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dovechim · 5 years

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bam! you got scammed! 01 (m)

➾ 10k

➾ warnings: excessive mentions of cum, mentions of unsanitary usage of cum, squirting dildo, cam girl/ cam boy AU, male masturbation, oral (m receiving), dirty talk, slight slut shaming, unprotected sex, creampie

➾ summary: some might say it's unethical. some might even say you’re a scammer. in this dog eats dog world, the line between right and wrong is a grey area indeed. but as a cam girl, there’s no such thing as work ethic, at least not to you.

jeon jeongguk learns the hard way when he falls for your scam, but you can be sure he isn’t about to let you get away with this.

➾ a/n: first of all, i truly apologise for using two gifs. i couldn’t, for the life of me, find a better gif of jeon when he’s pissed off and he does THAT thing with his tongue. you all know what I'm talking about. i hate myself so much because i had to look at so many pictures of jeon while searching for that second gif T___T

anyway, this is the first fic i’ve written where i stopped so many times and asked myself, what the hell am i writing? is this too weird?? but i am thankful for the friends i talked to and the encouragement they gave me :”) it got so long that i had to split it into two parts. the second part will be uploaded next week!

♡♡♡

Blinking red hearts on the top left of your computer screen. A red dot indicating that your webcam is on and currently filming. Numbers that climb higher and higher by the second, accompanied by a never ending stream of comments in the sidebar. And every now and then, a bright, happy chime that indicates someone has donated to your stream.

From your point of view, this is all that you see as you spread your legs wider, making sure the camera can capture all the mess that you’ve been making of yourself for the past hour. Your cute bunny hat slips down your forehead as you stroke the dildo in and out of yourself faster, watching the influx of comments praising you and urging you on.

cherry_chim013: whose cum is it this time? jackedasjeon: mine, of course jackedasjeon: it IS mine, right? handfulofhobi: not likely… we all know you don’t have that much cum considering how much u jerk off cherry_chim013: hahhaahfsd shit my dick slipped out of my hand jackedasjeon: SHUT UP jackedasjeon: how do u even jerk off with such a tiny dick?

“Oh come on guys… don’t fight,” you pout, sticking out your lower lip as you take the opportunity to rest your arm for a moment. “I’m sure jackedasjeon’s load is more than satisfying. I’d love to find out for myself one day…”

Normally, with the amount of comments that fly past, you have a hard time reading each and every one while trying to look sexy getting yourself off, but since these three subscribers happen to be your top contributors, their usernames are specially highlighted, and their comments are pinned in place for a few seconds.

handfulofhobi: does that mean it isn’t his?? cherry_chim013: HEY! my dick isn’t small, thank u very much

“I can vouch for cherrychim,” you giggle as you take out the dildo currently buried in your pussy. “I’d say he could give this one a run for its money?”

jackedasjeon: stop playing around babygirl jackedasjeon: i don’t care whose it is anymore jackedasjeon: i just want to see you cum

“Someone’s a little impatient tonight?” You raise an eyebrow at his demanding and insistent messages. “I haven’t even revealed whose cum it is yet… I got such a surprise when I went to pick up the package a few days ago. You gave me SO MUCH cum! Don’t worry, I didn’t spill any while transferring it in here.”

Your sentence ends with a giggle as you hide your face behind your hand, pretending to be embarrassed. Just then, a chime comes from your computer.

jackedasjeon has donated 500 coins!

You sit up a little straighter. ‘jackedasjeon’ has always been a consistent contributor to your streams, starting off with smaller amounts, but this is the most he’s ever given you. You give a little smooch to the camera as you sink the dildo into your pussy all the way, your face screwed up as it bottoms out inside you.

“Ah, it feels so much bigger today, I don’t know why,” you frown in confusion as you continue to fuck yourself. “Thank you jackedasjeon! Who knows… maybe you’ll get lucky next time? But for today, I’m very pleased to reveal that this huge load of cum that’s about to go in my pussy belongs to…”

You pause and reach for the shipping label that you had torn off, address and personal information scribbled out with black marker, leaving only the username visible. Showing it to the camera, you pause for a few seconds, making sure everyone has time to see what’s written on it.

“… handfulofhobi!” Your bright grin grows even wider as the subscriber conveys his delight with a hefty donation of 1000 coins. “Now now, don’t sulk, jackedasjeon. You too, cherrychim! There’s always a next time!”

You put the label away and lean closer to the camera as you start to whine and pant, inching closer and closer to your orgasm. In the midst of this, you read out several other random subscriber’s names in an effort to make everyone feel included. Then, your other hand reaches for the pump beside you, and as your walls clench around the dildo, you press it hard a few times, causing cum to spurt out of the head of the dildo and fill you up.

“It’s so thick… thank you hobi,” you giggle as you slow down your thrusting, reaching to redirect the camera in between your legs. The sheer amount of cum inside you makes everything so much sloppier, and soon the white liquid starts to leak out of you, turning frothy due to your thrusts. Still squeezing the other end to drain all the cum inside the dildo, you lazily push it in and out of your cunt. “You filled me up so well… thank you! I can only imagine what it’d be like to have you cumming inside me for real…”

You end off with a sigh, bringing your fingers down to play with your messy slit as you let the dildo slip out of you. Brushing your clit a few times, you make slightly tortured noises of overstimulation that your viewers love and enjoy, all in the name of putting up a show for them.

After a few minutes, you push the camera back so that your entire body is in the frame once more. You gather the sticky cum that stains your thighs, though it doesn’t do much more than spread it around. Pushing one finger into your mouth, you lick and suck the cum from it while maintaining eye contact with the camera, watching the comments suddenly surge.

While you read the comments, you reach for the dildo and suck around the head of it, squeezing the leftover cum inside it onto your tongue and playing with it, letting it drip down your chin onto your cleavage, covered by your pink lace bra.

cherry_chim013 has donated 400 coins! seojoonie has donated 100 coins! handfulofhobi has donated 800 coins! darkhorse015 and three others have donated a total of 400 coins! seojoonie: the best streamer on this fucking site seojoonie: you’d take my cock so well cherry_chim013: FUCK, that’s so hot cherry_chim013: i came all over myself handfulofhobi: oh my god handfulofhobi: it’d be my pleasure to fill u up in person baby jackedasjeon: push it inside you more babygirl jackedasjeon: don’t let a single drop go to waste jackedasjeon: if i were there i’d fuck it back into u

jackedasjeon: i’m still so hard

“Your pleasure is mine, cherrychim,” you giggle, resting your hand on your belly with your legs still wide open. “Today’s stream was made possible by the wonderful handfulofhobi… thank you so much! To everyone else, thank you for taking time to watch me. It was my pleasure,” you blow a kiss to the camera as you start to do your signature outro.

“As always, remember to like and subscribe to my channel if you liked what you saw! And turn on notifications so you’ll know every time I stream. For a chance to fill me with your cum next week, don’t forget to check out the link in the description box! Bye bye!”

You send a last kiss toward the camera before you turn it off for good, seeing the red light dim before you close your legs, grimacing at how sticky and disgusting you feel. Just as you are reaching for a baby wipe to clean up first, a notification pops up on your screen.

✉ jackedasjeon is requesting to send you a private message! ✉

Accept or Reject

You force a smile onto your face. Can’t reject one of your top subscribers, after all. They make up almost half of your monthly income from this site. The only reason why he’s able to even private message you in the first place. You sigh as you click accept, and a chat window pops up.

jackedasjeon is typing… jackedasjeon: i’m still hard… jackedasjeon sent you an image

♡

Jeon Jeongguk stares eagerly at his computer screen for a reply, grey sweatpants pushed down to his knees as he lounges at his computer table. Sure, he’d just stroked his cock for over an hour to his favourite cam girl, and that usually does the trick, but somehow today he can’t get it off. Too many horny bastards in the chatroom talking about how hard their dicks are and how much cum they’d pump her full of.

All just getting in the way of him enjoying his favourite cam girl. He really hit the jackpot when he stumbled upon your stream one lonely, horny weekday after class. You drew him in and captivated him immediately with your satin pink hair, glowing skin, wide, innocent eyes and always with that tantalising cleavage bouncing around on screen. No matter what kind of lewd things you did on screen, you always kept your corset top on, emphasising your tiny waist and making Jeon Jeongguk imagine how he’d wrap his hands around it as he makes your breasts bounce.

But more than that, watching your streams makes him feel like he knows you. Your soft voice, the sound of your laughter, and even when you aren’t doing anything lewd, just talking about your day or what you had for lunch, it makes him feel like he knows you in real life. Sometimes while listening to a lecture or working out, Jeongguk likes to turn on your streams and just hear the sound of your voice to keep him company.

He desperately hopes that you’ll entertain his request even though you officially ended the stream, and you limit your online activity to just that one time a week. Despite that, you easily maintain your position at the top of the leaderboard. It’s probably because you’re the first ever cam girl to offer such a service: each week, one lucky platinum subscriber gets a chance to send you a load (or two!) of cum and watch you fuck yourself full of it with your squirting dildo.

Jeongguk hasn’t had the chance, but after today’s stream, he feels more than hopeful. Just as he’s about to add on to the dick picture he sent, something appears on the screen.

meringuebaby is typing…

Jeongguk does a fist pump, his eyes lighting up in excitement. He rushes to delete the ‘i sent u my dick, pls respond?’ currently in the textbox.

meringuebaby: the stream not enough for you? meringuebaby: im not losing my touch am i…? T__________T

Jeongguk scrambles to type a reply back, his hands shaking. He can’t believe that you would even give him the time of day. You, the top streamer on this site, the hottest cam girl he’s ever seen in his entire life (ok, so he’s only watched your streams so far, but that doesn’t affect his ability to make objective judgements!), is private messaging him!

jackedasjeon: no no! never, babygirl jackedasjeon: i just needed a bit more help today… jackedasjeon: u’ll help me wont u? meringuebaby: of course i will… you’re my favourite subscriber ^^♡

Jeongguk’s heart skips a beat, and his cock throbs as he rushes to type a reply back onehanded. An onset of pictures interrupts him though, and he opens them one by one to savour them.

They are obviously just taken, and Jeongguk’s dick twitches at the thought of you taking these pictures just for him. The fact that no one else but him has access to these pictures, out of the millons of subscribers you have, makes him even harder. As he strokes his cock to images of your cum filled pussy, your perfect ass and your oh so innocent pout, he cums all over himself, pulling his shirt up just in time so he doesn’t stain it.

“Shit,” he swears under his breath as he pants, struggling to type a reply back to you.

jackedasjeon: my baby always knows exactly what i need jackedasjeon: i came so hard jackedasjeon: your pussy is so perfect

“… Jeon, how many times do I have to call you? Dinner is read- OH MY GOD!” Seokjin immediately covers his eyes and wails. “W-why didn’t you lock the god damn door? I need fucking first aid, your one eyed monster just massacred the entire human race—”

Jeongguk rolls his eyes as he reaches for his phone to snap a pic of his cum stained abs to send to you, along with a short message thanking you. He doesn’t even bother to hide his slowly softening dick as Seokjin continues to wail about how his mental health will now take a turn for the worse, his crops will die and he’ll get kicked out of school.

meringuebaby: welcome baby, your pleasure is my pleasure ^^ meringuebaby: wow, that’s a lot of cum… shame it had to go to waste T_________T meringuebaby: i really hope you’ll get lucky next week xoxo

meringuebaby is now offline.

Jeongguk is grinning at his screen like a fool, softened dick still out and sweatpants still pooled at his feet.

Yoongi is in the midst of carting a tray of food back to his room when he catches sight of this. Seokjin is still wailing and complaining in the hallway.

“meringuebaby again?” Yoongi glances at Jeongguk’s screen, not half as bothered by Jeongguk’s nudity as Seokjin is.

“Yeah! Hyung, she private messaged with me! Said I was her favourite subscriber!” Jeongguk is practicing bouncing up and down with joy, his bunny smile lighting up his entire face.

Yoongi still seems unimpressed, though he does raise an eyebrow when he sees just how much Jeongguk has donated to your stream today. “What does she do again?”

“She lets one subscriber send her his cum every week. Then during her livestream she fucks herself with her squirting dildo and fills herself up with that subscriber’s cum,” Jeongguk rushes to explain, directing Yoongi’s attention to the leaderboard at the top of the page. “She’s the top streamer even though she only goes live once a week!”

Jeongguk takes the time to finally tuck himself back into his sweatpants and wipe the cum off his abs with a tissue as Yoongi scrutinises the page with a doubtful frown. “She… what now?”

“She lets—“ Jeongguk is about to go into his whole tirade again when Seokjin, finally unfrozen from his state of shock in the hallway, regains his senses when he no longer sees Jeongguk’s exposed dick.

“What?? That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” he laughs as he approaches cautiously, as if Jeongguk’s dick might spring out at any time now. “First of all, that’s disgusting as fuck. Second of all, um… STD risk? Hello??”

Yoongi remains quiet as Jeongguk jumps to his favourite streamer’s defense with a petulant whine. “Ah Jin-hyung!You might think it’s gross, but her thousands of subscribers obviously don’t. And meringuebaby isn’t dumb, of course she makes us send her our test results too!”

“She probably doesn’t even know you exist,” Seokjin rolls his eyes as he walks away.

“She does! She said I’m her favourite subscriber!” Jeongguk calls out after the older man. Then he turns to Yoongi. “Isn’t she pretty?”

“She’s hot,” Yoongi admits with a simple nod. “The premise and all… very intriguing. I mean, lots of men love seeing cum filled pussy. But having the chance to have their cum featured on stream? She definitely hit a jackpot right there…”

Jeongguk beams with pride as he gazes at your profile picture at the top of the leaderboard.

“… but you’re totally getting scammed, dude.”

Jeongguk whips his head to turn and look at Yoongi. “What?”

Yoongi only laughs. “There’s no way she’s actually putting a stranger’s cum inside her like that. Even if she makes all of you send in test results, how can she be sure that they’re not fabricated? How can she be sure that it’s not someone else’s test results?”

“No way,” Jeongguk argues back with the utmost determination. “meringuebaby would never do that.”

Yoongi only sighs. When Jeongguk gets like this, there’s almost no way to convince him that he’s wrong. He’s one of the most stubborn people Yoongi has ever met. But that doesn’t stop Yoongi from saying his piece.

“Have you ever seen her actually pour the cum into her dildo?”

“…no, she always starts the stream right to the point. She’s already fucking herself when she comes online.” Jeongguk says in a small voice, but he defiantly pushes his chin up. “She probably doesn’t want to show us the boring stuff, that’s all!” And then a thought strikes him. “She always shows us the shipping label of the package!”

“That doesn’t prove anything, dude,” Yoongi only sighs at the youngest’s naivety. “She probably mixes up a batch of fake cum and loads it in. The consistency is way different, but you can’t tell when it’s in someone’s pussy. That’s how they do it in the porn industry too.”

Jeongguk is very quiet for a moment as he thinks about all the times he’s seen you fuck yourself with your beloved purple squirting dildo. It can’t be fake. You wouldn’t do something like that. Besides… besides! Jeongguk sits up straight with a sudden brain wave.

“Hyung!” He says with such a thunderous shout that even Yoongi, unbothered and unperturbed even if the sky were to come crashing down, jumps a little at the sheer volume. “The cum she uses every stream. They’re always different consistencies. Some thick, some super thin and watery, and some are just globs. If it was really fake cum, they’d all be the same consistency wouldn’t it? This just proves that they’re all from different men!”

