#i really tried to compress it down to be readable

[fey-changeling]

@marnz Omg “I don't care if she's the devil I don't want to be saved!”?????

Ohoho, right, this is the only venture maidens fanfic i'm currently working on (title from this song*), and I'm so sorry I think I have to lore-dump for this to make sense.

Essentially it's about two women who love each other very much who have been forced to make horrible choices/sacrifice their happiness and each other in service of their greater good. It's about them both knowing that they'll be instrumental in each other's destruction but neither wanting to hurt the other. (Feel free to skip straight to the snippet)

Rem: demi-goddess of death, loathes her father the evil god of death

Isolde: minor royal, very powerful cleric of fate

75-ish years ago they fell in love and established a mercenary organisation serving the fates. A few months ago Rem left the organisation, shortly after she stole an ancient artefact and used it to kill her father (no mortal has ever killed a god before and the gods all freaked out). Rem went into hiding, she had Plans™. Months later the fates decide Isolde can't be trusted due to her relationship with Rem, they take away her power permanently and banish her from the organisation. Rem's real goal is to destroy fate itself, severing all the gods' control over mortals.

This fic is set between Rem killing her father and Isolde losing her power, because what if they had met and the fates had a genuine reason to think that Isolde might betray them, and it's angsty and bittersweet.

And here's the snippet

The bedchamber was lit by soft candlelight, and Rem stood by the bed. Unarmoured, hair a mess, clothes crumpled. Although she had clearly been waiting, she was tensed ready to fly, like a prey animal cornered by a predator.

Isolde hadn’t expected the rush of relief or the pain that followed it. Anger and resentment yes, but not relief, not a fresh wave of heartbreak. She was going to cry, gods, she wanted to cry so badly, and she wasn’t sure if she was going to collapse, or how she would rid the building tension from her limbs in any way but spontaneously combusting. Then Rem had crossed the room in a blur, crashed into her and held her tightly against her chest.

It felt like a homecoming. It should have felt like a sin.

When they let go enough to look at each other, Rem’s fingertips moved very lightly over her face, tears rolling unchecked down her cheeks. She was exhausted, it was in every line of her body, the way she held herself. There were dark circles under her eyes and her face was gaunt. Isolde wouldn't think about why. Gently, she wiped the tears away with her thumb.

“Isolde,” Rem brushed her lips against her fingertips. “Isolde,” buried her fingers in her loose hair. “Isolde—” Isolde kissed her for she felt she would go mad if Rem said her name one more time. It was a brief, soft kiss, more than a little uncertain, hiding all that choking desperation.

“Oh, is this…? Is this alright—?” Rem kissed her more deeply, and when they parted Isolde swayed, her head spinning in that oh-so-familiar way.

“It’s worse.” She remarked, clutching at Rem’s shirt hard enough to turn her knuckles white. Rem opened her mouth, likely to apologise, and Isolde kissed her until she felt she would pass out, until she could barely think for the pain it brought. She broke the kiss, gasping into Rem’s shoulder as the world tilted violently around her.

“You absolute fucking masochist.” Her back pressed against the door, Rem leant over her, smiling. She wanted her, she missed her. She wanted to consume Rem and be consumed in turn. Rem would let her, she would indulge her, she always had.

* @rusalkaandtheshepherdgirl i'm tagging you in this because it's your fault this song is stuck in my head all the time 🥰

#this fic concept has been in my head for years #i could talk A LOT about it #i really tried to compress it down to be readable #i'm so sorry #marnz #wip ask meme #i don't care if she's the devil i don't want to be saved #what a fucking long title #no i'm not obsessed with rem's canonical kiss of death. why do you ask #i love writing them even if idk if it's anywhere near the canon characterisation anymore

[blitzturtles]

Title: Night Off

Rating: Teen and Up

Fandom: DC Comics

Pairing(s): JayDick

Summary: “If you’re not here to kill me, then get out!” Dick calls without moving. He should probably double check as to who his intruder is, but the idea of moving is somehow more unappealing than the idea of one of his enemies actually managing to break into his apartment. He’ll take the risk of potential kidnapping if it means that they’ll do most of the bodily lifting for him.

Notes: I was having a chronic pain flare, asked my wife who I should inflict it on, and her answer was, “Jotaro and/or Dick Grayson”. So here’s the Dick Grayson version. Btw, I’m doing a writing / fic giveaway! Check out this post to see how to enter. Goes until 8.25.21!

-

It’s extremely rare for Dick to pull out of a planned patrol, but there are nights when he can’t handle the thought, much less actually suit up and venture out into Gotham. Tonight is one of those nights. Old injuries are rearing their ugly head, making themselves too known to be ignored, and he knows that going out will be a mistake. He’s more likely to cause trouble than he is to prevent it, and he’s not about to cut into someone else’s patrol just to have someone come to his rescue. That’s time that could be better spent, and he hates the idea of anyone knowing the degree of pain he’s dealing with. To know that it cripples him to the point where walking is a slow, agonizing process. It feels like a weakness that he’s not prepared to share.

Bruce has chronic pain. That’s something Dick’s known for years. Possibly since he was a child, but the man never seems to be stopped or even slowed down by it. He’s never missed a patrol. Never needed someone to fish him out of a bad situation brought on by his knee completely giving out on him (not that Dick admitted to that being the problem; he’d lied and claimed it had been freshly injured.) It’s frustrating to watch, and it sets a precedent that Dick can’t keep up with. It makes him feel pathetic on nights like these, and it’s all he can do to try to distract himself with crappy television. Up until the moment when something crashes into his apartment through his-- previously locked-- window.

“If you’re not here to kill me, then get out!” Dick calls without moving. He should probably double check as to who his intruder is, but the idea of moving is somehow more unappealing than the idea of one of his enemies actually managing to break into his apartment. He’ll take the risk of potential kidnapping if it means that they’ll do most of the bodily lifting for him.

Sure enough, Jason shows up in the doorway of his living room a moment later with his helmet at his side, but his cowl still fixed in place. “You’re not dressed,” is the first thing that comes out of his mouth, and it makes Dick’s eyebrows climb up toward his hairline.

“Are you my babysitter now?”

“No,” Jason snarls, “I’m not fucking Bruce.”

“Alright then,” Dick shrugs and tries to leave it at that. The keyword being ‘try’, because Jason never could leave well enough alone.

“Why aren’t you out?”

“Changed my mind. Am I not allowed to do that?” Shit. He sounds unnecessarily snappish. More so aloud than he does in his own head, which he knows is the pain getting the better of him, but that doesn’t mean he wants it to reflect in his tone. He heaves a sigh, “Sorry, just wasn’t up for it tonight, you know? Think I twisted my ankle a little last night, and I thought I would take a night. See if the swelling goes down.”

Jason frowns as he mulls over those words, but he doesn’t outright reject them. “Okay,” he starts, and Dick almost sighs in relief, if only internally, “So that was bullshit.”

Fuck.

“Jason-”

“We can do this all night, so you can keep lying to me, or you can just tell me what’s going on,” Jason’s gaze shifts from Dick to the rest of his apartment, undoubtedly looking for some kind of clue. Or possibly some sort of trouble. Neither of which he finds, because Dick’s too stubborn to ice his joints, and the compression wraps he has on are hidden by his clothes.

“I’m not kidding about my ankle,” Dick says after a moment of contemplating his word choice.

“You’re just lying about the cause,” Jason concludes after a moment. His head is cocked to the side, but it’s apparent that he’s fixated on the offending joint, “And it’s not the only thing bothering you.”

The problem with Jason is that he’s far more observant than most people give him credit for. And intelligent, for that matter. It’s easy to forget that Jason thinks Shakespeare is a fun read, and that he’ll spend hours debating the topic with Alfred, if given the chance (and Alfred is always willing). There’s also the fact that Jason tends to pick and choose when he’s going to press an issue; often because he intends to come back around to it, but only when the situation turns in his favor. But the favor here has always been Jason’s. Dick’s stuck on the couch of his apartment, unwilling to move unless absolutely necessary, because his knee will feel like it’s being torn in half if he does, and that’s to say nothing about either ankle.

“I don’t really want to talk about this, Jason,” Dick uses the name for emphasis this time. With a short, clipped tone that he hopes conveys just how badly he would like Jason to leave, but Jason’s also nothing if not obstinate.

“Have you tried ice yet? Or heat?”

The words startle Dick, and he looks to Jason with far too many emotions readable on his face. Jason merely raises an eyebrow in return, and Dick sighs, “No. I don’t think I can get up.”

“Oh,” Jason breathes the word, like he hadn’t expected the answer. And he probably hadn’t. He’d probably expected Dick to continue to deny reality. To lie through his teeth until Jason gave up (which wasn’t going to happen, but that’s beyond the point now.) “Okay. Got any ice in the freezer?”

“Yes- what?”

Jason’s gone in an instant, heading for the kitchen with little concern for Dick’s desire to be left alone. He comes back a minute later with several bags full of freshly scooped ice. He passes them to Dick, one at a time, while Dick slowly places them on various offending limbs.

There’s a dumbstruck expression on Dick’s face, as if he can’t fully process what’s happening, which might have to do with why he doesn’t stop it either. Jason disappears again, this time into the bathroom, and Dick just- let’s him. He’s not sure what else to do now that Jason’s set his mind to- whatever it is he’s set his mind to.

“Here,” Jason says when he comes back with a paper cup of water and a handful of pills. It takes Dick a moment to remember that, a. His first aid kit is in the bathroom just like most peoples’, and the leap for Jason figuring that out isn’t really a leap and b. That Jason’s come here for a (very rough) patch up job more than once, which means he already knows exactly where he can find said kit.

Dick swallows the painkillers with little prompting and passes the cup back to Jason, who must dispose of it in the trash, given that he disappears into the kitchen again. When he comes back, he looks at Dick with that sort of halfcocked, curious expression he gets.

“Anything else I can do?”

“Uh- no. I think you’ve done plenty,” and Dick means that. Jason’s done more for him than Dick would have done for himself, and the ice actually feels kind of nice on the throbbing joints. Combined with the compression, it’s the best relief he’s gotten all day. Maybe the medication will actually do something for a change.

“Good,” Jason says, and Dick assumes that’s the end of that. That he’ll go right back out the window that he came in, but, instead, Jason flops on the couch cushion nearest to him and nods at the long forgotten TV. “What’re we watching?”

“We?”

“Yeah,” Jason says without missing a beat, “I got nothing better to do, and distractions can help with pain. Trust me.”

And two things occur to Dick right then. The first being that Jason isn’t just doing this out of some obligation. He wants to help. Wants to make Dick feel better, and Dick doesn’t know what to do with that information. And the second is that Jason knows, on a very personal level, what it’s like to be in so much pain that his body doesn’t cooperate with him, and of course he does. Jason’s death had been far from pleasant, and he still wears the scars of it. There’s no doubt he feels it in his bones and damaged cartilage. Never mind all the other injuries since then, and there’s a long, long list that Dick’s personally seen the fallout of several times.

“I don’t know,” Dick says once his brain starts processing in the right direction again, “CSI?”

Jason snorts, “What, want to spend all night yelling at the screen?”

“Maybe,” Dick says with a shrug, “You got something better?”

“Hell yeah,” Jason reaches for the remote, and Dick passes it to him without question, “We’re gonna watch some good ole-fashioned zombies.”

And there goes Dick’s eyebrows again, “Really?”

“Sometimes a man just needs something a little autobiographical, quit judging,” and Jason says it with such a severe tone that Dick can’t help but laugh.

Truthfully, it’s the best he’s felt all night, and that doesn’t change once the movie-- however bad it may be-- starts. He catches Jason with a small, half-smile tugging at the corner of one side of his lips, and it helps Dick to relax a bit, to know that he isn’t being judged.

#jaydick #jason todd #dick grayson #batfam #dc comics #blitzwrites #blitz

[kinsbin]

You Have Me

Title: You Have Me Word Count: 1580 Pairing: Kota/Twice [Self Insert/Canon]

Summary: Kota notices that everyone seems to be ganging up on Twice. When she notices, even more, that Jin is behaving weirdly, she goes to have a heart to heart with him. And to remind him that, even if everyone else acts like that, he’ll always have her to love him. 

A/N: Commission for @blueshipstealstars​! I’m always so happy to write for Kota and Twice even when I haven’t fully caught up with bnHA THEY’R STILL THE OTP FOLKS-

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

He was… different.

Not different in his normally ‘different’ good way, of course. Not in the way Kota was used to him being on a regular basis, so much more lively and unique in comparison to the rest of the overly serious frames of villains with a penchant for revenge that was stronger than their quirks themselves. So much more open and readable than the rest of those around her, from Dabi who kept to himself to even Tomura whose mind always seemed elsewhere amongst his hands and thoughts, Kota could always find comfort in the fact that, well, at least Twice would always be the same in one way or another. At least, when it came down to it, she could trust him to still be Jin at the very end of the day.

At least that was how it had been. Now he was… different.

It had started small at first, little changes of his personality and dismissals that he pushed away with his normal intense attitude. Those types of little moments faded into his usual annoying play fights with HImiko and made the rest of the group ignore him for the time being. Not Kota, though, because she always kept an eye on him. Her stern gaze, though it softened when it faded to him, was always carefully gazing at him. Noticing. Thinking. Calculating from a distance as the changes grew better and worse in waves throughout their events day after day.

It was what she was good at, after all. Observing as she did. She didn’t like to brag about it.

Nor did she like the way Twice seemed to get worse.

