#max actually more goes after fish when i have them then plants even | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

rfadaydreaming · 3 years

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the rfa playing minecraft

oh the chaos a mysme minecraft server would bring ♡

jumin

• does not know how to move in any direction except straight

• keeps falling into caves because he just… walks

• stands there in the dark for a few seconds to process what happened

• “the game broke, i cannot see”

• yoosung is like wtf how is it broken

• cave noises start to happen

• “h elp”

• seven has to track him down and it takes absolutely forever just because jumin does not know where he is… not even a hint... he was just walking around

• finally seven finds him and brings him up with a fishing pole, but when he finally gets him up, they both get blown up by a creeper

• “i don’t like this game very much.”

• has a house with v because there’s no way in hell he’s about to share a home with zen

• their house is actually so cute, modern on the outside but super cozy and cute on the inside

• here’s some reference pictures of what i think their house would look like !! starter home / end game home

• his room is so naked omg v comes in and adds a desk, some pictures, plants, just to make it more homey

• has so many cats to the point where it lags HEAVILY when you enter his room, it’s just a giant barrage of meows

• his playstyle is fishing, taming cats, naming cats, fishing again

• he gets lost in the boats so much though, you have to come save him because he’s stranded in the middle of the ocean

• you show up and there’s a cow stuck in the back of his boat, he’s starving to death, the phantom is killing him

• but the nice part about fishing all the time is he gets really good loot and enchantments so he’ll give them to whoever wants them since… well he doesn’t really need them

• except zen omg he gives him like. chain link boots, seaweed, paper

• zen breaks into his room and takes whatever he wants though because jumin doesn't know how to make a locked chest

• he’s honestly just here for the vibes, he’ll lay on his bed even when no one else is sleeping and listen to what everyone’s talking about in the voice chat

• you cannot even see him on his bed because it’s just a sea of cats + a drop in frame rate the second you open up his door

zen

• he’s so bad with technology so he has to read the tutorial like three times before he plays

• takes awhile to get used to the controls so he’ll stop walking, jump over a block, pause, keep on walking

• it’s cute to watch actually

• he follows everyone else around and likes to pretend he knows what he’s doing? but really doesn’t

• beats the shit out of jumin for just existing

• gets stuck in a village well and silently flips out because he’s too embarrassed to ask for help

• jumin finds him and they just stare at each other in silence… jumin figures out how to hit him one singular time before running away

• he lives in a dirt home with the green top for so long it’s actually embarrassing

• inside is just a torch, furnace, crafting table, basic bed and chest literally just a straight mans home

• it’s so ugly

• v tries to spruce it up a little because he just does not like to look at it… every time he walks by he gets the ick

• jaehee eventually adopts him out of pity and they live together, but she has to do all the hard work

• their house looks like this

• he mooches so hard oh my god she’ll spend an entire day cycle mining only for him to take all the iron and make himself a silly little outfit

• she never complains though because he’s really appreciative about it

• will give her little flowers in exchange for outfit materials

• and of course gives you flowers just because you’re you

• leaves them in a pot in your room with a sign that has a little winky face

• is always changing his clothes, every time he wakes up he changes into something different

• jaehee works so hard to find diamonds for him so he can be the first to have some diamond armor

• seven kills him the second he steps out of his house and snatches it from his dead corpse

• zen’s playstyle is just following everyone else around and pretending to help but he doesn’t do much, being sweet to jaehee and you, annoying jumin

• he gets bored easily so he doesn’t play for very long :( also gets mad at jumin and rage quits omg

yoosung

• absolutely loves minecraft and he’s been playing for years, he’s really good at it!!

• so sweet and fun to play with hehe he’s like the cheery little team leader

• helps everyone get settled and works hard to make sure the newbies have a nice amount of starter materials

• even if they die and lose them all he’s like “oh that’s okay don’t sweat it you guys!!” and runs to get them new stuff

• hums to the music while he’s playing, always updates people on what he’s doing and asks if anyone needs anything

• a man on a mission, gets to work on gathering materials with jaehee the second the game loads in, knows exactly what he’s doing

• he’ll move fast to make a quick little community house for everyone to sleep in for the night

• doesn’t like the day one dirt homes it gives him anxiety

• it’s a little small but cozy!! makes everyone a chest and puts a sign above it with their name on it

• adds a “:D” at the end of everyone’s names on the signs, but a “♡” to your name only!!

• zen goes off and makes his gross little dirt house because he doesn’t wanna sleep next to jumin

• he ends up just expanding off the community house once everyone leaves and lives solo with his little parrots

• unless you want to join him!! go ahead he’d love the company

• so nervous in caves and will only go into the shallow parts where the sun still hits, a very silent miner because he’s concentrating

• he’ll go deeper into mines when seven and saeran are with him but he almost pees his pants when the cave noises start to play

• gets startled so easily and screams whenever something happens, it's so loud that the mic automatically cuts it off– so you hear 0.2 seconds of a scream, dead silence, then suddenly “yoosung fell from a high place” it’s so funny

• 9 times out of 10 seven pushed him off too

• takes it seriously, wants to play until the end of the game but everyone else is busy running around with gremlin energy

• his playstyle is a little bit of everything, he’s not a bad builder but he doesn’t spend too much time on it. goal for him is survival and exploration

• if anyone needs anything he’ll run to get it without a second thought doesn’t get the appreciation he deserves >:(

• seven picks on him so much oh my god, once he asked him to come help mine diamonds but actually pushed him into lava and yoosung started to cry

• everyone made seven feel kind of bad for it so he apologized with a full set of diamond armor, tools, flowers and a cake… it still hurt though

jaehee

• minecraft queen

• plays by herself a lot, the music, building on peaceful mode, all the alone time she gets

• loves it a lot actually, especially after a hard day at work

• but she gets so stressed out playing with everyone else

• it’s kinda bad for her health

• sighs into the mic whenever someone’s acting like an absolute fool

• tolerates no bullshit

• do not hit her. not even by accident. do not do it

• it’s so tense, she slowly turns around stares at them for what seems like forever it’s actually so scary

• only you’re allowed to hit her because for the two of you it’s not a smack, it’s a boop

• she does it back too

• “boop!” with a cute little giggle afterwards

• instantly goes to get the basics set up when the game loads in, sticks with yoosung in the beginning to get a bunch of starter materials gathered together

• is always running around doing something but no one knows exactly what because she doesn’t share. she is doing something though, a very productive crafter

• she has never died, ever. probably the highest level here out of anyone else

• the resident necessity provider, will throw you stacks of bread exactly when you need some, it’s like a 6th sense

• has basic mining chests set up for everyone to take from if they want to, so torches, food, tools, dirt, armor etc

• she really likes to decorate more than build, but she’s still really good at it!

• loves designing up floor plans

• not the best at adding the little details though

• her homes always look kinda square so v helps her out with that

• she organizes other people’s chests because she just hates how messy it looks, seven gives her so much anxiety especially

• she’s always cleaning up after him and shutting his doors since he leaves them open constantly

• her play style is a little bit of everything, not afraid of the caves whatsoever so she’ll mine if no one else wants to do it

• you can usually find her decorating though

• spends so much time making a cute little kitchen in her house especially

• a “coffee machine” is definitely a must in her house, also has a really pretty and huge bedroom

• white concrete and dark wood slabs, her house looks so lovely

• decorates zens room for him too

• she doesn’t talk much in the voice chat when jumin’s in there because she doesn’t wanna get fired

• likes to come into peoples houses and jump around a few times to say hi before running off again

• her and zen throw flowers back and forth to each other while crouching up and down like a couple of nerds ♡

seven

• the second the game loads he is off to the races, he is gone baby!! no one knows what he’s doing but everyone knows he fears nothing so it must be exciting

• “GOD707 was slain by enderdragon”

• we’ve been in the game for an hour max how did he- nvm don’t question it

• he’ll randomly show up to the community house out of nowhere, do a few random things here and there, leave again for a few days

• comes back on a skeleton horse, enchanted diamond armor, a fleet of dogs, elytra, the wandering trader enslaved on a lead

• saeran follows him around most of the time so they’ll usually be off doing something together

• seven dies so much omg every five minutes there’s a death message in the chat

• if you manage to track him down you find that he is living absolutely lavish

• has so many bases scattered around like this, this, or this

• spends a lot of time building once everyone else goes offline, does not sleep until his base is done and he’s actually an amazing builder

• v loves to go around in his bases and just gawk

• he does not decorate whatsoever, that's for saeran to do! jaehee comes and organizes because he just throws everything into a chest and leaves

• his playstyle is chaotic horrifying, he does a bit of everything but the main goal is to get to the void and beat the ender dragon with his bare hands, he wants to become god

• never shuts his doors so there’s just big creeper explosion holes in his home that he’s too lazy to fix, claims it adds ~character~

• he loves spelunking so you can find him running around in caves most of the time, there is no fear in this man's soul whatsoever, loves battle and fighting mobs, insults them most of the time while killing them

• throws his diamond armor into lava just for the funsies, always parkouring in caves, you will get so much anxiety being around him

• sometimes mimics the cave noises just to scare yoosung

• burns down villages, starts random fires, jumps into holes, beats up any animal he sees

• sometimes he comes in to hit jumin’s cats just to hear him raise his voice a little and be like “Hey!” it’s really funny but annoys jumin

• he edges the creepers omg gets them to the point where they almost blow up but backs up before they actually do

• redstone master!! builds so many insane things out of it, has an entire theme park dedicated to himself, definitely has a torture room somewhere in his mansion

• he’s always joking around with everyone, especially with you

• “hey mc, hold this for me?”

• he slowly gets real close to you until your hands are touching and your heads are almost morphing into each other

• “bro... are we ab to kiss rn...”

• will come into your bedroom when everyone’s asleep does NOT knock first this man barges right in and stands over your bed, silent for a few seconds before suddenly tossing hundreds of diamonds down on you, throws back some ass a few times before running off once again

• hits people for absolutely no reason and yes he will hit with the intention to kill

• “no swearing in my christian minecraft server”

• gets motion sick at video games usually but he actually really likes minecraft!!

• a complete dad so he takes a little bit getting used to the controls but warms up quick

• don’t you dare hit him. that’s evil. he’s like “woah!! something just happened, i got attacked out of nowhere!! we have to be more careful you guys!”

• he’s genuinely so confused and concerned for everyone’s safety

• adores building so much, not just houses but also little structures here and there

• he’ll make greenhouses, vineyards, beach homes, treehouses, statues

• villages get completely revamped if he thinks they’re ugly which most of the time, he does

• his playstyle is completely just building and decorating, sometimes he’ll send jumin out for supplies but it ends badly most of the time

• aka jumin gets lost and/or dies

• he helps build everyone their own little structures so jumin gets a luxury cat mansion, zen gets a shrine dedicated to himself, yoosung gets a stage for his parrots to dance on, jaehee gets a coffee shop in the village, seven gets a giant ph pepper statue, saeran gets a sunflower farm all to himself, and of course you get whatever you want! omg he’d make you a heart shaped nether portal

• he’ll help when he’s needed but he doesn’t really play, he just builds

• everyone brings their spare materials to him if they don’t need them, yoosung and saeran help him farm for stuff if he needs something in particular

• really loves giving house tours when he’s done with a build and it is the cutest thing in the entire world

• he is just so insanely giddy and excited as he shows off all the little details, you can hear the smile in his voice

• everyone validates him and matches his energy too it’s so sweet :’)

• he’s always complimenting everyone on anything and everything they do

• “look at you, finding diamonds! good job!”

• “this house is so very lovely, i love the warm energy it brings.”

• he likes to wander around and find white cats for jumin to tame

• on the rare occasion he comes caving, he’s always the little cheerleader for everyone else of course

• “good luck down here everyone, please stay safe and call out if you need anything. we’re all here to help each other, alright?”

• two seconds later yoosungs drowning in lava, seven is mining bedrock, jumin is being shot by a skeleton, jaehee is fighting off a mob spawner, zen is lost, saeran is riding minecarts around

saeran

• he’s pretty quiet while he plays so no one ever knows what exactly he’s up to, he’s just shy

• picks flower fields absolutely clean, not a singular flower in sight, only if he finds a beehive somewhere then he’ll leave some for them

• has a lot of dye because of that, resident banner creator!!! he’ll make anything that you’d like

• he follows people around– especially seven, and just goes with the flow of whatever they’re up to, chaotic or not

• sometimes you think he’s afk so you just stop and stare at him but then he moves and you jump a little

• yoosung and him will just spam crouch for minutes on end together when they’re bored

• by himself a lot of the time, you can find him playing with some turtles on the beach somewhere or planting flowers

• builds a lot on his own solo server, but doesn’t really like to in the main one because he gets insecure comparing it to v’s and seven’s work.

• he does have his own little house away from seven’s mansion basement though

• if you come in and start complimenting it he gets so shy and blushy

• “thanks… it’s not that impressive i just whipped it up really quick…”

• seven knowing damn well that house took him several hours: 👁_👁

• he hits people to get their attention and then crouches all guiltily when they turn around, throws them a quick little flower before running off

• he has a ton of pink sheep collected outside his house, an army of jebs live in his basement

• his playstyle is just doing whatever he feels like. sometimes he’s getting materials for everyone, other times he’s just sliding around on ice with the polar bears for awhile

• he likes enchanting potions and that kind of stuff

• smacks seven with random potions like slowness, fire, poison

• had a pet fish in a little aquarium at his place, one day it despawned and he nearly burnt down his whole house from being so upset

• still convinced seven killed him

• he doesn’t get scared from the mines

• the nether though is is a different story, it’s terrifying to him

• especially ghasts and the sounds they make. will not go in there unless you are and you beg him to hold your hand or something

• has secret little minecraft pinterest boards full of silly statues and stuff that he likes to build around randomly

• blames herobrine for all of them which scares yoosung

mc (hey thats you!!!)

• jumin lets you name his cats, dye their collars, anything you want even if it’s silly. if you have your own cats then sometimes he brings his favorites over and they have little baby kittens together, you both spam crouch and jump around afterwards from the excitement of it all. don’t worry he pays child support !! you don’t know where he got diamonds but. you’ll take them anyways

• zen brings you random little presents that he thinks are super useful but… are not. you don’t have the heart to tell him that though. thinks spider eye is like the rarest thing in the entire game, secretly comes in to give them to you and message you something like “shh… keep it secret jagiya~ ;)” it’s the thought that counts

• yoosung is always so sweet with everything he does, he’ll bring you any sort of materials, tools. anything you need it’s yours. once he ran in front of you to take the hit from a poison spider when you know he’s absolutely terrified of them so you could get away safely. he tries his best to be brave for you <3

• jaehee invites you to her kitchen for taste testing, you’ll come in and try all the lil cakes she has sitting out while giving your feedback on all them in detail. mm yes very good, love the electric taste of the pixels in this one! finally she’ll be like wtf are we doing

• seven surprises you by making a cute little heart shape out of redstone, you press a button and it lights up red, fireworks go off, he’s jumping around throwing flowers and diamonds at you. he’ll put a sign down that says “will you… put your minecraft bed next to mine?”

• v is constantly checking in on you, he’ll say “knock knock!” before coming into your room, you’re like hey what’s up!! he replies i missed you! i just wanted to say hi :) before leaving again, comes in every day cycle with snacks to make sure you’re eating properly of course

• saeran brings you flowers all the time, he’ll shyly sneak into your room, crouch over to the bed super slowly, suddenly start throwing stacks of flowers all over you, crouch up n down a couple of times before running for the hills. forgets to shut your door and runs back real quick to shut it before leaving again

thanks for reading! find more on my mysme masterlist ♡!

