#and you see a wifi network by that name… it might be me! you never know! or… it could be the real deal. the real spinda's café is somewhere

[front-facing-pokemon]

#spinda #AAAHHHH YES!!! our belovèd spinda. from their café!!! probably one of my favorite minor characters from pmd sky #whom i don't even think was in the original explorers games. i think spinda's café was exclusive to sky. if i'm remembering correct #ly. or maybe that was shaymin village. i know shaymin village was for sure but maybe it was just that and not both of them. either way #have a delicious drink and allow the flower of conversation to bloom! i could quote spinda all day. he had “hopes and dreams” before toby #ever did. THAT'S ALSO like i had no idea what spinda's pronouns were. i kept trying to figure it out because i talked about him quite a lot‚ #but no one in game ever talked about him. to mention his pronouns? turns out. there's ONE line of dialogue where the post office fucker in #shaymin village mentions him and calls him a he. i think that's the only time spinda is referred to in the third person with a pronoun #i believe it's when they're talking about like. how you can send gifts or whatever and pick up the characters' responses at spinda's café #which is still a really fucking good feature. of any video game. SEE WHAT I MEAN spinda and their café is just an incredibly good Thing #it's to the point where my home wifi network is named “Spinda's Café Wi-Fi” because i love it so much. so if you're ever runnin around #and you see a wifi network by that name… it might be me! you never know! or… it could be the real deal. the real spinda's café is somewhere #nearby…! ugh. i wish. i would go there immediately #not even to mention all the other shit about this pokémon that's really good. like that they never walk in straight lines or whatever #their little dance. it's just. huUGHKLJKAHJVDHJHDAJSVGD i love spinda. a nice pick-me-up after the underwhelmingness that was grumpig #shake it this way… shake it that way… and stir it all around… and it's done!

[bluef00t]

Finally collecting these in a post—Atomic Robo robotswap ideas. This was more of a character design challenge than a real AU, but the concept kind of got away from me.

Rambling design notes + a couple panel redraws + some ideas I had for Helsingard and ALAN 1.0 under the cut:

This idea spiraled out of an old sketch by Wegner of real-boy Robo as a genetics experiment. I'm interpreting that as basically Wolverine minus the animal motifs (and generally much more well-adjusted).

I tried to mimic more elements of his bot design; for example the hair silhouette and the thick blue-tinted glasses, swapped for goggles as his lifestyle got more active. I guess sensitive eyes are a side effect of his mutations. (The classic superhero forehead curl on babyrobo has no design justification, I just couldn't resist.) His appearance would make the public of the '20s a little uncomfortable with seeing him as Tesla's son. Which feels very thematically appropriate.

I'm still calling him "Robo" because it feels weird not to, though it would be a nickname. Appropriate for a guy who never sleeps; plausibly derived from Robert/Ratko. (The American name would be how he's introduced to the public; the Serbian one used casually by Tesla.*) Honestly, it seems in-character for him to put down Robo as his actual legal name when he finally got that chance.

*Things I found out after picking these names for their superficial resemblance to "Robo": Robert means "famous, shining" and Ratomir means "defender of peace"; literally "war for peace". Definitely an affectionately ironic moniker for a son so determined to be an action hero. Though dear monolingual Robo probably wouldn't catch on until decades after Tesla's death... Well, now I've gone and made myself sad.

The action scientists are mostly an excuse to still draw robots. Let's say they're Robo's big midlife crisis project after realizing he was going to outlive his entire first team and not think about it too hard.

Vik (inspired by Robby the Robot) is the oldest of the models. He's optimized for processing power, which is how you get a robot that will try to suggest purely hypothetical (but mathematically sound!) solutions to urgent real-world problems. And enjoys TTRPGs of Turing-complete levels of complexity.

Lang (inspired by Robo) came shortly after, more optimized for the "action" part of action science. Being made of metal does wonders for your recoil management. (I know she hasn't had the hair buns in 10+ years, but that's what I was trying to do with the "antennae".)

Foley (inspired by Alan) is the newest model, optimized for human-robot interaction. Getting wifi installed in her head early on had the unexpected side effect of making her really good at understanding networks of all kinds.

BRN-3 wasn't built to be sentient. He's just a lab geological survey bot that began showing signs of sapience one day and attributes his own "enlightenment" to the "crystals" he'd been studying. This is obviously bullshit but nobody can give a better explanation, so...

Jenkins is literally just the Terminator, except his evil future is vampires instead of AI. He was sent back to kill Robo, which clearly didn't work, so they talked it out and now he just hangs around Tesladyne on high alert for anything that might kick off the apocalypse.

(I have no idea where Ada, Ben, and Koa fit in here, but I might come back to them later. Using their Agents of CHANGE power suits as android designs felt like cheating.)

Not included in these drawings are Helsingard and ALAN, but I'm considering switching around parts of their premises, too.

Helsingard was a Nazi supercomputer meant to calculate the perfect world-conquering strategy. Instead, it realized that Germany's loss was imminent and hid copies of itself around the planet. Every once in a while, someone accidentally boots up a copy and it tries to take over. In the modern age it's a total dice roll as to whether this will be horrifying (what major infrastructure isn't computerized these days?) or just kind of pathetic (it's too old to understand the internet and can easily get itself trapped in an office printer spitting toner and stacks of paper that read BEHOLD HELSINGARD).

ALAN (potential rename pending; the Turing connection is rather lost in the version I'm going with for now) is the world's second successful "unkillable" genetic experiment, a govt project during the Cold War to ensure that the last man alive in a nuclear winter scenario would be British. But it turns out telling a guy he's the next stage in human evolution and sealing him in a bunker for decades to await a chance to inherit the earth which doesn't come isn't great for his sense of compassion or morality. Eventually, ALAN decides to hurry things along before we inferior humans end the world in a less convenient way, and Robo has to... well, you know this part.

It turns out there was a secret phase 2 to this plan, which would have been to populate the solar system with perfect immortal mind-networked clones of himself. The single under-baked clone that it does manage to spit out before being shut down is our Alan :] He needs someone to look after him while his crazy healing powers fill in the missing chunks of his body and brain, and he didn't get a full memory upload from ALAN, so it's free son boy!

No changes were made to Dr. Dinosaur. He's already perfect.

#atomic robo #robotswap #bluef00t art #the part under the cut is pretty long I've been turning this over in my head for a while #there's definitely bits of continuity that don't quite work (even Wolverine would have trouble with the head-in-a-box-for-130-years thing) #but this isn't really about rewriting something coherent. this is about how fun it is to do panel redraws as warm-ups #000

[idkimnotreal]

something that i can’t get used to no matter what is pronouncing foreign words with a brazilian accent, here in brazil.

do you know how brazilians say “home office”? that’s “ho’-mee o*-fee-cee”. i will NEVER be able to bring myself to say that instead of the normal british/american pronunciation (which people might not understand). it just triggers the ocd part of autism for me. the same way that seeing something spelled wrong does. i just can’t live with it.

(*o as in office)

and that’s for words in all languages. my stepfather’s late wife had a german surname, and the wifi here at home is named after her family name. when my mom asked what was the name of the network i was seeing on my phone when i first arrived here, i pronounced it with a german accent, to the best i could (from observing english speaking german youtubers or watching german shows ahem dark).

i just can’t do something wrong when i know the right way to do it, and it bothers me when other people insist on doing it wrong when it’s so easy to learn. i want to fix it.

#that's windberg #i pronounced it as #veen-d-bug with a prolonged u #my mom did get it #i guess because even with a brazilian pronunciation windberg sounds foreign anyway #and that's ooeen-djee-ber-gee with a hard/spanish r and the e in american cat and the g in go #actually the r depends regionally #but here it's hard #ironically though older people in my region pronounce w as v naturally #i guess it could be german influence #but they don't need to have german ancestry to do that #it's just weird #younger people know it's an u though #which for germans it's not #so again confusion

[roed72mejer]

What You Ought To Know About Htc Desire S?

There many awesome free applications in the Android Industry. How do you make a on the applications that might be right you? Each one looks although you may could be tons of fun! Of course, elements than games available to use in your Android cell phones. There are also tools and helpful solutions. windows server 2016 activation crack can spend countless hours sifting through all advisors. The trick to deciding which free Android applications you want is to know from what others are. We took a consider the applications offered the Android Market. Here are the free apps we love to best. 365 Puzzle Club - A new number puzzle every day of the every 12 months! 365 Puzzle Club has 3 modes of play: Calendar mode offers a meaningful puzzle daily, Seasonal mode offers a gradual growth of different puzzle types, or practice on quickplay feature. Play games such as Sukodu, Tempenki, and Kakuro. Android secondly.1 has the excellent image processing and file editing registration. In windows server 2016 crack key following, let's taken up see the way you can use it the study, work and existence. The built-in iReader connects the multi reading method without the pain . online add up. Meanwhile, it supports CHM, UMD, TXT and HTML e-book formats. The application provides many retrieval modes and supports account plate. The user can find the favourite book anytime and any where. Do you wish to keep your phone looking new and fresh usually? Get Backgrounds, on the list of most popular free Android apps features more than 10,000 wallpapers for gratis. With this app, your phone will never look drab again. A regarding phone manufacturers have since released Android phones possess made a killing looking out. The appeal of the Android OS lies within the fact that it is a fuss free and not a worry to operate. The interface one other very user-friendly. All applications are accessible right by the dashboard as well as the home page features a web search bar for emergencies you will want instant associated with information. The browser may also launched easily right from the home website. Other phone features are also made easier. The SMS feature, for example, is conveniently organized into threads, plan easily determine what you are looking for when you open your inbox. This an additional very specific free Android weather software. Snowstorm gives you forecasts regarding snowstorms and aside from. If you're like me and reside in snow country, this has to be an app I indicates for when you start out contributing to during the snow time of the year. The T-Mobile MyTouch ought to with 4gb of microSD memory. These cards are not as expensive and are usually what will almost certainly be in the old days install more memory into the phone. windows server 2016 free of upgrading the phone is certainly a great asset nevertheless compared into the iPhone which comes with 32mb of memory this in the area that the MyTouch doesn't compare. 7)Motorola Quench synchronizes your phonebook contacts, media content, messaging and email trail with your social networking sources in an home present.It has entertainment feature such as media players that connects online with YouTube, TuneWiki, SoundHound and GoTv. There's also FM stereo streaming reinforcement.It has a SWYPE data input option feature. This can be 3G phone on the triple band UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA and then a quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE on 2G. Overall performance WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth regarding.1 with A2DP for local data gives. It has a 5 megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash and CIF video recording at 25fps. For headphones, you can opt between a wired 3.5mm headphone jack or wireless Bluetooth A2DP. It comes in four body colors, namely white, black, purple and licorice.

#WINDOWS SERVER

[lucadansembourg]

         𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐝𝐨𝐩𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠…  𝐖𝐑𝐄𝐍 𝐃’𝐀𝐍𝐒𝐄𝐌𝐁𝐎𝐔𝐑𝐆

the basics.

name. wren albert d’ansembourg.

title. his royal highness, prince of luxembourg & duke of esch-sur-alzette.

age. 25-31.

family. luca ( @lucadansembourg​ ), wendy ( @wendyjuliette​ ) & lara d’ansembourg (ADOPT HERE) - siblings ; theodor ( @theodcr​ ) & josefina olderburg (ADOPT HERE) - cousins 

relationship status. utp.

occupation. socialite & influencer.

follower count. 27 million followers on twitter,16 million followers on instagram, 11 million followers on tiktok, 6 million subscribers on youtube & 2 million followers on twitch. 

faceclaim options. maxence danet-fauvel, charlie rowe, alex fitzalan, henrik holm, tarjei sandvik moe, deaken bluman, chase stokes, brenton thwaites, felix mallard, charlie gillespie, george sear. 

group. @highsocietyhq

the story.

the d’ansembourg twins were a shock to the world, and maybe that’s the way that wren preferred things. from the moment he was born, he wanted to be an outsider. while his sisters were prim, proper and put together, and his brother an overemotional idiot, wren stood as a monument to the weird that most people kept hidden away, locked in a drawer for no one to see. 

he might have grown up in the palace, but he would escape as often as he could. wren craved normalcy in his early years, and he managed to achieve that by sneaking out a side door to play football in a side alley with the local kids. his friends that may not have been “approved” by his parents, but they were approved to show him about the world - the real world, not the one of royalty. 

wren thought of himself as separate from his siblings, and not just because he was the baby of the family, but because he was just... different. he didn’t care for politics, didn’t care for other royal activities. in his teen years, wren was practically a recluse to his family, hidden away in his dorm room at le rosey or his own private rooms in the grand palace, constantly feeling like the only puzzle piece that didn’t quite fit. 

wendy jokes sometimes that he must have been adopted, but wren is sure he wasn’t meant to be born into palaces and riches beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. 

while his parents always expected him to grow out of it, he did the opposite. he never stopped caring about the strange things he’d always regarded as more important that schoolwork. following lara to le rosey was one of the first truly “royal” things wren had done in his entire life, and he still managed to be awful at that. he was constantly in disciplinary hearings or getting shouted at by whichever teacher he pissed off with his detached attitude. but it didn’t crush his spirit at all, in fact, it only made him act out more. 

maybe it was an attention thing - that would explain the next ten years of his life that he’d spend vying for the favor of strangers over the internet to determine his own self worth, or whatever the therapist said. 

perhaps it was the years of his only friends being two kids raised by their laptop screens just outside the palace, or the hundreds of hours of looking at memes instead of actually doing as he was told, but something in wren made him want to do whatever he liked, no matter what others thought of him. 

when lara went off to oxford, wren took a gap year. and then another. and then another, and soon it had been five years - his sister had a master’s degree and he had a massive social media fanbase. he’s not sure which of them did better for themselves.

when his father died, wren realized that he was actually going to have to be a prince for the first time in his life. before, he’d let lara take the reins on anything and just showed up to parties in bright colored suits and weird patterned socks and ties that didn’t match. but now that his older brother was king: wren was expected to pull his weight. 

he was terrible at it, for starters. he said too much, threw jokes and lies out to the press just to see what they’d print the next day. he became somewhat of a cryptid for gossip columnists and tmz reporters, because if you could manage to catch him, wren would deliver biting remarks and hilarious anecdotes about the royalty around him. he loves to watch reporters scramble to confirm stories in any way they can. 

when nathalie died, he came back to luxembourg and found himself a bit aimless. he took up art during this time, making some really dark paintings and a whole lot of collage work, which he then had to convince luca to not hang up around the palace, because luca constantly plays at being everyone’s proud older brother. 

but he managed to pull the family back together, and things got easier, gradually. mainly, he helped everyone heal by not changing a thing - he stayed unabashedly strange through the entire ordeal, and in the process became a rock the others could rely on. 

maybe he wasn’t a misshapen puzzle piece, but just a weird one that took some time to figure out the location of. he didn’t feel like the outcast anymore, but instead a valued member of the family - and had they always treated him like that? he wasn’t sure - and that was the worst part. how could he stay in their favor if he didn’t know what he did to earn it?  

his (not so) “secret  twitter" is well known by most of royal stan twitter, and getting a follow back from him is something that is worn like a badge of honor. he pretty much exists on there to roast his siblings’ outfits and choices, but also to poke fun at all other royals. truly, it’s just one more piece of controlled rebellion. he wouldn’t say things to hurt his family... on purpose, at least. 

it became an arnauld d’orleans hate twitter during the occupation. he would come up with very colorful roasts to go along with photos taken of the french king from bad angles. it was resistance, the only way wren d’ansembourg knew how to do it. his plenty of instagram lives and twitch streams helped, too - bringing visibility tothe occupation of luxembourg to places that many people would have turned away from it altogether. 

and when the occupation ended, he threw a party in the back alley behind the palace that he grew up in. by the end of the night, it was attended by thousands of luxembourgian citizens. lara frowned upon it, but wendy had the time of her life, so he had enough support to call their “sibling vote” on whether he’d fucked up, a dead tie. 

he ran a charity stream that raised over eight million dollars for relief in belgium after the bombings, taking requests for things he could do in his room. he only broke four priceless artifacts during it,.

when he was invited to the protection program, he was the most wary of it. he didn’t need to network, he didn’t need to be protected from anything. wren knew he could care of himself, but a change of scenery seemed... kind of fun. it was getting boring in luxembourg, now that things have settled. and as long as he’s able to be connected to wifi, and he’s allowed to do at least three stupid tings a week, everything ill be alright. 

interested? contact me! 

i do want to say that i feel like the main thing i am looking for in a wren applicant is that his vibe is.... strange. i imagine wren is a 100 gecs song if it came to life.  he’s an ancient chaos god trapped in the lanky body of a d’ansembourg man.

most things are negotiable, and i’d love to discuss any changes or ideas you have. please contact me ( @lucadansembourg​ ) if you’re interested in filling this connection !!

