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theballadoffinchesandsaints · 3 years

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Let’s talk about the Vaincre trade:

(As I am writing this, only the first full chapter, July, has been published)

I’ve said before that I’m fairly certain it’s going to be Leo, but I want to walk through the thought process that got me there (this is long and unedited. You’ve been warned).

First, since this is going to be such a major plot point, I think it’s going to be a character who’s inner circle had at least a minor spotlight in the first chapter. These were Coops, O’knutzy, O’darwin, Thomas & Noelle (do they have a ship name???), Regulus (tho he’s obviously disqualified for not being a pro player rn), and Cole (with a bit of Dumo).

Additionally, I think a key component of this plotline will be developing characters so that they can stand on their own once separated from a crucial relationship (thematically, it makes the most sense to me).

With that in mind, let’s do some quick (yeah lol prob not quick) disqualifications from the list:

Remus: I know this is a more common theory (and god would it hurt) but Remus’ storyline is already jampacked with living up to the standards of the league, team, and public, as well as adjust to a new relationship dynamic with Sirius. On a more heavy note, Remus will have to navigate how playing hockey will interact with the trauma of Greyback’s attack and the resulting injury. I’m sure most of us inferred that this would be a plot point, but the idea was solidified in a snippet of Remus and the team discussing predictions for the top teams of the season.

Sirius: while narratively, I actually think it would be fascinating to see the lions learn to be a team without their leader and to see Sirius have to learn that there are other parts of the world he can trust, this one falls apart in both logistics and clues Hazel has already given us. Truly, I cannot imagine a trade in which it would make sense for the Lions to give up their beloved, talented, effective captain and first line center, especially after he just led them to Stanley Cup. And when someone asked Hazel about (I believe) what relationships would be highlighted in Vaincre, Coops made the list with the qualification that their storyline would largely center around Remus’s adjustment to the team. A Sirius trade requires long-distance Coops angst which, while possible, would be both difficult and against the spirit of the statement.

O’Darwin and Thomas & Noelle already have long-distance angst happening in July, so trading either Kasey or Thomas would miss some of the emotional punch we know Hazel is going to give us.

Cole: I mean, the kid’s a rookie. It doesn’t really make sense. Threads seem to be being set up with the Dumais’ baby sitter and maybe one of the new PTs? (I don’t remember exactly where I’m getting this from, but I’m near certain it was from Hazel’s tumblr). It seems like physical encounters are going to be a big thing with both of these relationships, plus all the obvious great storylines of a new rookie getting comfortable in the team, make it unlikely Cole will be the trade. Not to mention, there are no guts to punch with Cole. We love him already, but he isn’t close with anyone on the team yet. We’d feel disappointed, not devastated, if he got traded. We all know Hazel’s going for devastation.

Dumo: this one approaches probability for me. Dumo would be heartbreaking for every member of the team, but especially Sirius and Logan. It would also sort of follow through on a previous idea from a rough draft of SW where Dumo has a career-ending injury. All the players would have to learn to navigate life without a father figure, and it would break down the system of where many Lions rookies live. But this one’s all speculation, at least as far as I know. It’s not hinted at in July, and I can’t think of any snippets that suggest Dumo. Plus, it feels like all of the main POVs have been set up in July, and we know from the dreaded “of being a lion” snippet (in which said player gets called about the trade) that we do get POV chapters from the player who’s traded.

We’ll get back to O’knutzy later. First, some people who aren’t on the list that I feel are worth discussing briefly (tho these are unlikely for the reasons at the end of Dumo’s):

Kuny & Nado: Now, I remember Kuny’s “no trades, no trades” thing from Hazel’s tumblr. It hurts. It feels like foreshadowing. But, remember, Hazel has also said that these boys will both play a more secondary role in Vaincre. They’re both safe.

James: I go back and forth on this one all the time. Thematically, separating Sirius and James would be both heartbreaking and deeply interesting. James was a major force in bringing Sirius out of his shell, and Sirius would have to learn to maintain that without his best friend always by his side. James and Lily are also suspiciously absent from July. I know Hazel said they’re on their honeymoon, and I’m not disputing that in any way, shape, or form. However, it does provide ample excuse to become a new POV in August. However, I can’t find any snippets to really support it. And, just, in general, James as a character in Hazel’s fics (or at least in Solntse and SW) provides a stable backbone for the other characters. He’a developed as a character but stable and happy. This could be the thing that changes that, but, at the very least, it doesn’t fit the narrative role he serves in SW, and I think it would change the feel and character dynamic of the fic as a whole (not just of the team) too much for that to be the choice.

And then there’s O’knutzy:

Going into Vaincre, I asked myself: what are everyone’s plotlines going to be? Remus will adjust to the team and playing Greyback. Sirius will largely be his support system, tho some stuff may be done with his relationship with Regulus and/or moving on from any semblance of his parents’ influence. Dumo will welcome rookie Cole onto the team. James will be a new father. Thomas and Noelle will have long-distance relationship feels. Kasey will adjust to O’darwin, and probably also deal with his reoccurring injury.

And the cubs? Are in a happy, stable relationship with everything they’ve ever wanted. The seeds to a storyline regarding whether or not they choose to come out was definitely hinted at in July, but I don’t think it will be their sole focus. Thankfully, there is nothing pressuring them to come out currently. They think about it. They long to do it. But nothing has changed since the end of SW/CtC. If one of them was long-distance, that would change the dynamic. When you can always go home to your two loving boyfriends, it doesn’t hurt quite as bad when you can’t be affectionate when out with them in public. When you’re only in the same city for a day or two roughly every month (depending on which team the trade is with), every second you could spend holding them and don’t hurts more and more. Whether I think they choose to come out or not, I really don’t know. I think so, but I’m definitely not sure. But the real question is, which cub goes away and prompts this?

If it’s a cub, it’s definitely Leo. Hazel posted a snippet that just...says so much.

Do I even need to explain? She practically told us. I’ve spent over an hour analyzing nearly every prominent Lion when Hazel practically told us Leo was going to be the trade with this right here.

But I do have more to say. I don’t think either Finn or Logan would work well as the trade. The plot of them being separated was well explored in CtC, and I honestly just don’t think it needs more examination. They learned to cherish each other, talk to each other, love each other freely and honestly. Them being separated again would just hurt. It wouldn’t serve a narrative purpose.

On the other hand, I do think Leo’s character could actually benefit from some time alone. He had barely a few months as a full-blown adult, working in the NHL, before he entered a committed relationship with his two lovely boyfriends, both of whom had had years more time to live with and explore themselves (tho it’s not as if they were doing that freely). A couple of months or even years dating long-distance could force Leo to have some more adventures on his own and come into himself more. Then, he can fully return to his boys, his “long-lost lover[s],” and be more stable in his love.

In a similar vein, Logan and Finn have only had short amounts of time to make their leg of the relationship stable and happy in comparison to the time they spent yearning or heartbroken. Even in CtC, their reflex is to go to Leo first, which is, of course, perfectly fine and lovely and adorable, but I think they need to spend some time unlearning that knee jerk reaction.

Then, when Leo comes back (because one way or another, in canon or in my head, he will), all three are confident in themselves as individuals and in each leg of the relationship as well as the three of them as group. No one and no couple n e e d s anything, but they come back together because they all love each other, more than anything.

That’s what I think will see in Vaincre. At the very least, it’s what I want.

Vaincre is by the one and only @lumosinlove

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hnychn · 3 years

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𝐌𝐘 𝐁𝐄𝐓𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐇𝐀𝐋𝐅 [𝐓𝐒𝐔𝐊𝐈𝐒𝐇𝐈𝐌𝐀]

summary : tsuki had always been the rational one between the two of you, but sometimes even he needs his other half to knock him back to earth

warnings : twin!reader, fem!reader, cursing, physically hurt/comfort, generally fluff, PLATONIC, tsuki & reader get into a fight, not edited at all

word count : 1600+

a/n : i was rewatching karasuno's match against shiratorizawa last night, and i thought about this so :) it's just general headcanons about being tsuki's twin and it gets specific when i bring up the match :) enjoy ( ´∀｀)

karasuno masterlist ~ haikyuu masterlist

- contrary to popular belief, tsukishima is actually a really good sibling and an even better twin

- he’ll definitely make sure you’re taking care of yourself and eating and drinking often, especially if you have you’re involved in your own club

- he and yamaguchi wait after school for you too so you don’t have to walk home alone. tsuki says it’s because he doesn’t want your mom or akiteru to stress out over you if you get lost or something, but deep down you know it’s because he cares for you and doesn’t want anything bad to happen to you

- but, if you manage for the volleyball club, it makes his life a lot easier

- you definitely joined before yachi, right at the beginning of the year when tsuki and yamaguchi signed up for the team. you and kiyoko were quick to become friends, along with the third years (the only ones tsuki really trusted you around alone. pls tanaka nearly tackled you to the ground when you said you wanted to be manager had it not been for daichi grabbing his collar and tsuki pusing you behind him)

- tanaka apologised

- do i really need to tell you why tsuki didn’t trust hinata and kageyama around you?

- you were the one to recruit yachi to be another manager as well. she was in some of your classes and you knew her to be a kind and work-driven person, so you asked if she wanted to sign up

- pls babes never stood a chance saying no to you

- she was a blushing mess

- (she highkey has a crush on you and tsuki knows it, but that’s none of his business)

- just like tsuki, you’re able to quickly analyze players and their movements and you also are able to think ahead and plan out attacks or defences with the information you’ve gathered

- so the coaches really like you :)

- during the training camp, you and tsuki got into a fight, y’know, as siblings do. and you’ve gotten into arguments and fights with each other in front of the others, so they weren’t all too worried and assured everyone else that it was normal . . . but then y’all started getting physical

- hurtful words were thrown without thinking, it’s normal, but tsuki went a bit too far with his words and you aren’t the type to cry and run away, so what did you do?

- you tackled that bitch :D

- so there you two were, fighting like kids over the last popsicle in the freezer, while everyone just stood there in shock at what the hell was going on in front of them

- the others were quick to pull you away from each other, and the managers led you away from your brother while the two of you calmed down. it definitely took you a while to calm down from the adrenalin high from tackling your 6’3 brother, but you eventually did and went back into the gym where tsuki was sitting on the bench.

- the others tensed up when you walked over to him and sat next to him, thinking you were gonna start fighting again, but instead the two of you sat in silence for a while

- the other managers, who you’ve become great friends with, eventually got everyone to mind their business to give the two of you privacy to apologise or whatever

- and you did, because he’s your brother, and no matter how many petty fights (verbal or physical) you get into with him, he’ll always be your twin. your other half

- but that doesn't mean you'll never take his ass down again if he doesn't watch his words

- bcs you will ˙ ͜ʟ˙

- the two of you like to tease each other, i mean, this is tsukishima we’re talking about, if he’s going to tease someone it’s most definitely going to be you

- now onto what spurred this whole headcanon >:)

- everyone was nervous leading up to the match with shiratorizawa and, despite him not showing it, you knew tsuki was too. you could tell in the way he got dressed a bit slower that morning and the way he ate less and drank more water. plus it’s just twin intuition, you could just look at him and know what’s up

- n e ways, the match is going on and you would have fallen over the railing of the stands had it not been for akiteru’s grip on the back of your jacket (who scared the hell out of you when he first showed up. “kei’s not gonna like you being here, nii-chan.”)

- so it’s getting intense

- you’re sure this single match has taken 50 years off your life

- you’ll give tsuki a good slap when the match is over for it

- you cried a little when tsuki blocked ushy gushy’s spike, but you made akiteru and yachi swear not to tell anyone especially tsuki since he would tease the fuck outta you and you don't need that.

- and then (y’know where i’m going with this) tsuki just goes and fucks up his hand

- it was like you became the flash because you were down in the court in literal seconds (akiteru swore you jumped over the rails down onto the court, but . . . i guess we’ll never know ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ)

The walk to the medical room was silent.

You could hear the cheers and screaming from the main gym form where you were, the shrill sounds echoing down the hallway almost hauntingly. You cursed a bit when you felt chills run down your spine, because despite being wrapped in your karasuno jacket and an extra jacket akiteru brought, the short length of your skirt provided barely any warmth for your legs.

From beside you, Tsukishima was silent, simply clutching onto his bleeding hand while burning holes into the polished linoleum floor. You had expected him to tease you about the glare you sent Ushijima when you jumped onto the court (said boy would later confess to his teammate that that had been the only moment he truly felt fear), or make fun of the way akiteru’s jacket seemed to drown you and made you look like a wet cat; but he didn’t. And his silence was more unnerving than anything.

But you knew Kei. You knew the looks he was giving, the way his face seemed to relax and become more expressive when it was only the two of you, you could see his thoughts and worries as plain as day on his face.

You were twins after all. You knew Kei better than he knew himself, you knew his attitude was nothing short of a direct result of your brother's lies and his worry was because he had finally gotten a taste of what volleyball was really like, and he was craving more.

So, as the eldest twin, you did what you did best.

You teased him.

“Stop making that face, you look constipated.”

Tsuki snapped his head over to you and scowled, “Shut up.”

“No, you shut up, and listen well, Kei.” Your strict and monotone voice surprised him a little, he hadn’t heard you use that voice in a while, let alone with him; you were known as the nicer twin after all, “You need to trust that the others will hold their own. Have trust in your team to keep Shiratorizawa on their toes. You know them, you know they can hold their own and take some points. You’ve trained and practiced with them for a while now, Kei. You’ve seen their improvements and you’ve seen their hard times, have a little more trust in them. So stop worrying about what could happen while you’re not there and start thinking about what you’ll do when you get back, big head.”

There was a silence between the two of you as the medic room sign came into view. You sighed a little as you shrugged in your mind, perhaps Kei was too deep in his thoughts to care about your words, but there was only so much you could do to convince him to relax a little. But before you could slide open the door to the medic room, you felt a little tug on the back of your (akiteru’s) jacket.

Tsuki still looked down to the ground, but you could just about make out a small dust of pink on his cheeks, “thanks for that . . . y/n”

Your eyes widened a bit and you nearly made a move to pinch yourself because on the way to the medic room you must have died and went to heaven or aliens must have burst through the window and taken you to an alternate universe where your brother, Tsukishima fucking Kei, was thanking you.

You hands shook a little as you pulled Tsuki’s face down, pressing the back of your hand to his forehead and checking his body for other injuries, “What the fuck, are you sure it’s only your hand that’s injured? Did one of Ushiwaka’s spikes hit you in the head? I think you’re dying . . . yeah, that’s what it is. Maybe you should sit this game out Kei, you might start doing crazier things like tell me you love me or that I’m the best sister you could have asked for or-”

“OH, SHUT UP!”

You laughed as Tsuki pushed you into the medic room and ignored you as his hand was being bandaged up. Tsuki glared at you over his shoulder as you poked and prodded the back of his head and teased him further, but when he turned back around his glare softened.

Tsuki was grateful for your presence. He was thankful you were there to keep his head on his shoulders and make sure he stayed focused on what really mattered. And out of everyone in the world, Tsuki was glad you were his twin - his better half.

Not that’d he ever tell you.

- so yeah :)

- tl;dr tsukishima is a tsundere and secretly loves you ˙ ͜ʟ˙

#haikyuu #haikyū!!#haikyuu!!#tsukishima kei #tsukishima x reader #haikyuu x reader #haikyuu headcanon #tsukishima headcanons #sibling!reader #tsukishima x twin!reader #tsukishima x sister!reader #fluff #haikyuu headcanons

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mlovesstories · 4 years

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Assisting the Assistant

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Harley is Jensen’s assistant on the set of Supernatural. It wasn’t what she expected.

AN: Thanks to my amazing love @cherryblossomflowers for editing!

Warnings: Mentions of sexual assault

Words; 1600

Jensen x platonic reader

Jared x platonic reader

“So, what are you doing here, kid? How old are you?” Jensen asked in one of the production offices, interviewing for his set assistant.

“I don’t see why that matters, but I’m twenty. I feel like I can be of great help, and I have a few years experience in-“

“Do you know who I am?”

“A guy… needing an assistant?”

“You got the job. Welcome aboard,” he stood and shook her hand.

“Excuse me?” Harley gasped.

“You’re confident and not intimidated by a Hollywood actor, so to say.”

“Should I be?” She cocked her head to the side.

“No, but that’s the point.” Jensen smiled.

“Okay…”

“We start shooting the next episode tomorrow. Be here at 6am, kid.”

“You don’t know my name, do you?”

“You’re a kid, at least compared to me.” Jensen shrugged.

“Then I withdraw my application.” Harley snarled.

“Hey, wait!” Jensen chased after her in the office. “I’m sorry, it’s Harley, right?”

“Yeah, and I’m not a kid. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

—————-

“Morning, Mr. Ackles,” Harley caught up to Jensen as he exited the van dropping him off.

“Hi,” he smiled. “Follow me.” Jensen hastily walked toward his trailer. After they entered, he said, “take a seat.”

Harley slid onto the couch.

“Rules.”

“Woah- I’m not-”

“Stop being so defensive, kid,” Jensen laughed. “I’m not stuck up. Don’t wait on me hand and foot, and don’t follow me around like a puppy.”

“I can handle that,” she smiled.

“The PAs will get you settled. Go out and turn left. You’ll see the PA trailer.”

“Any other rules?” Harley looked to him.

“Plenty, but those can wait til later.” Jensen winked.

“Right…” Harley stood, unimpressed. “I’ll check in with you when I’m done,” she said matter-of-factly.

A few minutes later, Harley knocked on Jensen’s door. He opened it and she entered.

“You look official with your radio and clipboard,” he smiled. Harley offered a fake smile, not impressed. “What?”

“Nothing, Mr. Ackles. I’m just here to do a job that I’ve done before. I’m not new at this, and you don’t care about assistants.”

“Says who?”

“All the big stars don’t even do small talk with the staff. That’s just how it works in the industry.” Harley shrugged.

“Kid, I’m not like whoever you worked with before. Do your job and do it well, but ya gotta have fun too! Now that we got that out of the way, the PAs will give you the schedule for the day, it’s your job to make sure I show up at the right time. Can you do that?”

“Well, I can tell you, but it is really up to you whether you show up.” Harley grinned, joking.

“You’ll fit in just fine,” Jensen laughed.

Harley easily fit into the awesome that was Supernatural. This was the best set she had ever been on. Jensen talked to her and treated her with respect.

“Ackles! Makeup!” She yelled to him as she walked to the set from the wardrobe trailer.

“Stop bossing me around!” He groaned and rolled his eyes.

“I refuse to get you gum if you don’t listen to me, Jensen!” Harley yelled back.

“FINE, you ass.” He playfully whined. Jensen turned and walked toward her and was about to pass her when she stopped him.

“Here, you earned it.” She gave him his favorite gum.

“Thank you, Your Highness,” he bowed.

“Oh, shut up,” Harley laughed. “Go!” She pushed him toward the trailer.

____________

“Harley,” Jensen nudged his assistant on set.

“Huh?” She snapped at his voice, clipboard almost dropping on his foot.

“Can you PLEASE,” he whined. “Get me a cup of coffee from that place down the street?”

“Fine,” she rolled her eyes playfully at Jensen. “You’re due in Wardrobe in fifteen minutes, don’t forget.”

“Thank you,” he winked at her.

“Whatever, Winchester,” she laughed.

“I love you,” he thanked her.

“You better!” Harley yelled back as she walked away.

When she returned, she handed him and Jared each a cup of coffee.

“I get one too?” Jared looked at the cup in his hand. “Thanks, bud.”

“Jensen’s credit card paid for it, but your welcome,” Harley laughed.

“Hey!” Jensen gasped, ornery. “Next time take his card! Not fair!”

“Cool your jets, Jensen. You would have bought him coffee if you were getting it yourself anyway.”

“Hey, bud. What’s up with you?” Jared walked to Harley while Jensen was doing a scene.

“Huh?” She looked up at him. “What are you talking about?”

“You’re… quiet.”

“I’m fine,” she gave him a short smile.

“If you say so.” He gave the expression back.

————

“Hey, Jensen,” Harley greeted him. As he exited the van, he noticed she backed away from him as he went in to give her a hug.

“You okay?”

“Yep! Sorry, a little jumpy today.” Taking her clipboard, she read off the schedule to him for the day. “Here are your sides.” Harley handed him a few stapled half-pages. She turned to walk with him toward his trailer when she gasped.

“What?” Jensen looked at her face.

“Umm. Forgot to unplug my curling iron. I’ll call my roommate if you don’t mind.”

“Uh. Sure.” He narrowed his eyes at her. He saw a large figure turn the corner of a trailer.

“Hey, Max. How ya doing?” Jensen shook the actor’s hand.

“Glad I got a few episodes out of this gig. It’s the least you people could do for me.”

