#also how could i mess up just putting the numbers into a formula (?) that badly

[imabiscuitinthousandworlds]

my brain: youuuu want it alllll but you caN'T HAVE IT

me. who just wants to get a good or at least passable grade in the topic i'm super passionate about: yeah fuck you too

#gonna have to. practice properly this weekend #gonna reread everything we did and find practice stuff #i want to keep physics and the topic is literally so fascinating i am INVESTED #why isnt that enough to get a good grade thats so unfair #also how could i mess up just putting the numbers into a formula (?) that badly #like i seriously failed on the last test like. REALLY badly. im not going to again ofc i refuse buttttt #its just sooo annoying why cant i just be super invested and remember random obscure details abt the topic and get a grade on that :( #a biscuit's rambles #at least i dont have to memorise that stupid ass formulas anymore. i actually do have a chance lmao

[falcqns]

partner in crime lV

pairing: August Walker x Reader, August Walker x OFC (Maeve)

summary: August attempts a mission and looks for a nanny.

warnings: ANGST, mentions of graphic death, fluff, mentions of character death, mention of harm inflicted upon an infant. 18+ ONLY.

a/n: This one got a little dark, sorry! Hope you enjoy! also if I missed ANYTHING in the warnings, PLEASE LET ME KNOW! I have mom brain so it wouldn't surprise me if I forgot something!

August hung up the phone with a sigh.

Sloane needed him for a mission.

It wasn’t a high risk mission or anything, Sloane had taken him off of those when he’d informed her he’d be taking Maeve in, but August was still nervous. He didn’t really have friends, and the friends he did have were coming on the mission with him. He had no contact with his mother, his father was dead, and he had no siblings.

He had no one to watch Maeve. He sighed, and flopped his body down on the bed, being careful to avoid the sleeping baby just inches from him. He didn’t know what to do. Sloane said she’d watch her, but she was needed at the Capitol, so his only option was his mother.

He still had her phone number, and she still had his, but he was still nervous. He found her number in his contacts, not under any name, just a number, but he knew it was hers. He took a deep breath, and hit ‘call’.

She answered after the fourth ring. “August?” She said, in a rather monotone voice.

“Hello mom.” He said hesitantly. He heard a slight laugh on the other side of the phone.

“I’m guessing you need something. You never call me.” She said, and August swallowed the lump in his throat, sparing a glance at Maeve.

“Yeah, I do. I um-” He took a deep breath to try and stop the shakiness in his voice. “I have a daughter.” He said simply, and when there was no response, he continued. “I-I only found out about her 2 weeks ago. Her mother died, and I’m all she has left. But, I have to go on a mission, and I don’t have anyone else to watch her. I was wondering if you could.”

“Of course I can.”

August let out a huge sigh of relief. “Thank you. I know you and I aren’t on the best of terms, but I have to leave tomorrow night and I haven’t found a nanny yet.” He said.

His mother laughed breathily. “August, I know I wasn’t the best mother to you, and I apologize for that. It’s one of the biggest regrets of my life, pushing you away. If I can make it better, then I want to. And she’s my granddaughter. It’s my job to be there and help you.” She said, and August felt a tear drip down his face.

“Thank you, mom.” He said, a smile breaking onto his lips.

“You’re so welcome Auggie.” His mother said warmly and full of love, a tone and nickname he hadn’t heard since his father was still alive.

August took a shaky breath. He was fully packed for the mission, and his mother was almost there. He knew Maeve would be perfectly fine without him for a day or two, but he didn’t know if he would be. What if she had a trauma meltdown while he was gone, and his mom didn’t know how to handle it? What if something happened to her, and he couldn’t get there quick enough? He’d never be able to live with himself if something terrible happened to her. Despite going into this agreement of taking in Maeve with pity for her situation rather than love for her, she had a hold on his heart, and their bond was the strongest one August had ever had.

To be honest? Maeve had become his reason for getting up in the morning. It used to be his job, but when Anais walked through his door with Maeve in her arms, that little girl became his reason to live. Finding out who hurt Maeve’s mom was a top priority. He couldn’t let his little girl down.

Although he hated to think about it, or admit it, he knew that one day, Maeve would ask what happened to her mother. She’d probably ask him her first day of school.

He could just imagine her on a crisp September morning, a little dress on her body, running shoes on her feet, and her curly hair in two little braids. A backpack practically the size of her on her back, and her eyes full of excitement. He could see her bounding up to him in the school yard after her first day, and the first sentence out of her mouth.

‘Daddy, why don’t I have a mommy like everyone else in my class?’

His breath caught in his throat merely at the imagery. What would he tell her? He wasn’t religious, so telling her that her ‘mommy is up in heaven’ would mess with both of their minds, and his moral compass. How do you explain to a child, any child, that their mother is dead, and you didn’t know why?

A knock at the door pulled him from his reverie, followed by a squeal from Maeve who was playing at his feet. He stood up, and pulled her up to sit on his hip. He took a deep breath, and the father daughter duo made their way to the door to greet his mother.

He opened the door, and there stood his mom. She still looked the same, with a few more wrinkles, and a few more grey hairs. The only thing that was different was the warm smile sitting on her lips.

“Hi Auggie.” She said tentatively, and August smiled back. “Hi mom. Come on in.” He said, and she followed him inside the apartment. She looked around in an amazement at his rather large apartment.

“Your place is beautiful, honey.” She said, and August smiled again.

“Thank you. We recently moved because she needed her own room and playroom and my one bedroom bachelor pad wasn’t cutting it.” he explained, and him and his mom shared a laugh, the first one in many years.

He showed her around the living room, kitchen, his bedroom, her bedroom, the bathrooms, the office, and the both balconies. He dropped Maeve off in her playroom, and August and her mom made their way back to the kitchen.

“So, you might have noticed she doesn’t have a crib.” August said, and his mother nodded.

“Yes I did. Is there a reason she doesn’t have one?” His mother asked.

August took a deep breath and began to explain. “I mentioned that her mother had died, but I didn’t mention how. Her mothers name was Adriana. We were never in a relationship, I barely knew her. We had one night together, and I never saw her again. But, a little over 3 weeks ago, I got a call from a lady named Anais Torres from Child Protective Services and she told me about Maeve. Adriana was killed. In front of Maeve. I won’t go into detail about her death because it was awful. They also hurt Maeve. Not as bad as Adriana, but still pretty badly. She has some scarring around her wrists from it, but mainly it’s emotional trauma.” He said, and reached out to hold his mothers hand when she began to cry.

“That poor baby,” She said, a sniffle coming out as well. August nodded. “She seems so happy though.”

August nodded again before continuing. “She is. She has ups and downs. She doesn’t fully understand what happened, but I think she has PTSD. She goes to a psychiatrist next week and I’ll find out for sure, but I’m pretty much certain she does. The crib is the main trigger. They restrained her to a crib, and she was forced to watch her mom die through there. I put her in it the first night, but she was already half asleep when I laid her in it, so she didn’t notice. She had a nightmare a few hours after, and that’s when she realized she was in a crib. I thought about a playpen, but I assume she’ll have the same reaction. Her other triggers are handcuffs, guns, small spaces. She’s also having an aversion to the smell of peppermint gum, so I think whoever killed her mom was chewing peppermint gum.” He explained, and his mom nodded.

“Okay. If she does get triggered, what do I have to do to calm her down?” “Hold her.” August said simply. “Just remind her that she’s safe and loved and nothings going to hurt her anymore. It can go on for a while, but it never goes beyond crying. She’ll settle down, and fall asleep. She’ll be a little off and emotional for the next few hours, but she’ll be back to normal soon enough. Playing with her hair helps a lot, as does her pacifier.” He said, and his mom nodded.

“Okay. Does she have a daily schedule?” She asked, and August nodded again.

“I usually wake her up around 6:30 because I have to be at work for 7 and she comes with me, but I’ll let her fall asleep in the car again. If I let her sleep, she’ll wake up around 9 or 9:30, so don’t worry about waking her up. She has a floor bed, and she’s been staying in it really well. She doesn’t nap in it, she prefers to nap in my bed, which I allow. For breakfast she has formula, oatmeal, dry cheerios, and some fruit. She’ll play for a few hours, and then she’ll have a nap. She’ll sleep for an hour or an hour and a half, but don’t let her sleep longer than an hour and a half. Then she’ll have lunch. Usually she’ll have the same thing I have, so whatever you make, just give her some of it. Just make sure it’s in small enough pieces. She has a bottle after, and I let her have a little bit of screen time. Her favourite show is Mickey Mouse ClubHouse, so I let her watch a few episodes. She’ll have another bottle, and another nap, and then she’ll play again for a few hours. By the time she’s done playing she’ll be ready for dinner. After dinner, she has a bath, then a book and bed. She usually goes to bed between 6:30-7.” He said, and his mom nodded.

“I put her schedule on the fridge in case you forget anything, along with her triggers. If you need anything, call me. I managed to convince Sloane, my boss, to let me keep my phone on in case you or her need anything.” He said. She just nodded again, and then a chime from his phone was heard, signalling that Ilsa and Benji were on their way to pick him up.

He sighed. “I should go say goodbye to her. I’ve gotta go.” He said, and his mom followed him into Maeve’s playroom where she was building (or trying to) a tower with big lego blocks.

“Maeve?” He called, getting down to her level and watched as she whipped her head around and gave August a big smile. “Come to Dada,” he said, and she dropped the Lego she was holding to crawl over.

He heard his mom chuckle behind him. “She listens a lot better than you did at that age,”

August smiled as he scooped her up. “I always think the same thing. Definitely learned it from her mother.” August remarked sadly. Partly out of what he had learned about Adriana, but mainly because he was going to miss the little girl he’d come to love so easily.

“I’m gonna miss you, but you’re gonna have so much fun with your grandma. I love you.” He said, and she smiled and cuddled him back, her curly head resting on his shoulder. His phone chimed again and he let out a sad sigh.

“Dada has to go. I’ll see you in two days, okay?” He said, and tried not to cry when he handed her off to his mom.

He said goodbye to his mom, and gave her another kiss on the head, before walking out the door, and trying to ignore the sounds of his daughter's pained wails for him. He grabbed his bag, and headed out the door.

Benji and Ilsa were waiting outside in a normal, inconspicuous looking car. He took a deep breath, cleared his throat, and put on his tough face. He didn't want to cry in front of the team. He needed to be tough, and crying wouldn’t make him ‘The Hammer”.

“Hey Walker.” Benji said as he got in, and August gave him a smile.

“Where’s the mission?” He asked monotonously.

“Germany. We’re investigating a target who we believe is a part of The Amiens Family gang.”

At the mention of the gang, August almost choked on his own saliva. “D-did you say Amiens?”

Benji nodded, a confused look spreading on his features. “Yeah. Apparently they’re trying to find a civilian who escaped their custody once before thanks to the police, and according to the files Ethan and I recovered last week, this person has a lot of information, mainly about the financial aspect, and they are not happy in the slightest that this person escaped. One of the targets is in Germany following a lead of their own, so we’re following him.” He said.

August sighed and nodded, and was thankful that no one suspected him yet. He had to practically beg Sloane to keep Maeve off of his file, and he wasn’t ready for everyone to know about her quite yet. She was going through a lot, and the next few months were going to be tough on the both of them as they got to know each other, so the less people involved, the better.

Then, a thought popped into his head. “What’s this civilian’s name?” He asked.

Benji glanced down at the file before speaking. “Alexis Amiens. I think she was very high up in the family, but I couldn’t be sure.” August nodded, and tried to appear unbothered by this information on the outside while he had a freak out on the inside.

If he was remembering correctly, Alexis was the twin sister of Adriana. So, they were after someone who was out to get Maeve’s aunt. That scared the shit out of him. Not just the fact that they were going to be tailing someone who was either a close relation or close contact to the people who killed Adriana, and hurt his daughter, but the fact of who it was. It could have been a coincidence, just like Maeve’s screaming was, but just like the screaming, August didn’t think so.

Were they after Maeve? And if they were, what did they want from her? He desperately needed to fully read her file, but he couldn't very well pull it out in the middle of the car with Ilsa and Benji, who would question him about it, and then demand to know who Maeve and Adriana were. He agreed with himself that he’d wait until he was in Germany, and he’d find time to sit down and read it.

He’d read bits and pieces, but after what Anais had briefly told him about Adriana’s family, he never looked in the family section. Hell, he only barely glanced at it for her name and age before, so he should probably read up on it.

By the time they made it to Germany, August wanted to go home.

He missed Maeve, and his mom had called him and told him Maeve was having a meltdown because she heard police sirens, and it set her off. She calmed down, and was fine, but he wished he could be there for her.

The poor girl was probably so confused, August thought to himself. In the past month, her mom was killed in front of her, a gun was held to her head, she was saved by the police then handed over to CPS, dropped off at some random man (in her eyes) house, and just when she was feeling comfortable, that man had to leave, and she was being watched by another random person she’d never seen before.

But, as much as August wished that he could be with her 24/7, he knew that wasn’t a reality. He had to find a nanny to take care of her during the day, but how would find one that he trusted? He knew for a fact that there were probably people out there who wanted him dead. It was just a part of the job description. Before Maeve, he didn’t care too much.

He always told himself that everything happens for a reason. If he was killed on a mission, it was his time to die. Unfortunate and untimely but still, it was clearly the universe deciding his life was finished. But, now he had Maeve. He had a 7 month old to take care of. If he died, that meant leaving Maeve.

He knew it would happen one day, but he’d always hoped it would be from old age, not an enemy or stray bullet. He didn’t want that on her conscience. He didn't want the idea that ‘everyone I get close to dies’ in his daughters head because that wasn’t healthy.

No. He couldn’t die. Not until he heard her say Dada, not until she took her first steps, until she went to her first day of school (a thought that made him slightly teary eyed, despite being a good 3-4 years away). Not ever. He would not leave his daughter.

He’d lucked out and got his own hotel room. He had a feeling that it was because Ethan was still a little wary of him, as he was new, but he didn’t care. As soon as he was handed the key to the overpriced hotel room where the gala that they’d be attending the next night was being held, he was off towards the elevator, his duffel bag and briefcase in hand.

The second the door shut behind him, he pulled out the file, and sat down at the table that was located beside the big windows and balcony doors. He opened the file, and read through it thoroughly, making sure to not miss anything.

