#i got an entire extra node further into this

[wingsofninewheels]

debbie events, aka "maybe tarot lady needs a recolor"

#i had 10k stam saved up. i just don't grind unless debbie's around #they were really generous to give us debbie format overlapping with a 1st time hell #i got an entire extra node further into this #lnduq #love nikki #love nikki dress up queen

[64bitgamer]

[strawberrysoup]

Pocketful of Posies || Chapter 4

You’d been hiding for years and years now; from your family, from society, from alphas and packs. Suppressants were dangerous but effective and necessary for an omega who refused to be owned—but no suppressants were strong enough to fool the nose of a super soldier, who together with his pack would stop at nothing to bind you to them forever. 

pairings: dark!Avengers x reader chapters: 4/? status: WIP warnings: A/B/O dynamics, power imbalances, noncon and dubcon sexual situations, loss of autonomy, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat — this is a dark!fic, read at your own risk. not beta read (AKA there may be additional changes)

hey guys! i made a ko-fi! if you enjoy this and have some cash you could spare to help me out with my bills, id really appreciate it!

You wondered idly at his eyes, glancing between the brown and the blue with the kind of intent that betrayed the anxiety welling in your chest. His hair was short too, the last time you’d seen him in the papers it had been long. He was incredibly, uncomfortably handsome and your heart pounded, that stupid bitch lurking in your hindbrain was practically preening under his stare.

“Are you coming back to me little love?” He asked softly, frowning when you flinched back—you were so traumatized, the alpha couldn’t imagine what had happened to you, “focus on me now.”

“Her eyes clear?” Peter’s voice echoed slightly, coming from above, “they were so cloudy earlier.”

“Much clearer,” the blue eye and the brown eye crinkled at the corners, the blond smiling down at you in his arms as he made his way up a set of stairs, “I’d wager you’re even listening to me by this point.”

“Everyone needs to go through their clothes and pick out some things to offer up for the nest,” Steve didn’t sound like he was talking to anyone, rather to the room at large, but the prime’s voice coming from further than Peter’s, “she’ll need lots of options, we might have to fix them up for the first few weeks.”

“How is your nest building instinct, my love?” Thor rumbled, the sound traveling through his chest and vibrating down to your bones, “hopefully better than your submissive instinct, hm?”

There was a snorted laugh you couldn’t ascribe to anyone in particular and the whole thing made you bristle, every hair on your body was standing on end. Did they think it was funny? You were shattering into pieces, shards swept into a hurricane and scattered. You weren’t wearing your own clothes, your own skin didn’t smell right. Everything was wrong, sitting 10° off the proper axis. The thoughts spiraled —they would find all of your suppressant stashes, all of your weapons, the few things you’d taken when you ran away from home. Every second you spent in this house, your odds of escape plummeted.

You were transferred to a different pair of massive arms, Steve carefully restraining yours to your sides when you started to squirm and hushing you softly, “shh, precious, you’re okay. Let’s get you settled in. Thor, Nat just texted Carol that she and Clint should be here in the next half hour. Any ideas on Loki?”

The surface he laid you on was one of the softest things you’d ever felt. Your body practically melted over the ultra-comfortable mattress, white noise filling your brain with static for several long moments. When you came too, you instinctively inhaled deeply through your nose before yawning so hard your jaw cracked. If only there wasn’t a fucking alpha prime laying on his side directly next to you, one arm settled with a comforting pressure over your waist while the other propped his head up, you’d be quite comfortable.

A sudden flash of light jolted you from your fuzzy state, sitting upright abruptly only for the blond to firmly and smoothly force your back to the mattress again. His fingers traced swirls into the skin of your waist while he shushed you and you winced when his hand travelled higher over your ribs, thumb brushing a goosebump inducing arc over your flesh.

“S-stop,” your voice cracked as you reached down, pressing firmly against his arm—blood draining from your face as you realized his arm kept the hem of the oversized shirt you wore pulled far over your waist, “oh my God, get off—”

“Loki should be here shortly, I contacted him just after she ran out of the lab,” Thor stated from where he stood at the edge of what you realized was a bed the size of most bedrooms.

It was built into the floor in the corner of the room, a sea of pillows scattered across the surface and mixed in with blankets and sheets. It smelled—you realized you felt lightheaded almost, surrounded by the scent of the two alpha primes and their entire pack, it smelled so overwhelming. The back of your mind screamed that it smelled good, it smelled painfully and damningly good.

“I brought up some bags.”

Your head snapped to the stairs, watching a man with short brown hair come into view. He was shorter than Steve or Thor but still taller than Peter, built similarly to the finely toned young alpha. There was no extra bulk to the man, although you could see the bulge of his muscles through his long sleeved shirt. A delta, you would guess at a distance; there was plenty of dominance in his stance, but the he looked built to seduce rather than restrain.

Steve’s arm tightened around your torso, fingers carefully cupping the curve of your ribcage and pressing you more firmly into the bed. The prime was all too obviously meant to restrain, especially as he shifted, manipulating your uncooperative limbs until you were cradled in his lap while he sat against the wall behind the bed. His grasp was so entirely inflexible that you wondered what his bones were made of, his muscles—he didn’t strain for a moment, not even when you attempted to throw your entire body weight to the side.

“Any of those got a collar in ‘em, Buck?”

The prime’s hand came down over your mouth just seconds before you shrieked. The muffled noise sent shivers down the spines of the alphas in the room, the one holding you no exception. It wasn’t sufficient though, the pitch was critical to the sound’s efficacy and you couldn’t reach the proper volume. Lips pressed firmly into the side of your head, Steve still holding you so carefully you could barely move.

“Got a couple, here,” the brunet man, Buck, dug through the plastic shopping bags he’d set on the floor near the wall.

“Hey, hey, come on baby,” Peter had an obvious and serious aversion to your discomfort, emphasized by the way he quickly slipped onto the bed and plastered himself against Steve’s side so that he could wrap his arms around you, “they’re not choke or shock or spike collars, I promise they’re just pretty omega collars Bucky and Carol picked out. You’ll feel so much safer with a collar on, omega. Just hold still.”

The shift from Steve holding you down to Peter was almost unnoticeable, a shocking revelation. You swore you could sit on the kid and he’d end up a pancake, there was no way he should be able to hold you in place while you tried to thrash. One of his legs crossed over yours in Steve’s lap, the young alpha contorting you both until your forehead touched his and your body was curled with your neck extended. The hand over your mouth shifted and the scents changed, the newest addition belonging to the delta who must’ve been on the bed behind you.

“Here you go doll,” his voice was gravelly, a strange tone that sounded almost underused with a very slight burr that reminded you of an alpha’s purr—minus the calming pheromones.

“In the meantime,” Thor joined the crowd on the bed, shifting to settle just to Peter’s right and carefully avoiding Steve’s outstretched legs, “No shrieking, little love.”

The alpha command washed over you like tar, your chest seizing. Your vocal cords felt suspended, the more you tried to shriek the more painful the sensation got. The hand that hand been over your mouth slipped down to your chin, tipping your head back carefully as leather circled your neck. A reedy, whistling whine escaped your lips and Peter’s cheek was immediately rubbing against your face, down your neck and over the collar being tightened around your throat. He was scenting you, trying to provide comfort by drenching your skin with a protective perfume.

“Oh baby don’t make that sound,” he murmured, lips brushing over your face as the others shifted around the pair of you, “it’s for your own good, omega—”

“No!” Your voice rasped with the cry, “get it off! I won’t stay here, I won’t—”

“Regulate your breathing, precious, the collar will make you feel more secure,” in the shift Steve had ended up with you sitting on the bed between his legs, his ankles crossed to trap your lower body tightly while his fingers twined with yours to restrain your arms, “maybe it needs to be tighter? Bucky, is it pressing the hormone glands firmly enough?”

There was some shuffling and mumbling and you whined as the collar got a notch tighter, only slightly restricting your breathing. It was just this side of uncomfortable, walking the edge of distressing and you were forced to quickly calm your frantic breaths lest you hyperventilate—there was no telling what they’d do if you passed out, if you couldn’t control your breathing and fainted. You could feel the leather pressing the nodes on either side of your neck, causing a reaction that pumped your body full of chemicals. They were meant to induce intimacy and trust in an omega while alleviating stress, the constant oxytocin and endorphin production that flooded the system resulting in a low-grade addiction. Or so you’d hypothesized.

Omega physiology was a trash compactor of undesirable traits but the hormone set up was abhorrent, the limbic system an evolutionary disaster—two pituitary glands, two scent glands, and the thyroid were all located in the neck, the hypothalamus in the brain with the hippocampus and amygdala. You didn’t know the history of the collars, you didn’t have a head for timelines, but you knew that omega subjugation wouldn’t be so easy or convenient without them. It was like long term sedation with highly addictive chemicals; omegas didn’t stand a chance when their own body’s chemistry was used against them.

“This is inhumane,” you managed to choke out, between the rage and fear and high the collar caused you could barely keep your teeth from chattering, “I’m a human being, of sound mind—I can think for myself and protect myself­—I don’t need or want a pack, I don’t—fuck, please listen to me!”

Your voice was weak and raspy, no wonder the omegas you always saw were so docile; your breathing was somewhat restricted, your vocal cords unable to reach full range. Even if Thor hadn’t given an alpha order you wouldn’t have been able to shriek, speaking was exhausting. The command would wear off in an hour or two and it wouldn’t even make a difference. How were you supposed to argue your suitability for autonomy if you couldn’t talk?

“Of course you’re of sound mind, love—”

“No, shut up!” You croaked, eyes flashing to Thor’s surprised face, “listen. Would you treat a beta this way? If I was any other presentation this behavior would be abhorrent—it would be illegal! Please, you’re superheros aren’t you? Be rational, for a moment, please!”

You didn’t realize Bruce had joined the group in the attic until he spoke, “betas don’t have a physiological requirement for physical contact with other presentations, sweetheart.”

A green light went off in your brain, a shine in your eyes as you looked at the doctor, “w-wait, wait I would argue—” your voice cut out for a second and you cleared your throat the best you could, desperation sitting in your stomach, “I would argue that your wording is inherently biased. Omegas don’t have a physiological requirement for contact with other presentations; their bodies require chemicals that it doesn’t naturally produce, the same way we require amino acids to survive—”

“You know your stuff, don’t you princess? Where’d you go to school?” Tony Stark emerged into the attic, still wearing the immaculately pressed suit he’d been in earlier, “you know, before you dropped out and went into hiding.”

“It’s disrespectful to interrupt someone when they’re speaking, you duplicitous bastard,” you spat, the presence of yet another delta setting your teeth on edge.

“Oh yeah, hey Buck did you meet y/n? She really hates deltas,” he was grinning, the asshole.

“Is y/n your real name, sweetheart?” Bruce asked, tossing Tony a stern look, “We found several IDs in your things, all different names. The contract we got from the cleaning agency listed your name as y/n.”

It took you a moment to think through the question—and another minute after that to remember which name you used while in Ontario. You real first name, fake last name. Fake age, maybe? Or was that the Quebec ID? Did your real name even matter at this point? It had been so long since it had meant anything to you (other than being the easiest name to respond to properly, but you could train yourself to answer to anything).

“My name is inconsequential,” you finally responded, eyebrows furrowing, “we’re debating the ethics of kidnapping people, remember?”

“That sounds like biased wording if I’ve ever heard it,” Stark snorted, “try preventing a vulnerable omega from being killed in the streets.”

“Over dramatic, no basis for fact, denied,” you snapped angrily, quickly turning your attention to Bruce, “come on, listen man! You’re subjugating the entire omega population based on inherently incorrect medical assumptions from two hundred years ago or something! The only scientific causation between modern omega theory and actual omega statistics is that the overall population of omegas has dropped dramatically since the induction of Omega Law!”

“There’s no proof that’s causation, sweetheart,” Bruce’s arms were crossed over his chest, “the odds lie in the favour of correlation.”

“We would know if any studies had been done! There have been less than twenty official studies regarding omega biology in the last ten years!” Begging—you were begging, you could hear it, “there haven’t been any studies done regarding the effects of the other presentation’s interference in omega behavior on their physiology! We know more about Olinguitos than we do omega’s chemistry and those’ve only existed in main stream science circles for the last six years!”

“You need to calm down omega,” Steve’s voice was one octave away from a purr, “you’re getting frantic and your heart rate is through the roof. You’re going to hyperventilate.”

“Y’all think she might be more comfortable if she wasn’t being surrounded on all sides by strangers?” Sam asked sarcastically from the stairway as he came up with a tray, his facial expression riding the fence between irritated and amused, “Peter, Bucky, back up guys. Thor, you really gotta be right there when Steve’s got the poor thing completely restrained?”

Hope was like a gut punch, bile rushing up your throat only for you to swallow it back down—gulping with the collar around your neck caused enough discomfort that you realized eating was going to be difficult. Your eyes locked on Sam as the bodies around you shuffled once again. Bucky and Peter both slipped off the bed, the young alpha sulking while the delta calmly returned to the bags he’d left sitting in the corner. Thor wasn’t so gracious as to outright back off, but he did scoot about a foot back on the bed.

“Alright sweetheart, first things first, are you hungry? Dinner’s gonna be about an hour so I brought up some snacks. If Steve let’s go of you, do you promise not to try to run off?” The man approached the edge of the bed, holding the tray against his hip, “we can have a discussion.”

Suspicion lanced through you, there was no way the offer was as innocent as it seemed. Most of the time engaging with people who wanted to have discussions didn’t go well but you weren’t sure what your alternative option was. There was no reason to test their patience at this point so you nodded slowly, feeling Steve’s chest press into your back as he sighed. He lifted you carefully and set you down onto the mattress, far more gracefully than any alpha prime had the right to be as he climbed off the bed.

“Now can at least some of you get out?” The alpha turned to stare back at his packmates still cluttering the attic, “please?”

They were all still for several seconds before Thor and Steve exchanged a heavy glance and both nodded, turning respectfully and walking down the stairs—another shocking display that made your heart stutter. An alpha prime silently acquiescing to the request of an alpha in front of their pack, signaling that others should follow, was a sign of an incredibly strong pack. It meant strong, competent leadership, respect, and consideration. Too bad they still considered you little more than an animal.

Bucky and Peter followed with mournful back glances, Tony moving to join them looking more exasperated than saddened. Bruce went to follow but you immediately felt a prospect of hope leaving with him.

“W-Wait, Bruce—right? Bruce, you’re rational, a scientist? Please, stay, let me debate this with you—”

“Hey! I’m a scientist too! I have PhDs!” Stark balked immediately, tossing his hands up as if to emphasize the aggravation her attitude was causing.

“Tony, don’t—”

“No, you stay too!” You cut Sam off when the alpha began to admonish his pack mate, “you’re an asshole but you understand fucking logic, I’ll take it.”

“What about me?” Peter squeezed eagerly back onto the landing, “I have three masters and—”

“Peter no, no more alphas in here please,” Sam stared the younger alpha down for just a moment with a stern eye, “please?”

Peter groaned but turned back, trudging down the stairs like a teenager. The air felt clearer when all that was left in the room was a three people other than yourself, the two scientists and the alpha. Part of you felt increasingly panicked, as if somehow the quiet setting was more ominous than the previous. The other part of you realized that this particular group was far less likely to violate you while you sat half naked on a bed than the others.

“Okay now,” Sam toed off his shoes before stepping onto the bed, carefully bringing the tray with him to set on your lap before he sat down, “let’s slow down for a few minutes. I know I don’t understand what you’re going through, but my little sister is an omega so I do have a little more knowledge than most of the pack. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on from your perspective.”

Burning frustration lit a path down your spine—this alpha might’ve seen omegas as more than pets, but he certainly spoke down to you like you were an irrational child. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on from your perspective?

“From my perspective I’ve been assaulted and terrorized and falsely imprisoned for I don’t know how long now!” You spat, practically vibrating in irritation, “you’re trying to justify this treatment because I’m an omega but my designation doesn’t mean I deserve to be treated like something to be caught and stolen! I want to leave, I want this horrible collar off my neck, and I want my stuff back! And if you tell me to calm down, so help me God—”

Sam’s mouth snapped shut from where he’d started to speak, immediately folding his hands into his lap and clearing his throat, “right, no telling you to calm down. Got it. Now, where are you from?”

“Doesn’t matter,” you grit your teeth slightly when the alpha sighed, “I want to leave, now.”

“You can’t leave sweetheart, not unless we get everything figured out. If you have an alpha, we’ll need to get you back to them. If you don’t, we certainly can’t just let you go back off on your own—it’s way too dangerous.”

“No it isn’t, I’ve been on my own for years and I’m fine! Not once have I had any problems, not until now!”

“Yeah, unfortunately for you our beta here has an alpha rage monster inside of him who managed to catch your scent beneath the suppressants,” Tony looked almost proud as he slung his arm over the beta’s shoulders, tugging him slightly, “if Bruce didn’t tip off Steve, who knows if he would’ve caught it.”

“Wow—Jesus Christ, you make me want to punch you in the face,” you snarled, hands clenching into fists in your lap, “I’m not a helpless omega, I’ve been happy, do you understand that? Do you know how rare it is for an omega to get to be happy? It’s like winning the lottery. Please, I like being happy. Please just let me go.”

“Sweetheart it isn’t rare for omegas to be happy,” Sam was frowning like you’d dropped a suicide note on his lip, “there are so few of them, they’re taken care of like royalty, baby.”

“Plus, omegas in packs are statistically less likely to suffer mental illness—”

“God, would you shut up about that?” Bruce’s eyes went wide when you snapped at him, “that study was trash, the bias was overwhelming and it hasn’t been replicated since. Omegas in packs wear collars that force their bodies to over produce oxytocin and when that’s removed they go insane from withdrawals. The same happens with the chemicals produced by the other presentations’ pheromones; instead of being given supplements to make up for the absence omega’s bodies are left to wilt. It has everything to do with medical malpractice and nothing to do with omega nature! There’s nothing happy about that!”

“Look, there are obviously places where the known biology of omega’s has holes,” Stark admitted, one hand in his pocket while the other was held aloft, “There’s a lot we don’t know, but what we do know is that when omegas are left to their own devices they end up dead.”

“They end up kidnapped, raped, and forcibly bonded by alphas!” If the collar had allowed the pitch you would’ve been shrieking, “By alphas who’s packs rape and bond the omegas, too. The only danger to omegas are the other presentations!”

“That’s why they have to be protected,” Sam emphasized his words with a dose of calming pheromones, and you snarled.

“Stop trying to manipulate me! All your doing is inhibiting my ability to think and feel for myself—do you not see how cruel and insane that is? That you’re literally attempting to—”

“This is a lot of ROR rhetoric,” Bruce sighed quietly, obviously aiming his words to Tony but you picked it up.

