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vicsy · 1 year

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hold down, rewind

2,6k, mature, Daniel/Max. read on AO3.

I want to say huuuuuuge thanks to @leclerctops for putting up with me, reading through this mess and reassuring me that all of this makes sense. 💕 As usual, shout out to the Bread server, I love you all so much for inspiring me to write again.

Daniel processes his journey back home, curses time for its existence and kisses Max like a deja vu.

Time is a flat circle or whatever shit people keep saying on the internet; Daniel doesn't really keep up with the buzz, can't grasp the full meaning of it even if he tried amidst the turmoil of his homecoming. And yeah, everyone keeps calling it that.

For all Daniel knows, time is not some fucking circle; it's something he's constantly running out of. Time is never on his side.

Daniel wouldn't, by all means, call himself a believer in fate or a higher power but he'd send a thank you card to the universe if a chance ever presents itself. Or if he goes completely off the rails. His journey back home – and, yeah, he's calling it home now, he's rolling with the punches – to him reads more like returning from a failed conquest, dragging his battered body to where he can lick his wounds in peace; to somewhere he feels safe enough to admit to the failures that befell him.

Time, that bitch, would never be kind enough to him so he stops treating it like a commodity. Slaps a handle with care sticker on the whole thing and keeps on living. Without an ounce of regret, though, just with a bunch of lessons learned, a bruised ego, thicker skin and a face card that never declines.

Maybe something is wrong with time. Maybe Daniel has some screws loose in his head, not a surprise after the year he's had. Reality feels off, warped, tilted on its axis as he signs the dotted line and jokes around with Christian; poses for some photographs and records a couple of videos for good PR; greets the mechanics and Red Bull staff, who still consider Daniel one of their own more than a driver for a rival team. Frankly, he always kind of hated the taste of papaya.

It doesn't truly hit him until he's clad in dark-blue colors for the first time in what seems like forever. In what seems like lost time. It's then that he feels something catching up to him, scratching the back of his neck; asking him to turn around and witness the chances he's missed. Daniel won't look back, no way in hell. Only forward now, where the future is still uncertain but ignorance offers familiar comfort.

They say that the greatest and most impactful historical events tend to circle back and repeat themselves, like a curse of a lifetime. In Daniel's case, this for sure isn't that, barely an event. Those words are too big for an Australian boy with braces who just wanted to race all around the world, lost his way in the process, and defied all odds for a second chance.

This time, the whole Red Bull shebang would not be the same. Daniel isn't an active part of the grid but he wanted it that way, even if some fuckers on the internet call him a show pony now. He feels indebted to the team, all the squabbles laid to rest in the past where they belong. He'll put the work in now, he'll prove his weight in gold. A time comes when Daniel would get back into a race car under his own number or abandon it altogether, douse his life in gasoline and light up a match. In his wreckage of a mind, the decision is still up for grabs.

Daniel is not always there, at the Red Bull garage. He kicks back and lets time slip through his fingers like sand in the hourglass. Stays in Perth for so long he forgets where his passport is. Makes up for years of lost time with his family, fools around on their farm like a kid; goes on elaborate adventures with his friends, indulges in his every insane whim and finally laughs, unburdened. Time, ever the killjoy, only feeds his hunger.

He gets the itch under his skin the moment a new season actually starts, an alarm going off in his head, shrieking you should be racing, you should be training, you should be driving. And Daniel isn't in that place, doesn't miss it, he doesn't– except he fucking does. Has to google what FOMO is because Scotty won't stop bothering him, saying he has it like some kind of disease. Daniel promptly tells him to fuck off. Time's still not right.

Thing is, he fucking hates his friends for being right. And it's not like Daniel is… absent or something. He went to pre-season testing, all smiley and full of joy, fresh off vacation. At the track, Daniel didn't stay still for a single second. He chatted with Red Bull mechanics about the changes in the car, grilled them for all the details; distracted Max by telling him the most annoying jokes he knows, like Max hasn’t heard more of them during the short time they spent together off-season — tucked away safely on Daniel's farm, a secret to the outside world. He even got on well with Checo, not minding some tension. It was all fine. Daniel didn't feel out of place, sticking out like a sore thumb. It was fine.

When the lights go out in Bahrain, Daniel is not fine. Sitting in front of the TV in his Monaco apartment, not fine. He wants to curse the natural passage of time for the fact that his life is playing out on the screen while he's on the fucking sidelines. By choice, he has to remind himself, and yet he yearns to feel the fire ignite inside of him, but there is a dull ache in its stead. Daniel stares at his phone, at the thumbs-up emoji Max sent him as a response to his good luck message. On the screen, they're five laps in.

Daniel spent a month leading up to the season giving out interviews, repeating word for word, it's a new exciting chapter of my life and Red Bull does feel like home to me, like coming back to family and people have different, uh, reactions to me joining the team as a third driver and I'm focusing on doing what would be best for me in the long run. This and so many other rehashed sentences that Daniel treats like a doctrine, like the only true testament to exist in the world — the one he desperately wants to believe in. But all of it is pure bullshit. People telling him he came back to Red Bull because it’s easy and he’s washed is bullshit; trying and failing to accept that he’s back at square one, not even a real driver, is bullshit. Time is unfair and cruel to Daniel and he has no one to place the blame on, wandering like an exile in a world that was once at his feet.

He wishes for many things, honestly. To rebuild his career brick by brick; get back on the grid; not read dumb comments about his life on the internet; quit racing for good if it keeps hurting him. Stop worrying about time. But whatever Daniel wants to build from scratch is already there, waiting, after he willingly let it slip away. A couple of years ago, Daniel would have laughed at the prospect of crawling back to his old stomping grounds. You can’t go back in time, you can’t come back home and find it as it was. Right? Right.

As the Daniel Ricciardo he is today, he couldn't not appreciate the irony.

Time is a weird fucking concept, an indomitable force of the universe, but Daniel wouldn’t mind taking control of it, mould it to his liking, do some minor time travel while he’s at it. If he’s not behind the wheel of a Red Bull car, maybe a Delorean will do; he’ll take it for a spin, blissfully ignore Doc Brown’s lessons on messing up a timeline — it’ll do shit to whatever he wants fixed.

At the back of his mind, Daniel knows the universe is teaching him a lesson, but he's never been good at those, so he wishes he could skip this part straight to the one where he finds atonement.

“I missed you in this, in– blue,” Max blurts out, shy, cheeks flushed a lovely pink and Daniel doesn’t need a fictional car to fling himself into the past anymore.

On the dingy couch in his driver’s room, sitting an arm’s length from Daniel, Max looks too young again, eighteen again, with a puppy crush written all over his face. Daniel does an honest to god double take and his memory hits him with a flashback, the same setting about six years ago. Maybe he is wrong in the head. Or maybe he's just been blind and busy trying to grasp the concept of forces beyond his comprehension to see how Max was always the one who stayed, an unchanged constant of Daniel's otherwise turbulent being. A lifeline he's been clinging to as if he was drowning.

"Aw, Maxy, you're gonna make me blush," he jokes in self-defense, throat tight, and– it's weird since Daniel's been wearing Red Bull colors for a couple of months now. He gets it a beat later — missed you at the races, Max means. Daniel missed himself that way, too.

Max looks soft and happy, not wearing a cap for once, and Daniel reaches out to him with a quiet come here, sweetheart, forever unable to resist. Max climbs into his lap eagerly, with practiced ease, and loops his hands behind Daniel's neck. He can’t help but stare with warmth in his eyes before tilting his own head back and bringing Max down.

It’s a gentle press of lips to lips at first, a quiet hello between them, an I missed you that they won’t say enough times. It doesn’t take long for Daniel to turn things around, slip his tongue past Max’s plush lips, tug at the hair behind his ear and make it dirty. Daniel deepens the kiss, swallows a whimper Max lets out, the inside of his mouth smooth and hot. It makes them both dizzy. Daniel strokes Max’s side up and down, draws circles on his hip, squeezes his thigh before slipping his hand underneath the hem of the tiny shorts Max is wearing, palm flat against supple skin. He gasps at the teasing touch and Daniel reminds himself not to get carried away now.

Their first time back together in the same time zone, Daniel locked the flimsy door of the room shut, spread Max naked on that same couch, screwed two fingers inside of him and told him to keep quiet, the thrill of getting caught hanging heavy in the air. And certainly, Max couldn’t, not later when Daniel started fucking him in earnest, messy and fast, little ahs echoing in the small space they shared. Daniel moved forward with a harsh thrust and clamped his palm over Max’s mouth mid-shout. Kept fucking him shallow, eyes locked on his, waiting for a reaction, a sign. Max nodded against the stiff cushion, chest heaving with rabbiting breaths. Daniel got them both off like that. Came into the tight heat of Max with a hard gasp, pushing his head into the couch, feeling his mouth try to move under Daniel’s palm with a stifled moan; watched Max come undone beneath him, his stomach sticky with come and sweat, legs trembling at Daniel’s sides.

Today is race day, so anything beyond would be a no-go, but there’s less rush. Daniel is in the paddock for the first time as a Red Bull driver and on his home soil, too. It feels special and nerve-wracking. Daniel forces himself not to think about it, dials it down a bit, and chooses to focus on mapping Max’s back with his hands, moving to place them on the curve of his ass. Slick sounds of kissing ring loudly in the silence around them. Max cards through his hair messily and Daniel grips him by the jaw, fingers pressed firmly into the bone there, feeling it move as they kiss, losing the sense of time.

Max is a changed man now, too. Bigger, a new broadness to his shoulders, and so much bolder, unashamed to arch his body into Daniel’s with a lazy roll of his hips. It makes Daniel desperately want to crawl back into his own skin from years ago, dig that part of himself up and dust it off. With time, perhaps, he’ll come around. Until then he’ll just lick into Max’s mouth with renewed vigor, his weight solid and grounding on Daniel, wring ungodly sounds out of Max and relish in the thought of things suddenly falling back into place.

Max chuckles into the kiss, inadvertently breaking it. His eyes get all crinkly, in that special, endearing way that makes Daniel think about finally letting the words he’s been keeping on the tip of his tongue free.

"What?" he simply asks, lips stretched into an easy smile, something unspoken sticking to the back of his teeth.

"Nothing, it is just," Max ducks his head, rubbing his thumb against a pulse point on Daniel's neck. "It is funny how we are doing the same here again. Do you remember?"

Daniel remembers, too much sometimes, to the point where he wants to scrub his memory clean and hit rewind on the banged-up cassette player inside his brain, relive it over and over again, until the record jams and breaks for good. But time, he learned, won't let him do that, not even in exchange for the most precious riches of the world. Daniel wouldn't wish for it, though, not anymore. He's hit with an overwhelming clarity that he’s not alone at ground zero; that Max might just be the catalyst he’s been missing — a pleasant handful in his lap, the reason his heart always beats out of sync.

He still won't believe in fate, but the universe just might be his gal. She relented, guiding Daniel to the right place at the right time, rewarding him a Red Bull contract, his name written in blood on paper. Took matters into her own hands to bring him back where he belongs or whatever. Gave up on the torture and let Daniel circle back to the beginning, give it another go with some knowledge to back him up this time around. He probably needs to throw some of his old convictions in the trash, but it's not the worst he's ever had to do.

For now, Daniel needs a place to start anew; Max tethers him to it, illuminating the path home like a lighthouse.

"'Course I remember, Maxy," he manages, voice hoarse as he traces Max’s kiss-swollen lips with an index finger, touches a freckle there. “I seduced you with my wild charms and weird noises, yeah? You never stood a chance.”

Max punches him playfully on the shoulder as Daniel laughs unabashedly, his heart ten times lighter. Of course, it’s a lie. He was gone for Max from the start, his gangly limbs and all that blunt demeanor — hook, line and sinker. Took them some time to figure each other out, but here they are, signed to the same team again, sneaking away to make out on the couch like teenagers.

To hell with time and its tricks, then.

"It is a little bit weird, but of course in a good way," Max concludes, grinning crookedly, pressing his chest closer to Daniel. He feels Max’s heartbeat mingle with his, nothing but a layer of navy-blue fabric between them. "How we end up in the same position like years before. And you are back on the team now. It is almost the same."

Daniel thinks back to the string of events leading up to this, like he’s some hero in search of redemption with a chip on his shoulder the size of Australia.

“You know how some folks out there say,” he drawls, tugging Max down to kiss him stupid. “Time is a flat circle, baby.”

