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#i spent nearly 15 years of my life thinking i was weird that nobody else did the stuff i did and that i should keep my mouth shut about it
princekirijo · 3 years
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You know I really do love my parents but I will never forget the time they told me they weren't going to get me tested for autism/ADHD because they didn't want that stigma attached to me.
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Day 3: Chris Beck- Daddy and Creampie
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Warnings: Dub con, non con, forced pregnancy, breeding kink
Tags: @saiyanprincessswanie​ @mcudarklibrary​ @coconutqueen21​ @jtargaryen18​ @what-just-happened-bro​ @nsfwsebbie​ @bucksgoat​ @gigistorm​ @avengerimscreaming​ @venusavengers​ @saharzek​ @navybrat817​ @xoxabs88xox​ 
XXX
You and Chris worked together well. You and him had been co-workers for years for the Ares 3 mission. Your relationship was strictly professional, but you’d be lying if you both hadn’t snuck off during long training weeks to relieve some pent up energy.
You both had made it very obvious there were no feelings involved and that it was strictly a sexual relationship. He seemed fine with this, and you knew you were. You had bigger things to worry about, things far more important than a relationship. You and your team were on the brink of a breakthrough with the Mars trip being successful.
You were the team’s science officer as Beck worked at the surgeon. You both were to stay behind, you to research the planet and Beck to make sure you’re not hurt without proper assistance. You were to send weekly videos on the information needed for the arrival of permanent human life. 
Though it was a far-fetched dream, you wanted to find and grow enough organisms to start moving humans to the planet. After about 9 years on the planet, you were proud to say you had done just that. 
You excitedly turned on your computer to start a new weekly video, your mouth hurting from the uncontainable joy. “Good evening everyone, by the time this reaches you it should be morning, so good morning to you. I would just like to inform you all that the plants on the C-side of our inhabitants are growing enough oxygen to support 15 people, while the B-side and the D-side are able to hold 35. Side-A is not currently able to hold any form of life due to the temperatures still being too harsh, but I’m sure a weather modifier can be one of the first people on the shuttle here to start changing that safely. Chris and I happily await your arrival, and we hope to see you all soon. Bye-bye.” You smile and wave to the camera as you end the video, preparing it to be sent off. 
You thought about the number of people who would be here just in a few months. People of all ages and backgrounds had signed up to come, including children with their parents, so you could study how it would affect people of different ages, bodies, etc.
Just as you were walking out of your personal quarters, you bumped into Chris. “Oh, sorry about that,” he apologized, steading two mugs he held, “Tea?” You smiled at the raspberry tea he had become famous for making you every evening. 
“Thank you,” you happily grabbed one of the mugs and began drinking, “Just sent off the good news to base.” Chris raised his eyebrows before swallowing his own mouthful of tea.
“Are you excited?”
“You have no idea.”
“Yeah, it’ll be nice to have others around. Not that you’re not awesome.” Chris playfully elbowed you on the arm as you started leading him to the cameras in the kitchen. You wanted to check on the gardens and green life you had been nursing for the past 9 years.”
“No, I get it. I couldn’t have asked for a better partner on this, but man has it been a long nearly a decade.” Chris blew out a heavy sigh.
“God, has it really been that long? Seems like yesterday we got here,” you nodded your head as you checked off every camera for the night, “Well, I’m happy I spent it with you, too. How much you think we missed at home?” Now you let out a deep sigh.
“Who knows. The little information I’ve gathered hasn’t been too interesting, but I’m sure there’ll be something that’ll throw us off. You think socks with slippers are finally socially acceptable in public?” You looked down on your comfort shoes before meeting his eyes.
“If they haven’t, I think they’ll have to make an exception for you. You rock it so well,” he grinned at you. 
You laughed loudly, and he joined in. “Thank you, I’ll put in a good word for your stained shirts.” Chris mockingly rolled his eyes, causing another laugh to leave your lips, before he finished his tea. He took your empty mug to the sink as you got up to shower and prepare for the night. 
As you were in the shower you heard your door opening. “What the Hell, Beck, I’m in the shower.” your mind thought to the cameras in the bathroom that would no doubt see him walking in. Though the toilet and shower area were out of reach of the camera’s view, you still found the invasion too much. Sure they wanted to make sure you and Chris were staying strictly professional, you’d be lying if you said you and him didn’t turn off the cameras every once in a while to get in a quickie. 
You didn’t hear a response, so you opened the curtain to see nobody there. But your door was open. Huh, weird. Maybe he was just dropping something off? 
Once done in your shower, you made your way to your room and shrieked when you found Chris lying nude on the bed. “Chris, the cameras!” 
“Relax, babe, I turned them off. Think I’m a dumbass or something?”
You looked suspiciously at him for a second. “How, the cameras need a password that only I have.” It was your computer after all.
Chris reached for a slip of paper on the bedside table that wasn’t there before. It was the very one Dr. Grudge had given to you before the mission. “You hide everything in the same place. Under your sink isn’t the most clever hiding place, honey.” You rolled your eyes before shaking your head at him. 
“You’re something else, Beck.” 
“You love it. Now come on, it’s been two weeks, I’m hard as fuck, baby,” Chris pouted as he grabbed his massive member. You could feel your pussy clench at his words, and at how much you had missed him inside you. It had been a long two weeks.
You discarded the towel that covered your modesty, quickly climbing on the bed to straddle his hips. Chris hurriedly grabbed onto yours, both of you moaning in unison as you sunk down to his limit. 
“Fuck, daddy. You feel so good inside me,” you moaned as you found a rough but steady rhythm.
Chris growled, “Yeah? You like it when I fuck your tight little cunt? God, you’re so tight. I don’t think I’m fucking you enough, what do you think, hmm?” That’s when he took over and started thrusting up into you at a fast rate. The only sounds that could be heard were your loud moans of pleasure and skin against skin. If you listened hard enough, you could just barely hear the sounds of your pussy squelching around his dick. 
“Shit, I’m gonna cum,” you whined out. 
“Fuck, you’re squeezing me so hard, you wanna cum baby? Wanna cum all over my fat cock?” Chris’ thrusts got faster and harder as he reached a hand down to play with your clit. “Come on, honey, cum for me. Cum for daddy.” 
“Arg- oh God I’m coming!” you screamed out, drenching Chris in your juices. Chris continued to chase his own pleasure, you still trying to recover from the powerful orgasm. You tried to lift yourself from you to help him cum elsewhere, but Chris’ grip on you never faltered. 
“Let me cum inside you, I wanna feel your tight walls around me as I dump my load into you.” You quickly dropped from your post-orgasmic state at his words. You shook your head hurriedly. 
“No, you know I’m not on birth control,” you couldn’t have them due to them being destroyed on the journey here, “Pull out!” The pull-out method wasn’t the best plan, but it had been working just fine for the past 9 years. You couldn’t risk a pregnancy ruining the progress you had made, the academy would no doubt fire you both. 
“I spoke to Mark the other day, they lifted that rule a little while ago now,” Chris grunted, his orgasm was getting close, “With them sending supplies I figured we could easily get something to prepare for a baby. They’ll be here in what? 6 at most 8 months. You’ll still be pregnant with my baby by then. Our baby.” 
You shook your head. This was madness, even if the rule wasn’t in force you were in no place to have a baby right now. You still wanted to further your career, and you certainly didn’t want to have a baby with Chris. He was a good man, but you couldn’t see yourself with him in that position. 
“Chris, stop. This isn’t funny, let go now. I won’t tell anyone you did this if you stop now.”
Chris just laughed at you, “Can’t do that, baby. I want you to make me a real daddy, I’ve waited long enough. We’re. Perfect. For. Each. Other.” Each word was accompanied by a hard thrust, soon you felt warmth flooding your channel. “Fuck! Take it, take my load.” Chris continued pushing his cum further into you, working himself down his high. 
Chris held you to him as he stayed inside you. He stroked your back as he slowly pulled out of you, forcing your limp body into a position on your stomach. You were too numb to fight back, tears were starting to form in your eyes that you quickly blinked away. 
“You’re gonna be such a good mom, I can see it now,” Chris mumbled as he cupped your stomach before shoving his hardening cock back into you. This was going to be a long next few months. 
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leebrontide · 3 years
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A true, 30 year, tropetastic, queer love story. (Part 1)
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Pls open the link if you'd like to read a 30 year, trope-tastic true queer romance featuring pining, instalove, swords, childhood-friends-to-lovers and a happy ending.
We THINK the story begins in 1991. We know it starts at theatre day-camp for kids, a summer when we were both in elementary school.
The earliest memories are vague- I remembered a super cool kid from the older class with dark eyes who I was desperate to eat lunch with every day.
It's taken us years to reconstruct the timeline. We have figured out I did go to her house outside of camp that first year, because I remember her bird that tried to bite me. We can only guess at years based on camp themes.
Because we were little kids. I was 7. So we lost touch.
But here's the thing- we kept going to the same camp. She was always in a class ahead of me, because I'm a year and a half younger.
And every year- apparently without remembering we'd met before? We became summer best friends. Drawn together over and over.
But, being disorganized kids in a world of lesser tech, every year, when camp ended, we lost phone numbers- we lived a good 30 minutes away from each other, so I have to imagine our parent's weren't exactly heartbroken at the loss. It was a lot of driving.
In 4th grade, when I was 9, I made a new best friend, named Meredith. My parents heartily recommended the summer theatre camp to hers, and she was sent with me, the next year.
She, was older than me, so she was in Ty's class. & having excellent taste, also made friends with her.
The three of us played together all summer.
Then came the fall, and the inevitable lost contact. I remember being sad about that much more clearly, that year.
BUT, the big change happened when I was 10.
Again, sent to camp. Again, my friend Meredith was there to.
At lunch, I found them playing together. I went to introduce myself to the obviously cool older girl.
For some reason I tried to shake her hand? Little weirdo.
Ty reacts to me the same way- oh hey! Cool new person! I want to be friends!
Meredith looks at us both like we're out of our minds.
"You know each other. We played all last summer."
And suddenly, the spell of childhood amnesia was broken.
I DID know her. We were FRIENDS.
We HAD BEEN FRIENDS for years.
She LIKED ME.
SHE LIKED ME.
(love with memory disabilities is a trip, folks. And her lil ADHD kid brain was struggling right alongside mine)
We were elated.
But that wasn't the last shock to my little 10 year old heart that 5 week summer camp would bring.
Meredith was, and is, a poet. Somehow she had a habit, at 11 years old, of making up poems about people's eyes.
Weird stuff. I remember a pair of green eyes being compared to a deep sea, were the bones of drunken drowned sailors floated.
Very Anne of Green Gables.
And- I remember this part with perfect clarity. She turned to me and said, do you know who has pretty eyes? Ty.
We were crossing the stage, Ty was carrying a box of props like 15 feet ahead of us.
I said "does she?"
And then, ever the romantic I screamed "HEY TY TURN AROUND I WANNA SEE SOMETHING!"
She did.
And for the first time, I looked into the dark eyes I'd been drawn to for all those years, and saw them anew.
There's a reason cupid's supposed to have arrows.
I swear to you that this is true. It felt like an actual blow to my chest. Like a physical blow.
I was stunned. My little heart was hammering out of control.
I have no idea what I said, or did, or looked like after that.
But I figured out pretty quickly what that was. It was not subtle, even to a prepubescent nearly 6th grader.
But I was a pragmatic little almost-6th-grader.
This was a crush. Middle schoolers have crushes.
And they're supposed to fade over time.
I don't remember if I was worried that my crush was on a girl. I just remember the certainty that this was just a child's crush, and therefor nothing that would last or cause problems.
And when fall came, I lost her number again.
But this time I was devastated.
But, this time a hero saved the day! Meredith, sweet, wonderful, more-organized-than-either-of-us Meredith, still had the number.
And this time, I held on to it.
We became year round besties.
For the first year of adoring her year-round, I didn't worry about my little crush. It'd go away in time.
By 7th grade, it started to be a problem.
We were having sleep overs, and I started to feel guilty about how much I wanted to look at her and cuddle her all the time.
I don't think I told anyone right away. But Meredith was always the smartest of us three.
She's the one who proposed we play "wedding". She presided over the ceremony herself, and her little sister was our wedding photographer.
Oddly, even though I didn't know about this photo till years later, this is a game both of us remember playing.
It meant... something.
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I started to feel guilty. We were having sleep overs, talking every day on the phone. I wanted to look at her all the time- I wanted to be with her all the time. I wanted to kiss her, and started to realize she might be bothered by that.
I never wanted to hide anything from her.
So, I confessed my love. I didn't think of this as being especially radical or brave, but in retrospect, I'm impressed by 12 year old Lee's behavior.
She smiled brightly, and said she loved me to!
As her best friend.
I clarified my position.
She repeated that she loved me as her very best friend.
And these feelings were a bit scary and BIG, so that was all good. She still wanted to hang out all the time. Life was good.
By 8th grade, I was starting to worry. The crush hadn't worn off yet. Everyone told me these things wore off.
But I was more in love with her than ever.
And when Meredith moved to Nashville, we got even closer.
We joined the MN sword club. Made new friends. In the way of these things, a whole lot of them turned out to be some evolving variety of queer. Friends started coming out.
I barely needed to, my crush was horrifyingly obvious to all our friends.
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I promised you swords. The swords don't feature prominently, but the club was a major connection for us for years, and this detail has always struck me.
I'm not an especially good fencer. Especially then. I was constructed out of raw spaghetti noodles and moved like creaky budget claymation most of the time. I was calculating, but slow.
She was fast, and brash, and more skilled than me. She eventually beat some nationally recognized fencers. We called her "fiery Tybalt" because we're a bunch of big ol nerds who wanted to sound smart. She eventually took her name from that nickname.
Even at only 5ft tall, she should have beaten me handily and reliably. She could hold her own against much better fencers.
But we actually got BANNED from sparring together, because we were so evenly matched we could never get enough points for a win.
My one and only expertise in fencing was knowing her. But she knew me just as well, so there was a stalemate.
Our friends laughed at us.
I confessed my love again in 8th grade.
And 9th.
10th.
11th.
I never wanted to lie to her. It was important to me that she knew what I was thinking and feeling, but it was also important that I not burden her with it.
She always gave me the same answer. She loved me. She loved me SO MUCH.
What a shame she was straight.
Now, readers, let me remind you we're looking at two queer kids in the 90s at this point.
There were pressures at play.
When I was in 11th grade, she left for college. And she was far enough away that long distance calls were expensive. I couldn't call her every day.
What I remember most about senior year was being depressed and lonely.
But also, that after years of my family despairing of my ever learning to type, and eventually getting me the (then very expensive) dragon speech-to-type program so I could type my homework and not fail school- my contact with her was suddenly all in text. AOL messenger.
People have commented at all my workplaces about my typing speed. I type 120 words per minute now.
Specifically because it was the only way to talk to her most days.
I went to college the following year. We both got boyfriends. Both nice boys who liked and admired us.
BOTH broke up with us because we so obviously preferred each other over them. To an embarrassing degree.
The boy I was dating- bless him he only lasted 3 months- specifically told me "if I go out with you any more I'm going to fall in love with you. And you're in love with her."
Slick bastard.
He was right tho.
I couldn't be mad at him.
But this is when I started to really panic.
It'd been 6 years. My first crush was still absolutely roaring. Nobody else came close to tempting me.
And nobody else wanted to, when it became obvious they couldn't compete with her.
And she was still my best friend, so of course I told her. I told her I was miserable, because I was going to be single forever because nobody else would want me, because I was so in love with her.
She felt bad. She loved me so much. So much she'd been dumped to.
Such a shame she was straight.
I wouldn't find out till much later that that conversation had started something on her side, that, for once, she knew to keep from me.
She spent the next 6 months in intense contemplation.
She DID prefer me to all the other boys (and girls) who were chasing her in college.
And there were a lot of them.
She did think I was pretty, and she did love me. And she did want to be with me forever.
She'd been as dedicated to me as I was to her through this whole time. As caring, as invested, as, frankly, obsessed. Everyone could see it.
But she wasn't straight. She was bi.
And ace.
We wouldn't learn that word for many more years. All she knew was that the story of falling in love didn't match the love she was feeling.
But then she realized- she'd never felt the feelings she was "supposed" to feel for her boyfriend, either. She was not more attracted to him than to me. And he was a good looking guy. A catch by most any standard.
And she also hadn't loved him.
But she did love me.
So, my sophomore year of college (her junior year), we were preparing our trip to the Renaissance festival. A bunch of her friends were driving into town for it, and we'd see each other again at last. (we'd been back at school like 2 weeks, so naturally were desperate to meet up)
I am still flabbergasted as the next series of events.
She asked me out. On AOL instant messenger. After over 7 years of my pining, and adoration. After 7 years of choosing the pain of being near her and not being able to kiss her, over the desolation of not having her beside me
She very logically explained her reasoning.
I had a meltdown.
My poor room mate walked into our room to find me crying and throwing things at the computer screen.
I was convinced she was offering to date me because she felt bad for me. Because she loved me and wanted me to stop hurting and feeling alone.
So I turned her down.
That, friends, was HARD. REALLY HARD.
Thankfully, she was having none of it. She insisted it only made sense for us to date. I tried to stay firm. I refused repeatedly, all in that damned AOL messenger.
We reached a compromise- one date, at the Ren Fest, as a test.
And if it failed we'd never speak of it again.
Because the prospect of dating and breaking up was terrifying to us both.
If we were going to be together, we'd be defacto engaged. Neither of us could tolerate breaking up.
The weekend came- my college friends all knew, and accompanied me, made sure I was decked out in the best fair garb we could cobble together.
She drove up with her friends- including the ex- who had no idea what was happening. She had on her finest cape & boots & a swishy dress.
We could not manage to be alone together. Like it was a proper rom-com ridiculousness. All damn day.
But at least we were together.
She came back to my dorm that night, to spend the night, and drive back the next day.
Shout out to my room mate who stayed at her boyfriend's house that night. Love you, Lindsay.
We finally managed to kiss.
She abruptly decided kissing wasn't some weird thing people only pretended to like because it was normal, and was in fact an amazing wonderful thing we should do frequently.
I don't actually remember us deciding that the experiment was successful, and we'd be a romantic couple from then on.
Pretty sure the kissing melted my brain.
It was not like kissing my old boyfriend at all.
She went back to college the next day.
I do remember, that, MORE THAN ONCE, I nervously asked my roomy if this had all really happened. I was truly and genuinely concerned that I'd dreamed or fantasized the whole thing. I'd done both enough times before.
I couldn't just ask outright so I'd say something like. "Hey did anything- important happen yesterday?"
And she'd look at me like I was speaking some alien language, and tell me I was dating Ty now.
I wandered around in a dream-like stupor for a WEEK.
This is a good place to stop for now. More tonight. I need to go snuggle my baby and help my wife with lunch. 💖
Popping in briefly for the next installment.
All our friends knew immediately. Some of them- the newer ones, were confused because they had assumed we were always dating, on account of how blatantly in love we were all the damn time.
We decided tho, to hold off on telling our families. We decided to date a year first, to show that it was serious, and that we meant it.
It was a good year, full of the kind of pining that is regularly rewarded by happy weekends and spring breaks and summers.
The next august, before we went back to school, we each sat down our own parents. Hers were sort of "yeah ok whatever." I was not there for that conversation.
I went to my favorite restaurant with my own parents, and told them I was seeing someone. Dad was enthused. Wanted to meet him.
Well. I said. You have.
Because it's Ty.
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srhlsx · 4 years
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Rewritten & Reposted March 24, 2021
MASTER | Ch. 13 | CHAPTER 14 | Ch. 15
After that night, something changed between you and Bokuto. It was a subtle change, but a change nonetheless. He didn’t kiss you as often as you’d like, and while sometimes that drove you crazy enough to want to pull your hair out, it was enough to just have those moments together, those lingering touches and too-long stares that made your heartbeat a fraction faster. 
One change in particular came in the form of regular study dates. 