Jensen froze the handshake and gave the man a serious face.

“Right,” Jensen let go of the man’s hand and told Harley to follow him. “See you on set, Max.”

“Yeah, sure,” Max scoffed.

“Ass.” Jensen whispered. Harley bit her lip. “Come on. Is Jared here yet?” Harley nodded her head. “Can you go get him for me? I need to go over some lines.” As he said that, rain started to fall, “and get in my trailer ASAP. I don’t need you all soaked or borrowing one of my sweatshirts.” He chuckled.

“You’re stupid.” Harley ran off to Jared’s trailer.

“Hey, Jared,” Harley knocked on his trailer. “Jensen said he wanted to talk to you. Runs lines or something.” He slowly grabbed a jacket. “Will you hurry? I’m getting wet!” Jared laughed.

“Okay, lets go.”

“I told you not to get wet,” Jensen groaned. “Here,” he tossed her a large sweatshirt that smelled like his cologne.

“Moose decided to be a slowpoke so I got rained on!” She ran into his trailer followed by Jared.

“Sorry!” The taller man hurried up the steps.

“Hey, you notice Max Green being a shithead?” Jensen sat down next to Harley. Jared sat across from them. “He was a jerk to me.”

“He seems like a stuck up tool to me. He’s been rude. Said that he’s so well-known, and he’s that way. So much for ‘we’re lucky to have him’” Jared huffed.

“Here,” Jensen handed Harley a cup of coffee.

“What?” She accepted it.

“You need it more than me. Get warm.” Jensen smiled.

“Aw. Thanks, Ackles.” She gratefully sipped the drink. .

————-

Jared saw Harley from across the lot.

“Hey, Harley!” He waved. Jared saw her wipe her fingers under her eyes. He walked up to her, no one else around.”what are you doing? You okay?”

“Bye, Harley!” The two turned to see Max Green leaving through a gate. With a smile and a nod, he walked to his car.

Jared saw her shutter.

“What happened? He hasn’t been that nice to anyone since he got here,” Jared chuckled.

When she didn’t respond, he dragged her by her sleeve to his trailer and left for a moment. “JACK!” He called for his friend.

Jensen threw open his trailer door.

“What, man? You’re ruining my-“ Jensen faked annoyance until he saw Jared’s face. “What?” He followed Jared back to the younger Winchester’s trailer.

Harley looked up when the two entered.

“What is going on?” Jensen looked at Harley, a serious, blank look on her face.

“She’s acting funny.” Jared answered. Harley wiped a hand over her face.

“I’m okay. Just got some news this morn-“

“Nah, that’s not it,” Jared stated. “She’s freaked out every time she is near Mr. Big Shot.”

“Max?” Jensen looked to Harley.

“Did Max have anything to do with you not acting like you?” Jared asked.

“No, just sad.”

“You’ve been with us for too long. Talk to us.” Jensen told her plainly. “Did he hurt you?”

“Not really.” Harley whispered.

“I’m going to kill him,” Jared shot up out of his chair.

“No!” Harley shouted. “I’m fine. He didn’t do anything.”

“You’re lying! I can tell!” Jensen growled. Harley burst into tears.

“He- he grabbed my ass and touched my-“ Harley fell over into her own lap, tears hitting her jeans. Jared ran out of the trailer, and he slammed the door. Jensen ran to her side and pulled her into him “no, I’m fine,” YN said. When she sat up, Jared bounded through the door.

“Security escorted him off the lot. He won’t be bothering you anymore.”

“Thanks, Jared.” She stood and wrapped her skinny arms around his waist. Feeling his large body next to hers, she felt safe again.

Forever Friends (Everything):

@katymacsupernatural @unicornblood4ever @supernatural-crazed-girl

@fangirl-moment-x @empirialwolf @winchesters-favorite-girl @super100012

@percywinchester27 @waywardsuns @supernatural-jackles

@mcallmestiles @sdavid09 @kingandrear @bellero @skylarraker

@seality @jaycc7983 @luci-in-trenchcoats

@cherryblossomflowers @because-you-never-know-when

@sleepylunarwolf @choosemyname

@internationalmusicteacher

@encounterthepast @torn-and-frayed

@giggles1026 @xiumin-girl99

@mangueweaschester

@idksupernatural @silverstripe101a

@thevelvetseries @jennawinchester152a * @samsgirl93 * @supernatural3002 *

@tmiships4life * @breereadsthings * @mersuperwholocked-lowlife *

@a-magey @vicmc624 @hookedinto-fictionalworlds @beatifuldisaster018

@miraclesoflove @myopiamystical @fallen-wolf22

@waywardnewcomer

#Jensen Ackles #jensen x platonic reader #supernatural #supernaturalrpf #mlovesstoriesassistingtheassistant #mlovesstories

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butiaintgonnaloveem · 4 years

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Presents and Prizes and Sweets and Surprises

Characters: Dean Winchester, Sam Winchester, Reader, Jack Kline, Mrs. Butters

Word Count: approx 1600

Warnings: Spoilers for episode “Last Holiday” and language

A/N: This is just my way of venting my frustration with the episode. I was going to do a kind of fix-it fic, but this turned more into a reader insert as concerned spectator kind of thing. No one edited this, so sorry for any errors. This is frustration and crack.

Poking holes, making fun, wishing they were doing better things with the last few episodes - you know, the fangirl business.

“There’s a what living here? And what does it have to do with your underwear?”

Dean rolls his eyes, “A wood nymph. She was folding them for me.”

“Since when do you fold your underwear?”

“Since Mrs. B. started doing it for me,” he shrugs.

Speak of the devil, or nymph - she scurries in from the hall.

Her eyes are wide as she looks you over, a disapproving scowl on her face.

“Dean, we do not bring lady guests into the Men of Letters bunker. Ms. Sands was an exception, but it should not be the rule.”

“Lady guests? I live here,” you glare as you over-enunciate each word.

Clearly caught off-guard, she splutters, unable to reply more than a few cut-off words as she looks helplessly at Dean. “A-a woman? IN the Men of Letters bunker?”

“Times have changed, lady. And I don’t know if you’re aware, but you are also a female.”

“I am a wood nymph,” she says haughtily, “Friend of the goddess Artemis, and not subject to the problems a woman may bring to this bunker.”

You start to move on her, but Dean steps in, gently keeping you back with a hand on your shoulder, “Okay, I think this could be going better. Mrs. B., she does live here. We don’t really subscribe to the whole ‘fairer sex’ thing. I was just getting ready to find you for introductions when you walked in. Now, I think we can all get along, right?”

He looks between you with a shit-eating grin as though he just solved the easiest riddle, even though he didn’t do shit. Mrs. B. stands there wringing her hands and staring at you with trepidation, while you eye her up, looking for any signs of malice.

“I know!” Dean says with all the excitement of a ten year-old, “Mrs. B. how about you bring out some of those butter cookies you whipped up earlier and we kick this off right?”

She turns to fulfill his request just as you answer, “No, thanks. I don’t mind fending for myself. In fact, I prefer it. Dean, can I speak with you? Alone?”

He shakes his head and looks at her apologetically. She just waves him off and leaves.

“What the hell?”

“Yeah!” you throw your hands up, “What the hell?! You need to tell me everything that happened since she showed up.”

Days pass. Once Dean had told you what happened to make Mrs. Doubtfire appear, you went to Sam, hoping for some reason unfortunately, it seemed to be a lost cause. Once she highlighted the monster radar, they were constantly on the run. A quick vampire nest here, a coven there. In between Dean nestled himself in his purple huggy nightgown and drowned himself not in alcohol, but in mashed potatoes and pie. She even had Jack drawn out of his new soul-based depression thanks to her smoothies.

_____

“Won’t you join us, dear?” her sickly sweet voice invites you as the guys line up pumpkins for carving. She wears a forced smile as she clasps her hands in front of her, still uncomfortable with your presence.

“Nope,” you pop with an obnoxious ‘p’ sound, “I’m super right here.” You wave your deli-bought sandwich in the air and look back to your laptop.

“C’mon!” Dean groans. He looks up from the face he’s drawing on the huge, out-of-season monstrosity. “Relax a little, Mrs. B is even gonna roast up some pumpkin seeds - salty and sweet!” He looks at her with an excited and expectant nod.

She looks back like a proud grandmother, “Of course, dear!” As though there were no other option, making your eyes roll into the back of your head.

“Like I said, I’m good. You guys enjoy your...whatever over there.”

They shrug and ignore you, laughing like children and throwing pumpkin goop at each other until she scolds them. Until now, Halloween was despised by Sam, and only an excuse for slutty costumes for Dean. Not that it hadn’t been tried. There were attempts at parties, birthdays, Christmas; Jody invited you all over plenty, especially after the mess with Mary. But no. Suddenly Stepford Granny appears and it’s all hands on deck for celebrations. Something wasn’t right, and for some stupid reason, the guys didn’t notice or care.

_____

Your research on wood nymphs doesn’t offer a whole lot, they are pretty rare. More kindly disposed toward men according to a source, which explains her reaction to you, and summoned to attend the gods on Olympus, which also explains her service kink apparently. Other than that, it was a whole lot of crap.

On occasion you find her in the library, staring wistfully at the photo of the Men of Letters who previously occupied the bunker, but once she notices your presence, she shakes herself from her reverie and starts puttering about, lamenting the state of things around her.

Dean is blissful. Sam had been reluctant, but even he seems to be walking around without his usual dark cloud. You want them to be happy, to have the memories others take for granted, but the way she side-eyes Jack, the way she passive-aggressively speaks about you even when you are in the room, it won’t stop nagging at you.

“What do you miss most about them?” you ask her one day after she sends the boys off with their crustless sandwiches.

“Oh, well, it’s hard to miss them much when they’ve just left,” she laughs, stiff with discomfort.

“Not Sam and Dean, I mean them,” you tip your head in the direction of the photo on the wall.

“Oh.” She takes a half step toward it, but stops. “It’s - they gave me purpose, a home, and a family.”

“What about your real family? The other nymphs?”

She straightens out her stupid, festive apron then, looking at you dead on, “Mr. Sinclair and those gentlemen were no less a real family to me than my natural brethren,” she pauses for a deep breath, then for a moment longer until a tight smile pulls across her lips. “Now, have you eaten? Are you sure I can’t get you...”

“No,” you cut her off for the millionth time she’s asked.

“Well then, I best get back to work,” she mutters and wanders off.

_____

When you finally get the chance to corner Sam, he’s rushing while getting ready for his date and really only half-listening.

“And I just think that it’s really telling that Cuthbert Sinclair was the one to bring her on, I mean, he wasn’t always on the level with his magic and acquisitions and what the hell are you wearing?”

He turns around, smoothing down the brown sweater vest, “What? Mrs. Butters set it out for me. Said it makes me look dashing.” He smiles and shyly tips his head to the side, the way he does before giving his puppy eyes. All lost on you.

“You look like a sitcom dad. You’re just going out with Eileen, right?”

“Nothing wrong with looking your best.”

“Sure,” you agree with uncertainty, “But Sam, didn’t you look into this?”

“She was right about the first vamp case, she’s powered up the radar, and the bunker is on full blast, what’s wrong with that?”

“Because Sam! Magic also comes with a price, and when has a monster ever really been so thrilled to live in servitude? Or anyone for that matter? You think this is all out of the goodness of her heart?”

He looks at you, confused, “Yes?”

You throw your hands up, just as Sam checks his watch and curses under his breath before hastily leaving the room.

“What the fuck. Fine, you guys don’t care? I don’t care. I am fucking out of here.” No one stops you.

_____

Two days later, you’re called back to the bunker and very apologetic Winchesters, and cake.

“So she was a Nazi murder monster who also liked serving milk and cookies? Cool. Cool, cool. And Jack found this out? Jack?! I mean, no offense buddy, but Sam! You’re the lore genius! You’ve got this place set up with your own fucking Sammy decimal system, and you missed this!”

“I mean, if she was doping up all our food, like she was doing to Jack - “

“And you wondered why I didn’t want to eat her turkish delights! She had you guys running around with sack lunches like fricken four year-olds, all dopey smiles and rice krispy treats. I mean, I can’t believe you even knew how to spell ‘happy birthday’ all on your own and didn’t pull a Hagrid with how high you were flying on her nymph edibles!” You throw your hands up, nearly throwing your slice of birthday cake right off the plate, as Sam laughs.

“And you,” you point to him, “Mjolnir! Where did she pull that from? You weren’t thrown off with that? And don’t think I am letting you live down that sweater vest or birthday tiara. If all it took to make you guys so docile were a few parties and home-cooked meals and giving in to some praise kinks you seem to hae, then someone would have locked you both down already, it’s not like they haven’t tried. I cringed, you guys, cringed. My shoulders are still sore from it. In fact, I think you guys really owe me for having to put up with watching all that crap go down. For being so right, right from the start.”

They both roll their eyes, Jack for his part just sits and smiles while eating his own birthday cake. Dean flicks his fingers in a ‘bring it on’ motion while pursing his lips in displeasure.

“I want a party. With drinks and store-bought cake with that really good frosting, and a banner that says ‘you were so right and we were so stupid and we’re sorry and we will do better next tim-’”

“Alright, Veruca we get it,” Dean groans.

“Just do better, and don’t forget my golden goose,” you smirk.

#spn fanfiction #spn fanfic #spn s15 #spn crack #spn last holiday #dean winchester fanfiction #sam winchester fanfiction #my writing #in case you can't tell #i hated the episode

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paper-chain-queen · 4 years

Text

Cherry Lip Gloss

Hatsuharu Sohma X Reader

Rating: Teen with slightly suggestive themes

Word Count : 1600+

Summary: Reader is a beauty vlogger and has been tagged in a challenge.

This is my first time writing a one-shot, XReader thing and got a little inspiration while watching YouTube. Even though Hatsuharu and Isuzu are one of my favortite manga ships, I just felt he would be fun for this little one-shot.

You rushed around the room getting ready, which included setting up the camera on a tripod, checking the shot to make sure Haru was in focus, and that nothing odd was in the frame.

Soft brown eyes looked around the bedroom, taking in all the different decor as you set everything up. You even made the bed properly, flattening out the sheets and organizing the pillows as it was in the shot and Haru assumed you didn't want people thinking you were messy or anything.

The bed had been made when he had gotten there. Granted, that had been a few hours ago, and few 'activities' had happened since then.

"You've got dirty in your eyes." You teased as you fluffed a pillow and placed it neatly on the bed, moving to the squishy cow plushie that had fallen on the floor and putting it back on the bed.

" Can't help it, I'm a healthy teenage boy with hormones." He simply stated, and you were tempted to throw a pillow at him but resisted.

You could feel Haru's eyes burning holes in you as you adjusted the camera and lighting, checking everything for a second time to make sure it looked good. You usually wouldn't be filming to late in the day, but Haru had come over unannounced, so there was a change in plans.

Well, you had mentioned to him that your parents were out of town for the weekend, and Haru had possibly seen a rare opportunity to be alone with you. Not that you were complaining.

You took a breath and fluffed out your hair a bit as you sat down next to Haru, who was already fidgeting with a tube of mascara on the low-table.

"Hello my lovelies, welcome back to my channel, today we have a super special guest, Haru-Kun." You smiled at the camera and then presented the handsome boy who only gave the nod to the camera, greeting your audience with a simple and polite, 'hello and thank you for having me.'

You were already sure that you were going to get a hundred comments just about how hot Haru was. Not that you could blame them in the slightest.

Hastuharu had a 'bad boy' look, but despite his tattoos and piercings that could make him look a little intimidating, he was the sweetest boy you knew. Well... he was sweet and polite for the majority of the time. His dark side was a whole other story. But you found yourself loving both because whether he was light or dark, he was still Haru, and you loved him.

"Thank you for tagging me to do this challenge, I am so excited, alas... I am single, BUT Haru-Kun offered to help me out anyway." You explained to your audience, it was a lie, but you and Haru simply couldn't be public about your romantic relationship due to his family.

You looked to your white and black haired boyfriend, asking for what had to be the 7th time if he was really okay with doing this. Hatsuharu was so kind, and you didn't want to pressure him into doing anything he wasn't comfortable doing.

"Do you not trust me?" He asked, slightly lifting an eyebrow but still maintaining his somewhat placid face.

"Of course I do." You did trust him with your life... you, however, didn't fully trust him to be able to do your make-up, but it would be fun.

"I've laid out all of my daily make-up along with a few other fun stuff." As you spoke, Haru started to stretch as if he were getting ready for a fight, and you had to stop yourself from laughing from his dead-pan face as he did so.

"Are you going to tell me what to do?" Haru asked, already looking a little overwhelmed just by picking up your eyelash curler as if it were some device from outer space.

"Nope!" You chirped, popping the 'P.' He pouted, and you had to stop yourself from leaning over and placing a kiss on his lips. He was just way too cute for his own good.

The boy looked over all the products, picking up one and then placing it down before picking up another.

"What's this?" He asked

"Moisturizer." At that, he pumped the bottle and squirted a bit of creme into his hands, then proceeding to gently massage it into your face. Haru was very gentle with you, which didn't surprise you one bit.

"And this?" Now he was just being ridiculous.

"... lip gloss." You gave him a look that said 'seriously' as you tried to fight off a smile.

"Ah.. I like this one." He smirked as he stared blatantly at your lips.

"Haru!" You whined as your face blew up red, and he only laughed softly, clearly enjoying tormenting you. Haru really needed to be more discrete if we wanted to keep you guys a secret.

"I'll save this for last..." He mentions as he places the cherry lip gloss down and picks up a bottle of your foundation.

He was surprisingly confident as he just squirted the bottle onto your face multiple times, you finally had to stop him after the 4th pump, asking him not to waste anything.

No words could describe the way you cringed when he picked up a blush brush and started to spread your foundation all over your face.

"What? Am I doing it right?" He asked as he pulled away the brush that had already worked its 'magic' on half of your face.

"You do whatever you feel is right." You told him, even though you really wanted to turn his attention towards your regular foundation brush.

While he looked for the next thing to do, you tapped on the table, trying to gesture to the blending sponge without being completely obvious.

"That is cheating, miss." He playfully scolded as he 'booped' you the nose with your now slightly ruined blush brush.

"Sir, I do not know what you are referring to... now pick up the sponge and blend out my face, please," you begged as you forced him to take the sponge into his hand, and he only smiled as he then just started hitting you in the face with the sponge, gently bouncing it on your face.

"This works a lot better...." He muttered as he continued to blend out your foundation, making it look a lot less streaky.

"Yeah, good call." You teased, unable to hide your smirk, and at that comment, you earned a pinch to your thigh, making you squeal.

You made a mental note to edit that out later.

"Next is... oh this, this goes right here." Homeboy picked out the brightest blush he could find in your collection and went in hard.

"Oh..."

You bit the inside of your cheek as you caught your reflection in the mirror on the table.

"Haruuuu." You whined and started laughing as Haru went back to hit you in the face with the make-up sponge, trying to fix his mistake, making the bright blush a little less atrocious.

It was fun watching him concentrate so hard on the task, his face completely serious as he applied your make-up. As he worked, you just simply enjoyed his handsome features.

When it came time to do your eyes, you were thankful for the comically bright blush because Haru cradled your face to do your eyeliner, your heart was beating a million miles a minute.

"Okay, look up," Haru instructed, getting a little more confident the more he worked, you followed his orders and let him apply your mascara.

Haru backed away, holding your chin in his hands, admiring his handiwork. Last but not least, he reached for the cherry lip gloss he had picked up earlier and then instead of putting it on you, applied it to his own lips.

"What are-" Haru didn't let you finish your sentence as he leaned towards you and gave you a deep kiss, the cherry lip gloss transferring from his lips to yours.

"Haru! We're filming!" You squealed as he continued to give you small, delicate kisses along your jawline and down your neck.

"You -can edit -it out later." He said in between kisses.

"You love creating extra work for me!" You tried to get mad at him, but Haru was making it impossible for you to think straight.

"Well, since you're already going to have to cut it out anyway.... might as well take advantage." The handsome boy smirked, his darker side coming out to play as he placed kisses from your collarbone, sucking softly on your neck and then bringing you in for a long, heated kiss on your lips. Haru's fingers trailed up your waist to your chest, gently feeling you up, causing a moan to erupt from your mouth as his hand slid under your sweatshirt.

"No bra.. naughty girl... let's give them something worth watching," Haru smirked as he carefully pushed you onto the ground as he hovered over you, ravishing you as much as his curse would allow.

Later, when you posted the challenge video, only a few people commented on how Haru's clothes were slightly dishevelled compared to the beginning of the video. You were just glad no one noticed the bite mark the boy left on your neck.

Haru had also been begging for the full unedited video, but you were holding it hostage in case you needed him for another video challenge.