Name: Maeve Luna Walker

Age:  7 months old

Birthday: March 15th, 2020

He knew that. He kept reading.

Mothers name: Adriana Cora Amiens

Fathers name: August Nathaniel Walker

Godmothers name: Alexis Luna Amiens

He swallowed roughly. Alexis was not only his daughter's aunt, she was her godmother. And, Maeve was named after her.

Reason for removal from household: Mother’s death.

Next of kin: August Nathaniel Walker (father)

He was the only one listed, and that satisfied him. At least CPS knew better than to put her with her mothers side.

Description of conditions of the environment where the child was living:

August took a deep breath, before reading the paragraph.

Maeve was found by LAPD police officer (REDACTED) doing a wellness check called in by neighbour (REDACTED).

August rolled his eyes at the word redacted. He could get the information, but that would have to wait until he was back in Washington.

She was restrained to the bed using metal, police grade handcuffs. The diaper she was wearing had been soiled in more than once, indicating she had not been changed in several days. She was extremely hungry and dehydrated. The doctors at (REDACTED) hospital observed that if she had not been rescued when she was, she would have died within 24 hours from dehydration and starvation. There was no physical evidence of abuse on her, other than some light scarring on her wrists from the metal handcuffs. However, she is exhibiting signs of emotional trauma and will likely develop Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It is unclear at this time whether or not she witnessed the murder of her mother, Adriana Amiens, or not.

Addition: as of September 17th- it has been confirmed through viewing of security camera footage that Maeve was indeed present and conscious during the murder of her mother, Adriana Amiens.

He pushed the file away after reading that paragraph. His poor little girl. She almost died because of what happened, and although she wouldn’t have known what was happening, she most definitely recognized the feeling of being hungry, thirsty, and soiled beyond belief. August told himself his little girl would never experience hunger or thirst again if he had anything to do with it.

He took a deep breath to calm his anxiety that had blended into anger, before reading further, specifically on her mothers family’s history.

Adriana Cora Amiens, born August 5th, 1989, was the daughter of Amiens Family Mob leader Charles Jacob Amiens, nicknamed The Master, and his wife, Rose Alena Amiens (formerly Anderson). She was the twin of Alexis Luna Amiens.

Not much is known about her early life, or her education, other than she had a twin sister, an older brother named Andrew, and was privately schooled.

She had very few long term relationships. Her longest relationship has been noted as one of her fathers lackeys, Anton Filho. They began dating in 2000, and the relationship endured until 2005. Sources close to the family state that he was killed by Charles for ‘deflowering his daughter’.

Adriana reportedly emancipated herself due to the murder of Filho, and had zero contact with her father, and the rest of her family, including her twin sister Alexis because of it.

In 2019, she fell pregnant. Sources say that the father is unknown, while others believe it is Fritz Corleone, a former mobster she had been spotted with, however this was never confirmed or denied by either party. It is rumoured that she regained contact with Alexis, who emancipated herself from her family not long after Adriana did, although Adriana did not know this, but this has not been confirmed.

It is unknown whether she went through with the pregnancy and if she did, it is unknown of the child's whereabouts after the birth, and following Adriana’s death.

Adriana died on September 15th of this year. The cause of death has not been announced.

August rubbed his eyes roughly with his fingers. That was a lot of information to take in at once. He definitely thought she made the right choice by emancipating herself from her family after what her father did, but it didn’t go into detail about her father at all. His last hope for that lead was Wikipedia, which meant he’d have to cross reference all the information with the CIA database. He had planned to do so when he originally found out Adriana had been murdered, but he’d been so traumatized by the pictures he found of Maeve that he never looked at it again.

He pulled his laptop out of the briefcase, opened Google, and typed in Charles Amiens on one tab, before opening the CIA database on another. He typed the same thing in the database browser, before heading back to Google. He clicked on the wikipedia link and began reading.

In the files he read previously, there were no pictures of the family. In Charles page however, there was a man who looked just as you’d assume a mobster to look. The greasy slicked back hair, the scowl on his face, the curl in his eyebrow. August didn't dwell on the photo, but rather skipped down to the text on the bottom.

Charles Jacob Amiens was born on November 18th, 1967 to father Jacob Amiens and mother Elizabeth Amiens (formerly Jones), in Brooklyn, New York, New York, United States of America.

It is currently unknown where he obtained an education, both primary, secondary and post secondary.

August switched over to the database to check on the schooling. He confirmed that it is unknown where he obtained his schooling, but on the database, it says that it was a private schooling program named “The Family”. Something about that name was familiar, but he resolved to check on it later.

Amiens took over the head of the family mob the day he turned 18. Suspiciously, this was also the day that his father, Jacob Amiens, went missing and was not found until 2 months later, when his body was found in Prospect Park, although it was clear in the initial investigation that the murder did not occur there.

Now that sparked August’s interest. Did Charles really kill his father or was that just another one of the many coincidences that he’d come across in the last few weeks? Much like the other ones, he found it highly unlikely.

Charles has been associated with over 1500 murders in the upper California area, where he relocated his entire family and employees soon after his fathers body was recovered.

August checked this information as well, and it was also true. Just as he was about to go back to the wikipedia page, something caught his eye.

A notable pattern in the murders that Charles himself carries out is that he carves into his victims, specifically the initials MA, which most take to stand for Master Amiens, which is what he has his men call him.

August slammed his computer shut at that.

Adriana was murdered by her father. He thought back to the photos of the gun being pointed in Maeve’s face. Was Charles the one who inflicted all of this pain on his tiny 7 month old baby currently asleep in Washington under his mothers care?

August felt conflicted. On one hand, he wanted to murder Charles and all those who ever laid their eyes and hands on Adriana and Maeve, but on the other hand, he had a feeling that there was more to Adriana’s murder.

What kind of father would do that to their daughter? August knew he wasn’t the best person. He had a dark history, especially one with the Apostles, but ever since Lane revealed they were going to use Julia as a pawn in the game, he couldn’t do it, and he backed out. He’d changed. It doesn’t mean that he’s a perfect person, but he could never even think to do the things that Charles had done, much less to his daughter.

August glanced around the room, and his eyes landed on the warm and inviting looking bed, and decided to leave the research for tonight. Maeve was safe, and he had a mission to think about. He grabbed the file and lifted it up to put it in the briefcase, when a small envelope addressed to him fell out.

He put the file away, and bent down to grab the letter. He sat down on the bed and opened it.

‘August,

I’m writing you this letter in case anything happens to me.

After our night together, I fell pregnant, and gave birth to a little girl. Her name is Maeve Luna Walker. I made sure she got your last name, and that you were on the birth certificate. I never wanted her to grow up without a mom, but I think I’ve known since the minute I found out I was pregnant that she’d end up with you.

I’m loving being a mom. It’s the best job I could have, and I want you to know I’m not keeping her from you on purpose. We didn’t talk about our families that night, but I come from a rather dark one. I won’t go into details, but us having contact would ultimately result in your death. I don’t want that to happen. The CIA and the world needs you more than Maeve and I do right now.

If anything happens to me, please find who did it. There are people after me, but I don’t know who. I do, however, have a suspicion it has to do with my family. You’re a great man, and an excellent CIA agent. I know you’ll be able to do it.

When you find the woman of your dreams, I want her to adopt Maeve. It pains me to say that, but it’s the right thing to do. Maeve deserves to grow up in a happy and healthy household, a household that I know only you can provide. I need you to protect our daughter. She is the light of my life, and I know she’ll be the light of yours too. She’s a sweet little girl who is sweet and kind to everyone she comes across. She amazes me in the same way you did.

I’m so sorry if I’m gone when you’re reading this, but if I am, it was my time to go. I know we only had one night together, but I want you to know that I love you. I never stopped thinking about you, not for one minute. I love you so much. I will never stop loving you, especially for giving me Maeve, my light in my otherwise pitch black world.

I know you’ll be the best daddy to our little girl, and I’m sorry I won’t get to see her grow up. If she’s anything like her father, she’ll be the best.

I love you. Thank you. I’m sorry.

Adriana.

P.S. I wrote Maeve a letter as well. I was hoping you could give it to her when you feel it's the right time.’

August dropped the letter to the ground and let out a sob, his hands coming to cover his face. Adriana knew that she was going to die, and that there was nothing she could do. Even in that horrible, unthinkable and terrifying situation, she put Maeve first. She thought about Maeve’s safety and wellbeing, both physical and mental. She wanted their daughter to grow up happy and healthy, and wanted him to be happy too.

He felt awful. He’d thought about getting her number, but ultimately decided against it. His line of work didn’t exactly allow him time to have a relationship like that. Hell, it barely gave him enough time to parent, but he managed that. Maybe if he had just gotten her number, he could have saved her from all of this pain. He could have seen the moment that his child took her first breath. He could have seen her first words, the first time she crawled, all of it.

He picked up the letter and folded it up before placing it into his wallet for safe keeping. He picked up the file again. He grabbed the letter addressed to Maeve, and placed it in a different section of his briefcase. Once he was home he’d put in his safe until he was ready for her to have it. He thought about peeking at it, but ultimately decided against it. Adriana wrote that for Maeve, not him. When she read it, it would be up to her if she let him see the contents. He doubted he would let her read the one from him anyways.

Once everything was put away, August flopped on the bed, fully clothed still. It wasn’t long after his tears began to flow freely, and he thought about the mother of his child, who was never going to see her little girl again. He thought back to that night, and suddenly, he could remember every little detail. The colour of her hair, her eyes. The shape of her nose and lips. The way she embraced him with her arms, and touched him with her hands.

Just before he fell asleep, he grabbed his phone off the bedside table where he’d thrown in, and opened up Adriana’s instagram. He found a few selfies that she had posted around the time that they had met, and screenshotted them.

He found one that captured her beauty perfectly, and made that one his lock screen. His home screen was Maeve, the first night they were together, asleep on his chest. That way he had both his girls on his phone no matter where he went, even if one of them wasn’t actually his anymore.

August awoke to banging on his door the next morning.

He groaned, but stood up and answered the door. He was greeted by Ethan, with a stupid grin on his face.

“Rough night?” Hunt asked, and August nodded, stepping to the side and allowing him in.

“Need something?” He grunted out, and Ethan nodded.

“Benji asked me to check on you. He mentioned that you and him had spoken about the Amiens family when him and Ilsa picked you up, and you seemed a little on edge. I just want to make sure we’re both on the same team here.” Ethan said, a serious look on his face.

August always respected Ethan, despite them not always being friends. Ethan trusted his team, and if he had any doubts about anything, he always confronted them himself. He never let things play out. August could come up with a lie about why he was uncomfortable about it, but Ethan had a knack for smoking out liars, so he couldn’t do that. He didn’t want to risk anything.

“I’ve actually been investigating them on my own, is all. I-” He swallowed the lump in his throat. “I have a connection to them.” He said simply, and he almost hoped that that would be enough to make Ethan leave it alone, although he knew it wasn’t.

Ethan sat on the chair next to the table that held his briefcase. August sighed and sat on the still unmade bed. “My daughter.”

Ethan sputtered slightly before speaking. “Y-You have a daughter?” he asked, and August nodded in response.

“I do. She was born in March of this year, but I didn’t find out about her until the beginning of this month. Her mother was a part of the Amiens family. Specifically, Adriana.” He admitted, and Ethan sighed.

“Wow. That changes things. Wasn’t she murdered recently?” Ethan inquired, and August nodded once more.

“Yes. In front of Maeve.” He said, and corrected himself when he saw the confusion on Ethan’s face. “Her name is Maeve. They handcuffed my 7 month old to a crib, and forced her to watch her mother be murdered by her grandfather. That’s a speculation though, I’m not 100% certain. He also pointed a gun at her head through the crib, and I assume they were going to shoot, but the police raided where they were being held at that moment.” August said, and Ethan sighed in sadness.

“That’s rough. How is she doing now?” Ethan asked, and August smiled at the thought of his little girl. “She goes through waves. One minute she’s a happy and healthy little girl whose only concern is what toy she’s going to play with next, and the next she’s almost frozen, and seems to be reliving what happened to her and her mother all over again. She can’t sleep in a crib, or a playpen. She hates police officers, guns, handcuffs, and the smell of peppermint. In some ways she’s a normal baby, but there are so many things she’s struggling through, that I’m worried about her development.”

Ethan nodded, and was about to open his mouth to speak, when August’s phone went off. August picked it up, and answered.

His heart dropped into his stomach at his mom's words. Maeve had woken up and realized that August wasn’t there, so she called out for her Mama. When August’s mom had said that her Dada would be back in a few days, she was immediately sent into a meltdown, and his mom couldn’t calm her down, even after half an hour.

“Fuck. Okay. Let me think of something and I’ll call you back.” He said, and his mom thanked him before hanging up.

He turned to Ethan. “How badly do you need me on this mission?” he asked, and Ethan furrowed his brow.

“Is something wrong with Maeve?” He asked and August nodded.

“She’s having a meltdown because I’m not there and my mom can’t calm her down.” Ethan’s eyes widened.

“We can make do without you. You can go home, you’re needed there more than here at the moment.” He said, standing up, and helping August to get packed. August nodded, and as soon as he was packed he turned to Ethan.

“Thank you. I know this mission is important.” He said, and Ethan smiled at him.

“Being a father trumps all of that. You have a little girl, a little girl who just went through hell, so don’t even worry about it. Go make sure she’s okay.” He said, and August nodded, a smile peeking through on his lips.

August dropped his bag as soon as he made it through the door, in favour of finding Maeve. The door shutting behind him seemed to alert his mom to his presence, and a few seconds later, she appeared in the doorway of his bedroom.

“Hi, honey.” She said, opening her arms for a hug. August let himself relax in his mothers embrace for a few moments before leading him into the bedroom.

“She managed to cry herself to sleep, and hasn’t woken up yet. I thought you being here when she woke up would be better than anything else.” She said, and August nodded.

“Thank you.” He said, sincerely, and his mom smiled. “It’s no problem. Other than her huge meltdown she was a perfect angel. I’ll get going, and let you two spend some time together. If you need anything at all, just give me a call, okay?” She reassured, and August thanked her again.