#hshqadopt #henrik holm fc #maxence danet fauvel fc #rich kids rp #royal rp #semi appless rp #wrenadopt #quite literally if you don't stan wren we aren't friends #i went overboard on this because i have to make sure anyone who's interested understands what a deeply strange dude that wren is #it's important to me ok

[comfy-whumpee]

Dinner And A Show

Part of the Ellis AU. @lonesome--hunter, @iaminamoodymoodtoday, @wildfaewhump, @ishouldblogmore, @lektricwhump @just-a-whumping-racoon-with-wifi.

He was wearing an emerald-green silk shirt and black slacks. His shoes were polished and his hair was brushed and tied back. The ponytail was a little off centre, so that it lay over one shoulder and made a striking contrast with the shirt. He looked amazing – and the button-up sleeves hid all of his scars.

“You’re going to ace it,” Nic said as they fastened his cufflinks. “Just be confident, and don’t hesitate. Remember, this is work, not a real date. You just have to seem genuine.”

“Not a problem,” Ellis said. He briefly flashed a look of wide-eyed, guileless innocence, and Nic laughed. They laughed even as they remembered just how Ellis had come to possess that skill.

“Yeah, like that. You’ll be in control the whole time, honey.”

Ellis nodded, consulting his file one last time before setting it down on the floor. Alistair knelt there, hands holding the chain in his lap, head bent. He would be reading the file, Ellis’s strategy guide, the whole way through the outing, providing Ellis with the ability to check any detail he’d forgotten. No information would escape him. No surprises. He would be in control.

Nic kissed his cheek, and smiled. “Perfect. Go on, taxi’s waiting.”

They watched him go with a wistful smile. His back was straight and his head held high as he descended the stairs to leave. He’d never used to walk like that. He’d never been comfortable as the centre of attention. But then, they were starting to understand. The person he was day to day...wasn’t really him. He only came back to them in those private moments alone.

They hated what he was doing. They hated why he was doing it even more. He’d come out of it, one day.

For Ellis’s part, he was too busy thinking about the meeting. When he arrived, he was still thinking through information he could use. When he greeted her, he made sure his handshake was one she liked.

Handshake: Like she’s trying to crush your fingers and she wants you to do it back.

“Mr Engels,” she said, seeming impressed. “In the flesh.”

Ellis smiled sweetly. “That’s me. Pleasure, Ms Farringdon.”

She allowed him to lead her into the restaurant, and didn’t speak until they were seated. Only once the waiters were at a distance did she say, “I have heard rumours about you. You are... Different to the image I had.”

Ellis smiled a little less warmly now. He knew what the rumours about him were. Some of them, he had planted. “Let me guess. A terrifying crime lord, or Alistair’s sugar baby.”

“The latter,” she acknowledged. “They said you were... Pretty.”

He smiled again. Self-effacing, a touch embarrassed. “I’m glad you think so. But back to the pertinent topic. Why did you agree to meet me? I know you’re not on best terms with the original Engels.”

She looked to the side, prefacing her avoidance of the question. “I don’t recall any significant animosity between us.” Then her eyes returned to him and she smiled. “I was curious, of course. Alistair has worked alone for so long.”

“He has,” Ellis agreed neutrally. He looked down at the menu, considering.

Food: Hates seafood of all kinds. Hates hot food. Subtle flavours.

“I recommend the risotto,” he offered, as he selected the vegetarian ravioli for himself. “Mild flavour, delicate seasoning.”

She raised a sardonic eyebrow. “No starter?”

“Oh, naturally,” he said smoothly. “But the main course should be accounted for, when ordering the first.”

She hummed a brief chuckle. One slip, navigated successfully. He returned to looking at the drinks, until she spoke again.

“Why didn’t he come himself?”

Her tone was hardened around the edges, marked by her suspicion. There were rumours about him, yes, but she didn’t know that this was the person she’d expected to meet. He could have sent a decoy. He could be the decoy, for Alistair.

“Indisposed,” he said simply. None of her doubt was being expressed aloud, and he didn’t need to address it yet. “He sends his regards.”

She rolled her eyes. “Unlikely. He doesn’t like me.”

Alistair: ‘She’s a ruthless egomaniac who would kill her own mother for a tactical advantage.’

“He respects you,” he replied, setting his menu aside for the sake of signalling to their waiter that they were ready. “He did not think you should be subjected to dinner with him. Colleagues you may be, but friends, you are not.”

She considered that for a moment. He sat still under her blue eyes, reading his expression as best she could. He made sure to look simple, pleasant and honest, and while she wouldn’t truly believe that, the plausible deniability was useful.

She looked all the way to his shirt cuffs before looking back up. “Nice cufflinks.”

The formality was eroding. Ellis smiled, touching one. “Thank you. I hope you find dinner with me tolerable, if not pleasant.”

She propped her elbow on the table, chin resting across the back of her hand as she regarded him more intensely. Under his shirt the scars hid, and itched, and she kept looking.

Farringdon shook her head. “You don’t have to try so hard, cherub. Your partner and I have worked together enough in the past that you have some goodwill. Let’s just try to have fun.”

Ellis smiled properly, eyes bright with perfectly practised sincerity. “Let’s.”

-

Ellis closes his eyes with his hands poised over the keyboard.

Absolute silence in his home. Alistair is by the desk, waiting for an order. Nic is outside in the garden, reading under the porch. It’s raining, but Ellis had the office soundproofed a while ago. No sound in. No sound out.

He reaches for her.

Vision. Hearing. He connects himself up to her, taking in everything that she does. His hands start to move on the keyboard.

Computer, OS, email client, email address, every one that he can read down the side of her screen. Subject titles, as fast as he can type them, before she clicks off.

Email drafting. He transcribes in synchronicity with her, a second behind the movements of her body. He follows her pauses, her typos, her corrections, her edits. He is exactly as focused as she is, her words flowing onto her page and onto his without pause.

Email sent. Closed. More subject titles for what’s in her inbox. More in her sent items.

A video of horses. Even professional murderers have hobbies.

Then she checks it. Finally, she opens her phone and checks it, and he sees clearly the little GPS tracker she put on his bag when she thought he wasn’t looking - and he wasn’t, not with his own eyes, he practically handed her the opportunity. The bag is on a bus right now, and she closes the app, returning her attention to the computer.

A file. Title, date, last modified, author, and the content as fast as he can type it, which is faster than she can read it. Some distant thought recognises that the file is about him. He doesn’t pause. He will have her knowledge, all of her knowledge, and then he will know exactly what she thinks of him.

A notification on her phone pings and she looks down at it. Payment confirmation. He catches the banking app, the mobile network, the amount. She checks the GPS again, and sees its location.

She looks back at the profile of him and he types out the details of his own weekly routine without stopping to think about what it might mean until she gets up, and picks up a pre-packed bag, and takes one last look at her file and his photo and he watches her read the line about where he will be at this time of day, which he isn’t, because he’s watching her, and she heads out of the house.

She gets into her car, license plate noted, make, model, colour, landmarks around where she is driving from, street names, he can work out where she’s based later, and then she drives to his gym.

Before she gets out of the car, she checks her bag. He’s not surprised to see what’s inside.

In the pause as she looks, he writes a note to himself. Cancel gym membership.

He watches her move through the rooms in search of him. He watches her circle the property. He takes notes on how she enters and exits, how she avoids notice, the way she glances for cameras and speaks to those she passes as though she were a normal patron. He will learn from her, as he has learned from everyone in his life.

She leaves after half an hour of looking for him, bag still slung over her shoulder. She gets back into her car and pulls out a different phone. Dials a contact, and Ellis’s fingers fly to record the number.

“Hello.”

Ellis’s fingers stop.

“He wasn’t there.”

“Well, keep trying. You only have to find him once. I’m a patient man.”

The line disconnects.

Ellis opens his eyes. At the bottom of his garbled, rushed, typo-ridden document, there is a single word spelt with precision.

Harvey.

He takes a deep breath, and rests his wrists on the desk as the assassin drives home.

Harvey is trying to kill him.

#psychological whump #ellis: a whumper #my fic #whump #paranoia fuel #telepathy #failed assassination #manipulation #manipulative whumper #ellis #harvey #farringdon #nic

[alarawriting]

California Road Trip (Good Omens/Lucifer (TV))

OK, it is normally not my policy to post fanfiction to this account, but for some reason it doesn’t feel like a bad idea to do it if it’s a brand new fandom I haven’t done stuff in before, so here I go.

A few notes before I start here:

Both Good Omens and the tv series Lucifer are very, very much situated within Christian mythos - Christian specifically, not Judaism. However, Jesus Christ is very much Jewish. I don’t want to offend any Jewish readers, but I just won’t put up with the Christian historical attempt to somehow erase this fact. So I’m going to try to write him as a practicing Jew, which I admit is going to be weird, because generally speaking, Jewish people do not believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, which puts him in a kind of “who shaves the barber” situation here.

If there are any Jewish folks out there who would not be bothered by being asked questions about Judaism for the sake of a fanfic starring Jesus Christ and the Antichrist on a road trip, please let me know, because while I’ve been reading about Judaism my entire life and have a great deal of interest in the religion and culture, the fact remains that I was raised Catholic. 

BTW, the title is a working title and may very well end up changed.

Adam Young sat morosely on a bench in the baggage claim at LAX, occasionally kicking his satchel as an expression of his frustration. Bloody stupid America had to be so bloody damn big. And he couldn’t do anything mundane about it – couldn’t hire a car, his driver’s license wasn’t valid in the States; couldn’t get a flight to San Francisco, because Mum and Dad were hardly made of money and his own funds had been just enough to get here; and maybe there was public, a bus or something, but how was he supposed to find it? All the signs and adverts on the walls were for car rental agencies and buses to local hotels.

He fussed with his phone, trying to get Google to tell him how to get a bus to San Francisco so he wouldn’t have to use his other options. The data plan didn’t work in the States and the airport didn’t have free wifi, so he was trying to find an unsecured network he could hop on. Strengthening the signal of an unsecured network seemed to him more legitimate than, say, hacking a secure network, and much more so than, for example, shortening the distance between Los Angeles and San Francisco so he could hire a taxi. He was definitely not going to go that far.

“Hey there,” he heard a man say. “You look frustrated. Anything I can do to help?”

Adam looked up. There was a tall, skinny man with shaggy brown hair in a ponytail, the almost-not-quite sprinkling of facial hair on the chin that people were calling a “soul patch”, and light brown skin of the kind you might see on an Arab, or a Greek, or given that this was the States, maybe a Mexican. He was dressed in very nondescript American clothes – gray t-shirt, plaid long-sleeve shirt unbuttoned, blue jeans, sneakers – and had the kind of friendly smile that made you immediately want to trust him and tell him your problems. Adam was deeply suspicious.

“Oh, no, don’t put yourself to any trouble on my account,” Adam said. “I’ve just got a thing I need to work out, is all.”

“No problem,” the man said. “But if there’s anything I can do to help you, please, just ask. We’re family, after all.” He grinned widely.

Adam blinked at that. “…Family?”

The man extended his hand. “Josh Carpenter. I’m your cousin.”

Adam’s da had no siblings. Mum had one, Adam’s flamboyantly gay uncle who definitely did not have any children or Adam would have been hearing about them his entire life. “I don’t have any cousins.”

“Well. Okay. Technically I’m your uncle, but you and I are a lot closer in age than the rest of the family so I really don’t feel comfortable calling myself an uncle.”

“I’ve only one uncle and you’re definitely not him.”

“Other side of the family,” Josh said.

Adam stood up, preparing to put some distance between himself and the obvious scammer. “My da hasn’t got any brothers or sisters.”

“Other other side, Adam,” Josh said. “The side you don’t like to think about much.”

And that knocked the wind out of him. Adam stared at the other man, who looked to be at most a year or two older than Adam himself. “…My other other side. You mean… my bio-father.”

“That’s a rather cold word to use, but I can see why it would be your choice,” Josh said. “Yes. Your bio-father’s my older half-brother.”

“So you’re a—” He hesitated. How did you publicly call someone an angel, or a demon, and which would it be? And wouldn’t it be offensive if he got it wrong? He’d gotten the distinct impression from Crowley and Az that most of their people were not nearly as laid-back or friendly as they were, and if this was an emissary from his bio-father, was he going to have to unleash his other side after all? They weren’t supposed to interfere on Earth, not in any way that inconvenienced him, anyway.

“Oh, no, no. I’m as human as you are.” Josh smiled again. The expression lit up his entire face, making him practically radiate ‘I’m a great guy, you should want to be my friend.’

Adam was about to retort that if Josh knew as much as he thought he did, he’d know exactly how human Adam was, and wasn’t, when his brain finished processing the name “Josh Carpenter” in the context of the other things the man had said, and realized who he was talking to. “Wait – you’re – my God.” Abruptly he realized that what he’d said was so apropos it went out the other side to being inappropriate. “I mean—”

Josh laughed. “Don’t worry about it, I know what you’re trying to say,” he said. “Anyway, I’m not, you know. Not like people think, anyway. I’m basically like you.”

Adam, entirely too aware of how close to being a god he was, was not reassured. “So, um… do we need to fight now, or something? Because I really don’t want to fight anyone.”

