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bbangsoonie · 3 years

Text

to my ex (best friend)

member: juyeon genre: fluff?? word count: 2,175 synopsis: thanks to kevin’s tiktok obsession, you end up sending out a google form to all of the people you used to call your best friends. one response brings back forgotten memories and feelings.

“I can’t believe I’m stuck with the Canada boys for another 4 years,” you jokingly groaned.

Today was officially move-in day and the beginning of your college life. After roughly unpacking in your dorm room, you went over to Jacob and Kevin’s room to hang out. Jacob had his guitar out and was playing random chords for you to hum along to. Kevin, on the other hand, was glued to his phone. TikTok had been his new obsession and he was constantly watching the endless feed of videos.

“Hey, we are the iconic trio,” Jacob insisted.

“Wow Eric is basically a TikTok star now,” Kevin commented as he showed you two the video that popped up on his For You page. “This kid is stuck on straight TikTok though.”

Jacob laughed, although he was unsure of what that exactly meant. Knowing this, you chuckled at his efforts to appease his roommate.

“Hey, hey, hey,” Kevin tugged at your arm in an urgent matter. “Can we also do that Google form trend?”

“Uhh which one?” you asked.

“The one where you send out a Google form to your ex-crushes or ex-friends,” he turned to Jacob to further explain. “So basically it’s a questionnaire either revealing your past feelings or confronting what happened between old friends.”

“I don’t know, man. Our high school years were pretty vanilla. We didn’t even have that many crushes,” you shrugged.

“Hmm I mean we did have that huge friend group freshman year. It’s a shame it kinda fell apart as time went by,” Jacob reminisced.

You were reminded of the people you once considered to be your best friends. It was you and twelve other boys, which should’ve hinted at the inevitable end. The beginning of the end started with Hyunjoon transferring to a different school. Then, as you all grew older and high school drama kicked in, you were the topic of many rumors. People didn’t understand—or like—that you were the only girl in an all male friend group. Girls called you all sorts of names and spread ridiculous lies about you that spread to neighboring schools.

No one in the group had any bad blood with each other. Life just pulled you in different directions and you simply grew apart. Some joined the dance team, which consumed most of their time. Some joined varsity teams and focused on getting a sports scholarship. Some became trainees and lost contact with everyone. Some, like you and the Canada boys, became busy with college applications. Everyone had their own reasons and there were no hard feelings.

“Wouldn’t it be fun to finally find out what they all think? Get closure before we start our journey as college students?” Kevin asked, eagerly.

“I guess,” you agreed.

“Alright! Then we’ll play rock paper scissors to choose who has to send them out,” Kevin declared.

Your unlucky streak, without fail, won you the embarrassment honor of writing and sending the form to all your former friends. You grumbled, displeased at the fact that you were now the scapegoat fulfilling Kevin’s curiosity. Nevertheless, you searched through your contact list to find everyone’s phone numbers and sent them the link, hoping that no one changed their number.

By the next day, you received responses from all 10 of them. The trio reconvened in Jacob and Kevin’s room to review the answers. The first few were essentially what you all expected. They explained how life became hectic and your paths just crossed less and less as your interests and goals changed.

When you came across Haknyeon’s comment, you couldn’t help but laugh.

“You still owe me ice cream for lending you my pen during our final exam,” you read aloud. You recalled the day; you were freaking out about your misplaced pencil case and he had kindly offered his extra pen.

“What else would you expect from the foodie?” Kevin laughed.

By the time you got to Juyeon’s response, however, you froze. Curious as to what caught you so off guard, Jacob took the laptop from your lap and gasped. Kevin peeped over Jacob’s shoulder and his jaw dropped after reading it. He immediately looked at you, wondering how you were taking the information.

You were confused. He had been the object of your love and attention for a good three years in high school. Not wanting anyone to find out, you had swallowed those feelings and the Canada duo were the only ones to ever catch on. You and Juyeon used to be extremely close—even closer than you and Kevin or you and Jacob. He always quietly took care of you and the two of you shared everything with each other until one day he suddenly became distant. Without an explanation, he left your side and never returned. You just assumed he wanted to stop being friends. It hurt but you didn’t want to force a one-sided friendship so you stopped reaching out to him.

“What the heck?” you finally blurted.

Jacob slowly closed the laptop shut, eyeing Kevin who seemed way too giddy. He felt uneasy, not knowing if this was a good thing.

“So your first love was requited,” Kevin said smugly. “I told you so.”

“Okay you had absolutely no facts to back up your assumption back then,” you argued.

“What did I tell you? My gut is never wrong.”

“Yeah but he also just cut me off out of nowhere. How else was I supposed to interpret that?”

“Clearly not the way we did.”

Jacob smacked his hand over Kevin’s mouth to shut him up. He knew how much pain Juyeon’s name brought you. You didn’t show it but you still had a soft spot for him.

“It’s okay, Jacob. Whatever feelings I had for Juyeon—good and bad—are history. You don’t have to walk on eggshells around me,” you assured. “Besides, this doesn’t even mean anything. He wrote all of this in past tense. He’s just clarifying the reason why our friendship ended. Like Kevin said, I guess I finally got closure.”

“Closure? My brilliant idea has brought forth an opportunity for you to rekindle your love!” Kevin exclaimed excitedly.

“No. No way,” you shook your head. “The past is in the past. We are living very separate lives now.”

“Oh stop quoting Frozen and just try texting him,” he rolled his eyes. “Jacob and I never told you but he’s actually attending the same university as us.”

This prompted a very loud “What?” from you. Jacob buried his head in his hands, groaning. He was definitely going to get an earful.

“You’re bound to run into him eventually. So just take the initiative and face things head on,” Kevin advised. “Won’t that be less awkward than coincidentally meeting him after ignoring his response to the form you sent him?”

“And who’s the one who made me send it?” you glared, puffing your cheeks.

“You’re going to do it anyway so just hurry up and pretend you have no choice but to listen to me,” he snickered.

“Moon Hyungseo!”

At your use of his full Korean name, his eyes widened in fear and he jumped up to run away, barely avoiding your slap. Watching the scene in front of him, Jacob laughed. He had secretly hoped that you would reconnect with Juyeon as well. He knew how much you used to like him.

That night, you found yourself staring at Juyeon’s contact on your phone. Your heart raced at the thought of talking to him again. It had been years since you two last spoke and so many things had changed since then. You were no longer oblivious and clumsy teenagers. You knew each other’s past selves but didn’t know a thing about each other’s current selves. You were afraid that even if you became friends again, it would be too different. It was why you never harbored any hope for things to go back to “normal” with him. You couldn’t be disappointed if you never had any expectations to begin with.

Still, you took a leap of courage and sent a simple “hey” before you could chicken out. His reply was almost instant, which startled you.

You: hey

Juyeon: Hi Y/n

You: would it be weird if i asked to meet? i think we have a few things to talk about.. if that’s ok with you

Juyeon: Sure! How’s tomorrow at noon? We could talk over a meal at the school cafeteria

You: sounds good. see you then :)

You wanted to scream into your pillow. The awkwardness was driving you crazy but you were still looking forward to seeing him. He still had you wrapped around his finger and you hated it. But you still loved him.

The next day, your clothes were flung around all over your bed. You had rummaged through your entire closet to find an outfit you were satisfied with, resulting in you running a bit late.

Juyeon had arrived at the cafeteria early. He was so nervous that he couldn’t just stay still in his dorm. After all these years, he was finally confronting everything that he had concealed. He always felt guilty about the way he treated you and he was glad he could finally explain and apologize.

When he saw you approach him, he couldn’t stop himself from staring. It had only been a summer since he last saw you at graduation but your beauty still amazed him. He gulped, standing up to greet you when you reached the table.

The first few minutes were spent eating in awkward silence. Unable to bear it any longer, he cleared his throat to begin the conversation.

“Um so I guess my response to that form was a lot to unpack, huh?” he said sheepishly.

You almost choked on the food, surprised by his straightforwardness. He passed you your cup of water as you coughed.

“Yeah..” you mumbled.

“I want to start by saying I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I think I always had feelings for you. At first, it was subtle. I just liked spending time with you. I liked making you smile. I was content with just being friends. You know me, I’m the type to just watch my crush from afar. Then, as we got older, those feelings grew to be bigger than I could handle. I began to get greedy. And I felt that I could literally do anything for you. That’s when I realized how hard I fell for you and that scared me. I was afraid of ruining our friendship but I was also scared of my own feelings. So I started distancing myself from you. It’s a poor excuse but back then, I was a coward,” he confessed.

Juyeon had always been a very direct person. He never really beat around the bush and you liked that about him. That hadn’t changed about him but yet it still surprised you.

“If I could go back in time, I wish I could have done things differently. I knew I was hurting you but I thought that after all that’s happened, continuing to be friends with you would make you the center of gossip again. I didn’t want to make your life any harder,” he added.

“Juyeon, I cared about you a lot more than I did about those stupid rumors.”

“I know that now. But high schooler me was terrified of you finding out about my feelings.”

You contemplated on whether or not you should bring up your own past feelings. You wanted to reciprocate his honesty but were worried that it would be unnecessary. You took a deep breath and decided on the first option.

“You know, I was also terrified of having you find out about my feelings,” you admitted. Your words shocked him as he tried to figure out what you were implying.

“Wait, you.. You liked me too?” he gaped, making you blush.

“Let’s uh stop talking about that now,” you said as your cheeks reddened to a darker shade.

“While we’re opening up..” he looked at you with hesitance. “Is there any chance you still feel the same way now?”

His question caught you entirely off guard. You blankly stared at him, wondering if you heard him correctly.

“Juyeon, this is the first proper conversation we’ve had in years,” you deadpanned.

“That’s not an immediate no,” he lit up.

You wanted to laugh at his simplicity. His childlike innocence was still the same. It warmed your heart to see that he hadn’t changed as much as you were afraid he would. Yet, the fear in the back of your mind remained. You weren’t confident that you could even resume your friendship with him. At your silence, he tried to lighten the mood.

“So then would being friends again be okay with you?” he asked.

“I guess we could try,” you slowly nodded, bringing a bright smile to his face. You didn’t notice that your expression reflected his.

“Great,” he grinned happily.

And that was the beginning of a new story between you two.

bonus:

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hoefette · 3 years

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All the petty things I hate about fate!winx and their shitty universe/world building because

I'd added most if these in tags of other posts but I'm still so mad lmao

The way characters, Aisha and Mrs Dowling specifically make references to explicitly human or American things like instagram and Harry Potter

These people are from a different dimension for ffs why are they concerned with or are even aware of this very earth-specific shit? Do they teach earth classes at school over there?

I understand not wanting to have them be oblivious so Bloom wouldn't have to explain it to them, but it simply could be ✨omitted✨

Why would you go out of your way to date your work like this lmao ew

Ms. Dowling calling Tinkerbell an air fairy.. I cannot breeve with the stupidity why did they keep that in there

Why is Ms. Dowling.. the headmistress.. teaching classes? Where are the other teachers?

We ended up with a trio of antagonists (I guess you could call them that?) by the end of the season anyway so why not give us the trix, why have the characters play double roles as friends of our protagonists and also the villains/bullies? They clearly wanted a delinquent trio, in which case they could've gender bent the trix if they wanted to keep all the unnecessary sexual tension.

It just feels like the production team was lazy, they didn't want to hire more actors, they didn't want to bother with making the world immersive or lived in or believable at best, they just didn't give enough of a fuck

They wanted to make this show and attatch Winx to it for.. what? Like did you even google the main plot points? The abridged version or sparknotes to get details on the very literal, basic characteristics of our main characters or their roles or the world they inhabit????

It lacks wonder and intrigue.. I mean Bloom moves to another dimension, a school for fairies and we don't see her marvel once at anything.. and that's because she might as well have been in Switzerland because she's in exactly the same environment she would've been in over there anyway.

They could've said Alfea was in Europe and I'd believe it because nothing about the setting makes it feel otherworldly. I'm sorry but I'm not impressed.

Why do the teachers and graduated specialists communicate via facetime ?? In the magic dimension. ??? Why do they text each other and those texts then appear on screen like .. oh look, like a bad netflix teen movie ????? HELLO ??? it's the way technology and magic could've blended in so seamless into the world THE WAY IT WAS ALREADY DONE/SHOWN. Missed opportunity. it just takes you out of it imo every time you see the ugly, bland, gray text bar. Some fucking flavour pls I'm begging

How stupid the specialist must feel clonking around with the skinniest shreds of armor, plastic swords on their backs and battery powered flashlights and cellphones in their bags. R we larping?? I know I'd be laughing and asking why we hadn't already come up with something more effective .. idk like guns. I'm surprised I ain't see one gun in there.

In the beginning Ms. Dowling says some nonsense about fairies having lost the ability to transform to explain why there are no wings, which means they could've transformed before. So are we to assume that this supposed to be set in the time proceeding the original then?? Because something is not adding up with where they should be as a magical society technologically if that's the case

How does the production team want to keep the dark academia vibes with torches lining the walls and also want them to be face timing each other, presumably from miles and miles away in the dark forest???

Pls pick an aesthetic and stick to it everything was so unnecessarily dark. Where do they charge their phones since it's the only device we see that is the slightest bit modern and dont fucking tell me they charge it with magic I will punch you in the face

Why is there only one major monarchy that we are shown? Why are Solaria the only ones contributing to the efforts to defend the school and where is this mysterious battalion we never see lmaoo it's all so bad its laughable.

Is this set in the kingdom of Solaria? And why does the queen of an alleged interdimensional superpower monarchy pull up in black SUVs??????????? Why does she pull up with Andreas?? Is he not the king of Erakleon?? Where are his soldiers and his battalion and just?? Huh!? The world just feels empty like nobody lives here fr

Are we supposed to believe that the specialists get paired up with fairies just as a normal occurence and that they have to 'trust each other' and not because the plot demands it suddenly half way through when all we've seen so far are the fairies doing normalish school and homework, and the specialists outside, being physical everyday all day. This was never even implied that they'd have to work together apart from when we see the faculty as youngins with Rosalind. But even then.. it's like well why are they even together lmao? Is this a special team formed from Rosalind’s protégées? Were they formed after graduating from Alfea or what is this?? Are they the ONLY team of specialist/fairies hunting every single burned one?? What?

Are we now supposed to buy that Musa is being switched to 'support' because that's where her strengths lie and not in combat?? Are we supposed to believe that these girls know hand to hand combat?? When was this established? We see Terra wrapping some baby vines around a dude and I'm sorry is that the practical application of her power? Is this what the fairies are supposed to do once they graduate? Or is it just a switch in curriculum because of the threats outside the barrier?? This is never made clear.

Because if not then what's the point of this?? Why do they suddenly have endless classes together when the expectation was never set for the fairies to be like soldiers or out in the field fighting ?

Where exactly are they supposed to be what was the purpose of including Aster Dell and why is it a joy ride away from Alfea lmao?? Where Bloom is from and also not from?? Plot pls make it make sense

Why are fairies from another dimension vaping or smoking weed?? They are not human so why are they engaging in specifically human vices, yol couldn't come up with anything else to characterize 'delinquents'?? Very lazy very como se dices.. no effort. Nothing a little more spicy yol could invent, at least change the name and some properties holy shit did yol even try ??

So its fairies everywhere, having a lil party in the east wing of a phat castle.. and they are playing beer pong and dressed in t shirts and jeans..

Can you hear me screaming? Can you hear me vibrating with rage?

Not one floating decoration or magical anything in sight. Just purple lights and subpar vibes

Stella's costume design: tragic. I won't discuss further because we don't have the space or time but just know that it was absolutely atrocious and I hated it. Giving very debutante vibes

The entire budget going to that lame transformation sequence that was not a transformation sequence and those horrible, barely-there fire wings

Edgelord bloom and all her fucking leather jackets. Why do 30 yo, white cis men think girls exist in a binary? They could keep her earlier characterization and make her a hothead.. Bloom literally screamed herself into a couple power upgrades in the original come ooonnnn

Let girls be feminine without it being a character flaw what is wrong with yol its 2021. They could make her more mature, more angsty or whatever the hell else and not style her like that

The way Aisha's abilities flipflop between episodes and scenes. Very inconsistent. One minute she's struggling with a drop of water and the next she is moving an entire body of water for her bestie Bloom to fake transform because the plot demands it. Why even add in her struggles at all if you're just going to ignore it?

Why was Stella with them in that scene? She didn't do anything literally.. Aisha pulled the water and she did .. nothing.

Who the fuck is Rosalind? Why would they add her in,, to add nothing to story? The company of light was a thing, they could've plucked one of them hoes to be the antagonist. Why did the winx club need their own Delores Umbridge? Valtor was right there if you wanted an evil educator type character.

The camera work was so bland during the down beats, stagnant and fixed during a fairy party and erratic and ugly and disorienting during the fight scenes

I'm not getting over the fairy party because it was a good opportunity for the production and everyone else to show the differences between where Bloom was and where she is now but instead it just looks like a regular teen high school party?? This could have been set in Switzerland fr.

Everyone's just kind of standing?? You mean to tell me these people are from all different places in the magical dimension and their customs are all the same? They all throw parties like this ??

White and flavorless I am very bored

I guess the main question or takeaway I have is just.. who is this for? Because everyone, including the showrunners keep saying that it's for us, the fans of the original. But apart from the characters sharing some names, there are really no other similarities. So again, who was this supposed to appease or placate or satisfy? Because it sure as hell wasn't the winx club fans.

Overall, this feels very much like something I wrote and probably published on ff.net when I was 13 because I thought girls couldn't be taken seriously if they liked pink, and injected angst into everything that didn't need it and had no idea how to structure scenes or dialogue. It's just bad, objectively and N*tflix will keep making shit like this because apparently some people have bad taste??? Idk yol, be easy

#im never gonna stop i dont care i dont care #and i dont even usually make my own posts i just be reblogging and vibing #but im passionate abt this because he originak was the reason i wanted to learn how to draw #it was the reason i wanted to learn how to write and tell stories #it shaped a lot of shit for me because it was the very first one of its kind id ever seen #i ran home from school to watch it and argued with my friends about who got to be flora #i forced them to make cardboard wings with me and to perform the opening song during a school talent show #thank god we didnt get to perform otherwise we would all have died of embarrassment in hindsight #but ye i just hate to see things that obviously are very dear to a lot of people be treated with such casual indignity and its a disservice #a disservice to the fans and to the people who had probably want to create it as a passion project #to the people who spent hours and hours in rewrites and fanart amazing fanart and post series continuations #no one is saying the original is sacred and cannot be touch #this fandom actively calls out the bullshit rainbow has done and continues to do to the characters we love.. i havent spoken to one fan who #doesnt have an alter dedicated to their downfall. we found a piece of ourselves in these gorls and they were stripped and caricatured and #played for laughs so netfilx can make money and its just very upsetting to see.#so again fuck you brian young fuck you ignio and rainbow and fuck whoever the costume designer was #mine #text #fate winx club #fate: the winx saga #f:tws #winx club

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gisellelx · 3 years

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Hello! Love your blog and i wanna say

Your analysis and your posts in general are always so well researched historically. How do you do that and how can I do it too?

So I wanted to answer this with care and time and thoughtfully. I hope this answer will be good not just for you but will be worth reblogging for anyone who wants to think about how you develop good researching skills more generally. Because ultimately getting good at making sense of the world isn’t just about writing or just about fic or just about academia; it’s about being a good citizen of the world. The short answer to this question, up front: I’ve gotten good at research because it’s my actual job! I’m a professor and not even a new one really anymore; I have a book of research coming out later this year which still feels really weird to say. I happen to know how old you are because we’ve chatted so don’t forget to put into perspective that before you started formal schooling I had already written my first 50+ page research work. I’ve been at this seriously for almost two decades now. However, there are some fundamental ways that professional researchers go about thinking about everything, whether it’s something as inconsequential as fic or as monumental as the stuff going on in the U.S. right now that I think are a little different, and they’re replicable in useful ways. So here’s three things that matter. Get curious. This actually is pretty easy for fanfic writers because we already have something we’re curious about--whatever fandom(s) we’re in. But curiosity isn’t just about the spark; it’s also about getting interested in making connections between different kinds of things. When you encounter any given piece of information, the first thing you should start thinking about is “how does this piece of information fit in with everything else I already know” which will lead you to “how does it contradict what I already know” and “what else do I need to know to understand how this fits?” This leads you down really interesting rabbit holes. An example from fic/tumblr answers: A witch hunting Anglican really doesn’t map on to what I know of Anglicans/Episcopalians in present-day. So then I start to ask, “Okay. What was actually going on in the church in the 1640s?” I’m going to mesh it with some of my own knowledge: I know the protestant reformation happened a hundred years earlier, but I don’t know a ton about what happened after, except that the Puritans arrived in New England eh, about that time. So I go down the rabbit hole of finding out about the church in the 1640s. At some point there I’m going to run across some of the secular history: that the 1640s was the English Civil War. Okay, what was the Civil War about? Who won? How long were they in control? Questions beget questions and true, at some point, you have to decide when to stop if it’s for writing. But honestly, if you’re curious, you probably won’t stop thinking about it even if you’ve found out enough to answer the thing you want to answer. Because you’ll

Develop a lens. The thing you’re interested in becomes the way you start to see the world. Start relating everything to the thing you are trying to find out more about. Notice when you’re getting more information about that thing or when something would matter to that thing. I have an assignment I give my students where they have to write four short assignments relating stuff they see about language use to the things they’re learning in class. It’s partially to teach them about the concepts they’re learning, and partially to teach them about writing, but it’s mostly to accustom them to viewing the world through the lens I’m teaching them. It’s to help them get curious about why one barista’s tone sounds friendly and the other’s doesn’t even though the say the exact same thing. It’s mutually reinforcing: the lens begets curiosity and curiosity begets the development of the lens. If I encounter a fact, a piece of history, a moment in time, an old song, there’s a little piece of my brain after 11 years of writing Twific that is always asking “Where were the Cullens?” I have headcanons for days about how each of them, especially Carlisle, would’ve dealt with any individual moment in history. When I sing an old hymn in church I sometimes look down at the date in the hymnal to find out if it’s one Carlisle would’ve sung as a human. I’m always working through this lens, and that means I’m always adding to the knowledge.