Yoongi rolls his eyes. Jeongguk may be a cum connoisseur alright, but he isn’t exactly the brightest crayon in the box. He pats Jeongguk’s back a few times with a pitying smile. “You know what… as long as you’re happy. As long as it makes you happy.”

Then he leaves the younger man still grinning happily at his computer screen. Yoongi sighs as he hears the clink of coins signifying Jeongguk making yet another donation to your channel.

♡

“You ended later today,” Irene comments as you walk into the kitchen blindly, holding two cotton pads to your eyes. “Someone give you trouble?”

Ever the motherly figure, Irene has always been against you doing something like this. She always worries that someone might recognise you, especially since you’re one of the few top streamers to show your face openly on camera. But you argue back that there’s no way anyone could possibly recognise you. Not with the four hours you spend doing your makeup in the most ridiculous ways: heavy eye makeup, large, dramatic eyelashes with doll like circle lenses, custom made pink Sailor Moon wig. Most of the time you can’t even recognise yourself when you look in the mirror.

“Not really,” you say, not wanting to go into too much detail about the platinum subscriber who private messaged you, lest you freak Irene out even more.

At first, when she found out what you did as a side job (how could you have known that she’d be back from classes early?!) she had a complete meltdown over how “unsanitary”, “dangerous” and “scary” it was to be putting random strangers’ cum inside you. Not to mention how unsafe it was to be giving out your address on the internet! Until you told her you rented a PO box and showed her your stash of fake cum in the highest cupboard of your room, she was a sobbing mess wailing about how she was going to lose her one and only roommate to a nasty STD or worse, a horny, murderous kidnapper.

Now, sometimes she even helps you mix the cum for your streams when you get too busy to do it yourself. You would have thought that she would be too grossed out at the idea of what it was supposed to be, but she only treats it like a cooking project.

“Aren’t you afraid someone might figure it out one day?” Irene asks as she leaves dinner simmering on the stove to head for the fridge. “That this is all just a scam where you put on five push up bras, cover yourself in makeup, and where you don’t actually…”

Her voice trails off in embarrassment.

You peel off one side of the cotton pad, finding it completely stained with makeup and one false eyelash before peeling off the other. The five push-up bras in question are lying discarded on your bedroom floor, taken off the moment the stream ended.

“No one’s gonna find out unless they make a concerted effort to,” you say disinterestedly as you take off the rest of your makeup. “What I’m selling is an image, a fantasy. Those who believe in it won’t go about deliberately trying to ruin the very one thing that they believe in, the thing that gets them off and helps them escape from reality.”

You say this without an ounce of guilt whatsoever.

“If they really believe this—” you turn around and pluck your violet contact lens out of your eye to illustrate, “— is real, then they’re just fools. Sad, lonely fools.”

Technically, what you’re doing isn’t a scam, because do the guys who watch you still get to cum till their balls are empty? Yes.

Are you still fulfilling their fantasy of filling a stranger up with cum? Yes.

Before you started doing this, back when you had first signed up on the streaming website with only a few subscribers to your name, the top comment you always got was how the men wanted to fill you with their cum.

Why not give people what they want? That’s not a crime. You’re simply leveraging upon the laws of supply and demand (so econs class wasuseful after all!).

“Anyway, I just raked in another four hundred plus today,” you turn around bare faced again, scooping up your glasses and putting them on while grinning at your roommate. “You said you needed some textbooks on Monday right? They’re on me.”

“Oh ______... I can’t! It’s your hard earned money,” Irene hesitates as she scoops out the tofu stew she’d been slaving over for the past hour into bowls. “You should keep it for yourself.”

Irene always helps you with your streams, does your makeup and cooks you dinner even if she’s busy with school. This is the least you can do for her. You frown at her as she hands you a bowl of rice.

“Don’t even argue with me. I already ordered your books online. They’re coming in the next few days.”

Irene sits down opposite you as you start to dig in ravenously, her expression slightly worried, but she covers it up with a genuine smile of thanks. “Just be careful, _______.”

♡

You sit in front of your computer, textbooks open but attention elsewhere entirely.

A part of you slightly regrets being so generous to Irene as you stare at this semester’s tuition fee. Did it go up? Was the amount always this much?

You have barely enough in your bank account to cover it. Not to mention you’d have to miss out paying your portion of rent this month, on top of eating $1 kimbap for every meal if this goes on.

You sigh as you fold the letter in half. Just when you thought you could stop worrying about money so much, life just hits you in the face.

A chime comes from your computer as it lights up, and you click on the email notification from the cam girl website.

✉ jackedasjeon has sent you a private message!✉

Needing to take your mind off your worries for a second, you click to open his message.

jackedasjeon: when are you announcing the details for next week’s stream baby? jackedasjeon: i really hope I get lucky T____T jackedasjeon: i’ve been waiting for sooooo long T_____________T

Reading his messages makes you think about the dick picture he sent you. He’s clearly a well-built guy judging from the veins in his hands and arms, not to mention his generous cock, and last but not least, the cum stained abs that he was trying so very hard to show off. But the tone of his messages makes him sound like a whiny baby, and the thought of such a contrast actually makes you laugh.

Then, an idea strikes you as you click to your homepage and open a new announcement post.

hi cumnoisseurs ♡

how are my lovely icing chefs doing? ^___^♡ uwu

i was thinking of trying something new for next week’s stream! instead of picking a winner randomly (since I think most of you platinum subscribers have already had a chance once), there’ll be a bidding to determine the winner! owo

you can submit your bids on the discussion page! every night at 10pm, i will post the three current highest bidders ^_____^ bids are in increments of 250 coins! the entire bidding period only lasts for three days, so make sure you don’t forget!!

or i’ll be really sad that you wont have a chance to frost my cupcakes… qmq

i’m looking forward to receiving your icing bags uwu

lots of love,

meringuebaby ♡

As you read through your own post, you are cringing so hard from the overly sweet and cute tone that you almost throw up in your own mouth. The overuse of emoticons and ‘uwu’s has you want to wash your eyes out with saline. But this is what your viewers love, it’s the image you have cultivated for yourself, and you have to stick to it.

Sighing, you add a couple more emoticons here and there, deciding that there’s no such thing as overkill, before clicking on submit.

♡

Seokjin is having a nice, pleasant day whipping up some macarons; relishing in the peace and quiet. Having the entire kitchen to himself like this is rare. Usually, Jeon Jeongguk is in here making a mess with his protein shakes, or Min Yoongi is huddled in a chair eating whatever horrendous concoction made from three day leftovers in the fridge.

Seokjin shudders at the thought of that.

But at least with this; with this he can destress yet make some money on the side. It isn’t much, but taking small orders here and there has really added up over the weeks. He even has his own Instagram page where he features the best batches from his weekly bakes, and it really does a lot in attracting new customers.

He cracks one egg, separates the yolks from the whites, then moves to crack the second egg, tipping the yolk to one side of the shell and letting the whites fall into the pristine metal bowl beneath. All through this he can feel the serenity settle deep into his bones, he feels perfectly at ease. This is what he’s meant to do all his life; become the top pastry chef in Korea. His hands move to tilt the shell with the yolk just a little to make sure he gets every drop of egg white possible, when—

“Oh my GOD!!!!!!! OH MY FUCKING GOD!!!!!!”

— his hand slips, and the yolk falls into the precious reservoir of egg whites down below, contaminating it beyond redemption as it breaks apart upon contact.

Seokjin breathes out in an attempt to control his rage.

“HOLY SHIT!” Jeon Jeongguk’s voice does not stop yelling.

Seokjin wipes his soiled hand onto a paper towel. With resolute steps, he makes his way to the stupid punk’s room, fully intent on teaching him a lesson he won’t soon forget. He shoves open Jeongguk’s door violently, completely forgetting what happened the last time he entered Jeongguk’s room without first knocking.

But luckily this time, he doesn’t end up with an eyeful of Jeongguk’s one eyed monster.

Instead, he finds Jeongguk prostate on the floor, on his knees with his forehead touching the ground as he sobs.

“Thank you thank you thank you…” he is mumbling as he— are those tears on his cheeks?!

Seokjin glances around in alarm. Has the stupid brat finally lost it? Had Seokjin been too harsh on him lately? But asking him to clean up after eating is definitely not too much—

In the midst of his fretting, Seokjin catches a glimpse of Jeongguk’s computer screen. He is currently on the cam girl from last time’s— he doesn’t recall a name— home page. Seokjin reads the top announcement, posted just five minutes ago.

And he is speechless.

“H-hyung… isn’t meringuebaby great?” Jeongguk can barely speak, his voice is choked with tears. “She’s actually giving me a chance now… I don’t have to depend on luck anymore! HYUNG!!! This time I really just might win!!!”

Jeongguk is looking at him with stars in his eyes.

Well, no really, it’s just the tears that are making his eyes shine like that.

“Sh-she calls you all… cumnoisseurs?” Seokjin stutters.

Jeongguk puffs out his chest. “Isn’t she the most creative?”

Seokjin can barely believe his eyes as he turns back to the post. “She wants you to… to… frost her cupcakes? With your...your— icing bags?”

With every word, Seokjin’s voice reaches a higher pitch, until his voice almost breaks on the last word. This is… this is an absolute insult to the pastry chefs who shed blood sweat and tears trying to hone their respected craft. Who spend hours in the kitchen trying to whip up that perfect batch of soft, fluffy and white meringues for their macarons, break their backs trying to ice their cupcakes flawlessly, only for all of it to be turned into some kind of lewd, sexual innuendo by some cam girl.

His face is red with rage. His ears are burning. Seokjin is sputtering with indignance. But he can’t find a single word to say.

“… do you even have that kind of money?” He finally spits out.

All at once, Jeon Jeongguk deflates like a soufflé taken out of the oven too soon.

Seokjin feels a little better seeing this. Who the hell does meringuebaby even think she is—

“I’ll find a way,” Jeongguk is wiping away his tears with one hand, brow set into a determined frown that has Seokjin feeling a little nervous. Whenever he gets this look, it’s a sign that Jeon Jeongguk is about to do something extremely stupid, incredibly reckless and most likely life-endangering. Like that time he fell for that online scam by a Nigerian Princess promising inheritance of the throne in exchange for a few dick pics.

“Wh-what are you going to do?” Seokjin glances at Jeongguk nervously as the youngest pushes himself to his feet with resolution, taking a seat in his desk chair once more.

“I’m going to…” Jeongguk takes a deep breath as he wipes the last of his tears away, clicking open a new browser in his computer. “I’m going to find a part-time job.”

Well. That’s certainly not what Seokjin was expecting. He lets out a sigh of relief. “As long as it makes you happy, Kook-ah. As long as you’re happy.”

Seokjin turns away with a niggling worry in the back of his mind as he hears Jeongguk swear under his breath.

“What the fuck? $250,000 for a kidney??”

♡

The guy beside you keeps sighing. All throughout the lecture, he is scrolling rapidly on his computer, obviously not taking any notes whatsoever. Normally, you would be more than a bit annoyed at being distracted, but today you’re not in any mood to listen either.

Yesterday night you posted the first three top bidders on your page. Strangely enough, and dare you say to your disappointment, jackedasjeon is nowhere to be found. He hasn’t even made a bid on your page. Currently at the top is cherry_chim013 with a bid of 2500 coins, and handfulofhobi is a few places down with a bid of 1,000 coins.

The lecturer announces a five-minute break, and the guy beside you sighs once more. You turn to him with a concerned look, peeking at his screen. “Something wrong?”

He turns to you in slight surprise, black curly hair ruffled and with sleep still in his eyes. “Wh- oh. Nothing. It’s just… why does finding a part-time job have to be so damn hard?”

He slouches in his seat and juts his bottom lip out. You feel a pang of sympathy for him. Before you discovered this cam girl gig, you were in his exact position. Scouring the school’s part time job listing for something that is manageable with a full load of classes, yet pays decently. It’s an almost impossible feat.

“Tuition fee, huh?” You sigh and pat his back in solidarity. “This time of the semester always comes around way too quickly.”

“Uh… yeah… tuition fee’s a goddamn piece of shit,” he says as he rubs the back of his neck with a nervous laugh.

“How much are you short?” You rest your chin on your hand.

“Um…” he bites his lower lip as he meets your eyes, and it strikes you that you’ve never seen such round, innocent doe eyes before. “About… $550 maybe? Or more? I… I don’t know.”

He seems to be in a sorry state— jittery and lacking sleep. Poor thing probably stayed up all night worrying about how to pay his fee; he’s so out of it right now that he can barely even remember how much more he needs. You can empathise with that all too well.

“Di- do you have any good part time jobs to recommend?” He suddenly turns to you, sitting upright in his seat.

You peer at his computer again, garnering his name from his login at the top of the school’s webpage. “Jeongguk, right?”

“Yeah—“ He follows your gaze to his screen, and then he looks at the cover of your notebook. “Any part time gigs to recommend, ______?”

“I’m sorry, I really don’t,” you say truthfully. In fact, this was the entire reason why you resorted to being a cam girl in the first place. It’s just impossible to get by with a part time job that pays so meagrely. “You could… you could tutor? I don’t know of any students you could teach though…”

“Forget it,” Jeongguk says glumly, sinking down in his seat. “Did you know the black market buys kidneys for $250,000?”

“Dude, that’s way too much suffering to go through,” you shake your head vehemently. “I mean, I could never do that.”

“You’re right,” Jeongguk sighs as he mutters to himself, “it’s impossible to get that done in 2 days anyway.”

“Why not try something less painful? Like donating blood!” You turn to him with a sudden brainwave. “It’s for a good cause, and its relatively painless too!”

Jeongguk only shakes his head. “I can’t. I was just getting over a flu earlier this week, and I’m still finishing up the antibiotics…”

You sink back into your chair, wracking your brain in thought. “Then… what about… I know this sounds crazy, but… donating sperm? Like, become a sperm donor?”

Jeongguk immediately rejects your idea. “What? No way. My sperm is way too precious for me to just pour it down the drain like that. Besides, if I do that, then I might not have enough for—“

He stops talking suddenly, and his face grows really red. The tips of his ears follow suit, and you think it’s actually kind of adorable, despite how he seems to be a little simple minded.

“Awww. Does someone want to be a daddy someday?” You grin at him, watching his face grow even redder. “You’ll still have enough sperm even if you donate! Did you know your balls make several million sperm a day— about 1,500 a second??”

Jeongguk is a choking, stuttering mess as he turns away from you and your wholesomeness. There’s a whole other reason why he treasures each and every drop of his cum, and definitely not for the reason you think. Though he wouldlike to have kids someday, but that is entirely besides the point.

You are still going on and on about how much sperm he has in his balls right now, and to his horror, hearing you talk about his balls and his sperm and his cum is actually making him grow harder and harder by the second… if he doesn’t do something to shut you up, soon he’ll have a raging boner right in the middle of a lecture.

“I’ll consider it!” He blurts out, and you stop mid-sentence.

“See, I told you it was a great idea!” You are all smiles, patting him on the back. “Let me know how it goes, friend!”

You grin at him, genuinely happy that he decided to consider your suggestion.

And that’s how you and Jeon Jeongguk become friends.

♡

jackedasjeon’s bid is still nowhere to be seen on the second night. You’re getting a little more worried now, especially since the cherry_chim013’s top bid has now been replaced by kingcrabjoonie with 3000 coins.

You would have thought that he definitely wouldn’t miss out on this chance, seeing as how desperate he’s been lately. Clicking over to his profile out of curiosity, you see that he was last online a few hours ago, but yet he still hasn’t made any bids. Perhaps he’s waiting for the very last day?

