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moemoemammon · 3 years

Note

can we have the demon bros with an mc who's a horrible cook? (not solomon level bad though, but still pretty funky tasting.) however! they are capable of improving with practice. i'm a pretty bad cook myself so i have my eyes on this one 👁️👄👁️

MC is a Terrible Cook!

(Feat. GN!MC and the Demon Bros)

✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦

Lucifer

When Lucifer introduced you to the house's dinner-making rotation schedule, he expected that you might have a little bit of trouble. After all, you're now having to come up with a meal to serve the entire family once a week.

But what he didn't expect was for you to serve poison for dinner.

Maybe you were trying to appeal to the palates of demons? But although they eat strange things, that didn't mean they'd enjoy.... whatever it is you've put on the plate.

Lucifer also thought it might've been a fluke, until you REPEATEDLY offended their taste buds with the random concoctions you created in the kitchen. And you do so with such earnest that he can't bring himself to ask you to stay away from the oven at all costs-

"I've realized that asking you to adjust to an entirely new world of cuisine is a bit harsh of me, so I've decided to enroll you in RAD's cooking class. I think you'll find it useful, and... I look forward to eating what you make. Do your best."

Mammon

Mammon can't brag about being a five star chef or anything. Hell, he's tried serving cup noodles for dinner repeatedly. But that doesn't mean he doesn't know what tastes good, and your food? Yeah uh.... this ain't it, chief.

When you ask him to sample a new dish you've tried making, Mammon's filled with giddy pride. You're asking HIM to try it out, and not his brothers! That's his human! ✨

But now he sort of wishes you'd have asked someone else. What are you, Solomon?? Or maybe human food is just like that???? Well... it ain't as bad as Sol's, but it's still funky!

It takes everything for his dramatic ass not to spit out the mouthful of food right then and there. He can't when you look so hopeful-! Damn it, stop making your eyes sparkle so much!!!

"....Th-that's a pretty interestin' flavor ya got there, MC. Real uh.... unique! But if ya REALLY wanna make food that The Great Mammon likes, I'll just have to start teachin' ya! I ain't takin' no for an answer!"

Levi

It took a long while for Levi to actually taste your cooking, considering he spent most of his days in his room eating whatever he smuggled in. But one day, your cooking had the chance to change his life forever...

All he wanted was to recreate some TSL recipes with you! It should've been simple! It was only a cursed goat sandwich with cheese, and you were in charge of the tartare sauce!

Yet somehow... you've created something so foul, Levi is sure you've made a curse instead.... It emanates a darkness that rivals that of the Lord of Corruption himself-!!!

Okay, that's a biiiit of a stretch. But why is it so??bitter??? Uh... he probably should've asked if you could cook in the first place. Maybe a little practice wouldn't hurt, but how can he say that to your face??

"Th-that looks great, MC! But um... hey, why don't we do this every weekend? You know, trying to cook together? I can look up recipes so we can improve together! Ahaha..."

Satan

Satan is pretty bright, so it didn't take him long to realize he should start eating before dinner when it's your days to cook. Don't get him wrong, he's all for new experiences, but your food leaves much to be desired.

But he's not so cruel that he'd keep letting you get away with making food like that, so he tries helping you in the kitchen. That upgrades your cooking to something tolerable, at least?

Hey... wouldn't it be funny if you snuck your food into Lucifer's meal every night? Satan's sure he'd make a great face! Ooh, or maybe you should start preparing his coffee every morning?? Somehow, you even manage to make drinks taste completely unique!

Okay, maybe he shouldn't use you like that. How about you take advantage of his collection of cookbooks instead? He wouldn't mind if it means you'll come to his room more often.

"Why don't you pack Lucifer's lunch for tomorrow? I'm sure he'd appreciate it if you surprised him with a special meal of your choosing. And afterward, you and I could start prepping for dinner together. I'll show you the recipe I found for us. I think you'll like it."

Asmo

Asmodeus isn't one to hold his tongue, so the first time he tried your cooking... well.... We could say he's pretty conditioned to eating terrible things thanks to Solomon, so yours was somewhat okay!

But seriously, there's no way he can let his sweet little MC get away with such atrocities! He's GOT to help you out ASAP!

Asmo loves all things trendy and he's always staying on top of the new and popular foods, so he suggests making them with you! Every time something's trending on Devilgram, he'll make it with you! And he'll get some great pictures for his social, too!

It's a little tedious and he's not a fan of hard work, so there are days when he outright suggests going out for lunch instead. Teaching someone to cook is tiring, you know?

"Hm? O-oh, that's right. I'm still on my diet, so I probably can't eat whatever you're making. I know I know, a shame isn't it? As much as I'd love to, I just can't! But I'll gladly eat you instead, MC~! ❤️"

Beel

.................This should be illegal.

There's no way food can taste like this, right? It's got to be cursed. Or maybe you're playing a prank on him. Between you and Solomon, Beel has decided he won't even touch human world food with a 70 foot pole.

That being said, he loves you so he'll teach you how to make Devildom food instead. You can't mess up something if he's there to help you, right? Because Beel's starting to become wary of you when you enter the kitchen, and it's not good for his health...

Lucifer doesn't mind that though, since it keeps him out of the fridge in the middle of the night. The groceries have stayed in their places for three weeks straight! ✨

"You want to make a meal from home? Um.... I think Belphie's allergic to that, so why don't we make his favorite instead? I'll teach you, so let's go shopping. And we can get a snack on the way back, too."

Belphie

Belphie spends so much time sleeping, there are times he'll even eat in his sleep! It's a feat to behold. And we all know how it's nearly impossible to wake him up from his slumber...

Yet the first time he had your food, it was enough to make his eyes open. He had to make sure it was food he was eating, and not some kind of mystery slop Mammon put in front of him as a prank.

Wait, you made this...? Is Beel okay???? He's been eating this all this time?!?!!

Belphie doesn't like troublesome things like trying to teach you how to cook, but there's no way he'll let you abuse his brother any longer. He'll do his best... And besides, it's kind of cute watching you struggle cook.

"Hey, you know that's the sugar you're holding, and not salt? If we were cooking for Lucifer I'd let you go through with it, but I have to eat this, too. Here, let's just do it together, okay? I want you to learn well so you can make my favorite meals."

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fairestwriting · 3 years

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Hello! I was wondering if you could do headcanons for diasomnia (separate) dating Jade and Floyd’s little sister? Thanks for reading and have a good day!

so like a contest on who can be the most insane, your brothers or your boyfriend

+ ko-fi link, if anyone feels like financially supporting my writing

Malleus Draconia

They seem happy for you when you break the news, full of pride. Floyd puts an arm around your shoulders, look at you, his little sister about to be queen! Jade congratulates you on your relationship, but following it with a warning that it might attract unwanted attention, because of your boyfriend's status...

Things start feeling strange soon though. They make sure to let you know they're both excited to have Malleus over and... get to know him. What, why are you looking at them like that? They mean it! They won't do anything bad, they promise!

When Malleus is over it's... god it sure is. The twins aren't one bit afraid of him, and he's not one bit afraid of them, their terrifying auras just condense into something weird. At least it's mutually entertaining.

Jade serves dinner and Floyd circles around Malleus, bombarding him with questions. He's like a child at a recently-opened amusment park, never really seeing a dragon fae like Malleus in real life. Jade scolds him when he gleefully asks if he's ever burned someone when breathing fire, but just for the crudeness in his tone -- He's actually curious about it too.

Malleus will be pretty amused by everything? It almost feels like a normal, lively dinner. He doesn't mind all of the questions, it's refreshing to see people that just don't fear him at all. But, even then... you just have this bad feeling that won't leave. Like if the situation called for it, the three of them would break into an all out fight, ruining your entire home in the process...

When Malleus is gone, Floyd praises you for having such a fun boyfriend, patting you on the head while Jade nods along, agreeing that everyone had a wonderful time tonight, and he was welcome to come back whenever he wanted.

So, it actually went really well, you sigh to yourself in relief, glad none of your worries about the situation actually came to be. You thought Jade and Floyd might get overprotective, threatening Malleus in a million different ways--

Then, as Floyd rambles about how much fun he had, you hear him insert in a comment about how he wanted to see how long Malleus would last if he tried to squeeze him, and you think that maybe this didn't o as perfectly as it seemed.

Well, it was still pretty good, either way -- They’ll pester Malleus with questions everytime he comes over, though, and you might not get any alone time at all.

Lilia Vanrouge

You break the news, your brothers immediately look at you like they'd bitten into a lime. Displeased, strained expressions.

They know Lilia, he's powerful and a vice dorm leader, the sort of person Azul would want them to keep tabs on, so they had followed him around a couple times... and what they think about Lilia is, well, that he's like when you bite into a piece of candy and taste something bitter and savoury instead. There's just something so wrong about him. His smell is all off.

Floyd whines about it. Why pick Lilia? He's so weird, and not even the fun kind! He looks just like defenseless prey and yet he's not, that's just disturbing to him. Jade places a hand on his shoulder, adding that he should give their sister's boyfriend a chance, if she's chosen him then there's definitely some sort of... appeal to him that they hadn't seen yet. Well, that's what he says, but you can tell his smile looks plastic. You're immediately exasperated.

Lilia's arrival isn't really met with a warm welcome. It's you and Jade at the door, him visibly faking the politeness as he leads your boyfriend into your home, and Floyd stays in his room, refusing to come out until the food was ready.

Jade and Lilia's initial conversation is uncomfortable. Just small talk and polished greetings, and yet you can tell Jade is at his wits’ end talking to him. Why does Lilia bother your brothers so much? Even them can’t fully understand it, honestly.

Things lighten up when you’re eating, Floyd comes along and while he’s glaring at Lilia, who you know is deliberately acting oblivious, the whole time, Jade’s food is very good, and he’s still curious about the fae even if Lilia makes him uncomfortable, so conversation flows a little better.

When it’s time for Lilia to go, they both exhale heavily -- And looking straight into your eyes, tell you to never bring this guy over again. Date him if you want, just don’t... let him set foot into your home when they’re there.

Silver

Silver? As in the guy from Diasomnia they care the least about? Okay, sure, but like, why?

Jade feels neutral about it, if only a little disappointed. Floyd will complain about him looking so boring, what the hell do you even see in this guy? He just doesn’t look too fun to mess with, and that was the main thing they were looking forward to when you started dating someone.

Floyd tells you to get a cooler boyfriend, while Jade shrugs and says you’re welcome to bring him over anytime, if you wanted. Emphasis on if you wanted, he doesn’t particularly feel like interacting with Silver either.

You have a very normal dinner when Silver comes over. Floyd asks him some crude questions about how it’s like to serve Malleus, Jade serves dinner and asks about your relationship, how you met and such.

If he happens to fall sleep, Floyd is going to doodle on his face like they’re kids at a sleepover. And Jade will just watch, grinning as he fake-complains about how he shouldn’t treat their dear sister’s boyfriend like this.

After the introduction dinner, you ask them what they thought about Silver, and you receive a double shrug. They don’t really feel any particular way about him. He’s just some guy. Not worthy of much attention in that he isn’t someone they feel like they have to protect you from, and isn’t that fun to mess around with.

They check up on you every now and then when Silver comes over, but they don’t care if you leave the door closed. If you do, Floyd is going to barge in anyway, and linger around to get under your skin.

Sebek Zigvolt

I feel so bad for Sebek dear god.

So he knows you’re a Leech, right? He was likely aware of the risk that came with dating you, especially if you two wanted to be serious about it, he’d have to talk to your absolutely fucking terrifying family at one point. He’s willing to do that for his lady, of course!

Doesn’t mean it’ll be fun for him, though.

When you tell Jade and Floyd you’d been dating Sebek, they’ll grin wide -- Now that’s a fun Diasomnia member. They’re gonna make his life a living hell.

Sebek will come into your house with the mindset that he needs to do this properly, just the way he approaches everything else, but even he feels a heavy dread settling over his chest when he’s being greeted by the visibly excited, grinning twins.

They have a kind of good cop, bad cop scheme going on when Sebek is there. Floyd will pester him until he’s about to explode, asking questions at the pace of a machine gun -- Mostly rude ones about Malleus -- to see his reaction, while Jade lightly scolds him, smirking and doing nothing about.

They somehow find out that Sebek doesn’t like bitter flavors, and get together to make their dish as bitter as their and your palates can stand, then tease him endlessly about visibly not liking it.

They just... turn your boyfriend into a whole toy. You can ask them to stop all you want, but they won’t do it.

It’s just a mess. If you take him to your room, one of them is gonna stand by the door and tease you about how they won’t let you keep the door closed yet, what if Sebek isn’t as serious about chivalry as he seems to be? You never know!

Needless to say, they do like Sebek. Just... in the way that a cat likes toying with a mouse before it kills it. Jade tells you eagerly about how he’d love to have Sebek over again when he’s gone.

Don’t humor him. They will not grow out of bullying your boyfriend, he’s too earnest for his own good.

#twst #twisted wonderland #disney twst #disney twisted wonderland #twst headcanons #twst imagines #twst x reader #malleus draconia #lilia vanrouge #silver twst #sebek zigvolt #malleus draconia x reader #lilia vanrouge x reader #silver x reader #sebek zigvolt x reader #lis writing

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msgrumpygills · 3 years

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Social Media Anon Here!

Firstly, never change Grumpy ;) you are probably the only person on Tumblr to LISTEN to another view and let it change a prejudice.

Secondly, the Padagram/Social Media change bus continues. Don't be fooled people will be looking at positive and negative reactions to that change on social media.

So here goes!

1. They are starting to market season 2 of Walker in Hiatus. That really doesn't happen. That means they know they need to target new viewers. They are acknowledging they have a problem. The main problem is Jared either didn't learn enough about production quality on SPN (Jensen/Misha were both more interested in behind the camera's) or that he thought he could stick a Stetson on and we all had such sh1t for brains we'd watch anything. So they need a viewer boost DESPARATELY and are going all out to (a) persuade Walkers remaining viewer(s) that it's worth sticking around and (b) get back old viewers or convert 1m+ viewers to season 2. So now we see all the cast (and Keegan has more followers than Jared and Lindsay has a VERY engaged following) trying to persuade their followers how fabulous Walker is. Expect this scrabbling to continue if they want their COVID paychecks.

2. Connected to 1, Jared has started trying to break out of the fandom bubble. I don't think he's trying for power couple (the clue in a power couple is that two FAMOUS people get together and create a super brand, here we have one niche C famous guy and a hanger on wife), I think we are in Jared profile raising and trying to raise his recognition score, which is probably a little low having half assed it in the last year and a half. He's doing it by scatter-gunning so I'm not sure it's going to stick.

3. Connected to 2,

(i) if I run my algorithm clean laptop with a "Jared Padalecki" news search, I get (a) a daily mail article on Jared "clarifying the rift" (b) a "hello" magazine saying he's been "inundated with support after death of "family member"" (c) the new york times article on Walker and Supernatural. It then goes into a variety of articles about Jared raising money for Holly's family (fucking atrocious in my view to use her death for publicity) and a series of derivative articles on his mantrum and later explanation. ONLY THE NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE MENTIONS WALKER other than as a throw away, all of the others link to Supernatural only. Walker isn't on the main radar of anyone as a show. It's not mainstream enough to mention. it has ZERO buzz.