Maybe next time he would let you do his make-up.

#fanfiction #fruits basket fanfiction #hatsuharu sohma #haru x reader #fruits basket #hatsuharu x reader #fruits basket x reader

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theda-rison · 4 years

Text

Camp Nano July 2020 - Results, Discussion, and Conclusion

the Like, wow, Scoob!

Camp Nano July 2020 is done, and here are some thoughts:

I always knew that writing a comic script was going to be a learning experience - I’ve never written a comic script so it really couldn’t be anything except for a learning experience - but hoooooo boy, was it ever!

Before starting I couldn’t find anything on how long comic scripts normally are; I don’t know why, that just seems information that isn’t really shared? (If anyone knows of a resource, please send it to me!) I’m guessing it has a lot to do with there just being less comic writers than there are say, book writers and movie writers. That’s probably what happens when your interests are niche in some way, it’s just harder to find anything about them.

FORTUNATELY, I have the fancy library-bound volumes of The Sandman, and there’s excerpts of the scripts in the back. Which like… thank you @neil-gaiman, or whoever made that decision, because being able to look at an actual script and see how it’s formatted and what’s included has been the biggest help. Even the “How to Write a Comic Script!” videos I found on YouTube didn’t have example scripts which... I don’t know, I don’t get it. Please include examples, comic YouTubers. I am confusion.

Now is the time for a sexy graph, because we are the kind of people who keep Excel spreadsheets of word counts and make graphs for fun.

Anyway, let’s look at…

youtube

[Good. I was listening to As The World Falls Down by David Bowie over and over, and now this is stuck in my head again. I don’t know why I do these things to myself. Also, I love Peter Tork’s face during some of the “AAAHHHH”s lol]

I can’t remember if I stated this before or during Camp at any point, but my goal was 60k words. I dislike aspiring for un-round numbers like “1667″ every day. Any number I could possibly pick is arbitrary, but for some reason the classic Nanowrimo number of 1667 seems even more arbitrary. “2000″ is a much better number. And, I can generally write 2000 words in two hours before running out of steam, so it works out well. It also divides better.

Having said that, you might be thinking, “Theda, the end Actual number on your graph is a lot closer to 90k than it is 60k,” and you would be right, good eyes. Were I Brandon Sanderson and you were one of my students, I would toss you a gummi bear. As it is, you’re not my student and I have no gummi bears and I’m not even Brandon Sanderson… so life is just upsetting I guess.

[But I am back to listening to As The World Falls Down, so I suppose it all works out.]

Back to the graph: The Actual. Look at this wavy-fucking-scalloped-fucking progression. Look at it. I can’t tell if it makes me happy or angry or what, but I know it gives me some kind of feeling. I think I like it from a purely aesthetic point of view, but from the point of the view of the person who made it, it annoys me.

I had a couple of days where I - in my infinite stupidity - didn’t really elaborate on what was supposed to happen in some of the scenes in my scene list and so I spent my “Writing!” time (as it’s labeled in my planner) not writing, but looking at the page cursing myself for not having written any directions for me, a directionless person.

You may also notice that the Goal bars suddenly jump up on the 24th day,. That’s because - in my infinite wisdom - I redid my goals after reaching 60k. It just makes more sense to me to be like, “Well, I punched that goal in the face. Let’s try and go WAY overboard,” because I have the Too Much gene and as Henry Rollins says: “Don't do anything by half. If you love someone, love them with all your soul. When you go to work, work your ass off. When you hate someone, hate them until it hurts.” I wouldn’t say that’s a personal philosophy so much as a Thing I Am Compelled To Do Or I Will Die.

But that’s just me.

As for the trend line, I prefer it looking more steep because that’s way more gratifying, but that’s what I get for writing parts of my scene list like, “That’s okay, Future Me will take care of it!” Past Me, you are a dick and you need to stop doing these things. You are a bastard.

Now for the table!

[I’m sorry if that’s very small.]

And this time I’m showing you the actual table I use to write down my words. Complicated? Yes. Sexy? Very yes. A little annoying? Also yes. Do we get a little worried that she works too hard and refuses to take a vacation? We do, but we also know that she does it because she loves her work, and we love and support her and bring her snacks throughout the workday to keep her going. What a great table.

First of all: Yes, my first writing block is at 4am. It’s because I have a day job and if I write from 4-6 I can use my brain right when it’s freshly slumbered instead of using it for nonsense at work all day and being unable to write and aggravated because my mental capacity is nil and I no longer know what words are. In an ideal world I would be able to write all day but, here we are.

You might notice there’s a lot of 0’s in the 4am block, especially in the fourth week, and that’s more so because - in my infinite infiniteness (infinity?) - I am secretly an ice giant (but like, smaller) and it’s summer and the northern hemisphere is Too Hot and I literally will not be able to sleep at night until about December. Until then, I am forced to understand what it’s like to be a jacket potato for half of the year so I can empathize with their starchy pain because this is, for whatever reason, Important.

It me. (Recipe)

Anyway,

My record day was 7519 on the 10th, which is just sexy and fun and cool and everything we want, and my lowest was a big fat 0 on the 16th.

I felt super motivated for reasons I don’t remember on the 10th. This is because I didn’t have my planner yet and was not keeping notes anywhere else at that time. (It’s an undated Daily Passion Planner, in case you’re also a slut for planners and wish to know ;) ). I think I was trying to do a 10k day just for funzies? Which, technically, at 2k words in 2 hours I should be able to do 10k in 5, but cell phones exist (and are too distracting), and until I shed my corporeal form I still have to do things like “make food and eat it,” and “get up to pee,” and “experience all the vagaries and horrors of human existence.” I’m hoping it clears up soon.

The 16th was the day that Future Me took Past Me by the hand and said, “My good bitch, you need to stop doing that thing where you leave shit for me because you run out of motivation or executive function or whatever the fuck is happening where you decide you don’t want to do something anymore, seemingly at random. You deciding to leave school before the day even started because you were bored may have been cute when you were a kid - and also annoying for everyone around you, and just alarming that time they had to pry your hands off the door molding as you held on to it and screamed - but as an adult you are both the cause of and the person who has to deal with this bullshit, and you need to stop.”

On the 16th I went to the Shrine of the Self (sorry, I’ve been reading a lot of manga lately) and made an offering for forgiveness, and then hunkered down and added a TON of notes and partially written scenes to my scene list. You can see how much that helped; it’s almost like having direction is actually useful, lol.

BUT, despite all that direction and despite punching my goal in the face, breaking it’s glasses, and taking it’s lunch money, the script is not finished!

Here’s some math as of the 23rd:

There are 124 points in my outline On the 23rd, I had completed 44 of those points, at 363 pages or 59,601 words 124 / 44 = 2.81 Now we check: 44 * 2.81 = 123.6 (close enough) So as of the 23rd, the projection for completing the script was: 363 * 2.81 = 1,020 pages 59,601 * 2.81 = 157,479 words

Now, I don’t know what the fuck that means because I don’t really do numbers, but at the time of the 23rd it looked an awful lot like I wasn’t going to finish this Camp project. And uh… hey, that was correct.

So I’m going to be continuing Camp Nano July 2020, but also in August 2020, over about 20 more days (providing I hit my goal every day.)

So:

IF -> I need to get up to 158,000; 158,000 - 86,000 = 72,000 words need to be written. (I'm rounding the total up because I canNOT imagine this script being somehow smaller than that at this point, and I’m rounding my Camp total down because who cares about 72 words?) I divided 72,000 from a few numbers until I got a word goal I was okay with, that I think I can do, here’s that one: 72,000 / 20 days = 3,600 words a day (This would mean I can either do 2k in the morning and then 1600 later, or the reverse. You know, whatever way I feel spicy that day.) THEN -> I need to write 3,600 words a day for 20 days to (hopefully) finish this script before work picks up at the end of August.

And then I’ll chill from the end of August - October (except for maybe some short stories or essays. I have a lot of Thoughts and they need to be purged from my brain for my own good). And then I’ll use Nanowrimo Classic (November) to edit this fucker.

SO… that’s some stuff.

As I said at the beginning this endeavor was only ever going to be a learning experience. Having to write 158k words total doesn’t scare me, the longest thing I’ve written yet was something like 190k words. Trying to finish it before the end of August is the daunting part. Especially since being able to be creative right now just keeps making my brain puke out more ideas, and then there’s too many ideas and I’m just writing them all down and hopefully I can get to them later.

Anyway, good job on Camp Nano July 2020 everyone! We did it!

And if you didn’t do it: don’t worry, you’ll do it next time :D

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lingthusiasm · 4 years

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Transcript Episode 40: Making machines learn language - Interview with Janelle Shane

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 40: Making machines learn language - Interview with Janelle Shane. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 40 show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about artificial intelligence – teaching computers language – with special guest Dr Janelle Shane, who runs the blog A.I.weirdness.com and is the author of You Look Like a Thing and I Love You, which is a fun new book about A.I. But first, we have some announcements.

Lauren: It’s a new year and we have new, big, exciting plans for the Lingthusiasm Patreon page. We are introducing a Discord, which is an online chat space, for patrons to share their lingthusiasm with their fellow lingthusiasts.

Gretchen: We’ve heard from a lot of you that you got into linguistics because of Lingthusiasm or it reawakened your memories of how much you like linguistics because you did some courses on it way back when and now you wish you could talk about linguistics more. We’re giving you a space where you can talk about linguistics, share your interesting linguistics links that you come across, and talk about them in a space with other lingthusiasm fans. We’re really excited to see what this community becomes. It’s a bit of an experiment, but we think it’ll be really fun to do. You can join the Patreon at the tier where you get bonus episodes as well, and you also have a space to talk about those bonus episodes and the regular Lingthusiasm episodes and any other linguistics things you wanna talk about.

Lauren: We want to see more Lingthusiasm not just online but also on all kinds of things, which is why we are also sending stickers over the next few months to patrons at the Ling-phabet tier. Patrons who are at that tier for three months or more will get stickers that say, “Lingthusiast” on them.

Gretchen: You can stick that to your laptop, your water bottle, your notebook, anything else in your life. Because the original trial run of stickers that we did with the special offer last year were really popular, we thought we’d provide a way for you to do that around the year. You can join that tier on Patreon as well.

Lauren: You can get other items at our lingthusiasm.com/merch page, but the stickers are an exclusive for our patrons.

Gretchen: Thanks to everybody who’s been a patron so far. We’re really excited to see you in the Discord. And we’re excited to get to try that out.

Lauren: Our last exciting announcement is that our patrons also helped us meet a new funding goal, which means that we now have some additional ling-ministration support.

Gretchen: Our fantastic producer Claire, who’s been with us since the very beginning, is also going to be taking on some more of the administration for the podcast, so you’ll see her around a bit on social media and on Patreon. You can listen to a bonus episode with Claire if you’d like to get to know her better as well.

Lauren: Our current bonus is on the future of English and what English might look like in a couple of centuries from now, inspired by Gretchen’s New York Times article.

Gretchen: You can get access to this episode and 34 other bonus episodes – that’s twice as much Lingthusiasm that you can listen to – at patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Gretchen: Hello, Janelle. Welcome to Lingthusiasm!

Janelle: Hi, it’s great to be here.

Lauren: Janelle, we are so excited to have you on the show today to talk about how we can make machines do language.

Gretchen: I think one of the things that we have in common, definitely one of the reasons I enjoy following your blog and Twitter feed and so on, is that both linguists and your approach to A.I. like poking at systems and seeing where they break.

Janelle: Yeah, for sure.

Gretchen: In case some people aren’t already following you on all of the internets, I wanna give people an idea of some of the stuff that you have tried to make break.

Lauren: Janelle, in your work, for people who haven’t seen it, you take large data sets of particular sets of terms or particular language genres, I guess, and then you feed them into an artificial intelligence, and we’ll talk about what that is later, and then it spits out these delightfully whimsical outputs. It takes inspiration from the data set that it’s given. I have a sustained history of laughing inappropriately loudly on public transport while reading your blog because the results are always so entertaining. Gretchen, do you have a favourite to share with us so I can chortle inappropriately?

Gretchen: Lauren, I think we should start with ice cream because I know you have a deep and abiding love of ice cream, and Janelle has come up with ice cream flavours.

Lauren: Yes! Yes, yes, yes. Janelle, where did the ice cream data come from? Did you have a list of ice cream flavours that someone gave you or…?

Janelle: Yeah. In this case, it was a group of middle-schoolers, actually. There’s a school in Austin, Texas, called Kealing Middle School where there is a group of students in the coding classes who decided that – they saw my blog. They wanted to do it too, and they wanted to generate ice cream flavours.

Lauren: Aww.

Gretchen: That’s so great!

Janelle: The thing is, I had looked at that, and I’m like, “Oh, this would be cool.” Then, I looked online and I say, “I need examples of existing ice cream flavours” because the A.I. has to have something to imitate. It doesn’t know about ice cream flavours unless I have some to tell it about. They’re scattered around. There wasn’t any big master list of them. So, I kinda said, “Oh, well. I guess that’s not gonna work.” Then, these middle-schoolers kicked my butt because they went and there was, I dunno, dozens of them – 50, 60 of them. Like, a lot of them. Each of them went and collected a few from this site or that site. Each one site would only have a few at a time. They had to manually copy and paste to this data set. They just, through the sheer numbers and having the time to do it, they put together this amazing data set of existing ice cream flavours. These middle-schoolers ended up getting about 1600 different ice cream flavours. Whereas, I only managed to get together 200. With the data set that much bigger, it made a huge difference. They started generating pretty amusing flavours.

Gretchen: I’ve got the blogpost up about the ice cream flavours from the middle school students, and some of them are really good. There are these whimsical flavours like “It’s Sunday” and “Cherry Poet” and “Brittle Cheesecake” and “Honey Vanilla Happy.” These seem like kind of reasonable ice cream flavours, right?

Lauren: I’d be open to ordering a “Vanilla Nettle.”

Gretchen: “Cherry Cherry Cherry.” If you like cherries, this is the flavour for you. There are also some weirder flavours from this data set like, “Chocolate Finger” and “Caramel Book” and –

Lauren: “Washing Chocolate.”

Gretchen: “Texas Charlie Covered Stunt.” Then, there’s this even weirder category, “Nuts with Mattery,” “Brown Crunch,” “Cookies and Green.”

Lauren: Aww, so close, and yet…

Gretchen: “Mango Cats.”

Lauren: They’re weird to us because of the semantics of them – just to be linguist-y and spoil the moment for a second – but they still are English words, or they look like something we’d recognise as English words, even though I don’t think “mattery” is a word that I know of. I think it’s worth saying artificial intelligence doesn’t know what ice cream is, right, it’s just using this list of flavours to figure out what kind of patterns could fit into that list.

Janelle: Exactly. It’s doing it at a very basic level. Like, what kinds of letters tend to come after other letters? What letters are we often finding in combination? Which letters are we never finding in combination? It’ll learn frequent words like “chocolate” or something. It’ll learn how to spell that after some false starts during training, but, yeah, without any concept of what chocolate is.

Gretchen: If it ends up with something like “Vervette’s Caramel Borfle,” it learned “caramel” but who “Vervette” and “borfle” are, I don’t know. That’s just randomly combining some letters in ways that are probable as English words.

Janelle: Yeah, it’s like a kid who learns how to write and immediately starts putting down letters on paper like, “Is this a word? Is this a word? How do you pronounce this?”

Lauren: Because obviously we train the neural nets that are children’s brains by talking to them a lot and giving them more input and taking them to school and doing those kind of things, but a neural net-type artificial intelligence that we’re doing this kind of training by giving it lots of data, how does it know if it is generating something that is more or less English? Is there a little thing in the computer saying, “Good work, Computer”?

Janelle: What it’s trying to do, how it knows it’s making any progress at all, is its job is to try and predict the next letter or the next combination of letters. Then, it just checks its prediction against some example of real texts that it hasn’t seen before that it saved aside to check itself with and said, “Okay, did I guess close or am I still way off? Am I going to have to change my internal structure so that my guess would’ve been better and see if, going forward, that’s gonna be an improvement?” It’s like a trial and error, guess and check.

Gretchen: When you look at the different sorts of stages – because it goes through several different generations, right? It might start out with just “Here’s a bunch of Es because E is really common.” And then the check is like, “Yeah, but you could do better.”

Janelle: Yeah. It’s like guessing lots of Es is more correct than guessing lots of question marks or lots of Qs. Yeah, it has to say, “Oh, well, maybe I could work in an S from time to time. What do you know? That’s slightly more correct,” and proceeds from there.

Lauren: So, that’s how it learns “chocolate”? Because it might go in with CH and HC, and every time it goes, “Is HC right? Is HC right?” And the data set is like, “Naw, not really.” But when it’s got the CH for an ice cream list, it’s like, getting lots of positive feedback that that’s gonna appear in “chocolate” and “chip” and “cherry.”

Janelle: Yeah, exactly. The process, yeah, it is a lot different from the human child learning language because it’s taking place, really, in isolation with no other context. It’s as if you are setting somebody in a room with just a few dictionaries or a few encyclopaedias written in a language that they don’t understand. It’s even harder for the A.I. because it doesn’t have a concept of what language even is to start out with. It’s all just guessing what comes next in this sequence of arcane symbols.

Gretchen: It doesn’t have a sense of what’s probable in the world either, right?

Janelle: Yeah.

Gretchen: Because you have some of these flavours like “Peanut Butter Slime,” which those are all English words, it’s just it would make a terrible ice cream because slime and peanut butter and ice cream are not things that go together.

Janelle: Yeah, exactly. Or, if I’m getting it to generate Halloween costumes, it’ll come up with “zombie school bus.” It’s like, “Okay, zombie school bus. There’s magic school bus. Why is that more likely than zombie school bus?” We know. It doesn’t.

Gretchen: It doesn’t have any of that real-world knowledge that you can do – or like “Mango Cats.” What does it mean for a cat to be mango? I don’t know.

Lauren: If an artificial intelligence gained sentience, it’s likely it actually wouldn’t be a very good linguistics student because it doesn’t really understand the concept of sounds. It doesn’t seem to have a lot of understanding of the structure of a sentence. We talk in one episode about syntax essentially being this structure that we can hang other bits of sentences off. It has much more of a flat, just looking at the patterns on the surface kind of approach to language.

Janelle: Yeah. Keep in mind, too, the amount of computing power it has to work with is so much less than what it takes for sentience or anything near human level. If you’re looking at raw computing power, the neural nets we have today are somewhere around the level of an earthworm.

Gretchen: Maybe an earthworm would like peanut butter slime-flavoured ice cream.

Janelle: I’ll give all my Peanut Butter Slime to the earthworm.

Lauren: That’s very generous of you.

Gretchen: This was one of the analogies that I liked in your book, which I enjoyed very much. You Look Like a Thing and I Love You – the title of this book was named after another neural net, right?

Janelle: Mm-hmm. This was a phrase generated from a neutral net that was trying to do pick-up lines.

Gretchen: I guess that could be a pick-up line.

Lauren: We have things like ice cream names, and you’ve done death metal names, and Halloween costumes, and colours, and these are all three or four words at most. Pick-up lines is moving into more of the sentence/couple of sentences-type of thing. As the amount of words you’re trying to generate grows longer, how much more difficult does that make it for the artificial intelligence?

Janelle: It makes it a lot more difficult. When I was generating the ice cream flavours and things, I was deliberately going exclusively for these kinds of problems where it would just have to do a couple words at a time because when it tried to do longer sentences or phrases, it would not make sense. One of the things is that the A.I. I was working with at the time didn’t have very much memory at all. So, it would kind of lose track of things that happened a couple of words ago. It wasn’t really able to figure out then how to make a sentence work or make phrases work. It was a bit beyond it. The pick-up lines was definitely a case of, “This is too hard for the A.I.” It struggles, okay, not just the “How do you make a grammatical phrase?” but also “How do you do puns? How do you do innuendo?” These were all things that require a lot of background knowledge that this thing just did not have.

Gretchen: Another example that you use in the book is with recipes, right? It can figure out that you need to list some ingredients, you need to list some instructions, but then those instructions won’t contain the ingredients that were previously mentioned, necessarily, because it doesn’t remember that those are what it listed before.

Janelle: Yeah, we’ll see that. You’ll get something that on the surface at first glance looks like a recipe and then, when you actually read more closely, you’re like, “Wait a second. It has no idea what’s going on. It’s forgotten its ingredients. It’s telling me to chop the milk into cubes. Something’s going on here.”

Lauren: There’s something very confident about the way it fakes its ability.