Or maybe he’s just some poor lonely guy who doesn’t have that much money at his disposal in such a short notice. A part of you begins to feel bad for making your subscribers pay instead of holding a lucky draw like you always do, but you desperately need the cash.

Besides, doing this would weed out all the broke college students and leave only those with a stable income. You’re well aware that guys your age, guys in the same class as you even, watch your streams, but from a very practical point of view, these guys tend to donate in small amounts, and if you depend on them for a living, you’re out of luck.

After lingering on his profile for a few more minutes, you sigh and close the page entirely, pushing all thoughts of jackedasjeon out of your mind as you force yourself to concentrate on your five-page paper due tomorrow.

♡

“Hey, did you see Jeon today?”

Yoongi plucks out one side of his earphones, currently in the midst of rearranging one of his songs, when Seokjin pokes his head into the room. He glances at the clock and realises that it’s almost dawn. Yoongi rubs his eyes sleepily and stares at the older man, dressed in workout gear and presumably about to head to the gym and pretend to work out, return drenched in sweat (read: splash himself with water in the washroom at the gym) and call it a day.

“Don’t know. He didn’t come back again?” Yoongi saves his work once, twice, and three times.

“No. Normally I wouldn’t give a shit about what that brat does, but…” Seokjin’s voice trails off. “He’s up to something. I just know it. Last I heard was that he needs some six hundred bucks for that cam girl website or whatever—“

“He’ll be fine,” Yoongi says through a barely concealed yawn. “He’s not a kid, you know. Even Jeon Jeongguk has his limits too.”

“I know, but…” Seokjin’s voice is interrupted by the jingling of keys, and then a door opening and closing.

“There, see? He’s back in one piece,” Yoongi points his chin toward the sound of Jeongguk rustling about in the living room, turning back to his computer and pressing play again.

“Yeah, on the outside, but who knows what he’s missing on the inside?” Seokjin mutters to himself as Jeongguk drags his feet down the hallway, looking much more worse for wear than when he started out that morning.

“What happened to you?” Seokjin asks, half dreading the answer. “You didn’t… you still have both your kidneys right? Your liver? Your heart?”

“Your brain?” Yoongi pipes up, not even sparing a glance from his screen. “Oh wait. I forgot you didn’t have that one in the first place.”

“Hyung, you’re the one who doesn’t have a heart,” Jeongguk retorts back, but there’s no bite to his bark at all. The youngest can’t stop yawning, and his eyes can’t stay open for more than a few seconds. “I got it. Hyung, I got it.”

“Got what?” Seokjin asks, flabbergasted, but then Jeongguk pulls out a thick wad of cash. There must be at least $300 there. “Oh my god. You robbed a bank.”

Yoongi glances at what Jeongguk is brandishing proudly for a brief second. “You idiot. If he robbed a bank, he would have stolen way more than that.”

“I got an advance payment at my part-time job, and went to ask for a student loan,” Jeongguk says, his eyes opening wide enough with his signature sparkle for just a moment. “Boss made me work the graveyard shift even though no one in their right mind would want to buy furniture in the middle of the night before he would give me next month’s pay.” Jeongguk is puffing his chest out as he counts his money, grinning uncontrollably. “I can’t believe it was that easy. All my problems are solved!”

Seokjin watches the youngster kiss the wad of cash in his hands. “Kook-ah… you know that loans have to be repaid, right…?”

Just then, Yoongi speaks at the same time, tilting his head towards Jeongguk with mild interest. “Aren’t you still short? The highest bid on meringuebaby’s page as of last night is now 3000 coins. Meaning you need $600.”

Yoongi is casually examining his fingernails as he says this, and Seokjin turns to him in confusion. “Wait, how do you know what the top bid is?”

Seokjin’s mind is racing, and he comes to only one conclusion.

“Fuck, the bid only closes tonight and it’s already $600??” Jeongguk groans as he stares wide-eyed at the stack of cash in his hands. “I only have just enough, provided it doesn’t go up any further.”

“I could lend you some first,” Yoongi says with his eyes still on his screen, and Jeongguk lights up like a Christmas tree.

“Really, hyung? Oh my god. You have no idea how much it would mean to me!” Jeongguk is all smiles once more.

The conversation is moving faster than Seokjin can comprehend.

“On one condition,” Yoongi turns around with his arms crossed. “I want to send her my cum too.”

“No way!” Jeongguk explodes in a ball of indignance. “The rules are clear. Only one person’s cum and it has to be from the person who won the bid! That’s cheating, hyung!!!”

“It’s fine if you don’t want to,” Yoongi shrugs indifferently as he turns back to his computer. “It’s not my loss.”

“I could never do that to meringuebaby,” Jeongguk says with clenched fists as he places one over his heart. “It would be like lying to her!”

Yoongi only snorts and mumbles something about being ‘totally whipped’ under his breath that Seokjin can’t quite catch. But then, all of a sudden, Jeongguk is turning to him with those puppy eyes and a pouting lower lip.

“Hyung, you have cash, don’t you? Can’t I borrow some? I promise I’ll pay you back,” Jeongguk says with reverence.

“I… um… I don’t get what’s…” Seokjin can only stutter, entirely overwhelmed by the past few minutes to form a coherent response. Yoongi visits this seedy little cam site too?? This meringuebaby person is earning just how muchas a scam girl??

“I’ll wash your dishes for three months, even during your baking practices,” Jeongguk throws in desperately.

And that seals the deal. As much as Seokjin loves baking, he absolutely hates the washing up. Not to mention when there are multiple icing tips, multiple mixing bowls, multiple trays… just thinking about it makes him feel exhausted already.

On top of that, he does have a rather large order coming up… having Jeongguk do the washing would make things so much easier.

So against the more rational part of his brain, he sighs and takes out his phone. “How much more do you need?”

♡

On the last night, when you log on to check the bids at exactly 10pm, your heart skips a beat when you see who is occupying the top slot.

“Oh my god, that crazy bastard really did it,” you mutter to yourself when you see that the top bid is way ahead of the second place winner. jackedasjeon had only placed his bid just two minutes ago, and also ensured that no one else could outdo him by bidding 4000 coins.

While a part of you is overjoyed at the extra income, you also wonder why someone would bid that much more than necessary. Perhaps this jackedasjeon person is really desperate… who are you to judge? You push the thought aside and make a new post to officially announce him as the winner, and see that the coins are transferred into your account. Then you send him a private message with details such as the address of your PO box that he should send the package too, as well as a few other administrative matters like how to securely wrap his package, what date he should send it by, and other things including the need for him to get officially tested and screened for any diseases and include the results in the package.

Not like you’ll actually need it anyway, but all the better to add to the realism.

Once you click send, you navigate to your account page to cash out all of your hard earned coins, and almost immediately, your phone lights up with a notification from your bank. You’re saved. Thank god for jackedasjeon.

You sigh in relief as you start to write a cheque to pay off your tuition fees.

♡

Jeon Jeongguk is over the moon. He is overjoyed. He is skipping all the way from class back home.

Throwing open the door, he can’t contain his excitement as he heads straight to his room. He opens the private message from you again just to make sure he hasn’t forgotten anything. The test results should be sent to him by email by today; he’d gone to get tested a few days ago just to make sure that there wouldn’t be any delay. He managed to get a few large, airtight vials as instructed, bubble wrap, and a sturdy cardboard box. The only thing left is…

Jeongguk sighs as he leans back in his chair, unzips his jeans, and starts to look for his favourite porn.

Which leads him to you, of course. More specifically, he begins browsing through some of your highlights videos on your page just to get himself in the mood. Just as he clicks on one where he remembers that you’re talking about your Sailor Moon outfit, he pauses.

Does he really want to do this?

A stupid question, granted all that he had gone through in order to secure the winning bid. But that aside, Jeon Jeongguk pauses. He finally has the chance to send the girl of his dreams something, anything at all. Does he really want to send her a vial of his cum? meringuebaby deserves to be treated way better than that. After all the hours of company and relief that you’ve provided him, Jeongguk feels like it just wouldn’t do to be this impersonal.

And in a way, Jeongguk does feel as if he owes you a word of thanks, at the very least. You made the past year of college slightly more bearable. Every week he has something to look forward to, someone who understands him, someone who makes him feel a little less lonely. Someone who helps him get through the hell that is college.

Then, Jeon Jeongguk realises he doesn’t really want to send you a vial of his cum like some weirdo. He just wants you to know how much he admires you, and sending you cum in the mail definitely isn’t the way to do that.

So he zips himself up again and reaches for some paper and a pen instead. If Yoongi ever found out he was about to do something this lame and sappy, Jeon Jeongguk feels like he would just die, so he double checks and triple checks that the door is locked, before he begins to pour out his feelings to meringuebaby on paper.

An hour passes, two hours, even, Jeongguk has lost track. But five sheets of paper later, he is finally satisfied with the end product as he puts everything into an envelope and drops it into the box. He puts away the unused vials into a drawer, wondering if he’s being an idiot for passing up on this chance.

But no. More than anything else, he wants you to know how he feels about you. How grateful he is that you do what you do. He doesn’t want to be jerking off and just sending you his cum like that. He wants you to know just how much you’ve helped him get through the not so good days. And what better opportunity than this? Maybe you’ll be so touched you’ll even read out his letter during your stream.

He nods to himself, confident of his decision as he seals the cardboard box.

♡

“You got another package,” Irene sings out as she knocks on your door.

You click pause on your online lecture to open the door, only to find your roommate holding a box in her arms.

“This one’s unusually light,” Irene mentions as she comes into your room, setting the box down on your desk. “Should we open it and check what’s inside?”

But you wave her away. “Nah, why bother? It’s gonna be nasty as hell. Even I don’t want to see the stuff. Just tear off the label and toss the package. Or just leave it by the door. I’ll dispose of it properly when I head out.”

“Is this the one that helped you pay your tuition?” She asks curiously as she begins to carefully tear the label off the box. “This ‘jackedasjeon’?”

“Yeah, he’s a platinum subscriber, but he’s never won before,” you say as you bring the box outside and leave it by the door. Come to think of it, it is unusually light as compared to the previous packages that you received. But it can’t be anything much, seeing as you’re going to toss it out anyway, so you don’t think much of it as you head back to your room to get a headstart on preparing for your stream.

“Should I do something special? He paid a lot for this,” you muse as Irene starts to get out the supplies to help you mix today’s batch of fake cum. “I was thinking of throwing in a freebie. You know, I saw one streamer selling the water that she soaked herself in while doing her stream. She bottled it up and added glitter and some food dye or some shit like that. Made it look like unicorn tears and called it her ‘Gamer Girl Bath Water’.”

Irene wrinkles her nose as she pours out some lube from a giant 2 litre bottle and starts adding some water to it to adjust the consistency. “That’s gross. I know I’m saying this as I’m literally mixing cum right now, but still.”

“You gotta give her credit where credit is due though,” you say at your reflection in the mirror as you tie up your hair and start your skincare routine first. “She’s creative as hell. Why didn’t I think of that first? Now I’ll have to come up with something else. Like selling my worn underwear or something.”

“Are you crazy?” Irene turns to you with her spoon still dripping onto the counter. “That’d cost you an arm and a leg!! You’ll barely break even like that.”

“You’re right…” you sigh in resignation. “What does a girl have to do these days to make some money??”

Irene is silent for a moment as she concentrates on adjusting the texture the way you taught her the very first time, while you put on your base layer of makeup.

“Is this okay? Too thin? What kind of cum do you think jackedasjeon would have?” Irene asks thoughtfully as she scoops some of the mixture onto her spoon and lets it drip back into the container.

“Hmm, I don’t know,” you reply, brows furrowed in concentration as you focus on getting your eyeliner just right. “I guess he seems like he might have a pretty thick load? He does have a nice cock. And nice arms. But I guess he can be kind of childish sometimes. Maybe thin it out a little more.”

Irene suppresses a giggle as she does as she’s told. Every time the two of you cook up that week’s batch, you always play a guessing game and make up facts about the mystery man whose cum you’re supposed to be playing with that week.

“Come help me with this,” you turn from the mirror with your eyes closed, holding out your false eyelashes. Irene is the only one who can get them on you, and without them, your disguise would not be complete.

“I have no idea what I’d do without you,” you sigh as Irene is putting the finishing touches on your hair and makeup an hour later. “Where would I find a roommate who mixes fake cum for me, and dresses me up to scam men on the internet?”

Irene giggles as she pats your cheek with a grin. “All done. Now go and earn us some money, meringuebaby.”

♡

“Hello!! I missed you guys so much! How are my cumnoisseurs today?” Your voice, bright and cheery, fills the entire room as Jeon Jeongguk settles into his desk chair, but he can’t seem to sit still. He is brimming with excitement, his heart is racing and it feels as if it might explode out of his chest.

You look beautiful as usual, dressed with your pink wig and Sailor Moon outfit, waving your star tipped wand about as you do your usual greetings, reading out the names of your top subscribers. Today you are surrounded by cupcakes with pastel pink, power blue, and snow white frosting on three tiered cake stands, and you reach for one cupcake, scooping a bit of the icing onto your finger and sucking on it.

“Aren’t they pretty?” You are scooping even more icing onto your finger, savouring the sweetness on your tongue with a cute little moan. Jeongguk feels the blood shoot straight to his cock upon hearing it. “I have some pink macarons here too! I decided to get these because I was craving something sweet today… don’t they look good?”

Jeongguk rushes to type his comment, adjusting himself with one hand as his jeans grow even tighter.

“I’m even sweeter than these?” You giggle as you read his comment, and Jeongguk feels a surge of adrenaline as he watches you wink at the camera as you continue. “I think that’s my line, jackedasjeon. I must admit that I was a little impatient and I had a taste of you earlier… that’s why I was craving something sweet!”

Jeongguk feels his heart seizing up as his eyes are glued to the screen. The words don’t really register in his brain as he watches you bounce up and down in excitement, and then he is distracted by your ample cleavage instead. You would have read his letter by now, right? Is that why you look so happy?

cherry_chim013: you should do a live where you’re in the kitchen cherry_chim013: wearing just an apron cherry_chim013: hehehehe

cherrychim is one perverted fucker. But Jeongguk can’t say that he wouldn’t like to see that visual either. He watches with a stupid goofy smile on his face as you talk a bit more about your day and eat a few cupcakes, getting some of the icing on the corner of your mouth, and Jeongguk wishes he could reach through the screen and help you wipe it off.

“I brought a whisk with me today! I just thought it would fit with today’s theme,” you brandish the utensil and wave it around. “I tried it on myself earlier and… it felt really nice as a massager. At the end of the stream, I’ll be giving it away to this week’s winner!”

Jeongguk watches as you start to use the whisk to play with yourself, running it up and down your body as you play with your own breasts over your bra. He is entranced and absorbed. You push your skirt up to reveal your panties that already have a wet patch on them, and start to rub yourself with the whisk over them. Your cute little moans and whines are getting him harder and harder, and when you push your panties to the side and start to finger yourself, Jeongguk groans audibly.

“Let’s really start the party now, shall we?” You pause with a glance at the camera as you lick your own fingers clean. “This week’s winner is jackedasjeon! Thank you so much for your… generous donation, it was well received!”

You brandish your faithful purple squirting dildo, and accidentally squirt some of the cum onto a nearby cupcake.

