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alifeincoffeespoons · 4 years

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a moony has spawned in the server, a modern wolfstar au: chapter eight

r/collegeadmissions Posted by u/thirtysevenprime 7 hours ago | 3.2k points

I feel like I wasted my time in high school

Yeah, I joined all the “right” clubs. I worked my way up to become the SciOly captain. I did research at a T20 college and got a recommendation from my mentor. I competed in debate at the national level.

I took the hardest classes I could. I slept four hours a night my junior year, struggling to finish my homework for my six AP classes.

I have good grades. I have good test scores. I think my teachers like me.

But I feel like I wasted my time in high school. What was this all for?

For my college apps, I tell myself. All for that. But nothing’s guaranteed still—all I did was tick the right boxes. And they’re ticked. I fulfill the criteria for a competitive candidate at an Ivy, at Stanford, at MIT. But almost everyone applying is a competitive candidate. Almost everyone applying has done incredible things. Almost everyone applying has an amazing story. Who’s to say that the admissions officers will take me over everyone else applying?

And if they don’t—well, what was this all for?

I have a group of friends, sure, but are we really friends? We eat lunch together, and we talk about the homework that was assigned last night, but we don’t hang out on the weekends or anything. Why? We’re all too busy.

I’ve had a crush on the same girl since ninth grade. She’s sweet, funny, and gorgeous. We’re friendly, and she might even like me back. But I still haven’t asked her out, because I know I don’t have time for a relationship.

When I was in middle school, I loved watching those TV shows and movies about high school. The movies told me that high school would be fun parties and romance and friends for life. They told me that high school would be filled with drama, yes, but also laughter and moments of levity. They told me that I’d have a good time.

Did I have a good time? No. Did I have a bad time? Also no. My time in high school has been, to be honest, like living in a black hole. Every day is just going through the motions, one step forward, on and on and on. Until I reach the end—until I get the reward, an acceptance letter from my dream schools.

But what if there is no reward? What if I get to the end, and there’s nothing there? What then?

Would it all have been for nothing? What was this all for?

moony (Today at 11:43 AM) https://www.reddit.com/r/collegeadmissions/comments/k8ix2j/i_feel_like_i_wasted_my_time_in_high_school/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 have you seen this reddit post?

padfoot (Today at 11:44 AM) i’ll check it out wow big oof for this guy it’s slightly relatable i guess? not completely so like i enjoyed some of high school? i do agree that it always feels like there’s not enough time, and i’ve definitely pulled too many all-nighters to finish my homework and stuff but at the same time i’ve made some pretty good friends there’s james and marlene, and at least i think we’re friends and we’ve had good times together

moony (Today at 11:46 AM) that makes sense

padfoot (Today at 11:48 AM) HI MOONY

moony (Today at 11:48 AM) uh hi sirius? we’re already talking?

padfoot (Today at 11:48 AM) I’m not Sirius I’m James!! Nice to finally meet the person Sirius keeps talking to WHILE WE’RE SUPPOSED TO BE WORKING

moony (Today at 11:49 AM) oh i’m sorry

padfoot (Today at 11:49 AM) Nah it’s his fault not yours Because Sirius clearly doesn’t understand the importance of representing the Federation of Russia in SPECPOL and ASDFGklmnbvcghjkl;’ ugh sorry about that james is an asshole and stole my phone from me i managed to get it back and i’ve also now relocated to the other side of the table

moony (Today at 11:51 AM) oh don’t worry about it also he said you’re supposed to be working?

padfoot (Today at 11:52 AM) ehh we’re at a model un conference at mit right now it’s lunch so like all the annoyingly intense mun kids (hint: james) are drafting working papers and stuff

moony (Today at 11:52 AM) oh wait shouldn’t you be doing that too since you’re like the vp of model un and all

padfoot (Today at 11:53 AM) and james is the president and my mun partner so he can type up ways to revise the un convention on the law of the sea with regards to the south china sea crisis all he wants but i for one am going to enjoy my shitty free salami and american cheese sandwich and talk to you

moony (Today at 11:54 AM) oh okay

padfoot (Today at 11:55 AM) anyway what about you? re: the reddit post you sent me how do you feel about it?