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dreamlikeapsycho · 4 years

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I saw the max facts (pun intended 😂) you did for that question a while ago. So I was wondering if maybe you could tell us some more facts about Max it doesn’t have to be anything too detailed but anything you know would be nice to know, pretty please 😊

Okay... RANDOM FACTS ABOUT MAX - PART 2

I went on deep analysis mode this time to try and say all of Max's little nice and cute moments I know of.. Pls take notice, tho!! I'm not trying to flex or anything, I'm just a simple peasant girl on Maximilian's kingdom for a long time and it happens I have FBI blood in my veins 😭 so It's all gather on my brain and hard drive lol SO! I'm just answering this ask with a lot of thought and care so you can know more about Max and how he is even more awesome than you think!!! (And just in text form, cause Max doesn't need to be tagged on more personal stuff on IG (there’s too much illegal fishing at my tumblr pond already! 👏). It’s probably weird to know certain things, yes, but at least I'm respectful, I'll never bother him with this kind of stuff). Well, enjoy the bible below to end up knowing very little about him, still haha.. Just some more small facts.

- Max was at a barbecue just yesterday. It was someones birthday from the set of his new movie. He drank his beer, like usual, idk about the meat.. there was wurst and chicken.. I'm not sure if he's trying to be a vegetarian or not (after that thoughtful video he posted) 🤔.. maybe he didn't eat it, I don't know!!

- a little while before the start of this shooting, he was at the Baltic Sea filming for the series he's gonna be in (just one episode again! Don't get your hopes too high lol he's gonna be a security guard who disappears mysteriously, so....)

- He helped his friend renovate his house a few weeks ago!! How could I forget that on the first post.. Then, he had to go to Hesse for the movie shooting, and his friend had to call another friend to come help him lmao damn

I think I could describe some videos I have then... at least there's some cool and funny stuff. (Friends himself tagged in the past and cast friends)

- Max's dad went to the same uni as him. Also, he voiced a police officer on the phone in a short film Max wrote and directed all by himself (he didn't act on it, but he was also another police officer over the phone haha). Another thing, his dad made the official music for one of his plays.

- The falafel day.. his friend was taking a piss filming Max at the shop from afar and zooming in, saying "omg, guys! I found Noah from Dark! He's right there buying falafel" lmao, then, Max is just standing there looking all wonderful with his perfect hair and such, moving his hands, scratching his chin, ordering his food, and his friend talks some more, doing like a rough Max voice "yeah yeah, I'll have that one. Good, yeah". 😂

- the day he went to take a walk in nature. His friend asks him for a cigarette, he is denied, he goes to take it anyway, Max slams his cup of tea on the table and tries to take his cigarette back and it's all black and they're just laughing lmao (I love his laugh btw, so giggly!)

There was storys posted by Max himself.. so, maybe you saw it, but it's from before dark s3 came out.

- The pigeon storys. He filmed two pigeons chasing each other at the station, one always running from the other and he captioned "me trying to flirt" haha

- He screen recorded an ad for an app that deletes people from pictures and made some joke too, I can't remember exactly what he wrote, smt like "when you break up, but still wants to keep the picture" lol also, he unfollowed like 5 people that week after posting that... hm 👀

- he posted a video of him walking in the dark with really cold wind.. you can only see his hair flying around. Also, with a mask on, another chasing a cat in a big field, and that one drinking his coffee and eating his yogurt (you most likely saw it already)

- Ohh.. His friend was playing Max's drums the other day!!! Made a lot of jokes, it was obvious he was messing around in Max's room (maybe they live together, maybe he just waters the plants lol idk). Some of the jokes were "I've been playing this drums since 1921" and "the drums and me are a perfect pair, don't ever believe otherwise". I wonder what Max said to him.. he can't do anything about it, he's not in Berlin hahah. He has a little giraffe in his room, and other home decors (you can see it on his drumming video on his own IG)

- he likes to read on longer train rides.

- there's a video of him screaming inside a wardrobe after being jumped by a friend and one of him putting lipstick on with the song "I'm a sexy motherfucker" playing in the background hehe we was tagged, it was easy to find when there wasn't much tagged post.

- There's moments of ppl filming something/themselves and he just comes and photobombs it lol he is just like thiss 👏 showing his tongue and doing a funny face and such. One of those I saw it on the IG of a Das Boot cast member I actually already followed before.

- this group was such a blast. There's a few pictures, one of them he's in a dress, he has white stockings on til his thighs, heels and all haha lovely

- His improv-group.. he was almost in tears singing "I believe I can fly" with the group on their last day.. But he was happy! A mix of emotions. He loves everyone, he expresses his love a lot to people in general, he says it and adds heart emojis to make sure haha you can see his comments going on IG of his cast friends, especially from Das Boot (I followed a lot of the guys). So, about always commenting something funny on people's posts.. I didn't saved those, so I forgot most of it, but one I remember was that someone posted a video of a hailstorm and he was like "what are u doing, free ice!! Go grab them" hahaha

- Max has that Noah picture where he's peaking by a wall (you know that one Baran posted) printed and framed! 👏

- Things he’s pretty much always with: his backpack and his big headphones (it's always on his neck. At almost every picture, from every year, with different people etc. I was confused when he had normal headphones at his farm storys. Maybe he forgot them in Berlin 😭. Besides those, his rings, necklaces and bracelets (always, for years and years! Same ones, even). He uses frequently on premieres, as I saw it. Sometimes they also show up on his characters in his one-episode works!! Hahah is so nice when that happens. You can notice this on my screencaps.

- that pic of him that is everywhere now (with glasses, holding a bottle of champagne), I posted that months ago.. There's 2 more pics and 1 video. One pic, he is pretending the automatic lighter that's on the table is a Harry Potter wand (but I think I cropped the table, right.. I can't remember). This was actually posted by Max himself and he tagged his friend who took it. I went to see if they posted smt and there was a picture where he is literally biting the cork of that bottle off with his teeth Lmaoo, and one video.. he is talking on the phone trying to block the view with his feet.. this man!!

- he really doesn't care about buying too much unnecessary clothes and shoes and stuff. He is mindful of his things and the environment!!

- there's a video of him on the set of Der Zauberlehrling, I need to recall where I got that from (maybe I could share this one. I'm not sure), he is messing with the broom and someone asks him "hey Max, what's that animal?" and points to the fluffy microphone. He says "it's a fucked up coala bear" (in english) 😂

Again.. I can't say names or anything, cause ppl are not mindful! Like.. I know I'm probably weird, but only for myself and my FBI office LOL I don't go over there and follow/reply to all these people’s posts and storys or take their videos and tag Max on them, this is just not.... nah. I'll always be respectful (yeah, some older stuff has gifs, cause he had like 10k followers, and 5 fans on tumblr lol But i never sent/tag him in anything personal directly.. that’s why i only posted on tumblr for the past year, in fact! I never thought things would be the way they are now a year later.. so, newer stuff it's not posted/gif nor ever will). I don't want him to be weirded out and like, disappear from IG!! I think about these things.. when people are being weird and stuff towards him. I don’t know how ppl don’t think about this when tagging him recklessly in random pictures and videos!!!

I wish he had more interviews, so we could know more proper stuff about him. (The few interviews he has are translated on my IG highlight. There's still an 8min interview missing there, cause I'm contemplating about being more of a bother to german speaking people, since I only have basic german..

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pursueyourpersona · 4 years

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Since there will be newcomers to Persona 4 with the advent of Golden being released on Steam, here are some facts and tips about the game that newcomers might want to know before playing:

First up, the characters ( or rather, the investigation team) can straight up horrible at times, especially Yosuke and Chie. Yes, they do get better as the game goes along and Kanji is Actually Precious, but they can be really unlikable at times. You really have to invest in their social links to get the best out of them imo (you can even hug Yosuke if you take the correct choices!)

As an aside, there’s some really cringy scenes that have not aged well like the camp river scene where the Chie and Yukiko kick the boys into the river (Yosuke deserves it, but Kanji had a concussion and I am nothing but respectful to women) or most imfamously the Amagi inn scene. Golden adds a painful scene of the boys (even Kanji...) trying to pick up girls, only to fail and for Hanako to accidentally break (well, maybe it was intentional, who knows~) Yosuke’s new scooter.

Secondly, everyone’s shadow isn’t a pure representation of their true character. This means you shouldn’t take what they say at face value, especially Kanji’s and Naoto’s. While there is some truth to what they say, a lot of it is exaggeration (looking at you Shadow Kanji).

Teddie is actually a really good character who goes through an arc that makes sense for him. Yes, he’s a perverted bear who won’t stop making bear puns, but he’s also lonely and doesn’t know who he is or why he exists. He doesn’t betray you, he doesn’t leave you, he almost kisses you- wait what was that last one? Yeah, it happens in Golden, then you get interrupted. Teddie just...loves you.

Something that wasn’t in Persona 3 (well, unless you play P3P then yeah, I guess you could say that it’s there) and didn’t come back for Persona 5 is that there are two cases of branching social links: the Sun which you need to choose whether you want to Music or Drama and the Strength in which you either go Soccer or Basketball. While you still get the other person in the Strength link (Daisuke will always appear with Kou if you pick basketball and same with Kou with soccer), the Sun link choices do not interact at all.

Don’t try to do all the social links at once, you will fail (unless you have a guide). Do the links for the investigation team (except for Naoto who needs maxed out Knowledge and Expression? I think it’s Expression) and Marie, but then just pick and choose which ones to do. I’ll always recommend Nanako and Uncle Dojima because they do lock out after a certain date and probably Adachi’s. The Hermit as well because it’ll lessen the money you need to restore the party in the TV world.

You’re probably not going to max out every stat in a single playthrough (unless you’re looking at a guide) so these are the important ones: Knowledge, Understanding and Expression. Courage is hard to level up early and Diligence is kinda a dump stat I think? It allows you to get the Devil and Death social links and Origami job but that’s it. Also it allows to fish more.

Persona 4 has a fusion forecast! This is really helpful for when you want to make strong personas and get different skills on personas that wouldn’t naturally learn them. You don’t have to use it and simply just fuse whenever, but it’s there. You might actually be surprised to see extra stats or more exp if you haven’t been paying attention to the forecast.

There are scooters! New to Golden, they can increase courage, you can get new skills for your teammates, you can go to new places like Okina and the beach. Here is a list of skills the team can learn (Kanji being a healer...crazy). Naoto is probably the one you want to take out due to her kit being...not good (if you came from Persona 5, there aren’t any Curse or Bless skills and Hama and Mudo skills are useless in Boss fights) and Megidoleon is an SP drain. Yukiko would probably be next due to learning Marakunda and Mind Charge which makes her a crazy fire nuke. Teddie also has Dekunda which is really good too.

You get new skills from social links now, but they can be hit and miss. Yukiko for example has Amrita (clears all debuffs except for Down and of course, Death) and Divine Grace (increases healing by 50%), but she also gets Mudo...which, again, is useless in boss fights where you’re probably gonna want someone like Yukiko.

Gardening! Also new to Golden, you can plant vegetables which have different effects, from restoring SP to unlocking chests for you. It can also increase your bond with Uncle Dojima and Nanako if you harvest the fruits of our labour on a day either or both of them are home. It doesn’t take up anytime so there’s really no reason not to.

Don’t cheat on your girlfriend. They won’t beat you up, but there’s no guarantee that I won’t. I can’t tell you not to do so since there isn’t a risk of any limbs involved unlike in Persona 5, but like, don’t be a douchebag?

If you played Persona 3, you know how to recruit personas. If you haven’t, then it’s a little different. Like P3, there is a roulette, but unlike P3, you can choose which card you want instead of picking randomly. The cards are still chosen at random and there are ones that do negative effects, but with the side effect of being able to choose more cards.

The best girl is Naoto, obviously.

Kanji is best boy, obviously.

That’s all I have for now I think. I didn’t talk too much about Naoto because I do not want to start up that war. All I’ll say is that you shouldn’t assume a book by it’s cover and leave it at that.

#persona 4 #persona 4 golden #phew #it's a good game #i love persona 4 #but the characters are...#...something #hit or miss #you might like half the cast and hate the other half #for me kanji is the best character in the game along with naoto #but like #yosuke is a dick #and chie isn't any better #they can be really selfish #especially compared to persona 5s cast where everyone gets along #except for like akechi lol #mod hamster

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such-a-random-rambler · 4 years

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Once in a Blue Moon

It was an aligning of the planets when John and Virgil got to work together. That is to say: not as seldom as everybody thought, but not everyday either. It just depended how you defined 'together’, for technically John worked every dispatch. They were a great pairing: Virgil’s mechanical skills and John’s electronic ones meant there wasn’t much they couldn’t engineer their way out of.

They’d already tackled several problems at the overloading factory: Virgil had used a bit of brute force and the proper application of leverage to open a cooling vent for access, and John had whipped up an antivirus program in his short but brutal plummet to Earth. They security doors had been no match for Virgil’s jaws of life – something that he would have to have a word with the owners about, it shouldn’t be this easy – and they made swift progress to the control room.

That’s where it all went wrong.

“You uploaded you’re cure yet?” asked Virgil, raising an arm to shield his face from the sparking controls. It was not good when a display panel did that; it meant things were getting way out of hand, as if the warning lights didn’t already make that clear. Virgil had really grown to hate flashing red lights.

“It’s not a cure,” John said with a very clearly heard verbal eyeroll, “and you know that so are just saying it to wind me up.” Virgil did know that. There was some sort of malevolent trojan horse virus in the system that John was going to contain and eradicate, but surely ‘cure’ was an acceptable shortcut. John was hunched over, giving the terminal he was working at an intent frown. Virgil didn’t like that frown. It was a ‘something’s gone wrong’ type of frown.

“Problem?”

John pushed himself to his feet with a sigh of frustration. “Sort of. My programme is uploaded and is working it’s way through the system architecture and once it’s done facility operation will return to normal.”

“I sense a ‘but’ looming in my future.”

“But..... to complete that we will need to do a full system restart.”

“Off and on again.”

John nodded and Virgil felt his stomach sink. This was a manufacturing plant for high value, high strength biodegradable plastics which were in very high demand in a number of secondary industries. The process to create a reliable and durable product was complicated and long and relied upon down to the second timing in some stages, otherwise whole batches could be lost. These places were designed to resist total system shut down as that would the cost the company millions in clean up on it’s own, let alone lost contracts and waste. This was a true twenty four seven operation with back ups and contingencies to keep it running at all times.

Of course some of those would be off line at the moment as a result of the virus that was screwing up the temperature controls on the main furnace, threatening to send it’s unstable contents into a spontaneous combustion that would flatten half for the surrounding city. But not all of them.

“Is that even possible?” Virgil asked.

“Yes, if I had three quarters of an hour and a bit of luck I might be able to trick the remaining safe guards that the others were still in place, get them to shut down in a controlled cascade.” John said grimly.

Virgil gave a quick glance at the readouts – needles quivering at their max, bar charts at their limits and those damned red lights suggested that wasn’t an option. “We don’t have that long,” Virgil said “We have about ten minutes before it goes critical. What are our other options?” There were always other options. International Rescue didn’t give up.

“There might be another way” John said with a strange hesitation. “But it’s a bit more …. errr …. rough and ready, shall we say. You’re not going to like it.”

“If that’s what we’ve got, lets get on with it!” Virgil knew they had no time to waste.

John pointed him to one of the panels on the far side of the room. “I need you to take out all of the capacitors on that board, one at a time, from left to right. And I need to borrow a wrench.”

Virgil fished out his second favourite wrench and handed it over, turning smartly on his heel to set about his task. John pressed a few buttons on the main console before popping open another section of the room’s wall. Virgil clicked open his own, now as far away from John as he could be in the small space, and stared in puzzlement for a second. He wasn’t the computer genius that his brother was, but he knew what a capacitor looked like and whatever was running through this wall didn’t have any. It wasn’t like John to make such a mistake even under this much pressure. He turned to double check when a lot of things happened at once.

