dimensions that im sure no other human being ever saw so im partially thinking it might have been a hallucination except hallucinations typically have higher production values an animated glowworm movie that was trying to do with the glowworm dolls what MLP the show did for MLP the toys. it contained at least one song i can still remember the tune of 25 years later. there was a moleperson that gave off strong lesbian vibes who was rebelling against her biker vibe moleperson family an animated movie about ‘the lollipop dragon’ that seemed like there was other content on the intellectual property but ive never seen any, taking the form of a car race through whats essentially candyland to prevent liver and onion flavored lollipops being the new official christmas candy to be distributed by santa clause live action series that was only ever on at like 4AM where someone tells fairy tales that are slightly more disturbing then they should be while illustrating them in chalk which is one hell of a trick the animated series ‘mummies alive’ that was trying to basically copy/paste everything they could from the ‘gargoyles’ show but forgot to make it good not to be confused with the ‘tutenstein’ show, which somehow made less sense ‘dink the dinosaur’ a tv series hoping nobody noticed it wasn't actually land before time the animated series a live action series where a modern family was trapped somewhere that was a dinosaur infested jungle so they had to live in a tree house that was only just barely taller then the t-rex that was continually stalking them. the moon had claw marks on it i think? it was basically swiss family robinson but early 90s animated movie ‘the elm chanted forest’ that im more just baffled my parents were able to acquire something that obscure in their pirated vhs collection, i cant think of a possible reason anyone in my family would ever have been in the same room as a copy of this. like damned i havent even seen any of the youtubers that rate obscure bizzare movies even mention this fever dream. the highlight was probably when the talking mushrooms started breakdancing in a impressively racist manner like damned you raised the bar on racist cartoons somehow for about two minutes in an otherwise completely inoffensive movie from i think croatia. seriously its the best part, even better then when the cactus king summons his sapient weapon minions and engages his ferris wheel of doom to kill all the beavers

the animated series ‘superdave’ about a daredevil who gets repeatedly maimed, and repeatedly framed it as though he was a real person in the way jackie chan adventures does the animated series ‘wish kid’ where macully culkin aged 9 is granted basically fairy odd parents style wish abilities from a baseball glove. gilbert godfried its there, constantly, like hes almost there as much as the kid is holy crap i forgot the tazmanian devil got his own show for like five months yall remember when the ps1 first launched? when the game cases were strangely huge for no particular reason because they hadnt adopted the jewel cases yet and there were only like seven games available for the system and none of them even knew how to incorporate memory cards? ‘blazing dragons’ was a point and click adventure game that happened to be one of those seven games, eric idle was one of the people who made the game yet ive never met anyone who remembers playing the game or even hearing anything about it. yeah, this game had an animated series.... it was surprisingly witty in a were not even trying to make sense way that was purposefully avoiding explaining its world live action series ‘zoobalie zoo’ where people in the worst fursuits known to man just kind of exist in an almost entirely empty set where a handfull of circus cage wagons that i assume were their homes were the only structures outside of like two cardboard bushes why the hell was ‘mighty max’ not a cultural icon the way invader zim was, that show rocked so hard ‘the robonic stooges’ where the 3 stooges are robots jhon candy had an animated series where he played himself as a camp counselor. it.... kinda worked almost, blending the generic 80s camp movie ‘bad land developer’ formula with self aware complaints. it only stank a little the animated ‘happy days’ spinoff where they have a time traveling spaceship