(ii) if I run the same search on my compromised tablet, I get a SEA of fluff articles "jared padalecki goes to venice", "jared padalecki's wife wishes him a happy birthday" "jared padalecki goes to watch soccer" "jared padalecki goes to the wrestling". I'm expecting "Jared Padalecki defecates regularly" tomorrow.

At the end of that I get the same articles as in (i) but the majority of his publicity is still going through the fandom and the, not very viewed, endless zine type websites that update on every episode of every geek show every day.

So we are seeing, and I expect it to continue, a break out Padalecki, (who knows he and his forehead may wish to have a final crack at films), and a fluff Padalecki, trying to stay relevant a year after SPN relevance ended, because he hasn't got the same push for season 2 of Walker as he had for season 1 and Walker has zero presence. No one, not even the fans are talking about Walker.

Will it work? I don't think so. Keegan has 7m followers on Insta and that's because he's a photographer and writer and it's interesting. I would follow his account (I don't), but certainly it isn't a Walker instagram.

Jared is a clever guy, but he's boring on social media. He has a limited appeal. He does family snaps, hunk snaps, flogs orange pee and flogs his show. He says "family" and "mantra" a lot but that's really it. The clue is, if you didn't know who he was and came across his instagram you wouldn't follow him. Why would you? For a video of a guy running up steps? A smug picture of two middle aged men trying to flog you something?... (oh and lots of "brother" comments on Keegan's social media, which is irritating. It's like he thinks that is his repeatable formula and it isn't).

His media approach won't work because advertising and exposure pushes a product. In TV's case, it's not a one off product and there is a lot of competition. Product Jared needs to be more interesting (his mantrum's are the only exciting thing about him - and that is tragic) and his TV show just needs to be BETTER, well, a LOT BETTER.

Soooo, expect the Padapush to continue, but it's not about a couple, it's about individual marketing and for Jared breaking out of SPN bubble. For Gen, it's her tag along profile that she'll never break out of. She'll have to be satisfied with her superpower of being able to persuade people to buy toothbrush's and dog food (if she can).

Expect though the couple's bit to die off a little. Jared is getting over exposed. His engagement rating is plummeting (nearly 3% is a plummet) because of the repetitive photo content. He'll have to back off or people will switch off (I have already). What makes me laugh is.... from the dawn of time when cavemen took their wives 2 miles away for a new cave weekend.... NO ONE HAS EVER BEEN INTERESTED IN SOMEONE ELSE'S HOLIDAY SNAPS.... Gen and Jared apparently need to learn that lesson...

I might stop these posts now because, well, it's gotta be a bit boring for you and I write LONG. :)

Stay safe and wear your masks ;) xxx

I don’t want you to ever ever change, lovely! Also, I’m NEVER bored by your messages! You put so much effort into the research you do and the messages you send and it’s appreciated! <3

I started following Lindsey on IG because she seems pretty genuine, and her cat is way too cute! Plus, I like her attitude. I haven’t followed her for the whole Walker season, but even she doesn’t post a lot about it. She posts interviews and then posts about that night’s episode, but other than that, nothing. Can’t speak for Keegan, but how are fans and non-fans supposed to be excited about a show when the people STARRING in the show can’t be bothered? Maybe they’re all aware of how shitty it is or maybe they’re lazy, but it doesn’t make sense.

I’m always interested to see the difference in an “algorithm-free” setting and one that has an algorithm. I always figured Google was the same for everyone, but seeing the difference in articles you’ve outlined is insane. It really just goes to show that Jared isn’t the star that his stans think he is. He’s not as important as they think he is, he’s just an actor. It’s even more jarring to see just how little Walker is talked about at all. All of my devices probably have been “contaminated” when it comes to algorithm so I can’t really speak personally about the public and fans talking about Walker or not talking about it. I can say that on the posts about Walker from the Supernatural Facebook page, a good chunk of the comments are people saying they stopped watching, never got into it, or thought it was trash. There are only a handful of comments talking about how they enjoy the show.

I think it was disgusting for him to use a fan’s passing for publicity. And no, I don’t think it was anything other than a PR stunt. Her family had a GFM going that was promoted by plenty of the case INCLUDING GEN, so you know he knew about it. But for him to make his own special one and then have articles posted everywhere about how charitable he is? That’s gross PR bullshit and I hope it backfires.

I still follow a few Supernatural fans, Jared fans, Jensen fans, etc. on Tumblr and even they aren’t mentioning it. I think maybe the hardcore Jared stans post gifsets or whatever, but I don’t see much praise for the show itself, just Jared’s looks. Even the fans aren’t biting and that would make me reevaluate everything if I was Jared.

I'm expecting "Jared Padalecki defecates regularly" tomorrow. This made me laugh way too hard!

who knows he and his forehead may wish to have a final crack at films You are on a ROLL! Maybe I’ve become biased, but I can’t see Jared doing films. I mean, I could see him doing like a side character role or something small, but I can’t see him having a big part of a movie. Like I said, maybe that’s me being biased but I see him staying in TV. I could be proven wrong, but I don’t know.

I agree about Jared being boring on SM. I used to get some giggles from his Twitter posts and even some of his early IG posts because they were goofy, clever, and candid. It showed his humor and was more personable. Now it’s just all fake and comes off as someone whose only motivation to engage with fans is money and that’s a big turn off.

For me personally, I think that if instead of the “couple goals” bullshit that they try to push for their lavish trips, if they just posted cool pictures they took of different locations, activities, food or whatever, that would be more palatable than all the “Look at my hubster and I! We’re in Italy! Look at how in love we are!” But maybe that’s because I’ve become a bit of a photography nerd?

I guess time will tell whether or not Jared will make positive changes and if Walker can be saved, but I’m not really optimistic about it.

I AM optimistic about your takes on things so keep them coming! Long posts or not, I love them! <3

#grumpy answers #social media anon #anti jared padalecki #anti walker

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osakaso5 · 3 years

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Riku Nanase RabbiTube Rabbit TV Part 1: Spending Time With Riku

Part 2 | Part 3

Staff: …Now, on to the RabbiTube project.

Staff: Our plan is to introduce the videos by featuring clips on NEXT Re:vale!

Staff: We’d really appreciate it if you could show a side of yourselves that people don’t usually get to see on TV. It’s a pleasure to be working with you!

Momo: We’ve got high hopes for you guys!

Yuki: Feel free to fully expose yourselves to the public.

Mitsuki Izumi: Ahaha, please be gentle with us! Looks like I’m gonna have to do a RabbiTube study marathon..!

Gaku Yaotome: By the way, Tenn, I saw you watching RabbiTube videos the other day. Do you know any good ones?

Tenn Kujo: …I was just watching cat videos.

Gaku Yaotome: Cats, huh. That’s not gonna help us learn anything.

Ryunosuke Tsunashi: …I think they might help! You could learn ways to entertain and soothe people…

Gaku Yaotome: Ryu, not all of us are gonna be able to do that…

Yuki: …I’m liking the idea of Kitty Gaku.

Tenn Kujo: …Pfft…

Gaku Yaotome: Tenn, why’re you laughing!?

Riku Nanase: Kitties..! So could it be like a video of Iori going into a cat café?

Iori Izumi: Why do I have to go to a cat café!?

Yamato Nikaido: I’m not too excited about making videos like that, either…

Tamaki Yotsuba: I wanna do a pudding tasting!

Sogo Osaka: …Personally, I’d like to rank my top 100 spices from all around the world…

Nagi Rokuya: And I shall hold a Cocona watch party!

Mitsuki Izumi: You guys aren’t bringing anything new to the table!

Iori Izumi: …Actually, I suppose animal videos do have their appeal, despite how banal they are…

Riku Nanase: Did you say something, Iori?

Iori Izumi: No, nothing.

Momo: Ahaha! Great, you’re already brainstorming ideas!

Momo: You’ve all got the right idea! We wanna see you act natural for your RabbiTubes!

Yuki: Let’s have a fun year doing this.

IDOLiSH7 & TRIGGER: Yessir!

- - - -

Riku Nanase: We’re going to be RabbiTubers for our birthday project this year..!

Sogo Osaka: All the group chats up until now were fun, so it’s kind of a shame that we won’t be doing one this year.

Mitsuki Izumi: …Fair enough. It’ll be awesome to make videos for our fans, but I wish we could have our own celebrations too!

Yamato Nikaido: It’s become kind of a tradition by now.

Nagi Rokuya: …We do not work together as much as we used to. Though I understand that it is difficult to match all our schedules…

Tamaki Yotsuba: Do we not get to eat Mikki’s cakes this year?

Mitsuki Izumi: The cakes are the one thing we’re gonna make for sure! Right, Iori!?

Iori Izumi: Yes. I’ll help, too.

Riku Nanase: Hmm… Celebrations…

Riku Nanase: Ah! Why don’t we all go somewhere together for our birthdays?

Riku Nanase: I guess we probably can’t all go… But we can get our manager to arrange it so at least some of us can hang out!

Mitsuki Izumi: Going out, huh… That does sound like a nice change of pace from all the group RabbitChats!

Yamato Nikaido: It’s a shame that we won’t all be able to go, but getting to choose a spot does make it feel more special. …You should take me to a beer brewery, by the way.

Mitsuki Izumi: Sounds like you’ve already got one in mind!

Tamaki Yotsuba: Let’s take lots of pics and videos for the guys who can’t go. We can send them over RabbitChat.

Nagi Rokuya: OH! A wonderful idea. It will make us all feel as if we are there.

Iori Izumi: I’m sure uploading them to Rabitter would make many people happy, as well.

Sogo Osaka: That sounds fun..! Let’s ask our manager about it tomorrow.

Riku Nanase: Yep! …Looks like we’re going to have pretty fun birthdays again!

- - - -

Riku Nanase: Wow..! This place is so cute! Where are we!?

Iori Izumi: A glamping area.

Tsumugi Takanashi: Glamping, which is a simpler, more casual form of camping, is very popular nowadays!

Nagi Rokuya: Riku, have you ever gone glamping as a child!?

Riku Nanase: As a child? Um, I don't really remember...

Iori Izumi: Let's enjoy ourselves as though we were still young children.

Nagi Rokuya: We have prepared plenty of meat and fish for the occasion! And sweets, of course...!

Nagi Rokuya: We have a long night ahead of us, Riku!

Iori Izumi: You're allowed to stay up all night, just this once. Right, Manager?

Tsumugi Takanashi: Yes! I'll do everything I can to help you.

Riku Nanase: Thank you..!

Riku Nanase: I can't believe even a killjoy like Iori is going to let me stay up late!

Iori Izumi: As long as you don't make a habit out of it. Today is a special occasion...

Riku Nanase: And thank you for all the food, Nagi! We're going to have a feast tonight!

Nagi Rokuya: YES! A forest party it shall be!

Riku Nanase: Let's get started right away!

Nagi & Iori: Yeah..!

- - - -

Riku Nanase: Hey, Iori. How do I light this coal?

Iori Izumi: Ah, I'll take care of it, you just sit down.

Iori Izumi: I wouldn't want you to inhale the smoke...

Riku Nanase: ...Okay. Sorry for getting in the way.

Riku Nanase: Hey, Nagi. Is there anything I can help you with?

Nagi Rokuya: OH, I am in the midst of a heated battle with the dreaded Onion Demon! My eyes..! Riku, you must flee without me..!

Riku Nanase: O-okay..!

Riku Nanase: ........

Tsumugi Takanashi: Riku-san.

Riku Nanase: Ah, Manager.

Riku Nanase: It looks like all I get to do is sit tight. I was really hoping to do stuff with them, though...

Tsumugi Takanashi: Your cheeks have a bit more color than usual in them. It's probably thanks to how stable your condition has been lately...

Riku Nanase: Ehehe. Yeah, probably.

Tsumugi Takanashi: ...Let's cook something! It'll be a surprise for Iori-san and Nagi-san!

Riku Nanase: I don't know if I'm allowed...

Tsumugi Takanashi: Of course you are. We came here for you.

Tsumugi Takanashi: Just try not to work yourself too hard, like you've already promised us!

Riku Nanase: ...Yeah. I'll make something they're sure to love!

Riku Nanase: ...Or I'll try, at the very least...

Iori Izumi: Nanase-san? What were you talking about?

Riku Nanase: It's a secret! Iori, we'll have to make dinner, right?

Iori Izumi: Right...

Nagi Rokuya: Wow, will you help prepare our supper, Riku?

Riku Nanase: Ahaha, yep, that was my plan! ...Say, let's have a competition to see which one of us can make the best food!

Iori Izumi: What? Do you seriously think you'll win against me?

Nagi Rokuya: Heh... I would not underestimate the palate I have cultivated over many years, if I were you.

Riku Nanase: Anyway, our time limit will be one hour! ...Ready, get set, start!

- - - -

Riku Nanase: ...Uh... Can I add this in as is..?

Iori Izumi: I'm begging you, please don't add it in there without at least peeling it first..!

Nagi Rokuya: Iori. Should you be looking at other people's dishes? Something smells quite foul on your end...

Iori Izumi: ...Huh? Aah..!

Riku Nanase: ...Hmm? I think I smell something burning... Wait, Iori! Your meat, it's completely scorched!

Iori Izumi: Ugh, I got careless..!

Iori Izumi: ...But Nanase-san, you didn't even cook yours properly before adding it to the sauce!

Iori Izumi: Not to mention, you left your vegetables unpeeled... It was such a trainwreck to watch that I couldn't pay attention to my own cooking!

Riku Nanase: Huh!? So you're saying it's MY fault you burned your meat!? That doesn't make any sense!

Nagi Rokuya: OH, I was hoping to enjoy a relaxing glamping excursion, yet there they are, making a mess once again.

Nagi Rokuya: Their bickering is almost like the soundtrack to my elegant gourmet cooking.

Tsumugi Takanashi: A-ahaha...

- - - -

Riku Nanase: Finished!

Nagi Rokuya: It smells delicious!

Iori Izumi: At least we all managed to put together something. It's time to show the others what we made.

Tsumugi Takanashi: Remember to face the camera!

Riku Nanase: Okay! I made Hamburg steak stew!

Nagi Rokuya: Hamburg steak! How wonderful, Riku!

Riku Nanase: Ehehe. Pretty great, huh? You would know, considering how much you like Hamburg steak!

Iori Izumi: I'll admit that it sounds more complex than what I expected from you.

Riku Nanase: Even I can just throw stuff into a pot and cook it!

Iori Izumi: So not complex at all, then...

Riku Nanase: ...And I used frozen burgers and a ready- made sauce mix.

Nagi Rokuya: Heh, you are outing yourself as quite the lazy cook.

Nagi Rokuya: Iori, what did you make?

Iori Izumi: Beef stroganoff.

Nagi Rokuya: Wow, it looks to be of a much higher quality than a glamping trip would warrant.

Riku Nanase: That seems like a dish Yaotome-san would make, not you!

Iori Izumi: Excuse me..? I only made it because it requires little prep time, and is much simpler to actually prepare than many would think.

Riku Nanase: What did you make, Nagi?

Nagi Rokuya: I made grilled sandwiches with ham, egg, and cheese!

Riku Nanase: Wow, the bread is so nicely browned! It looks good!

Iori Izumi: They're also very well stacked.

Nagi Rokuya: YES! I piled on the ingredients as I grilled the bread. A task so simple, even I could do it.

Riku Nanase: Is it just me, or does glamping make even simple foods look like gourmet!?