#maxiel #max/daniel #daniel ricciardo #max verstappen #vicsy writes #this is just me processing daniel's homecoming through 2k+ words #this started as me wanting to write about Daniel and Max making out on the couch #but my brain said ELABORATE #so here we are #daniel/max

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kimchokejin · 2 years

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this is about me/my blog i guess

howdy! 🤠 thanks for stopping by. this is a bts hate blog. i reblog a lot of gif sets, memes, text posts, etc. and talk too much in the tags. i don’t really make things aside from what’s already here

most of my personal info is already in my description so i’m honestly not sure what to say lol. i have tag game stuff and posts that resonated with me if you’re just trying to get a ~vibe~ but if you want to know more about me for some reason, feel free to message! sometimes i can take a long time to respond but i do like to talk to people! especially about bts or just music in general

believe it or not i am an adult 😬 so just in case i would like to ask that minors don’t follow/interact. sometimes i say things on here that i don’t think i should say in front of minors and i don’t want to put anyone here (including myself) in an uncomfortable position. thank you for understanding!

also just a heads up that i am white if that informs your decision of whether or not or how to interact. if you are white and reading this and have never heard of white supremacy culture (which is so much more prevalent and sinister than i think a lot of us realize), please check out this website (that blew my mind tbh and i’m just not sure how many people have seen this masterpiece?) and let’s talk about it 😊

ummm this was my result for my bts personality quiz that i am still embarrassed about yet still trying to improve. as you can see i project onto taekook a LOT luv u babes <3

ummmm i also made a bts song ranker

THAT’S_MY_(a few months ago)_OPINIOOOOOOON.gif

a long, unrequested, incomplete but occasionally updated list of things i will NEVER shut up about:

disaster libra jimin

rm drunk tweets

hobi’s (alleged) joints

tae’s espn

jin’s masochism

expensive girl namjoon interviewing pharrell for rolling stone knowing in the back of his mind that expensive girl exists and will never be deleted from the internet

yoongi being THAT fucking funny and no one noticing

namjoon never having some goddamn peace and quiet…ever.

vmin in the rm studio tour vlive

foreheard jin

feral tae

fluffy blonde jimin (my greatest weakness)

jin’s shoulders

namjoon spoiling everything

hobi’s frog doll with the tiny penis

namjoon. like just look at him i'm sorry

jungkook making fun of rrrrap monsta in the year 2021 namtaekook making fun of jimin's dance move in save me in the year 2022

daydream hobi SHORT HAIRED HOBI MORE MV HOSEOK YTC IN BUSAN HOBI

“let the beat in”

alt boy gen z icon jk

happy yoongi :)

lachimolala/carobonara (still)

tae in the glass case (and namjoon’s face)

tae having “just one bite” (and namjoon’s face)

jimin shy dancing

jin setting off fireworks in the morning

vmin sticker betrayal

rm putting rap monster as his legal name

rm insisting his sweatshirt is on right side out when the pockets were literally inside

rm not knowing they’re live

the spanking game

j-hope’s “keep one rolled” shirt J-HOPE’S CONDOM SHIRT

but also the whole keep one rolled/legalize it/heroin trifecta

when rm asked bts what food they liked in america that they couldn’t get in korea

jinmin fart skit

rm saying wow to yoongi’s butt

bts trying to cheat on taped run episodes

jungkook getting caught taking jimin’s tissue

tae pretending to get drunk off a water bottle?

anpanman 180524 (rip namjoon)

“oh hyuuuuung” *finger guns*

SHE SAID SHE SAID SHE SAID SHE’S FROM HAWAII

tata mic

“yeah baby i’m nervous!”

namjoon learning and growing over time <3

the lies behind your eyes fake love cover

the bwl dance set to juice by lizzo

this picture of 2seok

the memetic capabilities of the tragically overlooked bts hybe-sanctioned animated fanfiction universe story app

#about me #making this a year late because i'm pretty sure only 2% of people use desktop at this point #a carrd? in THIS economy???

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adventism-atheism-orthodoxy-me · 2 months

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The Invisible Hand

Back in the late 1700's a man by the name of Adam Smith in a book he wrote entitled, the Wealth of Nations, gave a name, "The Invisible Hand", to a system, a god, that had existed since the dawn of time. Known imperfectly throughout history, mankind still benefited from this god's benevolence every time goods and services exchanged hands peaceably, rather than through war, violence and coercion. First sheaves of wheat could be traded for clay pots, or barrels of fish; later these same sheaves of wheat could be traded for currency, which didn't depend upon the particular needs of potters or fishmongers to determine value. Every time something is, has, or will ever be traded, this god's activities are made manifest.

However, like every system on earth, as soon as man realized that he could exploit it, distortions resulted from this exploitation. In Ancient Rome, "Bread and Circuses", became the way a ruler could distract his people from problems that plagued their everyday existence. It was a market trade-off in distraction, but at some point the cost of maintaining the expense of these distractions could no longer be maintained, and the Empire that used these tactics fell into disarray and dissolution.

We currently live in a society that has raised this "Invisible Hand" to heights unprecedented in history. We have sects with their own priesthoods: Capitalists advocate for completely unmediated restraints on market manipulation, while Communists advocate for total restraint, with only government manipulation allowed. None of this is seen to be mediated in any way by an even higher power, by none other than God who established these processes and mechanisms that would enable us to engage with one another peaceably.

I remember the first time I heard, "Greed is good", I thought to myself that it was an oversimplification of a very complex issue. Maybe fine for a bumper sticker, but certainly not something anyone would take seriously. Enlightened self interest does lead to good outcomes. Every creature in the animal kingdom seeks to avoid pain and death, and seeks to acquire food and shelter. That greed could be seen as the greatest good, a moral absolute in it's own right, unmediated by the grace of God who made this gift possible seemed bizarre. What's really disheartening is hearing Christians passionately argue that Capitalism is God given in the same sense as God IS Capitalism.

To suppress the invisible hand is to deny reality. Many communes, and even countries have tried to find a better way to produce and distribute goods and services to those who need them outside of using the principles outlined by Adam Smith. These societies almost universally fall apart because of unmitigated human selfishness. They are frequently run by authoritarian leaders, and are characterized by rampant slothfulness, and hording. Inflation in the Soviet Union could be measured by the length of lines that formed for the acquisition of goods. Rather than exchanging time for productive work that produced a product and a wage that could be used to purchase a good or service; time was spent in a line, producing nothing.

The Invisible Hand is a God given creation, it cannot be denied, but must be constrained by the "Good God, who loves mankind".

Much of modern intelligentsia loves to blame the modern American "Consumer Culture" for the ills in our society. The problem with that assertion is that the consumer can only buy what is produced. My favorite example is that nobody can buy a house that hasn't been built. But other examples abound. Hot dog buns are sold in units of 8, while hot dogs are sold in units of 12. Printer companies sell a different printer every year, and jack up the prices of printer cartridges in prior models. Smart phones are almost required, you can't park a car in my town without using an app to register a parking payment. Manufactured obsolescence means that goods that could be cared for and maintained for ten years historically, must now be replaced every five; and repairs cost more now because instead of resoldering a wire on an electrical device, whole modules must be replaced and the old ones tossed out into ever growing landfills. Grocery stores no longer use dumpsters, but rather use trash compactors to prevent perfectly decent food from being scavenged away. Healthy food is filled with additives to increase profits, and sometimes to encourage addiction, resulting in an ever diminishing quality of food, making all of us sicker. Monthly subscriptions for various services has become almost ubiquitous. Our entire society practically forces paid consumption - forces it. We are not a consumer society, we are a PRODUCER SOCIETY. Government statistics measures GNP, Nothing must prevent the ever increasing production of goods. And heaven forbid if prices or consumer confidence drops.

It is always characteristic of the "haves" to blame the "have nots", the disenfranchised, for their issues. Corporations, in their unmediated quest for profit, takes advantage of the consumer. First, they do everything they can to minimize costs, polluting their environments, that then need to be cleaned up by the very same consumers that bought their products. No longer are goods priced at cost plus 30%; rather, market research pin-points the precise pain point that limits the price most customers will spend for goods and services, and uses that for guidance, pocketing the excess as "profit". And don't even get me started as to how most of these consumers earn their living. They are disrespected by both their bosses, and by their customers.

"Consumers" are disrespected by producers, manipulated by them through advertising, exploited, tricked, coerced, and blamed for the rise and fall of economies. They are seen as nothing more than pawns and marks. Do not tell me that the individual consumer has any control over any of this.

Contrary to the assertion that the modern American consumer experience is that of freedom, it is an experience of bondage to a vast array of powers greater than ones own. Governments - federal, state, and local, Corporations, policies, laws, rules, regulations, even HOAs. All designed to make the individual feel small, unimportant and powerless. It is no wonder that societal rage is on the rise.

In the first Century there was a movement in Palistine that preached a message of freedom in a world of exploitation by the principalities and powers of the age. The cost of following this message to those who followed "The Way" was extremely steep, persecution and death in many cases. Yet this movement grew, in spite of the negative market forces weighed against it. People heard this message, heard the testimony about the one who had stood up to the bullies of heavenly and earthly power, and came out of the ordeal glorified.

That is the God that motivates.

We need fewer apologetics defending a God in the mold of Capitalist exploitation, a corporate middle manager, or worse - a CEO. He is not a God that offers any kind of redemption. We need more evangelists looking outside of our self imposed silo Churches preaching of a God better then the fallen world around us. Better than that world, and able to transform it.

It's NOT the consumer, it's almost never the consumer, it's the product. No amount of advertising in the world will redeem a subpar product.

A man can't buy a house that's not being sold, and he's not obligated to buy the one that is.

Glory to God, the maker of heaven and earth and all things therein. Have Mercy upon me, A Sinner.

#Adam Smith #The Invisible Hand #Capitalism #Communism #God #Consumerism #Meditations #Ontology

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liugeaux · 9 months

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Greatest Boxed Set Ever (Prepping for Vol 20)

Sure, I just talked a bunch about the incoming Greatest Songs Ever Vol 20, and I highly encourage you to read the linked blog (I'm kind of proud of myself). This post will be much more esoteric and odd.

That post referenced a fictional collection of CDs named the "Greatest Boxed Set Ever", and this post is that idea taken a step closer to reality. I've already talked about the 2 CDs I made in the early aughts to celebrate my narrow view of our musical world. Using the existing list of Greatest Songs Ever and that same NARROW scope, I've curated a 6-disc boxed set of tracks that, had I continued to make Mixed CDs, would have been volumes 3-6.

It's a weird alternate reality version of my established Greatest Songs Ever, that will lead directly into Vol. 20. I'm sure it sounds confusing, but as I established in that last post, I'm doing this for me, so these are my rules. **shakes fists maniacally at the sky**

Before we can create discs 3-6, we have to establish what tracks were on discs 1 and 2. Finding out what those were, was much harder than I imagined it would be. I somehow lost my copy of the original Greatest Songs Ever disc 1 and most disc drives have a VERY hard time reading 20-year-old burned CDs with heavy printed stickers on them.

I had to enlist the help of the only other person I knew who still had a copy of Disc 1, Lesley Keyes Colwell. With her help and an Xbox 360, the device that could read the discs easiest, I gathered the original tracklists for Discs 1 and 2. Below are the original tracks from what young Sergio (age 17-21) thought were The Greatest Songs Ever.

Disc 1 - Release Date - 2000-ish

Counterfeit - Limp Bizkit

Bones + Joints - Finger Eleven

Desperately Wanting - Better Than Ezra

Smells Like Teen Spirit - Nirvana

Adam's Song - Blink 182

Is Anybody Home? - Our Lady Peace

Typical Situation - Dave Matthews Band

Machinehead - Bush

Counting Blue Cars - Dishwalla

Papercut - Linkin Park

Everlong - Foo Fighters

When I Come Around - Green Day

Mr. Jones - Counting Crows

Drive - Incubus

Mudshovel - Staind

Save Yourself - Stabbing Westward

Shimmer - Fuel

1979 - Smashing Pumpkins

First things first, I'd stand behind every one of these songs. Choosing Limp Bizkit as track #1 is much more trollish than intended, but I love all this music, so no complaints here.

Disc 2 - Release Date - 2004-ish

I Believe in a Thing Called Love - The Darkness

A Certain Shade of Green - Incubus

Next to Nothing - Breaking Benjamin

The Best Deceptions - Dashboard Confessional

Bellevue - Fingertight

Sweet Child O' Mine - Guns N' Roses

You Oughta Know - Alanis Morissette

The Anthem - Good Charlotte

Under the Bridge - Red Hot Chili Peppers

Iris - Goo Goo Dolls

Far Behind - Candlebox

Run-Around - Blues Traveler

Interstate Love Song - Stone Temple Pilots

Wait and Bleed - Slipknot

Rain - Audiovent

Scars - Papa Roach

4 A.M. - Our Lady Peace

Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) - Green Day

Again, no regrets about any of these. Actually, a couple of them (Fingertight and Audiovent) are hyper-deep-cuts that deserve any and all attention they can get. There's a reason these CDs stayed in my Truck's rotation.