“I’m really glad you’re giving me a second chance, Auggie. I hate what I put you through after your father died. I hate the person I became. I thought I couldn’t be a single parent, but after seeing you do it, I don’t know why I ever thought that.” She said, a tear slipping down her face.

“Mom, it’s okay. I never hated you. I didn’t really understand why you were so cold and distant all of a sudden, but I get it. I wasn’t an easy kid, and I’m sure Dad dying didn’t help,” He joked, pulling a laugh out of his mom. “You were too much like him for your own good.” She said, and August smiled in agreement.

He watched as his mother gave Maeve a kiss on the head, before giving him one as well. “You’re doing a terrific job. I love you, son.” She said, and now it was August’s turn for a tear to fall.

“I love you too, mom.”

He walked his mom to the front door, and closed and locked it behind her once she left. He glanced at his watch, and decided to let Maeve sleep a little longer. Her poor little body was probably exhausted, just like his was from the quick time changes. He walked back into the bedroom, kicked off his shoes, and laid beside his daughter on the bed.

As soon as his head hit the pillow, Maeve’s eyes opened, and a huge smile broke out on her face when she saw her Dada. She cooed and placed her hand on his mouth again. August pressed a kiss to her flesh, and to August’s amazement, she smiled and giggled, instead of crying and asking for Adriana.

“Hello, my love. I missed you,” He whispered, as his daughter snuggled up to him, and closed her eyes again. August followed suit, and the pair were out within seconds.

It took a few days for Maeve to be back to herself fully. Everytime August would leave a room, she’d get anxious and cry, almost as if she thought he wouldn’t come back. August knew that it was his fault. He shouldn’t have taken the mission, she wasn’t ready to be left with random people yet, at least for days on end.

As he sat on the couch working on his laptop, Maeve playing with some cars while watching Mickey Mouse Clubhouse at his feet, he realized he needed a nanny. He really didn’t like the fact that he’d been bringing her to work everyday. No one else cared, but he’d rather her first words she says with him not be ‘gun’ or ‘murder’.

He had gotten a few numbers from one of the other agents who was also a parent, but had yet to call any of them, so that’s what he worked on while Maeve was distracted.

A few hours later, and he’d been having terrible luck. Everyone he called either couldn’t do it because of another job, had another family, wasn’t nannying anymore, or was 16. He was beginning to give up hope, when he looked at the last name on his list.

Y/N Y/L/N - (xxx) xxx-xxxx

He tried not to be too hopeful going into the phone call, but when you said that you were available anytime, and were willing to meet with him the next day. He was very pleased to learn that you had worked with children in the past who had PTSD, and developmental disabilities. He knew you were the one already, and knew Maeve would be in the perfect hands with you.

He had religiously cleaned his apartment last night, making sure it was up to standard for a nanny. As he vacuumed Maeve’s playroom, he realized she needed more toys. She had a few, but definitely not enough to support her development. He also needed to get her more books.

Maeve seemed to know what was happening the next morning, because when August woke her up she was all smiles, rather than her grumpy and cuddly self, who cried over August accidentally dropping her favourite pacifier on the ground.

He got her changed and dressed, and put her in her playroom while he got showered and ready. It was a Saturday, and he knew that you wouldn’t be staying for more than an hour today, but he also wanted to appear professional in the beginning. You’d get to see the mess that he was after some missions later.

He immediately liked you. The meeting time was 10:30, and you showed up at 10:25. You had told him that you once worked a job where you had to be on the floor 5 minutes before your shift actually started, so you were in the habit of showing up 5 minutes early to everything.

Maeve instantly liked you as well. She’d crawled up to you, and gave you a hug, and then refused to leave your grasp once she was in it. You had brought her a stuffed elephant, and told her and August that you loved elephants and always gave them to new children you nannied.

He showed you around the apartment, and blushed when you commended him about the floor bed rather than forcing her to sleep in a crib. You also mentioned that it made you happy when parents cared less about fixing the PTSD and cared more about supporting their child and their needs at that point in time because the majority of parents you’d worked with used exposure therapy.

By the time that you’d left August’s apartment, he knew that he’d found a lifelong female presence for Maeve. He wasn’t blind, you were insanely beautiful, but he didn’t want to imply anything because if he was wrong, the only one who’d end up hurting was Maeve, and he didn’t like that.

August watched as Maeve crawled over to the couch, and climbed up. His heart melted when she pushed the curtain aside and waved a chubby hand as best as she could at you as you left the building.

August walked over and scooped her up. “Did you like Ms Y/N?” He asked, and took her excited babbles and hand gestures as a yes. August smiled, and set her down. She took off running (crawling) towards the playroom, adn August turned to make dinner.

As he cooked for the two of them, he thought back to what you had said about exposure therapy. It made him happy to know that he was doing what was considered the right thing, and not forcing her to sleep somewhere that was the cause of so much of her trauma. While he wasn’t thrilled he assembled it for nothing, he knew it wasn’t her fault. He could have fully read the file and skipped the crib when he was shopping, but at least he saved another mother some money and assembly time.

Later that night, as he sat with Maeve in her room as she drifted off to sleep, her hand curled around his pointer finger, he really hoped that this would work out.

Taglist:

All:

@kpopgirlbtssvt @nerdypinupcrystal @sohoseb @bieberhoodforever @crazy-avengers-gal

@colicovision

Henry Cavill:

@amberangel112 @rocket44 @angelicwolf98

#august walker #august walker x you #august walker x y/n #august walker x reader #august walker x female reader #august walker x ofc #henry cavill x ofc #henry cavill x reader #henry cavill x you #henry cavill x y/n #mission impossible fallout

[marril96]

The Distance Between Us

Chapter 5: Working Girls

Pairing: Rowena x reader

Summary: The time has come for your first tutoring session.

Editor: @cherrypierowena

It was Friday when you next spoke to Rowena.

She seemed intent on avoiding you all week, and you happily returned the favor. The less you saw (and heard) of her, the easier it was to pretend you weren't stuck being tutored by her for the entirety of this semester.

What were you thinking, saying yes to that?

You were an idiot.

Just as the last bell sounded, and you were on your way out, happy to start your weekend, the devil herself had to — just had to — walk up to you and say, "Tomorrow. Quarter past three."

You blinked as if you'd just been maced. "What?"

"The tutoring," she said a tad slower, in an overly exaggerated tone, as if you were dumb. "That thing you're making me do? Remember?"

You rolled your eyes. "You agreed for the same reasons I did. I'm not making you do shit."

She returned the eyeroll, which somehow managed to look even more dramatic, more exaggerated. You wondered if it hurt to twist her eyes like that. And if it did — good.

"Whatever. You coming tomorrow or what?"

Did you even have a choice?

The sooner you got it done, the better.

"Where?"

"My house," she said as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

It kind of was. The way Rowena was, she wouldn't be caught dead with you — alone — in public.

"Sure," you say.

"Need directions?" she asked.

It was your turn to give her the are-you-dumb look. "I've been there countless times."

"Just making sure," she said, shrugging nonchalantly. "Don't want you to get lost."

Olivette, who was standing beside her, snickered.

Rowena smirked.

Nice. Already off to a great start.

"Don't you worry about me, sweetheart," you said condescendingly. Two could play this game. "Just make sure you're home when I get there. Busy girl like you, don't want you to stand me up."

"I won't, darling," she replied in the same tone. "I cleared me schedule just for you."

"How sweet."

"That's me."

Yeah. Sweet as diabetes.

Olivette pulled her arm, heading for the exit.

"Don't be late," Rowena said over her shoulder as she followed her.

"I would never," you shouted after her.

After the way she acted, you were tempted to. Badly.

*****

It was three o'clock sharp when you showed up at the MacLeod residence. Much to your disappointment, Crowley was out, doing whatever it was that he did on his own. Probably something not quite legal. Or moral.

You didn't ask.

You didn't care.

Just before you left the house, he sent you a message giving you his honest, heartfelt condolences. How sweet of him.

You hated to admit it, but it was oddly comforting. If anyone knew what it was like to study with Rowena — to be around Rowena for more than a few minutes, all alone — it was him.

Rowena opened the door dressed in something sparkly you thought she only wore to school to stand out.

Apparently, it was her regular attire.

Who would have guessed?

"You're early," she said in greeting, seemingly surprised.

"Hello to you, too," you said.

She scoffed and moved aside to let you in, then closed the door behind you.

The MacLeod house was small but comfy. The kind of house that made you feel right at home as soon as you walked through the door. Aside from their mother's, the MacLeod kids had two other bedrooms; Rowena had her own, and Crowley and Gavin, their younger brother, shared theirs. Not much space for a four-member family, but they made it work.

"Mother's at work," Rowena said. "Fergus is out. It's just you and me. And Gavin."

"Cool," you said.

Their mother was always working. Two jobs, you thought Crowley once said. Bills needed to be paid, and kids were expensive.

"Gavin won't bother us," Rowena said.

"Whatever."

You didn't mind the kid. From what you saw of him, he was a lovely little boy. A complete contrast to his sister.

She took you to her room. It was small, but somehow felt like home. The bed was by the wall in the middle, surrounded by a desk with a laptop on top, a large closet, a dresser, and, much to your surprise, two big bookshelves filled to the brim with books, hardbacks and paperbacks alike, all in seemingly pristine condition.

You would never admit it out loud, but you were impressed. You'd expected something more… pink. And sparkly. Maybe a few pictures of loser kids like yourself hanging on the wall, with targets painted on their faces in sparkly pink gel pen. The popular girl stuff.

Maybe she had those in her closet.

"It's just a room," Rowena said when she noticed you staring, a touch of smugness, of pride, in her expression.

You blushed. "Your books…"

"Aye, I've my own wee library."

A bit more that wee, it was. There were so many books!

"Don't touch anything," she added. "You can look" — she didn't seem too thrilled with that idea, either, but at the same time, she liked to be the one to impress — "but don't touch. I don't want you to damage the books."

You had to roll your eyes. "That's my sole purpose in life — damaging your books."

"For all I know, I might be," she retorted. "You seem like the type."

You cocked up an eyebrow. "Oh, really?"

"We wouldn't be in this mess if not for your damage."

Really?

Really?!

"You could've refused," you reminded her. "We both know why you didn't." Because little miss perfect wasn't so perfect after all. "Don't put your shitty record on me. I'm not the one bitching out the teachers."

At least when you did it, you did it out of earshot, around your friends.

If anything, Rowena could learn a thing or two from you.

Her cheeks flushed as red as her hair. "If you weren't such a failure, Mr. Shurley never would have blackmailed me!"

Maybe so.

But still…

"Maybe he doesn't like you."

God knew you didn't. Half the school didn't. Just because her group let her into their little circle didn't mean the entire popular scene liked her.

You'd heard the things they were saying about her behind her back. All the names they called her. The jokes they made about her.

Everyone knew the only reason she was popular, that she was someone, was that Olivette felt sorry for her. The same reason Lucifer started dating her Junior year.

Hell, you were pretty sure Rowena knew it, too. She couldn't not know.

But she put up with it. Because popularity was everything, even at the cost of dignity.

Being on top mattered more than anything. More than family. More than the people she'd trampled on her way there.

Despicable.

Rowena scoffed, looking at you as if you'd just suggested having live snails for dinner. "He loves me!"

You snorted. "Sure. Everyone loves you."

"People with taste do."

"Yeah, 'cause you're so lovable."

"Totally am."

As lovable as a splinter.

"Now, are you here to be rude or to learn?" she asked, changing the subject. "I've had to cancel plans to meet with you, you know. I don't want to waste my time."

You were the one being rude?

Typical Rowena.

"So sorry you can't make out with your asshole boyfriend for an extra hour this afternoon," you said sarcastically.

She rolled her eyes. "What I do with my time is none of your bloody business! But if you must know, I was supposed to go shopping with Olivette."

So she was in agreement with Lucifer being an asshole.

Interesting.

"My deepest apologies," you said mockingly, earning you another eyeroll.

Books, notebooks, and supplies were on the floor, on a neat pile beside the bed. You lowered your bag containing your own stuff beside them and sat down Indian style. Rowena joined you.

"When's your make up test?" she asked.

"Thursday," you said. You thought Ms. Hanscum would give you more time, but guess not. You had a tutor now. She expected results.

You expected another F.

Rowena sighed. "Well, let's see what it is you're struggling with."

How about everything? you thought sourly.

"This was in the test," she said, opening the textbook and pointing a perfectly manicured fingernail at the pages in question. "What exactly is it you don't get?"

You slid the book over to you, scanned the pages meticulously. So many numbers and formulas. Odd formations of numbers and letters that made no sense. Solved example problems that looked as strange as a foreign language. Questions you didn't — couldn't — understand, let alone solve.

You blushed as if caught doing something awkward.

This was embarrassing.

"Everything," you mumbled under your breath.

Rowena frowned, confused, curious. "What?"

You swallowed. Breathed in deep and hard for courage. "I said everything!" She blinked. You sighed. "None of this makes sense to me. Might as well show me hieroglyphs. I'll understand as much."

As if it wasn't embarrassing enough that a mean girl like her had to tutor you, you had to admit to your ignorance out loud.

This was fine, you told yourself. Totally fine. If she laughed at you, if she told her friends what a complete and utter idiot you were, so what? Wouldn't be the first time you were made fun of.

You could handle a bit of bullying.

You'd handled it before.

Go at it, Rowena, you thought. Do your worst!

Instead, her hard expression softened. No trace of a smile lingered on her mouth. No teasing glint in her eyes.

She looked… concerned.

What was going on?

"You really understand nothing?" she asked. Her tone was genuine, no mockery in sight.

"Yup," you said timidly, face falling to the open book between the two of you.

"Why didn't you ask Ms. Hanscum to explain?"

What was the point? You still wouldn't get it. Also…

"So you and your friends can laugh at me?"

Rowena looked appalled. "I wouldn't laugh at you."

"Sure you wouldn't." Just like she hadn't looked around at people who'd failed with a smug look on her face. Just like she hadn't stood aside as her friends teased and bullied and mocked people, and laughed along with them.

She was about to respond, but shut her mouth just in time. Good. You weren't in the mood for excuses and lies.

"Why don't we start with the first lesson?" she asked, changing the subject back to the topic at hand. "If you get a hang of that one, the other two will be easier to comprehend."