moony (Today at 11:56 AM) i mean given that i’m homeschooled it’s not like i could choose to have that kind of a social life even if i had time to i guess i have like one friend? but he has other friends too and i can’t expect him to hang out with me over them when i don’t know any of them so i didn’t even really have a high school experience to miss out on

padfoot (Today at 12:01 PM) :( i’m sorry if it makes you feel better, i do relate to the second part of the post where he talked about romance and never making a move

moony (Today at 12:02 PM) wait how? are people at your school blind or something?

Mouth, insert foot. Remus wonders if there’s a cure for compulsive idiocy.

padfoot (Today at 12:03 PM) i mean being gay and closeted isn’t exactly conducive to real, meaningful romantic relationships

moony (Today at 12:04 PM) i’m sorry

padfoot (Today at 12:05 PM) it’s fine, honestly okay lunch is over, so i have to get back to committee but call you later? i’ll have some time tonight probably

moony (Today at 12:06 PM) sounds good

read more on ao3!

#wolfstar #remus x sirius #remus lupin #sirius black #harry potter #james potter #marlene mckinnon #lily evans #jily #james x lily #dorcas meadowes #dorlene #hp #marauders #mwpp #marauders fanfiction #harry potter fanfiction #hp fic #my writing

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irarelypostanything · 5 years

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Slice of Life

[Dan]

In an unheard-of little town there was a somewhat well-known company (you probably haven’t heard of it). This company site was perfectly divided into a halved-off collection of secure facilities, where unknown things happened, and open facilities, where fuck nothing happened. It was widely believed that the open facilities existed solely to do made-up work to legitimize the actions of the secure facilities. This theory made a hell of a lot of sense to Dan, who jumped on every opportunity to ridicule everyone and everything dumb enough to cross paths with him.

“How do you like it?” he asked Ryan, the new hire. They were in a conference room. He had just finished a back-to-back meeting about something boring, like agile, or software as a service, or the necessity of tracking bug #71337 so as not to prevent hardware component #85858 from doing another #16667.

“Um,” Ryan hesitated, “does everyone here seem a little bit...toxic...to you?”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” responded Dan, “people here seem kind of strict at first, but you’ll quickly see that everyone is pretty relaxed.”

Dan un-muted the phone. “Hey fuck nuggets,” said Dan, “which of you idiots was stupid enough to run software on our card while half of the hardware team was trying to replace it?”

Ryan looked shocked. Dan muted the phone again. “Sorry, I thought I was muted,” he said. “That was supposed to be a joke.”

Dan un-muted the phone, since it was now apparent he was never joking. “No one? No one did it? Brad, I know from the logs and the timestamps that it was you, I just kind of hoped you had the decency to take responsibility for it before I kicked your ass off the team. Everyone else, you’d better have some good fucking news for me.”

In alphabetical order, Dan cycled through the list of software engineers he oversaw. In alphabetical order, Dan insulted the competence and basic intelligence of each one. Ryan observed a flurry of confrontation after confrontation, as if he was watching a Game of Thrones episode written by a 12-year-old who had only recently learned that the F-bomb raised eyebrows.

“By the way,” said Dan, after he had finished, “I just brought on Ryan. Everyone make Ryan feel welcome: He’s cheaper than all of you, and probably better. If you do a really good job of training him, I hope he replaces at least one but probably two of you.”

[Kevin]

“You made the right choice immediately quitting Dan’s team and joining Andy’s,” said a nondescript, low-ranked software engineer named Kevin in his monotone voice. Kevin looked like he was 16, even though he had to have been at least in his 20s. In a rambling, incoherent speech that almost started to be about software before derailing into a confusing series of digressions about anime, corgis, Undertale, corgis, and how Stannis Baratheon had done nothing wrong until the later seasons, Kevin finally arrived at something that could justifiably be called a point.