Janelle: Yeah. Well, I mean, part of the reason it sounds so confident is that it’s copying what humans have written, and humans generally didn’t tend to write in the middle of a recipe, “Uhh, wait a second. I have no idea what’s going on.” It learns that is not a phrase that appears in a recipe, so it’s going to express any kind of confusion. It’s just going to plough ahead with its best guess at what a human would say.

Gretchen: This is where, I think, your famous giraffe question comes from.

Janelle: Ah, yes. I love this chatbot. It’s a chatbot called Visual Chatbot. It’s designed to answer questions about an image. You show it an image and then it comes up with a caption, and then you can have this back and forth conversation with the bot about what it sees in the image. You think that premise would be fairly straightforward, but there are weird quirks that arise just because this thing is trying to copy how humans ask and answer questions about images. The training data is important. In this case, the training data is a whole bunch of people hired through Amazon Mechanical Turk to take turns asking and answering questions about images. Then, the chatbot was trained on answers. So, given this kind of image, given what the question is, what would humans tend to answer in this situation? Some weird quirks emerge just from that premise. One of the things that they wanted to make sure to avoid was this thing called priming. People tend to ask questions to which the answer tends to be “yes.” They found in an early version of this chatbot that they could get 80% accuracy just by answering “yes” to every single yes-or-no question.

Gretchen: Uh-oh!

Janelle: They ended up having to hide the image from the person who was asking questions, so that helped a little bit. Now, it’s about 50/50 if you ask a given question whether it’s going to answer yes or no to that. One of the things that they weren’t able to correct was this interesting thing with the giraffes. What happens is, if you ask the question, “How many giraffes do you see?” the chatbot will almost always return a non-zero answer. It can be doing great about an image and, “Oh, yeah. This is a person on a snowboard. There’s snow,” up until the point where you ask, “And how many giraffes are there?” It will answer, “Three” or “Two” or “Too many to count.”

Lauren: I think it’s just worth clarifying, just to really make this clear, this is not a data set in which giraffes appear in every image.

Janelle: True. Yes. I would love to see that data set – snowboarding with giraffes.

Lauren: “Yeah, there are three giraffes.”

Gretchen: Giraffe snowboarders – this is possible. Because I know this is an ongoing joke that you have, I tested with an image of the cover of my book which, as I think as everyone knows, contains zero giraffes because it’s not about giraffes. Visual chatbot told me that it is a sign that says, “Unknown, unknown, unknown,” on the side of it which I guess is not the worst for a cover that has text in it. It just can’t read the text – sure. Then, I said, “How many giraffes?” and Visual Chatbot said, “Two.”

Janelle: It comes from this thing is copying how humans tend to answer this question. In its examples of humans hired through Amazon Mechanical Turk, the humans had not tended to ask the question, “How many giraffes are there?” when they didn’t know if there were any giraffes.

Gretchen: Right. You’d say something like, “Are there any giraffes?” The person says, “Yes,” and then you say, “How many giraffes?”

Janelle: Exactly. If you ask the chatbot, “Are there any giraffes?” it will answer, “No,” quite often. But then, if you follow up with the question, “And how many giraffes do you see?” it’ll say, “Five.”

Lauren: This approach reminds me of, as Gretchen said earlier, as soon as I get my hands on some kind of thing that’s doing this back and forth question asking or as soon as I’m let loose on a Google Translate, I think it’s a very linguist-brain thing to try and find these points at which the computer can’t handle language properly. It’s always great when you have an approach that understands how humans actually interact with this data that helps explain why you end up getting these really strange answers and why it’s good to have linguists help design artificial intelligence or chatbots and these things because the way humans choose to do language is very different to what we think of as the nice, straightforward application at the end.

Janelle: There’s so many start-ups that are trying to have some kind of bot that you can interact with in an open-ended manner. Then, they run into trouble. Facebook M is one of these services that was discontinued last year because they thought it was going to be like a digital assistant, lives in your browser, you can ask it to do things like look up show times and stuff. But what people ended up asking for was the weirdest, most complicated things. One guy documented, oh yeah, he asked it if it could arrange for a parrot to visit his office. I mean, you’re not gonna prepare for that when you’re training one of these chatbots. It turned out to be the chatbot kept needing humans to step in and rescue it. They realised it was going to be too expense because they were always gonna need these humans.

Lauren: This is a company that has no shortage of resources to throw at a problem like this.

Gretchen: I think if you tell people, “You can interact with this like a human,” they think they can do things like make a request for parrots because humans can understand a request for parrots. Even if I can’t personally deliver you a parrot, at least I understand this request. Whereas, a chatbot, if parrots aren’t in the training data, then parrots don’t exist.

Janelle: This is one of the things, too, that makes it hard to tell the difference between humans and computers when you’re chatting with them. If you’re in a customer service situation, they try to really narrow the context in which you can ask questions and not make it open-ended, especially if they’re going to invisibly use bots because they don’t want you asking for parrots out of the blue.

Gretchen: Right. It’s like when you call into a customer service line, it’s like, “Press 1 to talk to this,” “Press 2 to talk to that,” they really wanna keep your options constrained because then the computer can help you. It’s when it’s open-ended and people start behaving as if it can do anything that a human can do that you start running into problems.

Janelle: Yeah. What you’ll get is you’ll get these companies that’ll build chatbots where it’ll start out as an open-end conversation with something that is secretly a bot but it hasn’t said it is. But then if it gets confused, it’ll invisibly hand control over to a human. That can be problematic because then, if the customer by then is frustrated and thinks they’re dealing with a robot, the poor human employee may not have a very pleasant time with that conversation. What I would really love – what I would love linguists to design for me – is some kind of very polite, in-context way to ask a question or interact with one of these bots that would reveal whether it is a human or a computer, some kind of shibboleth that is never – not asking about his favourite Star Wars character, because that’s impolite if you’re talking to a human employee – but some phrasing or something that’s tricky.

Gretchen: That’s an interesting question because I think, a lot of times, asking for something that’s a little bit non-cooperative, like “How many giraffes?” out of the blue, is maybe gonna deliver that answer. But it’s also gonna be confusing and annoying to a human.

Janelle: Exactly. My default has always been, as soon as a human – because better be polite to a computer than rude to a human sort of thing – but it would be lovely to be able to tell the difference. Companies should just tell us or have a “Talk to a human” button or something, but yeah.

Gretchen: You’re looking for an inverse Turing Test. A Turing Test is this classic test in computer conversation where, if a computer can fool a human into thinking that they’re talking to another human, then they’ve passed the Turing Test. There are ways of passing the Turing Test if you constrain the context enough. Or if you tell people that they’re talking to a child or they’re talking to somebody who’s on some drugs or something like this – or a philosopher – then they’ll be more likely to believe – these are the three kinds of people that a robot can be. But if you try to do something that’s very practical or that is grounded very much in reality, then people aren’t as willing to be generous with the computer’s misinterpretations. Janelle, your blog post that you make the neural nets do funny things, they’re really funny. And yet, I have a feeling that it’s not only that the neural nets are funny, it’s also that you’re really good at spotting the funny bits and bringing them out to a blog post for us.

Janelle: Yeah, there’s a lot of human storytelling work that goes on. How is this going to be interesting? Where is the funny thing that it’s doing? Sometimes, the ratio is like 100 to 1 of things that aren’t very funny that it generates and the one thing that I’m like, “Oh, yeah. I’m posting that.”

Lauren: Because, I guess, the thing about it being a computer process is that you could just generate infinite numbers of nonsensical ice cream names, but a lot of those are too nonsensical to even be particularly amusing.

Janelle: Yeah. It also has a tendency to – especially if we’re dealing with something short-ish and simple-ish like ice cream, then it’ll generate something and it says, “Mint Chocolate Chip,” and I’m like, “Oh. It just copied that.” It learned that one.

Lauren: Learnt that one too well.

Janelle: Yeah. Because as far as these A.I.s are concerned, exactly copying my examples is a perfect solution to the question I’m asking of it. If it can predict every single word, word for word, in the text file that I gave it, then that is a perfect score. Sometimes, it’s almost like a battle for me to try to get it to be just bad enough at the task.

Gretchen: Not so bad that it’s incoherent, but bad enough that humans can resolve what it’s supposed to mean and it’s still funny.

Lauren: One application of this name-generation process you’ve been doing was when you created a list of craft beer names and a company actually took one of those names to create a beer. Was that a process that you embarked on because you thought this was a good place to experiment with creative naming or how did that come about?

Janelle: This was one of the things where I happened to know somebody who was friends with the owner of the brewery, and I thought, “Well, this would be fun to actually get one of these beers to exist in real life,” because people keep saying that the names A.I.s are generating are pretty good. In the case of craft beer names, there’ve actually been companies who have taken each other to court over having beer names that were too close to one another. There’s this need to maybe show there’re ways to still come up with new beer names and we hadn’t exhausted all the possibilities yet.

Lauren: It’s really a collaboration between you and the A.I. where you are curating all of the names that it gives you in order to find the ones that have that perfect balance of following the rules you’ve given it but with a bit of a lateral thinking approach.

Janelle: Yeah. Just the right amount of lateral thinking as well, too. Sometimes, it’s way off the mark and comes up with, I don’t know, “Farm Fight,” as a name for beer. I’m like, “Well…”

Gretchen: Here are some of the beer names that were on the list like “Dang River” and “Binglezard Flack” and “Toe Deal” and “Devil’s Chard.”

Lauren: Some of them I can almost imagine being a craft beer. In the end, it was “The Fine Stranger” that was bottled and labelled.

Gretchen: That’s good. I think the examples are very funny, but there’s also an important part of making a lot of funny examples, right? It’s not just to entertain people, even though it is very entertaining.

Janelle: There’s people using these practically as their business in coming up with brand names. I did this one beer. There’s a whole art to naming brands, and it’s not just coming up with the names, but it’s also this whole framing of “Because of the etymology of this and that” or “Because the computer mashed this together with that.” There’s definitely a storytelling element to it as well. When I was going through this process with the beer, I was definitely getting the sense of, “Oh, yeah. I’ve got all these great names.” Any – not any one of these – but many of them would make great beer names, and the beer would sell well, and the brewery would be happy with it. But, yeah, how do I put it on the marquee, put it on the silver platter and make them actually say, “Yes. The authority has spoken. This is the name.”

Gretchen: Beyond brand names, there’re also lots of other practical applications people are using artificial intelligence for now, whether that’s machine translation or self-driving cars or all of these sorts of very practical aspects to things. It’s hard to see the inside of a self-driving car, and what that looks like, and how it’s making problems for things. Whereas, it’s easier to see what happens when you make a bunch of weird ice cream flavours.

Janelle: Exactly. That’s why I like doing these tests. Some of the biggest applications for A.I. is in doing financial predictions or looking for fraudulent logins and things like that where it, maybe, is comprehensible to somebody who’s in that field, but the way that they’re making mistakes in that field is not very obvious, not very interesting, if you’re not right there in that field working with these kinds of numbers all the time. If it’s making a mistake on an ice cream flavour, that is much faster to see, “Oh, yeah, it’s doing pattern matching. Oh, yeah, it doesn’t understand what it’s doing.” A lot of these same mistakes really do translate over to commercial applications.

Lauren: We’ve talked a little bit about how you have to curate the output because it will just keep spitting out silly ice cream names forever. We’ve talked a little bit about some of the problems with the types of data that are put into these processes in terms of, you know, if you don’t set it up very well and you have people answering questions about giraffes in a way that the A.I. is going to implement weirdly. There are bigger and more serious implications for thinking about the kind of data that we are using to create artificial intelligence processes not just with language but particularly for this topic looking at the kinds of data that people use to build artificial intelligence. You talk about this a bit in your book. Where do you see some of the biggest challenges in creating good A.I.?

Janelle: One of the things is, remember these A.I.s have about the raw computing power of an earthworm and they don’t have the context, then, to realise that there are some things that the humans do that they probably shouldn’t be copying. Completely unknowingly, they will copy things like racial/gender discrimination and they won’t know that that’s what they’re doing. They won’t know that that’s a bad thing. They just really can’t comprehend it.

Gretchen: It’s kind of like the chatbot that figures, “Oh, if I just answer yes to everything, I’ll get 80% accuracy,” even though it’s not actually useful, communicatively, to just answer yes to everything.

Janelle: It’s like this is exactly what you have asked for but is not necessarily what you want. When we give it a bunch of human decisions on resume sorting, for example, and we tell it, “Copy these human decisions,” then these algorithms can look and say, “Well, this is a very difficult problem, but looks like all of the applicants who’ve gone to this one college tend not to be hired” and “Oh, that college is a women’s college” and it is implementing the gender discrimination that it’s seeing in its training data because it saw this signal, didn’t know what it was, only knew that it was helping it copy the humans a little better.

Gretchen: Right. If the humans are already having their sets of bias and if I can magnify that bias, like if you have a human that’s answering “yes” 80% and now the A.I.’s answering “yes” 100% of the time, it doesn’t know what it’s doing.

Janelle: Exactly. Yeah. They are so good about being sneaky about – you may think that if you set up a resume sorting algorithm saying, “Well, we’re just not gonna tell it what gender any of these applicants are” and it is very good at figuring this out not just through colleges but through if somebody has their extra-curriculars listed and “women’s soccer team” is on there, it will glom onto that. Or even subtleties with word choice and phrasing, it will start using those kinds of trends and use them to copy the humans better.

Gretchen: I’m thinking about a different resume study which showed that people – they had the same sorts of resumes – people with a white-sounding name versus with a black-sounding name were more likely to get called back for interviews. You can imagine in the A.I. that it actually just learns how to predict based on someone’s name. Like, “Oh, we’ve hired a lot of people named ‘Mike’ at this company.” We all know these companies that have a whole bunch of people named “Mike” and “Adam” and stuff. “Maybe we should just only interview the people named ‘Mike.’”

Janelle: It will absolutely do that sort of thing. You see there’s a lot of companies out there that are offering resume screening but knowing what I know about how commonly these A.I.s can pick up on this bias I would not want one of these programs screening resumes for my company, for example. Or I would, at the very least, demand to see the evidence that this thing is not making biased decisions.

Gretchen: Right. That’s a sort of way of saying, “Okay, well, if this A.I. still thinks ‘Slime’ is a good flavour for ice cream, then really how much can we trust it to make a good decision about resumes?”

Janelle: I think that’s almost the counter-intuitive danger about A.I. in a lot of ways. It’s not that it’s too smart and it’s going to take over the world and it’s not gonna obey humans – no. The problem is that it’s not smart enough to realise what we’re actually trying to ask it to do.

Lauren: It keeps obeying us too well in ways that we don’t want it to.

Janelle: Yeah, if it can. When it comes to language generation, language processing, human language is really, really difficult. So, that particular domain, more than a lot of others, you’ll see these A.I.s that are really struggling to get a handle on what the humans are saying.

Lauren: It’s good news that linguists will have jobs for a little bit longer.

Janelle: Yeah.

Gretchen: One of the questions that really came up in my mind when we were thinking about interviewing you was, can the A.I. take my job as the co-host of the podcast, Lingthusiasm? If Lauren and I want to go live on a beach somewhere, can we replace, as co-hosts, a bot-generated Gretchen and Lauren to run this podcast? Lauren, what do you think?

Lauren: We actually put this to Janelle a few years ago, back when we started releasing transcripts for our early episodes. About three years ago, in 2016/2017, we didn’t have many episodes, so we didn’t have a lot of data to work with, but also it seems like in these last few years, the ability to process larger text has gotten better. Is that the case, Janelle?

Janelle: Yeah, that’s definitely the case. The kinds of things I was doing in 2016 – generating words, short phrases, paint colour names, ice cream flavour names, those sorts of things – I wouldn’t think of tackling entire sentences or, let alone, sentences that follow one another that make sense. But now, just pretty much in the last year, there’s been some really big A.I.s that have been trained on millions of pages from the internet. They are much better at generating text. They can generate grammatical sentences most of the time now. Most of the words that they use are real words. They still don’t understand what they’re saying. I think, yeah, it has gotten better.

Gretchen: You can potentially take something that’s been trained on, let’s say, most of the English pages of the internet and then fine-tune it on a smaller data set to try to push it more in the direction of just, for a random example, Lingthusiasm episodes.

Janelle: Yes. If, hypothetically, I had many episodes worth of Lingthusiasm transcripts, I might be able to make a robo-Gretchen and a robo-Lauren.

Lauren: Do you know what else has happened in the last couple of years, Gretchen?

Gretchen: I think we’ve produced a lot more episodes of Lingthusiasm.

Lauren: Between the main episodes and the bonus episodes, we have 70 transcripts, which is over 800 pages of data. Janelle, would that be enough to have a go at creating a robo-Gretchen and a robo-Lauren?

Janelle: There’s one way to find out.

Gretchen: Oh, boy! Let’s do some live neural netting on the podcast.

Janelle: All right! What could possibly go wrong?

Gretchen: Okay. Can you walk us through what are you doing right now on your computer?

Lauren: Janelle’s gonna share her computer with us so that we can see what’s happening, but we might get some screen grabs as we go through.

Gretchen: We may put some links into the show notes if there’s stuff that’s visual that’s hard to see as well.

Janelle: What we’re looking at right now, this is actually just a browser window in Chrome. What I’m looking at is a thing that is an interface to an A.I. that’s being hosted on Google’s computers right now. Google is graciously allowing people to use their powerful computers that are pretty specialised for these kinds of calculations. Even though I am working on a fairly ordinary laptop, I’m able to connect to some fairly serious firepower here.

Lauren: It’s really interesting to get to see under the hood of making an A.I. run. I think we’ll give people a bit of a taste of that here, but if you want more details and more of an explanation of how we made “Robot Lingthusiasm,” we’ll make that into a bonus episode.

Janelle: So, here we are. I’ve connected to this A.I. I’ve downloaded a copy of it. Now, I’m going to upload lingthusiasm.txt. I’m going to upload this file of 2.4MB of you two talking. Let’s – okay. Okay. We’ve got our first sample out here right now. “It is already conversations.”

Lauren: Except it’s just conversation by someone called “Gina.”

Gretchen: Maybe this is the hybrid between the two of us – our merged alter-ego? Shall we read a few of these lines, Lauren? I think we should each start with “Gina” as we’re reading the lines.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: First line. This is the first of Gina’s lines. “Gina: Yeah, that’s why I’m gonna be honest with you.”

Lauren: “Gina: We’re not always going to be like, ‘Oh, we don’t know why we did that.’ That’s why.”

Gretchen: “Gina: I know. The people who’ve come to me to ask me are gonna be like, “Yeah, I didn’t know who was getting up and down the stairs and going to a doctor’s appointment.”

Lauren: Okay. So, not very Lingthusiasm in content there, but I like where Gina’s going.

Gretchen: Yeah. I like that it’s getting a dialogue thing. We’re pleased to announce that, in fact, your Lingthusiasm hosts will be replaced by robots but only for one episode and it will be bonus and it will be very, very funny. You can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to listen to the next bonus episode, which will be written by robots and performed by you and me, Lauren.

Lauren: To listen to that bonus episode, check out patreon.com/lingthusiasm. You can hear us reading some of our favourite examples. We will also give patrons access to some of those reams of examples so you can find ones that make you chortle as well. It’ll have some screenshots from the A.I.-building process for patrons as well. Thank you so much, Janelle, for taking us through the process of actually training a neural net artificial intelligence and showing us some of the pitfalls and some of the challenges and for talking to us today. If people want to read more about how artificial intelligence is making the world weirder and more wonderful, and some of the challenges and limitations, your book is You Look Like a Thing and I Love You. I loved reading it.

Gretchen: Yes, I can personally attest that I got my copy the night before my book came out when I was very distracted. It successfully distracted me for several hours while I was waiting for that countdown, midnight, to have that happen. It has lots of fun pictures of weird things that the A.I.s are doing as well. Thanks again for coming on the show.

Janelle: Oh, it was my pleasure. This was a lot of fun. I loved listening to your very strange generated conversations.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, including extended versions of A.I.-generated Lingthusiasm transcripts, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts, and you can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, IPA ties, IPA socks, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet.

Lauren: I tweet and blog as Superlinguo. Janelle Shane is @JanelleCShane on Twitter, her blog is aiweirdness.com, and her book is You Look Like a Thing and I Love You. To listen to bonus episodes and help keep the show ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Recent bonus topics include future English, onomatopoeia, and linguistics fiction. If you can’t afford to pledge, that’s okay too. We really appreciate it if you could recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life.

Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer to Claire Gawne, and our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Janelle: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

#language #linguistics #lingthusiasm #episode 40 #transcripts #Janelle Shane #artificial intelligence #Neural net #roboLingthusiasm #AI

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atc74 · 5 years

Text

Indulgence

Warnings: Porn with Plot, fingering, nipple play

Summary: Y/N is anxiously waiting for Jensen’s hiatus when Gen calls her out for a girls day.