"Sure," you replied. You weren't expecting much; if Ms. Hanscum, who'd spent years earning her degree, couldn't teach you, you doubted a mere high school girl could.

Still, it was worth a try.

You could use the extra credit, and plus, you'd promised Sam you'd cooperate. Rowena had apparently told him she had no patience for slackers. You didn't particularly care what she thought, but at the very least, you could prove her wrong. You could work hard and do your best. Make her earn her extra credit and clean record.

"Okay, so you see this problem?" Rowena asked, pointing to a set of numbers she'd written down on a piece of paper.

"Yeah."

You wished you didn't.

You had a feeling these numbers would show up in your dreams tonight. And every night after that.

Math was a bitch.

"Do you know how we got 3?"

You shrugged. "Nope."

She might as well have asked you to translate lettering from ancient artifacts.

Rowena sighed. Not quite happy, but not exasperated, either. "Let's look at it differently. What's something you like?" She looked around, lost in thought. "Money?"

"Sure."

Everyone liked money, you supposed.

She grinned. "Great!"

Was that genuine joy on her face?

"Say you have one hundred dollars. I borrow you twenty. Sam borrows you five. You want to buy a… DVD."

That was one expensive DVD.

"What kind?" you asked.

She frowned. "What?"

"What kind of DVD? Like, which movie?"

"Gone with the Wind?" she suggested.

You made a face. "I'd never buy that! Especially not for that much money."

"It's a bloody classic!" she exclaimed, outraged.

Well.

Somebody loved old movies.

"Don't care," you said. "It's old, needlessly long, boring, and, uh, did I mention old?"

Rowena looked as if you'd just admitted to murdering her entire family in cold blood.

"Make it Mean Girls. It's symbolic, at least."

She scowled. "Fine. You want to buy Mean Girls."

"Perfect," you said with a sugary-sweet, diabetes-inducing smile on your mouth.

She rolled her eyes dramatically. Her favorite thing to do, it seemed. "You get to the store, and you find out it's on sale."

"I love sales!"

"Everybody loves sales! Anyway, the DVD you want…"

She went on a long, complicated explanation of prices, tax, sales, calculations, and formulas. At first none of it made sense, just as it hadn't back in Ms. Hanscum's class. But the more she explained, the more details she provided to the imaginary scenario with money and DVDs, it started to settle in.

It took a good ten minutes, but by the time she was done, you understood the problem.

And when she gave you a few problems she'd made up herself to solve, same structure with different numbers, you did it.

Correctly.

Soon the two of you moved on to other lessons. Rowena was surprisingly patient. You expected her to scream and shout and call you names. Instead, she explained everything thoroughly, five times if she had to. She didn't talk down to you. Didn't make you feel dumb for not knowing things that came naturally to her. Didn't rush you or chastise you for taking too long to solve the problems she'd given you.

She spoke softly and kindly, and gave you time to think solutions through.

She was, dare you say, better than Ms. Hanscum herself.

"I think that's about enough for today," Rowena said.

You looked at your phone, eyes going wide at seeing the time.

Two hours had gone by in a flash.

"Yeah," you agreed. "That was way too much math for one day."

Rowena giggled.

It was cute, you found yourself thinking. A strangely cute little sound.

"Would you like to come over tomorrow?"

You blinked. "To study?"

"What else?"

"Isn't that a bit… soon?"

"Your make up test is Thursday, right? It's better to prepare really well." She shrugged. "Not saying you have to. It's just a suggestion."

You didn't want to.

You never wanted to see these numbers — any numbers — again.

You especially didn't want to see them that soon.

But…

Rowena was right. The more you prepared, the more you studied, the better.

It wasn't like you had anything planned, anyway. Sunday was a boring day.

"Okay," you said after a moment of thinking it through. "Same time?"

"Aye."

"It's a deal, then."

"Don't be late."

"I'll be here at three again. Three fifteen sounds a bit weird, to be honest."

She made no response to that. Merely shrugged as if it didn't bother her. "Says you."

"I'll be going, then," you said. "Say hi to Crowley for me?"

"Whatever," she replied, annoyed.

You took that as a yes.

The first session went rather well. You hadn't tried to kill each other and you'd managed to learn a thing or two.

Maybe having Rowena MacLeod as a tutor wasn't so bad after all.

*****

Tags: @werewolfbarbie @oswinthestrange @songofthecagedmoose @apurdyfulmind @getthesalt-sam @metallihca @salembitchtrials @jay-eris @hellsmother @elizabeth-effie @victoriasagittariablack @rowenaswife @wonderifshelikesroses @xfireandsin @liddell-alien @hotdiggitydammit @lae-lae @darkhumorsblog @gaysnakess @angel7376 @cherrypierowena @ruthieconnells @evil-regal-vampiress @collectorofsecretsandsouls @angel-e-v-a @melisandre02 @a-queen-and-her-throne

#rowena #rowena macleod #rowena x reader #spn #supernatural #spn family #fanfiction #my fics #high school au

[maximelebled]

Growing Pains - Zelda, Tony Hawk, The Sims, games and related memories from my formative years

This blog post is about my personal history with video games, how they influenced me growing up, how they sometimes helped me, and more or less an excuse to write about associated memories with them.

This is a very straightforward intro, because I’ve had this post sitting as a draft for ages, trying to glue all of it cohesively, but I’m not a very good writer, so I never really succeeded. Some of these paragraphs date back at least one year. 

And I figured I should write about a lot of this as long as I still remember clearly, or not too inaccurately. Because I know that I don’t remember my earliest ever memory. I only remember how I remember it. So I might as well help my future self here, and give myself a good memento.

Anyway, the post is a kilometer long, so it’ll be under this cut.

My family got a Windows 95 computer when I was 3 years old. While I don’t remember this personally, I’m told that one of the first things I ever did with it was mess up with the BIOS settings so badly that dad’s computer-expert friend had to be invited to repair it. (He stayed for dinner as a thank you.)

It was that off-white plastic tower, it had a turbo button, and even a 4X CD reader! Wow! And the CRT monitor must have been... I don’t remember what it was, actually. But I do once remember launching a game at a stupidly high resolution: 1280x1024! And despite being a top-down 2D strategy, it ran VERY slowly. Its video card was an ATI Rage. I had no idea what that really meant that at the time, but I do recall that detail nonetheless.

Along with legitimately purchased games, the list of which I can remember:

Tubular Worlds

Descent II

Alone in the Dark I & III

Lost Eden

Formula One (not sure which game exactly)

Heart of Darkness

(and of course the famous Adibou/Adi series of educational games)

... we also had what I realize today were cracked/pirated games, from the work-friend that had set up the family computer. I remember the following:

Age of Empires I (not sure about that one, I think it might have been from a legitimate “Microsoft Plus!” disc)

Nightmare Creatures (yep, there was a PC port of that game)

Earthworm Jim (but without any music)

The Fifth Element

Moto Racer II

There are a few other memorable games, which were memorable in most aspects, except their name. I just cannot remember their name. And believe me, I have looked. Too bad! Anyway, in this list, I can point out a couple games that made a big mark on me.

First, the Alone in the Dark trilogy. It took me a long time to beat them. I still remember the morning I beat the third game. I think it was in 2001 or 2002.

There was a specific death in it which gave me nightmares for a week. You shrink yourself to fit through a crack in a wall, but it’s possible to let a timer run out—or fall down a hole—and this terrifying thing happens (16:03). I remember sometimes struggling to run the game for no reason; something about DOS Extended Memory being too small.

I really like the low-poly flat-shaded 3D + hand-drawn 2D style of the game, and it’d be really cool to see something like that pop up again. After the 8-bit/16-bit trend, there’s now more and more games paying tribute to rough PS1-style 3D, so maybe this will happen? Maybe I’ll have to do it myself? Who knows!

Second, Lost Eden gave me a taste for adventure and good music, and outlandish fantasy universes. Here’s the intro to the game:

A lot of the game is very evocative, especially its gorgeous soundtrack, and you spend a lot of time trekking through somewhat empty renders of landscapes. Despite being very rough early pre-rendered 3D, those places were an incredible journey in my young eyes. If you have some time, I suggest either playing the game (it’s available on Steam) or watching / skimmering through this “longplay” video. Here are some of my personal highlights: 25:35, 38:05, 52:15 (love that landscape), 1:17:20, 1:20:20 (another landscape burned in my neurons), 2:12:10, 2:55:30, 3:01:18. (spoiler warning)

But let’s go a couple years back. Ever since my youngest years, I was very intrigued by creation. I filled entire pocket-sized notebooks with writing—sometimes attempts at fiction, sometimes daily logs like the weather reports from the newspaper, sometimes really bad attempts at drawing. I also filled entire audio tapes over and over and OVER with “fake shows” that my sister and I would act out. The only thing that survived is this picture of 3-year-old me with the tape player/recorder.

It also turns out that the tape recorder AND the shelf have both survived.

(I don’t know if it still works.)

On Wednesday afternoons (school was off) and on the week-ends, I often got to play on the family computer, most of the time with my older brother, who’s the one who introduced me to... well... all of it, really. (Looking back on the games he bought, I can say he had very good tastes.)

Moto Racer II came with a track editor. It was simple but pretty cool to play around with. You just had to make the track path and elevation; all the scenery was generated by the game. You could draw impossible tracks that overlapped themselves, but the editor wouldn’t let you save them. However, I found out there was a way to play/save them no matter what you did, and I got to experiment with crazy glitches. 85 degree inclines that launched the bike so high you couldn’t see the ground anymore? No problem. Tracks that overlapped themselves several times, causing very strange behaviour at the meeting points? You bet. That stuff made me really curious about how video games worked. I think a lot of my initial interest in games can be traced back to that one moment I figured out how to exploit the track editor...

There was also another game—I think it was Tubular Worlds—that came on floppy disks. I don’t remember what exactly lead me to do it, but I managed to edit the text that was displayed by the installer... I think it was the license agreement bit of it. That got me even more curious as to how computers worked.

Up until some time around my 13th or 14th birthday, during summer break (the last days of June to the first days of September for French pupils), my sister and I would always go on vacation at my grandparents’ home.

The very first console game I ever played was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on my cousin’s Super Nintendo, who also usually stayed with us. Unlike us, he had quite a few consoles available to him, and brought a couple along. My first time watching and playing this game was absolutely mind-blowing to me. An adventure with a huge game world to explore, so many mysterious things at every corner. “Why are you a pink rabbit now?” “I’m looking for the pearl that will help me not be that.”

Growing up and working in the games industry has taken the magic out of many things in video games... and my curiosity for the medium (and its inner workings) definitely hasn’t helped. I know more obscure technical trivia about older games than I care to admit. But I think this is what is shaping my tastes in video games nowadays... part of it is that I crave story-rich experiences that can bring me back to a, for lack of a better term, “child-like” wonderment. And I know how weird this is going to sound, but I don’t really enjoy “pure gameplay” games as much for that reason. Some of the high-concept ones are great, of course (e.g. Tetris), but I usually can’t enjoy others without a good interwoven narrative. I can’t imagine I would have completed The Talos Principle had it consisted purely of the puzzles without any narrative beats, story bits, and all that. What I’m getting at is, thinking about it, I guess I tend to value the “narrative” side of games pretty highly, because, to me, it’s one of the aspects of the medium that, even if distillable to some formulas, is inherently way more “vague” and “ungraspable”. You can do disassembly on game mechanics and figure out even the most obsure bits of weird technical trivia. You can’t do that to a plot, a universe, characters, etc. or at least nowhere near to the same extent.

You can take a good story and weave it into a number of games, but the opposite is not true. It’s easy to figure out the inner working of gameplay mechanics, and take the magic out of them, but it’s a lot harder to do that for a story, unless it’s fundamentally flawed in some way.

Video games back then seemed a lot bigger than they actually were.

I got Heart of Darkness as a gift in 1998 or 1999. We used to celebrate Christmas at my grandparents’, so I had to wait a few days to be back home, and to able to put the CD in the computer. But boy was it worth it! Those animated cutscenes! The amazing pixel art animations! The amazing and somewhat disturbing variety of ways in which you can die, most of which gruesome and mildly graphic! And of course, yet again... a strange and outlandish universe that just scratches my itch for it. Well, one of which that forged my taste for them.

I can’t remember exactly when it happened or what it was, but I do remember that at some point we visited some sort of... exposition? Exhibit? Something along those lines. And it had a board games & computer games section. The two that stick out in my mind were Abalone (of which I still have the box somewhere) and what I think was some sort of 2D isometric (MMO?) RPG. I wanna say it was Ultima Online but I recall it looking more primitive than that (it had small maps whose “void” outside them was a single blueish color). 

In my last two years of elementary school, there was one big field trip per year. They lasted two weeks, away from family. The first one was to the Alps. The second one was... not too far from where I live now, somewhere on the coast of Brittany! I have tried really hard to find out exactly where it was, as I remember the building and facilities really well, but I was never able to find it again. On a couple occasions, we went on a boat with some kind of... algae harvesters? The smell was extremely strong (burning itself into my memory) and made me sick. The reason I bring them up is because quite a few of my classmates had Game Boy consoles, most of them with, you know, all those accessories, especially the little lights. I remember being amazed at the transparent ones. Play was usually during the off-times, and I watched what my friends were up to, with, of course, a bit of jealousy mixed in. The class traveled by bus, and it took off in the middle of the night; something like 3 or 4 in the morning? It seemed like such a huge deal at the time! Now here I am, writing THESE WORDS at 03:00. Anyway, most of my classmates didn’t fall back asleep and those that had a Game Boy just started playing on them. One of my classmates, however, handed me his whole kit and I got to do pretty much what I wanted with it, with the express condition that I would not overwrite any of his save files. I remember getting reasonably far in Pokémon before I had to give it back to him and my progress was wiped.

During the trip to the Alps, I remember seeing older kids paying for computer time; there was a row of five computers in a small room... and they played Counter-Strike. I had absolutely no idea what it was, and I would forget about it until the moment I’m writing these words, but I was watching with much curiosity.

The first time I had my own access to console games was in 2001. The first Harry Potter film had just come out, and at Christmas, I was gifted a Game Boy Advance with the first official game. I just looked it up again and good god, it’s rougher than I remember. The three most memorable GBA games which I then got to play were both Golden Sun(s) and Sword of Mana... especially the latter, with its gorgeous art direction. My dad had a cellphone back then, and I remember sneakily going on there to look up a walkthrough for a tricky part of Golden Sun’s desert bit. Cellphones had access to something called “WAP” internet... very basic stuff, but of course still incredible to me back then.