Finally, source well. Especially for something as fanciful as fic, there’s not a lot of reason to dive deep into academic tomes (although I have; I am a fucking nerd. See above re: my work.) But dive deeper than the first page of google. Read the first Wikipedia page you come to, but then read a couple of the pages it links to! If the English Civil War has to do with Cromwell and it established the Protectorate, and those things are linked? Well, read those, too! And then you might need to cross-reference--okay, now I know what the Protectorate was, and I’ve decided from that original go-round that Carlisle’s dad was probably a Puritan, not really an Anglican, so...what was the relationship of Puritans to the Protectorate? I’m going to next throw that into google. And I’m looking for high-quality sources: magazines, university websites, things that end with .edu or .gov. I’m clicking on the “about” to find out who wrote the thing and how much of an expert they are. If they say something that no one else has said and I can’t find anything that tells me they’re an expert in this? I’m going to disregard that info and move on. This is applicable to way more than just fic--this is about figuring out that as much as I go YEAH YEAH YEAH at some hyper-partisan trash website that fits my political view, I need to step back and consider where it’s coming from, who the author is, and how much they know. The more you’ve sourced, the easier this gets. My knowledge on Carlisle’s history goes deep, I fell in love with him and only him when I read the series. I have read about popular culture when he was growing up, I have read histories of the English Church, I have spent time thinking about and being fascinated by the history of the development of medical knowledge and medical schools. I didn’t go to the Eye or Big Ben when I happened to be in London; I went to the City Museum and wandered around the part of the city where I imagine he lived, looking for things which have survived since the 17th century and taking note of things which are new to think about what Carlisle would think about them (he is very un-fond of the Gherkin.) I literally spent a day and a half looking at London through Carlisle’s eyes. Because I’m curious; because I have a lens; and because I’m going to grab good sources whenever I have them. That is a SUPER long post. But I hope it’s helpful. When it comes to writing, the richer your knowledge, the more likely you are to drop the right detail which places your reader and makes them buy into everything else in the world. I remember reading a fic which took place in my hometown and the author had one of the Cullens flying in their private jet. In my hometown, a mid-sized city in the midwest, there is a commercial international airport, but there is also a smaller airfield which handles much of the private air traffic. That author had that Cullen plane take off from the smaller airfield. I don’t know if she is also from my hometown, but she got that detail right, and it signaled that I could trust the rest of her storytelling. So. It’s worth it: to be a good writer, to be a good researcher, and just to be good at understanding the world. I hope that helps and sorry for the word vomit. Professors write a lot, too.

#writing #research #carlisle cullen #history

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salamandersofftheclock · 3 years

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Principles You Can Use From Rowling’s Philosophy of Writing

by Ruthanne Reid

If you’re like me, you loved the Harry Potter series. Maybe you watched the movies or even visited the theme park, and you wondered about JK Rowling’s writing process and the strategy she uses to write her best-selling books. If you’re like me, though, you’ve also been deeply hurt by things Rowling herself has said. On Twitter, on her website, in interviews, and more, Rowling has promoted harmful views of trans people, and you might be one of her many readers who find it painful, or even impossible, to return to the Harry Potter books you once loved.I understand. Before I dive into the wisdom we can draw from Rowling’s writing process in order to write our first draft (or others), allow me to share a principle with you. Death of the Author: Or, How to Love the Book, Not the Author In 1967, a French literary critic named Roland Barthes wrote an essay called La mort de l’auteur, or Death of the Author, in which he states that any piece of writing should be separated from the author that wrote it. In other words, he believed in judging the written work completely on its own merits, without involving personal beliefs or actions of the author in question. Sometimes, this is possible to do. Sometimes, it isn’t, and we readers have to apply discernment to what we read and the lens in which we view things.I have two examples for you. HP Lovecraft First, HP Lovecraft, whose incredible work literally created today’s modern horror genre. Do you enjoy any kind of tale with Elder Ones, or chaos gods, or even just good old Cthulhu? (I know I do!) His work was so creative, so new, that you’d be hard-pressed to find any horror story that doesn’t show at least some of his influence.Unfortunately, Lovecraft was also an extremely xenophobic racist. Now, I enjoy a good chaos god, and I’ve made the decision to separate his xenophobia from his writing. That means, of course, that I must view critically anything he wrote that implies white English people are somehow the pinnacle of humanity.It means I purposely do not allow his racism to infect my way of thinking. By doing so, I am practicing la mort de l’auteur. JRR Tolkien Here’s a second example: JRR Tolkien, whose work defined modern fantasy. Do you enjoy anything with elves and dwarves or made-up languages? We owe Tolkien for that. He redefined and polished the fantasy genre so well that everything from movies to MMORPGs still use his templates. Unfortunately, he also described his orcs as “squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.” Yowza. Now, was Tolkien a racist? Not exactly. In fact, according to the standards of the time, he was absolutely liberal and anti-racist. So then what do we do with this bizarro and racially horrifying description? We see it and choose to discard it. Generations of artists and authors have done exactly that, turning orcs into anything but“least lovely Mongol-types,” and aiding this genre.Again, it’s important to see the problem so you can avoid letting it influence your work. We enjoy the good parts while consciously discarding the bad, rather than being influenced by it. So What About JK Rowling? She’s not dead. In fact, she’s still saying harmful things, even as we speak. Instead of listening to her readers, who (at least initially) approached her in love, trying to help her understand, she doubled down, rejected their experience and their words, and in the process, caused an unbelievable amount of pain. Here’s the thing about la mort de l’auteur: it is entirely up to you whether to apply it to what you read, or to simply discard the whole thing and find less troublesome authors. Both roads are valid. In no way do I condone her attacks on the trans community, or her persistent sharing of misinformation. I choose to apply la mort de l’auteur for the simple reason that I benefited from the good things she’s written, and I wanted to share them with you. However, if you aren’t comfortable doing that, you are absolutely welcome to walk away. In fact, I’d suggest these writing articles instead: Neil Gaiman’s rules of writing, or how to create your own rules of writing. Okay. Awkward stuff done. Ready to dive into the process stuff instead? Let’s go! 9 Rules From JK Rowling’s Writing Process Over the course of her writing career, Rowling shared a lot of solid writing wisdom, and in my opinion, eight writing rules stand out—along with a ninth we can apply from her choices since. Whether or not you’re writing your first book like Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone) or last book in a series (like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows), I think these rules speak to Ms. Joanne Rowling’s philosophy on writing.They are great writing tips for you to reflect on in your spare moments and then apply to your writing process, for short stories, novels, bestsellers, or even the first time you’ve ever attempted a book. Rule One: Protect your writing time “Be ruthless about protecting writing days, i.e., do not cave in to endless requests to have “essential” and “long overdue” meetings on those days. The funny thing is that, although writing has been my actual job for several years now, I still seem to have to fight for time in which to do it.” This is especially hard for those of us with family. Our loved ones come first, and while that is important, our loved ones also need to understand that we need time to write. Setting reasonable boundaries is a crucial step for a writer—even if they’re as simple as, “Mommy needs fifteen minutes of quiet time, okay?” If you have trouble setting boundaries with loved ones, try setting a reasonable boundary for one week. See how it goes. If it’s too much time or too little, tweak it. Establish a routine that signals to others that it’s your writing time, but also lets them know that outside of your writing space, you’re there for them. Not only will this teach the importance of flexibility and discipline to others, but also that your writing is valuable. It’s your work, and your dream! Needing quiet time to write doesn’t mean that you don’t love your family. Your writing deserves your time, too. Open communication about this can help everyone understand and respect that. Rule Two: Treat your writing like a job “You’ve got to work. It’s about structure. It’s about discipline.” It’s easy to forget that writing is a job. We don’t always feel like doing our job. We certainly don’t always feel inspired. To be writers, we must train ourselves to sit down and write even when we don’t feel like it. Those moments are the ones that really matter, even more than the shining, flying, muse-kissed moments.Writing when we don’t feel like it is what turn amateurs into professionals and rough drafts into polished manuscripts. “The muse works for you. You don’t write at her beck and call—you train her to show up when you’re writing. “ Rule Three: Believe you ARE a writer “I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.” Yes, writing is possible with another job. Yes, writing is possible with other responsibilities. Are you a writer? (I know your inner critic snarled no, but I also know a tiny candle-flicker of unquenchable hope in you whispered yes with so much longing you could cry.) You ARE a writer. That means you write. A runner runs. A painter paints. A cook cooks. You are a writer. You write. Accept this, fight to believe it, and be amazed at how far that takes you. Rule Four: Write what you know “Write what you know: your own interests, feelings, beliefs, friends, family and even pets will be your raw materials when you start writing.” This doesn’t mean you need to experience aliens in order to write about them. It means that all good stories have universal application. A great example is this Google Doodle. (Trust me. I’m going somewhere with this.) Take two minutes and thirty-six seconds to watch this: Halloween 2017 Google Doodle: Jinx’s Night Out It’s adorable, right? Without a single word, this video told an effective story. You felt for the little ghost, both when it was sad and when it was happy, right? News flash: you’re not a ghost. That was universal application. It doesn’t matter what culture you’re from or what language you speak; all human beings know what it is to be lonely, to feel left out, to be frustrated, determined, and to finally be with friends. That story works because the creators used their interests, feelings, beliefs, friends, family and even pets to tell this story. (I’m fond of the kitty, myself.) I’m greatly oversimplifying, but here’s the gist: you already know how to tell a moving story because you live one. If you’ve ever had emotions, ever responded to anything, then you already know what universal application looks like. Listen to the people around you, and apply empathy. You don’t have to be a ghost to write a good ghost story. Rule Five: Read “I always advise children who ask me for tips on being a writer to read as much as they possibly can. Jane Austen gave a young friend the same advice, so I’m in good company there.” Read. Read. Read some more! The more you read, the bigger your arsenal of words will be. The more you read, the better your grasp of metaphor, poetry, beauty, passion, and empathy will be. The more you read, the greater you will be as a writer (and probably human being). It’s like learning more dance moves or impressively difficult notes on an instrument. The more you learn, the better you’ll be. So read in your genre. Read outside your genre. Get in the habit of finding time to pick up a book instead of your phone (unless it’s to open up another book.) You DO have the time to read. Even if that’s just ten minutes a day. Any time counts. And the more stories you read, the more likely you’ll start to implicitly develop the skills you need to become a great writer. Rule Six: Persevere “Perseverance is absolutely essential, not just to produce all those words, but to survive rejection and criticism.” This is one of those unpleasant truths about publishing: you’re gonna get rejected. A lot. I wish there were a way around this. Harry Potter was turned down again and again because that’s just the way it goes sometimes. And it isn’t only publishers: when you get published, and your work is out there, you’ll get bad reviews, too. Mostly, they’ll just be people who don’t understand what you’re doing. Intellectually, you’ll know that. Your heart, on the other hand, is going to break into a thousand pieces. But here’s the secret: you can’t stop writing because of push-back. You MUST NOT stop writing because of push-back. Keep going. Don’t stop. When you get rejected, pick up your pen and keep going (and use the way you feel to put more universal application into your work). And when you’re feeling really discouraged? Remember that when someone doesn’t like your book, they might also just not be your ideal reader. That person just wasn’t your target audience.If your book isn’t to someone’s taste, that’s all right. It will be to someone else’s.Keep writing your book, because your ideal readers need it. Rule Seven: Bring your whole self to the page “What you write becomes who you are … So make sure you love what you write!” Writing is a little like a Mobius strip, in a way: Your beliefs and experiences and feelings all help craft your writing. However, your writing clarifies, corrects, and often reveals your beliefs, experiences, and feelings. As you write, you’ll discover things about yourself. You’ll clarify things, too, because it’s only as you come to write them that you realize they needed clarification in the first place. Now, understand: this means that if you haven’t given yourself a good look to find your biases (we all have them), you will bring those to the page, too. It’s important to see who you are as you bring your whole self to the page. Writing is a brave, bold venture, and life-altering discovery is part of the journey. Rule Eight: Accept that failure is part of the process “Failure is inevitable—make it a strength. You have to resign yourself to the fact that you waste a lot of trees before you write anything you really like, and that’s just the way it is. It’s like learning an instrument, you’ve got to be prepared for hitting wrong notes occasionally, or quite a lot. I wrote an awful lot before I wrote anything I was really happy with.” Failure is normal. Also, it is okay. You’re going to write a lot of crap. You’re going to push past those things and write more crap. It may take you twelve years. It may take you a million words. If it does, then you’re on the right path—the same one your favorite authors walk. Accept that it will take time, and that sometimes, your pencil won’t be your friend. If you accept it, then when it happens, you won’t throw in the towel and set the house on fire. Instead, you’ll be able to go, “Well, dang; that sucked, didn’t it? Knew it would happen. Time to write some more.” Rule Nine: Respect Your Reader Sadly, this rule doesn’t come from writing advice she’s given, but in a way, it’s the final conclusion of the previous eight. This involves bringing your whole self to the page. This involves empathy and universal application. This involves perseverance, never quitting, and willingness to tackle your writing troubles. If your readers value what you created, they will listen to what you say. Your words have the power to uplift or hurt others. None of us can ever really know where someone else is coming from, and it’s essential that both our stories and our interactions reflect respect. Respect yourself enough to be a better person. Respect your readers enough to hear what they have to say. This sounds scary, I know, but I promise you, it’s worth it.

#how to write #writing advice #writing #tw jk rowling #jkr #jk rowling #tw long post #long post #long text post #top writing advice #rules for writing

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popculturebuffet · 3 years

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Tom and Jerry 2021 Review: It’s Almost Adequate!

Hello you happy people, and welcome to a surprise review! While this was on my schedule, I moved it out to make room for my new Patreon Sponsored review. Yes at the 5 dollar tier you too can get a review a month.. but enough shilling. Point is I had some thoughts on the film, and felt I could squeeze a review of it into the schedule since my review for yesterday, the 90′s Tom and Jerry movie, got canceled as I both had to finish up my tex avery birthday review and hadn’t noticed it wasn’t on HBO Max like I thought. I could’ve sworn it was once but not anymore. Gee it’s almost like they removed their overtly awful Tom and Jerry movie from the service so people woudln’t be reminded of it when they watched the mediocre new one. Or it was never on there because HBO wants to bury that mistake in a hole. You make the call.

Point is I had some room in my schedule, so if I can’t cover the 1990 movie this weekend, though I FULLY intend to still do that at some point as it still fascinates me, might as well cover the one everyone’s actually watching. So join me under the cut with spoilers to go into why this film is .. ehhhh. under the cut

Tom and Jerry follows, as you’d expect, our working boys up to their ass in shit, what is this buisness. In this case Tom literally rides in on a rail with his keyboard wanting to be a big musician one day, while Jerry is shopping around for a home but can’t find any in his bracket. The two end up fighting, as you’d expect, when Tom performs as a blind cat in a park, a great gag, and Jerry first steals his customers by dancing to his music, but then when Tom tries to stop him, not only exposes his scam, but gets Tom’s beloved Keyboard broken.

In the process of Tom trying to get Jerry back for runing his day, Tom ruins the day of Kayla, a cynical young lady played by Chole Grace Moretz who like Robin in the last theatrical film, is a blonde girl who takes up way more screen time than our heroes for some reason. Tom accidently destroys the clothes she was sent to deliver, and she gets fired from her Task Rabbit esque job... despite the fact that TaskRabbit is app based, entirely built around how you do jobs for hire as needed, and that at most she’d get a bad review and that the app dosen’t actually hire people. I know this both because i’ve seen the apps and parodies of it show up on tv shows I watch, most recently Close Enough, and because I took the 2 minutes it took to google it , read some of the Wikipedia article and do the bare minimum that me, a paid only by commissions and patreons reviewer, did to prove a point, and that the writers of this film, who likely got paid at least 10000 for a rewrite, and more for whoever wrote the treatment, which is about 30,000 at lowest as told to me by this article on what screenwriters get paid I looked up solely to prove a point. So they got paid tens of thousands of dollars, probably more than standard... to not spend 5 minutes looking up what task rabbit is, becuase they wanted to give her a “hip” job instead of just having her work for a dry cleaner. Then again they got thousands upon thousands to half ass it and i’m getting paid nothing to go on a rant about how they half assed it, so maybe i’m the dumbass, I dunno, but at least I take pride in my work. And i’ve had trouble spellchecking at times so take that as you will.

But so far the film is not bad: the slapstick is blended really well, the action is pitch perfect and our heroes are given good motivations: Kayla’s to find a job, Tom to play piano professionally and Jerry to find a proper home. You ready for some letdown?!

All three of our heroes converge at the Royal Gate Hotel, a prestigious hotel that’s been host to popes, dignitaries and Drake. Jerry sneaks inside, and soon finds himself at home and making himself home, Tom TRIES to and ends up getting on the wrong side of Butch, the black cat from the shorts played in this film by reggaton performer Nicky Jam. Why they choose him over a comedian or anyone who could actually act, especially since Butch dosen’t have a musical number or anything, is a riddle for the ages. My best guest, as it always is, is that Tim Story owes him a Wookie-Style life debt. Not only that but even more bafflingly Butch’s gang, who to the films credit like him are all his gang of cats from the classic shorts, are played by Kevin Hart’s Improve Troop, The Plastic Cup Boyz. I got a preview for what passing a kidney stone’s going to feel like just typing that name. I thought I had no explanation for this, not even a wookie life debt can explain how Kevin Hart’s posse, because he has one for some reason but at least unlike Adam Sandler he’s helping his smaller named friends get big instead of just promoting guys who really shouldn’t have a career or dragging poor guys like Shaq or Terry Crews into your bullcrap because they like you., can explain how this happened. But I forgot I looked up Tim Story’s filmography when I first found out he was director here, more on him later, and found out he directed both Ride Along films, both think like a man films, and one of Kevin Hart’s specials, so the two presumably are friends or at least have a solid working relationship, and given how successful the first Ride Along was for both men, I doubt Tim would turn down a favor from him and vice versa.

And while I find the Plastic Cup Boyz inclusion in this film bizzare and wish it was fellow comedy troupe and starkid adjacent wonderkinds the Tin Can Bros so I could get Joey Richter voicing an animated cat, they at least try their best, their just not given much to do and I don’t get casting them in these side rolls or not giving the butch role to one of them as Nicky Jam just sucks in the role. And I get Butch isn’t the most solid or complex character, but it still isn’t THAT hard, with the 80 drumloads of great comedians out there, to find SOMEONE better, and it’s weird Kevin Hart himself isn’t in the roll. If it wasn’t a wookie life debt i’m betting Hart was going to play Butch, had to back out due to scheduling conflicts or whatever, and Tim found the first guy he could who’d take almost nothing instead of an actual actor.

Kayla meanwhile somehow takes herself from sympathetic to wholly unlikeable in the span of the scene by maniuplating and terrifying a poor woman into not taking the job, outright STEALING HER RESUME, meaning if she screwed up this might go on the poor woman’s record, and lying her way into the job. And if the woman had been you know a classist dick or something, i’d understand but this is a perfectly nice lady who worked really hard, and who looses out on a job because some little bitch talked her out of it and then stole her identity. This one act really just makes me not care: It’s one thing to do what you gotta to get a job, I myself have never lied on an application but I get new york’s insanely expensive. Even if she presumibly lives in a hole that’s cramped, has roaches or rats, who given this unvierse probably have tiny tv’s that are still way too loud and binge watch way too much Jersey Shore at 2 in the morning, and is probably haunted, probably by Droopy wearing a bedsheet going boo but still, and yes he’s also alive here but he has identical cousins. Not the point. Point is even if she has sympathetic motives.. what she did is not okay and when she get flashes of guilt throughtout hte film it’s never long enough to feel like it’s not her simply feeling bad she didn’t get this herself and not that she STOLE IT FROM ANOTHER PERSON. Again if she’d FAKED her resume, this would’ve been fine, simply set up some websites, and it would’ve worked so why they went with this elaborate setup that takes her into outright crimes is beyond me.