Nagi Rokuya: Heh. A fine dinner, is it not?

Riku Nanase: Yeah, it's the best..! Let's eat while it's all still hot!

Iori Izumi: Yes. ...Nanase-san, we won't stay here for very long, so I hope you'll take every chance you can to get some rest and fresh air.

Iori Izumi: We can all come here again at a later date.

Riku Nanase: ...Okay! Thank you so much for setting this all up for me. I don't think I'll ever forget this day!

Iori Izumi: You're being overly dramatic, as usual.

Nagi Rokuya: Iori, Riku! Show your best smiles, we are about to take a picture.

Tsumugi Takanashi: Here I go! Say cheese..!

End of Part 1.

#idolish7 #riku nanase #rabbitube #translation #i7 #rabbit tv

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costellos · 3 years

Text

a/n: here are all the Bucci gang asks from last Thurday’s Halloween headcanon ask game! I decided to compile them into one giant post bc... hoo boy... there were a lot. nonetheless, thanks for participating, friends! this was so much fun!! (also, side note, there are still a ton in my ask box. I’ll get to those sometime this week, so hang tight!)

tw: minor gore mention in Abbacchio and Fugo’s descriptions

❥ ┋ ❝ bucci gang & some misc. halloween headcanons!

bruno bucciarati.

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@buuni asked: ahhh the Halloween emoji game seems fun !! could I ask for Bruno 🍂 thank you !! And I hope you’re doing well this spooky season 🐇💕

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🍂 what their favorite fall activity is

participating in All Souls Day. although Bucciarati was raised Catholic, I don’t think he’d remain a practicing one. still, there’s something comforting about honoring the deceased. he’d tell you fun, little stories about his father and the kind of household Bucciarati was raised in. you can’t help but notice how happy he looks as he talks. how his eyes sparkle, that rare, genuine smile on his lips. at the end of the day, he tucks a chrysanthemum behind your ear and places a kiss on your temple. “I appreciate your patience, amore,” he hums, that smile still on his lips. “it means more to me than you’ll ever know.”

leone abbacchio.

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@heartsllabyul asked: OMGOMGOMG TOYAAAAAA 🍂🍿 with the loml leone abbacchio please 🥺

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🍂 what their favorite fall activity is

trying seasonal foods. Abbacchio finds a lot of it fascinating since “fall” isn’t really a season in Italy. it gets colder sure, but the culture around autumn isn’t nearly as big as it is in your country. he thinks a lot of autumn-based foods are odd. pumpkin spice anything tastes artificial to him, though he thinks butternut squash soup is decent. his favorite is spiked apple cider! but he’d never admit it. he thinks it’s entertaining watching you desperately search for some seasonal food that he’d like.

🍿 how they react to watching a horror movie

he doesn’t! Abbacchio doesn’t see the appeal behind horror movies. besides, his time as a police officer and mobster has made it difficult for him to see them as anything other than cheap entertainment. and that goes for slashers, psychological thrillers, and gorey flicks. despite all that, he’ll watch horror movies if you like them. he finds your interest endearing. he gets more embarrassed than he’d like to admit when you hold onto his arm as you watch.

giorno giovanna.

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anonymous: giorno + 🏠🍂? Abbababy Anon asked: Hmm hmm~ how about 🎃 for Fugo and Giorno?

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🏠 how they would react to being in a haunted house

pretty well! Giorno isn’t someone who scares easily. the most he’ll do is take a step back when something gets him. he keeps his fingers laced with yours, ready to advance (or abandon ship) whenever you’re ready.

🍂 what their favorite fall activity is

watching meteor showers. autumn is an astronomy hot spot, an event that he would love to share with you. anything about life and human existence is a topic of interest of Giorno. how to preserve it, how to observe it. he’d happily share everything that he knows with you. Giorno would take you far away from the city, far enough for you to clearly see the night sky, and far enough to be completely alone. but once the meteor shower starts, strangely, he wouldn’t be watching what seems to be falling stars. no, his eyes would be locked on his other favorite spectacle: the person sitting right beside him.

🎃 how seriously they take carving pumpkins

not seriously, and he’s not a big fan of it. he hates scooping out the pumpkin’s guts to start carving. the wet and sticky texture, along with the smell... no thanks. he’d rather watch you do it. and once you’re finished, he’d be happy to sprinkle some cinnamon in so that the pumpkin smells more palatable once it’s lit.

guido mista.

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@zellyroo asked: 🍂 and 🎃 w/ mista please? 💛💛

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🍂 what their favorite fall activity is

Mista loves picking apples. it’s a laid-back activity with a high return rate. spending time with you and getting food while feeding the Pistols? count him in. plus, he loves feeling like the perfect boyfriend when he has to help you grab those hard-to-reach apples. and dear god, don’t get him started on apple cider donuts. oof. he could eat 10, easily.

🎃 how seriously they take carving pumpkins

very seriously. he’s seen so many cool designs, how hard can it be? Mista quickly learns, however, that carving pumpkins is quite difficult. you laugh when you hear him curse under his breath as he tries to cut through it. the Pistols bully him for his ugly design, but it’s hard to understand them when their mouths are stuffed with pumpkin seeds. Mista just tells them to shut it. in the end, he gives up on his elaborate design, opting for something more simple. after all, he hates anything that complicates his life (and boy, is this stupid pumpkin doing just that). it comes out like any other jack-o’-lantern.

narancia ghirga.

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anonymous asked: Hi; May I ask 🧙‍♀️ for Narancia, please? Thank you! :D 🧡

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🧙 if they would dress up & what they would dress as

it would take a little convincing to get Narancia to dress up. he really, really wants to do it, but he doesn’t want to come off as childish! you’d have to tell him that everyone in the U.S. dresses up on Halloween. but once he’s convinced, he’s convinced. he’d be bouncing a variety of ideas with you; he’d probably have a new one every hour. in the end, he’d settle on something spooky with you, like dressing up as zombies! (much to Fugo’s dismay.)

pannacotta fugo.

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anonymous asked: 🧟‍♂️ 🍂 for Fugo! Abbababy Anon asked: Hmm hmm~ how about 🎃 for Fugo and Giorno?

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🧟‍♂️ a non-serious fear that they have

zombies. the idea of a virus spreading, how it wrecks your immune system and makes you lose control of yourself... it reminds him too much of Purple Haze. on a less serious note, he just thinks they look gross. he’s seen his fair share of innards and bodily fluids during his time in Passione, but. still. eugh.

🍂 what their favorite fall activity is

corn mazes, surprisingly! it was one of those things he thought was stupid at first, but loved once he was actually in one. the maze attendant gave you both a series of riddles mapped according to different intersections in the field. Fugo had a blast trying to figure it out; after all, it was just one giant puzzle. he had a smug look for the rest of the day once he found out that he beat Mista’s time.

🎃 how seriously they take carving pumpkins

too seriously for it to be fun. being raised in a demanding household has built him to be a huge perfectionist. carving pumpkins was something he thought would be really easy until he got to it himself. the pumpkin’s rind is so difficult to cut through that it makes his lines look jagged. and god, he was not expecting it to be so messy. Fugo had this elaborate design planned out, but once he finished, he ended up with a standard jack-o’-lantern face. you’ll have to remind him that it still looks great.

trish una.

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anonymous asked: 🍂 and 🎃 for trish?

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🍂 what their favorite fall activity is

getting fall-themed coffee, obviously! but not pumpkin spice lattes. god, no. Trish thinks they’re overdone. she’d rather go for anything with caramel and / or cinnamon. bonus points if it’s sugary (bitter coffee is only tolerable). she laughs when you get whipped cream stuck on your top lip, but her honey-sweet giggle is always followed by her swiping her thumb over your face. it’s a great excuse to touch you.

🎃 how seriously they take carving pumpkins

not too seriously. at least not initially. she sees it as another part of American culture that she doesn’t understand. but when she sees how much fun you’re having, she can’t help but get into it herself. it’s a fun past time, albeit difficult (who knew these gourds were so thick?). Trish makes it her personal goal to make her pumpkin look nicer than yours. although she’s unsuccessful in her endeavor, she’d admit that pumpkin carving was “just okay” — aka really fun.

#bucci gang #jjba #JoJo's Bizarre Adventure #headcanons #golden wind #part 5 #ask game response #giorno giovanna #Bruno Bucciarati #leone abbacchio #guido mista #Narancia Ghirga #Pannacotta Fugo #trish una #gore mention /#after about 3 months of running this blog #I finally got a Trish request #bless u anon :')#she was a joy to write for

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blackswaneuroparedux · 3 years

Text

Treat Your S(h)elf: I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher’s Guide To Wine, by Roger Scruton (2009)

You could say that wine is probably as old as civilisation; I prefer to say that it is civilisation, and that the distinction between civilised and uncivilised countries is the distinction between the places where it is drunk and the places where it isn’t.

- Sir Roger Scruton, I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher’s Guide To Wine

When I first got talked into investing in the dreams of my two cousins and their French families to continue to manage an old French vineyard I thought of Roger Scruton’s book. I already had this book on my shelf alongside his other works. Re-reading it nudged me to take a risk and go for it.

For one I have always loved wine and have drunk it from a very early age. Secondly what could be more cultured or civilising than to marry body and mind through the palate of philosophy and wine?

And finally, and perhaps more importantly, the opportunity to escape the madness of modernity - as well as make peace from war as a British combat veteran of the Afghan war by not so much as coming home but finding a new one - by getting back into nature with hard honest graft on the land that Mother Nature blesses. All of this I found especially appealing.

Of all the things we eat or drink, wine is without question the most complex. So it should not be surprising that philosophers from Plato and Socrates onwards to our contemporary times have turned their attention to wine: complex phenomena can lend themselves to philosophical speculation.

Wine is complex not just in the variety of tastes it presents – ‘wine tastes of everything apart from grapes’, I once heard a crusty old French vintner say – but in its meaning. Only the most woodenly literal-minded would deny that wine has a meaning: in its history, its role in human social life, in religious and other ceremonies. Though they drink it copiously over dinner at High Tables in their Oxbridge colleges, academic analytic philosophers do not spend as much time as they might in this kind of investigation of meaning or significance of wine – what we might call a phenomenology or a hermeneutic investigation.

Of course, there are more narrowly phenomenological questions which wine raises.

How do vintners or winemakers manipulate the underlying biochemical material to create the kinds of taste which they intend their wine to have? Does the ‘terroir’ of a wine really make a difference to taste, and if so how? What is the basis of evaluative judgements about the quality of a wine?

Arguably only those who actually make the wine and those who are life long wine connoisseurs can conceivably answer that on some experiential and technical level. But these are not the only philosophical questions in this area: the hermeneutic questions have their place too, in an understanding of the phenomena.

Sir Roger Scruton’s 224 page book is about the hermeneutics of wine rather than its psychology or phenomenology more narrowly conceived. Scruton, the late great conservative philosopher, is that rare breed who comes closer than most to bridging the gap between the grass roots and the High Table in answering such mysteries. The result is an engaging, insightful, informative and (in parts) a very funny book. It is immensely readable, more in the anecdotal style of Scruton’s England: an Elegy (2000) or On Hunting (1998), than his more heavyweight philosophical works, such as The Aesthetics of Music (1997), Sexual Desire (2004), Beauty (2009), and his writings on Wagner and high culture. He does often come across as curmudgeonly, but his (written) relations with women, music and poetry are very delicate and tender. And so it is with his love affair with wine. It is indeed a very personal book and its is warmly personable, like the man himself, and it contains so much of Scruton’s distinctive wit and intellectual personality, it ought to be of interest not just to wine enthusiasts (whom Scruton likes to call ‘winos’) and philosophers but also anyone curious enough to understand the place of wine in our world civilisation.

The first and obvious thing to say about Scruton’s book is how the title of the book is of course a play on words. It’s a playful wink to Eric Idle’s “Philosophers’ Drinking Song,” in which the Monty Python cast, lightly disguised as a group of Australian philosophers all named Bruce, list the world’s thinkers from a drinking standpoint. This includes the couplet slightly amending Descartes’s proof of his existence: “And René Descartes was a drunken fart / ‘I drink therefore I am.’”

The pun on words is Roger Scruton’s way of taking the Monty Python couplet seriously. After all Descartes was a serious man and though he was born in Touraine, the rich French wine region, did probably not drink much. He treats all this as a paradox that G.K. Chesterton might well have toyed with - that is, as a truth standing on its head to attract attention - and examines the drinking of alcohol as a way in which human beings learn more about each other, fellowship, some of the deeper realities, God, and not least themselves.

In this Scruton is a wise philosopher who teaches us how wine cultivates our moral virtue and our civilisation. He encourages us to recognise that stream of liquid descending from our pursed lips into our throat as the red or golden chord that runs from heaven to earth, and binds everything in-between into a cosmic whole. Wine both reflects and helps constitute our participation in all strata of reality, and points the way to our redemption, divine or otherwise.

In Scruton’s Prelude (a musical term, of course) where he quotes Emerson “who commends the great wino Hafiz [a Persian poet] in the following words: “Hafiz praises wines, roses, maidens, boys, birds, mornings and music, to give vent to his immense hilarity and sympathy with every form of beauty and joy.” This is echoed in Scruton’s terms that “by thinking with wine you can learn not merely to drink in thoughts, but think in draughts. Wine, drunk at the right time, in the right place and the right company, is the path to meditation, and the harbinger of peace.”

The book is divided into two parts, labelled ‘I drink’ and ‘therefore I am’ respectively. The second part of the book is more strictly philosophical - Scruton starts it with the nice conceit that ‘therefore I am’ contain the whole of philosophy, each word standing in turn for reason (therefore), consciousness (I) and being (am). But arguably wine and Scruton enthusiasts will probably get more out of the first part.

The first chapter is a nice description of his own discovery of wine as a young man. Warmly written, the chapter is devoted to his friends who made him “fall” for wine (or is it he who made them fall?) and his acquisition of a 1945 Château Lafite, “the greatest year from the greatest of clarets”. His first memories are happy ones of his mother’s home manufacture of elderberry wine in a post-war England where the French (and Spanish and Portuguese) grape had not yet “conquered the suburbs.”

“For three weeks the kitchen was filled with the yeasty scent of fermentation. Little clouds of fruit-flies hung above the jars and here and there wasps would cluster and shimmer on the spilled pools of juice.” Other Englishmen of Scruton’s generation will recognise and sigh at this description as many fathers - including my own - made his own beer and wine from motives of both fun and economy.

Thus ill-equipped, Scruton goes to university ignorant of the rich variety of wines available even then to an English wino. At Cambridge and, later, in Paris, a succession of tutors, patrons, and friends not only introduce him to a growing list of wines but also teach him how to drink them. Some of the wines he is given are complex and expensive Burgundies, others cheap French supermarket vin ordinaire.

But Scruton discovers that all have certain inherent qualities that an educated palate can discover by drinking them attentively and appreciatively. By learning their provenance and history, he enriches his knowledge of the locality that produced the wine — and he can imagine (I would like to believe this is so) that he can glimpse the character of the local people in the wine itself. He learns finally that certain wines go with certain things, not merely certain foods, but certain occasions, certain friends, certain thoughts, even certain topics of conversation. He becomes a wino.