Bokuto was not the most serious student, he was planning on mostly relying on his athletic ability to get him into the school of his choice - or if he was lucky enough, go professional as soon as he graduated. You reminded him that getting into the school was only half the battle, in order to play he needed to actually keep up with his grades. Studying with him was like trying to wrestle a puppy into a travel carrier while also having a toddler balanced on your hip with your hands tied behind your back… oh, and the room is on fire.
“You have got to sit down.” You sighed as you eyed the boy pacing circles around the counter in your apartment kitchen. Baba had offered to have Yua and Eiji over for a few hours that day to allow you time to get studying in without having to worry about them. You’d pick them up for some dinner later if you were ever going to get in the work that was needed.
“But I’m bored.” Bokuto whined, finally collapsing dramatically at the table across from you. He had been banished to sitting across from you rather than next you when for the first fifteen minutes of studying he spent insisting that he would be more productive with you sitting in his lap. He propped his elbow up on the table and rested his chin in his hand as he attempted to give you some of the best puppy eyes you’ve ever seen. “Can we take a break, (Y/n)-chan?”
“Don’t butter me up, we just took a break.” You laughed as you looked back to your notes in front of you, the ins and outs of biology were thrilling in their own right but Bokuto had a smile that could probably get you to do anything - so you looked away from him. “We don’t get to take another one for at least 45 minutes.”
Bokuto let out a loud huff and sadly looked back down at his own study materials. They weren’t as sloppy as you might expect them to be, but you were almost positive that was because Akaashi helped him when needed. His handwriting was small and scratchy, but the different colors he wrote in and highlighted with showed that he cared at least a little bit about what was going on in his classes. 
At the moment, he was working through some chemistry problems. When you first started studying you went and dug through your past school work and happily handed over your old notes since you’d taken that class a previous year. When he opened up your notebook, his eyes widened considerably and had repeatedly glanced between you and the pages before him. You had looked at him with a closed-eye smile and tried not to blush when he complimented your thorough notes.
“This is amazing,” He had breathed, amazed.
You laughed at his expression and responded confidently, “Yes, they are.”
He shot up then and reached over the table, his hands grasped either side of your head and dragged you clumsily over the table, messing up your neat organization. He smashed his lips against yours, smiling as you momentarily struggled through your surprise. “I owe you,” He grinned after pulling away and sitting down like he hadn’t just kissed you within an inch of your life.
Now though, the thrill was gone for him and every once in a while he would let out a small grunt, like he was clearing his throat. You glanced up at him only briefly while turning the page, keeping your attention where it needed to be. “You need a drink?”
“I need your attention,” He whined again. You would never admit to him that his neediness was almost endearing, the way he looked at you could’ve melted your heart in any other situation. 
“Give me twenty minutes on this chapter, then I will help you with your review?”
“Can we play a game?” He asked, eyes lighting up brighter than a firework.
You hesitated, “A game?”
“Yeah, like a study game!” He nodded, attention finally seeming to be productive. This newfound motivation intrigued you, so you humored him and encouraged him to continue to explain his idea. “Well, you ask me a question and if I answer it right you have to take off-”
“Do. Not.” You interrupted, laughing hysterically, while yelling above his voice. “Even think about finishing that sentence!”
“What!” He cried out, seeming defeated that you wouldn’t even consider his idea. “Hear me out!”
“This is not some kind of teenage rom-com, Bokkun!” You continued to laugh as he visibly deflated from your rejection. “I am not stripping my clothes to help you study.”
“What if I strip my clothes to help you study?” He countered flirtatiously, leaning forward on his hands across the table to get close to your face, eyebrows wiggling suggestively.
“We both know that’d be even more of a distraction,” You mumbled. The thought of Bokuto lifting his black volleyball t-shirt over his head, muscles rippling across his chest, stomach, and arms, had you just about drooling as your mind drifted. But before he could really take advantage of your momentary weakness, you pushed his face away and made him sit back down.
“Worth a shot,” He sighed, which made you laugh again.
*
“Not going to lie, that last one was a doozie.”
You looked up at Rumi and frowned, your brow creased in confusion at her comment. “You’re the one who said taking an advanced English literature class would be fun.”
“It is fun,” She shoved your shoulder. “The exam itself was just long as ~hello…”
You turned to face forward to see what your friend was looking at. Ahead of you, just at the entrance to your school’s campus, stood two lone male figures looking very out of place.
One was wearing a white shirt, red tie loosened around his neck, black sweater vest, and grey pants. The other wore a white collared shirt and grey blazer pushed half way up his arms, a loosened striped blue and white tie, and black pants. They both could not look more cool but also more out of place in the sea of students wearing the green, black, and pink uniform of your own school. 
You smiled at Bokuto and Kuroo both as you walked up to them with a hop in your step, wondering how they managed to get all the way to your school in time for the end of the day dismissal.
“Both Nekoma and Fukurodani dismiss third years as soon as exams are done in the morning,” Kuroo explained when you asked.
“Yeah, we test straight through the day then peace out as soon as we’re done.” Bokuto slung his arm around your shoulders and easily pulled you into him, not having a care in the world that there were plenty of people around.
“You guys are lucky,” You whined, stomping your foot and looking at Rumi who nodded in agreement and was standing close to Kuroo. “We could’ve gotten lunch!”
“Well, maybe one of these days I can convince you to sneak off on your free period and meet me,” Bokuto smiled down at you, pulling playfully at a lock of your hair and laughing when you swatted him away.
“Corrupting girls of others schools?” A voice behind you laughed loudly, making all four of you turn. “Seems beneath the two of you.”
Bokuto and Kuroo both smiled as Daiki led a few members of the boy’s volleyball team up to greet them, all doing some weird handshake thing that guys do. You didn’t miss the fact that one third year in particular made a point to be a little less enthused than the others, completely ignoring Bokuto altogether. 
You saw the slight twitch in Bokuto’s face when Shouta deliberately said hi to Kuroo but not him, the look of real confusion made you start to feel like the temperature around you was rising. You felt worry starting to grow in your stomach, Rumi also taking note of your sudden uneasiness. 
Being who he was, Bokuto was not going to ignore the fact that he was being ignored and made a point to greet the other third year. “Shouta, ‘sup man?” He held out the hand that was not currently wrapped around you for the other boy to shake but was left hanging.
Everyone stopped, whether they were in mid-conversation or just listening they paused and held their breath. At this point, the rest of the boy’s volleyball team knew that you had rejected Shouta but you weren’t sure if they knew everything that was said between the two of you. It had been a few weeks since the interaction and both your teams were too busy to talk, much less gossip about what was happening between players. You waited, along with everyone else, for what was coming next.
“Bokuto.” Shouta nodded curtly, even though he wasn’t nearly as tall as Bokuto, he gave off an air of looking down on the two of you. “Didn’t think you normally slummed around these parts.”
“Well, yeah,” He smiled, completely oblivious (or at least doing a damn good job acting) to the tension brewing. He looked down at you with an almost loving smile and nodded your way, “I told (y/n) we’d get some food after her exams were over. You guys sh-”
“Listen, man, nobody really gives a raging fuck about why you’re here.” Shouta interrupted, shocking the entire group with his crude choice of words. 
“Chill dude,” Kuroo stepped forward. “You brought it up, man.”
You noticed how Kuroo stepped up to stand next to Bokuto, neither of them flinching in the slightest. Even with calm expressions on their faces, you could tell from their eyes alone that they were not going to back down from anything that was about to happen. And they shouldn’t, they easily had the height and weight over Shouta and it didn’t look like the rest of the Shinzen team was gearing up to come to his aid. 
You felt a tug and looked over your shoulder to see Rumi pulling on your uniform jacket to get you to step away from the brewing confrontation in front of you.
“Why are you even here?” Shouta then asked, looking over at Kuroo with narrowed eyes, giving him a once-over. “Following around the super star like his little sidekick? Or just fishing around for the next girl to try and sweep up like your buddy here?”
“Shouta- '' You started to warn, noticing Bokuto’s and Kuroo’s jaws clenching but neither of them saying or doing anything.
“No offense, (y/n), but honestly fuck off.” You, along with everyone in the group, gasped in surprise at the hash comment as he enunciated each word. “It’s one thing to be hanging around the creep, but seriously having him come all the way out here to pick you up? I mean, how much attention do you n-”
CRACK-
Before Shouta had a chance to finish his terrible words, and before you even realized what was happening, your fist collided with his jaw. A satisfying crunch sound filled your ears as he fell to the dirt in surprise, looking up at you in shock as he held his jaw in pain, a few tears threatening to spill over his eyes. You were seeing red.
“Fuck you, you bitter bench-riding fuck.” You said in a rage, spitting each word. “Maybe if you were half the man he was you’d get more playing time and girls would actually be interested in you.” 
You were about to continue on your spree of insults when you felt a pair of hands grab onto your arms from behind and start to pull you away. “Alright bruiser,” Bokuto’s familiar voice was close to your ear. “I think he gets the idea.”
The four of you walked briskly down the sidewalk, away from the dramatic scene. Bokuto had his arm slung over your shoulders again, holding you close like he needed to keep hold of you out of fear that you’d go back and finish what you started. You could tell he was trying not to laugh, the situation being very serious considering you’d pretty much assaulted someone on school grounds. He continued to lead you away, never looking back to see if anyone was following or going to say something.
Once you’d rounded the corner a few blocks away, Kuroo burst out in a maniacal laugh while Rumi came up to you and grabbed you by the face. “You absolute badass.” She said, laying a dramatic kiss on your forehead. “Fuck that guy.”
You shyly looked away, coming to the realization of your horrific action. You looked down at the hand you had punched the boy with, clenching and unclenching it in a fist. “Damn,” You somewhat laughed, shaking out the lingering sting and looking up at Bokuto. “That felt really good.”
Bokuto smiled and squeezed your shoulders a little tighter, laying a kiss at the top of your head. “That’s my girl.”
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howdy! Any sterek fics where Danny and Stiles are friends?
AND
Anonymous said:Any Danny-centric fics? I miss him, I wish we got to see him be stiles' gay yoda
AND
Anonymous said:Danny gives Stiles gay tips? Sterek pls
Oh. I miss Danny and his dimples.  - Anastasia
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Kidnap The Sandy Claws by Reehoe, ZackaryAnderson
(1/? I 1,681 I Explicit I Stackson)
Stiles and Danny have a heart-to-heart about Jackson's genitals. Stiles contemplates it and gets punched by Erica.Later that night, Stiles and Jackson have a heart-to-heart about Jackson's genitals, too.
The Moon is Fully Risen (And Shines Over the Sea) by Shy_Fox_Lone_Wolf (KoreanOreo)
(1/? I 2,576 I Not Rated I Sterek)
In which everyone ignores Stiles after the whole 'Crazy Murderous Alpha' thing- and Stiles is a mermaid princess with Danny as her guard and adviser. Oh and the pack doesn't know. Oops.
Love at Second Sight by orphan_account
(1/1 I 3,058 I Mature I Sterek)
Derek is hissing through the phone, three little boys clinging to his legs. “No, you ass—astonishingly abominable person, don’t you dare laugh. Get me someone to help. I’m in the office. Laura says she won’t be back for two weeks. Two full weeks. Get me someone, now, before I fire you and throw myself out a building.”
Derek is a CEO, but when he's saddled with his nephews for two weeks, he needs help. And when his sister is killed in a car accident, he needs that same person even more. That person is Stiles.
I'll Huff and I'll Puff! by PolarisTheYoungWolf
(1/1 I 3,355 I Not Rated I Sterek)
Prompt: "Okay but imagine Stiles buying a dog whistle! Whenever Derek pisses him off and he wants some time alone!"
In a supernatural situation where they've hit a brick all, Derek lashes out on Stiles who is trying to help in his Stiles-like way. Stiles takes it really hard and wants some time away from werewolves after he and Danny figure out a solution to mess. Danny, a fellow human, felt hurt FOR Stiles and got him a gift.
This May Take A While by dara3008
(1/1 I 3,655 I Teen I Steter)
The very weird relationship of Stiles Stilinski and Peter Hale, through the eyes of Danny who is way too new in the werewolf busines to understand anything.
I burn, I pine, I perish by everysundoesntrise 
(1/1 I 6,972 I Teen I Sterek)
Lydia just wants to date Jackson Whittemore, but her father forbids her from dating at all, unless, of course, her new brother Stiles could also get a date. Lucky for her, Derek Hale is single and always in the need for extra cash.
(Loosely based on 10 Things I Hate About You)
Somebunny loves you. by Anonymous
(1/1 I 7,434 I Teen I Derek/Scott/Stiles)
[text to: Danny] Would it still be homewrecking if I slept with both of them? Simultaneously?[Danny] Delete my number.
***McHaleinski fic with werebunny!Stiles that nobody asked for.
Frustration by orphan_account
(1/1 I 9,625 I Teen I Sterek)
"Before, when Stiles had imagined the summer after his Sophomore year, it had been an awesome two months full of late nights gaming at Scott's, the endless freedom of being able to drive himself anywhere he wanted, and — he'd been optimistic — plenty of time spent on dates with Lydia. Oh, how wrong he'd been."
But it's about to get better.
wanna see my lab equipment? 'cause baby, it's so good by thankyouforexisting
(1/1 I 10,152 I Teen I Sterek)
“I need some chloroform,” the hot as fuck stranger says, barely even glancing at Stiles. He’s dressed in all black, and he looks strong, broad-shouldered, his posture ready to spring. “What?” Stiles squeaks, taking a step back, because his dad told him to beware strangers, especially if they’re asking for very illegal substances. Even if they’re gorgeous and looking really fucking sexy in black. Because Stiles is sure he locked the lab. This hot stranger broke into his lab. At 2 am.“I said,” he growls, turning and opening some drawers, maybe to search? “I need some chloroform.”“Um, do you know that’s really, really illegal?”// Stiles is a workaholic, Derek has boxers with baby wolves on them (and actually wears them), Danny mothers everyone, and the President doesn't have time for their problems.
Marzyć by RealityXIllusion
(14/? I 19,071 I Teen I No Pairing)
Stiles has always been an odd kid, if not for his ADHD or his bouts of insanity in regards to research kicks, then because of his secret abilities.OrWhat if Stiles moved to Beacon Hills his sophomore year and everything still happened (with the pack all meeting and getting bit) only the Hale fire had yet to take place. Stiles' new friends try to keep him out of the supernatural world but little do they know that he's already apart of it.
A Light in the Darkness by grimmfairy
(15/? I 36,831 I Not Rated I Stiles/Jackson/Derek)
A month after Scott turns away from Stiles, a month of loneliness and being ignored and guilt and dark feelings, Stiles starts getting texts from Jackson. Jackson is coming back, and he wants to join the Pack. Then he finds out about Scott's actions and goes to Stiles to comfort him and help him get back to a stable place emotionally. When Derek returns, he sparks a connection that has long lain dormant. Jackson wants his life with Stiles and Derek. If he happens to kick Scott's ass and Theo's ass, well, that's just life, isn't it?Excerpt:To Stilinski: Scott wants to talk to you because he thinks everything will just magically be ok. I told him to go fuck himself.
To Stilinski: He's coming to you after the meeting.
To Jackson: Come over?
To Stilinski: On my way.
Revenge, Plain and Simple by jamesm97
(30/30 I 36,993 I Teen I Stackson)
Jackson finds out that, One of the Alpha pack killed his birth parents, high on rage and sexual frustration Jackson's just a time bomb waiting to explode.
Stiles the ever loyal friend ends up getting himself skewered by a metal pole only he doesn't die it awakens a part of himself his mother and father tried to bind away, he's half witch half whitelighter and it's up to the charmed ones to help teach him to control his powers what else are family for anyway?
Move A Mountain by ZainClaw
(9/9 I 69,008 I Explicit I Sterek)
Stiles goes camping with his friends in New Mexico after graduation where they befriend a biker gang led by Derek: a guy whom Stiles can’t decide if he will be either relieved or devastated to never see again once their week is up.
Can't rely on me by Littleredridinghunter
(12/12 I 116,216 I Not Rated I Sterek I Rape)
The pack let him down, that's not really a surprise lately.
When Danny finds Stiles nearly bleeding to death the next day it's the start of a beautiful friendship.
Can the pack make amends before it's too late? Will Stiles ever forgive them for not being there for him when he needed them the most?
Alpha, Mage, Pack by Foxfire2018
(26/? I 307,519 I Explicit I Sterek I Rape)
Stiles was kidnapped and tortured for hours. Yet no one came for him. Hurt and cast out of the pack by people he thought cared for him, what is he to do? He finds himself accompanied by someone he never expected and someone he is eternally grateful for.Derek feels betrayed and foolish for what he allowed to happen. Out of anger and hurt he forced a valuable member he really started to care for out of his pack.With the pack scattered and people hurt, what will come of them? Will they bond together again in time for the next big bad?
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disappearingground · 4 years
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The Jenny Lewis Experience
The New York Times July 24, 2014
A version of this article appears in print on July 27, 2014, Page 18 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: The Jenny Lewis Experience.
By Jeff Himmelman
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“They’d put the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on,” Jenny Lewis said. We were sitting in a restaurant in Laurel Canyon, not far from her home, and she was describing her early childhood with parents who made their living performing as an itinerant Sonny-and-Cher-style lounge act called Love’s Way. “We lived in hotels,” she said. “My sister and I, they would just keep us in the hotel room, and they’d go down and play.” When Lewis was born in 1976, her parents were doing a stand at the Sands. They split up when she was 3, and her mother — herself the daughter of a dancer and a vaudeville performer — took Jenny and her sister to Van Nuys, in the San Fernando Valley, where she worked as a waitress and struggled to keep her family afloat. “We were on welfare,” Lewis said, before describing the day their fortunes changed, when an agent picked young Jenny out of a crowd at her preschool. “I think mostly because I was a redhead,” she said. “And I was a weird little kid, a weird little tomboy.”
She soon landed her first commercial, for Jell-O, and came under the wing of Iris Burton, an eminent children’s agent who represented River and Joaquin Phoenix and Fred Savage. Lewis started working steadily in commercials, television (“The Golden Girls,” “Growing Pains,” “Mr. Belvedere”) and film (“The Wizard,” “Troop Beverly Hills,” “Pleasantville”), living the surreal and somewhat communal life of a child star in the ‘80s. She spent her days being tutored on set and her evenings at places like Alphy’s Soda Pop Club in Hollywood, which catered exclusively to kids in the industry. At a party there when Lewis was 10, the actor Corey Haim handed her a cassette tape with Run-D.M.C. on one side and the Beastie Boys on the other. “There have been a couple of cassette tapes that have changed my life,” she said, “and that was the first one” — the tape that got her hooked on hip-hop, which eventually led her to songwriting.
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I asked Lewis when she first fully realized the role she played in her family, the depth of their dependence on her. “Eight years old,” she said. “I remember the moment. That’s a pretty big thing for a kid to realize. And I remember the power in that.” By the time she was 14 or 15, with nobody to answer to, she could be as wild as she liked as long as she showed up to work and hit her marks. “I was up for it, honestly,” she said. “I loved the work and I loved the people, and it kind of prepped me for what I do now.”
What Lewis does now, the music she makes, is hard to characterize. She is often compared with Joni Mitchell and Emmylou Harris, and there is a kind of timelessness to the way she writes and sings. But the throwback stuff doesn’t quite capture her. Among some music fans — including many other well-known musicians — Lewis is considered a kind of indie goddess, a stylish performer who defies genre and salts her songs with a sly and off-kilter intelligence. Her first band, Rilo Kiley, signed a major-label deal with Warner Bros. Records in 2005; her first side project, the Postal Service, led by Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie, sold more than a million copies of its debut; and she has released two well-received solo records since then. Next week, she will release a third, “The Voyager,” her first solo effort in six years. It has been a battle to get it out. Among other things, she has dealt with the death of her father, writer’s block and bouts of insomnia so severe and debilitating that she said they left her almost unable to function for nearly two years.