He saw John reaching into the guts of the wall and hitting something really hard with the wrench. What followed was the predictable blinding flash of an overload due to damage and contact with metal, the snap of discharging electricity like static from a balloon but a thousand fold . The lights went out, there was a dull ‘thumb’ of a large weight on a hard surface and a clang as the wrench fell to the floor.

Virgil stood, stiff and dumbfounded. His eyes, still troubled by the flash were struggling to accustomise themselves to the pitch dark. Spots were floating across his vision and the hair on the back of his neck stood up in a sixth-sense sort of alarm.

“John?” He whispered “What the actual hell.”

He turned on his trusty shoulder flashlight and swept it around the room. The place where John had been standing was filled with smoke which smelt cloying and metallic as it drifted through the room. Another sweep found what he was looking for – crumbled against the wall just a few paces away was his stupid stupid stupid brother.

“God damn it John!” Virgil said as he knelt at his side. Through the thin beam of light Virgil could see the slight fuzz to his hair and scorch marks on his suit that spoke of a large electrical discharge. Virgil pushed a furious two fingers to the pulse point just under the jaw and offered a silent prayer of thanks to anything in a position to hear when he felt the heartbeat - fast, uneven, but there.

“John, John!” Virgil shook his shoulder.

“No need to shout.” John replied, voice much softer than his usual commanding tones.

“ Oh there is plenty of reason to shout. Being as I think you just stuck your hand into the primary back up power system to overload it and shut the factory down. That's what you did, right?”

“Basically.” Virgil focused the light on John’s face to see it pinched, pale and squinting. He tried to bring up the suit’s biometrics but it wasn’t fully responsive, and it took a lot to damage Brains’ tech. “How long has everything been off?”

“Under a minute. You and I are going to have a conversation about ‘rough and ready’ and hitting complex electric systems with god damn metal rods and getting yourself god damn electrocuted.”

“I’m fine.” John protested.

“Really? Because I think you just got thrown across the room into a concrete wall. I also think you just got hit with about a billion volts of electricity. Now I’m not sure one of those made you lose consciousness, but I know which one is making your heartrate too fast. I’m also worried that I can feel occasional irregular heartbeats and I so don’t want to have to put a de-fib on you because I have no idea what sort of internal injuries you have right now.” Virgil was trying not to let his anger out and to stay professional but John sure did deserve it. Hitting it with a bloody wrench!

“If you’re finished, want to help me get up so we can get this place back up and running and go home?” John said, making no move to get up himself.

“That depends, do you think you’ve got any internal bleeding?” Virgil made a couple of physical checks that John bore with bad grace - unfortunately they were all familiar with the feeling of internal bleeding.

John gave a grimace and a shake of his head “Nah, only bruised.”

Virgil gave a put-upon sigh and man-handled John to his feet, taking most of his weight with an arm slung over his shoulder and Virgil holding John tightly to his hip. The quicker they did this, the quicker he could get John back for a CAT scan and an xray and an ECG.

They staggered to the main terminal where John flicked a few switches and pumped a breaker – with a whine and a whir something started up: lights and screens flickered on all around them, straining his eyes yet again.

“Please don’t do anything like that again.” Virgil pleaded as they waited for the main frame to reboot, “It was really stupid and you could have at least given me warning.”

“You would have tried to stop me.” John said, leaning his head against Virgil and closing his eye for just a second. “I didn’t want to do it, but - “ he paused for a few moments as he studied the booting sequence and obviously happy with what he saw there - “Mission accomplished, city saved.”

“Yeah, too right I would have tried to stop you almost killing yourself.” Virgil said, turning them slowly and starting to make their way back to his Thunderbird. Luckily they landed just outside the door so he wouldn’t have to carry John too far – he was heavier than he looked. “As it is, you might have wished you had when Scott gets hold of you.”

John groaned, long and drawn out. After a side-eyed glance at his brother - pale, in obvious pain and listing to one side even with his support - Virgil wasn’t convinced that noise could all be attributed to the thought of the dressing down he was going to get as soon as he was well enough to stand it.

“Do you think we could just not tell him?”

“Not a chance.”

“He’s not going to understand.”

“Oh we understand- ” Virgil said, wanting to emphasise that Scott wouldn’t be the only one to have a problem with John’s antics, even as he was pushing his brother into one of Two’s med beds. “-considering the number of lives at risk. But making a decision like that without having a conversation with the rest of us – it's just not on. How would you feel if we did it while you were up on Five. ”

John was clenching his jaw as Virgil raised the bed so he was leaning back instead of laying flat, but whether from a hidden injury or the memory of all the times John had watched them run head first into trouble without being able to do anything about it was impossible to say.

Suppressing a groan of his own Virgil headed to the cockpit for take off protocols. If everyone was being their usual selves Scott would be blazingly angry by the time they got back to the island and John would retreat into intractable silence and somehow it would all be Virgil’s fault.

Virgil was almost glad he worked with his brother just once in a blue moon.

also on https://archiveofourown.org/works/23156785

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13522767/1/Once-in-a-Blue-Moon

#John Tracy #Virgil Tracy #thunderbirds #tag #thunderbirds are go #I just can't help myself

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badlydrawndrawnings · 4 years

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in my desire on hopefully saving enough money for animal crossing new horizons and getting myself a switch (or switch lite), and with pocket camp new fishing tournament, i decided to make headcanons of sorts for most of the sugar bowl generation characters (and others) playing pocket camp. screw the timeline, and sorry if nothing about animal crossing makes sense

monty

made a nintendo account in case he needs to change phones (which happens after dropping phone in a tank and it breaks; he feels so glad about making said account)

has all the alligator/crocodiles villagers [campers? this isn’t a mainline animal crossing game] and most of the frog/toad villagers (he has to rotate the frogs/toads). will temporary kick one of his villagers out to fulfill a special furniture request from other villagers

makes the campsite look like a maze in one half, and lake/water area in the other half. the only amenity he has is the exotic fountain.

cabin has variety of villagers who are rotated out on a monthly basis and it’s set up as a movie theater; apollo [an american eagle] has a permanent stay there it’s mostly his fortune cookie that makes up the theater

camper has lots of plants and trees with seating

because he has the money and work is overwhelming, monty elects to get the happy helper plan when it gets introduce. his helper/assistant is jacques [a bird]; jacques isn’t sure if he feels flatter

josephine (and ike)

she fears smartphones on the chance the battery will explode in her face after reading an article of it happening to someone (older cellphones and phones don’t have this concern to her), but the game made her very tempted to get over her fear

after monty drops his phone she backs out because she now fears she may drop her phone and crack the screen (or get it wet and lose all her data. monty couldn’t convince her about making an nintendo account). ends of watching her fellow volunteers play the game for a while

ike bites the bullet and buys a smartphone so he and jo can play together. ike names his character avatar jo after josephine. ike also took monty’s word about making an nintendo account

camp terrain eventually becomes beach resort (josephine help ike not buy impulse buys of items needing leaf tickets), which works since their campsite is a transform into boardwalk with rides (they keep the merry-go-round and bouncy cake amenities) and food and games (a bit like lake lachrymose when in-season)

cabin is their grammar library; josephine and ike only allow the more realistic (as they can be) villagers in there. they like taking photos of jo and their villagers posing in their library

their camper is weird. it looks like someone has a lab for making drugs on the second floor, with the first floor mini museum being a front. it’s possible gregor got a hold of the game and they elected to keep it

charles (idk if he’s 100% working with vfd or just well connected to vfd)

gets overwhelm at the fact he has total 100 % control of something and he can do whatever he wants

likes cross pollinating flowers and almost has all the clothing and furniture and all the potted flowers (charles made himself a cross pollinating guide)

buys the birch tree terrain because it’s the only terrain he finds easy on the eyes. the birch tree terrain is only used for the summer and fall; spring he uses the spring garden foreground and middle because he got it during leif’s [a gardener sloth] gardening event and winter he goes uses the default terrain the games gives to player

makes campsite look like an actual camp site he is following the name of the game he usually changes furniture to change campsite layout

cabin looks similar to the lucky smell lumber mill library (he tried to recreate it)

camper is very home-y; living room and kitchen on first floor and bedroom and bathroom on second floor

esme

because she breathes the air of what is in and what is out, her camper, campsite, and cabin changes almost every week (she’s loaded she buys leaf tickets to help fuel her need to stay in)

there is no consistent pattern to be made one minute it’s a ball the next it’s a restaurant and the next it’s the woods with a bonfire

this goes to her character avatar appearance too if it wasn’t her name some would be asking ‘when did i agree to be this player’s friend’

villagers are mostly the hip, elegant, and cool theme ones that’s the only thing anyone can figure out (esme does have a random villager of a different theme depending what’s in and out)

buys the leaf ticket clothing regardless if they’re in or out they’re limited time and she’s not taking any chances if an out item they’re selling will become in in the future (again, she’s loaded)

when the game is consider out, esme doesn’t delete the game in case it becomes in again, which is a frequent thing (she even made an nintendo account to make sure if she did delete the app or has to get a new phone, everything is restore upon re-installation)

hector

hoards his leaf tickets because he wants to buy a good terrain for his town campsite; he buys the feather weather sky terrain and the old timey town background and middle (he got the 1st anniversary white iron fence it was cheaper)

the town eventually has strong fall/autumn vibes. there’s food stalls (the chocolate banana stall and sno-cone stall from redd’s [a fox] gardening event), trees from maple [a bear cub] fortune cookies, a flower wagon (from kick’s [a skunk] gardening event), a fountain with benches, lamp posts (same event from kick), and lots of leaf piles to run through

has many potted marigolds (he went overboard and made lots of them from kick’s gardening event)

the amenities hector has are the hot air balloon and bronze twins fountain

camper is pretty much similar to charles: living room and kitchen on first floor and bedroom and bathroom on second floor

cabin is a bakery-cafe; hector’s upset he can’t make a mexican restaurant so he goes all out with food/cafe/restaurant items from fortune cookies he got for 5000 bells and the cute confectioner items from pelly’s [she a pelican] gardening event. he even wears the outfit and never takes it off.

olivia

she buys katrina’s special furniture item the second it shows up for some reason [katrina is a panther fortune teller], but becomes glad when olivia decides what she wants to do with her camp site

loses a lot of her leaf tickets via the fortunate cookies she wants. as such, when it came to buying blathers or celeste [both are owls], olivia decides to save up to get both of them when they both are offer again.

camp is a mixture of a steampunk circus due to bob [a purple cat] and wolfgang [a wolf] fortune cookies. has most of spooky terrain sans the sky and fence (they’re the second reasons she lost a lot of her leaf tickets)

cabin is more steampunk library with astrological furniture due to julian’s [a unicorn] fortune cookies (this is why she’s saving up to buy blathers and celeste they fit the cabin theme more)

likes to wear dresses and skirts on her character avatar you will never see her wear pants unless it’s good

buys the wigs and switches them constantly (olivia wishes you can wear hat accessories over the wigs)

widdershins

widdershins blew all of his leaf tickets on the seafloor terrain and ocean sky (which he saved up for) to make an underwater campsite (there’s a lot of whale pool floaties). the villagers stays until they reach level 20 before getting kick out; the only who has a permanent resident is eventually gaston [a rabbit]

enjoys the fishing tournaments when they offer fishes in tanks and underwater related items; the other tournaments -and in general the events- aren’t his liking but he has a compulsion to complete them anyway (so for instance, he would do the fishing tournament mention in the opening but he isn’t happy about getting knitted items)

also has a compulsion to complete the catalog

cabin is an aquarium with villagers being the ones who are max out there. right side is freshwater fish and left side is ocean fish

camper is rather home-y; the first floor is a bedroom/living/kitchen combo while the second floor is a library with chairs and a sofa to sit on

got lucky with filbert’s [a squirrel] fortune cookies and has all the astronaut clothing; if his character avatar can’t be wearing a diver suit an underwater astronaut will do

r, duchess of winnipeg

r got in on the first day release she heard the hype and wants to see why people are making a fuss about it (she already has an existing nintendo account but doesn’t use it much she’s not an avid video game player)

r didn’t spend leaf tickets when first starting to play. as such she was -and still is- the richest of her friends when it comes to leaf tickets (she brought leaf tickets from time to time; esme is the second richest when it comes to leaf tickets) and eventually in bells (a bellionaire)

r’s cabin, campsite, and camper changes for the seasons. spring is usually a garden or sort or casual party, summer is a japanese festival or an actual campsite, fall/autumn she usually makes a fancy ball (usually due to it corresponding with the game anniversary) or goes out for halloween, and winter it’s...a winter garden. as the game gets fortune cookies and more creative events, r makes a japanese zen garden/japanese restaurant for the winter.

r hates the winter stuff in general (sans new years eve and exceptions) in part because it’s almost all christmas related. jack’s [like jack o lantern] garden event tested r’s limits; she came to the conclusion she can use the food, candelabras, chairs, tables, pumpkins, and potted flowers but that’s it (she almost used the hearth but change her mind)

only buys fortune cookies she likes and avoids the winter ones (again, almost all christmas related). r did however cave in and bought rhonda’s [a rhino] fortune cookie (r actually doesn’t mind the nutcracker). r got what she wanted: the clothing, castle pop-up book, and starry field pop-up book

r laughs at her avatar wearing a ballroom gown with their spoon hands cover in long sleeve gloves

snicket siblings

jacques was the first one to play after r; he got in right a week after it was open to the public (he makes a nintendo account for the same reason as monty). kit and lemony (same reason as monty and jacques) follow suit a week later, and everyone else join from there

out of the three (all of the volunteers really who are playing), lemony took gulliver’s bad as hell revamp the worst (jacques and kit and basically everyone else agree to change their rating) and made a strongly worded review that is one of top negative review of the game (even after lemony edited it an retraction after the pocket camp team revamp gulliver again).

jacques like wearing the fancy full set suits (the anniversary clothing are a second). lemony made attempts to cover his face but after fail attempts and coming to the conclusion he doesn’t like the king tuk mask he gives up. he wears the pumpkin head in october though

kit’s character avatar wears one of the special leaf ticket clothing items (it’s a jacket that cost over 100 leaf tickets) and glasses. she would have gotten a wig but after olivia show her character avatar with the wigs kit didn’t think it was worth it spending leaf tickets

jacques makes his campsite a campsite, kit’s campsite resembles a farm for some reason, and lemony’s campsite sort of looks like an unfinished town

jacques’ cabin looks like a regular cabin (he made a hidden space with a coffin and skeleton). kit’s cabin looks like a car garage that’s up and running with customers. lemony’s cabin looks like a nice writing study/library; he has the vineyard phonograph from brewster’s [a pigeon] gardening event playing in the corner

jacques and kit’s camper are dumping grounds for random furniture. lemony has villager pictures in his camper

they know christmas is popular in japan [no really, it’s not treated as a religious holiday it’s more for fun and romance], so they send requests to the team for more general winter theme furniture or like, other holiday stuff that’s not christmas. they makeshift Hanukkah [Chanukah? i seen this other spelling] menorahs knowing their requests will probably never be fulfill (given they learn that mainline games does the same thing)

olaf

doesn’t play pocket camp. he does however plays animal crossing new leaf. he has more control of what he wants to do in mainline and likes being mayor and the only player/human resident.