Point is she gets hired by the manager/owner, Mr. Dubrois, played by Rob Delany, but since his name isn’t used enough i’m just going to call him Mustache Manager. Her direct superior whose against her being hired is Terrance, the Gate’s Event Manager played by a way too good for this film Micheal Pena, who sadly is given nothing to work with. Terrance.. is supposed to be the bad guy because he distrusts kayla. And while one of those reasons is stupid, she makes a joke about the goldfish being an aquatics manger and he takes it dead seriously, he’s rightfully supscious she’s not who she says she is, since one of the places on her resume is a place he knows people from. The only way the film manages to make him the bad guy is he is COMICALLY out of touch: he dosen’t get sarcasm, as seen before, dosen’t want people posting jerry to “snapgram or instaface”, and seems to have trouble relating to his guests. What makes this not work is that he’s manger at a ludicrously expensive hotel. As such a good chunk of his events would be for Celebrties, since New York’s a big hub for them, having tons living there and visiting for films, apperances on late night talk shows, SNL and what have you and being a prime spot for events and it’s clear part of his job is talking to the guests as the two the film focuses on, more on that in a minute, know him and have met him before. He also mentions Drake having stayed there... he would NOT have kept this job.

You’d need to do through research on these kinds of celebrates and social media is the easiest way to do that, to get what they like, what they don’t, what they don’t want to talk about, what scandals or gos might be going on to keep paparazzi out. I don’t even know how this business works nor did I google it.. and I didn’t to prove a point.. that even with no real idea how this works.. I still get what you’d probably need to know to make events for rich famous people. I’m not convinced Terrance knows how an internet works. And given writer Kevin Costello wrote the well received and weird film I still want to see Brigbsby Bear, I get the sense a lot of this nonsense was added in rewrites demanded by executives and credit him more for what works in the film. More on that in a moment.

Kayla is hired on because the Royal Gate has it’s biggest event ever, the wedding of Ben, played by Colin Jost, and Preeta, played by Pallavi Sharda. Why is it big? What do they do exactly? Are they trust fund babies? Did Ben invent an app? Did Preeta cure global warming? Did they both help defeat Galactus DEVOURER OF WORLDS?!... I dont’ know. If the film told me at all why their big names, even if it’s just because their famous for being famous which would be fine, why this is bigger than a fucking pope visiting, I missed it and I actually went back to their first scene and the scene where Mustache Manager brings up the wedding in the first place to Kayla, and found nothing. We just know their rich, their getting married, Ben doesn’t listen to Preeta and is insufferable, and that they own two classic Tom and Jerry characters: Ben owns spike whose played by Bobby Canavale who isn’t bad but dosen’t try to sound like spike at all and that annoys me given unlike Tom and Jerry, the former of whom’s signature noises from the cartoon were used archivally and otherwise dosen’t talk and only sings on occasion or does that wonderfully weird “don’t you belivie it” thing., has a distinct voice they could’ve got someone to imitate. The other is Preeya’s cat toodles, that white cat Tom is always trying to bang, who got a neat less anthro redesign.

Toots, Toodles whatever you call her the redesign works, making her more of a cat, and only speaking in meows for some reason, and combinging the two female cats tom’s liked, but while still being just funny animal enough that him wanting some pussy, so to speak, isn’t too creepy.

And this is where the film undergoes a bit of a shift. While the 20 or so minutes are rightfully focused on our boys with a bit of focus on Kayla, from here on out she’s our defacto lead. Given the last film did the same damn thing of making Tom and Jerry not the main leads in their own movie, you can see the problem. I will say to the film’s credit it is still LEAGUES better in a lot of other ways than the 90′s film in that the plot is actually centered around them: Jerry, when stealing some cheese, and runs afoul of the tempermental Chef Jackie played by Kim Jeong. Though i’m 100% not convinced Ben Chang didn’t just lie on his resume at some place and has now somehow become a michline star canditate. He finds Jerry, and Kayla volunteers to catch him to help her own career and validly points out her doing this discreetly with only the staff knowing about the mouse will keep it from becoming a social media nightmare.

The 90′s film could work without them, replacing them with any animal sidekick for Robin, since nit’s so far removed from Tom and Jerry their really an afterthought. Here the film DOES feel like a tom and jerry plot at it’s core, Jerry’s somewhere he shoudln’t be, Tom wants to chase him either due to personal greivance or his job depending on it, in this case both. The small side cast are all involved, and given decent if thin justifications for being there: Butch is an ally cat and Spike and Tootles are the pets of the happy couple.

And honestly the slapstick portions, the portions that are tom and jerry focused or use the humans well, are BRILLIANT. No really, it’s good stuff once in a while using a bit from the classics but mostly coming up with new gags and the animation is gorgeous. I won’t lie and say it’s always perfect, sometimes the models are a bit off and look unfinished and that’s not forgivable when you delay your film two months, and thus have extra time to work on that. But that’s a few shots here and there versus the majority of hte film where the various animals all blend perfectly. Unlike most Live Action adaptations of an old cartoon, this one actually seemed to have good reason, as they’ve taken the basic roger rabbit tech of decades ago and expanded on it well. Just like that classic you often wonder how the hell they pulled this off, and outside of one egregrous sequence where tom sets up an elaborate trap we spend far too much time on, when they do use CG for any props, you can’t tell. This is best highlighted by what I consdier to be the film’s best sequence and what brings Tom into the plot proper after lurking on the fringes for a good 15 minutes: Tom, miserable in the rain, finds jerry living it up in an empty room, and after some fun shenanigans trying to get in, finally succeds leading to a good 2-3 minute sequence of the two chasing after each other in the room. There are no actors, no one else and the room is empty, but perfectly gimmicked to time with thier movments. Wether they used cg and I couldn’t tell or just simply timed things great, it’s utterly fantastic and shows why this film is live action: while i’td be fine animated they cleary ahd the tech and ideas to do it live and thus did it this way. Naturally Kayla meets Tom again, and after finding out the room was trashed by both him and Jerry gets Mustache Manager to hire him.

But this is the problem: While there are great set pieces like this, or a REALLY damn impressive one later where Terrance gets dragged into a ball of violence while walking Spike for Ben and we see INSIDE IT, with Terrance not moving as fast but that being okay. And I love the movie’s commitment that ALL animals are animated. So it has it’s charms and gets a LOT right.

It’s clear to me from this strong core that the script was messed with, either by director Tim Story or the execs. Some misguided and stupid bits I get even if it was a bad idea: Tom does do the piano at one point, after he thinks he’s gotten rid of Jerry thanks to again an unwieldy overly long bit of CGI that’s a down spot on the usually good just tom and jerry stuff. And he STARTS singing a 40′s jazz song, and I thought “Okay they really got this and are doing something like is you is or is you ain’t my baby this will be fun”. Then T-Pain started using autotune, because of course, and Tom’s shoulder devil started scratching next to him...

By the way Tom’s Shoulder Devil and Angel are played very well by Lil Rel Howrey , aka Rod from Get Out. So good on you man, one bit of non miscasting. There’s one or two cringe inducing moment of trying to be hip here or there though for a film like this it isn’t nearly as bad as you’d expect. Still bad but i’ve seen so much worse at this point i’m not going to bother getting mad or upset over it. I’m used to this kind of thing from kids movies.

But while the film dosen’t really lack Tom and Jerry, it sidelines them way too often> There’s just too many scenes just about Kayla, whose not only not a great character despite Chole trying her absolute hardest god bless her. Her hitting it off with the bartender, her arguing with Terrance whose even more insufferable and her bonding with Preeta and Ben being annoying, we’ll get to him.. WE’LL GET TO HIM. But they aren’t funny or interesting, there’s nothing THERE to really get me interested, nothing new or fresh that we haven’t seen done better before. There’s just nothing, it feels like large parts of blank space. And to illustrate this my Niece, who I watched the film with and really loves Tom and Jerry after I showed it to her... played with other stuff during most of those scenes. And she’s young, her attention span is not great.. but noticably during the actual scenes of slapstick she was glued to the tv, just like she was when I showed her the classic shorts. It’s not just old farts like me who remember tom and jerry from their youth.. it’s the kids your TRYING to appeal to that don’t want this. If you can’t get kids, who in general and speaking from my own personal experience will watch just about anything, to pay attention YOU. HAVE. FAILED.

Okay took a second to compose myself, let’s move on to the rest of the movie. So after T-Pain stabbed music in the throat, we get to the worst section of the film as Kayla brokers peace between the two to get Preeta’s ring back after the three end up in the aformnetioned violence ball with Terrance, who she ducks his claims that she didn’t catch the mouse.. which she did not but for once she’s sympathetic as Terrance is much more likeable either, though gaslighting him and getting him put on leave is a bit extreme. Bafflingly, Kayla gets his job as event cordinator for now, and thus has to broker peace between the two warring factions.. and does so in the strangest way possible: by booking a day for them in new york to hang out and be BUDDIES!. This isn’t bad as the last film as it dosen’t last, but it is just.. surreal seeing the two having a hanging out montage around new york. Like the film just took a really weird turn with this, the montage itself isn’t weird, it’s standard shenanigans minus the fighting but still good stuff. Unlike the 90′s movie instead of singing about being palls or helping a small child, they just get into cartoony shenanigans together. More proof the film could’ve been so much better just with them.

Speaking of proof the film would’ve been better without them , Ben fucks around with a drone for the wedding, after Preeta confided in Kayla the wedding’s getting to be a bit much. So let’s talk about Ben shall we? While Preeta is just nice, friendly and down to earth, Ben... is a dumbass, a jackass and just an ass. His whole schtick is that he keeps escalting the wedding despite her wishing he’d stop, and i’ts just.. not funny. A guy ignoring his partner’s wishes, constnatly doing big gestures in large part to try and win over her dad who RIGHTFULLY hates, and in general just sucks. I do not blame this on Colin Jost: He’s perfectly charming on SNL, and Weekend Update is usually damn fun under him and Micheal Che. But like with Pena and Mortez, he’s given NOTHING to work with, and furthe rmore can’t improvise.. aka the skill most SNL cast and almnus walk away with. So it’s no suprise he instead comes off like an anoying plank of wood you want to see fall down a manhole and never return so Preeta can marry someone else. I dunno the Doorman’s a pretty cool guy, and if he’s taken or something there’s always Droopy. Droopy’s the smoothest motherfucker and we all know. And if HE’S taken there’s mustache man. The point is we have a Dating Game’s worth of elligble bachelors and the film tries to sell a plank of wood who clearly wants to bang Preeta’s dad more than he wants a genuine equal relationship with Preeta.

So that dosen’t help the final act.. which is started with something REALLY weird to round off tom and jerry’s day as Tom catches a ball, interupts a play and get.s. thrown in the pound for it?

I don’t know how tha’ts a crime, I don’t get it either, point is the animal control guy is a creep who shows them off as they pass some angry dogs.. and..

MY BOY. There was an earlier joke with him taking the place of The Joker, and I thought that was it sadly but nope there he is! While, given they don’t really have much to do with each other, it is a tad weird he’s been grafted onto the tom and jerry legacy.. I really don’t care because it means Droopy gets to show up every so often in other stuff like this.. And hopefully the spinoff series coming in the summer. I”ve talked before about how much I love this dog so having him show up here was a HUGE delight and easily the higlihgt of the film and the gag is perfect. WHy is he in prison? I don’t know. But given who we’re dealing with I also assume he just disappeared later and showed up at the Wolf’s place again to get the evidence to clear his name and to help a young brodway hopeful played by Peyton R LIst get to her audition in time. And yes I just imagined another live action film with a classic character.. but admit it you’d rather be watching that one. They also run into butch who tries to force him to eat Jerry or they’ll kill him.

Terence saw the arrest on the tv though, so he bails the two out, pits them against each other, and sets them loose at the wedding. This goes how you’d expect. the two cause chaos and thanks to Weekend UpDumbass there’s pecocks, tigers and elephants, and Jerry naturally spooks the elephants, Spike, who has it in for tom as usual, goes after tom the tiger goes after him and the wedding is destroyed. Preeta breaks up with Ben and leaves, and Kayla is fired.

Less good is that Tom gets thrown out because Terrance backed out on his deal because he’s a fucking asshole. So while Kayla gripes to her sorta loveintrest bartender man, and wishes she could fix things, T and J show up, both realizing it’s their fault and both with a plan to fix things leading to our climax. Kayla goes back to the hotel, and while Terrance tries to boject she rightfully blackmails him. Sadly neither get their commupance and while Mustache Manager puts two and two together, he’s all for ending this PR Nightmare and helping with Kayla’s plan to get ben to stage a wedding in central park that Preeta actually wants while our two actual heroes go to stop her and do some light kidnapping of toodles to get Preeta to stop.

So it ends how you’d expect: Preeta makes a huge mistake, seriously Droopy go to their honemoon I guarantee Ben will wonder off into the ocean because he thought it looked sick bro, Kayla gets her job back and in a move that makes her almost tolerable hires the woman she stole from who Terrance clearly wants to bang, and Tom actually catches Toot’s eye, but then Jerry mucks it up because cockblocking tom has been his job since the 40′s, they fight, Kayla tells them to cut it out, they put an the end thing over it. Roll credits.

As you could tell I had issues with this film and had more the more I thought about it. So it’s not very good.. but I still recommend watching it if you have Max right now. Yes really. While the human parts are pretty awful as you could tell, you can have some fun mocking them, and it’s worth suffering through them for the bits with our boys, as those bits are geneuinely energetic, fun and what you came for. If you like tom and Jerry, you probably won’t like this movie.. but you’ll enjoy those bits. Hopefully if there’s a sequel, and this film was a suprise hit so their probably will be, they’ll learn their lesson from this one and focus less on the humans and more on the hyjinks but overall this is just a medicore waste of some really great technology and slapstick. This is just one huge ball of dispaointment instead of cartoon violence and i’m sorry it ended this way. If you liked this review, you can follow me on my patreon at patreon.com/popculturebuffet. Even 1 dollar a month helps and my next stretch goal nets a Darkwing Duck episode a month, so if that excites you, please sign up. And if you can’t afford to that’s fine and feel free to stick around anyway. Times are hard and I get that. And I will see you at the next rainbow.

#tom and jerry #tom and jerry 2021 #tom and jerry movie #tom and jerry the movie #tom cat #jerry mouse #droopy #toodles #spike #micheal pena #chloe grace moretz #kim jeong #colin jost #hbo max #mgm #warner brothers

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vrenaewrites · 4 years

Text

HUSH HUSH by Becca Fitzpatrick thoughts: Ch 12 - end

Full video here.

CHAPTER 12

Nora’s mom is on her way home

Nora goes to visit V

“I love drugs” LMAO

She goes into a diatribe about her doctor only eating easter candy i’m crying

It was a guy!!! He had dark eyes and he was wearing a ski mask!!!!!

After thought: was jules just manipping them SO HARD they couldn’t keep a grip on what the ski masked person looked like? If so...why keep wearing a ski mask as your calling card??

V had told elliott they were going shopping

Nora tells V about hitting the guy in the ski mask

Ooh nora told patch about shopping too!!!!

Too short and too skinny to be elliott though

V is like “the more i think about it, i really think it was patch”

Nora doesn’t get a chance to tell V about elliott before the drugs kick in hard

“I brought your homework, where do you want it?” she pointed to the trash can LMAO V IS THE BEST

She goes home and hugs her mom

CHAPTER 13

She and V go to borderline where patch works to get info from his coworkers

Nora is sweaty lmao

Nora literally wrote interrogations on one side of a piece of paper and flirting prompts on the other side this girl is ridiculous

V brought slutty heels to make Nora more seductive I’m dead

V invited Jules and Elliott...she’s been seeing Jules

Nora goes to tell V about Elliott but he shows up before she can

Jules doesn’t show up

Nora is like so Elliot if the prep school is so great why did you transfer basically challenging this potential murderer

Elliott is like “heard the girls were hotter at your school”

I am beyond confused as to why V invited these guys who know who Nora is, but also expects Nora to put on a whole ass disguise in the bathroom and go talk to the bartender… Why would you invite these guys along? This just makes it way more difficult…

Nora goes to the bartender and tries to make conversation; is terrible at it, basically asks him is it possible to get hired here with a felony, can I see patch’s job application, does patch have a girlfriend?

Patch is covering a shift so he is NOT off as originally expected

Patch confronts her in the girl’s bathroom and he’s like “are you following me?” POT KETTLE BITCH

She goes to take the high heels off and drops the list of interrogation questions and patch picks it up and I am nervous

Patch had a girlfriend but she’s dead

Gonna call it: she’s the girl who was hanged at kinghorn that Elliott was questioned about

Chapter 14

Her mom “Blinked owlishly” excuse me??

Nora’s mom wants to sell their house because it’s too much $

So Nora decides not to tell mom about the ski mask guy

She asks her mom about knowing if she loved dad and if she was ever afraid of dad

When the pats lost her dad would chop down trees with a chainsaw lmaoooooo what

Nora‘s mom says “ooh a boy is he on chess team? Student council? Tennis team?”

And Nora says… He likes pool… and her mom says “ooh a swimmer” LMAO

Someone ripped her room APART

It’s the ski mask guy!!!!! He jumped out the window

One of the cops looks like patch…

Nothing is messed up when the cops look at the room…

Is Nora going insane or is it angel shit

Unfortunately I think this book would be so much more interesting if I didn’t already know that patch was a fallen angel and I don’t know if that’s my bad for trying to fine just like a quick summary of what the book was about on the Internet, or if like the back of the book let you know that this is about an angel… I mean the cover let you know it’s about an angel but I would’ve thought these dudes are like…serial killers or something and that Nora had some kind of mental issue or they had messed with her iron supplements to make her go nuts…Which might’ve been more interesting than whatever is going on here

Chapter 15

Nora finally tells V about the article and v doesn’t believe her

Nora thinks that she has a great point because Elliot transferred schools after he was questioned… I’m sure it was really hard to keep going to school with people who knew you were a murder suspect...so…

Nora wants to go to kinghorn and question the students about elliott

The fact that this all somehow ties back to fallen angels is really pissing me off because we are halfway through it, and we have not even really from Nora’s point of you introduced the idea of Angels

Nora is suddenly like why the fuck is Jules always sick

Also how is he always around if kinghorn is such a difficult school

Nora realizes the article that she printed about Elliot was missing from her room after the ski mask guy broke in so now she is convinced Skimask guy is Elliot

I will say that I have absolutely no idea where this is going so it is keeping my attention because again I don’t understand how this is going to tie back to angels and why the girl died and etc.

Coach makes V and Patch switch places

“I didn’t do homework” “who did you do?” Bro come on

“The subjects pulse increased on contact”

She goes to her appointment with Miss Green and somehow Miss Green knows that patch took her home from the pier and that patch went into her house what the fuck is going on

I really really really hope that all of this weird shit comes together in the last like five chapters and I end up like screaming OH DUH putting all this together… But because this was recommended as part of my cringe series, I have a very strong feeling that is not going to happen and all of this means nothing

“something about Miss Green bothered me, it was almost like she had an agenda“ yeah bitch she knew a guy took you to your house and came inside, she is stalking you

Chapter 16

Nora runs into Marcy at the library and basically Marcy says V got attacked because someone mistake her for a bear or a moose because she’s fat, and then they have a name calling back-and-forth of skank, slut, anorexic pig like real vile shit

Nora goes to the underground tunnel to get to the parking lot even though...she didn’t drive…

Patch is in the tunnel

“His smile looked like he didn’t play by the rules”

She immediately is like “if he’s gonna rape me he cornered me in the perfect place” JESUS

I mean all women think like that in a dark space but she likes this guy and they go to school together and...damn that was a jump!

Nora gets a car between them and they have like a run around while she’s asking him questions

“Was it a coincidence that the last normal day in my life had been right before that fateful day?” Editor fight me

She lets him take her home again

I am starting to feel like we are back to after, where the same things keep happening over and over for no reason… She was so determined to get answers and then she let it go because he turned the conversation on her...she should’ve just held her ground and then like I am not leaving until you tell me what the fuck is going on, but she didn’t, so does she care or not

He asks her out…

Chapter 17

She is so infuriating, she’s getting ready for this date but thinking about kissing him rather than thinking about getting answers on if this dude is stalking her / reading her mind...it’s so frustrating

The detectives show up

Asking about Marcy…?

Marcy got beat up!!!! By patch??