“Oops! How careless of me!” You gasp as you pick up the cupcake and scoop up the icing, with the cum on it, and put it in your mouth. “Tastes like salted caramel now,” you giggle.

Jeongguk swears under his breath as he watches you taste the cum stained cupcakes. He was never really into foodplay, but watching you like this, he just might reconsider.

“It’s supposed to go inside me, not on the cupcakes!” You are giggling as you scold yourself. “Sorry about that, jackedasjeon. But since you sent me so much, there’s more than enough cum to go inside me.”

At first, Jeon Jeongguk is far too horny to hear what you actually said. But after a few moments, the words register in his mind, and he frowns in confusion.

“Wh-what?” Jeongguk says aloud even as you start to suck the head of the dildo, squirting some of the cum out messily around your lips as you go. “But I didn’t… how can this be?”

There must be some sort of mistake. Jeongguk didn’t even jerk off that day, let alone send you any cum in that package, so how can you still be streaming and thanking him like this? He opens the drawers at his desk to make sure that the vials are still there. They are sitting at the back of his desk, untouched from the last time he left them.

You are showing the camera ‘his’ cum now on your tongue, making a great show of playing with it and swallowing it. After a bit, you start to tease yourself with it, playing with your clit and as Jeongguk watches the cum drip onto your cunt, his erection just dies down completely.

As if to confirm his suspicions, he watches the cum drip down your chin, and it look suspicious. Even if he had somehow mistakenly sent you his cum, the cum that you are playing with right now is most definitely fake. In fact, it looks just like lube wth some water added to thin it out.

If he didn’t send you any cum… and you are still streaming as if you received it in the mail…

This can only mean one thing.

Jeon Jeongguk has been scammed.

♡♡♡

#bts #bts jungkook #bts jungkook smut #bts smut #ksmutclub #btsmaknaenet

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mashounen2003 · 3 years

Video

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Here is the text of the video, translated into English. Seriously, check out this video, this guy is awesome.

"Conspiracy Theories" by Guille Aquino.

Posted on June 27, 2019.

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Warning: if you're influenceable, you need to watch this.

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Alright, before we start, I want us to welcome and applaud our new friends from the CIA, the FBI, NASA, the former SIDE -today, the AFI-, the KGB, Interpol, and the lazy virgins at the troll centre on Miserere Park, who are surely already watching this video because today we're gonna talk about...

Conspiracy Theories.

We all know some: the humans didn't go to the Moon, the 9/11 was a self-attack by the USA's government, Bin Laden never existed, Walt Disney is frozen, Elvis Presley is alive, the Simpsons predict the future, Marcelo Tinelli went to a famous hospital with a famous object inserted in a famous place on his body, and Dengue and Zika fever were created by Bill Gates who genetically modified mosquitoes to depopulate the Earth because it most likely was easier than making work that "Internet Explorer" bulls*** he sold us. But let's get to the news: in early 2019, YouTube modified its recommendation algorithm to avoid promoting conspiracy theories and false information. And let's stop here because I want us to become aware of the magnitude this matter took on and how this little joke of the conspiracy theories videos completely went to Hell.

Think of it this way: YouTube, the second most trafficked website in the world after Google, with over 30 million visitors per day and over 1.3 billion users -almost a third of all people connected to the Internet in the world-, where 300 hours of videos are uploaded per minute and almost 500 trillion videos are viewed per day, had to change its own recommendation system because all of us were watching too many videos denouncing that Lali Espósito is an Illuminati:

Video excerpt: [with obvious robotic voice] "Also, at the second Number Ten, she covers one of her eyes again, obviously symbolizing the All-Seeing Eye."

And I'm very sorry to tell you that, in today's world, if YouTube has a problem, we all have a problem.

Conspiracy theories are the Internet's new porn. In fact, if you filter the words "conspiracy" and "theories" by the number of views, the most viewed video has 36 million views. THIRTY-SIX! MILLION! VIEWS! That's like putting together the total populations of Belgium, Greece, Cuba and Jamaica, and then lighting a giant reefer to everyone and making them watch this video of people saying the Earth is flat:

Another video excerpt: [Channel 13 interview with Flat-Earthers, recorded in a park in Buenos Aires] "I pour water into this dish... Look, I pour water, and it stays, you see? But we pour water into the globe... and it goes down, people."

Okay, now we're gonna go over some of the most popular conspiracy theories of recent times, and we're gonna try to deconstruct the psychological profile of the average consumer of the conspiranoid world.

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

We'll start with everyone's favourite...

The Flat-Earthers.

Excerpt of the second video: "This first meeting began to be announced in the groups I followed on YouTube. (And the tattoo you have there, what is it?) This is the flat Earth, the Sun and the Moon."

The Flat-Earthers basically hold the theory that the Earth is not actually spherical, and they claim Galileo Galilei was an old smoke-seller blabbermouth who often played into the Far-Right's hands, cut his hair in an old-fashioned barbershop and used the 1610 telescope mainly to bed with chicks. And I have nothing personal against the Flat-Earthers but I find it difficult to take them seriously, mostly because much of their scientific hypothesis can be explained with this blooper.

Excerpt of another, different video: "There's an inflatable pool filled with water and with two people in it, a third person suddenly jumps into the water, and the pool deforms and overflows on the other side, as one of the two previously present people also falls over the edge."

(Images from the film "Armageddon".)

The truth is that the "flat Earth" theory has one fundamental premise, and it's the same one that supports 100% of conspiracy theories:

There's a power above us that manages everything.

Governments, lobbies and other de facto powers are capable of lying on a massive scale, just as intelligence services, the New World Order and FlyBondi hostesses do.

Excerpt of the second video: "(And you can't see the curvature of the Earth from the plane.) Uh... I travelled by plane to Bariloche, and no, I didn't see it. There's some aircraft glass with a small magnification or something that changes your perspective, due to the thickness of the window, and because aircraft glass also has something."

Alright, stop, let's not turn this into "Point at the crazy assholes and laugh" either, right? Well, yes, a little- But we go beyond that! We're better than that!

Why do so many people choose to believe we're puppets of an evil system? One might say that, in the absence of a sense of real control over our own lives and in the face of the desolation of living in a seemingly random, chaotic world, believing there's an external force exerting control is, to some extent, comforting. Yes, phone the Vatican.

And according to a certain old white upper-middle-class snob who teaches at Harvard University, conspiracy theorists share several or at least one of the following features: they're paranoid, radical, extremist in their opinions; they aspire to a feeling of superiority, and basically, they feel special for possessing information that exceeds the common citizen. Yeah, it's like the row for an indie film festival.

Umberto Eco even said:

"The control syndrome invades us. When someone claims to have a secret, their strength is not in hiding something but in making people think there's even a secret in the first place."

And I didn't understand a f*** because I've never read a book in my life, but it sounds ultra-mega-hyper cool. I dare you to deny it!

So who would be the most likely to believe in these kinds of theories? People who had bad experiences in life, people in search of an answer that would rescue them from a deep existential crisis, and the most important: people in search of a place of belonging.

Excerpt of the second video: "Well, no, this opened a door for me to start thinking more, to question things, about a supposed alien invasion."

Wait, stop right there. Excuse me, but if I'm an alien and I have the power to cross the universe in a spaceship, with my own army and the ability to colonize a celestial body, I don't even waste my time invading a paper-thin planet. Give me a round planet or give me death!

And that's when the contradiction comes into play. Because if you believe in one conspiracy theory, you immediately start to believe in all of them. It's like the weed. Even the refutation of a plot fits within the plot itself: for example, if you believe Lady Diana was killed by the British Crown, you're also prone to believe Lady Diana is actually still alive.

(Woah, Mind Blown... She was totally killed anyway, sorry.)

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

Good, let's move on to the next one:

The Anti-Vaccination movement.

Okay, here we come to a key point, since clearly there are the "harmless" conspiracy theories and the... rather dangerous ones. We've all heard someone say vaccines may cause autism in kids. Now, I'm clearly a specialist in absolutely nothing, and I ain't gonna explain why you guys have to vaccinate your children, so I better recommend to you the websites of any Ministry of Health or Wikipedia, so that you later visit them and find out how very important it is to inject legal drugs to your sweet little angels. And it's not to detract from any position or to err on the side of bigotry, but if you're an anti-vax and your baby coughs next to me, I swear I'll kick their head off.

(Tack! That bag of germs...)

And after all, that's why we invented Democracy!

(Ha, of course not, but...)

In fact, I dunno who gives a f*** about this but maybe someone will find it useful: I follow a pretty simple method when it comes to ideologically locating myself regarding any issue. And this is:

Always do the opposite of whatever Gisela Barreto says.

Gisela Barreto: [speaks with a flag in the background] "Vaccines show up, and they show them to us as something that heals us. Actually, they're part of our death."

(Seriously, she came this close to being in the Avengers.)

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

Okay, and now let's move on to one that touches us all closely (at least here, in my country):

Hitler in Argentina.

It's the conspiracy theory ensuring that, after losing World War II, the Nazi leader, the most disgusting dictator and genocide in Human History, came to live incognito in our country. And I ask myself: what the heck did we need to shelter Hitler for? The birth of Alejandro Biondini, who's pretty much our local version of Nazism, was imminent:

Interview with Biondini in 1991 by Mariano Grondona in his program "Key Time":

Grondona: "Would you condemn Adolf Hitler?"

Biondini: "No, we vindicate Adolf Hitler."

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

Okay, question: is it possible to keep a secret on such a large scale for so many years? Well, the Math says no. Seriously! I've read that a physicist at the Oxford University (Where else?) took the "humans didn't go to the Moon" theory, and then this guy created a mathematical calculation based on the number of conspirators involved, the time elapsed since the conspiracy, and the inherent possibility that a plot would fail.

For example, in the case of Apollo 11, 411 thousand NASA employees were involved, and according to the variables this physicist analyzed, the lie should have been known in less than four years; half a century passed, and no employee denied the mission. What does this tell us? Well... they were threatened and killed off, of course! It's obvious! [imitating Mirtha Legrand] Stanley Kubrick was not in the coffin! Nobody saw him. Nobody saw him!

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

Gimme more!

Famous people who are actually dead.

For example, Paul McCartney. On the cover of the album "Abbey Road", he's barefoot; a clear subliminal message that the real one died and was replaced with a stand-in. (Why?!) It sounds silly, but the rumour got so big that McCartney himself had to go out and publicly deny it... Although come to think of it, he also came out to congratulate the butchers who named their butcher shop "Paul Mac Carne" ["Paul McMeat"], so maybe he's truly a stand-in and, to top it off, looks like a raisin.

Excerpt of another video: "Well, thinking of different names, someone said "Paul Mac Carne". And well, he, being a vegetarian, says the idea was very good, started laughing and sent us a greeting."

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

I love this one:

The Reptilians.

It's basically the theory that there's a race of amphibian aliens [Wait for a second: aren't they called "reptilians"?] living among us for centuries and hiding their reptilian features behind human faces.

(Oh, you were telling me they're not actually aliens because they were born here?)

Excerpt of the 1996 movie "Mars Attacks!".

And who discovered this? David Icke! Or "Ique". An unsuccessful former soccer player and sportscaster. (How can you be unsuccessful as a soccer sportscaster?! All you need is a suit!) It's like believing in a religion where your Pope is Diego Latorre.

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Now, I know what you're thinking: after all, how dangerous can all this get? I mean, no conspiracy theory has someone popular to represent it, no spokesperson of ridiculous and implausible plots has reached a truly important position in today's world.

Bah... There's actually only one.

The President of the United States of America.

That's right! Donald Trump, once the leader of the most powerful country in the world, had come to power mostly by throwing out fake news and conspiracy theories. And here are some:

Barack Obama is an immigrant.

Trump: "And I just say: why doesn't he show his birth certificate?"

Global warming is a myth.

Trump: "Obama is saying all of this has to do with global warming and I say all that is a hoax..."

Gisela Barreto was right.

Trump: "At two and a half years old, the baby, the beautiful baby, went to get the vaccine. Now he's autistic."

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

Okay, then... Conspiracy theories. For what? Well, in the case of Trump: influence on public opinion and accumulation of power. In the case of people who upload videos to YouTube... What do you think? A profitable, monetizable business! In fact, there's the conspiracy theory that we're actually making this video about conspiracy theories in order to have lots of views and earn buttloads of cash. (We'd never do that!)

And finally, a much deeper, inherent aspect of the human condition:

The need to believe in something.

The world is divided into two types of people: some think everything happens for a reason, everything is a sign, and perhaps there's also a magical entity organizing things for us; the other half of the people think we live in a desolate world without meaning or messages, there are only atoms randomly colliding with each other, and the Universe gives no f***s about us. Which of these two groups seems happier to you? Which one do you belong to? Which one would you like to belong to? I choose to join the conspiranoids! And listen to this, I know exactly what's going on:

The New World Order organized the Lollapalooza at the request of the Illuminati, who wanted to marketingly manage Lali Espósito, who actually wears a mask and underneath is "La Mona" Giménez, who's not actually a monkey but a reptile and has drank all the wine to get immunized against the vaccines at the request of Gisela Barreto, who was born in Corrientes just like Barack Obama, who claimed to have killed Bin Laden, who's actually alive and was driving the car that crashed that night and carried Chano Charpentier, who taught driving to Lady Diana, who was actually Mexican and was assassinated by Donald Trump, who was matched on Tinder with Hitler, who lives in a nursing home in Recoleta and has glaucoma, so he's hitting the reefers with Biondini, who is actually a hippie and a fan of León Gieco, invented global warming and, when being in a bad mood, takes a bus and goes to dinner at "Paul Mac Carne", where they invented the extra-thin Provoleta cheese, which coincidentally has the same shape as the Earth, which is actually flat!

*sigh* Knowledge is power. Quiero creer.

Soundtrack: State Anthem of the Soviet Union.

#conspirative theories #Analysis

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canyouhearthelight · 4 years

Text

The Miys, Ch. 68

One chapter, beta’d by both @satan-parisienne and @baelpenrose, so there should be a minimum of errors floating around in there.

As some have noticed, I did update the Master List over the weekend. A few other things I just want to touch on:

Ask box is literally always open, as is my inbox. Feel free to drop questions, comments, whatever in there. I love interacting with people, so it makes my day to see y’all reach out to me.

Also, I recently crossed the threshold for 500 followers. It’s crazy, and I’m just gobsmacked that you all follow me. I won’t be doing a character contest this time, but keep your peepers peeled for what I am doing instead...

Now, on with our chapter!

“To confirm Councilor Reid’s statement, the bacteria that was, until recently, potentially killing us, is instead killing itself?”

“Correct, Eino.”

“And this is a bad thing because it is sentient?”

“Partially why it is bad, yes.”

“Xiomara, if I may?” I couldn’t see them, but I could practically hear Grey lean forward and push their glasses further up the bridge of their nose. Just the tone of voice told me that this Grey was well-rested and firing on all cylinders.

Xiomara nodded, then dropped her head back to suppress a groan when she realized the rest of the Council couldn’t actually see her. “Please go ahead, Grey. You are probably better to explain this than I am.”

“Thank you.” A brief pause. “While I do confess that I argued stringently against the decision that Else is sentient, in the end, even I was satisfied with the decision. However, Terran studies of neural matrices do show that there is a threshold of connections, below which sentience does not exist except as a potential. It stands to reason that, for a hive minded species such as Else or even the Hujylsogox, loss of too many members would create a similar loss of sentience.”

Noah’s voice hummed in confirmation. “This is correct. Even if I were to lose too many of my avatars, and later come in proximity to others of my kind, I would no longer be myself but instead be absorbed into the sentient member, and they would gain any information I had learned.”