is actually pretty good at it. he completed all the four sections of the museum, got all of main street, and he does animal requests and is like, never mean to them. unless he hates the animal then olaf goes all out and does bad things as possible in this game: giving them rotten fruit, hitting them with a net, and making them fall in pitfalls (olaf collect many of them for this purpose), in hopes they tell him they want to move out of town

in fact, the bird jacques is one such animal because the real jacques did something to make olaf angry and olaf had to take it on ac!jacques. kitt [a kanagroo] and olivia [a cat] are on thin ice

has a soft spot for vladmir [a pink bear club] and hazel [a squirrel with a unibrow] for some reason

had to put the keep town beautiful ordinance after getting the golden roses he can’t play every single day at best he plays once or twice a week (olaf’s town has high standards he doesn’t want it a mess)

will only play pocket camp when all the villagers in his town are in

the denouement triplets

they deliberately made their character avatars look identical to one another so if one changes clothing or facial feature, the other two follow suit (they do this to mess with their friends/other players). this becomes a problem if one of them wears a fortune cookie outfit/clothing

even their campsite looks identical; usually it’s the lobby of the hotel denouement done to the best of their abilities. the cabin are also identical, being a hotel room. if someone changes it, the other two follow suit (again, to mess with their friends/other players). this becomes a problem if one of them has furniture from a fortune cookie

the villagers are dress differently they’re not dress the same. they don’t even keep the same villagers in their cabin or campsite. this is the only way to tell the three apart

frank’s camper looks like something from a 1920′s speakeasy, ernest’s camper looks like their home when they were five (there’s balloons set up for a birthday party), and dewey’s camper looks like his secret library (or his attempt at it)

frank crafts a lot of clothing for his villagers and likes dressing them up. he just wishes that all of the clothing is wearable for them (like pants)

ernest dump unwanted bugs to other people’s gardens during the second half of gardening events (claims he’s helping plays finish bonus tasks for first half)

dewey likes to take a lot of photo of him hiding behind furniture or a bigger villager to troll his friends and other players

bertrand

he starts playing as it was intended: being a camp manager running a campsite. however, as the game got updates and add more features, bertrand decides to get creative

his camper first floor looks like a fashion boutique selling clothes for men and women; second floor is what appears to be a miniature town, with a giant crystal hiding behind some tall grass

campsite ends up being a train station. he got the locomotive station and clockwork tower as amenities. the station itself has sellers selling things like magazines, clothes (it’s the concert merch stand from dj kk’s [a dog] gardening event), and flowers (it’s the flower wagon), with lief selling his flowers as the ‘boss’. has a grand elephant statue from a fishing tournament that sort of blocks the clockwork tower.

cabin is bob’s fortunate cookies mix with some marching band items from broccolo’s (a mouse) fortunate cookies (he thought they fit well together)

bertrand is the only one who character avatar has the greatest resemblance to him in real life; clearly it’s the glasses

will switch up his avatar clothing and wear dresses and skirts if bertrand can find a clothing combination his character avatar can pull off

beatrice

everyone is convince she is playing pocket camp but no one knows for sure because she gives hint she is playing but at the same give hints she doesn’t play

to get something out of the way: beatrice is playing pocket camp but her in-game name doesn’t starts with ‘b’ it’s something else entirely

wears the fairy wings (regular and autumn) and alternate between the two with an outfit that fits the wings aesthetic. beatrice knows they’re not dragonfly wings but fairy wings are close enough (she wears the bat friends from time to time, again with an outfit that fits the aesthetic)

has an makeshift play stage for her villagers to sing and play music and a small fountain area with benches at her campsite. she rarely changes it (see last bullet point), only switching up the musical instruments and fountain and benches

beatrice doesn’t know what to do with her cabin, so she decides to make it a game of musical chairs and every time she visits she takes out a folding chair and leaves until there is only one sitting. she did this with so many villagers beatrice is considering on holding a championship round

like the snicket siblings, beatrice makes a makeshift Hanukkah menorah and place it outside (in which she will destroy her campsite to celebrate). she couldn’t figure out how to put it in her camper, which is a nice cozy apartment with an attic

bonus: ishamel (original schism generation)

has a campsite cult. it becomes a beach cult when the beach resort terrain gets release; he claims it’s a regular beach resort

cabin is a prison housing villagers ishamel finds ugly and he rotates them every month or so. they only appear in his campsite when they get to the level where he can get their furniture request (after that he force feds them snacks to max them out)

the only time he changes campsite and cabin is when august and september rolls around he likes making classrooms and everyone getting an education

when november hits ishmael goes back to the cult and prison

camper looks very well furnish with many bookcases and chairs it’s a library

i advise those who made it this far to look up animal crossing pocket camp cults and pocket camp jail/prison this was actually a thing

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callunavulgari · 5 years

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TOP 25 FICS OF 2018

1. A Cornstalk Fiddle by @notbecauseofvictories | Devil Went Down To Georgia | The Devil/Johnny | 17k

Where Johnny goes, the Devil follows; where Johnny goes, the Devil is already there.

Heather Says: So. I never thought that my favorite fic of the entire year would be a fic written about a song - and one that I don’t even particularly like - but here I am. I read this fic the same night that I finally broke down and watched Moonlight, and ended up listening to Moonlight’s End Credits and Hello Stranger by Barbara Lewis on repeat while I finished that first chapter on my back porch. This is that perfectly atmospheric fic that you’ll find maybe once every ten years and could probably sustain you on its memory for just as long.

2. Work of All Saints by @kaikamahine | Coco | Imelda/Hector/Ernesto | 210k

Imelda Rivera (b. 1899 - d. 1969), a story that includes but is not limited to: the finest music school this side of the Santo Domingo, three traveling musicians and the mess they made of love, the twice-cursed assassination of Venustiano Carranza, all the patron saints, and ninety-six ways a man can try to cross a bridge.

Heather Says: This story blew my entire mind. It was lovely, and tragic, and hilarious, and everything that a good novel should be. The parts of this fic that map out the unseen lives of Imelda, Hector, and Ernesto, that hidden backstory that a movie can only hint about, were exquisite to the point that I was afraid getting to the point where, well, they die, would be a letdown. It really wasn’t. If anything, the story managed to get richer as it went along, until suddenly you’re in a room sobbing into a pillow at four in the morning and have to be awake in four hours. No regrets.

3. Under the Covers by @toast-ranger-to-a-stranger | Stranger Things | Billy/Steve | 87k

Steve is (maybe) a little bit still in love with Nancy Wheeler and (maybe) trying to figure himself out-- between the night terrors and the babysitting and the general weirdness that is Hawkins, Indiana-- before he graduates.

Billy Hargrove fits in there somewhere (probably).

Heather Says: Under the Covers was the first Harringrove fic that actually kicked me over the edge from ‘eh this ship looks like it would have good hate sex’ and into full-fledged believer. It’s an intricately crafted look into the world of Billy Hargrove and Steve Harrington post-season two and it is absolutely glorious.

4. Bloody Ruin by esama | Castlevania | Alucard/Trevor | 37k

Vampire hunter and a vampire try to get along.

Heather Says: Written before season two came out, this was one of those fics that I clicked on because the pairing interested me and I wanted to see how it worked. It did not disappoint, and even after I delved through the tag on ao3 after I marathoned season two, this is still my favorite.

5. a road less traveled and a life less led by Azzandra | Dishonored | Billie & The Outsider | 9k

She took him out of the Void, as promised. And then she kept him, she supposed.

Heather Says: You know all that fanart that started cropping up after Death of the Outsider came out? The ones where Billie and the Outsider crept around Dunwall or Karnaca stealing fish and safes and graffiti-ing buildings? The ones with that found family vibe? Yeah. This fic scratches the same itch that all that art did.

6. But I’m Not There Yet by sarahyyy | Yuri On Ice | Yuri/Otabek | 71k

“Are you not going to read the article?” she asks, flopping onto his bed. “Look who ranked second, just after Phichit Chulanont.”

Otabek reluctantly scrolls down, and oh. #2 - Yuri Plisetsky

In the embedded Instagram photo just under that subheading, a very grumpy Yuri is cuddling a very grumpy-looking cat. The caption reads: I found the cat version of me at the shelter today. #iknowisaidnomorecats #canyoublameme

Heather Says: And here, in the stupid cute category we have teenagers navigating love through social media. What’s more, there’s a companion fic.

7. flowers start to bloom in every different hue by orphan-account | Coraline | Coraline/Wybourn | 1k

Coraline grows up, gets a tattoo, and falls in love. In that order.

Heather Says: I read this fic on a slow day at work, often in quick bursts while I was waiting for the kitchen to finish my table’s food. It’s short. It’s sweet. It’s perfect. And honestly? It’s everything that I was looking for when I ventured into the Coraline tag on ao3 because I was curious.

8. Victory Conditions by @astolat | Transformers | Megatron/Optimus Prime | 37k

“Do you want me to tell you a story?” Megatron said mockingly. “You won’t like it, Prime. It’s not a very nice one.”

Heather Says: Fun fact, I’m not even in this fandom. I haven’t touched the Transformers fandom since the first movie came out in 2007 and I spent a very confusing week shipping a boy and his car. But Astolat has literally never lead me wrong, and I was having one of those bored days where nothing quite itches the right spot, so I sat down on the couch and spent two hours reading this. Worth it.

9. just in it for the game by grim_lupine | Thor | Thor/Loki | 6k

“It's excellent rehabilitation for my image,” Loki says, widening his eyes. “They love you, and because of that they'll trust me. You wouldn't ruin this for me, would you?”

Thor glares at him.

Loki’s mouth twitches. “Also, it's the funniest thing that's ever happened to me.”

Heather Says: The Thor/Loki bug never really bit me until after Ragnorak came out. I mean, sure, I read it and it was good, but hella’s Frostiron fics basically destroyed me for any other Loki pairing. HOWEVER. Ragnorak happened and screwed that all the way up. Also, you know, this fic is absolutely lovely and was just what the doctor ordered.

10. so this guy walks into a bar by MasterOfAllImagination | Pacific Rim | Newt/Hermann | 2.5k

“Bourbon,” Hermann says, hooking his cane on the edge of the bar and sliding by degrees onto a stool.

“Straight up?” the bartender asks.

“Please.” Does he look like the kind of man who enjoys having his nostrils fumigated by undiluted whiskey? “On the rocks.”

Heather Says: I coped with Pacific Rim 2 by reading a couple AUs and a couple very, very long fics full of tragedy and math. Weirdly, the AU of a chance meeting in a bar was the one that stuck.

11. cherry pie by @brawlite & @toast-ranger-to-a-stranger | Stranger Things | Billy/Steve | 133k

Billy Hargrove lives for summer. Endless sunshine, heavily chlorinated pools, roaming ice cream trucks, and unencumbered freedom? There’s nothing better.

Even being stuck in Hawkins can’t ruin the summer for him. He eats it up, devouring every day whole.

Heather Says: Yeah, okay, but this is the fic that made summer worth it. Highly recommend reading at the pool or with your feet hanging off the back porch. Every piece of this fic was dripping in summertime nostalgia. It was fan-freaking-tastic.

12. the ghost and the good queen val by Wildehack (tyleet) | Thor | Thor/Valkyrie/Loki | 27k

“What,” she says, her heart racing, “was that.”

“What was what?” Korg asks, frowning up at her. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Valkyrie squints suspiciously at the ship.

“Oh my god,” Korg says. “You did! You saw a ghost!”

Heather Says: So, remember how I coped with Pacific Rim 2 with copious AUs? This is how I coped with Infinity War.

13. For Better or Worse by DragonBandit | The Bright Sessions | Mark/Damien | 22k

All Damien ever wanted was someone who wanted him. All Damien deserves is to die alone, stripped bare of any of the comforts or affections of humanity, a title he willingly shed.

Mark Bryant seems to be the Universe's compromise.

Wherein Damien and Mark are soulmates, and this changes enough.

Heather Says: I think I’ve read this one three or four time this year? It’s 22k of well-written fic for a fandom that has a max of like 100 fics all with lengths that tend to vary between a couple hundred words to 2 or 3k, max. This fic is the one that really catapulted me into the fandom.

14. in waves by @lymricks | Stranger Things | Billy/Steve | 38k

It’s March and it’s too cold for Billy to be shirtless and wearing shorts, but he hadn’t noticed until Harrington appeared and made him hold still. Harrington can’t seem to stop looking at the bruises. “What’s it to you if I miss a little school, Harrington?” Billy asks. He feels goosebumps rising on his skin.

“I don’t know,” Harrington snaps back, looking uncomfortable. He shifts his weight from one foot to the other. Plant your feet, Billy wants to scream at him. I’m going to bowl you over.

Heather Says: And here we have the first fic that wasn’t written by either @toast-ranger-to-a-stranger or @brawlite that made me realize that this fandom was gonna be a good one. So fantastic.

15. the cure by aquaexplicit | The Flash | Cisco/Harry | 43k

“I guess I don’t really get what you need to fix? Harrison Wells is a hot, rich genius that pays you to make cool stuff with his daughter and is totally into you. If you guys boning is the biggest problem you have, I think this officially qualifies as your best relationship ever.”

When Barry puts it like that, everything sounds so simple and not at all as angst ridden as Cisco has been suffering the past few months.

Cisco hangs up on him.

Heather Says: I remember a couple years ago, I fell absolutely head over heels for this one Sterek fic where Derek had twin toddlers and Stiles was the hired babysitter. So I think there’s something about dad + babysitter fics that get me, even if this one in particular the ‘baby’ in question is a fifteen year old genius. Still. Dad + babysitter. I don’t even know, but apparently it works for me.

16. pull out the insides by SpineAndSpite | The Bright Sessions | Mark/Damien | 3k

“Stop,” Damien says again, more insistent this time.

“I’m not doing it on purpose.” Mark's heart pounds in his ears and he sees Damien’s hands shaking. God. They shouldn’t have started talking about sex. Shouldn’t have filled in the colors and shadows to this pencil outline of a sketch forming between them. They shouldn’t have given it a name.

Heather Says: This year seems to have had a theme when it comes to fics that I’ve liked and it seems to boil down to: people who are bad for each other have sex and catch feelings. Mark/Damien is not the healthiest ship. But it also hurts in this stupidly tragic way and hell if I didn’t fall head over heels for it.

17. tell me, get my shit together by paperclipbitch | Star Wars | Han/Lando | 5k

“I thought we were actively avoiding each other after the Trandosha Shitshow,” Han says.

“We’re actively avoiding each other after the Iridonia Shitshow,” Lando corrects him, “the Trandosha Shitshow is That Which We Do Not Speak Of.”

Heather Says: So, guess what I did in the two to three hours after seeing Solo? If you guessed: ‘combed through ao3 until you ran out of fic’ ding ding ding, you are 100% correct. This one was very, very good, which makes sense, because paperclipbitch has some good shit.

18. chases, escapes, true love, miracles by pepperfield | The Flash | Cisco/Harry 55k

Just because the timeline has been restored, doesn't mean things are back to normal. Cisco's got 99 problems, and Harry Wells is approximately 38 of them.

In which Cisco makes a bunch of plans, fails most of them, narrowly avoids being disintegrated, receives a hug or two, finds his groove, and gets his man. More or less in that order.

Heather Says: This one was long and wibbly wobbly, because it was basically what season 3 should have been. But it was also really great, and had some super quality Harrisco interactions.

19. Your Pretty Little Heart by Ever-so-reylo | Star Wars | Reylo | 64k

Modern day AU in which Ben is an Alpha, Rey is an Omega, and they are way better at having sex than at communicating with each other.

Heather Says: Speaking of people who are probably a little bit bad for each other... This particular fic was new to me, not because of the um, extensive sexual content, but because I’m usually not a fan of A/B/O. But this one was extremely good, enough that I actually liked it for a/b/o aspect rather than in spite of it.