When in his early middle years, Scruton buys a farm in southern England, he discovers to his delight an array of homemade-wine equipment, identical to that of his mother’s elderberry experiments, on the kitchen floor: “I listened to the bubbles as they danced in the valves, and studied the wasp-edged puddles on the tiles. I had come home.” Yet it is a different person who comes home. Scruton celebrates his good fortune not with elderberry wine but by opening and drinking in quiet happiness a treasured bottle of Château Lafite 1945 that had accompanied him in the long wanderings now ended. For, by this time in his life, Scruton is a confirmed Francophile in his drinking tastes.

The chapter ends on a remark concerned with the “new habit, associated with American wine critics like Robert Parker, of assigning points to each bottle” which should not only be “viewed with nothing but contempt” but also compared to “assigning points to symphonies, as though Beethoven’s 7th, Tchaikovsky’s 6th, Mozart’s 39th, Bruckner’s 8th all hovered between 90 and 95.

Perhaps his second chapter ‘A Tour de France’ is the best one. This is a very personal, but informative and interesting, guide to Scruton’s favourite French wine regions. starting in Burgundy, down to the Rhône Valley, the Pyrenees and ending in Bordeaux with T.S. Eliot’s description of a spiritual journey that applies equally to a journey through wine:

We shall not cease from exploration, And the end of all our exploring

 Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

With much reason, Scruton does not think very highly of blind tasting: “To think that you can judge a wine from its taste and aroma alone is like thinking you can judge a Chinese poem by its sound, without knowing the language.” I let out a whoop of appreciation when I read this. In one clean swoop he casually casts aside the resultant snobbery that comes from the ritualising and self-importance of blind tasting events.

I think blind tasting whilst sincere is also an exercise in showing off. I’m not saying people don’t have a nose for wine or can tell certain elements but blind tasting is not the best way to truly appreciate the full complexity of wine. Indeed in my embryonic wine making experience (by watching my cousins and the managers on our vineyard) I would say terroir is perhaps one of the most overlooked aspects of wine making and it determines the difference between good wine and a bad one.

It’s great to read that Scruton defines himself as a terroiriste. Not the French word for a terrorist! But a believer in the French word, terroir. It is derived from the Latin word terra meaning earth or land. It’s a word coined by the French to express a wine’s sense of place. There is no English equivalent for this word. It was originally used to distinguish the wine making practices of old world wine. In other words terroir is how a particular region’s climate, soils and aspect (terrain) affect the taste of wine alongside the traditions gone into producing the wine. Some regions are said to have more ‘terroir’ than others. Johan Joseph Krug (1800–1866), the famous champagne producer, once suggested that “a good wine comes from a good grape, good vats, a good cellar and a gentleman who is able to coordinate the various ingredients.” No trace of terroir.

But I think Krug is wrong and vintners as well as the wine industry as a whole have come to the same realisation of the importance of terroir. Back in the 1980’s, many of these ‘terroir-driven’ wines were actually affected by wine faults including cork taint and wild yeast growth (brettanomyces). Vines thrive in a range of soil compositions from highly draining granite and schist based soils to limestone and clay and vines, in turn, react to these different soils in different ways. And on top of the differing soils, certain areas of the world have such unique combinations of geology and topography that interact with specific sun exposures that the resulting wines have distinct characteristics that cannot be found anywhere else.

Nowadays terroir is used to describe practically every wine region. Because much of European wine (old world) is steeped in tradition it is easier to get a sense of terroir. It’s a bit harder in a place like Napa or Sonoma (new world) because of the looser laws that govern winemaking but younger winemakers are coming around to the idea of terroir and trying to express the land. But certainly in France today vintners - as they come to increase their geological knowledge and environmental understanding and find ways to marry that to their unique artistry and craft - have realised the unique role terroir plays in the wine making process.

The next chapter looks at wine from “elsewhere:” Here Scruton looks at the Middle-East where wine was born; Greece where Bacchus, Dionysos, and more importantly, Eros used to hover; the United States; Australia, New Zealand and their misspelling of Syrah as Shiraz, the Iranian city of poets, gardens, nightingales and last but not least, wine; a few lines on South Africa, then Italy, Romania and Spain. But “travel narrows the mind, and the further you go the narrower it gets. There is only one way to visit a place with an open mind, and that is in the glass”.

Scruton had already warned the reader in the previous chapter not to read the “elsewhere” chapter: “After punishing body and soul with Australian Shiraz, Argentine Tempranillo, Romanian Cabernet Sauvignon and Greek Retsina, we crawl home like the Prodigal Son and beg forgiveness for our folly. . . [Bordeaux] is the wine that made us and for which we were made, and it often astonishes me to discover that I drink anything else.” I rather fancy he is being tongue in cheek here.

This is for the “I drink” part of the book. Its author then moves to the “therefore I am” part which often needs much deeper philosophical knowledge than perhaps than even your average educated layman might have some difficulty having if they are not versed in a basic understanding of aesthetics as philosophical discussion. But here his aim is to rescue wine from the philosophers and the so-called wine experts.

To those who have never been captivated by the complexity of wine and the way it is bound up with western civilisation, a book on the philosophy of wine might be dismissed as the typical product of conservative snobbery and elitism. But this would be a mistake. Scruton is not a snob about wine (nor, for that matter, about anything else). On the contrary, one of the strongest themes in his writing is his deep love of the everyday, of the simple pleasures of society as he imagined it once to be, where people were at one with the land and with the traditions of their culture. According to Scruton, this is something that (although it probably never existed) should be open to all, but which is being destroyed by the march of modernity. (In a nice aside, he asks: ‘Who am I to stand against the tide of history? Come to think of it, I am the only person I know who does stand against the tide of history’.)

In passing, Scruton evokes the great philosopher Avicenna who lived in Isfahan (Persia) during Islam’s Golden Age (980–1037 AD); he was a wine aficionado who recommended drinking at work defying “the Koranic injunction against wine, citing it as an example of sloppy reasoning,” that does not take into account whether it is a small or a large amount. Scruton (p. 133) also points to the fact that “in surah xvi, verse 7 of the Koran wine is unreservedly praised as one of God’s gifts. As the prophet, burdened by the trials of his Medina exile, became more tetchy, so did his attitude to wine begin to sour, as in Surah v verses 91-92. Muslims believe that the later revelations cancel the earlier, whenever there is a conflict between them. I suspect, however, that God moves in a more mysterious way.”

Scruton is very quite skeptical that the vocabulary used by so-called experts to describe wine is of much help: “If I say of a wine that it has a flowery nose, lingers on the palate, with ripe berry flavours and a hint of chocolate and roasted almonds, then what I say conveys real information, from which someone might be able to construct a sensory image of the wine’s taste. But I have described the taste in terms of other tastes, and not attempted to attach a meaning, a content, or any kind of reference to it. The description I gave does not imply that the wine evokes, means, symbolises or presents the idea of chocolate; and somebody who didn’t hit on this word as a description of the wine’s flavour would not show that he had missed the meaning of what he drank or indeed missed anything important at all. Our experience of wine is bound up with its nature as a drink [which] endows wine with a particular inwardness [and] intimacy with the body [that is not] achieved by any smell, since smell makes no contact with the body at all, but merely enchants without touching, like the beautiful girl at the other end of the party. . . Nothing else that we eat or drink comes to us with such a halo of significance, and by refusing to drink it people send an important message —the message that they do not belong on this earth.”

Again, I found myself saying amen to that.

The good part of the second part is Scruton trying to make a case for the cultural uniqueness of wine. In one sense, Scruton is right to do this: it is undeniable in many parts of western culture, wine has played a unique role in religious and social rituals, which no other drink has. But he can push his point beyond plausibility when he attempts to argue that because of the qualities of wine itself – and what it is to drink it properly – nothing else could play this role (more on this later).

The argument starts well, with a very illuminating discussion of the distinction between the various ways in which a substance can intoxicate. There are those that merely stimulate without altering the mind (like tobacco, for example). Then there are those which have mind-altering effects, but whose consumption itself brings no plea- sure (e.g. heroin). The third category contains those things which alter your mind and bring pleasure in their consumption: cannabis and forms of alcohol other than wine are his examples. Wine, Scruton argues, is in a fourth category of its own: here the alteration of the mind is internally related to the experience of consuming it.

These distinctions are very useful, and the distinction between the third and the fourth category is subtle but certainly real. It relates to the question of what non-human animals can and cannot do. Scruton makes the nice observation that an animal cannot savour wine (or any- thing else). In being able to savour or relish the taste of wine, a person no more separates out the effect of the wine from its taste than they can separate the meaning of a piece of music from its sound. Although one would not realise this from reading the thousands of words that are written daily about wine, wine would not be the drink it is if it did not intoxicate.

The last two chapters deal respectively with wine and whine, and being and bingeing. Though Scruton has something to say in favour of Puritanism, he castigates the ease with which “puritan outrage [and in particular, prohibition, but also sexual behaviour] can be displaced from one topic to another, and the equal ease with which the thing formerly disapproved of can be overnight exonerated from all taint of sin.”

He vehemently protests against “the humourless mullahs,” and the misuse of drinking, but also rejects the idea that fermented drinks are just shots of alcohol, and insists on their social functions across civilisations and time: “The burden of my arguments is that we can defend the drinking of wine, only if we see that it is a culture, and that this culture has a social, outward-going, other-regarding meaning. . . When people sit down together sipping drinks, they rehearse in their souls the original act of settlement, the act that set our species on the path of civilisation, and which endowed us with the order of neighbourhood and the rule of law.” But he has not much against drinking alone, and ends with a few words from the Chinese poet Li Po (700 BC), the same poet whom Mahler used in his Lied von der Erde (though in a very approximate translation):

A cup of wine, under the flowering trees; I drink alone, for no friend is near. 

Raising my cup I beckon the bright moon,

For he, with my shadow, will make three men.

Scruton points out in several brilliant passages, the prohibitionist, like the modern day Islamists and moral police in the West and the all too familiar binge-drinker are alike in their ignorance of the virtue of “temperance.” They can envisage no stopping place between abstention and alcoholism. Their absolutist logic, he argues, is like objecting to a first kiss on the grounds that it will one day lead to a divorce. And neither can really understand drinking for any reason other than to get drunk.

Scruton confirms the wider value of temperance in our lives: “Virtue should be cast in human form if it is to be humanly achievable. Saints, monks, and dervishes may practice total abstinence; but to believe that abstinence is the only way to virtue is to condemn the rest of mankind. Better to propose the way of moderation, and live thereby on friendly terms with your species.”

As it happens, the occasional bender may actually have therapeutic qualities in moderation (i.e., if indulged in infrequently). George Orwell, who can hardly be accused of lacking a puritanical streak, thought that people should get drunk every six months or so. The experience, he thought, shook one out of one’s regular complacency and could be compared in this to a weekend abroad. Certainly it very often produces a feeling of greater humility in those who can remember what happened. Yet getting drunk is something that most drinkers do very rarely, if at all.

Changing our mood and outlook is a very different matter. Under the influence of a moderate amount of alcohol, our inhibitions are loosened. Shy people become bold, the tongue-tied talkative, the dull lively, the unimaginative fanciful, and the isolated social. (Even “mean drunks” usually start the evening in festive and forgiving mood.)

That last loss of inhibition is the most important because it promotes the fellowship that is the basis of a decent society. Not all intoxicants perform this vital function. Cannabis and similar drugs tend, if anything, to imprison the taker within his own consciousness (however expanded it may seem to him in his dreams). Except for those who lose themselves in alcoholism (and consequently become asocial in their attempts to deceive others about their condition), however, alcohol is a profoundly social drug. At the same time, not all varieties of alcohol are equally social in their effect. This thought leads Scruton to narrow somewhat the scope of his enthusiasm. Having rejected teetotalism, he continues: “The real question, I suggest, is not whether intoxicants, but which. And - while all intoxicants disguise things - some (wine preeminently) also help us to confront them by presenting them in re-imagined and idealised forms.”

Scruton makes a fascinating and intriguing point related to our historical relationship with the vine to make wine the highest ideal form. He claims that wine derives from a crucial historical transition in our relation to the earth – when human beings settled, put down roots and stopped being mere hunter-gatherers. In a memorable phrase, Scruton claims that in this way wine celebrates ‘the earth itself, as the willing accomplice in our bid to stay put.’ But of course one could say similar things about distilled spirits and beer. Such drinks are not made in such an incredible variety as wine is, but Scruton’s point is not about variety but about the intrinsic and relational qualities of the drink itself.

In the end, one cannot help feeling that he is relying a little too much on the sheer panache of his writing to help his argument bounce along: ‘Wine is not simply a shot of alcohol, or a mixed drink. It is a transformation of the grape. The transformation of the soul under its influence is merely the continuation of another transformation that began maybe fifty years earlier when the grape was first plucked from the vine.’ Wine is a transformation of the grape, to be sure. And the mind or soul is transformed in its consumption. But these two transformations are so very different that it is hard to see what can literally be meant by the one being the continuation of the other.

In fact, Scruton’s view is not just that wine is unique as a stimulant, but that it has to be drunk in a particular way in order for the harmony of taste and intoxication to take hold. It is not hard to agree with Scruton’s argument that there are more or less civilised ways of drinking wine. And this part of his thesis is very plausible: ‘The burden of my argument is ... that we can defend the drinking of wine, only if we see that it is part of a culture, and that this culture has a social outward-going, other-regarding meaning. The new uses of wine point towards excess and addiction: they are moving away from the old way of drinking, in which wine was relished and savoured, to the form of drinking typified by Marmeladov, who clutches his bottle in a condition of need.’

However I still found all this a tad unconvincing in that he makes a case that only the savouring and relishing of wine can play a central cultural role as opposed to other spirits - think of Scotch whisky for the Scots and beer for much of Northern Europe or even tea(!) for the English. So my apologies to Roger Scruton but I remain sceptical of his argument that of all stimulants, wine is uniquely civilising, however much I want it to be true.

I think Scruton is also wrong to despise cocktails. A well-made cocktail is as complex a set of taste experiences as a good Bordeaux. A good-strength cocktail is the perfect prelude to the theatre, giving one exactly the right lift to help the play to entertain, but not suppressing one’s appetite long enough to spoil a post-theatre dinner. It can be the booster rocket that starts a convivial evening. But the cocktail has its limits. The alcoholic strength of most cocktails reduces their usefulness both as an aid to sustained fruitful conviviality and to the kind of imaginative introspection that Scruton thinks necessary for a happy life.

That aside, Scruton knows that the best (including Li Po’s poetry) should be kept for the very end. The bouquet (of the wine, but in French the word is also used for the finishing of a firework) comes with the Appendix: What to drink with what, though here the second what does not stand for food, but for philosophers. This part of the book I very nearly coughed up my wine as I found it terribly amusing to pair a suitable wine, as one would with food, to a philosopher one might be reading.

St Augustine: Drink a glass of Moroccan Cabernet Sauvignon, though “the City of God requires many sittings, and I regard it as one of the rare occasions when a drinking person might have legitimate recourse to a glass of lager [which I did in Odessa, while reading Scruton], putting the book to one side just as soon as the glass is finished” [which I did not do, since I had three glasses, each of which containing half a liter].

Francis Bacon: “Any discussion of his insights should, I think, proceed by the comparative method. I suggest opening six bottles of a single varietal—say Cabernet Franc- one from the Loire, one from California, one from Moravia, one from Hungary, and if you can find two other places where it is grown successfully you will already have given some proof of the inductive method—and then pretending to compare and contrast, taking notes in winespeak, while downing the lot.”