This time Josh’s laugh wasn’t a gentle chuckle, but more like a belly laugh. “No, no!” He got his hilarity under control. “No. You made your decision when you were eleven, and I’m really glad, because I never wanted any of that nonsense either. And to be perfectly honest I don’t think Father did either. The whole thing came from John’s predictions, and I think they all somehow got the idea that John was channeling information directly from Father because he was one of my best friends, but the truth is? John was… a little weird, to be honest. Wonderful guy, great friend, but… he was never all that grounded, if I’m being honest.”

“So wait. None of that business was in the Divine Plan after all?”

“Contrary to popular belief I don’t generally have any more idea what Father is up to than anyone else, but I do know Him better than most, and no. I don’t think any of that was His idea.”

“Huh.”

Adam must have made a face that somehow indicated his bemusement, because Josh asked, “What?”

“It’s just… I’ve got a pair of friends. Well, I’m sure you know about them if you know about the Apocawasn’t, and Crowley and Az both refer to God as Her.”

Josh shook his head. “It’s a thing He’s been encouraging lately because the English language doesn’t have a good neuter pronoun, and obviously God is larger than any concept of gender, and He’s not really thrilled with what humans have assumed about Him based on the pronoun. But He doesn’t really care which you use, as long as it’s respectful, and… I had a biological mother. I’ve had quite some time where I’ve been using masculine pronouns, so I’m not going to switch unless He asks me to.”

“But it’s okay that I call Her my grandmother? Because that’s hilarious.”

“Sure. Grandmother, grandfather, granddeity… whatever you want. Long as it’s respectful enough.”

“I’m not sure my mental picture of God in a babushka kerchief and a rocking chair is respectful though.”

“Ah, ‘respectful’ when I say it doesn’t mean what the people who supposedly listen to me mean when they say it. I’m Jewish. If you want to picture God as rocking in a chair and wearing a kerchief, maybe doing Her knitting, creating a planet or two? That’s fine. The respect we’re called on to give to God – and by we, I mean humans, but I don’t think it’s much different for half-humans like you and me – is exactly like the respect you give your grandmother. If your grandmother says something that’s stupid and insensitive, you challenge her, because it was stupid and insensitive. If she has rules that make no sense, you challenge them. If She disowned your brother and most of his friends because he talked back to Her, absolutely you get to call Her on that and tell Her that was a dick move. But you still respect her, because She’s your grandmother. You exist because She gave you life, directly or indirectly.”

Adam thought he had stopped talking about a merely hypothetical grandmother about halfway through that. “Really? You tell God that something She did was a dick move?” He laughed.

“Every chance I get,” Josh said, grinning. “We actually disagree about a lot of things, but He listens to me more than He does to anyone else, I guess. Youngest son syndrome or something.”

Adam had in his life had conversations about ending the world, about life on the planets of Alpha Centauri, and about the management structure of Hell, but this still counted as one of the more surreal conversations he’d ever had. “So. Um. Were you just doing something when I happened to stroll by, or did you actually come here to see me?”

Josh put up his hands. “Guilty, I admit it,” he said. “I knew you were here and I knew you were in a little bit of trouble. I didn’t want to pry enough to find out what, though, so you want to tell me? I can probably help out.”

“I don’t need a miracle. I can do that for myself.”

“Good for you. I don’t do them anymore unless it’s an emergency, either, so I think we’re on the same page about that. What’s wrong?”

Adam sighed. “It’s such a bloody stupid mistake to make. I forgot how big the States are. In particular, this state. I came here to see Pepper at Berkeley, she’s doing her grad studies there… you know my friend Pepper, right?”

“She was there that day, so yes, I do.”

“You weren’t there, though.”

“The angels knew I disapproved of the whole thing and kept interfering with me getting a chance to talk to you, but I definitely checked out the whole thing afterward. So yes, I know of Pepper.”

“Right. And the price for a flight to Los Angeles was so much less than San Francisco, I could afford it myself without asking Mum and Da for money. And I had completely forgot that it’s a three hour drive between the two cities, because seriously? That’s much too much for the same state! Who even drew the boundaries for this state, because it’s ridiculous!”

Josh laughed. “I won’t argue against that. And I think I may have just the thing. Although it might take a miracle of the more mundane variety to get it to actually drive for three hours straight without breaking down, but I do have a pickup truck.”

Adam raised an eyebrow, taking in Josh’s appearance. “I’d have thought some kind of, I don’t know, tiny enviro-friendly electric car would be more your thing.”

Josh snorted. “Do you have any idea how much those things cost? If I had that kind of money, it’d go straight to a soup kitchen, maybe a homeless shelter or two. My pickup’s not the greatest, but it still runs, and it lets me carry furniture donations and things like that.”

“You do some kind of ministry or something?”

“Always,” Josh nodded. “Though not like you’re probably thinking. My day’s over; I’m here on Earth because you are, not for my own sake, so I let humans take the lead. I do volunteer work for several of the local Jewish charities, helping the homeless, the hungry, you know.” He leaned on the wall with one hand. “So. Up for a road trip with your cousin?”

“Uncle.”

“You’re making me feel old.”

“You’re two thousand, I should hope so!” Adam said, grinning.

“Yes, but all my brothers and sisters are billions of years older than me, so by that standard, you and I are practically the same age.” He pushed off the wall. “And speaking of my brothers. Did you know your father is in town?”

Adam went cold. “Wait, what? The Devil is here in Los Angeles?”

“Yes. Running a nightclub, apparently.” Josh put a hand on Adam’s shoulder. “You know, I really think you should meet with him. You shouldn’t completely shut your father out of your life even if you don’t want to be close.”

“He’s not my father,” Adam scowled. “My Da’s the one who taught me to ride a bike and who read stories to me at night and cooked me terrible hash browns when Mum was poorly and couldn’t make supper.”

“Right, I get that,” Josh said. “My dad taught me how to build a house, or a cabinet, and taught me how to ride a donkey, and used to walk me to Temple so he’d know where I was because he said I was going to go anyway so he might as well walk me there. But I also have a Father. It’s okay, you know, to acknowledge more than two parents. Step-parents and adopted parents have been a thing since humanity came into existence.”

“Yeah, well, your Father never appeared to you as a giant monster crawling out of the pavement trying to destroy your entire planet.”

“And I really think you ought to try to meet up with Lucifer and talk to him about that. Put some of those conflicts to bed. He was frequently a pretty terrible person when he was running Hell, but… it’s Hell. It makes people terrible even if they were great to begin with. He’s so much better now that he’s not there anymore.”

“What, do you hang out with him often?”

Josh shook his head. “He doesn’t even know I’m here. I haven’t gone to look him up in person, but… you know how it is. If you’re interested in knowing about a person… sometimes it just happens. That happens to you, too, right?”

Adam nodded slowly. “Yeah. Actually it does.” The thought occurred to him that Josh was the only other person on the planet who might really understand some of Adam’s challenges and sorrows in life. The stress of having to restrain near-omnipotent power, so often, because you wanted to be a human and to fit in with humanity, not to stand above it as some sort of lonely god – or devil. Crowley and Az knew a bit of it, but they’d never been human, and Warlock understood some of the weirdness of Adam’s life but had never had the power to perform miracles.

He made a decision. “If you’re offering, I’ll take you up on that trip to San Francisco, and you can maybe talk me into… meeting my bio-dad. Maybe. No promises.”

“That’s all I can ask,” Josh said.

“But if your car will hold together well enough… I’ve got a friend in the States, out on this coast, but I knew Washington was much too far away for me to visit him without a second plane trip. Maybe we could head up north and see him?” Warlock had fled the East Coast and the influence of his toxic parents as soon as he’d turned of age to do so. Adam had met him once or twice after the Apocawasn’t, when his father had had to come back to England – he hadn’t been the American ambassador anymore but he’d still had reasons to come back – and Crowley and Az had brought him to see the boy who should have been his parents’ son, his quasi-brother, at his insistence. But they hadn’t met in person in a few years; Warlock wouldn’t take money from his parents to fly to England and this was Adam’s first trip to the States.

“Sounds like a plan to me.”

Adam grinned, remembering something. “Oh yeah. Is there an ice cream place around here? I heard as a kid that America has thirty one ice cream flavors.”

Josh laughed. “Only thirty-one? You’re in for a treat. Yeah, I know where to find the nearest Baskin-Robbins, that’s the chain that advertised about the thirty-one flavors. There’s actually a lot more than that. Though sadly, Baskin-Robbins’ stores don’t generally have all thirty-one at once.” He gestured toward the door. “Come on. It’s kind of a hike. I couldn’t afford to park in the closer lots.”

Adam picked up his satchel and followed Josh. “I don’t mind a walk,” he said.

#good omens #lucifer (tv)

[nitewrighter]

[squints at your blog like a drive thru menu] hey yeah can I get a uhhhhhhh fuckin uhhhhhh large mchanzo please. thanks.

*drive-thru intercom crackle* McHanzo machine broke.

(jk here’s some McHanzo. I love me some corny anime tropes, don’t you?)

Taking place after A Conversation

—-

If Hanzo had to name the worst thing about being on the run—well, there were a lot of ‘worst’ things about being on the run. The guilt was bad. Devouring, rotting guilt that clawed itself even into in his moments of peace like veins of mold in cheese. There were the assassins, and there was the exhaustion of his own vigilance against his family’s assassins that made every day without an immediate threat on his life feel like a lie. But up in the top three was probably not knowing when he would get his next shower. He did have resources–safehouses and the like, which he had gotten from assassin and mercenary work, but those were few and far between. He had gotten a lot better than he would like to admit at quick, desperate wash-ups in public bathroom sinks, and he could count on both hands the time he had risked pursuit by the authorities or the Shimada clan just to get a few minutes in the shower at the home of someone he had just killed. Being able to bathe on his own terms for the first time in too long was probably the most luxurious thing he had experienced since he first came to the Watchpoint.

 Steam flooded the showers of the watchpoint dormitory. Hanzo’s fingers were well past pruning but he set his hands against the tiles of the wall and let the water pound his shoulders. He tried to let the sound of water drown out his thoughts, but still they bled into his consciousness.

What am I doing here? he thought, Genji is doing far better without me than he ever did with me. Why invite me? Spite? his stomach turned, Pity?

“You know you’ve been in here nearly 30 minutes, right?” McCree’s voice cut through the steam and bounced off the walls and Hanzo’s head jerked up.

“I—I…” to be honest Hanzo had completely lost track of the time. Not like him. Sloppy. 

“Not to put a damper on your beauty routine but Jack did say we gotta convene with him at 0930 to establish your intended role with us. You being Mr. ‘Spy Network’ and all.”

Right, thought Hanzo, That. Might as well just toss any resources I have into this circus too. Forget about any contingency plans for when this whole organization goes down in flames. Again.

“It’s hardly a spy network,” said Hanzo, turning off the water and sticking his hand out of the plastic of the shower curtain, padding around for his hanging towel, “Merely a collection of contacts. I cannot exactly send them out to gather intel. We all have to watch our own backs.”

“Been there,” said McCree as Hanzo finally found the towel and pulled it into his shower stall.

“’Been there,’” Hanzo repeated, toweling himself off before wrapping the towel around his waist. “You know,” said Hanzo, pushing the shower curtain aside, “You are just as secretive, if not more so, about your dealings before you joined this splinter cell than I am.”

“I was on the run. Not a lot of glamorous stories there,” said McCree, “One of the highlights was stopping a robbery at a ramen restaurant… and the train thing, I guess…” 

“’Train thing?’” said Hanzo.

“Took down a Talon strike team,” said McCree, flicking up the brim of his hat and smiling at him, the smile faded though, “They were after this glowy purple box thing. Looking back, I wonder if I made things worse, giving it to them…”

“You gave it to them?” said Hanzo.

“I kicked it off the train rather than let them kill the whole train trying to get it!” said McCree.

“It could have been a weapon that could kill far more people than just one train,” said Hanzo.

“I think about that too but… truth is I didn’t know. Thankfully, I still don’t know what the hell that thing was. Maybe it just speeds up Talon’s wifi or somethin’…”

Hanzo snorted.

“I hope it just speeds up their wifi…” said McCree, taking off his hat and itching at his hair. He shook his head. “Anyway. Meeting with Jack,” he moved to turn around and walk out of the showers, “0930 Hou–Fu–”

McCree slipped hard. His prosthetic arm flailed to try and grab for the doorway and missed in his descent. 

“McCree–!” Hanzo stepped forward too, grabbed his arm, felt the prosthetic grip his forearm and yank him down too in McCree’s fall.

The stream of panicked thoughts constricted around Hanzo’s mind as they both fell. If he cracks his skull open I’m finished. There’s no way to prove it wasn’t an attack. Only a few days in to coming back into Genji’s life and I’m already destroying the things he holds dear again. They’ll kill me. Make me leave the watchpoint. I don’t know which is worse. 

Both grunted as they hit the tiles of the shower floor. 

“Are you all right?” Hanzo said in an instant. 

McCree’s eyes were squeezed shut in pain until they flicked open and he gritted his teeth, “This is why we don’t take no gotdamn thirty minute showers!” McCree snapped at him. He realized his nose was inches from Hanzo’s and instinctively his eyes flicked down to see that, though Hanzo’s towel had come loose at the hip, perhaps by the grace of god it still served as a buffer between him and McCree’s jeans. Hanzo’s own heart was pounding at his throat and ears. Aside from a few embraces from Genji, this had been the most physical contact he had had with another body in a painfully long time. He caught himself and cleared his throat.

“I’ll um–just…” he kept one hand braced against the tile floor as he grabbed at the loose edges of the towel at his side

“Yeah–just–uh…” McCree was looking off, apparently pretending that the nearby shower drain was some kind of avant-garde artwork that he was struggling to understand as Hanzo fumbled between him, the floor, and his own towel.

Hanzo finally managed to roll off of McCree into a kneeling position to re-secure his towel as McCree grabbed his hat off the floor and shook droplets of water off of it.

“Thanks for the uh… attempted save,” said McCree, not making eye contact, still swatting water off of his hat.

‘Yes, well… I hope future attempts are… more successful,” said Hanzo, “Not that I… hope there is ever a need for future attempts again.”

“I getcha,” said McCree.

“Mm,” Hanzo grunted. 

“…Can we agree to…”

“Never talk about this again?” said Hanzo.

“Yeah,” said McCree.

“Yes,” said Hanzo.

“Good,” said McCree.

“Good,” agreed Hanzo.

A long pause passed between them. Hanzo half-forced a rueful chuckle.

“What?” said McCree.

“I think this is the longest we’ve gone without you calling me ‘Asshole,’” said Hanzo.

“Look at that,” said McCree, pushing his hair back, “Makin’ progress.”

—-

“Is there a reason why you two moved your seats 10 feet further away from each other than usual for this meeting?” said Jack.

McCree and Hanzo exchanged glances.

“I don’t understand the question,” said Hanzo.

“Yeah, we always sit like this,” said McCree.