20. Draconia by perceived_nobility | The Bright Sessions | Mark/Damien | 4k

"So I was driving. One ex wife and one ex husband later, stopping at the same fucking gas stations you and I stopped at."

Heather Says: This fic actually prompted a 3 hour long conversation on the ‘adult’ Mark/Damien discord where we basically outlined an entire fic that I never got around to writing where Damien is raising a child, has a farm, and runs into Mark ten years down the ride. One day, I might write it, because vaguely domestic, meet-again-ten-years-down-the-road fics always bowl me right the fuck over and just. There needs to be more fic like this one in the world. But until then, the world can marvel at the beauty that is this one.

21. Artifice by buttpatrol | Wolf 359 | Hera/Eiffel | 23k

A story told in parts about colour palettes, identity, robot uprisings, sensational trials, space, and messy love.

Heather Says: As I’ve recently finished relistening to Wolf 359 I have a fresh appreciation for this fic, which is one of the only longer fics on ao3 that just grips you by the heart and squeezes the same way that the series does. It might have been written before the end of the series, but it’s honestly just as perfect.

22. (shoot the lights out, hide) till its bright out by lipgallagher | Stranger Things | Billy/Steve | 93k

The most dangerous thing walking around Hawkins goes by the name Billy Hargrove.

And he fucking knows it.

Heather Says: I’m kind of cheating here, because this is a series rather than a single fic, but I’m not picking just one part. I read the first four or so parts of this fic when I was visiting my family in South Carolina and spent the next few days wandering around the place half-in Steve Harrington’s headspace. It was an incredibly surreal experience, which lead to a pretty strong combination of mania, depression, and an indescribable craving for ice cream. So like, maybe don’t read this fic if you’re in a bad head space? But also it’s very good and features one of the most fucked up and intriguing Steve’s that I’ve seen yet.

23. Until My Feet Bleed and My Heart Aches by Reiya | Yuri On Ice | Yuuri/Viktor | 197k

‘…Of all the rivalries in the world of sports over the years, perhaps none has become so legendary as that of Russian figure skater Viktor Nikiforov and his rival, Japanese Yuuri Katsuki…’

Heather Says: I actually read this one on the plane ride down to South Carolina, and kind of didn’t like it at first? I’m not sure if it was just the act of putting Yuuri and Victor into the position of rivals that made me uncomfortable or the goddamn delays that turned half a day of travelling into a full one, but eventually I was able to get into and enjoyed it quite a bit. I really like the rivals to lovers trope, so I’d been looking forward to this one a lot.

24. Traveling Far by @astolat | Game of Thrones | Jaime/Brienne | 24k

Three weeks into their delightful slog across Westeros, during yet another charming day of shitting in the woods, eating half-raw squirrel, and trudging his feet bloody, the single most dour and uninteresting woman Jaime had ever met in all of Westeros stopped in the middle of a field, drew a deep breath, and said, “When I was seven, my aunt came to visit with her son. My father told me that as the daughter of the house, it was my duty to show hospitality to my guests and to be gracious to them. I wanted to make him proud. So for three weeks, I let my cousin follow me around and talk to me about spiders.”

Heather Says: I’ve become very fond of astolat’s Jaime/Brienne fics, and I think this one is my favorite yet. Featuring Starks, found family, and a whole lot of walking.

25. lilies of the valley (cover me with kisses, make my garden grow) by diasterisms | Star Wars | Reylo | 8k

Every girl is entitled to the mistake. That one colossal fuck-up that permanently alters the terrain of who you are. You'll either learn from it or you won't, so might as well have the time of your life.

Heather Says: I just. I really like flower shop AUs, and the idea of a Kylo Ren who owns a sleek flower shop being menaced by a tiny gremlin in a leather jacket just. Kills me. It was really sweet and all kinds of wonderful.

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vintage-miseries · 5 years

Text

Team Angry-Stupid-Loudmouth

#squad: who's friends with who? what are the squad dynamics like?

Elrick: E’s friendly with the older crowd. He’s good mates with Wallace and Fredrik, they go to the gym together. He’s also good mates with Lucius and drags the poor old sod out for camping trips.

Luke: Luke can be friends with anyone, its up to the other person to tolerate him. It goes without saying that Colin is his ride or die for life. He also gets on well with Wallace and Fredrik, and has a “working relationship” with Lucius.

Kash: Kash is another individual who could get on with anyone, you just have to be the right sort of person to enjoy his company. Bishop will be his best mate for life, though in any AU in which he comes into contact with people he and Lukan have a good relationship.

microscope: zoom in -- describe the little, insignificant details about an OC.

Elrick: Dude actually has really nice eyes, proper green in good lighting, like sunlight through ferns. He also has fairly soft hair.

Luke: Luke has the ghost of freckles on his nose, though his complexion makes them hard to see. He’s got early laugh lines creeping in at the corner of his eyes and just the faintest tinge of red in his curls.

Kash: Green eyes touched with gold at the center, cat-like and curved. Thin lips that fork into a grin. Wild, fire-colored hair that never seems to be under his control.

fragrance: what do your OCs smell like?

Elrick: Tobacco, Old Spice, hair product, cedar-scented cologne

Luke: cloves, marijuana, shea butter, warm earth, sunlight warmed clothing

Kash: Rain, sage, oleander, fire-smoke, sea-salted ocean air

photo album: describe one of your OCs' favorite memories.

Elrick: The first night that Logan came to stay, when he couldn’t stand his parents any longer. They ordered pizza and played nintendo in the loft and they shared that first, clumsy kiss.

Luke: Luke would count any warm, summery memory as a good one. He particularly enjoys the memory of the first summer he spent as Colin’s friend, sitting on a beach in Hastings smoking bowls as the sun set and telling stories over dinner of fish and chips.

Kash: I feel Kash’s life is too long to pick out particular memories, though I feel the time he convinced Bishop to become highway men for a while was probably worth a couple of good laughs, especially given their supernatural capabilities.

wardrobe: what's your OC(s) style like?

Elrick: E’s a t-shirts and jeans kind of guy. Every now and then he spices things up with a jacket, but really he can’t be fucked about fashion, and tends to wear what’s most convenient.

Luke: Luke likes a plaid top, coupled with hiking boots, graphic t’s and a beanie. Whatever’s comfiest for an impromptu hike, as he tends to enjoy random walks. He’s less a fan of dodging through underbrush to avoid the cops but in those situations his gear is idyllic as well.

Kash: Kash likes a lot of black. Black jeans/trousers, boots, shirts, and a leather jacket when the weather calls for it. He’ll wear other colours as well, but he’s truly adopted the goth aesthetic, or well - he adopted it about four hundred years ago and never gave it up.

lightning: who's the most impulsive character? and who is their impulse control?

Elrick: E’s not impulsive unless it comes to jokes. Sometimes he can’t help himself and says something a little risque.

Luke: Luke can be impulsive, often due to his ADD.

Kash: Kash’s middle name is Impulsive, or Brash, or sometimes Just-plain-stupid. He loves to take unnecessary risks for the hell of it, just because he can and because the mayhem is usually worth it. Usually.

ufo: identity! what are some key identifying qualities or traits of your OC(s)? how to they identify in regards to gender/sexuality?

Elrick: Arrogant - Funny - Hangry - Fuck-knows-Sexuality

Luke: Kind - Excitable - Addict - Asexual

Kash: Rash - Funny - Annoying - Bisexual

love note: who likes who? crushes? relationships? are they mutual or unrequited?

Elrick: E’s had only a few crushes in his life. He liked Annie, but that fell through when he fell for his boy.

Luke: Luke likes people, but couldn’t be fucked for sex or a relationship, really. He likes a cuddle, and he’d marry Colin for the marital benefits if Colin wanted to, but really he’s just here to have fun.

Kash: Kash’ll fuck anyone he finds interesting, though when it comes to love, well, there’s only one person who he’s ever truly loved, and he has a hard time admitting it.

poison: vices/bad habits? what are they? how do they affect your OC?

Elrick: Elrick has a substance abuse problem, whether it be alcohol or harder chemicals, he’s always struggled. At the very least, he’s always going to have a slight drinking problem. He also bites his nails.

Luke: Luke doesn’t think it’s possible to be addicted to marijuana - luke is incorrect.

Kash: Kash thrives on mischief and mayhem, and will always go to irritating lengths to make things difficult for other people as well as himself. He’s also a chronic liar and incredibly vain.

compass: who's the moral compass? in general: what are your OCs' morality like? do they have high morals, or not? are their morals self imposed, or do they base their morals on religion/family/influence of others?

Elrick: E’s generally a nice guy though every once in a while he can experience a moment of anger or aggression, though these are usually righteously-based. His mum taught him to be a good bloke, his brothers and sisters kept him humble.

Luke: Luke is, by society’s standards, technically a criminal. By his own and anyone who knows him he’s a generally stand up guy who goes out of his way to help people.

Kash: Kash can be as sweet as honey when he wants to be, or as cruel and vindictive as possible if it suits him. Being an ancient supernatural creature, perhaps his scale for morals is a tad different from ours, or perhaps not.

track & field: which (if any) of your OCs are athletic? what sports to they play? which of your OCs would go HARD in P.E.?

Elrick: E’s the kid playing dodgeball to maim. He really enjoyed gym and was always fairly good at it, though he never tried out for teams or made any effort if he wasn’t particularly interested.

Luke: Luke, when he actually attended school, did not really enjoy gym.

Kash: Kash did not, nor has he ever attended a school. He doesn’t know what sports are.

conspiracy theory: what are your OC's beliefs? are they skeptics or do they believe easily? who acts on blind faith? who needs to see to believe?

Elrick: E will always be a skeptic, he takes after his father in that respect. He’d need to see something in order to believe it real.

Luke: Luke loves a good ghost/ufo/cryptid story. He fully believes in all of them, and absorbs conspiracy media like water

Kash: Kash, who hails from a land of fae-folk, monsters, and supernatural beings, does not believe in aliens but feels ghosts deserve more representation.

spellbook: are any of your OC(s) supernatural? if so, what are they/what are their abilities?

Elrick: E has been every creature variant under the sun, but never as anything other than a one-off AU. Sorry E, you’re just human.

Luke: Though seperate entities, Luke did spawn from my Hell-spawn Azelgore, a multi-limbed salamander creature from the third circle of hell. He’s also, on occasion, the same looking creature but actually the Loch Ness Monster, so there’s that.

Kash: Kash is the Cat Sìth, a Scottish creature of Myth said to haunt the Highlands. His abilities include taking human form, charming people, foresight by augury, and shared astral projection. He’s also a witch capable of various old world spells and potions.

contact: how does your OC(s) feel about touch/physical contact? are they affectionate? if so, how do they display affection to others?

Elrick: E’s actually very into physical affection. He enjoys a cuddle, a fuck, whatever. He’s not too touchy with mates, but Logan gets the brunt of his P.D.A.’S

Luke: Luke loves a hug, and doesn’t mind a cuddle every once in a while.

Kash: Kash is very selective about the people he touches. He wouldn’t enjoy just anyone coming in for a cuddle, but loves a touchy romp with Bargheist.

interiors: describe your OC(s) bedroom/home/or a place they consider "theirs". what's in it? do certain items have a special significance to your OC?

Elrick: Oh man, this boy doesn’t do interior design. Their bedroom is tan, he’s got a mirror, a bed, a dresser, and a tv. He’s got a well worn but comfortable green couch out in the livingroom that he’s particularly fond of. Logan thinks it’s gross.

Luke: Luke’s whole house is his safe space. He’s maxed it out with plants and art. If there’s a free space on the wall it’s only because he’s not bought a frame yet. Or he’s broken one and needs to replace it. It’s a weird, yet beautiful little boho space. He’s also got a hammock indoors so..

Kash: Kash’s abode is a little octagon out on the Cornwall coast. The ceiling is hung with dozens upon dozens of bottles, wind chimes, and assorted peculiarities. He also has a fair collection of bones, antique books, and pretty seashells that he leaves out on display. His reputation as a ‘witch’ in the local town sends him a good bit of business during the summer months, where he hawks his augury skills to unsuspecting humans.

hobby: what do they love? what captivates them? what are their passions?

Elrick: E loves simple moments, beer shared around a campfire, the breathlessness upon reaching the top of a mountain climb, BBQ’s in the summer, an exhausted cuddle at the end of a long day, shared grins, hard fucks, and falling asleep against one another

Luke: Luke’s passions are laughter, good food, and plants. He loves the smell that comes off of a hundred sun-drenched plants after he waters them, and loves the bloom of flowers that accompanies happy cacti. He loves the bursts of laughter that accompany a smoke-up, and he loves the sleepy giggles of a come-down.

Kash: Kash will always be an enigma, even to himself. His wants and desires are always far more complicated than they seem, and he never makes things easy. He loves starlit walks and abandoned places. He loves sushi and hard spirits, forbidden knowledge and chasing the impossible, magic, and forgotten things.

psyche: what's their head space like? do they have any mental illnesses? how do they process difficult or emotional situations? what are their coping mechanisms?

Elrick: E’s coping mechanism has always been a good, quiet drink alone. He broods best that way. He gets through difficult situations by being bullheaded and stubborn.

Luke: Luke laughs himself through shit. He copes by either falling through it, or by having a mental breakdown and then realizing it wasn’t that bad afterwards. If all else fails he’ll have a smoke-up and try to ignore the situation.

Kash: Kash will use every bit of magic at his disposal to get around issues, and if that doesn’t work, he’ll pack up and move away for a while. He’s good at running from his problems, and does it fairly often.

chess board: who is the most logical? or the schemer/planner?

Elrick: E’s not ... he’s stubborn and pessimistic but he’s a natural follower, happy to let someone come up with the plan if he can enforce it. He’s the bodyguard type.

Luke: Luke isn’t so much a schemer as he is just one bad idea away from prison. He’s impulsive sometimes and tends to think of the pros before ever thinking about the cons, and sometimes this gets him in trouble.

Kash: Kash is a bona fide schemer and a dreamer, but not much of a planner. He’ll come up with an idea fair enough, but he never seems to have a back up if shit goes tits up, and it usually seems to.

shooting star: if your OC(s) could have one wish what would it be?

Elrick: He’d wish himself free of the three years they spent apart, and wish himself clean.

Luke: Luke would wish natural intoxicants were legal the world over, or like, for world peace.

Kash: Honestly? He’d wish himself more powerful tbh.

#Elrick1 #Kash1 #Luke1 #OC MEME1

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queerwalrus · 6 years

Text

Your Laws Do Not Apply To Me

Part Two, or, five times someone told James Flint to fuck the new cook and one time Flint actually followed through

“Please, I am begging you, in the name of all that is holy, fuck the cook.”

Flint looks up from the charts he’s studying, spread out across the desk in the cabin of the Walrus, with an expression akin to the one a person would wear had they just been smacked in the face with a wet fish.

“And what the fuck brought that on?” asks Flint, putting down the compass he’d been using to check their course.

“I will actually throw myself overboard if I have to deal with the way he looks at you for too much longer.” says Gates, leaning against the now-closed door.

Flint cocks an eyebrow at him.

“And how, pray tell, does he look at me?”

“Somewhere between the idea that you hung the moon and that he’d go to his knees the second you asked.”

“Are you sure you haven’t mixed up lust and fear?” says Flint, resting his chin on the palm of his hand.

“Those are not emotions you mix up, James.”

“But he is scared shitless of me. He stole my schedule and I threatened to kill him in the wrecks.”

“Yes,” says Gates, in a certain tone of voice that managed to be more patient than a priest at confession, “but you threatened to kill him by pressing him against the rock with your entire body and the threat was fucking hissed into his ear.”

“So?” says Flint.

“So that man is going to come begging like a puppy for treats until you fuck him and every harsh thing you do to dissuade him is going to make him want it more.”