René Descartes: “As the thinker who came nearest, prior to the Monty Python, to stumbling on the title of [my] book, Descartes deserves a little recognition. . . He has ended up as the most overrated philosopher in history, famous for arguments that begin from nothing and go nowhere. I would suggest a deep dark Rhône wine [that] will compensate for the thinness of the Meditations.”

Baruch Spinoza: “The last time that I understood what Spinoza meant by an attribute it was with a glass of red Mercurey, Les Nauges 1999. Unfortunately, I took another glass before writing down my thoughts and have never been able to retrieve them.”

Immanuel Kant: “And when it comes to [his] Critique of the Judgment, I find myself trying out [several wines], without getting any close to Kant’s proof that the judgment is universal but subjective, or his derivation of the ‘antinomy of taste’— surely one of his most profound and troubling paradoxes, and one that must yield to the argument contained in wine if it yields to anything.”

Friedrich Nietzsche: “Although we should drink to the author of The Birth of the Tragedy, therefore, it should be with a thin, hypochondriac potion, maybe a finger of Beaujolais in a glass topped up with soda-water.”

Edmund Husserl: “I recommend three glasses of slivovitz from Husserl’s native Moravia, one to give courage, one to swallow down the jargon, and one to pour over the page.”

Jean-Paul Sartre: “Sartre’s great work of philosophy, L’être et le néant, introduces the Nothingness that haunts all that he wrote and said. . . If ever I were to read Sartre again, I would look for a 1964 Burgundy to wash the poison down. Small chance of finding one, however, so there is one great writer whom I shall never again revisit—and I thank God for it.”

Martin Heidegger: “What potion to complement the philosopher who told us that ‘nothing noths’? To raise an empty glass to one’s lips, and to feel it as it travels down—noth, noth, noth, the whole length of the tube: this surely is an experience to delight the real connoisseur.”

In conclusion I really enjoyed reading this book (again and again).

This is a wonderful book for anyone who loves wine and wants to try identify what, in all its complex connections with so much of what is valuable in civilisation, might be special about drinking it. I think he does a wonderful job in looking at the philosophical and religious questions related to wine, from the Koranic injunction against alcohol to the true nature of temperance. These questions take us far from the vineyard at times, making excursions into terroir as different as Wagnerian music dramas and the philosophical nature of smells. His arguments as well as his beautiful prose are fresh, original, teasingly provocative, but also joyous.

This book is only about 224 pages but fun to read either in one sitting or dipping in and out at pleasurable intervals.

There are pages of useful advice on what wine to buy that are also glimpses into what to look for in the wine. I think his recommendations are good ones even if he leans too heavily into French wines. As someone who co-owns a vineyard I can say with reasonable confidence that I know my French wines but also wine from South Africa but confess my ignorance of wines from the new world such as California or Chilean wines. But I see that as an opportunity to discover rather than stay in my comfort zone. Here Scruton gently prods you along to do just that.

As an aside Scruton, who never shies away from his staunchly conservative Tory beliefs, perhaps forget to mention one juicy vignette in that Karl Marx’s political and philosophical ideas were probably inspired by wine. Indeed Karl Marx’s family were the happy owners of a vineyard in Trier, a small affluent Rhineland city, on the rolling hills of the Mosel River Valley. The family sold it due to hard times. Then as now these vineyards of the Mosel Valley remain mostly small-scale, are still known for their fruity white wines, and especially their lemony Rieslings and agrotourism. It seems the politics of wine (tariffs and import taxes) played a larger role in the history of leftist thought than their quaint appearance might suggest. In the early 1840s, the economic struggles of these very vineyards inspired Marx to criticise the draconian Prussian government - and in the process, some historians argue, begin developing the theory of historical materialism for which he is best known. In fact there is a delightful book I can recommend written by Jens Baumeister called, ‘How Wine Made Karl Marx a Communist’ (2018) if anyone is interested in reading more about that.

Of course it’s always hard to know how seriously one is supposed to take Scruton in some of his more extravagant comments in the book, like many things he says in his other books: ‘you could say that wine is probably as old as civilisation; I prefer to say that it is civilisation, and that the distinction between civilised and uncivilised countries is the distinction between the places where it is drunk and the places where it isn’t.’ His desire to outrage and court controversy rises to the surface, and can result in some of the funniest moments in the book. But as with everything he writes, some of Scruton’s claims must be taken with a pinch of salt or more appropriately, with a glass of claret.

Indeed I prefer to picture his words as if he was one’s old and familiar drinking companion sitting on weather beaten leather chairs and making provocative but teasingly good natured remarks out of a desire to amuse rather than to be boorish or loutish. Indeed this book is best enjoyed with a glass of wine on hand whilst sitting on a comfy old worn out leather chair curled next to log burning fire as the light dims outside.

I would whole heartedly agree with Roger Scruton that wine is a “drink that causes you to smile at the world and the world to smile at you.” Instead of imprisoning you inside a solitary introspection, it takes you out of yourself - and your ideas with you - to mingle with others and their ideas. Wine is therefore a voyage of discovery - and rediscovery - in many senses. And for this I can happily raise my own glass and say amen to that.

But what glass of wine would I raise when reading Scruton’s own book?

Well, one bottle won’t do. So temperance is out of the window then - sorry Roger. You will need a good French Sauternes or Barsac (preferably 2014) with the nostalgic autobiography, a finely bodied Bordeaux wine (I would go with a more complex wine from Saint Emilion) with the philosophy section of the book, and a champagne (of course) to drink with the philosophical jokes towards the end of the book.

Oh go on then, finish off with a tipple of Cognac before bed time, I am sure Scruton wouldn’t begrudge anyone that pleasure.

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deathsteel · 3 years

Text

30 day fanfic challenge

Prompt #14 - Bitterness

“Okay,” Charlie said, handing over another demitasse cup to her coworker. “Try that one and tell me what you taste.”

Dean took the delicate cup from his coworker, feeling like a monstrous giant holding the tiny cup. He stuck his pinky out as he took a slurping sip, just to be obnoxious. They’d been doing the whole ‘coffee tasting’ thing for like an hour already.

“Hmmmmm,” Dean mused, rolling the sip of coffee around his mouth as he pulled a considering face. “I taste….coffee.”

“Ugh!” Charlie exclaimed, bating at Dean’s arm. “You’re the worst. They don’t all taste the same!”

“They do!” Dean argued, slugging back the remainder of the coffee with a grimace. Yuck! “All coffee tastes the same and I will never believe any differently.”

“People like you are the reason why Starbucks is taking over,” Charlie groused, abandoning Dean as a hopeless cause as she moved to wipe down the shop’s expensive espresso machine.

It was a slow evening, as they all were. Honestly, that was why Dean preferred to work the closing shifts. He didn’t have to wake up early, didn’t have to deal with grumpy people, and didn’t have to worry about Grindin’s owner breathing down his neck as he worked. Not that Billie wasn’t great, she was just scary af and didn’t appreciate Dean’s jokes as much as the rest of the weirdos on the night crew did. She also didn’t understand the innuendo behind the shop’s name or was being deliberately obtuse, Dean honestly couldn’t figure out which one it was.

“When’s Garth getting here?” Dean asked as he moved around the long pastry display case next to the register to go and collect some empty mugs that a study group had just abandoned at their table when they left for the day.

Charlie shrugged noncommittally, as she cleaned. “I dunno, he texted and said he was running late; that Billie knew and he’d be here to at least lock the door.”

Dean nodded, humming along to the local music that Billie liked to feature quietly over the coffee shop’s speakers. They played the same stuff often enough that he knew all the words, even if it wasn’t something he would have voluntarily listened to on a normal day.

The bell over the door of the shop chimed as Dean was carrying a precarious stack of half-filled coffee mugs back to the sink in the back room of the shop.

“Oh hey!” he heard Charlie exclaim as he rid the cups of their contents, rinsed them, and stuck them in the soapy water in one of the sinks. He’d wash everything later.

When he came back out, he saw Charlie chatting amicably with a slender dark haired man who was tying one of the shop’s maroon aprons over skinny jeans and a black t-shirt. Dean noted wide shoulders and a pretty perky butt before Charlie realized that Dean was coming and pointed out his presence to her companion.

“Yea, it's me and Dean closing tonight, so you can just let us handle all the cleaning stuff and you can do the important things,” Charlie finished as Dean sidled up next to the duo.

“Right,” The other man said with a decisive nod before he stuck his hand out to Dean. “Castiel, I usually open. I don’t think we’ve ever crossed paths. Dean, right?”

Dean nodded, shaking the other man’s hand registering absently how soft Castiel’s hands were and how strong his grip was. “Yea, you’re the one who likes to put smiley faces on the bottoms of all the cups.”

Castiel grinned, his tanned skin flushing just a bit across his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose. “Only when customers are being extra grumpy.”

“You must deal with a lot of dicks then,” Charlie chimed in helpfully, causing the other man’s blush to deep as he let out a disbelieving chuckle.

“Yea, we don’t get a lot of cheerful people first thing in the morning,” he admitted, looking around the mostly empty cafe. “So, what’s left to do?”

“Oh, we’ve got it handled,” Dean said, waving a dismissive hand. “Charlie usually handles the lobby and pastry case and I tackle the dishes and the mopping. We usually just find some way to kill time until it's time to close.”

“Must be nice,” Castiel said with a half grin.

“Yea, we were doing a coffee tasting, but Dean’s got the palate of a toddler so I gave up,” Charlie offered, gesturing to the small pour over array that they had set up to taste the different coffee blends that the shop offered. “I’m studying to get my Q grader certification.”

“Cool,” Castiel said, moving over to pick up the ground coffee that Charlie had set aside for another tasting. “I have a study guide for the written portion if you want to borrow it. It's a few years old, but I doubt much has changed since I took the test.”

