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imaginingsoftly · 4 years

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Baseball Trivia Pt. 2 - Josh Anderson

Type: Y/N insert shorts, strangers to enemies-ish to lovers, series

Requested: No

Warnings: standard swearing

There was no fucking way. Y/N stared at Thatcher as he talked, but the words he was saying weren’t computing. No fucking way was Josh Anderson on his way to Vancouver. It was like fate had heard her think that they would never meet again and laughed as she sent Josh in Y/N’s direction. “Earth to Y/N, where the fuck did you just go?” She snapped back to the present, shaking her head and smiling at the mountain of a man in front of her instead of responding. Thatcher gave her another weird look before continuing. “We’re gonna have the end-of-summer barbeque at my place after the last day of training camp, and I expect you to be there. Someone’s gotta help me man the grill.”

It was tradition. End-of-summer barbeques had become a thing beginning their sophomore year at BC, after the pair had become close during their freshman year. Almost eight years later it was still a yearly tradition, though now the barbeque was extended to the entirety of the training-camp team rather than just a few friends. “Took you long enough to pick a date,” Y/N retorted, slapping the bill of Thatcher’s baseball hat. “ I thought I was gonna have to have a barbeque all by myself.” Thatcher slapped the bill of her hat in response, and it turned into an all-out war. As an only child, Thatcher had become the closest thing she had to a brother, shenanigans included. It was refreshing to have someone to mess with who wouldn’t get upset when she roughhoused a little.

Even while trying not to let Thatcher and his professional athlete muscles overpower her much smaller frame Y/N found her mind wandering back to Josh. There was really no reason for her to be freaking out as much as she was. It was one hook up. There were no strings implied, no numbers exchanged, it’s not like she ghosted the guy, not really. Thatcher had never really expressed any distaste towards her dating other NHLers, but it was different when it came to his teammates. They were like his brothers, and were therefore her brothers by extension. In other words, off limits.

She really just needed to relax. He wasn’t even on the team when they got together. Everything would be fine. Josh was part of the family now, and she would follow his lead. If he wanted people to know they hooked up then fine, but if he wanted to act like a stranger that was even better. Thatcher was a little bit too protective of Y/N at times, and she religiously avoided getting into it with his teammates just to make sure she didn’t mess with team chemistry. Honestly, there was a chance Josh wouldn’t even remember her. It’s not like the guy had a glowing reputation anyway, and they had been drinking. It would be fine. Maybe if Y/N repeated it to herself often enough, she would start to believe it.

Y/N sighed heavily, giving in as Thatcher managed to wrestle her into a headlock. “Seriously, Y/N, are you okay?” Thatcher released his arm and turned her so they were facing each other. Crap. Here comes the interrogation. “You’ve been on another planet since we started talking. What gives?” She shrugged. There was no way she was going there right now.

“I guess I’m just tired, bro,” she said with a shrug, “conference play just started. I’ve got a lot on my plate.” Thatcher reached up to squeeze her shoulders, and Y/N struggled not to cringe at how easily he ate up her lie. It sucked to lie to him, but there was no way she was going to tell him about Josh, not without talking to Josh first. Her response seemed to placate Thatcher, and he gave up on that line of questioning after making Y/N promise to take care of herself.

Keeping things from Thatcher was tough; he was there for her after her boyfriend of three years broke up with her halfway through their junior year of college, he drove her down to UConn the summer after graduation so she could begin her first internship as a college grad, and he’d been the one to welcome her to Vancouver with open arms after the completion of said internship. He was there for every important part of her adult life, and now the one thing she hadn’t told him was going to bite her in the ass. The universe was out to get her.

Training camp would begin tomorrow, and in a couple of weeks Y/N would have to face Josh in the same backyard she was sitting in at the moment. There went any sleep she had planned to get before basketball was added to her workload.

---Josh POV--------------------------------------------------

“So there’s no one in your life? No girl at all? Not even a hookup?” The questions were getting annoying, to say the least. It wasn’t the guys’ fault; they just wanted to get to know him. The problem was that he shouldn’t be doing this. He was supposed to stay in Columbus, live his life there until he retired and then move back to Canada.

Josh shook his head. “No hookup. Although there was this one girl,” he said with a small smile, “she was something else. We talked for hours at the bar, and she knew so much about baseball and hockey history. We hooked up, and then she was gone when I woke up the next morning. No note, no number, nothing. And she was from out of town, so I couldn’t even try running into her at the same bar again.” All of the guys groaned sympathetically, and they finally let that line of questioning go. Truthfully, he hadn’t thought about that girl in months. She had been fun to talk to, and tough enough to dish back everything Boone and Seth had thrown at her, but it wasn’t like he wanted to fucking marry the girl or anything. Mostly, it was the fact that she had left that stuck with him. He was always the one leaving. The girls usually tried to hang around, maybe try to get more than one night. It was an asshole thing to think, he knew that, but damn it sucked to be on the other end of it. He didn’t even know where she lived. In all of their time talking he only learned she worked at a university. He didn’t even know if it was in the States or Canada.

A tape ball connected with the side of his head, and Josh shot a glare at Bo from across the locker room. A middle finger almost followed, until he noticed video cameras catching the exchange. Josh waved at the intern behind the camera sheepishly. They would have had to cut that for their welcome back video if he hadn’t caught himself. Another tape ball came flying at his head, courtesy of Stecher, and Josh whipped that one back at his teammate with a grin. The guys were alright, even if some of them could be pretty childish. Even Hughes acted older than some of the guys, and he was the team baby. A body slumped down into the stall next to Josh’s, and he looked over to find Thatcher watching him. “‘Sup, Dems?”

Thatcher smiled up at Josh, a shock considering the choice words he’d thrown in Josh’s direction after a particularly nasty dangle he’d put past the goalie at the end of practice. “Barbeque at my place this afternoon.” Shit. He’d planned on exploring the city, maybe finding a hookup tonight. “Non-negotiable, everyone comes,” Thatcher interrupted, almost like he knew Josh was about to refuse. “It’s a tradition. One of my college friends and I get together and man the grill. We’ve been doing it for almost eight years now. Bring yourself and your booze of choice if it isn’t beer or wine.” Josh nodded. Your goalie says you come to some end-of-summer party, you go to the party. Don’t mess with a goalie’s traditions or superstitions. Thatcher stood, punching Josh’s shoulder. “Everybody starts showing up around 4. See you then.”

Thatcher made his way around the locker room repeating the same announcement, and it was met with shouts of excitement and reminiscing on barbecues of year’s past. Clearly it was a hit. Brock and Petey somehow roped Josh into riding to the party with them, promising that Josh would be happy he’d taken an Uber with them instead of driving himself. “The drinking is legendary,” Brock had promised, a solemn nod of agreement coming from both Petey and Stecher, who flanked Brock. Legendary parties were his thing. This would be even ground, and he could keep up. Bring on the drinking.

--Y/N POV----------------------------------------------------

Y/N woke up the day of the barbeque feeling sick as the Dropkick Murphys blasted on her alarm. It didn’t matter how many times she told herself it would be fine, running into the guy she had ghosted was going to suck. Hopefully he was as interested in revealing their hookup as she was, and it would never get mentioned again.

She groaned as her alarm continued to scream the lyrics to Rose Tattoo, reaching up to swipe the alarm off her phone. Thatcher was expecting her at his place before he left for camp in an hour with a list of groceries for him to pick up on the way home. The desserts Y/N had prepared the night before were sitting on the counter when she stumbled into the kitchen for coffee, mocking her with their chocolatey stare. It was going to be one of those days. She caved, shoving one of the cupcakes into her mouth with a groan. If she didn’t get a handle on herself before she made it to Thatcher’s he was going to get suspicious. The last time she acted this strangely some poor kid from the Comets almost got punched for flirting with her. The guys had good intentions, but sometimes they took the caveman shit too far.

With her coffee brewed and cupcake eaten, Y/N shuffled into the bathroom to get ready for the day. She washed her face and brushed her teeth on autopilot, debating if mascara were really necessary. The guys had seen her at her worst, and she didn’t really care what they thought about the sprinkling of acne on her jawline that just wouldn’t go away. It’s not like she was interested in any of those idiots. Well, any of the idiots that had been with the team before a couple of weeks ago, anyway.

A hat would be necessary, even if she was just going to be in Thatcher’s house until it was time to grill. Her nose would burn something awful if she didn’t wear something with a bit of protection, and the soccer games she was working that week would just add to the burn. Hat protection for sure. She slapped on an old BC Hockey hat, one she’d stolen from Thatcher, and looked into her closet with a sigh. The decision on what to wear took far too long. The guys loved to throw her in the pool, especially Brock when he got drunk, so her bathing suit needed to be reliable. The problem was that they also loved to take photos for their social media pages, and her most reliable swimsuits were also the least flattering. The black and white striped bikini was the most durable, but Y/N really wanted to wear the strappy midnight blue one-piece she’d gotten on a whim during a day trip to Seattle. Durability won out in the end, and the bikini was stuffed into her bag beside the pajamas that would inevitably find use when she didn’t want to go all the way home at the end of the night.

Y/N’s drive to Thatcher’s was relaxing. She lived in the middle of the city, fond of the ability to walk down the street to the grocery store or the bars, but Thatcher’s place was right outside the city, on a quiet sidestreet that better resembled a neighborhood in her hometown. She stopped at their favorite coffee shop on her way out of the city, picking up another coffee for her and a breakfast sandwich for Thatcher. It didn’t matter how many times the nutritionist told him to knock it off, Y/N knew he relied on those sandwiches to get him through morning skates. In no way was Thatcher a happy camper in the morning. His attitude rivaled even hers. Thatcher was waiting outside when she arrived, sitting on his front stoop like she had missed curfew or something.

“You’re late,” Thatcher called as she opened her door, “and you’re gonna make me late for camp if you don’t hurry it the fuck up.” Y/N raised her middle finger in response, leaning back into the car for the desserts. Thatcher appeared behind her to help carry things, and Y/N had to slap his hand away from the trays when he tried to reach for a cookie. If he ate one now, he’d eat them all by the time the actual party started. She’d learned that lesson the hard way. Y/N placed the breakfast sandwich on top of the tray of cookies Thatcher was carrying, and he leaned down quickly to kiss her cheek. “You’re the bomb, bro, my saviour.” Y/N rolled her eyes. He was so dramatic about his breakfast sandwiches.

Y/N finally managed to get Thatcher out the door and off to camp with a promise to get the backyard ready for that night, so long as he grabbed the necessary groceries on the way home. It was their agreement since they’d both settled in Vancouver; she brought dessert and got the house ready for guests, Thatcher bought all the food and alcohol. Everything was ready for the night, really, with the exception of the grill. It looked like it hadn’t been cleaned since she cleaned it last summer, so Y/N grabbed all of her cleaning supplies with a sigh. She needed a clean grill if they were going to make burgers tonight. That was non-negotiable.

---Josh POV--------------------------------------------------

Brock and Stecher were far too loud when they were tipsy. Petey was fine, if anything even more quiet than normal, but the other two were borderline obnoxious. The pregame had begun the moment everyone rolled up to Brock’s place, and Josh had to admit he hadn’t expected it. Pregaming a team party was a little weird, but hey, he was with a bunch of fellow hockey players. They didn’t always do things that made sense. Herding them into the Uber waiting on the street outside Petey’s apartment was no easy feat, and Josh felt himself sweating a little bit as the responsible one of the party. This never happened. He was always the one being herded.

The ride was long, as apparently Thatcher lived outside the city, and Brock kept Josh entertained with stories of barbecues past. “I think the worst, though, was that time Jake almost drowned.” Stecher started laughing, and Josh stared at him uncomfortably. A teammate almost drowning was funny? Brock must have caught his expression, because he hurriedly continued. “He wasn’t actually drowning, he was just so drunk that he sat in the shallow end and yelled for help. It came up to like his chest.” Stecher roared with laughter again, and Josh joined in a little bit. That must’ve been a sight.

Thatcher’s house was far too nice for a bachelor, a moderately large home that was built for a small family and not a single hockey player who basically lived on the road. It was homey-looking, covered in gray wooden shingles and boasting a wrap-around porch Josh envied. It was perfect for sitting with a small group of friends. He could only imagine the inside, if the outside was any indication. The landscaping and yard decorations gave away that Thatcher hadn’t decorated the place himself. The inside probably looked like a design catalogue vomited on it.

Cars lined the long driveway and the street in front of it, all Range Rovers and fancy sports cars guys who didn’t know how to spend their money splurged for. Josh caught himself as the wave of negative thoughts continually rolled over him. These were his teammates, not the enemy. Those thoughts weren’t helpful.

Josh was pulled out of his line of thinking by the stopping of the Uber, and he was the only one to thank the older guy driving as they all piled out of the car. Petey led the way into the house, though Stecher made his presence known with a shouted hello as he brought them through a hallway that indeed looked like a design catalogue and into a bright and airy kitchen. The cabinets were white, as were the countertops, though most of the walls were covered in some kind of dark teal tile.

Thatcher was slumped on a countertop, flicking the bill of the baseball cap on the girl in front of him. He laughed when she raised a middle finger at him, flicking the hat again. The girl mumbled something under her breath that sounded suspiciously like a threat, in a voice that sounded vaguely familiar. She reached up and smacked Thatcher’s hand when he went to flick her hat again, and Thatcher laughed harder as he swept three beers off the counter and walked back outside through the accordion doors to his left. The girl shook her head after him, though the moment was broken when Brock stumbled into the room behind Josh.

“Y/N!” Brock yelled enthusiastically. He threw his arms around the girl from behind, and the laugh she let out made Josh freeze. It couldn’t be. “Babe,” Brock continued, “you’ve gotta meet our new teammate. He’s your kind of player. Likes to hit things.” Brock began to turn the girl around by the arm still slung over her shoulders, and Josh almost shouted at him to stop. He knew that laugh, and the girl attached couldn’t be here. Their eyes met, and Josh saw the panic he felt reflected in her eyes.

He was so fucked.

#josh anderson imagine #nhl imagine #nhl imagines #baseball trivia

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homespork-review · 4 years

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Homespork Act 4, Part 2: Flight of the Paradox Groans

BRIGHT: Remember Spades Slick being bizarrely aware he was in a comic, back in the Intermission? Buckle up, things are about to get even more fourth-wall-breaking. Appropriately, this starts by the comic focusing on an actual fourth wall, which activates to show...Andrew Hussie.

Hussie’s MS Paint avatar notices the audience watching him, laments that his side of the wall doesn’t have an off switch, and then recaps the first year of Homestuck.

Now, in all fairness: The recap is thorough, full of links, and explains things fairly well. It’s quite long, but given how much territory it has to cover I’m not sure it could be any shorter. So it does its job well, and it’s a boon if you’re getting lost with the plot.

As for the author insertion...on this occasion I don’t mind it. It comes across as tongue-in-cheek, but framed more as the author talking to the reader than as the author inserting himself into the narrative. It’s definitely very Homestuck.

Anyway, AH gets back to work, and after a couple of false starts we return to John!

John is still flying around with his jet pack. GC trolls him to offer him a world map of LOWAS and tell him she feels awful about killing him, although in literally the next line she tells him that technically he never even died so she doesn’t understand why he’s so upset. John understandably finds this disturbing. They have a brief nonsensical discussion about Jesus/Jegus, and then John agrees to go take a look at what’s on the other side of his Second Gate. Yes, on the advice of someone whose previous advice got him killed.

CHEL: Almost a shame we didn’t set up a Too Dumb To Live count, but then to be fair that was a separate timeline and he’s probably not thinking of it as something that “really” happened. This is supported by his later dialogue.

FAILURE ARTIST: The word Jegus is really popular in the Homestuck fandom, used far more often than it is in the canon. Gets quite annoying, in my opinion. Actually, a rather Jesus-like figure does appear, but he’s not called “Jegus”.

CHEL: Yeah, I think only Terezi, John, and Dave ever use the term, but it somehow became latched onto as an actual term used by trolls in general, even though in canon it isn’t.

BRIGHT: Fortunately, this time GC appears to be playing nice. John flies though the Second Gate and emerges...into LOLAR?

FAILURE ARTIST: Hussie does an amusing trick where he has what looks like a loading screen for a flash but it’s actually a still image eternally at 2%.

BRIGHT: Yes, it’s LOLAR. John promptly crashes into Rose’s house, smashing through a wall and into her bedroom, where Rose is still snoozing in her knitting pile. Apart from briefly being stuck upside down, he does not appear injured by this collision.

Rose has somehow slept through the commotion. John decides to let her rest and borrows her computer to talk to Dave.

The first one he talks to is actually Davesprite, who points out how moronic John was to listen to GC again. No arguments here! Then he explains how the Gate system works: Odd-numbered Gates, above players’ houses, lead to somewhere on their planets. Even-numbered Gates lead to other players’ planets, exiting over their houses. Normally they aren’t meant to go through even-numbered Gates until the houses are built up, so they don’t fall to their deaths, but fortunately John has a jetpack workaround. So far Davesprite is living up to his promise of being straightforward.

John realises he’s talking to Future Dave, and asks “do you think i could talk to the real dave for a second?”

...ouch, John.

Davesprite goes off on a tear, ranting that he is a real Dave — arguably the realest Dave, since he’s been running around LOHAC for months trying to get enough information to save everyone. John apologises sincerely.

CHEL: This won’t be the last we hear of this theme, though.

EB: i think i pissed off your future self. TG: what did you do EB: i said he wasn't the real dave. TG: ahahahahaha EB: i think i might have really hurt his feelings though! TG: pff TG: dont worry about it EB: why not? TG: cause i wouldnt give a shit TG: and hes me

BRIGHT: Not a hundred percent sure I believe Dave, there.

CHEL: Dave uses John to snoop around Rose’s room and get the captcha code for her journals. Classy, Dave. Not a SLAMMER point, however, as this does come back to bite him very soon.