Jack took a deep inhale, knew full well that was bullshit, and decided not to press the issue further.

#mchanzo

[spideymood]

Password Secret - Tom Holland

Pairings: tom holland x reader

Synopsis: A special late-night phone call escalated into something completely different.

Prompt: "Why is that your password".

Word count: A solid 2.3k

Author's note: So I just got back from Estonia with my orchestra, and I'm finally writing again! sorry for the long breaks. Anyway, this is for @noir-spiderr 's 3k Writing Challenge.

Warnings: Hmm, a lot of dialogue. And probably crappy writing...and a lot of strong language and curse words.

masterlist

· • ●· • ●· • ●

"Ah shit!" a stressed Tom Holland shouted. "My wifi-connection just disappeared."

" Fuck, I really need the script for my call with Rachel." The brit glanced at his phone in disbelief.

"Why don't you use mobile data?" Harrison, his blue-eyed best friend suggested.

The two mates currently sat at a cafe in Singapore, hiding from the press. In the process of hiding, Tom remembered that he had a phone call with one of the producers of the next film he was cast in, Beneath A Scarlet Sky. He was supposed to discuss the script and dates for principal photography with the producer.

"Another country my mobile data network doesn't work. I can only call people." Tom put his phone on the table as he took a sip from his iced tea from the cafe. "Can I borrow your phone?"

"Sorry. You know I never bring my phone if we're only going out eating lunch. Besides, what's the problem, haven't you already read the script before?" Harrison excused.

"Err, I might have or not read the script..."

"What the fuck Tom?" Harrison said in disbelief. "I literally gave you the script in paper-version two weeks ago, you div."

"I know. I've just been so, ehm, so busy lately. I kinda forgot it." The heat from the big city made it hard for Tom to not sweat. Due to the current situation, Tom couldn't stop thinking of potentially lose the part in the movie. "Fuck. Rachel's gonna call soon."

The hot weather in the south-west Asian country was a big contrast to the weather in England. He had spent the last days of break, before going on a press tour, with his friends and family.

"Ah shit, I even forgot to transfer the script to my google docs. It's in my Mac...in London." As the problem couldn't get worse, he would have no access to the script even if he found a place with free wifi.

"You're such an idiot Tom." Harrison sighed.

"Hey, you're the PA. Shouldn't you help me out with stuff like this?" Tom asked while trying to figure out a plan.

"Man, I only came with you since I wanted a vacation. I left all my stuff at the hotel - which is 30 minutes walk away," he answered as he took a long sip of iced coffee. "But if the script is at home, maybe we can get someone to log in on your Mac and send it to you?"

"Haz! That's a great idea!" Tom exclaimed, getting a little faith. "What the hell, man. When did you become so smart?"

"You dickhead! I've always been the smarter one." Harrison replied as he laughed.

"Who should I call? The twins are out of town, mum and dad are visiting my aunt." Tom listed up all possible people who could help him out.

Tom's eyes widened. "Fuck. The only person who lives close and is possibly available is Y/N."

"Y/N Y/L/N?! Our neighbour Y/N?" Harrison looked at Tom as if he was crazy.

"Do you even have her number? If so, when and how did you get the guts to ask for her number?" Harrison mocked.

"Ha-ha, very funny," Tom replied sarcastically. "She actually gave me her number after I helped her out once."

"What are you waiting for?" His best mate asked. "You've got approximately twenty minutes before Rachel calls!" Harrison questioned.

Tom took the clue and dialled your number. He put the phone by his ear as he waited for a response.

· • ●· • ●· • ●

When you gave Tom Holland your number, you never imagined he would call you in the middle of the night.

It had been a tiring day and all you wanted was to get a good night's sleep. Unfortunately, one British guy was in the way of your wish.

As the loud sound from your phone signalized that someone called, you couldn't help but groan. You checked the clock. Three o'clock in the morning. Freaking three o'clock.

"What the hell?" you mumbled as you stretched your hand to pick up your phone. An unknown number appeared on the display.

You had two choices. Pick up the phone and realize someone was calling the wrong number, or not picking up at all. On autopilot, you answered the call before thinking furthermore. "Hello?"

"Is this Y/N Y/L/N?" a British voice said. The voice seemed familiar, but you couldn't guess which person it was.

"Uh yes. Who's this?"

"Hi, uh, Y/N! It's Tom. Y'know. Neighbour Tom. The one who lives in the apartment across the hall?" Tom rambled as you tried to process everything he said.

"What the hell, Tom? It's three in the morning!" you groaned.

Tom went silent. He was so stressed out by the situation that he forgot there were different time zones. "Holy shit, I'm so sorry, love. It's just...um...I need your help."

"What can I do for you, maybe ruin someone else's beauty sleep?" You snapped. When you were tired and sleepy, you tended to become sassy. Immediately as you said it, you regretted it. Tom probably had a good excuse to call you. "Sorry, I didn't mean it. I'm just very tired I guess."

"No no no, it's my fault." Tom nervously answered. "So, I need you to break into my apartment and email me a script for an upcoming movie."

"Tom, what the fuck?" you replied shocked. "You sure I'm not dreaming? Is this a prank or something?"

"I wish it was only a prank. 'M sorry, but I need that script, and you're the only one I know that can send it to me on the little time I have." Tom excused.

Tom said desperately. "Or else I'll lose the part, which I really don't want to."

You took a deep breath before answering. "Okay, I'll do it. You did me a favour once, it's my time to pay. Tell me how to break into your apartment."

· • ●· • ●· • ●

Tom let out a relieved sigh. "Thank you thank you so much! You're an angel!" Harrison eyed his best mate suspicious. The two-minutes long phone call was the longest conversation Tom had ever had with Y/N, as far as Harrison knew.

"Well, you're not exactly breaking into my apartment. Just pick up the keys hidden behind the nearest lamp." Tom described as he waited for a response. "Y'know, the one lamp that flashes all the time."

"I just need to get dressed, wait a sec." was all he heard from the other side of the line.

You opened your door, on the way to do the special favour. "When I gave you my number, I never imagined you would call for such favour or even call in the middle of the night too."

"How many times do I have to say that I'm sorry?"

"I don't know? Maybe ten times more?" you answered as you laughed. "Alright, I got the keys. I'm unlocking the door."

"So I have an alarm system. The display for a code will be on your left side. The code is 772017."

"That's a lot of 'sevens' for a code. Is it a date or something? In 2017?" you suggested as you entered the code and turned off the alarm system. "You should consider changing it, y'know. Too many sevens."

"I mean, I see a giant Spider-man Homecoming poster with the premiere date which is oddly alike the code to turn off your alarm system." you continued.

"Well, about tha-"

"-you're a famous actor, you should at least secure your home a little better. I bet the bad guys from Home Alone could break in and steal all your stuff easily," you stated.

"Hey stop judging my security system! And the thieves from Home Alone were good thieves. They were just, uh, dumber than that eleven-year-old kid." Tom said defensively.

You searched through his apartment for his Mac. "Chill I was just joking. But you should consider changing it or something. Some fans of yours could track you down and everything."

"Alright then, darling," Tom said in defeat. Harrison couldn't help but laugh at the scene. He had no idea what the conversation had transferred to, but he couldn't stop but grin. "I think I left my Mac on the kitchen counter. Or wait, maybe it's in my cupboard."

"Why do you have so many Spider-man posters and figurines. Are you that self-obsessed?" you chuckled.

"...no."

"Bingo! Found it." you reached towards the closed computer, as Tom waited on the other line for updates about the situation. "Tom, uh, I need your password."

Tom froze the moment you mentioned 'your' and 'password'. He should have known. His eyes went wide when he realized what his password was. "Wait a sec!" Tom put his call on mute as he let out a stressed sigh. "Shit shit shit. Fucking hell!"

"What?" Harrison asked as he saw the stressed expression on his best mate's face.

"She needs my password."

"Of course she does, you dumbass." Harrison laughed. Tom replied by sending him a death glare. "What? Why is it such a problem?"

"Because, um, oh fuck," Tom exclaimed. "Promise not to laugh, okay." Harrison shrugged as Tom took a deep breath. "It's 'mrs(your name and last name)holland'. That's the password."

"What the hell, Tom." Harrison laughed. "Why is that your password?" He facepalmed as he watched his nerve-wracked friend in a crisis.

"I don't know! I just, I don't know, I needed a password no one would guess!" Tom explained vividly as his best mate cracked up. "Don't you dare laugh, you dickhead."

"You dumbass. What the actual fuck, you div!" Harrison rolled his eyes. "How're ya gonna tell her?"

"I honestly don't know. I mean, I don't want to seem like a creep or something, but I really need that fucking script." Tom heavily sighed.

"You're on your own, mate." Harrison saluted jokingly.

Tom turned off mute on the call and put the phone to his ear. "Tom? Are you there?" he heard.

"Yeah yeah. Sorry. Bad connection, I think." he excused.

"Anyway, I need your password," you said again. You couldn't help but grin when you saw a picture of Tom and his presumable brothers doing a human pyramid. The camera had captured the exact moment Tom fell backwards while his family had worried face expressions.

"Yeah, 'bout that. Um, please don't take this personal, okay. I'm not a creep or something, I promise. Gosh, I'm so sorry." Tom rambled. "But yeah, um, the password is 'mrs(your name and last name)holland'".

The other line went silent until you laughed. "Wait, what? You're joking, right?"

"I honestly wish I was."

"Holy shit, you're serious?" you exclaimed. You quickly typed the said password. Surprisingly, you got in.

"I never thought this night could escalate into something even weirder, but it just got up to another level," you mumbled.

"Just tell me you logged in." Tom groaned as he was again reminded of the somewhat awkward situation.

"Yes yes, I'm in. I'm guessing the script is in the 'script' folder. What's the name of the film, again?" you asked as you searched on his computer.

"It's 'Beneath a Scarlet Sky'," Tom replied quickly. "Transfer it to my email, please."

"On it."

As you saved the file and tried to remember how to transfer files through mail, Tom ran frantically around the streets trying to find a place with free wifi. Of course, he used to be afraid of people hacking his phone through unsecured free wifi, but he didn't have time to care.

In the end, he found a small shop selling Christmas decorations all year. "Okay, I just sent it."

"Thank you thank you, darling! You're an angel!" Tom thanked. He refreshed his mail several times until the script file turned up. "I just got it!"

"Yay!" you cheered as you turned Tom's Mac off. "I guess my job here is done." you yawned.

"Shit, I'm so sorry. Fuck, I forgot it's three in the morning in London. Thank you so much, love! You really helped me out." Tom thanked and rambled.

"Is there anything I can do for you? Any favour?" he asked flustered.

"I'm glad to help you out, Tom," you answered.

"But I guess, um, we should - well go out on a first date before, y'know, we get married. Haha." you hinted. "I, uh, I mean, it would be nice to get to know you better."

Tom's face reddened as he was reminded of the password scene earlier. He was still embarrassed. "Um, I, just, uh, please don't make me try to explain."

"I'm not going to bug you about it. It's just a bit, y'know, weird, Tom. But I mean, I'm not going to judge you. My name makes a perfect password, right? Hahah." you couldn't help but facepalm as you said the last sentence.

"Um, yeah, it really does. I guess." Tom replied awkwardly.

"Just come by my flat when you're back in town. I know a place with delicious pastries and hot beverages. I mean, only if you want to." you suggested.

"Yes! I mean, of course. I would love to meet up with you, darling." Tom answered excitedly.

"Great!" you replied quickly. "Anyway, good luck with the, um, meeting about the film. I can't wait to see you in it!"

"Thanks! Um, sleep well, Y/N. I hope I didn't bother you too much. I will surely call you another time. Probably when you're not asleep, right, ahahah. Yeah." Tom laughed nervously. "Good night."

"G'night." you smiled as you ended the special call.

The week after the incident, a very happy Tom Holland knocked on your door with bright sunflowers in his hands.

· • ●· • ●· • ●

Anyway, just wanna say that it makes me so happy to hear your responses to this!! So please leave a message or something <3

And it will also make me happy if you reblog this so others can read this ;D

· • ●· • ●· • ●

Add yourself to my taglist?

Permanent: @ultrunning @suncityparker  @starlightfound @hydrated-bag-of-bones @jubaydahk @ewolfwitchwisegirl @noir-spiderr @hollandharrison @lustful-holland @beautifulwisdom2001 @sweetieparker @isthisnotit @marvel-pilot @petersrogers @courteousdolan @positiveparker @casuallytumblingdownthestairs @teenwolfbitches2 @fockeytom @veronicas-littleworld @peter-prkr @spider-mendes @hermionedeservesbetterthanron @ive-got-more-wit @ilikealotofpeople-younotsomuch @brokenuntilapril26th2019 @mikalaka @sunshinehollandd

Permanent Tom Holland: @parkerpuffwrites @reengard @othersillyfangirl @inlovewithmobtom @the-queen-procrastinator @tomshufflepuff @southsidespidey

Tom Holland imagines: @makennac17 @alexindahouse

#ems3kwc #tom holland imagine #tom holland x reader #tom holland fanfic #tom holland fanfiction #tom holland blurb #tom holland #my writing #tom holland fic #nora writes

[blogs-from-europe]

Paris

We did not intend to come to Paris. We had planned ot head to Venice, but the coronavirus outbreak in northern Italy was kicking off and it seemed stupid to charge into the middle of it. Instead, we re-routed to Paris with no real plans for what we were going to do for the next month.

We took the Eurostar high speed train from London to Paris: there was wifi, cushy chairs, and some catered snacks we purchased from Marks & Spencers. The dining in London was meh, but their store-bought snacks blow Australia out of the water. Down with the Coles / Woolworths duopoly!

We arrived into Paris around 9pm and walked from the train station to our hotel. This may displease some of the parents reading this missive, but Matt and I did not check Smart Traveller before booking to go to Paris. It turns out that the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade considers France quite dangerous! The whole country has been slapped with an "Exercise a high degree of caution” warning, and this isn’t because of the coronavirus, this is down to the amount of violent crime tourists are likely to encounter (armed robberies on trains, car theft, etc.) and the riots. Oh and the likelihood of terrorist attacks. We certainly noticed in France that the cops were heavily armed: we saw a police officer cradling a machine gun during a friendly exchange with a citizen to give directions.

On our Sunday night walk from the train station to our hotel, the streets were mostly empty. We passed a number of sex shops, massage parlours with red lights, groups of men standing around apparently doing nothing, sex workers, and suspicious men selling cigarettes on street corners. We were on high alert for pick-pockets and the violent crimes which Smart Traveller had warned us about: with our enormous backpacks we were effectively wearing neon signs saying ‘We are tourists! Please rob us!’. Despite our fears we made it to the hotel safely. The hotel was a last-minute booking as part of our rescheduling to avoid Italy so we didn’t have many options when booking online: I think it would be safe to say that our hotel was one of the worst in Paris. We were given tokens to access the shared shower down the hallway from our room: for our three night stay we were given four tokens, effectively rationing our showers for the stay. (Again, parents reading this may be troubled to learn that we only ended up using three of the four tokens – the person who only showered once has a name beginning with ‘M’ and ending with ‘atthew’.)    