Here's where it gets weird. Discs 3-6 were never actually created. So, I've combed through my existing list and carefully curated 4 more discs that could fill out the rest of the box set. I gave myself a few parameters to work within. The songs had to be in the genres I listened to during my youth and be released within my lifetime (basically 1983-current). Each disc is given a release date based on the disc's contents to create a faux release cadence similar to a "NOW" collection. The songs can't have been released after the artificial release dates. This will make the songs on the discs progressively get newer as we venture through them.

This may make more sense once I start listing discs, if not, I promise it makes sense in my brain. Also, each CD cannot exceed 80 minutes because that's the length of a standard CDR format disc. With that out of the way, here are discs 3-6. I even threw together some fake disc art. I can't believe I found that weird-ass font again.

Disc 3 - Release Date - 2005-ish

Sugar, We're Going Down - Fall Out Boy

Time Ago - Black Lab

High Voltage - Linkin Park

Weight of the World - Saliva

Killing in the Name Of - Rage Against the Machine

At the Stars - Better Than Ezra

My Happy Ending - Avril Lavigne

Crush - Dave Matthews Band

Wonderwall - Oasis

Downfall - TrustCompany

Daughters - John Mayer

The Beautiful People - Marilyn Manson

The Dolphin's Cry - Live

No One - Cold

Brian Wilson - Barenaked Ladies

Hey Man, Nice Shot - Filter

Tribute - Tenacious D

I'll Be - Edwin McCain

Okay, here's the first disc where I see some cracks. That TrustCompany song might have been crowned prematurely, and both the Saliva and Live tracks probably should have been rethought, but overall, it's still a strong list.

Disc 4 - Release Date - 2006-ish

Man in the Box - Alice in Chains

All Downhill From Here - New Found Glory

Harder to Breathe - Maroon 5

Pressure - Skindred

Only Happens When It Rains - Garbage

Joan - Butch Walker

Kickstart My Heart - Motley Crue

Makedamnsure - Taking Back Sunday

Stop This Train - John Mayer

Complicated Questions - Finger Eleven

My Own Summer - Deftones

Fade to Black - Metallica

The Sharpest Lives - My Chemical Romance

Dreams - The Cranberries

Bright Lights - Matchbox Twenty

I Remember You - Skid Row

Mr. Brightside - The Killers

More Than Love - Los Lonely Boys

Live Forever - Oasis

Disc 4 is solid and includes an unprecedented 19 tracks. The only hole is the Los Lonely Boys song. Not that it's a bad song, it's fine, and might even deserve its spot, but the initial reason for its inclusion is super-dubious. That doesn't matter because once a song is enshrined, it CANNOT be un-enshrined.

Disc 5 - Release Date - 2013-ish

My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark - Fall Out Boy

Volcano Girls - Veruca Salt

Synthesizers - Butch Walker

Her Words Destroyed My Planet - Motion City Soundtrack

Gravemakers & Gunslingers - Coheed & Cambria

Everybody Talks - Neon Trees

Innocence - Halestorm

CrushCrushCrush - Paramore

Tears Don't Fall - Bullet For My Valentine

Thinking of You - Katy Perry

Car Radio - Twenty One Pilots

Open Your Eyes - Guano Apes

Little Black Submarines - The Black Keys

Watch Over You - Alter Bridge

Friday I'm in Love - The Cure

Weatherman - Dead Sara

Second Chance - Shinedown

So What If You Go - Adelitas Way

Kiss From a Rose - Seal

Just like the canonical blog posts, there's quite a date gap between Disc 4 and Disc 5, but that's fine. This is the first disc representing more modern songs, so there aren't really any regrets here (at least not yet). The closest is that Adelitas Way song, but then I listen to it and I totally agree with 2013 Sergio.

Disc 6 - Release Date - 20...um...23?

Shut Up and Dance - Walk the Moon

I Think I'm OKAY - Machine Gun Kelly Feat. Yungblud & Travis Barker

Here To Mars - Coheed & Cambria

New Horizons - Flyleaf

Roman Holiday - Halsey

Drown - Bring Me the Horizon

How About You - Staind

The Jester - Badflower

Thinking Out Loud - Ed Sheeran

Dreams - Van Halen

Oh no, where are the last 10 of Disc 6? Good question, it's the theme of Vol 20! That's right, I have built all these fictitious discs with the sole purpose of justifying the theme of Vol 20. Do you feel dumb yet? I hope not, I put a lot of work into this weird fever dream, so try to enjoy yourself.

Since these discs are basically full of rock tracks that I would have chosen had this project continued as a Mixed CD adventure, Vol 20 continues that idea. 10 new Greatest Songs Ever in the vein of the original aughts-era disc releases. Yeah, I get that I'm the only person this appeals to, and I get that anyone just now familiarizing themselves with my list will think I'm insane, but let me throw this out there. If you've made it this far and you're still reading ... you either understand the nature of this project and "get it" or you deserve to be confused.

With all of this "on wax," the next step is finally typing out the post for Vol. 20. It'll be out soon, I promise. Until then, please enjoy the ongoing Youtube playlist that is, THE GREATEST SONGS EVER!

#music #tumblr #myspace #greatestsongsever #greatest songs ever #mixed cds #compact discs #cdr #burned cds

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lastchancevillagegreen · 11 months

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Thursday, 22 June 2023:

Arthur or The Decline And Fall Of The British Empire The Kinks (Pye/ BMG/Abkco) (reissue released in 2019; original released in 1969)

For the past few months (at least since 11 April when I last posted two consecutive Kinks albums) the reissue of Arthur has been mysteriously off the market and commanding big prices. Discogs had zero copies, eBay had one or two and those are stupid prices. Amazon had third party sellers asking enormous prices too and then Sunday, I discovered everyone had Arthur, the 2019 double album reissue for normal prices! Discogs has half a dozen, amazon has it and I didn't even bother with eBay because I don't care what eBay has. It did dawn on me that I told my brother I wouldn't buy any more albums until I received his final birthday present (he is worried I'll buy whatever it is he has for me before he gets to deliver it to me mid July). Hopefully, it isn't a copy of this album (which I doubt it is). Arthur was the Kinks seventh album and their follow up to the magnificent Village Green Preservation Society, an album I simply cannot stop playing. I remember when Arthur came out and I didn't buy it because, as I've said, the Kinks often baffled me and scared me. What did I know about English history? They were way too adult for my little kid brain.

Above you will find photos of the album cover, the gatefold and the back of the album. I took the photos outside because this day has gotten away from me and by the time I snapped the photos upstairs it was 7:00 p.m. and it was too dark upstairs. When it is too dark, the digital camera will not properly focus because, as I've endlessly nagged, digital photography is 100% the worst invention since the computer. So, I had to go outside and shoot the photos. That was secretly fine because it is like a sauna upstairs which I do not cool down with an air conditioner in the summer (nor do I heat it during the winter) despite the fact I practically live upstairs year around watching movies or listening to albums. As for the gatefold, I was in a terrible mood today and I thought as I took the albums out, who the devil designed this gatefold? The first album comes out the normal opening for a double album, but the second album comes out opposite. And then I realized: it comes out of the kangaroo's pouch. I know that's how it came out in 1969 when it was just a single album, but it never dawned on Boy Genius until he turned 82 that it came out the kangaroo's pouch! See how adult the Kinks are?

Below are the front and back inner sleeves for Record 1 followed by the labels for that first album.

The next photos you will see are the second inner sleeve (front and back) followed by both sides of that album's label.

This album, a reissue, comes with a big booklet that talks about Arthur and how it was made. (There is also an ad for the 50th Anniversary box set of Arthur which contains four CDs. One of the discs contains "new doo wop choir recordings" of Arthur and learning that about made my head expand. I have enjoyed the "Preservation Live Choir recordings" of songs from Village Green off the 50th Anniversary box set of that album so much that I absolutely must have doo wop versions of Arthur. I'm all set at this point to name The Kinks as the greatest British Band ever to exist in all the universe but I won't, I'll keep that to myself.) Below you will find the front and back of that giant album sized booklet. The back of the booklet is at an angle so you don't see my shadow and the iPhone iPhoto pose that adorns most of discogs' photos.

The final shot is a close up of the hype sticker on the front of the album.

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legoshit · 3 years

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𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐑𝐀𝐂𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐀𝐍𝐀𝐋𝐘𝐒𝐈𝐒: 𝐇𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐊𝐀 𝐌𝐎𝐑𝐑𝐎𝐖

ft: hisoka my love

a/n: i’m a hisoka stan and i am not sorry about it (no i don’t condone his actions yes we exist) ALSO I HAVE YET TO WATCH THE ELECTION ARC SO I'LL ONLY BE DISCUSSING DETAILS FROM THE FIRST 4 SEASONS; I'LL MOST LIKELY ADD ON TO THIS WHEN I DO WATCH IT !!

some hxh spoiler warning

i think hisoka is a very misunderstood character in hunter x hunter. i find him incredibly interesting and i’ve had a strange attachment to him for at least a year. hisoka establishes himself as the primary antagonist of the first 2-3 seasons in the 3rd episode, when he turns a hunter examinee’s arm into flower petals after he bumped into him and didn’t apologize. he is referred to as “the magician” by some because of this as well as his appearance, which is very jester-like, with colorful makeup, hair, and clothing. he has a vastly different personality from many of the other characters, he's fairly soft spoken and mysterious, but can often say rather shocking things very casually, which can sometimes be unsettling. he is very sadomasochistic when it comes to battle, which he is also very skilled in. he craves power, constantly looking for someone who could potentially beat and kill him in battle. he gets off on killing and fighting people, and shows little interest in anyone he feels he could defeat easily. he wants the thrill, the adrenaline rush, the fear, all of it. for example, he wishes to fight chrollo lucilfer, but once he finds out he cannot fight due to kurapika's judgement chain that causes chrollo to not be able to use his nen, he completely loses interest and just leaves.

disclaimer: in this next bit, i am NOT defending the pedophilic tones in hisoka's actions, i'm not excusing it, it's just a part i think is important to say.

this hedonistic drive, like i previously mentioned, makes him need to find someone who can beat him, and gon and killua are on their way to being 2 of the greatest/most powerful nen users, so hisoka is attracted to them and their power. and it just so happens that they both are 12-13 years old, but on the other hand, he is also very attracted to kurapika and chrollo, who are... not literal children.

back to our regularly scheduled programming

hisoka acts as somewhat a mentor (i'm using that word VERY loosely) to gon and killua, likely so he can derive more pleasure when killing them later. he helps the two in the volleyball game against razor and his team and leads them to win with their last move. he could've very easily killed gon during the hunter exam and in heaven's arena, but he doesn't, just so he can see him grow into his full potential before killing him. he uses the metaphor of fruit to describe his opponents, referring to them as ripe or unripe.

he is entirely self-centered and selfish, and genuinely does not care what he does, as long as it makes him happy. he regularly skips phantom troupe meetings, being completely carefree and doing anything to have fun, which may or may not involve murder. he doesn't actually care about the troupe, he only joined in hopes of fighting and killing chrollo. he exposes the troupe by telling kurapika the bodies they used were fake. he lies about essentially anything whether it benefits him or if it's just for shits and giggles.

and how could i talk about hisoka without mentioning his nen. he is a transmuter type, making his aura sticky and elastic as his main ability to create the ever so famous bungee gum. he can activate it from his fingers/hands, and feet. this bungee gum is extremely resilient, and only he can see it, as well as attach and detach it from objects, people, etc. he actually named this ability after his childhood favorite bubble gum, which shared the same name, and if you look closely on the packaging, his entire look is based off the designs. his other ability, texture surprise, which is named after the stickers that came with the bubble gum, allows him to apply his aura to any smooth, flat surface to create imagery on it to change its appearance and texture. along with his nen abilities, he is also a master of hand-to-hand combat. wielding only a deck of traditional playing cards, he is able to trick his opponents to defeat and in most cases, kill them. with a genius level intellect, immense strength and endurance, enhanced speed, reflexes, stamina and agility, hisoka is damn near impossible to beat.

in essence, hisoka is a murderous sociopath who shouldn't be trusted, yet his attractiveness makes him a fan favorite. he is essential to the series, and our main characters probably wouldn't be where they are now without his help.

I WAS GONNA WRITE SOMETHING HERE I FORGOT THO

#queer coded villains <333 #hunter x hunter #hxh #hisoka morrow #character analysis

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sybilmarlowe · 2 years

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I've always been addicted to fandoms, I use to follow a lot of series and it's very easy to me to grow fond of certain characters. The peculiar thing is, the characters I like the most are usually the ones who have something in common with me (might sound pretty vain, I know, but I'm ENTJ, I don't do it on purpose 😅)

So, my fav characters are figures I relate to. I've already came up with some who were so close to my personality that I was like "ehy, who's f***ing spying me?!"