Rose’s dreamself has awoken on Derse, the purple planet, and flies across to the opposite tower. Dave’s dreamself appears to be awake, sitting upright in his computer chair; the room is entirely an unsettling bloody red colour apart from the SBaHJ cartoons on the walls, and… oh shit, there’s Lil Cal again, now in a long purple nightdress and hopping around the room on his own. If Rose was having nightmares because of dreamself issues, I can only imagine how Dave’s nightmares must look. Rose throws a ball of yarn at Dave’s dreamself, alerting him, and causing the awake Dave to pass out.

Back in Rose’s room, it seems that Charles Barkley quote was not misattributed:

FAILURE ARTIST: Another SBaHJ reference in the book quote. Is that where Dave got it?

Still, I don’t recall this book ever coming up again. Just another item that seems like a Chekhov's Gun but isn’t.

CHEL: John feels guilty about opening his birthday gift from Rose, but reasons that it’s technically now his anyway, so he does, finding another bunny, this one black and filthy-looking except for the pristine knitted purple patches repairing it, though its shape is eerily familiar.

The gift in this box is a resurrection. I used your present to thread life anew into a tattered heirloom. As long as I can remember, its black, greasy appendages have been tethered limply to its ratty, porous carriage. Too delicate to wash, too dear to discard. I used to love this rabbit. Now he's yours. I trust you'll find this to be adequately sentimental. Happy birthday.

Oh my gosh, awwwwww. Even if you don’t ship them romantically how can you not love their interactions? Definitely one of the comic’s strong points. Also I need to go hug my childhood teddy bear.

John puts the bunny back in the box again and the box in his sylladex, freeing Casey the salamander while he’s at it. And let’s just take a minute to feel utter horror because dead John still had Casey in his sylladex, so the best option is that she died too, and the worst is that we have an And I Must Scream situation on for a baby salamander. Gah.

FAILURE ARTIST: Thanks, I’d never thought of that and I never want to again.

You aren't actually sure if she is a girl though. You don't even know if salamanders can be girls. Aren't they hermaphrodites or something?

CHEL: No, for the record. Though some frogs can switch from one to the other.

FAILURE ARTIST: Casey is very popular as a name for an OC child of John (often having Rose as the mother).

CHEL: John answers Rose’s Pesterchum, upon which GA is half-heartedly sending antagonistic messages. John answers on Rose’s account, saying that Rose is asleep, which GA takes for Human Sarcasm, prompting John to pretend to be Rose.

GA: I Should Figure Out How The Viewport Feature Of This Application Works GA: So I Can See What Such A Primitive Creature Looks Like TT: haha, well i know what you guys look like. TT: you look kind of like... TT: howie mandel from little monsters.

Wait, how does he know? Am I forgetting a point at which he saw them?

BRIGHT: I always assumed that he was just goofing around and his guess happened to land in the right ballpark, but thinking about it, I’m not sure the kids ever express surprise at the trolls’ appearance.

CHEL: John, pretending to be Rose, talks about how awesome John is.

GA: He Is Either The Leader Of Your Party Or You Hold Whatever The Human Equivalent Of Mating Fondness For Him Is

CHEL: Both. Both is good!

FAILURE ARTIST: Knowing what we do of troll culture later this is an odd statement. Heck, it’s just an odd statement. Maybe this is why people think trolls don’t do friendship.

CHEL: John apparently confuses GA by saying it’s because Rose is thoughtful and John appreciates his gift, and suggests GA talk to John.

TT: why don't you pick the time that will make the most complicated mess out of everything imaginable?

GA sounds very annoyed, and leaves, intending to have the conversation with John that she had previously. We see her, GC, and the horns of AT and an unknown troll in the grey room, now revealed to be a computer laboratory. For some reason she chats via Pesterchum with another troll instead of just walking over to talk to them. This new troll is twinArmageddons, an appropriate name for the circumstances, who type2 iin yellow text liike thii2; he is, as it turns out, the hacker guy GC mentioned earlier. TA is busy setting up the network and seems irritable in general, and is not willing to help GA work her viewport.

TA: iif ii 2ee one more 2narl of wiire2. TA: kiind of juttiing out and beiing tangled or whatever. TA: ii am goiing two perform 2ome 2ort of athletiic fuckiing 2omer2ault off the deep end and get a call from the pre2iident or 2ome 2hiit.

Nice callback, but trolls, as we’ll later find out, don’t have presidents.

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 14

GA wonders why TA doesn’t want to talk to her, and TA complains that he knew in advance the trolls were doomed and no one believed him. He refuses to troll the humans himself but is setting up the system so the others can in order to get them to leave him alone. GA asks again for help, to no avail.

TA: iif you cant fiigure 2hiit out by fuckiing around you dont belong near computer2. TA: kiind of liike wiith regii2tered 2ex offender2 and 2chool2. TA: iif you move two a new town you have two go up two your neiighbor2 door and warn them about how 2tupiid you are. TA: and giive them a chance two hiide all theiir iinnocent technology. TA: and vandaliize your hou2e.

Ooh, a threefer plus one! Tacky simile for the Problematykks. As for WSP, we’ll later find out that 1) trolls kill all their criminals, 2) trolls don’t give a shit about the welfare of their children, and 3) trolls don’t appear to actually go to school. These two counts are neck and neck in the lead now!

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 17 WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 17

BRIGHT: As with much of Homestuck, the trolls give the impression of being made up as Hussie went along. That’s not entirely a bad thing -- it certainly makes the comic pretty unique -- but it does lead to some out-of-place slip-ups.

Anyway, GA chucks her F1 key at TA’s head and then starts poking him. We also see CG in the lab.

FAILURE ARTIST: I think I recall GA/TA were a popular ship before we learned more about GA. It does seem like they have a Rose & Dave dynamic going on.

BRIGHT: Back on Derse, Rose and Dave have a dance party to Dave’s music while accompanied by some crows and Lil Cal, who keeps teleporting around the room. Rose eventually gets tired of Cal’s shenanigans and hurls him out of the window, to the relief of many.

FAILURE ARTIST: The flash originally included music by Bill Bolin. In fact, it was his unfinished music being included here that caused all the drama in the first place.

BRIGHT: Time for some random interludes! First up is Maplehoof the pony, who is following Rose’s mother through a large cave which, judging by the grist lying around, recently contained very dangerous monsters.

FAILURE ARTIST: Apparently pets can collect grist for their masters...and know what grist is despite being a normal(?) animal.

BRIGHT: First Mom, and then Maplehoof, stand on a transportaliser platform and disappear. Second is Dad, who has just acquired a replacement shoe and hat (which showed up in the walkaround game, way back at the beginning of the Act), when he encounters a familiar-looking stranger with a Colonel Sassacre book, who leads him to another transportalizer platform. Both of these interludes do become relevant later, but at the time they seem a tad unnecessary.

Meanwhile, John uses Rose’s alchemiter and a code Davesprite gave him mid-rant to produce a truly epic hammer called FEAR NO ANVIL. It’s far too big for John to wield, but fortunately he can use the scaling upgrade on the alchemiter to reduce it to a more useable size. ...wait. When did Rose’s alchemiter get a scaling upgrade? Dave and Jade added a lot of modifications to his, but Rose’s should be the original edition. Sigh.

EB: so what is this? EB: the thing the code made... TG: really powerful hammer EB: how do you know? EB: i thought you couldn't use hammers. TG: i cant TG: better be though TG: got it from hephaestus EB: who's that? TG: really tough to kill dude EB: you killed him for it? TG: nope EB: how'd you get it then? TG: shenanigans EB: ok.

...and we’re back to sprite evasiveness. Davesprite is being less than forthcoming here, although it’s less obvious than with Nannasprite because it superficially imitates John and Dave’s bantering.

CHEL: Now, this would be a good way of keeping us interested if we were eventually going to see how he did it, and also they have a time limit, so not going off into a long anecdote would be understandable. However, we’ll see how his evasiveness level proceeds in the future.

BRIGHT: Dream Rose and Dave see John using Rose’s alchemiter on Dream Dave’s computer. Rose wakes up.

FAILURE ARTIST: It is interesting how early Homestuck avoided having characters have face-to-face conversations. Would have been unique if it kept up throughout the entire comic.

BRIGHT: Back in the meteor, GA hassles TA into opening the viewport on her computer. This turns out to be as simple as clicking on the point in Rose’s timeline that she wants to see. No wonder TA was frustrated!

Of course, by this point, the only one left in the room is Rose, now awake, and the young salamander. Rose hurries to catch up with John, but he blasts off to explore before she can reach him, taking her mutated kitten with him.

CHEL: John renames Vodka Mutini to Dr Meowgon Spengler, and Rose renames Casey to Viceroy Bubbles von Salamancer. Interesting link to the themes of identities which are starting to crop up, though it’s not really a direct analogue. The animals are the same animals with different names; the alternate timeline characters have the same names and superficially the same identities, but are they really the same people after their new experiences?

BRIGHT: Back on Derse, Lil Cal inexplicably lands on a stray rocket board, catching the attention of AR.

You're not sure which laws are being broken, but it is probably a lot.

AR follows Cal to yet another transportaliser, and they both dematerialise.

We jump back to John, who spies a boat on one of the islands dotting LOLAR and lands to investigate. He follows hoofprints in the sand into a subterranean hallway filled with monsters. Fortunately his new hammer has time powers, which stun the monsters long enough for John to kill them. Further on, he finds the transportaliser Mom used. John, naturally, stands on it, and is transported to a meteor in the Veil.

Actually, it’s not just a meteor; it’s one of the laboratories where the Skaian troops are produced. John, along with the cat and Maplehoof, finds a bunch of chess guys being grown in glass jars on a giant podium. Most of them are the standard carapaces we’re familiar with, but there are also a few larger pieces, apparently based on knights and rooks. He also finds a JUNIOR ECTOBIOLOGIST’S LAB SUIT, and another of those strange house-shaped sets of monitors.

On Prospit, PM is preparing to board a shuttle to Skaia when a COURTYARD DROLL sneaks up behind her. Unaccountably, she fails to notice him, despite the fact that he’s wearing a hat larger than he is. CD successfully pickpockets the White Queen’s ring, and PM departs for Skaia, none the wiser.

CD radios the DRACONIAN DIGNITARY to report mission success, and is told that he doesn’t need to keep wearing his ridiculous outfit, per orders from Jack Noir, who is now going by the SOVEREIGN SLAYER. CD says he’d rather keep wearing the outfit. Apart from the sword-through-the-chest part, it is a very nice outfit, so I’m with CD on this one.

Catastrophe is averted by Jade delivering a flying kick to CD’s head and following up with a very efficient smackdown. Her robot body replicates this back on Earth, beating the stuffing out of her mummified grandfather. Jade retrieves the ring, and puts it on her fingers to remind herself to give it back to PM later. Unfortunately, this doesn’t cause Jade to sprout wings and tentacles. Seems the rings don’t work on humans like that.

Meanwhile, in a Timeless Expanse, a WARWEARY VILLEIN is getting tired of the battle between Derse and Prospit. The next animation is called “WV?: Rise Up” and it’s one of my favorites! When I first read Homestuck I had to watch it a few times before I understood what was going on, but it is a very neat video.

Watch on YouTube

The Battlefield has been prototyped three times, and is now spherical. The forces of Derse and Prospit meet. The usual carapaces with swords are backed up by larger pieces -- some of them very strange -- and by battleships clashing in the sky. In the chaos, WV, who is farming peacefully on Skaia, has his home and farm burned down. He raises a flag and addresses the troops of both armies. Elsewhere, Jack Noir appears, flying over the Battlefield in search of the Black King.

WV rallies the armies and tells them that their real enemies are the monarchs, who are responsible for the war. Encouraged, the Dersite and Prospitan troops band together and march on the Black King.

Meanwhile, PM has reached the White King and discovers that she no longer has the White Queen’s ring. The White King listens to her and hands over his scepter, which seems to represent Skaia and serves a similar function to the Queens’ rings. Behind a nearby hill, the Hegemonic Brute radios somebody to report the transfer.

As WV and the united armies reach the Black King, Jack arrives and slices the Black King’s scepter in half, nullifying its powers and turning the Black King back into a normal carapace. PM is attacked by HB, who knocks the White King’s scepter out of her hand; it falls down a waterfall. Jack Noir beheads the Black King and turns to WV, and the animation ends.

...okay, much as I love it, I have to admit there’s a glaring question here: Namely, the kids started playing the Game less than a day ago and Dave’s kernelsprite has been prototyped for a few hours max. The second prototyping made the Battlefield more complex and the third took it into its current form. That’s a very short time to instigate a cross-faction revolution, organise the troops, and march on a monarch. For that matter, how long has WV been a farmer? The inhabitants of Derse and Prospit have obviously been doing their thing all the kids’ lives, but the Battlefield was supposedly a static, rudimentary space until John entered the Medium, so what gives?

Then again, the timeline in the Medium is supposed to be distinct from the timeline on Earth, so maybe that explains it?

CHEL: An interesting point is also raised by WV’s revolution. Namely, Derse is presented as a kingdom of darkness and evil by the game, while Prospit is presented as good. However, while PM is good, WV and AR are demonstrably not bad people either. In this animation, we see carapaces of both sides apparently don’t want to be involved in the war and are willing to rise up against the Black King. The rank-and-file carapaces on both sides, it seems, are decent people who are just following orders. (Not to mention very cute.) Jack Noir and his gang are nasty pieces of work, except CD who’s also just kind of going along with it, but there’s nothing saying white carapaces couldn’t also be… And is that a Problematykks point, presenting the black-coloured people as bad and the white-coloured ones as good? I know they’re chess pieces, but still.

This raises the question, however, what’s Derse’s motive? Are its rulers and archagents simply destroying for the evulz? I wonder. I also wonder how much Skaia itself is involved in this and how aware it is. Skaia is called the crucible of creation, and it’s responsible for the creation of the carapaces too. References are made to it “seeing” and “knowing”; it’s quite possibly sentient, though maybe not sapient. On top of that, SBurb is specifically a game, and a game needs an objective, and an adventure-type game needs enemies. Derse, it seems likely, was created and presented the way it is in order to give the players something to battle against even if its people don’t want to be their enemies. No wonder WV’s pissed!

BRIGHT: Yup. Hmm, thinking about it...the imps and other enemies we saw attacking John’s house early on were obviously Dersite, but the ones we’ve seen in Rose’s seem to be Prospitian, if anything? The colour scheme looks that way, at least. But Nanna said earlier that Derse was the enemy, nothing about Prospit.

Perhaps it has something to do with Rose being a Derse dreamer, while John is a Prospit dreamer? But in that case I’d have expected it to come up in the text. Instead it just goes unremarked.

Rose goes on a massive alchemising spree and ends up creating the Thorns of Oglogoth, a pair of wands.

The needles seem to shiver with the dark desires of THE DEEP ONE. Any sane adventurer would cast these instruments of the occult into the FURTHEST RING and forget they ever existed.

Instead of throwing the wands away, Rose takes on the enemies camping all over her house, with style.

Meanwhile, Dave goes on another, less visibly productive alchemising spree.

GET ON WITH IT!: 18

FAILURE ARTIST: The SBaHJifier could be considered productive in that it provides foreshadowing cartoons. Wish Dave’s Brain in a Jar came up again.

BRIGHT: Once he’s done creating smuppet variations to disturb the monsters encroaching on his house, he sits down to take a look at those two journals he copied from Rose earlier. One of them is called ‘MEOW’, and is literally just those same four letters, repeated over and over in different orders. The second is ‘Complacency of the Learned’.

There is no way to adequately recap the beauty of ‘Complacency of the Learned’, so we’re just going to show the whole thing:

Frigglish bothered his beard, as if unkinking a hitch in a long silk windsock. A more pedestrian audience would parse the exhibit as nervous compulsion. Behavior to petition contempt among the reasonable. He was however not surrounded by the reasonable, but the wise, a distinction in men that would forever be the difference in history's garland of treasured follies. As a matter of fact, his cadre of fellow wizards were all putting similar moves on their beards as well. The practice would evince thoughtfulness - sagacity, even - if they didn't do it all the time. Standing in line at the bank. Shooing squirrels from bird feeders. Few occasions were safe. Zazzerpan inspected the clue. A single piece of evidence cradled in his coriaceous old man palms. It was a human bone, not striking in the tale it told alone so much as that told by the thousands like it festooning the marshy soil of the mass grave. The grisly expanse bore the texture of a decadent dessert, like one of Smarny's formidable custard trifles wobbled out on wheels for the holidays, to the dismay of a small nation. "You're certain of this?" asked Frigglish. Despite what he was doing with his beard, he was, in fact, immersed in meaningful contemplation. "I am afraid I am becoming more so with each terrible tick groused by that gaudy timepiece slung around your neck." In case it wasn't clear, Frigglish wore a clock Zazzerpan didn't care for. It was magic. "The massacre of Syrs Gnelph was not as written." "What has you convinced it was the hand of our disciples in this blackness?" Executus chimed in. "I believe... I..." a fat face stammered, eyes darting with the guilt of a thief in the throes of an unraveling alibi. "I can summon a... more pressing line of inquiry..." No, Smarny. Nobody was in the mood for a sticky bundt loaf just now. Zazzerpan's ears fell insubstantial to any line of inquiry, pastry-oriented or otherwise. His abstruse contour carved a pondering shape in the fog carpeting centuries-dead. His eleven contemporaries too embraced the muted consternation of their great Predicant Scholar. Few wizards kept sharper adumbratives or read them with such lucidity. When Zazzerpan treated men with silence it was seldom unrepaid by the wise and reasonable alike. It was harrowing to entertain. Zazzerpan the Learned's storied Complacency of Wizards was marked for grander descendence. Disciples hand-picked, vetted by Ockite the Bonafide and tested by Gastrell the Munificent. The twelve sweetest, most studious children a pair of elderly eyes could give their sparkle. Not the ragged guttersnipe so oft-harvested by the common Obscenity, those vituperative little beggars with hearts to corrupt as dropped bananas brown. That these chosen youngsters would turn was not merely unthinkable, but something of a roundhouse to the temporal bones of the Upper Indifference's high chamber of Softskulled Prophets. His wisdom-savaged brow pruned further with recount of his many lessons to wouldbe successors. Lessons to advance humanity's elucidation and prosperity, an outcome this bleak trail now painfully obviated. There were few puzzles The Learned could not suspend and dissect in the recondite manifold beneath his extremely expensive pointy hat. Daring to pitch his cherished pupils in with the foul melange of history's rogues, the heretofore abstract scourge that built up civilizations with ungodly magic and tore them down with joyful malice, would prove an intellectual trespass to make his calcium-deficient bones quake. And more daring yet was the only question that now mattered. Could a bunch of bearded, scraggly old men in preposterous outfits hunt them down? He didn't have an answer. Only a simple observation so blunt and uncharacteristically jejune for the lauded sage it was breathtaking in its selfevidency. "We're going to need more wands." (Wow. Think of something better.)