Flint sighs through his teeth and shakes his head.

“He doesn’t want me.” he says, and Gates rolls his eyes.

“Do something about it?” he says. “It will be good for crew morale, too.”

“How the fuck will it be good for morale?” demands Flint, wet-fish expression back on his face.

“We won’t all suffocate under the weight of the lust.” says Gates, opening the door. “Also, he looks like he’ll be a screamer.”

Flint’s stunned and flustered sputtering is muffled by the rapidly closed door.

*** John Silver apparently doesn’t know how to keep his shirts or his mouth shut, and James Flint does not find it attractive at all. Silver’s up in the rigging today, helping patch sails, and every time a breeze wafts across the deck, the white linen of his shirt drifts away from the expanse of golden-brown skin that spans his back and ribs.

Joji elbows Flint in the side and wiggles his eyebrows.

“I’m not going to fuck him.” says Flint, refusing to dignify that expression by continuing to look at Joji.

Joji takes two steps in front of him so James can’t avoid seeing him and shrugs ‘why’.

“Because he’s a new crew member and he’s a lying snake.”

Joji rolls his eyes.

“I know he’s pretty. That doesn’t change my answer.”

Without breaking eye contact, Joji raises his arm to encompass all of Silver’s everything that is visible from this distance, including the unnecessarily tight trousers and the loose fall of his curls, which were just long enough to give you a solid handhold.

“I’m not going to fuck him, Joji.”

There’s a half second as Joji starts a new action, but Flint interrupts him before he can finish.

“No, you can’t have him either.”

Joji’s eyebrows say ‘sure you’re not going to fuck him’ in exactly the same way that they had right before James locked himself in a room at the brothel with Charles Vane and didn’t leave until early the next morning while valiantly pretending he didn’t want to be limping.

“With the utmost affection, fuck off, Joji.” says Flint.

Joji’s shoulders say ‘whatever you say, Captain’ while the wrinkles around his eyes say ‘you’re going to make him scream, aren’t you’, and Flint is very glad he’s walking away, because fucking Silver is beginning to seem like less of an ‘if’ and more of a ‘when’.

*** “So, Silver…” says Billy, leaning against the post of Flint’s tent during his break from careening work.

Flint lets his forehead fall to the desk.

“Not you too.” he says. “Honestly, Billy.”

“So you are fucking him?” Billy asks. Off Flint’s expression, he corrects himself. “You’re not fucking him.”

“No, I’m not fucking the brand new cook who stole the fucking schedule.” says Flint.

There’s silence for a while. Flint goes back to his paperwork. Billy’s breathing is even despite the hard labour he’s been doing - while shirtless, because if anything could convince the crew to put up with careening it was Billy Bones pulling on ropes attached to heavy things while shirtless - and the volume’s consistency means that he hasn’t moved.

“But are you going to fuck him?” Billy asks, all in a rush.

“For fuck’s sake, William.” snaps Flint, slamming the pen down on the desk he’s using. Billy throws his hands into the air.

“This is the kind of thing I need to know!” he says, and Flint glares at him.

Well, glares at his abs. Billy’s shirtless and sweating and Flint hasn’t gotten any since Vane, cut him a break. He drags his eyes upwards

“I’m not going to fuck John Silver.” he tells Billy’s pecs.

He tells the bit of his brain that sounds like Thomas and is currently excitedly offering ways someone with that kind of musculature could lift someone like Flint to fuck off, and makes himself look Billy in the eyes.

“I’m not going to fuck Silver.” he says.

“You’re not going to fuck Silver.” Billy agrees. “But if you do, could it be within the next three days? You’ll win me five pounds off of Gates that way.”

Billy dodges the rock Flint throws at him while grinning, and heads off for more food.

Later that day Flint tells Silver that there is no them, and wishes it felt less like he was lying as he said it.

*** “Listen,” says Eleanor Guthrie, and Flint cuts her off straight away.

“No, I’m not fucking Silver.”

“Are you fucking sure?” says Eleanor. “Because here you are giving him to me and telling me to tie him up here and make sure he’s safe and exactly where you want him.”

“She’s got a point, Captain.” says Billy. He’s rocked his chair back so there’s only two legs on the ground in order to stay a part of the conversation, and Flint has to swallow the urge to kick those legs out from under him.

“He’s got very valuable information in that head of his.” says Flint. “I want to make sure it’s intact when I return.”

“And while I’m tying him to things to make sure he doesn’t run off, are you sure you don’t want me to tie him to a headboard across the way?” Eleanor offers, her eyes sparkling with mischief. “I could gag him too, if that’s your thing. Even tie his ankles to the posts at the foot of the bed, should you so desire.”

Billy cackles with laughter, and behind him, Silver, just far enough away that Billy’s laughter is the first he’s heard of the conversation, looks very nervous.

Flint walks out and slams the door behind him.

The door swings open, and Eleanor’s voice drifts out after him as he leaves.

“Friends, Captain, he wants to be friends!”

Flint turns around and takes his next few steps backwards.

“So is Max your friend, or…” he asks, letting his voice trail off.

“Fuck off!” yells Eleanor, and when Gates falls into step with him, he’s grinning.

*** “Why ain’t the cook on board?” asks Muldoon, half-leaning on the wheel while they cut through the waves towards the Andromache’s expected position. “You keeping your conquests away from the front line now? I doubt Captain Vane will take that very well.”

“I’M NOT FUCKING THE COOK!” Flint roars, and the entire crew falls silent in response.

“Sure you ain’t.” says Dooley, a smirk planted on his face.

“Be honest with us,” says Muldoon, “is he as much of a screamer as he looks?”

“Does Mrs Barlow approve of him?” asks Logan. He, at least, seems more concerned for Flint’s welfare and happiness than the gory details of what John Silver was hypothetically like in bed.

“I haven’t told Miranda anything about him because I’m not fucking him,” says Flint, which is a lie - he’s told Miranda a lot about John Silver, which started with ‘he’s a lying, thieving piece of shit’ and ended with ‘he’s absolutely a screamer too, and his hair is just the right length to pull on and I bet you he’s made for sucking cock his lips are-’ at which point he’d given up and face-planted into Miranda’s lap and groaned while she laughed and petted his hair - “and I don’t know if he’s a screamer because I’m honestly not fucking him.”

The crew shuffles their feet a bit, and none of them look directly at him.

“You ought to fuck him.” says Muldoon, finally.

Flint throws his hands up in the air and storms off to his cabin, where he slams the door and resolutely does not think about what John Silver would look like on his knees, on his back, with his eyes half-lidded and his lips parted on a moan, begging for more.

It doesn’t work.

*** “What a day I missed.” James says, and stands.

Fucking John fucking Silver. How did he keep doing this? How did he keep getting under people’s skin, making himself indispensible to endeavour after endeavour?

“Come on.” James says, hand on the door handle, not looking back. If he looked back and saw Silver there, coiled on the sofa in Eleanor’s office like a pretty piece of set-dressing or some kind of prize collateral for a job well done, he’s not sure he could be held responsible for his actions.

Silver leaps to his feet and runs after James like a well-trained puppy, and that’s near to the final straw. He grits his teeth all the way back to the ship, and as soon as his feet are back on the deck, he grabs Silver by the back of his blue jacket and hauls him back to his cabin, resolutely refusing to acknowledge the wolf-whistles and catcalls of his crew.

Silver gets shoved through the door ahead of James, and James slams it shut as soon as they are both inside.

“Undress. Now.” he orders, and the fear in Silver’s eyes vanishes instantly.

“About fucking time.” he says, and shucks his jacket and the shirt that never stays fully buttoned and his boots and those fucking tight trousers and then looks up at James through his lashes and licks his lips.

James circles him slowly, rounding both Silver and the edge of the desk so that he could sink into his chair and let his knees fall open before they showed how much they were shaking.

“Come here,” he tells Silver, “and get on your knees.”

“Yes, Captain.” says Silver, and his eyes are so dark James can barely see the bright blue that has become so familiar.

James is right. John Silver has hair that is the perfect length to tangle his fingers in, and loves having it pulled if his moans are anything to go by, and he’s definitely born to suck cock, given both his skill and his enthusiasm.

“Yes, Silver,” James purrs, letting his head fall back and pulling a little more on Silver’s hair so he can feel him moan again. “Just like that.”

Silver shoves himself further down James’ cock and then looks up at James like he’s waiting for something. James finds himself laughing - not the same kind of laugh that happens on the deck in the sunshine, something darker and smokier and heavier, and Silver shudders at his feet.

“Do you want me to fuck your mouth?” James asks, and Silver’s ‘yes’ is muffled but audible. James ignores him, keeps talking. “Want me to fuck your throat until you’re hoarse, until everyone will be able to hear you and know exactly what you did?”

Silver moans, and his eyes roll back in his head a little. He’s loving every minute of this, and James suddenly has plans beyond seeing if Silver was as obedient on his knees as he was in Eleanor’s office. He tightens his grip on Silver’s hair and yanks him back, leaving Silver panting and looking up, eyes wide with confusion.

“As lovely as that sounds,” James tells him, “I’ve got plans for you, and they don’t involve me coming down your throat.”

Silver gasps, a little delighted kind of noise, and presses back into James’ hands.

“What do they involve, then?” he asks, and his eyes are dancing. James turns his hands and cards his fingers through Silver’s curls.

“You riding my fingers,” James says, “and you riding my cock.”

John shudders, one hand dropping to his lap, and James wraps his hand around John’s other wrist, pinning it to the inside of James’ knee.

“Give me your hand, Mister Silver.” James says, turning his free hand palm-up and curling his fingers.

Silver whines, high in his throat, and slips his hand into James’.

“Good.” says James, passing both of Silver’s wrists to one hand, holding them folded and against his thigh, watching as Silver shudders and shakes under his hands and his voice. “You’re being so good for me.”

Silver’s eyes drift closed as he moans this time, and James is actually going to fucking die, right here in this cabin, and his cause of death is going to be John Silver’s reaction to being praised.

“Come up here, darling.” James says, spreading his knees a little further, and then he winces at his use of the endearment. Silver doesn’t seem to care, scrambling to his feet and then into James’ lap like an overexcited child given free rein in a candy store, burying his face in James’ neck.

“Please, Captain, please.” says Silver, nosing at the sensitive skin behind James’ ear. “Please.”

“Please what, darling?” says James, and fuck the flinch he feels using the pet name, fuck it. It’s worth it for the slow squirm it forces out of Silver, for the shaking gasp that shudders out of his throat.

“Please fuck me, Captain.” says Silver, and there’s nothing more to it than a whisper, and it’s still the best thing James has heard since the last time Thomas kissed his first name into his skin.

“Alright then.” says James, and reaches for the oil in the second drawer of his desk. “Why would I deny you when you ask so nicely?”

Silver shudders at the first touch of slick fingers, rolls his hips back and down, searching for more. James fists his dry hand in Silver’s hair again and pulls down, biting down on the exposed skin and revelling in the sharp, delighted cry it draws from Silver.

“Do you like that, darling? Do you like it when I mark you up?”

“Yes, yes, yes.” pants Silver, fucking himself back on James’ fingers.

“So do I, darling, so do I - you don’t know what it does, knowing you’ll be marked as mine, knowing everyone will know I had you like this, desperate and begging on my lap.”

Silver’s eyes fly open, pupils blown wide, and those gorgeous lips part on a gasp.

“Oh, you really like that. You want everyone to know, don’t you?” James presses, punctuating the question with another finger.

“Oh, oh, oh, yes.” says Silver, and the sibilant end to the word drags on far longer than is necessary. James’ teeth sink back into his throat and this time it pulls a hiccupy sob loose.

“More, please, please, Captain.” begs Silver, and James knows his grin is feral and he doesn’t care.

“Look at you.” he purrs. “So desperate for me.”

Silver shakes and he begs, and his nails dig into the skin at James’ shoulders, and James can only take so much.

“Are you going to be good for me again?” he asks, a low whisper into Silver’s ear. “Are you going to be a good little whore and ride my cock until you’re screaming? Until I fill you up?”

Silver nods, words plainly caught in his throat, and James has no self control left, not any longer. He’s spent far too long caught up in daydreams of Silver, and the reality is so much better than he’d let himself hope. It’s the work of moments to have Silver sinking down on his cock, and Silver’s broken moan and shaking thighs are things of beauty. James gets one hand on Silver’s hip and the other in his hair and drags him down to kiss him, swallowing the soft keens he makes as he grinds his hips down against James.

“Please, please.” Silver pants, as soon as James lets him up for air.

“What do you want, darling?” James asks, hips already twitching up to meet each downward grind.

“Please, fuck me.”

James forces Silver took look at him with those hazy eyes.

“I am fucking you.” he says, and Silver shakes his head slightly.

“Want you to fuck me so they know.” he says, he pleads. “Fuck me so I limp. Fuck me so I can’t sit. Fuck me so I scream.”

And that - well, that James can do. He pushes upwards so he can lay Silver out on the desk and fucks into him, hard and fast and sure and Silver clutches at him with one hand and at the desk with the other and writhes and bucks, and screams every time James nails that spot inside him, and everyone was right and they will all know and James doesn’t care because it’s so good, and then Silver is clenching around him and coming with his loudest scream yet, and that’s all it takes to push James over the edge.

He slumps forwards, catching himself on the desk before he crushes Silver, and then lifts one hand to stroke across Silver’s hair.

“Good boy.” he says, and Silver smiles - a true, honest, smile, not his usual cocky smirk.

Silver is indeed limping the next day, and Flint spends all of his sunlit hours leaning on the railing with a contented smile on his face, one that only broadens whenever Silver looks up at him and flushes.

#the queer walrus variations #silverflint #my fic

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asfeedin · 4 years

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“Let the Hate Flow Through You”: Cooking Tasks That Fill Us With Dread

[Photographs: Vicky Wasik unless otherwise noted]

It should come as no surprise to any of our readers that everyone on the Serious Eats staff loves to cook. Many of us are even die-hard defenders of the proposition that anything homemade is preferable to store-bought, from English muffins and cake (bye, Betty Crocker!) to even condiments like mayonnaise and chili crisp, where the store-bought versions are totally fine to use.

That doesn’t mean we all love everything about cooking! Some kitchen tasks are incredibly annoying. Washing spinach? Picking thyme leaves? Touching corn starch? Yup, all of those are bad. Usually, we’d say about such tasks, “Life’s too short. No one has time for that.” And yet, now, for all of us, everywhere, cooking more of our meals at home, we all do, in fact, have time for even the most-time-consuming kitchen chores. But that doesn’t mean we have to like them any better than in the time before coronavirus.

We asked our staff to identify one thing they hate to do in the kitchen above all others, and their answers are included below, from peeling garlic and deveining shrimp to “baking” (nice one, Niki!). We found talking about the cooking activities we hate to be cathartic, so if you’d like to take a minute out of your day and gripe about anything kitchen-related—for fun, for your mental health, or just because making chicken cutlets really does blow chunks—say it loud and say it proud in the comments.

So Much Hand-Washing

Cooking and baking are inherently messy activities that require thoughtful cleaning and prepping to mitigate the risks of cross contamination and food-borne illnesses. Now that hand-washing is finally getting the attention it deserves inside and outside of the kitchen, I feel some shame in admitting that it is not my favorite task. Please don’t report me to the CDC! I still practice it carefully as needed! You can still come over for dinner when social distancing is over! I just have painful eczema on my hands, which is exacerbated by soap and hot water.