Worse and worse as the league pushed forward in its plans, his own thoughts being shut down with sharp words that made him flinch and look away, glaring in annoyance at nothing in particular while he bit his tongue. Events he was in charge of failed with only minor issues from him and major issues with the people that went along with him. The people he trusted and tried to recruit with the fervor of a church pastor on sunday mass, only to have it backfire in his face as he came back from missions with more bruises than his body could heal at any one rate. This, of course, only brought more mocking from the rest of the league. More reprimanding from Tomura’s mouth and more snarky, annoyed comments from Dabi as he bared his fangs towards the weaker positioned man at any chance he got, the fiery bastard. Kota joked (to herself mostly) that it was because he felt inferior in one way or another. That fire and show was all he could do in times of panic.

Now though? Now it was bad.

Bad enough for Twice to retreat from the latest meeting with a small tumbler of scotch on the rocks cradled tightly between slim hands, slipping out without a word as the meeting seemed to continue without notice of his disappearance. Kota’s eyes narrowed at the door where he left, his shadow still in her vision across the expanse of hallways before finally fading into nothingness against the light. The words of Himiko and Compress echoed uselessly in the peripheral of her hearing as she stood up, downed her own glass of alcohol as fast as possible, and exited the room.

“Going somewhere, Kota?”

An echo of someone’s voice was heavy in the air, calling her out as she paused at the door and looked behind her, her gaze as sharp as her frown.

“To find Twice,” She sneered back at them, annoyance dripping from her tone like a molten led, “Not that any of you fucks really cared about him leaving, did ya?”

She didn’t wait for their response before she exited the room, her shoes hitting the tile beneath them with purpose as she ran off to find her lover.

Kota wandered the halls of the hideout for longer than she would have liked to admit, checking rooms she thought that Jin might be in only to be worried when she found that he wasn’t there. Bare traces of him seemed to exist amongst the rest of the world around them, as though he was hiding his tracks. As though he didn’t want to be found. Kota worried, for a brief moment as her heart pounded in the back of her head, that he really didn’t want to be.

When she finally found him he was on top of the roof of the hideout, sporting a cigarette alongside his drink, mask cast to the side as he looked upwards at the stars with a thoughtful knit of sadness to his brows.

He startled when she appeared beside him, taking a seat next to him with a soft sigh leaving her lips. With a scrambled curse of surprise, Twice gripped at his mask with the intensity of four of himself and shoved it over his face, all but trapping the cigarette inside of the fabric. It took him a few more moments to pull it up just to show his mouth as he grimaced at the taste of ashe against his skin.

“What are you doing here?”

Kota winced at the cold tone of his voice, his body curling in on himself as he rested his chin in the palm of a hand.

“Checking up on you,” Kota’s answer was honest as she took a deep breath, “You aren’t yourself lately, Jin… I just… wanted to see if…”

She trailed off with a bite to her bottom lip, unsure of what else to say. How else to continue the statement that wanted to leave her. Jin’s laugh was a weak one, annoyed and sad as he turned to her, his lips pulled up in a rotten looking sneer as he pulled his cigarette from between his teeth and put it out on the cool concrete of the building.

“Wanted to what?” He grumbled, “Laugh at me like everyone else? Blame me for one more mistake I made that I probably deserve to be pushed around for? Hell, i deserve it so why don’t you save me the trouble of doing it to myself and-!”

“Twice!”

Her hand flew to his shoulder to stop him in talking, making the man startle as he grit his teeth and shrink into himself, his speech of annoyance at his own behavior fading into the distance as Kota’s heart ached at the words he had just snapped to her, the ferocity of his self-degradation hurting more than any slap or laceration possibly could on her body as she could only whisper out her question in a worried, quiet voice:

“Is that… what you think of yourself?”

“... It must be true, right?” He sounded desperate. Desperate for an answer and craving for this to be the right one. For any of his next words to be the right thing to say after he had said so many things wrong, “I do enough wrong… if everyone says so… It has to be true.”

“I don’t say so.”

Her statement was immediate and sharp. A crisp statement amongst a white noise of everything else as the world focused back into them. Twice lifted up his head, eyes wide with surprise at the words that left the other’s mouth but even more at the determination that shined beneath them as Kota’s grip grew more firm on his shoulder and she brought herself closer. Pushing herself into his personal bubble until their noses were touching. He was grateful she couldn’t see the red of his face.

“You are smart. You’re important,” She whispered through a smile, “You put so much pressure on yourself to make everyone happy… Jin, you can’t please everyone and trying to will only make you feel worse, you know that. I know I can’t make the others see it as much as I fucking want to… or make them stop how they behave with you but…”

She sighed, words failing her as she instead pushed forward, daring to kiss the exposed, slack jawed lips of the man before her with a gentleness the likes of which he could have only experienced in his dreams. All at once tears threatened to pour from his eyes, bright and hurt and shocked as he returned the kiss with needy vigour. With desperation for the affirmation of his existence to continue. As if, without it, he might disappear.

He might.

When they pulled away, Kota rested her head on his own, their foreheads touching as they shared their intimate moment under the stars, her lips pursed as she offerd him a rare, geuine sort of smile.

“To me? You’re the funniest, most amazing man in the League, bar none. Even if they don’t see it… You’ll always be important to me. So, please… try not to hurt yourself over something like that… When you know to me, you’re always perfect.”

Jin laughed, soft and exposed and painful as he gave a nod against her head, afraid any words might trigger tears down his eyes as he reached out and found Kota’s hand. Entwining their fingers together, the two shared one last kiss under the bright moonlight, their glasses long forgotten at their sides as Twice’s heart swelled into something akin to his usual delight. Akin to his usual mood.

Because, as long as he had his lover on his side, nothing could possibly get him down. As long as he was important to her, well?

That was okay.

#self insert #self ship #self shipping #self ship writing #self insert writing #bnha #kinley writes #writing commission

[yodawgiherd]

Heartbeat

>>>Read on AO3<<<

Rating: T Setting: Modern AU

Prompt: EreMika; Eren listening to Mikasa's heartbeat

I had another idea which i ended up scraping in favor of this one, but then my beta said that he really liked the first one. ... So, I'll edit the draft into something readable this evening (prolly) and you can expect a different take on the prompt tomorrow. Gonna be a really short one, I don't want to expand it too much. It's kinda angsty. ;(

Car tires screeched as Eren took the first exit, speeding up onto a highway, leaving the airport behind. Scanning the traffic, he picked a good timing and squeezed between two trucks, successfully entering the high-speed zone. Great, because he really wanted to step on it now. In the end, it was rather worthless, because it wasn’t like she would just let him drive in peace.

“Eren, why are you acting like this?”, Mikasa asked from the adjacent seat, reading his expression, or trying to at least, since he did his best to avert his face from hers.

“Like what?”, he half-growled, tightening his grip on the wheel. Just a tiny bit.

“We haven’t seen each other for months, and all you can do is “Hi”? Seriously?”

“Eh, I just don’t feel like talking.”

But she was already shaking her head.

“No, I know you. You’re pissed off about something. Tell me.”

“No…”

“Tell me!”

There it was, the steel in her voice to match her eyes. But Eren didn’t feel like caving in, so he ignored her, focusing on the driving for a change. After all, it was dangerous to lose your cool on the road, they can argue later.

“Eren, please.”, Mikasa’s voice softened, and he could feel her hand on his shoulder, gently squeezing, “I’ve been on this tour for months, I’m tired of it all. Performing, travelling, I just want to go home with you and rest.”

“Well what’s stopping you?”

“You! Acting like this! Best I could see was your face on the computer screen for this long, and when I come back then you won’t even hug me?”

There was pain her voice, hurt and confusion, and no matter how hard he tried, Eren couldn’t hold back anymore. He was never bad at saying no to her, not since childhood.

“I just…. Missed you, and then I saw the videos you guys did… and just some talk.”, he sighed, “I’m sorry.”

“The videos? You mean the music ones?”

“You know that there’s exactly fifteen different angles on your ass in the latest thing? And the outfits you and the girls wore… Revealing.”

He did try his best not to be bitter about it. Eren knew what Mikasa’s job was. She was in a band, they were idols, this is what they did. Yet it was hard to see it in the rational light, when the body of the woman you loved was the subject of talk in the celebrity magazines for the last months.

“Sex sells, Eren, you know that. We are new in the business, and need all the attention we can get, in any way we can acquire it. Those videos, that’s the easy way to get it, that’s how we sell our records, that’s how we got the tour. To make it big we must do them. Jean says…”

“Jean?”, he interrupted her, frowning, “Who’s that?”

“Our new agent.”

“So, he’s the one responsible for that visage, huh? I can see why he would do that.”

“I don’t like what you are implying.”

“Oh really? Well, maybe you’ll remember me, when next time he doesn’t ask you to throw your top away during the performance but meet him afterhours to “discuss” your future with the band and he’s going to require some oral persuasion.”

“You really think I’d ever do that?”, Mikasa was angry now, and it showed in the both her tone and the volume of her voice, “What do you think I am? A whore?”

“Yea well…”, Eren scoffed, still refusing to meet her eyes, “If I judged only from those music vids, I’d say that would be a pretty accurate description.”

“Eren…”

“It’s not very pleasant,”, finally he turned, matching her outraged gaze with his own, fingers gripping the wheel hard, “ to go for a beer after work and listen to another of those fucking conversation next table, where the patrons are watching you shake your ass on the fucking TV and discuss between themselves how much they’d love to run a train on that thing.”

“I…”, her eyes were glistening, and Eren was almost feeling sorry for his outburst, but then they snapped over his shoulder and widened not in reaction to his words, but to something else entirely.

“Watch out!”

There was a loud horn sound, squealing of tires, and a crash, the impact of the truck from the side sent the car flying. Metal creaked, and when the roof met solid ground, Eren’s vision went black.

Shouting woke him, a man’s voice, and soon two strong hands helped him, pulling him out of the wreckage and onto the grass.

“Jesus man, you okay?”, a tall male silhouette asked that, in a shaky voice that suggested he wasn’t really okay either, “You ran right into my path, I had no time react! Fuck!”

The trucker ran his hands through his hair, pacing back and forth, but blinking his eyes open, Eren noticed one way more important thing. He was alone, Mikasa nowhere in sight.

“Where’s…”, he coughed, lungs and throat hurting, “Where’s she?”

The man stopped in his steps, looking down at him.

“There was someone else in the car with you?”

Ignoring his own body, Eren rolled over, staring through the mangled mass of metal and plastic that used to be his car, searching for the familiar flash of pale skin or black hair. There, still strapped to the seat, Mikasa’s head was hanging at an odd angle, a massive scratch on one cheek, eyes closed, and she was completely unresponsive, not reacting to his shouts in any way.

“Call an ambulance!”, he screamed at the trucker, who quickly nodded and pulled out his phone, punching in the number with trembling fingers. Turning his attention back at the car, Eren crawled back in, ignoring the danger it presented to himself, and undid the belt buckle, pulling Mikasa’s limp body out. She was still unconscious, even when he slapped her lightly, hoping to wake her up, and when Eren pressed his ear right above her heart, he was shocked by what he heard.

Nothing. She had no pulse.

Instincts kicking in, even through the shock, he began giving her CPR, hands steady in their movements, much unlike how the thoughts raced inside his head.

Compressions. Open her mouth. Breathe in. Listen.

Nothing.

Clenching his teeth, he continued, not ready, not able to accept this. Mikasa couldn’t die, not here, on a side of a fucking road, just because he was being an asshole to her and didn’t watch where he was driving.

Compressions. Breathe in. Listen.

Nothing.

“C’mon Miki, you can’t leave me here. I don’t want to go on without you. Please…”

Compressions. Breathe in. Listen.

Nothing.

“She’s gone man.”, the trucker appeared next to him, clapping him on the shoulder, trying to show support. “I’m sorry for your loss, but…”

“Shut the fuck up.”, shaking the touch away, Eren continued his efforts, ignoring whatever the man said. With a sigh, the trucker took a few steps back, leaving him to his grief. Or so he thought.

“Please, I love you, so fucking much.”, Compressions. Breathe in. “Don’t do this to me.”

Listen.

There! With a joy he never felt before in his life, Eren could hear it, the soft fluttering of a pulse, unsteady, but there. She was back, she didn’t leave him. Sitting back on his heels, Eren closed his eyes, tears flowing down his cheeks, while the sounds of sirens

grew steadily closer. Soon after there were voices all around, medics left and right, picking up Mikasa’s body and putting it on a stretcher and up in the ambulance, giving her the immediate first care.

“Sir?”, another touch on his shoulder, this time from the medic, prompting Eren to look up. The man gestured towards Eren’s leg. “Your wound…”

Following his gaze, Eren saw that there was a big piece of metal, piercing right through his thigh, blood leaking everywhere. In his rush to save Mikasa, he didn’t even feel the pain, but now it began manifesting, white-hot needles of agony.

“Oh…”, was all Eren managed to say, watching the redness gush out.

Then he fainted.

He shouldn’t even be up yet, as the nurses told him, he got beaten up pretty bad, and his leg was still hurting, but once he heard that Mikasa woke up, nothing could keep Eren in the hospital bed. Hobbling with the help of a cane, he found her room, managing to cross the short distance to the chair next to her bed without falling once. Her eyes were on him from the moment Eren entered the room, but Mikasa didn’t say anything, until he managed to sit down, cursing under his breath when his leg protested the motion. Then, he could finally look up and take in her visage, noticing all the pain he caused by being a total asshole. The cut on her cheek was bandaged, and she had multiple dark spots on her face, standing out against the pale skin. From what Eren heard, or rather managed to squeeze out of the nurses and doctors, Mikasa got out with severe bruising and rattled bones, but nothing was broken. The worst was the shock to her system, making her heart stop, but Eren’s on-site CPR managed to kick it back on, saving her life.