Well, as you can assume by my fandom-themed profile, I recently started watching Peaky Blinders (I arrived shamefully late) and... What if I say I never saw the worst sides of my personality represented as well as in the character of Thomas Shelby?

Alright, I'm pretty different irl, I'm mostly cheerful and talkative, I'm not the head of any criminal organization (yet), I'm not even that manipulative and I prefer Scotch whisky.

But for the rest... I seriously had to stop the show in many points because seeing some scenes was actually too much. Especially when it came to see the worst parts of Tom's personality, I actually felt awkward watching at something I'd do irl but from an outside critical pov.

First of all, I totally understand that obsession for control, especially after having been through a really hard time. Not going to bother you with my personal story, but I actually lived a bad situation years ago and when it finished I literally told myself "alright, now I'm taking everything under my control, nothing will ever be able to break me again". So that's it, I want/need to have most of things in hand to feel secure.

Feelings? Total control on them too. It's impressivly possibile to put rationality over emotions sometimes. But possible doesn't mean functional. And although it's easy for me to appear calm and balanced to strangers, people next to me will always notice my real state, even more than myself sometimes...

And another thing: I NEED to give a f***ing SENSE to anything I do, I live from purpose to purpose, in the middle there's reaching for the following purpose 😅

Some other examples....

That scene in which Tommy shouted at Arthur for not being able to overcome thing "as he did". That's me, trying to help with logic and not always understanding why others can't do as I do (that was actually unpleasant to watch cause I literally hate that aspect of mine... 😭).

"I can be scared but still carry on": my lifestyle.

I'm rational as f***k but I take spiritual things hella seriously (oh, I read Tarots ✨).

Tough time? Disappear into the woods 😂

....or work to the point I don't have strength to stand anymore, not to allow my mind to "start talking about myself with myrself"

Of course, I hate myself but I have a high consideration of my potential 👌(this thing has never had sense to me tbh 😳 like, how can you be extremely confident and have a low consideration of yourself at the same time?? Well, Thomas Shelby was created to solve my existential doubts, apparently)

Ah, I found the way to calm down my messy way of living, when I met a person who was able to make me feel in the right place... But things went all wrong ☀ (fortunately nobody died hahaha) and here we are again ✨🍷

My greatest fear? STAGNATION. I could actually die from non-action 😱

The fact I speak French and I love reading poetry doesn't count, I guess, just funny 😂

And tbh I could go on, but I think I've already wrote enough. I knows this look like a f***ing teenage journal page (I should add 20s aesthetic stickers here and there, eh?) but I wanted to tell this story 😂

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I actually think Tommy's character is highly realistic, that's what impresses me the most. His reactions, his way of facing things, his vulnerabilities and bad and good sides, they actually did a stunning job in making a non-existing man so credible. And from some point of view... It has been extremely useful to me. Sounds trivial, but it's easier to understand you more and find on which aspects of yours you should work on when you see someone who's similar to you represented.

Now. I'm 28 going for 29 now, if Peaky Blinders taught me something, I'm in the right age to start my climbing for becoming a goddess (and won't promise I'm not trying 😏)🍷 in the meantime, I'll just use my little free time to work on fanarts 😂 next one will be Polly ❤ so keep following, I swear I'm not writing any other stupid thing like this 😂

#peaky blinders #random stuff #I did this more for myself than anyone else #tommy shelby #polly grey #don't know

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thedenofravenpuff · 3 years

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I gotta wonder what maded you start doing your Lazy Camp comics?

Cuz I'm paid to.

I was originally approached by @roan-rpg to make illustrations and backers rewards for the Roan RPG game book - later on Clear Skies asked if I wanted to take on a different project for the RPG-universe he created with Roan.

Showing me the old WWII comics by Bill Maudlin, saying he needed a cast fitting for it and comics made in a fitting style, aka ink and all.

And ya know, I always wanted to make comics, I was just never good coming up with enough ideas (or patience) myself. But taking on the Lazy Camp comics I never regretted. All the scripts in the world already exists, just gotta remember to make proper credit to our man Bill Maudlin, and making single panel comics in ink are actually easy and quick for me to do. Only obstacles ever just been a few times I needed a joke explained by a more military minded person, like Clear Skies himself.

Even made a couple of covers for future comic volumes with these to be sold at the Roan RPG booth at cons they dare attend when it is safe. And as proud as I am to see my art in print in the main book, these comic volumes are all just my art and even more pimping, ya know. And I've greatly enjoyed designing and working on every member of the cast. A few from other artists' designs too, just as loveable.

Even as I keep staying closed for commissions, I keep doing these for @roan-rpg, as a steady gig. I see Clear Skies as my employer and the greatest one at that. Met him once at BronyCon19 and had a great time meeting other crew members.

Been working on some fine stickers for the Lazy Camp cast, got some illustrations done for the expansion book, and we still plotting out more cast to be added to really dive into the different species and classes that Roan offers.

So stay tuned and make sure to look up Roan RPG on different sites to stay up to date on anything in the making! You can find them on twitter, DeviantART, FurAffinity, tumblr.. P:

The Roan RPG Project Leave a Tip on Ko-Fi

#PuffBlog #MLP #Roan #Roan RPG #Roan-RPG #RPG #Lazy Camp #Lazy Company #Lazy Company of Camp Palomino #Darthalex70 #Clear Skies #Commission #Bill Maudlin

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the-writers-bookshelf · 3 years

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ahh happy friday!! ive been working on a couple of different things for nanowrimo, but here's a section of one of my novels that im super proud of!!

I knock on the door, before taking a step back.

“Come in.” A voice calls.

(I asked Val, about a month into school, and she said that the headmaster rarely ever leaves his office. Tomiko thinks he’s crazy.)

I push the door open and walk in. “Hello, sir. You called us in here?”

“That I did.” The headmaster stands in front of a window, his figure silhouetted. He turns around and walks towards them, revealing a man around thirty, with bright blue eyes and blond hair.

(Not exactly what I expected.)

“Lana Asturias. Our newest student.” I nod, trying to keep my face emotionless. The headmaster meets each of my friend’s eyes in turn. “Valerie Dean. Godiva Fletcher. Tomiko Amari. Kayla Wright. Blaire Dalton.”

All of us shrink away from his gaze. He’s really creepy.

(I really wish I ditched class today. Don’t know where I’d go though. This school is in the middle of nowhere.)

“I bet you are wondering why I called you in here.” The headmaster says, sounding like every villainous director de escuela in any movie Lana’s ever seen.

I rub the scar over my nose, before crossing my arms.

“There’s something I’ve been doing research on over the course of my life.” I already hate where this conversation is going. “I’ve determined that you seven students are vital in the future of Alb- Great Britain.”

I frown.

“You do know we’re just students, right? It’s not like we can just become the Queen. Or sovereign.” Tomiko demands.

“Have you heard of the myth of King Arthur Pendragon?” The headmaster asks. I shake my head, but everyone else nods. (What? I was raised in a small village in Spain, I didn’t have time for reading.)

“You haven’t heard of it?” Godiva asks. I shrug.

“What does that have to do with us?” Tomiko speaks up.

“The myth states that during Albion’s greatest need, King Arthur will rise again, and be rejoined with the reincarnated souls of his most loyal knights.”

“But that’s just a myth. There’s no actual evidence to suggest that King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table actually existed.”

The headmaster glares at Kayla and she moves back next to Blaire. “Sorry.” She mumbles.

“Unlike what Ms. Wright thinks, there actually is evidence, it’s just been covered up.”

“By who?” Lana raises an eyebrow.

“By Arthur Pendragon.”

Lana scoffs. “Kayla says he’s a myth.”

“Well, in that case, let me introduce myself. My name is King Arthur Pendragon. And you are my Knights of Camelot.”

(unrelated to writing but im excited about it so im sharing, i finally got my stickers for my ipad that i got for digital art and they look so good!)

THIS IS SO COOL I'M SO HERE FOR THIS!!!! :D

#asks #fab friday writers #angelwiththeblue box

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adastraperfortuna · 3 years

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I Played Cyberpunk 2077

Ultimately, Cyberpunk 2077 is an excellent video game. It’s hard to talk about it without acknowledging the backlash that it received around its launch, but the backlash was directly proportional to the amount of marketing that it got. This happens to a lot of games – and frankly, a lot of my favorite games. If I were working at CD Projekt RED and I was responsible for the kind of marketing that resulted in the kind of expectations that they built for themselves, I’d have to take that sort of stuff into deep consideration. But, as someone who bought the game, enjoyed the game, and desperately wants to talk about the game, I’m not sure that it matters. So, to reiterate: Cyberpunk 2077 is good.

There’s so much game to Cyberpunk that it might be easier to start by talking about my favorite part of it that isn’t a game: the photo mode. I’ve joked before about my favorite gameplay loop in Star Citizen being “taking screenshots,” and that’s not my intent here, but some of my favorite games in recent memory have made it easy to look over the memories I made during their runtime. Interspersed within this review will be some of my favorite screenshots that I took – the inclusion of precise controls for things like depth of field, character posing/positioning, and stickers/frames helped to make my screenshot folder feel less like a collection of moments in a game and more like a scrapbook made during the wildest possible trip to the wildest possible city.

And what a city it is. Night City is my favorite setting in a video game in recent memory. It’s not incredibly difficult to make a large environment, but to make a meaningful environment where every location feels lived-in and the streets are dense with things to see and do? That’s a challenge that very few studios have managed to step up to. More than that, Night City feels unique in the landscape of video game cities – whereas a city like Grand Theft Auto V’s Los Santos is rooted in a reality we’re familiar with, Cyberpunk’s retro-futuristic architecture (and overall aesthetic) help lend it a sensibility that we’re unfamiliar with. It really feels like stepping into another world - fully fleshed-out, fully envisioned.

The environment is obviously beautiful and unique, but I was surprised by just how ornate it was. The thought and consideration that went into details as minor as the UIs you’ll encounter in and on everything from car dashboards to PCs and menus both diegetic and otherwise helps the entire world feel diverse, detailed, and cohesive. While everything feels of a kind and everything is working towards the same design goals, the sheer amount of variety was shocking.

The biggest thing that stuck out to me about Night City itself within just a few hours of playing was how vertically oriented it was. Not just in the “there are tall buildings” sense, though there certainly are tall buildings – I’m talking about the way that Cyberpunk uses verticality to tell stories. The first time that you end up high enough above the skyline to see rooftops will inevitably be during one of your first encounters with Night City’s elite. The hustle and bustle of street life fading away as an elevator climbs up the side of a building and you emerge into a world you aren’t familiar with was astounding. That claustrophobic feeling of being surrounded by monoliths isn’t only alleviated by attending to the rich, though – for similar reasons, my first journey out of the city limits and into the “badlands” will stick with me. Cyberpunk successfully manages its mood and tone by controlling the kind of environments you’ll find yourself in, and while that may seem like a simple, sensible, universal design decision, its consistent application helped ground the world for me in a way that made it feel more real than most of its contemporaries.

Something else that makes Night City feel real is how Cyberpunk implements its setpieces. In a decision that reverberates throughout the rest of the game, CD Projekt was clearly all-in on the notion of immersion and seamless transitions. While it was consistently surprising and exciting to find bombastic moments embedded in the world’s side content (one standout involves Night City’s equivalent of SWAT descending from the sky to stop a robbery in an otherwise non-descript shop downtown), it never took me out of the world. And, on the other end of the experience, the number of memorable, exciting story moments that were located in parts of the city that you had wandered by before helped make the world feel almost fractal, this idea that every building and every corner could house new adventures or heartbreaks.

One thing that did take me out of the experience, unfortunately, were a few of the celebrity (or “celebrity”) cameos. While I think that the core cast was well-cast, with Keanu Reeves as Johnny Silverhand in particular being an inspired choice, the game, unfortunately, wasn’t immune to the tendency to include recognizable faces just because they were recognizable. Grimes plays a role in a forgettable side quest that felt dangerously like it only existed because she wanted to be in the game. There are also an almost concerning number of streamer cameos (“over 50 influencer and streamers from around the world,” according to CD Projekt), and while most of them completely went by me, the few that did hit for me only served to disrupt the world. The only perceived positive here is that most players won’t have any idea who these people are.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the only thing that broke immersion in the game. Due to what I can only assume are particularly harsh memory restrictions imposed by the game’s release on last-generation hardware, the game has some of the most aggressive NPC culling that I’ve ever seen. While NPCs don’t strictly only exist in screen space, it often feels like they do, as simply spinning the camera around can result in an entirely new crowd existing in place of the old one. This is obviously rough when it comes to maintaining immersion in crowded spaces on-foot, but it gets worse when you’re driving. Driving on an empty road, rotating the camera, and finding that three seconds later there was an entire legion of cars waiting for your camera to discover them, far too close to slow down, was always a deadly surprise. It doesn’t help that your cars take a while to slow down.