“There’s no such thing as ‘radical’ omega’s rights! We just want to be allowed to exist without our lives and hormones being constantly controlled by outside forces that we never chose!” Your voice broke towards the end and you realized tears were welling in your eyes—this conversation was not going your way and hope was dwindling rapidly, “why is that so hard to understand? That chemically controlling another human being is inhumane?”

“Alright, alright, let’s take a second and calm down,” Sam requested sternly, eyes widening when you immediately hissed, “Not just you, ‘mega. Everyone, including me, okay?”

It was truly a battle to fight down the ire rising in your throat, nearly choking you at the collar. You wondered cruelly if he’d treated his sister like she was an infant her entire life, if this was his bedside manner for omegas. The poor thing was probably so addicted to oxytocin she was barely alive.

“Please, let me go,” you begged quietly, squeezing your eyes shut against the tears, “if you have any humanity in you, let me go.”

When you looked up at him again, the doleful look on his face made your heart crumble to pieces.

“Lots of omegas are apprehensive at first, baby,” his voice was gentle, low and forlorn, “when you first present… my sister was seventeen. She was in so much pain and she begged for help, for almost a full week. When she came out of it she could barely remember how bad it had been but we remembered. The agony she’d suffered because she didn’t have an alpha through the process—we couldn’t let that happen over and over again, could we? As her packmates how could we let her endure that? She was upset at first, but now she has a pack that waits on her hand and foot, a whole slew of babies, anything she could ever ask for at her fingertips.”

“She was upset at first,” your heart broke for Sam’s sister, where ever she was, “you realize she was only able to be upset at first, right? Because after a while, she probably stopped being able to process the usual scale of emotion she enjoyed before you allowed her to be given a chemical lobotomy and sold her off—seventeen, God, she never even got to live and you’re talking about her like she’s some sort of success story?”

The look in the man’s brown eyes was getting darker and darker the longer you spoke but a dam had broke and your mouth kept moving, hoarse sounds barking borderline cruel words in fast succession.  

“I hope her ability to feel betrayal went first so she didn’t have to deal with the memory of her family auctioning her off like fucking cattle. Success story,” you scoffed, lips lifted in a fang flashing snarl, “that wasn’t a fucking success story you knottedheaded piece of shit, it was a cautionary tale.”

#avengers x reader #steve rogers x reader #bucky barnes x reader #sam wilson x reader #tony stark x reader #carol danvers x reader #clint barton x reader #wanda maximoff x reader #bruce banner x reader #thor x reader #natasha romanoff x reader #dark!avengers #dark!avengers x reader #abo dynamics #pocketful of posies

[fatefulfaerie]

Abnormality

Zelink Week 2021 prompt #6/7 @zelinkweek2021

Word Count: 2,225

Incarnation: Age of Calamity

Additional Prompts Followed: Timeline Alteration

“UTA” inspired by the “TVA” of the Disney+ series “Loki”

Trigger Warnings: abduction, brainwashing

Before Link knew it, he was being pushed along a dark hallway, hands tied and feet tripping on each other when he was pushed too abruptly.

“Faster.”

He could barely see, but long, blinking blue lights told him it was a narrow space, and his boots sounded as if they were walking on steel. He walked faster nonetheless. His own iron armor made even more of a ruckus.

“Where are you taking me?” He asked over his shoulder to the man who was pushing him. “What’s going on?”

He was in Hyrule Field last he remembered, returning to the castle after battling a Moblin. He saw an odd, egg-shaped robot and the next thing he knew he was pushed to the ground, landing in the steel trappings of wherever he was now. He was brought to his feet and pushed whenever his captor thought his pacing was too slow.

The man never answered. Link was blasted with light when a door opened as if automatically with the same noise as a sword slinking into a sheath. Link, who marvelled at such unprecedented technology, was pushed in before he could remark at it. The man behind him was gone when those same doors closed behind him.

Link looked behind him and there were no longer doors, just a wall. So he looked in front of him.

The room was clad with a silver material unlike stone. Angles jutted out at odd places and Link had never before seen architecture like this as he slowly paced forward towards the table.

Someone cleared their throat, a woman. Link’s head popped directly forward.

“Name?” She asked.

“What’s going on?”

“Name?” She repeated. It seemed Link found another person who would not humor his questions.

“Link,” he answered.

The receptionist seemed annoyed, eyes rolling to the back of her head and her eyelids fluttering. Link wondered what he did to upset her, but she scribbled something down on a piece of paper nonetheless.

“Birthdate?”

“August 16th,” Link replied. “But--”

“You have been charged with the crime of temporal misdemeanors,” she interrupted. “How do you plead?”

Link’s mouth moved but no sound came out.

“T-temp…” he tried, but failed. “What even is that? What did I do?”

“How do you plead?” She asked. There seemed to be no negotiation.

“G-guilty,” Link stammered. “I guess.”

She pointed her pen to the left, where there was now an opening, a doorless entrance.

“Step onto the platform for processing please.”

Link hesitated.

“Now,” she said without even looking up, and so Link did as he was asked, stepping onto the platform with oddly textured lines. With a jolt, it moved him along, Link’s arms drifting from his sides and knees bending as if bracing for danger. But before he could even get a sight of what was in this next room, his vision was clouded by white mist, a substance that shot a tingling feeling throughout his entire body until he couldn’t even feel his body. He was paralyzed completely and before he could fall, mechanized hands clutched his limbs, his arms, his legs. He felt his armor being stripped off but he didn’t have the control over his eyes to see who was doing it or where it was going, to object to showing this much skin and feeling this vulnerable in a strange place. Neither could he employ his vocal nodes to object to the last bit of clothing being removed until he was left only with a blue Sheikah-grade undergarment covering his most private area.

He could still see though, still tell he was being moved along into the futuristic building with no discernible connection to anything he had ever seen in Hyrule.

When he finally stopped, he stopped in front of a man behind a podium. Around Link were burn marks and the foul smell of burning flesh. His heart began to race.

“Link 816-D, you have been--”

But the echoey voice of doom was stopped when someone came racing through a now opened door, a woman in a blue dress with jagged and yet structured patterned white lines. The dress was far too tight and far too short for anything fashionable in Hyrule, but the dark-haired woman looked professional and put-together nonetheless. The fact that her dress almost exposed her knees was the least of Link’s concerns, it was just odd.

He definitely was not in Hyrule.

“He is to be questioned,” the woman said. Link couldn’t deny she was beautiful. He tried not to think about it. “Concerning the matter of the leading variant at large.”

“Very well.”

Link felt the greatest sense of relief when he was able to move again, permitted to step off the platform, and given garments to clothe himself in. They actually quite resembled the white and blue that everyone in this place wore, Link given white pants, a blue shirt, and a jacket that said “variant” on the back.

He stayed silent until the woman sat him down in a room, sitting across from him with a welcoming smile.

“Sorry about all that,” she said with her hands clasped into each other and her elbows on the table. “We don’t have the best reception here at the UTA. Let’s just say you are very lucky to be with me right now.”

Link didn’t quite know what to say.

“I-I’m sorry but…” Link stammered. “What is the UTA? Why...w-why am I here and...who are you?”

She pursed her lips.

“Somehow I always forget you guys come in here with no context,” she said, almost apologetically. “Allow me to explain. My name is Whitney and I am an employee of the UTA, which stands for the Unified Timeline Authority. We are in charge of making sure that the timeline is pure of contamination such as unauthorized time travel, timeline splits, and nexus events that cause timeline splits. We have worked long and hard to turn a chaotic and temporally lawless timeline of Hyrule into a unified and cohesive timeline. We work tirelessly to make sure the timeline stays straight, and doesn’t veer off from the set path.”

It sounded rehearsed to Link, but more than that, it sounded confusing. He got bits of it but he still stared, overwhelmed beyond belief.

“Okay, okay,” Whitney said, pulling out a piece of paper and a pencil. She started drawing a straight line on the page.

“Here is your timeline. You pull the sword at thirteen but you put it back, right? You didn’t tell anyone?”

Link nodded.

“Okay so time moves along and you age, as you know.”

She started drawing another line, exactly parallel to the first.

“Meanwhile, there is an alternate universe where you do keep the sword. Believe it or not, these both are heading towards the same destination until BAM!”

She stopped drawing the first line abruptly and let the second keep going straight. She continued the first with a line askew, making an angle.

“You encounter the little robot and everything changes. The destination is put in jeopardy at a rate we’ve never seen before. So we step in.”

“You have seen the robot so we took you. We also took the robot so he can do no further damage. We then go to where the robot came from in the first place and make sure he doesn’t come again. Thus, we have two robots. Both are now destroyed. Now I know what you’re thinking. Two robots but one of you, how does that fix it? Eliminating the second robot made it so that it never contaminated your timeline, and so there is now another Link that made it to the destination, the event where all alternate timelines become one. Thus you are the extra Link, a variant.”

She erased some of both lines and made it so that the two lines converged into one, drawing a dot at the exact place where they did and labeling it “the destination”.

“So I’m here because I saw the robot?”

“Not quite. You see, we could have wiped your memories or even wiped you but we took the opportunity to gain some…intel…about another variant.”

“Who?” Link asked.

“You,” she answered simply.

“What?”

She almost laughed.

From below the desk she pulled out a clipboard, the exact one that Link saw that first woman with. She handed it over to Link, who took it and knitted his brow at what he saw.

At least half of the names on each and every of the many pages were either Link, Zelda, or Ganon, each name accompanied by two to four numbers and a single capital letter.

In the middle of the last page was what the judge called him, Link 816-D.

“Yeah sorry about that,” she said. Of all the things she could apologize for, she sounded too casual to be apologizing for any of them, for kidnapping him, for stealing the armor he earned, for uprooting his life. “You are actually the fourth Link to come in with that birthday, thus Link 816-D.”

Link put the clipboard down slowly, and returned his gaze back to the diagram.

“The destination,” he said, before looking up. “What is it? Why is it so important that you can’t have it not happen?”

The destination is the singular moment where we were finally able to unify the timeline into one. We refer to it as the calamity.”

The word struck fear into Link’s heart.

“C-calamity…” he began, attempting to fight his shock at how cheery she said that word, how casually she referred to something that could kill thousands of people. “As in Calamity Ganon? Are you serious? You...y-you want that to happen? Do you realize what that means?”

Whitney nodded.

“It’s unfortunate,” she said. “But it was necessary that we let it happen. The near destruction of Hyrule was the only way to unify the parallel timelines. It isn’t the first time we took advantage of a disaster to slowly work towards unification. There used to be three separate timelines that were nowhere near parallel, mind you.”

Link went pale, cold. His eyes stung and his lungs paused. Not only did they permit the calamity but they let entire kingdoms be destroyed for their order.

For some reason Whitney assumed that Link was just as comfortable as her with the situation.

“The variant we are concerned with exists in the single timeline beyond the destination but the variant is trying to undo the calamity, and we need to know why. Activating that robot and sending him across parallel timelines was his first attempt. He is, of course, only a variant of you, but we feel that questioning you will lead to a bit of clarity as far as his motives. If you submit to questioning right here and now, we can offer you a job, you won’t have to worry about being destroyed or anything. I used to be a variant, too, you know. All of us were variants once. We’d love to have you join us.”

Link wondered how long this woman had been here for her words to sound so fake, so insincere, so rehearsed. Perhaps she was kidnapped as a child, perhaps she was raised by other people like her, who lost themselves gradually.

Thus Link most assuredly did not want the job, did not want to be a part of something that trades apocalypses for senseless organization, that trades lives for convenience.

The kingdom of Hyrule he once served not ten minutes ago was so much more…

It was...

Well he supposed they were no better, doing those same things, just on a smaller scale.

So he could either work for the UTA or be destroyed like the variants who did not comply. He could die for his morals or he could sacrifice them.

But perhaps there was a third option, one where he fought for his morals, destroyed the UTA from the inside.

“I’ll take the job,” he finally said, Whitney smiled. “But I have to ask...you said you were a variant...who were you?”

It didn’t seem like a question that was commonly asked, and she hesitated. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to answer, it was more like she genuinely forgot. Link narrowed his eyes.

“I was a variant of Princess Zelda,” she said. “I used to go by Hilda but when I got here they labeled me as Zelda 108-A. I was taken the moment Lorule got it’s own Triforce. Lorule was destroyed by the UTA, but...it was already a mess.” Whitney shrugged. “It was probably for the best.”

Her entire kingdom was destroyed and she showed so little empathy. Link could hardly believe it. She was so casual about it, like she was talking about what she had for lunch.

“A friend got taken alongside me but,” she laughed. “You know it’s funny I don’t remember their name.” She shrugged again. “Must not have been a very good friend. I’m sure you’ll be a better one.”

Link pitied that poor friend. He could very well have been her best friend, could have refused to comply and could have been erased from her memory so that she would comply, would slowly lose herself and become another drone of the UTA.

Link inwardly refused to resign to the same fate, to maybe, if possible, save her too.

“What is your first question for me?”

#zelink #I guess #the concept kind of took over #zelink week 2021 #zelinkweek2021

[blackpoliglota]

‘Rona Better Recognize...

Aight y’all look: we have us a pandemic going on, and I have some things to say about it:

To start, PRACTICE PROPER HYGIENE BY WASHING YOUR HANDS (like the GIF), COVERING MOUTHS WHEN COUGHING/SNEEZING and washing clothes often.

If y’all aren’t doing this already, SOCIAL DISTANCE YOURSELVES.  This method of combating the virus has proven both experimentally and in reality to be the most effective thus far.  Don’t believe me?  Check out this FREE Washington Post article conducting simulations and discussing real world results.

Don’t underestimate this virus; that’s how Italy and Spain got their high case count.  This is coming from someone currently living amongst these people (Spain) and thus has seen the COVID-19 development here first hand.

Arguably the most important point of all: DO NOT LET FEAR PARALYZE YOU.  All of this fear mongering has done nothing but reveal the racial tensions between all of us and amplify them.  It’s also rendered the already socio-economically vulnerable even more so (yeah I’m coming for y’all panic buyers).  Another thing this fear y’all are letting control you has done is encourage this scramble for everyone the world over to get back to their home countries, which in turn puts everyone in more danger since increased travel = increased spreading of this virus.  The way to avoid making this entire situation worse than what it is is follow credible news sources; listen to what’s being reported.  And most importantly FOLLOW MEDICAL PERSONNEL’S ORDERS.  It should go unsaid the they’re the ones who know the most about how this virus behaves, and what the populace can do to combat it.  LISTEN TO THEM.

WHEW, ALRIGHT... NOW THAT WE GOT THAT OUT OF THE WAY... Onto the actual post!

SO, since I feel oh so inclined to continue on with this health theme, this time around I’m making this a review post for myself (and perhaps others).  The review topic is Spanish health vocabulary and phrases!  I’m debating on whether to make this a 2-part post or not, because there is a LOT of vocabulary involved with health, as most of you language learners already know from experience.  To start, I’ll be going over the human body and its many parts.  Here is a diagram of the body below:

This diagram may look a bit overwhelming what with all of these terms surrounding and filling up the entire thing, so here is a list of all of the body part terms separated into 3 lists:

La cabeza - Head

(Los) Ojos - Eyes

(La) Nariz - Nose

(Los) Labios - Lips

(La) Boca - Mouth

(Las) Orejas - (Outer) Ears

(Las) Oidos - (Inner) Ears

(Las) Mejillas - Cheeks

(El) Cuello - Neck

La parte superior del cuerpo - Upper Body 

(El) Hombro - Shoulder

(El) Brazo - Arm

(El) Antebrazo - Forearm

(El) Codo - Elbow

(La) Mano - Hand

(La) Muñeca - Wrist

(El) Dedo - Finger

(El) Pulgar - Thumb

(El) Pecho - Chest

(El) Abdomen - Abdomen

*** (La) Tripa - Belly (informal)

(La) Espalda - Back

(La) Escápula - Scapula

La parte inferior del cuerpo - Lower Body

(La) Cadera - Hip

(El) Trasero / (Las) Nalgas - Buttocks

(El) Culo - Buttocks (informal)

(La) Pierna - Leg

(Los) Muslos - Thighs

(La) Rodilla - Knee

(La) Espinilla - Shin (what I used to injure all the time while running track...)

(El) Ternero - Calf

(El) Tobillo - Ankle

(El) Talón - Heel

(El) Pie - Foot

(El) Dedo de pie - Toe

And that is the list of OUTER body parts, now for the list of INNER body parts!  And since there’s another list coming up, you know what that means... ANOTHER DIAGRAM!!!

There are still plenty of terms here, so I’m separating them into 3 lists again.  So without further ado:

El cuerpo interno en general - The Inner Body Overall

(El) Esqueleto - Skeleton

(Los) Huesos - Bones

(La) Médula Espinal - Bone Marrow

(La) Espina Dorsal / Columna (Vertebral) - Spine

(Los) Músculos - Muscles

(Las) Arterias - Arteries

(Las) Venas - Veins

La cabeza

(El) Cerebro - Brain 

(La) Faringe - Pharynx

(La) Laringe - Larynx

(La) Garganta - Throat

(El) Módulo Linfa - Lymph Nodes

La parte superior del cuerpo

(El) Corazón - Heart

(Los) Pulmones - Lungs

(El) Bazo - Spleen

(La) Vesícula Billiar - Gallbladder

(El) Estómago - Stomach

(El) Páncreas - Pancreas

(Los) Riñones - Kidneys

(Los) Intestinos - Intestines

(La) Vejiga Urinaria - Urinary Bladder

And there we have it!  The Human Body.  Both in and out.  Since I ended up with a hefty amount of vocabulary for this post, I’m going to save the vocabulary and grammar structures for how to discuss health-related issues for the next post.  Hopefully you all learned something or were able to use this post for review, like myself!  I included the sources from where the diagrams and some of the vocabulary came from underneath the “Keep Reading” button if you’re interested.  For extra health resources in Spanish, click on the Body Diagram link in the sources section of this post.  So here’s to Part 1 of health in Spanish; now onto Part 2!  Until next time!

Sources

Skeleton GIF: Tumblr

Outer Body Diagram:  http://www.cyberpt.com/spanishphysicaltherapy.asp

Inner Body Diagram: Google

Vocabulary: Linguee, My Notes

#Spanish #Español #Vocabulary #Vocabulario #Health #Salud #Health Pt. 1 #Salud Pt. 1 #Human Body #Cuerpo Humano #Coronavirus #COVID-19 #Black Linguist #NOLA in the house #⚜️⚜️⚜️ #Langblr #Studyblr #Original Post

[asweetlovemessage-blog]

a sweet good morning message for my love | TAM RELAX

bacsiykhoa.com

           - My Blog                    13-17 phút              

”

==>> A Sweet Love Message.

When it comes to Southern romance, it's no secret that choosing the right words is important. Crafting the perfect romantic message and expressing how much you care about someone may be difficult, but it can also be incredibly rewarding. If you need a dash of inspiration, explore these short love messages and quotes about love for a little help with telling your beloved just how much you care!