You’d never guess that from meeting her, though. She talks like a true child of L.A. — the “bro"s and “dude"s flow freely, without affectation — and her go-to traveling costume is a vintage Adidas track suit, Adidas shell-top sneakers and, on the day I first met her, hot-pink lipstick and oversize sunglasses. She lives with her longtime boyfriend and collaborator, the musician Johnathan Rice, up a long canyon road in the hills that separate the San Fernando Valley from downtown Los Angeles. Her house (called “Mint Chip” for its brown-and-light-green exterior) is set into the hillside, looking out over a ravine. There is a rehearsal space with a drum kit, a P.A. and some vintage gear, an old piano in the living room and a vinyl edition of James Taylor’s “Sweet Baby James” propped up beside the fireplace. Beyond the small pool in the back yard there’s a windowed gazebo that Rice uses as his songwriting space. Whatever you are imagining of the California light and the laid-back lifestyle: yes.
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Historically, nearby Laurel Canyon has been synonymous with a certain kind of lush ‘60s acoustic-and-multipart-harmony sound, but Lewis’s musical roots spring from the ‘90s and the smart indie rock of Elliott Smith and Pavement. When she was 20 or so, her acting career wasn’t where she wanted it to be, and she saw that she needed to make a change. “I was the best friend,” she said. “I was the friend, forever. I wanted the big, juicy roles, and they didn’t come to me.” (She read for the part of Bunny in the Coen brothers’ film “The Big Lebowski,” for one, but didn’t get it.) She had known Blake Sennett, another former child actor, since she was 17, and they began writing together and eventually formed Rilo Kiley.
She and Sennett dated and broke up and kept playing together. The relationship was always fraught (Gibbard remembers Lewis screaming at Sennett over the phone during the first Postal Service tour), but Lewis said it gave her the confidence she needed to become a real songwriter. “Through my partnership with Blake, I found a voice within myself that I didn’t know I had,” she said. “It sounds kind of cheesy, but I figured out who I was.” From the first lines of the first song on Rilo Kiley’s debut record, a track called “Go Ahead,” you can hear the DNA of the musician Lewis has become nearly 15 years later — a floating, distinct voice, an unpredictable melody, a wryly subverted rhyme.
The link between songwriting and autobiography is a tantalizing but tenuous one, and Lewis prefers to preserve as much mystery as she can. But she affirms that she has never written anything more personal than “Better Son/Daughter,” one of the strongest tracks off Rilo Kiley’s second record, “The Execution of All Things.” The song is about waking up in the morning and being unable to open your eyes or get out of bed: “And your mother’s still calling you, insane and high/Swearing it’s different this time.” Eventually it opens into an anthem of wounded fortitude, the kind you can imagine cars full of young women screaming along to. The actress Anne Hathaway, one of Lewis’s close friends, told me that she still turns to that song whenever she’s struggling. “It’s become almost like a prayer,” she said.
Outside whatever veiled references she makes in her music, Lewis doesn’t talk much about her mother. She acknowledged that it was a “difficult relationship” and that she didn’t have a “traditional upbringing,” but that was about it. At one point, I referred to a report in The Boston Globe in 1992, when Lewis was 16, noting that she owned a house in Sherman Oaks and a townhouse in North Hollywood. “We lost all of that,” she said, with a blankness I hadn’t seen from her before. I asked her why. “We just lost ‘em,” she said. “I achieved a lot as a child, I supported my family, but in the end we lost it all.”
In 2004, Rilo Kiley toured with Coldplay, but Lewis was still scraping by, living in a small apartment in Silver Lake with an Iranian rockabilly musician she found on Craigslist. In her bedroom, when she wasn’t on tour, she wrote the songs that would become “Rabbit Fur Coat,” her first solo record. The idea for it came from Conor Oberst, the songwriter (also known as the frontman of Bright Eyes) who helped form Saddle Creek Records, which had put out “The Execution of All Things.” “I encouraged her,” Oberst told me. “You know, why don’t you step away from this thing that is obviously causing you a lot of distress and make a record on your own?” Sennett had already made a solo record, which upset Lewis. “I was so jealous if someone else got Blake’s musical attention,” she told me. “I was shattered by it.” She made “Rabbit Fur Coat,” she said, in part to prove that “I can do it too on my own — I don’t need you.”
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The songs on “Rabbit Fur Coat” are ethereal and haunted, rooted in deep Southern and gospel-inflected melodic traditions. On the record’s title track, Lewis’s lyrics again invite comparison with her family life:
Let’s move ahead 20 years, shall we? She was waitressing on welfare, we were living in the valley A lady says to my ma, “You treat your girl as your spouse You can live in a mansion house.”
And so we did, and I became a hundred-thousand-dollar kid . . . But I’m not bitter about it I’ve packed up my things and let them have at it And the fortune faded, as fortunes often do And so did that mansion house
Where my ma is now, I don’t know She was living in her car, I was living on the road And I hear she’s putting stuff up her nose . . .
After the record was done, Lewis went on tour with Rilo Kiley. When the band played the Showbox in Seattle in 2005, Gibbard picked her up after sound check. They’d become friends during the Postal Service tour a few years earlier. As they drove around in Gibbard’s car, Lewis played the new songs for him. “I just remember, all hyperbole aside, being completely blown away,” Gibbard said. “It was undoubtedly the best thing that she had done.” The press shared Gibbard’s reaction, and Lewis got more attention on her own than Rilo Kiley had ever gotten as a band. “Everything was so easy for the first time,” she said. “It just unfolded so naturally. And then going out on the road and touring was the most fun I’ve ever had on tour. There was no tension for the first time.” Rilo Kiley would put out one more record, but it soon became clear that it would be their last.
“I want to show you something,” Lewis said. We were talking in her kitchen about her second solo release, “Acid Tongue,” which she recorded over three weeks in 2008 at the legendary Sound City Studios in Van Nuys. The record had a bunch of special guests on it — Elvis Costello, Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes — but the most meaningful one was Lewis’s dad, who died in 2010. In the living room, she pointed out a glass vitrine on top of the piano that held one of her father’s chromatic bass harmonicas. Before the “Acid Tongue” sessions, she hadn’t spoken to her father in years, but she felt comfortable enough with the musical family she had created around her — Rilo Kiley’s drummer, Jason Boesel; Johnathan Rice; some other musicians from the Laurel Canyon set — that she thought she could handle having him around. He played on the track “Jack Killed Mom,” and the reunion helped Lewis forgive him for leaving the family all those years ago. “He was playing lounges in Alaska,” Lewis said of when she tracked him down and asked him to play on the album. “That’s why I never saw him. It was not a malicious thing. My dad was a savant. He never drove a car, he never had a bank account,” she said. “I don’t even know if he realized that he wasn’t around, you know? I think he was just playing his gigs, trying to make a living.”
“Acid Tongue” was also a step toward recording everything all at once, live, to an analog tape machine — instead of in pieces to a computer. It’s a process that Lewis has developed a devotion to, and one that the songwriter and producer Ryan Adams would push to an extreme on “The Voyager.” (After “Acid Tongue,” Lewis and Rice released “I’m Having Fun Now” in 2010, an underrated duo record that failed to get the kind of traction they hoped for.) For the last few years, Lewis had been sitting on many of the songs that would make up “The Voyager,” battling insomnia and struggling to get them down. She ran into Adams in Los Angeles and told him she had some songs she was working on, and he invited her to come by his studio, Pax-Am, on the Sunset Strip. She played a few of the tunes for him on her acoustic guitar.
‘My dad was a savant,’ Lewis said. ‘He never drove a car, he never had a bank account. I don’t even know if he realized that he wasn’t around, you know?’
“My initial impression was there were some really minimal but necessary things that had to happen,” Adams told me. “I could tell that she had sat with them a little too long.” (Lewis agrees: “I was like: ‘Dude, go for it. Help me.’ ”) On the first song that they worked on together, “She’s Not Me,” they changed the key to relax Lewis’s voice, and then Adams and his production partner, Mike Viola, strapped on electric guitars and rolled through the full song, three times, with Lewis playing and singing live with a backing band. Adams pronounced the track finished for the time being and said they would move on, without even listening back to what they’d done. “For Jenny, revisionism wouldn’t have worked,” Adams said. “The version she would play on the couch in the control room, we would just stand there, like, ‘Wow, this is classic songwriting.’ Every time. So that was sort of my mission. How do we get an ‘unmind’ vibe here and then go back later and look at these beautiful raw takes and just splash a little bit of watercolor on them.” Lewis ended up recording the bulk of the record with Adams over 10 days. (She worked on the single, “Just One of the Guys,” separately with Beck before she and Adams went into the studio together.)
“The Voyager” is an older and more direct record than her previous two. Her characters are still drinking and doing blow and cheating on each other, but there is a kind of weariness to it all. One line in particular has caught the early attention of some of her many female fans, during the bridge of “Just One of the Guys”: “There’s only one difference between you and me/When I look at myself all I can see/I’m just another lady without a baby.” She has been hesitant to acknowledge what that line specifically means to her. “I wanted to communicate some very basic things,” she told me, without saying what they were. She was already starting to regret having talked about some of her other struggles while making the record, including open discussion of the insomnia that plagued her. “Now everyone’s asking me about insomnia, which I’m terrified is going to happen to me again,” she said. “You can’t think about it too much, and everyone’s asking me about it, and I’m like, ‘I’m fine, I’m fine.’ But, [expletive], am I not going to get to sleep again?” You could hear the fear in her voice. “It’s my fault for putting it out there,” she said.
The video for “Just One of the Guys,” which got more than a million views in its first 24 hours online, was made with the actresses (and Lewis’s friends) Anne Hathaway, Brie Larson, Kristen Stewart and Tennessee Thomas. It’s an entertaining video, part Robert Palmer, part Beastie Boys, with the women spending half the time playing a sleek female backing band and then switching into male roles, clowning around in Lewis-inspired Adidas track suits and fake mustaches. Lewis, as herself, holds up a positive pregnancy test, to which Lewis-in-drag-and-fake-goatee responds, “It’s not [expletive] mine.” When she gets to the “just another lady without a baby” line, she smiles at the camera and then dances. It’s a house of mirrors, a romp through emotionally treacherous terrain.
When I visited Lewis in June, she and Rice (she calls him “Rico”) showed me an early cut of the video in the bedroom of their house, with Lewis calling out “bra shot” whenever we caught a glimpse of her cleavage. Driving down the hill toward dinner later, we got to talking, if somewhat obliquely, about the expectations of her female fans and the sexuality that is inseparable from who she is and the music she makes. She didn’t like to talk about feminism, she said, and in particular the trend of women criticizing one another for not being feminist enough: “What does it matter what I think of Lana Del Rey?” In the months before the release of “The Voyager,” Lewis has taken to wearing airbrushed suits for her live shows, rather than the sexier get-ups she used to wear onstage; she has said she feels “androgynous” these days and wants her costume to reflect that. But not always. As we made our way down the ravine, she told a story about the day President Obama came to visit a compound not far from Mint Chip. She wanted to go out for a run, but a Secret Service member stopped her and told her she needed an ID if she wanted to get back through the security cordon. “I was like, ‘Dude, I’m wearing short shorts,’ ” Lewis said. " ‘You’ll remember me.’ ”
After recording and touring mostly with men in the early days, Lewis now consistently seeks out women for her band and even tried to put together an all-female crew for the “Just One of the Guys” video, which she also directed. She said her desire to work largely with women was a response to the dissolution of her relationship with her mom. “The more I surround myself with women, the easier it is to reconcile my past in a way.” It seems to be serving a kind of psychic need, to replace the female relationship that once dominated her life with a kind of surrogate family of her choosing, a family that has stood behind her through the struggles of the last few years.
“I’m happy to see her making records,” Beck told me. “I just feel like music needs her. It needs someone doing what she’s doing. She’s got a special voice, as a writer, and then as a musician. She’s this great combination of so many things.” Conor Oberst shares that view, describing Lewis as one of the most important songwriters and performers in contemporary music. “Go see her play,” Oberst said. “Because we should all feel lucky to be around while she’s doing her magic.”
On a night in early June, at a sold-out show at the 9:30 Club in Washington, Lewis had her magic all lined up and ready to go. Backstage, she was relaxed, joking with her band and casually doing her makeup in the mirror on the wall. Just before show time, one band member disappeared, but Lewis was unperturbed. “It’s O.K.,” she said with a smile when he showed up, apologizing, just as they were about to go on. “You made it!” She took a sip of red wine out of a plastic cup and then walked up the steps to the stage.
‘I just feel like music needs her,’ Beck said. ‘It needs someone doing what she’s doing. She’s got a special voice, as a writer, and then as a musician.’
To watch Lewis perform live is to understand what Beck and Oberst and other musicians admire in her. “She turns into this other person on stage,” Gibbard said, “this unbelievably powerful performer” — and it’s true. Lewis is both a natural and a pro. Throughout the night, she had big middle-aged guys and teenage girls — “teeny little chickens,” as she called them later — singing along to every word. During the encore, Lewis sang the ballad “Acid Tongue” accompanied only by her acoustic guitar and the rest of her band grouped around a microphone behind her. “To be lonely is a habit,” Lewis sang, her voice ringing out in the near-silent room, “like smoking or taking drugs, and I’ve quit them both. . . . " The audience and her band belted along with her as she finished the line: “But man was it rough.”
It was one of those lovely moments you hope for in live music, when everything in the room connects. But it was also a kind of emblem of where Lewis has been and of where she is now. She has overcome all kinds of obstacles to get here, often with great style, but it hasn’t always been pretty. Whatever demons stole her sleep for these last few years, they’ve surely been with her forever, in one form or another. But they are also what gives such depth and soul to what she does. “I’m not looking for a cure,” Lewis sang, and as she stood in the spotlight at the 9:30 Club, nobody there would have thought she needed one.
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scarletroseofrwby · 5 years
Text
TCSE AU Chapter 5:
Something wasn’t right.
Uneasiness filled atmosphere for longer than what anyone of the girls would have wanted. As soon as they moved into their dorm, the girl in white and the girl in black immediately moved further away from each other, eyeing the other skeptically with the slightest hint of fear. Ruby opened her mouth slightly to ask what was wrong, but then decided against it. At least for now. This tension was all too much to address for the moment.
It felt weird while they unpacked. Although they were each content with how they were organizing their belongings, everything felt weird. Perhaps it was homesickness of some sort? None of them truly knew. Once they had all unpacked, the room was now cluttered with the beds piled up in the middle.
“This...isn’t going to work,” Weiss said, crossing her arms.
“It is a bit cramped,” Blake added.
“Maybe we should ditch some of our stuff,” Yang recommended, caressing her chin in thought.
“Or we could ditch the beds...and get bunk beds instead!” Ruby said, immediately excited at her great idea.
Weiss glanced at her partner. “Isn’t that dangerous?” 
 Ruby only shrugged. “Top or bottom?” 
 The heiress’ face reddened, flustered by misunderstanding. “Excuse me?”
“I said top or bottom?” Ruby didn’t understand exactly why Weiss was confused by the question.
Yang leaned closer to Weiss’ ear and cupped her hand so that nobody else could hear. “Hey Ice Queen, I hope you know that she isn’t aware of that stuff yet.”
Now Weiss was even more embarrassed. Not only did she misunderstand what her partner meant, she actually thought of going that far for a moment. She shivered, mentally face-palming and scolding herself. Things were already going wrong, and they haven’t even spent an official day in their dorm yet.
Before things could get any worse, Ruby and Yang already started configuring the beds. Blake jumped in to help Yang, leaving Weiss standing there. She might as well help Ruby since standing does no good right now. Although Yang and Blake’s bunk beds looked relatively safe--one bed stacked on top of a few hardback books under each leg--Ruby’s was completely unsafe. Her bed was dangling from the ceiling by a few measly ropes. If one were to snap, it’d be the end for one of them.
“I got top bunk!” Ruby called out.
Scratch that. It’d be the end for Weiss Schnee. Of all the ways she could die, the most likely scenario would be death by bed. Quite pathetic. Especially for a huntress.
But Weiss had other things to worry about right now. One of them being the issue with the Faunus on her team. Neither one knew what to do with each other, and all they could do as of right now was glare from a distance. Obviously it wouldn’t get by Ruby without suspicion, so the young leader decided to drag her sister out of the room. Yang followed, confused as to why Ruby left their partners in the dorm.
“What’s going on, Rubes?” Yang asked, crossing her arms.
“Don’t you think something’s up with Weiss and Blake? They keep glaring at each other, and the atmosphere is too tense for comfort.”
“Hmm,” Yang rubbed her chin, “I guess you aren’t wrong there. Something’s definitely up.”
Blake only stared at the door, waiting for Yang to come back. But a few minutes passed, and still nothing. She thought she’d leave, not wanting to make any contact with Weiss. Walking over and reaching for the doorknob, she paused when Weiss called out to her.
“Faun--erm--Blake, I...I want to apologize for what I said yesterday. You didn’t deserve it, and I shouldn’t have been so biased. I’m sure you’re different and not like ones that I’ve met.”
The bowed girl eyed the heiress suspiciously. “And why should I believe you? After all your family has done to my people?”
Weiss sighed. She really wanted to show that she can be different. That she wouldn’t end up like her father. “Because I don’t want to be like my family. I want to change, and I’m really trying, but it’s just hard. I don’t want to be cold and difficult. I realized that I’ve been that way for far too long. I want to change, and I want your help.”
“Help with what?”
“I want you to be a friend. You have no idea how difficult this is for me. Working with Ruby was a task in and of itself. Doing this is completely out of my comfort zone.”
Blake’s eyes lightened up, her expression less serious. A faint smile appeared on her face. It was slightly unfriendly, but it was trustful. Which was a great start.
Weiss held out her hand for Blake to shake. Blake took it, but her grip was still uneasy.
“Acquaintances. Only time will tell for sure, but no more and no less.”
Ruby and Yang had their ears perched up against the door, listening in on their conversation. To nobody’s surprise, Yang didn’t get a single thing they were saying, but Ruby was baffled by how oblivious Yang could be sometimes. She never paid attention to anything, even in the heat of battle.
But with that out of the way, Ruby burst back into the room with a cheerful smile. Yang entered after her, upholding the same exuberance as her sister.
“We’ve finally moved in! We should celebrate!” Yang suggested.
“Let’s get tacos!” Ruby yelled, bringing smiles to Weiss and Blake. “What do you guys say?”
How could anyone refuse when Ruby makes puppy eyes? Even a cat couldn’t refuse those sparkly silver eyes. Blake shrugged and nodded at the young girl. “Why not?”
They all looked to Weiss. “Shouldn’t we be studying?”
“Weiss, classes don’t start in a couple of days! We still have plenty of time to study, but for now, let’s just live! It’s not like it’s life or death if we miss a few questions anyway.”
Inside, Weiss kept debating with herself. She wanted to celebrate with her new friends, but old habits are too hard to break. She’d only hear her father’s voice followed by a stinging sensation on her cheek. How much it had hurt could not be described. She went through hell and back to attend Beacon. Isn’t that something worth celebrating?
Ruby took Weiss’ hand, ready to drag her out the door. “C’mon Weiss, let’s go have fun!”
The voice inside her had overtaken her father’s voice. “I suppose we can. Show me around Vale, Ruby. I want to see everything in this city since it’s now my home.”
This brought absolute joy to Ruby.
“Yes ma’am! You will not be disappointed!”
------------
Later that night, team RWBY slept soundly within the comforts of their new home. The following couple of days flew by quickly. Weiss got her studying done as promised by Ruby, and Yang managed to get Blake to spar with her.  When classes came up, the team of four young women dressed up in their uniforms, preparing for their first official day of school.
Ruby sat on her bed while looking at all of their schedules. “So we have a few classes together today. We all have Vale History at nine, then Sparring Class at 10:15, then--”
Weiss widened her eyes as she checked the clock. “What time did you say our first class was?”
“Nine, why?”
“It’s 8:55, you dunce!”
The team suddenly realized how close they are to being late, rushing out of the dorm immediately. Team JNPR, who lived across from RWBY, completely forgot their classes. Running after the four girls, they all made a desperate attempt at not being late on the first day. Weiss kept a close eye on her watch as they all started using their semblances to reach the lecture hall. Time was running out.
Jaune was falling behind everyone, his stamina surprisingly low for his figure. “How far is this classroom?!”