She lies that patch isn’t on his way

They go to the arcade

He’s behind her showing her how to play pool fuck yeah

He’s like “if I hit this, take off your jacket”

A guy named Rickson shows up, him and patch start roughhousing and we see patch’s giant back scars

They call him patch because he used to get his ass beat in bar fights and had to get patched up a lot lmao

Chapter 18

He leaves her in the Jeep while he gets dinner and she goes sleuthing

So in chapter 18 she is saying she would settle for finding his cell phone number but...she called him at Boze arcade in like the third chapter so what number was that, did you not write it down once you washed it off your hand, or was that the arcades phone... why do you not have his phone number anymore

He has a metal flashlight with blood on it in his glove compartment, making Nora think he had beat up Marcy after all

I swear to God, if he gets back in the car and she starts getting horny for him after finding this flashlight I am not gonna finish this book I am going to quit

He pulled out a gun?!?!?!?!!?!?!???!?!?

Paintball gun. He says it’s paint on the flashlight?? Sure Jan

He gives her a snow globe of the pier, cute!

Mom catches them lmaooo

Chapter 19

So Nora is on the phone with V and she’s like how did the date go with patch and Nora said something about him giving her pool pointers and he says I bet he could give you pointers in other areas… And then the next sentence is V trying to convince Nora once again that patch is the one who broke her arm… So… Why the fuck do you want your best friend to fuck the guy who broke your arm????????

Nora realizes that the angels that were painted on the roller coaster have the same scar that patch has

“My voice was strewn with cobwebs” huh?????

She goes on their home computer to google “angel wings scars” LMAO why did every girl in a YA novel in the early 2000s google what their monster boyfriend was

Info dump re angels: they talk to humans in their minds, can possess them during the unholy Hebrew month

“I filed everything away that I had just read in my mind, and stamped ‘scary’ on the outside“ lmao

“V, do you believe in superheroes? Do you think the Bible is real?”

Chapter 20

Elliott is at her house...drunk

He punches the side of her house

He invites her to go camping with him Jules and V...after he acknowledges she doesn’t like him

He rips her out of the house and throws her against it when she says she doesn’t wanna go

Thank god her mom wakes up

V tries to talk Nora into going, and Nora tells her what happened at the house, and V is like “well he was drunk”

Insert pic of unamused Kristen Stewart face

PLEASE tell me she’s being controlled by the angel powers because wtf

“Maybe you’re trying so hard to pin the ski mask on Elliott because you know it’s patch deep down” she’s not wrong tho patch is also a terrible dude who is stalking(?) her

Nora goes to Portland to investigate Elliott, and kierstens death

She throws away her questions this time, smart

She interrogates the waitress at kierstens old job, who is NOT amused but agrees to tell her some tea if she gets food and tips her big

Kiersten and Elliott were hooking up

Elliott bought kierstens apartment so he def coulda planted the note

Elliott and Jules were in the restaurant talking about a test that Jules has failed...I get the feeling it wasn’t academic

Chapter 21

Someone’s watching herrrr

V is in Portland with Elliott…? But she’s alone...she wants Nora to come get her

Red flag

She gets hustled by a homeless woman for her coat

She left her phone in the coat

She witnesses a shooting...of the bag lady...who was wearing her coat and hat!!!!!!!!!!

She calls patch and he comes to get her

V went home with the boys

“The water was smooth black poison” wut

The Jeep dies on the highway and a storm rolls in

Chapter 22

They get a room to wait out the storm because the lights and phones are down

She still is like wary of him but she doesn’t really have a choice at this point, fair.

Also, favorite trope: there’s only one bed

Her clothes are wet so she makes him blow out the candles so he can’t see her in her underwear….

She touches his scar and gets sucked into blackness?!?!

Chapter 23

There are 8 chapters left and I have a BAD feeling that we’re in sequel bait territory

She’s in like a flashback from 8 months ago

Miss green meets patch at bo’s, he calls her Daubria

“Your kind and my kind don’t mix” she’s an angel and he’s a fallen one, I just know it “it’s not easy getting down here”

“If you save a human life, you can get your wings back”

“Now tell me why you’re really here”

Something about the book of Enoch and him wanting to recreate it

He wants a name from her list since she’s a death angel

Daubria says Nora’s name and patch asks who wants to kill her and Daubria says, “you”

So…..if he stops himself….he can get his wings?

She comes back and patch pins her to the bed, pissed

So she has just found out that he wants to kill her, he has her pinned to the bed, and she asks “is Daubria your girlfriend???” Why do you literally care and why do you not have any self-preservation skills

He kisses her?!?!

She bites the shit out of his lip

He did try to kill her on the archangel but couldn’t do it, he was gonna stab her in her house, couldn’t do it

She’s passing out because she needs her iron pills

He calms her down

He lets her touch his scars again so she’ll trust him

Chapter 24

She wakes up next to a skeleton in a graveyard

The Irish guy is talking to patch there

Patch wants to become human, as he heard in the book of Enoch

She comes back

Patch feels through a “sheet of glass” unless he possess a body

Patch is the angel from the prologue I think

“If you can’t feel, why did you kiss me?” “Because I can feel it in my heart”

He fell because he lusted after a human girl

He didn’t know Daubria was still on earth…

She now thinks Daubria is the ski mask person

Chapter 25

Patch goes to get the car and leaves Nora there

They get her home and patch checks the house for her

V doesn’t answer her phone

Daubria is there!!

She says she isn’t the one who has been spying

She planted the idea in V’s mind that patch attacked her

Her birthmark means she’s Chauncey’s descendant, and the book says if patch killed his vassal’s descendant he can be human (according to Daubria)

She goes to kill Nora so she’ll be out of the way

Daubria is v hurt by him falling and “falling” for the human girl

Daubria goes full angel, using tk, glowing, trying to stop Nora

Daubria sets the house on fire

Patch comes back and tells her to drive his Jeep to Delphic

She starts to search for V in the meantime

Chapter 26

She goes to the movies and gets a ticket for the sacrifice, remarking on the irony of the title

V isn’t at the movies

But patch is?!?!

“Shut up or I’ll get security” “yeah, get security, this guy wants to kill me” “I want to kill you”

“I’ll tell you what I’ve done: I’m not good, but I was worse”

He’s now saying she’s worth falling for basically

“I don’t kill people who are important to me, and you top the list”

Patch ripped daubria’s wings off

“Let’s be honest, you got it bad for me, and I’ve got it bad for you.”

“You don’t need me to help you fight her.” “What do I need you for?” “We have unfinished business”

They making OUT in this theater bathroom

Her phone rings, V and the guys broke into school, and Elliott says “Nora come play or there’s a tree in the courtyard with V’s name on it”

Listen. To. Me. If these two plots have nothing to do with each other, I am going to rip my hair out. These could have been 2 different books.

Chapter 27

She tells patch about the article

Patch says he doesn’t remember Jules being at the arcade…

Jules is an angel I bet

The jeeps tires are slashed so they pay an employee to take his car

He tells Nora to stay in the car

Chapter 28

Elliott calls Nora and says he’s watching her

Nora GETS OUT OF THE CAAAAAAR

AND GOES INTO THE SCHOOL NORA HE TOLD YOU NOT TO FUCKING GET OUT

Nora tripped over Jules’ dead body…

Elliott is in the library, basically dead…

The lights keep going on and off…

The ski mask person is here!!!!!!!

IT IS JULES?!?!

He’s an angel!!!! Called it, He’s been fucking with her mind

He throws her in the bio room, and she sees a scalpel on the ground and grabs it

Jules was Elliott’s benefactor and made him choose between love and money…

Jules really wanted patch, but patch can’t be hurt...so he’s using Nora to get to him

Jules is patch’s vassal!!!!! So he’s fucking PISSED

HE IS CHAUNCEY!!!!!!

The guardian presence she felt wasn’t her dad, it was Jules

She stabs him, but bumps a table as she tries to escape…

He passes out

Chapter 29

She finds V in the e-zine lab

All the doors are chained…

She ends up trapped in the gym

Jules has a gun!!!!

He beat up Marcy because he didn’t want anyone messing with “his girl”

Patch finds them, Jules holds her at gun point, patch possesses Nora to beat the SHIT out of Jules

He couldn’t stay long enough to kill Jules, and the effort made him pass out

She climbs up the air shaft despite being afraid of heights and Jules is fucking with her, making her think she’s falling

Patch helps her anchor to reality

They’re both on the rafters

She realizes if she sacrifices herself, patch can be human

She throws herself off the rafter

Chapter 30

She hears a clock and wings, but then she slides backwards instead

She wakes up in her bedroom, with patch

Patch turned down her sacrifice so she could live

“What good is a body if I can’t have you?”

He’s a guardian angel because he saved her

V and Elliott are fine

The police think Jules killed himself

V says “shoe-shopping therapy” instead of retail therapy why

The book ends with patch coming back to give her a kiss...boring

There’s an exchange that’s the last sentence of the book where he pulls away and she’s like “more” “more?” “more”

#reading #book review #cringe books #booktube #hush hush #becca fitzpatrick #patch cipriano #nora grey #negative review

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knuxfan24 · 4 years

Text

Sonic ‘06 - Greenflower Zone Mod Technical Write Up

On April 27th of 2020 I released the Version 1.1 update for my Greenflower Zone mod for Sonic ‘06, a few days before release, I got the idea to do a technical write up on the process that I went through making this mod, as it is a strange one that has morphed over the span of almost a year, evolving and growing with the ‘06 Modding Scene itself.

Original Proof of Concept

youtube

Back in May of 2019, I started toying around with some old Sonic ‘06 tools, thanks to my interest in modding the game rising following improvements in Xenia which made the game more playable within it. As I’d previously done Greenflower Zone Act 1 for Shadow The Hedgehog in February of the same year, I decided to use it as an experiment for importing stage terrain into ‘06; as I already knew the rough process for converting a model to an XNO thanks to me trying to put one of my Sonic Forces Avatars over Sonic. However, we didn’t have a way to do collision at this point, so my initial plan was to use the common_stopplayercollision object to kind of fake the collision so I would at least be able to walk around it. Unfortunately, the character doesn’t treat that object as ground, so they just float above it. Yet I still decided to place some objects around by manually typing in coordinates based off the object placements I’d previously done for the Shadow port.

Initial Collision Experiments

Shortly afterwards, Melpontro offered to convert a collision mesh for me, while we didn’t have surface tags on it, it was a good enough job to let me experiment more with the stage, which I did by continuing to copy and paste object coordinates from the Shadow port, again, all in plain text XML files. As a result, objects weren’t rotated correctly due to Quaternion Rotation being literal satan and I would have to check an object in game to even see if it was close to being correct.

SonicGLVL

At some point, I hit upon the idea of using SonicGLVL (the Sonic Generations Level Editor) to visualise the object placements. This mostly came about due to me remembering that object rotations in Generations SET Files are also Quaternions, so I could copy and paste their values to get the rotations correct. While I was still hand typing everything, this made it easier to determine object placements, especially considering Shadow The Hedgehog could spawn multiple Rings from one Ring object, a feature ‘06 lacks, as a result, I had to guess the right coordinates for the other Rings with no way to visually check it without booting up the game.

Surface Properties and Sticky Walls

A few days after I’d done more SET work, I sent Melpontro a version of the collision with various meshes tagged by type, allowing him to create collision with various Surface Properties, resulting in proper footstep sounds for surfaces. However, this also led to an issue caused by ‘06′s unusual tagging system for collision meshes.

Walls in ‘06 need to be tagged as such, resulting in quite a bit of trial and error until we got it mostly working. With Act 1 done to a good enough state for a proper work in progress, it was time to move on to Act 2.

WinForms and HedgeLib

Around the time of working on Act 2, I decided to start cobbling together various small C# programs using HedgeLib to try and help me with the process, while I was roughly familiar with bits and pieces of the ‘06 SET Format thanks to my previous work on the Sonic ‘06 Randomiser there was still a lot of things I didn’t know.

One of the first things I wrote was something that would load a SET File and allow me to see all the parameter values of the objects within the SET. This allowed me to document what I thought the parameters for certain objects do (while also discovering a frustrating quirk in HedgeLib). As time passed, work continued on Act 2, while I also started creating an original layout for Shadow, designed under the mindset of playing the stage backwards. Before I got sidetracked working on something else.

The Mod Manager’s early beginnings

Over time, I gradually became frustrated with having multiple copies of ‘06 and accidentally cross contaminating them with various mods thanks to me copying them to the wrong install. While Hyper had a GitHub page for a Sonic ‘06 Mod Manager, it didn’t actually work, leading to me to write a small C# Command Line application to copy and remove the Greenflower files for me. This eventually led to me creating a small GUI for it with the ability to load multiple mods together, which would soon be expanded upon.

Around the same time, I also experimented with Melpontro’s old Emerald Coast stage mod, managing to get it running on Xenia, while also figuring out how ‘06 handles volume objects such as camera volumes. I also brought back a joke Sonic Forces mod at this point, Chair The Sonic, which would evolve into Furniture Adventure 3 before I killed the joke thanks to it going far enough to become unfunny.

Greenflower did take a backseat at this point, only really being used to test Vertex Colours for underwater colouring, as well as experimentation with the game’s dynamic lighting system. Though it would soon be used as a testing ground for something.

The GLVL Converter

On the 2nd of June, I posted this image to my Twitter, based on the wording of my tweet, it sounded like I already had a system in place to convert Generations objects to ‘06. However, I would have still had to do all the parameters manually in an XML. This process seeked to change that, with me manually creating GLVL Templates for objects as I needed them and writing code to auto convert them (shamelessly ripping off the GensToForcesSETConverter in the process). At a future point, I wrote a tool that would autogenerate the templates for me, although the object parameters were just labelled as Parameter1, Parameter2 and so on.

Throughout the process of experimenting with and understanding objects, Greenflower was used as my test bed, as I was too lazy to make a proper test stage for myself at the time and didn’t really have easy access to the unused test level recreations.

The Mod Manager and Tropical Jungle Extra

While working on the SET Conversion experiments, I continued to work on my Mod Manager alongside it before creating a new experiment to mess around with the DLC system and the converter. I started creating a layout for the third section of Tropical Jungle for Sonic, as he does not normally visit that segment of the stage.

Greenflower took a massive backseat at this point, as most of the focus went into Tropical Jungle Extra, before me and Hyper teamed up to create a better Mod Manager out of both of our work. After releasing Tropical Jungle Extra, I worked on a similar concept for Silver and the first section of Dusty Desert, although this never saw the light of day, nor did my short lived attempt at creating a DLC episode for Knuckles.

Lost in Translation and Camera Experiments

At some point in July, I started tinkering with Greenflower again, rebuilding the SET files from the ground up with our new templates and the GLVL Converter, while also experimenting with using dynamic cameras for some parts, at some point I also inserted the music thanks to our XMA workarounds. However, thanks to me having no ability to experiment with the collision, I drifted away from it again and started working on a new project, messing around with Google Translate’s API. This project became Sonic The Hedgehog: Lost in Translation.

I was still working on the Randomiser at this point, so my attention was very divided, with Greenflower slipping down the priority list. At this point, I was also aware of SRB2 2.2′s intent to redesign the zone from the ground up, which pushed it even further down while I waited for it.

The Collision Converter

Towards the end of the month, I remembered Sajid’s previous attempt to write a Collision Converter for me using LibS06, after requesting that code, Skyth provided me with the line to make it work, which I tested on a shoddy import of the Sonic Adventure 2 version of Green Hill Zone Act 1.

With a Collision Converter in hand, I started experimenting with other stages, creating a version of Westopolis for ‘06, as well as some other experiments that didn’t go very far. Before eventually jumping back into and finishing Lost in Translation.

At this point, Greenflower was still on the backburner, with me only really using it to see how the Sonic Adventure HUD mod would look with it and also putting it into the ‘06 demo for the hell of it.

More focus was placed into the Mod Manager around this time, with us rewriting it (leading to the creation of the Aldi Mod Manager jokes).

Mortar Canyon

For some silly reason, I started messing around with Mortar Canyon from Sonic Forces, there isn’t really much to say about it, other than the fact that I needed to use the Switch terrain, as the PC terrain behaved unusually.

SRB2 Version 2.2

Following the release of Sonic Robo Blast 2 Version 2.2, I tested opening and exporting the Greenflower Act 1 terrain for it from Zone Builder to see if it still worked, and it did. As a result, I started messing with it again, although my priority at the time was on my Tropical Jungle mod for Sonic Forces. Issues with the Zone Builder export also lowered my motivation to work on it, although I continued to experiment in the background, trying to find fixes.

About a week later, I toyed around with the Zone Builder source code, finally managing to correct the issue, which was caused by Zone Builder’s OBJ exporter “optimising” the exported terrain by throwing out certain vertices.

With the source for Zone Builder, I also experimented with having 100% accurate object placement, writing a small hack to export the Thing Placement into a text file which I could then use to write into a SET file with HedgeLib. However, object heights are handled incorrectly in Zone Builder, requiring me to fix certain objects manually.

As I finished up work on Tropical Jungle for Forces, I started working more on Greenflower in the background, while also experimenting with some dumb jokes. However, I soon hit another motivational block, The water and grass edges...

Nonami the Material God

Thanks to poor documentation of the XNO format, we had no clue how to make transparent objects look good or how to make translucent objects at all. As a result, I kinda trailed off for a while. However, on the 2nd of March, Nonami showed an image on the Lost Legacy Discord server of translucent water in their Emerald Coast mod and also told us the byte to hex edit to enable it. A quick test later, and I had translucent water

I soon moved the level over to the Kingdom Valley slot, as I wanted to use the breakable wall object that stage has, which meant I needed that slot for the sound, before following up with creating Vertex Colours for the underwater terrain.

Hyper later took over some work on the Skybox and Grass Edges, experimenting with hex edits and texture upscaling to help smooth out the transparent edges while I worked on creating the SET files for the other characters He also worked on fixing up the fence collision for me, as the way it exported from Zone Builder caused Sonic to be able to fairly easily clip through them.

Eventually, I decided (with very little thought behind it) to make various elements of the stage grindable, before following it up with (incredibly tedious to make) Light Dash splines. Eventually, me and Hyper screwed around with it in Multiplayer late into the night, giving us the inspiration to start trying to create a Prop Hunt gamemode for ‘06 too.

With most of the motivational stumbles out of the way, I decided to tackle the flowers and trees by recycling models from Sonic Lost World and Sonic Generations, a process which proved extremely tedious, as the XNO Converter we use only allows for one model at a time. A fact which didn’t help when I needed to export every single flower and tree one by one.

The Act 1 Release

On the 18th of March 2020, I decided to FINALLY release a version of Greenflower, with it soon being updated to correct a few small issues I’d overlooked. After a small break, I started working on Act 2. Thanks to my workflow developed for Act 1, Act 2 went fairly smoothly at first, as I already knew what I needed to do to make the grass edges and water look good. I could also copy the Skybox from Act 1 with no problems, which was nice.

The Act 2 Retargeting Whack-a-Mole

When it comes to level layouts for ‘06, easily the biggest annoyance comes from objects such as Springs. In ‘06, Springs can target other objects by their IDs, which is a really nice feature. However, if the object IDs get changed around, then the target will no longer match up, as a result, I had multiple points where I had to comb over the act to make sure every Spring still targeted the correct object. This was an issue that was much more pronounced in Act 2, due to there being many more Springs in it.

To make matters worse, the object IDs shown in SonicGLVL seem random, so to get the ID of the object I wanted to target, I’d have to convert the SET and look for the object there to get the correct ID. Towards the end of development, I hacked something together that would make the GLVL IDs match the converted ones, making it much easier to handle, if still tedious. My insistence on deleting unneeded objects in the various other character SETs is the primary reason for this headache.

Another problem I noticed a lot in Act 2 were seams in the terrain where Zone Builder didn’t export the terrain correctly, while these were (mostly) easy to fix, it was tedious every time. As it involved the following process.

-Remove the Skin Modifer -Edit the affected meshes so they’d join up correctly -Reapply the Skin Modifier -Export the edited meshes -Import them one at a time -Edit the collision -Export the collision -Convert the collision

Not hard, just tedious, as with a lot of the work that needed to be done on this project.

Specular Mapping

At some point, I toyed with the idea of adding a small specular map on the windows and roofs of the various houses scattered around the zone. After multiple attempts which blew up in my face, Nonami pointed me to a shader that would do what I wanted, creating this nice, actually fairly subtle effect which was also added to Act 1 for consistencies sake.

However, attempting to add this trick to the water did not go well at all...

Developer Time Trial

At some point when working on Version 1.0 of Greenflower, I changed the text for the Hard Mode selection on the stage select to Not This One. Thanks to me not bothering to make a Hard Mode SET thanks to me finding them to be a waste of time.

In Version 1.01, I did sneak a small SET in that would be loaded if you selected the option, but it otherwise served no purpose.

While messing with the Town Mission timer for Prop Hunt, I realised I could use it to create a Developer Time Trial mode, by simply recording my best time and setting it as the Timer’s value. Originally I intended to record runs for all nine characters, but a limitation of the DLC system prevented me from neatly adding them for the amigo characters, so it was cut down to just Sonic, Shadow and Silver.

youtube

These also use slightly modified SETs, mostly to remove the Bronze Medals, Starposts and Voice Triggers.