Wow.

Dave is understandably intimidated by this, and decides to stop reading for now. He puts his copy of the SBURB Beta in the notebook to act as a bookmark, and leaves both books in his room for later.

Then he checks in on Rose, who is burning her version of the MEOW book.

CHEL: Dave inquires about the wizard story.

TG: i thought you hated wizards TG: whats the deal with that TT: I like wizards. TT: What I don't like is my mother's obsession with feigning interest in them to antagonize me. TG: oh man thats so messed up TG: that you think that TG: she probably digs wizards for real just like you and youre blowing shit out of proportion like pretty much always

Once again, we see exactly how fucked-up Rose’s relationship with her mother is. Mom Lalonde has somehow managed to raise a child in such a way that Rose interprets everything her mother does as an attempt to mock and provoke her.

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 16

TIER: The Lalondes are pretty damn dysfunctional as a family unit, and considering the zany nature of early Homestuck and its world's weird logic that is saying something indeed.

CHEL: As for the MEOW book, it turns out the gods from the Furthest Ring informed Rose while she was sleeping that the book’s contents are highly dangerous and must be destroyed. Said gods dwell in the sky above Derse; Dave’s never heard or seen them, but Rose points out his dreamself is always wearing shades, listening to music, and distracted by Cal.

TT: You're the prince of the moon. TG: ........ TT: I'm sure they've been meaning to seek a royal audience. TG: ..........................

Davesprite chats to Rose next. She protests at being spied on by two people, but Davesprite asks her why she burned the codebook. She didn’t need to in the future, but according to her future memories of the gods absorbed from her future dreamself, Davesprite appeared to make it relevant by traveling to the past. A sinister and familiar face watches through Dave’s window, soon proving to be the Draconian Dignitary, while Dave and Davesprite awkwardly spout elaborate mixed metaphors about how safe they are, until Dave, embarrassed, says "so i guess ill go back down and burn that book".

As any savvy reader could guess, he’s too late. The prompt suggests that he should go back in time to stop the books from being stolen, but, well...

It looks like you already tried that. GORE GALORE: 10

Dave looks completely undisturbed, but whether he is undisturbed is a different matter. He flings the corpse out the window into the lava, claiming it would freak Jade out.

John, in the lab, presses a button, causing the first monitor to depict his town, shortly before his birth. There is a Betty Crocker factory and a shopping mall, neither of which are in the town now. Zooming in locks a target over Nanna Egbert, who is taking a stroll with Dad. A meteor looms; this looks like it’s going to go very badly, considering the target lock, but it hits the factory instead. When John presses the glowing blue button, a PARADOX GHOST IMPRINT of Nanna is created; refer back to Rose’s experimentation in the lab and the green slime blobs. This time, the slime is sucked into a tube.

The next monitor does something similar with Grandpa Harley on his ship, and the next the same with Bro Strider, who stands over a meteor crater on an unseasonably warm day; something of an understatement, as the sky is the same lurid red and the sun the same glowing spiral that they were during the Strider bros’ battle even though it’s December. Bro is, regardless, prepared for the occasion with a small pair of outrageously awesome shades. What he needs these for will soon be revealed.

The fourth monitor goes back to John’s home town, a gigantic crater where the factory once was. In the shopping mall, Dad Egbert stands outside a joke shop, while Nanna apparently remains inside, busying herself with a tall bookshelf, a ladder, and a rather hefty unabridged joke book.

Mom Lalonde, clutching the infant Rose and wearing a rather snazzy long Jaspersprite-pink scarf, has come to town to study the meteor impact at the request of Grandpa Harley while he explores elsewhere. Unfortunately, now is the time a meteor chooses to strike Nanna’s location, destroying the shop.

An old mother lost today, but a new son gained.

Wait for it.

Mom Lalonde flees, dropping her scarf, which Dad Egbert picks up and slightly creepily sniffs. The monitor continues tracking her, and John captures her paradox imprint too, starting the machines whirring away...

Four babies abruptly appear on the pad, already diapered and bespectacled and old enough to sit up unaided. Convenient, no?

When the kitten jumps on a green button, the slime is blended in pairs; Nanna’s and Grandpa’s, and Mom’s and Bro’s. More blinking lights ensue, and another four extremely familiar-looking babies appear.

BRIGHT: I will say this: These kids are adorable.

While babies clamber over him, John vaults up his echeladder to the rank of Ectobiolobabysitter, acquiring one million Boondollars in the process. This automatically converts itself to a Boonbuck, the weight of which smashes his Porkhollow.

Finding out just what is going on here will have to wait, as the comic takes a brief detour to a battleship navigating the Medium nearby. There’s someone very familiar at the wheel…

An old man has much to do before he returns to Earth, dies, gets stuffed by his adopted-yet-biological daughter-slash-grand-daughter, and stuck in front of a fireplace.

Also aboard the ship are Dad Egbert and Mom Lalonde. Dad returns Mom’s scarf, and the two of them hold hands as Grandpa Harley pilots the ship towards Skaia.

We return to the lab, where John has his hands full with the babies. One of them has managed to break one of the paradox slime jars from earlier, but appears uninjured. Also, CG’s trolling him again.

CHEL: CG makes mention of the ULTIMATE RIDDLE, but John is confused because CG hasn’t told him about that yet. He uses an ableist description in explaining.

CG: SEE I KIND OF PAINTED MYSELF INTO A CORNER. CG: I STARTED TROLLING YOU AT THE END, JUST BEFORE THE RIFT. CG: AND THEN JUMPED BACK A LITTLE. CG: AND NOW I GUESS I'VE BECOME RAILROADED INTO WORKING BACKWARDS HERE. CG: UNLESS I WANT TO DO THE SORT OF DUMB SCHIZOPHRENIC HOPPING AROUND LIKE THE OTHERS. CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 18

… why wouldn’t you just hop right back to the start and work in a linear fashion from there?

TIER: Because CG excels at making things complicated for himself and is fundamentally rather stubborn and set in his ways/actions. Like he's made his bed, he's gonna lie in it.

CHEL: Anyway, CG banters with John for a bit, and then informs him that he (John) has arrived in the Veil and created infant versions of the players and their guardians.

EB: so they are like cloned copies of us? CG: NO. CG: THEY ARE LITERALLY YOU AND YOUR GUARDIANS. CG: PARADOX CLONES.

A paradox clone, we are informed, is A CORRECTLY CLONED DUPLICATE THAT WILL INEVITABLY GO BACK IN TIME AND BECOME THE ORIGINAL TARGET THAT WAS CLONED. The game worlds contain many clues hinting at the ultimate destiny of the players to create their own selves through the game, and the only way things could possibly go involved the players creating themselves, or else the game session would never happen.

CG: WHICH IS ESPECIALLY PATHETIC SINCE PARADOX SPACE APPARENTLY WENT TO ALL THIS TROUBLE TO MAKE YOU JUST TO HAVE YOU FAIL AND DIE. CG: REALLY THERE'S NOTHING MORE TRAGIC THAN THESE NULL SESSIONS FULL OF KIDS ENTERING THE GAME AND FULFILLING SOME COSMIC DESTINY SHIT JUST TO GET WIPED OUT AND LEAVE BEHIND AN EMPTY POINTLESS INCIPISPHERE FOR ALL ETERNITY.

Tragic and completely unnecessary, when there are millions of perfectly good humans already in existence who could just as easily create winning game sessions without this aspect of it. Here we see another aspect of Homestuck which hasn’t come up quite so clearly before; an extremely weird take on determinism. I’m not sure if this is meant as a parody of Chosen One plotlines or if Hussie just thought it sounded cool, but it’s uncomfortable. As it turns out, only clones created by SBurb have a hope in hell of winning the game, and even they fail most of the time. Regular people who enter the game to save themselves from the destruction of the planet will fail and die there, which honestly is not really selling this game as a good thing, since it’s what causes the destruction of the planet in the first place. I’ve had actual, legitimate, honest-to-God nightmares about this aspect of SBurb, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.

FAILURE ARTIST: I think many fans wish to play SBurb. There’s lots of fan sessions and fake GameFAQs and custom Lands. Yet in reality SBurb is not a fun time. This is cosmic horror. I think Hussie is sometimes playing it for horror and sometimes he ignores the implications.

Then again, some people want to live on the troll planet, which is straight-up dystopia.

CHEL: Again, it isn’t really clear what he’s going for. Is it supposed to be terrifying or did he just think it would be clever? Does even Hussie know what he was going for? While it’s not exactly a joke, I think it’s worth another point here:

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 17

It might be a joke. As I said, I could see it as a parody of or playing with the Chosen One narrative. In this case, literally only the chosen ones have any hope, for reasons that are not down to any merit of their own. But if it is, there isn’t really much made of it.

Of course, the reasons people want to live on the troll planet are reasonable when taken alone, but a) contradicted every alternate scene and b) not a fair trade for everything else that’s going on there. But we’ll get to that when we actually see it. And I admit, SBurb powers would be fun, but not worth the loss of my entire species.

TIER: To me at least it's fun in the same way wondering how I'd fare as a wizard during Harry Potter's years at Hogwarts, or a ninja in Naruto is. Fundamentally you'd rather want to never encounter this sorta stuff even if you get some swanky I guess powers, but the mental exercise of it is quite honestly, really fun. The game has quite a lot of interesting things to poke around with, from lands to quests to what your co-players are up to. And I'm def guilty of playing trollsona games, because the world presented is just really fascinating in its gruesome glory.

Never want to have to actually go through it, Lord knows I'd be dead within the first ten minutes if I'm super lucky, but stories about it are pretty neat.

CHEL: That’s true, but the paradox clones thing seems almost to be taunting us for having that mentality. We can pretend we’d be the super-smart strong competent ones who make it, but in this universe if we demonstrably have parents we’re doomed to die for nothing and there’s nothing we can do about it.

BRIGHT: Another fun thing about this is that it fundamentally isolates the players from the rest of humanity. If you think about it, unless they have children with a non-player, they are completely unrelated to anyone else on Earth.

CHEL: And they can’t have kids with a non-player unless something thoroughly horrible happened, because as is stated later SBurb specifically takes its players away and destroys their planet around the point of their puberty.

BRIGHT: Although I think John is actually related to Dad — as far as we’re told, Dad is in fact Nanna’s biological son, which makes him genetically John’s half-brother.

They also miss out on (going by how active the babies are) the first couple of years of life. Those two years are crucial in terms of brain development. SBURB probably controls for that, but it wouldn’t be surprising if there were negative consequences.

Oh, and if you’re a player, your existence means your civilisation is doomed. Lovely!

CHEL: And do the players ever feel any guilt or conflict over this? Do they hell. It doesn’t even occur to them, and I’m pretty sure it didn’t occur to Hussie either.

TIER: Welcome to the hell game that is SBURB; it's fundamentally pretty fucked up! It runs on a hellish scale of "things have already been predetermined" and I am Big Fear™.

CHEL: That’ll come up later, too, but there it’s obviously intentional nightmare fuel, and not at all a bad use of time travel as a story device.

CG, meanwhile, explains that he was the one to create his session’s players. With twelve of them it was a bit more complicated, but troll lineages are complicated anyway, and we’ll find out how later.

The babies are still getting all over the lab. Note that they're repeatedly referred to as "little pink monkeys". Then again, calling a non-white child a monkey really wouldn't be good.

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 18

John’s infant self has latched onto the Sassacre book, while his infant Nanna is sitting in Dad Egbert’s old hat. Baby Bro is napping in the lap of Lil Cal; that baby’s braver than I am, I can tell you that. Baby Dave is sitting on Maplehoof, and baby Grandpa has found a pair of pistols. John does not take them away from him, or even seem to notice he has them.

HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 7

BRIGHT: Earlier baby Bro broke one of the paradox slime cylinders and was sitting in it. John is pretty astoundingly bad at keeping babies away from obvious hazards.

TIER: That or the equipment is probably not sturdy enough to make it past an inspection into faulty management.

CHEL: But then he’s distracted by CG trolling him again, at least this time moving forward in time from the last conversation.

CG, like GA, apparently fails to grasp sarcasm...

EB: we had this great dare going. EB: to see who could be the least helpful and informative. EB: and you totally lost, dude! EB: you were hella helpful. CG: I WAS OBVIOUSLY JUST SPITING YOUR STUPID POINTLESS HUMAN DARE. [...] CG: ANYWAY, HOW COULD WE HAVE MADE A DARE IF I'M MOVING BACKWARDS ON YOUR TIMELINE.

… which is weird because moments later he uses it himself.

EB: do you even have elves? CG: YES, LET'S COMPARE WHICH FANTASY CREATURES THAT DON'T EXIST WE BOTH DO OR DON'T NOT HAVE. CG: WHAT A GREAT FUCKING IDEA, JOHN!

Hussie seems to waver back and forth a lot on whether trolls get sarcasm or not, in general. Since he’s contradicting himself with troll worldbuilding, that’s a point.

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 19

Banter aside, he informs John that the babies are sent to Earth via meteors during the Reckoning.

BRIGHT: How do they survive the impact? Some of those meteor strikes destroy buildings. Those are some ridiculously resilient kids.

CHEL: Cut to AR, who is still having fun on the rocketboard, until he runs into a frog temple atop a meteor. This is apparently horrifying and illegal by his standards.

You are going to throw whoever is responsible into the slammer. You always call jail the slammer when you are extra angry at crimes.

Inside, he finds an empty time capsule, like Jade’s, some complicated machinery, and a monitor screen showing a greyscale house with a very familiar bespectacled female infant and dirty old hat in it. The year depicted, says the monitor, is 1910. Enter none other than Colonel Sassacre himself.

Eight days prior, the orphan girl was taken in by an aristocratic southern colonel and legendary humorist. He recovered the young lady from a crater where a bakery once stood, operated by the man's wife, a notable baked goods baroness.

An explosion outside leads them both to a crater, where once stood the doghouse of the colonel’s pet, Halley, but before the Colonel can investigate further he’s shot through the heart.

This is exactly why babies should not be allowed to dual-wield flintlock pistols.

BRIGHT: I remain baffled as to how Baby Grandpa can even lift those things, let alone pull the triggers.

CHEL: Baby Grandpa crawls from the crater, and Halley the dog turns out to be alive.

The young boy has difficulty pronouncing the name though. Sounds more like "Harley" when he says it.

How does he know it? The colonel died before he even noticed the baby was there. Is baby Nanna speaking well enough to tell him yet? I guess he could be told later, as Sassacre wasn’t in fact their only sapient guardian...

Thirteen years later, the boy develops a taste for adventure. He and his guardian bid farewell. His sister is sad. She will be left all alone with the wicked pastry baroness. She can handle it, he tells her. He believes in her.

It isn’t clear why she didn’t go with him, or leave under her own power. They don’t seem to be imprisoned, as the panel depicts them outside on grass with no restraints or guards over them, so it’s not a matter of only one of them being able to get out. That’s a point for Nanna not trying and a point for Grandpa not bringing her:

HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 9

That dog is also remarkably lively, considering it, unlike Bec, is an entirely normal dog, it was an adult thirteen years previously, and it’s somehow supporting the weight of an entire teenager on its back (again, please don’t try this at home, you can break the dog’s spine that way).

FAILURE ARTIST: As we’ve said, Colonel Sassacre is a thinly-veiled Mark Twain expy. The real Mark Twain died in 1910 at the same time Halley’s Comet was in the sky. It’s a cute historical gag having him be literally killed by a comet but it does muck up the timeline. Nanna must have been a senior citizen when Dad was born. Perhaps he’s adopted?

CHEL: The other option is that Dad is a senior citizen now, but surely John would have wondered why his dad is so ridiculously old. I think it’s just that thing in mainstream comics and cartoons where adults are split into Old and Not Old, and the parents are normal ages for parents but the grandparents would have to be in their hundreds going by the gags. See how Scrooge McDuck in the DuckTales reboot is over a hundred and forty years old yet his sister’s son is still a youngish adult.

AR notes that the appearifier is centred over Halley the dog, but hears someone coming. It proves to be the Draconian Dignitary. AR hides and watches, noting that DD is carrying Rose’s notebooks and Dave’s beta envelopes. DD keeps the MEOW book, but throws away the other items. Complacency of the Learned lands on the floor, and the envelopes land in the time capsule, which sets to bloom in four hundred and thirteen million years.

Meanwhile, John talks to CG while infant Mom Lalonde pets the mutant kitten. John asks if there’s any way to delay the Reckoning, but nope; CG warns him that the smallest meteors will start going in only a few minutes.

EB: ok, well you keep saying how doomed we are and how all this bad stuff happens sooner, but you never say why! EB: what happens in our game that's different from yours that makes things go so badly? CG: JACK NOIR.

The Jack Noir from the trolls’ game session allied with them and helped them dethrone and exile the Black Queen, while the one from the humans’ session, as you may recall, killed the Black Monarchs and gained their powers, and is currently rampaging through the Incipisphere. John asks if it’s the same Jack Noir, but CG explains.