I felt my face contort into a horrified expression. “Noah, does that happen?”

“Only in very dire circumstances, Wisdom. It is considered a capital crime do so against a cluster’s will, and the height of rudeness to begin to do so accidentally.”

“Question: if a species can lose sentience due to low population, can it actually be considered sentient?” Eino’s tone was carefully inquisitive rather than argumentative.

“The problem cannot be framed in that way and make logical sense,” Grey advised, not unkindly. “According to the Galactic research database, each member of a hive-minded species serves as a neural connection for one single, larger mind. Just because the individual loses neural awareness or function, the species does not; believing so would be comparative to stating we are not sentient as a species simply because sufficient neural damage can render one of us brain-dead.”

“Thank you for the clarification,” he breathed, seemingly in relief.

Grey continued. “In this case, however, there are no others of Else’s species. It is such a young race, that despite so many bodies, it only has one mind for now. Should too many bodies die off from starvation out of Else’s attempt to do no further harm, sentience will be lost. At that point, there is a reasonable amount of certainty that it will begin to eat freely again, and become sentient again.”

“And there is no guarantee that the new version of Else will like us as much as the current version. We can’t take that chance,” Xiomara finished. “What if we end up with a homicidal bacterium instead of an apologetic one.”

The entire channel fell silent at the weight of her words. I couldn’t blame anyone – it was a lot to process. Hell, I was the one who brought the topic to her attention, and even I felt the need to vomit when she said it. It was too much to really contemplate for long.

“So, what are we supposed to do? Feed it?” The words may have sounded sarcastic coming from a different person, but I knew Pranav was considering this a genuine option. In the time I had known him, he had always worked with the facts, regardless of what anyone hoped to dreamt.

Looked like it was my turn. “We actually have a few options that Else mentioned on their own, when they were trying to convince me not to have them eradicated.”

After a brief pause, Giang Huynh spoke up. “Please elaborate, Sophia.” Not only the illness, but the destruction or degradation of several structures had led to his department being the one most effected by Else. Instead of his normal belligerence, he just sounded resigned.

Taking a deep breath, I laid out what Else and I discussed. “The first, probably easiest option, is to isolate all of Else and deposit the entire culture into the first nebula we reach.”

“Nebulas are very rich in iron,” Eino pointed out. “But does it need oxygen?”

“Else is largely anaerobic,” Grey responded. “Due to its diet of iron, open air is almost immediately fatal to it. This explains why it has been predominantly found in bone marrow and the spleen, as that is where the highest amount of iron can be found in the human body, before the blood is oxygenated.”

“Are there any downsides to this option?” Simon asked. Since I was technically still on medical leave, he was acting in my stead. The only reason I was allowed on this conference was as a witness, not a Councillor.

“Else doesn’t like it,” I admitted. “Because, and I quote, ‘there are no humans in a nebula’.”

“Miys, does Else have a say in this?” Eino asked, curious.

“As a sentient species, yes, they must agree to the relocation unless their current environment is untenable without drastic intervention. Technically, their current environment is viable for the foreseeable future.”

“Wait – what?” Simon sputtered. “We only recently stopped needing constant transfusions.”

“Not all of the ship needed them on a constant basis,” Grey pointed out. “And some who were impacted did not need them at all until very near the end of the crisis.”

She means others like Tyche, I realized. “Okay, so that’s an option, but only if we lack any others and can talk Else into it,” I forged ahead. “Which means any discussion of whether or not Else needs to be forcibly relocated is moot, because they did bring up other options.” I paused for response, and continued when there was none. “The second option was dropping them off on a barren, iron-rich planet with a late-sequence star.”

“How is that any different?” Huynh sputtered in confusion.

I watched Xiomara’s eyes get wide. “Tactics,” she breathed before repeating it, louder. “It’s a tactical preference. An iron-rich world, especially a barren one, is more likely to be mined, isn’t it?”

“Mining such planets requires significantly less effort and resources than are needed to mine a nebula,” Noah confirmed.

“And mining gives them the chance to be picked up by a new species,” Xiomara dropped like a bomb, triggering a rush of muttering.

“We should only base the value of an option on whether or not it will be a detriment to Else if it is certain to prevent the detriment, regardless of the impact to us.” I was initially surprised to hear such a venomous tone from Huynh, before considering his home nation’s history. Okay, he has every reason to be adamant here. After all, his country had suffered horribly at the hands of mine, not even a century prior. “Are there any other options?”

“Put them in stasis and bring them with us,” I confessed. “But, I also pointed this out to Else: And then what? It’s still a finite resource situation, in the long run. Not to mention the fact that we are working toward having the least possible impact to the new world – doesn’t bringing a sentient plague with us completely defeat the purpose?”

“We are already studying the impact our own gut bacteria will have on Kepler 442b,” Grey added. “And while we have no plans for large-scale mining of natural resources, the planet and its star already have poor metallicity.”

“I feel like those options really cover everything that is actually available to us,” Xiomara confessed.

“Agreed,” Pranav chimed in. “There is an option that Else does not like, but provides greatest opportunity for it to thrive. There is an option it likes, which also provides the chance for a species that shows every indication of being quite social to potentially interact with others. And there is an option that is really only a stopgap measure.”

“Ultimately, Else has to agree to whatever measure is to be taken,” Noah pointed out, attempting to be helpful.

“Else wants to stay with us,” I rebutted. “So much so that it is about to lobotomize itself in the attempt. We have to convince it to take an option that is better for its survival.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realized what I was saying. I didn’t even attempt to suppress the groan of regret that erupted.

“If you are done impersonating a cow,” Xiomara grinned wryly, “Yes, that means we need to negotiate with Else.”

“You mean I need to,” I grumbled.

Grey gave me a sliver of vain hope. “We are attempting to locate another individual who has been able to get in touch with it, Sophia. While their method of conveying it was quite crude, Mr. MacMaoilir and Mr. Okima did have a valid concern regarding how taxing it is for your body when you are speaking with Else.”

“Any luck?”

“Not as of yet, no.” Damn it. Even Grey sounded unhappy with the fact.

“So, unless something drastic changes, the plan is for me to try to talk Else into agreeing to either relocating to a nebula or a barren planet, either way, no people. Does that about sum it up?” Confirmations came from everyone. “Wonderful. And if anyone comes up with any other options, please make sure we know ahead of time. Even a brief conversation is going to be ten hours, if the last one is anything to go by.”

“About that,” Eino ventured hesitantly. “The case study for your previous interview with Else indicates that you recited scientific papers to provide a lexicon. Is this true?”

“I wish it wasn’t, but yes, it’s true.”

His tone almost immediately perked up. “Since you know going in what you will be discussing, would it be more beneficial if we instead played a targeted lexicon for you to recite? It may minimize the time you spend reciting unnecessary or repetitive words.” When I didn’t immediately respond, he clarified. “I understand that your previous interaction involved many open-ended questions, and therefore you needed as many words as conceivably necessary for an intelligible response, but this time, the questions are close-ended, are they not?”

“The questions are at least more close-ended, yes,” I admitted, realizing what he was getting at.

“Council, I would like to offer my department to support this situation by preparing a targeted lexicon for the upcoming negotiations with Else. Should another person be found to enter into negotiations, we will also create a script for the questions themselves, which should provide enough language for Else to respond coherently with their answers.”

I shrugged and nodded at Xiomara. Even if I was going to be the person doing this, a targeted lexicon would be easier – and less time consuming – to recite than scientific papers.

She nodded firmly before replying, “That is a value add, definitely. Council vote?”

Unsurprisingly, the decision was unanimous. “Any idea how long it will take to get everything ready?” I asked, admittedly impatient. “We don’t know how long we have until Else reaches that threshold Grey mentioned.”

Eino hummed for a moment. “Tentatively? Five days. Conservatively, I would put it at a week.”

Pinching my nose before swiping an entire down my entire face, I made some quick estimates. “I don’t think Else has that long, I’ll be honest. Grey, do you have any idea how fast it is reducing itself? Or better yet, how long before it reaches a critical density?”

“As to the second inquiry, there has been no study to even begin estimations, but I will task a group of researchers with finding an answer. However, we do have hard data in regard to the first question: Since you last spoke with Else, seventeen percent of its population has died off. It has also ceased replication of itself. By current estimates, we have less than thirteen days before Else is entirely extinct.”

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#the miys #science fiction #humans are weird #aliens #original fiction #humans are space orcs #plague #apocalypse #sci fi

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hgb94 · 4 years

Text

I’ve got a lot of emotions about Zolf, clearly. This got...a little long. So, here are all the things I love about Zolf, and all the things about him that break my heart. Really, all the things I love about him end up breaking my heart. I’m definitely not projecting at all in here. This is 100% well thought out.

Zolf is The Protector. It’s one of the first and most obvious of his characteristics that I noticed. He constantly tries to protect the lives of people around him, even if he barely knows them, even if he doesn’t particularly like them. It was heartwarming to see how deeply he cared for people he’d known such a short time. He knew Sasha for about 10 seconds before stepping in between her and Barret’s men. “Didn’t seem very fair odds.” He’d known Hamid for two or three days before offering to wear Barret’s ring for him. “Mr Barret, as their employer, you are dealing with me.” He didn’t even like Wilde, but he categorically refused to hand him over to Gourmand’s men in exchange for his own (and the group’s) safety. He grew to despise Bertie, but still did his best to keep him safe. And when he finally becomes enraged by Bertie and is ready to kill him, his central reason is: “I have had it with his constant endangering of the people that I like and love!” The only thing that gets him to stand down is Sasha reminding him that Bertie’s death would upset Hamid. He’s generally the one advocating for the more sensible course of action. He gets angry with Hamid for engaging in reckless heroics and yells at him for a solid 5 minutes before admitting that he feels responsible for him and he doesn’t want him to die. Sasha wants to ride the gyrocopters, and he’s citing a newspaper article about recent crashes. It was endearing and heartwarming, but by the time he left in Prague, it was heartbreaking, for three reasons.

He blames himself when the people he cares for get hurt, and when he can’t protect them, he feels useless. After the catacombs and Mr. Ceiling, he can’t walk, he can’t fight, and he doesn’t even have a weapon. Everything he did to protect them during that arc, at significant risk to himself, wasn’t enough. “I’ve been so useless.” Sasha died. Hamid got hurt. He had to sit at the top of the stairs, unable to do anything, listening to Hamid scream as he was burned by the fire elemental. One of the only things he really has left to protect them after the catacombs is his ability to heal, which is probably why it hurts so much when Hamid refuses his healing, choosing to use a potion instead. (To my knowledge, Hamid has never willingly accepted healing from Zolf since learning that Zolf’s healing powers were connected to the whole Poseidon drowning sacrifice thing.) There in the Arc, without his legs, without a weapon or armor, healing is the only thing he feels like he can offer. And Hamid won’t let him. The world collapsed and not only can he not fix it, he blames himself for it. “I don’t think I’m powerful, I think I’m powerless! I can’t do anything about this, I can’t fix the mistakes that I’ve made. I can’t walk, I can’t get out and heal people because I need help to get down the stairs.”

He’ll do anything to protect others, but he hates asking for help himself. Honestly, although I didn’t realize it until later, this starts becoming evident at Dover. The only thing Zolf can do during his imprisonment and court-martial is provide Hamid with information to formulate a defense. He has to sit and wait and rely on his new friends to get him out of it. He was powerless. And afterward, Hamid had to push him to accept a temporary loan of 500 gold to pay off his debt to the navy. Later, when Mme. Rose asks them about their most embarrassing memory, Zolf’s is being court-martialed. When he’s lectured at the Temple of Poseidon and sent to cross the channel on a tiny boat in a terrible storm, he doesn’t ask anyone to come with him. He makes it perfectly clear how dangerous this will be, assures them that he’s the only one who needs to do this and won’t blame anyone for taking the train instead, and then waits for them to choose. In the catacombs, with his ruined leg, he focuses on Hamid. He buries the fact that he’s now effectively legless. Box that up and deal with it later, because Hamid and Sasha need him to stay calm. And on the way out of the Arc, it doesn’t matter how much he’s done for the group, he feels the need to apologize to Sasha for her having to carry him around when he’s legless. “You investigate, I’ll watch up here. Don’t want to be a burden.” When she stretches out her back at the hotel after putting him down, he apologizes again, like it’s his fault.

The only life Zolf willingly risks is his own. When Sasha goes overboard crossing the channel, he only pauses long enough to try and make sure Hamid is safe before throwing himself after her, while offering Poseidon his life for hers. As Mr. Ceiling forms a massive robot to attack the group, he’s in a wheelchair, legless, without armor or weapons, and he hides the three of them from its sight and puts himself between it and them. When Earhart puts a gun to Sasha’s head, he shakes off his airsickness and draws her attention. “If you expect me to fear death, you’re going to be sorely disappointed.” I don’t think that was false bravado. It’s true. He doesn’t fear his death. He’s never been afraid for himself. He fears the deaths of people he loves. I would argue that is his greatest fear.

I also love Zolf’s passion for romance novels. It’s freaking adorable at first. He’s locked in a jail cell and falls in love with a series of romance novels. “Jennifer, no!” “Richard is not the right one for you!” From the description, they’re simple, melodramatic, and predictable, and I’ve definitely read a few books of that exact genre. He loves them and they’re a wonderful escape for him. When he reacts so violently to Bertie endangering the author, Harrison Campbell, it seems a little excessive at first. And ultimately perhaps that was just the straw that broke the camel’s back, the last in a long string of incidents that caused him to snap. But I get it. I have that thing. The thing that you go to on the bad days. When your mind won’t stop spinning out of control with worst-case scenarios.When you have to get out of your own head for a few hours. When you’re numb and struggling to feel anything at all. It becomes a lifeline that you hold onto when you’re drowning, and to have someone tell you that it’s trash, to mock it, to try and destroy your connection to it…I’d have tried to toss Bertie overboard too. Okay, so maybe I am projecting a little. Zolf’s self-confidence and faith. At the start, Zolf projects a lot of confidence. He’s the leader, he guides the group, makes decisions, and he seems to know who he is, Zolf Smith, Cleric of Poseidon. He believes that he knows what his god wants, and he’s devoted to those beliefs. His confidence balances his caution and allows him to lead the group through dangerous situations while keeping a clear head. After visiting the Temple of Poseidon, he does his best to alter course to his new perception of Poseidon’s desires, but there’s a little crack, a hairline fracture in his understanding of his god and himself. And then Mr Ceiling takes a chisel and hammer to the cracks and shatters Zolf’s faith. “I saw a robot casually decide, ‘maybe I should be a god’, and do you know what, I think it could have done it, because, our gods, right, they’re like us. They’re as stupid and as fallible as us, and they screw up. If something can casually decide, ‘maybe I’ll be a god’, and I have no way of saying that it couldn’t become a god, what’s Poseidon?” He’s faced with the fallout of their choices in Paris, and he doesn’t know if they did the right thing. The economy of Paris has collapsed, chaos, riots, violence, how many people have died? Is this really better? “I don’t know what I’m doing most of the time, I can’t see into the future, but usually my decisions don’t affect millions of people!” And after his dreams from Poseidon, Zolf is filled with more questions than answers. “I don’t know why he’s…stupid dreams and symbolism and rubbish like that and not anything...just…I just want to have a conversation.” Poseidon gives him new legs, but legs aren’t answers. “I just don’t feel like I deserve them. I don’t know why I have them. I don’t know why he’s given them to me. I just don’t know.” They make their way out of Paris and see a Meritocrat destroy Eiffel’s Folly to control the rioting. He learns that his family were part of the Harlequins. Has he been working for the wrong people? And then he nearly kills Bertie and he kills any faith he had left in his ability to lead this group without putting them in danger.