I try to obsessively plan out my kitchen tasks to reduce hand washing. That means prepping in order from the cleanest to dirtiest ingredient, dry to wet, water-based to oil-based. There is a special type of dread that comes when both of my hands are greasy, sticky, and unusable. My personal purgatory would involve dredging fried chicken while the oven timer goes off, my phone with the recipe on it goes to sleep, and the doorbell rings at the same time. —Maggie Lee, designer

Bones to Pick

The only two single-use tools I own are a cherry pitter and fish tweezers, for deboning fish. Pitting cherries is a tedious task, but at least you get to eat cherries as you work. Deboning fish is grunt work. When I can’t get my fishmonger to do it, I have to dig through my utensil drawer to find the oddly shaped tweezers. Though plucking each pin bone out of fish fillets offers some gratification, not unlike plucking an errant eyebrow hair, it’s an annoying layer of prep work that gets in the way of cooking. It’s not satisfying like chopping or dicing, it’s not a skill that I seem to get better or faster at, and it’s something that, if you forget to do it, markedly decreases the enjoyment of the meal. I hate it! —Daniela Galarza, features editor

Garlic Prep

This most mundane of tasks is the one I can’t stand the most. Not because it’s particularly difficult, but because it’s a daily nuisance. There’s hardly a recipe that doesn’t require fiddling with garlic’s papery skins, and of course garlic is wonderful so I’m never willing to skip it, which just…pisses me off! Look, I know every trick in the book, from smashing the garlic with a knife and rattling the cloves around in metal mixing bowls to giving each clove a gentle twist between my fingers to pry the skins loose, but none of them work well enough or consistently enough to ease my mind of the inevitable dread whenever it’s time to peel yet more garlic.

There is a flip side to this, though, which is the deep appreciation I feel when a fresh crop of garlic rolls into the market and for a few months I get to enjoy those easy-to-peel skins before they dry out and become so damned annoying again. —Daniel Gritzer, managing culinary director

Minty Fresh Aggravation

[Photograph: Max Falkowitz]

Whenever I have the energy, I like to add tons of fresh herbs to almost anything I’m cooking, and I especially love the summery freshness of mint. But the prep is such a fussy nightmare! First you have to carefully wash, then dry the whole plants, and then painstakingly pick off leaves one at a time. With things like parsley and cilantro I tend to just chop everything up, but mint stalks are so woody and fibrous there’s really no getting around individually picking off the leaves.” —Daniel Dyssegaard Kallick, developer

A Tough Nut to Crack

No matter what I do or whatever method I use (toaster oven, small sauté pan), the nuts I am attempting to toast always burn. It drives me nuts and burns me up. Burnt nuts aren’t really usable for anything. I am awaiting the development of the single-use nut toaster that automatically turns off when the nuts are a nice toasty golden brown. Until then I’ll continue to suffer, though no longer in silence. —Ed Levine, overlord

Berry Annoyed

When it comes to washing produce, my laziness knows no bounds. This is especially true with washing berries. They’re delicate, so I don’t want to mush them up; they’re more absorbent than anything with peels or a skin; and they require a careful picking through to take out any unwanted debris. I’ve begrudgingly come around to washing most fruits and veggies that come through my kitchen (as one should), but berries still get to me. —Jina Stanfill, social media editor

I Like My Fingers, Thanks

It’s time to get hyper-specific: I was hired because of my abilities to cut footage, not produce, so my chopping skills leave a lot to be desired. My mandoline has helped hide that fact whenever I’m prepping a dish that requires razor-thin shavings of anything. I’ve had no issues with anything I’ve sliced except shallots. I’m not sure if it’s the tear-inducing onion fumes or their slick layers that makes shallots super-slippery, but thinly sliced shallots are my arch nemesis. The only silver lining is that if I ever need fried shallots to snack on while going on the lam without fingerprints, I’ve got the perfect solution. —Joel Russo, video producer

Grating Cheese Really Grates

I am a perfectionist in the kitchen and prefer to do everything myself, but if there’s one task I delegate it’s grating cheese, an awkward motion that seems designed to induce repetitive stress injury. My great-grandfather had no rotational function in his forearm owing to a war injury, and so, I’m told, he built his own cheese-grating system operated by foot pedal. I am looking into a similar solution. —John Mattia, video editor

Golden Fried No-Thank-You

Like most people, I appreciate a perfect piece of fried food—from donuts and chicken to deep-fried pickles. However, despite how much I enjoy fried food, I absolutely dislike deep frying anything at home. I basically avoid it at this point. From having to make sure I have oil on hand (I never do, and I never have the right oil, to boot), to checking that the oil is hot enough and maintaining its temperature (which is a guessing game for me, even with a thermometer), and then to cleaning up the mess and the oil itself (which, to be honest, I’ve sometimes left for my husband to deal with), is just a recipe for more work than I’m willing to put in. On top of that, the fry smell permeates everything in my apartment for at least a week. I’ll leave the business of fried food to places that have commercial deep fryers and will continue to frequent them whenever I’m craving fried food perfection. —Kristina Razon, operations manager

Sharpen My Knife? Yeah, Right

As I look at this list of the cooking tasks my work colleagues dread, I’m pretty surprised. A lot of these tasks I actually really enjoy. Peeling garlic, picking mint leaves…those are things I relish and even find relaxing. You can’t mess up peeling garlic or picking leaves. But you can absolutely mess up sharpening a knife. Despite the fact that we have a really useful guide to knife sharpening, I can’t get myself to do it. I’m terrified I’m going to cut myself or mess up my blades. What looks like a really cool, meditative process on video just fills me with fear. And I know that dull knives can also be very dangerous! So the lesser of two evils is to use an electric sharpener. Don’t tell my colleagues! I don’t want them to be disappointed. —Ariel Kanter, director of commerce and content marketing

Baking

Look, I’m not a complete monster—I love to eat baked goods (though I’d argue that cake is seriously overrated). But with rare exceptions, like these insanely easy ricotta-brown butter cookies, this damn fine cherry pie, and these truly phenomenal lemon bars, I’ll go to great lengths to avoid making them from scratch. I’d say my resistance is a 70-30 ratio of “fear of discovering at the very end that I’ve messed up the dessert/bread and all my hard, finicky work was for naught and everyone will be disappointed and I will be judged” and “unpleasant mess.” But really, it’s so, so many reasons. Allow me to elaborate:

Too many bowls: It’s just too many bowls, period. Do I even have that many bowls? What if they’re reactive? And then after I’ve made the damn dessert I also need to clean them all?? Hard pass.

Whisking dry ingredients together: This is a task I thought I had under control until I found out Stella recommends doing it for AT LEAST ONE MINUTE—which might as well be a year.

Sifting: Sometimes the recipe asks you to sift stuff. The sheer amount of powder that winds up on my work surfaces, clothing, and floor is unacceptable. Especially when it’s cocoa powder that gets damp and is suddenly chocolate.

Using a stand mixer: I love my stand mixer for making fresh pasta. But when I have to actually use the bowl, it’s infuriating. Scraping the sides of your mixing bowl is just an endless game of turning the machine on and off, sticking your arm in at weird angles only to almost always miss a spot.

Too many leftovers: When I take on a baking project, I’m faced with indivisible recipes that yield far greater than two servings. Yes, you can freeze pie or cookie dough, but my freezer is incredibly small. Because I have zero self-control, this almost always results in a severe stomachache. For this reason, I almost only bake for company, which leads me to perhaps my greatest pet peeve…

Not being able to taste as you go! The idea that my baked good could look amazing on the outside, but I won’t know if I messed up until I serve and slice into the thing, is profoundly disincentivizing. As the EIC of a prominent food site, I put a lot of pressure on myself when cooking for company, and while I never second guess the quality of a Stella recipe, that doesn’t mean I can’t introduce untold human errors into the process.

The only way to get better at baking is to keep…doing it. Enough said.

Finally, to anyone thinking, so your real issue is being tidy, organized, patient, and detail-oriented…I guess you’re right. Shame on me! Thankfully, those traits don’t present in every area of my life. —Niki Achitoff-Gray, editor-in-chief

Sticky Cilantro

I love cilantro (sorry if it tastes like soap to you), so I don’t actively shy away from this task, but I loathe the seemingly special ability it has to stick to anything and everything once chopped—the cutting board, the knife, my hands, whatever you use to try and scrap the knife clean. —Paul Cline, president

Cutlets!

I hate making breaded chicken cutlets. I hate everything about it. It is, for me, the manifestation of cooking hell on Earth. Why does something so delicious have to be such a pain in the neck to make? Because that’s really the rub; there’s a lot of cooking tasks I dislike—washing fresh spinach 10 million times only to discover there’s still grit in the washing water; crumbling up cold leftover rice with my hands; touching powdered plant starch of any kind—but there’s only one that I dislike and yet feel compelled to regularly repeat, since I don’t know if life is worth living if you can’t eat good chicken cutlets at least once every two weeks.

Part of it is the mess, sure. But a lot of cooking tasks are messy. Any and all baking projects make me make a mess of my kitchen. And even if making cutlets means I have to clean a cutting board, a meat mallet, at least two half sheet pans (one for the breaded cutlets to rest, another for cooling), a cooling rack, a quarter sheet pan (for breading), and two 1/8 sheet pans (for the flour and egg wash dredging), a skillet, the stovetop (of oil splatters), the counter (for spills), the floor (for random flour and bits of panko), and my hands 10 billion times to prevent immediate food poisoning and belated food poisoning via cross-contamination, that isn’t the whole picture of my hate for these stupidly delicious things.

Part of it is you can’t do anything else while cooking them. They’re quick to cook, sure, but you can only cook a few at a time in even a 12-inch skillet, and you need to watch them, tend the temperature of the oil as you would a baby’s first toddling steps, and you need to salt each one right out of the fryer otherwise they’re crap, and then you have to cook like six more because who, really, makes just two freaking cutlets at a time except for heathens and (some very diligent) line cooks? That’s a solid block of kitchen time spent just frying things; you can’t clean as you go, you can’t prep other food, you’re just cooking cutlets for however long it takes to cook them all.

Another part of it is: No one likes a badly cooked cutlet, and cooking 10 cutlets, say, requires you pay careful attention to cooking the cutlets for a sustained period of time. It’s outrageous! And then, inevitably, when my attention flags, or I have to do literally anything else that might be necessary, like talking to my child, or paying attention to my wife, or thinking even for a moment, “man, I absolutely hate making chicken cutlets,” a cutlet will burn or get unevenly colored or overcooked because I haven’t been swirling the oil, or checking on its underside crust, or maybe I’m just at the end of the process and rather than “wasting” more cooking oil and topping off the fat in the pan, I try (for the 100 billionth time) to make do with less oil than is obviously necessary and all the burning bits of panko from the other 16 cutlets I’ve made start sticking to the crust of the final three, mottling their appearance and generally messing them up.

The only way I’ve found to deal with cutlet madness is to make them at least an hour before I have to eat them, because otherwise I find any flaw in any cutlet an indictment not just of my skills as a cook but of the entire cutlet-making operation.

But, of course, even the badly cooked cutlets taste really good, even when eaten as a cold leftover, provided you salted them properly and salt them again out of the fridge, and so the process will begin again solely on the strength of how good the things are to eat, any time of day, prepared in any stupid way.—Sho Spaeth, editor and writer and lover of cutlets

Cleaning Shrimp

There were a lot of time-consuming prep tasks that I used to dread when I cooked in restaurants. The combination of the sheer volume of prep required to get through service (picking a full pint of thyme leaves or thinly slicing a quart of chives to dole out to all the cooks on the line is a major pain in the ass when you also need to get purées cooked and blended, whole fish broken down, lobster meat picked, and so on), and the constant breakneck push and anxiety to get the endless list of tasks done by the time the first wave of guests are sat in a dining room can take the joy out of menial kitchen tasks. But these days, I don’t dread having to clean a big haul of produce that I picked up from the farmers market—in fact, I find the process very enjoyable and soothing.

That doesn’t mean that I suddenly enjoy every prep project under the sun, though. There’s one that I will always despise, and it’s peeling and deveining shrimp.

There is nothing enjoyable about the process—it’s tedious, time-consuming, not very appetizing, and over the years I’ve come to realize that the irritation I feel when handling raw shrimp is physical as well as mental (my hands get super-itchy when shelling shrimp without gloves). But when I want shrimp for dinner, like for a recent riff on aglio e olio pasta, I can’t bring myself to purchase already peeled and deveined ones. Shrimp shells are packed with so much flavor, it’d be a shame to miss out on that potential.

So, I begrudgingly set up a shrimp processing station instead, and get to work excising those giant digestive tracts, cursing myself the whole time for not just making shell-on salt and pepper shrimp instead. However, that would involve deep-frying, another cooking project that I don’t love tackling at home. —Sasha Marx, senior culinary editor

Dirty, Dirty Greens

It’s a running joke in the Serious Eats office that my refrigerator is usually a barren wasteland. I just don’t tend to keep a lot of food around; it inevitably goes bad because I’m so full from snacking all day at work in the test kitchen that I rarely feel like cooking when I get home. But once in a while you’ll find a pie plate in there with my favorite recipe on the site: spanakopita. The one thing I’ve learned from the dozen or so times I’ve made this recipe is that washing and drying leafy greens and herbs SUCKS. It is just the absolute worst, especially when you have a smaller salad spinner. —Vicky Wasik, visual director

Rice, Rice, Baby

I’m well aware that making rice is one of the simpler tasks to take on in the kitchen, and I’m slightly fearful of the backlash I might receive when my colleagues read this. It’s hard for me to pinpoint just what it is about making rice that I don’t like. Maybe it’s the pesky grains that try to escape when you wash them (I’ve only recently invested in a fine-mesh strainer, which has made me hate the process just a little less); or maybe it’s the water-to-rice ratio that, without fail, I always have to look up to make sure I’m getting just right. Whatever it is, I dread it. So whenever I’m cooking and I need to serve a dish with rice, I just nominate whoever is around me to do it instead. —Yasmine Maggio, social media intern

So now you know our dirty secrets. What tasks do you dread these days?

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the-freshwater-experience · 6 years

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Kribensis

Kribensis (Pelvicachromis pulcher)

Max Size: 5 inches (males), 3 inches (females)

Minimum Tank Size: 20 gallon (for a breeding pair), 15 gallon for a single female.

Optimum pH: 7

Optimum Temperature: 23-27C

Hardiness: Very forgiving as a first cichlid. Can adapt to a range in pH and temperature, and can withstand poor water quality for some time. I know this because my filter broke once for 2 weeks without me knowing and killed almost everything else but these guys. However, my female did get pop-eye from it, which eventually killed her. I once had to do a quarantine in an unheated tank at 20C, they took it fine. Don’t subject them to bad water quality intentionally though, that goes without saying.

Aggression: This species is rather peaceful as far as cichlids go, but have their aggressive perks. First off, never introduce conspecifics (others of the same species), or other small cichlids to a breeding pair. They get extremely aggressive when breeding, and I would not recommend it even in a densely planted 30 gallon tank with many caves, hiding spots, and natural boundaries. Small and fast swimmers such as tetras, danios, minnows, etc are fine, as are armoured catfish such as corydoras and plecostomus (although plecos will eat any eggs laid). If you must house more than two (1 male, 1 female), make sure to introduce the smallest males first, and make sure to keep at least 5 or 6 to spread out aggression.

Feeding: Will eat pretty much anything you offer. Flakes, pellets, algae wafers, live, freeze dried, or frozen foods. They are normally bottom feeders though, and must be acclimated into eating floating foods. To do this, keep the water level at around 12 inches high, so they can actually see the food. This can take some time for them to learn. 2 days for my female, almost a week for my male. Once they start coming up to you at feeding time, you can start increasing the water level up to whatever you desire.

Sexing: Sexing in this species is so easy its not funny. Don’t do a google image search for it, you’ll get conflicting results.