Bronze Medals

When initially importing the SETs, I decided it would be a cute idea to replace the Emblem and Emerald Tokens in SRB2 with the very underused Bronze Medals. As it turns out, ‘06 actually has a counter for these medals that goes unused in the final game, activating the counter was a simple as adding OpenMedal(_ARG_0_, 15) to the main event in the stage’s Lua file. While the medals serve no purpose in Greenflower, I felt like enabling the counter just to show an unused piece of ‘06 off while also encouraging exploration in the form of Medal Hunting.

Closing Words

While it may not seem like too much on the surface, I personally am actually quite happy with how Greenflower has turned out. Its long development time and various restarts have given it the chance to fully take advantage of our advancements in the Sonic ‘06 modding scene. While there is still a lot left for us to learn, I’m content with this project’s release state and am ready to move on to something new in the future.

Greenflower for ‘06 has being nearly a year in the making, and I’m glad to have been able to see it through. A special thanks goes to the people who helped me in this mod’s creation, it wouldn’t look as good as it does without Nonami’s XNO research and it may not even have gotten finished if Hyper hadn’t helped me test it and thrown some ideas my way.

Here’s hoping we can do some more quality ‘06 mods in the future and realise some of the potential this game never got to show (and maybe do some silly stuff along the way too!).

#the knux rambles #technical write up #modding #sonic '06 #development notes

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arabellaflynn · 4 years

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Hello, all. It has been a rough pandemic.

As you may have figured, since I am in the performing arts, I have been completely out of work since this shitshow began. The earliest venues will open up here in MA is September, which is not helpful for me, because I need to be out of my current place by 8/31. No one will rent to me on my Patreon income, so I've been trying to figure out how to supplement that with other online work.

My first thought, frankly, was camming. I'm attractive and I know that, and I don't care about being naked in "public". I have a lot of opinions on the legitimacy and legalization of sex work, but making a statement would be a convenient bonus; I'd be in it for the tips. As the appliance menagerie on the Flintstones used to say, "Eh. It's a living."

The best camera I currently have is attached to the slightly-less ancient laptop. You know, the one with the broken hinge that won't hold the screen up on the right. Only the wifi on that computer has quit working. The onboard chip was always kind of flaky, but for some reason it has chosen now to deteriorate to the point where it no longer acknowledges a router on the other side of the goddamn wall. Shooting in the living room with an ethernet cable is not an option, because another housemate is already doing that.

I bought a dual-band USB wifi adapter with antenna. It's a Realtek chip -- not gold-plated, but also not total junk. I specifically checked to make sure it worked with Ubuntu Bionic before I ordered. I have now installed three separate sets of drivers in three completely different ways, read everything ever written about this on AskUbuntu, and still the computer refuses to acknowledge its existence. Not even if I blacklist the onboard chip to keep it from falling back into previous bad habits.

The other elderly laptop (with the working wifi) has a cam that tops out at 640 x 480, which I suppose might squeak by as a tiny facecam on Twitch, or for tutoring where no one cares about pixelization. The microphone, however, is crap. It's a tinny omni on the screen bezel that likes room noise more than my voice. I don't have an external microphone, and there's no onboard Bluetooth for my wireless headset. So I bought a USB Bluetooth adapter, which this computer is ignoring as hard as the other one is the wifi dongle. I have a wired headset with a mic, but because this computer is probably mere months too old to know what to do with an inline mic on the same jack as the output signal, it doesn't register at all.

The camera on my phone is potato quality, because that is honestly about how much the phone cost. Ditto the refurb Kindle. Neither is smart enough to keep up with streaming video, which I found out when I tried to do a video rehearsal for something months ago.

I have no place to do any kind of professional non-entertainment streaming work (e.g., tutoring) with my terrible equipment in any event. I don't own a desk. If a free desk appeared on my doorstep tomorrow, I would have nowhere to put it. My bedroom is small enough to contravene the Geneva Convention requirements for POW cells and I'm basically stuck in here, for reasons of both air conditioning and not having to interact with a house full of people who very much want me gone.

What I do have is a set of working emulators and some free video editing software, so I decided to take a stab at a subtitled Let's Play. I can certainly ramble on for 30 or so hours of Final Fantasy II. At the very least it'll give me something scheduled to do. So I pulled everything out and set it up, only to find that my controller was "pining for the fjords" -- no lights, no acknowledgement from RetroArch, no response to any button presses.

...

...okay, well, at least we're down to a level of equipment I can afford to replace. So I am waiting for the mail carrier to bring me another $10 gamepad, whilst stuck in bureaucratic hell. I'm down to emergency public assistance, which keeps asking me to send them random documents, inconveniently one at a time. Even when I can submit them online I'm required to wait a minimum of 2-3 business days before a human can look at them. I'm trying to not be mad -- they are clearly horribly overworked -- but it also leaves me with a lot of time to do nothing but busy-wait. They've finally decided I'm destitute enough for food stamps, so now I have to sit on my hands until the card arrives in the mail.

The chronic, crushing lack of resources is not helped by (or helping) the fact that I'm just not functioning very well. I was already on the edge of disintegration when the lockdown orders hit anyway; I was taking every piece of work I could find in an effort to scrape together enough for first/last/deposit on a new apartment, and honestly that's more than I can handle. I can consistently get to about 20 hours of "stuff that can't be done while in bed, wearing pajamas" per week, with occasional spikes up to about 30, before I start losing the ability to take care of myself. I skip showers, let my living space become a complete disaster area, and go to bed without dinner because the whole process of choosing something to eat, preparing it, eating it, and cleaning up after myself is so overwhelming that I just burst into tears and don't do it. I fed the rats twice a day and cleaned their cage once or twice a week, but couldn't manage to do the same for myself.

It's difficult to explain to people the state of being physically and mentally exhausted without also being sweaty and shaky from muscle fatigue. Perhaps the single most salient example I can give is lying in bed at night and realizing I kind of vaguely needed to pee. Not like urgently -- just enough that I knew if I didn't, I'd wake up the next day with an uncomfortably full bladder. Then just lying there anyway, not because I thought suffering was noble or I deserved it or anything idiotic like that, but just because taking care of it would involve standing up, walking into another room, and initiating a new task, and I did not have the capacity to do any of those things.

If you suggest I start making a to-do list, I will sit down right now and invent a brand new Blunt Object Transfer Protocol (botp://) expressly for the purpose of punching you, personally, in the face over the goddamn internet. I will even credit you in the patent application. I will not share the licensing profits, which judging from social media right now, would be approximately all of the money on the face of the Earth. I do not need "life hacks".

What I really need is a case worker, or possibly a babysitter, or just to have shown up at the ER about two months ago, because that is the only way I have ever found to get people to pay attention when I ask for help. Otherwise I get triaged out of sight and out of mind -- they ask if I'm suicidal, I tell them no, they tell me 'okay, here's a prescription for six Xanax and a packet of resources, go home and fix it yourself'. I'm just like, you sons of bitches, do you think I don't know how to Google things? If I could fix this on my own, I wouldn't be talking to you. Except I can't right now, because plague.

Everyone wants to fob me off on someone else. I was referred to an SSDI attorney by a friend, because frankly that's where I'm at right now. I wrote to them, specifically mentioning his name and the associate who helped him, and explained that I was basically a vegetable and I needed help applying for disability. I'm a college-educated suburban white girl, who grew up hearing her parents make rude jokes about welfare queens -- I have no idea how any of this works and I'm so broken I kept losing my place in a blanket whose pattern was literally "knit-purl-knit-purl to end of row; turn work over; repeat". Their response was "Sounds like you need some help applying for SSDI/SSI disability. Here's the website for the Boston Bar Association, good luck!" Crisis lines of both the psychiatric and financial varieties keep directing me to one of two national clearinghouse sites for social support services, both of which direct me to each other, because neither has any programs in my area.

I am trying really, really hard not to resent the ever-loving fuck out of anyone who has any sort of support system right now. One housemate has almost the exact same list of medical problems that I do, and is also completely out of work right now. She is married to the one who has a grown-up salaried WFH IT job, and will never have to worry about having a roof over her head or food in the cabinets. The single housemate has supportive family literally a five minute walk down the street; if she ever gets her feet kicked out from under her, she can stay with them temporarily while she scrambles back up. Another friend yote out to California right before lockdown to stay with his family. A local offered to help me with paperwork, then ghosted me intermittently before explaining that he was having a hard time himself right now and barely had the capacity for his own life. I have an elderly rat, no more savings, and no options.

I don't even know how I'm going to move the little I own. How do you even ask people to do that in the middle of a pandemic? If I don't have the money to move, I definitely don't have the money for a moving company, and I'm envisioning all of my community-minded friends pursing their lips in judgement and declining because like all the good people they are diligently social distancing.

I have also discovered, while hauling an empty suitcase out to Watertown and a full one back home again, that I do not cope well with face masks. It's fine if I'm not doing much, especially if I'm in a climate-controlled space like a store or the T, but as soon as I exert myself at all, I see spots. And no, it is not a matter of "just get used to it"; I have tested this by trying to wear a mask during my home workouts. It is just stuffy enough under there, and there is just enough reduction in air flow, that the world keeps going all film-grainy and dark on the sides, which I know from experience is the first step on a very short path to the Magical Land of Syncope. I had to stop during the outdoor trek and sit on the suitcase about twice a block through the commercial district, where it stayed on because there were people. This was when it was 72 whole degrees out (and the AC is generally on 74°F inside) which doesn't bode well for moving my heavy shit around in late August.

I'm normally good at catching things at the weird-vision stage, although enough random strangers and T employees have asked me if I'm okay that I have to assume I look as ill as I feel at that point. And I have an absolutely tragic talent for talking people out of calling emergency services when I do actually keel over, but everyone is so health-panicked that I don't think it would work right now. I know what's happened and why, but I can't exactly communicate that to bystanders when I'm unconscious. As nice as EMS is, I don't feel like waking up to a round of Twenty Questions ("How many fingers am I holding up? Who's the President? Do you have a seizure disorder?"). So I just don't go out.

Alison over at Ask A Manager got a question about this the other day that suggests this is considered legitimate can't-(always-)wear-a-mask territory, and I am able to wear a mask where required in MA, which is indoors/during interactions with other people when it's actually useful, so I don't have any qualms on the scientific or legal front. I have just never been a good judge of how much potential peril/damage it's "reasonable" to put up with, and I don't have the capacity to explain myself over and over again a million times a day.

I'm fucking tired. I'm tired of covid, I'm tired of living in a big glitzy continent-spanning banana republic, I'm tired of anxiety, I'm tired of other people carping at me to do things I can't in order to fix their anxiety for them, I'm tired of not having the space to dance, I'm tired of asking for help before things fall apart and being told 'well, come back when it is an emergency', and most of all I'm tired of this cycle where I tell myself "I'm going to stop being lazy! I'm going to put on my big-girl pants and wake up early and work 40 hours a week and support myself like an adult!" and then fail at it again because I just do not have the capacity to do that. I do not know how to make the system understand that I need some kind of support right now.

Sorry for yet another depressing update, but that's where I am right now.

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years

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THE COURAGE OF PROJECT

Then when you start a startup anywhere. That's why mice and rabbits are furry and elephants and hippos aren't.1 The very design of the average site in the late twentieth century. He got a 4x liquidation preference. Google, it's hard to get into grad school in math. Can we claim founders are better off as a result of this new trend. Where you live should make at most a couple percent difference. But investing later should also mean they have fewer losers.

They make something moderately appealing and have decent initial growth.2 If you major in math it will be whatever the startup can get from the first one to write a paper for school, his mother would tell him: find a way to turn a billion dollar industry into a fifty million dollar industry, so much the better, if all fifty million go to you. The classic yuppie worked for a small organization. Before us, most companies in the startup funding business. The best way to get a big idea can take roost.3 4 or 5 million. This essay grew out of something I wrote for myself to figure out how to increase their load factors. But you can also apply some force by focusing the discussion: by asking what specific questions they need answered to make up their minds. This plan collapsed under its own weight.4 Startups happened because technology started to change so fast that big companies could no longer keep a lid on the smaller ones.

The only place your judgement makes a difference is in the industry.5 People who do great work, and it's a bad sign when you have a special word for that. One of the exhilarating things about coming back to Cambridge every spring is walking through the streets at dusk, when you can see into the houses. If you have steep revenue growth, say over 6x a year, no matter how many good startups approach him. Recently we managed to recruit her to help us run YC when she's not busy with architectural projects.6 This works better when a startup has 3 founders than 2, and better when the leader of the company in later rounds. I'm not saying you can get away with zero self-discipline.

We're not a replacement for don't give up. What you should not do is rebel. But while series A rounds from VCs. Someone who's scrappy manages to be both threatening and undignified at the same world everyone else does, but notice some odd detail that's compellingly mysterious.7 Even Tim O'Reilly was wearing a suit, a sight so alien I couldn't parse it at first. They can't tell how smart you are.8 The story about Web 2. Maybe one day the most important thing is to be learned from whatever book on it happens to be closest. This essay is derived from a keynote at FOWA in October 2007. They'll decide later if they want to raise.9

Sometimes it reached the point of economic sadism: site owners assumed that the more pain they caused the user, the more benefit it must be to them. It's cities that compete, not countries.10 Kids are curious, but the best founders are certainly capable of it. But investors are so fickle that you can fix for a lot of time on work that interests you, and don't just refuse to. But you have to be an insider.11 A key ingredient in many projects, almost a project on its own, is to step onto an orthogonal vector. So ironically the original description of the Web 2. Back when it cost a lot to like I've done a few things, like intro it to my friends at Foundry who were investors in Service Metrics and understand this model I am also talking to my friend Mark Pincus who had an idea like this a few years ago.12 0 seemed to mean was something about democracy. We didn't have enough saved to live on. There is another reason founders don't ask themselves whether they're default alive or default dead.13

So most investors prefer, if they wanted, raise series A rounds. They're unable to raise more money, and precisely when you'll have to switch to plan B if plan A isn't working. That doesn't mean the investor says yes to everyone. Miss out on what? It's so cheap to start web startups that orders of magnitudes more will be started. Investors evaluate startups the way customers evaluate products, not the way bosses evaluate employees. The bust was as much an overreaction as the boom.14 Startups are undergoing the same transformation that technology does when it becomes cheaper.15 Another way to fly low is to give them something for free that competitors charge for. After all, a Web 2.16 He bought a suit.

Instead you'll be compelled to seek growth in other ways. They all knew their work like a piano player knows the keys. But consulting is far from free money. They say they're going to get eliminated. What does it mean, exactly? If investors were perfect judges, the two would require exactly the same skills. And to be both good and novel, an idea probably has to seem bad to most people, or someone writes a particularly interesting article, it will show up there. The mere existence of prep schools is proof of that.17 So far the complete list of messages I've picked up from cities is: wealth, style, hipness, physical attractiveness wouldn't have been a total immersion. Don't just do what they tell you to do. But advancing technology has made web startups so cheap that you really can get a portrait of the normal distribution of most applicant pools, it matters least to judge accurately in precisely the cases where judgement has the most effect—you won't take rejection so personally. If raising money is hard.

There is no sharp line between the two types of startup ideas: those that grow organically out of your own life, and those that you decide, from afar, are going to get rarer. While some VCs have technical backgrounds, I don't know enough to say, but it happens surprisingly rarely.18 Most subjects are taught in such a boring way that it's only by discipline that you can never safely treat fundraising as more than a startup that seems like it's going to stop.19 It sounds obvious to say that you should worry? One reason startups prefer series A rounds? When I was in high school either. If you feel you've been misjudged, you can do. Google. Of course, someone has to take money from people who are young but smart and driven can make more by starting their own companies after college instead of getting jobs, that will change what happens in college.

Notes

Though they are themselves typical users. But it takes to get good grades in them to private schools that in three months, a valuation. Giving away the razor and making more per customer makes it easier to get them to stay in a time machine.

Apple's early history are from an angel investment from a mediocre VC.

In the beginning.

Plus ca change. But on the other.

And that is exactly the point of a stock is its future earnings, you now get to go behind the scenes role in IPOs, which allowed banks and savings and loans to buy it despite having no evidence it's for sale.

However, it will seem dumb in 100 years. Digg is Slashdot with voting instead of blacklist.

Sofbot.

I write out loud can expose awkward parts.

I've become a so-called signalling risk.

Hint: the way they have because they couldn't afford a monitor.

And it's particularly damaging when these investors flake, because there was a new search engine is low. They have no connections, you'll find that with a wink, to take care of one's markets is ultimately just another way in which income is doled out by Mitch Kapor, is to raise money after Demo Day, there would be easy to discount, but I'm not against editing. As one very successful YC founder told me they like the one hand and the exercise of stock options than any preceding president, he tried to shift back. At three months we can't believe anyone would think twice before crossing him.

Progressive tax rates has a significant startup hub. He, like speculators, that alone could in principle 100,000 sestertii apiece for slaves learned in the early adopters you evolve the idea is crack. As we walked in, we love big juicy lumbar disc herniation as juicy except literally.

It's sometimes argued that we didn't, they thought at least accepted additions to the modern idea were proposed by Timothy Hart in 1964, two years, it was cooked up by the National Center for Education Statistics, about 28%. I've come to accept that investors don't like the bizarre consequences of this essay talks about programmers, but I know of no Jews moving there, and should in some ways First Round excluded their most successful startups are competitive like running, not the original text would in itself deserving. This is not whether it's good enough at obscuring tokens for this type are also several you can't even claim, like play in a city with few other startups, because time seems to pass. Please do not try to avoid that.

This kind of people starting normal companies too. If Ron Conway had been raised religious and then using growth rate to manufacture a perfect growth curve, etc, and then a block or so.

But it is to trick admissions officers. I meant. The mere possibility of being harsh to founders. As he is at fault, since 95% of the class of 2007 came from such schools.

I started doing research for this purpose are still, as they are now. There was no more unlikely than it would be easier to say that it is dishonest of the next round, that suits took over during a critical point in the usual standards for truth. Wittgenstein: The French Laundry in Napa Valley.

It wouldn't cut their overall returns tenfold, because they wanted, so the best ideas, they mean statistical distribution. The original Internet forums were not web sites but Usenet newsgroups.

A doctor friend warns that even this can give an inaccurate picture. At some point, when the problems you have no idea what's happening till they also influence one another directly through the window for years while they think they're just mentioning the possibility is that in Silicon Valley. I find hardest to get rich by creating wealth—wealth that, isn't it? Look at those goddamn fleas, they have less money, the big winners aren't all that matters, just as if you'd invested at a famous university who is highly regarded by his peers.

Compromising a server could cause such damage that ASPs that want to pound that message home. He, like arithmetic drills, instead of blacklist.

Thanks to Tim O'Reilly, Peter Norvig, and the guys at O'Reilly for inviting me to speak.

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weekleegeography · 4 years

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What To Prepare to China?

China, the most populous country in the world at 1.436 billion people (approximately 44 times of Malaysia’s population of 32.15 million people) and also the third or fourth largest country in the world (approximately 29 times the size of Malaysia). We have definitely heard a thing or two about China, with most notable “Made in China” in majority of your items. Production cost is one of the lowest in the world, hence why it is known as the world’s factory.

You might be planning to go to China, and so happened to stumble upon this blog as you are finding for some information on what to prepare before heading there. Otherwise, you could be my friend who read this because you saw me posting, or you just happened to see this for whatever reason. Not to worry. For my first ever travel blog, I will be sharing based on my experience on what you should prepare before heading to China and some things to keep in mind. I will be writing this from a Malaysian’s perspective (I’m a proud Malaysian), but I will try my utmost best to be as international-friendly as possible. Ya know… need to reach out to more readers! Anyways, hope you enjoy!

1) Let’s talk Visa.

No, I’m not talking about the credit card Visa. I’m talking about your permission to travel into the country visa. As of 26 December 2019, all Malaysians are required to apply for a visa before entering into the People’s Republic of China. You may use Passport Index to check if your passport requires a visa before entering to China. The link is right here!

https://www.passportindex.org/

However, the process of applying a visa is incredibly simple. All you need to do is to go to this website. shown below!

https://www.visaforchina.org/web/guidance/StepByStep_questions.action?visacenterCode=KUL&request_locale=en_US&site_alias=KUL_EN

Just follow the process. It’s a very quick process and shouldn’t take more than a week. However, it’s always good to apply at least one month before your trip.

2) Cashless Society Is Real

You might or might not heard about it, but China is currently in a transition to a cashless society. By “transition” I meant like it’s probably 95% complete. You can literally pay anything and everything with the two e-wallets in China, which is WeChat Pay and Alipay. Even small shops, roadside vendors, and markets have their own QR codes which you can scan and pay. There is a higher chance that you are not able to pay with cash than e-wallet.

WeChat Pay

As of 23 December 2019, a foreigner is still unable to use WeChat Pay in China as WeChat Pay in Mainland China requires you to have a local phone number and a Chinese bank account to be able to use. Well, no cashless society for foreigners then.

BUT WAIT.