They all made it in time. Pyrrha ended up throwing Jaune into the lecture hall while she sprinted. Ruby made it first with the help of her semblance. Weiss was next, using her glyphs to speed into class. Yang and Blake tied with Ren and Nora, with Jaune flying in before Pyrrha. Luckily the professor let them off the hook, but Weiss would not tolerate it. She planned to yell at Ruby after class to keep track of time so that this doesn’t happen again.
Of course, class itself could have been better. Professor Port only talked about himself, but allowed one student to demonstrate fighting techniques against a Grimm. It was a smaller one, a Boarbatusk. Weiss was chosen to fight against it, only to end up nearly losing because of a few mistakes in her strike pattern. It costed her, and if it weren’t for Ruby’s shouting, she might not have known where to strike to kill the Grimm.
As the team exited class, they prepared for their next one, which was sparring with Ms. Glynda Goodwitch. Although she was still relatively young for a teacher, she was an exceptional huntress. Ruby looked forward to this class, wanting to be able to spar someone other than her sister for once.
The students entered the arena, sitting in the stands while their teacher stood in the large ring below.
She began teaching them about their aura first, explaining how it works and everything else they needed to know. Ruby already knew this, having her dad teach her everything about it in her younger years. But her silver eyes affected how her aura worked. Her aura could not heal the pain done by the curse because there was no physical damage done. It really messed up her battle performance one time when her sister decided to be reckless and broke her leg while fighting an Ursa. Ruby couldn’t walk until Yang’s leg had fully healed.
Ruby would never stop nagging about it since then. Yang didn’t understand how or why Ruby felt the same pain, but she just assumed it was a ‘sister’s intuition’. That was incorrect, obviously, but Ruby never bothered to explain it to Yang.
A tap on the shoulder was all it took for Ruby to stop thinking about the past and refocus. She looked to whoever tapped her, which happened to be Jaune.
“Hey Ruby, Glynda asked us to go first,” he whispered to her.
“Oh, right, right. Sorry,” she whispered back.
As they made their way to the ring, Glynda moved to the stands above. Spotlights were on the two students, and everyone had eyes on them. Especially on Ruby. She could feel the nerves tensing up on the both of them, but Jaune seeming even more so.
“Ready your weapons!” Glynda commanded, her voice echoing in the arena.
Jaune drew his sword from his scabbard, his shield forming on his left arm. Ruby pulled out her scythe, allowing it to surge into its fullest form. Many of the students were impressed with her weapon.
“Begin!”
Ruby immediately rushed in to strike Jaune. He blocked with his shield, but the mass of the scythe brought him to his knees. The cloaked girl pulled back, looking for another opportunity to attack. As Jaune stood back up, he was wide open, giving Ruby the chance to attack. She struck him in the chest, dealing a large amount of damage to his aura. He stumbled back, but quickly recovering to gain an attack on Ruby.
The two went at it, but it was clear that Ruby had the upper hand. She was more experienced in combat, while Jaune had little to no experience whatsoever. By the time the match was finished, Jaune was pretty beat up. Ruby had no damage done to her whatsoever, but she could feel Jaune’s pain. She could feel the impact on Jaune’s dignity, his self-esteem sinking.
Helping him up and off of the ground, Ruby smiled, slightly sympathetically. “Hey, you did great.”
“Pfft, don’t lie to me, Ruby. We all know who won the match. You don’t need to do this.” He stretched, only to feel a wave of pain throughout his body. “Ow, that hurts. You really did a number on me.”
Ruby’s eyes flashed for a moment, and suddenly her body felt as sore as Jaune’s did. “Y-Yeah, sorry about that.”
Hiding the truth was the easy part. Hiding the pain was sometimes difficult.
“Ruby, are you okay? I didn’t hurt you at all, but yet you seem like--”
“It’s nothing. It’s nothing at all. I’m fine, just...tired is all.”
He bought it. Which was a great relief to Ruby. But it’s hard to mask the pain completely. Especially the pain of that one day. Ruby could never forget that. How could she forget it? It was her birthday, and then the first thing she saw was...
Ruby shook her head. I refuse to think of that right now. Weiss saw the look on Rub’s face, feeling slightly concerned for her partner.
“Are you alright Ruby? You did exceptionally well during match, despite the fact that your opponent had no skill at all,” Weiss said.
And once more, Ruby smiled. “Yeah, I’m fine. And thanks. Jaune’s trying his best, but i have to agree with you.”
“If you’re ever in need of an actual sparring partner, I’d be happy to spar against you.”
This made Ruby giggle. “Thanks, Weiss.”
The day continued on, and by the time they were all dismissed, Ruby was already worn out. Never had she ever had such a tight schedule. It was class after class after class with no warning. But she would have to get used to that, assuming it would never get easier from there.
Within a few days, they were all assigned their first mission. Although it was more like a field trip, Ruby still liked to think that it was a mission. In a way, it was like a mission. Gather tree samples and try not to get killed by Grimm.
It was during that time when Jaune had immensely improved in his fighting skills. Ruby didn’t know how it happened, but it did. It surprised everyone the next week when Jaune managed to take down Ren during sparring class. Apparently he had been training with his partner Pyrrha to improve.
But as the weeks went by, it was already the second month of their school year. Ruby was now becoming well known among the school, and although she didn’t mind the attention too much, there were times when it was overwhelming. Everyone heard about her, which meant everyone wanted to know more. And one student in particular wanted to know everything about her.
He hides well among the students, but keeps an even darker secret. His team gathers around him as they keep an eye on the young girl, watching as she leaves her class.
“Looks like we found our next target.”
~~~~~~
Wowie, I’m alive and finally updated this fanfic! Forgive me for posting this way late. It was either getting an A or writing this. Although I’d much rather do the second option, I still want to do my best in school. Also reached over 100 followers! Thank you all so much for supporting me and loving what I do!
Now some things about this story: White Fang will be N/A and Weiss won’t be as cold as in the actual story. She’ll still have a bit of coldness and bitterness in her tone at times, but it won’t be as distant. This is all for the sake of the story flow. Also this chapter is kinda short because I’m just trying to get the story going and prepare it for what I have planned.
Until next chapter!
-Scarlet
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press-a-repeatedly · 5 years
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Zul’s Top 9 Games of 2018
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By Zul Edwards
Heyyy it’s me. I’m back! What a year! 2018 has come and gone and many awesome games have been played by everyone here at PAR. The votes were tallied, the results are in, and I am included in that bunch. However, some of the games I played and loved this year were no-shows on our list. Some AMAZING games that I think deserve a little love on our corner on the internet.  So, I thought, if you out there reading this were interested, (spoiler alert, nobody is) here is my OWN personal top nine games of 2018.
So, let’s get this thing started with my number 9!... oh yeah, I only played 9 games in 2018. heh.
9) No Man’s Sky – So I was one of those gamers who was excited for NMS when it was first announced a few years back. Thought the idea of exploring a quintillion planet was awesome. Then the game came out, I heard it sucked, and I ignored it. Enter a couple years later when it was on sale, had a ton of updates and new features: true online with friends, customizable characters, base building, and a brand-new story. However, it wasn’t enough to keep me hooked. Don’t get me wrong, I liked exploring the various galaxies and doing various side quests, engaging in dogfights with pirates and mining for space gold, but overall it just still felt so empty, so repetitious, and so… blah. I guess I still prefer quality over quantity, even if the quantity is in the quintillions.  
8) The Alliance Alive – The first on the list of “Games only Zul played this year”. The Alliance Alive is a 3DS game from the creators of the classic “Legend of Legacy”, literally a game I borrowed from Justin, played for all of 30 minutes, then promptly returned to Justin never to be spoken of again. So, to my surprise when he told me the same studio was making another game, The Alliance Alive, but it was helmed by one of the writers of the Suikoden franchise, I was cautiously optimistic. Much to my (pleasant) surprise, the game was good! A blend of classic JRPG turned based battles with flairs of modernization: skills learned through fighting, increased stats based on the location of fighters in battles, and a darker story not usually found in those classic SNES/PS1 RPGs this seems to emulate.  While the main characters fall into some pretty cliché tropes, the side characters really shine. From giant axe-wielding lizard men that remind me of my own D&D character, to a demon-dog-man butler, to a mad child genius scientist who rides a duck robot, this game has a lot of flavor. I really should go back and finish.
7) Chasm – While it’s no secret that I love Castlevania games, I think it’s fair to say I’m not really a giant fan of Metroidvania games. I prefer the simpler side-scrolling action of Castlevania, constantly moving forward towards a goal of smacking Drac in the face with a metal whip, to the backtracking and map completing chore of most Metroidvania games. With that said, something about the less intense and simpler format of Chasm kept me hooked till the end. I didn’t mind backtracking and completing the map in Chasm because it wasn’t as vast or complicated as other games in the genre. It was colorful, had great music, stellar pixel art and a fun yet challenging battle system and platforming. Overall it was a blast to play, but it just got overshadowed in a year filled with superior games.
6) God of War – “WHAT THE FUCK?” I hear you slam on your keyboards as I place the unrivaled GOTY in a paltry 6th place. Don’t get me wrong, this game is good. In fact, it’s VERY good. However, for whatever reason, I guess this game didn’t hook me like it did for everyone else. I only have a passing familiarity with the GoW series. Even though I’m a diehard SonyBoy, I only ever played GoW 1 and never beat it. Kratos and Atreus are some of the best written and best-acted characters to come out of a video game in this year or any year. Hell, if we had a “best new character” category again this year, I would struggle to not put Atreus in the top 3. The music is amazing, the writing is fantastic, the scope, cinematography and the constant one camera perspective were all stellar achievements in the medium of gaming, not to mention I’m pretty much obsessed with all things Norse… BUT. I dunno. Little things kept taking me out of it. Atreus’s sudden, jarring mood swings. The poor pacing in certain parts. The sudden introduction of major characters and/or story elements, that felt kind of brushed over and/or rushed. The lackluster side content, the padding and the empty worlds. The game is good. But it never felt great to me. Most games that I love, I think about when I’m not playing them, then I rush home from work to play them because I want to complete them, either for the story or because the gameplay is addicting, but this game felt more like a chore sometimes. I didn’t even buy it, I just borrowed it from Butch earlier in the year when it came out. I’m sorry Cory. I tried but I just didn’t love this game.
5) Moonlighter – Now here’s a game I absolutely adored. Flew under my radar and was recommended by Nick. By day you’re a humble shopkeeper, selling various wares and curios. By night, (by… MOONLIGHT) you explore dungeons ala Link to the Past style in a top-down view, into randomly generated maps. Each area has different items to collect & new materials to find, which you bring back to the shop to sell, which with the money you earn, can craft new weapons, which will get you further into dungeons, which will mean you find more items to sell which means you make more gold to spend on armor and weapons, which means you can get better materials to keep delving deeper, WHICH MEANS… ahem. Ah yes. That classic feedback loop. It sucked me in. It’s simple but effective in keeping me engaged. Coupled with a great art style, fluid beautiful pixel graphics and a surprisingly good amount of story for this type of game, Moonlighter took a nice chunk of my time early in the year.
4) Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom – Another entry in “Games only Zul played this year”, NNK2 was a surprise hit for me. I never played NNK1 and heard rather negative things about it from Nick over the years. I bought NNK2 on a whim months after it came out because it was on sale and I was craving a good JRPG, and it did not disappoint. I loved pretty much everything about this game. The music, the story, the beautiful not quite Ghibli, but practically Ghibli art style, the characters, the mechanics, the town building, the combat… it was everything I was looking for. There were certainly parts in the middle that lagged a bit, and the general “go to town > solve town’s problem > make an alliance with the town” could be considered cliché or predictable, but every town felt unique and its inhabitants all felt genuine. Recruiting citizens into your kingdom and assigning them all a role in your castle was a time sink I didn’t realize I would be so into, but I think I spent more hours on that than anything else in the game. And it also gets marks for being the other child in a video game besides Atreus, King Evan, that I didn’t want to strangle, and in fact by the time the credits rolled, he’d probably be #2 or 3 in Best Character of the Year for me.
3) Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age – Now as far as JRPGS go, Dragon Quest is the ultimate grand-daddy, even more so than Final Fantasy, but it was a series I never really got into. I played some previous games in the series and found passing enjoyment in a couple titles but never enough to ever want to complete a game or seek out other entries in the series. That all kind of changed when I played DQ 11. DQ has never really strayed too far from its classic turn-based JRPG roots. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” would be their mantra I assume, and I love it. In a time when the turn-based system is all but gone from genre giant Final Fantasy, DQ has instead chosen to stick with it, and fully master the dying style. It was hands down the best JRPG I’ve played all year, and probably one of the best I’ve played in several years. It has everything: a great story, compelling characters, awesome music, amazing art style, engaging combat, fun side quests, a challenging yet fair difficulty curve, and it’s actually, really funny on top of all that. While the length might scare people away, (I clocked in right around 120 hours after getting the platinum trophy for 100% completion of the game) it’s some of the best time I spent gaming in a long time. It’s a classic in a modern era. It’s weird, if you said to teenage Zul “one of your favorite JRPGs ever will be Dragon Quest 11, and one of your least favorite JRPGs will be Final Fantasy 15”, he would never have believed you… but here we are.
2) Monster Hunter World – Ah yes. The one oddball in my gaming repertoire. I think we all have one of these, right? That one game/series that for whatever reason, sits outside your normal gaming habits, yet you love it, nonetheless. Maybe you love Halo and FPS games, but you also really like Animal Crossing for some reason. Or maybe you’re a diehard Dark Souls series fan but just can’t get enough of Cooking Mama as well. Variety is the spice of life they say, and while I’m primarily a “character & story first, RPGs, video games are art” kind of dude, something about smashing Monsters in the face with a giant hammer has kept me hooked on the Monster Hunter series for nearly 10 years. I love the challenging but fair battles, the deep customization, the various weapons and armors for both male and female hunters, the varied and unique monsters that all have their own ecology, musical themes, and battle styles you must learn and adapt to if you want to survive. It’s also linking up with friends (or even strangers online) and tackling a beast as a team. For all these reasons and so much more, this series sunk its claws in me from the very first time I played it, and it hasn’t let go. Monster Hunter World is the next-gen, beautifully realized game I’ve wanted for years; and it took the story, art, gameplay, and fun I’ve come to expect from this series to another level.
1) Red Dead Redemption II – I honestly don’t know how to write about this game. I can say all the other things I’ve said up until now about how great the music is (it’s amazing), how varied and alive the characters feel (they’re amazing), how stunningly awe-inspiring the scenery is or how fluid and lifelike the character animations are (they’re amazing), how the story and personal journey of Arthur Morgan literally brought me to tears more than once (he’s #1 in Best Characters btw. And they’re amazing), how rich every side quest is, how fun the mini-games are, how great the dialogue is, or any of the other truly breath-taking aspects of the game, but I don’t think I could do them justice. Hell, I don’t even know how to put them into words myself inside my own head. To me, this is one of those games that surpasses all of that. Yea, it has flaws, every game does, everyTHING does, but to me, it’s perfect, warts and all.  I can’t give it much higher praise than that, and it is absolutely the best game I played in years. When a game can give me an extensional crisis during some of its final moments, I think it’s safe to say that It’ll stick with me and has undoubtedly set a very high bar for all future games. The team at Rockstar outdid themselves and have my thanks for bringing this game into the world.
PHEW. Well, that’s it. Top 9 games of 2018 according to Zully Boy. Another great year in gaming for me personally and here’s to another great year in 2019! Lots to look forward to, and hopefully some hidden gems that’ll surprise me along the way. Happy Gaming everyone!
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missizzy · 5 years
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Fic: All Five, Part 15: Work Back Home(Star Wars)
(Read entire work on AO3)
Roughly half an hour later, Mace walked into the plant store where Xador and Edny hadn’t found much interesting, and he sure didn’t see any shatterpoints anywhere around either. When he told them that Big Hargo had taken some business by someone he was pretty sure was the Sith, and that he was now accepting a banishment from Colorpa, Edny’s face was filled with cautious hope, but Xador asked, “Is he going right now? Not even stopping to grab some bags first? Did you hypnotize him into literally turned and leaving by the nearest way out?”
Mace reached through the Force. He’d actually headed in the direction of his headquarters. He figured he probably would pack some things first, maybe even claim he was going away temporarily to whoever he’d leave to run things. Especially if he was hoping to eventually come back, although he might have realized what Mace had, that any deputy he chose would claim everything for himself first, and not welcome him home.
Sure enough, he was there, he mind very occupied, his fear still driving him. “I think he’ll be out by morning,” he said, after another moment or so. “As will I, but I will stay here until he’s beyond the walls, if that makes you feel better.” He could spare that much time. He wanted to at least visit the two signal towers before he left anyway.
That was enough for Edny. The fear she’d been carrying around every second she’d been in his presence decreased substantially. He allowed her to hug him, hard, and the enthusiasm of her thanks honestly stunned him.
But Xador, meanwhile, was looking very cross, even before he demanded, “So am I getting anything out of this? If you tell me my reward will be your not handing me over to the authorities, I swear I’m gonna take your own laser sword and ignite it right in the middle of…”
“I would expect you to be able to provide for yourself amid all the chaos that will soon ensue with this city’s biggest crime boss gone. I don’t suppose it would help that much if you accompanied me to the signal towers, but I could be wrong there.”
Xador seemed to consider it for a moment or so, but said, “There are other places I should be tonight for that. Hey, Edny, do you know…”
“No.” Edny had pulled away from Mace, and now she was drawing herself up and turning away. “I don’t know you, sir.”
“Hey, I just helped save your life!” he protested, moving to grab her.
“There’s no need for this.” Mace placed himself between them. “You won’t get anything out of her if you get violent. Edny, do you actually have any useful information for him?”
She looked thoughtful for a moment or so, and Xador looked a little calmer when she shook her head. “I’ve known nothing he hasn’t surely changed by now.”
“Makes sense,” said Xador, and Mace didn’t sense any deception from her either. “So, fine then. None of the three of us know each other. I’m sure you’ll be happy not to know either of us, Master Jedi.”
“I would be happy not to know you,” sighed Mace. “But don’t think either of you are going to get that lucky if you ever cause trouble anywhere I am.”
“Did we really get so up in your cloak you’ll take the time out?” laughed Xador, but he was already on his way out. Edny watched him leave, then continued to stare at the door for a minute or so, obviously wanting to put some space between herself and him immediately.
Just before she left, she turned to take one last look at Mace, and she said, “May the Force be with you, Master Windu.”
“Thank you, m’am,” he said, and bowed slightly.
He himself stayed behind just long enough look into the Force again, this time concentrating upon the fate of his two companions. For Xador he couldn’t see much, which was to be expected; one could rarely see the fate of a man who lived like he did. For Edny, however, he could see a little. There would be more grief for her, he could tell, and fear, and also a child she would have to raise on her own. But there was also persistence, and love, and not a little amount of joy. Things wouldn’t be easy for her, but she’d be all right.
Both of the signal towers were far away enough Mace took a bus to the first one, which was empty enough he used the chance to contact first Padmé, sending her a quick message telling her he would be setting off to join her. Then he contacted the Temple. By a stroke of luck, he found himself talking to Yoda and Qui-Gon together. When he told them about Big Hargo diverting the ship, Yoda said, “Look into that, we should. Talk with Knight Kenobi, we will?”
He sensed the Dark Side strong around the first of the towers even before he got off the bus. It was the one by the Red Gate, as it was called; Mace had heard three different stories about why. That he’d sensed nothing like it the entire time he and Padmé had been in the spaceport made him suspect that Darth Maul had used that signal tower a lot less. Perhaps he’d thought he would use it, but had found that impractical.
The security on it was better than it had been on Edny’s tower, and breaking in would take more time than he had. So instead Mace spent a little while walking around the perimeter, standing over some of the blocks on the bottom which contained the majority of the tower’s wiring; that was a common feature of Colorpa’s older buildings. He’d gone nearly around when he reached the ones with notches on the end near the wall, which was definitely a sign of being tampered with, especially when, on closer examination, he also discovered it opened on that end.