Cyberpunk’s approach towards cars in general is interesting. While I certainly had trouble with them when I began playing, I eventually began to get into their groove. If you want to learn how to drive effectively in Cyberpunk, you have to learn how to drift. After the game’s latest substantial patch, the team at CD Projekt finally fixed my largest problem with the game’s driving – the minimap was simply too zoomed-in, making it difficult to begin to make the right decisions on when and how to turn when traveling at speed. Now that that's resolved, however, whipping and spinning through the streets is fun, and the cars feel appropriately weighty. I’ll still occasionally boot up the game just to cruise around its streets and listen to the radio.

Speaking of the radio, did I mention that Cyberpunk 2077 has one of the greatest game soundtracks that I’ve ever heard? The radio is filled with great original songs from some pretty great musicians, but that’s not where the soundtrack’s beauty starts and it certainly isn’t where it ends. The original soundtrack (composed by P.T. Adamczyk, Marcin Przybylowicz, and Paul Leonard-Morgan) was consistently beautiful, moving, and intense. The world feels gritty and grimy but ultimately beautiful and worth saving, and a great deal of that emotion comes from the soundtrack. While the heavy use of industrial synths could’ve lent itself towards music that existed to set tone instead of form lasting memories with memorable melodies, the sparkling backing tones and inspired instrumentation helped keep me humming some of its tracks for months after last hearing them in-game. I’m no musical critic, I don’t know how much I can say about this soundtrack, so I’ll just reiterate: it’s genuinely incredible.

It certainly helps that the encounters that so many of those tunes are backing up are exciting as well. I was expecting middling combat from the company that brought us The Witcher 3, and while the experience wasn’t perfect, it was competitive with (and, in many ways, better than) the closest games to it than I can point to, Eidos Montreal’s recent Deus Ex titles. Gunplay feels tight, shotguns feel explosive, and encounter spaces are diverse and full of alternate paths and interesting cover. My first playthrough was spent primarily as a stealth-focused gunslinger, using my silenced pistol to cover up the mistakes that my feet made when trying to avoid getting caught. Trying to sneak into, around, and through environments helped emphasize how complex the environments actually were. While it’d be easy to run into a wealth of the game’s content with your guns loaded and ready to fire, that may contribute to a perceived lack of depth in the game’s world design. I’m trying to write this without considering what other people have said about the game, but this particular point has been something of a sticking point for me – there are individual, completely optional buildings in Cyberpunk that have more interesting, considered level design than some entire video games, and the experience of evaluating and utilizing them was consistently mechanically engaging and exciting.

The sheer number of abilities that the player has can be almost overwhelming. While leveling does encourage the player to specialize into certain traits, especially when said traits can also serve as skill checks for the dialogue system and some traversal opportunities, every trait houses a bundle of skills that each house a sprawling leveling tree. Far from the kind of “three-path EXP dump” that you’ll find in a great number of AAA titles, Cyberpunk’s leveling experience can be legitimately intimidating. It’s difficult to plan the kind of character you want to play as when you’re trying to project eighty or a hundred hours forward for a character that will be constantly encountering new kinds of challenges. I certainly didn’t begin my playthrough by wanting to be a stealth-focused gunslinger – in fact, I was originally aiming for a melee-focused hacker build. While I was drawn to what I was drawn to, hearing stories from other players about the kind of builds that they ultimately considered to be overpowered made one thing exceedingly clear: Cyberpunk is a game that rewards every kind of play, possibly to its own detriment.

Cyberpunk’s main story is notably short. I wouldn’t consider this to be a problem, considering the sheer amount of engaging, exciting, heartfelt side content, but it might be the core of the difficulty scaling plateauing so early on. As you progress deeper into the game you’ll find that almost every build, as long as you are willing to commit to something, is more than viable. Look around long enough and you’ll find people saying that every single build is overpowered. For me, that fed into the central power fantasy in an exciting way. By the time that I rolled credits a hundred hours in I was more or less unstoppable, walking into rooms and popping every enemy almost instantly. For others, this was a problem – it can be frustrating to feel like all of your work to become stronger wasn’t met with an appropriate challenge when the time came to put it into practice. This is a difficult problem to solve, and I don’t have a solution. I’ll fondly remember my revolver-toting, enemy-obliterating V, though, so I can’t complain.

Regardless of the scaling, however, the content you play through to arrive at that pinnacle of power was consistently, surprisingly robust. While the differentiation between “gigs” and “side quests” is confusing (word for the wise: gigs are generally shorter and more gameplay-centric missions that are designed by CD Projekt’s “open world” team while the side quests are made by the same team that made the main quests and are generally longer and more narrative-centric), both kinds of side content are lovingly crafted and meaningful. Of the 86 gigs in the game, every single one of them takes place in a unique location with a hand-crafted backstory and (almost always) a wealth of different approaches. These don’t exist separately from the rest of the game’s design philosophy, even if they are made by a separate team, and you’ll often find that decisions made outside of gigs will reverberate into them (and, sometimes, the other way around). I’ve played a great deal of open world games, and never before has the “icon-clearing content” felt this lovingly-crafted and interesting. While the main quests will take you traveling across the map, the side content is what really makes it feel dense and real. You’ll be constantly meeting different kinds of people who are facing different kinds of problems – and, hey, occasionally you’ll be meeting someone who has no problem at all, someone who just wants to make your world a little bit brighter.

It’s surprising, then, that one of the most obvious ways to integrate that kind of content in Cyberpunk is so sparsely-utilized. “Braindances,” sensory playback devices used to replicate experiences as disparate as sex, meditation, and murder, play a critical role in some of the game’s larger quests, but they almost never show up in the side content. You would imagine that the ability to freely transport the player into any kind of situation in a lore-friendly way would’ve been a goldmine for side content, but its use is limited. This isn’t even a complaint, really, I’m just genuinely surprised – I wouldn’t be surprised if they used them more heavily in 2077’s expansions or sequels, because they feel like an untapped goldmine.

Another thing that the game surprisingly lacks is the inclusion of more granular subtitle options. While the game does let you choose the important stuff – whether or not you want CD Projekt’s trademark over-the-head subtitles for random NPCs, what language you want the subtitles to be in, what language you want the audio to be in – it doesn’t include something that I’ve grown to consider a standard: the ability to turn on subtitles for foreign languages only. As the kind of player who avoids subtitles when possible, I went through most of Cyberpunk with them off. Unfortunately, a tremendous number of important cutscenes in the game take place in languages other than English, and I didn’t know that I was supposed to understand what these characters were saying until I was embarrassingly far into one of the prologue’s most important scenes.

NOTE: I was pleasantly surprised to discover after replaying the ending of the game earlier today that they've fixed this issue in a patch. Nice!

I can only complain about the game’s language support so much, because there’s something important that lies between the player and the story they’re there to experience: a fucking incredible English localization. Ironically, it’s so good that I can’t help but imagine that most players won’t even think about it. It’s easy to notice and talk about an excellent localization when it’s from something like a JRPG, something with a clearly different style from what you’d expect from a work made in English, but never once in my entire playthrough did I even briefly consider the idea that it was natively written in anything other than English. I knew that CD Projekt was a Polish studio, but I just assumed that they wrote in English and localized it backwards. The language is constantly bright and surprising, the jokes land, the characters have memorable quirks, everything feels natural, and the voice acting is legitimately some of the best that I’ve ever heard in a video game. Both versions of the main character’s voice were damn-near instantly iconic for me, landing up there with Commander Shepard in the upper echelon of protagonist VO. I can’t praise it enough.

That said, even if the localization was incredible, it’d be hard to appreciate if the meat of the story wasn’t up-to-snuff. I was ecstatic to discover, then, that Cyberpunk 2077 has an incredible story. Every great story starts with a great cast of characters, and Cyberpunk hit it out of the park with that. The core cast of side characters are some of my favorite characters in years. Judy, Panam, River, and Kerry are all memorable, full, charming people. Kerry Eurodyne in particular is responsible for my favorite scene in a game since the finale of Final Fantasy XV. The quest “Boat Drinks,” the finale of Kerry’s quest line, is quietly emotional and intensely beautiful. He, and the other characters like him, are more than the setting they’re in, and the way that the game slowly chews away at the harsh and bitter exterior that the world has given them as it reaches to their emotional, empathetic core consistently astounds. Night City is a city full of noise, violence, destruction, and decay, but you don’t have to participate in it. You don’t have to make it worse. You can be different, and you can be better. You don’t get there alone, you can’t get there alone, and Cyberpunk is a game that revels in how beautiful the world can be if we are willing to find the light and excitement in the people around us.

Of course, Cyberpunk is a video game, it’s an RPG, and the story is more than a linear progression of memorable moments. Something that struck me while making my way through Cyberpunk’s story was how expertly and tastefully it implemented choice. I’m used to games that give you flashing notifications and blaring alarms whenever you're able to make a decision that matters, so I was initially confused by how Cyberpunk didn’t seem reactive to the things I said and did. The game would give me a few options in conversations, I’d select one of them, and then the story would progress naturally. However, as I continued, I began to notice small things. One character would remember me here, a specific thing I said twenty hours before would be brought up by someone there, an action that I didn’t even know I had the choice to not take was rewarded. The game slowly but surely established a credibility to its choices, a weight to your words, this sense that everything that you were saying, even beyond the tense setpiece moments that you’d expect to matter, would matter. It was only after going online after completing the game that I realized just how different my playthrough could’ve been. While nothing ever reached the level of the kind of divergent choices that The Witcher 2 allowed, there were still large chunks of the game that are entirely missable. Three of the game’s endings can only be unlocked through the completion of (and, in one case, specific actions in) specific quests, and multiple memorable quests were similarly locked behind considerate play. This isn’t really a game that will stop you from doing one thing because you chose to do something else, most of the choice-recognition is simply unlocking new options for the player to take, but it always feels natural and never feels like a game providing you an arbitrary fork in the road just for the sake of making it feel artificially replayable. CD Projekt has already said that they made the choices too subtle in Cyberpunk, but I deeply appreciate the game as it is now – more games should make choices feel more real.

It helps that the dialogue system backing up some of those choices is dynamic and the cutscene direction backing those scenes up is consistently thrilling. The decision to lock you in first-person for the entire game was an inspired one, and it resulted in a bevy of memorable scenes made possible by those interlocking systems. There are the obvious ones – being locked in a smoky car with a skeptical fixer, getting held at gunpoint by a mechanical gangster with his red eyes inches away from your own and a pistol’s barrel just barely visible as it presses against your forehead, having to choose between firing your weapon and talking down someone with a hostage when in a tense, escalating situation. There are also a million smaller ones, situations where the scale of the world becomes part of the magic. The first time that I sat down in a diner and talked with someone I had to meet or the first time that I rode along through the bustling downtown of Night City as a politician sized me up will stick with me because the perspective of the camera and the pacing of the real-time dialogue interface combine to make almost everything more powerful. There’s so much effort put into it – so many custom animations, so many small touches that you’d only see if you were staring intensely at every frame. All of that effort paid off, and the controversial decision to strip third-person out of the game was ultimately proven to be one of the smartest decisions that CD Projekt has ever made.

Another decision that helped power an exciting, engaging story was how the game freely manipulates the time and weather during key story moments. It’s a small touch, it’s one that you won’t notice unless you’re looking for it, but every once in a while you’ll walk into a place during a crystal-clear day and come out five minutes later to discover that it’s a cold, windy, rainy night and you have a city to burn. Along with the first-person limitation, this initially feels like something that could only harm immersion, but when it’s backed up by a story that motivating and scenes that thrilling you’d be hard-pressed to notice it outside of the flashes of telling yourself that this scene or that scene is the best that you’ve played in a long time. This also helps avoid a problem that games like the Grand Theft Auto series consistently face – instead of letting scenes happen at any time, compromising direction, or doing something like a timelapse, sacrificing immersion, Cyberpunk manages to always keep you in the action while also presenting the action in its most beautiful and appropriate form. There are moments where it truly feels like it’s meshing the kind of scene direction that’d be at home in a Naughty Dog game, the gameplay of Deus Ex, and the storytelling of the WRPG greats, and in those moments there is nothing else on the market that feels quite like it.