Alipay

Alipay has just very recently launched a Tour Pass which enables foreigners to join in the cool Chinese gang and pay with your mobile phone. Just download the Alipay app, register yourself as an international user, follow the steps to register and you will be able to use Alipay e-wallet in China for 90 days. How it works is that you will receive a virtual prepaid card issued by the Bank of Shanghai. Don’t worry at all, any remaining balance in the wallet will be refunded back to your registered card once the 90 days has ended. Alexander Wong from Soya Cincau wrote a simple article on this. Tap this link below to read more about it.

https://www.soyacincau.com/2019/11/06/alipay-ewallet-tour-pass-for-tourists/

In a nutshell, as foreigners, just set up Alipay and you will be able to pay with your phone everywhere.

Malaysians, if you have not gotten BigPay, you are missing out big times. BigPay is basically a credit/debit card based on a Mastercard prepaid introduced by AirAsia. You can use it to make payments at over 30 million Mastercard merchants worldwide as it functions like a normal credit/debit card that is managed by the BigPay app. Just install the app, sign up, top up some cash into it and you are ready to use the card. While there are countless of benefits on using BigPay, I will highlight two big reasons to get this card.

i) BigPay offers the best exchange rate when you purchase an item with BigPay card when you travel overseas. In other words, by using BigPay and purchase items using the BigPay card in another country, BigPay offers the best rate and pays to the merchant at the current exchange rate. To elaborate further, the money that you change at your local money changer will have a higher rate due to many hidden fees, but BigPay does not have any hidden fees.

ii) If you are a frequent AirAsia flyer, use BigPay and enjoy zero processing fee while buying any flight tickets from AirAsia. Not only that, spend with BigPay and you can collect BIG points which can be used to redeem flight tickets.

**I am not promoting BigPay but it’ll be good if they can pay me for writing about them. It’s a real life saver for travels.

***But if you are going to get BigPay, why not use my referral code to sign up? You get RM10, I get RM10. It’s a win-win. My referral code is ZW1PKS7ATN.

So what is the bottom line from this long segment? I’ve topped up the Alipay app using the BigPay card, which I get the best rates while able to use Alipay to make purchase in China conveniently.

3) The Great Firewall of China

Took a nice photo and wanted to post it on Instagram? How about posting a status about how you are having a good time so far on Facebook? Want to make a video call with your friend using WhatsApp? Sorry, you can’t do it in China.

Yes, if you still do not know about this, China bans many, many websites that we access on a daily basis. Some top notable sites are:

Social Media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit

Messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Telegram, and Line

Anything from Google, including your Gmail, YouTube, and even Google Play Store

For a more complete list, I have attached a website here which you can take a look.

https://www.vpnmentor.com/blog/the-complete-list-of-blocked-websites-in-china-how-to-access-them/

Unless you are fine with WeChat, which is the only messaging app I can think of that is able to use in China, you will need a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to bypass the firewall.

My own experience to get by this problem is by getting a portable WiFi from Klook to bring over to China. Be sure to read the reviews stating that it can access the firewall. I got it from this website below!

https://www.klook.com/en-MY/activity/18737-3g-4g-wifi-mainland-china/?krt=s20&krid=3c37b711-5b56-4331-6e62-5a33130b4b6a

I also downloaded at least 3 to 4 of free VPNs from Google Play Store before heading to China with hopes that some of them work. China has been actively cracking down these VPNs, so not all VPN works. If you are able to afford a proper VPN, you can subscribe to a legitimate VPN service which will be much better. I have not subscribed to a VPN service before this trip, but now I have.

I personally subscribed to Nord VPN about a week ago and it is working charms so far. I managed to get a great deal of only paying RM230 for a 3-year subscription! PM me to know how or wait a while as I will post a new blog on how I got such a good deal!

Be sure to download and prepare the VPNs before heading to China as you won’t be able to access to the Google Play Store once you are using China’s internet.

So with so many apps unable to be used, what do you use? That brings me to my next point.

4) Baidu Maps, WeChat, and Didi as your replacement

If you are able to read Chinese, then Baidu Maps is your alternative to Google Maps. It is basically China version Google Maps. Baidu is basically China’s Google.

Baidu Maps helped me to determine if it was worth walking, taking the public transport or driving to a destination. For public transport, it showed me the exact route to take, the exact bus number or train line to take, and even the total fare of the trip. As there is no access to Google in China, it is quite unreliable to use Google Maps in China even with VPN access as it does not tell you as much as Baidu Maps does. However, do take note again that it is only in Chinese, so for my fellow friends who can’t read Chinese, you can still download and try to work your way around the app.

WeChat is your replacement for WhatsApp, and why I would suggest to get a WeChat account is so that you can communicate should you need to communicate urgently. There was once that I was separated from my group, and thankfully I was able to find a café with WiFi and used WeChat to communicate. Sometimes, VPN can fail you, so it’s always better to get an app that allows direct communication.

Didi is your replacement for Uber. Sometimes, you need a taxi ride but perhaps you are too used to the e-hailing lifestyle. Didi is the app for you. Works just like Uber, except it is China version.

5) Bicycle apps

Now this was one of the things that I regretted not doing on my previous trip to China. The city of Chengdu has an excellent bicycle rental service and it’s literally so easy to cycle around the city. Sometimes, cycling is the fastest way to get to one point to another, and the rental is cheap.

The most notable bike sharing application that I’ve observed in Chengdu are OFO and Mobike. I did not do this process, but my guess it that the steps are:

1) Set up your Alipay account and top in money as told in the previous point. Make sure you sign up under the tour pass.

2) Download OFO or Mobike or both and complete the set up. Use the Alipay account to link it together.

3) Fly to China and enjoy using the service.

Again, make sure to do any downloading and signing up BEFORE heading to China.

6) Bin your toilet papers

Malaysia is blessed with an awesome sewage system, at least awesome enough that we can flush our soiled toilet papers into the toilet bowl and flush everything away. However, not everywhere is like this, and China is one of the countries that bins their soiled toilet papers instead of flushing it down. As habits are hard to break so soon, we might sometimes throw into the toilet bowl by accident or intentionally because it might be too unacceptable to bin it as it might smell or it is just pure disgusting thinking about it.

I’ve learned this the hard way in my trip, as one of my travel mate forgotten to bin his used toilet paper, and the result was that the whole toilet was clogged. By the time we managed to clear the clog, half of our day was gone and we had to throw some of our plans away due to a lack of time.

It’s real guys, you just got to bin it. It’s much more disgusting to see a clogged toilet bowl than a soiled toilet paper. Speaking about toilets.

7) Yeah, it’s paper.

China has no bidets. So for #TeamWater, you can either shower in your accommodation, or bring wet tissue out in case the production happens outside.

8) Plug outlet

It’s different. Malaysia uses the Type G as we were once under British influence.

[Type G plug used in Malaysia]

China uses the Type A plug, so be sure to bring a universal adapter to the trip. My little hack is that I also bring an extension wire along to plug into the universal adapter so that I can have more plugs to charge more devices.

[Type A plug used in China]

Be sure to always check for the plug outlet before visiting any countries. It’s a good investment to get a universal adapter.

9) Mala (麻辣) everywhere

At least for Chongqing and Chengdu, they take their mala very seriously. It’s hard to run away from their distinct mala taste in most of the food there. They even placed the Sichuan pepper into their stir-fried vegetables.

So if you are not a fan of mala or the numbing sensation from the mala, try to

bring some local food

from your country to compensate. Hard for me to suggest, as I’m usually very curious about the cuisines of each countries and will just try no matter how weird it is.

In a nutshell:

I hope that some of these tips can help you to prepare before heading to China. I hope that you enjoyed my blog, and do share it with those who might need it. It is a big country with too many things to offer, but some fundamental preparation will be great. I am sure after visiting ones, you will know better on some hacks. Do share it with me too! I would love to hear them!

Pack your bags, and let’s get travelling!

Just kidding, not now. Stay at home now as we are in a middle of Covid-19 pandemic.

#china #prepare #travel #hacks #travelhacks

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addierose444 · 5 years

Text

College Essays: A Guide

I loved visiting and researching colleges. Writing college essays, on the other hand, was a long and difficult process. The whole idea of a college essay stressed me out since I have long considered writing one of my weaknesses and had been told that college essays are really important. Funny how I am writing this blog now. Seriously though, there are a lot of things that are out of your control when it comes to college applications, so really try to write the best essays you can. For a fun fact, today marks the anniversary of the day I created the document for my Smith essay. Though I genuinely think this guide can help you and really hope that you read the entire thing, please don't use this guide as sneaky procrastination from actually writing your college essays. I hope that these tips and suggestions help you!

General Tips

Tip 1: Start Early

It is never too early to start! The sooner you’re happy with your essays the less stressed you will be about the whole college application process. Fair warning, the earlier you submit your applications the longer the wait feels. I recommend starting to think about college essays the summer before senior year. If you can it would be awesome to start writing drafts then as well. I wrote my first college essays Junior year in English class. Though I didn’t use any of those essays, it was a great introduction to writing college essays.

The best place to start is reading the Common App prompts, which are available all of the time and don’t change much year to year. Besides, one of the prompts is literally “share an essay on any topic of your choice”. I personally chose the first prompt and wrote about my background and identity as a girl adopted from China growing up in Vermont with an interest in STEM. Choosing the right prompt is important, so be flexible and willing to try a different prompt. Prompts for supplemental essays (essays for individual colleges) can sometimes be found on colleges’ websites. They can always be found in Common App. Smith releases its prompt on August 1st with the opening of Common App. For those of you applying to the Smith class of 2024, here is your prompt:

We know that colleges ask a lot of hard questions on their applications. This one is not so hard and we promise, there is no hidden agenda - just have fun! If you had a theme song - a piece of music that describes you, what would it be and why? Please include the name of the song and the artist.

Tip 2: Stay organized

This refers to keeping track of the essays you have to write and their deadlines. I put all of my application deadlines in my Google Calendar and had each essay as a task in my task manager. Before writing any essays, research the schools you are thinking of applying to in order to get a sense of the number and types of essays you will have to write. Know that some schools make you write extra essays depending on your prospective major. Also, be aware that some schools have optional essays. I would highly recommend that you write these optional essays.

I wrote all of my essays in Google Docs. Each essay I had had its own document. At the top of the document, I had the word count highlighted in green and the prompt(s) in italics. If the essay had a choice of prompts, I highlighted the one I chose in cyan.

I organized my essays in a college folder in Google Drive. Early on, I had subfolders for each of the colleges I was thinking about applying to. I would recommend this to you if you’re applying to a lot of colleges that require multiple essays. In my case I only applied to five schools, so subfolders weren’t necessary. Even so, I had to write the Common App essay along with ten supplemental essays. An alternative organization system (that can be used in conjunction with the previous method) involves creating subfolders by the application deadline.

Tip 3: Be authentic

I will refrain from directly stating what most people consider the number one tip. It’s really important, but you're probably tired of hearing it and sort of confused by it. In essence, remember that it's you the admissions counselors want to get to know and that you’re the one that would be attending the school if admitted and committed. That being said, be conscious of your audience and the function of a college essay.

The Process

Step .5: Choose a prompt

Sorry for the use of half steps! They are for essays where you get to choose your prompt. Start by reading all of the prompts and pick the one that jumps out to you. As stated above, be flexible. Your choice is by no means set in stone. There is no universal best prompt, there is only a best prompt for you.

Step 1: Read the prompt

That's it. No analyzing the prompt at this point.

Step 2: Just write

By “just” I mean, ignore the word count and don’t worry about flow. This step is purely a brain dump. Just focus and get all relevant ideas out onto the page. Now is not the time for editing, seriously, don’t move the cursor. You may honestly benefit from handwriting your brain dump. If you get stuck, start on a different train of thought. Even if things are going smoothly, consider writing something totally different.

Step 2.5: Reflect honestly

This step is for those essays that let you pick a prompt. Here’s where you're real with yourself about if you’re happy with the prompt you chose and where the essay is headed. Repeat the above steps as necessary until you have chosen the best prompt for you.

Step 3: Craft the essay

This is where you actually write an essay not just some thoughts. This is the hardest part to do and to explain. First, reread the prompt and read what you wrote in step 2. When actually crafting the essay, don’t delete anything (unless you’re correcting a typo). In Google Docs you can go into revision history and find old versions of your essay. Find the thread of ideas you think is best and write your essay based on those ideas. There is no set format for a college essay. Remember that college essays are relatively short so focus on concision.

Step 4: Revise and edit like crazy

This step is extremely important and will take more time than you expect. I wrote and rewrote essays to make them exactly how I wanted. Even after I felt satisfied with an essay I read and reread them for grammatical errors. Don’t just trust your own eyes. In my case, I had all of my essays proofread by my parents and my aunt. An iteration of my Common App essay was also read by an English teacher and a guidance counselor. Listen to all suggestions, but remember that it's your essay and that it’s your voice that matters.

Now that you have read all of my tips and suggestions, I wish you the best of luck, especially with your Smith essay. I know that a lot of people enjoy reading other people’s essays for inspiration and to get a sense for what a college essay is. I personally didn’t read any while I was writing mine. That being said I read a few for my Junior year English class (online and from my peers). Since the Smith essay is new this year, I will be posting the essay I wrote last year to my blog along with my thoughts about it.

#college #Smith College #college essays #college applications #college admissions #advice

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botanyshitposts · 6 years

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I study speciation and basically what I've learned is that how we define species is somewhat arbitrary, and often depends on sort of subjectivity and convenience, depending on what you study. There's all sorts of different "species concepts" that try to get at a more objective definition, but none of them are universally applicable and testable. Essentially everything is on a spectrum of relatedness and things far apart are certainly distinct, but we don't know where to draw the line in between.

thank you for weighing in!!! this is definitely the vibe i’m getting. it’s very easy to lay down The Fuck Line, but at what cost???

at this last carnivorous plant conference i attended a lecture called ‘do plants care about species?’. it was a long time carnivorous plant hobbyist and former evolutionary genetics professor who accidentally stumbled across a huge complex between four sundew species along the east coast. his results not only implied that we didn’t understand the full extend of this set of ‘species’, but also implied that the taxonomic names for these organisms were being shifted around and incorrectly labelled as a consequence of the complex, because both researchers and hobbyists assumed they were four different species instead of a weird shifting mass of....things.

he then drew upon his scientific background and, based on the mutated hollow seeds he’d gotten from crossing some of the plants in his garage, made a really compelling and fascinating hypothesis that 1. the plants originated from at least two very small, very isolated populations that were only able to interbreed along the east coast after the ice age allowed them to spread from their ancestral grounds, and 2. this complex- as a result of their small number and isolated populations- are actually currently undergoing a massive genomic shift causing some wild shit on a molecular basis, and the hollow seeds he found in his tests (again in his garage lol) indicated the death of the triploid embryo inside the seed needed for development- a clear symptom of the specific genomic rearrangement he was suspecting.

it sounds crazy how i explain it but he’s publishing a paper in the ICPS newsletter in september with all his results that i’m eagerly awaiting. the most fascinating part of this is that apparently, this isn’t human-caused; this slow instability of the genome within this population has been going on for thousands of years, and in a few thousand more the plants will have died of- quite literally- natural evolutionary causes. im gonna be real with you here, these concepts are waaayyy above my head as an undergrad, but i followed along the best i could and will def try to go about fully understanding it via google searching whatever i can’t understand once the paper comes out. the idea of a species having symptoms of it’s slow genomic decline towards extinction is fascinating to me.

if this sounds at all comprehensible for you as someone who studies things along these lines, past-me wrote down some notes during the lecture that i now can’t remember the context of but give me a vague remembrance of some of the loftier concepts i haven’t yet learned. they are:

“Glacial Stragglers”: i remember the context being the isolated populations giving rise to this condition

“Epigenetic signaling failure”: the specific condition expressed in the hollow seeds of the choice test crosses

“[epigenetic signaling] breakout”: a certain condition being expressed on a molecular level in the genome of some individuals that causes scrambling, which in turn causes the hollow seeds in crosses that have been scrambled. i remember he said that in this condition, a plant with a normal genome and a plant who had undergone the condition would look identical phenotypically, but on a molecular level it’s apparently a sign that the genome is....not very stable and is really not doing so hot

ughhh im kicking myself for not taking more notes!! my adhd brain said i would remember more but as always i remembered only the broad concepts!!

but its just really wild to me because like. as a biology student in the year 2018, about 90% of the extinctions we learn about in class are human-caused. the mechanisms behind extinctions that aren’t caused by humans- ones that are just caused by luck of the draw, not even environmental factors but internal factors and genomic instability over a huuuuge amount of time- are absolutely chilling to me. and like, they’ve happened before. before humans they happened all the time. some of them had it coming for years. it just....happened.

#long post #plont asks #asks #it was SO COOL and i understood only like 3 PERCENT OF IT!!!!#but ever since i heard that lecture i cant stop thinking about it #carnivorous plants #Anonymous

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flamedork · 5 years

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would you mind sharing a little more about the mentor ship process? As in like, what you hope to get out of your experience and how you approached the author? I only ask because I’ve been super interested myself for a long time but had no idea where to even start )):

Of course! I mean, I’m in the very, very early stages, so idk how helpful any of this will be.

I’m very lucky; I know a creative producer who works with the organisation I’m trying to get a grant through. She’s the wife of one of my former teachers; I wouldn’t say she knows me very well, but my town is pretty limited in terms of young artists so she remembers me. She sent me a Facebook message and said that she heard that I’d been struggling with moving forward with any of my projects and she wants to meet up with me to chat about some options I might be interested in.

So, terrified and sweaty, I sit at this little bakery waiting for her. I have no idea what she’s going to talk to me about. I had this feeling I was going to walk away more lost and less motivated than before.

So, she tells me about her job, what she does, who she helps, what she knows. She explained the place she works for has applications for grants twice a year for people under the age of 26. And fucking bombards me with all this information.

She offered the suggestion of a mentorship and I fucking sparked. I had no idea it was even an option. I was even like ‘idk who to ask’ and she was like ‘ask literally any author. the sky is the limit.’. A lot of authors have done mentorships before, so there are probably a heap out there that would be interested.

I raced home and googled Australian authors. I want to do a temporary residency with this author and moving outside of Australia seems so ridiculous. Anyway, didn’t find any names that I recognised. Nor any authors that wrote in my genre (YA is super niche in Australia). I was pretty bummed out. I started sifting through author’s names on my bookshelf - skipped passed the big names - and got to Jodi McAlister’s name. Her Valentine series was something I’d read like six months prior and a story that I really enjoyed. And Yahtzee. She’s Australian, she writes YA and I already fucking own two of her books. On top of that she’s a professor. I feel like I’ll learn a lot from her.

I’ve almost finished the email. It’s hefty. 800 words. Man, I hope she says yes.

So yeah, I need to win the fellowship first. But if I do, I want to work with this author for a few months, which might mean moving temporarily, write the first three chapters of my novel and the synopsis under her guidance.

As for you. Depending on your situation there’s a few different places you can start.

Do you need support and funding during your mentorship?

Google art organisations in your area/state/country.

Read about their eligibility and requirements.

Look at what they offer in terms of grants.

Go to workshops and start meeting people in the industry, get your name out there, make friends with people who are interested in the same things you are.

Build a CV and portfolio.

Apply.

Finding the mentor

Write a list of authors you’d like to work with. People you absolutely admire and people who have a similar style to you or authors that have similar characters as you.

Google a list of authors in your genre who accept mentorships and add them to your list.

Email them.

(ps: i would assume they want to be paid for being a mentor. but i haven’t gotten to those questions yet. so if you’re not going to apply for a grant, think about the $$ too)

The email

Tell them who you are and why you’re emailing them.

Tell them your situation (are you working and have limited hours? are you applying for a grant?)

What’s the plan? (how long? what are you writing? how much are you writing under their guidance?)

What do you want to gain from this mentorship?

Why did you choose this author?

Send it the fuck away.

The worst they can say is no.

Idk if any of this helped, but good luck! I hope you find the right mentor and write your butt off!

#mentorship #Anonymous

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bazypitchandsimonsnow · 6 years

Text

Watford Cove

Chapter 5: not so typical love song

Rating: T

Genre: Fluff/Angst

Word count: 5365

Chapter: 5/13 [All chapters]

Summary: Baz goes to Simon's house to work on the project.

Read on AO3

AN: So as some of you may know/remember, I work at an amusement park. I was supposed to work today but it's literally raining all day so the park is most certainly closed. Which means I can post early! Hooray! This is personally one of my favourite chapters. I enjoyed writing it quite a bit, though I had trouble writing Baz's emotions. The boy is a weird self destructive mess and it's difficult getting that across lol. Finally, we learn a bit more about Simon. Plus some fluff, of course. Hope you all like it!

Tagging: @wayward-son-61 @lunar-lover394

———————————————-

“Where are you going?”

I lazily turn towards Mordelia. She’s standing next to me with her arms behind her back, rocking on her heels. The picture of an adorable, unassuming child. You can hardly tell she's a brat.