“Hi.”, she finally breached the silence, managing a half-smile before the sting in her cheek made her stop.

“Hey.”, he shot back, redirecting his gaze back on her face. “You look great.”

“They say I’ll have a nasty scar.”

“I bet it will look great on you.”

“Yeah right.”, she giggled, “Jean will have a stroke when he sees me.”

The mention of her manager did bring back the memories of the crash, and the conversation that led to it. The stupid argument that was totally Eren’s fault, and almost killed them both.

“Miki, I…”, clearing his throat, he reached out, taking her hand between his, squeezing. “I…”

But the words just died inside his throat, over and over, because seeing her in the white bed, with the machinery around her, the reality of just how close to losing her forever seemed to finally hit him, making everything he could say feel hollow. Because how could words ever make up for this? How could he ever express the terrible feeling of loss and hopelessness he felt, in those cursed seconds when she was lying dead in his hands. Back then, it was like the universe just stopped existing, time and space felt meaningless, because without her, what was the point of going on with his life? Eren took a shuddering breath, hoping to fill the hole that seemed to appear in the middle of his heart with oxygen, yet it hardly helped.

“I’m so fucking sorry.”

And the angel, the saint she was, Mikasa reached out, wiping the tears Eren didn’t even realize he was shedding from the corners of his eyes, the tiny smile she had shining more radiantly than any sun.

“It’s all right, I forgive you.”

But it wasn’t all right, not until she gently pulled him closer, allowing him to rest his head on her chest, right above her heart, to listen to the steady rhythm, soothing as nothing else to Eren’s ears. Because she was still here, alive, she didn’t leave him all alone in this cruel world. Mikasa didn’t say anything when his tears began anew, drenching her gown, she just dragged her fingers through his hair, whispering that it’s okay. And the heartbeat, that was more beautiful than any music Eren ever heard in his life.

#eremika #fanfic #snk #prompt fill

[charlottecarterbcu]

Lookbook - Typography 

My overall aim is to find a font style that will communicate my trend well, following on from the research that I did with the festival posters and advertisements, I have decided to use a clear and bold simplistic font that will communicate my trend well. I’ll be focusing mainly on the older style festival posters that had simple bold sans serif fonts as I want to communicate that my trend is simplistic and to the point with its essential styles and additional features. Now that I have completed further research for my trend, I have been able to think about what I want to rename it. I have decided to rename the original WGSN Happy Camper trend, Repurposed Camper, it’s still a very similar title with a similar narrative but by putting repurposed in the title I am emphasising the sustainability aspect of the trend and how I am extending the trend further to include repurposed material. I also feel that the camper part of the title means different things for both trends with WGSN’s focusing mainly on the great outdoors, whereas my camper element of the trend is based on specifically festival camping.

I have also taken inspiration from the Popular Camping magazine font style that has been mentioned at different points throughout my research, as its bold statement simplistic style is just what I’m looking for to communicate my trend. After looking at many different font styles on Adobe Fonts I have narrowed down my choices to three fonts including, Fino Sans, Protipo, and Buffalino. With my front cover now complete on Photoshop I have been able to try out all three of these fonts on my front cover in InDesign. The first font, Fino Sans, is probably the one that is most similar to the Popular Camping font as it clear and bold, I also chose to try out this font in uppercase to compare it to the magazine. This font was effective in introducing the trend and appeared very loud with the use of uppercase with the sharp letter shapes. However I felt that the overall appearance of the font appeared too open, this could have been resolved by altering the kerning of the letters, however I did not want to do this as it would end up looking like a replica of the original Popular Camping font which is what I am trying to avoid as my aim is to use a new and relevant font that is personal to my trend.

Following on from the previous font I have decided to try the next one in lowercase with a capital letter as I found the uppercase design too loud for the Lookbook as I want the clothes and other imagery to tell the story with the title just being used for descriptive purposes and to tie the whole concept together. Despite this it still needs to be relevant to the trend. With the Protipo font I found that the letter shaping worked a lot better with the sans serif rounded edges being a lot more subtle which is what I want for my Lookbook title, the use of lowercase also helped to achieve this. Despite this I’ve had the opposite reaction to this font compared to the first one, in thinking that it’s just not enough and is underwhelming which could lead the reader on to thinking that the trend within the Lookbook will be disappointing too, which I definitely want to avoid.

The third and final font that I tried for my chosen font is Buffalino. I have chosen to use this font style as I believe that it will communicate my trend well through its simplistic yet modern style. Following on from the previous font, I decided to stick with the lowercase with a capital as I think using all uppercase would be too overpowering for my Lookbook which doesn’t link with my trend. Similar to Protipo, Buffalino is a sans serif font with rounded edges. What made this font different was its modern twist on the traditional font with its elongated lettering. This font is simple but engaging at the same time which will work great on my Lookbook to communicate my trend as the concept of my trend is all about basic festival wardrobe essentials with a twist with the additional link to sustainability, additional accessories and functional features.

To create a paragraph style for my title font I went into type-paragraph styles and clicked on add new. The paragraph style for my title is the regular Buffalino font sized to 78 with a leading of +73 and -40 tracking and left alignment. I reduced the leading down from the standard setting of 93.6pt to 73 to bring the two words of the title closer together so that they can be read together and not as separate words, so that it flows as Repurposed Camper, rather than Repurposed. Camper. With the font being sans serif, it already makes the word clearer to read as a title, but I also decided to change the tracking of the words to -40 which reduces the spacing between the letters in the word, compressing it closer together, this will help to speed up the reading of the title, resulting in the message of the trend quickly getting across to the reader.

I went through the same process to create the paragraph style for the rest of the Lookbook. However as this will be used for sentences, I have made some changes in comparison to the title paragraph style. I still used regular Buffalino, but I changed the size down to 12, the leading down to 16 and the tracking up to -10. The average font size in a printed out Lookbook is between 10 and 12, this is why I changed my font size to 12 because if we were in university, we would be printing out our Lookbooks. For my narrative paragraph I needed the text to fit into a small section of the page, therefore along with using a smaller size I also changed the leading to bring the sentences closer together so that it all fits in the text box whilst also being readable. The narrative was unreadable with the original tracking that I had used in the title as having the letters so close together in a small sized font made it difficult to read. This is why I changed the tracking up to -10 so that they are still close together for easy reading but not overlapping. This should help with the reading of the narrative as usually serif fonts would be used to help with the joining of the words, however I wanted to use the same font throughout my Lookbook to keep it all linked and relevant.

At the start of this module, I didn’t know a lot about typography and all of the different elements to consider when using a font, as I’m the sort of person that uses Arial 14 for everything usually. Despite this I do feel that I have learnt a lot about different font styles and when and where to use different tracking and sans serif or serif text. I am also happy with the overall appearance of the wording throughout my Lookbook as it is clear to read and not over the top in terms of style which works really well with my trend. I also found the use of paragraph style in InDesign helpful as it enabled me to make sure that all of the text throughout the Lookbook was the same, and if I had made changes to anything it put a + next to the paragraph style letting me know that there was a difference on the page in comparison to the original font style. I also found out that there is a font for everything thanks to the expansive library on Adobe Fonts which really helped me to narrow down my font options.

My only criticism in terms of typography is that I said early on in my research that I would try out the fonts in different colours to see which colour worked best linking back to the festival posters. However, I decided without carrying out the research that sticking with a black font would work best as I just wanted the garments and imagery to show the colours of the narrative. I do think that I made the right decision, though, to ensure that I am fully researching what’s best for my Lookbook, I should have still looked into what the font would have looked like in colour and I will definitely remember this going forward in regard to future projects. Looking forward to future projects I will also always consider what the right font will be for my piece of work to ensure that it fully communicates my narrative. I will also continue to use Adobe Fonts to search for new and relevant fonts, whilst also continuing to consider the font styles and what will work best for my piece of work considering both serifs and tracking.

Fig.59 Popular Camping 1968, Pic UK (n.d.) Vintage Popular Camping Magazines.

[knight-of-heart-and-art]

Rose Quartz and Citrine

  3500 words of Dirk being a dramatic idiot and Hal fixing stuff. Also of Dirk repeatedly getting distracted by the fact that Roxy's apparently better at creating humanoid robots than he is. 