CG: SO LET'S SAY YOU PLAY YOUR BANDICOOT AND I PLAY MY BANDICOOT. CG: THEY ARE ESSENTIALLY THE SAME BANDICOOT, SAME APPEARANCE AND DESIGN AND BEHAVIORS. CG: BUT THEY ARE STILL COMPLETELY SEPARATE BANDICOOTS ON SEPARATE SCREENS. CG: SO WE BOTH HAVE OUR OWN ASS BANDICOOTS TO OURSELVES, THE SAME BUT DIFFERENT. CG: OUR JACKS ARE THE SAME BUT DIFFERENT TOO. CG: SAME GUY, DIFFERENT CIRCUMSTANCES AND OUTCOMES. CG: OUR JACK TRUMPED THE QUEEN, BUT GOT NO FURTHER. CG: YOUR JACK GOT THE BEST OF BOTH OF THEM, AND IS NOW SOMETHING HIGHER THAN A QUEEN OR A KING… EB: like an ace? CG: SURE OK.

The trolls don’t know what went so differently to cause the two Jacks to behave so differently, but CG doesn’t think it matters by now. John interrupts him, deciding to do yet another Con Air ending re-enactment.

Watch on YouTube

Recap: montage of Con Air posters and images to the tune of “How Do I Live Without You”. John hands the thoroughly disgusting Con Air bunny to the protesting baby Rose, while CG watches huffily on his monitor. Jade demands a toy too, so John hands her the bunny he received from Rose in an excessively dramatic fashion. CG frustratedly hits himself in the head. In scribbly crayon-like drawings, Casey the salamander performs a drum solo with glowing blue mushrooms for drums and the Con Air plane crashes. More Con Air imagery, John embraces baby Jade and the baby Lalondes while sobbing; GC points and laughs at him over CG’s shoulder and they have a slapfight. John imagines himself in Nic Cage’s iconic wifebeater and mullet and performs an air guitar solo.

TIER: Lemme tell ya, as someone who's only experience with this darn movie is whatever pops up courtesy of John this sequence is just a trip and a half. Possibly a higher number.

CHEL: Cut to end-of-act curtains; they open on the next page, declaring a PSYCHE; there are more pages to go.

Cut to Dave’s hands, covered in the dead Dave’s blood. I… guess he’s supposed to be staring at them in shock? It’s impossible to tell through his shades. For all I know he could be worried about the cleanup. GC trolls him and they banter creepily, with her demanding to know what his blood smells like and him taunting her about her blindness.

TG: just him and me TG: havin a see party TG: like a couple of eagle eyed bros peepin shit up into the wee hours GC: D4V3 GC: C4N 1 COM3 TO YOUR S33 P4RTY? TG: i guess but youll have to be careful not to stumble around bumping into all the gorgeous masterpieces hanging around everywhere TG: god so beautiful to look at with my perfect eyesight GC: C4N 1 L1CK TH3 P41NT1NGS? TG: yeah thats fine

Neither of them seems to take it particularly hard. If there was narrative around the dialogue, I think we’d get a better grasp of how Dave feels. Lacking much body language or punctuation, tone is a bit tricky to get.

FAILURE ARTIST: There’s a character later who gets a lot of grief for insulting her blindness but reading what John, Dave, and CG say I don’t know how that character could be worse.

CHEL: AT, meanwhile, is trolling Jade, rather politely. He even takes time to ask if she’s having a good nap. She’s worried about John’s dreamself not waking, and AT scrolls into his view of the future timeline, but can’t find John awake, nor see into his dreams. Jade, however, will wake up soon, and she thanks him for this report. Unfortunately, when Jade wakes up she will be in danger, and AT can’t see any further. He tells her CG wants to talk to her about her exploding robot. He can’t see whether it exploded or not because there are a lot of explosions, but asking future Jade shows it did, and that she declared CG to be a pretty nice guy, which surprises AT since he doesn’t think CG is particularly nice. Jade says she thinks AT is nice too, and asks why he’s the only one who talks to her while she’s asleep.

AT: bECAUSE YOU HAVE A ROBOT, tO LET YOU SAY THINGS THAT HAPPEN, oN PROSPIT, AT: aND i'M CURIOUS, AT: bECAUSE THE ONLY TIME i EVER HAD FUN PLAYING THIS GAME WAS WHEN i WAS ASLEEP, AT: bUT NOW ALL OUR DREAM SELVES ARE DEAD, AT: }:'(

AT happily remembers his own time on Prospit, and we cut back to Rose, being trolled by GA despite the fact that Rose is obviously in the middle of an epic magic battle. The conversation is understandably chilly, and GA still hasn’t figured out that “Dumb Rose” as opposed to “Smart Rose” was John rather than a bizarre roleplaying scenario.

GC continues trolling Dave. He asks her how she operates a computer without sight.

GC: 1M SORRY D4V3 TH4T YOU W1LL N3V3R 3XP3R13NC3 TH3 S3NSORY BOUQU3T TH4T 1 3NJOY 3V3RY D4Y GC: TH4T 1 3NSCONC3 MYS3LF 1N L1K3 4 W4RM 4ND COMFY B4THROB3 M4D3 OF FL4VOR 4ND M3LODY TG: oh ok TG: so the dumbest and most far fetched explanation imaginable ok got it

Yes, pretty much. This brings me to a Problematykks point; GC is supposed to be blind, but it really doesn’t seem to affect her in any way at all. Its workaround is ridiculously convenient and effective, and while I’m not blind myself, I know many people with physical disabilities hate it when fiction does this. I know I would be pissed off if a piece of fiction showed an easy and convenient way to not have autism anymore. (Horrible, horrible memories of someone back in the days of Livejournal’s Fanficrants of a fic in which autism was somehow cured by having a foursome. I don’t remember how that was supposed to work.) “She’s a space alien” only goes so far in explaining it. Why even bother making her blind if it’s not going to affect her in any way?

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 19

FAILURE ARTIST: She’s the least blind blind person in media. Characters like Daredevil from Marvel Comics and Toph from Avatar the Last Airbender have a Disability Superpower but at the end of the day they still can’t do things like read printed text. GC has no disadvantages.

BRIGHT: She can apparently smell and taste photons.

Which raises the question why none of the other trolls ever show a heightened sense of smell or taste. If GC can learn to interpret smells as colours, her sense of smell must have been that strong all along, and there’s no indication in the text that she’s biologically more sensitive than her companions. Trolls must be better at following a trail than bloodhounds.

CHEL: Synaesthesia which makes one strongly associate colours with smells is a thing, and synaesthesia is generally the word the fandom uses to explain Terezi’s ability, but you still have to actually see the colours for that to work. If she was only mostly blind and was picking up blurry colour patches, I could buy it (and that is how the fandom tends to do it with human AUs), but not if she’s supposed to be completely blind, and she still wouldn’t be able to read text that way.

BRIGHT: Time for another animation, and for a hop back into the recent past.

Watch on YouTube

As the meteor locked onto Dave’s house approaches, Dave climbs up the tower to retrieve his cruxite egg from the nest his sprite made. Unfortunately the sprite attacks him, knocking him and the egg off the tower. Bro Strider appears on top of the approaching meteor and slices it in half with his katana; the two halves are diverted by the blow and strike different areas of the city. Dave’s fall is broken by a rocket board, which is presumably how Bro got up to the meteor in the first place. (How did he manage to aim it to intercept Dave’s fall? Wouldn’t it take longer to get from the meteor to Dave than it takes for Dave to fall from the top of the tower to the roof of the building? We shall never know.) The egg hatches, and Dave is transported into the Medium. There’s no sign of what happens to Bro.

CHEL: Yet more cartoon physics around the Strider bros.

BRIGHT: I don’t know if we mentioned this earlier, but although Dave and Bro live in an apartment block that presumably housed multiple people, only Dave’s apartment gets transported into the Medium. Everyone else in the complex is left to die on Earth. SBURB is sociopathic.

Elsewhere in the Medium, back in the present, Grandpa’s ship is approaching Skaia, with Mom Lalonde and Dad Egbert on board.

Down on Skaia, Jack Noir draws his sword and slaughters the army WV raised to march on the Black King. WV cowers, but Jack leaves him alive. He then uses the Black Queen’s ring to send some sort of giant red tentacle attack through Skaia, slaughtering Dersite and Prospitian forces indiscriminately.

CHEL: Are they tentacles? I always thought of them as some sort of lightning lasers.

BRIGHT: That makes a lot more sense!

In the ectobiology lab, as the clock ticks down to the Reckoning, the babies are teleported to asteroids around the lab. There must be an air supply in this asteroid belt — characters are consistently shown as being able to survive outside.

CHEL: Maybe it’s just the players’ natural badassery. Batman Can Breathe In Space.

BRIGHT: On Skaia, CD makes his way through Jack’s slaughter fest, which has now ravaged a sizeable chunk of planet, and hands him the White King’s sceptre. Jack raises the sceptre and initiates the Reckoning. The meteorites start to vanish into Skaia’s defence portals. In the frog temple, DD somehow combines the MEOW genetic code with a paradox clone of Halley, creating Jade’s guardian Bec. Bec’s creation damages the laboratory equipment in the temple.

Cut to Jade, who is snoozing peacefully while her dream self explores Prospit. She looks up at Skaia, to see Jack’s shadow passing in front of it. Jack launches his tentacle attack on Prospit, slaughtering the inhabitants, then severs the chain attaching Prospit’s moon to the planet. The moon begins falling towards Skaia.

Jack then flies to LOHAC, where he encounters Bro Strider on one of the turntable mesas. Unexpectedly, Bro is able to give Jack an even fight. After a few exchanges, he drives his katana into the mesa; some sort of golden light emanates from the crack, and Bro absconds.

Wait, how did Bro get onto LOHAC? How did he survive the meteor impacts?

TIER: The ol' "rule of cool". As long as something is sufficiently "absolutely kickass!!" the rules of reality and physics can go sit on the bleachers twiddling their thumbs for all they fucking matter. There's a reason early fandom pinned down Bro as an unorthodox but immensely cool older brother type guy for so long. Because with what little information was available before we got bludgeoned with "No actually he was the absolute fucking worst thing to happen to Dave and fucked him up for life" that was the general impression he gave off.

CHEL: This and the meteor splitting are yet more reason not to take Bro’s treatment of Dave seriously; this is a world in which ludicrous animesque badassery rules the day, and physically impossible feats of battle occur every five minutes. Forcing a child to go through extensive and excessive sword training in brutal heat in a precarious place, possibly every day, ought by rights to be normal there, and I can’t believe he was physically hurt by swordfighting when he survived a meteor collision as an infant. Besides, training that extensive quite possibly could be the only thing that would keep Dave alive in these circumstances.

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 18

BRIGHT: There’s a random Squiddles interlude, and then we return to Skaia.

John’s unconscious dream self has fallen out of Prospit’s moon as it plummets towards Skaia. Jade tries shaking him awake, and then slaps him, but to no avail. At the last moment, she throws him out of the path of the moon, and her dream self is then killed when it lands on her. Back on Earth, her dreambot overloads and explodes.

CHEL: Taking her tower room with it; Jade’s sleeping body plummets towards the earth.

BRIGHT: The moon leaves a gigantic crater in Skaia. John’s now-conscious dreamself hovers above it.

The babies vanish through the defence portals to Earth.

CHEL: Each takes an item with them. John takes the Sassacre book, Rose the first Con Air bunny, Dave rides Maplehoof, Jade takes the bunny Rose gave to John (which is in fact the Con Air bunny plus several years and repairs), Nanna sits inside Dad’s old hat, Mom takes the mutant kitten, Bro sleeps in the lap of Li’l Cal, and Grandpa dual wields the flintlock pistols he should not be allowed.

BRIGHT: Dave and Rose reach the Gates above their houses and set out to explore their Lands. We close on an eerie shot of Bec outside the frog temple on Jade’s island at night.

CHEL: Jade’s tower room is blown to bits, and a truly enormous meteor hovers over the scene.

Curtains close. End of Act 4. Before Act 5, we receive a message from Rose, via her GameFAQ.

[ZZZZ] Rose: Egress. This is my final entry. My co-players and I have made every earnest attempt, with occasional relapse, to play this game the right way.

Really? You haven’t been in the game for more than a couple of hours and Jade still isn’t in at all! Maybe consider that the fact that not all your players are in the game yet when you wonder why it isn’t working?

I have been meticulous in documenting the process to help our peers and successors through the trials should we fail. In my hubris I believed these classes were relegated to the Earth-bound, but in even this quaint supposition I was in error. Our otherworldly antagonists have assured us of our inevitable failure repeatedly, while the gods whisper corroboration in my sleep. I believe them now. I just blew up my first gate. I’m not sure why I did it, really. I am not playing by the rules anymore. I will fly around this candy-coated rock and comb the white sand until I find answers. No one can tell me our fate can’t be repaired. We’ve come too far. I jumped out of the way of a burning fucking tree, for God’s sake.

I can see her point. The game is horrible and should be stopped. On the other hand, I’d at least attempt to spend more than one day investigating it before trying to break it. Randomly destroying shit is more likely to make things much worse than anything else.

I have used a spell to rip this walkthrough from Earth’s decaying network, and sealed it in one of the servers floating in the Furthest Ring. The gods may disperse the signal throughout the cosmos as they wish. Perhaps it will be of use to past or future species who like us have been ensnared by Skaia’s malevolent tendrils. In case it wasn’t clear, magic is real. Pardon my egress. You’re on your own now.

This note is signed with a glowing multicoloured “RL” and revealed to be emitted from a purple box with an aerial, floating in space. It seems that’s how their internet’s still working.

FAILURE ARTIST: The internet seems to be a magical dimension in Homestuck and not something that’s part of physical infrastructure.

CHEL: Hours in the future, WV lands in the desert remains of Earth, wrapped up in John’s old ghost-patterned bedsheet, which is still white. A villein becomes a vagabond. In his memory, he tears up an effigy of Jack Noir… where’d he get it? Did the game create it for some reason? Anyway, John’s blanket falls on him from the sky as Prospit plummets; WV calls it a RAG OF SOULS. Adorably melodramatic.

John’s awoken dreamself gazes sadly at Jade’s deceased one, which for some reason isn’t actually under the rubble of Prospit and appears to still be three-dimensional. There’s no excessive blood splatter like with the dead Dave, which is good, not too over the top. He retrieves the Queen’s ring from her hand. Was he told at any point that it’s important? Because if he doesn’t know, I’m not sure robbing the dead is very heroic. He sees an image of himself flying over the battlefield in a large cloud above him; in the vision he’s near a castle, so he goes to seek it out.

On Earth, PM wraps herself up in an old Prospit banner. A mistress becomes a mendicant. In her memories, she has beheaded the Hegemonic Brute and is arranging a meeting with Jack Noir. He arrives and she presents the crowns; smirking evilly, he honours their bargain, and the Courtyard Droll brings her the green parcel. She brings it to the castle from John’s vision as he arrives there, hands over the box, and angrily walks away.

FAILURE ARTIST: She’s Honor Before Reason (maybe she’s programmed that way) but she has the right reaction. This is a lot to go through to deliver a package.

CHEL: Inside the box is a letter from Jade’s unknown pen pal, who writes in dark green and a distinctive jolly-hockey-sticks dialect, with a tendency to ramble off on tangents about movies and wrestling.

Anyway you should listen to jade from here on out john because she sure seems to know whats best for you. Whatever your adventure throws at you im sure shell tell you you can handle it. She believes in you.

And another letter from Jade.

even though its super late and you probably went through a lot of trouble to get it, i really hope this present cheers you up! you looked so sad while you were reading my letter. um... which is to say, the one you are reading now.

She explains that in her dreams she goes to Prospit and John’s sleeping dream self is there, and that’s where she gets her visions. She hopes he likes his present, and says her penpal is fun…

john i am REALLY looking forward to seeing you when you wake up!!!!! its been nice playing with my prospitian friends and all, but also kind of lonely knowing you were in the other tower sleeping and having lousy dreams. :( im not sure where i am when you are reading this but im sure ill make it down to where you are soon! (jeez how did you get down there??? oh well ill find out) i cant wait to fly around the moon with you and show you all my favorite places. itll be so much fun!!!!!!!!! :D <3 jade

Ow. I think this is the only time John cries in the entire comic.

A Single Tear(™) is a bit of an understated reaction to the death of one of your best friends who you just recently learned is also your twin sister, but to be fair, John isn’t left with very much time to react, as next panel Jack Noir’s sword is pointed at his face.

BRIGHT: John knows about dream selves and waking selves by now, I think?

CHEL: He knows they’re a thing but I don’t think he knows they count as backup lives. AT told Jade dream selves can die separately from regular selves but I don’t think anyone told John.

FAILURE ARTIST: Jack Noir wants the ring, but then he’s stopped by Jade’s gift: a robotic bunny wielding multiple weapons.

They line up for a fight.

Hours in the future, on a destroyed planet, AR wraps police tape around himself and becomes a Aimless Renegade. Before the disaster, he went to the Veil, where he found a sleeping John. He saves John by putting him on a rocket board.

Back to the robotic bunny. Jack Noir flies away from the fight. Grandpa’s battleship lands and Grandpa takes away Jade’s body. Mom and Dad disembark the ship and wave goodbye as it leaves. Grandpa cries a Single Tear as he transports Jade’s already taxidermed body. Did he have a machine?

CHEL: For that matter, why isn’t he helping anyone who’s actually still alive while he’s there?

HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 10

FAILURE ARTIST: Nope, transporting a dead body is more important.

Again going back, White Queen leaves Prospit. On landing, she becomes Windswept Questant and wanders the Earth. We go forward years later. She repairs the laboratory and meets up with AR, WV, and PM. WV’s homemade spear hides the ring.

John watches this scene through the clouds of Skaia. He looks at the ring in his hand. In another cloud, there’s Jade’s laboratory. We close in on it and inside is The Fourth Wall. It isn’t turned on, but we are still lead to Andrew Hussie, banging away on a computer keyboard as he recaps the plot for a second time.