I sure have talked a lot about this game’s story, considering the fact that I have barely brought up its central hook. The early twist (unfortunately spoiled by the game’s marketing), the placement of a rockstar-turned-terrorist-turned-AI-construct firmly in your brain after a heist goes wrong and your best friend dies, helps establish a tone that the rest of the game commits to. Johnny Silverhand starts as an annoying, self-centered asshole with no real appreciation for how dire your situation is, but by the end of the game he had more than won me over. Reeves’s performance was really stellar, and the relationship between him and V is incredibly well-written. More than that, his introduction helps spur on a shift in the way that you engage with the world. The first act is full of hope, aspiration, the belief that you can get to the top if you hustle hard enough and believe. After you hold your dying friend in your arms and are forced to look your own death in the eyes, though, things begin to turn. Maybe the world is fucked up, maybe it’s fucked up beyond belief. But there Johnny is, telling you to fight. Why? Every time you fight, things get worse.

But the game continues to ruminate on this, it continues to put you in situations where fighting not only fails to fix the problem, but it makes it worse. Despite that, it’s positive. For me, at least, Cyberpunk’s worldview slowly came into alignment, and it’s one that I can’t help but love. Cyberpunk 2077 is a game about how important the fight is, how important believing in something is, even if you’re facing impossible odds, even if there’s no happy ending. It’s a story that posits that giving up is the worst ending of all, that your only responsibility is to what’s right and to the ideals that you and the people you love want to live up to. The game uses every story it can tell, every character it can introduce you to, and every encounter it can spin into a narrative to drive that home. And, when the ending comes, it was phenomenal. All of the endings were powerful, effective, and meaningful to me, but I’m more than happy that I went with what I did.

Cyberpunk 2077 is an excellent video game. It’s not flawless, but no game is, and at its core it's one of the most fun, beautiful, narratively engaging, and heart-filled games that I’ve ever played. I couldn’t recommend it highly enough, and I sincerely hope that everyone who has skipped out on it because of what they’ve heard is able to give it a shot someday. Maybe they’ll love it as much as I do. Wouldn’t that be something?

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antivirus-mh-au · 3 years

Text

Antivirus - Chapter 4

First Chapter Previous Chapter Ao3 Link TW: None Note: I am completely exhausted and working on a laggy computer. I will add these links when I’m not a zombie trying to use a zombie laptop. Thank you for your patience.

Click the link. Let the page load, the old laptop whirring as it opened. A YouTube video, like so many others. Opening shot, an abandoned building in the middle of the night, muffled voices talking.

Shrieking, screaming. The camera lowered as the one holding it ducks for cover. Four voices yelling at once. Suddenly, laughter. Relieved laughter.

"Fucking bats!" A man called out. The camera raising, focusing on the dark shapes fluttering out the window.

"We need to be careful," a woman said, voice light-hearted. "Those things carry rabies."

Laughter breaking through the group again, a logo of a camera appearing on the screen.

He paused the video and glanced down at the title. "OUR GREATEST HITS, VOLUME ONE."

He sent a text to his friend.

Phoenix: who are these assholes?

The reply was immediate.

Skully: they're my assholes. College kids I made friends with on Twitter. Really cool. I don't remember being that cool when I was twenty.

He grunted aloud. Lucky him, remembering anything about his twenties. Not everyone was so fortunate.

Skully: They’re part of the MH fandom. They actually live in Alabama and were able to track down some of the locations in the videos.

He rolled his eyes.

Phoenix: Find any bodies?

Skully: Just blood.

He shuddered, pulling his hooded jacket closer to his body.

Phoenix: Cool. Morbid, but cool.

He was such a liar.

Skully: Anyway, not what I was sending them to you about. They just made a new video today and I think you might be interested in it

He grimaced.

Phoenix: This is about your crazy boyfriend, isn’t it?

Skully: He’s not my boyfriend!! I don’t know him!!!

Skully: And you know my partner doesn't share.

Phoenix: But it’s still about him. The prophet guy.

Skully: … Yeah. But you should still watch this! I think you’ll find it interesting

He leaned back against the wall and huffed.

Phoenix: Why?

Skully: … the kids talk about Tim, alright?

Skully: They talk about him a lot.

His fingers hesitated over the keys. He lingered, reading the words again and again. Tim…?

Phoenix: Fine.

Phoenix: Send me the video.

The video, almost thirty minutes long, took its sweet time to load. First thing on screen was the same logo as before, a camera with a generic full face mask behind it. The name of the channel followed, MH Unlocked. He shook his head.

The name faded out, replaced by three people on a couch. Two women, one man. A second man sat on top of an end table on the right side of the couch. The lamp that probably belonged in that spot sat on the floor at his dangling feet.

The woman on the left, a bushy haired brunette with deep tan skin, a high ponytail and golden brown eyes, gave the camera a grin.

"Hey investigators!" She waved. "We're back with another video."

"And this one's a doozy," the woman beside her said, raising her mug, which proudly bore a pride flag. If he had to guess, it was the lesbian one. Her hair was dyed orange, peachy skin flushed by makeup or a light sunburn, it was hard to tell.

"Before we start," the first woman said, "be sure to leave a like and give us your thoughts and theories in the comments! I promise, we read all of them."

"Eventually," said the man on the end table with a grin. He was the palest white guy ever, with curly black hair, glasses, and about a thousand freckles on his face. The man next to him gave him a shove, and the first man burst into laughter.

The other man, with skin several shades darker than the brunette and a suit far too good looking for this kind of environment, rolled his eyes. He waved a hand, with a silver ring on his index finger, at the camera.

"You already know us," he said. "I'm Mix."

"I'm Holly!" The brunette on the other end said.

"I'm Wren," the orange haired woman said.

"And I'm Steve!" The freckled man grinned wide, his green eyes practically glowing with excitement. "We've got a big story for you guys today."

"Oh, very big," Wren said, before taking a drink from her mug.

"Big like the worst headache you've ever had," Mix said with a smiling roll of his eyes. Wren smacked him on the shoulder without looking away from her drink.

"So." Holly reached up from the floor and pulled up a laptop. The brand logo was covered up with a pineapple sticker. Her eyes scanned the screen as she fiddled with the touchpad, Wren leaning over to see what she was doing.

"Last night," Holly said. "Something weird happened over on the Neophyte_Calling YouTube channel."

"Weirder than normal," Wren said.

"Yeah," Holly said. She glanced over towards Steve, who swiped at the screen of his phone. He looked up.

"We'd show the footage but people don’t seem to like when we do that," Steve said. "Something something spreading the sickness." He shrugged with a smile. "But we've all watched it and we can give you a play by play of what happened."

"It might not seem that dramatic," Wren said, "but the implications are pretty intense."

"I'll say," Mix said.

"Last night, at around ten pm," Holly started, "in the middle of his usual stream, the Neophyte went quiet. The way he does when whatever he's supposedly channeling is trying to talk through him. After about thirty seconds of silence, he started bleeding onto the table from his head, which remember, is mostly off screen. He said, "he's coming," and fell over as the screen glitched out. For another hour there was complete silence before the stream randomly ended."

"Weird shit," Steve said.

Holly nodded. "Very weird shit - but in character for him."

"Now, for those of you that don't know who the Neophyte is," Mix said, "he's the guy you see people calling 'the Prophet' in this fandom. Talks like a drug addict on a high, but many people believe there are secret messages in his words that can be decoded. They say those messages predict the future."

"Not everyone believes this," Holly said.

"I don't," Steve said, hunched over and watching his friends. "But there's definitely something funny-weird about the guy. Very… uncanny valley."

"Sometimes, unprompted, he'll stop talking and do this creepy voice." Holly cleared her throat, and when she spoke again, she lowered her voice, taking on an odd pitch to her words. "Grains of sand in the hourglass of time. Your existence is irrelevant." She shuddered, and let her voice go back to normal. "Something like that."

"That's an awful impression but it gets the job done," Mix said.

"You try doing one better," Holly said.

"The one thing all of these coherent messages have in common," Wren said, "is that they're all addressed to the same person. Someone called Tim."

Steve nodded. "And you can guess who most people think that 'Tim' is."

"It's been ten years since Marble Hornets ended," Mix said. "But it would make sense if it were Tim Wright the Neophyte was talking to. He was the only survivor, after all."

"But that would imply that Tim is watching the Neophyte streams," Wren said.

"And if he's watching the streams, he could be aware of us, too," Holly said.

The four went quiet. Mix looked at the floor. Steve traded a look of discomfort with Holly. Wren took a sip of her mug. She pulled it away from her lips with a sigh.

"If he does know about us," Wren said, "why not come forward and tell his side of the story? He could change the whole game by revealing himself."

"Probably because he's a fucking murderer," Steve said. Mix glared at him, but Steve only shrugged. "You know I'm right!"

"He did kill two people," Holly said, looking at her laptop. "Just because Kralie killed Jay doesn't make what Tim did right."

"But what other choice did he have?" Mix said. "Alex wouldn't have stopped trying to kill Tim. One of them needed to die."

"That doesn't matter to the legal system," Holly said.

"We're getting off topic," Wren said, raising a hand. "It doesn't matter if the Neophyte was talking about Tim from Marble Hornets or not. What matters is that someone is going somewhere and that's apparently good news for the Neophyte or whatever he's channeling."

"You can say the Operator, it's okay," Steve said.

Holly glared at him from over Wren's head.

"It does matter, though, if he's talking about Tim in particular," Mix said. "What if Tim is heading back to Alabama? Maybe he left after the end of the series."

"It's possible," Holly said, "but that's pure speculation. We don't know that."

"Isn't speculation all we do?" Steve said, swinging his legs gently. "Come on, let's give the audience something to chew on. What do you guys think the Neophyte was talking about? The crazier the theory, the better."

Mix frowned. "Well…"

With a shake of his head, the viewer closed the tab. He'd seen enough. Enough to make his eyes burn and hands shake. He took a deep breath, and shuddered, pulling his jacket around himself. It was a warm day beyond the safe confines of this abandoned house, but that didn't stop the chills shooting through him.

Was he afraid? Or was he angry?

With a growl he thrust the laptop away from him and reached for his sketchbook. The pen he'd been using before still rested inside. Forcing his thoughts away from the video, he focused everything in his mind onto his art.

He wasn't a great artist, but his memory was good, and with nothing else to do most days, his skill was getting better. With proper art tools, he could've even gotten great at it. But there was no need for greatness right now. Art was supposed to be healing, and that more than anything was what he needed.

In his mind he captured the image, something he'd seen so many times before. Grinding his teeth, he let the image flow onto the page once more. His favorite thing to draw, the one thing that really made him smile.

Losing track of time was part of the appeal. With the light from his laptop, he could see the whole page, or at least enough of it to work. The ink bled into the paper, the lines assembling into a rough image that soon became a face. He could see it so well in his mind's eye. As if the man he pictured was right in front of him. But he wasn't. And if the man knew what was good for him, he'd stay that way.

The sound of a new message on Discord got his attention. He glanced at the time instead. An hour, flown by, his mind lost in an ink-based daydream. Exhaling hard, he looked back at the art on the page. It wasn't finished. It would probably never be finished. But as it was… it was perfect.

Tim Wright made a very good model, unaware of that as he was.

Running his hand over the page, feeling the indents where his pen dug deep into the paper, he shook his head, and smiled.

"Better not be coming back, Tim," the man, the Maniac, said. "If you do… I'll have to kill you.”

#marble hornets #mh antivirus au #mh fanfiction #marble hornets fanfiction #marble hornets au

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nicknellie · 3 years

Note

By the time I finish/send this it’s going to be at the most random time so I say good night and technically good morning for whenever you read this!

I’m glad that you were able to finish your schoolwork, if it’s any consolation you still did hand them in, which is amazing! Also shame on them, they should’ve explained how all of this was going to work.

Same here! It’s so fun replying to these

Let’s do this

(Also if I were to make a tally of how many times I used exactly and agreed I would be in the hundreds by now 😂)

1. You are so brilliant, yes. Reggie just uses random stuff to hold his things especially considering that he has like 1000 scrapbooks so all the other stuff needs to go somewhere. (He also has used Luke’s and Bobby’s)

2. I didn’t think that Reggie actually has pictures of random baby, oh my goodness that is hilarious.

3. Exactly, and the reason why he doesn’t recognize the French dip is because he has no clue where it came from but it does belong to him

The non-box stuff

First two very random comments that totally did not come from me accidentally hitting some board games and seeing jam which led to inspiration for this

First point, Sunset Curve and then later Julie and the phantoms most definitely had board games. In this scenario I’m going to use Spin Master Hedbanz because, I have no clue when this game came out so I’m just gonna say it’s a game that the Molina’s play.