 Somehow you never expected to be actively avoiding human contact when you had the opportunity and the desire to not be alone. Then again, up to a certain point in your life you never expected that you'd end up not being more or less alone on a drowning planet, but hey. Shit happens and everything's different now.  Some things are more different than others. Is that a stupid way to put it? You feel like it is. In your opinion, though, you're in a weird and stupid situation, so whatever stupid statements you make will have to be excused.  What the fuck are you doing right now, anyway?  There's a short and mostly-true answer to that question, and it is...nothing. Listening to music turned way too loud, sitting in a tipped-back desk chair with one sleeve of the sweater that it's too warm for pushed up so you can scratch absently at your arm, mesmerized and a little disgusted by the way crystalline streaks radiate out from where you touch and yield to flesh again as your fingers move on. It's a pretty quick fade—you're not the one who can make them stay. Roxy, Dave, Jake, John—the people you care about, their touch leaves your skin branded with rose quartz and citrine. It's not really like being branded, though. It doesn't hurt, and it's not just a surface thing, your skin literally changing with some strange alchemy that you can't explain or puzzle out.  Not that you haven't tried. You've played with the possibilities, spent hours in front of the mirror gingerly tracing your fingers across your arms, face, chest until your skin went translucent and fractured, cracks too fine to feel pulsing with gentle light that fades from amber to magenta and back again in a regular cadence. The beat of your heart, if you want to be specific. And that's what this all comes down to, isn't it—your heart? Or Heart. Your goddamn aspect manifesting again, for what reason you have no idea.  You don't know if you want to know, really. Your aspect only stirs itself up when it's needed, and that's almost never not meant bad shit. You're semi-okay with using your powers, seldom and cautiously; needing to use them is a whole other story. There's no way that scenario wouldn't be bad.  At least you figured out something was fucky before anyone else noticed. At least you had enough sense to cut yourself off. Sadly, you still can't figure out how to fix this shit; you've tested a wide variety of possible remedies that all ended up having exactly zero effect.  Well.  Other than the hard reset. Self-decapitation had an effect, all right, beyond making you feel stoned for six hours. Just not the one you were hoping for. Precisely the opposite, actually.  Thinking about that—waking up in the bathroom, pushing yourself off the floor and almost passing out again as you saw the not-quite-broken living crystal statue in the mirror, its eyes shifting coals of flame and its spun-gold hair dishevelled from when you hit your head on the floor—thinking about that, you dig your nails a bit harder into the skin of your arm, enough to wince and pull your hand away. It's just a few shallow scrapes on already-irritated skin (you should've stopped scratching a while ago, if you're being honest), but where the skin's broken the crystalline effect spreads out, persisting beyond what's normal. There's only a little bit of blood seeping out, but it glows gold for a few heartbeats before reluctantly darkening to dull red.  It's pretty. It'd be pretty if it weren't so damn wrong. You don't even want to be watching it, but it's happening and you're a stupid fuck, so yeah. You do watch, and when the crystal cast fades from your skin you lay your palm flat against the sore spot until it glows amber-rose again. It's pretty, yeah, but you can't forget that you're looking at it because you're trying to figure out how to make it go away for good.  You don't care to think how many hours you've spent doing this over the last few weeks. Too fucking many, for you to know as little as you do. Enough that you're beginning to suspect that the question of "how can I get rid of this?" doesn't have a good answer.  The only thing that might do anything is another hard reset. Despite the fact that it was decidedly unhelpful last time, you're vaguely considering trying again. The katana's still in the bathroom, even.  The abrupt cessation of the music playing over the speakers is enough to make you jump, snatch the sleeve of your sweater back down, and bribf the front legs of your chair back down with what seems like an earth-shaking crash. It probably isn't; guilt magnifies perception.  "Someone's jumpy." The voice is calm and amused and very, very familiar. It makes sense, too; who else is jacked into your electronics, can just tell them to switch off and have it happen? "What, you weren't expecting company?"  "Since the door was locked, not really." Control your fucking voice, asshole, you know you can do it. "What the fuck are you doing here, Hal?"  As you actually turn around to look at him it occurs to you that your eyes have a habit of not staying amber-orange when you're upset, now. Too late to conceal your movement, though; you're just going to have to pray that they stay the color they're supposed to be. You're calm enough, you can pull this off.  (You're such a fucking liar.)  And seeing him? That makes your state of mind several orders of magnitude less serene, and you're pretty sure you don't manage to keep your shock off your face, let alone out of your eyes. Roxy was the one to make him a body—after weeks of telling you to do it yourself and half-accepting your excuses she finally showed up, grabbed your shades off your face, manhandled a chassis out of your workroom and left without saying a word. To you, at least. She was talking to him the whole time—but god damn did she do a good job. There's fine wiring woven into his white hair, the suggestion of LED lights behind red irises, but where his skin doesn't show circuitry it looks fucking organic. And he doesn't move like any bot you ever built, there isn't anything but inhuman smoothness as he crosses his arms and smirks at you.  You didn't expect the two first emotions you felt at seeing him to be a painful mix of awe and guilt. Mostly guilt so strong as to qualify as crushing. You should have been the one to give him this. You weren't. Fuck.  "Can't I just come to check up on my pseudobro?" he asks sweetly, and it takes you a minute to remember that yes, you did ask him why he's here.  "No." Being short with him should definitely get rid of him. If you could take your eyes off him it might have as much as a 20% chance of success.  "Oh good, because that's not why I'm here." Hal grins, steps past you—how the fuck does he move that well? That...humanly?—and shoves everything on your desk two feet to the left to make room to sit down. A few books, a cup, and a handful of batteries crash to the floor. Amazingly the cup stays intact, but the batteries bounce and roll off to wherever shit that gets lost on the floor goes. "Most of the subset of the population of this universe that contains your friends have been seriously wondering if you'd managed to lock yourself in your room and die. I mean, their line of thinking was that it was the most reasonable explanation for your sudden and complete online and physical disappearance. Be careful when you do get around to opening your pesterchum, by the way. Whatever dechoose to open it on is probably going to crash from the sheer volume of messages on there."  "I'm alive. Feel free to go tell them that." Your hands itch. Out of the corner of your eye you can see that they're not precisely normal anymore, but looking down to see how bad it is is definitely going to attract Hal's attention. The pocket of your hoodie is deep enough to swallow them completely, and if Hal notices that movement he apparently writes it off as simple defensive body language.  "Oh, I knew you would be. We're hard enough to permanently kill that it's not a very viable option." Hal leans forward a bit, his amused smirk giving way to something less readable. "At some point it's just easier to come check on you than to argue with them about it. Besides, it's not like my digging you out of mental pits is anything new."  God you wish you had your fucking shades on. You're too rattled, and he's too close for comfort.  "I don't have anything going that requires your help in digging me out of, Hal."  And he has the temerity to scoff at that. "You," he says, and that tone of gentle amusement is so fucking irritating, "aren't just in a pit. You're in some kind of black hole, right now. Past the event horizon—nothing gets out, everything gets in, nothing actually reaches you, the pressure's working on compressing you into a neat little singularity of depression or panic or what have you. This is an epic pit. Legendary, even."  Accurate. "Fuck off."  "Nope. I'd have at least four separate people trying to dismantle me if I left without making you work this out."  "Bullshit your way out of being scrapped. I'm fine."  "Your eyes are grey."  He says that in the exact same tone he's been using the whole time. Thus it takes you a minute to process the statement. Unfortunately, your mouth keeps going while your brain skips tracks.  "It's none of your business what my—wait. Fuck." Is there really anything else to say? "Fuck..."  Hal seems less surprised than curious. He leans in a little closer, his eyes brightening. "Ooh. Yellow. Red. Black—damn that's creepy." Your hands are tangled up in your sweater, too slow to block his hand as it comes up to touch the side of your face. "...ah. Nice."  Part of your mind is registering that Roxy's somehow managed to get his skin to pretty damn close to human skin temperature. Part is noting that your own skin is going crystal around his fingers even faster than it would if you messed with it yourself. A gleeful little bit is analyzing just how great of a relief it is to have some fucking physical human contact, and how that positive reaction is neatly fitting against the rush of anxiety caused by totally failing at not letting anyone know about your shit.  "Huh." Why the fuck is he smiling? "There we go. Pink's a good color for you. It matches the skin. Hell of a lot prettier than what Dave got, if you ask me—you're going to look amazing next to Jake."  What in the name of fuck is he talking about? "Hal—"  "Wait." He blinks, taking his hand away from your face. "You didn't know about the aspect shit. You don't know? This whole panic-hermit thing is about your fucking aspect shaping you? Is that it?" And when you reluctantly nod, taking one hand out of your pocket to rub at the altered spot where he touched you, Hal stares at you for a solid five seconds before dissolving into helpless laughter.  "This isn't funny." That statement has absolutely no effect. He's losing his shit, definitely not capable of coherent speech, or anything other than vague gestures at you. "Hal." Again, you find yourself with a sense of low-level amazement over how human he seems overlaying your worry.  When he finally gets control of himself, Hal wipes at his eyes even though he obviously doesn't need to (is that calculated? or does he have your subconscious muscle memories that tell him that's just what you do in this situation? Okay examining him is less of a way to keep yourself from some flavor of panic and more of an unhelpful distraction at this point) and shakes his head. "Fuck, bro, do you never bother to talk to people about shit?"  "You know how I handle issues." He should. He does.  "Yeah. Badly. You handle them badly." He rolls his eyes, leaning over to try to touch your face again and refresh that fading crystal, but just shrugs when you knock his hand away. "Trust me, you didn't get the worst possible alteration. You're not waking up covered in sand that bled off your skin, you don't have teeny horrorterrors showing up in any reflective surfaces in your vicinity...you just look a little different. Not even bad, no wings or tentacles or shadow selves, it's something little and pretty."  You want to argue that it's not fucking little, but yeah. No. You have a dawning sense of mingled confusion and certainty that the past couple weeks were monumentally stupid on your part. It doesn't feel good. "What the fuck?" That is not a question that conveys any of the things you want to ask, but fuck it. "What the fuck?"  Hal raises one eyebrow, the amusement sliding off his face, to be replaced with something dismayingly similar to either fear or pity. "Holy shit. You actually thought you were the only one—Dirk, if you start crying I swear to god I'm going to leave and send Jake in instead, dealing with that is above my paygrade."  "You have a paygrade?"  "No! That's why you getting emotional is above it!"  "I'm not getting emotional, fuckwit." Not while he's still here, at least. Later you can have a full meltdown over how pointless this was, when you let the relief sink in. "Don't suppose you know how to turn this shit off?"  "Actually I can help with that." Hal flashes you a grin, sliding off the desk and putting his hands on the sides of your head. You'd have flinched at the brief arc of turquoise electricity as he makes contact, but he's holding you steady. "Mind and Hope are the two best aspects to straighten this out, as far as we know. Breath and Space are the absolute worst, if it matters."  "None of that should matter, since you're not even a player and if you were you'd be—"  "Heart? No offense, but not everything revolves around you. And full offense, but fuck you." He doesn't even sound mad, though—just irritatingly amused and condescending. "Nothing you just said is accurate...and stop trying not to look at me, dumbass."  You're not going to admit that you were definitely doing that. Instead you look at him, let yourself get caught up in trying to figure out how Roxy did this good of a job on him. Better than thinking about how you must look right now with his hands on your face.  "Stop panicking," Hal says after a few seconds.  "I'm not."  "Liar. What, don't tell me you're afraid of it?" He shakes his head, the movement tiny enough not to break eye contact. "You're panicking. And you're fighting it. And you're fighting me."  "Shh. Stop." He blinks, and you find that you need to blink too. Or maybe he blinks and does something to your head that you have to copy him. He's definitely in your head now; it's a little like when you used to dream awake except that the extra sensory input is coming from Hal instead of from the dreamself iteration of you. There is surprisingly little difference. "Your mind is such a mess, Dirk."  The rueful tone of those words gets a laugh out of you, for no reason whatsoever. "Tell me something I don't know."  "Mm." He considers you for a moment, the gentle pressure of him easing away from your mind even as the pressure of his hands against your head doesn't change at all. "It isn't going to hurt you, I swear. Dave was halfway metallic and Jake didn't look human at all before we worked out how to control it. Even if something goes a hell of a lot more wrong than it's going to, you—"  "Can't die."  "Well, not for long." Hal tilts his head, and you find yourself mimicking the motion. Damn but that's strange. "...oh. So you thought dying would make it go away, huh?" You don't mirror his wince, but you do vaguely appreciate how human it is. "Dirk, you idiot."  "It was worth a shot..." Shit, your mouth is on autopilot, probably because you're focusing on not thinking about the memory of waking up completely transformed, for the simple reason that you desperately do not want Hal to see it.  Of course, that's a lot like not thinking of a pink elephant.  "Elephants don't look like that."  "...fuck you."  "You know, that loses a lot of the annoyance value when I have a body I could use to get fucked with." He grins as you splutter wordlessly, that spark of teal flashing through his eyes. "Anyway, I don't need to pick images out of your mind. You're giving me a good look at what you look like when you let go, right now."  For the first time in several minutes, you break eye contact and look down at your hands.  Oh, fuck.  They're not just crystalline, they're glowing bright enough to shine through the fabric of your sweater. Or maybe that corona isn't ambient light at all but something different. An aura. And that's worse. That is definitely worse, there's no way you can hide that.  It's as bad as it can get, except it's not, because when you move to shove your hands back in your pockets and hide the crystal cast of your skin, an afterimage of them stays. Not an afterimage. The second set of hands is tangible, you can feel the weight of them in your lap, it's not an illusion—  A strangled sound forces up out of your throat before you can control yourself, and you close your eyes firmly. "Hal?" you say, when you can get your voice almost level.  "Yes?"  "Fix it." Shit, you really are panicking. "Fix it, fix me, turn it off, alright? I can't—you need to—just, fuck, I—"  "Shh." Hal sighs—another one of those baffling social reflexes, he doesn't breathe, does he?—and shifts his hands until he's cupping your head, fingers burying themselves in your hair, thumbs moving to rest on your eyelids, palms flat against your temples. "Breathe." You can feel him in your head, cynical and amused and so fucking complex that you feel dizzy trying to analyze him, surrounding you with something that it takes you a minute to classify as concern and caring. "Show me what you look like. I know you can visualize, do it for me."  "I—"  "In your head, bro. C'mon." Who taught him to be this gentle?  Okay.  He's right, you can visualize yourself pretty well. Not look like you are now—you can't handle contemplating yourself fully-crystal, traced with fractures and four-armed—but normal. Almost normal. The image in your mind wears a baffled expression between blond hair that you've actually brushed properly and the scar across your throat, arms crossed almost defensively across your chest. Or maybe it's in that pose because even though you didn't mean to include it, there's crystal blending into the skin above your heart, rose quartz and citrine curling in fractals out across your chest.  It stubbornly refuses to let you wipe it away, too.  You're so caught up with trying to amend your mental image that Hal's quiet laugh makes you flinch. "You're such a perfectionist."  "I made you, so obviously not." You regret the words as they leave your mouth—he doesn't deserve that, he's helping you.  "You wouldn't finish me because you knew you couldn't get me perfect by yourself, so yeah, you are." He doesn't sound offended. "Stop trying to make it all go away. You can't."  Hal takes his hands away, and you open your eyes to look down at yourself. Your skin is normal. You have two hands and no more. If the aura is still there, it's so faint you can't consciously see it.  While you're still examining your hands, Hal reaches over to ruffle your hair, completely ruining any sense of order it still had. "Check your pesterchum," he says. "I don't want to have to come back and drag you out." He's out the door before you look up.  You sit still for maybe three minutes after he's gone. Then you get up, find your phone on the counter, and start reading messages, formulating explanations and apologies. Or at least you try, because after a few minutes of reading through the messages they've left you, the concern and worry and unexpected love, you find yourself trying to wipe your eyes dry. It's less than effective and the tears stain your hands citrine again.  That's all right. That's fine. You can make it go away when you want to.

#Dirk strider #hal strider #homestuck #tag this as shipping and I will end your life #ill repost it later with a better summary amd shit but right now I just want my moirail to read it #writing #My writing

[arplis]