Pairing: Jensen x Reader

Word Count: ~1600

Written for: Written for @leatherwhiskeycoffeeplaid and her Still Dirty at 30 Birthday Challenge (2018).

*Thanks to Tumblr and the fact that they refuse to allow me to appeal the original post, here is the edited version.* Thanks in advance for reading again :)

Like Jensen’s scent? Buy it here!

As a reminder, this is a work of fiction and should be regarded as such. No harm is intended toward the actor(s) or their families.

The days leading up to a hiatus were always the longest. This one was no different and you struggled to find enough to keep your mind occupied. If you scrubbed the floors one more time, they would need to be refinished. Just as you were about to wash the windows in the kitchen for the second time, your phone buzzed.

Gen: Hey, I found a great new boutique! Let’s go find something to welcome the boys home. Be there in 10!

You: Ugh. Fine, but you’re buying lunch too!

You stowed your phone and went upstairs to freshen up. You quickly brushed your hair and pulled it back in a loose braid. You slipped on a pair of boots and grabbed a light jacket. By the time you made it back downstairs, your front door was opening and Gen peeked her head in.

“Ready?” she asked and you nodded, grabbing your purse and keys. You closed and locked the door before you followed Gen back to her truck.

“Where are we going, Gen?” you probed as you gazed out the window, the sights of your quiet neighborhood flying by.

“My girlfriend told me about this great little boutique that sells lingerie. I thought it would be fun if we picked out a welcome home gift for our men. You know…something a little sassy, maybe a little naughty. Give them an incentive to work harder and come home a little more often!” Genevieve laughed and you found it contagious.

“Jen and I talked about trying for a baby. Maybe this can kick start the trying part,” you thought out loud.

“That’s great, Y/N/N! I can’t wait to be an Auntie! Truth is, we are trying, too,” Gen revealed as she pulled into a parking spot.

“Then let’s do this. Let’s get some naughty lingerie and get pregnant!” you exclaimed, possibly a little too loud, as you got out of the vehicle, your cheeks heating up as you got some sideways glances. “Oops!”

You and Gen entered the little shop. It was clean and brightly lit. There was warm, natural wood flooring and shelving. There were some very conservative pieces toward the front of the store, but as you wandered farther inside, the choices were definitely a little racy, racier than you were used to. Sure, you owned lingerie, but it was sort of run of the mill. It isn’t like you and Jensen needed it to boost your sex life; you definitely didn’t need any help in that department…but maybe Genevieve was right.

Gen caught you daydreaming and brought you out of the trance you had been in. “So I rented out the store for an hour. Here,” she held out her hand handing you a few things to try.

“What? Who even does that? I didn’t even know that was an option!” you gasped, never able to fully embrace this lifestyle.

“Hon, it’s a Tuesday at eleven in the morning; it’s not like people are swarming the place! Besides, they have champagne! So let’s get our drink on and try on some sexy shit!” Gen whisper yelled at you and you gave in, taking the items she handed you.

As you made your way to the dressing room, an employee greeted you with a glass of bubbly and took the items from you, hanging them in a dressing room. “Please, make yourself comfortable, Mrs. Ackles. I have already spoken with Mrs. Padalecki and we have some things already in your dressing room for your convenience. Relax, take your time and have fun.”

You raised your eyebrows in surprise at Gen, who tried feigning innocence at your accusatory grin. “You totally planned this!”

“Yes. Yes, I did. Now sit down, drink and enjoy. You spend too much time cooped up in that house waiting for him to come home. Let’s have a girl’s day and have some fun,” Gen pleaded with you.

Within the hour, you had drank enough to make you loosen up. You tried on everything the salesperson had brought you, plus Gen’s selection. You had narrowed it down to seven and let Gen pick five. You honestly loved them all, but thought purchasing all of them would be overindulgent and that just wasn’t who you were. Gen made her choices, then showed you hers. Finally you checked out and were back in the vehicle, headed to lunch.

“Gen, this was a lot of fun. Thank you for taking my mind off everything for the day,” you thanked your friend as she pulled up in front of your house a few hours later. You weren’t sure what you would do without her.

“It was my profound pleasure. Let me know how he likes his presents,” she called as you walked through your front door. You took your bags up to the bedroom then returned to the kitchen for a glass of wine. It felt like a bath night, you decided. Taking your wine back upstairs to the master bathroom, you filled the tub, dumping in some of your favorite bath salts.

You stepped in the foamy water, setting in until you were neck deep. The aromatherapy scents cleared your mind and eased your tired mind. You sipped your wine until it was gone, then set about shaving and exfoliating until you were soft and smooth. You drained the water and toweled off before you wrapped your robe around you to retrieve the bottle of wine from the kitchen.

Pouring another glass of your favorite red, you stared at the bag on the bed as it silently dared you to put on one of your new purchases. Maybe just one, you thought. You searched through the bag and found one of the risque pieces you picked out. It was a pair of light pink and black high waist panties, almost like a corset, with a black lace ‘x’ up the front. The silky fabric felt amazing on your smooth and softened skin as you pulled them up your legs. You slipped the bra over your breasts and fastened it in the front.

You had never taken the time to look at yourself in lingerie before, because it was always for him, but as you stood in front of your full length mirror, you couldn’t help but feel sexy. It was a waste though, seeing as you had no one to show. Jensen wouldn’t home for a couple more days. You sighed and unclasped the bra, letting it fall open, revealing your full breasts, your nipples hardening as the cooler air hit them. You slowly ran your hands up your hips and stomach, before cupping them, a tit in each hand, and gently massaged them. A small moan left your lips as you continued, wishing it was your husband’s large hands on you. Just as you pinched your nipples, tugging slightly, you heard a growl behind you and whipped around, covering yourself as best you could.

“Jen! Jesus Christ! You scared the fuck out of me!” you shrieked, then reality hit you. “What are you doing here? I thought you wouldn’t be home until Thursday?”

“Well, if this is what I come home to, I should surprise you more often,” his husky voice rolled off his tongue and went through to your core, making you shudder.

“It’s new. You like it?” you crooned seductively as you returned your hands to your breasts.

“I like what’s under it better. You are a sight for sore eyes, Darlin’,” Jensen admitted as he stalked toward you, replacing your hands with his. His plush lips came crashing down to yours, the kiss hot and demanding. His tongue was warm and wet as it probed your lips and you sighed, opening to him without hesitation. Your hands smoothed up his back to his neck, playing with the opening of his henley.

He roughly turned you around in his arms, but continued his ministrations of your breasts, roughly squeezing the nipples between his fingers, as you arched against him. You felt yourself moving and found yourself seated on the corner of your bed, Jensen still held you firmly against his chest, one hand on your left tit, as the other trailed down your torso, landing between your legs.

Jensen’s feet wrapped around your ankles, pulling your knees apart, giving him easier access. Your moans filled the room as he massaged your mound, but not going further just yet, “Jen, please. It’s been too long and I need you.”

“Not just yet, Darlin’. Gonna make you work for it,” his breath hot on your neck. “Just let go for me and I will make you feel so good.”

You obeyed your husband’s command and let yourself go under his touch, leaning back into him. His right hand applied more pressure, rubbing your pussy through the fabric and it quickly dampened with your arousal. His lips attacked your neck, licking and sucking at the spots he knew made you weak with desire. His hand snaked inside your panties and picked up speed. Your orgasm approached in a flash as you came with a shout all over the silky material and his hand. Jensen continued to work you through your high until your breathing returned to normal.

“If this is the result of indulging myself, maybe I should do it more often,” you giggled, still wrapped in your husband’s arms.

“God, I missed you, Y/N/N,” Jensen murmured into your neck, placing sweet kisses along it’s length. “Let’s make a baby.”

Ready for the smuttier sequel…

Did you like it? The nicest thing you can do for a writer is reblog their work and tell them, and others, how much you like it!

Tags: @closetspngirl @emoryhemsworth @iwantthedean @meganwinchester1999 @sis-tafics @wilde-abandon @wegoddessofhell @holyfuckloueh @horsegirly99 @smoothdogsgirl @dolphincliffs @thisismysecrethappyplace @neeadinghugs @roxyspearing @theoriginalvicki @andkatiethings @mrswhozeewhatsis @just-another-busy-fangirl @linki-locks11 @evansrogerskitten @hennessy0274-blog @hobby27 @gh0stgurl @charliebradbury1104 @blacktithe7 @the--blackdahlia @fortisetgloriosusinarduis @roseblue373 @hannahindie @pinknerdpanda @cherrycokegirls1 @mogaruke @4llmywr1tings

Jensen’s Jamboree: @supernatural-jackles @dean-winchesters-bacon @cameronbraswell @docharleythegeekqueen @maddiepants @squirrel-moose-winchester @amanda-teaches @thing-you-do-with-that-thing @adoptdontshoppets @akshi8278 @kathaswings @deansgirl215 @x-waywardaf-x @elara98azalea @jerkbitchidjitassbutt @pretty-fortune

#jensen ackles #jensen ackles x reader #jensen x reader #jensen ackles smut #jensen smut #jensen x reader smut #jensen ackles fanfiction #supernatural rpf #supernatural fanfiction #Supernatural fanfic #spn fanfiction #spn fanfic

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chemicalmagecraft · 5 years

Text

The Gamer Hero, Deku Chapter 2

A/N: Wow, thanks for all you guys who left nice reviews and stuff. Sorry it took me so long to update, but I had a play I had to go to a lot of practices for, which was especially annoying because of the four scenes I was in, I only had an important role in one.

To LadyCalus, I have no idea how to do that.

To the user known as Iliekfishes, I would like to say that, while I do not appreciate your tone, I do appreciate that you gave me some criticism. Now, to address what you said, I said that I hadn't seen any My Hero Academia/Gamer fanfiction, which was at the time true. I have, however, checked some out after you pointed that out to me. If it bothers you that much, though, I can edit it if you ask nicely. As for the formatting, I do admit to using Ryuji's The Games We Play as a sort of reference for the formatting, as I remember that that fanfic was very faithful in formatting to the original webcomic and I couldn't remember how exactly it went. Now, while I can deal with you insulting me to a certain point, I would prefer you not call the other viewers names. I also have no clue what "almost all the tension is midigated by cannon" means. Finally, while I didn't mean to make it seem like I was anyone's gift to fanfiction aside from my own, much less God's, I do apologize if I unintentionally gave off that vibe. If you can possibly think of any tips to not sound like a jackass, I would be willing and grateful to hear them out. Sorry for putting you on the spot like that, but you did call people who were nice to me dumbasses, which I very much do not appreciate.

To Voltrasin, I understand your confusion, but the reason why Kamui Woods and Mt. Lady had ? for titles is because Izuku can't see the titles and levels of anyone fifty or more levels over his. Should've made that more clear, sorry. And yes, all heroes will have their hero names as their titles.

Also, I forgot to include map and quest log to the main menu. Fixed it, but I figured I should let you know

Now, on with the story!

xoxoxo

I stared at the pile of sludge in front of me. "Well, kid, seems like you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Unfortunately for you, I need a disguise." Ping. I looked at the new text box.

A new skill has been created through special action! Repeated exposure to bloodthirst has created the skill 'Sense Bloodthirst' to sense ill will.

Yeah, no thanks. I jumped out of the way as he lunged at me. "Observe"

Name: Kurosawa Shou

Title: Sludge Monster

Level: 26

HP: 1600/1600

MP: 500/500

STR: 30

VIT: 39

DEX: 34

INT: 16

WIS: 6

LUC: 6

Quirk: Sludge Body

Emotions: Grateful, bloodthirsty

Status: Sludge body

"Itadakimasu!" the slime said as part of his body shot out and stuck to my ankle. I gasped and quickly bent down to try and tear him off of me before he could do anything more to me. Unfortunately, my fingers slipped through him with little resistance. "Get over here!" he yelled, and I was yanked into him. As I was painfully dragged across the ground, I heard a ping, but I was a little too distracted by the sludge villain trying to eat me or something. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get away from him before he submerged me in himself and started trying to force himself down my throat. It was at this moment that I noticed something in the corner of my eye that I could somehow see perfectly fine.

HP: 184/250

MP: 275/275

And the HP was slowly going down as I struggled with the sludge villain. That was not a good sign. I struggled harder, but I couldn't get out. I thought I was going to die there. I heard another ping and looked up, hoping it was something I could use.

A new skill has been created through special action! Through repeatedly enduring damage, the skill 'Physical Endurance' has been created.

Due to struggling while unable to breathe, your VIT has raised by one!

Crap. Normally that would be good, but I couldn't use them to escape. My HP was still draining and my vision was starting to go dark. "Am I going to die here?" I thought. Just before I blacked out, though, I heard something.

"TEXAS SMASH!"

xoxoxo

When I came to, someone was lightly slapping me on the cheek. "Hey! Wake up!" a familiar voice said. I groaned and looked up to see... "Whew! Thought we lost you there!"

LV?

Toshinori Yagi

The name wasn't familiar, but there was no mistaking who the large, muscled, blonde man was. "ALL MIGHT!" I scrambled to my feet, now aware that I had been rescued by my idol. "Can I have your autograph?" He grinned and pointed at my hero analysis notebook, which must have slipped out of my backpack during the struggle. I opened it to the All Might page and beamed at the autograph that he'd written on it. "THANK YOU!"

"Good to hear it, kid! Always great to see a fan! Nowifyoudon'tmindmeIhavetogoturnthisvillainin!" He rushed out that last part while pointing to two soda bottles that the villain was stuffed in and then jumped away. Of course, by then... "WHAT ARE YOU DOING, KID?! LET GO!" I had stupidly grabbed onto his leg.

"If I let go I'll die!" I yelled back over the wind.

"GOOD POINT!" he said. He landed on a nearby roof and let me off. "I have to go now! Knock on the door and someone should let you down!" He made to jump again.

"Wait!" I yelled and closed my eyes. "All my life, I've looked up to you. I've wanted to be a hero just like you. But... my Quirk has only just surfaced. I'm sure it has potential, but it's going to take a lot of training for me to be able to use it as a hero. Even with potential, though, the exams to get into Yuuei are in ten months. Do you think I can still get into Yuuei?" I looked at him for an answer, but... "WHAT!?"

All Might

LV 9

Toshinori Yagi

If it weren't for the title confirming it, I'd have thought that he was a different person. Sure, he was blonde and very tall, but he was almost literally skin and bones! I guess whatever the hell just happened to him to make him a scarecrow was also what lowered his level, but... "Observe"

Name: Toshinori Yagi

Title: All Might

Level: 9

HP: 500/500

MP: 1100/1100

STR: 11

VIT: 4

DEX: 19

INT: 52

WIS: 35

LUC: 9

Quirk: One For All

Emotions: Annoyed, concerned

Status: Totally Fucked Up

"What happened to you, All Might?"

He sighed, then coughed up some blood. "Before I say anything, I need you to promise me you won't say a word of this to anyone. Don't go blabbing about this online, don't tell your friends, don't even say anything to your family. Got it?"

I nodded vigorously. "I won't tell anyone. It's obviously a big deal."

He sat down and raised up his now-baggy shirt, revealing a giant wound on his... everywhere... that could only be described as "Totally Fucked Up." It looked like someone took a fusion between a sledgehammer and a blender to his chest. "I was in a really bad fight five years ago. Took the villain down, but not before getting this ugly thing in return. By all rights, I should've died by now. Luckily, I 'only' got off with constantly coughing up blood and only being able to do hero work three hours a day."

"Toxic Chainsaw couldn't do that do you!"

"You really know your heroes, huh? No, it was another fight. I made sure nobody would hear about it, otherwise there'd have been a lot of panic. Kid, if you wanna be a hero, maybe you should wait a bit. Put it off 'til college or something, when you can actually use your Quirk." He got up and left through the door. I just stood there, stunned. Then I saw a giant explosion. "That's either a villain or Kacchan snapped," I said. "I wonder which one." Ping. "What's that?"

A quest has been created!

A quest?

What Now, Kacchan!?

You just saw an explosion! Maybe you should investigate.

Time limit: 30 minutes.

Well, I had nothing better to do... I looked down to see what I assumed were the rewards.

Completion: 2000 EXP, ?, ?, ?.

Failure: Bakugou Katsuki dies.

Okay. Definitely doing that now. Even if it could be considered vigilante work, I really didn't want Kacchan to die. I decided to run for it.

xoxoxo

When I got there, I saw a crowd of people standing just outside of the safe area. I pushed my way through the crowd to see the sludge villain from earlier in the middle of a flaming street, struggling with someone who was inside him. "Did he get loose when I grabbed onto All Might?" I thought. "Is this my fault?" I looked at the titles.

Sludge Monster

LV 26

Kurosawa Shou

Lord Explosion Murder

LV 14

Bakugou Katsuki

It was Kacchan in there! Before I knew what was happening, I was running in there. Ping. I looked at the text box.

New objective! Save Bakugou.

Welp. Looks like I made the right call. I focused back on the sludge villain in time to see him turning towards me. "You came back for some more, huh, kid? Well I'll kill you if you want it so badly!" The sludge villain looked like he was about to lunge, so I threw my backpack at his face. He flinched and yelled at me. I ran up to him and started tearing at the sludge around Kacchan's face. I heard a ping but didn't stop to look at it. I managed to get the sludge off of Kacchan's mouth. He gasped, coughed a bit, and then yelled, "GET AWAY, FUCKING DEKU! YOU'RE GONNA DIE!" That was either a death threat or he was actually concerned about me. Either way, my response was the same.

"What kind of hero would I be if I let you die?" I would've said something else, but my Sense Danger activated and I jumped back just in time to not get hit by a gooey punch.

"I'LL KILL YOU!" The sludge villain yelled. I would've done something but then I heard a pair of pings.

"I'M PATHETIC! DETROIT! SMASH!" a familiar voice yelled. A rush of air extinguished all of the fires and somehow blew the sludge villain apart while leaving Kacchan untouched. A few seconds later it randomly started raining. I looked to where the blast originated and saw All-Might standing there. "I'm sorry, boys."

xoxoxo

"What were you thinking!? You could have gotten yourself killed!" The heroes were not happy I rushed in there. I didn't really want to pay attention to their lectures, so I just looked at my text boxes. One of them congratulated me on how I made some sort of ripping skill my tearing the sludge off of Kacchan. It didn't look too good, but maybe I could work with it. The other one, though...

Congratulations! The quest What Now, Kacchan!? was completed!

Completion Rewards: 2000 EXP, Increased closeness with Toshinori Yagi, Access to the Skill Grimoir system, 3000 Skill Fragments

Your level has increased by one!

That... was something. At least I was level six now, even if I had no idea what a Skill Grimoir system was. Or what the heck I do with Skill Fragments. All I knew was that a bunch of balls like Munny from Kingdom Hearts swirled around me before getting absorbed into my body after All Might hit the villain, which apparently everyone saw and I had to explain that I had no idea what the heck happened there to the heroes. Turns out that random balls getting absorbed into the idiot kid who stupidly ran into the villain attack is normally a red flag of some sort. Specifically that, apparently. That is a really specific scenario to be wary of. At any rate, they eventually let me go when I promised that I wouldn't do anything too stupid without adult supervision. I was walking home when...

"HEY! DEKU!" A fuming Kacchan shoved himself at my face. "I DON'T EVER NEED YOUR HELP! IF YOU EVER TRY TO BAIL ME OUT LIKE THAT AGAIN, I'LL KILL YOU!" Just to make his point, he let out an explosion aimed at the sky as he walked away. I sighed and continued along my way... for all of five seconds before All Might ran out in front of me.

"I AM HERE!"

"All Might! What are you doing here? Weren't you speaking to the press?"

"HA HA HA HA! I STAND FOR JUSTICE, NOT SOUNDBITES! FOR I, I AM ALL MI-plghght!" He started to go on this big speech before spewing out blood and shrinking down to his civilian form. I gave him a few minutes to clean himself off before he said, "Young man, I came to thank you and apologize. If you hadn't told me that you couldn't use your Quirk, if you hadn't ran in there... I would've been a worthless bystander, too afraid to do anything. So thanks."

"All Might, I-"

"I'm not done. You told me you couldn't really use your power, so when I saw this boy who might as well be Quirkless try to save a life, it inspired me too. There are stories about every hero, how they became great. Most have one thing in common. Their bodies moved before they had a chance to think, almost on their own. And today, that's what happened to you." I'm not going to lie, I teared up at this part. A lot. "Young man, you too can become a hero!"

"I-I don't know what too say! Thank you!"

"And I'm going to give you my Quirk, too!"

"Wait, what?"