I eventually got to play another Zelda game on my GBA: Link’s Awakening DX. I have very fond memories of that one because I was bed-ridden with a terrible flu. My fever ran so high that I started having some really funky dreams, delirious half-awake hallucinations/feelings, and one night, I got so hot that I stumbled out of bed and just laid down against the cold tile of the hallway. At 3 in the morning! A crazy time! (Crazy for 11-year-old me.)

(The fever hallucinations were crazy. My bedroom felt like it was three times at big, and I was convinced that a pack of elephants were charging at me from the opposite corner. The “night grain” of my vision felt sharper, amplified. Every touch, my sore body rubbing against the bed covers felt like it was happening twice as much. You know that “Heavy Rain with 300% facial animation” video? Imagine that, but as a feverish feeling. The dreams were on another level entirely. I could spend pages on them, but suffice to say that’s when I had my first dream where I dreamed of dying. There were at least two, actually. The first one was by walking down a strange, blueish metal corridor, then getting in an elevator, and then feeling that intimate convinction that it was leading me to passing over. The second one was in some Myst-like world, straight out of a Roger Dean cover, with some sort of mini-habitat pods floating on a completely undisturbed lake. We were just trapped in them. It just felt like some kind of weird afterlife.)

I also eventually got to play the GBA port of A Link To The Past. My uncle was pretty amused by seeing me play it, as he’d also played the original on SNES before I’d even been born. I asked him for help with a boss (the first Dark World one), but unfortunately, he admitted he didn’t remember much of the game.

We had a skiing holiday around this time. I don’t remember the resort’s or the town’s name, but its sights are burned in my memory. Maybe it’s because, shortly after we arrived, and we went to the ski rental place, I almost fainted and puked on myself, supposedly from the low oxygen. It also turned out that the bedroom my parents had rented unexpectedly came with a SNES in the drawer under the tiny TV. The game: Super Mario World. I got sick at one point and got to stay in and play it. This was also the holiday where I developed a fondness for iced tea, although back then the most common brand left an awful aftertaste in your mouth that just made you even more thirsty.

We got a new PC in December of 2004. Ditching the old Windows 98 SE (yep, the OS had been upgraded in... 2002, I think?). Look at how old-school this looks. The computer office room was in the basement. Even with the blur job that I applied to the monitor for privacy reasons, you can still tell that this is the XP file explorer:

A look at what the old DSLR managed to capture on the shelf reveals some more of the games that were available to me back then: a bunch of educational software, The Sims 2, and SpellForce Gold. 

I might be misremembering but I think they were our Christmas gifts for that year; we both got to pick one game. I had no idea what I wanted, really, but out of all the boxes at (what I think was) the local Fnac store, it was SpellForce that stood out to me the most. Having watched Lord of the Rings the year prior might have been a factor. I somewhat understood Age of Empires years before that, but SpellForce? Man, I loved the hell out of SpellForce. Imagine a top-down RPG that can also be played from a third-person perspective. And with the concept of... hero units... wait a second... now that reminds me of Dota.

Imagine playing a Dota hero with lots of micro-management and being able to build a whole base on new maps. And sometimes visiting very RPG-ish sections (my favorites!) with very little top-down strategy bits, towns, etc. like Siltbreaker. I guess this game was somewhat like an alternate, single-player Dota if you look at it from the right angle. (Not the third-person one.)

I do remember being very excited when I found out that it, too, came with a level editor. I never figured it out, though. I only ever got as far as making a nice landscape for my island, and that was it!

A couple weeks after, it was Christmas; my sister and I got our first modern PC game: The Sims 2. It didn’t run super well—most games didn’t, because the nVidia GeForce FX 5200 wasn’t very good. But that didn’t stop me or my sister from going absolutely nuts with the game. This video has the timestamp of 09 January 2005, and it is the first video I’ve ever made with a computer. Less than two weeks after we got the game, I was already neck-deep in creating stuff.

Not that it was particularly good, of course. This is a video that meets all of the “early YouTube Windows Movie Maker clichés”.

Speaking of YouTube, I did register an account there pretty early on, in August of 2006. I’ve been through all of it. I remember every single layout change. I also started using Sony Vegas around that time. It felt so complex and advanced back then! And I’m still using it today. Besides Windows, Vegas Pro is very likely to be the piece of software that I’ve been using for the longest time.

I don’t have a video on YouTube from before 2009, because I decided to delete all of them out of embarassment. They were mostly Super Mario 64 machinima. It’s as bad as it sounds. The reason I bring that up right now, though, is that it makes the “first” video of my account the last one I made with the Sims 2.

But before I get too far ahead with my early YouTube days, let me go backwards a bit. We got hooked up to the Internet some time in late 2005. It was RTC (dialup), 56 kbps. my first steps into the Internet led me to the Cube engine. Mostly because back then my dad would purchase computer magazines (which were genuinely helpful back then), and came with CDs of common downloadable software for those without Internet connections. One of them linked to Cube. I think it was using either this very same screenshot, or a very similar one, on the same map.

The amazing thing about Cube is not only that it was open-source and moddable, but had map editing built-in the game. The mode was toggled on with a single key press. You could even edit maps cooperatively with other people. Multiplayer mapping! How cool is that?! And the idea of a game that enabled so much creation was amazing to me, so I downloaded it right away. (Over the course of several hours, 30 MiB being large for dialup.)

I made lots of bad maps that never fulfilled the definition of “good level” or “good gameplay”, not having any idea how “game design” meant, or what it even was. But I made places. Places that I could call my own. “Virtual homes”. I still distinctively remember the first map I ever made, even though no trace of it survives to this day. In the second smallest map size possible, I’d made a tower surrounded by a moat and a few smaller cozy towers, with lots of nice colored lighting. This, along with the distinctive skyboxes and intriguing music, made me feel like I’d made my home in a strange new world.

At some point later down the line, I made a kinda-decent singleplayer level. It was very linear, but one of the two lead developers of the game played it and told me he liked it a lot! Of course, half of that statement was probably “to be nice”, but it was really validating and encouraging. And I’m glad they were like that. Because I remember being annoying to some other mappers in the Sauerbraten community (the follow-up to Cube, more advanced technically), who couldn’t wrap their heads around my absolutely god awful texturing work and complete lack of level “design”. Honestly, sometimes, I actually kinda feel like trying to track a couple of them down and being like, “yeah, remember that annoying kid? That was me. Sorry you had to deal with 14-year-old me.”

At some point, I stumbled upon a mod called Cube Legends. It was a heavily Zelda-inspired “total conversion”; a term reserved for mods that are the moddiest mods and try to take away as much of the original foundation as possible. It featured lots of evocative MIDI music by the Norwegian composer Bjørn Lynne. Fun fact: the .mid files are still available officially from his website!

This was at the crossroad of many of my interests. It was yet another piece of the puzzle. As a quick side note, this is why Zelda is the first series that I name in the title of this post, even though I... never really thought of myself as a Zelda fan. It’s not that it’s one of the game series that I like the most, it’s just that, before I started writing this, I’d never realized how far-reaching its influence had been in my life, both in overt and subtle ways, especially during my formative years.

And despite how clearly unfinished, how much of a “draft” Cube Legends was, I could see what it was trying to do. I could see the author’s intent. And I’m still listening to Bjørn Lynne’s music today.

The Cube Engine and its forums were a big part of why I started speaking English so well. Compared to most French people, I mean. We’re notoriously bad with the English language, and so was I up until then. But having this much hands-on practice proved to be immensely valuable. And so, I can say that the game and its community have therefore had long-lasting impacts in my life.

I also tried out a bunch of N64 games via emulation, bringing me right back in that bedroom at my grandparents’ house, with my cousin. Though he did not have either N64 Zelda game back then.

The first online forum I ever joined was a Zelda fan site’s. There are two noteworthy things to say here:

It was managed by a woman who, during my stay in the community, graduated from her animation degree. At this stage I had absolutely no idea that this was going to be the line of work I would eventually pursue!

I recently ran into the former head moderator of the forums. (I don’t know when the community died.) One of the Dota players on my friends list invited him because I was like “hmm, I wanna go as 3, not as 2 players today”. His nickname very vaguely reminded me of something, a weird hunch I couldn’t place. Half an hour into the game, he said “hey Max... this might be a long shot, but did you ever visit [forum]?” and then I immediately yelled “OH MY GOD—IT IS YOU.” The world is a small place.

Access to the computer was sometimes tricky. I didn’t always have good grades, and of course, “punishment” (not sure the word is appropriate, hence the quotes, but you get the idea) often involved locking me out of the computer room. Of course, most times, I ended up trying to find the key instead. I needed my escape from the real world.  (You better believe it’s Tangent Time.)

I was always told I was the “smart kid”, because I “understood things faster” than my classmates. So they made me skip two grades ahead. This made me enter high school at nine years old. The consequences were awful (I was even more of the typical nerdy kid that wouldn’t fit in), and I wish it had never happened. Over the years, I finally understood: I wasn’t more intelligent. I merely had the chance to have been able to grow up with an older brother who’d instilled a sense of curiosity, critical thinking, and taste in books that were ahead of my age and reading level. This situation—and its opposite—is what I believe accounts for the difference in how well kids get to learn. It’s not innate talent, it’s not genetics (as some racists would like you to believe). It’s parenting and privilege.

And that’s why I’ll always be an outspoken proponent for any piece of media that tries to instill critical thinking and curiosity in its viewer, reader, or player.

But I digress.

Well, I’ve been digressing a lot, really, but games aren’t everything and after all, this post is about the context in which I played those games. Otherwise I reckon I would’ve just made a simple list.

I eventually got a Nintendo DS for Christmas, along with Mario Kart DS. My sister had gotten her own just around the time when it released... she had the Nintendogs bundle. We had also upgraded to proper ADSL, what I think was about a ~5 megabits download speed. The Nintendo DS supported wi-fi, which was still relatively rare compared to today. In fact, Nintendo sold a USB wireless adapter to help with that issue—our ISP-supplied modem-router did not have any wireless capabilities. I couldn’t get it the adapter work and I remember I got help from a really kind stranger who knew a lot about networking—to a point that it seemed like wizardry to me.

I remember I got a “discman” as a gift some time around that point. In fact, I still have it. Check out the stickers I put on it! I think those came from the Sims 2 DVD box and/or one of its add-ons.

I burned a lot of discs. In fact, in the stack of burned CDs/DVDs that I found (with the really bad Sims movies somewhere in there), I found at least three discs that had the Zelda album Hyrule Symphony burned in, each with different additional tracks. Some were straight-up MIDI files from vgmusic.com...! And speaking (again) of Zelda, when the Wii came out, Twilight Princess utterly blew my mind. I never got the game or the console, but damn did I yearn badly for it. I listened to the main theme of the game a lot, which didn’t help. I eventually got to play the first few hours at a friend’s place.

At some point, we’d upgraded the family computer to something with a bit more horsepower. It had a GeForce 8500 GT inside, which was eventually upgraded to a 9600 GT after the card failed for some reason. It could also dual-boot between XP and Vista. I stuck with that computer until 2011.

We moved to where I currently live in 2007. I’ve been here over a decade! And before we’d even fully finished unpacking, I was on the floor of the room that is now my office, with the computer on the ground and the monitor on a cardboard box, playing a pirated copy of... Half-Life! It was given to me by my cousin. It took me that long to find out about the series. It’s the first Valve game I played. I also later heard about the Orange Box, but mostly about Portal. Which I also pirated and played. I distinctly remember being very puzzled by the options menu: I thought it was glitched or broken, as changing settings froze the game. Turns out the Source engine had to chug for a little while, like a city car in countryside mud, as it reloaded a bunch of stuff. Patience is a virtue...

But then, something serious happened.

In the afternoon of 25 December 2007, I started having a bit of a dull stomach pain. I didn’t think much of it. Figured maybe I’d eaten too many Christmas chocolates and it’d go away. It didn’t. It progressively deteriorated into a high fever where I had trouble walking and my tummy really hurt; especially if you pressed on it. My parents tried to gently get me to eat something nice on New Year’s Eve, but it didn’t stay in very long. I could only feed myself with lemonade and painkiller. Eventually, the doctor decided I should get blood tests done as soon as possible. And I remember that day very clearly.

I was already up at 6:30 in the morning. Back then, The Daily Show aired on the French TV channel Canal+, so I was watching that, lying in the couch while waiting for my mom to get up and drive me to my appointment, at 7:00. It was just two streets away, but there was no way I could walk there. At around noon, the doctor called and told my mom: “get your son to the emergency room now.”

Long story short, part of my intestines nuked themselves into oblivion, causing acute peritonitis. To give you an idea, that’s something with a double-digit fatality rate. Had we waited maybe a day or two more, I would not be here writing this. They kind of blew up. I had an enormous abcess attached to a bunch of my organs. I had to be operated on with only weak local anaesthetics as they tried to start draining the abscess. It is, to date, by far the most painful thing that has ever happened to me. It was bad enough that the hospital doctor that was on my case told me that I was pretty much a case worthy to be in textbooks. I even had medical students come into my hospital room about it! They were very nice.

This whole affair lasted over a month. I became intimately familiar with TV schedules. And thankfully, I had my DS to keep me company. At the time, I was pretty big into the Tony Hawk DS games. They were genuinely good. They had extensive customization, really great replayability, etc. you get the idea. I think I even got pretty high on the online leaderboards at some point. I didn’t have much to do on some days besides lying down in pain while perfecting my scoring and combo strategies. I think Downhill Jam might’ve been my favorite.

My case was bad enough that they were unable to do something due to the sad state of my insides during the last surgery of my stay. I was told that I could come back in a few months for a checkup, and potentially a “cleanup” operation that would fix me up for good. I came back in late June of 2008, got the operation, and... woke up in my hospital room surrounded by, like, nine doctors, and hooked up to a morphine machine that I could trigger on command. Apparently something had gone wrong during the operation, but they never told me what. I wasn’t legally an adult, so they didn’t have to tell me. I suspect it’s somewhere in some medical files, but I never bothered to dig up through my parents’ archives, or ask the hospital. And I think I would rather not know. But anyway, that was almost three more weeks in the hospital. And it sucked even more that time because, you see, hospital beds do not “breathe” like regular beds do. The air can’t go through. Let’s say I’m intimately familiar with the smell of back sweat forever.