Arplis - News: Cooking with Varlam Shalamov

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. The Kolyma Stories and my extended time indoors offered me the opportunity to use up some obscure items that have been languishing in my pantry. The complete stories of Varlam Shalamov (1907–1982), published by NYRB Classics in two newly translated volumes, contain some of the bleakest and most powerful writing we have about the Soviet gulag. They’re also terrifyingly and indelibly about food—that is, about starving to death. Shalamov was first arrested in the twenties, when he was a student at Moscow University, and then again in 1937 for Trotskyist activity. He spent the next seventeen years in labor camps, including on the far northern island of Kolyma, where he mined for gold in some of the most horrific conditions in all the gulag. He found no redemption in the camps, writing that they were “a negative school of life in every possible way. Nobody can get anything useful or necessary out of the camps … Every minute of camp life is poisoned.” Yet in the decades after his release, he boiled the horrors he’d seen down to their pure essentials and shared them via this extraordinary body of work. Shalamov is plainspoken—“he knew his material perfectly, and wrote in a way that everyone can understand,” notes the translator Donald Rayfield—but prolonged immersion in the work reveals him as a better Solzhenitsyn; the stories are compulsively readable despite their subject matter, as compressed and brilliant as the Arctic snow. The temptation would be to compare them to “metal number one,” as gold was called by the Soviet authorities—if Shalamov had not so loathed it. I was reading the first volume, Kolyma Stories, two weeks ago as New York City shut down due to the ongoing public health crisis. He was the only writer who didn’t feel frivolous—not because there can be any comparison between America’s sudden food insecurity and the Stalinist gulag’s conditions of prolonged starvation but because I have been depressed by the human behavior on display. To me, social distancing seemed to erupt spontaneously, and I found it heartbreaking. Even if it will later emerge as necessary and the best decision, I’m hopelessly stuck on the idea that distance is bad. I read a Leslie Jamison piece about being sick with the coronavirus and caring alone for her two-year-old, and on an emotional level, I’m outraged that I can’t bring her soup and human kindness.   The recipe called for a Pullman loaf pan, but I had to make do with what was on hand and baked my bread in a Dutch oven. Proper Russian rye bread is not round.   I don’t claim Shalamov’s moral authority for my opinions, but I think often of the first point on a list he wrote in Moscow in 1961, which Rayfield includes in his introduction to Kolyma Tales. The list is entitled “What I Saw and Understood in the Camps,” and the first point is: “The extreme fragility of human culture, civilization. A man becomes a beast in three weeks, given heavy labor, cold, hunger and beatings.” That’s too bleak for our times, but it bears keeping in mind. The third point is: “I realized that friendship, comradeship, would never arise in really difficult, life-threatening conditions. Friendship arises in difficult but bearable conditions (in the hospital, but not at the pit face.)” We have opportunities. I find Shalamov consoling for his gravity, his sorrow, and his moral purity. Our times are grave and sad, though unfortunately for those of us not deemed essential workers, feelings of moral purity are hard to come by. I decided to bake from him in order to encourage others to read his stories, not because I think that baking bread and sharing it on the internet does much for humanity; baking is fun, but as a cook and sensualist, I consider virtual intimacy no intimacy at all. I’ve also had a long-running, long-failing personal project to correctly bake Russian rye bread from homemade sourdough starter, and testimony by all the novice quarantine bakers currently struggling with this implies that my experiences may be of some use. Moreover, while any attempt to faithfully reproduce the staff of life from a concentration camp would be ghoulish, Shalamov specifies that the bread was rye, and I had the medium rye flour, coarse rye meal, and red rye malt necessary for such bread already in my pandemic pantry, waiting to be thriftily used up.   Appropriately, it was snowing on Shalamov baking day. I weighed options for using this can of condensed milk.   Shalamov writes that bread was the “basic food” in the camps, and it appears in nearly every story. “We got half our calories from bread,” he explains. “The cooked food was something hard to define, its nutritional value depended on thousands of different things.” It was bread that kept him alive, specifically the ratio between its quantity and his labor. Men in his stories scheme for bread, fight for it, weep when they don’t get “a crusty piece.” There are loving descriptions of allowing crumbs to dissolve on the tongue. In the story “The Typhus Quarantine,” in which the Shalamov proxy Andreyev wakes up in the hospital and realizes he’s going to survive, he observes that “as little as half a kilo of rye bread, three spoonfuls of porridge, and a bowl of thin gruel were enough to resurrect a man: as long as he didn’t have to work.” I considered making a second dish, oreshki, that I remember from my time living in Moscow: walnut-shaped cookies filled with a caramel made from condensed milk. The inspiration was “Condensed Milk,” a Shalamov story in which the narrator achieves one of his few victories over the forces trying to destroy him, tricking an enemy out of two cans of condensed milk. He consumes both instantly, after having “used the corner of an ax to pierce a hole” in the cans. I also had a can of condensed milk sitting in my pandemic pantry. Moreover, a Russian friend from Irkutsk—where the narrator arrives after his long exile, in the last story of the first volume—once told me that to make the caramel, you boil the sealed can for hours, stopping just before the point of explosion. This sounded like a cooking adventure of the type I am familiar with and enjoy, but for two factors: I’d have to order a cookie mold off the internet at a time when people need the transportation grid for more pressing matters, and it felt inappropriate to Shalamov and his work. Thus, I made bread. It’s the title of a story, and it’s the ultimate human comfort food. There are many styles of Russian rye, but the one I’ve been trying to reproduce has a chewy, spongy, sour interior and a leathery black crust dusted with coriander seeds. I found a recipe that seemed close in a book called The Rye Baker, by Stanley Ginsberg. The first step was to develop a starter.   The recipe did not specify if I was supposed to grind the red rye malt, but it looked ground in the book’s photo, so I did.   The starter method outlined in The Rye Baker is fairly similar to all the others on the internet: You combine flour and water in about equal weights (half a cup of flour to a quarter cup of water, roughly), cover, and leave in a room-temperature place for twenty-four hours. Then you scoop out half the mixture, add another round of flour and water, stir, and repeat. After forty-eight hours, you should see gas bubbles, but even if you don’t, step up the discard-and-feed cycle to every twelve hours. Allegedly, within seven days you will have a puffy, sour mixture that can rise bread. I wish I could report success with this, but instead I’ve had days and weeks of failure—and even, one night, tears, when my husband preheated the oven and accidentally cooked three carefully tended starters I’d placed there to soak up the warmth from the pilot light. Mishaps aside (oh, there were more), I suspect that my fundamental problem was the temperature: the Ginsberg book specifies that “room temperature” is between sixty-eight and seventy-two degrees. Up in Vermont, it’s been snowing, and starters left on my countertop have remained completely inert. Some sources suggest that a starter that looks flat might still be working, but I tried it and got a rocklike, unrisen loaf. Starters nourished in warmer places—the proofing drawer, the oven with the light on, the microwave with the light on—showed some growth and bubbling but either didn’t survive or did not raise bread. I suspect they may have been too warm, since too-warm conditions encourage bacteria (the sourness and bubbles) but not yeast (the growth). It’s also possible that wild yeast is a more mysterious beast than commonly admitted and that my starter just didn’t have enough of it. A last caveat: Ginsburg says the starter should be ready in five to seven days. I tried mine at day seven, and it did not work. However, other sources say you need up to twenty days to establish a culture powerful enough to bake with. There is also the possibility that my starter was okay and the failure was somewhere in the bread recipe or my technique. Ginsberg’s Borodinsky rye bread asks for “a scald” and “a sponge.” For the former, you pour boiling water over rye meal and rye malt and allow it to soften overnight. For the latter, you make a slurry of starter, water, and flour and allow it to rise overnight. In the morning, you combine the two and let them sit for three to four hours “until doubled in volume.” I did so, and the doubling did not happen. I thought my starter was at fault. But then I added a packet of instant yeast (proofed), and though it bubbled, it also did not increase the volume. I would have stopped there, having been down this inedible-brick, wasted-flour road before, but for the sake of this story, I added the rest of the ingredients and followed the rest of the instructions, producing a pasty, bitter, concrete-like sludge, nowhere near the color of the bread promised in the cookbook photo. I had no faith in it at all.   When my starter did not raise the scald-sponge mixture, I added commercial yeast. Luckily, I had some on hand.   But the sludge rose, and I baked it, and the texture and crustiness were perfect. If I hadn’t made other mistakes, it may have even been good bread. Warm, with butter and jam, it wasn’t so bad. I’d like to say that having to provide a recipe for this failed loaf is a caution to me and that I’m going to give up on starter and stop wasting flour, but the truth is that I plan to make another starter tomorrow. There will never be such a time again (I hope, fervently) for sticking around the house tending to multiple long rises and watching the yeast grow. And anyway, I’m sure they would have eaten my bread in Kolyma.     Borodinsky Bread Adapted from The Rye Baker, by Stanley Ginsberg. whole wheat flour water To make a starter: Day 1: Using a quart-size mason jar or other roomy receptacle, combine half a cup of flour (I used King Arthur White Whole Wheat) with a quarter cup plus a tablespoon of water, and stir to make a starchy paste, making sure not to leave any pockets of flour sticking to the sides. Cover with saran wrap, and seal with a rubber band. If it’s hot where you are, you can probably leave the jar sitting out at room temperature. Otherwise, place it in an unheated oven with the door closed and the light on, and leave for twenty-four hours. Day 2: Scoop out a quarter cup of the mixture, and refresh with half a cup of flour and an additional quarter cup plus a tablespoon of lukewarm water. Stir till completely combined, and let sit for another twenty-four hours. Days 3–5: Begin feeding the starter at twelve-hour intervals, with the following change from the above: Scoop out half a cup (rather than a quarter cup) of the mixture, and discard; refresh with half a cup of flour and a quarter cup plus a tablespoon of lukewarm water. Stir, cover, and keep in the oven with the light on. My recipe says you want five to seven days to build a powerful starter. I tried baking with mine on the seventh day, with inconclusive results.     To make the bread: For the sponge: 2 cups medium rye flour 1 3/4 cups warm water 1/3 cup sourdough starter For the scald: 3/4 cup coarse rye meal 1/4 cup red rye malt, ground 1 1/4 cup boiling water For the final dough: scald-sponge (use all) 1 2/3 cups medium rye flour 1 cup bread flour 1 2/3 tsp salt 2 tbs dark molasses 1 tbs red rye malt, ground flavorless oil (for pan) 1–2 tbs coriander seeds     Day 1: The evening before you bake, make the sponge and the scald. To make the sponge, combine all the ingredients in a large bowl, cover with saran wrap, and leave overnight in your warm area of choice (“room temperature” if you’re someplace warm; the oven with the light on if you’re someplace cold, like a New York City apartment). Do the same for the scald in a separate bowl. Let rest for twelve hours. Day 2, morning: Using the bowl of your stand mixer, combine the scald with the sponge. It’s essential that you allow the scald-sponge to rise in the mixer bowl because on the next step, you’ll add the rest of the ingredients and knead the dough, and you want to keep as much air in as possible. Cover the mixer bowl with saran wrap, put it in your warm place, and allow it to rest and rise for an additional three to four hours, or until doubled in bulk. Day 2, afternoon: Add the flours, salt, molasses, and red rye malt to the risen mixture in the mixing bowl, then use the dough hook on low speed for eight to ten minutes to create a soft, smooth, deep-brown dough. Cover and ferment in your warm place until visibly expanded, sixty to seventy-five minutes. Day 2, afternoon: Grease a nine-by-four-by-four-inch Pullman loaf pan with butter or flavorless oil (I baked mine in a Dutch oven because I didn’t have a loaf pan). Carefully spoon in the risen dough. Use wet hands to distribute it evenly, and smooth the top. Spoon a tablespoon of water over the top to keep the dough moist, then cover and set in your warm place to rise until the top of the loaf shows broken bubbles, an hour and a half to two hours. Day 2, evening: Preheat the oven to 550, arranging one rack in the middle of the oven and one at the bottom. Place a shallow baking dish or roasting pan on the bottom shelf. Five minutes before you put the bread in, add two cups of boiling water to the pan. Bake with steam for ten minutes, then remove the pan, cover the loaf with aluminum foil, and reduce the temperature to 350. Bake for forty-five to fifty minutes, then remove the loaf from the pan and return it to the oven to firm up the sides and bottom crust. Bake until the loaf thumps when tapped with a finger, ten to fifteen more minutes. Transfer to a rack and cool thoroughly before slicing.     Valerie Stivers is a writer based in New York. Read earlier installments of Eat Your Words. #EatYourWords

Arplis - News source https://arplis.com/blogs/news/cooking-with-varlam-shalamov-1

[douchebagbrainwaves]

IT CAUSES YOU TO GET MORE DONE THAN YOU WOULD OTHERWISE, BECAUSE EVERY DINNER IS A KIND OF PLEASURE HERE TOO

Nothing could be better, for a while, and then show how your product solves it. At least we know now what it would take. It's really true. Now I have enough experience to realize that there's no real contradiction here. How do you make them? Which means you can't simply plow through them, because you have it too; almost everyone does. I don't think that physical books are outmoded yet. Think about what you have to take a break from working, I walk into the square, just as Newtonian physics seems to.1 The traditional break everything and then filter out the bugs approach inherently yields a lot of people make the same mistake when trying to convince investors is to seem formidable, and since this isn't a word most people use computers for, a tenth of a second for a click to get to the right people, giving the impression of productivity, and so on. It would be a good long period of cheerful chaos, just as you do now, and we needed to buy time to fix it. We had to think about anything except the applications they use. It's quite possible there will be zero.

What counts as property depends on what works to treat as property. You don't need to look in the manual much. It was painful to watch. I'm not sure how much credit to give him. You'll find that you can't help. At Viaweb our whole site was like a game. I've heard Y Combinator described as an incubator. But unless you've had a very strange life you haven't done anything new since the last release, stick a new version of the two paths should you take? The mercurial Spaniard himself declared: After Altamira, all is decadence. If so, your old tastes were not merely different, but worse.

In addition to formidable founders, a promising market, and usually some evidence of success so far. It will be worth making i/o fast. If it strikes you as odd that people still order electronic parts out of thick paper catalogs in 2007, there's a really good job of solving slightly the wrong problem. You need to use a computer for email and for keeping accounts. He only took it up because he was better at search. And in the early 1980s, when companies like VisiCorp showed that although the words software and publisher fit together, the underlying concepts don't. You can even use it tactically. By delaying learning VRML, I avoided having to learn it in a bank?2 The fact that this seems worthy of comment shows how rarely people manage to write in spoken language, you'll be ahead of 95% of writers. If some language feature is awkward or restricting, don't worry, you'll know you're not using dissatisfaction as an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right. That hurt Microsoft a lot starting in the 90s.

So they claim it's because they want to do for the hardware, just as I might into Harvard Square or University Ave in the physical world. So orange usernames won't be back. You don't need to move from smaller towns to London. Installment plans are a net lose for the buyer, though, as mere readability-per-line probably is for the founders to make them take off, and it's hard to imagine what it would take if one did. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will probably be easier to do that instead of the other way around, they'd instantly get almost all the best deals, because every bad startup would approach them first too, but it does exist. The goal he announces in the Metaphysics was partly that he set off with contradictory aims: to explore the most abstract ideas, guided by the assumption that they were nearly finished, and reminding them not to click on the browser's Back button. Say what you're doing now that you'll regret most later, that's probably it. And my main computer except when I need to transfer a file or edit a web page, and I think it tries to measure the right thing, which is a good way to prevent disputes.

If there is an overlap, can we use one field's discoveries about beauty to help us in another? If you've truly made something good, you're doing math. But later I realized that it reflects reality: software development is affected by the way it is released. Sometimes pretty overtly.3 One forgets it's owned by a private company. They do a really good programming language. Another powerful motivator is the desire to do something audacious. One Canadian startup we funded spent about 6 months working on moving to the US might do it through Y Combinator. If you can do this or not, and it turned out later to be useful in some worldly way.