In the end, all of this leads to Prague. He’s lost his faith, he’s doubting his god, he’s doubting the Meritocrats, he’s doubting his choices. “I am the weak link.” “You might believe in me, I don’t anymore.” He’s afraid he’ll crack, make choices that put them at risk, and if he can’t trust himself to protect them, why is he still here? He has to leave. Partly to sort himself out, to deal with his own issues, but also for them. He can’t stay in command when he can’t trust his own choices. “I don’t trust myself, and I don’t trust myself around you.” If someone gets killed, that’s on him. “I know that if something happens again and I crack…I might not be able to do anything to save you.” At the end of the day, he’s still trying to protect them. He just believes that the best protection he can offer is his absence.

And...a little Sasha heartbreak as frosting on this pain cake. Zolf promised to help with her degenerative magical disease. He promised that he wouldn’t let her die. As long as she was with him, he’d be able to slow it down. They’d go do research and look into it and find someone else well-versed in magic and diseases who could cure her. He promised. And then he left. And sure, she could have done it on her own. She could have pushed “cure my disease so I don’t die” to the top of their priority list. She could have told Hamid what was happening, immediately sought out the Aphrodite lot as the cleric of Artemis suggested. She could have done that alone. But this is Sasha we’re talking about, and the only person Sasha ever trusted enough to willingly ask for help was Zolf. And she sits there, listening to him in Prague, listening to all the reasons that he feels he needs to leave. She never brings up her sickness as a reason for him to stay, never even hints at it. She listens to everything he says, and she tells him he should be free to leave. “If you’re choosing to go, then...you should have the choice. That should be allowed.”

#rqg #rqg spoilers #zolf smith #meta #I love him a lot

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leglesstv · 4 years

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The Dream Run: Greg Holzman’s Island Life

Part 2.

If you were born before the last twenty years of the 20th century you’re able to grasp how much new technology and cheap air travel have changed the world and the way we live in it: profound changes that have touched every aspect of our lives. Surfing has always required commitment to the pursuit of good waves, but the nature and depth of that commitment has morphed and grown. Greg joked with us about one of the photos he sent us - him perfectly framed in the spiralling mouth of a smooth and luminous barrel - saying it was “nothing money can’t buy”. He’s right of course, but money’s only part of it – to experience the kind of nirvana we glimpse in shots like that requires planning, preparation of equipment, logistics, lots of water-time and perhaps more than anything, fitness. Add to this the fact that as a self-employed fisherman, when Greg’s not working, he’s not earning. Sponsors? Well, he gets a few boards from Buddy McCray. His logistical team is a loose network of local contacts he’s developed to facilitate the various resources and services inevitably required at short notice in out of the way places. Greg’s strike missions are conceived, organised, funded and executed autonomously: it’s all his own experience, knowledge, time and money. There are few among us able to shut up shop and disappear, possibly for months at a time, living self-sufficiently on the road, chasing the chance of finding a particular spot firing for a limited time. You may plan for a road trip or a boat trip, but Greg’s is commitment on a whole other level. Access to technology is one thing, knowing how to put it to best use is a skill acquired over time. Greg’s background in fishing has been a huge help in interpreting long-range weather forecasts, weather maps, charts of out of the way places: all key factors in his ability to score quality waves. Help and advice from fellow travellers, including a smattering of kneeboard surfers spread around the globe. Behind all this though, remain two things. One is what started it all going more than half a lifetime ago in San Diego: an irrepressible drive to ride big, challenging, high quality waves. The other is what drove Greg to leave Oahu for the outer islands in the late 70’s: the drive to explore the outermost limits of his ability on his own, away from the crowd. While there are plenty of pro and semi-pro freesurfing footboarders criss-crossing the globe at any given time, each with a Youtube channel and an Instagram account, it’s kind of nice to know that kneeboard surfing has Greg Holzman out there pushing the limits of what’s been done and pushing the rest of us to step up our game and look beyond our comfort zone.

Greg views his big wave pursuits as “strike missions”. Track a swell, find a spot, check wind and tide permutations, airlines, local travel, accommodation, be ready to go at the drop of a hat, and be prepared to surf at 100% when you get there. He’s been doing this for about 40 years, perhaps with increasing sophistication and expertise, but that’s the only change. We received an email just after Christmas.

“So for fear of more words I’ll give you the story of my first solo big wave venture. It was at Pipeline. 1978. It was a giant West swell. Surf reports weren’t accurate back then but looking out I could see it was nice East winds in Kailua and I knew a big West swell was pumping. I was all about Pipeline at the end of my Oahu period so I felt very comfortable out there.

I surfed with the heavies of the day, so I was pushing my limits. Driving up Kam Highway, the hour it took really got the heart pumping, especially when I hit Indicators reef and saw how big it was. More often than not, the swell was huge instead of too small, but in the 70’s no-one knew how big till you got there. When I got to Ehukai Beach Park I saw no-one out, perfect offshores and third reef sets at 20ft Hawaiian. Some amazing waves but I wasn’t sure I was ready for that!

Jack Lindholm was headed out on his bodyboard. I watched him catch a few incredible rides that got me stoked. The Second reef was capping hard and seemed like easy take-offs, but that was Jack on a bodyboard and he could take off later than anyone at the time.

I remember he didn’t make it out of a tube on one and came up the beach with his board almost torn in half. I didn’t know him but commented on his board. He said he was going to change boards and go back out so I told him I would get ready and meet him out there. As I walked down to the beach I saw Sam Hawk paddle out, headed to the peaks at outside Log Cabins. I never saw Sammy again. Obviously, he lived, but that was all I saw of him as it was soon after this that I moved to Kauai.

Anyway, I paddled out. It wasn’t that hard; in fact it was really easy with the channel and a big West swell. Everyone was at Waimea Bay - for good reason. When I got out, I remember seeing the sets on the outer reefs break a minute or two before they hit us. What I remember most was how hard it was to catch those monsters on my 5’2” twin fin fish. The waves had a deep-water slope to them, and you had to take off as the wave was breaking. Jack had it down and before too long he was gone. I never saw Jack again either. So here I am and all I’m seeing is giant lines - just like the movies - and I’m getting further and further from shore. I’m thinking that I may need to get rescued and wondering if anyone’s watching in the lifeguard tower. I thought how embarrassing that would be and decided I needed to move inside and catch one underneath or I was not going to get in. Paddling in was a death sentence and it was obviously on the rise, so in between sets I paddled inside. When a set approached EVERYTHING in me said “move outside NOW”, but I waited. I thought if I didn’t catch that first one I was getting to that beach dead or alive. Luckily, I made the right call and that first wave was deep and inside and an easy take-off. In fact, I commented to myself on how easy it was, really. Once it hit that first reef I just sat there in this big easy barrel - no fear anymore - and the wave was just as perfect and easy a wave as I could get. It spit and I glided out onto the shoulder. I looked out thinking “I can do that again” when … the whole channel was closing out. I immediately turned for shore, just in time to see it turn to close-out sets. When I got there I heard the hoots and claps of tourists cheering. I had survived my first solo big wave event. It scared me but I never felt more alive and I never forgot it. Just like many firsts, they are worth remembering.”

So, fast forward to 2016, with Greg’s island life undergoing change, and another dream run about to start. While in Kandui in May that year, Greg picked up a Facebook friend request from Paul Macklin, an Aussie traveller who for years had sent him photos of his surf travels. Paul was then living in Bali. Greg decided he needed to return to G-land, so in July he left for Bobby’s Camp.

Paul met me in the camp. Bobby Radiasa remembered me - it was like I had never left. All the same guys. Many had gone back every year I was gone. Having that family vibe in camp is a very addictive feeling and Facebook has kept us all back in contact. So, 2018 became the thirty-year reunion for me and G-land. I had three trips in 2018 looking for the gold standard G-land of June - July 2016 that was still the three swells of recent memory. I got amazing waves, but that massive perfect Speed Reef (which rarely happens) eluded me. After seeing the photos of those days I swore I was investing in this as a goal: to get it at its best. I didn’t care how many trips it would take.

After G-land in July 2017, I was off to South Africa: from Bali to J-bay. I worried about the cold, coming straight from the tropics, and I did freeze, but I learned a few tricks there as well on staying warm - including a 1mm wetsuit top under my clothes - that let no cold air in on those freezing surf checks! That’s where I met Gigs and Stevo. I stayed with Mike Ruthnum, who I’m indebted to for introducing me to great people, fellow KB riders, and secret surf spots that I will always remember. J-bay was an eye-opener. Much had changed there. Crowds were always a factor, but the town had a great vibe. The South Africans have all the forecasting at their fingertips now, so they come from around the country for the bigger swells, which I found different than the 80’s. But with that came KB riders. I found a very cool group of fellow riders who were happy, very much a club feeling, and with a wide range of boards ... it was an impressive group. I came home knowing that I would return next season. A month is not enough time in Africa. But as soon as I got home, I saw $500 tickets return to Bali. I knew Gigs was going and Simon Farrer - who I hadn’t seen since he was 18 on my island with Buddy - was meeting Gigs at G-land. Simon was already a phenomenon at 18. Seeing his movies made me want to spend time with these two world champs. So back I went for more.

That took me right into the 2018-19 season with a passion for strike missions. I managed to strike a few Pacific spots early 2019 during Hawaii’s stormy moments. Each time selling more plants and looking: as soon as it was a good moment and I had cash I was going - sometimes with less than 8 hours to pack and be at the airport. I was on call for G-land when I saw a series of swells and good winds lining up. I told myself I wasn’t going to plan in advance for Indo anymore. My goal was one which wouldn’t end till I caught that 2016 Gold standard swell. Lucky for me it came on a day that looked like it wasn’t going to happen. The surf was huge and the direction was good with a high tide, but the wind was light onshore. I was pretty bummed when I saw the rain at 9 am, (not usually a good sign) but it passed quickly. All the guys went in. I knew the winds were changing with that sound the bamboo makes and quickly suited up. I got down to the beach and Donny the photographer said to hop on his bike. Blacky and he were headed out on the boat to take photos. I knew it was good and a heavy paddle out, so off we went. As soon as we neared it, we saw this was no normal day. When you see the photographer and boat driver pounding the boat and cheering like they were you know it’s not a normal day. Two guys were out, but they wanted nothing to do with those sets. My heart was pounding hard. I knew this was going to be a test - of all I had learned to stay safe, and the test of my equipment I so badly wanted.

What made it even better was my photographer was right on it with me to document. I paddled out to an empty lineup and two guys who just paddled over the sets. It was destiny, fate, or just plain perseverance.

I learned a lot: about my boards, my goals and how hard it is to drive through those shock waves deep in barrels when it’s like that. I could see that what I needed was a board with the fins further back for stability as one bottom turn is all you get and then you’re behind and flying. Some I made, some I should have made, and others were just plain heavy. The crowd eventually showed up and the tide went out. One of the biggest problems with this kind of swell is it’s only good at high tide for a maximum of 4 hours. Usually only about 2 to 3 hours at its best. That’s a lot of investment for such a short window. For me it was worth it. It taught me I could still do it and what my boards needed next mission to maximize my tube time.

It’s obvious that there’s a lot more to surf exploration at this level than meets the eye. A lifetime of preparation and expense may seem a high price to pay for memories - a few photos and stories representing the sole concrete evidence of mere minutes spent riding perfect surf - but to Greg, as for anyone else doing what he does, it’s not about money.

I’ve done 12 trips in three years and surfed Hawaii winters every swell I can in between. I’ve gone to 5 destinations and gone back to each - if I can - till I am satisfied I’ve caught it at its best. I feel I have only really achieved that this year (2019) at G land, which is lucky because next year isn’t going to be the year - with the WSL going off there in the middle of the season.

In Hawaii we take surfing very seriously. It has changed from when I started, Then, it was much more about the soul surfer and not publicizing where you went and not photographing your sessions. It wasn’t for money either. Now, everyone thinks they can get a free something if they’re good. It’s competitive and I try to remain in a collaborative mind-space. I have found it’s probably a help that I am a KB rider because we’re always trying to prove we belong in the lineup. At this point I rarely feel I can’t deal with things in a lineup, but often I know the fight isn’t worth the effort. I’ll voluntarily move out of the space as I don’t like catching scraps. If I have no chance for the sets, I’ll remove myself from the situation to save myself from certain mental crisis. Or a yelling match. This happened a few times at Jeffreys this year and in September 2018 at G-land with 80 guys in the water. Everyone - even your friends - are on a different level and chances are you’re not going to like what you see, so I’m out at that point.

Knowing how much effort went into getting himself into the line-up for those sessions, that’s a pretty big statement, one that we might all be wise to keep in mind every time we paddle out.

Words - Rob Harwood - Legless.tv

Photos: Donny Lopez, John Barber & Courtesy of Greg Holzman

#greg holzman #Rob Harwood #legless.tv #kneeboard surfing #kneeboard Hawaii #hawaii #steen #kneelo #gland #donny lopez #john barber #blast kneeboards

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scottedwardfowler · 4 years

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Hey guys! In this post I’m to talk about the top three websites I’ve personally use to get work as a freelance video editor. If you’re just starting out, and you’re part time or on a budget, I’ve got a few places you can check out that won’t break the bank.

youtube

This post is a response to a question that I got on my last video, “How to Get Started Editing In Premiere.” Which you can find on my youtube channel here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhj-GmQTgjs&t=1s

The question came from Izabela who asked, “Id love a video about getting started on becoming a freelance editor. What are the best freelancing websites to apply for jobs, tips, and suggestions for anybody who’s starting out. Thank you so much, great video!”

I think that’s a really good one to ask, a lot of people (including myself) when they’re first starting out struggle with how and where do we find work.

There’s actually tons of freelancing sites online that you can search for and try out. So here’s a couple of Honorable mentions:

Guru & Freelancer - Best suited for beginner freelancers on a budget

There’s a Low cost to get started and bid on jobs, with a decent amount of various editing jobs available. I haven’t used them as much, because when I was first starting out, I signed up for a bunch of freelancing websites, and I ended up having more luck landing gigs with these other sites first, so the first one is

Fiverr - is a website that’s normally Best for one time, or short term gigs. It has it’s advantages of being easy to sign up and start using, because Unlike other freelance sites, you Don’t have to bid for clients. After some time, and you’re established, Fiverr pushes clients to you by listing your profile near the top of searches. And Fiverr makes tipping very easy, so you can make extra money on top of what you earned for the gig.

However the cons are that Fiverr takes a 20% Commission, and Most gigs are low pay. So that 20 percent really eats into your profits. You get to set your rates, and what kind of editing jobs you can offer and what the turn around time would be. However, there’s a strict policy on no contact outside of Fiverr, so you can’t make a deal with a client outside of the platform and cut Fiverr out of their commission.

Now we come to UpWork, which is the site I’ve had the most success with. It’s the Most popular freelance site, and offers high quality gigs, as well as not so high quality. It sort of ranges all over the place. But once you’ve been on the platform long enough, you can sort of get an idea of what great job postings are before you even bid on them. I like to think of Upwork as a long term lead genitor, because I have several clients I met years ago who I still work with today. And it all started with one project. It can be difficult to get that first client however, because it is very competitive but once you do, it gets much easier to land future clients.