Another charming feature of the hotel was the low ceilings, roughly only two meters in height:

For our first day in Paris, it rained all day. 

To stay out of the rain, we picked a couple of indoor activities: a visit to the Musee de Cluny (famous for its Lady and Unicorn tapestries and various other medieval art) and a visit to the Pantheon. After paying to get in, we realised that the Lady and Unicorn tapestries section of the museum was closed. Disappointingly, a promising section of the museum called ‘Treasures’ was also closed – I must confess, Matt and I did inadvertently go into the Treasures section and stole a fleeting glance at a magnificent tapestry before a strict Frenchman told us (in French so this may not be an exact translation) “Can’t you see this section of the museum is closed? No treasures for you! Get the hell out!”. Utimately we only got to see some old rocks and a bath. Overall rating for Musee de Cluny is 1/5. Matt observed that it should really be called the “Musee de Close-y”.  

Next we trudged uphill through heavy rain to the Pantheon. Matt had expressed his indifference towards visiting churches, but I thought Foucault’s pendulum (housed in the church) might be of interest to him. Turns out, the Pantheon has many great qualities: it’s an amazing sandstone church built in the 1700s. During the Enlightenment, the church became a sort of secular shrine to the great figures of France including writers, politicians, scientists, etc. In addition to looking through the church (which included a huge dome, Foucault’s pendulum and some cool paintings of Joan of Arc) we got to explore the crypt which was much more pleasant and well-lit than you might expect a crypt to be.

Contrary to popular opinion, we did not find the waiters of Paris to be particularly snooty (maybe this is because we are residents of Fitzroy, which is home to many snooty waiters – mostly with fluoro hair and ripped jeans) but we did notice that they would greet us assuming we were French with a ‘Bonjour!’ or ‘Bonsoir!’ and when we would respond in attempted French they lose a little of their joie de vivre and would immediately switch to English. This was obviously intended as a kindness and did make things easier for ordering and finding a table, but meant we were robbed of the chance to practice our French. This also suggests that our pronunciation of ‘Bonjour’ is so poor that we cannot even pass for particularly uncultured or stupid Frenchmen.

To get around we tried renting electric scooters and bikes via Uber, with mixed results: there was terror, joy, and some frustration with Uber’s capricious parking rules.

For the super-interested, here are some other things we got up to in Paris:

Montmarte: We rode our electric bikes to Montmatre, an area famous for Sacre Coeur, an old church with a fantastic view, and the Moulin Rouge. The ride was mostly uphill, but on the electric bicycle was quite easy.

Wine tasting: We also did a wine tasting via Airbnb. Key takeaway: Chardonnay in France is not aged in oak barrels, meaning it doesn’t have that strong oaky taste (which I often find to be kind of cloying). Matt and I never really liked the taste of Australian chardonnay, so this was probably because of the barrel flavour. We also learned about tannins (broken down grape skins which appear in red wines) and about how rose is made (red grapes, but the skin is taken out sooner!)

Catacombs: There are old mines under Paris, which were the source of the sandstone used to build many of the city’s great buildings. These were later filled with bones after the central cemeteries were filled. We both regretted visiting the catacombs as it was very somber and confronting: millions of bones, hundreds of years old, piled on top of each other in a network of disused mines. Who enjoys this stuff?? We both felt sad and flat after the Catacombs, but then stopped for a hot chocolate and apple pastry which improved the mood. Afterwards we agreed to not visit any more mass graves.

Champs Elysées: We walked past the Louvre and gardens, Champs Elysées, Arc de Triomphe – a lovely area. We stopped for crepes and paid 1.5 euro (~$2.50 in Australian dollars) to use a public bathroom.

We also spent some time watching street hustlers. In the photo below, just below the Eiffel Tower you’ll see a ring of people in black. 

We watched them for half an hour or so. They stand together all day pretending to play a three-shell game, betting 100 euro a pop. The idea with the game is that the dealer hides a ball under one cup, then quickly shuffles all three cups to ‘hide’ the ball - the person who paid to play can then pick the cup which they think holds the ball. If they are right, they get 200 euro; if they are wrong they lose the lot. We inferred the people dressed in black are working with the dealer, spending all day pretending to play. They win some, they lose some, they clap and say “bravo!”. The idea is to make it look like riotous good fun for people passing by so that they might be tempted to play. They’re essentially just shuffing money around within their group. A key part of the scam is that after each shuffle one of the group picks a cup which, if you’ve been paying attention to the shuffle, clearly does not hold the ball - the incorrect guess is jeered at by the group and then someone else guesses correctly to much cheering. This makes the game look easy, and probably fools observers into thinking they’re especially good at the shell game because they can find the ball every time. I can only assume that when someone is playing the game for real, the shuffle is much faster and tricker to follow.

After watching for a while, we saw a middle-aged tourist approach the group, watch from the side for a while, and then scurry away to pull cash out of his money belt. His friend tried to talk him out of it. He played anyway. We watched him lose. His friend walked off in disgust. He lost again. He walked off to find his friend. The shell game people packed up after that. I assume they also pick your pockets when they can.

There were a few more tourist-scams going around, but we didn’t have any trouble. We don’t know why these three golden retreivers were standing sentinel outside the subway...

... but we can only assume it was a part of some kind of elaborate hoax.

Matt and I are now in Chamonix, a ski town in the French alps. He is practicing the ukulele and I am writing this. We’re staying in an Airbnb - our hosts are have at least three cats (two of whom have deigned to let me pat them) and we were warned that if we hear a noise like someone tapping on the window during the night it is just the local deer inadvertently banging their horns on the window while they try to eat whatever bits of grass near the house aren’t under snow.

[internetexplorersclub]

a home is a good meal, an apiary, a cathedral

This week has been an emotional one, because it started out with the fire in Notre Dame, an event I never imagined capable of happening. I know churches are flammable, but somehow this bulwark of Paris seemed untouchable? It was also a place that I have such clear memories of—we lived in Paris for a few months when I was in fifth grade, and both Claire and I were taken by Notre Dame, its gargoyles, its stained glass, its solidity. So this was an unsettling event. 

I found myself surprised by the joy I felt upon learning that the rose windows had survived, and upon finding out that was an apiary on the roof of the sacristy, and the bees survived. That being said, if you feel compelled to donate to a church restoration, please consider the three black churches that burned in Louisiana—they’ve already raised $2M, but I’m sure costs will exceed that. 

The Public Domain review wrote about how woodcuts in 17th century England were reused and remixed, in an interesting precursor to meme culture today. 

 Jia Tolentino wrote about the nostalgia she felt when hearing a remix of Toto’s “Africa” made to sound like it’s in an empty mall. I experienced a similar wave of nostalgia when I found a Tumblr that remixed songs to sound like they’re playing in another room at a college party. 

Related is this piece about unexpected memories “accidentally trapped in amber” by our devices—from old wifi networks to tabs in browsers to weather for locations we visited long ago. 

I’ve been sitting on these for a while, so it’s TIME to share them. Three long reads about Men In American Society! First up: One Hundred Years Of Men Taking Off Their Shirts, which is just fascinating:

There were plenty of men who took off their shirts onscreen between Gable and Brando, but once you watch Brando do it in A Streetcar Named Desire, it’s difficult to keep them in mind. 

A good chaser is this look at one of Hollywood’s first heartthrobs, Sessue Hayakawa, one of Valentino’s contemporaries, showing his role as heartthrob (girls are throwing their fur coats to prevent him from stepping in puddles!) while still navigating racist typecasting. PLEASE let there be a biopic of him, I will be first in line. 

536 was apparently the “worst year to be alive,” due to a volcanic eruption in Iceland and then plagues, plural, which made it snow in the summer China, ruining crops, and put Europe into an economic stagnation that lasted until 640. 

A historian wrote about Britain’s “first Brexit,” aka leaving the Roman Empire, and I was struck by learning that they were the rednecks of the Roman Empire:

In Britain – more, perhaps, than anywhere else in the empire – loyalty to Rome co-existed with a sense of alienation from its rule. No matter how assiduously a British aristocrat might take baths or invest in central heating, he was almost certain to be viewed on the continent as a redneck. Centuries after the absorption of Britain into the Roman empire, the very notion of a civilised Briton was still capable of generating hilarity. “There’s no such thing,” one poet in fourth century Gaul had sneered.

Back to the heart of the Empire though: new evidence about where people fleeing Pompeii ended up! Historians compared names of Pompeiians with inscriptions and grave sites in neighboring cities in the years following to see where people ended up. Also, they have excavated the first horse from Pompeii! 

To close us out: the universe, perhaps sensing my need, has brought forth some wonderful articles about food and home and family recently. Juan Paul Brammer wrote about the

“healing magic” of his abuela’s caldo de pollo

, and I found myself just knocked off my feet by his writing:

For those of us who have been assimilated, Latin-American history itself can feel like this—half-remembered fever dreams of textures, relics, and traditions with labyrinthine roots that evade tangibility. I believe it’s why our culture lends itself to the fantastical, why magical realism found its home under our roof. We inhabit an “in between.” This notion of being caught between worlds, dubbed “nepantla” by queer Chicana scholar Gloria Anzaldua, plays out colorfully in our cuisine, where indigenous traditions live on in everyday kitchen objects like the comal, a flat griddle for tortillas, called “comali” in the Aztec world, and the molcajete, a tripod mortar and pestle from pre-Columbian days.

Bon Appetit has been doing a series on red sauce Italian restaurants, so you can read about the history of Buca di Beppo (completely fascinating), as well as Roxane Gay on Little Dom’s, and about how home isn’t always a house.

These restaurants are firmly ensconced in a neighborhood. When you eat at one, you are, for an hour or two, a necessary thread in that community’s fabric. You are part of an authentic experience.

I headed to Little Dom’s after reading this—I’d had it recommended, but had never stopped by—with my aunt, uncle, and toddler cousin. We sat outside on the patio on a slightly chilly Los Angeles evening, cutting into rice balls and watching the gooey cheese emerge, and taking bites of gnocchi that—at least, to me—were heavenly. The kiddo was thrilled with spaghetti, and there was something a little big magical as we joined in that community fabric, sitting on the sidewalk, surrounded by bustling tables.

#internet explorers club #internet ephemera #woodcuts #nostalgia #red sauce #heartthrobs

[wardoftheedgeloaves]

China Story Time II: Learn Programming and Epidemiology the Very Hard Way

I haven’t posted more than two installments of my promised series on Chinese historical linguistics and dialectology. In lieu of progress on it, please gather round the campfire and enjoy this entirely unrelated story about the time I taught the summer camp from hell in Shenzhen. (Dialectology tie-in: we once had a cabbie who only [?] spoke Canto.)

I wish to emphasize that this story has not been embellished.

Summer in China is a sultry and slow-paced affair for the private-school English teacher--you stop teaching seriously in late May, school gets out in late June, and you don’t have to be back until early September. Your pay is good enough that you’ve got savings to last you the summer, but you could always use a bit of spare cash. Unless your social situation is good, your isolation (and the weather) doesn’t help your work ethic too much. Your life is lived at tea houses, reading thinkpieces and books and procrastinating on writing more thinkpieces and working on your Mandarin and getting around to that damned monograph. (Alternative English-teacher mode: hit the bars prowling for locals who may or may not fit within the (n/2)+7 rule, demolish a couple of six-packs’ worth of alcohol, hit the hay at 2:30 in the morning, wake up at noon, repeat. I was luckily never this much of a degenerate.)

As in the US, the affluent Chinese parent often sends their offspring to summer camp for some educational enrichment and peace and quiet at home. So it was that a recruiter offered me, and another English teacher (we’ll call him...Nick) in Chengdu, the chance to earn 7000 kuai (~$1050) each teaching programming in Shenzhen. A class in the morning from 9-12, repeated from Monday to Friday, with a chance for a second week in Lu’an, Anhui. Plane tickets and accommodation included, other details vague. Technically illegal--you’re not supposed to do any work outside of the job sponsoring your visa--but nobody cares about summer camps.

To learn programming, the students (and we) are provided with little inch-by-inch-by-inch plastic cubes with wheels called “Pocket-bots” or something of the sort. These are actually rather nifty little gadgets. You connect to them with your phone or computer in a spacious computer lab (or so the brochures say) and click and drag instructions to create and run programs. E.g., you might tell the bot to go forward for 10 seconds at speed 10, then check to see if it was on white (rather than black) paper, and sing a little song if it is, then turn left and repeat. The software allowed you to do if-loops, for-loops, and while-loops at the very least, which is pretty good for small kids. Satisfied that we would have the equipment needed to teach the class, we packed our Pocket-bots and arrived in Shenzhen on a sticky, hot, sunny July morning.

Now, a word on Shenzhen. In 1978 when Deng took the wheel, Shenzhen was a sleepy little fishing village of thirty thousand people whose only interesting feature was that it was right next to Hong Kong. This made it perfect for the early-80s experiments in capitalism, and over the next four decades it exploded (it now has 12 million people and a standard of living on par with Western Europe). As a result of its early rise to wealth and power, it’s home to the first private school in China, founded 1994. However, private schools in China tend to be boarding schools, and boarding schools tend to be out away from the city center where land is cheap and distractions are relatively few.

So this place is in the middle of nowhere, or as close to the middle of nowhere as it’s possible to get in the Pearl River Delta. It’s surrounded by forested mountains (Guangdong is surprisingly hilly). It’s about 95 (35) degrees, humid as hell, and in direct sunlight--July, south of the Tropic of Cancer. We’re in the kids’ dorm rooms (luckily we each get our own private dorm room with a private, cold-running shower.) We drop our bags, wash up, and go meet the kids.

And it turns out that a fifth of them are Americans! You see, this wasn’t just a programming camp--it was also an English and cross-cultural experience camp. Approximately 15 high-school kids from Florida and California were being flown out, all expenses paid, to be big-brother/big-sister with the Chinese kids, who were in late elementary school. The chaperone (we’ll call her Margaret; in fact I can’t actually remember her name, but it definitely wasn’t Margaret), the mother of one of the kids, was thoroughly perplexed--but, hey, a free trip to China.

So Nick and I go and look at the teaching rooms (this is about one in the afternoon). These aren’t the sparkling, spacious computer labs we saw on the website, oh no. We have a couple of primary school classrooms no more than about five meters by six, with laughably tiny kindergartner-sized chairs and tables. There’s a smartboard, which we can barely get to run and which we can’t connect to our computers to show the programs the kids are supposed to run. There’s no free access to the wifi. Instead, we have to get our teaching assistants to put their login credentials on every single device that needs to connect to the wifi--and since you have to have wifi to connect to the robots, well. In other words, it’s going to be a s***show, and we’ve got five mornings of it ahead of us.