(Hedbanz is the fast-paced, easy to play question game of “What am I?” Ask “yes” or “no” questions, I think Amazon can be thanked for that description)

Anyways, so they play this and after not guess Luke flips a table. that’s this entire point that Luke is the one during game nights to flip tables (never play Monopoly with him)

The second point, the jams. First Reggie hates strawberry jam, loves raspberry jam and is indifferent to marmalade (I mention the last one although it’s not really a jam) however Alex loves marmalade and grape. Luke has no taste, but sometimes likes jelly, and Bobby like marmalade as well (honestly idk)

Now numbers,

2. Wait yes, I don’t know how else to describe it aside from that. (All of them feel guilty, and massive group hug and movie night after)

3. Luke as a frustrated puppy is his facial expression when Reggie accidentally scares Victoria and Luke sits down on the couch. Also yes, that is exactly the conversation they have (Yes Willie can also get through to him). Also it does work when Juli tries it however maybe not as much as when Alex and Willie talk to him.

4. Yes, basically Luke and Alex are two halves of a whole and can read each other very well.

5. Oh yea, Alex is always very sarcastic with the boys and is a tiny bit hesitant in front of Julie however after that interaction he acts more like how he normally is.

6. Yes and there’s no in-between (although it could be that he stayed there for a few days and hasn’t been back since). Aww, that’s so sad and exact what happens, however he doesn’t have someone who gives him a flower, unlike Julie, so he just sits there crying.

8. Yes! I like that theory as well, also for some reason Luke was always very good at solving Rubiks cubes however Bobby never was.

10. So I randomly saw this meme one day and you mentioning the spinning tea cups reminds me of it (I have no clue who made this sadly)

(Just change Luke to be sitting with Julie then) Also yes Luke doesn’t like things that spin, honestly I love the fact that I went off on a board game tangent and you went off on a theme park tangent.

Yes, every single ride Alex goes on, also yes for bobby. I love the little addition you made that they save it for the end of the day, adding on there’s like one ride that Bobby won’t go on (maybe the tea cups) and he always rides the logflume ride during that time)

Oh yes, anytime they go to a waterpark or go on a roller coaster or basically anything Reggie will take a picture of it, (also there’s quite a few of the boys going on roller coasters that Reggie doesn’t want to ride)

Luke goes on a ghost train once and regrets everything, he spends the entire ride with his head buried in Alex‘s hoodie. Yes, also Bobby has to make sure that Alex doesn’t accidentally bump in to random strangers.

Toffee nut- for a second I thought you said that Reggie didn’t know one of his friends was allergic to gluten and I was like this fits Bobby so much but I misread that severely. But that’s exactly what happens, also Julie brings it up once, just in general, and that’s where Alex has to be like ‘Reggie we are already dead’

11. The game to see if Reggie is lying or not, love that. (Honestly I wanted him to have actually met Queen Elizabeth very randomly however your theory fits so well)

13. Yes, they all just randomly dance around the studio. I mean the band in full cowboy outfit should be very high up on your list of things to expect for season two.

14. That’s exactly why I said that, because Nick shouldn’t be able to see the boys however since he’s actually Caleb during that moment he can. So he has to pretend like he isn’t furious, he kind of fails but somehow is able to pass it off.

They can’t deny good music, love this line and yes they most definitely can’t.

15. I’m glad that you like the little Han-solo idea

16. Yes, yes, we all know that Alex still lets them in the kitchen because he can’t say no to the puppy dog eyes however during that moment he tries his best to keep them out

17. Alex was most definitely the cutest baby also that is precisely what the photo looks like. (As you mentioned earlier I believe whenever Reggie was upset at Luke he would give Julie baby pictures of Luke. So of course Reggie does the same to Alex and shows Willie pictures of him as a baby. And Willie has heart eyes for the rest of the day from that photo

19. They definitely jump in puddles also the amount of times Luke has done that to Alex for no reason at all is a lot (also this is adorable)

20. Yes, I think everyone fell in love with Alex after the first episode as they should. ‘I have been crying for 25 years. How is that possible?!?!’

Yes Reggie and Willie definitely only talk in puns to each other and Alex is not happy (lies but for now they will let Alex be)

Also this makes me think that if flynn had known that Luke existed when she was going to egg Julie’s house, he definitely would’ve helped. Also yes, Emily buys those eggs right then and there, alongside toilet paper because.

21. That’s exactly what I thought but now seeing it in writing makes me upset. Him having a key symbolizes that he now found his home, and when Luke ran away Alex was so torn because obviously he supported his best friend more than anything however at the same time he just didn’t know what to do. (I don’t think I’ve seen this list but I am very intrigued, should we petition the show to let you write Mitch‘s character for season two) Yes, Alex and Luke are such brothers and we can blame Mitch.

24. The first time I saw the song I just thought that she sang in it as background vocals or something and then I was massively disappointed. Wait wait, what if in season two we get a song from Flynn that basically answers flying solo and shows how much Julie means to Flynn. I am in the same exact boat flynn is in a music program so at the very least we have to see her doing something they can’t just waste that talent like that. So I know this YouTube creator by one video and one video alone which is I’m going to kill Santa Claus, but yes I added it to my watch later (also you did get the title right, caps and everything)

25. Yes, he wanted to be strong for her which is why he initially went. (Third chance at getting a family 🥺🥺 awww)

Yes they exactly would’ve been uncle Reggie, uncle Luke, and uncle Alex, she definitely would’ve been nicer just due to the fact that the boys never would’ve let her get away with it.

26. I mean even when the boys forgive him, he still doesn’t forgive himself. Also yes, and the first thing he does is remake the hat for Alex because for some reason Alex hasn’t been able to find the hat (and or one for Willie because he wears beanies as well) Just imagine happy Bobby reunited with his bandmates (family) though aww.

28. Yes, also Reggie is like a cat when it comes to yarn so after he initially got tangled of course he got himself even more tangled until he just became a ball of yarn. (I love that title, also there is two parts because Reggie made a similar one again due to the fact that this happened twice)

30. Yes, Willie does have an old soul and him and Alex connect very well with Vitoria

32. Yes, best fan base ever. Legitimately they will get stopped on the street and if someone finds out that their sunset Curve they immediately get some sort of fanart or sticker (also a hug because Luke will give free hugs to everyone)

Yes, honestly I was thinking that Alex could be a cat as well however you’re entirely correct it’s Bobby who is the cat. I’m a bit stumped on what Alex would be, hear me out he would be a hedgehog just because that would be absolutely adorable. (Also I love the owl idea that’s brilliant)

Wait, not only does Alex get that but a fan handmade a puzzle of the band and it’s one of Alex‘s most treasured items from a fan.

34. The boys laugh for so long but the eventually help him out of the fridge, not before Reggie takes a picture though

35. Wait yes, Ray helps them out with the photoshoot. At first he thought that Flynn was asking him to take the pictures and he was completely prepared but then he quickly realizes that she kind of just wanted him to be there too not only help out but because he’s the greatest.

37. They take all of his hoodie expect the pink one, however they do wear it just give it back.

39. He says it immediately, honestly doesn’t even register that he says it until about five minutes later

40. It’s actually a mixture of both, also because Alex wears Luke’s shirts while they are practicing. Even if the practice doesn’t turn out the best they always have a great time just because they love spending time with each other and that makes everything better.

So you mentioning Willie wanting to learn lifts and stuff, and it made me think of the fact that Kenny Ortega has done dirty dancing which means they should have a scene like this

https://youtube/DIKpUa0O7Ns (if the link doesn’t load basically its the dirty dancing - time of my life final dance)

So now I need this in season two. (Also Willie is the one who is being lifted)

Also I agree this may take the cake for my favorite (also because I now have the dance I want Willie and Alex to do in season two)

Now I may have Time of my life stuck in my head ‘and I owe it all to you’ (actual a song lyric and technically I only have myself to blame)

I’ve been trying to answer this all day but kept getting interrupted by things including but not limited to my schoolwork and the fact that my kitten escaped the bathroom while my mum was trying to wash her which caused s t r e s s but I’ve finally got round to it so here we go!

Before I start, thanks! I actually managed to get most of my work in on time today which I’m really proud of (all of it was in on time if we ignore maths, but that’s my worst subject and I don’t think my teacher is excepting much from me anyway 😂😭)

And oh god I kind of am tempted to make tallies of how often we say that now lmaooo I’d add for me any variation of “ahdslflkdp” or “omg lmaooo yes”

Anyway! Let’s start!

BOX STUFF

1. Thank you!!!!! Exactly but somehow I can imagine he still manages to be messy. Like all his stuff is packed away neatly, but the boxes they’re packed away in are just everywhere and it’s a nightmare for Alex who likes to be clean and tidy. (Luke doesn’t care whether things are messy or tidy, and Bobby is messy but not as cluttered as Reggie I think) And yes!! He uses Luke’s and Bobby’s too, as well as a drum Alex accidentally broke and is now kind of like a box if that makes any sense lol

2. Ikr lmaooo he just puts them in there like “well we needed something” and when Bobby continues to say it doesn’t count because it’s not him he just claims the baby is an honorary member of the band

3. Yes! Maybe he found it one day, thought to himself that he’d read it and try it out later but then completely forgot about it and the box

BOARD GAME AND JAM STUFF

1. I am so in love with this idea oh my godddd, yes, your mind!!!! They have these extravagant board game nights that last hours and hours (while they’re all wearing their matching pyjamas or onesies of course). I love games like Hedbanz omg and I can totally imagine them playing this and also games like Cluedo, Pictionary, Articulate (great game btw if you’ve never played, highly recommend), and any game Julie finds like at a charity shop (because I can totally see her and Flynn going to charity shops and finding a bunch of cool stuff??) Whoever is in a team with Julie is pretty much guaranteed to win (unless it’s Luke, but Alex or Reggie with Julie are pretty much unstoppable) and in the old days Reggie was the master of all games. You’re so right about Luke getting angry lmao monopoly was banned after the first fifteen minutes of the first time they ever played it

2. I love how random that whole thing is but also that you’re 100% right. Also the fact that This Band Is Back is also called Reggie’s Jam has led to some interesting different versions of that song over the years

NUMBER STUFF

2. This kind of links in but not really - once they’re with Julie they have movie nights too and Flynn and Willie often join in. Julie and Flynn have a couple’s jumper and Reggie and Luke are jealous of how comfy they look all snuggled up together so because Luke is wearing one of Alex’s hoodies they both get into that. The only problem is Alex’s hoodie only has one head-hole so they end up stretching it and Alex isn’t happy. Him and Willie just watch the whole time, Alex not finding any of it amusing, Willie laughing his head off

3. Yes that was the exact image I had in my head!!! And it only works when Julie does it because it’s Julie and Luke isn’t really convinced but he’ll agree with her because it makes her happy and that’s all he really wants

4. Ok that made me think of Merlin if you’ve ever watched that show??? If you haven’t then you should, it’s on Netflix and one of my all time favourites. Anyway the phrase two halves of a whole is really similar to two sides of the same coin which is used all the time in Merlin and now I kinda wanna write a Merlin AU where Luke is Arthur, Alex is Merlin, Reggie is Gwaine, Julie is Gwen, Carrie is Morgana, Caleb is Uther, etc.

5. Yeah 🥺 I kinda just want more of Alex relaxing around Julie next season y’know? Like they’re obviously super close but he doesn’t always act around her the same as he does with the guys. I want to see them get closer, have nights where it’s just the two of them, maybe Alex officially coming out to her (though I like to think he already did that and it just wasn’t shown to us)

6. Omg ok that hurt. Wow. Because the boys don’t cross over or go to wherever Rose went after they died, they just stayed in the dark room for an hour, they can’t watch over Bobby and see how he’s doing and they can’t send him any signs like Rose did for Julie. If they had been able to do that then things would have been so much different!

8. What if Bobby started trying like everything the boys liked when they were alive? Like after he realises he can’t make jewellery or write poetry anymore he tries the Rubik’s Cube but can’t do it. So he tries puzzles but just can’t find them as interesting as Alex did. And he tries crosswords and sudokus but can’t wrap his head around them like Reggie. Eventually all his interests kind of drop away and he’s left with even less than he already had.

10. Absjdldl yes lmao that’s perfect! Honestly I love that for us, little random tangents here and there is perfect 😂

Yessss I love that lol like when he meets up with the guys again he’s soaking wet and grinning like an idiot lmao

Reggie has scrapbooks dedicated to their theme park trips and it’s kind of messy and most of the photos are blurry but he loves them as they’re some of his best memories

Also the image of Alex getting so lost in his happiness watching everyone having fun that Bobby just has to pull him out of the way of people is glorious and I love it

Also I had another random thought literally just now. This is kinda based on something that happened when I was 12 I think? So Sunset Curve goes to a theme park and they’ve just finished lunch and Alex wants to go back on rides immediately so they decide to go on something small and not scary so they won’t like vomit their food everywhere. Reggie goes with it because they won’t be going on a big ride. They go on one of the smallest rides there, literally it’s this platform that moves side to side I can’t really explain it better than that. And it is the most terrifying ride any of them have been on in their entire lives even though it looks fine and Reggie refuses to go on anything else for the rest of the day just in case he’s tricked by its tame appearance again.