There was a seal-lock built into the wall, and it was impossible to break it without triggering an alarm. But using just a sliver of his blade, Mace was able to cut a hole just big enough to look through.
He wasn’t quite sure what it was he saw in the box. It looked kind of like a holocron, but while it was not without the Dark Side, it was so weak he hadn’t sensed it until he’d gotten within a hand’s length of it, if only because of the mysterious broken piece of it he was currently carrying around blocking it out.
Because that was the main thing he could determine about it: it was made of the exact same substance as the object in his pouch, and it was the right size that the broken piece could have easily come from it.
Pulling back, Mace gingering slip a pinky finger into the hole. He didn’t even actually have to touch the thing; same feeling of wrong. This time, he was also hit by a strange feeling of distance, as if he would, if he reached out, be able to touch and feel things half a galaxy away, maybe more.
Were the Sith trying to do something like that, to spy on the Jedi, or even cross vast amounts of space within a moment? Had they possibly even succeeded at the former? At least if they managed the latter, the Jedi would know.
He didn’t linger much longer, either by the block, or around the tower. He sensed nothing else out of the ordinary, and he didn’t have time for any more in-depth looking. As dawn rose over Colorpa two and a half hours later, Mace Windu had already left the city, settled in the corner of a long bus where he hoped he wouldn’t even have to sit too close to anyone during the three days it would take to get to Tanzer. He had given Padmé a full update, and learned she and her two companions had reached the city and gone to ground in a motel on its outskirts.
They probably wouldn’t be able to get rid of those two as easily has Mace had his own two; they neither of them had anything to go back to. He found themselves dwelling just a little on whether they could settle them somewhere on this planet, or whether they’d have to take them off it with them. It probably wouldn’t be that much of a bother to get them into a refugee resettlement center, one far enough away from Avvarbor Prime that they could be convinced that nobody there would be interested in hurting or killing them. It was getting them through Colorpa first that might be more of a pain.
Except that Mace also had an uneasy feeling that he himself was never going to set foot in Colorpa again.
The Jedi Temple, Coruscant
On Master Jinn’s instructions, Anakin had spent the last hour looking up weird gadgets that were very tangentially related to Sith Holocrons. Like where it was believed some inventor who never would’ve been able to open it had found one, and there were signs of it influencing his work, situations like that. His Master and Obi-Wan had gone to the Archives to research other objects that might be related or even be what Master Windu had found before leaving Colorpa, the ones that were darker.
He found himself flipping through the creations of Syne Orbs, an inventor from Avvarbor Five who’d died only the previous year. He’d made his living by selling traveling lights and similar, but he also filed paperwork for a device he claimed could be used to listen in on encrypted messages, even ones both sent and received all the way on the other side of the galaxy. When Anakin looked at some of his wares, he was reminded of the lantern Master Jinn had given him back on Sopertlia, on a day that felt so long ago now.
His hadn’t been the only invention to remind Anakin of that lantern. It probably helped that he’d been working with it lately. As his Master had suggested, he now had a way to take the lights on and off of the chain and put them back. Detached, and occasionally floated around, they definitely looked a little like some of the levitatable lights developed on more than one planet.
He was looking further into the various records related to Orbs, noting he’d died of a disease it was very unusual for humans to get, when Obi-Wan came in, and Anakin could sense Master Jinn was close behind him. “Well, Anakin,” he said, “you’ll be happy to hear this: the two of us are to go outside the Temple.”
“Really?” Anakin couldn’t help how his face lit up.
“Yes, really,” said Obi-Wan. “You remember the transport that left Avvarbor Prime and was diverted here, apparently on the orders of the Sith? We’ve been looking into where its various passengers went, especially the Epostulate ones. It looks like most of them have rented out an apartment clump on Level 3011. The Council has decided the two of us are to go down there, see if we can get any information out of the locals, if any of them are Force sensitive.”
“Why us, though?” Anakin was now mature and responsible enough to ask that question. “I mean, any pair of Jedi could do that, and they might even be in less danger than us.”
Obi-Wan let his obvious discomfort show then, as he said, “Qui-Gon brought up the same point. He got the Council to admit that they’re hoping the two of us will attract the Sith’s attention. We’re pretty sure Darth Maul isn’t on Coruscant right now, so he wouldn’t be able to come attack us tonight, but hearing we’ve been there, if the inhabitants have been told to keep an eye out for us, maybe then sending Qui-Gon down there too a few days from now, might draw him back here.”
“You think he’d really do that? Come here, to Coruscant, alone, with all the Jedi right here?” Although he wouldn’t be completely alone, Anakin then thought, since the Sith almost certainly had operatives here, and probably the second one was on the planet somewhere. Or, of course, he might bring fighters with him, like the Sith had twice in the last decade and a half.
“I don’t know, honestly,” said Obi-Wan. “All I know is the Council seems to believe it’s possible.”
Sometimes, when the Jedi went down into Coruscant’s lower levels, they would leave the Temple by an exit on one of the lowest levels still in use. Master Jinn accompanied his former and current Padawan down to it an hour or so later, Anakin trying to remember as they walked where they were in relation to the abandoned areas he’d crept through on that day he’d run into Master Dooku.
The memory of Dooku brought up another worrying thought. Very quietly, he asked, “Does anyone else in the Temple know where we’re going?”
“Of course not,” said Master Jinn. “This is the sort of task that must be done quickly and quietly. You yourself should not talk about it with anyone outside the five of us, and maybe not that much even then.”
Anakin wasn’t sure he liked that, being asked to limit how much he talked about it with Padmé. But maybe things would be different by the time she got back to Coruscant anyway.
For now, he just reminded himself that this meant they shouldn’t have to worry about any spies at all, and he was even cheered when Master Jinn pulled each of them in turn into the kind of fierce hug Anakin didn't always even want anymore. “Come back safe,” he said, and then watched, his care warming them both through the Force, until the door had shut behind them.
Since that first time, when he and Padmé had both still been Initiates and she’d nearly died saving someone, Anakin had traveled down to the deep levels of Coruscant three times, all of them with Master Jinn. It definitely felt less safe than it had ever been, even with Obi-Wan with him, but that was simply because he knew more now. Even during his last visit, a little after he’d turned twelve, he hadn’t quite grasped the full extent of the crime that went on, or how desperate life could be for so many who lived down here, and what could happen as a result.
“Stay close to me, Anakin,” said Obi-Wan. “I know at your age I would feel like I should be more daring, and I know you’ve done things probably more dangerous than this, but all the same, it would be silly of you to get yourself hurt right now.”
Surely Obi-Wan realized how restless that was going to make Anakin. But he did understand the logic of the knight’s words. So he tried to remember all the mantras he knew for keeping himself at peace and patient. Master Jinn had taught him a lot of those over the years. It helped that they spent a significant amount of time walking downward, steady rhythmic steps that gave them both something to concentrate on, combined with their surroundings, though through much of it there weren’t very many lifeforms near them.
He even managed to keep doing them during the brief elevator ride, listening to the hum it made-a little whirry; it could do with a tune-up. When the door opened up, they were blasted by cold air, although Anakin felt more the warmth of all the people crowded together in the space ahead of them, so different from the levels they’d just traveled through or even the places immediately around them.
He noted that last bit to Obi-Wan, saying, “I think they chose a place deliberately away from everybody else. Surely that means they’re up to something.”
“Not necessarily. If they’re refounding their community here, they probably don’t want its members, especially not the younger ones, mixing too much with other people, especially on a planet like Coruscant, where there are so many different kinds of people, and they know so little about any of them. Cult groups are often like that, always afraid of their ways being changed or people abandoning them.”
Anakin couldn’t help then but think of certain things he’d heard said about the Jedi, especially here on Coruscant. Maybe Obi-Wan could tell, because he said, “It has often been the task of the Jedi to avoid that kind of thinking. Our ways are our ways, and while change should not be unheard of, nor should it be undertaken without great care, prudence, and knowledge. But we do not put ourselves above those who aren’t us. On the contrary, we spend our days doing good for them, walking among them, even if we live apart from them. Young Jedi see plenty of the galaxy by the time they are knighted; they do not make that commitment blindly.”
He probably would’ve talked more, too, if they hadn’t now just about reached their destination, a large cluster of buildings, two or three floors, it looked like, clumped against and around each other like pieces of mud. There was absolutely no one outside, and this was big enough a residential cluster that there should have been at least a few people going from one place to another.
They walked to what was roughly the middle of it, hoping the Force would nudge one or the other of them towards one of the buildings, or someone would decide to come out when they saw them. When neither happened, Obi-Wan called out, “I know there are people here, people who are obviously hiding from us. We won’t be much of a bother to you. In fact, we’re trying to protect you. We know who you are, and where you came from, and you did not intend to come here to Coruscant. We also know that your ship was diverted by the mysterious man who came to your city and said he would teach you. I imagine you were fleeing from him, and now he chose your destination, and there’s a good chance he has some further plans for you.
So if you want us to stop him, then any information you have about him could be what allows us to do that. If you don’t want to come out now, you know where to find us.”
This was probably the right course to take, but Anakin couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed that it looked like they weren’t going to get much done themselves that day. Even more so when they’d started walking, and were nearly out of the complex.
Until a young woman burst from the entrance from the building at the edge of it, her hood half-falling down as she stumbled in her heavy dress, nearly colliding with them before she skidded to a halt with a, “I believe you. The rest of them don’t, or say they don’t, but I do. And the two people who are in charge of us right now, one of them’s behaving really weird. Master Tenni, he’s mostly all right, focused on getting us the virtual employments and food and stuff, but Master Kolut, he’s not helping with any of that. Instead he says he’s always off trying to find out why we ended up on Coruscant, almost all the day, every day. I think he’s doing something else.”
That definitely sounded suspicious, but Anakin could think of a lot of things Master Kolut might be doing that he had nothing to do with the Sith which he still wouldn’t want his followers knowing about. Obi-Wan was probably thinking the same thing, as he asked her, “Do you know if he has any powers? Or if he was a student of the one you fled from?”
She shook her head. “I never knew those sorts of things. Though I think most of us here don’t have any powers. I know I don’t, and nor does anyone in my family.” As she spoke this she glanced around, as if she’d just heard something.
Obi-Wan of course promptly asked, “Is it safe for you to remain here now?”
“No, I’m not leaving,” she said, and shrank away, and both Jedi knew instantly that it wasn’t.
“You need to come away with us,” Anakin said, before Obi-Wan could stop him. “I know that must seem really scary, but aren’t you scared to go back in there?” She was; they wouldn’t have even needed the Force to sense that.
But she must have been even more scared to go with them, because she just shook her head and started to retreat.
“The choice doesn’t have to be between them or us,” Obi-Wan offered. “There’s a refuge not far from here, level 3038, in the Mustrose Complex, go up the lift just west of here and it’ll be easy to find.” But his words somehow seemed to frighten her even more, and she outright turned and ran back the way she had come.
Obi-Wan shook his head. “You should’ve left it to me, Anakin. I could’ve almost certainly gotten more information out of her.”
“And would you have gotten her out of here?” Anakin asked, as they resumed their walk back to the lift. “Could we have said anything to make her go?” He would feel terrible if they could have.
But instead he felt even worse when Obi-Wan just said, “I don’t know. Someone in her position-it’s hard enough to get them to save themselves even in the best of circumstances, and when she’s newly on a planet like Coruscant, bigger and scarier to her than even the entire galaxy ever was to us, and has reason to believe a great and powerful being is after her…”
“And we have to just walk away from her now, don’t we?” Anakin wasn’t even disputing that; he knew he couldn’t. But he wasn’t going to pretend to like it.
“We can’t force her to leave,” said Obi-Wan. “Jedi can only do that sort of thing when enough is at stake that they can justify it to the Senate. And in this case, even talking to her about it for too long could cause the leaders of this community to file a complaint about us, which we really do not want right now. And yes, I know it’s painful…”
“Painful?” Anakin did his best not to yell it. “It’s way worse than that! What if they kill that poor girl?!”
“I know, I know,” said Obi-Wan, and Anakin knew he did, if only because he knew the knight’s mind. “But the fact remains that if we did other than what we are doing right now, it would likely result in far worse happening.”
Anakin didn’t say anything then. What could he have said? But he was going to be mad for the rest of the day, he decided, and he didn’t care if he wasn’t supposed to be mad just because he was a Jedi.
Back in the elevator, Obi-Wan said, “At least we got the information about their leaders, and she was telling the truth that there wasn’t much Force sensitivity, from what I could sense. Did you get the same impression?” When Anakin said that he had, he said, “We’ll pass that name on. I think Qui-Gon could trace at least some of his activities with neither he nor his followers any the wiser.”
The Next Morning
It was one of those mornings where Master Rancisis decided he wanted to lecture the next generation on a subject he believed they all needed to know about. So Anakin was out of their quarters right after breakfast, and Qui-Gon had told him he could go to lunch from there, and there was no hurry for him to return after it, so long as he didn’t take half the afternoon. Normally he wished Master Rancisis wouldn’t forcibly drag all the Padawans in the Temple at the moment to one of his speeches, but there was no denying it was convenient on that occasion.
First he was able to talk with Obi-Wan about what had happened with Anakin specifically the previous day, and even a little about how to help him cope with it. “I certainly would’ve felt the same way he did when I was that age,” he commented. “To some extent, I still do.”
“More than just to some extent,” said Obi-Wan, smiling. “Anyone who’s been your Padawan would know that. But that might at least make it easier to get Anakin to listen to whatever you say to him about it.”
He couldn’t stay the entire morning either, though, and Qui-Gon was alone when he sat down to deal with the matter of Ugs Kolut. He’d gotten his full name off the ship’s paperwork the previous night, and from there messaged all of the various friends he’d made around Coruscant over the years with all the details they had on him. A message had arrived in response from one of them, a tech who had been working in the Senate building for over two decades, who had looked in the Visitor’s Log and seen Kolut’s name six times. He’d also asked Qui-Gon to call at home at a certain time when he’d be on break. He was probably using this as excuse to talk to him about some other matter, but Qui-Gon commed him anyway.
Sure enough, when Rozitti answered, there were about ten minutes where he complained about new taxes applied to everyone who lived in the Senate District that didn’t hurt the Senators any, but did very badly hurt those that worked for them. He had to know Qui-Gon and the Jedi couldn’t interfere any with that, but he didn’t try to remind him of that, just heard him out.
Finally, Rozitti said, “And to make it even worse, I’m not sure my boss isn’t secretly looking through our messages. That’s why I didn’t want to go into any more details about your guy Kolut when I wrote you last night. I’ve set this to not archive on my side. But I’m pretty sure your guy’s been to some pretty high places as a visitor, and in the Supreme Chancellor’s office at least one, somewhere between 4:24 and 4:28 of this year.”
“Your private messages?” Qui-Gon demanded, his mission momentarily forgotten in his dismay. “Are they truly allowing that now?”
“According to law, no,” Rozitti answered with a rueful smile. “But even if we could be sure he’s doing it, how would we stop him? Law enforcement on Coruscant doesn’t serve people like us, my friend. You know, if you could ever make yourself of aid to us, you’d have a lot more friends here than just me.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, my friend.” He would, too, but now, unfortunately, might not be quite the time. “Meanwhile, are you still willing to give me any more information about who exactly Kolut might have talked to? Even speculation might be useful.”
Rozitti shrugged. “His aides, or some of them, I’d assume. Maybe some other officials? Or other political figures, not even senators, necessarily. I haven’t heard of him coming in or being in with any other visitors in particular, but if there was any serious under-the-console stuff going on, those involved might try to avoid being connected to each other. Be interesting to know if he met with the Chancellor himself; not everyone who goes to his office does, of course.”
Qui-Gon, too, would be very interested in knowing that; he suspected that if the man was meeting with the Sith, he probably didn’t see very many people besides whoever their operative was. “And the other dates he might have come in? Any other details you happen to know?”
He rattled off the dates, but no obvious pattern appeared, and after that he had pretty much told Qui-Gon all he knew. Qui-Gon thanked him then, and added, “Remember, if you ever have serious financial difficulties…”
“I know,” said Rozetti. “Nice doing business with you, Master Jinn.” He was smirking as he disconnected. It made Qui-Gon’s lips curl up a little.
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So here it is, my life. I write like a 10 year old because my mind is too active to think about correcting myself.
For a long time now I have been struggling with my life and who I am. I struggle to understand why I have been punished and why nothing ever runs smoothly for me.
I shall start from when I was 14, the youngest age I remember feeling like this and then I shall work my way up to current day.
Being 14 was one of the worst ages for me. I was different from any of my friends, I liked different music and I dressed different. I stood out when I was with them and standing out was something I hated. I wanted to be in the background and unnoticed but my quirky sense of style didn’t let me. I was quiet and my head was full of worries. I felt under pressure at school, I wasn’t clever and I wasn’t popular so I was just a nobody. I made some friends online that were like me and coming home to speak with them was the best part of my day. We would share all our worries and talk about how much we hated school, I thought they were good for me until I wanted to be more like them. My music taste was now depressing and emo. The songs were all about killing your self and not wanting to be around. At this point in life I found that hurting yourself could help with the daily struggles, I started to cut myself just so I could see blood and feel that stinging sensation. I never showed anyone this. I covered myself up constantly.
Once I was 15 I had found a group of friends that accepted me. For the first part of the friendship I was the ‘cool’ one because I was different. I was invited out all the time and I had less time to think about what was going on in my head. To the world I was happy but inside I still felt like same old me. Being 15/16 was a new experience for me. I got my first boyfriend who was also seen as quite cool. I spent a lot of time with him and he made me happier but it was also at this time when I stopped eating. I was very very skinny but I didn’t see it. I used to get annoyed in the shop because I couldn’t find any size 4’s and the 6’s were too big. One of the girls from our friendship group once shouted to me in the corridor ‘if you get hospitalised for anorexia don’t expect me to come and visit’ and this hurt. It played on my mind over and over and then once again I felt unaccepted.
Once school was over I spent a lot of time in my room sat on my computer. I didn’t do well in my GCSE’s and this was a massive worry for me. I spent a lot of time online editing pictures of myself and making myself into this better person. My face was covered in spots and I had zero confidence. Online I was a warrior but real life I was so weak. I started college and made new sets of friends. I was in and out of relationships with different people but none really ever made me fully happy. My emotions were up and down.
Then I turned 17 and this is when I would say things took a massive turn for the worst. I started hardly ever leaving my room apart from at weekends. I quit college because I felt like I wasn’t good enough. I would stay up till 4/5 in the morning and then stay in bed till I knew someone was coming home from work. I was very depressed but unable to admit it. I had a poor diet and remained worryingly skinny. I didn’t know how to express myself so once again took to social media. This is when I started googling how I hide food so that I didn’t have to eat it.
18. This was a completely different year for me. I went crazy but kind of good crazy. My life was the opposite to what it ever was. I got a job. I had money. I started going out multiple times a week and I loved it. I used to drink and drink and drink and go wild. These were my best times because everything else was forgotten. At 18 I then got into a long term relationship. This relationship was bad for me. It made me worse than I ever had been. I don’t want to go into much detail on here because this is very private to me. This was now my lowest time in life. This was the first time I planned how to kill myself. I once went to the train station and planned on getting a train as far away as I could do nobody could find me.
The relationship went on till I was about 22. After it ended I was in a bad way. Nothing made me happy now and I decided to take action myself because I wanted to fight this sadness. This is when I made the spontaneous decision to go to South Africa. I booked it and was off 3 months after. I was scared but the fear was good adrenaline for me. Once there I completely forgot about anything that had gone off in my life. Animals were now my life and I was so focussed on it. I was there for 6 weeks and if money wasn’t an issue I would have stayed there. I went down every route possible to stay there but at the time it was so hard.
I came back and as expected I just sank straight back into my depression. I didn’t have many friends now but the ones I had were amazing. We would go out every weekend and just have the best time. She had her own house so I could go there to escape when needed. I was fine when there but as soon as I left I would just cry in my car. On the drive home once I put my foot down on the accelerator and shut my eyes in the hope that I would crash so hard that I’d die. I opened them obviously lol because I’m still here.