“You have your Q?” Charlie asked, sounding starstruck. Dean rolled his eyes, deciding he’d leave the coffee nerds to talk while he went and knocked out the dishes early.

~~~

He returned to the front of the store about half an hour later, wiping water off his forearms with a paper towel to find Charlie had moved on to sweeping and tidying the tables in the now empty cafe. It was about 45 minutes until close, but at this rate they’d be done hella early and Dean could go home and crash in front of The Bachelorette for a bit.

Dean wandered over to Castiel who was fiddling with Charlie’s pour over, doling out three of the store's small mugs worth of coffee before he rinsed the whole apparatus and set it on the drainboard next to the espresso machine.

“Hey,” Castiel said as Dean leaned up against the counter next to where the other man was working. “I thought you might want to try this new blend Billie is rolling out next week.”

Dean let out a noncommittal noise and shrugged. “Nah, all coffee tastes the same to me dude. I don’t have a ‘refined palate’.”

The last part was said with heavy sarcasm complete with air quotes, earning an amused snort from Castiel that made Dean’s stomach do a somersault.

“Maybe you’re just not drinking it the right way,” Castiel replied, crossing his arms over his chest and tapping his chin in thought for a moment before he made a face that Dean could only describe as an ‘Ah-ha face’.

“I’ve got an idea,” he said, handing Dean the mug of coffee that he had just poured. “Hold this, I’ll be right back.”

Dean confusedly took the offered cup, smiling down at the liquid inside when Castiel made an endearing dash to the back room; his sneakers squeaking on the floor as he went. It took about a minute before the other man was back, holding a small brown wrapped package in his hand. As Dean watched, Castiel unwrapped the parcel to reveal a bar of chocolate.

“I’ve been saving this for something special,” Castiel explained as he broke off a piece, holding it up to Dean’s mouth. “Hold this in your mouth and take a sip.”

‘Oof,’ Dean thought to himself as he obediently opened his mouth and let the other man slip the shard of confectionary past his lips; Castiel’s soft fingertips brushing his bottom lip as he withdrew his hand.

“Now take a sip,” Castiel urged as Dean stood there dumbfounded with a semi and a piece of chocolate sitting on his tongue.

Dean stifled his whimper in his coffee cup as he brought it to his mouth, taking a slurp of coffee in to join the chocolate in his mouth. Immediately he was confronted with the sweetness of the chocolate as it melted almost instantaneously from the heat of coffee, cutting the bitter edge to the dark roast as he let the flavors play across his tongue.

“You’re probably tasting how sweet the chocolate is right?” Castiel asked, earning a quick nod from Dean in reply. “Good, now what else?”

Dean’s eyebrows furrowed in confusion as he stared at the other man. He tasted coffee and chocolate, duh.

But as he watched the other man’s excited blue eye dance in enjoyment, Dean started to taste the earthiness of the coffee, the tang of...citrus, maybe? It teased at this taste buds, just at the edges of his awareness and Dean kinda understood why people talked about coffee like it was some divine ambrosia. Dean had always thought it just tasted like sour, dirty water. But maybe he could see the appeal.

“Citrus,” Dean offered cautiously, earning an encouraging nod from his fellow barista. “And...well it tastes kinda like a forest smells, y’know?”

“I do know!” Castiel exclaimed, breaking off a piece of chocolate and absently taking a sip of his coffee to go with it. “Maybe you should just be pairing your coffee with food to enjoy it.”

“Maybe,” Dean mused, staring at the other man with barely concealed adoration.

They lingered for a few more minutes, drinking the coffee and diminishing Castiel’s chocolate stash by half before Charlie loudly declared that it was ten minutes until close and she was done cleaning the lobby.

That seemed to launch Castiel into action and he excused himself to start counting down the register and gathering the day's receipts. Dean meanwhile gathered up the last of their dishes and rushed them through the dishwasher. He was filling the mop bucket when Castiel poked his head into the backroom and waved him off the task.

“Don’t worry about mopping,” the other man explained. “I’ll get here at bit early in the morning and take care of it. Just get your stuff together, we’ll leave as soon as it hits closing time.”

“Just pray no one else comes in,” Charlie said breezily as she swanned past Castiel towards the employee lockers along the back wall.

Dean shrugged, putting the mop away and washing his hands one last time before grabbing his own jacket out of his locker and heading to wait in the front of the store for closing time.

Luckily, no customers came in for coffee in the interceding 3 minutes until close and it wasn’t until the trio was locking up and walking towards the parking lot that Dean found the courage to speak.

“Sucks that you’re clopening, man” Dean offered as Charlie peeled off with a wave to head towards her lime green Volkswagen Beetle.

Castiel chuckled, shoving his hands in the pockets of his maroon hoodie as they walked toward Dean’s black Impala and the blue Hyundai parked next to it that Dean assumed belonged to the other man. “I’ve never heard it called that.”

“Call it what you want, it's still the hell shift,” Dean joked. “Hope we didn’t scare you off the night shift for good.”

“Nope,” Castiel replied, rocking up onto his toes as they stopped at their cars. “In fact, maybe next time I can just close and I can buy you a drink afterwards.”

“Oh,” Dean said, being caught out because he hadn’t expected the other man to beat him to the punch like that. “Well, as long as its not coffee I think I’d be really into that.”

“I can probably manage that,” the other barista said with a dopey smile.

Oh second thought, maybe Dean could learn to like coffee.

#30 day fanfic challenge #bitterness #destiel #fic writing #spn #fan fiction

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victorscrown · 3 years

Text

V I C T O R ‘ S C R O W N ⸻

type: excerpt

word count: 2236

warning(s): mentions of suicide

status: second draft, unedited

For as long as Finnick Odair can remember, the ocean has been his home. He learned to swim almost before he could walk; his mother used to joke that he should have been born with fins and gills instead of arms and legs. His earliest memories are drenched in saltwater and smell like brine and fish. They are sand-bottomed, adorned with seashells and kelp and coral, set to the melody of waves crashing against the shore and seagulls crying from the air. They are wrought from long hours spent aboard District 4’s trawlers, netting seafood bound for the hungry mouths of Capitol citizens. His parents’ house might be where he sleeps, but the ocean is where he belongs.

Despite this, the ever-present threat of the Hunger Games sweeps Finnick out of the water and deposits him in the austere world of Career education almost before he’s old enough to understand what he’s preparing for. The only son of eminent fleet captain Lochlan Odair and his shipwright wife, Finnick is selected for District 4’s prestigious training academy two years earlier than the normal recruiting age. Every minute Finnick is not at sea he is training, learning how to survive, how to fight, how to win.

Being a five-year-old in a class of children two years his senior should have left him at a distinct disadvantage, but Finnick is a natural, both at the physical and mental aspects of Career academia. After his first day at the academy, Finnick marches thorough the door of his home, head held high, and announces, “I’m going to win the Hunger Games one day.”

His parents don’t quite know what to think about this. As one of the few families of Panem with some material wealth to call their own, a sense of responsibility falls on the Odairs, a need to provide for and protect the less fortunate of their district. They donate frequently to the Games fund. They satiate the appetites of greedy Capitol officials with bribes and obsequience. But willingly sending their own child to the Games is a sacrifice above and beyond what they are willing to make. In District 4, it’s considered an honor to be chosen to compete in the Games, but it doesn’t make the possibility of their child dying at the hands of another any more palatable. So Finnick’s parents mask their worry behind sunny smiles and words of congratulation.

We are so proud of you! Their voices warble like the tide. You will make such an excellent angler. All of the fish will just hop right into your net!

Meanwhile, Finnick, young, soft, and new, is dazzled and awed by the bright posters hanging from the academy walls. Show pride in your district! the posters urge. Volunteer to compete and show Panem what District 4 is really made of!

In Finnick’s academy days, volunteerism, while not rampant like it was in Districts 1 and 2, was frequent enough to preserve the district amidst a sea of destitution. To the trained, money is a powerful motivator, and the fact that many victors pour their winnings back into the district makes the Games seem much more appealing. But the Games are only appealing when someone from District 4 wins.

Finnick is seven when he hears about Nereus. News of the victor’s death floods the streets as though carried by a riptide, and soon all of District 4 is talking about it. Poor old Nereus, academy personnel would mutter when they thought the students could not hear. Found his body on the beach. Wanted to see the sun set one more time, the poor fool.

Even then, Finnick is old enough to know of Nereus, victor of the Forty-second Hunger Games. While other victors were deeply involved in the functions and activities of the academy—drafting the school’s curricula, hosting seminars, even teaching classes for potential tributes—Nereus did not step foot once in the academy after his victory. He holed himself up in his luxurious house in the Victor’s Village and did not emerge unless coerced. Except on the night on which he died.

Officially, Nereus died of a heart attack—a tragic accident, the mayor of District 4 claims at his district-wide funeral. But there are rumors floating around District 4, eddying in the dorms of the academy and muddying the waters of the mayor’s claims like silt.

They say Nereus died of a heart attack, but he never goes outside. Why would he go to the beach unless he knew something? Unless he planned something?

One night, Finnick is brave enough to ask his father about it.

“Dad, the mayor says Nereus died of a heart attack. But everyone else is saying he planned it himself. Like he wanted to die.”

Finnick’s parents exchange looks. Finnick just waits. His father will answer eventually; he always does.

“I’m not sure I understand your question, Finnick,” Lochlan says at last.

“Why would Nereus want to die?” Finnick asks. “He won the Hunger Games, right? He lived in a big house and had all the food and money he could ever want.”

Lochlan takes a deep breath, as if about to dive underwater, and fixes Finnick with a serious look. “Nereus’ death was unfortunate, yes. But he was selfish, through and through.”

“Lochlan,” Finnick’s mother starts, reproving, but he carries on.

“You were right, Finnick. Nereus was a victor. And as such, he had a duty to his district. A duty to care for his people, to give them help as they needed it.”

“Like you do,” Finnick says.

Lochlan nods solemnly. “Nereus was so caught up in himself he forgot his obligation. But we will never be so. You, son, are an Odair. And when you grow older, when your mother and I are gone, you will carry the responsibility for our district as well.” His eyes, to which Finnick’s are so often compared, are as dark and fierce as a stormy sea. “As captain, I must direct my crew. I must tell them how to steer the ship, exactly where we are to go, or else we will get lost out on the open sea. Or even worse, crash and sink the bottom of the ocean. District 4 is one giant ship. There must be a strong, steady captain, or the ship will not make it safely back to the harbor. Do you understand?”

Finnick is seven and understands very little of what his father’s metaphor implies. But he nods his head obediently and tucks the conversation away in his heart, where he dwells upon it often in the quiet, solitary moments before dawn.

Later, Finnick realizes District 4 didn’t mourn Nereus’ death as much as they mourned the sudden lack of monetary resources his presence sanctioned. He might have been a recluse, but his winnings still aided the people. With one more victor dead, there was one less salary the district could use as a crutch.

Unfortunately, Nereus’ death seems to be the advent of a streak of bad luck for District 4. In the following months, when the seas are normally teeming with life and District 4 flourishes under its bounty, trawlers begin hauling in seafood black and putrid with disease. A parasite, they soon discover, and quicker than a flash flood it spreads from the sea to the air. Infected birds begin to litter District 4’s pristine shores alongside their infected prey. This won’t last, trawler captains assure their Capitol managers. Give it a season, and the parasite will die out and your quotas will be met.

Another season comes and goes. Fishing is poor and the district poorer.

In response, strict rationing is instituted by the Capitol. The inner sectors of the district, already barely keeping themselves afloat, start to get pulled under by the riptide of starvation. Dissent ripples outward, starting in the inner sectors, where the rationing hits hardest, to the outer fringes of the district, where the Odairs live. The Capitol, fearing outright rebellion, tightens its chokehold on District 4 with an unforgiving fist. Anyone suspected of instigating an uprising are punished severely, or just disappear altogether. A district-wide curfew is enacted, with harsh retribution allotted to any who break it. And the academy is shut down, because every child over the age of seven is forced onto a trawler alongside their older siblings and parents, shuttled inland to work in the processing plants, or consigned to long, back-breaking hours combing beaches for clams and any other edible source of food.

The fleet is out to sea for weeks at a time, venturing out to waters previously considered too dangerous to fish. Finnick is lucky enough to have grown up on his family’s trawler, but other children are not so lucky. Every week, it seems there is a new story about some untrained child being washed overboard by colossal waves, or strangled by the heavy nets, or withered away by dysentery caused by eating rotten seafood. These children are mourned the way children sent to the Games are mourned.

Finnick’s mother and other shipwrights are displaced from their jobs in the shipyards to assist in the process of moving delicate, time-sensitive cargo onto trains and hovercrafts bound for the Capitol. With so much of the seafood being rendered inedible, it is imperative that every iota of good food is transported to the Capitol as quickly as possible to minimize the amount of time trawlers spend in port and reduce the spoiling of perishable goods. Finnick and many other children do not see one or both parents for weeks.

The only time everyone has off is to partake in the 60th Hunger Games. The afternoon before Reaping Day, every vessel in District 4’s fleet returns to shore, but there is no relief in the days to come. For the next three weeks, District 4 witnesses firsthand the consequences of minimal to no Career training. This year’s volunteers—a pair of inner district adolescents desperate to fight their way out of poverty or die trying—have not been properly trained in over a year. They don’t stand a chance against their Career counterparts from One and Two. District 4 watches, deluged in shame and horror, as both of their tributes are killed off in the first week of the Games. The chance of securing relief from the Capitol in the form of food or other supplies dies with them.

Finnick doesn’t quite understand what the Games imply, why they occur or why children must be sent to die. But he recognizes his parents’ grief, the pronounced slump of his father’s shoulders, the sheen of tears in his mother’s red-rimmed eyes. He recognizes the bent heads and dull gazes of other adults, and even some children, who even younger than Finnick are impacted by the despotism of the Capitol.

The night of his ninth birthday, Finnick is rocked to sleep by the roll and pitch of his father’s ship, already redeployed after the Games. He misses his mother desperately, but he most likely won’t get to see her for another fortnight, when the trawler will deliver its bounty into her custody onshore. It can’t go on like this forever, he thinks, though it’s hard to think about much other than the hunger gnawing at his belly. At some point, things will go back to normal.

And gradually, things do. In the following months, the parasite infecting District 4’s waters dies out, and more food becomes available to citizens outside of the Capitol. Children are allowed to go back to school. The academy reopens, and vigorous training resumes. By now, though, District 4 is a good two years behind the other districts in terms of Games readiness. And it shows when Four loses yet another Games—to a girl from Three, of all places.

The humiliation wears at District 4’s normally indefatigable spirit. It’s made indubitably clear that the only way District 4 will begin bringing home victors is if they’re trained first. So District 4 unites the best it can, pouring every possible asset into scholarships and Games-related aid organizations. Every extra cent of the Odairs’ income flows directly into fund dedicated to providing for Four’s tributes in the arena. As for Finnick, there is nothing he can do but train. And train he does, with an unprecedented intensity and focus. His dedication garners the attention of academy faculty, who praise his skill and commitment. Even Capitol officials, stationed at the academy to monitor for suspicious activity, remark at the newfound enthusiasm with which he tackles his education.

Your boy shows such promise! they’d tell Finnick’s father. He’s going to be a volunteer for sure.

By the time Finnick’s thirteenth birthday arrives, he has been living at the academy full-time for three years. Once children achieve Games eligibility at age twelve, the most promising are assigned personal trainers, some of whom are former victors. Batten is a perfect match for Finnick’s relentless ambition. He shapes Finnick into just what he intends to be: A reason for District 4 to maintain its pride, a victor through and through.

#thg fanfic #the hunger games #finnick odair fanfic #hunger games fanfiction #thg #finnick odair #series: victor's crown #fic: victor's crown #ch: finnick odair #victor's crown: excerpt #[ let's play a game called how many tags can emma possibly add to a single post ]#[ you have no idea how long it took me to format this lol ]

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satonthelotuspier · 4 years

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🐰 Untamed Spring Fest 2020 🐰

Day 20 & Day 21- Fond & Charm - 1.5k

This is a joint Spring Fest/Wangxian Week (a little late) piece - the Wangxian Day 8 was a free day.

A-Yuan forms a friendship with a bunny-loving tall-gege at the petshop, and Wei Wuxian is enchanted.

Its fluff, just tooth rotting fluff. Have fluff.

Bunnies Build Friendships

It was a Friday evening, and after picking A-Yuan up from school that day they had called to the barbers as A-Yuan needed a trim.

The process was unpleasant for them both, A-Yuan, like most young children, detested having his hair cut, which made for a stressful half hour while Wei Wuxian and some of the other patrons and hairstylists tried to distract A-Yuan enough to allow the barber to work. Eventually, thankfully, the task was completed and A-Yuan looked out from under a freshly neatened fringe of hair.

They walked down the high street, and Wei Wuxian considered what they could do to reward A-Yuan for being mostly well-behaved during the haircutting process.

The obvious answer was ice-cream, of course, but Jiang Cheng had messaged him earlier telling Wei Wuxian he was home and would cook dinner that evening; and if they went home and A-Yuan didn’t eat it, Jiang Cheng would give him that look.

Despite his general grumpiness Wei Wuxian and A-Yuan were lucky Jiang Cheng had allowed Wei Wuxian to move in with him when, through tragedy, he had been left with the small boy to raise.