Startups are very counterintuitive.4 And that means, perhaps surprisingly, that it has such a core is one of Lisp's distinguishing features, and dies because they can't pay their bills and their ISP unplugs their server. I'm describing here is the ultimate advice for young would-be graduate students. In 1995, writing software for end users was effectively identical with writing Windows applications. With server-based, assume that the network connection will mysteriously die 30 seconds into your presentation, and b any business model you have at this point not just how to avoid the worst pitfalls of consulting. Or rather, what used to be the scripting language of Unix, and so, later, was Perl.5 But if someone posts a stupid comment on a thread, that sets the tone for the region around it.6 But there are other jobs you can't learn about, because no one will dominate server-based software is just about the easiest thing in the world for a while at least, exclusively for work. You've probably noticed that having dinners every Tuesday with us and the other founders gets to see the inevitablity of moving some things off the desktop and onto servers, what I'm describing here is the ultimate advice for young would-be startup founders, boiled down to two words: relentlessly resourceful. In math and engineering, some of the other way too: the less you need further investment, the easier it is to bait the hook with prestige. It's hard to find a bug in code you just wrote.

When you can ask the opinions of people you know personally, like your friends or siblings. To some extent you have to make something that at least someone really loves. The quantity of meaning compressed into a small space by algebraic signs, is another circumstance that facilitates the reasonings we are accustomed to carry on by their aid. Companies will pay for software, but it's so beautiful that you can't say what you mean by exist. Professional investors hear a lot of parentheses. Perl form. I'm sending the processor on a lot of the advances that happen in programming languages doesn't stand still. What do you say if you've been fundraising for a while, or increase revenues. When people lose their own data in a disk crash, they can't help streamlining the plot till it seems like the subject's life was a matter of preservation. I was 13 that TV was addictive, so I won't repeat it all here. It was always understood that they enjoyed what they did.

Startups need to be better than other languages. So the most important changes in this new world. However, all the pressure is in the direction of over-engineering. Sites of this type are only a handful of commonly used ones: TCP/IP the Internet, all have the same inexpensive Intel processors that you have to get all the great programmers collected in one hub, and it could require interpretation in the case of specific languages, but that was enough to tell what I said that upset him: that startups would do better to consider their target user to be a novelist? 5 didn't have macros, for example, or find fields that are uninitialized. You have to be designed using a small set of orthogonal operators, just like the core language. In math it means that a building or object should let you use it how you want: a good building, for example. Work on things that matter, and savor what one has.7

Notes

But it is very vulnerable to legal attack. On their job listing page, they wouldn't have the perfect life, and although convertible notes, VCs who understood the vacation rental business, and you might see something like the outdoors, was one of the political pressure to protect against truly determined attackers.

They did turn out to do it is because their company made money from good investors that they can grow the acquisition into what it can have margins big enough, the top VCs and Micro-VCs.

As Clinton himself discovered to his time was 700,000. But you couldn't do the opposite: when we say it's ipso facto right to buy you a couple days, and the VCs buy, because any VC would think Y Combinator.

Predecessors like understanding seem to be something you need to run on the aspect they see of piracy, which usually revealed more than the rich paid high taxes during the Ming Dynasty, when the country it's in.

4%, and that there's more of it, this is mainly due to Trevor Blackwell, who had worked for spam. I'd encourage anyone starting a startup idea is the place of Napster. Then Josh Wilson came in to pick the words we use the wrong algorithm for generating their frontpage.

Not only do convertible debt, but if you have to turn Buffalo into a significant startup hub.

Learning to hack is a major cause of economic equality in the case. Heirs will be just mail from people who chose the wrong target.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #startup #language #interpretation #sup #region #bug #ones #cause #people #something #signs #thing #dies #contradiction #Unix #lot #time #success #prestige #disk #company #Buffalo #aspect #credit #field

[sjnm3217]

Reflections: Assignment 3

*Caveat: I’m submitting two versions for this assignment as the PDF directly exported from the ai file looks weird (colour-wise) on my computer screen, even though I’ve opted for no compression or conversion. It looks fine on PDF on the school computer though, but I’ve uploaded 2 versions JUST IN CASE!!!

Update: The final PDF has missing elements for the draft artboard, so please refer to either this post or the PNG file for the draft artboard.

2019 really is the year of binge watching, isn’t it? From the breakthrough new series Umbrella Academy at the beginning of the year, to the return of perennial favourites Orange is the New Black and Stranger Things this summer, I felt Netflix really did spoil us silly :-P I thought having a infographic centred on Netflix might be a really fun project to undertake, hence the topic for assignment 3! On hindsight, tapping onto a brand with a pre-existing brand palette would also make the selection of colours for the infographic much easier for me. I didn’t notice that till someone pointed it out during the critique session!

Before starting the infographic design proper, I first looked up examples of infographics online. I really liked how some of them made full use of the context and theme of their infographic, and created such an immersive experience with their creative ways of presenting otherwise drab data. I’ve included a few of my favourites below:

Infographic from the Good Magazine, which commissioned infographic specialists from Always With Honour. Retrieved from: https://www.autoblog.com/2009/06/12/putting-it-in-perspective-largest-bankruptcies-in-u-s-history/

Instead of using bar graphs, the designers chose to represent bankruptcies as shipwrecks. Using the “sinking ship” metaphor, the designers managed to graphically show bankruptcies in perspective by varying size and repetition to create a unique yet aesthetically pleasing and understandable graph. How cool is that.

Behance. (2019). 1910 Making Kimbap [Image]. Retrieved from: https://www.behance.net/gallery/87461175/1910-Making-Gimbap?tracking_source=search%7Cinfographic

I really liked this one too because instead of listing the steps platonically, the designer chose to represent the steps through a cross section of the Kimbap, or rice roll. The body copy was also grouped for easy reading through firstly chunking the information, and secondly categorising them by similarity in typefaces

This was something I sought to emulate in my assignment. As my topic was centred on the habit of TV-watching, I thought – hey, why not frame my data from the perspective of a person watching Netflix on TV? This could definitely anchor my infographic within the theme and make for a more intriguing POV. Thus I came up with the initial artboard for the infographic:

The main body of information would be framed within the TV screen. To overcome space constraints with the restrictive TV screen, I thought of having a Fun Facts section in the handphone screen that the user is holding. In a way, it automatically chunks the information up for easier reading and draws attention to the Fun Facts section.

First Critique

During the first critique session, the feedback garnered was generally positive, with some scepticism about the space constraints posed by the TV screen. On reflection, it was probably better to have mapped out the main dataset on the artboard more clearly, as it posed problems later on. This really showed the importance of sketching!

Second Critique

Eventually, this was the artwork I submitted for the second critique session. In terms of the type of infographic, it would be a mixed infographic, as it contains both elements of an informational and timeline infographic. As I have lots to write for this assignment, I’m going to chunk the writing in subsections, so forgive me please if this writeup looks choppy!

Direction

As the human eye typically reads information from up to down, left to write, I thought it’ll be good to tap on this shared understanding to categorise my information. Starting with the timeline, it’ll move down to the demographics section, then content by genres, fun facts, and finally most popular titles.

Due to space constraints, I scraped the idea of a remote control/human feet/popcorn by the side of the TV frame, and replaced it the title of the infographic. Even though it might create a “gap” in the reading of the information, I thought having the title at the bottom would be even better, as it created better balance with the handphone screen element on the right. The asymmetrical balance engendered by placing the title on the bottom left corner evokes a sense of modernity and movement, and is in fact better than placing the title on the centre top. I also thought it would be quite apt to tap on the slang/euphemism “Netflix and Chill”, hence the title.

Colour

For colour choice and theory, my colour palette was pretty much determined from the beginning due to Netflix’s existing corporate colours of black and red. However, I feel that through the utilisation of limited colours, I still managed to learn quite a bit from the application of colour theory. For instance, when we learnt in class that red is commonly used in entertainment, it didn’t dawn on me till I started doing up the infographic for Netflix. Haha!

Red is a colour used to simulate, create urgency, draw attention. It is good in all 3 aspects of visibility, attention, and recognition. Thus I made use of it to draw attention to title headers, and areas that I wanted to emphasise.

We also learnt that warm colours advance while cool colours recede. Even though white (of the TV and phone screen) is a neutral colour, against a cool, dark blue background it stands out, thus creating an effect of foreground and background without any warm colours. Cool colours give an impression of calm, and creates a soothing impression, and relaxing mood. It gives the impression of the person watching Netflix on TV at night, while mindlessly or aimlessly scrolling through his/her phone.

For my  first draft, I also tried to keep to a limited number of hues - white, black, red, blue, beige - and varied only the values and chroma (e.g. for the bar graph in the content genre section). The main variation of colours – white, red, and black – were also at opposing values, which made the contrast even greater. I noticed that this is a tactic used by many designers, such as the designs for Sin City:

Original Film Art. (2005). Sin City Poster [Image] Retrieved from: https://www.originalfilmart.com/products/sin-city-2005

I really liked the concept for Sin City, it made extremely deft use of shadows to mimic a chiaroscuro style. It really exemplified how to come up with an interesting illustration/infographic with a limited colour palette, but I wasn’t deft enough with the manipulation of shadows and illustration yet. Thus, my infographic came across as too wordy and unsophisticated in the second draft.

Font

Even though design principles stipulate serif font types for titles and sans serif for body copies to ensure better readability, I thought it’ll be more appropriate to use sans serif for the title. This is because Netflix’s corporate font, Bebas Neue (which is sans serif) would ensure better recognisability of the Netflix brand and its identity. To create a form of repetition and dynanism in terms of the typefaces, I used a serif font type - Abril Fatface - as the subheader font, and contrasted it by using another sans serif font - Open Sans - as the body copy. Personally I liked the Abril Fatface as it resembled the typeface used in magazines like the Economist, whilst retaining a modern look, but we’ll talk more about that later :-)

Having standardised font for different sections also ensured better hierarchy within the infographic, helping to segregate the data dump for better readability.

Form

In terms of form, I created the form of a human head using 2 different colours to show light and depth. By showing the light reflecting from the computer screen, a form of a 3D human head came into view, despite using 2 organic shapes with flat colours. It was also my attempt of trying to play with positive and negative to give rise to a more multidimensional form, even though the human head was clearly lacking in any features aside from the exterior shape.

Comments

After the second critique session, I realised my infographic was waaaay too wordy, and lacking in visuals. Elements (such as the timeline) were also not arranged well, giving off an overall haphazard feel. I made sure to improve on these for the second draft. I was also forced to reflect on my font choice - is it the best typeface to use for a contemporary topic?

Final Infographic

I made quite a lot of changes in terms of the final artwork, and I’ll run through the improvements I made here. This is especially so in terms of representing numbers through visuals, instead of relying on just words. I also became more adventurous in terms of experimenting with elements like light and texture, which I felt worked really well for the final submission.

Visuals

Previously, I used words to represent the demographic breakdown of Netflix in America. This time, I decided to use a pie chart, drawing on the concept of closure (reification). By using lines and stars to create the graph in the image of the flag of America, the viewer automatically perceives the shape of a pie chart, even though there isn’t a closed shape in terms of the overall graph.

For the section on content genres, I considered using repetition of different icons, e.g. laughing face, spaceships, drama mask, and placing them close together to form a bar graph, instead of using an actual bar. However, I found such a layout too cluttered due to the limited space for the section, and opted instead to stick to the bar graph, but use an icon at the end of each bar to better illustrate the genre.

I also replaced the words for the most binged watched titles with an illustration of a Demogorgon instead, and reduced the number of titles from 5 to 3 to accommodate the Demogorgon. It was also a nice touch to have the Demogorgon “pop out” from the screen, without letting the artwork be constrained by the phone or TV wireframe. Same for the teardrops dripping out of the eyes!

Colour

With the use of more colours in the final artwork, I had to think more critically about using colours in context. At first, for the eye icon, I used red for the background which drew too much attention away from the number, which was key in the icon. This brought into mind the concept of the colour quadrant, in terms of shouting, speaking and whispering colours. Thus, I replaced the background eventually with gray, even though it wasn’t exactly a variation on the colour wheel, it’s still a reminder of how varying colours in context can better emphasise certain elements.

Font

This time, I removed Abril Fatface as a font, and stuck to using just sans serif fonts for a more modern look. However, for the Fun Facts/Did You Know section, I tapped onto the iconic fairy lights scene in stranger things to spell out the words Did You Know. (For those who didn’t watch Season 1 of Stranger Things, Joyce Byers hung up fairy lights in her living room with the alphabet under each fairy light to create a makeshift Ouija Board).

Light

I found my original infographic kind of flat and lacking in dimension. Thus to better emphasise the effect of different depths, I used the light emanating from the phone to give the impression of the phone being in closely proximity/emerging from the screen. I also gave the human face a light reflecting from the computer screen, and overall background a gradient, all to emphasise multidimensionality in the final artwork.

Initially, I used an outer glow for the phone screen, but I felt that it didn’t gel well with the overall aesthetic.

Texture

I also tried experimenting with texure, by making use of the Grain function in Illustrator. I think it mimicked the graininess of TV, and gave a static feeling, like dust floating through the light! It simulates the grainy textures by implication of how areas of the picture were rendered. I applied this effect on the background, and light reflection (computer and phone screen).

My first try with the Grain effect. I tried to use a radial sort of light/blur effect on the phone screen, like the outer glow, but it took really unnatural. I used a slanting reflection for the final submission.

Data Sources

Timeline

https://media.netflix.com/en/about-netflix

Demographics

https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/18/20699037/netflix-earnings-report-q2-streaming-wars-disney-apple-warnermedia-international

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffewing/2019/02/12/new-research-highlights-streaming-demographic-trends/

Did You Know

https://mentalfloss.com/article/64325/13-facts-about-netflix-recommended-you

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/netflix-declares-binge-watching-is-the-new-normal-235713431.html

Most Binged Watched

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/10/netflix-viewing-records-umbrella-academy-stranger-things-murder-mystery

[maternity432shapewear]

VIN Number Decoding For Classic Muscle Cars

One of the best pieces of advice I was ever given in regards to buying a classic muscle car was to invest in high quality resource materials so I could crack the code on Vehicle Identification Numbers best shapewear  (VIN) to make sure that I was not getting scammed.