==>> a sweet and romantic love message.

==>> a sweet good night love message.

==>> a sweet i love you message.

10 Brainstorming Techniques & Tips for Tapping Into Your Creative Side by Quincy Seale 12-16 phút

Some of the links in this post may be affiliate links. If make a purchase through these links, we receive a commission at no extra cost to you. Please see our disclosure for more info.

James Allen wrote this about thought: “Man is made and unmade by himself. In the armory of thought he forges the weapons by which he destroys himself. He also creates the tools with which he builds for himself heavenly mansions of joy and strength and peace. Between these two extremes are all the many grades of character, and man is their maker and their master. ”

So if man is the maker and master of thought, how do you go about learning to harness your own thoughts to create a better reality and become a more efficient, more productive, and more successful human being?

Well, obviously there are plenty of ways to go about such an endeavor, but today I want to talk about one of them. Brainstorming.

Because in order for us to get better at thinking, we first need to learn how to produce more thoughts. The more thoughts we have, the more chances we have to bring something more exciting into this world, and the more we generate new thoughts, or brainstorm, the better our mind gets at creating these new ideas. The Key to Brainstorming

The key thing to realize about brainstorming is that it’s solely about creation. It’s not about judging the ideas that arise or forcing yourself to think a certain way. What it really is, when it comes down to it, is “forceful creation.” To put it another way, you are willfully forcing your brain to be creative.

And since creativity is something that should be allowed to run its own course rather than be intellecualized, the entire process is a bit of a contradiction.

For this reason, it is a process rife with confusion and hesitance. So today I want to go over some different brainstorming techniques you can use. And you can use these to attack any problem in your life – from coming up with a new marketing strategy for your business to writing a new book to launching a new website to designing a new life for yourself.

Let’s have a look. 1. Mindmapping Software

Mindmapping Software

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

The first tool I want to introduce is actually software, and I realize this might sound extremely counter-intuitive and possibly counterproductive. After all, how in the world can you tap into your mind’s innate creativity with an electronic-based program?

But I stand by my assertion that mindmapping software really is priceless when it comes to this type of thinking, and it’s very hard to describe until you just dig in and give it a try.

The type of software I’m talking about specifically is the kind used by MindJet MindManager and Freemind.org, the latter of which, as the name applies, is downloadable for free.

The way these program works is you have an empty page with theoretically as much room as you could ever need. You click on the blank slate and create a bubble or box, depending on which program you’re using. You then write in the box the main idea you’re working from.

Let’s say, for instance, that you’re planning out a new website. You might write the name of the website here. If you click on another place on the page, it creates new nodes that comes out from that. You might lable one “Marketing,” one “Products,” and one “Audience,” for example.

Then from each of these nodes, you can create other smaller nodes. From “Marketing,” you might branch out to “Follow-up Marketing,” “Social Marketing,” “Branding,” and so on.

And you keep branching out and getting more and more specific until you’re just hammering out specific ideas for each segment of the web you’re creating.

This is just one way to use it – your mindweb or mindmap can be ogranized however you see fit.

And of course you can also do this type of mind-mapping technique on paper. But I find it way more productive to do it with software. It’s like a whole new world of creativity opens up to me when I match the speed of my mind and the speed of a computer with this old technique. 2. Become a List Whiz

Become a List Whiz

Photo Credit: matthewvenn | Flickr

A great way to train yourself to be more creative is to get in the habit of writing lists. Set time aside everyday to write lists about random things, or pressing problems when needed. Feel free to write about zany, irrelevant lists if you can’t think of anything better; it’s really just about strengthening your idea-generating muscles.

Lists I often write include stuff like, “10 Novels I Would Like to Write,” “20 Businesses I Could Start Tomorrow,” “10 Blog Articles for My Site,” or chapter lists for books I want to write someday.

Do this each and everyday and watch your creative muscles grow. 3. Mastermind Groups

Mastermind Groups

Photo Credit: rosefirerising | Flickr

Mastermind groups are a fantastic way to leverage the thoughts, knowledge, and inspiration of others in your path to success and happiness. Masterminding is nothing more than surrounding yourself with like-minded people who have similar goals.

You can create a formal group that sits down and actually involves in group discussions or brainstorming exercises if you like. It’s a platform where you can bounce ideas off of each other and take turns commenting on them.

You can also create something more semi-formal, where you meet every once in a while and sit down to discuss issues affecting your central industry or interest and then fill each other in on your individual challenges and invite ideas.

Or it can be completely informal. Just go out of your way to work out and socialize, etc, with people on the same path as you – mastermind ideas and inspiration will usually evolve naturally through your social interaction.

Online forums are also a good resource for masterminding and you don’t even have to ask people to specifically brainstorm. Just make a thread about the issue or situation and people will chip in with their different experiences and opinions. 4. Meditate Before You Brainstorm

Meditate Before You Brainstorm

Photo Credit: illusivemind | Flickr

One of the best ways to make yourself more emotionally healthy and tap into your creative juices is to develop the habit of meditation. After all, it’s hard to break into your intuitive side if your mind is filled with the clutter and stress of everyday life.

Meditation doesn’t have to be far-out or religious either. Just think of it as learning to calm and focus your mind. To mentally recharge. I make it a habit to meditate everyday as a part of a morning ritual I perform upon waking every morning – after working out and cleaning around the house. Just a quiet ten to twenty minute meditation.

Directly after this meditation is a great time to do a brainstorming session. In fact, you can make it a habit to brainstorm every morning after your meditation on whatever is currently your biggest goal, idea, or challenge. 5. Brainstorm in Your Sleep

Feeding yourself issues to handle while you sleep can often yield incredible results. Sometimes an issue is more appropriate for your subconscious than your conscious mind, and in cases like this, active brainstorming is nothing more than walking in circles. When you get in bed, meditate on the problem or idea for a minute, asking your subconscious to give you a solution by morning.

It can feel like magic at times. 6. Group Passing

While I do recommend masterminding, I’m actually not a big proponent of brainstorming in groups. Not that I don’t know they have enormous potential, but I’m just more of a solo-thinker myself and I find I don’t get as much out of them as most people do.

But if there’s one group-brainstorming exercise that really works well, it’s the concept of group passing.

Basically, you start with the central idea, or the foundation of what is to be brainstormed, and the first person in the group expands on that idea, without any input from the group. This person can even be tasked with coming up with the idea to be brainstormed.

Then they pass the paper to the next person and that person expands on it as they see fit. The idea is passed then to the next person and it evolves even further. The paper goes around the entire group and then the final result is shared with everyone.

Another thing I like about this tactic is that it can be done without physically getting together – over the Internet. Google Docs is a great way to do it; the online documents are easily shared and editable among the group. 7. Write It Out

Write It Out

Photo Credit: Abdulla Al Muhairi | Flickr

Using a good old pen and paper will never lose its effectiveness when it comes to letting your thoughts run free. In fact, some people prefer this as your mind works faster than you write, so by the time you finish writing down a thought, you’ve already got another in mind. In contrast, when many people type, they find themselves starting and stopping a lot, resulting in a much choppier process.

Do this any way you like. Free-writing is particularly effective for letting your mind run free. Write lists – this is a common brainstorming method for people who don’t even know what the word means, so it seems our minds intuitively work that way. And of course, you can create mindmaps.

One of the best things about writing is you can take this technology with you anywhere. Get a small notepad and keep it at all times, pulling it out when new thoughts cross your mind. I find this puts me in a constant brainstorming state, and I walk around creating throughout every minute of my day.

This type of constant approach allows you to catch yourself at your most creative. When intuition strikes, you can just sit down and get to spontaneous writing.

Whiteboards are also very effective. Hang one in your house with your major projects or developing ideas on them and it makes it official. You look at it and you get inspired. You have an idea and you add to it. It evolves as time goes on and sits further into your mind. 8. Give Yourself Omnipotence

I like the way Tim Ferris does this in his dream-lining technique. When he goes to goal-set, he asks himself what he would accomplish in three months time if he was the richest and smartest man in the world, and then starts from that foundation.

This essentially gives you liberty by removing all limitations. You don’t stop yourself from brainstorming down a certain path because “Oh, I’d need a couple hundred thousand dollars to do that” and then move on to another idea. Instead, you arrive at an idea that doesn’t recognize any boundaries and figure out a way to make it possible. 9. Brainstorm the Outlandish

Take the previous technique a step further by imagining nothing as impossible. Some of mankind’s greatest feats were accomplished when people decided to figure out a way to do something no one believed could be done.

How can we hurl a huge chunk of metal through the air so fast that it stays aloft and use it to carry people around the world? How can I create a light that never goes out so we don’t need fire to do the things we can usually only do in the day-time? How can I manufacture a device that allows me to talk with someone on the other side of the world as if we were speaking face-to-face?

The only way to produce impossible results is giving yourself impossible challenges and attacking them with your mind. 10. Walk Away From Thinking

Walk Away From Thinking

Photo Credit: bbcjk.king | Flickr

Sometimes you get too wrapped up in a problem and can’t extract yourself from it, so somewhere along the line in your brainstorming you may run into a dead-end or keep going in circles. What’s happening here is you’re trying to think yourself through it rather than tapping into your creative side.

Often, it’s best to get out from behind the computer or desk and go for a walk or do something that completely removes you from the situation. Your brain may just need downtime to sort things out, and you’ll often find that minutes after it’s out of mind an epiphany strikes. The Power of Thoughts

Thoughts may be the most powerful force on Earth.

In fact, they are so powerful that the existence of life on Earth is at risk due to things our thoughts have created – a worrying problem, no doubt, but a wild reality to contemplate.

Look around you. The computer mouse in your hand. Your laptop itself. The software that powers it. The table it sits on. Look up at the ceiling – the walls surrounding you and the building containing the room. The streets outside and the entire city laid out around you.

Everything you see and touch that is made by man was created first in the mind of a person and went through a process to be turned into a reality. In fact, some philosophers, and perhaps even some scientists, would go as far as to say that your entire reality is but a thought, and that your own thoughts can be used to direct and create the world around you.

I don’t want to get too esoteric on you today, but it’s clear that thoughts are an extremely valuable resource that has been recognized and even held in awe by wise-men throughout the centuries.

Will you be wise enough to see their value? Pick one of these brainstorming exercises and use it to start mastering your thought-creating capabilities. Tackle one of your greatest challenges today. And make doing so a habit. ”

[iain-unit-04]

Creating a movement system in Unreal

Wall Running: Wall Running in Unreal was a little bit tricky to get right. The first thing I tried was giving the "wall" actor a collision box which cast to the player when it detected an overlap. However, at that point I got stuck and couldn't figure out how to disable gravity, so I looked it up, and the post I found about it used a line trace instead, which turned out to be much better because it meant that both sides of the wall could be handled with the same bit of code rather than two separate collision boxes, and therefore two separate chunks of code (of course I could have made it a function and passed the collision box in as an argument so that the same bit of code handles it, but I'm doing it this way now so it doesn't matter.)

The first part of this is to, on begin play, manually set the "Plane constraint" to enabled:

Unfortunately, the unreal documentation is completely awful and the best information I can find on this node is "Sets whether or not the plane constraint is enabled. Target is Movement Component" and that helps explain absolutely nothing. So I'm not entirely sure what this does, but (at a guess) I'd say it means that later on I can control which axis the player is able to move on.

The player character now has an extra variable called "jumps left" which allows me to have greater control over jumping. While the actual "max jumps" variable is increased to 2 as well, this is easier to manipulate in game.

So first things first, when the jump button is pressed, the game checks if the player has any jumps left and, assuming they do, decrements the number. I could always plug this into a "switch on int" node if I wanted different behaviour on a second jump, but I don't really see a reason to do that for this project. The next thing it checks is if the variable "wall running" is true or not. This variable defaults to false.

If "wall running" is false, the player just jumps as normal, but if it's true, the game will use the player character's "right vector" multiplied by a positive or negative float to determine which side of the player the wall is on, and then launch them away from the wall. It then calls "end wall run", which I'll explain in a moment.

First, however, the player has a second capsule collision object, which is used to detect whether or not the player is overlapping with anything.

When this capsule detects an overlap, it checks to see if the object it's overlapping with has the tag "wall." If it does, it changes some variables in the character movement. It sets the air control to 1, but it's 1 by default so this is mainly there in case I decided to reduce movement control on a wall. Then it sets the gravity scale to 1, so the player doesn't slide off. It then sets the plane constraint normal to 0 on the X and Y, but 1 on the Z which, according to the documentation, means that X and Y can change, but Z cannot. (I want to experiment further with all of these variables to see if this makes walls "stickier" and how that affects game flow.) It then sets "wall running" to true, resets the number of jumps left and calls "wall tilt."

Wall tilt is this funny little event which uses the actor's location and their right vector as the start and end points on a line trace, which is then returned into the variable "on right." Basically what this means is the engine draws a line from the centre of the player character out to their right hand side, and then checks what it returns. If it returns true, that means the line trace hit something, and the wall is on the right hand side. If it returns false, the line trace didn't hit anything, and the wall is on the left hand side. This isn't entirely reliable, so there's a bug where the player will sometimes lean in the wrong direction while wall running. I want to investigate further with this too. Regardless, if the wall is on the right, it sets the head angle to -1, and if it's on the left, it sets the head angle to 1. This plays the "lean" animation, which just tilts the camera away from the wall (when it works.) The event "end wall run" simply calls this animation process in reverse.

Finally, when the wall run ends, or when the event "end wall run" is called, the engine checks that the overlap that's ended is with the wall, and then does all the stuff from event begin overlap, but backwards. It turns the gravity back on, unlocks the Z axis, sets wall running to false and decrements the number of jumps, seeing as the player has probably jumped to get off the platform, and even if they haven't, it's good for the challenge.

----------------------------------------------

Dash: Creating a dash system in Unreal Engine was, gratifyingly, much easier than wall running. All it took was this little bit of code:

which basically launches the character up into the air a tiny bit so that they don't get caught on the floor, then almost immediately launches them forward. It determines "forward" by using the "get actor rotation", and then from that, the "get forward vector" nodes. Then it just multiplies the forward vector by however much you want to launch them by. Then there's a short delay, which acts as a cooldown, before going back into the "do once." This is just to stop the player spamming dash moves. I could always limit this further with an integer called "dash remaining" or something, which resets when they touch the ground, so the player can't just dash forward over and over again. That's actually a pretty good idea, thinking about it. The last thing to do was increase the "Falling Lateral Friction" variable on the player movement object, so that there's an element of wind resistance to stop the player from flying off into the abyss if they jump in mid-air.

[thecoroutfitters]

Written by R. Ann Parris on The Prepper Journal.

Editors Note: Another guest contribution from R.Ann Parris to The Prepper Journal. As always, if you have information for Preppers that you would like to share and be entered into the Prepper Writing Contest with a chance to win one of three Amazon Gift Cards  with the top prize being a $300 card to purchase your own prepping supplies, then enter today!

One of the challenges when we get into preparing for disaster is keeping everything neat and organized. In some cases, we’re trying to maintain our own or a spouse’s sanity and keep some of our preparations neat, tidy and organized without being in plain sight while short on space, either square footage or because we rarely allow something to leave our grasp. Beyond the ease in counts and condition checks, and avoiding a hoarder’s larder, organization can help us with both rotating supplies and in some cases even rationing our supplies should we fall on hard times.

Happily, there’s lots of stuff out there that can help us. Repurposing some items that are inexpensive, commonly found curbside and at flea markets or yard sales, or that we might already have laying around can help us maintain that organization without breaking the bank.

Maps & Rolls

Keeping our wrapping paper neat and tidy might not appeal to preppers, but we can steal some of the ideas out there for keeping our maps, charts, and our property plats accessible and tidy. There’s one where you take an old wire shelf and affix it vertically to a wall or door instead of horizontally. The 250ml wine boxes are ideal for keeping both maps and wrapping paper contained and neat, and most alcohol retailers are simply delighted to let you have boxes.

Cutting the bottoms out of hanging shoe organizers lets us customize height. That one has added benefits because you can leave pouches intact to keep map pens, sprays, and dry erase markers and erasers right there with them. It also allows some mobility, so they can be re-hung by a work board, in a radio or control room, or at the desk and table where you do your planning.

Hanging Shoe Organizers

You have to watch the weight in these guys, but otherwise, the sky is the limit. They can hook us up in pretty much all wedges of our preparedness “health” wheels. I’ve got some in use for “daily” life, too.

One’s in the kitchen keeping small packets of instant cereal and snack foods and the last bar of one kind or another from either getting lost in the abyss or from having the boxes continue to eat up space. One’s for winter, and keeps hats, scarves, and gloves neat and organized. The bottom row holds some quick slip-on slippers for household members and the dogs’ various booties. There’s another set up with each person’s preferred garden and yard work sets of gloves and pocket detritus.

For preppers, the value goes up further. With stick-on labels or clothespins, we can use them to track dates for at-a-glance organization. We can also take a space where we would be limited to boxes or shelves and turn it into basically a rack for them. A couple of freebie curbside-pickup filing cabinets, a bar or two to go across the top, and we can string our organizers on dowels or sturdy branch/sapling trimmings.

The filing cabinets here are actually reading nooks, but it gives you an idea of how the addition of a plank (freebie-pickup shipping pallets, walls/shelves from curbside bookshelves) and a curtain (surviving sheet from a wrecked bedding set) can keep it from being “ugly” even if it’s out in a home where somebody cares. If appearance is less of a concern, some suit hangers and any ol’ pole can be hung in sheds, basements or a storage room to accomplish the same – a flip or slide-through storage area for small items.

Those items can be anything. It can be a great way to keep veggie seeds separated by planting/growing season and year. We can use them for sewing supplies or art supplies. Instant drink packets, seasoning packets and shakers, granola bars, little packets of vitamin-rich gummy treats, boxes and packets of pudding or gelatin mixes, and other kitchen items fit easily. We can arrange them to be a general category like snacks or spices, or we can set each up by expiration or best-by date.

Educational goodies, supplies for the radio room or office, entertainment items, hygiene items, and especially first-aid and medical items that do start separating or losing efficiency are all other options for storing someplace we can find and see them easily and check those dates without pawing through boxes.

We can use hanging closet organizers much the same way to buy some extra space, although they’re not as handy for the tiny little items and still have the weight restrictions.

We can also use them to help us ration, just like we can with canning jars. We can pack each with a week, a month, or a quarter’s “goodies”. That can be seasonings or instant helpers like gravy or dressing mix. It can also be things like chocolate chips, tea bags or a brick of coffee, smaller packets of cookie, edible cake decorations, or Slim Jim’s. Some of the shoe organizers are big enough we could even seed them with fresh games like Qwixx or Dog Bites Man, new decks of cards, some specialty feel-good lotion or chap stick, or something seasonal to brighten the mood.