Pre-A-Yuan, Wei Wuxian was barely able to look after himself, but his brother had been immensely supportive, and with Jiang Cheng’s and Jiang Yanli’s help he was getting to grips with raising a child, and they were muddling through.

If it wasn’t for Jiang Cheng though, they would never eat a home cooked meal; Wei Wuxian wasn’t allowed near the kitchen, even the three sibling’s spice-resistant palates were tested when Wei Wuxian was let loose in charge of food.

So yes, that was definitely ice cream and sweets that were out of the question.

As he was considering the situation they walked past a pet supplies store. Inspiration struck him.

“A-Yuan, before we go home to dinner with shushu, do you want to go in and take a look at the animals?”

Five year old A-Yuan agreed readily.

They spent a little time looking at the fishes in the tanks along one wall, but A-Yuan was most enchanted by the small rodents.

He cooed over the mice and the gerbils and hamsters.

But he lost his heart at the large rabbit enclosure.

“Bunnies, baba” A-Yuan informed him with excitement in his voice.

He pressed his hands and face against the glass of the enclosure, steaming the glass up a little with his breath.

“Not quite so close, baby” Wei Wuxian said gently. He lowered to his haunches next to A-Yuan and they watched for a while.

“Look at the bunny hopping” A-Yuan pointed at a white rabbit who hopped over to one of the food bowls to begin nibbling on his dinner. “Can we have one, baba?”

“No, A-Yuan, we don’t have a garden for a hutch, and there isn’t enough room in the apartment”

“But the white one is really cute” he looked up at the very tall man who stood just to the side of them.

Wei Wuxian looked up too, and nearly fell backwards, right onto his behind. People shouldn’t be allowed to just be standing next to unsuspecting people when they looked that good, with their handsome faces carved out of jade, and their unusually pale amber eyes.

“The white one is especially good” he agreed with A-Yuan, then glanced at Wei Wuxian, he didn’t have the same soft look in his eyes as when he’d been looking at the rabbit or at A-Yuan though. “Your baba is right. You shouldn’t get a rabbit if you have no space for one. It would be unfair”

There was a slight pushing out of a lower lip in a pout, which the man didn’t seem to know how to deal with. He looked at Wei Wuxian again, nonplussed.

But A-Yuan wasn’t a child given to much sulking or bad temper, and he was soon watching the rabbit again, all smiles.

He threw another look at the man. “Tall-gege, can you see all the rabbits from up there?”

The man with the light coloured eyes agreed that yes, he could. He was entirely unprepared for when A-Yuan held his arms up to him though.

“Show me please?”

Another helpless glance at Wei Wuxian.

“A-Yuan, I’m very tall too, you know” Wei Wuxian was too surprised at being found wanting in the height department that he had to defend his own honour.

“You’re not very tall. Not like tall-gege” he said with the deadly logic of a child, they only knew what they saw, and said what they thought.

Something Wei Wuxian could appreciate in an abstract way, but not when his height’s honour was questioned.

The tall-gege seemed to make a decision, then bent a little to pick A-Yuan up, forming a ledge with his arm for the other to sit on.

“Thank you” A-Yuan patted the other on the cheek, then focussed on the rabbits he had a perfect bird’s eye view of now.

Damn, when his son had more magnetism than he did. A-Yuan could charm the birds out of the trees if he wanted.

Wei Wuxian didn’t quite know how to deal with the situation. He was aware it was a little rude of A-Yuan, but honestly, he was that kind of open, forward personality himself so he didn’t really feel he was justified in telling him off too much. Still.

“Is he heavy? A-Yuan you shouldn’t ask strangers to pick you up. And absolutely not at all unless you’re with me or your shushu, OK?” he asked A-Yuan.

A-Yuan nodded, “Yes, baba”

“Lan Wangji” the other said.

“Hmm?”

“My name is Lan Wangji” meaning they were no longer strangers. It was the kind of simple, sensible logic that appealed to A-Yuan, who nodded, and introduced himself in return.

They eventually had to leave the rabbits and their new friend behind, or risk the wrath of Jiang Cheng.

***

Over the next few months the Friday trip to the pet store became a staple, more often than not Lan Wangji was there, looking at the rabbits, and A-Yuan would always run over to make himself known with calls of “Wangji-gege”.

Wei Wuxian was eventually able to convince the other to extend their meetings to a trip to the coffee shop afterwards, and so it continued.

He knew Lan Wangji was fond of A-Yuan, A-Yuan had the talent of breaking through walls without evening realising he had done so, but Wei Wuxian thought...or was that hoped?...that Lan Wangji was starting to soften to him too over time. Even with his more strident personaility.

Lan Wangji was reserved, and stoic, but he had been so naturally kind to A-Yuan it was easy to see there was a softer heart under all that frost.

And Wei Wuxian had always enjoyed a challenge.

Despite his subtle hints that he was receptive to more, if Lan Wangji was, he wasn’t asked out on a date.

So their relationship continued on as it had; they met in the pet shop on Friday afternoons, followed by a trip to the coffee shop when neither had prior commitments.

It continued like that for months.

Eventually Wei Wuxian decided subtle wasn’t working, and he’d have to take matters into his own hands and ask the other, and take the risk he was misreading the situation. It was possible, the other wasn’t very demonstrative and it was difficult to know what he was thinking.

But Wei Wuxian had two choices, ask him out himself, or wait longer on the off chance that Lan Wangji might actually eventually ask him.

The first came with its own risks of course; but he thought it was a risk he should take.

Lan Wangji wasn't at the pet shop that first Friday after he’d made his decision, so he had to wait until the week after. He had intended to wait until A-Yuan was distracted by his flavoured milk or colouring book, but he seemed unusually focussed this afternoon.

“Wangji-gege” he said eventually, seriously.

“A-Yuan” the other acknowledged.

A-Yuan placed his folded hands on the table, looking for all the world like a businessman mid-negotiation; Wei Wuxian genuinely had to stifle a laugh.

“I would like it very much if you let my baba take you out on a date. Are you free next Saturday?”

“A-Yuan!” Wei Wuxian nearly fell off his chair in surprise. Where had this child picked up such an idea?!

“I’m free, A-Yuan” Lan Wangji agreed, his tone as serious as A-Yuan’s was. Honestly, he was so soft with A-Yuan it made Wei Wuxian feral, even though he was extremely embarrassed. He was meant to be the shameless one, not his son!

Asking people out on dates for his elders!

Lan Wangji had said yes, but was that because A-Yuan had asked on Wei Wuxian’s behalf and he didn’t feel like he could turn him down?

“You don’t have to-” Wei Wuxian tried to release him from his commitment.

“I want to” Lan Wangji assured simply.

#untamed spring fest #wangxian #lan wangji #wei wuxian #a-yuan #fluff #first meetings #mo dao zu shi #mo dao zu shi fanfic #the untamed #the untamed fanfic #modern au #mdzs #mdzs fanfic #grandmaster of demonic cultivation #Shay's stuff

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justicebled · 3 years

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BOOK SENTENCE STARTERS . ‘ANTHEM’ . ‘ i’m a game changer ‘ - zelos wilder.

it seemed some places had even surpassed his reach. he recalled words he’d said to a certain tomboy princess once; a dear friend among many he’d never anticipated. i like traveling, i think it suits me, he’d mused. a night before deciding something as absurd and grandiose as changing the world. of choosing a future reliant on one another and themselves; not fate or the whims of others.

for yuri lowell? he wouldn’t have it any other way. following someone’s script was boring anyway; and couldn’t really lead to fulfillment if you hadn’t chosen it with your own hands.

still, he hadn’t expected meltokio.

it was a new city-state on a continent allied with the empire; or something like that. certainly not related to the guild state of dahngrest, once again on a delivery errand. it was a bit far to be taking down a monster; but sadly enough someone clearly wanted something delivered instead. it would have made for a good challenge and fight if he had to travel long distance for some ghastly beast that had warranted a beat down. there went a fun prospect.

ah, well. another time. not to mention they couldn’t exactly pass on good gald if it benefited their guild’s prosperity though yuri didn’t care much for excess of it; much less managing it, though as designated leader... more like designated babysitter, he thought almost affectionally, it had fallen to him and those that were older in his little pack to manage it.

he’d done many a thing during their long journey nearing months prior; and being in charge of making sure certain kids didn’t get their sticky fingers on gels and the like was one of them. a job often shared with raven or judy. he’d long held the position of being in charge and he was curious to see in his long absence from a brief stay at the home front how the ‘boss’ was slowly digging his shoes into the indentions of it. karol still had a ways to go.

“ guess i’ll just have to make this job interesting. “ he drawled; taking steps into the open gate with a casual stride and a wily half-grin at his trusty partner. a seemingly canine companion with the pride of neither beast nor man. “eh, repede?” said canine barked through the pipe in his mouth; a decisive woof! as the vigilante wondered most curiously just what kind of city meltokio was.

it sure was gaudy; that was for sure. but if the vigilante knew anything about well, anything, long embedded into a hungry stomach and defiant child’s eyes, it was the prettier the packaging the darker the underbelly. sure, the place was teeming with colors, market stands and even mansions reaching auspiciously and obnoxiously high into the distance in what he could only assume, much to his cynical expectation: a noble’s quarter.

some things never really did change, did they? then again as a stone cold realist; colored with both justified and embedded prejudice for those in authority, yuri couldn’t quite say he wanted to check out the mentioned locale. he didn’t want to assume it was rotten, but nothing was ever entirely peachy either.

not my problem right now, he mused; glancing at the paper with his bodhi blastia gleaming colors in an otherwise neutral palate of his humble, loose moving apparel. problems popped up eventually; or they didn’t. right now what mattered was the job; and securing a place to rest with what gald he had on him. oh, and repede was gonna get hungry; himself included. probably wise to stop at a place he could afford food.

too busy mulling over the paper it was only the loud, rather irritating tenor resonating in his ears too close for his sharp hearing that made yuri realize he was coming onto a scene. a scene of women flocking like flies in frills so thick he couldn’t even see a body around some red-haired man with clothing perhaps even gaudier than meltokio itself. or maybe he was just a staple of what he was getting into. those clothes weren’t cheap, and the smug proclamation ringing still in his sensory had him arching a violet brow well into his hairline, however brief.

they were flocking to him. he seemed perfectly happy disrupting an otherwise bustling street with perceived buffoonery and his casual slouch insinuated he really didn’t give a damn; then again did an idiot really care about being an idiot? weird. as weird as the gem beneath the slope of his neck; glittering borderline onto his chest. weird sense of fashion. puffy pants and pink? yuri was no guru, but he didn’t really see the appeal. then again, he didn’t care much for the scene to begin with. he had things to do and they were in his way.

as he was about to pass by; he couldn’t help but mutter in an opposing, lower register to the gaudy man’s line of hearing; something thinly veiled in boredom and sarcasm.

“good to have dreams, i guess, even if delusional. ” the deadpan baritone echoed enough for at least a few of the women to look aghast at his subtle but stealthy comment as the man passed; but it was so softly muttered it was hard to accuse him, now wasn’t it? his lips twitched into a half smirk; borderline devilish. he had no problems saying it louder but alas, on the job. what a dumb thing to walk in on, anyway. someone should really make him move so people could get around him.

it was too ridiculous to even be amusing; and what exactly was he game-changing? being a second raven a decade younger? you’re doing great then, he thought sarcastically. he was more drained than anything else. that hadn’t been any small trek and while he adored camping and being on foot, even his feet were tired. he wanted food, an inn and a nap before the next phase of the request. as someone behind him began to question if they’d even heard yuri at all, he couldn’t help but widen his smirk.

maybe he was going to be right about meltokio after all. might as well milk the good parts of the adventure for what it was worth, then. repede whining beside him seemed to agree; as both man and partner walked easily and without a thought for their muttered comment onward to the main streets. they weren’t the type to regret anyway; and besides....

this was gonna be some trip. / @zelotae

#𝐕; 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐅𝐔𝐓𝐔𝐑𝐄 𝐖𝐄 𝐂𝐇𝐎𝐒𝐄: i walk a thousand nights to change the world.#zelotae #here we gooooo #rip z man #yes i set this up like he was talking to himself as yuri passed by i'm awful #do i regret? no...rip #𝐀𝐍𝐒𝐖𝐄𝐑𝐄𝐃 ✴ —— either veiling a good heart; a hard truth or jest; there is no in-between.#𝐈𝐂 ✴ —— he walks the unbeaten path; bowing his head to no one.#yuri: stop blocking the way moron ur embarrassing #also yuri: lmao game-changing what #also yuri: i'm so tired could u stop hogging the street #local noble women are aghast at a man wearing commoner clothes!!1

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nerdygaymormon · 4 years

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Would it be in your capacity to explain why non-Mormons think the church is a cult and then counter that accusation with how the church isn't a cult? I'm curious, but scared to look myself...

I think practically every religion could meet the definition of “cult.” The word has a very negative connotation and people often use it to attack groups with doctrines or practices that are different from what they think are correct.

Typically when we think of a ‘cult,’ it has some of the following features:

Charismatic leader who says they have direct access to the divine - There’s a lot of misunderstanding about this, but our modern leaders have said they get revelation the same way any of us may do so--a thought while pondering, a dream, a feeling that is confirming, and so on. But sometimes we talk about the prophet like he meets with Jesus every Tuesday in the temple and then tells us what Jesus wants us to do, that would be inaccurate and sound much more like a cult. Visitors to our services may think we worship the prophets and not Jesus since we often quote them.

Theology is heretical to the established religions around it - the LDS version of Christianity would be seen as very apostate by most Christian churches. How do you think most Jews viewed Christianity when it was beginning?

Not long-lasting - It takes about 100 years to show a religious group is established and not a flash-in-the-pan. By lasting for a long period of time, it shows the religions isn’t dependent on one or two leaders and its teachings aren’t self-destructive. Also, this means that earlier statements & practices that are "strange” get toned down or reinterpreted so they group is more palatable

Opposes critical thinking - Some of our members say things like “once the Brethren have spoken, the thinking is over.” That is some cult-like thinking. If something is said and it bothers your conscience or reasoning, that’s important! You have every right not to believe or practice those things. We don’t demand loyalty to the president of the Church, you’re free to believe what you want, even if it is different from the prophet.

Isolates members - I saw this more in Utah & Idaho than in other places, which is the attitude that my kids only play with other Mormons, we don’t have any non-members friends. That type of isolation keeps the person from hearing anything critical and can dramatically alter their view of reality

Disrupts families - This is related to isolating members. This is often seen as a method to brainwash someone, to cut them off from family members or long-time friends who might have influence on them. Sadly, this type of attitude is seen by some members who limit/cut off family members who leave the church, kick out a teen who comes out as queer, etc.

Sexual impropriety - There’s often things like a leader who has inappropriate relations with members of the congregation, or grooms youth. It’s something people point to about bishops who ask sexually-explicit questions to teens. Fortunately steps have been taken to reign in some bad practices. For one thing, the person being interviewed can have another adult of their choice in the room when meeting with a leader (and I encourage everyone to take advantage of this). Another is that our leaders have been instructed to stick to the list of temple recommend questions and not go beyond them. For example, “Do you keep the law of chastity” is appropriate. “Do you masturbate, do you think about sex, did you engage in petting” are inappropriate.

Doomsday - cults often teach that the end of times is imminent, use this fear (or hope) to get their members to do extreme things in preparation. While we talk about the 2nd coming, we don’t really do much of this. I suppose some people look at food storage this way, but we’re not a church that focuses on this type of rhetoric and behavior.

Highly manipulative - There are groups that attack people who leave or who oppose the group or the leader. This could be physically, but also psychologically. While the LDS Church will excommunicate people for certain things, it’s not an attack, we don’t make public statements about people and try to discredit them.

Like I said, most religions have some of these aspects, but it’s a matter of degree. I think most young religious movements can easly be classified as a cult. This includes our church in the time of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. But time and experience has tempered some of those aspects, and in order to appeal to a larger group of people, our church lost some of the more cultish aspects it used to display. And that’s typical of any religious movement that has lasting power, it finds a way to temper those cultish tendencies.

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mel-at-dusk · 4 years

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HOW THE MARASCHINO CHERRY BECAME A COMFORTINGLY TRASHY AMERICAN ICON

Just when did the syrupy, lipstick-red lynchpin of ice cream sundaes, 1970s fruit salads and throwback cocktails conquer the world (and your grandparents’ home bar)?

The cocktail cherry may be small, but it looms like a fiery red planet over the modern history of eating and drinking. Look, there it is, bobbing around in the rust-brown murk of a Manhattan; and, hey, there it is again nestled in the snowy peak of an ice cream sundae, lurking in the syrup-soaked folds of an upended can of fruit salad, or in your parent’s drinking cabinet, languishing in a sticky jar first opened at the dawn of the Clinton administration.

For more than 100 years it’s been the Zelig of the culinary world, beaming out from multiple places it probably shouldn’t be, inviting you to spear one with a cocktail stick, bite down and let your mouth flood with the unmistakable taste of… well, what exactly?

Not actual, fresh cherries, that’s for certain. No, the taste of a cocktail, glacé or ersatz maraschino cherry has nothing to do with the luscious, grape-like subtlety of real stone-fruit. Its impact on the palate — almonds and preservatives and a great, hallucinatory wash of artificial sweetness — is the flavor profile of a cherry as described by a drunken child. Something that, even way back in 1911, was railed against in a New York Times editorial as “a tasteless, indigestible thing, originally, to be sure, a fruit of the cherry tree, but toughened and reduced to the semblance of a formless, gummy lump by long imprisonment in a bottle filled with so-called maraschino.”