CHEL: Which we shall do as well when we’re done with this section, because it’s insanely hard to keep track of everything.

FAILURE ARTIST: Andrew Hussie says Nanna’s comet landed 99 years before John’s “birth” so he has some clue about the age but still doesn’t see it odd that a woman that age has a son who is probably only in his thirties.

CHEL: As I said, it’s also possible Dad was really old too, but that’s never really suggested. Not to mention, since they were brought into existence as toddlers, shouldn’t the kids be noticeably older than the ages given for them? John should be biologically fourteen to fifteen by now and at that age that can make a visible difference. I know the art style doesn’t really give clues, but no one I’ve seen has ever pointed that out in fanfic either.

FAILURE ARTIST: Newborns aren’t distinctive looking and can’t really do the cute things toddlers do. People in TV and movies regularly give birth to six month old infants so it’s not strange.

CHEL: True, but this isn’t TV, it’s a comic, and they don’t have to use an actual infant as a prop here.

BRIGHT: Possibly it’s intentional. Among other things, we see the newly-created players survive short trips through vacuum, crash-land on Earth without even minor injuries, and handle weapons they shouldn’t be able to lift for another four or five years. This could work if players have superhuman abilities (that is, beyond the classpect system). If that was the intent then it really should be made more explicit, though.

Of course, what it really boils down to is that Homestuck runs off Rule of Cool and Rule of Funny, and occasionally breaks down on examination as a result.

On the whole this is a solid Act, I think! We have a lot of new stuff happening, more characters get introduced, and we find out some more about the trolls. It’s much less rambling than Act 1.

COUNTS ALL THE LUCK: 0 ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 18 CALL CPA PLEASE: 8 CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 19 GET ON WITH IT!: 18 GORE GALORE: 10 HOW NOT TO WRITE A WEBCOMIC: 15 HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 10 IN HATE WITH MY CREATION: 0 RELATIONSHIP GOALS?: 1 SEND THEM TO THE SLAMMER: 1 SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS: 0 WHAT IS HAPPENING??: 9 WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 19 TOTAL: 127

#homestuck #Let's read #homestuck meta #reread #literary critique #sporking #Homespork

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dragonie · 4 years

Note

7, 11, 31 & 42 for the courier ask? :3

7. favorite companions? least favorite companions?

Favourite companions: Pretty much all of them? ED-E is her robot son, Boone has solidarity as a Legion-hating sniper, Arcade and Veronica are kind and caring and Cass is always a ton of fun with trail stories. I headcanon that she felt a bit awkward around Rex at first until she and Veronica scrubbed that Legion Bull off of him (and gave his front half a good wash, his back half a good-tune up, and a treat for being such a good boy too); it’s not exactly symbol she reacts well to. In DLCs, she and Christine form a tight bond, and she also becomes good friends with Chalk and Cloud.

Least favourite companions: DEAN DOMINO also Joshua Graham since that’s just a huuuuge thing. For the main game, she gets along well with Raul in general but has fought with him at least once about whether the Legion “keeps the roads safe.” Her interactions with Lily can also be kinda bittersweet since it does make her think of her own grandmother, way back when.

11. when, why and how did they become a courier? how long did they remain a courier before benny shot them?

jfjggjgj timelines, my worst nemesis

In vague, non-age-specific terms: Jane became a courier pretty young; after the loss of the Mothers she got picked up by a caravan and started tagging along with them for survival, doing odd jobs for her keep and swapping over occasionally at big stops. An older caravan guard took pity on her and became a sort of mentor, teaching her how to shoot.

Although she lived as a caravaneer for some time, the structure felt confining - she was always curious, wanting to poke her nose into crumbling ruins, see what was over the far mountains rather than the same old road. For a while, she struck out on her own, living mostly off the land, whetting her curiosity and never staying in one place for long. Some part of her was always searching for a home, something to replace what she’d lost, and never finding it, always moving on. Sometimes, she’d stop in a place and people’d ask her if she was going a certain way, give her a letter to deliver, or a parcel, and some caps. Seemed like a good idea to make a bit of money doing what she was already doing anyway, and after a bit of time as a freelancer she found herself in a town big enough to have a local branch of the Mojave Express. Took contracts as she pleased, got money for her wanderings. She’d been years at it before the chip job took her through Goodsprings.

31. where do they usually sleep? do they have more than one home location? do they live with any other people?

Pre-game, she mostly slept outdoors, bedding down wherever was convenient. If she happened to be stopping at a town, or a caravaner’s kip, she’d take the cheapest beds she could; she can sleep under pretty much any conditions. Early game, she mostly kept this up, and to a certain extent throughout: when she’s on the move, she’ll sleep wherever. Very early game she mainly stayed around Goodsprings and the nearby locations, still kind of in recovery; Doc Mitchell kindly let her stay on, for a bit.

She took advantage of the Lucky 38 suite offer at first; no reason to say no to a free bed, and there were enough rooms to give her friends a place to stay in Vegas too. It was a good enough place to get some rest and store her stuff for a time.

Until the Sierra Madre. After that, the Lucky 38 seemed...sinister. Too familiar. A silent casino, full of ghosts of the past. Brought up too many memories to sleep properly. So she moved her stuff out, made her main base a cosy abandoned ranch, way south of the city, with a well and some plants still hanging on; she’d bunked down there a time or two before. When in Vegas, she started crashing at the Kings’ place instead, or buying a room at the Atomic Wrangler, although her friends still make use of the Lucky 38 sometimes, and near the endgame they do get back together there for Intense Strategy Sessions.

(In the Furies AU I have with @datura-tea, Jane is living in Westside and forming a girl gang with her girlfriend Moz :3c)

42. name a random fact about your courier.

Her favourite season is spring when the desert is in bloom; she’s particularly fond of cactus flowers and globe mallow!

#courier jane #fantasmagoriam #asks #thanks! <3

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kadaransmuggler · 5 years

Text

Tag Meme

i wasn’t tagged, i just saw this and really wanted to do it for the disaster boy. i’m tagging @jennserr @fairy-squad-mother-18 @jovianghost @fearnotthedemons @judgeofeden and literally anyone who sees this with ocs. 1. Choose an OC. 2. Answer the questions as that OC. 3. Tag 5 people to do the same.

1. What is your name? ”Depends on who’s asking. Most people call me Courier, or Six. Not a lot of people get to call me Eli anymore. Just found out my last name is Novak, so there’s that, I suppose. Not that it’s any of your business.” 2. Do you know why are you named that?

“No. I don’t really care either.”

3. Are you single or taken?

“Why? You interested? Anyway, it’s....complicated. Real complicated.”

4. Have any abilities or powers?

“I’m damn good at what I do. I’m quick and quiet and I can get any package you’ve got safely across the Mojave. Only had one delivery that I didn’t make and there were...extenuating circumstances to that. Other than that, I’m a damn good shot.”

5. Stop being a Mary Sue.

“Fuck off.”

6. What’s your eye color?

“Brown. Like Charlie- like my mom.”

7. How about your hair color?

“Also brown. Got that from Dad.”

8. Have any family members?

“I do, all recently acquired, I suppose. My son, Jonah, is nearly fifteen now. My other son, Warren, is two. Dad just moved in with us. Charlie- Mom- is still getting used to it too. Oh, and there’s Leo. He’s my half-brother. He just rolled into town not too long ago.”

9. Oh? How about pets?

“A cat. Her name is Adder. Leo brought her to me. She was feral when he did- she’s still mean. Just like me, I guess.”

10. That’s cool, I guess. Now tell me something you don’t like?

“It’d be quicker to list the things I do like.”

11. Do you have any activities/hobbies that you like to do?

“Wouldn’t you like to know? Sorry. I’m working on the whole antagonistic thing I’ve got going on. I draw, I play the guitar. I pole dance, too. Bet you’d like to see that one, huh?”

12. Have you ever hurt anyone in any way before?

“It’d be easier to list the ways I haven’t hurt people.”

13. Ever… killed anyone before?

“That’s practically what I do for a living. And for fun.”

14. What kind of animal are you?

“The human kind?”

15. Name your worst habits?

“I hit things when I get mad- usually the wall. I drink- a lot. I...there’s that whole thing with the chems. Sometimes when I get bored I go outside the city and kill Fiends. It’s like fish in a barrel. Of course, a lot of people would say that’s a good habit. Used to I did too. I just...have a lot more in common with them than I’d like to admit. Only difference between me and them is that I got into med-x and jet and they got into psycho.”

16. Do you look up to anyone at all?

“I...his name is James. That’s all I’m going to say about that.”

17. Are you gay, straight or bisexual?

“I like what I like. And I happen to like a lot of things.”

18. Do you go to school?

“I think the only school around here is the King’s School of Impersonation. And I’m not interested in impersonating a guy that was dead well before the world ended.”

19. Ever want to marry and have kids one day?

“I...I’ve already proven that I’m not made for that.”

20. Do you have any fangirls/fanboys?

“I suppose so. A lot of people in Mojave know who I am. Pretty sure the whores on the Strip like me a lot, but that’s mostly because I’m a fool with a lot of caps.”

21. What are you most afraid of?

“....Dying alone.”

22. What do you usually wear?

“When I’m out in public, my duster. Always. It lets people know who I am. Beyond that...I’ve not got a lot of clothes that are mine. James, however...well, he doesn’t mind when I steal his shirts, even though they’re way too big.”

23. What’s one food that tempts you?

“Surprisingly enough, lemons. James and Leo bring them back for me. James has taken it upon himself to be my self-control when it comes to those.”

24. Am I annoying to you?

“Yes. But don’t take it personally, damn near everything is.”

25. Well, it’s still not over!

“Great.”

26. What class are you (low/middle/high)?

“When I was growing up, most of the time I didn’t have two caps to rub together. Now, Vegas itself is mine. You tell me.”

27. How many friends do you have?

“I don’t have friends. Not close ones. There’s...I traveled with a few people. Boone, Cassidy. I guess...I guess Arcade is the closest thing I have to an actual friend, and he just patches me up when I get too many holes in me.”

28. What are your thoughts on pie?

“I’m not a fan of it. Or most sweet things, really. I like to watch James bake them, though. He’s good at it. And he looks nice covered in flour. If you repeat any of that, I will shoot you.”

29. Favorite drink?

“Sunset sarsaparilla. Spiked with whiskey, if possible.”

30. What’s your favorite place?

“The cocktail lounge of the Lucky 38. It took me forever to clean all the grime off the windows, but now I can see out, and the air conditioning keeps it nice and cold. Or, on those cool desert nights, there’s a roof in Westside I’m awful fond of now.”

31. Are you interested in anyone?

“Well, I am married. Not that anyone can tell I’m interested with Benny. And there’s- there’s someone else, too. And I’m definitely not saying anything else about that.”

32. That was a stupid question…

“Yes. It was.”

33. Would you rather swim in a lake or the ocean?

“I don’t really like to swim. But the lake, if I had to pick.”

34. What’s your type?

“Why? You hoping you might fit the bill?”

35. Any fetishes?

“You looking to help out with it? I don’t see any other reason for you to know that.”

36. Camping or outdoors?

“Practically, camping. I’ve been caught by too many dust storms out in the desert to go anywhere without a tent. Preferably? There’s a rooftop, in Westside, with an old quilt spread out on top. I like to lay out there and look up at the sky at night.”

#tag meme #eli novak

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7deadlycinderellas · 5 years

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Keep on smilin’

(in which I see a movie, and manage to barf out a fic within a week)

(https://archiveofourown.org/works/17404283)

Michael Banks was eternally grateful for the six extra years they all got in the old house. Six years that could have been stolen from them.

For it was 1940 and Cherry Tree Lane, nay, the whole of London, had transformed.

Jane had been the first to feel the wind changing. She’d been out of work for the first two years after Winnie had been born, and when everything had settled, she found that someone with her organizational experience was suddenly in great demand, and the position of helping coordinate the ambulance services for local hospitals had become one of great importance. Many of her coworkers were from families who were high up in politics, and they talked.

She had been nervous about going back to work with Winnie still so young, the question of her mother’s life niggling in the back of her head. Money was still tight, nothing to pay for a true nanny. What her and Jack would have given for Mary Poppins to return to them again at that time.

It ended up being almost a non issue. Winnie was a self possessed child even as a toddler, and turned out Ellen’s sister (who had moved in with the Banks following the scare at the bank) was a former school teacher who could spare an eye during the day. Ellen herself tutted at the arrangement, at least before slipping Winnie a sweet.

“I hate leaving here all the time, it feels like taking advantage of poor Ellen, you know how she always reacted when Father and Mother tried to convince her to watch us.”

“I’m home half the time as is Jane, working on my art, it’s no trouble at all. It’s the least I can do to repay you for all you did to help out after Kate passed.” Michael assures her.

The true answer appeared in Georgie, who adored his young cousin, and when out of school spent much of his spare time reading to her from storybooks and pushing her down Cherry Tree Lane and in the park in her little wagon, later tied to the rear of his bike.

Michael had been the next. The handful of pieces of art he’d completed and sold through newspapers and magazines had earned him a name, and a man visiting the bank one day had given him a business card and told him that if the wind kept blowing the way it did, he might be in touch.

In his office years later, drawing barrage balloons and Spitfires, he mused that no one had ever told him war could be a boon for an artist in need of a job.

Before Winnie was born, Jack had taken a job as a tram driver. Though he really missed the routine of lighting the lamps, most positions had been eliminated when the city changed over to electric lights. He chose to revel in the ability to still lead people home at the end of the night. One night at the flat, he told Jane about a supervisor at work who had inquired about his age.

“He said something about positions being reserved after a certain age.”

“Conscription? We’re not at war yet- why would they even be talking about it?”

Jack’s age ended up keeping him out of the forces, but he told Jane that most of his former fellow lamplighters joined up. For some, it was a god’s send.

“Nothing quite like a war for opportunity, it seems.”

John and Annabel had studiously read the newspapers and listened to the newscasts, still retaining a bit of the tiny adults they had spent far too much of their lives being. Annabel, in particular had decided it was her life’s goal to become a journalist.

A few days before the big news, Annabel heard the announcement that the government was evacuating children to the countryside.

“If there doing this they must have a reason….oh but John, we can’t leave everyone!”

“They do seem to be being overly cautious, it’s not like Germany’s declared war or anything….”

The twins shared a look.

“We should remember this. It might end up being safer. For Georgie and Winnie at least. But we musn’t worry Father and Aunt Jane”.

When 1939 had come, and the first air raid sirens blared after Chamberlin’s words on the wireless, only Georgie and Winnie seemed truly unawares. While they cowered in the cellar until the all-clear, Michael was so grateful that Jane and Jack had come over for breakfast. At least they were all here.

Winnie was frightened by the noise, so Georgie pulled her into his lap.

“Don’t cry Winnie, just pretend we’re on an adventure. This isn’t a cellar- it’s a cave! And on the other side is a magical valley! Where elves live, and fairies,”

“And unicorns?” Winnie wants to know, sniffing.

“Of course!” He adds enthusiastically.

“And animals that talk!” Annabel adds. “Just be careful of the wolf, he might not be trustworthy”.

Michael raised an eyebrow. The children had of course told them all about their adventures that awful year, but they hadn’t spoken of it often. Whereas him and Jane had seemed to forget Mary Poppins, these three had seemed to simply move on.

Eventually the all-clear comes, and they leave the cellar and go on. They put up blackout curtains, carry gas masks and line the house with sandbags. The young men in the neighborhood were called up for military service. Even Admiral Boon abandoned his cannon. Him and Mr. Binnacle even did their part by joining the Home Guard.

But still, no bombs fall. And for a time all seems well.

“Some of my schoolmates who left have already returned”, John comments around Christmas.

“It does seem like it was a bit of an overreaction,” Annabel admits. “Maybe this will be over soon.”

1940 comes. Ellen despairing at the state of her meals now that rationing had taken hold.

“Can’t bake hardly anything with the butter and sugar they give us, and feeding you lot was hard enough as it was.”

Annabel had dug up the zinnias and planted some potatoes and carrots, but Ellen still insisted that if the ones’ who had hired her were still around could see what she put on the table now, they would have thrown her out on the street.

“What do you think Mother and Father would have thought of all of this?” Michael asks one day.

“Mother and Father both saw the Great War. That was the world they left when the flu came. To think they lived in a time of prosperity when they were our age. It’s completely changed. I don’t know what they would think of where we are now.” Jane admits.

“I could hardly blame them. We’re all on tenterhooks.”

The unspoken between them was the fact that the family was still together. The children being at home and Michael’s work for the War Office precluded him from being conscripted. Jack, it turned out, had been correct in his assumptions about his supervisors questions- bus and tram drivers over 25 were considered too important to draft. Though Jane admitted that she still had a niggling fear that that might one day change.

One night he told Jane what hurt him most was that they took away the light on the fro of the tram. Complete blackouts all night, even a tiny gas lamp could be a risk.

“Can hardly see a thing at night. Always afraid I’m going to hit someone. As if the crowds on my tram weren’t ashen faced enough as it is.“

Jane held tightly to his hand. Always a leery at heart, and here trapped in darkness.

The older children march down the street with Winnie a number of times. They map out every single house with an Anderson shelter, and every tube station, between the schools and home. Georgie, again, tries to get the girl to see it as an adventure, like the marches were the world’s biggest game of hide and seek. Michael just feared that one day, Georgie’s own childlike resolve would break.

Once during a raid, Michael sees the older children showing Winnie the bowl they used to keep in the nursery (how it never broke during the Admiral’s cannon fires he will never know), and over hear them telling her.

“There’s magic everywhere, you just have to remember to look up and find it. Even when things are hard. Especially then some might say.”

Annabel keeps tight to her radio. Despite the quiet, Germany invades Norway, then the Netherlands, and then France.

And just when the rest of England seems to practically have become compliant, summer comes and the first bombs fall.

The church down the road is destroyed. The park is burnt to a crisp. Jane biggest challenge at work becomes guiding people around fire and debris to help the ones they can. She suddenly has all the work she could ever want, and never enough vehicles or doctors.