When I got out, my mom stopped by a supermarket on the way home. And that is when I bought The Orange Box, completely on a whim, and made my Steam account. Why? Because it was orange and stood out on the shelf.

(As a side note, that was the whole bit I started writing first, and that made me initially title this post “growing pains”. First, because I’m bad at titles. Second, because not that I didn’t have them otherwise (ow oof ouch my knees), but that was literally the most painful episode of my entire life thus far and it ended in a comically-unrelated, high-impact, life-changing decision. Just me picking up The Orange Box after two awful hospital stays... led me to where I am today.)

While I was recovering, I also started playing EarthBound! Another bit of a life-changer, that one. To a lesser extent, but still. I was immediately enamored by its unique tone. Giygas really really really creeped me out for a while afterwards though. I still get unsettled if I hear its noises sometimes.

I later bought Garry’s Mod (after convincing my mom that it was a “great creative toolbox that only cost ten bucks!”), and, well, the rest is history. By which I mean, a lot of my work and gaming activity since 2009 is still up and browsable. But there are still a few things to talk about.

In 2009, I bought my first computer with YouTube ad money: the Asus eee PC 1005HA-H. By modern standards, it’s... not very powerful. The processor in my current desktop machine is nearly 50 times as fast as its Atom N280. It had only one gigabyte of RAM, Windows 7 Basic Edition, and an integrated GPU barely worthy of the name; Intel didn’t care much for 3D in their chips back then. The GMA 945 didn’t even have hardware support for Transform & Lighting.

But I made it work, damn it. I made that machine run so much stuff. I played countless Half-Life and Half-Life 2 mods on it—though, due to the CPU overhead on geometry, some of those were trickier. I think one of the most memorable ones I played was Mistake of Pythagoras; very surreal, very rough, but I still remember it so clearly. I later played The Longest Journey on it, in the middle of winter. It was a very cozy and memorable experience. (And another one that’s an adventure wonderful outlandish alien universe. LOVE THOSE.)

I did more than playing games on it, though...

This is me sitting, sunburned on the nose, in an apartment room, on 06 August 2010. This was in the Pyrénées, at the border between France and Spain. We had a vacation with daily hiking. Some of the landscapes we visited reminded me very strongly of those from Lost Eden, way up the page...

So, you see, I had 3ds Max running on that machine. The Source SDK as well. Sony Vegas. All of it was slow; you bet I had to use some workarounds to squeeze performance out of software, and that I had to keep a close, watchful eye on RAM usage. But I worked on this thing. I really did! I animated this video’s facial animation bits (warning: this is old & bad) on the eee PC, during the evenings of the trip, when we were back at our accomodation. The Faceposer tool in the Source SDK really worked well on that machine.

I also animated an entire video solely on the machine (warning: also old and bad). It had to be rendered on the desktop computer... but every single bit of the animation was crafted on the eee PC.

I made it work.

Speaking of software that did not run well: around that time, I also played the original Crysis. The “but can it run Crysis?” joke was very much justified back then. I had to edit configuration files by hand so that I could run the game in 640x480... because I wanted to keep most of the high-end settings enabled. The motion blur was delicious, and it blew my mind that the effect made the game feel this smooth, despite wobbling around in the 20 to 30 fps range.

Alright. It’s time to finish writing this damn post and publish it at last, so I’m going to close it out by listing some more memories and games that I couldn’t work in up there.

Advance Wars. Strategy game on GBA with a top-down level editor. You better believe I was all over the editor right away.

BioShock. When we got the 2007 desktop computer, it was one of the first games I tried. Well, its demo, to be precise. Its tech and graphics blew my mind, enough that I saved up to buy the full game. This was before I had a Steam account; I got a boxed copy! I think it might have been the last boxed game I ever bought? It had a really nice metal case. The themes and political messages of the game flew way over my head, though.

Mirror’s Edge. The art direction was completely fascinating to me, and it introduced me to Solar Fields’ music; my most listened artist this decade, by a long shot.

L.A. Noire. I lost myself in its stories and investigations, and then, I did it all again, with my sister at the helm. I very rarely play games twice (directly or indirectly), which I figure is worth mentioning.

Zeno Clash. It was weird and full of soul, had cool music, and cool cutscenes. It inspired me a lot in my early animation days.

Skyward Sword. Yep, going back to Zelda on that one. The whole game was pretty good, and I’m still thinking about how amazing its art direction was. Look up screenshots of it running in HD on an emulator... it’s outstanding. But there’s a portion of the game that stands tall above the rest: the Lanayru Sand Sea. It managed to create a really striking atmosphere in many aspects, through and through. I still think about it from time to time, especially when its music comes on in shuffle mode.

Wandersong. A very recent pick, but it was absolutely a life-changing one. That game is an anti-depressant, a vaccine against cynicism, a lone bright and optimist voice.

I realize now this is basically a “flawed but interesting and impactful games” list. With “can establish its atmosphere very well” as a big criteria. (A segment of video games that is absolutely worth exploring.)

I don’t know if I’ll ever make my own video game. I have a few ideas floating around and I tried prototyping some stuff, though my limited programming abilities stood in my way. But either way, if it happens one day, I hope I’ll manage to channel all those years of games into the CULMINATION OF WHAT I LIKE. Something along those lines, I reckon.

#video games

[hydrus]

Version 324

windows

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source

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I had a great week. The downloader overhaul is almost done.

pixiv

Just as Pixiv recently moved their art pages to a new phone-friendly, dynamically drawn format, they are now moving their regular artist gallery results to the same system. If your username isn't switched over yet, it likely will be in the coming week.

The change breaks our old html parser, so I have written a new downloader and json api parser. The way their internal api works is unusual and over-complicated, so I had to write a couple of small new tools to get it to work. However, it does seem to work again.

All of your subscriptions and downloaders will try to switch over to the new downloader automatically, but some might not handle it quite right, in which case you will have to go into edit subscriptions and update their gallery manually. You'll get a popup on updating to remind you of this, and if any don't line up right automatically, the subs will notify you when they next run. The api gives all content--illustrations, manga, ugoira, everything--so there unfortunately isn't a simple way to refine to just one content type as we previously could. But it does neatly deliver everything in just one request, so artist searching is now incredibly faster.

Let me know if pixiv gives any more trouble. Now we can parse their json, we might be able to reintroduce the arbitrary tag search, which broke some time ago due to the same move to javascript galleries.

twitter

In a similar theme, given our fully developed parser and pipeline, I have now wangled a twitter username search! It should be added to your downloader list on update. It is a bit hacky and may be ultimately fragile if they change something their end, but it otherwise works great. It discounts retweets and fetches 19/20 tweets per gallery 'page' fetch. You should be able to set up subscriptions and everything, although I generally recommend you go at it slowly until we know this new parser works well. BTW: I think twitter only 'browses' 3200 tweets in the past, anyway. Note that tweets with no images will be 'ignored', so any typical twitter search will end up with a lot of 'Ig' results--this is normal. Also, if the account ever retweets more than 20 times in a row, the search will stop there, due to how the clientside pipeline works (it'll think that page is empty).

Again, let me know how this works for you. This is some fun new stuff for hydrus, and I am interested to see where it does well and badly.

misc

In order to be less annoying, the 'do you want to run idle jobs?' on shutdown dialog will now only ask at most once per day! You can edit the time unit under options->maintenance and processing.

Under options->connection, you can now change max total network jobs globally and per domain. The defaults are 15 and 3. I don't recommend you increase them unless you know what you are doing, but if you want a slower/more cautious client, please do set them lower.

The new advanced downloader ui has a bunch of quality of life improvements, mostly related to the handling of example parseable data.

full list

downloaders:

after adding some small new parser tools, wrote a new pixiv downloader that should work with their new dynamic gallery's api. it fetches all an artist's work in one page. some existing pixiv download components will be renamed and detached from your existing subs and downloaders. your existing subs may switch over to the correct pixiv downloader automatically, or you may need to manually set them (you'll get a popup to remind you).

wrote a twitter username lookup downloader. it should skip retweets. it is a bit hacky, so it may collapse if they change something small with their internal javascript api. it fetches 19-20 tweets per 'page', so if the account has 20 rts in a row, it'll likely stop searching there. also, afaik, twitter browsing only works back 3200 tweets or so. I recommend proceeding slowly.

added a simple gelbooru 0.1.11 file page parser to the defaults. it won't link to anything by default, but it is there if you want to put together some booru.org stuff

you can now set your default/favourite download source under options->downloading

.

misc:

the 'do idle work on shutdown' system will now only ask/run once per x time units (including if you say no to the ask dialog). x is one day by default, but can be set in 'maintenance and processing'

added 'max jobs' and 'max jobs per domain' to options->connection. defaults remain 15 and 3

the colour selection buttons across the program now have a right-click menu to import/export #FF0000 hex codes from/to the clipboard

tag namespace colours and namespace rendering options are moved from 'colours' and 'tags' options pages to 'tag summaries', which is renamed to 'tag presentation'

the Lain import dropper now supports pngs with single gugs, url classes, or parsers--not just fully packaged downloaders

fixed an issue where trying to remove a selection of files from the duplicate system (through the advanced duplicates menu) would only apply to the first pair of files

improved some error reporting related to too-long filenames on import

improved error handling for the folder-scanning stage in import folders--now, when it runs into an error, it will preserve its details better, notify the user better, and safely auto-pause the import folder

png export auto-filenames will now be sanitized of \, /, :, *-type OS-path-invalid characters as appropriate as the dialog loads

the 'loading subs' popup message should appear more reliably (after 1s delay) if the first subs are big and loading slow

fixed the 'fullscreen switch' hover window button for the duplicate filter

deleted some old hydrus session management code and db table

some other things that I lost track of. I think it was mostly some little dialog fixes :/

.

advanced downloader stuff:

the test panel on pageparser edit panels now has a 'post pre-parsing conversion' notebook page that shows the given example data after the pre-parsing conversion has occurred, including error information if it failed. it has a summary size/guessed type description and copy and refresh buttons.

the 'raw data' copy/fetch/paste buttons and description are moved down to the raw data page

the pageparser now passes up this post-conversion example data to sub-objects, so they now start with the correctly converted example data

the subsidiarypageparser edit panel now also has a notebook page, also with brief description and copy/refresh buttons, that summarises the raw separated data

the subsidiary page parser now passes up the first post to its sub-objects, so they now start with a single post's example data

content parsers can now sort the strings their formulae get back. you can sort strict lexicographic or the new human-friendly sort that does numbers properly, and of course you can go ascending or descending--if you can get the ids of what you want but they are in the wrong order, you can now easily fix it!

some json dict parsing code now iterates through dict keys lexicographically ascending by default. unfortunately, due to how the python json parser I use works, there isn't a way to process dict items in the original order

the json parsing formula now uses a string match when searching for dictionary keys, so you can now match multiple keys here (as in the pixiv illusts|manga fix). existing dictionary key look-ups will be converted to 'fixed' string matches

the json parsing formula can now get the content type 'dictionary keys', which will fetch all the text keys in the dictionary/Object, if the api designer happens to have put useful data in there, wew

formulae now remove newlines from their parsed texts before they are sent to the StringMatch! so, if you are grabbing some multi-line html and want to test for 'Posted: ' somewhere in that mess, it is now easy.

next week

After slaughtering my downloader overhaul megajob of redundant and completed issues (bringing my total todo from 1568 down to 1471!), I only have 15 jobs left to go. It is mostly some quality of life stuff and refreshing some out of date help. I should be able to clear most of them out next week, and the last few can be folded into normal work.

So I am now planning the login manager. After talking with several users over the past few weeks, I think it will be fundamentally very simple, supporting any basic user/pass web form, and will relegate complicated situations to some kind of improved browser cookies.txt import workflow. I suspect it will take 3-4 weeks to hash out, and then I will be taking four weeks to update to python 3, and then I am a free agent again. So, absent any big problems, please expect the 'next big thing to work on poll' to go up around the end of October, and for me to get going on that next big thing at the end of November. I don't want to finalise what goes on the poll yet, but I'll open up a full discussion as the login manager finishes.

#release

[crinkled-emotions]

Autumnal Asks

I was tagged by @its-me-theicequeen

lantern - how did you meet your best friend? What were your first impressions of each other?

So, I met my oldest best friend when I was 7 (I'm 17 now damn) and basically we started talking because we both liked horses I think. We fought like crazy and we're in completely different states of Australia now but I still love her heaps and love talking to her when I get the chance.

The second best friend I made when I was 12. We actually didn't talk until I was 13 or 14 when I properly became friends with her. To this day I still consider her one of my closest friends. Fun fact; we hated each other for a period of time.

Oof, now the girl I could seriously consider my second sister at this point- we met at the start of the year due to being one of the only four new kids in our dorm at school. We met during orientation, and haven't separated since. She's hilarious and always up for a fight, but luckily the mum friend in me always stop her before she does something stupid haha.

frost - if you could give some advice to your younger self, what would you say?

Mate, you've got a lot to learn. I know it seems like your life is great and you know everything there is to know, but tone down the know it all and actually give people the time of day to talk to you. You never know, maybe you'll stop being lonely.

maple - is there a hobby / skill that you’ve always wanted to try but never did?

You know, I actually really love netball; the sport, if you haven't heard of it before. My friend plays it and I got to be good at it when I was younger, but I hated the girls at my school therefore I didn't pursue it, so my netball career never exactly started off. Would definitely give it a good go now, in fact I'm starting next year. It's never too late!

harvest - what fictional character do you most identify with? Why?

I can't answer this. Personally, I relate to Georgie from Heartland; gosh, I love her. She is mature and level headed, but underneath that calm personality shows a girl who doesn't know what she's doing the next day, let alone with her life.

fireside - if you had your dream wardrobe, what would it look like?

Hm. My style is really simple, so it'd probably be full of comfy t-shirts, 5sos merch, SuggLife hoodies, black skinny jeans and Converse. Maybe a pair of vans or my slippers. Life would be great my dudes. Ooh, actually I would love to have a shit ton of makeup just to experiment and play around. It's a lot of fun tbh.

cider - a food that you disliked as a child but now enjoy?