Another option is to use a shoe organizer as a pre-staging area. Rather than those things that jump in buggies getting tossed in a box or drawer for a while, they can get slotted by category. It can also help with those items that seems like a great idea but then hide when we want them. That can be everything from eyeglass repair kits and those mini sewing kits, to things like outlet and light-switch wall plates, overhead pull cords, and those plastic twisty-cap wire connectors that like to multiply in drawers and tool rooms.

Curtain Rods

While we’re hanging things to improve our organization, we can keep an eye out for curtain rods. With some rings and-or big S-hooks, they can help us in all kinds of spaces. We can mount them in our bathrooms – and our outdoor camping/solar showers – to drape bathroom organizers and avoid having stuff sit on ledges and floors. With hooks affixed to light baskets and tubs, what we can hang for easy access increases even further.  Those baskets can easily be the bathroom organizers or oddball dishwasher or silverware baskets that show up here and there or wire or plastic bins form the dollar store, and get used for school and office supplies, kitchen spices, each individual’s hankies and bandanas, or anything else we like.

We can arrange them under cabinets or against walls to keep items like spools of thread, bungee cords, and weed-eater wire accessible. With hooks or loops, we can add our extension cords, gloves, and tools. By our doors, they’re another easy way to keep hats and gloves organized, and the airflow they’ll get will let them dry faster.

While I specified curtain rods, be flexible while we’re upcycling and repurposing. I see swingsets and bed frames on freebie listings and by the curb on a regular basis. Tree trimmings can yield nice, straight pieces. The scrap guys in town will let us have pretty much whatever we want at about a halfway between their cost and sale price. Be flexible.

  Garage & Shed Storage

We can use all kinds of oddball wrecked, found, used, or inexpensive items for storage, although the garage and shed where we don’t have to hear anything from family members really shines. We can use coat hangers and hooks with a piece of looped rope, chain, or bungee cord to keep heavy extension cords, hoses, and heavy rope neatly coiled and off the flat surfaces. A wrecked binder offers three rings that can hold anything, from our bungee cords to cleaned cans with a hole punched that can then hold our paint brushes, garden pruners, gloves, or safety glasses.

You have to pretty much murder somebody to find them now, but a plastic 2L soda bottle is awesome for allowing us to stack and move bottles and for keeping stuff in a pickup or van right where you want it. They can also be screwed flat to a wall to use the holes as shallow storage nodes, but they’re too shallow to have much value for me there. Instead, see if a plumbing outfitter or company has PVC scrap. It’s usually deeper and you can cobble that into a honeycomb with some screws and get a lot more use out of it.

Throw-Aways

All kinds of things that hit our recycling and trash have other uses, particularly in keeping our storage neat and tidy. The cardboard boxes that soda comes in get a lot of play for upcycling into soup and veggie can organizers, but we can also just slit the top off entirely. Swiffer pad tubs are awesome for stacking and labeling the sides, but really only for lightweight stuff. Old-school laundry detergent boxes with the flip-up lid and the little plastic handle are sturdy, stackable, and you can hook that handle around a screwdriver on your belt or a carabiner for hands-free carrying. Plastic coffee cans, jugs, powdered parmesan shakers, and creamer tubs are hugely versatile.

Indoors or out, they can help us organize absolutely anything. Arrange packets of Lipton and Knorr sides, seeds, Heartgard and Frontline, or spice blends. Keep extension cords, tow cables, tie-down straps, or Christmas lights neat and tidy, and ready to deploy again (which buys time and space for other stuff). They can also help us keep kits of commonly replaced items together.

The plastic options can help us keep pests out of dry pantry goods and little packets of drinks or boxes of pudding. Those plastic bottles are also handy for rationing out things like brown and white sugar that last forever in storage, or once we bust into bulk bags or buckets of snack foods and dry goods.

Drink bottles get a lot of play for organizing wire, ribbon, and cord. If you have access to wide-mouth juice or sports drink bottles, those make excellent ways to keep some ammo in a bag nice and dry – but don’t try it with narrow-neck water and soda bottles, not even with .22 LR. There’s nothing wrong with using them for beans or grains, either, since they stack up like cordwood well.

Mostly, though, I think people seriously underestimate how much water they need. I may be the only person affected by Uncle Murphy on a regular basis, but you need water stored even with a well, because you need time to hunt down the problem and repair it if the pump goes down. So, for the most part, I’d rather see soda bottles get used to store water, everywhere, in homes and in vehicles.

Organizing Preparedness Supplies

The time spent in organizing not only makes maintaining our storage a little less daunting and time consuming, but also allows us to better visualize gaps. The sanity boost from neatness and not being overwhelmed by our piles o’ stuff can’t really be overstated, either, and less-involved family is less likely to add to our stresses when they’re not overwhelmed by it all, too. Since there’s so many items out there that we can scrounge for free or little outlay and repurpose, we really don’t have any excuse not to keep our storage organized.

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[suzanneshannon]

A Lightweight Masonry Solution

Back in May, I learned about Firefox adding masonry to CSS grid. Masonry layouts are something I’ve been wanting to do on my own from scratch for a very long time, but have never known where to start. So, naturally, I checked the demo and then I had a lightbulb moment when I understood how this new proposed CSS feature works.

Support is obviously limited to Firefox for now (and, even there, only behind a flag), but it still offered me enough of a starting point for a JavaScript implementation that would cover browsers that currently lack support.

The way Firefox implements masonry in CSS is by setting either grid-template-rows (as in the example) or grid-template-columns to a value of masonry.

My approach was to use this for supporting browsers (which, again, means just Firefox for now) and create a JavaScript fallback for the rest. Let’s look at how this works using the particular case of an image grid.

First, enable the flag

In order to do this, we go to about:config in Firefox and search for “masonry.” This brings up the layout.css.grid-template-masonry-value.enabled flag, which we enable by double clicking its value from false (the default) to true.

Making sure we can test this feature.

Let’s start with some markup

The HTML structure looks something like this:

<section class="grid--masonry"> <img src="black_cat.jpg" alt="black cat" /> <!-- more such images following --> </section>

Now, let’s apply some styles

The first thing we do is make the top-level element a CSS grid container. Next, we define a maximum width for our images, let’s say 10em. We also want these images to shrink to whatever space is available for the grid’s content-box if the viewport becomes too narrow to accommodate for a single 10em column grid, so the value we actually set is Min(10em, 100%). Since responsivity is important these days, we don’t bother with a fixed number of columns, but instead auto-fit as many columns of this width as we can:

$w: Min(10em, 100%); .grid--masonry { display: grid; grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fit, $w); > * { width: $w; } }

Note that we’ve used Min() and not min() in order to avoid a Sass conflict.

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Well, that’s a grid!

Not a very pretty one though, so let’s force its content to be in the middle horizontally, then add a grid-gap and padding that are both equal to a spacing value ($s). We also set a background to make it easier on the eyes.

$s: .5em; /* masonry grid styles */ .grid--masonry { /* same styles as before */ justify-content: center; grid-gap: $s; padding: $s } /* prettifying styles */ html { background: #555 }

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Having prettified the grid a bit, we turn to doing the same for the grid items, which are the images. Let’s apply a filter so they all look a bit more uniform, while giving a little additional flair with slightly rounded corners and a box-shadow.

img { border-radius: 4px; box-shadow: 2px 2px 5px rgba(#000, .7); filter: sepia(1); }

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The only thing we need to do now for browsers that support masonry is to declare it:

.grid--masonry { /* same styles as before */ grid-template-rows: masonry; }

While this won’t work in most browsers, it produces the desired result in Firefox with the flag enabled as explained earlier.

grid-template-rows: masonry working in Firefox with the flag enabled (Demo).

But what about the other browsers? That’s where we need a…

JavaScript fallback

In order to be economical with the JavaScript the browser has to run, we first check if there are any .grid--masonry elements on that page and whether the browser has understood and applied the masonry value for grid-template-rows. Note that this is a generic approach that assumes we may have multiple such grids on a page.

let grids = [...document.querySelectorAll('.grid--masonry')]; if(grids.length && getComputedStyle(grids[0]).gridTemplateRows !== 'masonry') { console.log('boo, masonry not supported 😭') } else console.log('yay, do nothing!')

Support test (live).

If the new masonry feature is not supported, we then get the row-gap and the grid items for every masonry grid, then set a number of columns (which is initially 0 for each grid).

let grids = [...document.querySelectorAll('.grid--masonry')]; if(grids.length && getComputedStyle(grids[0]).gridTemplateRows !== 'masonry') { grids = grids.map(grid => ({ _el: grid, gap: parseFloat(getComputedStyle(grid).gridRowGap), items: [...grid.childNodes].filter(c => c.nodeType === 1), ncol: 0 })); grids.forEach(grid => console.log(`grid items: ${grid.items.length}; grid gap: ${grid.gap}px`)) }

Note that we need to make sure the child nodes are element nodes (which means they have a nodeType of 1). Otherwise, we can end up with text nodes consisting of carriage returns in the array of items.

Checking we got the correct number of items and gap (live).

Before proceeding further, we have to ensure the page has loaded and the elements aren’t still moving around. Once we’ve handled that, we take each grid and read its current number of columns. If this is different from the value we already have, then we update the old value and rearrange the grid items.

if(grids.length && getComputedStyle(grids[0]).gridTemplateRows !== 'masonry') { grids = grids.map(/* same as before */); function layout() { grids.forEach(grid => { /* get the post-resize/ load number of columns */ let ncol = getComputedStyle(grid._el).gridTemplateColumns.split(' ').length; if(grid.ncol !== ncol) { grid.ncol = ncol; console.log('rearrange grid items') } }); } addEventListener('load', e => { layout(); /* initial load */ addEventListener('resize', layout, false) }, false); }

Note that calling the layout() function is something we need to do both on the initial load and on resize.

When we need to rearrange grid items (live).

To rearrange the grid items, the first step is to remove the top margin on all of them (this may have been set to a non-zero value to achieve the masonry effect before the current resize).

If the viewport is narrow enough that we only have one column, we’re done!

Otherwise, we skip the first ncol items and we loop through the rest. For each item considered, we compute the position of the bottom edge of the item above and the current position of its top edge. This allows us to compute how much we need to move it vertically such that its top edge is one grid gap below the bottom edge of the item above.

/* if the number of columns has changed */ if(grid.ncol !== ncol) { /* update number of columns */ grid.ncol = ncol; /* revert to initial positioning, no margin */ grid.items.forEach(c => c.style.removeProperty('margin-top')); /* if we have more than one column */ if(grid.ncol > 1) { grid.items.slice(ncol).forEach((c, i) => { let prev_fin = grid.items[i].getBoundingClientRect().bottom /* bottom edge of item above */, curr_ini = c.getBoundingClientRect().top /* top edge of current item */; c.style.marginTop = `${prev_fin + grid.gap - curr_ini}px` }) } }

We now have a working, cross-browser solution!

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A couple of minor improvements

A more realistic structure

In a real world scenario, we’re more likely to have each image wrapped in a link to its full size so that the big image opens in a lightbox (or we navigate to it as a fallback).

<section class='grid--masonry'> <a href='black_cat_large.jpg'> <img src='black_cat_small.jpg' alt='black cat'/> </a> <!-- and so on, more thumbnails following the first --> </section>

This means we also need to alter the CSS a bit. While we don’t need to explicitly set a width on the grid items anymore — as they’re now links — we do need to set align-self: start on them because, unlike images, they stretch to cover the entire row height by default, which will throw off our algorithm.

.grid--masonry > * { align-self: start; } img { display: block; /* avoid weird extra space at the bottom */ width: 100%; /* same styles as before */ }

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Making the first element stretch across the grid

We can also make the first item stretch horizontally across the entire grid (which means we should probably also limit its height and make sure the image doesn’t overflow or get distorted):

.grid--masonry > :first-child { grid-column: 1/ -1; max-height: 29vh; } img { max-height: inherit; object-fit: cover; /* same styles as before */ }

We also need to exclude this stretched item by adding another filter criterion when we get the list of grid items:

grids = grids.map(grid => ({ _el: grid, gap: parseFloat(getComputedStyle(grid).gridRowGap), items: [...grid.childNodes].filter(c => c.nodeType === 1 && +getComputedStyle(c).gridColumnEnd !== -1 ), ncol: 0 }));

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Handling grid items with variable aspect ratios

Let’s say we want to use this solution for something like a blog. We keep the exact same JS and almost the exact same masonry-specific CSS – we only change the maximum width a column may have and drop the max-height restriction for the first item.

As it can be seen from the demo below, our solution also works perfectly in this case where we have a grid of blog posts:

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You can also resize the viewport to see how it behaves in this case.

However, if we want the width of the columns to be somewhat flexible, for example, something like this:

$w: minmax(Min(20em, 100%), 1fr)

Then we have a problem on resize:

The changing width of the grid items combined with the fact that the text content is different for each means that when a certain threshold is crossed, we may get a different number of text lines for a grid item (thus changing the height), but not for the others. And if the number of columns doesn’t change, then the vertical offsets don’t get recomputed and we end up with either overlaps or bigger gaps.

In order to fix this, we need to also recompute the offsets whenever at least one item’s height changes for the current grid. This means we need to also need to test if more than zero items of the current grid have changed their height. And then we need to reset this value at the end of the if block so that we don’t rearrange the items needlessly next time around.

if(grid.ncol !== ncol || grid.mod) { /* same as before */ grid.mod = 0 }

Alright, but how do we change this grid.mod value? My first idea was to use a ResizeObserver:

if(grids.length && getComputedStyle(grids[0]).gridTemplateRows !== 'masonry') { let o = new ResizeObserver(entries => { entries.forEach(entry => { grids.find(grid => grid._el === entry.target.parentElement).mod = 1 }); }); /* same as before */ addEventListener('load', e => { /* same as before */ grids.forEach(grid => { grid.items.forEach(c => o.observe(c)) }) }, false) }

This does the job of rearranging the grid items when necessary even if the number of grid columns doesn’t change. But it also makes even having that if condition pointless!

This is because it changes grid.mod to 1 whenever the height or the width of at least one item changes. The height of an item changes due to the text reflow, caused by the width changing. But the change in width happens every time we resize the viewport and doesn’t necessarily trigger a change in height.

This is why I eventually decided on storing the previous item heights and checking whether they have changed on resize to determine whether grid.mod remains 0 or not:

function layout() { grids.forEach(grid => { grid.items.forEach(c => { let new_h = c.getBoundingClientRect().height; if(new_h !== +c.dataset.h) { c.dataset.h = new_h; grid.mod++ } }); /* same as before */ }) }

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That’s it! We now have a nice lightweight solution. The minified JavaScript is under 800 bytes, while the strictly masonry-related styles are under 300 bytes.

But, but, but…

What about browser support?

Well, @supports just so happens to have better browser support than any of the newer CSS features used here, so we can put the nice stuff inside it and have a basic, non-masonry grid for non-supporting browsers. This version works all the way back to IE9.

The result in Internet Explorer

It may not look the same, but it looks decent and it’s perfectly functional. Supporting a browser doesn’t mean replicating all the visual candy for it. It means the page works and doesn’t look broken or horrible.

What about the no JavaScript case?

Well, we can apply the fancy styles only if the root element has a js class which we add via JavaScript! Otherwise, we get a basic grid where all the items have the same size.

The no JavaScript result (Demo).

The post A Lightweight Masonry Solution appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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A Lightweight Masonry Solution published first on https://deskbysnafu.tumblr.com/

[entergamingxp]

Final Fantasy 7 Remake Review — For the Reunion

April 6, 2020 6:00 AM EST

23 years after Final Fantasy 7 changed the gaming landscape forever, Final Fantasy 7 Remake seeks to revisit Midgar on a scale we could only dream of.

Final Fantasy 7 Remake is here at last. Hoo boy, where does one even begin?

Say what you will about the original Final Fantasy 7, but its influence on the gaming landscape was massive. It’s not a legacy you can simply ignore, whether you like the game or not. There has been a huge amount of hype and expectation for this remake, and the team at Square Enix has seemingly shown every bit of acknowledgment and respect for that going forward. It’s because of that legacy that I must lay down a couple of points before we begin.

First: I have endeavoured to make this review as spoiler-free as possible. That includes both the events of Remake and of the original. If you don’t know what specifically happens in either, I’ve got you in mind. For those who do know spoilers, I urge you to keep them quiet to fresh players as well. Just go and look up the raw, unspoiled reactions to That Scene from the original; it’s something best preserved for people to experience fresh.

Second: my credentials. I’ve played the original Final Fantasy 7 to completion at least once, and other attempts at playthroughs more than that. This was well after the 1997 release (probably first around 2005), and I went in already knowing about That Scene and other spoilers. FF7’s impact on gaming and JRPGs had been well established by then, so I arrived late. Nonetheless, I thought it to be an excellent game and thoroughly enjoyed my playthrough. It isn’t — and wasn’t — my favourite Final Fantasy game, though it’s never strayed far from the top of the list.

“It’s inevitable that opinions of Remake from any source or outlet will be coloured by prior attachment and sentiment to Final Fantasy 7 (or lack thereof).”

Lastly, I’ve also seen or played most spinoffs (notably Advent Children, Last Order, and Crisis Core). That’s a little less pertinent to this review, but fans of those products can take heart: there are nods to these in the game, as well as style choices that reflect them in places.

Hopefully, now you can approach my words on Final Fantasy 7 Remake with the full context of my connection to the original. It’s inevitable that opinions of Remake from any source or outlet will be coloured by prior attachment and sentiment to Final Fantasy 7 (or lack thereof). As such, take my words as a guideline and use them to make an educated decision of where you’ll land.

Remake Part One

If you’re an FF7 fan reading this review, you’re probably here to find out how much of the game is present. Remake has been split into multiple parts after all, and this is just the first. Square Enix did this to cut as little as possible from the game, sparing no expense in remaking it to the fullest. Having now finished, I can say that they achieved that aim so far.

Content wise, there is a full game here, and my playtime ended at 43 hours. This entailed playing on Normal from start to finish along with being thorough and doing as much side content as I could. Further, additional perks and content become available once the credits roll. If you’re worried that you’re paying full price for an unfinished game, don’t; this is as much a full release as any newly numbered Final Fantasy title, and without Final Fantasy 15’s wealth of DLC required to make it whole.

“Pretty much every locale, scene, and story beat from the original is present in Remake.”

That said, Remake takes place entirely in Midgar, in contrast to the five to ten hours spent there in FF7. Pretty much every locale, scene, and story beat from the original is present in Remake. The additional time is primarily spent to bolster these moments, expanding on dungeons or smaller areas to give them the same scope. A tremendous amount of attention and care has been given to every facet, though. Character banter and dialogues are numerous, with a lot more cutscenes and chances for each to express themselves. Much of the runtime is used well, with new areas and events feeling interesting and consistent with Midgar’s style. Only a small fraction feels like genuine filler.