“It was nice talking to you,” said Ryan. He promptly left.

Having finished the process of ramping up the new hire and doing his professional duty, Kevin got up to talk to Andy about their next set of software goals. This quickly diverged into a rant about how Stannis Baratheon had done nothing wrong until the later seasons.

[Andy]

After a minor one-hour interruption, Andy made it on time to his scheduled presentation for the roughly 50 customer representatives who had flown from the East Coast to hear him speak.

“Software testing,” began Andy, “pretty boring stuff, right?” He made sure to make eye contact with at least two rows in the front and the one in the back. He walked around the room with typical ease. This was not his first rodeo, so to speak.

“But look at these costs.” He beckoned to the PowerPoint, which was simply a dumbed-down slide displaying bars decreasing in length. “Most mobile app companies had to invest bucket-loads into literal stacks of test phones, until a more virtualized testbed came along. Our own site in Baltimore struggled with unexpected integration costs, until they adopted Google Test and changed the game for the rest of us. This is engineering at its finest, and what I would like to present to you is software’s latest evolution.

“Virtualized hardware, for all our major cards. Software-defined EVERYTHING. By leveraging existing models, my team has already managed to completely shift the existing paradigm. We have cut costs by roughly 37.6%, and all we had to do was use a system I have personally designed with only 2% of my allocated budget so far. I laid the groundwork. My team put in the real work. We demonstrated the added value that this new model creates, and we did so to bring the technology of tomorrow to you.”

He dropped his mic. The customers applauded and gave him a standing ovation. As he walked out, they chanted his name.

[Nora]

Nora was finishing up for the day. Since that morning, sometime in the middle of her drive to work, she had felt an unshakable feeling of sadness coupled with an even more mysterious feeling of absolute loathing.

“How was your day?” Dan asked her. She hated how he entered her cubicle instead of remaining outside of the invisible lines. Ordinarily she would have been okay with it, but today everything felt off.

“I don’t like anything about this,” she said. Her conviction, more so than her quickness, surprised herself. “I don’t like where I work, I don’t like where I live, and I don’t like who I am.”

“How old are you?” asked Dan.

“25.”

“Quarter-life crisis. These are the typical signs.”

She and Dan had been friends for three years. They had learned the ropes together, written and peer-reviewed thousands of lines of codes together. They had saved demo after demo, flown out simultaneously for efforts in San Diego and DC and even Toronto. They had proven that two people who worked well together could do more with a shoestring budget than most leads could do with a revenue sea.

None of that mattered to her today.

“What’s wrong?” asked Dan.

“Everything.”

“Be specific.”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not really.”

Nora drove home. Nora slept with her boyfriend. She woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of his snoring, and even two midnight beers could not get her to drift off again. She looked at her boyfriend for a long time...they had been together for a year. Yesterday she loved him. Tonight she saw nothing in him. He just looked ugly, a little overweight, kind of stupid when he spoke. It didn’t feel like there was any reconciling it. She wanted to go for a late-night drive but then remembered the beer.

On a whim, outside of the apartment they shared, Nora pulled out her Android and went onto Uber. Continuing on this whim, she checked Uber and plugged in her parent’s house. Monterey Blvd. San Francisco.

She looked at the cost. $127 and 38 cents.

By morning she was gone.

#short stories #fiction

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mst3kproject · 7 years

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Reptilicus

I defy you to find something in this movie that doesn't qualify it for MST3K. Giant lizardy monster? Check. A musical number that has nothing to do with the plot? We have that. Actors who appear to be dubbed despite also appearing to speak English? The entire cast! Black and white footage tinted blue in an effort to make it look like it belongs in a colour movie? You betcha! Wooden acting? Beakers of kool-aid standing in for SCIENCE? Foreigners pretending to be Americans? Toy boats? Yep, Reptilicus has it all, wrapped up in a bright technicolour package by our old friend, American International Pictures!