Some nights the older children don’t return from school until late, stuck in the shelters waiting for the all-clear, hoping that they continue to be alive to hear the explosions.

One night Jack doesn’t return until sunrise. Jane cuddles Winnie in one of the apartment buildings four underground shelters fearing for the worst.

When sun comes along with the all-clear, he finally emerges from the dark, eyes bright when he sees the two of them, alight.

“I was about to clock out when the sirens started.” He says, breathy, barely able to stop embracing Jane and Winnie long enough to speak. “We all had to dash for the tube station. There must have been two hundred of us in there overnight. So many of us it seemed we might suffocate.”

“I’m so glad,” Jane implores, voice wavering. When they settle Winnie down over breakfast, so adds.

“I never thought I would have this. I always thought I had to pick, that I couldn’t live in the world my mother wanted for us and be a wife and mother. Then you came along.”

“I showed you the light, you might say?”

Jane nods. She spares another glance at Winnie.

“Mother always said ‘our daughters daughters will adore us’. It’s so strange to say, that admits a war, that it’s nice to be needed, for my work to be valued. It feels selfish, but it’s all we can try to do, for them as well as us.”

She reaches over and smooths Winnie’s hair, and dreadfully misses the other children, even as they’re just across town.

There’s no more hiding it. John and Annabel go to their father with the paperwork. Three more days of terror, and all four children are hastily packed and taken to the train station to be evacuated.

Jack had had to go to work early and couldn’t them seeing them off. It had taken him nearly ten minutes to let go of Winnie in the morning. She doesn’t stop tearing until they meet up with the others, bags in hand, signs around their necks.

“Keep good care of her will you all?” Jane says, tearing up herself.

Georgie takes Winnie hand tightly, and Annabel wipes her face with a handkerchief.

“Wouldn’t imagine doing anything else.” Georgie assures her. His other hand is holding his carpet bag, a copy sticking out of Peter Pan.

“Do they know where you’re going?” Michael asks, anxiously. They always managed to act so big but right now his three children seemed so very small.

“Australia,” Annabel says.

Australia, both Jane and Michael thought, that’s a whole half a world away.

“I thought most of the children were being sent to Canada?” Michael asked, shocked.

“Anywhere that will take us. Besides, I’ve always wanted to see a kangaroo,” Annabel adds, trying to sound light, to steady her father’s nerves and her own.

“We’ll be fine Father. There are no bombs in Australia. As far away as we’ll be from you, Germany will be even further.” John assures him.

No bombs. Such a small wish it would seem.

“Fly a kite for us will you?” Michael asks, embracing John and Annabel in turn, Jane following him after.

“We’ll fly one every day we can.” Georgie promises.

The train whistle sounds, and the four children grab hands and turn away from Michael and Jane. The siblings hold onto each other, and Georgie tight to Winnie, as they fade from view.

That image won’t leave Michael. The next time he has a moment to himself, he pulls out his sketchbook and draws them, in middle of a crowd of faceless children. And as an afterthought, he adds balloons into the distance, and a barely recognizable figure holding an umbrella, leading them towards the balloons through the sky.

Maybe he could use it for an evacuation poster.

After that, the days turn into weeks, and autumn comes. The day raids slow, but the night’s are still hellish. The sights of smoke and fire are every day, and everyday, more of the familiar city disappears.

Michael’s at work when it happens. He never thought he’d be grateful for a day raid.

When he returns, all that’s left of Number 17 Cherry Tree Lane is a pile of wreckage.

Head swimming, Michael barely as time to think before he’s joined by Ellen and her sister, who had been at the grocer’s, and are now by his side, cursing the Germans.

“We’ll all be flattened, and they still won’t be satisfied will they?” She insists. Her voice is enraged, but her eyes are wet. Number 17 was as much her home as theirs.

They all crowd into Jack and Jane’s tiny flat, so empty now without Winnie. Jane has a night shift at the hospital, and the others have already tried to get some sleep before the nights raids could start. In the dim light of the single gas lamp they keep lit, Michael wallows.

Everything lost say the clothes on his back and briefcase. So many things. The dishware passed from their parents, the knick knacks Kate had brought to their marriage. And the photographs…

Michael feels his eyes stinging again with tears. Memories could fade all too easily, compared to pictures.

Pictures.

Removing his sketchbook from his briefcase, Michael commits it to paper. Number 17 Lane as it was in full bloom. It’s spring in his drawing, the cherry trees are in bloom, and the Banks family stand in front.

In his drawing, Kate is still there, her face as clear as in his mind’s eye. His parents are on the steps, in the flush of their lives. The children are as grown as they are now, Georgie flying his kite, while John and Annabel look on Jack and Jane stand off to one side, a little in their own world. Michael thinks, and adds two more small figures to the roof of the house beside them, twirling amidst what must be the soot.

He would draw it as it was, as it had been, as it would always be for them, no matter where the rest of the world took them.

His spirits are lifted a few days later, when the post comes in. Jane hands him the envelope.

“They don’t know. I’m amazed this even got through.”

Number 17 is written in John’s neat script, but the drawings inside are Georgie’s and Annabel’s. They both had inherited Michael’s artistic skills, but Annabel was far too sensible to indulge them much.

Her drawings are of the trains, the ship, the farmhouse where they have been billeted. Georgie draws the kite in the sky, the chickens and sheep, and yes the kangaroos, though they look far more ordinary to Michael’s eye than what the children had probably thought. John’s letter inside is equally reassuring. They are safe, and together. Winnie swears she saw a mermaid on the trip, and all four speak of having never seen the sun so much in their lives.

“Don’t worry too much of us Father,” Georgie adds as a post-script, his handwriting far shakier than his siblings, “we could never have imagined such an adventure. “

Michael tucks the drawings in his jacket pocket. When he goes to work the next day, he sees a poster someone has put up from the US.

“Keep em’ smiling with letters!” It says, with a drawing of a smiling serviceman accompanying.

And for the first time, in a long time, Michael feels like he might be able to.

#mary poppins #mary poppins returns #fic

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believerindaydreams · 3 years

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So this is where Colonel Autumn's legacy ends; in the kitchen of a shack in Megaton.

Arcade turns over a holotape marked "Enclave logs" which are nothing of the sort, not really. It's Autumn's personal diary, left on a shelf in a secret room hidden behind a cabinet.

"Never knew any of this stuff was here," Boone says, piling boxes of Snack Lads into a milk crate. "I mean, if I had I would have taken that rug, I like it. Ties the room together."

"Do you want to listen to these? They might talk about you."

"No. Especially not if they are." He opens the fridge, takes out a stash of purified water. "I'm having second thoughts about your Doc Henry's cure, even."

"Are you kidding?" It'd been his first and only sure instinct, to contact his Remnant family for help- and Daisy will never let him hear the last of it, but she'd come through, bringing Judah and Orion a little more quickly than Veronica's train. Johnson and Henry had refused, one because "I'll be damned if I get dragged back again, Daisy," but the other for reason of having vital Mutant research to do in New Vegas.

Memory research. The vials sit in his doctor's bag, as yet untouched.

"Manny keeps hinting. Says I'll remember things maybe I'd rather not- I'm not you," Boone says, dragging a coffee table into a corner. "I know how to shoot and use my blood-sight, that's all I need to get by. Carla's gonna take it, she can tell me what she thinks."

"Maybe she won't know- I confess," Arcade says, rubbing his forehead with the back of his hand. "The vague thought that the treatment might backfire so badly I need confinement to a room with padded walls is almost an incentive, given...present circumstances." There are two Enclave guards in Hellfire armor outside his door. They're expecting him to go to Raven Rock next, and he's running short on excuses not to do it.

"See, and you trust this doctor. I've never heard of Henry."

"Trust me, if anyone could do this, it's him. He regards medical conundrums as puzzles for his amusement."

"Maybe I don't like being lumped in with his Super Mutants," Boone says, tucking two face wraps around the carpet roll.

"Technically, you are a mutant."

"Doesn't mean I want to think about it."

Arcade sighs, weighs the holotape in his hands. "Which brings me back to this. I'll take it downstairs and come back when I'm done. It might take a while."

"Fine. I have some sniper mods to mess with."

Arcade nods and pulls the cabinet close behind him before descending, to the painfully stark room so reminiscent of the one Autumn had at Raven Rock. A work bench, ammo containers, a stiff metal chair.

He sits down in it and listens. Autumn's initial confusion and vague frustration at being handed a set of house keys. I did only what anyone unfettered by the town's absurd superstitions could have done- that ridiculous Moira Brown could have done it, if she ever bothered to leave her shop. Generations of children exposed to radiation for what? Chanted mysticism? Arrant nonsense.

The tape leaves off and picks up again at odd intervals- it's hard to gauge the passage of time, though the growing list of favors owed the Lone Wanderer means this must be a record over considerable time. Thirty Quantum sodas for a weapons schematic is hardly the worst bargain I've been offered, but the collection will take some effort. I could simply requisition the amount from stores, but even Sierra might sense a rat- or more likely, simply demand access to my supply. The Lone Wanderer's supplies and equipment must be reasonably available within the wasteland- I place Raven Rock in enough jeopardy on these fact-finding trips without taking stupid risks.

...killed the Raiders, unfortunately not in time to save the prospector or his dog. He licked my hand as he died-

never mind. A Lone Wanderer with a companion would be a contradiction in terms.

... brought the child to Raven Rock, thoroughly relieved to be rid of his incessant chatter. He did, at least, seem to comprehend the necessity of holding his tongue regarding Little Lamplight- clean populations are too few and far in between, for the Enclave to charge in and risk the deaths of what may be a valuable genetic pool.

...these rumors about a living man-tree would appear to be nothing but wild scavenger tales. A Vertibird could settle the point once and for all, but I can think of better uses.

...staring death in the face- no more ammo, bleeding out, and the Deathclaw raising its hand for a last swipe.

And then it was blasted out of the sky, by this stranger who won't tell me his intentions, his trainers, or even his first name. Which I suppose makes us a fair match.

I've hired him with the offer of this house, on the same hire terms Moira offered. He accepted and took my bed upstairs, as if he already owns the place.

...nobody should be better with my own gun than I am. If he hadn't already had abundant opportunities to kill me I might think twice.

...there is no purpose that could be served by taking the ferryboat to Point Lookout, given its isolation and lack of habitation, and yet- I could point out to Eden that the concentration camp there merits investigation, though he'll doubtless balk at a three-month absence.

...stopped by Underworld again- the ghouls can't be faulted for their knowledge of medical supplies and liquor, given their need for both- I did not care for Ahzrukhal hinting that a new sobriquet might be in order. But his vodka is better than Carol's.

...beaten to the punch, or rather the shot, yet again. Sierra seemed quite unconcerned by the death of her would-be paramour, saying that anyone who would hold her back her plans for home-brewed Nuka-Cola was doing the world a disservice. My companion reloaded his rifle and said nothing.

The parallels are both noted and undesirable.

...damn it! Damn him. From Father's description Boone must have seen this Tranquility Lane distress message- the Eyebot itself must have generated it, because Gannon certainly did not. If Whitley wasn't supplying my navigational data I'd blast him across the Potomac, but the researcher has made himself indispensable. Adams needs to be brought under firmer control.

But Boone isn't talking about it, I may finally have let my double life slip despite all precaution; and this isn't his usual reticence, because he practically blathers now. Usually about his wife.

Damn her too. Although if that's the price for his silence, so be it.

...everything that could have gone wrong going wrong. I ought to have been on hand at Raven Rock, making sure the three of them were settling in- failing that, I should have arranged to have them brought to Project Purity. There would have been more than enough time, all the tedious arrangements for my father showing off his worthless toy to the wasteland.

But it would have meant exposing my own weakness to the whole of the Purity team, and so I trusted to luck. Which gave them a Vertibird and the means to use it, apparently.

I never would have expected mistrust of the Enclave to run so deep at Rivet City- they're using practically the same anti-mutation standards, the Purity team has worked there for years- but Bannon has sent no uncertain word that Doctor Li's team is banned for life. Three half-dead escapees and the Enclave's best prospect for local recruitment is up in smoke. Two-faced, syncophant cowards of a city council!

And I...should have been at Raven Rock. For the three of them. Particularly Boone.

Damn you, Father.

...so much for removing everything incriminating from the house; I've run enough risks to chance leaving this last one.

If you are listening to this, Boone, I would like you to know-

Arcade stops the playback there, absently wipes his eyes. There are too many things in the account that chime with him, for good and for ill; he's going to have to take Henry's cure now, just to be clear in his own mind what's empathy and what's phantom memory.

It's never occurred to him that even if Mark had the best of intentions, his survival could still have led on to ends this catastrophic.

He buries the holotape deep in his makeshift Followers coat, goes back upstairs to find Boone listening to the radio and eating a whole caravan lunch.

"Waste of time?"

"Not exactly. I think it was very insightful about what kind of state of mind I need to be careful not to fall into."

"Hmm?"

"Such as letting my fear be stronger than my loves," Arcade says simply; and hugs Boone until the sniper splutters and reciprocates.

"You're not gonna make me listen, are you?"

"Well- the whole thing was intended for you, I think. But there's a part at the end you really should."

"Burn it," Boone says easily. "Decided what I'm going to do, move on. Start clean, no bad memories."

"Okay. I'll keep your dose anyway." He opens the doctor's bag, uncorks an inexplicably purple potion. Drinks it down.

Fifteen seconds later, everything comes back to him.

The part that floats above the rest, while he's retching and Boone is jamming stimpaks into his system, is that the chance he accidentally gave the leader of the Enclave an infectious mutation is the most murderous irony imaginable.

#ttw draft

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beersfromthebleachers · 6 years

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Winter Meetings and ‘Tis the Season

I’m a little upset that I completely blanked about the 2018 Winter Meetings taking place in Orlando, Florida; a city in driving distance across the state from me.....and then I remembered that throwing a Christmas banger is more my specialty and would be a lot more fun to take part of over the holiday season. Over the year, it has been quite an adventure drinking more and caring less about baseball for a season. I guess that’s what they actually call a ‘title hangover’ now that I finally witnessed my team win one. So with the year exploring craft breweries, a failed fantasy baseball season, and nothing to do with my free time (other than work and video games) since graduating with my degree, I think I can give this little love project more attention than it should.

That being said, Winter Meetings wrapped up this week in Orlando. There have been some big names making splashes in places that we would never think of. Title odds have been shifted for many teams, former contenders are trying to bet it all on what’s let in the tank, and more signings continue to happen AND we’re still not done yet. Let’s try to review with some of the highlights that went down:

1. The Angels won the Ohtani sweeps and then some

It was clear that Shohei Ohtani was wanting to play for someone on the west coast so he can stay closer to his home country of Japan. What was taken more by surprise is that he didn’t join a team that was a go-ahead contend for for a title OR a team that didn’t already have a Japanese baseball star on the squad. Ohtani was not looking for flash or a big pay check, he wanted to be represented as a solo Japanese star just like fellow former colleagues he has played with on the national squad or in the NPL. Not to mention, he wanted to rise to fame without the pressure of a spot light being on him and he doesn’t have to worry about that with Mike Trout being there. Despite being the major arm in the Angel’s rotation, the Angels have made other big moves by landing Zack Cozart and Ian Kinsler. With the towering shadow that the Dodgers cast across town, the Angels are making big moves in order to remain a playoff contender for the 2018 season.

2. The Big Bad Yankees are back and hungry for more

I haven’t seen a title fight of monsters this big in New York since Godzilla and King Kong were going at it with a brief ring appearance of Puft Marshmallow Man. I heard a collection of groans from Yanks fans all over the bar that Aaron Boone was a ‘mediocre’ choice for managing the young Baby Bombers after the Joe Girardi departure, but we all know the Steinbrenner’s old flirtation of bringing back old players and having them manage the old team as tenure for their lucrative contracts, but hey that’s not the worst thing money can’t buy. But you know what it can get you? The NL MVP and home run leader Giancarlo Stanton from the Miami Marlins, courteous of their new owner and old Yank, Derek Jeter. Look this was inevitable, the Yanks were going to add a big bat either sooner or later and they grabbed the most expensive one they can already pay for without worrying about a ‘Bryce Harper price tag’. There is going to be a reason buying outfield tickets to Yankees Stadium will be one of the most expensive ticket in baseball with home runs hit by Stanton and Aaron Judge (not to mention the other big bat hitters in their line up who can crush it) landing in the bleachers. After returning to the AL Pennant for the first time in more than half a decade, the Yankees are back and willing to go after a big arm so they can remain baseball royalty.

3. Plenty of big name FA players still available

Despite new title favorite front runners, there are plenty of players that need new homes and can strengthen anyone’s line up. The Boston Red Sox are in talks of grabbing Eric Hosmer and J.D. Martinez to retaliate to what the Yankees have added to their team. The Sox still have better pitching on paper than the Yankees, they could also get a more powerful arm to strengthen their bullpen as well. Pitching names like Yu Darvish and Jake Arrieta are flirting between title contenders or getting a big pay check for a team that would semi-par with a ‘chance in hell’ of making a wild card; suitors include the Texas Rangers, Milwaukee Brewers, Houston Astros, and the New York Yankees. It also crazy to see some of these big named players leave title contending teams to go play for an up and coming squad. The Phillies just landed former Indian Carlos Santana and the Tribe is also cutting ties with Jason Kipnis and Danny Salazar. One thing is for sure, there is only 10 days until Christmas and someone could be getting a present either sooner or later.

Yes my dear friends, the Winter Meetings beginning just brings the countdown on when pitchers and catchers and check in and we wait for the snow to melt. Winter has arrived and we are at the close of the 2017 baseball season officially. As we ring in 2018, we hope to see some bigger baseball headlines happen through the whole season before Spring Training begins. Until then, I will be drinking plenty of beer and look forward of keeping the party going on here as much as possible.

Happy holidays fans!