Final Fantasy 7 Remake is fairly linear at first. You’ll proceed through a chapter in a fairly direct fashion, with some side areas and branching paths to explore for treasure and extra fights. Once you move to the next chapter, you likely won’t be coming back. There’s a handful of areas where the game opens up, allowing you to explore a more populated area and take part in side quests and mini-games. One area relatively late in the game opens up quite a bit more, bridging a couple of areas together and allowing an open-ended respite before funneling you towards the final few chapters.

You’ll gain access to a chapter selection function once you beat the game, however. This lets you go back with an experience/AP gain increase and find anything you missed, as well as access the post-game content. I’ll come back to specifics later. So, how does it play?

Mechanics, Materia, and More

Final Fantasy 7 Remake continues the trend of Square Enix games becoming more cinematic and action-heavy in battles. If their aim is to make a playable Advent Children, they’re getting pretty close. This time around, the Active Time Battle (ATB) system of old has been merged into this for a pretty compelling take on an action/RPG.

You start the game as the main character Cloud. Combat will consist of utilizing his basic attacks, as well as manually guarding or dodging incoming damage. Your ATB gauge fills over time and increases when you strike, at which point you can open a menu to expend it. Time slows dramatically in the menu, letting you select from abilities, magic, and items. You can hold up to two bars of ATB (with the option of a third later), and every menu action requires at least one to use. These abilities and spells can be interrupted, but they hit considerably harder than your basic attacks. The damage difference is noticeable, so don’t come in expecting a pure action game; you’ll need the turn-based menu abilities to progress.

Once you get other party members, you can freely swap between them with a D-pad press. Characters you aren’t controlling will play defensive and try to get attacks in when safe. You’ll be the one ordering them to use menu abilities as they build ATB, though, and it becomes quite intuitive to cycle through them as you need.

To keep things fresh, each party member has a set of different mechanics and playstyles. All have an attack string and guard/dodge options, but that’s where similarities end. The triangle button is dedicated to the character’s unique actions. Cloud swaps to a slow-moving, hard-hitting Punisher stance, Tifa has finisher attacks based on the stacks of an ability she has, and so on.

“Of the handful of hybrid action/RPG systems the series has tried, Final Fantasy 7 Remake definitely feels the most well-done.”

Charging time is pretty slow if you aren’t getting in the thick of it, but this also leaves you quite vulnerable to attack. Guarding is a trade-off, as it slows your passive ATB gain dramatically, so trying to stay aggressive and dodging smartly is encouraged. This is further compounded by each enemy having a break meter below their health; hit them enough or with certain attacks and you’ll pressure them, which usually stuns them and makes them take more break damage. Max it out, and you’ll stagger them, wherein they’re completely stunned and take a large increase to all incoming damage for a time.

Of the handful of hybrid action/RPG systems the series has tried, Final Fantasy 7 Remake definitely feels the most well-done. It avoids the spamming of items from Final Fantasy 15 and ends up feeling like a Final Fantasy 13 that you actually control.

If this seems basic, there are further ways to supplement your moves. New abilities are gained in two ways: learned from specific weapons, or gained by equipping materia. Weapons are spaced out throughout the game, and each has a specific ability. Use that ability in battle a handful of times and you’ll achieve proficiency with it, whereupon you can use it regardless of your weapon.

Materia is the major noteworthy mechanic from FF7, and it’s been carried over almost identically to Remake. You’ll find materia orbs as you explore, and these can be set to slots in weapons or armor to gain their abilities. Furthermore, you’ll level the materia through AP gained after battles. A Fire materia will grant the Fire spell to the character while held, for example, and can be leveled up to access Fira and Firaga. Materia can be freely exchanged between characters out of battle, and most strategies for tougher fights will hinge on your setup. Different materia types can offer passive buffs, active abilities, or even massive summons that can be used only in specific fights.

At first, you won’t have much materia to play with, and even fewer slots in your gear to equip them. Cue Remake’s weapon upgrade system. Every time a character levels up, they’ll get 5 SP to spend, with bonus SP available from side objectives later. Each weapon has a unique “core” skill tree, and SP unlocks nodes on it. Each unlock grants the weapon new passive stats, modifiers, or even materia slots. At certain level thresholds, you’ll gain access to new sub-cores to further customize them.

What’s more, each individual weapon gets all your SP retroactively, so no need to pick and choose which to invest in. This means that if you like Cloud’s Buster Sword, you can absolutely keep it relevant throughout the entire game. All weapons have their own unique identity now, with stat priorities and abilities that you can prioritize based on circumstance or playstyle. The build options are quite diverse, and since you can reset them for a small gil fee, there’s no wrong way to approach it.

All these systems are in service of allowing you to customize your characters for the battles to come. Each ability has its uses, and there’s a good selection of materia to play around with. What I found most limiting about the battles, then, is the action parts.

Those who played the demo might have expressed some misgivings about the lack of variety in Cloud’s moveset. For those who feel that this is pretty basic, I’m sorry to say that it won’t get that much more diverse. Almost every ability and materia is one selected from the menu, not in your basic attacks. The different playable characters and conditions of encounters might shake things up, but it’s the ATB spenders that receive most of your attention.

I found this especially disappointing because my expectations were set quite high from the outset. Exploring down a side path in Chapter 2, mere minutes after where the demo ended, I found the Deadly Dodge materia; this changed Cloud’s attack string immediately after a dodge into a larger AoE one. Finding this so early eased my fears that the combat would feel similar for the whole runtime, then! Surely there would be other modifiers like it if I got this one so early?

Nope! This is almost the only materia like it in the whole game.

Much later, you can get the Parry materia (which lets you do a short hop and strike back if using dodge while guarding), and that’s about it. All other materia like it is simply a passive effect or occasional long cooldown. Otherwise, it’s all menu abilities that require ATB. This was tremendously disappointing to discover, and more options like that to personalize my general moveset would have been so much nicer to have. Even something like a perfect guard would have been great, though at least Cloud’s Punisher mode has counters on block. Perhaps that’s on me for coming to Final Fantasy 7 Remake having just played Devil May Cry 3, but that’s how I felt regardless.

That misgiving aside, the battles are nonetheless fun experiences. Bosses in particular tend to be larger than life affairs, with multiple parts to attack and various phases of the fight that change their mechanics. Again, those who played the demo will be pleased to note that more bosses play in the vein of Scorpion Sentinel than not. Some encounters can be pretty challenging, though for every game over I encountered (maybe half a dozen), a quick adjustment to my materia loadout and shift in strategy saw me triumph next time.

“There was a hell of a lot to love about the battles in Final Fantasy 7 Remake, and even if I had been hoping for more, it still stands out as a damn good time.”

Even regular enemies have individual mechanics. The circumstances by which the pressure and stagger systems are applied is unique to most enemies, so learning and exploiting their weaknesses makes the experience much smoother. There was a hell of a lot to love about the battles in Final Fantasy 7 Remake, and even if I had been hoping for more, it still stands out as a damn good time.

Mini-games are also interspersed throughout Final Fantasy 7 Remake. Most are variations of what was in the original, but there’s been a few added just to break up the routine. They were enjoyable for the most part, so there’s not much to say about them save that I appreciate the inclusion. There’s also a coliseum, letting you fight specialized groups under set conditions in exchange for unique rewards.

After the credits roll, you’ll gain access to the Chapter Select and can revisit any part of the game. You’ll also unlock Hard Mode, which doesn’t serve as a difficulty selection for a new game; instead, you can activate it when accessing Chapter Select. Hard Mode locks out your items and stops MP recovery from rest spots, but offers unique collectibles in exchange. New battles are added to the coliseum also. Those who want more even after the game is over shall find there’s at least a little to check out.

Overall, Final Fantasy 7 Remake kept my attention for the whole runtime. The only real lapses were a few areas of traversal that were overly drawn out, and some of the side quests felt a little mundane. Even so, these featured additional cutscenes and conversations with the cast that really furthered the attachment to the world, so it at least felt worth it to do them once finished.

Tifa fans should do all the side quests in Chapter 3. Just saying.

Regardless, it was an enjoyable game to play. A little more concession to action mechanics would be great, but the hybridised action/RPG implementation was otherwise very impressive. Square Enix definitely seems to have arrived at a happy medium that previous Final Fantasy titles didn’t manage, and I hope they continue with it.

Presenting: Midgar!

Presentation is the shining star of Final Fantasy 7 Remake. The demo made it clear that Square Enix wasn’t messing around, and it’s honestly one of the most graphically striking games I’ve ever seen. If any concerns were had about that level being impossible to maintain consistently, they certainly kept it close. Some of the larger open areas — particularly the slums — suffer from character pop-in, delayed loading on textures (if they aren’t just rough or muddy outright) and other small nitpicks. In addition, some cutscenes with minor NPCs talking to party members can be pretty jarring. They simply cannot match the level of fidelity achieved in rendering the main cast or other notable characters.

When the main cast is the focus and the set pieces are rolling, though? It’s far and away beyond anything else the series — or Square Enix in general — has produced. There’s a lot more daytime than the original game, so there’s enough colour variety to keep it from looking bland. Mechanical dieselpunk designs weave into gritty but “lived-in” slum streets. A pristine plate sector at night gives way to rusting maintenance structures underneath. The tall, clean and imposing Shinra HQ is met with the garish lights and noise of Wall Market. Midgar is a fantastically designed place and a treat to explore.

It’s not just the city itself that is well designed, though. To Square Enix’s credit, they have taken the sometimes goofy enemy designs from the original and kept them completely intact. High fidelity or no, it’s not afraid to take an enemy that is just a spiky dancing frog and have it make sense. There are even character dialogue and bestiary entries that further suggest how they work or came to be. If things didn’t have to be changed, they weren’t; they were just reimagined and made to fit.

“Midgar is a fantastically designed place and a treat to explore.”

All of this visual and design splendour is furthered by the audio quality. From start to finish, the voice acting and direction is stellar. Shelving the voice actors that played the characters previously was unexpected, but the new cast absolutely nails their roles. Most have emotional moments or serious scenes that the actors manage to capture effortlessly. Even the NPCs and minor characters have quality voice acting. Shoutouts, in particular, have to be given to Barret’s VA for one particularly memorable scene, and to Hojo who is suitably creepy and sinister in every appearance.

Last but not least on the presentation front: the music. Oh man, the music. NieR: Automata laid the groundwork for implementing dynamic tracks, adding layers as needed to change the tone of the same track at just the right moment. Everything that was learned from that game was applied wholeheartedly to Final Fantasy 7 Remake, and then some. Musical cues and stings are on point, highlighting crucial moments in the best possible way.

The original soundtrack is regarded as one of the finest works of legendary composer Nobuo Uematsu. Now, most of those tracks have been remixed or remastered in a slew of creative ways, but they almost always fit the tone required well. Some see multiple variations in different areas to wholly distinct effects. Music in the boss fights tends to really stand out, as the longer battles allow them to build up and crescendo during later phases. You know that the music is a highlight when songs are one of the main collectibles and each is a separate remix from their actual game appearance, all done in the style of music that might actually be made in Midgar’s setting. Genius.

There’s quite a lot to unpack and respect about the game on presentation. But all that presentation is in service of one thing: telling the story.

Reunions

I fully intend to avoid spoilers, so I will keep this section relatively brief.

The story of the original Final Fantasy 7 is one of the major elements that left a mark in gaming. These characters, their world, and their tales are iconic and beloved. Every moment of that story has been retained in full, just as Square Enix originally intended. Some trailers have hinted at adjustments and new developments — especially the launch trailer, which I encourage you not to watch for fear of spoilers — but this accuracy was paramount to the developers.

It’s safe to say that they achieved this. Every notable character, conversation, or location from the original game is included in Remake in some way. There’ll be adjustments, of course; they’re displayed in high fidelity and voice acted this time, so concessions will need to be made. But it’s all here, and the attention to detail in places was honestly staggering.

With that said, Square Enix had no intention of just retelling the same story verbatim. Additional scenes and moments have been sprinkled all throughout, with at least one early chapter composed entirely of new events. All of it builds on the original framework, strengthening it further. There’s more character growth, banter, and interactions between the cast than ever before. It ends up making them feel so much more real and believable. Even characters I wasn’t certain about initially won me over by the credits. This isn’t limited to the cast either, and gives the same treatment to villains and NPCs.

The fact that this is only a chunk of the complete tale means that certain events, characters, and flashbacks have been brought forward in the timeline. You’ll be seeing Cloud get headaches or recall memories of his hometown right out the gate… and that’s to say nothing of Sephiroth. Even so, all of these concessions are handled with the same care as the rest of the game, so their placement fits and strengthens the whole. Better to portray these scenes and build up the characters now than have them appear out of nowhere 10 hours into a second game, right?

Now… thus far, I’ve been talking purely about parts that primarily concern the original work. If this praise was also true of the wholly original plot threads and changes, I’d have no issues whatsoever with Remake’s story. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. Far from it.

Early on, there will be a couple of divergences to the story that seem to be setting up a new sub-plot. These divergences increase in volume over time, and grow exponentially in the last two chapters. All the original beats remain, but they’re interspersed with these divergences, leading to a new climax and expanded conclusion.

“Genuinely, I was loving my time with it. But if the game had been a tasty meal up until that point, the final section soured it.”

And here is where it all started to come apart for me. For a brief while, I was ripped out of Final Fantasy 7 and dumped heavily into an unholy marriage of Advent Children and Kingdom Hearts. It was awkward, it was confusing, and it left me shaking my head in dismay. It felt massively out of place.

Did this part have to change so dramatically? Maybe. It wasn’t a true climax or game-ending point in the original, after all, and I expected some new conclusion and an added boss or two to cap off this experience. Yet, until now, it had been such a solid remake that made measured changes to supplement the classic story. Here, at the eleventh hour, it jarringly erupted into a massive spectacle that honestly felt like underdeveloped fanfiction.

When I say spectacle, I mean that it was spectacular to behold in terms of graphics, sound, scale… but it comes at a huge cost, and that cost is the integrity of the story going forward. This finale and the accompanying changes have massive implications for the future installments of Remake, all of which feel like they’re going to ride the divergence train at full speed away from the classic plot. Suddenly, the insane turns that things like Dirge of Cerberus took are looking far more likely in the future.

I had been enjoying Final Fantasy 7 Remake throughout the entire runtime, whether it was new or old material. Genuinely, I was loving my time with it. But if the game had been a tasty meal up until that point, the final section soured it. This isn’t just because they tried something new, either; I could easily forgive it if it was just a new thread that tried, landed flat, and wrapped up. No, this sudden divergence has ramifications that could potentially change all future installments in dramatic ways from what was expected, and I now find myself lacking confidence that it can succeed.

In conclusion: old stuff? Great! Supplementary additions to old stuff? Also great! Character writing, development, and worldbuilding? Excellent! Brand new stuff? Middling at best, potentially disastrous at worst. Most of my grievances with the game are almost entirely to do with that final section. I fully admit to bias in the kinds of stories and developments I like, so your mileage may vary. But I cannot say I walked away from the ending feeling happy.

A Final Fantasy For Fans and First-Timers

One of the big questions approaching this game is, inevitably, “Should I play this if I haven’t played the original?” That’s an easy answer: yes. Everything is here that made Final Fantasy 7 such a stand out of its era, delivered with some of the finest presentation we’ve seen in triple-A video game development. It’s a fun action/RPG hybrid with solid gameplay systems, a strong story, and a set of well-realized characters that suitably develop and bond over time. Fans of the original will inevitably spot more references or appreciate the extra nods, but even newcomers should be able to slip in and find plenty to enjoy.

Next: should you play this now, before the other parts come out? That’s a more tentative response, but yes. Had I not walked away from the ending with such mixed feelings, it would’ve been easy to recommend. Even without knowledge of the source material, the main story and throughline here is clear to follow and wraps up nicely. It’s mostly the setup of larger threads and what’s to come that have me so hesitant to recommend it, and I don’t think the ending was handled well. Buyer be warned, regardless.

“Final Fantasy 7 Remake is arguably the best non-MMO Final Fantasy game released in a very long time.”

Final Fantasy 7 Remake doesn’t replace the original. That’ll be true even when all parts have been fully released. Final Fantasy 7 will be a generational touchstone of gaming with a legacy that has lasted decades, and will remain long after the hype for Remake has cooled. I don’t foresee that same legacy being granted to Remake once the dust has settled, but it nonetheless stands with Resident Evil 2 Remake as a testament to the quality such a project can aspire to.

This is still one of the most excellently presented games I’ve ever experienced, and with a few tweaks for the next installment, that excellence might extend to gameplay and story too. Whatever misgivings I may have going into future releases, it’s undeniable that this was an enjoyable 42 hours marred by a single bad one. Even so, Final Fantasy 7 Remake is arguably the best non-MMO Final Fantasy game released in a very long time. Despite my qualms, it’s been a welcome Reunion.

April 6, 2020 6:00 AM EST

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/04/final-fantasy-7-remake-review-for-the-reunion/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=final-fantasy-7-remake-review-for-the-reunion

[demialwrites]

False Start Ch 2

Link to AO3 Page

This makes some references to the first chapter, and it’s been a while, so here it is. This is basically Reader’s first time, and they have it with Genji. ^^

Props to those OW imagines blogs who can write shit similar to this and not fucking blush and almost die. I have respect for you.

Genji didn't push you after the first attempt to try again. Some time went by, and he did bring it up once. He asked if you wanted to make another attempt. You expressed concerns about whether or not he would fit, because he didn't last time. He wiggled his fingers at you and said, "Let me know if I can be of assistance with that."

Then he grinned at your embarrassment and wrapped his arms around your torso, gently pinning your arms to your body, rocking you back and forth. You automatically bent your elbows upward to wrap your arms around his.

Genji always showed a lot of affection, more than you could ever need. And it was always careful and gentle. It was as if he wasn't sure at what point any roughness from his cyborg body would hurt you, and he was constantly trying to avoid finding out. Perhaps he felt a little guilt from hurting you during the first attempt at sex months ago.

Nonetheless, the way Genji was with you came off as very tender. One could call it loving. It had the side effect, intentional or not, of quickly nurturing some strong romantic feelings. Before you knew it, you started to wonder if you had stronger feelings for him than he did for you. You'd never been so happy to see or touch someone in a long time. He always made time for you, so you guess he felt the same.

It didn't help that Genji looked at you with a strong, unidentifiable emotion in his eyes sometimes. He took his visor off more and more, the more often you both spent time together. It was overwhelming trying to hold his gaze when that happened. It seemed to make things worse when you looked away. When you did that, he just moved in to be close like he was doing now, which seemed to increase the feeling and making you a little flustered.

Something occurred to you, and you had to ask.