We know the inevitable talk/confrontation with our boss/program coordinator is going to be a disaster, so we leave for a few hours to try and find a six-pack of Tsingtao. Remember how I said this was in the middle of nowhere? It was in the middle of nowhere. We walk out of the gates for a full kilometer (possibly more; the road meandered, and the terrain was by no means flat) past construction sites and dense forest bordering on jungle until we finally, finally reach an air-conditioned convenience store nestled between auto-repair shops, low-rise tile-walled tenements, light industry and eight-kuai noodle parlors. (Those of you who have been outside of a major city center in China will know the kind of neighborhood I’m talking about--not dangerous, by any means (except for the traffic), but boring, sprawling and not overly prosperous.) But they have beer, and we knock back two each along with a good liter of water.

We have a chat with the supervisor at about 9 o’clock that evening while the kids are engaging in...god, I don’t even recall. I think the Chinese kids were in bed, while the Americans were playing cards and vidya. Now readers who have spent much time in China or with Chinese organizations will know that it is a faux pas in China to admit fault, and an even bigger faux pas to play hardball to get somebody to admit fault. The result, usually, is deflection--our supervisor didn’t know about any of this, it wasn’t her fault, she would ask her boss to try and improve things.

(I don’t wish to come across as too hard on Chinese culture here. I think this is really a situation where American and Chinese culture are doomed to clash, and clash badly. If you fuck up in the US, you’re supposed to admit fault and apologize, at least theoretically--deflection and white lies are infuriating on the receiving end and the natural reaction is to start tearing them apart to get an admission of contrition. In China, the convention is often that you tell a white lie or deflect to save face--and if the other person you’re talking to is Chinese, they’ll often accept that even if it’s not really believed. The result in Chinese-American communication can be an arms race, where the American will get ticked off at the deflection and perceived dishonesty and start playing hardball, which prompts more deflection. Looking back on it now, it was clear that trying to play hardball with our supervisor was pointless--we were never going to get good computer labs or WiFi, and the only thing to do was to figure out something to do. But knowing that we’d at least theoretically been hired to teach programming, we endeavoured to do our best. (Remember, between flying all the Americans over and the company’s profit, the Chinese parents were getting fleeced.) Nick had recently discovered the stern precepts of Jordan Peterson after catching herpes-type-2 (that’s the bad kind) of the mouth from a liaison with his dermatologist, and reminded me that it was our duty to do the best we could by the students.

Day one: Monday.

There are about 70-75 kids in the program between the Chinese and the Americans, so we have about 35 each at least in classrooms of about fifteen square meters, sitting on tiny little kindergarten chairs at tiny little kindergarten desks (not so much of a problem for the Chinese elementary-schoolers, much more uncomfortable for the American high-schoolers). Our teaching assistants spend most of their time in the back playing on their phones after they’ve set the WiFi on each device, which takes about an hour to get worked out. (Remember, three-hour class with a fifteen-minute break). Each room has an underpowered air conditioner which succeeds in reducing the temperature from the mid-30s C to the upper 20s (from about 92 to 78 in freedom degrees) if the windows are closed, at the cost of any breezes.

And we run into the first problem. Your device uses WiFi to connect automatically and effortlessly to a nearby Pocketbot. That’s not a problem when you’re in a spacious computer lab with ten other people and a strong signal. When you’re in a tiny little room with thirty-five other people and a network that wouldn’t have been out of place in the last years of the Clinton administration, well. 

Some kids couldn’t connect to their bot at all. Others were controlling four robots at once with a single device. Some were able to stay connected through the session, others’ internet kept crapping out every ten minutes.

After an hour and twenty minutes of this, we call a twenty-minute break.

easternestablishmentarian: “What the fuck do we even do?”

Nick: “No idea. Start in on the basic ideas of programming. Have the teaching assistants translate.”

We do. The teaching assistants are not all that happy about having to play translator, particularly since their English isn’t very good and the concepts are, well, complicated! I had some success in doing the teacher-as-robot routine you see in intro programming classes, where you have to tell the teacher exactly what to do (Keep going! *teacher-bot crashes into wall*), and extended this up to about half past eleven by making it a group activity where the Chinese kids had to direct their American big-sibling robots around the room. We spent about another fifteen minutes trying to do something, anything, with the robots--remember, we couldn’t show our laptop screens on the smartboard, which didn’t work, so we had to draw the program with chalk. At about 11:45 we just call it quits and let them leave for lunch early.

Right after lunch (which, incidentally, was extremely strange--the cafeteria staff had been instructed to try to make some sort of Chinese-Western fusion, with results like spaghetti with both tomato and soy sauce. If only they’d just stuck to good local dishes, of which there are hundreds, but oh well...) we call an emergency meeting with Margaret.

Margaret: You guys aren’t going to bail on us, are you? I have no clue what’s going on.

Me: No, but it’s clear that there’s no way to do programming and the kids’ll hate it. Let’s just do a regular summer camp.

Later that day we go back out for more beer and sketch out a plan. We don’t have WiFi or devices worth a damn, so electronics are off. However, we do have a campus of at least twenty or thirty acres filled with small fields and six-story dorms and classrooms connected by a labyrinth of walkways. (During the school year, the school is home to about three thousand students, all boarding, so it’s the size of a couple city blocks at least.)

We call a meeting with our supervisor.

Nick: This isn’t working. We can’t do programming.

Supervisor: Well, do you have any other ideas?

Nick: We could do sports and games.

Supervisor: Oh, I think that will be wonderful!

(Nick, later: “How much are these parents paying again?”)

Day two: Tuesday.

We start with Sardines, which degenerates into chaotic hide-and-seek but keeps them occupied for a good hour and a half. The teaching assistants are sent to look for athletic equipment like basketballs, which they’re not too happy about. Midway through break we run out of cups.

Us: “It’s 35 degrees outside and we don’t have enough water. There are only two water dispensers for 80 people and no more cups.”

Teaching assistant: “Oh, well, we didn’t know we would run out. I don’t know where the water is, maybe they can bring some tomorrow.”

Us: *sigh*

We discover that some air-conditioned buses (dlory! dlory! hallelujah!) stop right in front of the school and run towards a major commercial center. We go out for hotpot.

Nick: “So, fun fact--I’m actually on a spousal visa. I married a local chick for visa purposes.”

Me: “Huh.”

Nick: “Yeah, we divorced, but the immigration department doesn’t have access to divorce records and my visas’s still valid. Can’t technically work on it, though.”

Day three: Wednesday.

Capture the Flag, followed by semi-structured time in which the Americans are divided into groups, assigned Chinese students, and instructed to create activities. We run out of cups again.

Nick: *drinking straight from the water dispenser tap*

Me: “Didn’t you say you caught...”

Nick: “Shut up, easternestablishmentarian.”

Me: “...”

Me: “There are seventy-five kids here.”

Nick: “Just shut up.”

I buy my own personal supply of bottled water that afternoon. He did agree to only fill up a bottle from that point onwards.

Us: “Supervisor, please tell us--will there be WiFi when one of us teaches programming with the robots in Lu’an in Anhui?”

Supervisor: “Oh, uh, I don’t know, I am not going to Anhui.”

Us: “Please find out.”

Day four: Thursday. 

It being sunny and slightly cooler, we take the kids on a hike through a back trail that goes by a farm and into the woods. Guangdong proves to be home to some terrifyingly large arthropods, none of which are aggressive.

After lunch, we debate who will go on to Lu’an. Nick makes a good case for needing the money, so I cede it (in part because Anhui is a notoriously boring and underdeveloped province, and Lu’an is only its second- or third-biggest city).

Us: “So, supervisor, please tell us.”

Supervisor: “Oh, yes, there is no WiFi for the summer camp in Anhui, I asked.”

Us: “But Nick’s going to be teaching robots again?”

Supervisor: “Well, maybe he can also teach something else, like English, but yes, it’s a robot camp.”

Us: “But you need WiFi to work with the robots.”

Supervisor: “Oh, I’m not the supervisor in Anhui, just here in Shenzhen, so I didn’t know.”

Day five: Friday.

After a laughably pointless closing ceremony, we collect our paychecks (in cash) and head into Shenzhen, where Nick tries to send it out. 

Bank teller: “So, uh, what are you doing in China?”

Nick: “I’m visiting family, it’s a spousal visa.”

Bank teller: “OK, so I don’t think this is possible, you have the tax form?” (note: this is quite common for foreigners, even those on legal visas--foreigners’ money has all sorts of systems and regulations surrounding it that most bank tellers don’t know how to handle (because there are so few foreigners), and to avoid losing face they will often just tell you that it’s not possible to do what you want to do.)

At this point, I’m starting to shake my head furiously in Nick’s direction--get us out of here before they start asking questions about where this money came from and call immigration. After two hours, we give up.

Me: “You could have gotten us deported.”

Nick: “Nah, man, they’re just clueless bank tellers.”

I fly back to Chengdu the following day seven thousand kuai richer, while Nick hangs on until Sunday and then flies to Lu’an with the Americans, where another group of Chinese kids get their parents fleeced for robots that don’t work (though, as he told it, things worked out fine, kind of.) The kids, incidentally, were great about the whole incident--the Chinese kids I think in part because their lives are so structured that just getting to run around was a breath of fresh air for them. The Americans were fairly willing to work around the absurdity. Nobody got deported and nothing’s appeared in the news about an epidemic of the sort of disease that schoolchildren aren’t supposed to get.

So we come to the moral of the story, children: all’s well that ends well, and buy your own water.

[deprofundisad]

How to nicely and smoothly save your DMM stream without a screen capture app but using simply VLC (and Video Download Helper).

 AKA when your computer is a potato 

EDIT: DMM recently changed their protocol and that trick ISN’T WORKING anymore (especially if your stream’s url starts with http://tc-video3.dmm.com)... 

... but you won’t let that stop you ;)

(Of course, this is all theoretical, since, you know, it’s not technically legal and stuff... so obviously, I’m just posting that out of general, scientific, detached interest XD)

So, as I am found of mentioning, my laptop is a potato. It is over 11 years old, has traveled around the world with me and has somehow survived all the tea and coffee I poured on it through the ages. It is truly a warrior and still allows me to stream HD videos on the net without any problem, like the DMM streams for example (cheaper than dvds, even though it’s fun the get them both and compare the editing XD). Where the troubles start however is when screen recording is involved. The graphic card and processor of my good old potato just can’t handle the pressure of streaming HD video *AND* screen recording it at the same time in a decent quality, whatever the different settings I tried to cajole it with. This was just the line it would not cross and kept sulking when I tried to force Active Presenter on it by getting very hot and handing me over very jerky-hicky out-of-sync recordings. 

Since screen recording was a big no no, I tried to remove it from the equation and I thought about tinkering around a bit with VLC since it has a stream recording feature. AND IT WORKED VERY WELL! (theoretically, of course XD)

The only tricky bit is how to find the url of the stream (edit: just made that step easier;)) in order to put it into VLC, so that it can manufacture a nice and smooth recording for you. There are however 2 small downsides: the processing of the video by VLC may be a bit quite very long and you will want to leave your potato alone while it’s dealing with the task.

 So, if you’re interested on knowing how to achieve that (out of pure curiosity, of course, nothing else XD), there is how you should proceed.

First, to buy a DMM stream, follow the steps from the excellent guide made by Riku, from 1 to 7. And I will explain the alternative 8th step - how to save the video on your disc without using a screen recording app (with pics!) - under the cut.

You can still try the following steps BUT THE TRICK ISN’T WORKING ANYMORE because DMM changed their streaming protocols

SERIOUSLY, It DOESN’T work anymore! 

STEP 8 BIS: 

Please read this first: you can follow the rest of the tutorial, however you will get stuck at the end of step 8 bis B and VLC will never actually start recording. The progression line will never actually start progressing. I have received a number of messages from people asking me for help - despite the fact that this post was edited 2 years ago to signal that the trick wasn’t working anymore - because they couldn’t record the stream with VLC. Well, again, I’m sorry but it is perfectly normal because the trick doesn’t work anymore. I have tried to find a way around the problem 2 years ago before throwing in the towel quite quickly once I found an easier way to cook up a decent screen capture recording with my good old potato and figured it was maybe more time-consuming but certainly less of a hassle than digging around in DMM’s code with almost zero computer skills. If I ever come back to this quest of finding a new hack and become successfull, I’ll edit this post. In the meantime, please keep in mind that even if you follow the next steps, you won’t be successful in ripping a DMM stream.

STEP 8 bis A 

First, you need to find the URL of the stream. I used to do a trick with Firefox and the web developer console, but it turns out there is a much easiest way to find it with Video Download Helper. Note that if your computer is a new sleek thing, you can try to save the video directly via Video Download Helper (I’ll just call it DH now, for clarity sake, because VDH may be confusing): you have a 1 on 3 chance that the addon will succeed in completing the download. But if you have a potato, the chances drop down to about 1 on 100. That’s why using both DH and VLC may be the safest option.

Before anything else, if you’re not already using it, add the Video Download Helper addon to your browser (it works best with Firefox). You can find it there.

Once you have set up your VPN, bought your stream and gone to your library on DMM.com, open the stream you’re interested in (still hypothetically XD) and start it, just like you would if you were going to simply watch it. Like this one for example

Once you have started the video, look at the top right corner of your browser and you will see the DH icon, 3 little balls, suddenly wearing the colours blue, yellow and red. This means it has detected video(/audio/stuff) flux that it can download.

Then, pause the video and shut down your VPN. (Technically, you can still watch the video and change the quality settings as long as you don’t refresh the page).

 Go back to the page where the stream is open and open the menu of DH (the 3 coloured balls) by clicking on it. It will display the list of medias it has detected on the page, like this: 

In our present case, those are the different levels of quality you can choose to watch the video in. If you glide over the one you’re interested (but don’t click just right now), you will see a little white arrow appear in a grey box next to it, on the right side. Click on that arrow.

And on the menu that appears, click on the option “Copy the URL”, like this:

  Congratulation! You just copied the URL to your video.

Note that if you’re not a potato owner, you may try your chance with downloading directly the file on your disc by choosing one of the 3 first options. Unfortunately, DH doesn’t handle well long heavy videos. But you never know, eh? Might just be lucky this time. If your computer is old and slow, don’t even bother to try...

 STEP 8 bis B

The only part left to do is to record the stream with VLC.

Open VLC and in the menu “Media”, choose “Convert/Save”

 Click on “Network”

 Since VLC is a clever little beast, the URL you just copied should already appear in the url box. If not, simply click right and paste it. Then select “Convert/Save”.

 You will get to the following window: 

The source is the URL you previously added. If you check “Display the output”, you will get to see the video at the same time VLC is converting it, but I will advise against it if your computer is a potato and if it can’t handle screen capturing, because the process will be dreadfully slow and you will end up with light glitches in the final video if the processor is overwhelmed. And most likely you will only get a glitchy preview anyway.