You also have the the Flexibility of what kind of projects you can do, such as getting paid hourly vs project based. The negatives of UpWork are that it’s kind of Expensive to get started, you can sign up for free, but in order to bid on any jobs it costs 15 cents per credit. And most jobs postings range from 4-6 credits. So if you were to bid on a ton of jobs, that 15 cents starts to add up. Also, Upwork has a complex Commission rate, I’m not going to go too deep into it but essentially it’s 20% for first 500 you make per client. And roughly 10 percent after that first 500. And that’s per client, so every time you land a new client, UpWork takes 20 percent of your earnings on the first 500 dollars.

Also, when it comes to disputes between freelancers and clients, Upwork almost always sides with the clients. So I would recommend doing hourly gigs, because typically hourly gigs tend to be more long term and Upwork has hour tracking features built into the platform that make it easier to prove disputes between yourself and a client over work done.

This next one may surprise you, I’ve also landed some great clients from Craigslist. The cool thing out craigslist, is that the jobs are local to where you live. So you can meet the client face to face and discuss the job in detail at that point. Meeting in personal and developing relationships, really drives what the ultimate goal is which is to create long term client relationships. Plus, there’s no bidding on gigs, or commission rates getting in the way. You look for gigs on the site, reply to a posting, and hopefully you can connect with some great people.

Now, on the flip side Craigslist does have a sketchy reputation for being a place where weirdos hang out so you have to be on guard there. Also, there’s no gig protection here so if a client stiffs you after you’ve done the job for them, that’s totally on you. There are things you can do such as ask for half of the project payment upfront, or even a quarter of it to protect some of your costs. But it’s definitely a risk you take. The last negative, is that it’s more of a time commitment to drive out and meet a potential client somewhere. If it doesn’t work out on a place like UpWork or Fiverr, oh well, you never had to leave your house. So those are some things to be aware of.

The thing about freelancing is, not everyone is doing it full time. Some may freelance as a part time- side hustle, others might be doing some every once in awhile as a hobby. And not everyone has the same budget in order to get started freelancing. So I understand that everyone’s situation is different, but I just wanted to list out my top three sites that I’ve personally used to get clients. There’s a lot more information I could deep dive into on each site, and Ill probably do that in future videos, so stay tuned for that, But I think those sites I mentioned are definitely a great place to start, if you’re looking to get into freelance video editing.

Ok so the next part of Izabela's question was about what tips and suggestions I have for getting started with freelancing. I think a great place to start is trying to have an understanding of what it takes to build a business. No one knows what it’s like to build a business when they’re first starting out, so you have to seek out sources and people who do have that information And I know it’s weird, especially when you’re first starting out, to think of yourself as a business. But that’s the reality, you have to go clients and try and sell yourself and your services in order to get jobs.

So I think a good way of becoming more confident in building your freelancing business is to actively learn as much as you can from different sources. So the fact that you’re here watching my video, is a great thing already. I’m always trying to learn what other people’s strategies are, and how they became successful so that I can pick up a few things here and there to apply to my own business.

In fact I recently just finished reading a book called “Three Simple Steps”, it’s by Trevor Blake. And I think it’s a really good book to inspire people who are just starting out freelancing or creating their own business. Ill just quickly read the description blurb from amazon:

“Despite stock market crashes, dot-com busts, and the specter of recession, the author started a virtual company from home, using a few thousand dollars of his savings. A few years later, without ever hiring an employee or leaving his home office, he sold it for more than $100 million. As the economy slipped into another free fall, he did this again with a company in a different field. He accomplished this through no particular genius. Rather, he studied the habits of the many successful men and women who preceded him, and developed three simple rules that, if followed diligently, virtually ensure success. Using them first to escape poverty, then to achieve a life of adventures, he finally turned them toward financial independence...

Written in a straightforward and no-nonsense style, Three Simple Steps shows you how to take back control of your destiny and reshape your mind for increased creativity, serenity and achievement. While building on the wisdom of great thinkers and accomplished individuals from East and West, Three Simple Steps isn't a new age text or guide to esoteric fulfillment. Rather, it's a practical guide to real-life achievement by a pragmatic businessman who attributes his incredible successes to these very simple ideas. Three Simple Steps, a 2013 Small Business Book Awards winner, is a must-read guide for everyone who wants to achieve more, live better and be happier.”

The three simple steps in case you were wondering is, number one is to spend more time thinking positively about the things you do want, rather than thinking about the things you don’t want. For example, in our case as freelancers, no one likes having to bid for jobs or chase down clients, you could reframe that as the more jobs I bid for the better practice Ill have at understanding what clients want.

Second, spend 20 minutes a day (preferably in the morning) in quiet time by yourself so you can clear your mind and from that, creativity and inspiration for your business can spring from it.

Third, the author talks about setting intentions rather than goals. The difference as the author describes it, as an intention is a goal but with the doubt of it’s attainment removed. So as freelancers, a goal might be I hope to make enough money this year to quit my regular job. An intention is, I know will make enough money this year to quit my regular job. You have to set your mindset to that intention everyday. Which is hard, but in the end that’s what will make it rewarding.

I would highly recommend this book, I found it be really insightful about starting and growing a business from the ground up. But I will say, the first couple of chapters were kind of slow because they were mostly about the author's life journey, which did tie into the rest of the book in the later chapters. But it gets into some really great stuff after the first few chapters.

So if you’re interested in that book, I’ll leave a link below that you can check out. And that about does it for today’s video, let me know in the comments below what freelancing sites you guys use or prefer the most? I’d love to get a comment thread going, so we can all help each other out on where and how to get jobs as freelancers. Three Simple Steps (Book): Amazon - https://amzn.to/3bS5uao (affiliate)

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whelvenwings · 6 years

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✭ Girl Like You ✭

Pairing: Michelle Jones/Shuri Word Count: 13.8k Thank you so much to @lesbiansassemble for letting me take part in her 10k femslash challenge, with the prompt “We’re Trapped”!!

MJ doesn't do opening up to people. She doesn't do dancing at lame parties. She doesn't do singing in public. She doesn't do losing control in any way that she could possibly help, ever. She also definitely does not do being trapped in an elevator - not after what happened at the Washington Monument.

And then she meets Shuri.

((I wrote this for a challenge with a 500-word minimum, and ended up writing so much more. I totally fell in love with these characters and how I imagined their relationship might grow. I hope you enjoy it if you check it out!!))

Read the first chapter below or check it out here on AO3!!

***

“- and she’s coming to our school? Our school?”

“Ned. I’m not kidding.”

“Tell me this isn’t like the time in eighth grade when -”

“No, I swear to God, it’s not like the time you ate your own eraser.”

“You said that you’d switched out one of my things for candy and it just looked so -”

MJ folded her arms, sank down in her seat on the bus, and tried to tune out the conversation Peter and Ned were having in front of her.

“I said that because I thought you’d guess , not just pick something up and chew on it…”

She closed her eyes, and pictured her desk back at home: and there they were - her headphones, sitting on top of her laptop. Exactly where she’d left them, trudging past in an early-morning haze on her way out of the door; their wire curled up in an enticing beckon, promising bass thick enough to drown out whatever was going on in front of her.

“No, no, seriously,” Peter was saying. “I swear, she’s actually coming to our school.”

MJ’s head was aching. Last night had held an accidental Wikipedia binge, hopping from article to article, reading all the new tech pages that were springing up like weeds on the sidewalk; Kimoyo Beads. Ring Blades. Vibranium Strike Gauntlets. The details were sparse and there wasn’t a lot to go on - but over the course of the six hours MJ had spent lost down the rabbit hole, at least two of the articles had already grown extra subsections. New information was flooding in.

It had made MJ’s heart thud as she sat bathed in the blueish light of her laptop at three in the morning, on the night before the first day of junior year.

And it was only now, as she sat on the bus and tried desperately to convince her body that closing her eyes constituted more sleep, that she felt even the slightest twinge of regret. Watching this stuff happen was once-in-a-lifetime.

“Hey, MJ.” Ned’s voice, loud enough to be heard clearly over the roar of the bus, made MJ frown. “MJ.”

“Mmm.” She did her best impression of a person who was extremely asleep.

“EM JAY.”

She slit her eyes open, making sure that her stare encompassed the exact right ratio of tiredness, irritation, lack of investment, and sheer dead-eyed scariness as possible. Ned hitched on a grin in the face of it, clearly not appreciating the artistry that went into the expression’s careful emotional makeup.

“Did you know about this?” he said, gesturing with one hand towards Peter. The bus rattled onto the school grounds, stop-starting to avoid the students running across the path. MJ glanced from Ned to Peter’s profile and back again, making sure to look completely disinterested.

“Know about what,” she said flatly.

“Who’s joining the school this year?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Really?” Peter spun completely in his seat to look at her. MJ’s eyes flicked over to him - his brown hair a slight mess, as usual, though she could see that there had been some attempts to school it into a definite style. He, too, looked tired, though MJ could concede in the privacy of her own head that he wore it with better humour than she did herself. “How’d you know?”

“Because we’re best friends already,” MJ said.

“You what?”

“Oh, yeah. Me and my dear friend Please Shut Up go way back.” She glared at the pair of them, and then shut her eyes.

“What’s up with you?” she heard Ned say. “Late night?”

“You really wanna know?”

“Uh… yeah, I gue-”

“I was hanging out with Please Shut Up. Having a ton of good times.”

“You’re mean.”

MJ snorted. The bus came to a complete stop, and the doors sighed open; MJ kept her eyes tightly closed for a few seconds longer, trying to enjoy the feeling as much as she possibly could while everyone around her scrambled for their bags and began to pile out into the parking lot.

“Ding ding,” she heard Ned say. “This is our stop.”

“Ugh.”

Rolling her eyes behind closed lids, she grabbed for her backpack on the empty seat beside her, and slouched off the bus behind Ned and Peter. She winced against the sunlight, sleeplessness watering everything around her down to a kind of liquid surreality. She yawned - but even as she did so, even as most of her mind was dedicated to wishing that she was back in her bed with her head on a soft pillow and her comforter pulled all the way up to her chin, even as she blinked slowly and sleepily - she realised that there was some kind of commotion happening across on the other side of the parking lot.

“Oh my god,” Ned said, punching Peter - surprisingly hard, MJ thought, but Peter didn’t seem to really feel it. “Oh, my god, it’s happening. It is happening.”

The words what’s happening were on the tip of MJ’s tongue; an image of Ned’s smug face rose up in front of her, how happy he’d be at knowing something she didn’t after she’d been rude on the bus, and she bit back her questions. Instead, she started to head quickly towards the school - directly away from the crowd. There were a few odd looks thrown her way by all the people heading in the opposite direction, but she paid them no attention whatsoever.

The growing melee surged behind her as she walked through the school gates, not meeting anyone’s eye. Instead of going inside, though, she took a quick right, heading for a conveniently placed wall that started low and slowly sloped upwards; climbing up, she walked her way to higher ground, peering over the heads of the crowd in the parking lot.

She was too far away to see what was really happening, except that there were four sleek black cars all parked side by side, and some women in red standing absolutely still and eyeing the general ruckus of students. They seemed to be keeping some kind of peace just by looking vaguely ready to kill anyone who looked at them.

MJ stared, wishing she could so effortlessly channel that kind of energy.

The clothes they were wearing… she narrowed her eyes. She knew that armour, she knew those patterns. They all had shaved heads, too - no hair for anyone to grab onto in a fight.

She blinked. Surely, it wasn’t possible. She’d just spent all night reading about these exact women and their country and their weapons and their technology, and now she was sleep deprived, and seeing things. These could not be the Dora Milaje.

MJ wasn’t even completely clear on how that was pronounced, let alone being prepared to see them in her school’s parking lot.

And then, out of one of the cars, stepped a girl.

MJ felt her breathe leave her, before she’d even fully registered who she was looking at. Dressed in lowkey, casual clothes - just jeans, a t-shirt, and a black and white jacket, with her hair tied up at the back of her head - was a person MJ knew by sight, instantly. Someone she’d read about; someone she followed on Twitter; someone she’d seen on the news, announcing the arrival of new outreach buildings across the country. Someone she’d actually considered getting Snapchat for, just to see her stories and selfies.

Shuri, Princess of Wakanda.

The crowd around Shuri were going wild, yelling and waving. The Dora Milaje were looking, somehow, even more stern as they kept the tide of teenage enthusiasm at bay. Shuri offered them all a grin, and MJ felt her heart flip in her chest.

With a little nod of her head, Shuri began to walk towards the school. Like a flock of seagulls, the students all around her shuffled and squawked at each other, following along; Shuri seemed unfazed, not ignoring them, but just smiling around and occasionally laughing.

She must be used to this by now, MJ thought.

“I told my brother,” she heard the Princess say as she headed through the gates. “I told him, I wanted to take the bus! The big cars will only make it worse! Tomorrow I’m taking the bus here and there’s nothing he can do about it…”

MJ shifted, almost falling off the wall. Shuri was going to be here - not just for one day, but for two?

The suddenness of her movement must have caught Shuri’s eye. Down below, the Princess jerked her head up - frowning, her eyes drifted upwards too - and quite suddenly, MJ found herself meeting the gaze of the Princess of Wakanda.

MJ froze.

Shuri’s eyebrows raised slightly, and her mouth crooked into a smile - a small one, genuine, not for show - as she took in MJ standing atop the wall. MJ swallowed. Before there was time to smile politely, or wave, or do anything at all, the moment was over. Shuri had walked into the school, her eyes sliding away.

When the swirling wave of students chasing after her had washed inside with her, MJ hopped down off the wall. She leaned back against it; she could still feel her heart pounding.

Shuri had smiled.

And MJ hadn’t even tried to tame her hair this morning, beyond shoving it into a bun at the back of her head. Not that she expected someone as smart as Shuri to be making judgements about someone based on how many flyaways they had going on, hair-wise, or how beat-up their shoes looked, or how probably vacant and awestruck their expression was…

MJ breathed out. But Shuri had smiled.

She found herself half-smiling down at the ground, just thinking about it.

“So, how did you enjoy meeting Princess Please Shut Up ?”she heard a voice say. She looked up, blinking away her mind’s looped replaying of the moment that had just happened.

Ned was smiling at her smugly, while Peter stared up the steps after Shuri.

MJ considered using words to reply, and then decided a simple gesture would do the trick.

“Aw, come on. That’s not nice.”

They headed inside as a reluctant, ragged trio.

“So… she’s here because…” MJ said, unable to resist fishing for information any longer.

“To go to school,” Ned finished for her. “Something about community outreach or whatever.” MJ tried to keep walking normally, tried to keep breathing. Shuri. The Princess of Wakanda - a title so grandiose that it sounded ridiculous even to think it - that Shuri. Was going to be here every day? Was going to take classes? Was going to join band or the cheer squad, was going to go to parties, was going to - to go to high school?

“But she’s, like… a genius,” MJ said, sounding stupid to herself. “Like… she doesn’t need high school.”

Ned shrugged, while Peter looked thoughtful.

“Peter, does she even know about -” Ned began.

“Don’t know,” Peter said shortly, with a pointed look, before seeming to sink back into his thoughts. MJ narrowed her eyes at the pair of them, before shrugging it off.

Whatever. Those guys were losers.

And Shuri had smiled.

***

Read the rest here on AO3!!