It seems tailor-made for the show, and Joel apparently agrees. I wrote most of this review before I found out that Reptilicus was slated to be the Season 11 debut, and now I’m looking forward to seeing how many of my predictions here come true when the episode hits Netflix on Friday.

SPOILERS: none of them! Not a damned one!

Copper miners on the tundra of Lapland discover a piece of a frozen prehistoric monster in the arctic permafrost (never mind that the scene was shot on a nice spring day in the woods somewhere). A guy named Sven is charged with bringing the find back to civilized parts for study. I hope you like Sven, because he's going to keep hanging around for the entire movie, and apparently possesses the same all-purpose security clearance as a Japanese child. He's still in town when the chunk of monster thaws out and begins to regenerate. Ultimately the regrown beast escapes its tank at the Copenhagen Aquarium and goes on a cartoon-people-devouring, scale-model-smashing rampage. Because what else is a prehistoric lizard monster going to do with its spare time?

Yep, that's the quality of effects we're talking about here. I like the windows that appear to be drawn on with crayon.

Being as the movie is set in Denmark, the sign on the building where the monster parts are being kept says AKVARIUM. I don't know why, but my friends and I used to find that outrageously funny. Every time it appeared on screen we would all shout AKVARIUM! in obnoxious faux-German mad scientist voices. Of course, that was years ago. We're now thirty-somethings with mortgages, children, and assorted professional qualifications – but I bet if we all got back together and watched this movie, it would be exactly the same. AKVARIUM!

Had the MST3K of the 90s ever seen fit to tackle Reptilicus, I'm pretty sure they would have made some kind of running joke about the AKVARIUM. I can also imagine them asking Reptilicus if he'd like some coffee with that Danish, the two monsters taking turns on the hexfield to offer competing stories of why Gamera vs Reptilicus fell through, and Dr. Forrester and Frank putting together a 'Visit Beautiful Deep Thirteen' campaign – with or without a lounge act.

It almost feels kind of unfair to attempt any actual analysis of this movie. Analysis is for movies that have higher ambitions, and Reptilicus really does not. If I squinted hard enough I might be able to pull something about scientific over-reach or cooperation between nations out of the mess, but whatever I came up with would be sort of a Last Minute 11th Grade King Lear Essay, made mostly out of coffee and bullshit. All Reptilicus wants is for the audience to have a good time (and maybe to visit Copenhagen), and it does accomplish that even if not quite in the way it wants to.

Rather than talking about what Reptilicus fails at (and believe me, it fails at quite a bit), then, let's talk about how it succeeds. What we really have here is a very fine example of how having something fun to look at can go a long way towards saving a lousy movie.

When you get right down to it, just about everything in Reptilicus is bad. The plot is contrived and full of holes – why do we keep Sven around when by all rights he should be back in the arctic doing his damn job instead of hanging around in Copenhagen? How stupid is just about everybody at the AKVARIUM to let the tail thaw out? Could they really not come up with a better way to suggest drugging the monster than the old trope about 'somebody offhandedly says I wish we could do Thing and somebody else goes why not'? How does General Grayson keep forgetting about the monster's regenerative powers so that he starts shooting at it again?

The acting is terrible. Apparently there's a reason for this – the Danish actors who starred in the production didn't speak any English and had no idea what their lines meant! That's why everything had to be dubbed over later, which means each performance in Reptilicus is a collaboration between two un-talented actors who were truly less than the sum of their parts. Worst of all is Carl Ottosen as General Grayson and the uncredited guy doing his voice. Ottosen almost always looks like he's not entirely sure what he's reacting to, and voiceover guy has only two modes: grouchy grump and solemn declaration. Sometimes he manages to do both at the same time. I hate to say it, but the best actor in the movie is probably Dirch Passer as Petersen the Comic Relief Janitor, who has a passable sense of physical comedy. He almost manages to sell his reactions to things like the electric eel and the microscopic view of his sandwich, even when the jokes themselves aren't particularly funny.