"My Quirk. It's called One For All. It's a special power that can be passed on from one generation to the next, cultivated by one user then given on to a successor." He patted the OH GOD wound. "I won't be able to be a hero much longer, so I've been meaning to find someone to give One For All. It's actually why I came here. So, kid. Whaddya say? Wanna be the next All Might?"

midoriyaizuku.exe has stopped working. Reboot? Y/N

"WHAT!?" I yelled.

"I want you to be my successor. I'll also help train you to use your Quirk even if you don't want my Quirk, so don't worry about that."

I bowed. "All Might, I'd be honored!"

"Great, kid! Let's trade phone numbers." All Might asked me for my phone number. ALL MIGHT ASKED ME FOR MY PHONE NUMBER! I gave him my phone number and he gave me mine. "I'll call you when I get everything ready. See you then!" He then walked off. I spent the rest of my walk home in silence, contemplating what just happened today. It was so crazy! But one thing was for sure. One thing that I had to do the second I got home. I walked in the door and immediately said, "Mom! I have to tell you something!"

Mom immediately came running and said, "What is it, honey?" She looked a little nervous.

I gulped. "Mom," I said, "I have a Quirk." The look on her face, that look of relief, joy, and excitement, was something I knew I'd cherish for years to come.

xoxoxo

A/N: Oh, snap! Ain't this a twist! Yeah, I'm way too much of a wuss to deal with the implications of Izuku being able to print money and I didn't know how to get Izuku magic without flat-out introducing magic otherwise, so I just combined the two problems into one solution. Izuku's going to figure out what that Skill Fragment and Skill Grimoir thing does soon, and I won't say anything more until them. Also yes, Izuku is going to make progressively more video game references if I can remember to do it. Seriously, the Gamer needs game shout-outs!

Anyways, I'll see y'all next time! Let's hope I manage to update this thing sometime within a month next!

#The Gamer Hero Deku #Gamer Hero Deku #fanfiction #GHD CH2 #BNHA

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howsareeasy · 6 years

Text

it isn’t failure; it’s data

Equipment: mac pro 2014 with inbuilt mic. Moto G3 (and then Moto G6) for reading via the Adobe Acrobat PDF reader. For hosting purposes, Dropbox and Mediafire. Software: both GarageBand and Audacity.

There’s 1600 words under the cut. Or you can read here over at Dreamwidth if it’s easier

Chose: GaragageBand or Audacity: For the sheer scope of the information gathered alone, Audacity. I held out on using Audacity until I got my head around GarageBand, because GB was Apple. I did five of my first podfics in GarageBand (and the last six in Audacity). I'm glad that I did GarageBand before I got into Audacity, because Audacity didn't feel that difficult when I got my head around it, because I already had my wars with GarageBand. Although I do like GarageBand for the ease of rerecording (you literally just record over the offending area), and insertion of silences, it has a lot of drawbacks. For instance, when it comes to longer files (about 180mins) it will start to eat your files. In addition, because not many people use GarageBand, information on troubleshooting is pretty rare, and Apple insists on upgrading and changing the interface ever so often. As a result, a lot of people I know are working from their legacy interface from 2014. It doesn't help me with what I have now. I only know one person (other than myself) who worked in GarageBand, and got tired of bugging her (she's busy and took ages to respond to my questions, because she's BUSY). whereas with Audacity, there are enough people to have a wiki. There are guides everywhere in terms of how to use Audacity, especially podfic specific guides. Overall, Audacity is a bit more straightforward, once you know what to look for. The wiki is relatively comprehensive and easy to follow. For instance, once I got my head around recording edits and putting them in the spaces where they needed to be, the process of recording patches then patching them for reedits is fairly straight forward. Audacity has the advantage of doing more pin point edits when it comes to mouth noises, and general cleaning up of fic background noises with noise plates. Audacity's envelope application is a lot better and smoother than GarageBand's fades (in terms of say, if you want to have music fading in or out of your narrative). Now, I don't think I'm going to be the sort of person to use music in a podfic unless the writer is pretty much waving semaphore flags and going - this piece of music here!- but it's a neat effect. Hardest thing about podficcing: For me, it was getting the reading down pat, to be honest. When I listen to my first five podfics, I'm surprised at how fast I'm reading, so every reading it's been me telling myself to slow down. It's one of the reasons why I started to edit as I go, because it forced me to refocus, and check my speed when rabbiting along. Then because my reading got slower, I could engage in the process of the fic more. However, as I grew more confident with the reading flow, I'd allow myself to read through a chapter or so, and then go back and edit. I didn't really get the concept of what a read/performance was until podfic 7, I guess (AO3 is down now, so I can't remember what it is. I want to say Cloud City). The whole concept of pauses in podfic and how that's a part of hitting the ear didn't really strike me until about podfic 10 (Stay In My Eyeline to the point where I took it down and recut for silences). But I think podfic 9 (Good Timing), made me happy enough with my narrative and voice bits. As much as podfic 11 KICKED MY ARSE, I'm more or less happy with the pauses and spaces in the fic. I mean, I could have done more, let the quiet spill out, especially towards the ending, but you can only learn by doing. I'm not going to beat up myself with the first podfics, tbh, because no one is born a master. Now, that last podfic. I don't think I had any hubris with the first ten podfics. I tried to improve on every one as I went on, and I think they got better quality wise when I jumped over to Audacity, because again, because of noise plates and edits made for a cleaner product (I could get rid of the 'clunk' sound when I'd stop the recording), but that last podfic (Now That I'm In Madrid) almost made me rage quit many a time. Between the file deletions, Audacity freezing, my files crashing, having to borrow someone else's PC to get my three hour files on as well as the edits, the installation of my mpegg plug in refusing to deal on my macbook (until I had to manually install it, after overriding Apple’s admin permissions to accept the plug in), only to export the chapters and not being able to bundle them into a book. Plus my voice turning to gravelly mush in the last third of the reading, it's been a hard knock on my confidence, to be honest. To the point where, I'm like, "Yeah, I liked podficcing, I guess? But erm... I don't think it likes me much." That being said, I really like the last story, and I'm sorry that I didn't do my best by it, but it was beyond my ken. To the point where, if I had to redo the podfic (lol, no), I couldn't do it any better right now, and that's fine. Reading source: A lot of people read their fic on screen while the recording is going on in the background. I tend to read directly from my smartphone, using the Adobe PDF app. I do like the app because you can highlight bits, and insert comments on the document, it's also smooth scrolling experience reading wise. My Moto G6 has more power and a better screen so it's an easier read. File hosting: Dropbox and MediaFire are relatively straightforward. They are fine. Most annoying bit of podficcing: Podfic covers. As much as I know that they didn't have to be made, I pretty much did it, because people do expect them (before Itsadrizzit started the push to overturn the practice). I wouldn't do anything beyond a text box now, but podfic covers came at the worst time for me. After recording, edits, and listen throughs and before uploading for hosting. I forever whinged around that. Most surprising bit of podficcing: The edits, I guess? I didn't mind them at all. I can do edits while being sociable, whereas for preprepping and doing the reading itself, I had to lock myself away and put my phone on 'do not disturb' mode. Would I podfic again? I don't have the resources, nor will I be in a position to get a new laptop for the while so, no, I don't know. More no than yes. It depends? As it is, I can't risk anything more than a 60 min run time (no more than 9.5k word count) and even then, I do wonder if I should review that to 30 mins (about 3-4k word count) because I can't trust my equipment. It makes no sense to set your stall up for anything less than a 2k word count. It's too much hassle for me to find an empty space and record for anything under 1.8k at least. Not to mention the edits, listen through (ugh) and hosting. I can't do anything chaptered in terms of podbooks (because I don't know how to bundle the chapters to export without having ppl downloading 24 separate files and I don't have the bandwidth to deal with that right now. I'd just do a basic .m4b file, although I hear that people aren't fans and NEED. CHAPTERED .m4b podfic, but these madams will have to deal). My computer cannot be trusted to splice various files together (for instance, if I wanted to do a fic with a run time of 180mins, I'd have to do three 60min files, then splice them together. My computer crashed twice doing that feat, so no). This is tragic, because it's knee capped what I wanted to do. Liiiiike that 25k fic to pod in my bookmarks is now deleted (170 mins run time, three files of 57 mins give or take). Overall, yay or nay? Yay! I'd like to think that I have shown respect for podficcers before, but after doing it for three weeks (11 podfics in three weeks, but I spent two weeks before doing the research) my respect is tenfold. It's not just reading what's on the page, but reacting to it with a mixture of control with the air of surprise. There's an art to it, as well as the technical bits, be it just having a fluid and enjoyable listening experience. Hell, just reading aloud alone is its own feat of stamina. There's the weighing up of file hostings, and this on top of the lack of Blanket Permissions, so if you find a fic that you want to do but there's no BP, you're out of luck, and there are far too many writers who are really arsey toward the whole medium. Conclusion: So, yeah, my experiment ends here! It wasn't a total failure, but it hasn't been an activity brimming with triumphant successes either. Thanks for the weigh ins and the advice from the podficcers who've been doing this for a minute. If you're a writer and are reading this, please think about including a BP in your profiles, even if it's a yes, maybe so (please ask) or hell no (so you won't be bothered).

#podficcer's log #podfic phase 2: audacity bugaloo #adventures in podficcing #adventures in podfic

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keirce · 3 years

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Guns n’ Robots Chapter 1

Chapter 1

A/N : I have no idea what the hell I'm doing. Sometimes, it's actually the case, I don't know what I'm typing, please don't blame me for only having time to write at midnight or later. School's a bitch.

13/9/175 N.E

The forest was very tranquil. One could have gone camping for a week, and have a quiet think, if not for the loud screaming heard off in the distance.

"-AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH! This was NOT a good idea! I gotta get out of here!"

Silvo was currently running away from a megafauna the size of a full-grown elephant he had tried to hunt, which seemed to have something akin to the tail of a dinosaur, legs of a lion, and the head of an eagle. Worse was the fact that rain had almost turned visibility to zero. He was not having a good time, dirt in every nook and cranny of his metallic body with no time to wash it off. Silvo wondered how long he'd have to keep going right up until a metal wall seemed to come out of nowhere and beat the shit out of him. He quickly realized that this was it. This was the wall of the mining area. Trying to find a gate would be a task, but Silvo had an idea.

Wait. There's a wall in front of me, and a sturdy looking large animal behind me. Hmm...

As he wasn't always the smartest in the room, Silvo took a moment to think.

OH YEAH!

He quickly turned around, trying to find the ginormous creature in the pouring rain. He thought, for only a second, that it might have given up and left. This was quickly proved wrong as its beaked head came just barely into view. Part 2 of the waiting game had started. Under his breath, Silvo counted down the seconds to arrival.

Seven.

Its front legs were now visible.

Six.

The rest of its body showed itself.

Five.

Half the tail came next.

Fou-

"HOLY SHIT!"

The animal seemed to really want to take a bite out of Silvo, and jumped straight at him, closing the distance in less than a second. He barely had time to dodge. The plan worked, the animal went right through the wall, into the mine. There was only one downside:

It had taken Silvo with it, dealing him a blow in the left side of his chest.

He let out a bloodcurdling scream. The left side of the chest contained the delicate speech module and a large amount of important wiring connecting his motors to his power supply, completely obliterating both. Walking had become quite the challenge, and speaking was impossible, as his voice died off. He decided to just steal a dropship, and get off this batshit crazy planet.

But how the hell am I going to do that when it's difficult to fucking move!?

Oh, if he could move, he would definitely chase down the behemoth, who had by this point, run away, but he needed to focus.

Silvo made an effort to crawl over to the dropship area, where people would be loading boxes and whatnot into a ship that would travel to a completely different planet and give said boxes to companies who paid for minerals. It was hard, considering how the state the wiring was in made it so the left half of his body was paralyzed. He tried as hard as he could, until someone came up from behind and stepped on his back, pointing a gun at his head. A moment later, a deep, abyssal voice emanated.

"Speak. Who are you?"

A set of silver robotic fingers wrote down the words "HELP ME" on the ground, seeing as it was soil. The figure seemed to get the memo, and let his foot off of Silvo, who breathed a nonexistent sigh of relief. The figure helped him up, slung Silvo's arm around his neck, and brought him to the medical ward. Silvo shut himself off for the time being.

Alright, time to wake up.

A set of bright, emboldened letters lit up. They were so close that he could've sworn that they were right in his face, which wasn't actually wrong.

Loading…

15%

38%

62%

83%

99%

100%

Welcome, Silvo Cita.

A bright light shone into his optic, as if someone was shining the nearest star into his face. After it faded away, Silvo could see that he was laying down in a bed, with a stool next to it. There was a window on the wall leading outside. On the stool was another simula, except that this one was around 8 feet tall. This made Silvo sit up out of shock.

"Holy shit…"

"Hey, you. You're awake. You tried to cross th- I mean grab a dropship, right?" Silvo wasn't paying too much to his question, as he was looking at the very clean white paint on the walls, standard for the medical ward. Nobody knows why, but this was very different from the ward at the base, or Delta base, as it was called, which had paint seemingly scraped off the walls, some even fading.

"Damn, does this place have clean walls all over?" The man sighed at this question.

"Don't all PM bases have clean walls?"

"What!? Hell no! The walls look like shit, especially now." Silvo had spoken the truth. Carefully edited truth.

"What do you mean by 'especially'? What happened?" Not carefully edited truth.

"Uhh, nothing?" Silvo, being Silvo, only half expected this to work. However, when he made eye contact with the man, he seemed to be staring right back into his robotic soul. It was as if he was reading his mind.

"The base was destroyed, wasn't it?"

He had read Silvo's mind.

The man sighed, and got up from the stool, walking out of the room. As Silvo sat on the bed, he thought that it might be time to put his plan into action, considering that his left arm didn't flop over when sitting up. Taking that and the fact that he spoke into account, He knew he was all fixed up and got out of bed. Facing the window, he took a few steps back to get a running start and jumped through the window. One problem, though.

This was the 4th floor.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck, GRABGRABGRAB!"

He had grabbed nothing but the air, and fell to the ground. Getting up, Silvo checked himself, only spotting a bunch of scratches and a dent.

Fuck you, plot armor.

Continuing onwards toward the dropship area, everything was smooth sailing. Nothing but a lot of caves, bushes and other stuff. It was nice, seeing the little insects scurry about, and those men that just saw him and went off, probably to report something. Wait, what?

"Oooh, that's not so good, is it? Better get running." With this, Silvo began getting the hell out of there in record time. He thought that it was because he broke their window, but it was actually because they knew he'd try to get a dropship. But he couldn't think too much, as he was getting close to the dropship area. When he made it there, there was lot of resistance, to absolutely no one's surprise. Hiding behind a nearby tree, Silvo began to rack his brain over what to do.

Man, I really should've tried to find a gun or something! How the hell am I gonna get through this?

But eventually, he found a way.

Silvo began to walk off to the right side of the dropship area.

Once he got there, he went over to the back, all under the cover of many trees. This actually worked, as no one decided to check the back. He thanked his lucky stars, as well as the fact that they were this dumb. He opened the hatch, and hopped inside, grateful for the stupidity of this base's staff, or at least he would've, if all the guns they had weren't trained on him the second he walked out of the forest. He noticed some of the gunners cursing the radar under their breath for not working in the forest for whatever reason. Absolutely stumped on what to do, he didn't notice the 8 foot tall simula walking through the crowd of guns. He raised his hand up, and pushed it down, the standard sign for "put your guns down".

He began to speak.

"Well, well. Look what we have here. You tried to grab a dropship. Again. I gotta arrest you, now ge-"

He was stopped mid-sentence as Silvo jumped on top of his head, getting through the open hatch of a dropship. He closed the hatch, and immediately smacked as many buttons he knew of as fast as he could. By some miracle, this worked.

Ha! I knew paying attention in User training would pay off!

The ship booted up, and the three bottom thrusters fired up, lifting it off the ground. Then, the thrusters on the back sparked, and quickly went from minimum to maximum power, sending him off at mach 5.324, or around 4085mph, which would be 6574kmh. One of the benefits of being a simula, but only one thing was on Silvo's mind.

"I should pay him back, and the best way to do that is to become a mercenary! Way better than the pay I got in PM!"

He then noticed that he didn't feel the seat on a large part of his upper back. He touched that spot and felt a dent. A very large dent, from the fall off the 4th floor.

"Fuck."

A/N: 1600+ words brothers. Maybe writing at 2pm wasn't a bad idea after all.

Faints

#writing #action #science fiction

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chriskarrtravelblog · 5 years

Text

Your Letters

We love receiving your letters, and hearing your views on Britain, your travels and the magazine. Check back here for regular updates from our mailbag

Denise Bridge’s photograph of St Michael’s Mount

Making Memories

The photo on the cover of the September 2019 issue [Vol 87, Issue 4] took me back to St Michael’s Mount, which I visited for the first time last year. After seeing Mont-Saint-Michel about 20 years ago with an aunt and uncle I was delighted to journey to Cornwall last spring with the same aunt and uncle and another aunt to explore the English island and it did not disappoint. As you can see in the photo [attached] it was a glorious day! Less touristy than its French counterpart, St Michael’s Mount offers fantastic views from the castle – well worth the climb up – and the gardens were a riot of colour despite the heavy snow earlier in the year. We ended our day in St Ives for dinner – delicious pasties which we managed to eat without the gulls getting any! Although we saw many destinations in the county from our rented cottage in Looe, such as Port Isaac, The Eden Project, The Lost Gardens of Heligan, Fowey and Polperro to name a few, the article on Hidden Cornwall has given me many more ideas for a future trip. Nearly every article in this issue brought to the fore many memories of other trips: Cadbury’s World which was a delicious experience; Chatsworth House in the Peak District; the Isle of Sky, Portree Harbour and the story of Flora MacDonald; Bettys tearooms of which I have visited a few in Harrogate and York; Totnes and its motte-and-bailey castle; Brighton Pier; and Portmeirion village where I started my collection of tableware in 1993. Thanks for the memories; this issue was a delight from beginning to end!

Sincerely, Denise Bridge, Ontario, Canada

BRITAIN REPLIES

This issue was obviously made with you in mind! How fortuitous that we covered so many of the places you have visited – although by the sounds of it, you are very well travelled in Britain… We hope we can continue to conjure up such happy memories for you.

A Series of Fortunate Events

I wanted to write to let you know that your article on Hidden Cornwall [Vol 87, Issue 4] reminded me again why Cornwall is such a special place for me.

Many years ago, I watched the original Poldark series. I fell very hard for Ross Poldark and the people that surrounded him. I was not quite a teenager, and it all made a very strong impression on me.

Then, in 1997, I found that there was a Poldark Appreciation Society which was holding annual lunches in London. I went and had the pleasure of meeting and talking with Robin Ellis and Angharad Rees (Ross and Demelza). A kind lady befriended me at that lunch, and we went to the 1998 luncheon together. She was pregnant at that time and asked if my husband and I would be the godparents. My husband did not want to fly, but just couldn’t let her down. So he flew overseas for the first time – because of Poldark.

The founder of the Society drove us all around Cornwall and to the Poldark sights in 2004. That was an incredible treat. Angharad Rees had opened a jewelry store in London, and my husband and I were pleased to visit her there. I couldn’t believe that he was meeting her. She was a lovely lady.

Thank you so much for the beautiful article. I hope to be in Cornwall again one day. Lori Padova, by email

BRITAIN REPLIES

Thank you so much for sharing your truly incredible story with us. The places a passion can take you!

“Our Mount”

I was thrilled when my copy of BRITAIN [Vol 87, Issue 4] arrived. There on the cover was a remarkable picture of St Michael’s Mount! “Our Mount” to the residents of Penwith, including some of “my people”. Prior to the Second World War five farms had unobstructed views of the Mount. These farms were cultivated by my grandfather’s brother, whose descendants still reside there.

Not long ago my wife, Carin, and I rented a Penwith cottage for a month. During our stay we experienced almost all of the locations featured in the article Hidden Cornwall, and more.

I can’t begin to tell you how much I enjoy BRITAIN. I look forward with anticipation to future copies. William D. (David) Thomas, St Albert, Alberta, Canada

BRITAIN REPLIES

We are very jealous that you had the opportunity to spend such a lovely long time in Penrith, but deservedly so as you have such local ancestors! We hope you enjoyed many uninterrupted views while you were there.

Proof We’re Not Perfect

We’ve received numerous letters and emails about our reference of speaking to the ‘ancestor’ of Richard III in Volume 83 Issue 2, which of course would not be possible. We did of course mean ‘descendant’ and we can only apologise for this heinous error and promise to keep a closer watch over things in future.