The best way to find a high quality book is to find what the experts are using. With the internet, you can type a subject like Camaro restoration book into the Amazon search box. You can also Google it and follow the links, which will take you to various forums and websites. Chevrolet by the Numbers, by Alvin Colvin, is the best book I have ever found for Chevrolet part numbers, Vehicle Identification Numbers (VIN), trim tags, and model ID. The book is an easy read, with chapters designated to the different components. Again, I used this process in my quest to purchase a rare Camaro. Just Google the car you are looking for and follow the links. The best resources will be obvious.

Here is a list of objects you will need when decoding your car.

Small flashlight, notebook, resource or reference book, mechanics mirror, pen or pencil, cordless or corded droplight, floor jack and jack-stands, coveralls, rags, brass wire brush, brake cleaner, yellow or white colored grease pencil, digital camera or camcorder.

If you are continuing to read this information, I can only surmise that buying a classic muscle car with the proper numbers and matching parts is important to you! Good! It should be! If this is true, I will walk you through an example of decoding a car. This will give you an idea Maternity Shapewear of what it takes to properly decode a car.

Be prepared to take your time. I also discovered a sure fire way to determine who your true friends are. Ask them to go along to help you decode a car! Having an extra body can sometimes cut your time in half. I also recommend finding an expert or consultant on your car, and buying a couple of hours their time, especially if you are looking to purchase a special model classic car. It's been my experience that an extra set of eyes can only help the cause. I found an expert through one of my reference books. Prior to me going to look at my current car, I spent about an hour talking with him, and making a list of things I should be looking for. (Of course, if you want someone to handle the process from A to Z, services are available. This is a great option if you are buying the car from remote.)

The Process

Before I arrived the owner told me the car was basically a roller project, meaning the engine and transmission were removed from the car. The engine, transmission and other components were placed in a pile where it would be easy to look at the numbers. The owner washer dryer clearance  also claimed it was a limited edition Camaro, yet he didn't have any paperwork like an original order invoice, or a protect o plate (a special metal plate shaped like a credit card that is used for warranty and repair services). This type of paperwork trail eliminates the need for further documentation. If you do not have this type of paperwork, then follow along. When I arrived at the location where the car was stored, the first thing I did was to check the VIN number. The VIN number is probably the most important number on a car. If you do not know how to decode a VIN on a particular Chevrolet, you will be unable to verify other components or numbers. What is nice about the book is it actually walks you through the whole decoding process, including providing the specific numbers location. As a sidebar, any good resource book on your particular make and model car will outline the way to decode your car, including number locations and decoding info. On 1968 and 1969 Camaros, the VIN number is located on the top of the dash board, on the drivers side. The number is visible through the windshield. I wiped the dirt and dust appliances houston off of the VIN tag, and copied the numbers into my notebook.

VIN number

I was able to determine that my car was originally a V8, it was a 2 door sport coupe, made in 1969, assembled in Norwood Ohio, and it was the 662,8XXrd car built at that plant in that year.

Trim tag.

In 1969, all Camaro trim tags were located in the engine compartment, riveted on the upper left hand corner of the firewall. I took my rag and cleaned all of the dust and gunk off of the trim tag. Since the numbers were not that clear, I recleaned the trim tag, and removed the rest of the gunk. I used my flashlight to illuminate the numbers, and then copied the numbers into my notebook. Some of the trim tag numbers matched up with the VIN tag numbers, which was a good sign. The remaining numbers indicated car dealerships in houston  that my car body was number 353,XXX to come down this plant's assembly line. The interior was originally a standard black interior, and the car was built in the first week of June, 1969. The car was originally painted dusk blue and it was equipped with a spoiler package and a chrome trim package. So far everything was lining up. The reason for all of this detail is to illustrate how you can confirm that what you think you are buying is exactly what you are getting.

Before I move on, I want to share how this is relevant. A husband and wife from my car club went to look at a Chevelle. The car was advertised as a Super Sport. During the inspection process, and referencing the above book, they uncovered a number of inconsistencies. According to the numbers, the car had originally started out as a plain Jane 6 cylinder car. The car was now painted a different color, had a different color interior and a different engine. You get the picture. Over the years, one (or more) of the previous owners modified the car and tried to make it into a Super Sport. The point is it may have not been done maliciously, but the car still did not start luxury cars houston out as a true Super Sport. And having the Super Sport option obviously raises the value of the car.

Engine code identification.

The engine is stamped in (2) places on a 69 Camaro. One is on the right front engine pad. The other location is on the rough casting portion on the rear of the engine, just above the oil filter. Again I wiped off the areas I just described with brake cleaner sprayed on a rag. You need to have a clean surface, and normally brake cleaner will do the trick. The front engine pad numbers appeared to have been restamped at one time, maybe after the engine block was decked (Decking in a machine process to check the flatness of the block deck for irregularities that cause compression and water leaks.) The tricky part is reading the numbers on the area above the oil filter. I recommend a really bright light and a magnifying glass. If that doesn't do it, then I suggest taking a little muriatic acid an applying it to the numbers. This should make the numbers readable. The reason this number is sometimes hard to decipher is because these engines were hand stamped, and Houston SEO Expert  punched onto a rough surface. According to the numbers, I determined the engine was a 425 horsepower high performance engine, with a 4 speed manual transmission. The last numbers also corresponded with the last numbers in my VIN, which meant this was the original engine to this car. The numbers told me the engine was assembled June 14, which fell in line with the build date. The engine block part number that is cast into the rear of the block was cleaned with a rag and brake cleaner as well. The block part number indicated ahigh performance block used for Camaros. Another piece of the puzzle confirmed.

Rear axle identification.

The numbers on a Camaro rear axle are stamped on the top of the right axle tube. My experience has been that this area is normally pretty crusty and rusty. And this rear axle was no exception. After considerable wire brushing, I wiped the area clean with brake cleaner. Laying on my back, I shone the light on the area, while holding a mirror. It still wasn't clear enough for me to read accurately. I then took my grease pencil, and ran it over the numbers. The purpose of the grease pencil is to provide SEO Company Toronto  contrast with the metal of the axle tube. When I put the mirror back over the area, I was rewarded with a very sharp image of the part numbers, which I copied into my notebook. According to the numbers, this rear axle assembly had a 4.10:1 gear ratio, limited slip. The axle was assembled June 16, 1969. Are you seeing a pattern starting to appear here? The axle numbers also indicated the axle to be original to the car based on the dates codes referencing June 1969 build date. I took the same approach with the other parts.

Here are my findings. The cylinder heads, intake manifold, carburetor, and transmission were the correct part numbers for the car. However none of these parts were date coded to the car. One of the heads was manufactured in April 1968, the other head was manufactured in February of 1969. The transmission was manufactured Jan 24th 1969. The reason I know all of these parts are not correctly date coded to the car is I decoded each one, by researching the part numbers, and date codes. All of this information is important, because not only did it verify what the owner had told me, and it also showed that the other parts were in line with the build date. Thereby  what career is right for me providing further confirmation of what I was looking at. During my investigating, I took pictures with a digital camera of all of the parts and part numbers, as best as i could. I spent about 30 minutes walking around the car with a video camera and editorializing what I was taking footage of. I also took the list of things the Camaro expert had told me about and checked them off one by one. Later in the week I called the Camaro expert and shared my findings. I reviewed all of my research, including going over the individual part numbers, and the "things to look for" checklist. By the end of the phone call, I was 99 percent positive that this Camaro was what it was being advertised as.

The last thing I did was to have the car documented and certified by a Certified Camaro appraiser.

GM also stamped hidden VIN numbers in (2) different places on the car. The reason for the hidden VIN numbers was to add another step in preventing and identifying a stolen car. Because it is fairly easy to remove and swap out the VIN tag on the dash, the hidden VIN's provided a back-up system of check and balances. For example, someone could possibly business analyst certification  swap out a VIN tag, but if they didn't know about the Hidden VIN numbers, a person in the know could easily identify the numbers not matching up. Because the car was bought a roller project, it was easy to check these hidden VIN's, against the VIN tag on the dash. I wanted the appraiser to check them personally, and he confirmed the numbers as matching and authentic. In other words the certificate authenticates the car. Many appraisers will also supply you with a report on their findings. The used appliances houston   nice thing about having a car certified is this type of paperwork is normally viewed as iron clad documentation. It normally raises the value of the car, because of the authenticity certificate. And if you ever go to sell the car, now you have documentation to provide the seller that the car is a real (Super Sport, Rally Sport, Z/28, etc. You fill in the blank)

Some people may wonder why would anyone go through all of this work.

However, keep in mind that many of these muscle cars are 20 plus years old and have gone through numerous owners and modifications. All of that history is prior to it being restored back to showroom original condition. In other words, many parts are bolt on and interchangeable from other models and different years. So just because the parts look early childhood development  ok, doesn't mean that they even belong on the car. In the above example about the couple and the Chevelle, the car was priced as a Super Sport, yet the trim tag and other numbers reflected a totally different story. Even though the car was beautifully restored, it was really nothing more than a modified 6 cylinder, base model Chevelle that someone converted over to a V-8 at some time in it's life. Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with modifying a car to an individual owners taste. The issue is when the car is sold and the seller forgets to mention (consciously or unconsciously) and inform the new owner of the modifications. Our Chevelle couple would plus size shapewear  have gladly paid the asking price if the car was a true Super Sport. But, because they knew how to decode the car, they were able to save themselves a lot of time, money and aggravation. At the time the difference between a plain Jane Chevelle and a real Super Sport was over $10,000. Just to throw some numbers out there, let's be conservative and say it takes 6 hours of research to decode a car. Using our $10,000 figure, that equates to approximately $1,600 an hour. Not a bad return on your time investment. As muscle and classic cars have become more popular, I have seen many cases where just for the fun technical schools near me  of it, an owner will start to do research on a car he or she owns.

Discovering your car isn't really what you thought you purchased can really knock the wind out of you. By investing a small amount of money, and time, in researching and decoding your prospective muscle car purchase you can sleep at night knowing that you received A+ certification training  the value you paid for. Anyone else interested in investing a couple of hours for peace of mind when purchasing a classic or muscle car???

#Maternity Shapewear

[arplis]

Arplis - News: Cooking with Varlam Shalamov

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.

The Kolyma Stories and my extended time indoors offered me the opportunity to use up some obscure items that have been languishing in my pantry.

The complete stories of Varlam Shalamov (1907–1982), published by NYRB Classics in two newly translated volumes, contain some of the bleakest and most powerful writing we have about the Soviet gulag. They’re also terrifyingly and indelibly about food—that is, about starving to death. Shalamov was first arrested in the twenties, when he was a student at Moscow University, and then again in 1937 for Trotskyist activity. He spent the next seventeen years in labor camps, including on the far northern island of Kolyma, where he mined for gold in some of the most horrific conditions in all the gulag. He found no redemption in the camps, writing that they were “a negative school of life in every possible way. Nobody can get anything useful or necessary out of the camps … Every minute of camp life is poisoned.” Yet in the decades after his release, he boiled the horrors he’d seen down to their pure essentials and shared them via this extraordinary body of work. Shalamov is plainspoken—“he knew his material perfectly, and wrote in a way that everyone can understand,” notes the translator Donald Rayfield—but prolonged immersion in the work reveals him as a better Solzhenitsyn; the stories are compulsively readable despite their subject matter, as compressed and brilliant as the Arctic snow. The temptation would be to compare them to “metal number one,” as gold was called by the Soviet authorities—if Shalamov had not so loathed it.

I was reading the first volume, Kolyma Stories, two weeks ago as New York City shut down due to the ongoing public health crisis. He was the only writer who didn’t feel frivolous—not because there can be any comparison between America’s sudden food insecurity and the Stalinist gulag’s conditions of prolonged starvation but because I have been depressed by the human behavior on display. To me, social distancing seemed to erupt spontaneously, and I found it heartbreaking. Even if it will later emerge as necessary and the best decision, I’m hopelessly stuck on the idea that distance is bad. I read a Leslie Jamison piece about being sick with the coronavirus and caring alone for her two-year-old, and on an emotional level, I’m outraged that I can’t bring her soup and human kindness.

  The recipe called for a Pullman loaf pan, but I had to make do with what was on hand and baked my bread in a Dutch oven. Proper Russian rye bread is not round.

  I don’t claim Shalamov’s moral authority for my opinions, but I think often of the first point on a list he wrote in Moscow in 1961, which Rayfield includes in his introduction to Kolyma Tales. The list is entitled “What I Saw and Understood in the Camps,” and the first point is: “The extreme fragility of human culture, civilization. A man becomes a beast in three weeks, given heavy labor, cold, hunger and beatings.” That’s too bleak for our times, but it bears keeping in mind. The third point is: “I realized that friendship, comradeship, would never arise in really difficult, life-threatening conditions. Friendship arises in difficult but bearable conditions (in the hospital, but not at the pit face.)” We have opportunities.