"I'm happy it turned out like this, but what made you think that what we did wasn't going to be a one night stand?"

Judging by the angle of his helm, he seemed to be staring into space before. He lifted his chin and observed you before answering.

"I made the assumption that you were not that kind of person. I'm glad I was right," he replied, the smile evident in his voice.

His answer made something click and slide into place inside you.

"Maybe we could...maybe you could help me now."

"Really?"

He sounded hopeful.

"Yeah," you replied, forcing some confidence into your voice. You were okay with this; you were just nervous.

Genji didn't move, however.

"Right now, right now?" he asked, as if he didn't believe what he was hearing.

"Yes," you insisted, expanding your arms from your body and his fell away in turn, "Now, before I lose my nerve."

Genji took your hand and led you back to your room. You couldn't help but be reminded of the time he followed you back to your room after that particular mission.

Once while inspecting Genji's hands, you made an offhand comment that he should wear a condom over them while fingering you, in case he pinched your insides with the knuckle joints. You were sure that you were worrying over nothing, so you never brought it up again. But Genji had condoms and lube ready.

"Genji, I was kinda joking," you told him, while taking your clothes off and tossing them haphazardly on the floor, out of the way. Genji had no need to take anything off, the lucky man. He merely removed the plates covering his face and sat on the bed.

"No, I think it's a good idea. I have not touched someone like this since I got this body."

"But you have...had sex?"

For some reason, it embarrassed you to ask.

"Oh? Yes. At the time I was surprised they wanted to - have sex with a cyborg, I mean - but I have accepted it now."

You wanted to argue with him, but he would probably consider you biased. You loved his body, and maybe he didn't.

"Anyway, I am worried you will be reluctant to try anything more involved if I hurt you with my fingers."

You wanted to tell him it wasn't true, but he was being sweet. So you held your tongue and instead sat facing Genji on his lap. You were still a tiny bit nervous, you admit.

"Before we get started," he began, running his hands up and down your hips, "there was something important we didn't do the first time. No foreplay."

There was that intense look again, softened only slightly by a sly smile.

The warm up was sloppy. Genji intended to rub your clit, but you couldn't help pressing the entire area to his palm. The material it was made of felt fantastic to grind against. All he had to do was apply pressure. You hungrily pressed your open mouth to his, and he returned your desperate enthusiasm. Genji's free arm hugged your lower back, and you explored the interlocking parts of Genji's back with your fingertips.

It was embarrassing how soon your mind hazed over, pressing down harder on Genji's hand. He held it steady and firmly rubbed. Seems you had both been waiting for this moment. You moaned into his mouth in lieu of saying his name. Eventually, you broke the kiss and pinned him with a heated stare.

"Finger me," you demanded.

His smile was lazy and his eyes clouded with lust from the makeout session. The sight drew you closer. He slid his bottom lip, slick with saliva, through his teeth. You were so close to pressing your lips to his again, despite your demand for a change of pace.

Genji flopped back on the bed, and you fell forward on his chest with a surprised noise. Genji chuckled and grabbed a condom and the tiny bottle of lube from behind him. You both sat back up. You rested your cheek on his shoulder while he carefully applied the lube to you. He caressed the back of your neck with his free hand.

"That should be enough."

You couldn't help raising an eyebrow when Genji does slide a condom onto his pointer and index fingers.

"I am not taking a chance," Genji insists.

He's being so careful, that your cheeks get warm. You shifted on your knees, getting comfortable and giving Genji permission with a look.

"Hang on to me, if you like," he says, ending the sentence with a quick smooch to your lips and a happy smile. It does comfort you to rest your hands on his shoulders, pressing a few fingers on his round vents.

Your mouth drops open, ready to gasp in anticipation of the pain, but his fingers slid in to the first knuckles no problem.

"It feels really weird," you said. Not surprising, considering it was two artificial fingers shoved into a condom.

"But it does not hurt?"

"No."

He watches your face while pressing his fingers in to the second set of knuckles. There was a sudden burning pain, and you flinched, your eyebrows tightening together. He stopped and pulled back a bit.

"Too far?"

"Yeah, but we're here to do that, aren't we?"

He looked unconvinced. You were worried he would suggest you guys should stop, so you squeezed the part of his shoulder near his neck, for what it's worth. He's never told you to stop touching his body, so perhaps he can feel it in some way.

"What if I took over? You stay still," you suggested.

"If you say so. We could always-"

"No," you shooked your head, "I'm comfortable now."

You closed your eyes. You tried to remember to breathe from your stomach to relax your body. It's working. It burns still, but not too much that you can't work my way down. Then Genji's finger involuntarily twitches and brushes against something extra sensitive. The little bit of pleasure feels like a relief compared the uncomfortable stretch, and it makes your eyes fly open in surprise. He corrects the bend of his fingers, thinking he did something wrong.

"No, don't stop."

"Hm?"

Genji must have figured it out, because he curled his fingers further, gently petting the swollen node inside. This time you squeezed Genji's shoulders because of the burn from the movement of his fingers. You bit your lip, powering through the pain.

Genji inclined his head.

"It's fine," you assured him.

It was worth it, as you had fantasized numerous times about Genji's unique hands pleasuring you. That made this extra intense, and you had the greedy feeling of wanting more than you could have. Eventually, the good feeling deep inside outweighed the pain. And then the pain disappeared altogether.

You closed your eyes and leaned forward, resting your forehead between his chest pieces. Just enjoying the feeling of Genji's fingers inside you, and the fact that you were comfortable with it. That felt like a win. You let out a deep, relaxing breath.

"You know," Genji began, and you could feel a faint vibration in his chest while he spoke, "this is about my size. Maybe a little bigger."

You lifted your head in surprise to look at him.

"W-we don't have to," he quickly added, his fingers still making the gentle little movements inside.

He looked a little guilty for having even suggested you try the real thing today. You seriously considered it for a second before smiling and agreeing.

Genji quickly withdraws his fingers with a ridiculous wet sound and a suppressed smile.

"Come, come," he says, patting the middle of the bed.

"Missionary is just fine for your first time. I think you'd agree."

Your agreement is to lie back on the bed, resting your head on the pillow. Genji crawls on top, supporting his weight with his hands on either side of your shoulders. He gives you a reassuring kiss.

"Hey. You are doing well."

You nod.

Genji leans back to sit on the bed. You let him arrange your legs on the bed to his liking. He asks you if you're okay while removing the black cover on his crotch. His eyes close and there's quiet sigh of relief when his cock flops out, fully hard. He looks up at you, and you can tell with the wider eyes and barely noticeable downward curve of his mouth that he's worried about what you'll think of the state of the skin on his length.

"I'm fine," you laugh nervously, remembering to answer his question. Because he's been really sweet this whole time, you can't help but try to lighten his mood, "It...matches!"

When he realizes when you're referring to the scars on his face and his dick, he makes an "oh" face. Then he breaks into loud laughter that he can't seem to stop. There's a few tears. You're not sure if you should be offended or laugh with him. When his laughter dies down to giggles with quivering shoulders, you can't help grinning along.

"I love you...but that was awful."

You're shocked, and he looks horrified. It's his turn to have a rosy blush and look away this time. This is something you haven't seen on him before. If it wasn't awkward for him at this moment, you would have told him how cute he was.

"You love me?!"

You're ridiculously happy. You weren't sure Genji felt as strongly as you did. Now that you knew, you wanted to hear it again. The three words sounded beautiful in his voice, distortion and all.

You're up on your knees in front of him in a flash, grinning like an idiot. You take his chin in hand, grasping at the metal encasing it, and you turn his face firmly towards yours. Thankfully, he doesn't resist.

"Hey," you almost whisper, in case, for some silly reason, being too loud scares him off, "I love you, too."

He looks into your eyes for a few, long seconds. It's nerve-wracking; maybe you didn't say the right thing. Then his facial expression softens, and he leans forward to give you an equally soft kiss, maintaining his stare and dragging your bottom lip with his lips before letting go.

"Lie down," he requests.

He crawls back on top, intending to get started. Because he's not down there to see, he finds your entrance by with gentle pats of his fingertips. He goes nice and slow with the next part, the actual insertion. He holds the head of his cock at your slick hole, and it feels better than you thought it would. You can't help biting your bottom lip again and spreading your thighs for more. He pressed the forehead of his helmet to yours, so that you had no choice but look to look into his soft brown eyes. They sparkle with amusement, as if each of you exchanging declarations of love was a shared secret.

"Relax," he reminds you, "I'm here. We can stop at any time."

Genji closed his eyes and distracted you with kisses as slow as the speed at which his length slides in. He stops once to ask if the angle is okay. You nod again.

"There's a little bit of stretching, but I can handle it."

In fact, it's feeling very much like it's worth it. Your clit is starting to pulse and demand more attention. Arousal seems to make things easier, so you reach down between the two of you to touch yourself. Genji groans softly and stops kissing you to drop his forehead into the pillow next to your head.

"Let me enjoy how tight you are."

You wondered if it felt as good to him as it felt to have him inside you. Warm and with a kind of satisfying fullness you'd never experienced with your own fingers.

"Ready to start?"

You hummed your agreement, and he began to kiss down from your cheek to your neck.

"If it hurts, I'll distract you."

He continues to kiss your neck, and his hips start to move slowly. He slides in and out with shallow thrusts. He goes as slow as he can. You release a breath when the painful stretch begins again. It's minimal, and Genji starts to nip at my skin, little bursts of pleasure shooting down my spine, so it's easy to concentrate on the feeling of his mouth on your neck.

"Genji," you begged with a small voice.

He hummed and pulled on your ear gently with his teeth. He sped up his thrusts, and by now, the pain had passed. You could let go of the last bit of tension you didn't know you were feeling and let your legs drop open some more. You could really enjoy the feeling of Genji inside you. Being filled and the resulting feeling of being connected to Genji on a very intimate level. You wrapped your hand around the back of his neck to trace the metal links of his artificial spine.

You lifted your head to glance at the sight of Genji rolling his hips, pumping in and out of you.

"It feels so good," he said, pressing a kiss your mouth, "to be inside you."

It was at this point that all you could do was continue to touch your clit and lie back on into the pillow. Your thighs opened further on their own. Genji whispered encouragement into your ear, each sentence punctuated by kisses to your neck. Each supportive word helped build the sweet pressure inside your lower stomach.

"You are so tight. I don't think I can hold on any longer..."

You could guess that Genji was very close, because he stopped kissing your neck and buried his face in your neck. Despite that, he still paused all movement to ask if you were okay. At this moment, that was more frustrating than sweet.

"Genji, please don't stop," you begged again. You sounded pathetic, but you were lost in the moment and didn't care. You wrapped your legs around his waist to keep him close, even though he wasn't going anywhere.

Genji leaned up, shifted his weight to his elbows and wove his fingers through yours. Genji resumed thrusting, but you didn't know if he did anything else besides that. It was just you and the pleasurable tension building inside you, until Genji interrupted with strained words.

"Y/n, I love you. Cum with me."

By some miracle, that works. All the tension building in your lower body is released, and your hips lift really far off the bed. It forces a small moan out of your mouth. Genji is quiet when he cums. He whispers 'yes,' to himself a few times and then silence. His whole body shudders afterwards.

"I almost didn't..."

He didn't bother to finish the sentence and instead rolled over to lay next to you. You didn't realize how sweaty you had gotten until now. You wanted to get up and do something about that, but Genji was still holding one of your hands. You remained, melting into the bed and letting the good feelings make your heart sing.

#genji x reader #female reader #smut #fluff #my shit

[mockymyths]

AL-07 - Subject: Food

Angrily AL-07 stuffed the packets of candy into the small metallic box. She pushed aside a small bag of chips before pulling it out completely to make room for the sugary treat. With a huff she shoved the box as far in the back as she could and practically jumped into her bed with the bag of chips in hand.

She forced herself to regulate her breath and mentally let go of the irritation that coursed through her veins.

“The monkey doesn’t know what they’re doing.” She made her voice low and growly, pitching up at specific moments in the speech. She shook her head slightly as if to mimic the creature she was imitating. “Monkey doesn’t know what a Vetron Impact Regulator is.” The bag popped as she pulled it open and crinkled when she reached in for a chip. “Monkey’s so stupid. I’m so much better because I can’t be bothered to do my fucking job and explain what anything is and teach them.” AL-07 dropped the voice and rifled through the bag, trying to grab a handful.

She veraciously engulfed the first handful of chips. The second handful was chewed at a more casual pace, AL-07 took time to ensure that they were enjoying them.

“Jackass.” AL-07 continued to nibble at the chips in silence for a while before they felt something.

Tal was curious and worried. They felt AL-07’s anger and are coming to investigate.

“Fuck.” AL-07 scrambled off the bed and dragged the box of treats back out. They folded the opening of the bag closed and stuffed it into the little space left inside before closing it and shoving it back under. Once more they scrambled onto the bed and lounged. AL-07 slowed down their breathing and waited.

“AL,” Tal called from the other side of the door. “Am I permitted to enter?”

“Sure,” AL folded their hands behind their head and stared up at the ceiling. One leg bent so that their foot laid flat on the bed. The metallic door silently opened and Tal slinked into the room, ignoring the door as it closed behind them.

They sat crouched on the floor, resting their lengthy arms between their legs. AL-07 still had a hard time understanding how a long lanky cat-like alien could find sitting like that comfortable when their entire back arched away like that. Tal tilted their head forward towards AL, despite their sitting position they were still much taller than the bed.

“AL,”

“Tal,” Al-07 interrupted the alien.

“AL,” they gave her what she could only describe as a reproachful look with their large teal eyes.

Despite the flatness of their pale grey-blue face, the brightness of its eyes made it seem as though they stuck far out. Almost like they could see into anything.

“AL, are you listening?” AL nodded even though they never looked at Tal. Tallian’s eyes were shit, as were their ability to smell usually. Their ability to connect via minds was were it was at for them so Tal should already know AL was listening. “It freaks me out when you don’t look when we’re talking.”

“Why?” Al begrudgingly looked at Tal.

“Because that’s what you used to do. You don’t do it anymore. Are you mad at me?” Al furrowed their eyes at Tal then looked away once more with a sigh.

“I wasn’t used to you talking to me in my head, and for some humans it can be considered rude to not look when someone’s talking to you. But you’re not human, this isn’t earth, and it doesn’t bother me anymore to hear you like this.” AL watched Tal out of the corner of their eyes nod.

“Ok. So then why are you mad?” AL tried hard to not roll their eyes and finally sat up, leaning their back against the wall and facing Tal.

“Kallic was being a dick again. That’s all.”

“Dick means genitalia.” Tal stated more than asked.

“It can also mean he was being a jerk, rude, stupid.” Tal nodded once more.

“Ok. But then you started to panic.” AL’s eye twitched. “You knew I was coming and started panicking. Was it because of what Kallic said to you?” AL thought carefully.

“No.” she licked her lips. “I just wasn’t prepared for you to come in.” Tal’s ears quirked up and their short snout twitched.

“I’m sorry. You didn’t have to let me in! Was I interrupting something? I can leave!” The alien began to stand up properly.

“No No No!” AL scooted towards the edge of their bed and waved Tal down. “You’re ok! It’s ok! You weren’t interrupting anything!” Tal quieted and settled back down with a tilted head and twitching ears.

“Then why were you panicking? Do I scare you? I thought we were past that.” Poor thing sounded hurt. AL-07 bit their lip and finally crouched on the floor next to their bed.

“Just don’t tell anyone ok?” Tal nodded and curiously crouched down further as AL pulled the box forward and opened it. “I was just pigging out on chips and I didn’t really wanna share them with you.” Tal jerked back. Once more their node twitched and their ears stood straight up.

“You’re hungry? Are we not feeding you enough? I am so sorry! Come we will go get you food now!” AL, exasperated now, grabbed onto Tal’s armored wrist and yanked back with all their might.

“No it’s not that! Calm down already damn it!” Tal paused in their hurried motions and watched as AL collapsed back onto the bed with a “oumph”

“Then why were you eating if you did not need the sustenance?”

“I was annoyed! I was angry eating.” Tal tilted their head and AL rubbed their face before settling themselves down more comfortably on the edge of the bed. “Some humans like to eat. Like a lot. They may not need to, they might not even be hungry, but sometimes they’ll eat just cause. They could be sad, angry, bored, whatever. Sometimes they just want a certain taste of something and will eat just enough to get that.” Tal nodded.

“You were angry so you were eating even though you didn’t need to.” AL nodded back at them. They grabbed the bag of chips and showed them to Tal.

“These are crispy. They’re salty and they’re not very filling. Perfect for when I wan’t something like that, great for bored eating and angry eating.” She grabbed one of the bags of gummy candy she put in earlier. “And these are sweet and gummy. Great for when I want something like that, or just want something a little chewy.” Tal nodded.

“Human’s are so much more complex than I thought. So then why did you hide them from me? You didn’t want to share with me? Is that another weird human thing?” AL rolled their eyes.

“The last few times I left stuff like this sitting in the kitchen someone else ate it and threw it out. Nothing is more heartbreaking then telling yourself you’re going to treat yourself to something only to find it gone.”

“It is upsetting to find the food you worked hard to get gone missing.” Tal nodded. “Got it.” AL nodded although deep down they wanted to roll their eyes extra hard.

“Right.”

“So what else to humans do with their food? I would like to know. I know the Glorans will get angry and violent if anyone tries to interrupt their meal time. Do humans bite if someone reaches for their food?”

“Um, maybe? It depends on the human. Especially when they’re starving. If a human is starving it can alter their mood or energy. They can get tired, groggy, quiet, maybe even angry in general. I usually refer to that as being “hangry”.”

“Hangry?” AL nodded.

“If a human announces that they are Hangry then they are warning you that they are in a bad mood because they are too hungry. It's almost like a warning. If you don’t want to deal with them in a bad mood then get them food.” Tal nodded.

“I think I myself was… Hangry… just the other day.” AL began to nod but stopped themselves. God, with the number of conversations they had over human and alien conventions, AL was beginning to feel like a dancing parrot with all the head bobbing.

“Right! You were getting all twitchy when we were trying to fix the Galactic Tic Speculator for all of the ship’s main Tic Recorders! And then once we got to the cafeteria you refused to engage in conversation until we got some food in you!” Tal clasped their hands together and bounced slightly on their ind legs.

“Oh this is so exciting!” They finally uncurled themselves fully from their position and circled around behind AL onto the bed, leaving a large circle for AL to relax in whilst being surrounded by Tal. “Now you said Kallic made you mad. Let us “talk shit” about him until you feel better.” AL cackled and settled back against Tal’s soft armored stomach.

“Oh my god he’s such an idiot!” Tal nodded.

“He does think highly of himself much in the way that a insufferable Belswax would!”