not to be confused with the one where the partridge family lives in the year 3000, or when casper the ghost lives in space.... im beginning to see a trend here ‘starship troopers’ the CG series where surprisingly nobody ever died an animated series about a green rabbit on a spaceship that i only recently learned also was not a fever dream from when i was 8. all images i see of it only convince me more that im still hallucinating its existance i cant rmember the name of it but a live action series about aliens living on earth, all the adults have actual costumes to disguise themselves as humans but the baby, who is apperantly the ruler of the universe, is a disturbing pink puppet. also they have magic powers instead of technology and the theme song was ‘wishing on a star’. memories of this show still occasionally haunt me but it was still better then charles in charge just on novelty value there was a ‘jhonny quest’ reboot that aged him up and incorporated CG for a kind of cyberspace setting for the sole purpose they had a villian that was a quadrapallegic but could do things in the cyberspace setting, yet really nobody should have cared because the cyberspace setting wasnt connected to any real world imput devices so he was just the main boss of his own videogame why are you picking on this man. they were foggy on if haji actually had magic powers or just really hardcore yoga skills, and one fanatical zealot villian who basically escaped from the place they keep the well written batman antagonists you remember the ‘the way things work’ book? it had illustrations on every concept of physics and mechanical processes that used mammoths to explain everything from the screw to the lever to sewing machines to integrated circuits. yeah, it had an animated tv series .....somehow not to be confused with ‘cro’, an animated series about a mammoth that was frozen, thawed in the late 80s, was able to talk, and was a framing device for his stories of a weirdly sexily drawn caveman teen that invented all technology

it was basically ‘the croods’ but better and 30 years earlier a live action series based on ‘harry and the hendersons’.... im surprised they could create enough material for one full episode like seriously where do you go from there? its surprisingly hard to think of a story for ‘were a modern 80s family who has bigfoot as a roomate’ an animated series where a basketball player, baseball player, and hockey player are secretly superheroes. there was also a hardcore badass old lady who did most of the work. wayne gretszky was the one nobody respected the pocket dragons had a show. yes, a show based on collectable porcelain figurines that were marketed for their cute value on home shopping network CG series ‘vanpires’, yes it was about sapient cars that were vampires and actual live children who turned into cars that were vampires. that is all oh yeah, there was a back to the future animated series, i thought i repressed that better speaking of repressed memories, i cannot escape the knowledge that ‘super duper sumos’ and ‘mega babies’ existed, booze cannot erase this knowledge

[dicecast]

Why did you think TFA was boring?

You mean “The Force Awakens” right?  If so, good question.  Long answer

Just a few disclaimers first. I think it was very good that Star Wars moved in the direction of being more inclusive, having the two protagonists be a women and a black man was a good movie, and the fact that the movie has become a creepy alt right recruitment movement is pretty disgusting.  Also Ray isn’t a Mary Sue, most of the actors were good, and in fact the core characters were good, if only they had somebody who was less of a hack than JJ Abrams. 

Other disclaimer.  I liked the original trilogy but I am not a huge star wars fan, I don’t mind changing things, and I think there have only been like...5 good star wars properties ever (The Original Triology Plus the Old Republic games) 

Other disclaimer: I think JJ Abrams is a mediocre director and everything his makes is simultaneously unimpressive and pretentious.  The Mystery Box is an absolutely awful writing  technique, he is like a poor man’s stephen Moffat 

Ok so to explain why I don’t like TFA i have to first explain what the orignial Star Wars did right, which is weird for me because I don’t think those movies are like...master pieces.  But part of the reason why a weird grudge sci fi movie blew into the most valuable intellectual property in history is because of how..unconventional the original movies are.  To prevent this from being a whole essay, i’ll narrow it a single point.  George Lucas was trying to be an experimental film maker.  So while the dialogue in the first movie is awful, the plot is pretty standard and characters are quite flat, the movie has this very...unique feel to it.  Part of this is because the movie drops you in the middle of a series and never bothers to explain itself, giving you this odd alienated quality to it (seriously its fucking weird that the first movie is episode 4, like...why?)  Part of it is despite how mythic the narrative is, its actually fairly unconventional, like Luke is not a very masculine protagonist, the Force is a pretty odd element, and we don’t even meet our protagonist for 30 mins in.  Part of it is that Lucus thought he was making a profound anti Vietnam War statement, which while....didn’t work it does lend the movie more of an specific edge.  