I was so mixed up now. I lost a lot of good people in my life because people didn’t know how to handle me and I pushed a lot of people away. This is also when I noticed my erratic mood changes. I could change from happy to crazy to depressed in such a short period of time. It’s a weird feeling, you can sort of feel it building in your head but you can’t stop it and you know it’s coming and you don’t know when it’ll go. I lost control a lot of the time. At work, if something didn’t go my way I would lose the plot. I started punching things and throwing things across the room. I thought maybe I had anger issues so I went to the doctors. God knows why I never went for depression but went for anger hahaha. The doctor did some tests and then decided it might be thyroid related and that was the start of my under active thyroid. It was manageable but explained my extreme tiredness. I took my tablets and got on with it. The anger calmed down and that was good enough for me. I’d coped with depression for so long that I was just used to it now.
Things turned to put slightly when a woman tried to commit suicide of a bridge on to my car. This is when my anxiety started. I was jumpy and hated and still to this day hate anyone being behind me. I got anxiety over strange things like not knowing what’s behind closed doors and even just things like texting someone first.
Things remained like this for a while.
I then moved out. I was in a relationship for a short time but soon ended once I was too busy with my housemates. We went wild. I did a lot of dangerous things. Like when I think back I wonder how I’m still here. This is when I created my second plan on how to kill myself. I went through a very very bad time at work. I didn’t want to go back to my parents house because I thought they’d hate me. I thought everyone would hate me. So one day I decided that was the day I would end my life and end my pain. I couldn’t see any other way round it but that same night my mum demanded I went home to her. I did thankfully and seeing my dog brought a lot of happiness. He saved my life.
And then I met Laura. My biggest life saver. I was very reserved when I met her because I wasn’t happy about opening up to her. I trusted a lot of people who eventually let me down and I didn’t want this to happen again. But I had a good connection with her, she made me feel different in a good way. I spent a lot of time with her.
Money became an issue and I had to move back home which meant less time with Laura but we did fun stuff like going to Manchester and trips out. She moved to Sheffield after a while and we got back on track. My strange mood changes were still a big thing and I hated that sometimes they would happen when with Laura but I couldn’t help myself.
I was the happiest I’ve ever been with Laura. But gradually I pushed her away like I do everyone. I hated myself but again I couldn’t stop what I was doing. It was like my body was took over and I was just completely different. I was in a bad way and this time I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t eat a single thing for 4 days and I was weak and just cried all day.
I hate this bit so I’ll skip the majority of it but I did get Laura back and we were happy and it was the best thing that ever ever happened to me and it really does prove that if it’s meant to be it will happen. The break was good for me because it showed me what I really want and what I was missing out on.
Ill leave this bit here because I am nearly on current day and this is a lot more complicated.
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tigermaskdan · 6 years
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Week 6 - Dickbag of the Football Week
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Sucks to be a Packers fan.  Not just because you live in Green Bay, but because you’ve now lost handsome man, and general all around football machine Aaron Rodgers for the season.  
I generally like Aaron Rodgers, but I will say that his fans are at the point of his career where they’re fucking annoying.  They’re like Colts fans were when we came up with any fucking stupid excuse we could think of as to why Manning was better than Brady.  “His team around him is garbage and he still wins!” “He’s throwing to nobody!” “He has no defense!”  
God that’s so fucking stupid.  For pretty much all of Brady’s career at least one of those is true at any given time.  I don’t like Tom Brady.  He’s the same as anyone else that’s weird and successful in that they think the rest of us would be just as successful if we followed their bullshit life style.  He’s basically NFL’s Gweneth Paltrow.  That said, unregulated gun to my head, if in their prime I had to choose between Peyton Manning, a man I’ve spent most of my life rooting for; and Tom Brady, a close personal friend of Donald Trump; I would choose Brady every day and twice on Sunday.  Every Packers fan that tells you different with Aaron Rodgers is full of shit, because they’re constipated from all the cheese, but they’re also lying.
Moving on, Colts did Colts things.
Dickbag of the Week:
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ALL. THE. NFL. STREAMING.  I get better service from Frontier Airlines than we do from the NFL and they’re one line item cut away from charging you for a chair.  Trump get’s better service at a Korean BBQ than we do from the NFL. 
Let me set the scene here.  Colts are on Monday Night Football, one of the few times this year that this shitpile of a team is going to make it onto a national broadcast, which means I actually get to watch it.  HOWEVER, it happened to fall on the same night as my neighborhood associations 2x a year meeting.  I know what you’re thinking, “Dan, you unctuous pit of fermented cat hair, those things are a waste of time, it’s just old people bitching about their neighbors.”
Well flesh dongle, can I call you flesh dongle? Yes, flesh dongle.  You’re right, but you’re still a flesh dongle.  Also, I should at least go to one of these things.  For all I know, I’m the guy they’re bitching about.  
I figure no big deal, I can watch ESPN, and many other channels, on my phone thanks to the millenial cable package of my parents satellite login.  I do this all the time with NBA, MLB or NHL games that are on ESPN with no problem.  HOWEVER.  As I settled in to be regaled by tales of people speeding near a school zone, I was met with this message (not literally this message, but one like it):
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I switch over to the DirectTV live TV app, same shit.  The message says I can watch on a tablet, computer or connected streaming stick, but not my phone.  WHAT DOES IT FUCKING MATTER.  You mean to tell me, that if I had an iPad that had the same tittyfucking sim card that is in my phone in it, I would be allowed to watch this game?  Is there a contractual allowance on screen size?  Would too many Pagano superlatives fry my phones processor?  Why the fuck is this a rule?
Now I’m staring down the barrel of 2 hours of people bitching that the lawn care service at the neighboring development is blowing around too much weed clippings, and I’m panicking.  I’m trying to think of what I can do.  If it is SO. ASSDAMN. IMPORTANT.  That we are unable to watch the game in app, or in browser, on your phone, surely they have found a way to block you watching the game on your phone if the browser is set to desktop mode.
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You know what brings my piss to a boil? Those fuckers didn’t even make it HARD to circumvent their lock out.  I just had to click a checkbox on my phone.  But since it’s in desktop mode, it doesn’t run nearly as smoothly as if it were in the app.  So rather than actually block me from watching the game, they just made it so I had a shittier viewing experience.  It’s almost worse than getting blocked. 
Young people don’t have cable anymore.  If they like a sport, they get the streaming package, and the NFL streaming package is a GODDAMNED JOKE.  
Blackout rules, generally, fucking suck and apply to everyone, so NFL gets a pass on that, but suppose you’re like me and are out of market.  You want to watch your team, no matter how rancid they are, and only your team.  For the NFL it is $200 for a fucking season.  And again, due to archaic ass blackout rules, national games aren’t included, so for the Colts, it would come in at around $15 a game to watch Doyle & Moncrief as “the Butterfinger Twins!” SOME of the time.  
Meanwhile, single team packages for NBA, MLB and NHL clock in at $120, $85 and $112 respectively.  Even with blackouts the value per game is exponentially higher.  If I’m a millenial that has no money because I built my house out of avacado toast and szechuan sauce packets, looking to maximize my entertainment dollar so I can spend the rest on Bitcoins - why would I even CONSIDER the NFL?  Shit, WWE Network is $10 a month, has thousands of hours or archived footage along with original content and ALL THE PPVs.  No wonder wrestling is having a boom period.
And they wonder why NFL ratings are down.  Even aside from the shitty streaming services, I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again many many times, it’s simply hard to watch football without feeling guilty about concussions.  That’s hurting it right there.  Plus most of the league beats their wives and the league only cares if there’s tape.  That’s strike two.  Everyone is sick of teams threatening to leave if taxpayers don’t mortgage their school system to buy a stadium with more luxury boxes, that’s strike three.  
And to top it all off, I have to look at Jerry Jones-damned MAGA trolls blaming the NFL ratings slide on a bunch of players trying to use their public platform to raise awareness to something that actually matters. 
SO, if you’re not going to actually fix the deep seeded problems in the NFL’s general governance, the least you could do is fix your streaming service.  Make it fucking affordable, make it fucking easy to watch on the go and for Christ’s sake try to do something about blackout rules.  Otherwise you won’t have to worry about players taking a knee, because the NFL won’t be a big enough platform to warrant protesting on.
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Text
DGB Grab Bag: Jagr Draft Proposal, Doan Effect, and Lindros on Arsenio Hall
Three Stars of Comedy
The third star: The Vegas Golden Knights jersey numbers. First of all, they gave No. 97 to David Clarkson. Yes, Connor McDavid’s number. To David Clarkson. Who is, I think it’s fair to say, not all that Connor McDavid-ish.
So that was weird. But then they made up for it with some solid trolling:
This will get even funnier when Sidney Crosby scores 12 points in his first game in Las Vegas and Gronk-spikes the puck after every one.
The second star: This photo. Speaking of Rob Gronkowski, he is now best friends with Tuukka Rask, and this may be my new favorite sports photo of all time.
The first star: The Senators logo without eyebrows. Why yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like. And no, you won’t be able to un-see it.
(Original image created by Twitter’s @Gerv_Rebrand, who should be in jail.)
Be It Resolved
It’s September, and Jaromir Jagr still doesn’t have a home for the 2017-18 season. This is unacceptable.
Yes, he’s 45. Sure, he’s lost more than a few steps, to the point where he’d have a hard time beating the Zamboni around the ice these days. And yes, last year’s 46 points made for the least productive full season of his career. In a league that’s all about speed and youth, plodding old guys aren’t exactly in high demand.
Counterpoint: He’s Jaromir Freaking Jagr. Let’s get this done.
At this point, it seems possible that nobody will sign him, or that he may be reduced to signing a PTO (professional tryout) like some scrub. Hockey fans around the world are slowly coming to terms with the fact that there just aren’t many good outcomes left for this story. Maybe Jagr gives up and retires, or he heads back to Europe. Maybe he sits around for half a season waiting for an injury. Or maybe he latches on somewhere as an unwanted fourth-liner, and the whole thing takes on a sad Jerry-Rice-as-a-Seahawk vibe.
There is a better way.
So be it resolved: The NHL must immediately institute the Jaromir Jagr Rule. If you’re over 40 and you’ve won multiple scoring titles and you still want to compete and nobody’s signing you, you get to play for everyone.
Yes, everyone. Here’s how it works: We give Jagr two more weeks to sign a real NHL contract—no PTOs or two-way deals or any of that nonsense. Somebody commits to the guy, or else we take matters into our own hands.
[Spongebob Squarepants Meme Joke.] Photo by Robert Mayer-USA TODAY Sports
If Jaromir Jagr still doesn’t have a deal by September 15, he plays for everyone. Every team in the league gets to use Jagr for one home game and one away game. That adds up to 62 games, which sounds about right for a 45-year-old who’ll need some rest here and there.
But who gets him for which games? That’s the fun part. Gather round your TV, kids, because Saturday, September 15, is the Jaromir Jagr draft. That’s right—every team in the league, in reverse order of last year’s standings, gets to pick the games it has Jagr in the lineup.
The Golden Knights probably use the first overall pick on their home opener. The Avs could, too—it’s the next night, and it’s not too far a flight. The better teams might want to save him for crucial games later in the season, especially against the elite teams. OK, let’s face it, especially against the Penguins.
Be honest: If the NHL held that draft, you would watch that so hard your eyeballs would explode. And then imagine the season playing out. Jagr’s one home game as a Penguin. His return to New York. The Capitals using him for the outdoor game so that he can also be the oldest guy on the alumni team. The home-and-home between the Bruins and the Habs where he plays for both teams. Best of all, the NHL website with a little “Where’s Jagr?” graphic, in which he’s wearing glasses and a red-and-white striped shirt.
Look, I may have thought about this too much, but don’t act like you’re not on board. Make this happen, NHL. Your millions of fans, and one very old man with a mullet, are demanding it.
Obscure Former Player of the Week
It’s college free agent season, with players like Will Butcher sparking the annual debate over whether NCAA players should have different rights than their CHL counterparts. This has been a long-running issue for the NHL, dating back to the 1980s when bidding wars over players like Adam Oates led to the institution of the short-lived supplemental draft. While it only ran from 1986 to 1994, the supplemental draft did produce a handful of legitimate NHL stars, including John Cullen, Steve Rucchin, and NHLPA ’93 legend Shawn Chambers. It also produced this week’s obscure player: Dave Snuggerud.
Snuggerud was a hard-working winger who made his name at the University of Minnesota and spent time with the American national team in 1988. That stint included an appearance at the Winter Olympics, where he scored three goals for Team USA, as well as a rare international fight against Canada’s Trent Yawney. The Sabres had taken him with the second pick in the 1987 supplemental draft, and he made the team out of training camp in 1989. He scored 14 goals and earned a handful of votes in both the Calder and Selke races his rookie season, which would end up being the best of his career.
While his production dipped after that, he remained an NHL regular for a few years; the Sabres traded him to the Sharks for Wayne Presley in 1992. He also had a quick run with the Flyers, but he was out of the NHL by 1993, and out of pro hockey altogether by 1995. All told, Snuggerud played 265 NHL games and scored 30 goals. His legacy includes some solid hockey hair and one of the most enjoyable names in recent league history.
After his playing days ended, Snuggerud went into teaching and coaching. His nephew Luc is currently a prospect in the Blackhawks’ system.
New Entries for the Hockey Dictionary
The Doan Effect ( noun): The unwritten but nearly universal rule among hockey fans and media which holds that a player who spends all (or almost all) of his career with one franchise seems to get far more love than players with similar resumes who played for several teams.
This concept isn’t new, but with Shane Doan retiring this week after a 21-season career with the Coyotes/Jets, it seems like a good time to give it a name. Doan was a perfectly fine player. He scored 400 goals, could be a physical force, and was a respected leader. He played in two All-Star games. He was good.
But if you didn’t follow hockey and were just going by the reaction to his retirement this week, you might think you were witnessing the end of a legendary career. This is a guy who never finished in the top ten in voting for any major award, or in the top five for postseason All-Star winger honors. He didn’t get a single Hart Trophy vote in his two-decade career.
Shane, your legacy will live on. Photo by Joe Camporeale-USA TODAY Sports
And yet, his retirement feels like a really big deal. That’s the Doan Effect kicking in. Players who are closely identified with one team just seem to get a big boost to all their legacy sliders that players who bounce around the league don’t. It helps explain why Adam Oates and Mark Recchi had to wait years to get into the Hall of Fame, while Mike Modano was a never-in-doubt sure thing. Jeremy Roenick (five teams), Pierre Turgeon (six), and Bernie Nichols (six) aren’t getting in, but Daniel Alfredsson will. I don’t think the Doan Effect is unique to the NHL—it seems to crop up in other sports—but its impact seems especially strong in hockey.
To be clear, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. From a fan’s perspective, a player’s legacy has to be more than the sum of his stats and award votes. There’s something to be said for the connection that develops between a player and a fan base over a long career, and if that bleeds over into the wider perception of a career then that seems fair. It’s a reasonable approach to take.
But it does need a name. And now it has one. Thanks, Shane.
Classic YouTube Clip Breakdown
The Philadelphia Flyers announced this week that they’ll be retiring Eric Lindros’s No. 88 this season, because I told them to. The news comes a year after Lindros finally got his call from the Hockey Hall of Fame.
Hall of Fame induction and number retirement are two of the highest honors any athlete can achieve, but they pale in comparison to the very top of the mountain: appearing on an early 90s episode of The Arsenio Hall Show. Luckily for Lindros, he did that, too.
youtube
It’s sometime in the spring of 1993, and a teenaged Lindros has recently finished scoring 41 goals in 61 games as a rookie with the Flyers. He’s also just been named one of People Magazine’s most beautiful people. Life is good.
Now he’s going to appear on The Arsenio Hall Show, which was pretty much the height of coolness back then. Seriously, forget the infamous Sports Illustrated cover a year later—getting a rookie on Arsenio was basically the NHL’s marketing peak.
Arsenio introduces Lindros while making his name rhyme with “Vandross,” and Eric heads out to say hello. Word is he’d planned to charge out wearing a tasseled denim vest, sprint through the crowd, and flip the couch, but somebody else got there first, so he went with the standard handshake.
We start off with a typical Arsenio question, in which he gets really serious while leaning forward and tenting his fingers. Arsenio Hall was more engaged and attentive on every throwaway question he ever asked a guest than I was exchanging my wedding vows. Dude was the best.
Hall mentions having several hockey fans on his staff, including cameraman John Gillis. According to his IMDB page, Gillis’s other credits include Hollywood Squares, My Two Dads, and Solid Gold, just in case you were worried that there wasn’t someone out there having a way cooler life than you.
Hall goes with a thought-provoking question about starting a roster from scratch and the nature of team-building, at which point Lindros responds, “I really don’t know.” I think I might have figured out why hockey players don’t get invited on many talk shows, you guys.
I can’t decide which I want to own more, Lindros’s shirt or Arsenio’s jacket. I think the answer is both, and that I want to wear them at the same time. I could pull that off, right?
“They say you have no weakness. What do you think your weakness is?” asks Hall. Lindros ponders the questions, gets a few words into his answer, then falls over injured and goes on the LTIR for three months.
Actually, Lindros lists a few players who he can’t yet measure up to, including a mention of “Wayne Gretzky, who took the Kings all the way” as the crowd cheers. Wait. Do… do Americans think the Kings won the Stanley Cup in 1993? Did you get an alternate version of the series where they cut off the feed right before McSorley’s stick measurement? How many of Canada’s other dozen Stanley Cups since 1993 have they not told you guys about?
Lindros ends up mentioning four players he can’t compare to: first ballot Hall-of-Famer Brett Hull, first ballot Hall-of-Famer Wayne Gretzky, first ballot Hall-of-Famer Paul Coffey, and… Keith Acton. Huh. That’s the most out of place any pro athlete has ever been in a group of four since Mongo McMichael joined the Horsemen.
We transition into the story of Lindros’s first time on skates, and then into a vaguely weird discussion of him playing barefoot that ends with him saying “skin to win.” I’m so disappointed that he didn’t stick with that as his catchphrase. It sounds so much better than his eventual choice, “I want to strangle Bobby Clarke.”
We move on to topics like teeth and Philadelphia, and you can start to sense Arsenio desperately trying to pull an insightful answer out of this kid. He succeeds somewhat with a question about fighting. Then he mentions talking to Lindros’s dad before the show, which is clearly a lie because Lindros is still here and not holding out for a spot on Chevy Chase.
Lindros drops a mention of Chatham, Ontario, at which point half the audience cheers like they have any idea where that is. Apparently, they’re big on Ferguson Jenkins, Robertson Davies books, and Hawaiian pizza.
Hall starts wrapping things up, at which point Lindros finally says something interesting when he mentions falling down the stairs at school during an awkward growth spurt. Hey, that sounds like a story. We can build on this. Take us home, Eric!
“And uh, I don’t know what happened.”
Epilogue: All of the hockey fans on Hall’s staff were fired three seconds after this episode ended.
Have a question, suggestion, old YouTube clip, or anything else you’d like to see included in this column? Email Sean at [email protected] .
DGB Grab Bag: Jagr Draft Proposal, Doan Effect, and Lindros on Arsenio Hall syndicated from http://ift.tt/2ug2Ns6
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flauntpage · 7 years
Text
DGB Grab Bag: Jagr Draft Proposal, Doan Effect, and Lindros on Arsenio Hall
Three Stars of Comedy
The third star: The Vegas Golden Knights jersey numbers. First of all, they gave No. 97 to David Clarkson. Yes, Connor McDavid's number. To David Clarkson. Who is, I think it's fair to say, not all that Connor McDavid-ish.
So that was weird. But then they made up for it with some solid trolling:
This will get even funnier when Sidney Crosby scores 12 points in his first game in Las Vegas and Gronk-spikes the puck after every one.
The second star: This photo. Speaking of Rob Gronkowski, he is now best friends with Tuukka Rask, and this may be my new favorite sports photo of all time.