The characters don't have much to them. Sven is a terrible main character, without charisma or recognizable personality or even any motivation. He sticks around for the whole movie and spends most of it just standing there watching other people do stuff. Sometimes he answers phones or acts as a chauffer. He comes across less as the movie’s hero and more as its administrative assistant. Grayson's just there to shout orders and complain, but he's still closer to being a proper protagonist than Sven – maybe this is why they have him narrate a few scenes, in an attempt to correct this bizarre oversight. The professor's two horny daughters never amount to much, and Passer's comedy can't quite save Petersen from being the character everybody most wants to see die (he does not, but at least he's out of the story once the rampage begins). The Scientists are Movie Scientists, too interested in what they might learn to think about things like consequences and personal safety.

The effects are the opposite of convincing, always drawing attention to themselves as effects rather than contributing to the story. I've seen some ridiculous movie monsters, but Reptilicus himself (everybody in the movie refers to the creature as male) is right up there in the top ten. He looks something like a very silly Chinese dragon – a long, skinny, snakelike beast with a forked tongue, a mane of ratty fur down his back, tiny useless legs, and a pair of small wings that are, tragically, never used. Apparently a scene of Reptilicus flying was filmed, but was deemed ‘too unbelievable’ and cut from the film. The monster's acid-spitting consists of squiggles of green goo that resemble radioactive silly string. When he eats a farmer, it is represented by an animated cutout of the man in Reptilicus' mouth.

Okay, so I did just talk about how the movie fails, and I could keep doing so for some time. The comic relief isn't funny. The movie stops for a moment to break into a travel ad. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The point is, Reptilicus objectively sucks and if it were shot like a modern disaster film, all gritty and gray and trying for realism, it would be insufferable. Instead, however, it's cartoony and colourful, and while the effects aren't convincing they're always at least creative. The sets always look like sets, and the models always look like models, but they're elaborate and inspired. Everything sucks, but movie are a visual medium, so if it's fun to watch the viewers will forgive all kinds of sins.

It's also a perfect example of an important bit of bad movie truth: you can't make a bad movie on purpose, not the good kind of bad movie. People can try, but they come up with stuff like The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, which I couldn't even watch all the way through. A truly enjoyable bad movie is one that's trying hard to be a good movie and fails in just the right sort of ways – an intentional bad movie is the equivalent of a belabored explanation of a punch line that wasn’t that funny to begin with. The thing that makes Reptilicus so much fun is the same spark that animates Teenagers from Outer Space, or Starcrash, or even Troll 2 – its sincerity.

Reptilicus is one of the most utterly unapologetic movies I've ever watched. We've all seen movies that seem a bit embarrassed by themselves – remember Being from Another Planet, which wishy-washily tried to be a Serious Movie about Serious People instead of just embracing the fact that it was about a fucking space mummy? Reptilicus is the opposite of that. It's not ashamed of anything, even in the places where by all rights it should be. Its monster is an immobile puppet in a scale model, but the shots linger lovingly on every shoddy detail. Peterson the Comic Relief Janitor ought to be painful, but the script is so earnest that he somehow becomes a meta-joke: the very fact that he's not funny is itself funny. Somebody thought the movie could be used to sell Copenhagen as a tourist destination, so they have the characters tour the city and talk about what a great time they're having. The movie never gives less than its all to anything it puts on the screen.

So yeah, I love Reptilicus. It's never boring and it’s frequently laugh-out-loud funny, and there's nothing in it that's either offensive or scary. There are much worse ways to waste eighty minutes of your life.

#mst3k #reviews #episodes that never were #reptilicus #60s

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