Here are some of your choice responses:

Descendant, Not Ancestor

The cover of my May/June edition states “King Richard III – We talk to one of his ancestors” . Clearly impossible ! And this mistake is repeated in the referenced article where the author Susan R Frost is described as an “author and ancestor of King Richard III” . Two unfortunate errors in an otherwise interesting genealogical study. Nick Tyler, by email

Glaring Error

On the cover of the May 2015 issue of BRITAIN, it states: ‘King Richard III, we talk to one of his ancestors’. I think you meant to use the word ‘descendants’, since ancestors live BEFORE the person referenced, while descendants live AFTER said person. The correct word was used in the opening to the article on page 43.

I myself am a lateral descendant of William of Wykeham [NF] (one of several early spellings of the name including Wycombe [AS] (1324-1404), Bishop of Winchester, Founder of Winchester College and New College Oxford, and Chancellor of England (1367-1372) during the reign of Edward III. I have my direct line of descent back to Edward and Joan Wickham, who were married in Chichester, Sussex, in 1539.

I am looking forward to visiting Leicester when I am in England in August. Joann Wickham Sugg, by email

How Did This Happen?

I would be very interested to know how you managed to talk to an ancestor of Richard III. I doubt Susan E Frost claims to be his ancestor as you write on page 44 under her picture, of course she is a descendant. You seriously need a proofreader.

It was a good article – I too have Plantagenet ancestors, as do many of us in the United States who are descended from families with royal lines who fled to Virginia in the 1600s. I am proudly descended from 16 of the Magna Carta barons and have researched 42 families I am directly descended from who came to Virginia in the 1600s.

Your magazine is beautiful and I have saved copies since 1997. I have arranged to pass them along to a fellow Anglophile. They have been very useful to me in my 20 trips to England over the past years. I find it difficult to see how such an error could make it onto the cover. Linda L Cummings, Addison, TX

A Land of Glory

I just wanted tell you how much I enjoyed the article ‘A Land of Glory’ in the November 2014 (Sep/Oct 2014 issue for UK readers – ed). In 2009 I visited the British Asparagus Festival and stayed in the Vale of Evesham at the Evesham Hotel.

I totally enjoyed the hotel and the area. One of the days I was there, the hotel owner asked me if I was doing anything and I said that I didn’t have anything special planned. He informed me that if I wanted, he would see if an employee had the time to drive me around the countryside.

Later that morning, he brought an employee to me who was available and we agreed on a time. She picked me up about 2.30pm and drove me around the area for two-and-a-half hours, stopping when I asked to take pictures and telling me about things as we went. I had the greatest tour of the area I could ever expect, including Stratford-upon-Avon and other areas on a beautiful May afternoon. She got paid her hourly wage and some petrol money.

On my last day, I took the train past Evesham to visit the Morgan Motor Company, which I also enjoyed. In fact, just yesterday on the TV programme Factory Made, there was a piece about the Morgan Motor Company and their cars with wooden bodies. From there I went back to London for two nights before returning home. I thought I would go back to England in a heartbeat, and I did last year. I visited a friend in Chelmsford, which was great. The bottom line is: England is a wonderful place to visit, but stay away from London.

Lee Edgerton, by email

Insufferable Know It All of the Year Award

Hello.

We have just come to the end of a busy year, with almost continuous touring right from the beginning of spring. Due in part to inclusions in Britain magazine. Thank you for your efforts.

However, in my endeavour to be awarded the prize for Insufferable Know It All of the Year I must warn you that you might be deluged with letters from every history pedant who reads your magazine. On page 71 of the November/December 2014 issue (January 2015 in the US) there is a caption that describes an engraving as Charles I after he was ‘sentenced to the guillotine by Parliament’. Please join me in my quest to be Insufferable Know It All of the Year by telling your editorial department that Charles I was not sentenced to the guillotine.

Firstly because this efficient means of despatch was never used for judicial executions in England and secondly, if he had been subjected to such a sentence, it would be a long wait for it to be carried out, as the guillotine was not introduced as a method of judicial execution by Dr Guillotin, and even then not in England, until the mid 18th century, about 100 years after his unfortunate demise.

How did I do? Did I win the prize?

Best wishes,

Paul, by email

BRITAIN REPLIES

Well done Paul – you spotted our deliberate mistake. No, honestly, this should have been picked up by the team and we will give our sub a firm (metaphorical) slap on the wrist.

Mince Pie recipe corrections

Mince pies from the recipe in our Nov/Dec UK 2014 (Jan 2015 USA) issue

To say that I am disappointed is an understatement. I just tried to make the recipe for mince pies as printed in the January 2015 (Nov/Dec 2014 in the UK) issue of your magazine.

Hello, ‘juice of one orange’? The orange from my backyard tree (navel) yielded ¾ cup of juice, which made a very sticky dough. Adding more flour made it heavy. What about providing a specific measurement of liquid needed? Remember, all oranges are not equal, in size or amount of juice.

My second problem – nowhere does the recipe tell what the oven should be preheated to. Doesn’t it matter how hot the oven is?

Anyway, I took a chance on 375°F. Poor guess. The end result was that the birds in my yard enjoyed the disaster, and I’m just happy that I didn’t wait until the day before Christmas to make your mince pies.

Merry Christmas,

June Prance, Florida, USA

I await eagerly each edition of BRITAIN magazine and have been reading it for over 30 years since I lived in England. I enjoy the articles that remind me of my travels then and have helped me plan for the future. I was going through the January 2015 (November/December 2014 in the UK) magazine and found the recipe for mince meat tarts.

The first time I ever had them was when I was teaching there and was invited to a Christmas party. I thought I would try to make them but noticed that although castor sugar is mentioned in the ingredients, it is not in the procedure. While I assume it would be mixed with the flour and butter, I would not wish to mess the recipe up.

Could you clarify if, in fact, that line was left out?

Thanks and already looking forward to the next edition.

Sincerely,

Martha Sadler

By Email

In reading through the recipe for mince pies in the latest issue of BRITAIN magazine (January 2015 in the US and November/December 2014 in the UK), this recipe on page 30 didn’t list an oven temperature. I couldn’t find it if it was listed.

It said ‘place into a preheated oven for 10-15 minutes.’ This might be common knowledge on your side of the pond, but to me in frigid Menomonie, Wisconsin, USA that knowledge is woefully lacking.

What should that temperature be?

You have a great magazine. Someday I would like to return to your land and explore some more of the places I have read about in your publication as well as explore London again. I would really like to visit the Twinings store at 216 Strand; the tea shops fascinate me.

Merry Christmas and happy New Year. May it be a healthy and fruitful coming year for you guys.

Larry Doupnik, by email

BRITAIN REPLIES

Whoops, our apologies. We’re not sure what happened there, we must have over-complicated things but here is an equally delicious but clearer recipe so that you can make a fresh batch in time for Christmas:

225g cold butter, diced 350g plain flour 100g golden caster sugar 280g mincemeat 1 small egg Icing sugar, to dust

To make the pastry, rub 225g cold, diced butter into 350g plain flour, then mix in 100g golden caster sugar and a pinch of salt. Combine the pastry into a ball – don’t add liquid – and knead it briefly. The dough will be fairly firm, like shortbread dough. You can use the dough immediately, or chill for later.

Preheat the oven to 200C/gas 6/fan 180C. Line 18 holes of two 12-hole patty tins, by pressing small walnut-sized balls of pastry into each hole. Spoon 280g mincemeat into the pies

Take slightly smaller balls of pastry than before and pat them out between your hands to make round lids, big enough to cover the pies. Top the pies with their lids, pressing the edges gently together to seal – you don’t need to seal them with milk or egg as they will stick on their own. (The pies may now be frozen for up to 1 month).

Beat 1 small egg and brush the tops of the pies. Bake for 20 minutes until golden. Leave to cool in the tin for 5 minutes, then remove to a wire rack. To serve, lightly dust with icing sugar. They will keep for 3 to 4 days in an airtight container.

*Sourced from BBC Good Food

The 7th Earl of Carnarvon enjoys a moment with his family, including the 8th Earl (far right)

Spitting image of Princess Diana

The picture of the 7th Earl of Carnarvon, page 42 of the January 2015 issue (November/December 2014 in the UK) took my breath away. The girl in the flowered dress could be the late Princess Diana. The hair, the pose and smile….uncanny and haunting.

Mary Wilkinson, Illinois, USA

BRITAIN REPLIES

This was almost identical to the comment our writer said – they could be twins.

Requisitioned has arrived

What a superb book. Thankyou Sally for your lovely email and your efforts to ensure my prize arrived.

I have a 91-year-old uncle who will also appreciate this book.We are both lovers of all things British. My son teases me about always watching BBC TV.

All the very best for a Joyful Christmas…

Sincerely,

Evelyn Lawson, by email

More Addresses

Firstly, I love your magazine but must express my ongoing amazement when realising over and over the constant omission of addresses on particular ads and/or events. I think I may have written about this before…

Many of your ads declare interesting places to see and attend but lack any specific addresses.

It seems there are fewer letters from readers, which are always enjoyed, that seem to be being replaced with more ads. I’m sorry to complain so much. I am 86 and cannot remember never receiving the magazine – it is always welcome no matter but please tell us where all these fantastic things can be found.

Thank you.

Most sincerely,

Lucy M Edwards, Florida, USA

BRITAIN REPLIES

Lucy, we will have a word with our ads team and try to get them to advise our advertisers but unfortunately as they only have a certain about of space they tend to favour impact over detail. For our part we’ll endeavour to add relevant info into editorial where possible.

How to write to us

By post to: Letters, BRITAIN, Chelsea Magazines, Jubilee House, 2 Jubilee Place, London, SE3 3TG; or to: Letters, BRITAIN, Circulation Specialists Inc, 2 Corporate Drive, Suite 945, Shelton, CT 06484, USA. Or email the editor: [email protected]

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The post Your Letters appeared first on Britain Magazine | The official magazine of Visit Britain | Best of British History, Royal Family,Travel and Culture.

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source https://coragemonik.wordpress.com/2019/09/23/your-letters/

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profoundgardenertree-blog · 6 years

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"quote me happy learner driver insurance

quote me happy learner driver insurance

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I received a quote for an auto insurance and they require a deposit and then the first premium payment..Will the deposit be refundable? Why is there a deposit? Thank you!

Where to get car insurance quote?

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Should the government ban gender discrimination for insurance rates?

Why is it legal for car insurance companies to charge males more than females when they have the same driving record, same age, same car, and same everything else?""

""Im getting quotes for well over 4,000 for car insurance is this right?""

Im getting quotes for well over 4,000 for car insurance is this right? My grandson is 17 and has passed his Advanced driving test. He has a VW Polo. Would he be able to be put on my insurance as I have 5 years no claims. Would this lower his by much? He has also been driving cars/tractors around a farm since he was about 13 would this make a difference? Thanks""

Auto insurance wont pay for damages?

I was involved in a bumper to bumper accident(at fault) in a borrowed car(my fathers) here in California. Now i get a call from the insurance that they wont pay for damages to the other vehicle because im not in the policy. Im not excluded from the policy either. My father only has liability insurance. Does the insurance has to pay for damages by law?

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I'm a male. im 19 almost 20. the car wouldn't be brand new, it'd be a 2008 with like 20k or so miles on it. and i've never had an accident in all my 3 years of driving, never even been pulled over, not a single ticket. perfect record, i have good grades, college student. Im just wondering like a GENERAL idea...don't tell me to go get a quote...ya i know i can do that, but there is a reason why im asking on yahoo answers as well! it shouldn't be too much right? not like a mustang or camaro coupe?? because mercedes c class's are rated high in safety as well! and this is going to be a v6 sedan, not a v8 coupe or anything.""

30 day insurance policy for newborns?

I am a teen mom and since the baby can't be covered under my parents insurance we are planning to do a legal guardianship, however you cannot get guardianship of an unborn child so we are doing it after he is born. But I was wondering if right after he is born if the hospital bills will be under my parents insurance because I have heard there is a 30 day period in which you need to get the baby's insurance arranged. So during the 30 days would the baby's hospital stay and everything be covered while we get the insurance arranged? Thank you!""

My car was totaled by my insurance?

I bought a 1999 Honda for $4,500 in March of 2010 from a private party, about nine months ago. The owner never disclosed the fact that the car had been totaled in December on 2009. According to Washington State unless the total meets certain criteria it doesnt have to be listed on the title. On January 17th 2011, I was involved in a car accident. The insurance totaled my car. Somehow the insurance discovered that it had been perversely totaled, which I was not aware of. I had full coverage on the car. They now are saying that I will get receive what the car is worth with a savaged title. My question is, do I have to except this or can I fight for the value of a clean titled vehicle? Should they have run a check on the vin when I insured it with them and discovered the that the vehicle had been totaled before? Or is everything my fault?""

Where can I find affordable health insurance for me and my family?

How can I find affordable heatlh insurance for me and my family? We are currently unemployed with no health insurance.

Cheapest auto insurance rate in NJ ??? I have a perfect driving record....?

I just moved from Boston and don't know what companies are the cheapest ??? Any suggestions ??

Drunk driver ran into fence of ours and his insurance wont cover full cost to replace...what can we do?

recently, an underage drunk driver ran his car off the road and into our fence and tore up about 100 feet or so. we had a company come give us an estimate of around $1000 to fix which includes material and labor...the insurance company of the young man that ran into our fence is only willing to pay around $600 because they are saying that the fence is 15 - 20 years old and didnt cost that much back when it was built.....now, i have a huge problem with this...is it our fault that a drunk driver ruined our fence...should we have to pay out of our hard earned money the rest to make sure the fence is put back? is there anything we can do about this? any feedback is helpful....im so mad i want this to get nationally recognized!""

How much will car insurance cost?

I am 19 and got taken off my parents policy because I had to at fault accidents. I am a female college freshman who would be driving a 1996 Honda Accord. About how much Should I expect to pay for auto insurance? I just want basic coverage. Also I have had my license for about 2 and a half years.

Insurance for a 125cc ?

I am 22 years old with 2 years no claims on a bike (50cc) and have had a full uk driving licence for 5 years how much roughly would it cost to insure a 125cc bike?

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Co-signing insurance for car?

Can a person who doesn't have a car Co-sign for my car insurance (Like My Mom)?

How where and how can I get cheap car insurance?

I lost my job last year and I'm getting back on my feet again and I'm looking for very cheap insurance because I still can't pay too much.

How much will my auto insurance rate go up after an acciedent?

i have lieability insurance and pay 55 a month

Can't afford the insurance on a car I just bought.?

I can't afford the insurance on a car I just bought yesterday, I had made quotes before and one of them was in my price range for full coverage since I am making payments but I didnt realize until now it was for liability. Am I able to take the car back with no penalty or will it hurt my credit?""

Will getting quote for Insurance affect my credit?

I am trying to switch to an insurance company with cheaper rate, so I have to get quotes from several. I am wondering if it will hurt my credit if everyone check my credit using my SSN? soft inquiries just like when I pull out my credit report?""

How can I get free health insurance?

My husband and I can't afford health insurance. Is there a way to get it for free? We live in southern California.

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I'm under my moms insurance , and I just recently applied for Medicaid and got accepted . Once I got my card my name was on it . I don't need the insurance but my unborn baby does . How does this process work if unborn baby needs insurance but I don't ?""

What are the most common vehichle that is cheapest on insurance?

I'm trying to find a new vehichle but I want to know which cars are the mostly bought because they are cheaper on insurance.

Cost of liability insurance for medical doctor?

What's the average cost for a private physician's liability insurance? What tips and advice do you have for someone starting a private practice?

Car insurance?

1st off i live in new jersey i accidently hit a car but didnt know i did it till later when the dude whose car i hit came up and confronted me.it wasnt my car but my roommates and i dont have insurance.ive offered to pay about 75% of the damage but i dont know if dude still wants to make a claim.i talked 2 the police and he said i could lose my damn lisence for bout 2 yrs.can any1 add a bit of clarity to this for me?

""I am looking for car insurance in uk,can you recommend one?""

Every year,my insurance goes up even with 5 years no claim and same car. Why? It should have been cheaper surely, I heard of quidco,is it worth the hassle?""

Cheap auto insurance for new driver?

I was just wondering of anyone knows of an insurance company that will insure new drivers for a low cost. I know it's hard to find because it always costs more to insure younger drivers due to the likely hood of them getting into an accident. I don't have my license yet, but will have it estimated by June of 2013, by then I'll be 17. I'm going to get my permit sometime in January so I would need the insurance by then.""

How much do you pay for car insurance?

I pay $380 a month for my car insurance. more than anyone else i know. Just curious what everyone else pays Im a 20 year old male, single, living in California, have a 2002 bmw and a 1998 lexus, with 4 speeding tickets""

Wife is pregnant and we have no insurance?

Hi everyone. Just found out last night that the wife's 7 weeks pregnant (yay!) but we don't have health insurance (boo!). I live in California and was told there is something called Medi-Cal (?) that helps people who are low-income and don't have health insurance in their pregnancy needs but I don't know if I qualify. My gross monthly income is $3000. Also, if I don't qualify I heard there is a low cost insurance called AIM? Anybody who's ever had dealings with Medi-cal or AIM your pointers and experience will be muchly appreciated!! Thanks! Excited but scared of becoming a daddy!! AHHHH!!!""

Classic mustang AAA insurance?

How much does it cost (annually or monthly) to insure a classic mustang (1964-1972) with AAA?

""How much does car insurance cost for 21yr old, is it monthly or yearly?""

I am new to US. I stay in Los Angeles, CA. I have never driven before. And I am talking about a pre-owned car probably a 90s or 2000 model of toyota. Would appreciate if you'd answer with an estimate.""

How much for dentures upper and lower and mini implants to secure both of them with no insurance in ohio .....

no insurance

Can my car insurance cover the damage I did to my neighboor's car?

I made a dent to his car, with my door. We spoke, and I asked him to get an estimate. It is 600 dollars. If my insurance pays for it, what would happen to my payments? how much are they expected to change?""

Hi i passed my driving test 3 weeks ago on my 18th day and looking for a car which is cheap on insurance?

I have been looking at a 5 door 2003 ford fiesta but I am 6ft tall and is the fiesta seems too small for me. I have been looking at a 2005 1.6 5 door ford focus 3771 monthly premium to insure. Will my insurance be effected if i go for a 1.6 can any one help me

Car insurance on a first car.?

I'll be buying my first car on Friday. I went to the garage today and was told I should come down on Friday when it will be ready to pick it up. My question is should I be getting my insurance sorted before Friday? I haven't put any money down on it as they said I wouldn't need a deposit on the car. Is it just the licesne plate number I need?

""In Ca, If you had insurance on a car that was repossessed , do u still have to pay for the whole premium?""

Or what happens? How can you, or do you cancel it ? This is about the state of California.""

Advice on car insurance after having an accident?

I only passed my test 5 weeks ago, and 2 weeks after getting my car I had a crash and my car was wrote off (I know I'm the reason its so expensive for young drivers :S) Just wondering if anyone knows of any insurance companies that won't rip me off. (I know this is a long-shot! but it's worth a try) Thanks in advance :)""

""I live in St. Louis, MO and am a 20 year old male. I was looking for the cheapest auto insurance possible?

I will be getting either a 04' Grand Prix or a 03/04 Monte Carlo and I might have to get full coverage insurance. What company has the cheapest auto insurance. Like around $100 bucks or a little more?

Cheap and best insurance for me.?

I have a 99 dodge intrepid 4-D sedan and I am looking for an auto insurance for it. I have a clean driving history with no tickets since I got my drivers license (1.5 years ago). Please help me find an auto insurance in a way that I dont spend too much and yet covered. Thanks in advance.

Where can I get Really Cheap Auto insurance?