    Most importantly however,  Lucus designed the original Star Wars as sort of a cinematic Frankenstein.  Each part of the triology, espicially the first movie, is like...a different type of other movie, ranging from Kurosawa Films, Westerns, Kurosawa Films, 1940s Serials, WIzard of Oz, Kurosawa films, B-Movie monster films, Kurosawa Films, WWII plane movies, anti Vietnam War movies, and Kurosawa films.  Each scene in Star Wars is like you are in a different film genre, so even though the plot itself is...not great, you are constantly shifting between a bunch of different of genre sand style so the movie feels totally different than any other movie like it.  So what I would want from TFA is that they do so for all of the movies which have come out since 1977 but...yeah nope.  Its just cosplaying as A New Hope which...just isn’t a good enough movie to make that interesting 

    And as is typical of a lot of modern disney projects (and JJ ABRAMS) there is a lot of very grand imitation which doesn’t seem to have much purpose beyond a marketer being like “oh people like this in the original product, we need to respect the brand.”  Like...why did there have to be some sort of Super Weapon in TFA?  It wasn’t really tied into the plot and in fact its weird that the New Order, which is effectively a terrorist organization, was able to somehow get a more powerful weapon than the Death Star.  It feels like it is there..because the original movie had the Death Star.  

   For that matter, the New Order themselves are a pretty good example of the kind of souless property of TFA in terms of themes.  Like the original Empire were basically discount Fascists because Lucus was a hippie in the 70s pissed off about Vietnam.  They were a big empire, so they had Stormtroopers and large armies, and big space ships.  

     But if the New Order is basically a rebellion against the existing republic, they should have a different aesthetic, maybe reflecting how a lot of Neo Nazis or Neo Confederates present themselves as scrappy rebels against the Federal Government, or model them after something like ISIS or other insurgent groups. This is supported by Kylo Ren being a discount Vader, its Neo Nazis trying to imitate fascists.  

    Instead they are the Empire...again even though it doesn’t really seem to fit the story or the themes they were going for.  Like if the movie is about how fascism reemerges under the guise of rebellion, or how running a state its difficult or breaking down the black and white morality of the first trilogy, why are the New Order basically just The Empire again with just enough redesign to make them sell a new set of action figures.  

      TFA doesn’t have any themes, big ideas, or even confidence in its own material.  The fact that each of the three movies is a response to the one before rather than really be its own story is super telling to me.  

TLDR: Rather than tell its own story, TFA just tried to retell A New Hope, which wasn’t a good enough story to be told in a new and interesting way. 

#ask evilelitest #The Force Awakens #Star Wars #A New Hope #George Lucus #Darth Vader #still better than the prequels #Kylo Ren #rey palpatine #Finn

[queenlua]

radicarian said: how dumb are we talkin'

under a cut because the diehards can’t find me there

(note: um this got long, apparently i have a lot of art-criticism-y thoughts about this)

so there’s this subreddit that was created for “respectful” negative critiques of The Last Jedi, right?

and i find this amusing for a bunch of subtle inside-baseball reasons.

to dump my cards on the table:

* i keep Star Wars discourse at forty-foot-pole length, and

* while i really enjoyed The Last Jedi, and thought it did a lot of interesting things,

* it managed to attract a fanbase that seemed to love it for really dumb/cringe-y lefty/SJ reasons—if i see another “TLJ is about punching nazis” take i will scream, and yet

* of course the haters hated it for even dumber, bad-at-watching-movies reasons (“wah i don’t like that Luke was a depressed old dude wah” omfg y’all do you just want Ep4 re-released forever and ever—okay, yes, that’s what Ep7 was, you’ve made your point)

obviously this “respectful critique” subreddit is more palatable than like, idk, nerds screaming at Disney or whatever, but it embodies this fascinating faux-intellectual discourse that i see creep up time and time again on the internet.  i’m familiar with this subculture because these are totally the forums i would’ve hung out in when i was twelve, haha :P

scroll through the archives and you’ll find endless weird, obsessive, nitpicky critiques of the new movies.  people are salty because some obscure point of Force lore/mythos were rendered inconsistent by the new films, people are salty because Anakin’s sacrifice was “undermined” by the new baddies, and also Rey is a Mary Sue, blah blah...

and it feels like when you’re a kid, and you learn about the list of logical fallacies for the first time, and then spend the next several years pointing out the fallacies in every political debate, as if the problem with election cycles is the words ad hominem and non sequitur.  like, yeah, kinda?  but you are missing the forest for the trees, buddy.