[Note: At this stage, I also recommend to shut down all the other applications running on your computer, including firefox, to help your little potato to really pour all its strength and power exclusively into the task of getting you that nice video. And before you actually launch the processing of the video, you may elite to do a couple of other optional things to help it further: first, if you have a laptop, make sure to deactivate any energy saving mode and connect your power cable (just don’t trust your battery). Secondly, you may also choose to try and prioritize VLC as a main task (Ctrl+Alt+Delete > Task Manager (Window) > Processes(Windows XP) or Details (Windows 10)  > right click on VLC > change the priority > High) the CPU will allocate the most ressources to (and you can switch it back later; the priorities will reset to default anyway when you shut down VLC or when you switch off the computer).]

Then, choose the path for the exit file and create a name for it by clicking on “Browse”. If you know what you’re doing, you can also tinker with the profile, but the default one is really fine too, especially for a trial. When you’re ready, just hit “Start”.

You will arrive at this final window:

The progression line may flicker for a few seconds in yellow, as VLC is establishing the connection to the url of the stream. When it’s ready to start, you will see appear on the bottom right the complete duration time of the video file and on the bottom left the progression of VLC as it processes it from the beginning to the end. Don’ t touch anything, just let it do its thing until the end; at this stage, your role is over and the rest is up to your potato.

The speed of progression will depend on the speed of your internet connection as well as whether you continue to use you computer to do something else in the meantime or if you let it focus exclusively on the task. The manier the tasks you ask it to deal with at the same time VLC is treating the video, the higher the chances to get some minor glitches in the processed video. If your computer is a smart new thing, watching another video or browsing the internet at the same time may not have much impact on the process. However, show some mercy for your little potato and try to help it by being patient. I had to let mine in peace for 4 hours and a half so that it could process 3 hours and a half of high quality video. Also, if you can use an internet cable instead of the wifi, that may speed things up. And if your potato is a laptop, remember to plug in the power cable (it is unlikely that the battery will hold long enough) and deactivate any energy saving mode.

  When the conversion is over, it will look like that.

Close VLC, take a big breath and look up the emplacement of the file on your disc. If you chose the default settings, it should appear as a mp4 file (with the audio track already merged in) quite heavy (depending on the quality of the stream that you chose) but with a nice and smooth quality to it.

To give you an example, there is a short clip from the final video (beware of spoilers - but since someone already uploaded the OP song...) from the second highest quality of Tousute Hiden that I may or may not (XD) have gotten after letting my eleven years old potato do his thing for a little over 4 hours (total file size of 4Gb). (Note: Tumblr drastically lowered the video quality, but it’ s still possible to see that the video isn’t jerky)

So, anyone interested in trying out that trick - purely out of scientific curiosity - on, say, Tousute Hiden for example XD, before the end of the delayed stream (in a little over 12 hours), by all means, be curious as hell... theoretically, of course XD 

Feel free to ask if you have any questions.

REMINDER: again, please keep in mind that this tutorial doesn’t work anymore because DMM changed their streaming protocols 2 years ago.

#DMM #VLC #useful #no screen record #save video stream #tousute #hiden

[mariposakitten]

Things to know about calling tech support

No matter how crappy you think your internet provider is, I promise you the tech support agent WANTS TO FIX YOUR PROBLEM. Either because you’re nice and we want you to have a good day or because you’re a jerk and you won’t go away until we do.

You are going to have to help troubleshoot. Please don’t act surprised when we ask you to do so. No, you should not “get paid for doing our work” just because you had to unplug and plug in your router.

If you physically can’t do a task for whatever reason, tell us that. (As opposed to, say, getting angry that we even asked.)

Outages and systems being down are no more fun for us than they are for you. They are almost always caused by something outside of our control. Yelling at us, calling us names, or repeatedly explaining how inconvenient this is for you is not going to get it fixed any faster.

We do, in fact, know what we’re doing. When we ask a question or say “try this,” we’re doing so for a reason. If you think you know how to do my job better than me you are more than welcome to hang up and do it yourself, but if you’re asking for my help, please don’t argue with me when I’m trying to give it.

Your computer running slowly does not mean you are being hacked.

Seeing your neighbor’s wifi network does not mean you are being hacked.

Receiving a phishing email or a scam phone call does not mean you are being hacked.

You are probably not being hacked.

You are going to have to answer questions at the beginning of the call. Name, address, callback number, maybe a security question. Yes, it’s annoying. It has to be done. Arguing, getting angry, complaining that “I already gave this information!”, or passive aggressive tricks like only giving your first name and making us ask for the last name, or rattling off an address or number too fast for us to type it down, will only make everything take longer.

Yes, maintenance does periodically have to be done in order to keep things running smoothly. Yes, we have to (by law!) do it during a time when the fewest number of people use the services. Yes, that means the middle of the night. Yes, if you are a night own trying to get online at 3 am, that sucks. I get it. I’m a night owl too. But I promise to you, I swear on my soul, it is not a conspiracy against you personally. It’s really not. It’s just an unfortunate necessity.

There is no need to shout. We can hear you.

Sometimes shit just fucks up. That is the honest truth. There is no such thing as technology that never fucks up. There is no magical service that will never have an interruption. Sometimes shit goes wrong. 

Relatedly: there are many, many things that we can FIX even though we may not be able to explain WHY. Sometimes the why isn’t obvious! Sometimes the why is super technical and explaining it would take all day. Sometimes it could have been caused by any number of things and we can only guess which ones it might be. Sometimes it’s just gremlins. The important thing is fixing it.

There is no situation where verbally abusing the tech support rep is going to help you. None. Even if it doesn’t make your situation worse, I guarantee it’s not going to make it better. “But it makes me feel better!” Yes, working out your anger and frustration by abusing someone else is often very cathartic! It’s still a dick move. Don’t do it.

Look, I get it. It’s 2019. When the internet goes out it feels like a catastrophe. But it is not okay to stop being a human being! Common sense and common decency do not go out the window as soon as you hear “Hi, thank you for calling [X], how can I help you?”

#tech support #frustrated #please stop yelling at me #i really am trying to help

[sunlaozu]

KAGEHINA NEIGHBOR AU WHERE THEY COMMUNICATE VIA WIFI NETWORK NAMES AND THE OTHER NEIGHBORS ARE LIKE "DUDES JUST START DATING ALREADY"

Entirely based on this post. This is also a gift of appreciation (and a very truly belated birthday one) for you, Sage!

They were new in town when Shouyou was handed the task to set up the wifi.

The first few days in their new house were spent on cleaning, unpacking and tidying, and this went on for Shouyou until their wireless router had been discovered broken in the midst of unpacking. A new one had to be bought immediately on spot, his father decided, and Shouyou’s opportunity to explore arose when his father appointed him to be in charge.

And without wasting a breath, Shouyou took this as a chance to map through the town he so very wanted to explore.

His legs are pedaling the gears of his bike through the streets with much fervor, and the wind slaps against his skin, through his hair, in his ears, and he’s desperate, eager to unfold all the pieces of the place where it’s already breathing to him a sense of contentment within one take of its air.

The town is small, near the countryside and from what he’s gathered through the car trip on their way to their new neighborhood, it’s bursting with ocean of colors and floral scents which had all been a delightful welcome. There are more cherry trees than he’s ever counted, more spring flowers, and he feels the ache to tread through the tall sunflower fields when he sees them sitting by the bank of warm lakes.

Here, Shouyou could already tell there’s a promise to a fulfilling life for all the things it possess which Tokyo lacks.

Their neighbors are kind. They presented them with a fresh fruit basket as a warm welcome, and they helped Shouyou in his task earlier too when he asked them for directions on shops to purchase wifi accessories from. It’s only after many pauses in his track as he gets lost in discovering wonders of the small town and getting acquainted with the shop workers assisting him, Shouyou does finally manage to buy the much needed router.

But it also takes Shouyou plugging the router into a socket to realize he has no idea what he’s doing.

As it turns out, his small drops of knowledge in setting up the connection hadn’t been enough for him to carry through. Luckily, he has an internet service on his phone and it works well enough for him to do research on establishing the network, but when he feels his brain cells crumpling under the pressure of mind-consuming work later on, he ends up calling for his father who’d give him a guide.

It goes on until the night, until he becomes very sure of his closely approaching death at this point, but eventually, he gets there.

And then, something happens before the wee hours of an evening.

Shouyou’s sacrificed what little sleep he had for this one moment: on the screen, their connection– ‘Little giant’ as he names it– has finally appeared under the list of available networks.

Like a switch, his body instantly slumps against his chair. His triumph have soaked him in waves of relief pleasantly, but the rapture feeling is outweighed by the lack of rest when he feels it immediately chipping away at his consciousness. He decides to call it the night, eyelids growing heavy, and moves his mouse to close the dock on his laptop.

But then he witnesses a sudden change of name as one of the other networks, with some fancy lock beside it, goes from ‘Setter Soul’ to ‘I’m using little giant to torrent volleyball’.

Suddenly, Shouyou doesn't feel as tired. He shoots up from his seat, grows a pair of wide eyes and makes a sound quite close to, if not, an inhuman squawk.

He isn’t sure what to do. He doesn’t know what to do. He’s flushing with shock, anger, but mostly confusion, and so, it’s entirely out of an impulse when he tries to connect to the other network but gets horrified to see a password is required for him to enter.

Oh, yes. He nearly forgets. The fancy lock means that it's a private connection. That jerk.

Then he’s furiously typing the next second, having his own network’s name changed to ‘How did you get that lock?!’ because he can’t think of another way to reach out to this person, so he desperately hopes that they’d see.

And they definitely do see, all right. ‘Find out yourself.’ The response files in with a glare of mockery in its words.

Shouyou grits his teeth, had to fling himself onto his bed for a moment first so he could scream, right into his pillow, without waking up his family.

‘You’re an asshole.’

‘And your taste in music sucks.’

‘Are you snooping around my iTunes?!’

‘D'espairsRay? Their music is giving me despair, all right.’

What comes afterwards had been a furious flurry of banters and threats. Insults thrown back and forth, buttons pushed and pressed repeatedly that it eventually reaches to the point where someone (who surprisingly notices them) has to step in and dismantle the aggressive tension. The ruckus does die down, but only for a while. Unlike Asshole (as Shouyou decides on their name) the newcomer is much more helpful and incredibly kind enough to help him secure his connection.

Shouyou shouts in glee once he manages to achieve the private connection. Even more so, Asshole hasn’t said anything since the newcomer pops in to help but Shouyou feels the need to say something, to poke at him, because with the advent of the lock, the asshole should have been kicked out.

‘Hah, suck on my secured internet!’ He grins smugly, saving the new change for a name.

Asshole replies, ‘Doesn’t change that your music still sucks.’

They fight again.

Even if Shouyou manages to make his family’s network private, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’d signal the end to his interaction with Asshole.

In fact, he only hopes that with his newly acquired skills, his life could be spared for a little longer in the future if he were to set up a router again; Shouyou doesn’t think he’d last if he has to deal with another asshole bursting into his life because his soul is already withering into ashes and that was just one he had to deal with and their constant presence.

But despite all this and the animosity they harbored for each other, they keep talking.

It’s unclear why they’re still talking when all they’ve done is point jabs at each other. Shouyou knows he should probably stop responding to them, but he’s never one to overlook when someone is picking a fight with him, and he's definitely not the kind to back down either, so truthfully, Shouyou does play some part of fault in here.

There’s never a fight when the two are talking, but then their fights soon become more playful, less intense, and before he knows it, it’d lead them to an occasional small, mindless talk, and— and it’s- well, it’s weird. It’s weird enough that they’re communicating through the network names, and it’s even weirder when he considers the possibility of having his family and his neighbors read their drifting, fleeting conversation.

Or… their neighbors? Shouyou finds himself startled at this waking realization. Asshole has to be a neighbor of his after all for their networks to within each other’s range. There’s no way someone isn’t a neighbor if they popped up in their list, it doesn’t make any sense otherwise.

“Great. I’m neighbors with an asshole.” Shouyou says, sulkily, as he stuffs his face into the pillow. Yet, surprisingly, he somehow feels less disappointed with the revelation than he thought he would have.

And so, this peculiarity they share continues and it has gone on for a good month now. Shouyou is currently in his post-graduation, and he still has yet to receive any of the acceptance letters from the universities he’s applied to so, he’s been making use of his free time doing various things, and chatting with Asshole become among these things.

From the looks of it, Asshole seems to be in the same shoe as him, because he’s fast, highly responsive, though there are times it takes a while for them to reply, it makes Shouyou wonder in the briefest moment if they’re around his age and whether they’re a postgraduate like he was too.

One day, he wakes up on a sunny morning nestled into the crook of his pillow, to Asshole’s new network name when he checks his phone. 

'Are you awake?' The name reads, and it’s a question, and it’s something odd, so out of blue because they never ask him this, never did check in on him. Until now, that is. He knows that it’s Asshole too because he’s checked the list, their only other neighboring networks (Cat Town, Thunder, Blueville, and the one that’s stepped in to stop them fighting before- Mountain Valley) haven’t changed their names at all since the start of thei strange routine.

Shouyou kicks the bed sheets off of him. He pads towards his laptop to switch it on, and when he hears it whirring to life, he goes on to day with some hot tea from the kitchen, but not before he could type out a new handle for his family’s network to let his presence be known.

‘I am now!’

‘Finally. You slept for way too long.’

‘Aww, were you waiting for me?’

‘I bet you sleep like a log.’

Oh boy, Shouyou rolls his eyes, and sets his cup down onto the desk with a little more force than necessary. Now, just when he thinks how Asshole might be nice to him this time, they don’t and go back to square one, but he sets that aside for now in favor of shooting them back a furious reply.

“Brother!” Natsu announces her presence as she peeks her head into his room. “We’re going to the grocery store, and mom says that she wants you to come too!”

“Mm, okay.” Shouyou drones in reply.

“Now.” Natsu adds, and like that, she’s gone from the doorway.

He sighs, looking at his laptop then onto his unfinished drink. ‘I have to go,’ He types in a rush, putting his laptop to sleep, but he forgets to confirm the change when Natsu calls for him again from downstairs.

It takes a while, because his parents has winded up bringing them on a tour around the town after they finish their groceries.

When they finally return home in early evening, Shouyou feels a little drained, but the tiredness gets replaced by a mild surprise when he comes back to read ‘I’m sorry.’ on the display of his screen. He’s confused, isn’t entirely sure why the other is apologizing, but when he sees his unchanged network name since the morning, everything clicks in place.

He quickly sends an apology for his sudden disappearance, all the while trying to ignore how solemn the ‘I’m sorry’ has sounded in his head and the plummeting feeling in his chest.

Asshole, Shouyou muses, turns out to be not much of an asshole after all.

Well, in a way, they still are one since they haven’t stopped calling him a dumbass. But other than that, the condescending impression Shouyou had of them at first turns out to be a kind of misconception. Asshole speaks in a tone that settles for something less than arrogance, something more than a little straightforward, and to put it simply they’re brutally blunt with their words, even when they don’t know it, and Shouyou isn’t afraid at all to call him out.

Even on the rare occasions when the two are sharing a conversation on a topic pertaining to some depth in their lives, Asshole is being blunt.