I am a student, on a really tight budget. I have to get insurance, have not so good credit and a couple of speeding tickets. Other than that have a clean record. I just need something cheap, very cheap. I am a safe driver and only use my car to drive to school. thanks fr your help""

quote me happy learner driver insurance

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/annual-car-insurance-cost-jose-gardner/"

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lapintrait · 6 years

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Hi everyone, January was not a great month for me and my buns. Saturday the 6th was a really happy day, it was the day I brought home a new edition to my little family of two bunnies, a little 7.5 week old Netherland dwarf whom I named Arlo. My bonded pair Peanut (neutered male) and Clover (spayed female) are the absolute loves of my life, Peanut is my emotional support animal and this angel came into my life as I was on the verge of committing suicide after battling with multiple chronic illnesses. I’d been planning on getting another bunny for a few months by that time, and was completely prepared and ready for a new edition. That night bringing him home was as normal as any other night, Arlo was in a separate cage and was busy binkying and exploring his new space, my other two babies had no inkling of a new bunny invading their territory. They were too busy cuddling and munching on fresh hay, acting their completely beautiful selves and I went to bed with no suspicion of the chaos that would await me the next day. Waking up at 8:30am I went straight to my bunnies to check on how Arlo went his first night at home, he was completely fine and happy. I then started to greet Peanut and Clover and started to pat Peanut on his head as he was loafing against the bars (they have a three storey cc cage). In that moment I didn’t really notice anything odd, until Peanut tried to get up but fell back down as he was noticeably weak, he couldn’t move his limbs very well. I completely shut down and in a panic ran to wake my mum up so that we could race to the vet. Mum observed him and freaked out as we both watched him try to get up and then end up laying down looking like he was having a seizure, in a frenzy mum grabbed some scissors to cut apart their cage while I was sobbing trying to reach him through their little door, she finally cut it open and I immediately scooped him up and placed him on my bed as I got dressed while my mum rang our local vet. Unfortunately the vet there today knew nothing about rabbits. I sat in the room with him just crying and holding him as my mum and the vet, receptionists etc rang every vet clinic that was open on a Sunday and knew anything about rabbits. Everybody was closed. We had no choice but to drive to a 24 hour vet hospital 20 minutes away and pray that the vet on staff could help. We got there and they took him straight in, the vet luckily had treated rabbits before but couldn’t tell us exactly what was wrong with him. They gave him fluids and took some blood tests and we had to go home and wait for them to call us in a few hours. Honestly the rest of the day is a blur of tears for me, they rang us back and the blood results showed an extremely high level of lactase and high glucose but other than that everything else was normal, she was pretty worried about the high lactase and was going to retest bloods later on after he’d been on fluids and syringing critical care. We range again at 11pm and then 7am the next day. The lactase went down but he was still paralysed. We drove back to the vet to visit him at 10am and I just burst into tears seeing him like that. He looked so much worse 😢 he was completely still except for his mouth spitting out critical care. I stayed with him for over an hour hugging and kissing him but managed to drag myself back out. We then got a call ten minutes later saying that Peanut had passed away after we left, my whole world just came crashing down around me. It felt like my chest was caving in and that a part of me died with him. On top of losing him, I was hit with a $1600 bill for 24 hours of care. I’m 19 years old, I don’t earn that kind of money from disability pensions, I had to borrow from my parents. Watching Clover grieve her soulmate has been the most heartbreaking experience. She no longer lets me touch her or come near her, she was constantly digging or laying in Peanut’s favourite spot. Peanut would’ve been 2 this coming June, and they had been bonded since he was 8 months old. In between grieving for my best friend, I was constantly worried about Clover. She didn’t stop eating but it was the social aspect I was concerned for. She has always been a very skittish bunny. She has never liked it when people came up to her or picked her up since I got her when she was 6-7 weeks old. Peanut brought her out of her shell, he was a very outgoing bunny and loved when people would pat him and cuddle him. Clover was from a backyard breeder and lived in terrible conditions so that could play a part in it, I took Clover and I also took her sister, Oreo, in September 2014. Watching Clover grieve I came up with the idea, a week after Peanuts death, of going into my local RSPCA and adopting a male bunny so that I could try bonding her again since she thrives so much on bunny company. In came Oregano (now known as Bear). He was an overweight albino mini lop and looked completely miserable. I put him on hold and came back and adopted him the next day. Right from the start I knew something wasn’t right, he didn’t eat much of the veggies I gave him (kale, bok choy, fennel, mint etc) and barely ate any hay. However, his stomach was HUGE! I knew that if he was “overweight” he would at the very least be hooking into the veggies. I took him to the vet after waiting a few days to see if he improved. He didn’t. His poops were smaller than Arlo’s, a 10 week old nethie, and he still wasn’t eating right. The vet felt his tummy and agreed with me that something wasn’t right, it was just hard to tell if he was obstructed or not without X-rays, to start him off she gave him a shot of penicillin (just in case), an opioid shot, intravenous fluids, 0.5ml of ranitidine twice a day to get him moving and some critical care for me to syringe feed him. Well, later that night was a complete disaster. As soon as I got home I gave him the medicine and critical care, my nan was holding him and stroking him for 30-45 minutes while I cleaned out his cage, when I put him back in his cage he went over and ate a pellet and then jumped into his litter box when he started moving his head forwards and back, I knew rabbits don’t have a gag reflex so I immediately panicked as he started making dry retching sounds and dribbling out of his mouth. This was one of the scariest moments of my life seeing him like this, I thought he was dying right in front of me, we ended up driving back to the 24 hour vet because it was the only one open at 9pm. By the time we got there he had stopped gagging and his breathing had returned to normal, they put him on oxygen to be safe and listened to his lungs just in case there was anything that went in. He was given the all clear and to continue his medication and speak to my vet tomorrow morning. Two days later I’m panicked and crying at the emergency vet AGAIN but this time with CLOVER!! I felt a large abscess under her chin yesterday and knew immediately it was dental issues. I had been through this before with two previous buns, one being Oreo. She ended up dying at 1.5 years old from dental issues, so I knew there was going to be a risk that it could be genetics and that Clover could be at risk. Shes 4 this year in August but it’s finally caught up to her 😞 there was a 15% increase in emergency consult prices, altogether it was $320, because it was Australia Day and we ended up getting meloxicam and baytril just to keep her comfortable until we saw our normal vet the next day. As I suspected, Clovers teeth are most likely infected and she needs surgery, possibly multiple surgeries, that cost $1500!!!! Clover had the surgery 5 weeks ago and is doing really well but she’s going to need another one very soon and I have no idea what to do and Bear also cost another $155 to get more fluids, meds, glucose test etc, and is and is going to need an X-ray which she said was a few hundred dollars. All up I’m around 4 grand in debt to my family from vet bills. These bunnies keep me going and I have had no other choice but to start a gofundme. I know right now things are tough, but please please please consider donating, no amount is too little or even sharing this would help. These bunnies keep me going and I just want to be the best bunmum I can be for them. Please consider donating no amount is too little and please reblog so I can get the word around ❤️

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trekkiewatt · 7 years

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Rutherford Roundup - The Reverend Samuel Rutherford

Remarks At “THE RUTHERFORD ROUNDUP” Held in Toronto on November 3, 1973 On which occasion Brigadier W. S. Rutherford unveiled a portrait. of the Reverend Samuel Rutherford, 1600 — 1661. In attendance were 48 descendants, including spouses, of the illustrious Scottish divine. The founder of our branch of the family was the late William Rutherford, who as a boy of eighteen, came with his family to Canada in 1833. The family landed at Quebec, having taken seven weeks, to cross the Ocean in a sailing vessel. William Rutherford was the second son of the late Ebanezer Rutherford and was one of a family of seven children. He was born in 1815 in the County of Monaghan, Ireland. It has always been a tradition in the Rutherford family that among our ancestors was the Rev. Samuel Rutherford who, among his many distinctions, was in 1647 the Principal of St. Mary’s College at St. Andrews University. St. Andrews was then the ecclesiastical centre of Scotland but to quote from ~ book on St. Andrews: “In a certain way, the history of St. Andrews is undeniably disappointing. It was the scene of great events; we know that the events occurred but, as a rule, we do not, until after the Reformation, find any vivifying details — Wallace was here, and Bruce, and Edward ‘I and the Black Douglas. We know this and there our knowledge stops; the history of St. Andrews, for more than half of its..period, is destitute of colour and personal facts’ Some day I hope that if you have not already visited St. Andrews you will do so and see the ruins of the magnificent ... 2 —2— Cathedral built on the rise overlooking the East Coast of the North Sea. There you will see the large Memorial Plaque to the memory to the Rev. Samuel Rutherford. His actual burial place, however, is at Anwoth, where for many years he was the greatly beloved Pastor. At St. Andrews you will see in the dining room of St. Mary’s College the portrait of the Rev. Samuel. On the outside of the College carved in stone are the Rutherford Arms. In the library you will find some of his manuscripts in fine hand—writing and the College is still doing research on his theological teachings. His is a name greatly to be revered as I shall try to point out in this brief sketch of some of the outstanding events of his life. First let me pause to ask the senior member of our Rutherford Clan, Brigadier Dill, to unveil a full—size copy of the portrait I mentioned. The Rev.Samuel Rutherford was born about 1600 in the Village of Nisbet, Roxburgshire, and entered Edinburgh College in 1617, earned his M.A. in 1621 and two years after, elected Professor of Humanity. In 1627, he was appointed Minister at Anwoth, Kirkcudbrightshire took a leading place among the clergy of Galloway. In 1636 his first book, “Exercitationes Apologeticae —3— Pro Divina Gratia” — an elaborate treatise. Against Arminianism — appeared at Amsterdam. Its severe Calvinism led to a prosecution by the Bishop. Rutherford was deposed from his pastoral office and sentenced to confinement in Aberdeen during the King’s pleasure. He was as proficient in Greek and Latin as in English. It was here that he wrote his famous “Letters” which have gone through many editions. The copy in my hand belonged to Robert Burns and bears Robbie’s signature. Rutherford was present at the signing of the Covenant at Edinburgh in 1638 and at the Glasgow Assembly he was restored to his Parish. In 1639 he was appointed Professor of Divinity at St. Mary’s College. In 1643 he was one of eight Commissioners sent from Scotland to the Westminster Assembly. More books followed including “Lex Rex” — a Dispute for the Just Prerogative of King and People. This treatise established Rutherford as one of the early writers on Constitutional Law. There followed “Divine Right of Church Government and Excommunication”(1646) and “Free Disputation Against Pretended Liberty of Conscience “ ... 4 —4— (1648) described as “perhaps the most elaborate defense of persecution which has ever appeared in a Christian country”. Further books followed and in 1648 — 1651 he declined successive invitations to theological chairs at Harderwijk and Utrecht. After the Restoration in 1660, his “Lex Rex” was ordered to be burned by the Stuarts. He was deprived of all his offices and on a charge of high treason was cited to appear before the ensuing Parliament. He died on the 23rd of the following March. At St. Andrews you may see the gate in the wall from which he delivered his polemic against rule by Divine Right in the presence of Charles II. He was a man of great intellect, of great humanitarian qualities and a defender unto death of those principles in which he believed. Thirteen generations is a long time to trace a family tree, even with two marriages. It is difficult to trace any of the Rev. Samuel’s family. Allowing three children per generation and three and a half centuries, there should . . . 5 —5— be about 200,000 of us! The tradition has always been passed on by word -of- mouth. My Mother used to say that until her generation, there had always been a Presbyterian Minister in the family by the name of Samuel. In any case, tradition is often stronger than reality and there can be no possible, probable doubt that we are all Rutherfords! We have good reason to be proud of our Rutherford ancestry. There used to be a couple of Rutherford peerages but on checking “Burkes”, I found none. We do know, however, that it was the scientist, Lard Rutherford, one time professor at McGill, who made a notable contribution toward the splitting of the atom. Also, I think there used to be a title in abeyance for want of heirs and I thought how nice it would be to have Brigadier Bill receive it. The British “Who’s Who” lists five Rutherfords who are Knights. We trust they are worthy of some connection with our family. As to our immediate ancestry. William Rutherford married twice — to sisters. By his first wife, he was the father of Uncles Eben and Boyd and Aunt Grace Morton. At the age of 50 Uncle Eben and .a Major MulhoUan4t from Toronto started an orange grove on the outskirts of Havana, Cuba. The city developed, Uncle Eben became a “developer” was the first President of the Country Club, and died leaving over half a million, a consider— —6— able sum in those days, even when it was divided among nine brothers and sisters. By his second marriage, our grandfather or great-grandfather Rutherford, as the case may be, had seven children: Eliza, Mary, Will, Sara, Sam, Alice and Hattie. As I recall, Grandmother Rutherford lived to he 96, my mother Sara 95, Aunt Alice 97 and Aunt Hattie 100. Aunt Hattie was a missionary in China and on the table is a medal which she received at the time of the Boxer Rebellion. As I mentioned I cannot find that we are “related to a peer” but in these changing times it may be of comfort to relate that according to the “Mornington Times”, our grandfather cleared three farms, and this before the days of tractors, etc., finally settling in a beautiful location at Millbank, Ontario, near Stratford. There he not only had a fine farm, but was the Postmaster, owned the general store, the saw mill and a tannery as well. If the worst comes to the worst, with an inheritance of such a work ethic we. should be able to survive and look forward to another “Rutherford Roundup’ three and a half centuries down the line with happiness and prosperity again clearly depicted on the faces of each and every one of us. November, 1973. S ~ ~ 7 —7— ADDENDA: * From a biography of the Reverend Samuel Rutherford: “He was known as Joshua Redivivus” and one chapter is entitled: “Samuel Rutherford and some of his Extremes”. A further quotation is as follows: “For no man of his age in broad Scotland stood higher as a scholar, a theologian, a controversialist, a preacher and a very saint than Samuel Rutherford ... He could write in Latin better than either in Scotch or English.” He is also quoted as saying, “I am made of extremes From the tombstone at Anwoth: “What tongue or pen or skill of men Can famous Rutherford commend His learning greatly raised his fame True godliness adorned his name He did converse with things above Acquainted with Emmanuel’s love Most orthodox he was and sound And many errors did confound For Zion Kingdom and Zion’s cause And Scotland’s covenanted laws Most constantly he aid commend Until his time was at an end Then he went to the full fruition Of that which he had seen in vision”. 1. WILLIAM RUTHERFORD (b. 1815 County of Monaghan, Ireland d. 1886 at Millbank, Perth County, Ontario) William Rutherford, the second son of the late Ebenezer Rutherford and Maria Sofia Campbell, was one of a family of seven children, born in the year 1815 in the County of Monaghan, Ireland. Maria Sofia Campbell was the daughter of William Charles Campbell, a solicitor of Belfast, Ireland. It is believed that Ebenezer Rutherford and his wife had a farm in Markham Township in York County, Ontario. Maria Campbell Rutherford’s sister and her husband may have had the adjoining farm. With the family he came to Canada in 1833, landing at Quebec, having taken seven weeks to cross the ocean in a sailing vessel. He proceeded west to Ontario and settled near Peterborough in the Township of Cavan where he cleared a farm. He was known as one of the Cavan Blazers, having enlisted to put down the rebellion of 1837. However, the lure of the Queen’s Bush attracted him and we find him travelling west again, passing through Muddy York (Now Toronto) and Hamilton and on over the primitive roads by oxcart until he came to the Township of Wellesley where he decided to settle and there started clearing another farm from the bush lands. Here he married Mary, daughter of James Freeborn, of Donegal, Ireland, but after a few years his beloved wife passed away, leaving two sons and one daughter. Ambitious to advance still farther into the bush, Mr. —2— Rutherford sold his farm and with his brother—in-law, John Freeborn, went west a further ten miles where they located on the banks of a small river and cleared land enough to build a log home. In a short time Mr. Rutherford built a grist and saw mill and this was the nucleus of a settlement which they called the Village of Millbank. Here he married Eleanor Freeborn, a sister of his deceased wife, and to them were born two Sons and five daughters. The grist mill was the first industry established in the Village but in the years following, Mr. Rutherford built a tannery, a flax mill and a woolen mill and also established a general store which served the newly settled district for many miles around and eventually grew to quite large proportions. These industries all prospered but his chief interests were the management of the store and looking after two farms, both of which were grants from the Crown and consisting, one of one hundred and fifty acres adjoining the village and the other of one hundred acres on part of which the village was surveyed and from one corner of his farm he donated to the village lands for a public cemetery, and a further portion to the Episcopal church for the erection of a church building and manse. —For many years Mr. Rutherford was actively interested in the buying and shipping of live stock to the United States, his principal markets being Buffalo, Albany and New York, and to these places he shipped many hundreds of carloads. In these earlier days the nearest railway point was Moorefield Station, about sixteen miles away, and it was necessary to drive the stock this distance for shipment, but later when the railway was built through the —3— Township of Mornington, he had a shipping base close at hand. Mr. Rutherford was widely known and very highly respected throughout North Perth and North Waterloo and was the first Postmaster for the Village of Millbank, receiving his appointment in 1850 and which office he retained during the remainder of his life. He was a member of the Wesleyan Methodist Church at Millbank and was a firm believer in salvation through Jesus Christ, his last testimony being a confession of faith in which he quoted the words of the Scripture, “Look unto Me all ye ends of the earth and be ye saved. He died on February 10, 1886, at the age of seventy—one -years and was buried in Rushs Cemetery, near Wellesley Village. His family left Millbank in 1888. His first wife, Nary Freeborn, died March 10, 1853. His second wife, Eleanor Freeborn, died in Los Angeles, California around 1928 at the age of 96. WILLIAM RUTHERFORD (1815 — 1886) • Mornington and Its Pioneers by Malcolm McBeth, published by the Milverton Sun, Milverton, Ontario, 1933. This part was already quoted and removed. Eben Rutherford, the eldest son of William Rutherford and Mary Freeborn, was probably born in 1846 in Wellesley Township, Waterloo County, Ontario. After the age of 50, and probably after the Spanish American War (1900), Eben Rutherford, together with a Major Mulholland from Toronto, started an orange grove on the outskirts of Havana, Cuba. As the City developed, Eben became a property developer. Correspondence with his brother—in—law (Henry B. Jackman) dated 1912, refers to his real estate speculations and his promotion of land companies in which he wanted his relatives to invest. He refers to the necessary bribes to the “car line” and its manager to “put the line our way”. He was promoting a company which would be capatilized at $250,000 in 6% nineteen year bonds with 125,000 shares attached. An additional 350,000 shares were given as a bonus to the promoter. He refers to being able to sell 100 acres for $1,070,000 to net a profit of $490,000. Eben Rutherford was President of the Country Club in Havana. He died around 1917 without a wife or children. His estate of approximately $500,000 was divided equally between his nine brothers and sisters. This was a considerable sum in those days and the significance of this inheritance to his relatives should not be underestimated. 1. JAMES FREEBORN of County Donegal, Ireland. Born 1768, died 1848. He may have come to Canada in 1840 with at least three of his children. His wife Mary Reid died February 20, 1884 at age 98. (a) JOHN FREEBORN (born Donegal, Ireland, 1820) Formal history and standard biography play an important part in fostering a national spirit. Canada has an ample supply of such works; but the history of the beginners of the nation, the men and women who carved out homes for themselves in the dense forests, on the wide, lonely prairies and in the stern mountain valleys, their story can be gleaned only from almost inaccessible nooks, where lies “a veritable storehouse of information” on pioneer days. Just as it was the unknown soldier that won the Great World War so was it the unknown pioneers that with suffering, heroism and dogged determination laid broad and deep the foundations of Canada. In the middle forties there opened up the “Queen’s Bush” for settlement, about the last available territory for settlement in Western Ontario. In this territory was the unsurveyed Township of Mornington and many people “squatted” on what turned out to be excellent farms. The first of these came in 1843 and took up land in the vicinity of Musselburg and Poole and within three or four years the whole township was populated. Among the very first settlers of Millbank was William Rutherford and John Freeborn, the subject of this sketch, who arrived in 1847. The village plot was laid out by these two gentlemen. It received its name some years later in the following manner. Mr. Freeborn had built a mill on the west side of the creek which was flanked by a bank of considerable height; and one day when passing the place in company with a surveyor named Maxwell, he asked Maxwell to suggest a name for the village and that gentleman, taking inspiration from his surroundings, suggested the circumstances of the “mill and the “bank”, a combination of which resulted in the name of Millbank, by which the village was thence— forward known. John Freeborn was born in County Donegal, Ireland in 1820 and in 1840 embarked for America, resolved to try his fortune in the New World. He arrived at St. John, N.B., and remained there one year working at ship carpentering which trade he learned in Ireland, removing at the end of that time to Boston, Mass., where he pursued the same avocation with credit and profit till induced by friends living in Peterborough County, Canada West, to visit them in 1842. Mr. Freeborn’s friends persuaded him to remain in Canada and during the next three years he was connected with the Government works on the Ontonabee and Trent Rivers, where large timber slides and kindred works were being constructed, but being compelled by ill—health to leave that locality he came west and settled in Stratford when the only building it contained was a tavern and a store. Here he worked at his trade until 1847 when he came to Millbank and in the same year commenced the erection on the pioneer mill in Mornington operated by a waterwheel which drove a muley, or up and down saw. After being in operation for four years it was destroyed by fire when he rebuilt an improved scale. He continued the operation of it for several years when he embarked in the mercantile business from which he retired a number of years later after having acquired a competence by a long career of energetic perseverance, enterprise and strict integrity. 2. (a) MARY JANE FREEBORN (born 1811) who married William Rutherford around ? She died March 10, 1853 bearing her last child. (a) ELEANOR FREEBORN (born 1832?) who married William Rutherford after her sister died. She died in Los Angeles around 1928 at the age of 96. JAMES FREEBORN (1820 —?) Mornington and its Pioneers by Malcolm McBeth, Published by the Milverton Sun, Milverton, Ontario, 1933.

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