The first star: The Senators logo without eyebrows. Why yes, it's exactly what it sounds like. And no, you won't be able to un-see it.
(Original image created by Twitter's @Gerv_Rebrand, who should be in jail.)
Be It Resolved
It's September, and Jaromir Jagr still doesn't have a home for the 2017-18 season. This is unacceptable.
Yes, he's 45. Sure, he's lost more than a few steps, to the point where he'd have a hard time beating the Zamboni around the ice these days. And yes, last year's 46 points made for the least productive full season of his career. In a league that's all about speed and youth, plodding old guys aren't exactly in high demand.
Counterpoint: He's Jaromir Freaking Jagr. Let's get this done.
At this point, it seems possible that nobody will sign him, or that he may be reduced to signing a PTO (professional tryout) like some scrub. Hockey fans around the world are slowly coming to terms with the fact that there just aren't many good outcomes left for this story. Maybe Jagr gives up and retires, or he heads back to Europe. Maybe he sits around for half a season waiting for an injury. Or maybe he latches on somewhere as an unwanted fourth-liner, and the whole thing takes on a sad Jerry-Rice-as-a-Seahawk vibe.
There is a better way.
So be it resolved: The NHL must immediately institute the Jaromir Jagr Rule. If you're over 40 and you've won multiple scoring titles and you still want to compete and nobody's signing you, you get to play for everyone.
Yes, everyone. Here's how it works: We give Jagr two more weeks to sign a real NHL contract—no PTOs or two-way deals or any of that nonsense. Somebody commits to the guy, or else we take matters into our own hands.
[Spongebob Squarepants Meme Joke.] Photo by Robert Mayer-USA TODAY Sports
If Jaromir Jagr still doesn't have a deal by September 15, he plays for everyone. Every team in the league gets to use Jagr for one home game and one away game. That adds up to 62 games, which sounds about right for a 45-year-old who'll need some rest here and there.
But who gets him for which games? That's the fun part. Gather round your TV, kids, because Saturday, September 15, is the Jaromir Jagr draft. That's right—every team in the league, in reverse order of last year's standings, gets to pick the games it has Jagr in the lineup.
The Golden Knights probably use the first overall pick on their home opener. The Avs could, too—it's the next night, and it's not too far a flight. The better teams might want to save him for crucial games later in the season, especially against the elite teams. OK, let's face it, especially against the Penguins.
Be honest: If the NHL held that draft, you would watch that so hard your eyeballs would explode. And then imagine the season playing out. Jagr's one home game as a Penguin. His return to New York. The Capitals using him for the outdoor game so that he can also be the oldest guy on the alumni team. The home-and-home between the Bruins and the Habs where he plays for both teams. Best of all, the NHL website with a little "Where's Jagr?" graphic, in which he's wearing glasses and a red-and-white striped shirt.
Look, I may have thought about this too much, but don't act like you're not on board. Make this happen, NHL. Your millions of fans, and one very old man with a mullet, are demanding it.
Obscure Former Player of the Week
It's college free agent season, with players like Will Butcher sparking the annual debate over whether NCAA players should have different rights than their CHL counterparts. This has been a long-running issue for the NHL, dating back to the 1980s when bidding wars over players like Adam Oates led to the institution of the short-lived supplemental draft. While it only ran from 1986 to 1994, the supplemental draft did produce a handful of legitimate NHL stars, including John Cullen, Steve Rucchin, and NHLPA '93 legend Shawn Chambers. It also produced this week's obscure player: Dave Snuggerud.
Snuggerud was a hard-working winger who made his name at the University of Minnesota and spent time with the American national team in 1988. That stint included an appearance at the Winter Olympics, where he scored three goals for Team USA, as well as a rare international fight against Canada's Trent Yawney. The Sabres had taken him with the second pick in the 1987 supplemental draft, and he made the team out of training camp in 1989. He scored 14 goals and earned a handful of votes in both the Calder and Selke races his rookie season, which would end up being the best of his career.
While his production dipped after that, he remained an NHL regular for a few years; the Sabres traded him to the Sharks for Wayne Presley in 1992. He also had a quick run with the Flyers, but he was out of the NHL by 1993, and out of pro hockey altogether by 1995. All told, Snuggerud played 265 NHL games and scored 30 goals. His legacy includes some solid hockey hair and one of the most enjoyable names in recent league history.
After his playing days ended, Snuggerud went into teaching and coaching. His nephew Luc is currently a prospect in the Blackhawks' system.
New Entries for the Hockey Dictionary
The Doan Effect ( noun): The unwritten but nearly universal rule among hockey fans and media which holds that a player who spends all (or almost all) of his career with one franchise seems to get far more love than players with similar resumes who played for several teams.
This concept isn't new, but with Shane Doan retiring this week after a 21-season career with the Coyotes/Jets, it seems like a good time to give it a name. Doan was a perfectly fine player. He scored 400 goals, could be a physical force, and was a respected leader. He played in two All-Star games. He was good.
But if you didn't follow hockey and were just going by the reaction to his retirement this week, you might think you were witnessing the end of a legendary career. This is a guy who never finished in the top ten in voting for any major award, or in the top five for postseason All-Star winger honors. He didn't get a single Hart Trophy vote in his two-decade career.
Shane, your legacy will live on. Photo by Joe Camporeale-USA TODAY Sports
And yet, his retirement feels like a really big deal. That's the Doan Effect kicking in. Players who are closely identified with one team just seem to get a big boost to all their legacy sliders that players who bounce around the league don't. It helps explain why Adam Oates and Mark Recchi had to wait years to get into the Hall of Fame, while Mike Modano was a never-in-doubt sure thing. Jeremy Roenick (five teams), Pierre Turgeon (six), and Bernie Nichols (six) aren't getting in, but Daniel Alfredsson will. I don't think the Doan Effect is unique to the NHL—it seems to crop up in other sports—but its impact seems especially strong in hockey.
To be clear, I'm not sure that's a bad thing. From a fan's perspective, a player's legacy has to be more than the sum of his stats and award votes. There's something to be said for the connection that develops between a player and a fan base over a long career, and if that bleeds over into the wider perception of a career then that seems fair. It's a reasonable approach to take.
But it does need a name. And now it has one. Thanks, Shane.
Classic YouTube Clip Breakdown
The Philadelphia Flyers announced this week that they'll be retiring Eric Lindros's No. 88 this season, because I told them to. The news comes a year after Lindros finally got his call from the Hockey Hall of Fame.
Hall of Fame induction and number retirement are two of the highest honors any athlete can achieve, but they pale in comparison to the very top of the mountain: appearing on an early 90s episode of The Arsenio Hall Show. Luckily for Lindros, he did that, too.
youtube
It's sometime in the spring of 1993, and a teenaged Lindros has recently finished scoring 41 goals in 61 games as a rookie with the Flyers. He's also just been named one of People Magazine's most beautiful people. Life is good.
Now he's going to appear on The Arsenio Hall Show, which was pretty much the height of coolness back then. Seriously, forget the infamous Sports Illustrated cover a year later—getting a rookie on Arsenio was basically the NHL's marketing peak.
Arsenio introduces Lindros while making his name rhyme with "Vandross," and Eric heads out to say hello. Word is he'd planned to charge out wearing a tasseled denim vest, sprint through the crowd, and flip the couch, but somebody else got there first, so he went with the standard handshake.
We start off with a typical Arsenio question, in which he gets really serious while leaning forward and tenting his fingers. Arsenio Hall was more engaged and attentive on every throwaway question he ever asked a guest than I was exchanging my wedding vows. Dude was the best.
Hall mentions having several hockey fans on his staff, including cameraman John Gillis. According to his IMDB page, Gillis's other credits include Hollywood Squares, My Two Dads, and Solid Gold, just in case you were worried that there wasn't someone out there having a way cooler life than you.
Hall goes with a thought-provoking question about starting a roster from scratch and the nature of team-building, at which point Lindros responds, "I really don't know." I think I might have figured out why hockey players don't get invited on many talk shows, you guys.
I can't decide which I want to own more, Lindros's shirt or Arsenio's jacket. I think the answer is both, and that I want to wear them at the same time. I could pull that off, right?
"They say you have no weakness. What do you think your weakness is?" asks Hall. Lindros ponders the questions, gets a few words into his answer, then falls over injured and goes on the LTIR for three months.
Actually, Lindros lists a few players who he can't yet measure up to, including a mention of "Wayne Gretzky, who took the Kings all the way" as the crowd cheers. Wait. Do… do Americans think the Kings won the Stanley Cup in 1993? Did you get an alternate version of the series where they cut off the feed right before McSorley's stick measurement? How many of Canada's other dozen Stanley Cups since 1993 have they not told you guys about?
Lindros ends up mentioning four players he can't compare to: first ballot Hall-of-Famer Brett Hull, first ballot Hall-of-Famer Wayne Gretzky, first ballot Hall-of-Famer Paul Coffey, and… Keith Acton. Huh. That's the most out of place any pro athlete has ever been in a group of four since Mongo McMichael joined the Horsemen.
We transition into the story of Lindros's first time on skates, and then into a vaguely weird discussion of him playing barefoot that ends with him saying "skin to win." I'm so disappointed that he didn't stick with that as his catchphrase. It sounds so much better than his eventual choice, "I want to strangle Bobby Clarke."
We move on to topics like teeth and Philadelphia, and you can start to sense Arsenio desperately trying to pull an insightful answer out of this kid. He succeeds somewhat with a question about fighting. Then he mentions talking to Lindros's dad before the show, which is clearly a lie because Lindros is still here and not holding out for a spot on Chevy Chase.
Lindros drops a mention of Chatham, Ontario, at which point half the audience cheers like they have any idea where that is. Apparently, they're big on Ferguson Jenkins, Robertson Davies books, and Hawaiian pizza.
Hall starts wrapping things up, at which point Lindros finally says something interesting when he mentions falling down the stairs at school during an awkward growth spurt. Hey, that sounds like a story. We can build on this. Take us home, Eric!
"And uh, I don't know what happened."
Epilogue: All of the hockey fans on Hall's staff were fired three seconds after this episode ended.
Have a question, suggestion, old YouTube clip, or anything else you'd like to see included in this column? Email Sean at [email protected] .
DGB Grab Bag: Jagr Draft Proposal, Doan Effect, and Lindros on Arsenio Hall published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv
0 notes
John
Autumn of 2013, I saw you for the first time at school. Didn’t know who you were, I just knew we always made eye contact from across the cafeteria. We had the same civics and careers block, but you had careers when  had civics, and vice versa. Sometimes, when I was waiting for first period to start, I’d sit outside of my classroom and see you walking into yours. We always made eye contact then, too, and I remember thinking you were really cute. you dressed well and you were clean kempt. Nothing happened yet.
Winter of 2013/14. I posted my number on twitter in the early evening because I was bored. Later that night, I got a prank call. Someone kept calling, screaming “SWAAAAAG” and then hanging up (real mature). I texted the number to find out who it was, but the only response I got back was, “SWAAAG.” The next morning I got a couple of my older friends to spam the number so I could find out who it was. It was you. I didn’t really know who you were that well, so I asked my best friend at the time and she told me all about you. What school you went to the year before, who you hung out with, and how you hit her up sometimes. I didn’t think much of it and went on with my life. Later on in the winter, I was on my way to Montreal and posted a snapchat story of me in my 1/4 zip blue PINK sweater. The zipper was undone, so you could see some cleavage. This was the first time you ever really made a pass at me. You made a comment about my boobs we talked for a bit, and that was that.
Spring of 2014, we got to talking a bit more. One night, while I was out babysitting waiting for the parents to get home, I got bored. I went into the washroom and sent my first booty pic ever on snapchat. I sent a bunch until I heard the parents come in, quickly got dressed and the dad drove me home. After sending messages and risky pictures to each other for a couple of weeks, my birthday was coming up. I had a dinner with a bunch of my girl friends, and my best friend slept over that night. I remember you telling me you were doing shrooms. As the night went on, my best friend got really drunk and started throwing up and passing out. I didn’t really know what to do, I was super innocent at the time, so I asked you for help. You told me what to do and assured me everything would be OK. It was. I had never made out with anyone before, and being 16, I decided it was time. A week later, I was sitting in my backyard with my friend, my parents out at a party, wen you asked me if I wanted to chill. I hesitantly said yes, as I was scared of what was to come. We decided to meet behind Hopedale, a 32 minute walk from my house at the time. My friend sat on the baseball diamond benches while I trekked over to the park to meet up with you. We talked for 15 minutes before we got to making out. Eventually, you asked me if I’d give you head. I said I would. You took 2 of my firsts from me so quickly, but I was fine with it. I was starting to really like you. After that, we hooked up like there was no tomorrow. Before class behind the bleachers, during class at your house, we had a lot of fun. But I started to learn something about you. You weren’t a relationship person. I just decided I would have to come to terms with that, as I was extremely self-conscious and naive.
Summer of 2014, my best friend and I went to SOM where we saw kids that I would call my friends now, but at the time I was very shy and kind of an outcast. My friend, however, was friends with them so we stuck with em’. Later on in the day, Faisal and Sam R., two people I hardly knew came up to me and asked, “did you suck John’s dick?” I felt all sorts of emotions. I was confused and embarrassed and didn’t know what to say, so my friend stuck up for me and played it off like it was no big deal. I saw you later that night, pupils wide and dark and sweating up a storm. I small talked with you Drew and Olivia for a while, before I left. You and I never really talked much after we started hooking up. A week later, I was sitting in the staff room at Winners when I got a text from you making me promise not to tell anyone else we hooked up. Funny thing is, I didn’t have any friends to tell in the first place.
Later that summer, I walked to your house because you had it to yourself for the day. We put on some netflix and started doing what we did best. I had never been fully naked in front of anybody before, but you stripped me down and made me feel so sexy. We made out for a bit, and you begged to fuck me. I said no, and you hesitantly accepted my answer. You asked if we could at least 69, and I eventually agreed to this compromise. The feeling was nice, I must admit you did a good job. I left your house with wobbly knees, which made it nearly impossible to walk home. We hooked up every now and again during summer, but nothing to crazy happened.
Autumn of 2014 came, and I met my current best friend Margot. We knew each other for a week, but it felt like I had known her my whole life. She Tod em she wanted to throw a halloween party when October came, and I insisted she put you on the guest list. September rolled by, and eventually came thanksgiving 20114, the day I lost my virginity. Natalie and I had a shift together at Winners until 7:30, so I missed out on dinner at my aunts house. Since nobody was home to pick me up from work Nat dropped me off and I went downstairs to watch TV. Then, I hit you up. I had been thinking about having sex for a while, and decided it was the perfect time to lose the big V card. Your sister dropped you off as soon as you were done dinner. I knew it wouldn’t be long until my family was home, so I took you on a walk to Glen Allen park, were I spent most of my childhood. It was there, on the park bench, that I whispered in your ear to fuck me, and told you it was my first time. We finished up pretty quick and then went our separate ways. From that day until February of 2015, we wouldn’t speak. Let me reiterate: you wouldn’t speak to me. In a sense, I was lucky. If it weren’t for that happening, I wouldn’t have started my relationship with my first love, who coincidentally I talked to for the first time the day after we fucked. Still, when you showed up to Margot’s party, I was hurt. You hardly even looked my way, and as revenge I had every person on the guest list at that party sign my hard hat except for you. I kept the hat for memories.
Winter of 2015 Sloane had her birthday party. You know, the one where Faisal clocked you in the head? although you took my virginity and then didn’t talk to me for 5 months, I was still worried about you and came over to check up on you. I  was told to go away by one of the moms chaperoning the event. Later that month you would pick me up in your cousins truck and drive us down to the lake for what I call our worst hook up of all time. You tasted like poppers,  burped in my mouth, and let me take care of you with no reciprocation and then drove me back home. The Abbey vs TAB hockey game happened not long after, and this is the first place I heard about you and Jenna. Now, I know I couldn’t be mad at you because you and I were never exclusive, but it still hurt a lot. I kept denying and denying and denying it. You and I kept fucking around, and the more we did the more I caught feels. I visited Chloe in auto all the time just so I could chill with you. Then, one day, you messaged me asking if Margot (my best friend) would be down to hook up. You were such a bad person, John. I don’t know why I wasted so much time around you. Nevertheless, I ignored your shitty personality and continued to fuck you, throughout spring and summer.
Then came Autumn of 2015. The last time we ever laid hands on each other. I picked you up across from Josh’s house (god forbid anyone knows we hook up, even after all of this time) and we went to Blakelock’s back parking lot. I dropped you off at home, and the next day Margot told me how Josh was telling her a random girl picked you up from his house the previous night even though you were supposed to be exclusive with a girl named Jenna. This made my heart sink into my chest. I forgot about it, and just swore I would never touch you again. But then, a week later, Rachel told me about you and Jenna. And then Natalie. And I was heart broken. This whole time you were exclusive with somebody else and I had no idea. I confronted you about it and you denied it, so there was nothing left for me to do but cut you off completely. It was so hard, after spending so much time and putting in so much energy into this thing that we had. I finally realized over the 2 years we knew each other, I meant jack shit to you. Even so, I found myself defending you to people who would talk shit.
Winter of 2015/16, New years to be exact. I’m sat at Andrews, watching everybody around me hooking up so I drunkenly shoot you a message. You say you cant hang out for another hour, but it was already 3 am and I was due home. The next day, we talked a little about the night before. You told me you would do anything to see me again, and I told you I needed a stable exclusive relationship in my life because I was tired of the random hook ups. You said you couldn’t da me, but you would stay loyal to me. I refused to believe you, and after that we just stopped talking. Sometimes there was a “hey how are ya”, but nothing serious. A couple months later, Lexi tells me all about how you and Jenna were at a party together on New Years literally swallowing each other in the bathroom. I lost my shit. I told Adrian all about your weird sex things and how you had a thing for eating ass. It got around and eventually I felt so guilty about it, that I blocked you on every social media platform. Out of sight, out of mind.
Spring 2016. Jenna comes to TAB. You guys are officially over (or so she told me), and we compare stories. You, of course, had feelings for her much more than you did for me. I got over it. All of it. How you were an asshole. How you were in love with another girl despite me giving you LITERALLY my all. I’m over it. And although this went on for 3 years of my life, I will still forever be thankful for you, John. You were a milestone in my life, and you can never take the way I felt about you away from me.
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flauntpage · 7 years
Text
DGB Grab Bag: Jagr Draft Proposal, Doan Effect, and Lindros on Arsenio Hall
Three Stars of Comedy
The third star: The Vegas Golden Knights jersey numbers. First of all, they gave No. 97 to David Clarkson. Yes, Connor McDavid's number. To David Clarkson. Who is, I think it's fair to say, not all that Connor McDavid-ish.
So that was weird. But then they made up for it with some solid trolling:
This will get even funnier when Sidney Crosby scores 12 points in his first game in Las Vegas and Gronk-spikes the puck after every one.
The second star: This photo. Speaking of Rob Gronkowski, he is now best friends with Tuukka Rask, and this may be my new favorite sports photo of all time.
The first star: The Senators logo without eyebrows. Why yes, it's exactly what it sounds like. And no, you won't be able to un-see it.
(Original image created by Twitter's @Gerv_Rebrand, who should be in jail.)
Be It Resolved
It's September, and Jaromir Jagr still doesn't have a home for the 2017-18 season. This is unacceptable.
Yes, he's 45. Sure, he's lost more than a few steps, to the point where he'd have a hard time beating the Zamboni around the ice these days. And yes, last year's 46 points made for the least productive full season of his career. In a league that's all about speed and youth, plodding old guys aren't exactly in high demand.
Counterpoint: He's Jaromir Freaking Jagr. Let's get this done.
At this point, it seems possible that nobody will sign him, or that he may be reduced to signing a PTO (professional tryout) like some scrub. Hockey fans around the world are slowly coming to terms with the fact that there just aren't many good outcomes left for this story. Maybe Jagr gives up and retires, or he heads back to Europe. Maybe he sits around for half a season waiting for an injury. Or maybe he latches on somewhere as an unwanted fourth-liner, and the whole thing takes on a sad Jerry-Rice-as-a-Seahawk vibe.