“Out,” I reply.

“Mum says you go out too much.”

I do feel a bit bad about that. Daphne does legitimately care about my well being. “Well, you can tell her I’m not going out drinking. She can stop worrying.”

“Drinking what?”

I sigh. Right, she is still seven years old. “Nevermind. I’m just going to do schoolwork at someone’s house. I might be home for supper or not, I don’t know.”

“Okay. When can I ride on your motorbike?”

I smirk and buckle up my helmet. “Let's wait until you can reach the pedals. Then we’ll talk.”

Mordelia pouts pathetically. I ruffle her hair, which only makes her pout become an impressive scowl. I flip down my visor with flare and rev my engine. I give Mordelia a salute before driving off down the country road.

Simon’s house isn’t that far from mine, actually. Maybe a twenty minute ride, the way I break the speeding laws. I zip down the hill at ludicrous speeds, and keep that pace up across the country roads until they become moderately paved. Soon I’m on the sparse outskirts of Watford Cove, not the bloody fucking wilderness like mine. A much nicer place to live in my opinion.

Only a few minutes in, I arrive at the address Simon texted me. The house is actually quite posh. It’s not the terrible extravagance of the Pitch mansion of course, but it’s nice. Red brick, white shutters, some fancy curtains. There's a silver mailbox at the end of the drive with "Salisbury" painted on it in annoyingly bright green letters. The handwriting looks childish, as in a child probably wrote it. The initials "LS" are under the words like an artist's signature. Hm, interesting.

I park my bike in the driveway then make my way to the oak door. The doorbell chimes deep and loud. There’s some steps and soon it swings open. Oh. This is...not Simon. Because Simon is not an older greying-blonde woman.

This woman reminds me of portraits my own grandmother. She was also tall, straight backed, and respectful looking. But my grandmother never showed an ounce of happiness. This woman has a very kind smile on her face though, her wrinkles more from the expression rather than age.

“Hello,” she says kindly. “May I help you?”

“Um, I’m here to see Simon.”

Both her blue eyes and smile widen. “Oh right, Simon said you were coming. Simon! Your friend is here!”

There’s a crashing sound, like someone falling on the ground. Rapid steps come down the stairs until a beaming Simon jumps to the bottom.

“Hi Baz,” he says breathlessly. “Glad you found it.”

“I have Google Maps, Salisbury,” I deadpan, but with a smirk.

“Oh yeah, right, let’s go.” He motions for me to follow him inside. I nod to the woman. She looks up towards the stairs, hands on her hips.

“Simon,” she says with mock accusation, “are you not going to introduce me to your friend?”

Simon freezes halfway up the steps and whips his head around. “Oh right! Sorry, Gran. Um, Gran, this is Baz. Baz, this is my grandmother, Ruth Salisbury.”

I reach out my hand. “Pleasure to meet you, Ms. Salisbury.”

Her brows rise up in surprise. I suppose she didn’t expect politeness from a guy wearing a black Ramones shirt, leather jacket, and ear piercings. But she still takes my hand. “Pleasure to meet you as well, Baz. You two have fun.”

Simon scoffs. “It’s school, Gran. We’re not supposed to have fun.”

“School can be fun if you try, darling. Maths has made me very good at cards.”

“And you fleece Mrs. Jones every week at your games, I know. We gotta go.”

“Yes yes, go do your schoolwork. Don’t break anything.”

Simon and Ms. Salisbury smile good naturedly at each other as we go upstairs. He runs at a breakneck pace, nearly tripping over the green carpet. I follow more slowly, looking over the walls. Unlike my house, there are many personalised things. Landscape art, funny knick knacks, and some pictures. There’s one of Ms. Salisbury with an older man, who I assume to be her husband. Next to that, there’s the couple again but in their younger years. A boy and girl stand in the foreground, both as blonde as Ms. Salisbury. The last one at the top of the stairs is obviously the two kids as teenagers, grinning with arms around each other. The woman looks weirdly familiar. Her freckles, they remind me of...stars.

“Baz, c’mon!” Simon yells.

“Yes, yes, I’m coming. You’re quite bossy today, darling,” I say teasingly. I hear his gasp, then fall into a coughing fit.

“I-I just want to start working.” His voice is still a bit hoarse.

“Alright.”

I saunter down to the hall Simon went down. I step into his room, and...well, I’m not sure what else I expected. The bed and desk look old, but everything else is new. The floral blanket, the multicoloured rug, the IKEA shelf filled with comics, all quite fresh. The walls are bright blue and covered in posters. Troye Sivan, Lana del Ray, Hayley Kiyoko, and assorted pastel coloured art. Equally pastel clothes are spread out across the floor. The whole room is so...bright. It sort of hurts my eyes. I’d prefer everything a bit darker. I guess I like Simon’s colour palette in small doses, just not all in one room.

I look up. Simon’s at his desk. I finally notice that he’s wearing a new shirt. It’s like the sunflower one, but pink and with bright red rosebuds instead. It works with the copper undertones of his hair. He looks perfect in it.

“Pretty,” I whisper.

“What?” Simon asks sweetly.

Fuck, I hope my face isn’t as red as his shirt right now. “Um, nothing.”

He looks confused for only a moment then shrugs. “Okay. I woke up late and forgot breakfast, so I'm starving. Want some of this? For brain food and stuff.” He holds up a mint aero bar. My smile is instantaneous.

“Sure. Mint aeros are my favourite.”

He grins to his ears. “Mine too!

I sit in the chair next to him. He breaks off a large piece for me. We eat the chocolate at the same time, but Simon gets some around his mouth. (Of course he's a messy eater.) I want to slowly lick it off his cheek then kiss him so hard we run out of breath. I quickly look away to resist temptation. “So, you got the project up?”

“Oh yeah!” He turns back to his laptop. I see that the desk is covered in scribbly note paper, candy wrappers, and nail polish bottles. He’s got almost every colour in his preferred pastel shade. He’s actually wearing the pink one right now. It matches his shirt. I have to keep myself from making an out loud comment again.

“So I’ve started making the powerpoint,” Simon says, bringing up the application. “And I think we should start with Watership Down. The actual place. Cause it’s like, the most important setting right?”

I bite my tongue, because I...disagree. Strongly. Watership Down should be in the middle, because it is the end of their first journey and the beginning of the next. It’s important to illustrate that, I think. But he doesn’t know I would think that.

“Sure, cool,” I mutter.

“O-Okay. Then, uh, for characters, we should start with General Woundwort.”

Wrong, very wrong. He’s important, sure, but others should be discussed first. Maybe Hazel, Bigwig, or Fiver. Fuck, Bluebell should come before Woundwort.

“Yeah, that’s fine.” I hope there isn’t a strain in my voice.

“Awesome! And I thought for analysis, we could talk about the archetypes and shit.”

No! Archetypes are Jungian! We’re supposed to do Freudian! Oh, fuck it.

“Give me that,” I hiss, snatching the laptop away. Simon blinks at me confused. I type furiously, barely thinking really, just spouting out the knowledge I have onto the slides. Some of the stuff is very smart but not well put, so I redo the wording. Not good with words, just like Simon said. I don’t know how long it takes, but when I’m done, I put the laptop back on the desk with my arms crossed.

“There,” I say curtly.

Simon looks through it, jaw falling open wider and wider with every slide. I shift away. Christ, this is embarrassing.

“Holy shit,” Simon whispers. I wait for him to start laughing, or yelling because I change his work. But he just turns to me with big awe filled eyes. “You’re...really smart.”

My cheeks must be as red as tomatoes now. I scoff and look at the Hayley Kiyoko poster. “Yeah, whatever.”

“No, no, I mean it, Baz. This is bloody brilliant! You’re super smart!” His brow furrows. “Why do you never show up to class? You could be getting As in like, everything.”

I press my lips together, digging my nails into my bicep. “I don’t care about school or grades. That’s all.”

“Really? You just, don’t care?”

“No, I don’t.”

Simon sighs, and I hate how close to pity it sounds. I don’t need his pity or anyone else’s. I made my choice a long time ago, and I don’t regret it. Well, I mostly don’t regret it. Certainly don’t regret because of where I’m going when term is done. Not at all...

“So, uh,” Simon says rapidly, obviously trying to break the forming tension, “I'm also mostly done the drawings. I’ll scan them later and put them in the presentation if you like them.”

He pulls out a sketchbook from his desk and flips through the pages. He shoves it in my face once he’s found the right one, making me jolt back in my chair. I snatch it from him.

“Christ, Salisbury, let me actually look,” I chuckle.

“Oh, sorry, sorry.”

I look at the picture, and it’s my turn to be awestruck. It’s...amazing. Rough, raw, a bit messy, but amazing. He’s captured Watership Down in just pencil. Sure, it’s just a hill, but Simon has drawn it from the perspective of the rabbits, so it looks looming and majestic. There are little shapes at the top, and I realise it’s a few of the rabbits looking out into the distance. A cute and perfect addition.

“Wow, this is incredible,” I say with absolute reverence.

Simon blinks at me. He seems genuinely surprised. “R-Really?”

“Yes. You’re very talented, Simon.”

“Oh, uh, well, thanks. I’m...really glad you think so.” He fiddles with his fingers nervously. “There’s a-a couple more if you want to see them. Three pages after.”

I flip through a few more pages. There are a lot of rough, abstract sketches. They look more like feelings than specific things. Waves of smoke, angry scribbles of pencil, over and over. He must do that a lot. Eventually, I land on what I think I'm supposed to see. It's obviously Fiver, based on the photo he showed me. But it's not an exact replica. It's a gorgeous interpretation. He's emphasized Fiver's large, sad, all knowing eyes. You can almost see everything terrifying and wonderful happening in them. To say I’m impressed doesn’t really cover it.

I go to the next page, and I immediately recognise it as a scene from the animated movie. When El Ahrairah, the first rabbit, was given physical gifts to survive predators from their fictitious god Frith. This one is in colour, and somehow even more stylised than the movie. El Ahrairah himself is a deep rich brown with grey loops, the sun is swirl of orange and yellow, and the sky is ripples of vibrant blue. The same colour as his eyes.

“These,” I say, “are perfect, Simon.”

Simon chuckles nervously, fiddling with his fingers. “I’m glad you think so. Think Miss Possibelf will approve?”

“If she doesn’t, she’s completely incompetent. And I don’t think that’s true.” I absentmindedly turn to the next page. It’s the start of another unfinished drawing. It’s of someone’s face. Someone with sharp cheekbones and dark wavy hair. Wait, is that-

Simon snatches the book and quickly flips it closed. He hides half his scarlet face behind the leather cover for a long moment, until he nervously coughs and lowers it. “Okay, good,” he stutters. “Glad you think so. I, uh, guess we’re done now. Man, we really could just do most of this over text.” Mother of God, must he keep doing that hair tuck? It’s torture.

“I suppose that's true," I chuckle.

"Wanna hang out?" He asks very quickly, gripping his sketchbook with ghost white knuckles.

I shouldn't. Fuck, I really shouldn't. I should go home, avoid him, keep my toxic self far away from Simon. But fucking hell, I'm weak for this boy, and just weak in general.

"Sure." My voice stays impressively neutral. "Any ideas?"

Simon twists his lips, looking around the brightly coloured room. His eyes drift down to my hands and he smiles mischievously. “I could redo your nails.”

I look down at my hands. Well, my nails are definitely chipped. I forgot to repaint them a few days ago. I look back at him with a raised brow. “I doubt you have a bottle of my ‘Chanel Le Vernis in Gris Obscur’, Salisbury.”

“Nah, definitely no Chanel. But I got some pretty good stuff from the drugstore.” He lifts up some obviously cheap but pretty nail varnish bottles. They’re all his pastels colours though.

“Not really my style.”

He shrugs. “Maybe you’d like to try something new?”

I bite the corner of my mouth. The colours hurt my eyes a bit. But he looks so adorable with that hopeful grin and glint in his eyes. I sigh, and put my left hand out. “Very well. I want your darkest shade though.”

Simon literally bounces with excitement. “Awesome! So, uh, how about...” He messes around with the bottles, almost dropping a few. Eventually he settles on a pale blue. “This one, and,” he holds up a unused looking dark grey, “this one? We can alternate.”

“Hm, sure. That grey doesn’t really match your style, though.”

He shrugs. “Eh, came with the set. Glad it did. It, uh, matches your eyes.” He looks pointedly at the desk instead of my face. That’s good though. I don’t want him to see the blush that’s spread across my cheeks. “Now gimme your right hand.”

I do as he says, placing it on the desk. He puts down some paper towel then pick up his nail polish remover and cotton balls. I have the exact same supplies at home. He reaches towards my hand, but quickly hesitates. He’s shaking actually. I can’t blame him. Every time we’ve touched, it’s been accidental or very quickly. This is different. This isn't a shoulder pat or playful shove. This is long and sustained and purposeful. And I may not be showing it, but I’m just as nervous.

“I can take it off myself,” I say quickly, reaching for the bottle. But Simon pulls it away.

“No no, I’m good. Just sit there and look...badass, alright?”

My lip twitches up. He’s so sweet. I leave my hand where it is. “Very well.”

Slowly, shakily, he slips his finger under mine. His skin is callused but still much smoother than my rough palms. It feels weird, but very nice. Almost electric. He dabs the cotton ball on the nail, rubbing off all my high end black nail polish. Huh, they look odd. it’s been awhile since my nails have been clean. After wiping them dry, he starts on with the blue. It’s a nice colour. Not something I would pick, but I can see the appeal. Simon drags the brush against my nail slowly but surely, making sure the coat is even.

“Hm,” I say, “you’re good at this.”

“Thanks,” he chuckles. “Self taught. A lot of trial and error, y’know? Took me ages to figure out how to do my right hand.”

“I learned from YouTube videos. Those makeup gurus know their shit.”

“Huh, smart. Oh, y’know what.” He stops painting and spins in his chair. Even with his back to me, I now he’s fiddling with his phone. Suddenly, the honeyed voice of Lana Del Rey is resonating through the room. He spins back with a grin.

“Your weird music is necessary?” I raise an eyebrow for sarcastic emphasis. Simon chuckles.

“Yeah, helps me concentrate. And it’s part of my continuing effort to convert you to good music.”

“Oh, is that your grand mission?”

“Yup! Slowly pull you away from all those screamy boys with bad haircuts and towards the beauty of Troye and Lana.”

I scoff. “You keep trying that, darling.”

He gives me a shy but sort of playful look from under his long eyelashes. “I certainly will...darling.”

Oh shit. I hope my complexion hides my blush enough. I smile back and try to look calm, hiding the storm in my chest.

We switch between chatting and companionable silence. Though Simon is never truly quiet. He hums along with the song, or makes noises of contemplation and frustration while trying to get my nails right. His hands slowly get less shaky, which helps. When we’re not talking, I take the opportunity to just watch his expression. How he sticks his tongue out in concentration, and his brow pulls together, and his face adorable pinches together when he gets something wrong. He always tries his best to fix it though, even with his clumsy fingers. It’s really sweet. Just like him.

I'm so unbelievably fucked.

“And...there!” He pulls back with a flourish. “Topcoat and everything. What do you think?”

I examine my hands. Huh, the blue is actually nice on me. And he’s right, the grey matches my eyes. It’s very well done. Maybe black isn’t the only colour I should use. I look up. Simon is staring at me wide eyed, chewing on his lip, leg jittering.

“It’s wonderful,” I say. “You did a marvelous job, Salisbury. Maybe you have a future as a nail artist.”

His nervous expression breaks, thankfully. I’ve found I prefer his grin to his genuine agitation. Blushing smile? Adorable. Wide eyed leg jittering? Not so much. “T-Thanks. Maybe...you could do mine sometime?”

Our eyes meet, and there’s no deception there. He’s always so genuine. It’s amazing. “Sure," I say before thinking. "If you can learn to like black.”

She shrugs. “Well, if you can learn to like blue, I guess I can try black.”

He grins, and I grin back. There’s a stretch of silence. It builds between us, making the air thicker and thicker. I’m torn between what I want to say and what I should. That I want more from this, more than just winks and smiles and “darlings”. But I know it can’t work. Simon should know that. I should tell him, all of it. But...he'll hate me. For not telling him about Switzerland, for using him like a plaything, for being an utterly stupid reckless prick. Can I handle him truly hating me?

“Simon, love! It’s nearly supper! Are you and Baz done your work?” Ms. Salisbury’s voice carries quite well. It jolts me from my depressive pit. Simon sighs and leans out towards the door.

“Yeah! Be down in a minute, Gran.” He looks at me, and I swear I see genuine sadness. “Looks like it’s time to say goodbye.”

I try to hide my own disappointment. “Yeah, looks like it.”

He bounces out of his chair, then offers his hand. I inhale sharply. Did not expect that. But after only a second of hesitation, I take it. He pulls me to my feet with ease. I’m still disturbed by how much his strength excites me.

“C’mon, let’s get you back on your motorbike, Pitch.”

“Should get you on it one day,” I say under my breath.

“What?”

I straighten up, hands in my jacket pockets. “Nothing, Salisbury.”

We walk down the stairs quickly. Well, Simon more jumps down them. He’s a never ending ball of energy. Ms. Salisbury is at the bottom.

“How was the work, you two?” she asks sweetly.

“Wonderful!” Simon chirps. “Talked about bunnies and stuff, and Baz let me do his nails.”

My brow shoots up to my hairline. I can’t believe he’s so open about this. If I told my father or Daphne the same, they would not say anything at best and lecture me at worst. But Ms. Salisbury looks positively elated by Simon’s words. “Oh, marvellous. Finally you can practice on someone other than me, love.”

Simon rolls his eye. “Yeah, like you don’t like it.”

“Of course. But it’s good you have another guinea pig. May I see your work?”

Simon looks at me in silent question. I shrug in response, then hold out my hand for his grandmother. She flips the glasses down from her head. “Amazing job, Simon. You’ve gotten so much better. And it looks great on you, Baz.”

“Thank you, Ms. Salisbury.”

She pulls away, waving dismissively. “Please, call me Ruth. Now, Baz, will you be staying for dinner?”

“Uh.” I turn to Simon. “Am I staying for dinner, Simon?”

Simon’s face turns red. “Oh, sure, if you want.”

I shrug. “I’m certainly in no rush to get home, and if it’s no trouble.”

“Oh it’s none at all,” Ms. Salis- Ruth says, waving her hand dismissively.

“Then I guess I’ll stay for supper.”

Ruth claps her hand once loudly. “Wonderful! Let me put out another setting.”

She saunters off to the kitchen. I decide to actually take off my jacket and boots and stay awhile. Simon leans in close to my ear, making my pulse spike.

“Hope you like roast beef,” he whispers. “It’s the only thing Gran knows how to cook well. Grandpa was a chef, and she’s been on her own since he died, so she’s never had to cook anything else. But she’s been learning more since I’ve got here.”

I shrug like he does. “I think I’ll live.”

“Good to hear.”

Simon leads me to the small dining room table. When I go to the left side, Simon grabs my hand and drags me to the right. I jolt slightly. Wow, that’s bold for him. Not that I’m complaining. I sit next to him as Ruth brings out a platter of delicious smelling meat and mash potatoes. Simon immediately shovels the food on his plate, licking his lips like a starving animal. I on the other hand take only a few slices delicately just like my mother taught me. But Ruth gives me an odd look.

“Are you not hungry, Baz?” she asks.

“Um, no, I am,” I reply slowly.

“Then please, take as much as you like. I always make a lot because of Simon’s endless appetite.”

Simon rolls his eyes, speaking with a mouth full of roast beef. “I’m a growing boy!”

“Growing monster more like it,” Ruth chuckles.

Huh, okay. I decide to be polite and take some more. Dinner proper starts, and it's...weird. My family is never this talkative at supper. We’re mostly silent and sullen. But the Salisburies are the exact opposite. Ruth and Simon chat, though Simon has trouble responding through all the the food in his mouth. (The boy has zero manners. It’s adorable.)

“So, Baz,” Ruth asks, facing me, “how’s school for you? I’ve only ever heard about it from Simon and Miss Penelope.”

No one’s ever asked my opinion of school either. I shrug. “It’s alright. Not my favourite place to be, of course. I think English is my favourite subject.” I tap Simon’s foot under the table. His breath hitches slightly, and he flashes me only a small smile. But it’s enough.

“Glad to hear so. Simon loves English too. He’s always eager to get to first period for Miss Possibelf’s class every morning.”

I flick my eyes over to Simon. His cheeks are flushed as he bites into his roast beef.

“Hm, glad to hear I’m not the only one who loves literature.” I let my voice drawl a bit, hopefully enough for Simon to notice but not Ruth. He doesn’t look up from his food, but I feel his toe tap my foot. And once again, it’s enough. Everything Simon does seems to be enough for me.

“I’m just glad Simon’s adjusting to Watford,” Ruth sighs. “It’s not easy moving schools most of the way through the year.”