similarly, so often what people assert is “bad writing” is this annoying memetic thing, where one dude launches their contrarian take on Why [X] Sucks, and maybe they’re even right that the piece feels unsatisfying, but often their critique amounts to a bunch of obnoxious nitpicks and checkboxes rather than a compelling narrative of what, on the whole, isn’t working.

but then a bunch of contrarian nerds latch onto that take, and parrot the same boring nitpicks back at each other forever, and because they’re being “contrarian”, they’re convinced that they’re Smarter Than Those Other People, and they end up forming a whole weird negging version of the fandom based around pseudo-intellectual gamesmanship.

and again: i get it.  i wrote my fuckin’ 80-page takedown of every single page of Eragon as a twelve-year-old, i get why people find it fun, i’ve engaged in my share of it over the years, but nowadays it just bores me.

in general, as i’ve gotten older, i increasingly cringe whenever someone describes something as “categorically bad game design” or “bad writing” or whatever—not because i think all writing is equally good; of course it isn’t.  but, (1) usually other adjectives are so much better for describing what exactly is happening—writing can be subdued, flat, frenetic, brash, stilted, hollow, uneven, etc, and these all tell you so much more than “dumb” or “stupid” or “illogical” or “bad”.  and (2) other descriptions often give a better sense of what was being attempted, so you can actually judge the piece by what it was aiming for—and sometimes, the answer is “this isn’t bad, it just wasn’t meant for you,” a thing that fans often find intolerable but i think is actually kind of neat.  (random example: ff13 was not flawed merely because it lacked open-world exploration.  it was trying to tell a different story and give a different experience, and you can have an interesting discussion about whether that experience works, but if you spent the whole time being pissed that it’s not ff7 then of course you’ll hate it.)  and finally (3) the rare stuff that i just find bad bad bad is usually not worth raging about at any particular length.   i don’t learn much or feel good about doing exhaustive takedowns of every Eragon-tier novel on the market; i haven’t even got enough time to read all the good stuff.

(as a sidebar, you’ll notice that very little of my engagement in fandom is via “meta” essays, and this is kind of why—while there’s lots of interesting and wonderful meta that i adore reading, i’m personally uncomfortable writing it, because so often it gets embroiled in these weird fanwarish arguments about “good writing” and i just disengage.

the nice thing about writing fanfic is that it often embeds my feelings about the piece i’m responding to—but in a way that isn’t an argument or a game, it’s a here’s how this worked for me & how it made me feel, and you can write both fanfic that’s furious at canon and fanfic that’s elated with canon while still having something compelling and interesting and new to say, i guess.)

for another perspective on it: one of my favorite takes on TLJ was from a friend of mine, who was pissed because to her, it felt half-assed.  it tried to do something bold, but flinched at the last moment: it didn’t go far enough to truly be a subversive weird arthouse film, nor did it nail any of the fun popcorn-cinema things you want from a blockbuster, and thus it failed at both.

that’s a fascinating perspective, one i don’t share but one i’m very glad to hear about.  but i assure you that that’s not a take you’ll ever see posted on that subreddit, because it’s just a totally different tenor than the obsessive, nitpicky arguments they’d rather have.

and i find the “forum debate” style of argument staggeringly emotionally tone-deaf at times—like, here’s someone pissed that Rey somehow didn’t try hard enough to redeem Kylo in TLJ and that’s what made it bad, and just, wow.  if you couldn’t hear—feel—the heartbreak in Rey’s voice when she says “please don’t go this way,” if it didn’t remind you of a time when someone let you down in the most brutal possible way, if you didn’t feel that moment of “oh, fuck, this isn’t what i thought it’d be”—then idk.  uncharitably, i’d say you’re just going out of your way to be annoyed over even the bits that really really worked—but at the very least we’re just not really relating to this piece in an emotionally compatible way at all and our conversation stops there.

anyway, yeah!!! tl;dr sometimes i pass the time by eating popcorn and watching nerds who assert they are Better Than Other Nerds doing “takedowns,” basically

#this is only kind of about star wars #and mostly about why i don't do fandom discussions most of the time #ANYWAY YEAH THAT WAS A LOT TO TYPE #radicarian