#writing prompt #1500 words #sci fi #alien #food hoarding

[abigailswager]

What the HEX: A Look at Richard Heart's Controversial New Crypto

New Post has been published on https://dailybitcoinupdates.com/what-the-hex-a-look-at-richard-hearts-controversial-new-crypto/

What the HEX: A Look at Richard Heart's Controversial New Crypto

HEX is a new financial tool and cryptocurrency launching on the Ethereum network via a Bitcoin UTXO snapshot on December 2. Critics are questioning HEX’s legitimacy, calling it a colossal cash grab and privacy compromise. Devout fans can’t wait to claim their tokens and start staking. So who’s right and who’s wrong?

Richard Heart, the outspoken man behind HEX, sat down with Cointelegraph to talk about the upcoming launch and counter a few of the criticisms surrounding the project.

Heart explained that HEX is the world’s first high-interest blockchain certificate of deposit (CD), letting users stake their tokens in return for interest. Users can enjoy interest payments ranging from 3.69% if 99% of the total supply is staked, up to an improbable and enormous payout of 369% if only one percent of the total supply is staked — paid out in HEX tokens. It’s worth noting that the monetary value of such a payout depends entirely on the market value of HEX at the time of maturity.

“It’s the world’s first blockchain CD that attacks the largest market in the banking ecosystem outside of savings accounts,” Heart said.

Move over, big banks?

HEX is essentially a crypto version of the traditional fixed deposit. The client-side looks like the popular banking instrument: a user locks up funds, then receives their invested principal plus interest when the term matures.

“Banks use your money as a sort of collateral that’s just an excuse for them to borrow money from the government at extremely low rates,” Heart said.

HEX fixes this…

Meanwhile, Bitcoin has some serious limitations, Heart explained. “What does Bitcoin do? It lets you enter a number on your screen which changes the number on someone else’s screen. It makes sure nobody does that twice by burning millions of dollars in electricity.”

Of course, the cost to secure a single such transaction is far from millions of dollars, but Heart has a soft spot for hyperbole.

Heart said Bitcoin prices can spiral downward due to miner competition, causing difficulty to spike to all-time highs while the market price dwindles. Miners have to keep selling more of their newly minted coins, and thus continue to push the price further down. Heart neglected to mention Bitcoin’s difficulty adjustment system, which finds an economic balance between mining costs and monetary rewards.

Rather than losing against inflation, HEX users earn it by locking up coins, Heart said. People are competing against each other for larger and longer stakes, starting as early as possible, in order to get a larger piece of the profits. “If you end your stake early or late,” he said, “you’re penalized.” Only users who don’t lock their coins suffer from inflation because they’re not letting the rest of the world know when they will sell them. “It’s a truly unique system. It’s the first of its kind,” Heart beamed.

Heart complains that Bitcoin’s system still has critical bugs that aren’t solvable by wasting more electricity. “Bitcoin’s security model burns millions of dollars but starves developers of money, has no security audits, and no bug bounty.” Heart continued by pointing to the decline in wider Bitcoin adoption: “Fewer people accept it, it has fewer addresses, fewer Google searches, only minor upgrades besides SegWit… Lightning only has $6 million in total, and also has critical vulnerabilities from time to time.”

Heart explained that HEX solves these problems. “It does everything Bitcoin does, but better, except liquidity, but that’s because it’s brand new.” First, Heart pointed out that users can profit from referrals.

Secondly, lending BTC in the hopes of making interest requires trust, whereas HEX does not, Heart said: “To earn money on your Bitcoin, you have to lend it out to a counterparty and hope that you ever see it again. With HEX, you lock it in a smart contract. It’s trustless interest.”

This programming is secure, he explained, since the consensus code that controls the inflation and validity of coins is locked in a smart contract. Developers can’t accidentally generate a bug, he said. “But in Bitcoin, if you try to improve the network anywhere, your changes touch the consensus code. That’s how that last inflation bug got accidentally put in there.” Heart compared such a change to upgrading an airplane’s software while it’s in the air — a dangerous, difficult task.

10% of the world will hate you

Many criticisms aimed at HEX focus on Heart’s potential to make the lion’s share of profits from the scheme. The origin address, an element of the scheme that users are obliged to trust, receives a massive portion of claimant bonuses. “Whoever holds the keys to the origin address is going to be happy,” Heart said with a chuckle.

When asked for his thoughts on HEX, Cryptoconomy podcaster Guy Swann took the question to his listeners. “I started a thread in our Cryptoconomy Telegram group and it got out of control, fast,” Swann said. “I can’t believe how this thing is set up. Its core design could make it one of the most prolific schemes to funnel money to a single party that I’ve seen in the crypto space.” Swann expressed further concerns, comparing it to OneCoin in its “brazen means of aggregating vast sums (upwards of two-thirds) of all invested ETH and HEX supply under a single entity’s keys.”

Swann explained, “To get HEX after the airdrop, you participate in an ‘Adoption Amplifier,’ which makes a game out of bidding on new HEX tokens by sending ETH into a ‘pool’. That ETH then goes directly to Richard…” Swann concluded, “Everything in this ridiculous token is designed to look like a game and encourage gambling. But the one universal factor in every game element is that Richard gets wealthier and you get a worthless token that he invented for free…”

Others have fired criticisms at Heart for HEX’s purportedly Ponzi-like structure, as well as for privacy and security concerns regarding its claiming process. Vlad Costea, a writer at Bitcoin Magazine, presented a range of arguments against HEX’s purported legitimacy, calling it a scam back in January 2019 when it was originally branded as “Bitcoin Hex.”

Costea wrote: “Bitcoin Hex resembles a Ponzi scheme…” He criticized the project as a sort of “fool’s gold,” promising to “make everybody richer at the expense of a simple sign-up process.” The writer also pointed to privacy concerns regarding the claiming process.

During the launch phase, anyone holding Bitcoin can claim 10,000 HEX for each Bitcoin stored in a wallet address. Costea wrote,

“People watching the weekly interviews and understanding the process will probably think that they have nothing to lose. But the price to pay is privacy itself, as participants to the Hex scheme willingly reveal to the public how many bitcoins they own (unless they obfuscate their transaction history with a tool like Wasabi wallet, that is).”

Following a barrage of criticisms fired at HEX, Costea concluded that the tokens will have no value, with gullible traders left handing over their valuable crypto gold for worthless stones.

The project uses “tactics a scam might use”

Heart justified the design of HEX’s payment system: “The market sets the price. If no one wants in, the price will be nothing.” He took a lighthearted approach in handling critiques of outright fraud: “So there’s this trustless thing that people can use — or not — and pay what the market says it’s worth — or not. Scam!”

Heart elaborated: “I don’t care who you are, 10% of the world will hate you. In crypto, there’s a tribalism that every coin you buy is a world-changing amazing thing. Every coin anyone else buys is a scam by default.”

He also responded to critics bemoaning his financial success and profit-seeking motivations: “They’re closet socialists. They say, ‘I’m poor, so I want you to be poor, too.'”

Heart addressed the issues surrounding privacy and security, saying “every HEX claim is safe and secure.” For extra anonymity, users can claim each “BTC Freeclaim” to a new ETH address over TOR and click “new circuit” after each claim. Heart said, “I don’t know your IP. I don’t know your name. I know the public address that has claimed HEX. It’s like knowing you have a front yard and people can see your front yard.”

Heart continued:

“I don’t want your data. If I wanted to know your IP address, I could set up a Bitcoin node and just listen, or I could buy a wallet company or make an app. It’s so stupid.”

Heart has extremely ambitious hopes for the project, envisioning HEX “overtaking all other cryptocurrencies… and onboarding people in the real world.” He explained the project uses “tactics a scam might use,” like referral bonuses, in order to attract interest — but offers an honest, real project.

There is no doubt that Heart is a master marketer and salesman. He appears to be genuinely passionate about the project, aiming to recreate the early days of free mining, $1 Bitcoin, and massive profits for the fortunate few. Exactly how few will benefit from HEX is yet to be determined.

Richard Heart is pitching his new controversial crypto HEX as the first high-interest blockchain certificate of depositRead More

#cointelegraph.com

[michaelfallcon]

Cell Phones! Robots! Frozen Espresso! At Ada’s Discovery Cafe

In the future—not long from now, surely—each and every telecom data replenishment node will sport a far-out high-end cyber modified coffee experience. But here in 2018 there is Ada’s Discovery Cafe, a first-of-its-kind high-flying collaboration between Seattle local indie Ada’s Technical Books and multinational telecommunications conglomerate AT&T, open now at Broadway and East Thomas.

It’s a match made in Seattle, or at least the Seattle of today, where rising rents and influx of new money tech culture make successful cafe/bookstore/event space/coworking hybrids like Ada’s so very important. Founded in 2010—roughly an eon ago in the Seattle time scheme—Ada’s is the work of Danielle and David Hulton, an enterprising couple with deep connections in the international informations security and cryptoanalysis scenes. David co-founded a leading information security conference, ToorCon, in 1998, and sold his company Pico Computing to a larger technology firm in 2015. Danielle is a Seattle Pacific University graduate in the field of electrical engineering and manages day to day for Ada’s growing team including bookstore, events, co-working, and cafe staff.

Those operations now include Ada’s Discovery Cafe, opened in late September a block from the iconic Broadway strip running north-south through the heart of Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. Once synonymous with the city’s bohemian music scene and LGBTQ community, not to mention coffee culture, today it’s a neighborhood in flux, with construction everywhere and a rapidly changing social milieu. (Walking to the cafe I passed a gentleman in skin-tight neoprene gym clothes and wraparound sunglasses, hitting his Juul vape and checking his iPhone, balanced atop a Segway MiniPro just so.) The Hultons are ardent advocates for Capitol Hill: they’ve lived here for 15 years and owned a business there for around half that time. “We’re passionate about the neighborhood,” says Danielle, and they see the newly opened Discovery Cafe as a way to further serve it.

I asked Danielle Hulton how it happened in the first place, that Ada’s would come to partner with AT&T, and the story is something like a corporate meet-cute. “They contacted us out of the blue,” she tells me, “and at first our event coordinator met with them—he meets with everyone—but very quickly he realized this was something more.” From there Ada’s had the opportunity to pitch their vision to the team at AT&T, and they swung for the fences. “We pitched this really ambitious concept,” says Hulton, “with coffee robots, super high-end third wave coffee, and a focus on being approachable to customers using storytelling. It was a two-page pitch with a few pictures, and a month later they called us back and said yes.”

Ada’s co-founder Danielle Hulton.

The end result feels fresh, new, highly enterprising, and still very much in the early stages of determining the optimal outcome (as they say in tech, one imagines). The hybrid relationship—is this a cafe? is this an AT&T store? is it both?—was still very much in public beta during our visit, which meant being greeted semi-aggressively by a small team of AT&T staff upon entering the cafe’s east entrance, imploring us to sign up for an app and get a discount on the day’s coffee. The app itself requires multiple intrusive permissions and repeated opt-ins; it also controls multiple massive televisions displaying DirectTV (tuned to Food Network during our visit). The store does offer a hands-off locker program to access AT&T purchases, as well as a self-serve kiosk to purchase further products, so the greeter-led fancy AT&T store vibe is still very much being dialed in. “They’re still learning the neighborhood,” Danielle Hulton offers. “They just want it to be a relaxed space.”

But your coffee purchase—indeed, the totality of your coffee interaction—have not been AT&T app-ified, and it’s very much Ada’s own staff, own menu choices, and own expression of playful, geeky coffee culture on exhibit here at the pop-up. That’s the key compound word here, “pop-up,” as Discovery Cafe is officially a three-year commitment in which Ada’s has complete creative control over the bar space. “We control everything from here”—pointing to the bookshelf, stacked with titles by Ursula Le Guin, Roxane Gay, and Cordelia Fine—”to here,” says Danielle, gesturing to the end of the coffee bar. Over the next three years, one presumes that AT&T’s hopes the space, a kind of ur-millennial New Seattle tech denizen AT&T store on steroids (or rather, nootropics), can make waves and shift units on Capitol Hill. In the meantime, we’ve got a very ambitious little coffee bar to enjoy.

Overseeing the insertion order for said ambition is Cole McBride, the 2018 United States Barista Champion and a career competition barista. The Hulton’s relationship with McBride extends back the better part of a decade, when McBride—in a previous capacity with Seattle’s Visions Espresso coffee supply and consultancy—helped train and set-up the couple’s first coffee bar, at the Ada’s Technical Books flagship store (at 425 15th Ave E, a few blocks straight up the hill). At the new Ada’s Discovery Cafe McBride has been given what appears to be free reign to design a challenging, surprising, playfully geeky take on the coffee bar menu in 2018, chockablock with flourishes from frozen espressos to cocktail riffs like the “Cannon Iced Coffee” made with Scrappy’s lime bitters (an ode to the drink’s creator, Pacific Northwest coffee professional Mike Cannon) to a series of drinks brewed on co-founder David Hulton’s own line of KYOTOBOT robotic coffee brewers.

Cole McBride with KYOTOBOT.

Shots drop into frozen espresso cups.

That frozen espresso? With its Igloo cooler full of billowing dry ice? It works. Made on my visit with Verve Coffee‘s Ethiopia Sakara, the shot offers loads of warm-cold contrast upon first sip (expect an icy lip mark on your cup), melding into a lovely sort of melted chocolate orange thing for the back half of the shot. It’s the drink we tried at Ada’s I could most see myself coming back for, as a civilian coffee enjoyer, to drink for fun on future visits to the neighborhood.

“Cole taught David and I everything we know about coffee,” says Danielle, “and through the years we stayed in touch online and we’ve followed his journey. He’s a really great fit for the space and for what we’re trying to do for accessibility, and we’re excited and proud to have him onboard.”

There’s that word again—accessibility—and so I asked Hulton to help dial it in. The menu at Ada’s Discovery Cafe is a lot of things: exciting, challenging, unabashedly weird, and oddly reverent to the coffee styles of yesteryear, with options like dry and iced cappuccinos and shakeratos. But I’m not sure the word I’d use is “accessible“, or at least not in the same way as, say, the massive hulking Starbucks Reserve store a few blocks down the road, whose presence at five years in now looms over any other new coffee project on the Hill. I feel like David and Danielle Hulton understand the question well.

Ada’s co-founder David Hulton.

“Accessible, in this context, refers to our approach,” Danielle tells me. “We own a technical bookstore, you know, and we want that to be accessible, but we sell books about quantum mechanics! The idea is, this is something anyone can get into, and we will make it really friendly for you without being snobby, and the same thing extends to coffee. The whole point of our brand is to be curious.”

That’s all well and good, and this notion of democratizing specialty coffee for the curious is something we’re hearing more and more of from new cafes around the world. Snobbishness, it turns out, isn’t great for business. Making delicious coffee accessible, however, more assuredly is. Where frozen espressos and siphon robots fit into the equation, I’m not totally sure (quantum mechanics is not my field), but I do know that the menu at Ada’s is unabashedly fun, and frequently surprising, in a kind of “nerds take over the cafeteria” sort of way.

“In the last few days of this soft opening we’ve had executives come in here from AT&T, and they don’t know much about the coffee industry,” Danielle Hulton tells me, by way of example. “One of the executives ordered a latte, and she was just…blown away. I mean, she went out of her way to say it was the best latte she’d ever had. That’s just quality beans and quality milk. No extra flourish, just quality—and that’s cool for me. This space can introduce people who would maybe never go into a third wave shop for what coffee could be.”

“They see the value of what we’re doing as small brand trying to innovate in the coffee scene,” she continues candidly. “They could have easily partnered with someone like Starbucks or Tully’s.”

But they did not, in fact, partner with Tully’s or Starbucks, or any other multi-national coffee conglomerate. Instead, they partnered with Ada’s, a small business whose co-founders seem to be swaddling their new creation into the world like loving parents of a second child, with lots of lessons learned and hopes and dreams for the future and also some quite natural concerns. The interior design vibe, controlled entirely by AT&T, feels like what you’d find in the common room event space of a fancy new condo building. The TV’s are big and garish and have been widely derided by commenters in the local press. The footprint for books and magazines, while well-curated, is far too small—with all that space, and all that expertise from the team at Ada’s, it could easily be expanded to include more titles.

I guess I just want more Ada’s in the Ada’s Discovery Cafe experience at AT&T Lounge, but therein lies the devil’s bargain of big brand/small brand collaboration. It is rarely ever perfect, but it has the capacity to create experiences that get people talking and pique their fascination, and on that front the Ada’s + AT&T project has been a roaring success out the gate. People want to see and experience this thing for themselves, and in today’s ever-crowded new cafe market, that’s saying something.

And so for at least the next three years we get Ada’s Discovery Cafe, which means more dry ice espressos, more highball iced cappuccinos, more coffee cocktail riffs from morning ’til afternoon, and more from our new friend KYOTOBOT. Maybe this really is the future, in which enormous brands partner with tiny brands to help create a version of both for more people to enjoy. Perhaps we, as a society, can requisition further nodes of collaborative dispensation betwixt large corporations (with money and vision) and indie companies (with good ideas/delicious products/etc) so that exciting and interesting things have the backing and platform to capture popular imagination at scale. This is how a lot of great literature and film and music is made, after all—as a collaboration of art and industry.

More good ideas, more tasty coffee, more books, and maybe, you know, if you need it, some more GB for your data plan. This is… not capitalism, exactly, or at least not any sort of zero-sum straight-line version of it. But in 2018 it feels very much like Capitol Hill.

Ada's Discovery Cafe is located at 800 E Thomas St, Seattle. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook and Instagram.

Jordan Michelman (@suitcasewine) is a co-founder and editor at Sprudge Media Network, a contributor to Portland Monthly and Willamette Week, and co-author of The New Rules of Coffee. Read more Jordan Michelman on Sprudge. 

The post Cell Phones! Robots! Frozen Espresso! At Ada’s Discovery Cafe appeared first on Sprudge.

Cell Phones! Robots! Frozen Espresso! At Ada’s Discovery Cafe published first on https://medium.com/@LinLinCoffee

[epchapman89]

Cell Phones! Robots! Frozen Espresso! At Ada’s Discovery Cafe

In the future—not long from now, surely—each and every telecom data replenishment node will sport a far-out high-end cyber modified coffee experience. But here in 2018 there is Ada’s Discovery Cafe, a first-of-its-kind high-flying collaboration between Seattle local indie Ada’s Technical Books and multinational telecommunications conglomerate AT&T, open now at Broadway and East Thomas.

It’s a match made in Seattle, or at least the Seattle of today, where rising rents and influx of new money tech culture make successful cafe/bookstore/event space/coworking hybrids like Ada’s so very important. Founded in 2010—roughly an eon ago in the Seattle time scheme—Ada’s is the work of Danielle and David Hulton, an enterprising couple with deep connections in the international informations security and cryptoanalysis scenes. David co-founded a leading information security conference, ToorCon, in 1998, and sold his company Pico Computing to a larger technology firm in 2015. Danielle is a Seattle Pacific University graduate in the field of electrical engineering and manages day to day for Ada’s growing team including bookstore, events, co-working, and cafe staff.