There is a better way.
So be it resolved: The NHL must immediately institute the Jaromir Jagr Rule. If you're over 40 and you've won multiple scoring titles and you still want to compete and nobody's signing you, you get to play for everyone.
Yes, everyone. Here's how it works: We give Jagr two more weeks to sign a real NHL contract—no PTOs or two-way deals or any of that nonsense. Somebody commits to the guy, or else we take matters into our own hands.
[Spongebob Squarepants Meme Joke.] Photo by Robert Mayer-USA TODAY Sports
If Jaromir Jagr still doesn't have a deal by September 15, he plays for everyone. Every team in the league gets to use Jagr for one home game and one away game. That adds up to 62 games, which sounds about right for a 45-year-old who'll need some rest here and there.
But who gets him for which games? That's the fun part. Gather round your TV, kids, because Saturday, September 15, is the Jaromir Jagr draft. That's right—every team in the league, in reverse order of last year's standings, gets to pick the games it has Jagr in the lineup.
The Golden Knights probably use the first overall pick on their home opener. The Avs could, too—it's the next night, and it's not too far a flight. The better teams might want to save him for crucial games later in the season, especially against the elite teams. OK, let's face it, especially against the Penguins.
Be honest: If the NHL held that draft, you would watch that so hard your eyeballs would explode. And then imagine the season playing out. Jagr's one home game as a Penguin. His return to New York. The Capitals using him for the outdoor game so that he can also be the oldest guy on the alumni team. The home-and-home between the Bruins and the Habs where he plays for both teams. Best of all, the NHL website with a little "Where's Jagr?" graphic, in which he's wearing glasses and a red-and-white striped shirt.
Look, I may have thought about this too much, but don't act like you're not on board. Make this happen, NHL. Your millions of fans, and one very old man with a mullet, are demanding it.
Obscure Former Player of the Week
It's college free agent season, with players like Will Butcher sparking the annual debate over whether NCAA players should have different rights than their CHL counterparts. This has been a long-running issue for the NHL, dating back to the 1980s when bidding wars over players like Adam Oates led to the institution of the short-lived supplemental draft. While it only ran from 1986 to 1994, the supplemental draft did produce a handful of legitimate NHL stars, including John Cullen, Steve Rucchin, and NHLPA '93 legend Shawn Chambers. It also produced this week's obscure player: Dave Snuggerud.
Snuggerud was a hard-working winger who made his name at the University of Minnesota and spent time with the American national team in 1988. That stint included an appearance at the Winter Olympics, where he scored three goals for Team USA, as well as a rare international fight against Canada's Trent Yawney. The Sabres had taken him with the second pick in the 1987 supplemental draft, and he made the team out of training camp in 1989. He scored 14 goals and earned a handful of votes in both the Calder and Selke races his rookie season, which would end up being the best of his career.
While his production dipped after that, he remained an NHL regular for a few years; the Sabres traded him to the Sharks for Wayne Presley in 1992. He also had a quick run with the Flyers, but he was out of the NHL by 1993, and out of pro hockey altogether by 1995. All told, Snuggerud played 265 NHL games and scored 30 goals. His legacy includes some solid hockey hair and one of the most enjoyable names in recent league history.
After his playing days ended, Snuggerud went into teaching and coaching. His nephew Luc is currently a prospect in the Blackhawks' system.
New Entries for the Hockey Dictionary
The Doan Effect ( noun): The unwritten but nearly universal rule among hockey fans and media which holds that a player who spends all (or almost all) of his career with one franchise seems to get far more love than players with similar resumes who played for several teams.
This concept isn't new, but with Shane Doan retiring this week after a 21-season career with the Coyotes/Jets, it seems like a good time to give it a name. Doan was a perfectly fine player. He scored 400 goals, could be a physical force, and was a respected leader. He played in two All-Star games. He was good.
But if you didn't follow hockey and were just going by the reaction to his retirement this week, you might think you were witnessing the end of a legendary career. This is a guy who never finished in the top ten in voting for any major award, or in the top five for postseason All-Star winger honors. He didn't get a single Hart Trophy vote in his two-decade career.
Shane, your legacy will live on. Photo by Joe Camporeale-USA TODAY Sports
And yet, his retirement feels like a really big deal. That's the Doan Effect kicking in. Players who are closely identified with one team just seem to get a big boost to all their legacy sliders that players who bounce around the league don't. It helps explain why Adam Oates and Mark Recchi had to wait years to get into the Hall of Fame, while Mike Modano was a never-in-doubt sure thing. Jeremy Roenick (five teams), Pierre Turgeon (six), and Bernie Nichols (six) aren't getting in, but Daniel Alfredsson will. I don't think the Doan Effect is unique to the NHL—it seems to crop up in other sports—but its impact seems especially strong in hockey.
To be clear, I'm not sure that's a bad thing. From a fan's perspective, a player's legacy has to be more than the sum of his stats and award votes. There's something to be said for the connection that develops between a player and a fan base over a long career, and if that bleeds over into the wider perception of a career then that seems fair. It's a reasonable approach to take.
But it does need a name. And now it has one. Thanks, Shane.
Classic YouTube Clip Breakdown
The Philadelphia Flyers announced this week that they'll be retiring Eric Lindros's No. 88 this season, because I told them to. The news comes a year after Lindros finally got his call from the Hockey Hall of Fame.
Hall of Fame induction and number retirement are two of the highest honors any athlete can achieve, but they pale in comparison to the very top of the mountain: appearing on an early 90s episode of The Arsenio Hall Show. Luckily for Lindros, he did that, too.
youtube
It's sometime in the spring of 1993, and a teenaged Lindros has recently finished scoring 41 goals in 61 games as a rookie with the Flyers. He's also just been named one of People Magazine's most beautiful people. Life is good.
Now he's going to appear on The Arsenio Hall Show, which was pretty much the height of coolness back then. Seriously, forget the infamous Sports Illustrated cover a year later—getting a rookie on Arsenio was basically the NHL's marketing peak.
Arsenio introduces Lindros while making his name rhyme with "Vandross," and Eric heads out to say hello. Word is he'd planned to charge out wearing a tasseled denim vest, sprint through the crowd, and flip the couch, but somebody else got there first, so he went with the standard handshake.
We start off with a typical Arsenio question, in which he gets really serious while leaning forward and tenting his fingers. Arsenio Hall was more engaged and attentive on every throwaway question he ever asked a guest than I was exchanging my wedding vows. Dude was the best.
Hall mentions having several hockey fans on his staff, including cameraman John Gillis. According to his IMDB page, Gillis's other credits include Hollywood Squares, My Two Dads, and Solid Gold, just in case you were worried that there wasn't someone out there having a way cooler life than you.
Hall goes with a thought-provoking question about starting a roster from scratch and the nature of team-building, at which point Lindros responds, "I really don't know." I think I might have figured out why hockey players don't get invited on many talk shows, you guys.
I can't decide which I want to own more, Lindros's shirt or Arsenio's jacket. I think the answer is both, and that I want to wear them at the same time. I could pull that off, right?
"They say you have no weakness. What do you think your weakness is?" asks Hall. Lindros ponders the questions, gets a few words into his answer, then falls over injured and goes on the LTIR for three months.
Actually, Lindros lists a few players who he can't yet measure up to, including a mention of "Wayne Gretzky, who took the Kings all the way" as the crowd cheers. Wait. Do… do Americans think the Kings won the Stanley Cup in 1993? Did you get an alternate version of the series where they cut off the feed right before McSorley's stick measurement? How many of Canada's other dozen Stanley Cups since 1993 have they not told you guys about?
Lindros ends up mentioning four players he can't compare to: first ballot Hall-of-Famer Brett Hull, first ballot Hall-of-Famer Wayne Gretzky, first ballot Hall-of-Famer Paul Coffey, and… Keith Acton. Huh. That's the most out of place any pro athlete has ever been in a group of four since Mongo McMichael joined the Horsemen.
We transition into the story of Lindros's first time on skates, and then into a vaguely weird discussion of him playing barefoot that ends with him saying "skin to win." I'm so disappointed that he didn't stick with that as his catchphrase. It sounds so much better than his eventual choice, "I want to strangle Bobby Clarke."
We move on to topics like teeth and Philadelphia, and you can start to sense Arsenio desperately trying to pull an insightful answer out of this kid. He succeeds somewhat with a question about fighting. Then he mentions talking to Lindros's dad before the show, which is clearly a lie because Lindros is still here and not holding out for a spot on Chevy Chase.
Lindros drops a mention of Chatham, Ontario, at which point half the audience cheers like they have any idea where that is. Apparently, they're big on Ferguson Jenkins, Robertson Davies books, and Hawaiian pizza.
Hall starts wrapping things up, at which point Lindros finally says something interesting when he mentions falling down the stairs at school during an awkward growth spurt. Hey, that sounds like a story. We can build on this. Take us home, Eric!
"And uh, I don't know what happened."
Epilogue: All of the hockey fans on Hall's staff were fired three seconds after this episode ended.
Have a question, suggestion, old YouTube clip, or anything else you'd like to see included in this column? Email Sean at [email protected] .
DGB Grab Bag: Jagr Draft Proposal, Doan Effect, and Lindros on Arsenio Hall published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv
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flauntpage · 7 years
Text
DGB Grab Bag: Jagr Draft Proposal, Doan Effect, and Lindros on Arsenio Hall
Three Stars of Comedy
The third star: The Vegas Golden Knights jersey numbers. First of all, they gave No. 97 to David Clarkson. Yes, Connor McDavid's number. To David Clarkson. Who is, I think it's fair to say, not all that Connor McDavid-ish.
So that was weird. But then they made up for it with some solid trolling:
This will get even funnier when Sidney Crosby scores 12 points in his first game in Las Vegas and Gronk-spikes the puck after every one.
The second star: This photo. Speaking of Rob Gronkowski, he is now best friends with Tuukka Rask, and this may be my new favorite sports photo of all time.
The first star: The Senators logo without eyebrows. Why yes, it's exactly what it sounds like. And no, you won't be able to un-see it.
(Original image created by Twitter's @Gerv_Rebrand, who should be in jail.)
Be It Resolved
It's September, and Jaromir Jagr still doesn't have a home for the 2017-18 season. This is unacceptable.
Yes, he's 45. Sure, he's lost more than a few steps, to the point where he'd have a hard time beating the Zamboni around the ice these days. And yes, last year's 46 points made for the least productive full season of his career. In a league that's all about speed and youth, plodding old guys aren't exactly in high demand.
Counterpoint: He's Jaromir Freaking Jagr. Let's get this done.
At this point, it seems possible that nobody will sign him, or that he may be reduced to signing a PTO (professional tryout) like some scrub. Hockey fans around the world are slowly coming to terms with the fact that there just aren't many good outcomes left for this story. Maybe Jagr gives up and retires, or he heads back to Europe. Maybe he sits around for half a season waiting for an injury. Or maybe he latches on somewhere as an unwanted fourth-liner, and the whole thing takes on a sad Jerry-Rice-as-a-Seahawk vibe.
There is a better way.
So be it resolved: The NHL must immediately institute the Jaromir Jagr Rule. If you're over 40 and you've won multiple scoring titles and you still want to compete and nobody's signing you, you get to play for everyone.
Yes, everyone. Here's how it works: We give Jagr two more weeks to sign a real NHL contract—no PTOs or two-way deals or any of that nonsense. Somebody commits to the guy, or else we take matters into our own hands.
[Spongebob Squarepants Meme Joke.] Photo by Robert Mayer-USA TODAY Sports
If Jaromir Jagr still doesn't have a deal by September 15, he plays for everyone. Every team in the league gets to use Jagr for one home game and one away game. That adds up to 62 games, which sounds about right for a 45-year-old who'll need some rest here and there.
But who gets him for which games? That's the fun part. Gather round your TV, kids, because Saturday, September 15, is the Jaromir Jagr draft. That's right—every team in the league, in reverse order of last year's standings, gets to pick the games it has Jagr in the lineup.
The Golden Knights probably use the first overall pick on their home opener. The Avs could, too—it's the next night, and it's not too far a flight. The better teams might want to save him for crucial games later in the season, especially against the elite teams. OK, let's face it, especially against the Penguins.
Be honest: If the NHL held that draft, you would watch that so hard your eyeballs would explode. And then imagine the season playing out. Jagr's one home game as a Penguin. His return to New York. The Capitals using him for the outdoor game so that he can also be the oldest guy on the alumni team. The home-and-home between the Bruins and the Habs where he plays for both teams. Best of all, the NHL website with a little "Where's Jagr?" graphic, in which he's wearing glasses and a red-and-white striped shirt.
Look, I may have thought about this too much, but don't act like you're not on board. Make this happen, NHL. Your millions of fans, and one very old man with a mullet, are demanding it.
Obscure Former Player of the Week
It's college free agent season, with players like Will Butcher sparking the annual debate over whether NCAA players should have different rights than their CHL counterparts. This has been a long-running issue for the NHL, dating back to the 1980s when bidding wars over players like Adam Oates led to the institution of the short-lived supplemental draft. While it only ran from 1986 to 1994, the supplemental draft did produce a handful of legitimate NHL stars, including John Cullen, Steve Rucchin, and NHLPA '93 legend Shawn Chambers. It also produced this week's obscure player: Dave Snuggerud.
Snuggerud was a hard-working winger who made his name at the University of Minnesota and spent time with the American national team in 1988. That stint included an appearance at the Winter Olympics, where he scored three goals for Team USA, as well as a rare international fight against Canada's Trent Yawney. The Sabres had taken him with the second pick in the 1987 supplemental draft, and he made the team out of training camp in 1989. He scored 14 goals and earned a handful of votes in both the Calder and Selke races his rookie season, which would end up being the best of his career.
While his production dipped after that, he remained an NHL regular for a few years; the Sabres traded him to the Sharks for Wayne Presley in 1992. He also had a quick run with the Flyers, but he was out of the NHL by 1993, and out of pro hockey altogether by 1995. All told, Snuggerud played 265 NHL games and scored 30 goals. His legacy includes some solid hockey hair and one of the most enjoyable names in recent league history.
After his playing days ended, Snuggerud went into teaching and coaching. His nephew Luc is currently a prospect in the Blackhawks' system.
New Entries for the Hockey Dictionary
The Doan Effect ( noun): The unwritten but nearly universal rule among hockey fans and media which holds that a player who spends all (or almost all) of his career with one franchise seems to get far more love than players with similar resumes who played for several teams.
This concept isn't new, but with Shane Doan retiring this week after a 21-season career with the Coyotes/Jets, it seems like a good time to give it a name. Doan was a perfectly fine player. He scored 400 goals, could be a physical force, and was a respected leader. He played in two All-Star games. He was good.
But if you didn't follow hockey and were just going by the reaction to his retirement this week, you might think you were witnessing the end of a legendary career. This is a guy who never finished in the top ten in voting for any major award, or in the top five for postseason All-Star winger honors. He didn't get a single Hart Trophy vote in his two-decade career.
Shane, your legacy will live on. Photo by Joe Camporeale-USA TODAY Sports
And yet, his retirement feels like a really big deal. That's the Doan Effect kicking in. Players who are closely identified with one team just seem to get a big boost to all their legacy sliders that players who bounce around the league don't. It helps explain why Adam Oates and Mark Recchi had to wait years to get into the Hall of Fame, while Mike Modano was a never-in-doubt sure thing. Jeremy Roenick (five teams), Pierre Turgeon (six), and Bernie Nichols (six) aren't getting in, but Daniel Alfredsson will. I don't think the Doan Effect is unique to the NHL—it seems to crop up in other sports—but its impact seems especially strong in hockey.
To be clear, I'm not sure that's a bad thing. From a fan's perspective, a player's legacy has to be more than the sum of his stats and award votes. There's something to be said for the connection that develops between a player and a fan base over a long career, and if that bleeds over into the wider perception of a career then that seems fair. It's a reasonable approach to take.
But it does need a name. And now it has one. Thanks, Shane.
Classic YouTube Clip Breakdown
The Philadelphia Flyers announced this week that they'll be retiring Eric Lindros's No. 88 this season, because I told them to. The news comes a year after Lindros finally got his call from the Hockey Hall of Fame.
Hall of Fame induction and number retirement are two of the highest honors any athlete can achieve, but they pale in comparison to the very top of the mountain: appearing on an early 90s episode of The Arsenio Hall Show. Luckily for Lindros, he did that, too.
youtube
It's sometime in the spring of 1993, and a teenaged Lindros has recently finished scoring 41 goals in 61 games as a rookie with the Flyers. He's also just been named one of People Magazine's most beautiful people. Life is good.
Now he's going to appear on The Arsenio Hall Show, which was pretty much the height of coolness back then. Seriously, forget the infamous Sports Illustrated cover a year later—getting a rookie on Arsenio was basically the NHL's marketing peak.
Arsenio introduces Lindros while making his name rhyme with "Vandross," and Eric heads out to say hello. Word is he'd planned to charge out wearing a tasseled denim vest, sprint through the crowd, and flip the couch, but somebody else got there first, so he went with the standard handshake.
We start off with a typical Arsenio question, in which he gets really serious while leaning forward and tenting his fingers. Arsenio Hall was more engaged and attentive on every throwaway question he ever asked a guest than I was exchanging my wedding vows. Dude was the best.
Hall mentions having several hockey fans on his staff, including cameraman John Gillis. According to his IMDB page, Gillis's other credits include Hollywood Squares, My Two Dads, and Solid Gold, just in case you were worried that there wasn't someone out there having a way cooler life than you.
Hall goes with a thought-provoking question about starting a roster from scratch and the nature of team-building, at which point Lindros responds, "I really don't know." I think I might have figured out why hockey players don't get invited on many talk shows, you guys.
I can't decide which I want to own more, Lindros's shirt or Arsenio's jacket. I think the answer is both, and that I want to wear them at the same time. I could pull that off, right?
"They say you have no weakness. What do you think your weakness is?" asks Hall. Lindros ponders the questions, gets a few words into his answer, then falls over injured and goes on the LTIR for three months.
Actually, Lindros lists a few players who he can't yet measure up to, including a mention of "Wayne Gretzky, who took the Kings all the way" as the crowd cheers. Wait. Do… do Americans think the Kings won the Stanley Cup in 1993? Did you get an alternate version of the series where they cut off the feed right before McSorley's stick measurement? How many of Canada's other dozen Stanley Cups since 1993 have they not told you guys about?
Lindros ends up mentioning four players he can't compare to: first ballot Hall-of-Famer Brett Hull, first ballot Hall-of-Famer Wayne Gretzky, first ballot Hall-of-Famer Paul Coffey, and… Keith Acton. Huh. That's the most out of place any pro athlete has ever been in a group of four since Mongo McMichael joined the Horsemen.
We transition into the story of Lindros's first time on skates, and then into a vaguely weird discussion of him playing barefoot that ends with him saying "skin to win." I'm so disappointed that he didn't stick with that as his catchphrase. It sounds so much better than his eventual choice, "I want to strangle Bobby Clarke."
We move on to topics like teeth and Philadelphia, and you can start to sense Arsenio desperately trying to pull an insightful answer out of this kid. He succeeds somewhat with a question about fighting. Then he mentions talking to Lindros's dad before the show, which is clearly a lie because Lindros is still here and not holding out for a spot on Chevy Chase.
Lindros drops a mention of Chatham, Ontario, at which point half the audience cheers like they have any idea where that is. Apparently, they're big on Ferguson Jenkins, Robertson Davies books, and Hawaiian pizza.
Hall starts wrapping things up, at which point Lindros finally says something interesting when he mentions falling down the stairs at school during an awkward growth spurt. Hey, that sounds like a story. We can build on this. Take us home, Eric!
"And uh, I don't know what happened."
Epilogue: All of the hockey fans on Hall's staff were fired three seconds after this episode ended.
Have a question, suggestion, old YouTube clip, or anything else you'd like to see included in this column? Email Sean at [email protected] .
DGB Grab Bag: Jagr Draft Proposal, Doan Effect, and Lindros on Arsenio Hall published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv
0 notes