I was going to say nothing, but then I thought about this tomato pasta thing my mum makes and I used to HATE it- like my mum would threaten me with bed or eating it and I'd just go to bed- but now I actually adore it and it's probably one of my favourite meals; especially with heaps of parmesan cheese. Yum.

amber - share an unpopular opinion that you may have.

I'm one of those people that doesn't really have unpopular opinions- either I think of them right before they become popular, or I see someone say something and I just agree with it. That being said, I ship Joe and Byron hardcore and no one really seems to so I guess that counts?

fog - how well do you think you’d do in a zombie apocalypse scenario?

I would die on the first day. I'm no good when I'm camping, I can't imagine how I'd be in that kind of situation. I'd probably hide somewhere and never come out.

jack-o-lantern - if you could look like any celebrity, who would you choose?

Anna Maynard! She is so humble and shy and relatable and GORGEOUS. Her eyes look gorgeous against her blonde hair, and she always wins with her makeup. Total babe, 10/10 would recommend. Also super happy for her with her new gig hosting a talent show, that sounds awesome!

spice - have you ever encountered a house that you believed to be haunted?

Yes, actually! I used to dream that the house on the end of my street was haunted- I moved before I could explore it sadly. I might try when I go back there for the Summer

orchard - share one thing that you’d like to happen this autumn.

Well actually, it's spring for me oops but hey. I can join the Americans/ the Brits for a while. Honestly, this spring for me would be the prime time for me to work on my horse riding, especially my jumping since that's my favourite thing. I'd also like to start my first full- length Joe x Byron story after my exams.

crow - which school subject do you wish you had an aptitude for?

Math. I HATE math and I'm the dyslexic where I only struggle with math (I mess numbers up constantly, can't keep track of formulas, think a 7 is a 1 sometimes etc etc...) so if I could improve anything it would be my math. My ATAR score would soar up. That or my plant production course- I'm not the best at that course and I don't enjoy it but I'd like to try harder in it and improve my grades.

bonfire - describe your dream house.

I'm one of those sad people who are either in the middle of the city with everything accessible, or a farm with a tiny town fifteen minutes away. I'm kind of leaning toward the farm (I'm at agricultural school so I'm biased lmao) so that my kids have plenty of room to run around, get dirty, and learn how to take care of themselves. I'm big on independence but also being able to scrape your knee etc. I'm not a bubble wrap-type of person, I don't think.

cinnamon - if you had to live in a time period different than the present, which would you choose and where?

You know what? This is going to sound so random, but I would love to visit the 1850's during the gold rush in Victoria, Australia- a lot happened and I would have loved to experience it. I've done a lot of research about those times and they were rough, but I think it'd make you a better person in the long run.

cobweb - (if you’ve graduated) do you miss high school?

I graduate next year lol, not sure I'll miss it for a couple of months after that.

cranberry - what’s one physical feature that you get complimented on?

My eyelashes and my eyes! Since I'm Irish, my hair is really thick and it's dark so my eyelashes are naturally long and thick. I always get lots of compliments on them which is really nice for an insecure little shit like me. My eyes also get lots of compliments since they change with my mood hahahaha.

maize - share the weirdest encounter you’ve had with a stranger on the street.

I was standing in line for Maccas and one person tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around and she complimented me on my SuggLife hoodie! It was really nice of her but super sudden. I can't really call that weird but I still remember it. It's either that or the time a guy pushed me out of the way as he ran from the cops. That was terrifying.

quilt - how do you take your tea (or coffee)?

I hate tea (with a passion), and I don't drink normal coffee since it reacts badly with my anxiety medication. I drink decaf though, and I put in two teaspoons of both coffee and sugar, sometimes a little more sugar than coffee. I'm more of a hot chocolate person to be honest.

pumpkin - do you think that humans are inherently good or bad?

I've seen a lot of shit, been through a lot of shit, but I don't believe humans are inherently bad. I think there's always a breaking point for everyone, and once it's reached it's hard for someone to go back to the way they were.

moonlit - are you a neat or messy person? Is your room / house orderly?

I'm freakishly neat a majority of the time, but when I'm sad I don't clean my room or change my sheets and it gets really gross. That reminds me, I need to clean my room again.

flannel - have you ever gone on a bad date?

To go on a bad date, you have to have been on a date right?

cocoa - if you could have any type of hair, what colour and cut would you have?

I wish I still had my long hair! I recently chopped all the ombre off and now my hair barely goes past my shoulders which sucks. I'd love to redo my ombre when my hair is a lot longer and healthier. I want it healthy before I damage it again.

ghost - is there someone that you miss having in your life?

Yes, actually. It sounds random but I grew up with this guy since we were born (he's two months older than me) and we sort of hated each other but I was honest with him and he was honest with me, we had a good system. Our parents were close friends and I haven't talked to him at all since I moved from Victoria, but I wish him all the best. He was one of the rudest, asshole-ish guys when I was a kid, but it kept me on my toes so I guess that's a good thing.

I'm also tagging people on Wattpad! For Tumblr, I tag: @seductivebuttercreams. Good luck

#byron langley #mypast #myfuture #mystory #joe sugg #thatcherjoe

[eggoreviews]

All MCU Films RANKED

Recently, I kind of got out of the fake fan box when I finally finished watching through the many MCU films I’d missed over the last ten years. And it was clear as I was going along that Marvel has definitely had its weak points, but its strong points made everything worth the watch. So here’s my list of all MCU films up to Infinity War ranked from worst to best! (I know Antman and the wasp came out on saturday but I’m a UK egg so I have to wait til fuckin august to get my insect content so guess I’ll die)

Disclaimer: My opinion will probably, definitely not be yours

19. Iron Man 2 (2010)

As much as I love pretty much all of the main cast, somehow this film falls completely flat for me. First off, as I mentioned in my other Marvel list, Whiplash is kind of just a terrible villain and his motives for doing anything he does during this film is mostly absent. Also, compared to how well structured the first Iron Man film’s narrative felt, the story for this instalment is messy and very difficult to keep track of. Instead of escaping terrorists and fighting a genuinely memorable villain, Tony instead spends this film going to board meetings and expos and for some reason at one point, a race in Monaco? And then he’s in the race? I’m just confused. Point is, they kinda fucked this one up.

18. The Incredible Hulk (2008)

Thinking about it, this film isn’t terrible. It’s just a bit eh. At this point, Marvel were only just really finding their feet with these films and it’s notoriously difficult to make a decent Hulk film. So what really lets this film down is the fact that Norton doesn’t stick around and this film probably could’ve benefitted from Mark Ruffalo’s presence, most of the side characters are a little underdeveloped and the villain seems pointless until the last twenty minutes when he turns green and smashes shit. Much like the villain, the plot itself feels kind of slow until that last twenty minutes when shit gets smashed. So yeah, not awful, but doesn’t match up to the rest of them.

17. Iron Man 3 (2013)

Iron Man 3 is another not-terrible film. It doesn’t have a bad villain, so the whole Mandarin twist isn’t why this is placed so low as I didn’t mind that really. It’s mostly the pacing and the story that messes this one up a little. As I mentioned in my villain list, there’s so many different subplots happening that it’s really difficult to pick up on the majority of what’s happening. For example, you’ve got the weird fire stuff that everyone’s worried about, Rhodey is the Iron Patriot, Killian turns up, there’s a terrorist, oh look this woman that Tony briefly had a thing with and now Tony’s crashed his suit and here’s a random child. There’s just so much they’ve tried to cram in that I got a bit lost watching this one. That said, it definitely isn’t a bad film, just needs a little bit off the top.

16. Thor (2011)

Now we’re getting into the films I really like, so this is where ranking gets a bit more difficult. The thing about Thor is that it’s good. And that’s kind of it. It’s a perfectly good origin story that’s paced really well and offers enough humour and Thor hitting things with his hammer/fists to keep it all interesting. Plus, Loki’s introduction makes this all the more brilliant, as it kind of foreshadows him becoming a bit more evil in future. Well, you only know that if you stayed til the end because it only takes him about the length of some credits to bring himself back to life.

15. Thor: The Dark World (2013)

I know, everyone hates this film and it should be in last place. But I kind of don’t hate it, and I also don’t get why everyone else does. Sure, it relies a bit too much on technobabble and a villain that’s no more compelling than most of the others from phase one, but the film has a genuinely full and interesting plot. Alongside that is the changed dynamic between Thor and Loki after the events of the first Avengers as he struggles to trust him and we see Thor seem to genuinely mature as a character. So in my mind, this film is pretty good.

14. Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

Here’s another film that garnered a lot of hate. The additions of Scarlet Witch, Vision and (briefly) Quicksilver work very well and they seem to have interesting dynamics with the rest of the team. The final fight is pretty satisfying, the villain feels like a genuine menace, even if his character is a little uneven, sometimes opting to be overly serious android and other times the weird comic relief. In that sense, Ultron’s character does feel a bit odd, but that and the massively unneeded and very weird love plot between Bruce and Natasha (seriously I nearly turned this film off during that bar scene) are the only criticisms I really have of this film. It’s pretty decent.

13. Iron Man (2008)

The one that started it all is very, very good and is also the only Iron Man film I really like. This one has everything a Marvel film needs; humour, a fair amount of explosions and a decent villain. The only reason this didn’t place higher is because, obviously being the first one, it’s a little by-the-numbers. But all that means is that future films took this formula and made it better.

12. The Avengers (2012)

I know this one is normally higher and I still love it, don’t get me wrong. But it’s easy to forget that, at times, the pace of this film is a little bit slow. Like that New York fight at the end will always be amazing, but there’s a good chunk of the film where everyone is just kind of sitting around. Same goes for the first 20 odd minutes too. Overall, great film, but it’s the slightly uneven pace that keeps it from getting higher.

11. Ant-Man (2015)

You could argue that this one is just a less good copy of Iron Man, especially in its very derivative villain. But what puts this film a bit higher for me was the pretty much untouched genre of blending a superhero film with a heist film. That’s a fuckin good idea and I’m very here for it, which is why I’m so mad that we aren’t getting the sequel for another month. The cast in this is brilliant too, especially Evangeline Lilly’s Hope (who I’m very excited to see kick arse in the cool wasp costume tbh)

10. Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)

Cap’s first solo outing makes for one of my favourite MCU origin stories and it’s also one of the most underrated. This film proved that superhero films could work in a period setting and that makes it even cooler. Plus, brilliant villain guest spots from Hugo Weaving and Toby Jones round off the film to make something that feels a lot more than the sum of its parts. Yeah, I enjoyed this one a lot.

9. Captain America: Civil War (2016)

This is the first Marvel film that genuinely felt like it had lasting, important stakes. Seeing the Avengers fall apart with Zemo pulling the strings is fascinating to watch, as for the first time on a grand scale, we see genuine consequences for the actions of the heroes. The introductions of Spider-Man and Black Panther served to make this film much better. My only issue? That weird forced romance with Peggy’s cousin or whatever. That was just strange. Like, come on Cap, your boyfriend with the metal arm is gonna get jealous.

8. Spider-Man Homecoming (2017)

This film did the unthinkable. It made me give a shit about Spider-Man. This isn’t to say that I ever disliked the character or that the other two played him badly, I’ve just never been particularly invested in his character. The pure bean that is Tom Holland changed this and now Spidey is one of my faves. This film knows that, if we’re really rebooting Spidey again, there’s stuff we do and don’t want to see. Uncle Ben dying and Peter being emo about his spider bite? We don’t want to see that again. A perfect blend of a superhero and a teen movie and a genuinely chilling villain from Michael Keaton? We bigly want to see that.

7. Doctor Strange (2016)

While you could say that this borrows a little heavily from Iron Man’s origin story, it’s mostly the amazing visuals and interesting characters that place this one so highly. We see a genuine, if a little fast, journey in Strange’s character from arrogant know-it-all to magic robe guy. Plus, a good villain in Mads Mikkelson makes this one much better, so when the sequel inevitably comes, I think I’ll definitely be seeing it. The only thing this film lacks is a big finale, as everything seems to tie up a little too easily.

6. Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

Almost the best sequel in the MCU, this films builds on the events of Cap’s first outing to deliver a sort of spy thriller. Again, I’m a big fan of the Marvel films that push the boundaries and branch out into different genres and it’s pretty clear that the experimentation in this film worked perfectly. It’s an intense spy film with some genuine emotion as we see Cap try his best to get through to his boyfriend. More like this pls.

5. Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

I can’t tell you how much I love the Guardians (Kinda unrelated but Dave Bautista is at a comic con I’m going to in October. Fuck I’m excited for that). They brought a badly needed sense of genuine fun to a franchise that still felt a little bit too serious. With a perfect cast with good chemistry, a cool space setting with brilliant visuals and a narrative that keeps you hooked, the only thing keeping this film from being perfect is a slightly out of place villain.

4. Black Panther (2018)

The rest of this top 5 all come very close to the top spot to the point where it was too difficult to rank them. Cultural significance aside (which is one of the many things that made this film brilliant), this film’s characters and storylines make a point of breaking away from the usual Marvel mould to make one of the best MCU films to date. In a rare feat that not many of these films do, every single side character in this film feels developed and necessary, which is why so many of them slotted so well into Infinity War (except Nakia for some reason. Really hoping she comes back for Avengers 4, unless she’s been Thanos’d I guess)

3. Avengers: Infinity War (2018)

They pretty much perfected this one. Some people are saying this is a little gloomy, but that’s to be expected when purple Josh Brolin is trying to kill everyone. What stops this one from being too emo is the well-needed presence of the Guardians, but I could legit just gush about this film for ages so we’re moving on.

2. Thor: Ragnarok (2017)

This film is miles, miles better than both of the other Thor films and pretty much everything else in the MCU. Taika Waititi does something that most other Marvel films really couldn't manage; it has a terrifying, brilliant villain and yet the whole film still maintains some of the best humour in the MCU. Guest spots from Cate Blanchett, Jeff Goldblum, Karl Urban, Tessa Thompson and the director himself are all equally amazing and help make this film what it is. If we lose Thor in Avengers 4, I’m praying for Tessa Thompson’s Valkyrie to take up the mantle.

1. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)

As I said, the top 4 were very, very close together, but Guardians 2 only just beats them all for me. It’s a pretty unpopular opinion, but I think this film took everything from the first and only made it better. In this instalment, we see some desperately needed development for each and every character, with the decision to make this film more character driven being one of its best aspects. Almost pitch perfect humour, an amazing villain, my favourite final fight in the whole of the MCU. Yondu’s heart-wrenching death. I swear if we lose any Guardians permanently in Avengers 4, I won’t be happy.

Just as I typed that last sentence, I had another idea for a Marvel list. Might do another one of what I think each surviving character from Infinity War’s role might be in the next one. Ooo.

Go treat urself.

#eggoreviews #films #marvel #mcu #iron man #captain america #infinity war #avengers infinity war #avengers #tony stark #ranked #steve rogers #list

[salecheapsneakers-blog]

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[ultrasfcb-blog]

Lewis Hamilton retires from Austrian GP as Max Verstappen wins

Lewis Hamilton retires from Austrian GP as Max Verstappen wins

Lewis Hamilton retires from Austrian GP as Max Verstappen wins

Lewis Hamilton lost the world championship lead after retiring from a sobering Austrian Grand Prix for Mercedes, as Max Verstappen took an unexpected victory for Red Bull.

Hamilton retired due to a loss of fuel pressure with eight laps to go as he was looking to regain his title lead following a Mercedes strategy blunder and tyre problems.

His retirement, with title rival Sebastian Vettel finishing third in his Ferrari behind team-mate Kimi Raikkonen, puts Vettel into a one-point lead heading into next weekend’s British Grand Prix.

Mercedes will leave Austria and head to Silverstone with plenty on their minds as they ponder how what had looked set to be an easy one-two on a weekend they had dominated fell apart.

Their problems handed a first win on their home track to Red Bull, for whom Verstappen drove beautifully to control the race once Mercedes hit their problems, well out of reach of the pursuing Ferraris.

Verstappen’s Dutch fanbase were out in force in Austria

Mercedes miss a gaping open goal

What had appeared set to be a comfortable cruise to a one-two for Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas began to fall apart for Mercedes relatively early on.

Bottas started from pole but Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen muscled between the Finn and Hamilton off the line and took second place, with Hamilton into the lead and Bottas briefly falling back behind Verstappen into fourth after the first corner.

Bottas reclaimed second place with a brave move around the outside of Verstappen and Raikkonen into Turn Four and Mercedes looked to be in control.

But Bottas retired on lap 14 of 71 with a loss of hydraulic pressure, and Mercedes’ strategists failed to react to the imposition of the virtual safety car, which remotely forces all cars to reduce speed, as his car was recovered.

Stopping under the VSC costs less time than during active racing and all the leading teams apart from Mercedes took advantage. The world champions soon realised they had made a grave error.

Verstappen rejoined just 13 seconds behind Hamilton, with Raikkonen and Red Bull’s Daniel Ricciardo also close enough to mean the Briton would come out behind them when he stopped.

The last time both Mercedes retired from the same race from mechanical reasons was the 1955 Italian GP

Mercedes’ chief strategist James Vowles came on to the radio to apologise to Hamilton, saying it was his error – a message he had to repeat later in the race after his driver complained about the team “throwing away a win”.

It was the third time this season that Mercedes’ strategists had made an error around a safety car – after Hamilton lost a win in Australia in March, they failed to stop him under a safety car in China.

But as it happened, Mercedes cascading series of problems made the strategy error moot.

Hamilton stopped on lap 25 for tyres and rejoined in fourth, ahead of Vettel. But the world champion was soon struggling with rear tyre wear and his rival closed in, and overlook on lap 39.

A dark stripe was appearing on Hamilton’s left rear tyre – a sign of blistering, where the rubber overheats, bubbles and tears badly – and it became clear Hamilton would have to stop again and fourth was the best he could hope for. Ricciardo had already run into his own blistering problems and dropped back, and would retire later with a broken exhaust.

But then on lap 63, Hamilton complained of a loss of power and pulled off the track with a loss of fuel pressure, his first failure to finish in the points since the 2016 Malaysian Grand Prix, when an engine failure inflicted major damage on his title hopes.

Verstappen’s unlikely win

Heading into the race, few would have predicted a Red Bull victory, after the team’s least competitive showing in qualifying of the year so far. Nor would anyone have predicted such a thrilling, eventful race when Mercedes looked set to dominate.

But hotter temperatures in the race than in qualifying brought them back into the competitive picture, and Verstappen put himself into a position to benefit from Mercedes’ misfortunes with an aggressive first lap.

As Raikkonen ran wide out of Turn Three after challenging the Mercedes, Verstappen pounced. Bottas passed the Ferrari and Red Bull on the outside on the run to Turn Four, and then the Dutchman took third place from the Ferrari with a brave move into the fast Turn Seven.

Verstappen stayed within range of the Mercedes in the opening stint and was in a position to pounce when Bottas hit problems and Mercedes messed up Hamilton’s strategy.

The 20-year-old had a difficult start to the season, with significant errors in all the first six races, but since the Canadian Grand Prix he has driven beautifully with the control and precision that marked this race.

Verstappen was six seconds clear of the Ferraris with 20 laps to go, but he began to run into the same blistering problems that had afflicted Ricciardo and Hamilton and he had to measure his pace to the end. He crossed the line just 1.5secs ahead of Raikkonen, with Vettel a similar distance behind.

Nico Hulkenberg was the first to retire from a race which tested many of the cars to breaking point

The good side to Grosjean

Behind the top three, Romain Grosjean took his first points of an incident-prone season on a strong weekend for Haas, for whom his team-mate Kevin Magnussen finished fifth, just 1.575secs behind.

The Force Indias of Esteban Ocon and Sergio Perez were next, ahead of an unlikely eighth place for Fernando Alonso’s McLaren after starting from the pit lane.

The Spaniard had a difficult race running at the back for a while, but benefited from the unusually high number of retirements and not being affected by the tyre blistering on some other cars, and passed Sauber’s Charles Leclerc in the closing stages.

Leclerc, expected to replace Raikkonen at Ferrari next season, was ninth, ahead of team-mate Marcus Ericsson, the two passing Toro Rosso’s Pierre Gasly together at Turn Four in the closing laps.

Driver of the day

It has to be Verstappen. Red Bull had looked down and out after qualifying but the Dutchman matched aggression with control and intelligent race management to produce what team boss Christian Horner called “an incredible, unexpected win”

What happens next?

The British Grand Prix next weekend is the third race of F1’s first ‘triple header’. Mercedes will be expected to dominate there, as the track’s high-speed nature and sweeping corners is likely to perfectly suit their car’s qualities. But Austria showed that nothing can be taken for granted.

What they said

Verstappen said: “It was really hard to manage the tyres. We had to manage them and hang on. I need to catch up with the points. It was a good day for me and I just hope we can continue like this.”

Vettel said: “We were chasing him down at the end but couldn’t quite make it. The pace was good, the tyre management was good. Positive day.”

The hills are alive etc… The race takes place in the Styrian mountains

That guy: the pre race entertainment had nothing on what unfolded on track

BBC Sport – Formula 1 ultras_FC_Barcelona

ultras FC Barcelona - https://ultrasfcb.com/formula1/7298/

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[virginieboesus]

7 Of The Worst Movies Based On Games

The video game and movie industries have had a very rocky relationship ever since they first got together. That much is pretty well documented already. I mean, there have been some good, or at least average, movies that were based upon games… The first Resident Evil movie comes to mind, as does the first Silent Hill movie. However, there have also been some outright terrible attempts to create video game related movies.

From films that utterly miss the point of the games to ones that would have been better off without the video game connection, we’ve had our fair share and more of bad tie-ins. Everyone knows that a video game tie-in to a movie is usually going to be terrible, but the same is true the other way around. That’s why, today, we’re going to look at 7 of the worst movies based upon video games that have ever been created!

7. Doom

The Doom game franchise was once the king of first-person shooters… Whilst the gaming side of the franchise may have reinstated this title in recent times with the release of DOOM (aka Doom 4) on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC, it will never escape the legacy of the live action movie. Rather than dealing with the religious aspect of Doom, whereby the creatures are literally coming from Hell, the movie decided to go down a much more generic route. With scientists on Mars bringing to light an artificially created chromosome that subsequently infects the entire colony, people who lived and worked there are turned into a variety of different monsters.

However, to make this change in the base plot even more detached from the actual games, this infection will only turn you into a monster if you were already inherently evil. I mean, I would like to say that this feels like it could have been written by a child, but then, they would probably have come up with something better. Add to this the fact that the characters are wholly unrelatable and just unlikeable, and you have a recipe for disaster. The movie even features Karl Urban (a tremendous actor) and The Rock, but even that super-team couldn’t make this movie work.

Also, why does a movie based on a first-person shooter end with a battle of fists?

6. Double Dragon

Now, you’d think that taking a beat-em-up gaming and turning it into an action movie would be one of the easiest things you could possibly do, right? I mean, the entire formula is there for you already! Sure, the storyline of Double Dragon isn’t exactly Oscar-worthy, but then, you wouldn’t expect a particularly deep story from an action movie anyway. So you would need to really do a bad job to screw up a movie based on Double Dragon, right?

Well, that’s exactly what the director and crew of the Double Dragon movie decided to do! Taking place in the year 2007 after a huge earthquake totalled most of Los Angeles, leaving it a flooded shell of a city, the movie features some of the most un-gang-like gangs ever! On top of that, they somehow managed to make Robert Patrick (of Terminator 2 and X-Files fame, amongst other great roles) look even more pointless as an antagonist that Samuel L Jackson’s character in Kingsman – the big difference being that Kingsman did it on purpose and it worked well because of that.

Everything about this movie screams a misunderstanding of the game itself, or a blatant lack of care about it.

5. Resident Evil: Extinction (And All Subsequent Sequels)

Now, I’m in the minority of gaming fans who actually enjoy Resident Evil: Apocalypse, the second movie in the live action series. Yes, Paul W S Anderson had made his wife (Milla Jovovich) the main character, pushing Jill Valentine to the background, despite the movie being (very loosely) based upon Resident Evil: Nemesis… But it was still an entertaining action movie (but not a horror movie in the slightest). For me, the entire movie series went downhill when we got to Resident Evil: Extinction (and onwards).

RE: Extinction featured Alice (Jovovich’s character) using telekinesis to move flames around the air and burn all of the zombie crows. It took one of the video game series’ most beloved characters, Claire Redfield, and stripped her of all likeable qualities (likely so that attention would be focused on Alice), and turned an already messed up Carlos into a shadow of his former self. From there, things just got worse, with the characters that we loved from the games being treated like afterthoughts! The first movie was an interesting take on the Resident Evil idea, but the reason it worked was that Alice wasn’t an over-powered Goddess and it didn’t feature any of the characters from the games to tarnish. The second was an average yet entertaining affair, whilst everything after that would do best being put in the nappy-bin where they belong.

4. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation

The first Mortal Kombat movie was an entertaining romp featuring some reasonable fight scenes and a plot that actually managed to fit in with the game, mostly. But by the time the sequel came around, we were all in for a laughable excuse for a movie! To begin with, they recast a number of returning characters, killed off one of them right at the beginning, and had some of the worst CGI I have ever seen in a film. Even as a young lad, I knew how absolutely terrible the movie was!

The dialogue is also atrocious, making the original Resident Evil (with it’s “Jill sandwich line included) looking like Oscar-worthy gold! In fact, the only reason I would ever put this movie on again is to listen to the epic theme song. But then, I could just listen to it on Spotify and save myself the torture that is Mortal Kombat: Annihilation.

3. BloodRayne

Looking back on the genre as a whole, Vampire movies haven’t had a very good time this century. From being absolutely tarnished by the likes of Twilight, to the fact that the Underworld series started off so well and then just went downhill with every movie after the third, the genre has had a lot of trouble. One movie that did nothing but make this even worse was BloodRayne. Now, the games that this movie was based on are actually really rather fun to play. Sadly, Uwe Boll got hold of the movie rights, and that spelt doom for the film straight away.

With everything from the wrong time period for the setting, action sequences that look like they would be more fitting on an episode of East Enders, and acting from top quality actors that feels like the “phone in” equivalent, it really is an awful movie. How did it go so wrong? Oh yeah… Uwe Boll.

2. Super Mario Bros

Well, here we are; the video game movie that started the crossover industry, and also the first one to let us all down. It is rather common knowledge that this movie is utterly terrible, but what you might not know is that the directors actually wanted to make a cyberpunk movie, which is why everything in Super Mario Bros looks so dystopian and futuristic. As fans of the games, this caused a lot of confusion and outright annoyance for viewers, due to the complete change in the way that the Mushroom Kingdom looked. On top of that, the goombas look horrific, bearing no resemblance to their video game counterparts.

Another interesting fact about the movie comes from the casting; Mario and Luigi are supposed to be brothers, right? So why are they from two different ethnicities? Everything about Super Mario Bros is confused, contrived and just downright badly made. This movie set the precedent for video games movies to come, and for that alone, it would feature high up on this list. However, add to that the fact that it is just a generally terrible movie, and it more than earns the number two spot!

1. House of the Dead

Zombie movies are everywhere these days. In fact, zombies, in general, have taken over the big screen, small screen and gaming industry like a digital apocalypse. Sadly, that means that you’ll naturally get some films that were best left to rot. It should come as no surprise that this particular “gem” of a movie was directed by Uwe Boll (again). It starts off as a generic teen horror movie with a bunch of people going to a rave on an island that then because infested with zombies. From there, we get one of the most confusingly directed movies ever. Scenes will switch between the teenagers screaming and running for their lives, to shots of them pulling of Trinity-esque slow motion kicks from The Matrix!

This, plus the complete lack of a connection to the game, makes you wonder how Uwe Boll ever manages to get the rights to anything anymore!

And That’s All Folks

Those are 7 of the worst movies ever made based on video games. There are, of course, a reverant tonne of others that could have made this list, so I may make a sequel to this post in the future.

What video game movie do you hate the most? Let me know in the comments below!

from More Design Curation https://www.16bitdad.com/7-of-the-worst-movies-based-on-games/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=7-of-the-worst-movies-based-on-games source https://smartstartblogging.tumblr.com/post/174335533990