Those operations now include Ada’s Discovery Cafe, opened in late September a block from the iconic Broadway strip running north-south through the heart of Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. Once synonymous with the city’s bohemian music scene and LGBTQ community, not to mention coffee culture, today it’s a neighborhood in flux, with construction everywhere and a rapidly changing social milieu. (Walking to the cafe I passed a gentleman in skin-tight neoprene gym clothes and wraparound sunglasses, hitting his Juul vape and checking his iPhone, balanced atop a Segway MiniPro just so.) The Hultons are ardent advocates for Capitol Hill: they’ve lived here for 15 years and owned a business there for around half that time. “We’re passionate about the neighborhood,” says Danielle, and they see the newly opened Discovery Cafe as a way to further serve it.

I asked Danielle Hulton how it happened in the first place, that Ada’s would come to partner with AT&T, and the story is something like a corporate meet-cute. “They contacted us out of the blue,” she tells me, “and at first our event coordinator met with them—he meets with everyone—but very quickly he realized this was something more.” From there Ada’s had the opportunity to pitch their vision to the team at AT&T, and they swung for the fences. “We pitched this really ambitious concept,” says Hulton, “with coffee robots, super high-end third wave coffee, and a focus on being approachable to customers using storytelling. It was a two-page pitch with a few pictures, and a month later they called us back and said yes.”

Ada’s co-founder Danielle Hulton.

The end result feels fresh, new, highly enterprising, and still very much in the early stages of determining the optimal outcome (as they say in tech, one imagines). The hybrid relationship—is this a cafe? is this an AT&T store? is it both?—was still very much in public beta during our visit, which meant being greeted semi-aggressively by a small team of AT&T staff upon entering the cafe’s east entrance, imploring us to sign up for an app and get a discount on the day’s coffee. The app itself requires multiple intrusive permissions and repeated opt-ins; it also controls multiple massive televisions displaying DirectTV (tuned to Food Network during our visit). The store does offer a hands-off locker program to access AT&T purchases, as well as a self-serve kiosk to purchase further products, so the greeter-led fancy AT&T store vibe is still very much being dialed in. “They’re still learning the neighborhood,” Danielle Hulton offers. “They just want it to be a relaxed space.”

But your coffee purchase—indeed, the totality of your coffee interaction—have not been AT&T app-ified, and it’s very much Ada’s own staff, own menu choices, and own expression of playful, geeky coffee culture on exhibit here at the pop-up. That’s the key compound word here, “pop-up,” as Discovery Cafe is officially a three-year commitment in which Ada’s has complete creative control over the bar space. “We control everything from here”—pointing to the bookshelf, stacked with titles by Ursula Le Guin, Roxane Gay, and Cordelia Fine—”to here,” says Danielle, gesturing to the end of the coffee bar. Over the next three years, one presumes that AT&T’s hopes the space, a kind of ur-millennial New Seattle tech denizen AT&T store on steroids (or rather, nootropics), can make waves and shift units on Capitol Hill. In the meantime, we’ve got a very ambitious little coffee bar to enjoy.

Overseeing the insertion order for said ambition is Cole McBride, the 2018 United States Barista Champion and a career competition barista. The Hulton’s relationship with McBride extends back the better part of a decade, when McBride—in a previous capacity with Seattle’s Visions Espresso coffee supply and consultancy—helped train and set-up the couple’s first coffee bar, at the Ada’s Technical Books flagship store (at 425 15th Ave E, a few blocks straight up the hill). At the new Ada’s Discovery Cafe McBride has been given what appears to be free reign to design a challenging, surprising, playfully geeky take on the coffee bar menu in 2018, chockablock with flourishes from frozen espressos to cocktail riffs like the “Cannon Iced Coffee” made with Scrappy’s lime bitters (an ode to the drink’s creator, Pacific Northwest coffee professional Mike Cannon) to a series of drinks brewed on co-founder David Hulton’s own line of KYOTOBOT robotic coffee brewers.

Cole McBride with KYOTOBOT.

Shots drop into frozen espresso cups.

That frozen espresso? With its Igloo cooler full of billowing dry ice? It works. Made on my visit with Verve Coffee‘s Ethiopia Sakara, the shot offers loads of warm-cold contrast upon first sip (expect an icy lip mark on your cup), melding into a lovely sort of melted chocolate orange thing for the back half of the shot. It’s the drink we tried at Ada’s I could most see myself coming back for, as a civilian coffee enjoyer, to drink for fun on future visits to the neighborhood.

“Cole taught David and I everything we know about coffee,” says Danielle, “and through the years we stayed in touch online and we’ve followed his journey. He’s a really great fit for the space and for what we’re trying to do for accessibility, and we’re excited and proud to have him onboard.”

There’s that word again—accessibility—and so I asked Hulton to help dial it in. The menu at Ada’s Discovery Cafe is a lot of things: exciting, challenging, unabashedly weird, and oddly reverent to the coffee styles of yesteryear, with options like dry and iced cappuccinos and shakeratos. But I’m not sure the word I’d use is “accessible“, or at least not in the same way as, say, the massive hulking Starbucks Reserve store a few blocks down the road, whose presence at five years in now looms over any other new coffee project on the Hill. I feel like David and Danielle Hulton understand the question well.

Ada’s co-founder David Hulton.

“Accessible, in this context, refers to our approach,” Danielle tells me. “We own a technical bookstore, you know, and we want that to be accessible, but we sell books about quantum mechanics! The idea is, this is something anyone can get into, and we will make it really friendly for you without being snobby, and the same thing extends to coffee. The whole point of our brand is to be curious.”

That’s all well and good, and this notion of democratizing specialty coffee for the curious is something we’re hearing more and more of from new cafes around the world. Snobbishness, it turns out, isn’t great for business. Making delicious coffee accessible, however, more assuredly is. Where frozen espressos and siphon robots fit into the equation, I’m not totally sure (quantum mechanics is not my field), but I do know that the menu at Ada’s is unabashedly fun, and frequently surprising, in a kind of “nerds take over the cafeteria” sort of way.

“In the last few days of this soft opening we’ve had executives come in here from AT&T, and they don’t know much about the coffee industry,” Danielle Hulton tells me, by way of example. “One of the executives ordered a latte, and she was just…blown away. I mean, she went out of her way to say it was the best latte she’d ever had. That’s just quality beans and quality milk. No extra flourish, just quality—and that’s cool for me. This space can introduce people who would maybe never go into a third wave shop for what coffee could be.”

“They see the value of what we’re doing as small brand trying to innovate in the coffee scene,” she continues candidly. “They could have easily partnered with someone like Starbucks or Tully’s.”

But they did not, in fact, partner with Tully’s or Starbucks, or any other multi-national coffee conglomerate. Instead, they partnered with Ada’s, a small business whose co-founders seem to be swaddling their new creation into the world like loving parents of a second child, with lots of lessons learned and hopes and dreams for the future and also some quite natural concerns. The interior design vibe, controlled entirely by AT&T, feels like what you’d find in the common room event space of a fancy new condo building. The TV’s are big and garish and have been widely derided by commenters in the local press. The footprint for books and magazines, while well-curated, is far too small—with all that space, and all that expertise from the team at Ada’s, it could easily be expanded to include more titles.

I guess I just want more Ada’s in the Ada’s Discovery Cafe experience at AT&T Lounge, but therein lies the devil’s bargain of big brand/small brand collaboration. It is rarely ever perfect, but it has the capacity to create experiences that get people talking and pique their fascination, and on that front the Ada’s + AT&T project has been a roaring success out the gate. People want to see and experience this thing for themselves, and in today’s ever-crowded new cafe market, that’s saying something.

And so for at least the next three years we get Ada’s Discovery Cafe, which means more dry ice espressos, more highball iced cappuccinos, more coffee cocktail riffs from morning ’til afternoon, and more from our new friend KYOTOBOT. Maybe this really is the future, in which enormous brands partner with tiny brands to help create a version of both for more people to enjoy. Perhaps we, as a society, can requisition further nodes of collaborative dispensation betwixt large corporations (with money and vision) and indie companies (with good ideas/delicious products/etc) so that exciting and interesting things have the backing and platform to capture popular imagination at scale. This is how a lot of great literature and film and music is made, after all—as a collaboration of art and industry.

More good ideas, more tasty coffee, more books, and maybe, you know, if you need it, some more GB for your data plan. This is… not capitalism, exactly, or at least not any sort of zero-sum straight-line version of it. But in 2018 it feels very much like Capitol Hill.

Ada's Discovery Cafe is located at 800 E Thomas St, Seattle. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook and Instagram.

Jordan Michelman (@suitcasewine) is a co-founder and editor at Sprudge Media Network, a contributor to Portland Monthly and Willamette Week, and co-author of The New Rules of Coffee. Read more Jordan Michelman on Sprudge. 

The post Cell Phones! Robots! Frozen Espresso! At Ada’s Discovery Cafe appeared first on Sprudge.

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Cell Phones! Robots! Frozen Espresso! At Ada’s Discovery Cafe

In the future—not long from now, surely—each and every telecom data replenishment node will sport a far-out high-end cyber modified coffee experience. But here in 2018 there is Ada’s Discovery Cafe, a first-of-its-kind high-flying collaboration between Seattle local indie Ada’s Technical Books and multinational telecommunications conglomerate AT&T, open now at Broadway and East Thomas.

It’s a match made in Seattle, or at least the Seattle of today, where rising rents and influx of new money tech culture make successful cafe/bookstore/event space/coworking hybrids like Ada’s so very important. Founded in 2010—roughly an eon ago in the Seattle time scheme—Ada’s is the work of Danielle and David Hulton, an enterprising couple with deep connections in the international informations security and cryptoanalysis scenes. David co-founded a leading information security conference, ToorCon, in 1998, and sold his company Pico Computing to a larger technology firm in 2015. Danielle is a Seattle Pacific University graduate in the field of electrical engineering and manages day to day for Ada’s growing team including bookstore, events, co-working, and cafe staff.

Those operations now include Ada’s Discovery Cafe, opened in late September a block from the iconic Broadway strip running north-south through the heart of Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. Once synonymous with the city’s bohemian music scene and LGBTQ community, not to mention coffee culture, today it’s a neighborhood in flux, with construction everywhere and a rapidly changing social milieu. (Walking to the cafe I passed a gentleman in skin-tight neoprene gym clothes and wraparound sunglasses, hitting his Juul vape and checking his iPhone, balanced atop a Segway MiniPro just so.) The Hultons are ardent advocates for Capitol Hill: they’ve lived here for 15 years and owned a business there for around half that time. “We’re passionate about the neighborhood,” says Danielle, and they see the newly opened Discovery Cafe as a way to further serve it.

I asked Danielle Hulton how it happened in the first place, that Ada’s would come to partner with AT&T, and the story is something like a corporate meet-cute. “They contacted us out of the blue,” she tells me, “and at first our event coordinator met with them—he meets with everyone—but very quickly he realized this was something more.” From there Ada’s had the opportunity to pitch their vision to the team at AT&T, and they swung for the fences. “We pitched this really ambitious concept,” says Hulton, “with coffee robots, super high-end third wave coffee, and a focus on being approachable to customers using storytelling. It was a two-page pitch with a few pictures, and a month later they called us back and said yes.”

Ada’s co-founder Danielle Hulton.

The end result feels fresh, new, highly enterprising, and still very much in the early stages of determining the optimal outcome (as they say in tech, one imagines). The hybrid relationship—is this a cafe? is this an AT&T store? is it both?—was still very much in public beta during our visit, which meant being greeted semi-aggressively by a small team of AT&T staff upon entering the cafe’s east entrance, imploring us to sign up for an app and get a discount on the day’s coffee. The app itself requires multiple intrusive permissions and repeated opt-ins; it also controls multiple massive televisions displaying DirectTV (tuned to Food Network during our visit). The store does offer a hands-off locker program to access AT&T purchases, as well as a self-serve kiosk to purchase further products, so the greeter-led fancy AT&T store vibe is still very much being dialed in. “They’re still learning the neighborhood,” Danielle Hulton offers. “They just want it to be a relaxed space.”

But your coffee purchase—indeed, the totality of your coffee interaction—have not been AT&T app-ified, and it’s very much Ada’s own staff, own menu choices, and own expression of playful, geeky coffee culture on exhibit here at the pop-up. That’s the key compound word here, “pop-up,” as Discovery Cafe is officially a three-year commitment in which Ada’s has complete creative control over the bar space. “We control everything from here”—pointing to the bookshelf, stacked with titles by Ursula Le Guin, Roxane Gay, and Cordelia Fine—”to here,” says Danielle, gesturing to the end of the coffee bar. Over the next three years, one presumes that AT&T’s hopes the space, a kind of ur-millennial New Seattle tech denizen AT&T store on steroids (or rather, nootropics), can make waves and shift units on Capitol Hill. In the meantime, we’ve got a very ambitious little coffee bar to enjoy.

Overseeing the insertion order for said ambition is Cole McBride, the 2018 United States Barista Champion and a career competition barista. The Hulton’s relationship with McBride extends back the better part of a decade, when McBride—in a previous capacity with Seattle’s Visions Espresso coffee supply and consultancy—helped train and set-up the couple’s first coffee bar, at the Ada’s Technical Books flagship store (at 425 15th Ave E, a few blocks straight up the hill). At the new Ada’s Discovery Cafe McBride has been given what appears to be free reign to design a challenging, surprising, playfully geeky take on the coffee bar menu in 2018, chockablock with flourishes from frozen espressos to cocktail riffs like the “Cannon Iced Coffee” made with Scrappy’s lime bitters (an ode to the drink’s creator, Pacific Northwest coffee professional Mike Cannon) to a series of drinks brewed on co-founder David Hulton’s own line of KYOTOBOT robotic coffee brewers.

Cole McBride with KYOTOBOT.

Shots drop into frozen espresso cups.

That frozen espresso? With its Igloo cooler full of billowing dry ice? It works. Made on my visit with Verve Coffee‘s Ethiopia Sakara, the shot offers loads of warm-cold contrast upon first sip (expect an icy lip mark on your cup), melding into a lovely sort of melted chocolate orange thing for the back half of the shot. It’s the drink we tried at Ada’s I could most see myself coming back for, as a civilian coffee enjoyer, to drink for fun on future visits to the neighborhood.

“Cole taught David and I everything we know about coffee,” says Danielle, “and through the years we stayed in touch online and we’ve followed his journey. He’s a really great fit for the space and for what we’re trying to do for accessibility, and we’re excited and proud to have him onboard.”

There’s that word again—accessibility—and so I asked Hulton to help dial it in. The menu at Ada’s Discovery Cafe is a lot of things: exciting, challenging, unabashedly weird, and oddly reverent to the coffee styles of yesteryear, with options like dry and iced cappuccinos and shakeratos. But I’m not sure the word I’d use is “accessible“, or at least not in the same way as, say, the massive hulking Starbucks Reserve store a few blocks down the road, whose presence at five years in now looms over any other new coffee project on the Hill. I feel like David and Danielle Hulton understand the question well.

Ada’s co-founder David Hulton.

“Accessible, in this context, refers to our approach,” Danielle tells me. “We own a technical bookstore, you know, and we want that to be accessible, but we sell books about quantum mechanics! The idea is, this is something anyone can get into, and we will make it really friendly for you without being snobby, and the same thing extends to coffee. The whole point of our brand is to be curious.”

That’s all well and good, and this notion of democratizing specialty coffee for the curious is something we’re hearing more and more of from new cafes around the world. Snobbishness, it turns out, isn’t great for business. Making delicious coffee accessible, however, more assuredly is. Where frozen espressos and siphon robots fit into the equation, I’m not totally sure (quantum mechanics is not my field), but I do know that the menu at Ada’s is unabashedly fun, and frequently surprising, in a kind of “nerds take over the cafeteria” sort of way.

“In the last few days of this soft opening we’ve had executives come in here from AT&T, and they don’t know much about the coffee industry,” Danielle Hulton tells me, by way of example. “One of the executives ordered a latte, and she was just…blown away. I mean, she went out of her way to say it was the best latte she’d ever had. That’s just quality beans and quality milk. No extra flourish, just quality—and that’s cool for me. This space can introduce people who would maybe never go into a third wave shop for what coffee could be.”

“They see the value of what we’re doing as small brand trying to innovate in the coffee scene,” she continues candidly. “They could have easily partnered with someone like Starbucks or Tully’s.”

But they did not, in fact, partner with Tully’s or Starbucks, or any other multi-national coffee conglomerate. Instead, they partnered with Ada’s, a small business whose co-founders seem to be swaddling their new creation into the world like loving parents of a second child, with lots of lessons learned and hopes and dreams for the future and also some quite natural concerns. The interior design vibe, controlled entirely by AT&T, feels like what you’d find in the common room event space of a fancy new condo building. The TV’s are big and garish and have been widely derided by commenters in the local press. The footprint for books and magazines, while well-curated, is far too small—with all that space, and all that expertise from the team at Ada’s, it could easily be expanded to include more titles.

I guess I just want more Ada’s in the Ada’s Discovery Cafe experience at AT&T Lounge, but therein lies the devil’s bargain of big brand/small brand collaboration. It is rarely ever perfect, but it has the capacity to create experiences that get people talking and pique their fascination, and on that front the Ada’s + AT&T project has been a roaring success out the gate. People want to see and experience this thing for themselves, and in today’s ever-crowded new cafe market, that’s saying something.

And so for at least the next three years we get Ada’s Discovery Cafe, which means more dry ice espressos, more highball iced cappuccinos, more coffee cocktail riffs from morning ’til afternoon, and more from our new friend KYOTOBOT. Maybe this really is the future, in which enormous brands partner with tiny brands to help create a version of both for more people to enjoy. Perhaps we, as a society, can requisition further nodes of collaborative dispensation betwixt large corporations (with money and vision) and indie companies (with good ideas/delicious products/etc) so that exciting and interesting things have the backing and platform to capture popular imagination at scale. This is how a lot of great literature and film and music is made, after all—as a collaboration of art and industry.

More good ideas, more tasty coffee, more books, and maybe, you know, if you need it, some more GB for your data plan. This is… not capitalism, exactly, or at least not any sort of zero-sum straight-line version of it. But in 2018 it feels very much like Capitol Hill.

Ada's Discovery Cafe is located at 800 E Thomas St, Seattle. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook and Instagram.

Jordan Michelman (@suitcasewine) is a co-founder and editor at Sprudge Media Network, a contributor to Portland Monthly and Willamette Week, and co-author of The New Rules of Coffee. Read more Jordan Michelman on Sprudge. 

The post Cell Phones! Robots! Frozen Espresso! At Ada’s Discovery Cafe appeared first on Sprudge.

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