Toffee nut - omg yeah no I love that! Bobby is definitely allergic to gluten. Alex loves baking special gluten-free stuff just for him and the others are banned from eating it (but y’know they ignore that and do anyway)

11. Tbh now you’ve said that I want it too and I’ve changed my mind, there’s a high chance he did meet her. Somehow. Even he’s not really sure what happened but yeah he did 😂

13. Honestly just any kind of fancy dress? Like cowboys is up there but I’d love to see Fairy Princess Luke ngl

14. I love the image of Nick very poorly containing his anger and ending up accidentally saying something like “they wouldn’t know sophistication if it snuck up and slapped them” and then having to explain what the hell that meant to Julie

16. No one can resist Reggie and Luke’s puppy dog eyes 😂 I love the idea that he shoos them away but they look at him through the door. So he shuts the door, leaving them outside, but they move to the window. He pulls the curtain down over the window but they come in through the front door and stand in the kitchen again and either he has to relent and let them stay or offload them to Bobby or Julie depending on when this is

17. Afjkgjl yes and Alex looks as if he’s embarrassed by it but really he’s isn’t, he’s actually angry because he wanted to be the one to show Willie his baby photos and Reggie stole that from him damnit!

19. This is kind of unrelated but it’s on the subject of water so kinda close - water fights. Absolutely. Especially in summer. Alex is the best at them. Luke sucks (it’s kind of becoming a theme that Luke is awful at anything competitive and I love that lmao)

20. LITERALLY. He said that and a bunch of other things (there’s too many to list lol) and I was immediately like “ok yeah he’s gonna be my favourite isn’t he” and I was right

Absjdidko yeah he hates the puns but love that they’ve found something to bond over, he’ll just never admit it. Whenever they’re doing it he just shakes his head disappointedly, trying to hide a smile

Lmao yeah Luke is well-practised at egging houses and for at least an hour he would have been thinking “I want to but it’s Julie” unable to decide and eventually he would have done it for the fun

Emily Patterson honestly would’ve won Mother of the Year imo (except the arguing with Luke, but that’s one flaw and otherwise she was great)

21. Omg yeah totally, he would have definitely struggled between supporting Luke by not going and supporting himself by going. Either he would have not gone, or gone secretly and updated Emily and Mitch to tell them Luke was safe.

YES DEFINITELY PLEASE AND THANK YOU. Honestly I love Mitch and there’s so much I want to see from him (especially a conversation with Ray) and I would love to write his character @ Kenny Ortega please hire me :)

Also here’s the list of you want to look through it whenever lol

24. I love this yesss we deserve to see Flynn’s response to Flying Solo! Honestly my prediction for her is that she kind of starts feeling left out of everything because she can’t see the boys (even though Julie and the guys obviously don’t mean to leave her out and they’re devastated when she tells them that’s what’s going on) which A) could be how she starts to reconnect with Carrie and B) could be the reason she sings a song for Julie. And YES Jadah Marie is so talented therefore Flynn is and that can’t be wasted!

Lmaooo I’m Going to Kill Santa Claus is one of the only videos I’ve not seen of his but I love all his other stuff. And I’m legit proud of myself for remembering that title 😂😂

25. Exactly! Like Trevor I think would be a semi-lenient parent and whenever Carrie acts up it would have been Alex who was the first to tell her off and tell her what she should have done. He would never shout, but he also wouldn’t sugarcoat it and would be honest. Reggie and Luke would have been gentler on her but Bobby would have just been terrible at discipline lol

26. Yes omg 🥺 the little gestures like making more hats are the things that get the boys to finally forgive him. And I know for a fact that Willie wearing a beanie is all I’m going to be thinking about forever now, holy moly

28. Ajsbdkspskke yes!! Eventually it turns into a whole series of songs that end with “Bobby I Swear I Will Hide All Your Knitting Needles If You Don’t Start Cleaning Up Your Yarn, This Is Your Final Warning”

32. I love that! The band is very sociable so they run into fans a lot and fans just start bringing their fanart and stickers wherever they go because you never know when you might run into Sunset Curve

Omg I can totally see hedgehog Alex that’s literally perfect I love it! Because he’s kind of shy and nervous but also prickly (like come on, his sarcasm and the way he just deadpans half his lines is brilliant)

Yessss it’s this really detailed painting made into a puzzle of all of them and Alex puts off making it for ages because he doesn’t want to damage it or anything 🥺

34. Lmao yeah Reggie has to take a load of photos because he’s using his Polaroid and he’s laughing so much that the camera shakes and the photo comes out blurry every time

35. Yes she wants him there because Ray is obviously the Best Dad Ever (I am definitely in agreement with Reggie on this one). Also it helps because then it doesn’t look like Flynn is by herself taking all these photos because the guys can’t be seen 😂

37. Yes lol the one rule is that if you take the pink one you MUST give it back. Willie is the only one who can occasionally get away with breaking that rule, in which case Alex just takes it back himself

39. Absjdldl yes especially because Carrie doesn’t comment on it (because she’s not really listening to him, just speaking her thoughts aloud, because I feel like she does that a lot? Talks to herself because it’s easier to understand her thoughts when she says them?)

40. Omg yes and that’s even better because Alex had done it with Luke and Reggie so he knows how! I mean, it doesn’t go well at all, but they have fun!

God me too now I’ve got it stuck in my head 😂 tbh I had Devil Went Down To Georgia and also Ring Of Fire stuck in my head for ages after we mentioned those so it only makes sense lol

#the spacing probably turned out weird between paragraphs idk but it just wasn’t working so I had to go with it 😂#williexmercer #asks #emily answers

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walaw717 · 3 years

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Since I have backed away from spending much time using social media, I have been able to reflect on the last few years, especially the last year and ask myself a simple question – where did I go off the tracks?

I realize that even knowing better, in the last year especially, I allowed fear to turn into anger and in the process become entangled in thoughts words and actions which were harsh to others and supportive of positions I do not fully hold.

In this last month of returning to journaling and stepping away from the one line meme bumper sticker world of social media I realized that once again I had substituted many things into my life to replace a relationship with God I have nurtured since childhood. It embarrasses me to say this and it embarrasses me to admit that I find my need for that relationship so powerful in my life. I find I am embarrassed because a well educated and intellectual person is supposed to be beyond such “nonsense”. Also, I find myself often embarrassed by how often people publicly do so many cruel and horrible things with the word god on their lips, especially the televangelists and just as often the mainstream religious leaders who have often been an embarrassment, frustration and disappointment for me. It seems to me at times that to speak of God and one’s relationship and need of God is almost itself sacrilegious - but I know that feeling for me is so strong because throughout history God has been used as a cudgel for fear, punishment and obedience more than a center of real relationships. Or we often find that the love coming from the lips of the speakers about God is hollow and meaningless.

However, in my work as a therapist and counselor over thirty years I know that the best work that has occurred in my office is when God has been in the room – verbally acknowledge or not. God is in action in this world – the living force of all relationship and that relationship is not simply restricted to man. Last year I witnessed the ancient willow in my yard lift a frond and embrace a planter of new flowers we had just placed on the balcony rail.

So, what happened for me? To me? How did I get so far removed from that which has been my center and sustained me?

A man, a minister, a priest whom I thought was my friend ignored my grief and pain when I lost my mother. I should not have been surprised, I had seen him do this before, rushing away from a funeral service and leaving the widow to mourn alone because he had a new baby that was more important for him to see than to see the need of comfort she required. And in that same year I spoke to a Bishop at the end of my year of discernment to become a priest and in our conversation he did not acknowledge me as a person in conversation but focused on administrative things. Although neither should have shaken my faith in God, it shook my faith in the church and I mistakenly thought the church was God. From that point I slid into a slow burn in life because I disconnected from the very thing that had sustained me through a difficult childhood and then through most of my adult life. I think this is a common mistake – to conflate god with the church and the people of the church. And then expect them to be perfect for us in representing God.

It is occurring to me however that no person can ever be that perfection and that is why the essence of God in the world is grace – the ability to understand the violence, the suffering and pain that life manifests and forgive it all. Why the world, why the universe is made this way is beyond my understanding, but it is, and we need the grace of forgiveness of others and ourselves to survive. How do we become vessels for such grace? And more importantly we need to ask how we isolate ourselves from such grace.

A few days ago, I spoke to a small group of nursing students about the role of Behavioral Health where I work. They introduced themselves by name and pronoun and I was struck by how young they were and how sad that the best they could offer as a personal introduction was their name and preferred pronouns. If I had had time, I would have redone introductions and had them tell me something more personal about who they were. I spoke about the need of presence and kindness in the work of a nurse and/or counselor at the bed side. The people need that presence. At the end one very androgynous young women asked me about the issue of how to deal with the inequity and lack of “social” justice in the world. I think that is the question in some way we all deal with in our lives.

My answer to her was to be present with individuals, to be kind and to be aware of the person in front of us. In my better moments that is how I have helped people. No such thing exists in the social media driven by the speeches of politicians, the memes of hate and dis-ease or the private manufactured lives of celebrities. It surely does not act in the crowd shouting for change. Social justice is individual justice. I wish that act of presence and awareness had been present in the priest I knew and the Bishop I spoke to – but they too are human and just like you and I are inclined to get lost in self directed moments. We all do.

It is in our relationship with God that we are at our best. When we are present with “him” that we are most present with others. When we are present with “him” we lose our concerns and fears and can be there in the moments when life around us is suffering because when “he” is present we have a strength and peace that is beyond words. We can hope that others can offer that to us in our moments of pain and need and that they too have the experience of that presence. God is always there but it is in our relationship with another “His” power is most noticeable. In those moments too we learn that love is not some sexually driven frenzy of our DNA but it is simply being and is just there in that intimate moment.

Our relationship with the presence of God is vital. And it is when we are in that relationship, we create the church, the community of God and can then be life-giving and life-affirming.

And We can know that in our not being God and having moments of weakness that God will be there through another – because we will have moments of being distracted and be selfish and inward.

Our relationship with God is what gives us purpose and the center of our being.

When we let our relationship with God slide, an emptiness sets in. I have seen that in my own life in the last few years. Sometimes we try to fill that hole with various things, politics, social media, a multitude of things but those things don’t quite fit. None of those things makes us whole. What makes us whole is our presence in the moment of another’s greatest need.

Real love wants us to experience that life-giving relationship. Real love is willing to share the experience of the presence God within us with others. In that sharing is our act of presence and kindness.

Here's where our hope is: when we are in right relationship with God, we can be in a right relationship with each other, and those relationships help build each other, not tear each other down. If often feels like our society has lost sight of this – especially the intellectually driven and self-conscious academic life that has come to dominate us though our universities and our obsession with self-esteem. We have lost the knowledge that esteem is how we are held by others by our presence and actions. And of course, where there is too much self – there is too little room for the presence of others and God.

There are many things that can try and keep us from having that closeness with God. Sometimes those things come from our family members, especially those who do not want us to make room in our hearts for anyone else. Mostly though the thing that most keep us from that relationship with God and keeps us from that relationship each other is distraction with how we feel. That was my priest friend’s failure toward me and in turn my failure toward him.

For me over the last few years social media has been a distraction, I find all too often the people I meet there have more of a relationship of talking at each other and not really sharing with each other. The one’s I have really connected with share themselves, which is quite risky in the public forums of social media. Being an administrator has also been a distraction – I miss sitting and being present with others – not to solve their problems but to be there and maybe offer some direction and comfort if I am able.

And my hurt over the loss of my mother, my very deep hurt that a friend forgot my suffering became the greatest distraction to me. I simply decided that all the talk was “bullshit” and no one really meant it. It was after that my private practice began also to deteriorate as I focused on things other than the presence of those coming to meet with me.

I became the very thing that had hurt me.I no longer blame my priest, but I do allow that to be a reminder of the importance of being present in each moment with people and to make sure to not allow my fear and anger pain to turn to anger. This is something I have always known but in the knowing I forgot to live and that forgetting was directly tied to dismissing God from my life.

Now I am doing the hardest thing any human can do for another person- find and offer forgiveness for him being as human as I .

And all of this has come to me because I divorced myself from social media for twenty-eight days.

I just realized that without awareness I gave up social media for lent and in going to the desert of my own soul I found a relationship with God again.

This is a further offering of peace to all of you I have been unkind too over the last few years, especially over the last year regarding politics.

If there is a hell, and I believe there is and there are many gates to hell, the distraction and cruelty of social media is the one most crowded now.

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