And yet, even though this resistance to the gloopy, synthesized commercialism those little red globules represent is at least a century old, the cocktail cherry abides as a cultural artifact. Not just in the post-Mad Men context of master mixologists hoarding artisanal Luxardo cherries or producing their own housemade varieties, but in studiedly kitsch, revivalist dessert parlors like New York’s Morgenstern’s Finest Ice Cream; and even, scattered throughout Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time… in Hollywood, garnishing the industrial-strength whiskey sours of one Rick “Fucking” Dalton.

“When you see a bright red one now, it’s like a bartender with a waxed moustache and sleeve garters,” notes Jared Brown, drinks historian and master distiller with venerated British gin brand Sipsmith. “It’s no longer just itself. It’s nostalgia and irony and humor.”

So how does something so ridiculous and occasionally reviled come to have such durable appeal? How the hell are they even made? And what, exactly, do bitter food standardization wars, embalming fluids and carcinogenic food dyes have to do with it?

Well, pour yourself a stiff Mai Tai, crown it with what may be your final ever cocktail cherry, and let’s chart the turbulent life, near-death and eventual resurrection of a near-indestructible American icon.

As with most convenience foods, the cocktail cherry story starts out innocently enough. Cherries stretch back to the prehistory of Europe and West Asia, and pretty much since that time, they’ve been notorious as the frail divas of the produce aisle — difficult to transport, susceptible to bruising and known to liquefy without refrigeration. And so, innovative orchard owners in the early 1800s — most notably the Croatian-born, Italian-based Luxardo family — started preserving at-their-peak cherries, both as an alcoholic liqueur and steeped in a boozy brine made up of mulched cherries, pits and sugar.

This was the Big Bang that gave us the maraschino, named for the sour, Marasca cherry variety that Luxardo made their own. It wasn’t long until these pickled fruits were infiltrating the U.S. as part of the wider mania for cocktails in the mid-to-late 19th century. (The original 1888 recipe for the martini, as Brown notes, called for a “cherry rather than an olive.”) But soon, that original, burgundy-hued Luxardo maraschino was joined by a whole Rothko color wheel of lurid U.S.-made knock-offs, soaked in cheaper preserving syrups.

One reason for this was pure cosmetics. “The first taste is with the eye, and in the days before social media, the maraschino cherry offered a huge visual bounce,” notes Brown. “Think of it resting in the brown tone of a Manhattan — it’s like a bright red beacon in the drink. [And so,] there was a need to get it as brightly colored as possible.”

Yet it’s also notable that the maraschino cherry’s turn-of-the-century ascendancy also coincided with the wider vogue for lab-made dyes, flavorings and additives that flourished in the pre-FDA era. (Relevant: This was also a time when, at the behest of nervous dairy farmers, margarine had to literally be dyed pink in some states to broadcast the fact it wasn’t butter.) “For many years, I’ve asked audiences at tasting events what maraschino cherries, grenadine and sloe gin have in common,” says Brown. “And the answer, of course, is nothing. Nothing! And yet, go back to my childhood and they were all the same color and flavor because they came from the same lab.”

Throw in the arrival of Prohibition in 1920, and the fact it meant fruit could no longer be preserved in alcohol, and other brining methods needed to be found. It was a team of Oregon-based scientists who, after more than five years of experimentation, realized that calcium salts could preserve the Northwest’s seasonal glut of fresh cherries, and also help them retain their firmness. What’s more, in the 1930s, this same team realized that if you bleached the cherries and then dyed them red (or green, or even, occasionally, electric blue) the vivid pop of color would be even more pronounced. At this point, the American “maraschino” — leached of its natural color, embalmed in synthetic preservative and flavored with almond-derived benzaldehyde — had mutated into something only tenuously related to its European forbearer.

The original maraschino farmers in Italy were — if you can believe this — not crazy about American producers using their name to hawk cloying, cherry-shaped candies the color of antifreeze. But by 1940, they had lost a long-stewing food standardization battle, when the FDA decreed that the name “maraschino” had now evolved beyond its original meaning and, to most Americans, meant the artificially flavored neon red scourge of the Luxardo family.

And so, in the wake of World War II, the cocktail cherry’s cultural dominance truly began; slotting into an additive-laced mid-century food landscape, they gleamed from Betty Crocker cake recipes, adorned every other drink at a newly established 1950s Tiki bar chain called Trader Vic’s, and even, come 1978, gave their name to a hardcore adult film called Maraschino Cherry. “I remember adoring them,” says Brown, recalling his 1970s childhood in upstate New York. “There was nothing better, when we were out at a restaurant, than getting a cherry on a little plastic cocktail sword.”

If anything they were even more adored in the U.K., where a collective, post-rationing proclivity for all things sweet only added to their appeal. Eccentric TV chef Fanny Cradock would place them on the top of troublingly phallic “banana candle” party concoctions, and in Only Fools and Horses — a beloved, long-running BBC One sitcom about a family of luckless grifters living in South London — it became synonymous with main character Del Boy and his fondness for gaudy drinks that represented a tacky sort of sophistication. Even when I was growing up in 1990s London, my parents — first-generation Nigerians who rarely drank — would always have a glowing container of what we knew as glacé cherries beside a long-opened bottle of brandy.

“You can’t underestimate the power of a good garnish,” laughs Alice Lascelles, drinks writer and author of Ten Cocktails: The Art of Convivial Drinking. “That Day-Glo cherry is something I associate very strongly with childhood and the idea of a grown-up drink, a celebratory drink.” This mixture of childishness — of innocence — and a more adult glamor seems to be at the heart of the cocktail cherry’s appeal throughout this period toward the end of the last century; they’re fruit with all the subtlety and unpredictability chemically extracted, an unapologetic hit of trashiness that appeals to both Chuck E. Cheese birthday party attendees and the kind of chain-smoking bar flies we all sat two stools from long before social-distancing measures required it.

But, of course, the cocktail cherry party came to an abrupt halt later in the 1980s. Partly, this may have been lingering scares over the occasional use of Red Dye Number 4 — a chemical colorant with some links to cancer in animal trials — in some preserved cherries, permitted because they were deemed to be “decorative” rather than a foodstuff. Also: There were unfounded rumors about formaldehyde being used as a preservative which, perhaps fittingly, just wouldn’t die.

Mostly, though, their waning was linked to the demise of the movement that first popularized them in the U.S. “The maraschino cherry collapsed precipitously along with the collapse of cocktails,” says Brown. “Suddenly, you weren’t finding anyone over the age of 10 lunging toward maraschino cherries, and what happened was people discovered wine, which eventually went into craft beer.”

At that point, in terms of the popular consciousness, cocktail cherries were mostly glimpsed at the fringes of culture, or within insalubrious bars with “C” hygiene ratings tacked to their windows. Then, inevitably, as the cocktail revival of the mid-2000s began in coastal cities, sailor-tattooed mixologists started looking into what preceded the neon cocktail cherries of their youth, and eventually rediscovered Luxardo’s original, burgundy-colored and naturally sweetened maraschinos.

“I remember I’d race [Milk & Honey founder and bartender] Sasha Petrosky and Audrey Saunders [of the Pegu Club] to a place called Dean & Deluca because it was the only place you could buy Luxardo maraschino cherries in New York,” recalls Brown about the frenzy during the craft cocktail boom. “It didn’t matter which one of us got there first; we would end up [dividing] them out until the next shipment.” Now, Brown reports, Luxardo is sending “palette-loads a week over” for import and he himself preserves around 200 jars of maraschino-style cherries a year to sell from his home in the English countryside. In 2017, Luxardo planted 2,000 new Marasca cherry trees in Northern Italy — taking their total to 30,000 — just to keep pace with demand.

The pendulum, after all those years of traffic light-red candied cherries, has swung back to something purer again. Yet, interestingly, the unnatural cocktail varieties haven’t disappeared. They’ve had their own rebirth, whether crowning old school cocktails at acclaimed, 1960s-inspired Detroit bar Hammer and Nail, or clogging social media feeds as part of author Anna Pallai’s Twitter account-turned-campy-coffee-table-hit 70s Dinner Party. “There’s a definite trend for kitsch that’s brought them back,” says Lascelles. “Instagram has helped as well, because they really pop in a picture.”

It makes sense that the current, extremely online moment — where almost everything can be both completely sincere and larded in multiple confusing layers of irony — would be the time when both these diametrically opposed approaches to cherry preservation would find room to flourish. They are, as Brown notes, “jubilant and ebullient at a time when humor and fun is something we are all desperate for.” It seems as plain as the unearthly red glow, beaming from the bottom of a filled coupe glass in the corner. Like that opened jar in your parents’ home bar, the cocktail cherry isn’t going anywhere.

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astrology-india · 4 years

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How To Attract A Taurus Man And Make Him Fall For You

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How To Attract A Taurus Man And Make Him Fall For You

Have you met a handsome man who was born under the astrology zodiac sign of the Bull, and who sends tingles down your spine every time you think of him?

Maybe you have been on a couple of dates with your Taurus crush, but the dates never mature into a serious relationship?

Possibly you are looking for ways to capture the heart of a Taurus man and keep it?

Learning how to attract a Taurus man and make him desire you is not as hard as you may think. To be able to ignite attraction in your Taurus crush, it is important that you familiarize yourself with his key traits, and what he is looking for in a romantic liaison.

The Taurus male has the zodiac sign of the Bull which indicates a masculine strong-minded character, that can be stubborn and reserved.

Alternatively, the ruling planet of Taurus is Venus, the planet of love. This gives him the trait of being a trustworthy and devoted partner to someone who takes their time to understand him.

A Taurus man is ruled by his senses rather than logic and is initially drawn to a woman by her looks and her aroma. Dressing well will excite his visionary sense and leaving traces of your distinctive perfume will arouse an animal instinct that will always keep you in his mind.

Additionally, a Taurus man tends to gravitate towards beauty, loyalty, and a woman who is confident. Remember the saying, ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, beauty comes in many forms so be confident moving forward.

This article will give you insights on what you need to do to appeal to the man born under Taurus the bull. Please keep reading.

8 Tips For How To Attract a Taurus Man

Be Confident

When trying to win the heart of a Taurus man, femininity is just the tip of the iceberg. Besides looks, your level of confidence really matters ladies. Taurus men find confident women to be quite sexy.

A confident woman is one who is not afraid to articúlate her needs and desires. She is assertive and is not afraid to share her point of view with the opinionated Taurus guy.

However, care must be taken to not become overbearing or dictatorial, because your Taurus crush could pull away if he feels too pressured.

You should be able to acknowledge your strengths and weaknesses as well as work on making yourself better. Above all, be comfortable in your own skin.

Sow The Seeds Of Desire In His Mind

Some Taurus men can sometimes take forever in showing their affections which can create uncertainty in a woman’s mind.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was something that could draw him out of his shell without him thinking you were too pushy???

Well, something that has worked for lots of women wanting a relationship with a Taurus man is Text Chemistry. This is a process that has been developed by a dating expert that uses carefully crafted messages that make a man desire the woman who sent them

Sounds way out I know, but when you think about it, everyone has a cell phone and it is now an accepted part of our lives. If you could send messages directly to your crush’s subconscious brain you could create a desire for you without him even realizing.

Every relationship situation is different so you need to make up your own mind if this simple technique will show you the easiest way to attract a Taurus man.

Listen to a video that tells you how to create the desire in a man’s mind. This has been successfully used to make a man obsess over a woman or even powerful enough to get him back after a breakup. Click this link to discover for yourself Text Chemistry here.

Show Your Femininity

Men are visual creatures. What’s more, in his book, Get the Guy, Matthew Hussey has emphasized that the principal thing that makes men gravítate towards women is femininity.

If you want to appeal to the alpha Taurus man, your femininity is highly important. Taurus men appreciate beauty. They crave to be with a woman who not only smells good, but also one who is well-groomed, and one who makes the most of her best features.

Therefore, be sure to hit the gym, wear a signature perfume, flattering hairstyle, statement jewelry, and a dress that flaunts your favored features. Your outfit should highlight your best features, but it shouldn’t reveal too much. To complete the look, be sure to wear a smile.

Be Authentic

Relationships thrive on authenticity and connection. With that in mind, if you want to become irresistibly attractive to your Taurus crush, truthfulness and loyalty are crucial qualities.

A Taurus man is very loyal, and he wants to spend his life with a woman who is loyal. Additionally, he tends to gravítate towards a woman who is not afraid of staying true to herself.

He wants a woman who does not wear a facade when around him.

With that in mind, do not be afraid to express yourself truthfully. Be willing and ready to let your Taurus boyfriend know who you are, including your faults. Disloyalty and untruthfulness will certainly turn him off.

Exercise Patience

Patience is a virtue when dealing with a Taurus guy more so because one of the positive traits of Taurus men is patience. What’s more, Taurus men can have a tendency to be very stubborn, cold, and aloof, and sometimes you will need to show patience to cope with it.

Therefore, if you want to win the attraction of Taurus man and keep it, learn to be patient. Taurus men love to take things slow, and they don’t like to be pushed or chased.

When you communicate your intentions and interest in him, it is important that you allow him to move things at his own pace. Being demanding and nagging will definitely make him lose interest in you.

Understanding how a Taurus man acts within a romantic situation is vital if you want it to become a long-term commitment. Truly understanding a Taurus man’s particular traits and characteristics will give you the key to his heart.

Someone who has studied the characteristics of a Taurus man is relationship expert Anna Kovach. Anna has written a book detailing everything a woman needs to know about her Taurus crush, from dating through to the bedroom.

If you want to know the key ingredients that will make a Taurus man surrender to your charms, and also, be happy to spend the rest of his life with you Taurus Man Secrets will give you the answer.

Cook Him Good Food

I’m sure you’re familiar with the adage, “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.” If yes, then you know how to win the love of your Taurus man.

Taurus men are said to have a refined palate, and a delicious meal can be a great turn-on for the bull. Therefore, you can invite him over and cook him his favorite meal.

Alternatively, you can take him for dinner to a restaurant that specializes in hot spicey dishes, which usually happens to be the bull’s perfect cuisine.

Nothing raises a Taurus man’s ardor more than a full stomach, accompanied by his favorite wine, secluded lighting, and background music.

Sense of humor

Laughter helps the brain to release endorphins, which are feel-good hormones.

What’s more, when a Taurus man is completely relaxed in your company he is renowned for his great sense of humor.

Laughter will not only boost your bull’s mood but also enhance your connection and increase his attraction towards you.

So, be sure to provide some funny stories that may have happened to you recently.

However, it is important that you exercise caution when making jokes because Taurus males can be extremely sensitive. Just stick to comical incidents that are in the news or situations that have happened to friends.

A great way of breaking the ice with a Taurus man is by sending him comical material via text. Be very careful not to overdo it and send messages for the sake of it.

If you want to know how to make the best impression and get the best reaction you can find out by clicking this link here.

Shower Him With Compliments

Have you ever been complimented? If yes, how did it feel? It must have felt good, right. Well, men love receiving compliments. With that in mind, you can make yourself irresistible by making him feel good about himself.

In other words, it is important that you give your Taurus crush genuine compliments. For instance, you can take notice of his determination, sense of style, sense of humor, and even his generosity.

The secret is to compliment him on something you find attractive, and something that will spark his interest.

I have included the YouTube video below because it has been recorded by a woman who gives you some more tips on how to attract a Taurus man. I hope it helps you win his heart.

youtube

Final Thoughts

Do you feel like you are now ready to conquer your Taurean’s world? Do you think you are now well equipped to create more attraction with the Taurus man you have eyes for?

Well, being the attractive woman a Taurus male will chase and commit to comes down to showing him your best qualities. In other words, to be an irresistible woman, you need to be grounded in your femininity with regard to how you dress, smell, talk and even walk.

Additionally, it is important that you let the Taurus male do the chasing, which comes down to exercising patience.

Remember a Taurus guy does not want to be rushed or pushed to do anything. Allow him to move things at his own pace.

However, if he needs encouragement, the perfect way to do it is via text message. Subtle words that he reads in your messages will make him crazy to be with you. Discover these powerful magic sentences here.

If the bull shows interest in you, be sure to respond with confidence and authenticity. Do not pretend to be someone you are not. If you want him to fall hard for you, let him see the real you who is comfortable in her own skin, and who accepts her flaws.

Last, but definitely not least, find out all about his traits and characteristics so that you know exactly how to handle him when he falls for you. Check out Taurus Man Secrets here which will give you everything you need to know to complete your perfect relationship.

Once you believe in yourself, and follow the tips in this article you will know exactly how to attract a Taurus man.

Looking For More Help With A Taurus Man?

I hope this article has been of help. If you would like to read more informative posts about a Taurus man, you can find them by clicking this link to our homepage.

#attract #Attraction #make him want you #Taurus man

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