#baseball #2017 season #mlb #winter meeting #orlando #florida #shohei ohtani #japan #Los Angeles Angels #new york yankees #giancarlo stanton #free agency #journal

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purplecherryblossomfest-blog · 7 years

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From NH to NC

When I was nine years old my father’s best friend pasted away from a brain tumor. I was very difficult for him because this man helped him kick his vices to the curb. So when the man’s family moved to North Carolina, my father and mother decided it was best for us to also pick up and moved here too. So we pack everything that we could fit into our silver Subaru hatchback with all five of us crammed somewhere in between and started the fourteen hour drive from New Hampshire to North Carolina. The drive was fairly uneventful. Coming from a small town in the north east to Charlotte was a shock for me. The weather and the people were very different. People would wave at you, even when they didn’t know you, which was weird and threw me off guard. The mosquitos and the humidity were the worst parts. I was used to sixty seventy degree weather in the summer, I thought I was going to melt.

NH Lake Winnipesake where i grew up. :)

The actual worst part was that my parents moved us down here with no plan. No jobs nowhere to live. We couch crashed on my father’s friend’s family’s living room floor for a long time until they decided that it was best for us to leave. After that it was a string of campsites for about a year. My parents picked up small jobs and we relied mostly on the kindness of other for food. We would do things with the church we had started going to when we moved, like help set up for services and conferences and they would feed us there. It would rain and all of the things that we owned would get ruined. Luckily my father was able to find some more permanent work and we found a place to live. It was really big enough for the five of us and it had a lot of problems, but it was a million times better then sleeping on the hard ground.

I still miss New Hampshire and plan to go back up some day to visit and show my family where I grew up. I blessed to have found a home for my family that is very much like it. It was a very difficult time for my family, but I know that we were made stronger for having to live through. There are a lot of families out there now going through the same things, kids who have no control over what their parents do, kids who have to suffer through homelessness because their parents have lost jobs are housing for various reasons. My heart goes out to them because I know what they are going through. Thankfully here in Boone there are people who care enough to take in these families and help them out with food and basic needs to help them get back on their feet!

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kuwaiti-kid · 4 years

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This White Man’s Journey to Understanding Racism in America

These are incredibly challenging times right now, aren’t they? For months now, we’ve been dealing with COVID-19 and the isolation that comes with it. As if that weren’t enough, we’ve had three racially motivated killings during the same time.

Ahmaud Arbery was gunned down by a father and son, one of whom is a retired police officer.

Breanna Taylor was shot in her apartment (8 or more times) while in bed. They said they were searching for a suspect who allegedly was already in custody (according to a lawsuit filed).

And the final, most egregious of them all was the murder of George Floyd. A Minneapolis police officer held his knee on this man’s neck for over 8 minutes, suffocating and killing him senselessly while other officers stood by and watched. The look on his face and the lack of emotion in what he was doing was stunning.

I’m Angry

As I’ve watched the outrage on the news and, more importantly, on social media, I’ve been surprised, amazed, and, if I’m honest, pretty angry about what I’ve seen.

During the most recent killing of innocent black men and women, I’ve seen many people, especially white people, like me, asking what they can do. That’s good. We should be asking that question. We should have been asking that question and doing something about it for years.

Conversely, I’ve seen far too many people expressing uninformed, often harsh opinions on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media. They express outrage over what’s happening. They shame people who don’t feel that outrage. That self-righteousness grates on me.

Over the past few years, that’s the pattern I’ve observed. Another police officer kills an innocent black man or woman. Media goes into a feeding frenzy over it. Everyone suddenly expresses outrage that this is happening and goes out of their way to show their anger.

A Pattern Repeats Itself

Here’s the question – Where have they been over the last several decades? Do they think this is something new? If so, that’s sad. It’s been going on for hundreds of years.

Here’s another question. Will the outrage be different this time? Will it turn into action after the news dies down? Because so far, that hasn’t been true. As one involved in this battle, it’s pretty hard to see this pattern repeating itself yet again.

I’m hoping that hearing the story of how I went from an indifferent, disconnected, and a biased white person to the man I am today will offer some answers as to what you (we) as a majority community can do to affect change. I’m no saint. Nor do I have all the answers. If we’re honest with ourselves, all of us have racism in our hearts at some level.

For those asking the question of what they can do, I will share my ideas in this post. My comments are based solely on personal experience. Take it or leave it. It’s up to you. And I will not try to shame you for what you are or aren’t doing right now.

With that wordy intro, let’s get started.

A Sheltered Childhood

Who am I? I’m a white male Baby Boomer. I grew up in Zionsville, IN, an all-white community just outside of Indianapolis. The only time I saw black people were on the news, usually those arrested for committing a crime of some sort. The other times were on the basketball court when my HS team played a Marion County school that had black players. There were no schools in Boone County, where Zionsville was, or most any other school on our regular basketball schedule.

I heard and was a part of tasteless jokes about blacks. The N-word was common among friends. I never had a black friend. Nor had I ever had a meaningful conversation with anyone of color. I suspect many of you who are reading this grew up in similar circumstances, whether you are black, brown, Asian, white, or any other ethnicity, likely hung out and grew up with people of the same or similar ethnicity and background.

We don’t have a choice where we grow up. That choice comes when we’re on our own.

Relationships Matter

It seems that many of us form opinions about other people groups based on information we get from other people, be it friends, the mainstream media, or social media.

That brings up a question I asked myself many years ago.

If, as a white person, I don’t have relationships with African Americans, how can I form such strong opinions and stereotypes about them? Where did I get the information that shapes those stereotypes and views? If it’s from the media, how do you think it gets portrayed? Do you ever see the media show blacks in a good light? Rarely.

In most cases, they show blacks at their worst. They emphasize gangs, guns, and violence. The portrayal is of a group of people who are criminals to be feared.

That was my view for the longest time too. I had no relationships with anyone of another race, let alone another culture. There were no blacks in my neighborhood, my town, my school, or anywhere around me. Even in college, nothing changed. I hung out with people who looked like me. I was oblivious to the concerns I heard on the news from blacks about being mistreated. It didn’t affect me, so I didn’t pay attention to it.

The Awakening

When my wife, Cathy, and I moved to Indianapolis from where we were living in Bloomington, IN, we started attending Second Presbyterian Church (Second). My brother and his wife attended there. We were looking for a church, so we gave it a try. That was in 1984. Second Pres. was one of the largest and wealthiest congregations in the city. That didn’t include us but did include many of the area’s business and civic leaders.

The former Mayor of Indianapolis, William Hudnut, was the pastor at Second before becoming Mayor. The CEO of Ely Lilly, some of the city’s top lawyers, doctors, and business leaders, were members and in leadership at Second.

The Event that Changed Us

A Senseless Killing

Somewhere around 1987, racial tensions in the city were escalating (sound familiar?). During that time, Michael Taylor, a seventeen-year-old boy, was arrested. I don’t remember the reason for the arrest. He was handcuffed and sitting in the back of a police car. Somehow, he ended up shot and killed while handcuffed in the back seat of the police cruiser.

Protests began immediately. Leaders of black churches raised their voices. After the police investigated the killing, they determined that Michael Taylor had somehow committed suicide with the police officer’s gun while handcuffed, hands behind his back, in the back seat of the police car. I’m not joking. That’s what they drummed up at the time.

Tensions went through the roof. The Mayor of Indianapolis at the time, Stephen Goldsmith, called together white and black pastors of the largest and most influential churches in the city asking for help. It was there that our pastor, William Enright, met the pastor of Light of the World Christian Church, T. Garrot Benjamin. After the meeting, Tom Benjamin invited Bill Enright to do something together as churches.

In typical grand thinking, pastor Benjamin suggested the two churches shut down their doors on Easter Sunday and do a joint worship service in one of their churches. He was ready to roll. Since Bill’s church is Presbyterian, run by elders, and required to do things “decently and in order,” Bill told Tom he liked the idea, but it would take some time to work through the system.

The Planning Begins

I don’t recall exactly how long it took, but it was at least a year before anything got scheduled. A group of people from each church got together to talk about and plan an event. It was during this time that I met Andy Hunt.

Andy was the business manager for Light of the World Church. He and his wife Sandra and their three children moved to Indy from Atlanta for Andy to take that position. More on that shortly.

Our group met regularly and finally came up with a plan. We would hold a joint worship service, not on Easter, but a regular Sunday at Clowes Hall on the campus of Butler University in Indianapolis. We scheduled the event and continued meeting to plan the details.

The Celebration of Hope

The name for the event was The Celebration of Hope. We felt it captured what we were trying to portray. The hope that blacks and whites could come together in unity to worship, pray, and fellowship together. And that’s precisely what we did.

It was a beautiful experience. Our two choirs, with entirely different styles, sang together. Ushers from each church led people to seats. Elders from both churches served communion. We took an offering that day. It was divided equally between the two churches.

James Forbes, who at the time pastored Riverside Church in NY City, gave the message.

The auditorium was packed. Most of us in attendance had never experienced a worship service like it.

Relationships Begin

I mentioned that I met Andy Hunt during the planning meetings. He and I hit it off almost immediately. We decided it would be good to get our wives together for a meal. So we did. Cathy and Sandra hit it off as well.

As we talked about the event, we realized something was missing. It was great to get together in large groups for a single event. But what we needed was to build personal relationships with each other.

To accomplish that, we decided to start a dinner group with couples from each church. At its peak, we had six or seven couples who were part of it. We met for dinner monthly. A different couple hosted each month. We continued meeting for a couple of years. It was a fantastic experience for all of us.

We learned that, despite our different backgrounds and experiences, we had far more in common than differences. We all loved our kids. Many had struggled with jobs, finances, relationships, etc. There was one difference. For the first time, the whites in the group heard about what it’s like to be black in a predominantly white world.

It was eye-opening and shocking to most of us. We had no idea what blacks, especially black males, had to deal with daily. Remember, we all came together after the Michael Taylor shooting. For blacks, this was a regular part of their lives. Fear of that happening to them was real. For whites, we thought it was an isolated incident. How wrong we were.

A Moment of Truth

Andy and I continued to meet for lunch, and the four of us for dinner fairly regularly. But there was something that was bothering me about his and my relationship. I would talk to him about pressing issues in my life. He listened, but I always felt he kept a distance. As time went on, I continued to feel like he was holding me at arm’s length.

Finally, I’d had enough. Keep in mind; this was before email, texting, and the things we take for granted today. So, I sent Andy a letter. In the letter, I told him I was tired of trying to get close to him and to get pushed away continually. I said I wasn’t looking for any more shallow, surface relationships. I already had plenty of those. But if he wanted to start opening up to me and share his life, I was all in. I told him I didn’t know what his problem was, but that I didn’t cause it.

As soon as Andy got the letter, I got a phone call from him. He was on the verge of tears and asked if we could have lunch. We went to Hoolihan’s a couple of days later, where he finally opened his heart and told me his story.

Crying Over Nachos

Andy and Sandy were in the process of moving to Atlanta. That’s where Sandra’s family lives. They just had their first child, Drew. Sandy and Drew went back to Atlanta while Andy stayed behind in California to finalize things with his job.

Sandra’s mother loved Drew. It was her first grandchild. When she and Drew were together, grandma had Drew in her arms. One Saturday afternoon, they decided to visit a new mall that opened up in Cobb County. So Sandra, Drew, grandma, and grandpa got in the car and headed to the mall.

As they pulled on to the ramp to the mall exit, a car full of young white men pulled beside them. They rolled down the windows and yelled the following: “What are you n***ers doing up here in Cobb County. You got your own n***er malls where you come from. You need to get your asses back to your n***er malls and get out of Cobb County.”

Grandpa decided he needed to defend the honor of his family. So he was going after the boys. In the back seat, grandma said to Sandra, “take Drew.” Remember, that was something that just didn’t happen. Drew and his grandma were inseparable. She passed Drew to Sandra, had a massive heart attack and died in the back seat of the car.

As Andy told this story, I was balling like a baby. He could barely get the story out himself. What came next changed the nature of our relationship forever. He told me that after that happened to Sandra’s grandmother, he’s hated white people ever since. He said words that resonate with me to this day. I use them often. He said I let an incident become an indictment. The incident killed Drew’s grandmother. He indicted all white people as a result—powerful and poignant words.

Changed Hearts and a Changed Relationship

That lunch happened almost thirty years ago. Other than my wife, Andy, is my closest friend in the world. He is truly a brother from another mother. The four of us have walked through life together ever since. We have vacationed together almost every year for the last twenty years.

One of the life missions for Andy and me is to do what we can to foster racial reconciliation. We have been a part of starting three Great Banquet ministries. The Great Banquet is a three day spiritual renewal weekend. Other versions you may have heard of ar Walk to Emmaus, the Catholic Cursillo, and the Tres Dias.

In 1995, I attended my first Great Banquet. Ironically, it was in Zionsville, IN. That’s the small white town where I grew up. I invited Andy to go there several times. He always had an excuse for why he couldn’t attend. Once we started a community at Second, he and one of our other mutual friends from Light of the World church finally participated.

The Truth Comes Out

I later learned the reason they wouldn’t go to Zionsville. It was because of its reputation as a racist, all-white town. Once it moved to Second, they were all in!

That community now has probably around 3,000 or more members. Andy and Bill, our other friend, invited dozens of people from Light of the World church to the Banquet weekends. What started as an all-white group, now boasts a diversity that probably consists of 40% or more people of color. They’ve gone on to do more things together as churches. May personal friendships across racial lines now exist.

When Cathy and I moved to Northern Virginia in 1998, we started another Great Banquet out here. Our first weekend was in October 2001, right after the 911 terrorist attacks. One of our primary goals was to build a racially, diverse community. God has blessed that goal. Once again, with intentionality, the local community is close to 2,000 strong and of a similar level of diversity. Because it’s in NOVA, that diversity expands beyond blacks to include many Latinos and Asian Americans.

It Starts with Relationships

By now, many of you might be wondering what’s the point of all of this. That’s a legitimate question.

Here’s the point. If whites and blacks don’t start building relationships with one another on a personal level, I don’t see how meaningful change takes place.

When our opinions come, not out of our personal experience, but from media or others, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to have empathy and understanding of the pain of our black and brown brothers and sisters.

Until the Celebration of Hope and my friendship with Andy, I certainly didn’t. The result of that friendship has changed my life. It’s changed Cathy and Sandra’s lives as well. It’s made it easier for me to develop relationships with other people of color. It gives me a perspective of events I see that I would never have without these relationships. There is absolutely no way I’d have the empathy I do without hearing Andy’s and others’ stories. It puts faces with the struggles. I hear real-life, often chilling accounts of what they deal with daily.

Where to Start

At times like these, many people want to know what they can do; where to start. Here’s my suggestion. If you’re white, you know someone, either at work, at your kids’ schools, sports, or somewhere who is black or brown. Pick up the phone today and call them. Don’t worry about what to say. Keep it simple. Ask how they’re doing with everything going on right now. Ask them if you can have a cup of coffee (socially distant, of course) to chat.

You don’t have to have any profound conversation planned in your head. Just say you’d like to get to know them better. Let them know you stand with them in their pain. Ask them how you can support them. Be willing to hear their passion, rage, tears, or whatever comes up. Understand that for them, the George Floyd murder was the tipping point. It’s the accumulation of decades of discrimination, of life devalued and being thought of as lesser than.

A pastor friend of mine said it best. Just engage in the ministry of presence. Be with them in their pain.

Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired

African Americans are tired. They are tired of being pulled over for DWB (driving while black), tired of having conversations with their sons about how to behave if you’re pulled over by police, tired of wondering whether their sons will come home that night.

They are tired of being followed in stores, tired of having to explain why they’re walking in your neighborhood, which also happens to be theirs. A friend gets a visit by the local police almost every time a new owner moves into his neighborhood on his street. It usually goes something like this. He’s out working in the yard, or even walking down his driveway. The new neighbor calls the cops to report a man who appears to be doing something untoward. They know Dave well. Many have been to his house before. But because they were called, they have to respond. So they come, have a brief conversation, and report to the new neighbor they live there.

They are tired of gentrification, being pushed out of their homes and neighborhoods in the name of economic development.

They are tired of being turned down for loans, even though they have the same income, credit scores, and qualifications. If you don’t know this history, research redlining, a policy that kept blacks from buying houses, one of the most significant sources of wealth for white Americans.

They are tired of being overlooked for promotions for jobs in which they are equally or even more qualified than their white counterparts. I have not only read about all of this, but I’ve heard personal stories from people I know.

Getting Defensive

Don’t get defensive if that’s what you hear. Even though it may not feel real or right to you, it is real to them. Think about it. As a white father, have you ever had to have that conversation with your son? I know I haven’t. It’s not something that ever crossed my mind. But every African American father I’ve met has had that conversation with their sons.

Please understand. I don’t offer these things as some sort of expert on the topic. I’m not. In the years I’ve spent with Andy, Sandra, and many other African Americans, these are some of the things I’ve come to know. They come from conversations with many people with whom I’ve developed relationships over the years.

Two Types of Responses

I’ve seen two types of responses from whites during this and other times of police killings of blacks. The first, and most damaging, is the opinionated, self-righteous person who spouts off about blacks being their own worst enemies; that if they’d just comply with police, they wouldn’t get killed. Or one of the favorites, something like, “I don’t know why they’re bitching all the time. They have the same opportunities the rest of us do.” These words have to be coming from people who have never had a meaningful conversation or relationships with a black or brown person. Because if they did, there is no way those words would cross their lips.

The other response and one I appreciate is, “what can I do?” I hope the suggestions above provide some ideas. Sometimes, we make things more complicated than they are. We want to make a big difference. Start with one person. See where that goes. You’d be surprised at what you will learn. But it won’t happen overnight. Andy’s and my story is a perfect example of that. The person you’re sitting across from has lots of years of mistrust for white people built into their lives. It’s not personal. Be patient, and keep showing up.