-Males are noticeably larger even at a young age. They have a pointed dorsal fin. They usually show less colour. The pink colouration is usually much less vibrant. The black line is less solid, and top and rest of the body is more of a greyish pale colour.

-Females are much smaller. They have a rounded dorsal fin, with a clear tip. Base colour of the body is yellow, the black line is solid. The pink is solid as well, concentrated on the stomach only, and turns purple when breeding. The stomach is slightly bulging.

Breeding: -These are cave spawners. You can easily make a cave by turning over a clay flowerpot. Once the female has laid its eggs in it, it will disappear into the “cave” for a number of days until the fry hatch and begin free-swimming. For the first day or two outside the cave, the fry will mostly stay on the substrate. They can swim just fine at this point, but don’t expect them to move much.

-To trigger spawning more easily, do some 50% or larger water changes. Make sure the fresh water is slightly cooler than the tank’s. This replicates the rainy season in African rivers.

-The general consensus is that high protein foods (bloodworms, blackworms, brine shrimp, mosquitoe larvae, frozen, freeze dried, or live) are good for triggering breeding. This is only true to a degree. It is not the food itself, but rather the change in food that triggers it. For an example, I fed my pair a diet of 90% freeze dried bloodworms and 10% algae since they were juveniles. The result was my male growing beyond the 4 inch“max size” within a year and a half. Not once did they spawn. After running out and substituting freeze-dried tubifex (a lower protein diet), I had a spawn almost instantly. Therefore, I don’t think that the high energy diet is just for giving them energy for breeding, but also to replicate seasonal diet changes in the wild.

-You have control in the sex of the fry. A neutral pH (7) results in a 1:1 male-female ratio. A higher pH that is more alkaline would result in more males, and a lower pH that is more acidic results in more females. You can change it using buffers (neutral), alder leaves or driftwood for tannins (acidic), or calcium carbonate (alkaline).

-Unusually, its the female that initiates courtship, and the male that is choosy about his mate.

-You get more stable breeding pairs if you let the fish choose their own mates, instead of forcing a 2 fish together. Buy a group, and when a pair develops, re-home the rest. Now rehoming is not always possible, so sometimes forcing a pair is necessary, which is what I did.

-According to some sources, they are occasional harem breeders in the wild, with one male to several females. Don’t try this at home, you don’t have enough space. I tried it and caused a massacre.

(Male front-bottom, female back-top)

Other Notes: -There is a large amount of genetic variation within the species. Some males have red colouration running from the tip of the lower jaw to the anal fin, others only have a salmon coloured spot on the belly and a bright yellow jaw. Some will show blue or greenish iridescence on the dorsal fin and gill plate, others won’t. Some will have up to 6 eyespots on the tail, others have none. Some males will be a dull grey colour with no markings on the body until they are breeding, others will stay in full colouration at all times. -Females will grow much faster and larger if you keep them away from males apparently. My female in my breeding pair was barely larger than when I first got her two years before. Meanwhile, some who keep females alone have grown them to almost the size of males. They can lay more eggs if they pair off at this point.

Other species in the hobby: -Pelvicachromis taeniatus

#kribensis #fish #freshwater #aquarium #cichlids

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vickyvicarious · 7 years

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max and the breakfast club (bmw 3)

bullymagnet week, day three: detention.

follows on the heels of day one and day two so read those first.

Somehow, he thought school jail in Mayview would be… more than this.

Max has been in detention for ten minutes by this point, and he can feel himself actually getting bored. Life lately has been so full of terror and nonsense that he had a little trouble recognizing the feeling at first but, yup, that’s what it is. Boredom.

Oh, for sure, the room does appear to have a population startlingly similar to the characters in The Breakfast Club, at least if you’re willing to consider Max the brain. Which, well, he has one, and that’s more than can be said for most of the rest of this town, so the comparison sort of holds. Johnny is obviously the rebel, so there’s another match. Granted, the jock is a ghost, but he has been pretty quiet, just like the recluse and the beauty (actual students Max does not recognize), so at least that’s something.

Actually, even Johnny has been quiet, busy scribbling away at a piece of paper in front of him. Garcia snoozes behind the desk, the other kids are quiet, Max taps on the desk and half-heartedly considers doing homework to live up to his role here. Nope, he quickly decides, he’s never gonna be that invested in any kid of bit, let alone an unintentional one that Mayview apparently generates on its own. Besides, none of the cool stuff he’s heard was in the movie is actually happening. This detention is basically like all detentions. It definitely does not live up to the hype Starchman gave it.

Sighing, Max drops his chin into his hand. He’s got nearly an hour left to go, the only book in his bag is flipping The Hobbit which got him into this mess in the first place, and after everything he doesn’t even have his hat back. This whole day (except lunch) has been a bust.

Well. Crawling through the improbably-large vents with Johnny was kinda fun, but that’s probably just his adrenaline addiction talking. None of that to be found here, anyway. Might as well take a page from Garcia’s book and nap his way through what he can of this –

Just as Max’s eyes slide shut, a paper airplane hits his head. It actually lodges itself in his ear, sending him bolt upright with an undignified yelp that has everyone turning around to look at him.

“Heheh, um,” Max grins at them, airplane crumpled in his fist under the desk. “I sneezed?”

“Do that on your own time,” Garcia yawns, subsiding back into a pile on his desk. The pretty girl two desks ahead of Max takes a minute to inspect her long hair, presumably for boogers, before wrinkling her nose at him and returning to texting under the table. The jock ghost goes back to flexing each individual chest muscle. The recluse in the back lets her bangs fall back down to cover her face completely, and Max catches a glimpse of an earbud.

Two desks to Max’s right, Johnny is back to dutiful scribbling, complete with furrowed eyebrows and the tip of his tongue sticking out the corner of his mouth. He’s fooling no one.

Glaring at Johnny, Max slowly unfolds the airplane, setting it on the desk in front of him. It reads:

Do you wanna ice cream

Underneath, there’s boxes to check either ‘yes’, ‘nah I’m a weirdo or maybe lactose intolerant’, or ‘only if it’s floating’.

Max blinks. He looks up, but Johnny is completely absorbed in his fake studying even though he is pretty obviously just drawing squiggles, so he ends up just reading the note again a few more times in confusion.

Why would the ice cream be floating, he finally writes back, then as an afterthought makes a new box for ‘is this for another time or are you saying you have ice cream on your person???’ and checks it.

Folding the paper up into a square, he balances it on his thumb and flicks it back, aiming for Johnny’s eyeball. Sadly, the shot falls short, ending up lost in the row of desks between them. Johnny sits upright, staring at it with unnecessary focus. Slowly stretching out a foot, the bully gradually slides down in his seat until his hair is level with his desktop, in an effort to get the note without actually getting up. It’s… not exactly what Max was going for, but the sight’s pretty amusing nonetheless, and he can’t help smirking as Johnny strains only two inches away from the edge of the paper.

Eventually, Johnny catches the note with the tip of his toe and drags it back swiftly, picking it up before hunching intently over it. Max continues to watch with interest, because even though Johnny’s hunched too low to really see his expression, he kinda looks like he’s getting red again.

The returning note would have hit Max in the face if not for his excellent reflexes. As it is, he hurts himself trying to instinctively catch it with both hands, and has to take a minute to breathe through his teeth. He really misses PK. The little guy must’ve gotten full or something, since it wandered off and hasn’t yet returned. Honestly, that’s not much of a problem anymore since the cast does its job, except for when Max forgets he’s injured… which he tends to do way more often than anyone with his amount of parkour experience can justify.

Johnny looks almost concerned. It’s weird, but also a little disappointing because if he were blushing he definitely isn’t anymore. Not that Max has any special reason to care if he’s blushing or not, but. Uh.

Do I look like the kinda dingus who carries ice cream around everywhere, I meant taking it from you scream in the back, Johnny has written under Max’s checkmark with what looks to Max’s eyes like classic defenserence. Also, he’s circled the part about floating ice cream and written WE KNOW underneath all ominously, with wiggly letters and everything.

Since Max has no idea what Johnny knows about floating ice cream (or what anyone could know about something like that, to be honest), he just flat out ignores that bit – but he can’t help turning in his seat to look at Recluse in the back. Yeah, that girl actually does have a cooler under her desk. Okay, weird.

Just because I let you draw on my cast and crawled through the ceiling with you, doesn’t mean I want to bully anyone, Johnny. You know, maybe it’s something to do with them beating me up and breaking my stuff, but I don’t actually like bullies.

So maybe Max’s note back is a little harsh, but, uh, at least it’s the truth. Getting invited to join in on bullying really bothers Max. Sure, Johnny is kind of endearing with his love for his friends and his cheerful enjoyment of violence. He doesn’t seem to really have anything against any of the people he bullies, so much as he just enjoys wreaking havoc, and Max kinda gets that to an extent. Plus fighting with him is… almost fun, sometimes.

But still. Max has been bullied before. He’s not a fan of the institution.

Two seats over, Johnny’s eyes get very very wide and he starts blinking rapidly. His cheeks are flushing red again, but along with what looks weirdly like hurt on his face his fist is clenching around the note and, oh boy now he’s baring his teeth. He looks like he can’t decide whether to murder Max or cry, which. Wow. He knew Johnny liked him more after hitball, but –

He reaches into his bag, but all his notebooks are in his locker; all that’s in there now is metal junk and that dumb book. Fishing through his pockets luckily reveals a gum wrapper that has seen better days and at least two wash cycles, but at least there’s no gum in it.

Maybe some other time though, Max quickly scribbles onto it, before rolling it up and pelting it at Johnny’s face. He definitely doesn’t want to admit that he feels guilty for calling a bully a bully, that’s not what this is, it’s just. Gotta encourage interpersonal growth or whatever. That’s all.

Upon reading the latest note, Johnny’s anger dissolves off his face in favor of a very wide, very wobbly grin. He looks up to meet Max’s gaze for a second, flushes, and then props his elbow up on the back of his chair as he glances around the classroom, like he’s trying to look all cool and unconcerned.

It’s… kind of adorable?

Who knew Johnny was such a dork when it came to trying to make friends.

Max is still marveling at this revelation, when he spots a flash of a familiar blue inside Johnny’s open jacket. Widening his eyes, he has to resort to gesticulating wildly to get the other boy’s attention since he’s out of paper and throwing a magnet would probably wake Garcia up.

As soon as Johnny notices Max’s charades, any hint of him ever being something like innocent or adorable slips away in favor of a grin made of pure evil and possibly shark teeth implants.

‘Oh, this?’ He pantomimes in very fake surprise, before reaching into his jacket and taking out MAX’S HAT. Far from returning it, even though that was the whole reason they both ended up here, he pretends like he’s never even seen it before. Johnny silently oohs and ahhs over every inch of it, before turning it around backwards and planting it on his own head.

Max’s hands hit the desk, hard.

“GIVE THAT BACK JOHNNY,” he whisper-yells. “JOHNNY. TAKE IT OFF.”

Johnny puts his hands behind his head, silently pretending to whistle.

“YOU-”

“SHHHHHH,” the ghost jock says, “Some of us are trying to serve our time peacefully, man.”

Both Max and Johnny shush him right back with extreme violence, then the girl shushes them, then the weirdo in the back starts hissing, and finally Garcia wakes up with a loud “SNNMRF.”

“No talking in detention,” he intones menacingly… then meets Max’s eyes. “Ugh, you.”

“Mr. Garcia, I need my hat back,” Max says daringly, arm straight up in the air. “Or I don’t know what kind of weird stuff I might start saying.”

Blackmail is a filthy, filthy business, but by golly does it feel good. He almost gets why Suzy is so dedicated to the craft. Garcia blanches, and instantly orders Johnny to return Max’s hat. The bully does so with an impressed look on his face, darting intrigued glances between the teacher and Max, but he doesn’t care.

He’s too busy pulling his hat on, adjusting it to maximum comfort level. His head, which Ollie kind of had a point about feeling naked without it, is finally back to normal and it feels good. He almost wishes he’d thought about using his blackmail on Garcia sooner, though he’s not sure Starchman would have cared.

Max shoots Johnny a triumphant grin, tapping the brim of his cap with two fingers.

The bully stares at him for several seconds, eyes wide and not appearing to breathe, before dropping his face flat to the desk with a thunk. He puts his arms over his ears and doesn’t move once for the rest of detention.

It takes almost half an hour to let out, but even stuck back in the same silent torture as he was before the first note flew his way, Max somehow feels anything but bored.

Instead, he puts his hands behind his head and silently pretends to whistle.

#bullymagnet week #bullymagnet #paranatural #my fic #johnny actually obeys the rules of detention most of the time #rj though talks a lot in detention it's super metal #also at one point in drafting johnny wrote a poem about his friends just thought i'd share that #it was terrible he has no talent with words

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drewxmay · 7 years

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Contestshipping Review - Part Nine - Who, What, When, Where, Wynuat?

Index

-The Title-

The episode is so good I don't care about how long it took me to remember it.

(It took me 3 months)

-Episode Link-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWqXaycQsFw

-The Review-

0:00

The episode starts off with Ash and Pikachu screaming defiantly against the waves.

Presumably for training becuase of course that will work.

0:12

Max: And remember May about your next contest!

May: Ya just one more ribbon and I'll be able to enter the Grand Festival!

The last time you saw Drew you only had 2 ribbons. Dang has it really been that long???

0:23

23 seconds in and we already see Drew! This episode is up to a great start!

Ash: Hold on. Is that... Drew?

Shocked becuase you haven't seem him is so long,

Why is he here anyways?

Maybe he's also planning to scream at the waves becuase that was a great idea for training on Ash's part.

0:40

Drew: Masquirain use Silver Wind!

HOLY SH*T THAT THING IS POWERFUL.

Ash: Whoa check out that power!

I would've kicked you in the face if you hadn't said that.

0:56

Ash: Drew hey! :runs up to Drew and everybody follows:

Drew: Oh, it's you guys again.

Ash: We saw the whole thing! That technique was awesome!

Drew: :flicks hair: That's just one of the many awesome attacks I'll be using at the grand Festival.

Ash and Drew's conversations are just so pure I wish we had more of them lol.

1:09

May: And that's where you and I will face off!

Drew: So you already have your five ribbons?

May: :pulls out ribbon case triumphantly: Just one more to go!

May I thought that you would have learned by now. You should know not to brag about having four ribbons you should already know he has five.

Drew: Isn't that nice. :pulls out ribbon case with all five ribbons:

Ash: He's got all five...

Drew: The Grand Festival is in six weeks, only one more contest until then May.

I feel like as May gets better at training she should be able to easily know stuff like this, and for some reason she hasn't learned yet. Also I won't be reviewing the episode she gets her fifth ribbon she gets it though as anybody he knows that much about Contestshipping should know.

1:49

Drew: Still as happy-go-lucky and clueless as ever.

May: Well how about a practice battle right here Mr.Know-It-All???

Drew: Well I guess Masqurain and I could use a little warm up before then.

1:59

Theme song!

Or not...

Just go to 2:03...

2:05

Ash: Begin!

Why is Ash in charge of this battle, isn't Brock usually?

Drew: After you May~

Passive Aggressiveness.

Battle goes as accordingly-

May uses silver wind, and it comes out as rings. Masquirain flew through the silver wind and the wind all disappeared. Then Masqurain used Silverwind, and Beautifly dodged it by... somersaulting in the air or something. May said to dodge it with a somersault so...

THEN A GIANT FISH APPEARED ON THE BEACH.

3:00

I remember bursting out laughing when I first saw this. You need to watch it for yourself it's so goddamn funny.

So then Team Rocket comes out of the top of it's head and does their into thingy... actually they didn't they did the first 2 seconds of it then Meowth said their cut it short.