Their responses are short too, often- no, usually, and it’s short enough that Shouyou doesn’t need to keep changing his network name to urge Asshole to continue (something that they do for him) after he’s done reading their text. It’s the little things like these that’s altered his view on Asshole because clearly, they didn’t mind how Shouyou is always brimming with a head full of words and even catered to him with a few words like ‘Wow.’ or ‘Cool.’

‘You talk too much.’ The words flash through his laptop screen after Shouyou finishes his storytelling of his ‘the most epic super fun incredible forest adventure’ when he was a kid, but Shouyou knows that there’s no bite to those words; it’s just Asshole punctuating their thoughts in such a way that makes it seem so much like they’re stating a fact.

He’s aware that the man- or woman- or whoever- on the other side won’t see him but that doesn’t stop him from sticking out his tongue at the screen as he retorts. ‘And you talk too little!’

There’s no reply for a little while, but as soon as one comes in, Shouyou knows he’s in for a night of longer banters than the usual.

Their neighboring networks joins in their conversations sometimes, but it happens once in a while.

Mountain Valley is nice as ever, and Thunder gives Shouyou the vibe of a well-respected awesome upperclassman. Blueville, on the other hand, while there’s something about them that doesn’t feel quite right, they could be fun to talk to as well.

At first, it was hard to keep a track on who’s saying which, and there was the one time everything has spiraled down into a big mess of garbage dump because no one knew who was who that they all ended up changing their network names back to what it originally is. Then from that point onward, whenever they have conversation in groups, they have a mutual agreement on leaving the first initial of their network handles at the start of their message.

Shouyou thinks it’s pretty cool, especially how they’re all neighbors, living in the same area, and how they don’t mind this strange thing they’re doing, and he briefly wonders if he gets to meet them all properly in person one day.

But there’s one neighbor who never joins them until the day they seemingly had enough.

This time, it’s only Asshole and Shouyou engaging in a conversation, and they’re talking about their favorite sports which coincidentally is volleyball and they’re quick to passionately talk about it when Cat Town barges in with their newly set name, ‘Oi, communicate like normal people.’

‘Huh?’ Asshole says, and Shouyou copies them.

It takes a while for Cat Town’s name to change again. ’Don’t you guys have social medias?’ and then another, ‘Or phone numbers?’ and Shouyou sits there, feeling an imaginal rock thrown at the side of his head at the existence of given options.

Shouyou embarrassedly types, ‘I… didn’t think of that.’

‘Me neither.’ Asshole types too.

‘Oh my god, you both are idiots.’

Shouyou has to exchange his number with Asshole’s pretty quick afterwards before anyone else gets the chance to see them and jot them down— although Shouyou has a feeling that no one would even be bothered with them at this point. Cat Town’s interruption could stand to be a testament to that. Soon enough, Shouyou’s network name goes back to being Little Giant, and as for Asshole, Setter Soul.

Chatting through phone turns out to be far, far more convenient than using the network name, and Shouyou couldn’t believe that he hadn’t thought of exchanging phone numbers before.

But then… things begin to get even weirder from there.

Asshole turns out to be a man and he turns out to have a name as well after all.

His name is Kageyama Tobio, he is a postgraduate like Shouyou and he’s a bit younger than him. The name is pretty cute, fitting even. There’s a kind of charm to it that resonates well with Kageyama’s character: awkward, somehow dorky, and it’s totally different than the first impression of a douchebag vibe which Kageyama had given him.

Now that they have some privacy to themselves, it’s more bearable as well. There’s more room for them to talk about themselves, they can talk about anything they want, but they’re alone, and the thought of this makes Shouyou's stomach squirm. Their conversations are sheltered now from the outside world; no outsiders to prey on the words they’d send to each other, no Mountain Valley or Cat Town to dance into their conversation freely, and as nice as it is to have their own privacy, Shouyou finds it would still take some time for him to get used to these new changes, and he does get used to it within a week's time.

And one day, Kageyama accidentally sends him something.

Kageyama sends him a picture. Only, it isn’t any picture, it’s the one where Shouyou finally gets to see the face of the man behind the screen who he’s been talking to. Although the possibility it isn’t Kageyama still stands since there isn’t any kind of caption attached to the picture sent, but Shouyou is pretty sure that it’s him.

The man in picture is understandably and impossibly attractive; short black hair with bangs tapered to a v-shape, a nose slotting from a high bridge into a perfect size of a mold, dark eyes and a pair of unfairly tempting lips.

‘Is that you?’ Shouyou asks.

‘Oh. Yes, it’s me.’ Kageyama texts him a bit later and Shouyou’s heart flutters at the confirmation, ‘Sorry. Sent it by accident.’

A beautiful and most gracious accident the world has to offer, Shouyou thinks and nearly smacks himself in the face at the thought.

He spends the next few moments on (definitely not) breathlessly fawning over Kageyama then. He squints at one point later, thinking that he might have seen this face somewhere before… which would make sense, he supposes. Kageyama is his neighbor after all, so he’s bound to have seen him at least once or twice.

Turning onto his back on his bed, Shouyou turns the camera on his phone to his face. He shifts around on his mattress, determined to find the perfect spot and the perfect angle for a selfie, and when he does find it, he snaps a picture of himself with a peace sign thrown up and a big bright smile peering into his phone screen.

Shouyou sends the picture to Kageyama, but only after he’s mustered enough courage.

He receives a text sometime later, and Shouyou’s face has grown thousands of shades darker than the hot red surface of the sun, stars in his chest dancing and bursting with bright lights as he reads the newly received text from Kageyama.

‘Cute.’ Kageyama says.

‘I know! I am!’ Shouyou returns the message with an emoji of a tongue sticking out to the side. It’s then an idea strikes him.

He wonders, what if they were to meet up? Meet properly for their first time, get to know each other more, and it’s not as if they live far, they’re neighbors, so it seems like a good option and a convenience for them to try.

But then Shouyou begins to mull over the details should they decide to meet. On one hand, it’s nice to finally see Kageyama face-to-face, but then he thinks about his attractive face, then some more thousands of other thoughts that could go terribly, horribly wrong.

“What if I make a fool out of myself?” He thinks aloud, shuddering at the worst scenarios playing in his head.

There’s a part of his mind that’s waging war with his doubts, whispering to him the chances of it being one among millions of things that could go great too, that it could be the best opportunity he’d miss out on, and so, he decides to give it a try.

With firecrackers lighting the sparks off his skin, he finally sends Kageyama the question in mind and puts his phone back down on his desk after.

He waits for the reply, but then two minutes passes by, five, fifteen, and by the thirtieth, he begins to panic and thinks he’s said the wrong thing, but he also tries to rationalize himself, that Kageyama is probably busy, and it’s not the first time he doesn’t reply within thirty minutes, so he decides to put his mind on something else. But then his phone sings an alarm, notifying him of an incoming text.

‘Sure. When?’ He reads on the screen.

He stares at the text, dumbfounded. Then, in the next second, he finds himself catching up in his sheer excitement Kageyama’s agreement has brought him that he dives back under his sheets to rejoice.

‘Let's meet up tomorrow!’

‘... Tomorrow?’

‘I mean…’ He pauses on typing, biting his lips to think of a reason. ‘We’re neighbors, aren’t we?’

‘Oh, yeah. Tomorrow then. Where?’

‘Great! Let's meet around three in the afternoon, yeah? We could just… stand outside the house and look for each other?’

‘Sure.’

They’re going to meet each other. Their first meeting. Their very first meeting. After two to three months of talking, they would meet. They’re going to meet up, and then– and then- talk? Shouyou doesn’t know what they will do once they run into each other but he figures a little trip around the town wouldn’t hurt.

He starts rolling around in his bed, grinning so widely through the entire time it starts to hurt his cheeks. It takes him five more minutes to recompose himself, click open his phone and fervently expressing his joy by flooding Kageyama’s inbox with dozens of emojis, finally ending his spree with a good night text.

‘Night. See you tomorrow.’ Kageyama replies, and it’s to this and the low humming pleasant sound within the room Shouyou has fallen asleep to.

Shouyou goes out for his daily run in the early morning. He admits, he is quite eager to meet Kageyama later on, but he’s been feeling nervous too since he wakes up which had been way too early, and it's worse that he doesn’t feel as ready as he did last night for their meeting. So, he figures that he’d run a little more around the neighborhood would do him a good favour.

He starts his routine with a few simple stretches before dashing through the sidewalk with every mighty kick off the ground. He does this, picking up his pace every few meters, until the familiar ache begins to settle in his legs, until his nerves dissipates, replaced by the good burn of jogging. And by the time he feels completely flushed of his nervousness, he decides to put an end to his routine there and jog back— but then, a voice speaks to him out of nowhere, effectively stopping him in his tracks.

“You’re even shorter than I imagined.”

Shouyou squeaks in surprise. He completely stills to a stop, his head turning ever so slowly to the side and sees- then nearly chokes when he’s met by the face he spends staring on his phone for a while the previous night.

Kageyama in person, is much more handsome than the Kageyama in picture. The first thing he notices, are the eyes. In the picture, Kageyama’s eyes had been dark, pitch black, but it might have been the bad lighting because here, under the ray of sun where it’s hitting his eyes, Shouyou could see their colors threaded in all hues of grays and blues.

The second thing he notices is that Kageyama is tall. He stands at least a head taller than him, much to his annoyance, and he’s wearing what looks to be a sportswear.

“You–?” Shouyou gapes, definitely quietly reeling over how he’s meeting Kageyama earlier than their promised time. “Y-you– oh, um, er, you run too?” He dumbly asks.

Kageyama blinks, somehow glaring. “I always run at this time.” He says, muttering, and then, Shouyou gawks, no longer shaken but shocked by the fact how they have never bumped into each other on their run.

“That’s funny, because I always run at this time too!” Shouyou says, and Kageyama looks surprised himself at this too.

“Oh.” He tells, growing quiet, and Shouyou can’t help but be amused at how well Kageyama’s way of texting has reflected him within just a few seconds into their meeting in person.

“So, uh.” Shouyou starts. They’ve already met each other now, and it sounds awkward to have them leave things as they are now only to get back together at later time. Heaving a deep breath, he points a thumb to another direction and gathers up his courage to ask, “Wanna go for a run together?”

But Kageyama doesn’t even wait for him, much less sparing him a glance as he suddenly runs past him with a breeze. “If you can catch up to me, that is, dumbass.”

“Wait… Huh?” Shouyou says dumbly for the second time, the gears in his head still wheeling until it clicks. “What the– hey! That’s totally cheating!” He shouts, and doesn’t think twice to chase after him, his laughter twinkling in the air.

It’s no secret that the two had a whole rocky start at first, but somehow, they still managed to get along. Then somehow, somewhere along the way, they end up developing feelings for each other, and well— here they are.

‘Hey, guys! We're dating now!’ Shouyou changes his network name for the first time in a while, to tell their neighbors slash network name friends of some great news.

‘Finally!’ Mountain Valley says a moment later.

‘Yeah, we knew.’ Thunder follows, although their words ends up feeding both Shouyou and Tobio confusion.

But overall, their neighbors responded to their news with a glee and that's enough to make them happy.

After all, it too was from here where their connection had begin, where the connection had been the weakest but grown to be strong in time. So, it's only fair to let the ones who'd been there at the start to know where they are now, too.

#> answered; asks received! #sagechan #haikyuu #hq #kagehina #kageyama tobio #hinata shouyou #hinata shoyo #kageyama x hinata #kagehina fic #haikyuu fics #aira writes #shouyoto writes

[annahk97-blog]

giffgaff the mobile network run by you: Annah: hi guys and welcome to the show. My names Annah and I am currently studying graphic Design at the university of Essex. Today I have my mum with me here and we are going to talk about the company giffgaff.  Some of you might recognized the name, they are a mobile network company. After today’s chat I’m sure everyone will understand giffgaff and their values a little bit clearer. The reason giffgaff Is our topic today is because not many people know about them, we are going to dig a little deeper Who are giffgaff? Annah: hello mum welcome thanks you for taking part in our chat today, do you have any idea who giffgaff are? Jo: well obviously they are a phone company Annah: well done mother! (laughs) check you out Jo: well I’m rubbish with technology, so I don’t know much about giffgaff or any phone network for that matter! Annah: giffgaff is very different to most phone networks Jo: oh, really how’s that? Annah: well for a start they class you as a member and not just a customer, also you get to pick your own contract basically. They have these things called good bags and you select which one you feel best suits you. Jo: ok so mine would be quite a basic package I don’t really use many minutes or calls, just data for candy crush. Annah: this is true! So, you would save so much money compared to being tied up in a normal contract. You can also cancel when you want. There is also an option if you want the same good bag each month you can just have it set at reoccur and the money goes out like a direct debit. I find this super handy because there’s nothing worse than being somewhere with no WIFI and your credits run out, I’m with giffgaff and I defiantly think it’s a perk! Jo: I like the sound of this. It’s a good idea, I like the idea of being able to change when I want that’s what I call freedom. That’s different to other mobile phone networks. Branding: Annah: giffgaff are quite disruptive with their advertising, they aren’t afraid to be different. Jo: I think that’s quite interesting, I can imagine the industry is so hard to compete with now. Especially on telly with all the different adverts. You have to be so careful that you don’t offend anyone as well. Annah: when I hear the word giffgaff, gaff sticks in my head which is slang for home, so I see home as where the heart is. When you think of a home its usually quite a warm and welcoming place. Jo: this is true I understand that sense of community and togetherness. I do find it really hard to believe that a company actually has your best interest at heart because most of these days they just want your money. There not actually bothered about you. Annah: I think many members of the public would share that thought with you. It’s a shame that this is always a thought on the mind. You always feel like something is too good to be true when it’s that cheap. Just an interesting fact did you know the term for giffgaff actually means the Scottish word for mutual giving. Jo I’ve never heard of that before, and well you know me I think I speak for most parents when I say I love a bargain/ Annah : well you learn something new every day, the thing is all the money you save by cutting the cost could go on a treat like a holiday or a new car. Jo:  that’s very true it all adds up! Overall summary Annah: I really like how they use the word transparent, it basically means that as a company they are straight up with you and there’s no hidden secrets. I think you need this in a business for it to be successful. I hate having to read through all them terms and conditions it’s so long winded, with giffgaff you don’t have to sign anything. Jo: I think it’s the word we live in its starting to change and people are trying to make everything less complicated. However, I do like the idea of not having to spend ages reading. When you’re in a phone shop I hate all that pressure to just read and sign straight away, I like to what I’m getting and what my contract includes. Annah: Mum what is your overall feel about giffgaff? Jo: I think it’s a shame that no one knows who they are because they have such good deals available. Annah: I am actually with giffgaff but I have learnt things today that I didn’t know. I have to admit giffgaff had a glitch back in November over signal and data. That’s the first time in over four years I’ve had a problem with them. They were back up and running in a few days, to me that shows consistency in a company. Jo: I agree I might have to rethink my own contract Annah: okay well we’ve now run out of time today guys, I want to thank my mum for joining us today and thankyou to you guys for listening. I hope today has helped you save them pennies a little bit more.