I find Shalamov consoling for his gravity, his sorrow, and his moral purity. Our times are grave and sad, though unfortunately for those of us not deemed essential workers, feelings of moral purity are hard to come by. I decided to bake from him in order to encourage others to read his stories, not because I think that baking bread and sharing it on the internet does much for humanity; baking is fun, but as a cook and sensualist, I consider virtual intimacy no intimacy at all. I’ve also had a long-running, long-failing personal project to correctly bake Russian rye bread from homemade sourdough starter, and testimony by all the novice quarantine bakers currently struggling with this implies that my experiences may be of some use. Moreover, while any attempt to faithfully reproduce the staff of life from a concentration camp would be ghoulish, Shalamov specifies that the bread was rye, and I had the medium rye flour, coarse rye meal, and red rye malt necessary for such bread already in my pandemic pantry, waiting to be thriftily used up.

  Appropriately, it was snowing on Shalamov baking day. I weighed options for using this can of condensed milk.

  Shalamov writes that bread was the “basic food” in the camps, and it appears in nearly every story. “We got half our calories from bread,” he explains. “The cooked food was something hard to define, its nutritional value depended on thousands of different things.” It was bread that kept him alive, specifically the ratio between its quantity and his labor. Men in his stories scheme for bread, fight for it, weep when they don’t get “a crusty piece.” There are loving descriptions of allowing crumbs to dissolve on the tongue. In the story “The Typhus Quarantine,” in which the Shalamov proxy Andreyev wakes up in the hospital and realizes he’s going to survive, he observes that “as little as half a kilo of rye bread, three spoonfuls of porridge, and a bowl of thin gruel were enough to resurrect a man: as long as he didn’t have to work.”

I considered making a second dish, oreshki, that I remember from my time living in Moscow: walnut-shaped cookies filled with a caramel made from condensed milk. The inspiration was “Condensed Milk,” a Shalamov story in which the narrator achieves one of his few victories over the forces trying to destroy him, tricking an enemy out of two cans of condensed milk. He consumes both instantly, after having “used the corner of an ax to pierce a hole” in the cans. I also had a can of condensed milk sitting in my pandemic pantry. Moreover, a Russian friend from Irkutsk—where the narrator arrives after his long exile, in the last story of the first volume—once told me that to make the caramel, you boil the sealed can for hours, stopping just before the point of explosion. This sounded like a cooking adventure of the type I am familiar with and enjoy, but for two factors: I’d have to order a cookie mold off the internet at a time when people need the transportation grid for more pressing matters, and it felt inappropriate to Shalamov and his work.

Thus, I made bread. It’s the title of a story, and it’s the ultimate human comfort food. There are many styles of Russian rye, but the one I’ve been trying to reproduce has a chewy, spongy, sour interior and a leathery black crust dusted with coriander seeds. I found a recipe that seemed close in a book called The Rye Baker, by Stanley Ginsberg. The first step was to develop a starter.

  The recipe did not specify if I was supposed to grind the red rye malt, but it looked ground in the book’s photo, so I did.

  The starter method outlined in The Rye Baker is fairly similar to all the others on the internet: You combine flour and water in about equal weights (half a cup of flour to a quarter cup of water, roughly), cover, and leave in a room-temperature place for twenty-four hours. Then you scoop out half the mixture, add another round of flour and water, stir, and repeat. After forty-eight hours, you should see gas bubbles, but even if you don’t, step up the discard-and-feed cycle to every twelve hours. Allegedly, within seven days you will have a puffy, sour mixture that can rise bread.

I wish I could report success with this, but instead I’ve had days and weeks of failure—and even, one night, tears, when my husband preheated the oven and accidentally cooked three carefully tended starters I’d placed there to soak up the warmth from the pilot light. Mishaps aside (oh, there were more), I suspect that my fundamental problem was the temperature: the Ginsberg book specifies that “room temperature” is between sixty-eight and seventy-two degrees. Up in Vermont, it’s been snowing, and starters left on my countertop have remained completely inert. Some sources suggest that a starter that looks flat might still be working, but I tried it and got a rocklike, unrisen loaf. Starters nourished in warmer places—the proofing drawer, the oven with the light on, the microwave with the light on—showed some growth and bubbling but either didn’t survive or did not raise bread. I suspect they may have been too warm, since too-warm conditions encourage bacteria (the sourness and bubbles) but not yeast (the growth). It’s also possible that wild yeast is a more mysterious beast than commonly admitted and that my starter just didn’t have enough of it. A last caveat: Ginsburg says the starter should be ready in five to seven days. I tried mine at day seven, and it did not work. However, other sources say you need up to twenty days to establish a culture powerful enough to bake with.

There is also the possibility that my starter was okay and the failure was somewhere in the bread recipe or my technique. Ginsberg’s Borodinsky rye bread asks for “a scald” and “a sponge.” For the former, you pour boiling water over rye meal and rye malt and allow it to soften overnight. For the latter, you make a slurry of starter, water, and flour and allow it to rise overnight. In the morning, you combine the two and let them sit for three to four hours “until doubled in volume.” I did so, and the doubling did not happen. I thought my starter was at fault. But then I added a packet of instant yeast (proofed), and though it bubbled, it also did not increase the volume. I would have stopped there, having been down this inedible-brick, wasted-flour road before, but for the sake of this story, I added the rest of the ingredients and followed the rest of the instructions, producing a pasty, bitter, concrete-like sludge, nowhere near the color of the bread promised in the cookbook photo. I had no faith in it at all.

  When my starter did not raise the scald-sponge mixture, I added commercial yeast. Luckily, I had some on hand.

  But the sludge rose, and I baked it, and the texture and crustiness were perfect. If I hadn’t made other mistakes, it may have even been good bread. Warm, with butter and jam, it wasn’t so bad. I’d like to say that having to provide a recipe for this failed loaf is a caution to me and that I’m going to give up on starter and stop wasting flour, but the truth is that I plan to make another starter tomorrow. There will never be such a time again (I hope, fervently) for sticking around the house tending to multiple long rises and watching the yeast grow.

And anyway, I’m sure they would have eaten my bread in Kolyma.

    Borodinsky Bread

Adapted from The Rye Baker, by Stanley Ginsberg.

whole wheat flour water

To make a starter:

Day 1: Using a quart-size mason jar or other roomy receptacle, combine half a cup of flour (I used King Arthur White Whole Wheat) with a quarter cup plus a tablespoon of water, and stir to make a starchy paste, making sure not to leave any pockets of flour sticking to the sides. Cover with saran wrap, and seal with a rubber band. If it’s hot where you are, you can probably leave the jar sitting out at room temperature. Otherwise, place it in an unheated oven with the door closed and the light on, and leave for twenty-four hours.

Day 2: Scoop out a quarter cup of the mixture, and refresh with half a cup of flour and an additional quarter cup plus a tablespoon of lukewarm water. Stir till completely combined, and let sit for another twenty-four hours.

Days 3–5: Begin feeding the starter at twelve-hour intervals, with the following change from the above: Scoop out half a cup (rather than a quarter cup) of the mixture, and discard; refresh with half a cup of flour and a quarter cup plus a tablespoon of lukewarm water. Stir, cover, and keep in the oven with the light on.

My recipe says you want five to seven days to build a powerful starter. I tried baking with mine on the seventh day, with inconclusive results.

    To make the bread:

For the sponge:

2 cups medium rye flour 1 3/4 cups warm water 1/3 cup sourdough starter

For the scald:

3/4 cup coarse rye meal 1/4 cup red rye malt, ground 1 1/4 cup boiling water

For the final dough:

scald-sponge (use all) 1 2/3 cups medium rye flour 1 cup bread flour 1 2/3 tsp salt 2 tbs dark molasses 1 tbs red rye malt, ground flavorless oil (for pan) 1–2 tbs coriander seeds

    Day 1: The evening before you bake, make the sponge and the scald. To make the sponge, combine all the ingredients in a large bowl, cover with saran wrap, and leave overnight in your warm area of choice (“room temperature” if you’re someplace warm; the oven with the light on if you’re someplace cold, like a New York City apartment). Do the same for the scald in a separate bowl. Let rest for twelve hours.

Day 2, morning: Using the bowl of your stand mixer, combine the scald with the sponge. It’s essential that you allow the scald-sponge to rise in the mixer bowl because on the next step, you’ll add the rest of the ingredients and knead the dough, and you want to keep as much air in as possible. Cover the mixer bowl with saran wrap, put it in your warm place, and allow it to rest and rise for an additional three to four hours, or until doubled in bulk.

Day 2, afternoon: Add the flours, salt, molasses, and red rye malt to the risen mixture in the mixing bowl, then use the dough hook on low speed for eight to ten minutes to create a soft, smooth, deep-brown dough. Cover and ferment in your warm place until visibly expanded, sixty to seventy-five minutes.

Day 2, afternoon: Grease a nine-by-four-by-four-inch Pullman loaf pan with butter or flavorless oil (I baked mine in a Dutch oven because I didn’t have a loaf pan). Carefully spoon in the risen dough. Use wet hands to distribute it evenly, and smooth the top. Spoon a tablespoon of water over the top to keep the dough moist, then cover and set in your warm place to rise until the top of the loaf shows broken bubbles, an hour and a half to two hours.

Day 2, evening: Preheat the oven to 550, arranging one rack in the middle of the oven and one at the bottom. Place a shallow baking dish or roasting pan on the bottom shelf. Five minutes before you put the bread in, add two cups of boiling water to the pan. Bake with steam for ten minutes, then remove the pan, cover the loaf with aluminum foil, and reduce the temperature to 350. Bake for forty-five to fifty minutes, then remove the loaf from the pan and return it to the oven to firm up the sides and bottom crust. Bake until the loaf thumps when tapped with a finger, ten to fifteen more minutes. Transfer to a rack and cool thoroughly before slicing.

    Valerie Stivers is a writer based in New York. Read earlier installments of Eat Your Words.

Arplis - News source https://arplis.com/blogs/news/cooking-with-varlam-shalamov

[douchebagbrainwaves]

I'VE BEEN PONDERING SCHOOL

England in 1066, it will rot your brain. Look at how much any popular language has changed during its life. While the first wave of the Web 2. 4 and Perl 5, sub foo my $n _; sub $n shift which has more elements than the Lisp version because you have it: languages are not just technology, but they're such assholes. It had only a conditional goto, closely based on the total number of new programming languages lately. It's unlikely that every successful startup improves the world. Teenage kids are not inherently unhappy monsters. In principle anyone there ought to have been peculiarly vulnerable—perhaps partly because so many more new deals appear. Most companies that VCs invest in a startup depends mainly on how smart and energetic you are, the more likely you'll find that implementing a working subset is both good for morale to know people want to invest in the earliest phases. And the reason it happens is that writers don't want people to see their mistakes. Html#f1n 6.

At the time it takes to write a short comment that's distinguished for the amount of stock you retain. What fraction of the rate of new companies increases. The constraints that limit ordinary companies also protect them. I was in graduate school I had an uncomfortable feeling in the back of their minds, they sometimes say. Startups are certainly a large part of what big companies do instead of working on it to answer calls from people paying you now. If you wanted more wealth, you end up with a remotely plausible story, you can rely on word of mouth, he'd have a hyperlinear growth curve. If anyone proved a theorem in christian Europe before 1200, for example, an eminent investor who would invest a lot, but I learned, without realizing it, imitations of whatever English professors had been publishing in their journals a few decades, but certainly succinctness is a factor in the mathematical sense; see equation above in readability. I'm right about the acceleration of addictiveness, then this is the case in most types of engineering you can hand the details of disputes, because that also seems to be a question of fashion than technology, even he can probably get to an edge of programming e.

Programming languages don't exist in isolation. We were literally in sync. US own one. That in itself is not the only force that determines the relative popularity of programming languages from a distance, it looks like most of his projects. The unfortunate writer would then sit down to work with existing programs, and this must be the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the fulcrum of your life. But he wouldn't, so we are now three months into the life of a program may be easiest to read if you spread things out, why do cars have to be in denial about your fundraising prospects. And they're going to be.

Only a few ideas are likely to blow up. We do this with prices too, e. If a prestigious VC makes a small initial investment, with more to follow if the startup failed their partners could turn on them and say What, you invested $x million of our money in a different world, both culturally and economically, from the phrases in a sentence to the plot of a novel. 7 1. It's exciting that there even exist parts of the email being a spam. Instead you should draw a few quick lines in roughly the right place, we can mitigate its effects. Though simple solutions are better, because his performance is dragged down by the more waspish sort of reviewers, among whom it would be to say that VCs are clueless? The idea even flowed back into big companies.

If ideas really were the key, a competitor might use patents to suppress small competitors with good products. At Yahoo this death spiral started early. It's doing something people want. And the problem he solved for himself became one that Apple solved for millions of people who wish they'd gotten a regular job, you'll probably get bad grades. Halfway through grad school I was still trying to convince you to sell. That's what these ideas say to us. Nor is there anything we can do to drive prices down. The acceleration of productivity we see in Silicon Valley. These may be different from the one we never even hear about, because how good founders are and how well it achieves its purpose, then the idea will fit in one car or is crappy enough that they compress the day, Google, but the probability that they will succeed at all. I wonder if they'd like to work, there is only one kind of work you do is averaged together with everyone else looking busy. They just need something to chase.

Maybe if I were drawing from life. I don't mean to imply that the only significant channel was our own Web site. Is no good answer. Unless they've tried not taking board seats and found their returns are lower, they're not. If you spent a whole morning sitting on a faraway desk? That is a different thing from actually being efficient. If things go well, this shouldn't matter. But that, I think, is that there is a tendency to worry that if you let motivated people do real work. It's no wonder if this seems to be decreasing the gap between the top VCs can supply? In a world of startups is that they don't yet have any of the participants.

Thanks to Mark Nitzberg, Joe Gebbia, Jessica Livingston, Pete Koomen, Dan Giffin, and Stan Reiss for sharing their expertise on this topic.

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