Simon sighs in return. They sound almost exactly alike. Though Simon is more exasperated. “I told you, Gran, I’m fine. My grades are much better than last term.”

“There’s a good reason for that.” Ruth aggressively stabs her beef, and Simon looks sad as he nods slightly. This is the only crack in Ruth's kind demeanour I’ve seen all day. It’s strange, and the curious brainiac in me wants to know more. But the sensible part knows to just keep eating my food.

“Hey,” Simon chirps, “did I tell you about the kid who gave himself a wedgie in gum class yet?”

Ruth’s playful smile immediately returns. “No, I don’t believe you have.”

“Oh man, it was hilarious! Baz you’ll love this too.”

I lean my cheek into my palm. “I’m sure I will.”

Simon launches into the rambling anecdote, using mostly weird noises and illustrative hand gestures instead of words. Ruth and I both laugh along genuinely. This is the first time I’ve enjoyed a family meal in ages. It may be unusual, but it’s certainly not unenjoyable.

Soon enough, dinner is over, and Ruth brings out dessert. They’re sour cherry scones from Pritchard Bakery. Simon takes three immediately and starts slathering butter all over them.

“You like scones?” I ask mockingly.

Simon nods, scone crumbs all around his mouth. “Uh-huh. Gran got me some my first day here. They’re absolutely incredible.”

“My cousin owns the bakery, you know.”

His eyes go impossibly wide. “Really?! Could you get me some free samples?”

I shrug, a playful smile on my face. “Maybe.”

“Simon, you eat enough, you don’t need any more,” Ruth kindly berates. Simon frowns.

“There’s never enough scones, Gran.”

Ruth and I exchange an understanding look. Maybe I will bring him to see Cousin Pritchard before I go though. Something to make him happy before I’m gone.

Soon enough, Simon’s eaten all the scones, the dishes are done, and it’s my time to go. I’m a gentleman, I know when to take my leave. Simon and Ruth walk me out of the house.

“It was lovely having you, Baz,” Ruth says. And I have to admit, I’m a bit taken aback. Most parents and/or guardians aren’t this friendly to me. Dev and Niall’s parents barely acknowledge my existence nowadays, and they’ve known me since I was a baby. It’s a warm feeling I never thought I’d miss.

“Thank you for having me, Ruth,” I reply, smiling graciously.

“Anytime. Simon, feel free to invite him over again.”

Simon smiles sweetly at me, cheeks unabashedly scarlet. “Yeah, okay. Maybe we should meet up before the presentation on Wednesday?”

I nod, hoping my cheeks aren’t as bright. “I think I’d like that.”

Because I would. I regretfully very much would.

“Awesome! See you later!”

My lip twitches up without thinking. “See you.”

I get my helmet on. I don’t rev my engine as loud as usual to be respectful. Simon waves with his entire arm, while Ruth’s looks more like the queen. I salute in return. (That seems to be my thing now. I’ve embraced it.)

As I drive back towards my home, my mind stays with the Salisburies. With nail polish, roast beef, and a sense of peaceful happiness that lingers in me long after the house is in the distance.

I get to the Pitch hill and just sit there, looking up at the looming little bastard. I know what I’m supposed to do. Go back to all the misery there. But fuck that. I turn to the left, not back towards Simon’s, but at least somewhere my father isn’t. Somewhere I can keep this feeling for a little longer. And maybe get really pissed.

———————————————-

“Basilton! Where have you been?!”

If I didn’t already have a migraine, I’d assume my father’s voice had just given me one. Going on a two day bender will do that to you. I stop walking but don’t turn around. Honestly, I look like a wreck right now, and I don’t want him to see it.

“Away,” I say curtly.

“Away where?! We haven’t seen you in days! No calls, no mail. We’ve been worried sick!”

I groan and turn on my heels finally. To my utter surprise, he looks genuinely concerned. His eyes are wide and his hair is disheveled, like he’s been running his hands through it. Huh. Actually worried about where I’ve been. That’s a first.

“Well, I’m home now,” I sigh. “Happy?”

“Certainly not.” He puts his hands on his hips like a pissed off school teacher. “I’ve been getting calls from your school. You’ve missed almost all of your classes, including tests and projects. I thought we had an agreement.”

I whip around, scowling with as much menace as I can muster with a hangover. “No, you gave me an ultimatum. And I refuse to be threatened into doing what you want, Father dearest.”

I start stomping away again, but we Grimms refuse to not have the last word. “Are you sure you haven’t just been...distracted, Basilton?”

I stop halfway up the stairs. The tone of his voice could imply many things, but I have a sinking feeling I know what he means. I chuckle, shaking my head. “Daphne told you about Tuesday, I suppose.”

“That you brought a boy over to our house without our knowledge? Yes. And I find it a bit disrespectful that-”

“That I what?!” I yell, probably louder than I should, considering it’s late at night and I have four younger siblings. “Dare to be gay?! Sorry it’s harder to ignore my sexuality when I’m actually acting on it.”

My father takes a deep breath, something he always does when he’s trying to keep his slipping composure. “Basilton, that is not what I meant.”

“Oh really? So you’re actually okay with me bringing guys around? Maybe I’ll start having big gay nightclub parties in the receiving room.”

I can see my father losing his cool. Bit by bit, his perfect British man composure is slipping. It’s the effect I certainly have these days. “That would not be appropriate, Basil. And I merely meant that maybe this ‘Simon’ is distracting you from your studies and causing your poor grades.”

For a second, I don’t know whether to laugh or be furious. Fire bubbles in my gut, my fingers curling on the bannister. Yup, let’s go with righteous fury. I stomp down the stairs and push my face into his.

“No,” I growl, “Simon is not at fault. You are. You are the catalyst for all the things I’m doing now, Your bullheadedness, your pride, your prejudi-”

“Oh for God’s sake, Basil!” He roars. “For once in your life take some goddamn responsibility for your own actions!”

I step back a bit. I haven’t seen him this outwardly angry in a year, but he’s practically seething. If he was the kind of man to throw a punch, he would have just clocked me. But instead he just stares me down in an attempt to intimidate. That won’t work.

“Fuck you,” I mutter, turning on my heels and stomping towards the door.

“Where are you going?” he calls after me.

“Out!” I turn to glare at him. “And I’ll be back when I feel like it!”

I make sure to slam the door very loudly, hoping my message is clear. I know exactly where I want to go. And who I want to see.

———————————————-

AN: Is Baz being a total brat here? Yes. Is his bratiness sorta justified? Also yes. Things are complicated. And finally we meet Ruth! I loved reading everyone's comments speculating about Simon's home life cause this was planned from the start lol. But why is Simon living with Ruth? Well, that will be explained shortly. Tune in next time for answers :)

Chapter title is from "Alfie's Song" by Bleachers.

#carry on #snowbaz #simon snow #baz pitch #ruth salisbury #fluff #angst #punk/pastel #mysnowbazfanfic

46 notes · View notes

owlmylove · 6 years

Note

big ask, how do you make friends?(not you as in you but as in the general all of us you does that make sense?)

aight strap in kiddo. heres how to win friends and influence smiles

first: find people that seem cool, or interesting to you. this is nowhere near as high stakes as it may seem because, though you may not know it yet, you don’t have to commit to being friends with someone just because you get to know them. we all make brunch and coffee date promises that will eventually go unfulfilled, not because we’re terrible people but rather we realize we’re better suited to hanging out with others. so, tldr: find cool people and don’t worry overmuch about it

now, find a way to talk to them. this depends on A. how often you see this person annnnd B. your own confidence level.

if you see a cool person and don’t immediately know how to approach them, the easiest way in the world to make friends is to open with a compliment and go from there. this sounds ridiculous, but I’m currently at a large university and I literally make friends every day. most of the time, that’s prompted by complimenting them. I once told a girl outside starbucks I loved how she was working that croptop, and she almost yelled with joy, complimented my hair, and demanded to ask for my instagram. if someone is in a rush I naturally don’t interrupt them, but I have stopped by other people’s tables or seats in cafés before to inform them how much I like their outfit/hair/earrings/messenger bag. after they fawn over the compliment, proceed to small talk.

small talk takes practice.

and thats okay! most things in life do! you’ll get better the more you do it - I swear to god I’m the proof.

bounce off whatever response they give to your initial compliment and, most importantly (and easiest for you!) keep the focus on them. try to end most - but not every one! - of your thoughts with an open question for them to keep the conversation rolling. complimented their jewelry? (usually a v. good pick, people take pride in their jewelry. sidenote, try to compliment things people choose: clothes, books, shoes, accessories. although “you have incredible eyes!” is a great compliment, it’s awkward as an opener because it A. requires you to have looked them in the eyes for a long period of time before talking to them and B. sounds like a pick up line. [I wait until I’ve been talking to them for a while before I acknowledge how wow, I’m sorry, the light just hit your eyes and they’re gorgeous! I’m sure you get that all the time, but wow.])

ask them where they got their bracelet. if someone got it for them, ask about the gift-giver. if they don’t remember where they got it, laugh and say that all the best pieces in a wardrobe are the ones you forget where they came from. give an example of your own, if applicable. try bouncing from complimenting their hair to asking where they get it done and maybe make a joke about how you wish you could bring a professional negotiator to your appointments, because otherwise you’ll ask for a trim, the stylist will give you a buzzcut, and you’ll say “oh thats perfect, thanks :))” almost everyone has had that experience, I promise.

I should also acknowledge: I’m writing this as a cis female. I can (and do) compliment a lot of people, mostly women. But I’ve been told that if you’re male-presenting, then giving such compliments to people of any gender might be seen as flirting? As such, for those who don’t present as girls: give compliments in a way that feels right for you. One of the best drive-by compliments I recently got from a guy was while I was late for a performance, striding across campus, and a guy passing by just said “Hey, I love your style,” without breaking stride or trying to force a conversation. No matter what you identify as, if you’re worried someone will think you’re hitting on them be sure to keep that air of, “I don’t mind if this conversation comes to a natural conclusion.” Even if you desperately want to be their friend, desperation is easily detected and can be as uncomfortable in platonic contexts as it is in romantic ones.

so don’t lean in too close, don’t force extended eye contact or stare, and don’t compliment any body parts unless you think you can do so without being suggestive. casually mirror their body language when possible (if they’re leaning their cheek on one arm, wait a beat or two before propping your chin up similarly) to make them feel like you’re attentive and similarly minded.

if you can immediately tell you have a common factor with a person, go for it. if someone’s reading a book you’ve read, or a book you want to read, or a book you wrote, sit sorta near them, glance their way and, acting as if you’ve just now recognized the book, ask them how they’re enjoying it. if they’re a deep reader and go “huh?” as your voice drags them up from the literary depths, give a self-effacing smile and say “Oh, I’m sorry to interrupt. That’s just one of my favorite books. How are you liking it so far?” this leads to any other question about a book you can imagine.

ditto any t-shirt about a form of media you’re familiar with, or patch or sticker or pin. all of those are just nerd flags flying high in pursuit of like-minded people to talk to. trust me.

once you’ve made enough small talk and, if it’s working well, try finding a “to be continued” thread. could be “oh, you come to this coffee shop every morning to? well maybe I’ll see you next Wednesday then! it was nice meeting you, have a good day c:” orrrr maybe it’s “awww your dogs adorable!! here’s pictures of my pet/any other vaguely related to the conversation thing on instagram. [insert photo sharing, wait until you both stop actively looking at the photo] oh here, what’s your instagram? I’ll follow you!” open the search tab and hand it to them so you don’t have to worry about mistyping.

also a very, very good method is to find something you can relate to the present conversation that you might not be able to immediately show. so an article, video, a picture you can’t-find-right-now, friend’s name, movie review, the name of this really cool bookstore you found in Annapolis because they mentioned they’re going there soon (if you really don’t mind bullshitting, find out where they’re traveling in the future, claim to remember a bookstore/museum/etc. you went to once, years ago and say oh shoot, what was the name? it was a pretty cool place - I’ll think of it tonight at like 2am. I can send you the name whenever I think of it if you like? [pause for answer] okay great! here, whats your number? and then go home, google some cool places, and text them a few hours later.) anything that gives you A. a way to continue this conversation and B. an excuse for not doing so immediately and, therefore, C. the chance to get their name & contact info.

now, if this isn’t just some cool-looking person you’re meeting for the first time, but someone you see regularly in a residential, academic or professional setting, start laying the groundwork for friendly vibes before you make a move. smile when you see them. if they’re a classmate, try sitting a lil closer (but not crazy close.) pay attention if they speak up in a group. if they drop something, and you don’t have to take extreme steps to do so, pick it up. if someone drops something across a lecture hall, don’t go running for it. but just close-lipped small smile + eyebrow flash when you see them and, after a few of these, try for a nod and/or a grin. if you’ve spoken to them at least once, if only to pick something up for them, you can try a “hey!/hello!” with a smile if they seem receptive to it. if you haven’t spoken to them yet, you’re welcome to try it if they seem receptive, but I usually wait.

if you don’t see this persona regularly, but semi-regularly, you need to evaluate whether the times you encountered them is significant enough for them to remember. please know this has waaay less to do with whether or not you’re memorable, and more to do with how much data our brains sort through every single day. think honestly about this, and decide this: when you eventually introduce yourself to them, would it be stranger to admit you remember the first time you both occupied the same space, or stranger to pretend to have forgotten?

I have a classmate who I vividly remember meeting for the first time, but we never really spoke until on instagram recently, 2 years later. So I never made a point of mentioning our meeting, until he actually referenced it! Then I went ahead and mentioned the highly-specific detail which made him so memorable as a question I was unsure of - “Ahaha yeah, his class was great! Weren’t you the one who _____?”

Try never to be presumptuously confident in social settings until your conversational partner indicates it’s appropriate. It is almost always more polite to allow yourself uncertainty.

case in point: my default when friends are introducing me to people who I’ve seen around a few times is “Oh! Hello, I’m ___, haven’t we met before?” Assuming you have met before (even and perhaps especially when you know for a fact you haven’t) is SO MUCH SAFER than asking “have we met?” When they respond in the negative, we haven’t, you get to say “Oh, really? I guess I’ve just seen you around so much, I could’ve sworn we were introduced. Well, it’s so nice to officially meet you!” and then proceed with small talk, ideally including whoever your third party member is or, in the event of being one-on-one with this prospective friend, try asking them some questions about wherever you’ve been seeing them (so what do you think of our biology lecture?) OR compliments (Oh, I just noticed how awesome your watch is! where did you find that?) OR any other question you like. proceed with the small talk until one or both of you seems ready to leave, there’s a decent enough lull in the conversation, OR you’ve found a “to be continued thread” which you can string up before making your goodbyes.

(Sorry if I’m exhausting this post with too many conversational examples, I just know how much younger, more-anxious me liked the idea of having a script to fall back upon)

don’t worry if you don’t get a contact method after the first conversation! you have spoken to the person, laid the ground work for a follow-up conversation, and that’s awesome. keep interacting with them when you see them, but be mindful of how interested they seem in interacting with you. the worst thing is to always stop and wait for a conversation when someone just wants to get on with their day. if they seem impatient, or busy, just say “hey! good to see you c:/have a good day c:/your hair looks great [insert name]!” and carry on.

Friendships aren’t formed by constantly forcing conversations with a person. They’re formed by being mindful of those around you, considering people’s perspectives & emotions, and having a positive presence people want to be around.

you can shoot them periodic texts or DM’s, depending upon the contact method. best to start off is to send or discuss things relevant to your IRL conversation. if that starts a whole new text convo: awesome!!! if it fizzles out; let it fizzle. wait a few days/week/etc. try asking them for a book or music or coffeeshop recc, because people fucking love an invitation to offer their opinion (what do you think this novella of an answer is?) and then springboard into your own tastes, things you like and dislike, and see how well your views and tastes align. remember, talking to a potential friend is just like an interview! you may feel like you’re under examination, and need to win their attentions, but you’re interviewing them for the position too.

finally, go ahead and invite them to hang out. you can do this waaaay earlier if you have sufficient reason/confidence to do so: if you compliment someone’s superhero shirt, and they say they can’t wait for the new movie next week, and you can’t either, say this! say you’re planning on going [insert date] if they wanna come get their mind blown with you and/or go halfsies on the pricey popcorn.

also, naturally: if you’re in a coffeeshop and both clearly plan to be there again sometime soon, establish when you’ll see them next. when you do: don’t seat yourself at their table unless A. they invite you to or B. they’ve been clearly invested in talking with you for more than a few minutes, at which point you can say “Do you mind if I sit?” and then boom! coffee friendship!!! which is also the best way to deal with the natural, awkward pauses that come between topics - you can both reach for your cups as you think of ways to continue

But: if you don’t have the excuse of “here, wanna study for the next exam together?” or “carpool to work together?” or any of the above, go ahead and find something you think they might like too. If you have other friends who’d be down, and who aren’t super abrasive or wild or super super shy personality types, go ahead and try to make it a group hang. “Hey! Some of my friends & I are going to the movies on Friday night if you’d care to join!” orrrrrr invite them to grab coffee if that’s not where you usually meet them, or invite them to an outdoor market or some cool event (ideally with free admission!) like a live concert or gallery showing, etc. etc.

If you only have their instagram when you first hang out with them, take a picture of them over the course of the night (not a selfie unless they ask for it.) I know how people feel about getting photographed, so I always take a bunch, tell them to try different poses, and then let them swipe through and pick their favorites for me to send them. offer the same, and tell them instagram/social media messagers kill the image quality if they don’t already know. Boom! now you have their phone number, and now they feel good about themselves bc of you. Woooo, positive correlations! if they want to take pictures of you, even if you’re squeamish around cameras, go ahead, laugh and let them go for it. otherwise, refusing the picture skews the friendship towards their ego, and suggest, if only subconsciously, that you like them more than you like yourself.

from then on, it should be pretty smooth! see how the hang out goes, decide whether you want to keep hanging with them (as I said, you have that right!) and then text them when you want to. and as you spend more time interacting with them, and grow more comfortable, you might have some of Friendship Bonding Moments™ I’ve encountered. such as: being told I played a minor role in someone’s weirdly vivid dream, anytime someone sent me a post/song/video/article of clothing/picture of a dog and said it reminded them of me, sending me a new song they love and demanding I listen to it, asking for my opinion on what they’re going to wear tonight, and/or whether they should post a picture to instagram, someone randomly calling me up to say they’re headed to my favorite diner at 2am, do I want to come? (~Just College Things~), telling me they made extra dinner/food/baked goods and do I want some?

and then, congrats! you have made friends! if you really like them, and enjoy this sincerely and/or ironically, feel free to make them a friendship bracelet to immortalize the event once you feel comfortable enough with them

(although I have also promised to make friendship bracelets for people I have just met + had very positive conversations with, preceded by “Okay, that’s it, we’re friends now. You can expect your friendship bracelet in 3-5 business days.” and they all, without fail, freak out over the mere thought of a friendship bracelet and the implication that we are now officially friends. this works on people I met like, less than 5 minutes ago. it’s also really easy to say “you can expect your friendship bracelet in 3-5 business days. Here, what’s your instagram/phone number? I’ll text you!” bear in mind: don’t be presumptuously confident. gauge their level of enthusiasm before you ask for their contact details, or take the joke too far. but know that most will almost immediately say yes, because even adults who may laugh at the thought are still just little kids deep down, and everyone wants a friend to like them enough to make them a friendship bracelet)

if you’re looking for more than just casual friends: time, conversations and empathy all help to turn casual acquaintances into friends you can trust & rely upon. asking how they’re doing if it seems they’re having a rough day and actively listening, offering advice (only if they want it) or food or an indulgent stress relief hang out, or asking (one of the rare times presumptuousness is okay!!) if they wouldn’t mind letting you vent about a coworker or something frustrating - any time you encourage them to emotionally share with you, or you offer to share your emotions with them, will help solidify your friendship. as much as I hate admitting when I’m sad to my close friends, those that I do admit it to are the ones I trust & rely upon the most.

finally, most importantly and, yes, most clichédly: be yourself. The more a friend learns about you, the deeper the friendship. Never lie about yourself for the sake of impressing a friend, or all that effort you’ve put into making a friendship will be built on false grounds. you’ll never be comfortable or relaxed around someone you have to act around, so don’t! if someone doesn’t like you for you, they’re not worth your friendship in the first place. I may sound like Dr. Seuss or Hallmark, but I’m serious.

Okay cool, so it’s 4:33 am and I should be studying for me french final in 6 hours, but hey, here’s like 3,000 words of rambly social advice and scripts. should I write a book about this? I feel like I could write a book about this. Hmm. Maybe thats just the espresso & caffeinated chocolate talking. please weigh in on book or nah in the comment section below

Anways, I hope with every fiber of my sleep-deprived soul that some small part of this goliath answer could help you! And if, in my stupor, I outlined every possible scenario except the ones you actually needed to know about, don’t hesitate to let me know and I’ll try my best to assist. Now go forth, make friends, and be you! ♥

#reply #social anxiety #how to win friends and influence people #social skills #how to #Anonymous

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