Final Thoughts

The most important thing I’ve learned and been the most grieved about is that this is a way of life for black and brown people every day. We are all stirred by the senseless and inhuman murder of George Floyd. Remember Michael Taylor, the death that birthed the Celebration of Hope and my friendship with Andy and his family. That was 1987. Redlining started in the Roosevelt administration. Woodrow Wilson screened the Birth of a Nation in the White House. If you don’t know what that is, look it up.

Racism is in the very fabric of America. Is it better? Yes? Is it over? Not by a long shot. It won’t end until whites get involved and demand changes. What you’re witnessing now in cities across the country is a release of hundreds of years of frustration and anger at a system that refuses to change. It’s a shame that people are destroying businesses and looting stores. That’s criminal and, for many, reinforces the stereotypes many whites have of blacks.

But let’s not be too quick to judge. Put yourselves in their shoes. Peaceful protests have not brought about meaningful changes. When another police murder happens, the pent up frustration reaches a peak. When there are three in a row like now, it can and did reach a breaking point.

They want and deserve change; to be treated with respect; to feel like their lives mean something in a free society. I’m asking my white brothers and sisters to join me in saying, we hear you. We value and stand with you. We will walk with you in pushing for changes that make a difference.

If we do that, things can and will change. If we don’t, I’m afraid what we’re seeing now will be the way of life for the foreseeable future.

The post This White Man’s Journey to Understanding Racism in America appeared first on Your Money Geek.

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Fortnite v-buck generator: eleven Factor You're Forgetting to carry out

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Gizzard Lizard’s shoot-out in Tomato Town befell on the last evening of April, which was the last evening of Season three. Anticipation was functioning higher. On the list of ingenious innovations of Fortnite is always to introduce seasons of about two months, as on the cable-tv collection, also to integrate new plot and activity factors. (Past week, inside of a crossover masterstroke, Thanos, the indestructible villain of the new Avengers movie, dropped in on the game—that's, gamers could adopt a Thanos pores and skin—and so, for some time, the Fortnite set gleefully schooled many Thanoses in a means that the Avengers couldn't.) On April thirtieth, a comet that were hovering around the island was alleged to strike right after midnight. For days, meteors were showering the sport. Teasers—the most recent being “brace for impact”—experienced influenced a raft of speculation and conspiracy theories. At first, people today expected the comet to hit the crowded city setting referred to as Tilted Towers, but some clues led others to forecast, properly, that the comet would wipe out Dusty Depot, which was thereafter to be called Dusty Divot.

It absolutely was hard to do research on an evening such as this; Gizzard Lizard returned to the sport. He played on a PC he’d designed at school. It didn’t have a graphics card. He’d hardly ever been a huge gamer—his mothers and fathers were fairly stringent about screens and experienced never ever consented to an Xbox or perhaps a Wii—though he’d played Minecraft for a while. This level of obsession was one thing new. He noticed on his find-your-close friends bar that lots of schoolmates were being participating in, so he FaceTimed just one who goes by ism64. They teamed up and hit Fortunate Landing. Gizzard Lizard wore an earbud underneath a set of earphones, to ensure he could speak with ism64 whilst listening to the seem of approaching enemies. From the distance, it appeared that he was speaking to himself: “Enable’s just Create. Be careful, you’re gonna be trapped less than my ramp. I’m hitting this John Wick. Oh my God, he just pumped me. Come revive me. Create all-around me and come revive me. Wait around, can I have that chug jug? Thanks.”

I’d been struck, looking at Gizzard Lizard’s online games for a couple of days, by how the spirit of collaboration, amid the urgency of mission and danger, appeared to bring out one thing approaching gentleness. He and his buddies did favors for each other, watched one another’s backs, available encouragement. This was something that I hadn’t witnessed A great deal of, say, down with the rink. One particular could argue which the old arcade, Using the ever-existing risk of bullying and harassment and also the obstacle of saying dibs, exposed A child to the planet—it’s character-setting up!—but there was a little something to be explained for this kind of refuge, regardless of whether it did entail assault rifles and grenades.

After which you can the John Wick was on him. “Oh God! Oh God!” Foiled yet again.

A John Wick was an achieved player who experienced earned a skin that bears a resemblance for the character performed by Keanu Reeves inside the “John Wick” motion pictures. (Officially, the skin is called the Reaper, presumably to prevent licensing costs, but players get in touch with it John Wick.) It absolutely was available to anyone who had attained all hundred tiers of the sport in Season three—a mix of accomplishment and knowledge which would have necessary taking part in for involving seventy-five and 100 and fifty several hours.

As the last several hours of Time 3 expired, gamers scrambled to succeed in Tier a hundred, and get their John Wick skins. Gizzard Lizard was nowhere near. He’d started off the year as being a noob. Appear the subsequent early morning, Day Among Time 4, he experienced a intend to put inside the hrs to receive to Tier 100. It could take severe commitment. For The very first time, he acquired a thousand Fortnite V-bucks, for $9.ninety nine, with which to purchase skins. He went Along with the Carbide, a sleek one which brought to thoughts a wetsuit. This was The very first time he—or, more to the point, his mother and father—had at any time put in anything but quarters over a sport.

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hoopslab · 7 years

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Kobe vs Dirk: scouting, boxscores and impact

In the RealGM Top 100 project, we have done a lot of analysis and comparisons of great players vs one another in NBA history. One interesting one, that doesn’t get done often, is Kobe Bryant vs Dirk Nowitzki. Kobe is universally thought of as better in the general NBA lexicon, from casual fan to former players. But, what do their careers look like if we step away from team accomplishments like rings and accolades, and really look at them from a scouting/analytics level? Let’s find out (original post from 2014 Top 100 project).

Kobe vs Dirk

In the vein of the 1-on-1 matchups I described yesterday, I decided to start with the two best current/modern day players still on the board: Dirk Nowitzki and Kobe Bryant. This is a very interesting, potentially epic comparison, that in my experience pretty much never gets made (not including this project, of course, where Reservoir Dogs has taken a crack at it). But outside of here, there are a million Kobe threads and Dirk is pretty popular on this board too, but rarely (if ever) do I see Dirk vs. Kobe. I think part of that is due to perception...before 2011 it was considered ridiculous around here to put Dirk on Kobe's level (I remember ranking 2003 Dirk over 2003 Kobe in the 2010 RPoY project, and it was NOT well received). After 2011 people felt better about giving Dirk his due, but he generally gets compared with great frontcourt players. When in reality, I think he and Kobe make one heck of a match-up. So, let's start digging in and see where it goes.

The boxscores

Regular season, 10 year primes per100 possessions

Kobe Bryant (2001 - 2010): 37.5 pts (55.9% TS), 7.6 reb, 6.9 ast, 4.1 TO

Dirk Nowitzki (2002 - 2011): 34.5 pts (58.4% TS), 12.3 reb, 4 ast, 2.8 TO

Playoffs, 10 year primes per 100 possessions

Kobe Bryant (2001 - 2010): 35.8 pts (54.8%), 7.1 reb, 6.7 ast, 4.0 TO

Dirk Nowitzki (2002 - 2011): 33.4 pts (58.5%), 13.5 reb, 3.5 ast, 3.0 TO

I often like to start with the box score stats (regular and postseason) just to get some baseline information out there to look at. Most of us watched both of these careers play out, so we all have images in our heads of what these two can do. But the numbers help to firm up the impressions, and really quantify those contributions. The per-100 numbers aren't so necessary for two players in the modern era, but for this project I like to use per 100 for everyone for a bit of cross-era normalization.

Anyway, the story is similar in both the regular and postseason. Kobe scores on slightly more volume, with Dirk at better efficiency (but both look really impressive in both). Kobe is more of a playmaker, while Dirk is stronger on the glass as you'd expect for a big (though again, it's clear that each contributes in the opposite category as well, for their position). From these numbers I don't think anyone could really get a feel for who was better, but both look extremely elite for a long period.

"The style makes the fight"

Both Kobe and Dirk evolved stylistically over time, going from extremely raw (Kobe entered the NBA as a teenager out of high school, Dirk entered the NBA as a teenager from Europe) to extraordinarily polished. Very good arguments can be made that Dirk and Kobe are the two most skilled offensive players of this generation, mixing technique and precision in with physical attributes that already made them mismatches.

They are also two of the most unique talents that the NBA has seen. I think people recognize the uniqueness of Dirk, but maybe don't always see it in Kobe because he (seemingly deliberately) reminds people so much of Jordan. But ironically, despite his resemblance to his Airness, Kobe is still extremely rare. People forget that before Jordan a shooting guard that was 6-6 or 6-7 and uber athletic was extremely rare. After Jordan it became more of the goal (because everyone wanted to be the next Jordan), but for the most part these bigger 2s handled the ball more like 3s. Kobe, on the other hand, could control his dribble and direct the offense almost like a combo guard...only most combo guards are 3 or 4 inches shorter. Then, while Jordan was always a slasher first-and-foremost (and then later in his career became more of a post threat as his athleticism waned), Kobe always seemed more comfortable operating from the outside-in. He had the high-flying athleticism (and later the strength/footwork to be a great post threat on offense), but his long-range was always more natural than Jordan's and it was a larger staple of his scoring. This played a part in what has been both a boon and a bane for Kobe...he could always get a shot that he was comfortable with from the perimeter, no matter how he was defended. As such, he is one of the best difficult-shot-makers that I've ever seen. That sometimes tempts him to take a lower percentage shot when a higher percentage look (for himself or a teammate) was available, but on the flip-side it makes him a higher-than-expected percentage threat when the offense breaks down and he has to make something happen alone.

And then there's Dirk. No one has ever seen a 7-footer that is such a natural, effortless, pure scorer from the perimeter. He has the jumper of an elite shooting guard, and the ball-handling and court vision of a reasonable small forward. Put those things together, and it is extremely difficult to match up with him. Up through his MVP season the conventional wisdom used to be that he was too good on the perimeter to be defended by a big man, but that he was too tall to be defended by a wing. For the most part this was true, which is why he was receiving All NBA nods early in the decade and rose to MVP status by 2007. However, he had the misfortune in his MVP season of running into the one coach that knew his tendencies well enough (former coach Nelson) and also had a long wing that could play 1-on-1 defense (in Stephen Jackson) that, in conjunction with other factors, allowed a #8 seed to defeat Dirk's #1 Mavs. That series played a big part in Dirk's perception as a so-called "failure" for a long time...but it seemingly had the hidden benefit of getting Dirk to focus more on his post-game. Once he mastered that and added it to his other offensive talents, Dirk became nigh unguardable 1-on-1. Which is why many consider 2011 his absolute peak, despite his MVP and most impressive box score exploits coming 4 or 5 years earlier. Plus, because Dirk IS 7-0 tall, he brings a dimension of spacing/defensive warpage that even exceeds his own scoring. This is part of why his impact shows up so well in +/- studies, even better than his boxscore numbers might suggest. Having a 7-footer that can dominate a game from the perimeter, demanding not only a big man to leave the paint (weakening opposing defenses) but often a double if he stepped inside the arc, is arguably the biggest warping effect you can have (which is why I tend to believe his offensive impact might be pretty close to what a modern Bird would have been, despite Bird's much better passing, because Bird is 3 inches shorter and height really matters for this effect).

Chronology and the story outside of the box scores: the infamous RAPM

RAPM has gotten a lot of attention thus far in the project (understatement alert), but here the RAPM scores over time help to really tell the story of how Dirk's and Kobe's impacts have changed over time as their roles have changed and their games have developed. It's unfortunate that we don't have RAPM data for 2001 and that 2002 is only partial season data as well, because that was an important time period, but we have enough data to work with that I feel like I have a handle on what the missing/partial data may have said anyway. Again, the RAPM numbers reported are from Doc MJ's normalized PI RAPM spreadsheet from 1998 - 2012.

Late 90s Kobe and Dirk didn't really move the needle much (RAPM values right around 0). Dirk scored a slight positive RAPM in 2000 (+2.3), and in the partial 2002 his RAPM was still at a similar place (+2.6). Kobe, on the other hand, went from a mark of +0.7 in 2000 to a +4.9 in the partial 2002, then he just about replicated that score in 2003 (+5.5). It is pretty universally agreed upon that Kobe took a major step forward in impact in 2001, so I'd guess that his 2001 score probably looks similar to/better than his 2002 and 2003 scorers. So, much as the impressions of the time would have suggested, Kobe took the leap towards stardom a bit before Dirk.

However, in 2003 Dirk's RAPM scores surpassed Kobe's to date (Dirk's score jumped to +7.3 in 2003, an elite amount of team lift) and he maintained that mark like a metronome for the next six years (RAPM between +7.2 and +8.0 every year between 2003 and 2008). What's really interesting about Dirk's flat-line major impact is that so much was changing around him. 2003 was the peak of Nellie-ball (where the Mavs had a legit title shot if Dirk doesn't go down to injury against the Spurs) with Nash and Finley as side-kicks, while by 2008 Dirk had won an MVP and come within a breath of another possible championship in a team with a more defensive philosophy with Coach Avery Johnson and side-kicks Josh Howard and Jason Terry. The situations were dramatically different, the team philosophy at the opposite end of the spectrum, but Dirk's impact remained rock solid at a level worthy of a reasonable MVP.

Kobe, meanwhile, was entering the most volatile period of his career both on- and off- the court. For the 2004 season the Lakers brought in the aged Karl Malone and Gary Payton to supplement Kobe and Shaq in a posited super-team, and of course Kobe had his incident in Colorado that had to deal with over the course of that season. This was also the peak of the unfortunately public Shaq and Kobe feud, and after the 2004 season we saw Shaq (and Phil Jackson, and Malone, and Payton) leave town. The Lakers (and Kobe) both had their worst season of the decade to date. With all of this going on, it doesn't surprise me that Kobe's RAPM values reached the lowest point of the decade in these two years (average of about +1.5).

However, in 2006 Kobe returned renewed (after his first major injury and the Lakers missing the playoffs in 2005), and Coach Jackson also came back to town. Kobe was soon to turn in an offensive season for the ages in 2006, and this touched off his own metronomic high-impact stretch in which he registered RAPM values between +6.4 and +8.1 every year between 2006 and 2010. This time period, of course, saw Kobe win his only career MVP as well as his first two Finals MVPs. For those that had questions as to whether Kobe could really be a megastar and lead a team to the promised land without Shaq, all of those questions were answered emphatically 'yes!' during this stretch.

Back to Dirk. After 2008 coach Johnson was out, to be replaced by Rick Carlisle. Carlisle was a defensive coach like Johnson, but by all accounts he was a better tactician and planner. While the Mavs continued to have 50+ win seasons in '09 and '10, they weren't really championship contenders. And while Dirk continued to measure out with really good RAPM scores (+5.3 and +4.9), it was a step down from his Groundhog Day-like +7.5s through the middle of the decade. Seemingly it took those couple of years for Dirk to perfect the post-game that I mentioned above, for the Mavs to build a team that complimented him fully while also fitting Carlisle's schemes, and for Carlisle to perfect the way that he wanted to use him. But it all came together in 2011, when the Mavs put on the floor a defensive-minded squad with tough, battle-tested vets at every position that were really strong and their complemntary roles. But a squad that would have been awful without an offensive engine...and it just so happens that the Mavs had one of the best offensive engines of all-time on their squad. Everyone knows that Dirk led the Mavs to the title in one of the more storied "superstar without big name help" runs that we've seen. But RAPM also recognized the incredible lift that Dirk was providing to those teams, as his +11.5 normalized RAPM in 2011 marked a career-high for Dirk and entered him into the pantheon of the top-10 highest RAPM scores measured since 1998.

The playoffs

Dirk and Kobe both have reputations for performing on the big stage. There have been box score numerical analyses done in this project to either argue for or against Kobe's performance based on scoring efficiency, and those arguments are worth absorbing and filtering. Kobe apparently did have some efficiency blips through the years against good defenses, which we didn't see with Dirk (who maintains an absurd volume/efficiency ratio from the regular season right into the postseason). I don't really think that individual scoring efficiency is nearly as important as many make it out to be, but for players that are primarily offensive and more specifically primarily scorers, scoring efficiency has to at least be considered. On the other hand, Kobe has also faced off against some of the best defenses in history throughout his time, and that can certainly affect the old true shooting percentage.

(Aside on playoff on/off +/-)

Interestingly, for those that give any credence at all to playoff on/off +/-, it's Kobe (even with his lower scoring efficiencies) that tends to look more impressive than Dirk. Dirk's best postseason mark of his career (obviously) came in 2011 with an impressive +16.8 per 100 possessions, and this capped off a run of three positive double-digit marks in four years (thought the first two were for relatively short runs and thus I give them next-to-no weight as single seasons). However, outside of that period his playoff on/offs are pretty pedestrian compared to the other greats of this generation. He was +6.9 in the 2006 run, but pretty meh else for a career playoff on/off mark (from 2001 - 2014) of +1.8.

Kobe measured out with a positive playoff on/off +/- in every playoff run of his career (at least since 2001) in which his team made at least the 2nd round. His best career mark came in 2003 (+17.4), but he was also really strong in 2001 (+14.2 vs. Shaq's -0.3, lending credence to those that say that Kobe was driving the bus for that postseason run) and 2009 (+12.4 vs Pau's +6.8, though Odom measured out best at +16.7). Kobe was also +8.9 in 2008 and +7.6 in 2010, and sports a career-mark of +8.3 that's right in line with Shaq, Duncan and LeBron.

Bottom line:

As I figured before I got started, this is an epic comparison. It's almost a toss-up, a "what do you like"? Stylistically, in the box scores, and in the +/- stats for both the regular and postseason it's hard to find a consistent advantage for either of them. Kobe is probably the incumbent as far as this match-up goes, and the saying is that you have to beat the champ to take his place...and I definitely don’t see this as a clear win for Dirk. In fact, with playoffs impact estimates thrown in, that might be enough to tip this whole thing in Kobe’s favor in my mind. But at the very least, it’s a very interesting comp between two players that you don’t often hear mentioned in the same breath.

#historical #RealGM Top 100 #GOAT #Kobe Bryant #Dirk Nowtizki

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