#whelvenwingsfic #nessies10kchallenge #shuri x mj #mj x shuri #trapped in an elevator #fluff and feels

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taratheinfluencer-blog · 5 years

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I Tried Living Like a Social Media Influencer for a Week - Here��s What I Learned:

In a world full of Instagram and Youtube, a new elitism was born: Social Media Influencers.

What are social media influencers? According to the Digital Marketing Institue, social media influencers are, “users who have established credibility in a specific industry, have access to a huge audience and can persuade others to act based on their recommendations.”

After the death of app Vine, the top users couldn’t fathom losing their daily 6 seconds of fame and get a real job, so instead, they turned to good ol’Youtube. Youtube, which was once a platform for content creators to post actual formatted-scripted-creative videos, then became a playground for inFlueNcErs to post shallow videos of themselves vlogging their day-to-day life of doing $1,000 shopping hauls and Taco Bell mukbangs.

Though these vloggers claim their content is actual ~hard~ work, from a viewers standpoint it just looks like an extreme form of the narcissism of privileged people showing off how much money they have and how much fun they can have without having to maintain a real job.

In addition to their hard work of filming themselves eating fast food, there’s also the extremely hard and tiring work of them posting pictures of themselves onto Instagram. While I personally do not understand how this is real work, other sources would argue that it is. A recent survey showed that 75% of generation z and millennials consider online content creation to be a real job, and 34% of those people want to start a YouTube channel themselves.

Still, I can’t help but be irked when hearing about this lifestyle. But why? To figure out where this rooted irritation stems from, I decided to try to live like a social media influencer for a week. Vlogging. Instagramming. Eating like them and dressing like them. For a full week. Yeah. yeah. Here is what I learned:

1.) It Takes A lot of Confidence:

Is it confidence or is it narcissism? Depends on the vlogger. Either way, you’ll need one of the two to get started in the influencer world.

Let’s start off with vlogging. Talking to a camera while walking in a public space with people staring at you…..not an easy feeling. Every time I started filming and a person would notice, I instantly felt self-conscience.

Even when I was attempting to film alone, as soon as I would start talking to the camera as if it was an actual person, I couldn’t help but to laugh. Every. Time.

Maybe I should give more credit to vloggers who talk to their camera in public and make it look so easy and natural because it’s not.

Going along with the self embarrassment, posting consistently on Instagram added to the feeling.

I normally post on my Instagram one or two times a month, but posting pictures of myself WEEKLY felt like I hit the beyond cringe status.

Pressing the post button was dreadful, and I ended up deleting most pictures an hour after they were posted.

Posting my face onto my friend's timelines every single day and updating my Insta story every minute felt like a whole new level of narcissism. It’s so silly and weird to think influencers easily post these pictures and just ~expect~ people to like them and to care about what they’re up to that day

This goes along with the majority of influencers being narcissistic. In a 2016 study, researchers interviewed 239 influencers on their Instagram habits and found that they all ranked high on the Hypersensitive Narcissism Scale.

The researchers also said, "narcissists can post and manipulate specific photos to make themselves and their lives appear to be a certain way. Instagram appeals to narcissists because many interactions on it are 'surfacy' or 'shallow.”

The vlogging side to being an influencer is one thing because at the very least you can try to make something fun out of it, but the Instagram part? Absolutely, absolutely, not the lifestyle for me.

2.) It’s Only Fun if You're Making Money:

If I knew it was guaranteed I could live this lifestyle and start making the same amount of money as the top influencers do, going through the cringe and embarrassment of it all would totally be worth it.

Influencers get paid through brand deals and sponsored ads. Companies will reach out to influencers and ask them to either post a picture of them using or wearing their product, or shout out their company in a video in exchange of receiving anywhere from $200-10,000+ per post.

Social media influencer Tana Mongeau announced on her Instagram story this past week that the clothing company Fashion Nova pays her up to six figures per photo that she posts onto her Instagram wearing their clothing and tagging them in it. SIX FIGURES to post a picture on Instagram.

Mongeau has also explained in her past videos that clothing companies send her and other influencers exclusive catalogs of clothing articles selected just for them. These items are worth anywhere from $500-5,000. She picks the clothes that she likes, they send them to her for free, she then films a Youtube video of her showing off the clothes and pretending as if she actually shops there, then she can either keep the clothes or send them back. Either way, she still receives a thicccc paycheck for giving the company an online promo.

Influencer David Dobrik stated on his vlog channel that he was able to buy 10 new cars for his friends, plus a new Ferrari for himself, within one year due to giving the company SeatGeek shoutouts on his vlog. 11 new high-end cars in one year...just for talking about a company for literally 45 seconds.

Without the paycheck and without knowing if I’ll ever get a paycheck, I just don’t see the point in being an influencer just for ~fun~ especially knowing other people are banking off of it.

It’s like people who casually drink. Alcohol doesn’t taste good. There are zero health benefits to it. So if you’re not drinking to get drunk, what’s the point?

Being an influencer is embarrassing. There are horrible mental health benefits to it. So if you’re not posting to get paid, what’s the point? Attention?? Fans?? Feeding into narcissism???? Probably, but I still want a paycheck at the end of the day.

3.) It Takes A lot of Time:

Finding the perfect picture to post on Instagram takes. a. lot. of. time. After doing a full photo shoot in my Insta-baddie outfit outside of a 711 (which ties back to the needing self-confidence part and trying to continue on even when customers are staring), I then had to go through 103 pictures and even then I had to take more to find the ~one.~

But it doesn’t stop there!

Trying to edit and FaceTune the pictures like the influencers do was even more time consuming than taking the pictures and picking out the Dolls Kills mixed with Fashion Nova outfit itself.

If it took me that much time trying to decide which picture to post, I can’t even imagine how long it takes influencers, given they have more pressure put on them to post the right one. I only have a little over 4,000 followers to impress online, but real social media influencers have a solid 500,000-1,000,000+ that’s a lot of pressure! Not to mention if they’re posting the picture through a brand deal and the brand doesn’t like the picture, they can take the paycheck back...so their post has to be perfect.

Trying to come up with vlog content also took up a lot of time.

When I wasn’t laughing or cringing at myself, I was vacantly staring into the camera lens trying to come up with something to say, annnnnd I had nothing.

Then there were times where I did think of something to say, but either the sound quality was off or the sentence was worded funny so I would have to do retakes of me talking while also trying to make it sound natural.

AND THEN, once you FINALLY got your footage, you have to edit it all. The current trend among vloggers is to do quick edits with lots of weird effects and added sounds which took me 8 whole hours to figure how to do, and even then, the outcome was still shitty! !!!

While I still do believe vlogging isn’t real work, I WILL give them credit for their editing skills, now that I consider hard work.

*side note: while I do credit editing film as hard work, it can also be noted that there are vloggers out there who pay someone else to edit their videos for them….SoOOoOo

*side side note: I was going to add the vlog here but after this experiment, I weirdly decided I want to actually try to make a vlog channel this summer since most of my friends already do and I learned a lot from this, so I’m holding onto that content until the birth of my channel.

4.) It Does Hurt Your Mental Health:

While doing my research on what the influencer lifestyle was like, I tried to take note of what they typically eat in a day and what they wore.

From the different “What I Eat in a Day” videos I watched, it mostly seemed to consist of ice coffee (which I already drink on a daily basis so that was easy) and avocados and other super healthy foods.

The common outfit choices I noticed from the wardrobe hauls I watched mainly consisted of crop tops, street fashion, and anything that reveals a lot of skin.

Going back to a previous statement I made, influencers have a lot of followers and a lot of eyes on them, so it’s easy to see that they do whatever they can to always look their best.

While I did enjoy their food choices and clothing choices the most out of this entire experience (because it tasted good and looked cute), I feel like it would eventually become mentally exhausting to always be sooooo aware and conscious of what you look like at all times.

I mentioned before that I used the FaceTune app like all the other influencer do when editing my pictures before posting them. While I could write a whole other 25-page-long-essay on the dangers of FaceTune itself, I’ll just summarize it by saying this: FaceTune is an absolute evil drug that can trigger body dysmorphia within the user and within people who see the final FaceTuned pictures.

The features on that app that allows for you to look as if you lost 50 lbs, makes you look taller, fixes your skin complexion, and even alters your jawline??? are so dangerous and triggering to people who already suffer from low-self esteem, dysmorphia, and eating disorders, and I strongly suggest not even downloading the app, ever.

I also caught myself checking my phone every second to see how many likes I was getting after posting something. When posting content on social media becomes your job, I can totally see how addicting numbers can become and why people obsess over them.

In a recent interview with influencer Alexandra Mondalek done by The Guardian, Mondalek said, “I was putting too much weight into who was viewing my Instagram, I would worry about how a post was performing instead of making important calls. I felt a certain pressure to make a brand of myself, and there was so much anxiety in that.”

I also caught myself comparing my posts to similar posts that got more likes and wondering why mine weren’t getting as many, but then would remember that the majority of the influencer’s pictures have been FaceTuned, and they don’t actually look like that in real life so I shouldn’t be comparing myself to them.

Mondalek also said in the same interview that, “I’d be lying if I said I could look at an explore page on Instagram and not compare myself to what I see on those pages. Someone is purchasing something you can’t purchase or making connections you haven’t yet made. It’s the rat-race lifestyle boiled down into the palm of your hand, and sometimes it feels inescapable.”

Final Thoughts:

After this experience, I will give influencers a bit more credit. This definitely isn't a lifestyle anyone could pull off so props to those who can.

However, I still do not fully see a purpose or meaning in their job. And I'm pretty sure they don’t either — they just like the perks of the lifestyle.

Mongeau has stated several times in her vlogs that she knows she’s talentless and that she just got lucky, and I respect her for owning up to that.

I guess my core issue with influencers lies within the ones who cannot be honest with themselves and admit their job is meaningless.

These people really aren’t contributing much to society or working that hard, but are still making more money than teachers and some doctor — people who actually work — and it bothers me! Nobody needs that much money!

But....I did read in a recent study that, “narcissists tend to follow other narcissists on Instagram,” and prior to doing this experiment, I was already following these influencers on my own free will. So, maybe, if we’re being honest here, my problem isn’t the influencers work ethic, but deep down inside I see myself in these people and am just jealous that they’re living a richer life than I am.

Sources:

https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/en-us/blog/9-of-the-biggest-social-media-influencers-on-instagram

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/3617062/children-turn-backs-on-traditional-careers-in-favour-of-internet-fame-study-finds/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/08/instagram-influencers-psychology-social-media-anxiety

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2018/05/29/five-ways-to-beat-social-media-algorithms-with-influencer-marketing/#20f2d13f6db7

https://www.businessinsider.com/narcissists-habits-instagram-2018-1

https://blog.logograb.com/visuals-videos-what-happened-vine/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563215303307

https://chatterblast.com/being-a-social-media-influencer-its-a-real-job/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563217306805

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emotionallyunstablegamer · 4 years

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(512) It may not have been number 500 but it did end up being the last thing on year 3 and that's a pretty big deal on its own.

I have two original memories of FFVII one of a demo my uncle had on his PC and Cloud shooting missiles out of his ass. The second was playing the intro of FFVII up to when Cloud falls into the church and I didn't want to fuck up my cousin's save so I panic mode named Aerith his nickname not realizing it didn't autosave and that I was naming Aerith, not Cloud haha. But something about the tiny bit of the game I had played really resonated with me and always stayed on my mind. I drew doodles of Cloud and one of my most prized possessions was an instruction manual for FFVII even though I didn't own the game. When I finally got FFVII I was around 7 or 8 it was because a woman my grandmother babysat for was selling their PS1 and games and I made sure I got FFVII. We didn't have a memory card at first so I just replayed as far as I could for the first two days before I got one, I usually made it to around where Hell House spawned before I got a game over. When I did finally get a memory card I kept getting stuck in the area between sector 5 and the playground not realizing the red/pink pole was the walkway I needed because it blended in on my tiny TV which I had to press 1 & 2 at the same time to get channel 3. I was blown away by Wall Market and Cloud cross-dressing, I thought it was wild and I loved it.

When I finally got to the end of the Shinra building I was like wow what an incredible game this is insane, fighting giant robots in an elevator, beating up dudes on motorcycles with a sword, saving Aerith, and at the time I played the graphics were still really revolutionary so I was blown away at the first FMV with the full-sized models of Barret, Cloud, Tifa, Aerith, and Red XIII. I thought I had gotten close to the end of the game, then the world map opened up and my tiny kid mind fucking exploded. I didn't know where to go (now I realize the game is pretty linear but I don't mind that). I got my ass handed to me by the Midgar Zolom over and over and over before I realized I was insanely far away from Kalm the next stop on the journey which was literally next to Midgar. I honestly liked the Fort Condor minigame the first time I played it because it reminded me of Warcraft and Starcraft. Every day before school, I was playing for as much time as I could, and if I didn't have time to find a save I cataloged every single thing I did so I'd be able to do it faster when I got back home. All-day I thought about FFVII. It was the first game to break my heart, to explore my emotions and understanding of people. Cloud's journey to find himself resonated with me and helped me deal with my own life and the things I went through. The cast felt like a family, a family with problems but a family that loved each other and worked together.

I love the esthetic of this game, I love the mechanics, the graphics even if everyone looks like legos, the characters, the world, the music, the stories, the little bits and pieces I just couldn't understand when I was a kid. This game will always be my absolute favorite because of the feelings it gives me. Objectively it has a lot of problems and it is definitely overrated in some ways but I love it for all those faults, it was my first Final Fantasy. It helped shape me in so many ways. I legit had moments during the replay of this that I broke into uncontrollable sobbing because of my memories attached. This game has been a constant with me. This playthrough is only the 3rd time I've ever beaten it and the only time I've 100% it. It is not the greatest game of all time and the first part of its remake though incredible is its own beast which I love in new and exciting ways and I cannot understate how ready I am for more. I started this telling stories but there are just so many memories and I'm typing forever. I love this game and if you like RPGs it is more than worth it on whatever platform you chose to purchase it on.

”But you gotta understand that there ain’t no gettin’ offa this train we’re on, till we get to the end of the line.” ~Barret Wallace

Special shout out to my wonderful girlfriend Anna who watched me through every moment of my 70-hour playthrough.

#zacks #big #list #2019 #2020 #sept #final fantasy vii #cloud #tifa #barret #aerith #vincent #red xiii #nanaki #cid #yuffie #cait sith #reeve

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lelou-quotes · 4 years

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In Defense of Being Average

There’s this guy. World-renowned billionaire. Tech genius. Inventor and entrepreneur. Athletic and talented and handsome with a jaw so chiseled it looks like Zeus came down from Olympus and carved the fucker himself.

This guy’s got a small fleet of sports cars, a few yachts, and when he’s not giving millions of dollars to charities, he’s changing out supermodel girlfriends like other people change their socks.

This guy’s smile can melt the damn room. His charm is so thick you can swim in it. Half of his friends were TIME’s “Man of the Year.” And the ones who weren’t don’t care because they could buy the magazine if they wanted to. When this guy isn’t jetsetting around the world or coming up with the latest technological innovation to save the planet, he spends his time helping the weak and helpless and downtrodden.

This man is, you guessed it, Bruce Wayne. Also known as the Batman. And (spoiler alert) he doesn’t actually exist. He is fiction.

It’s an interesting facet of human nature that we seem to have a need to come up with these sort of fictional heroes that embody perfection and everything we wish we could be. Medieval Europe had its tales about gallant knights slaying dragons and saving princesses. Ancient Rome and Greece had their myths about heroes who won wars single-handedly and in some cases confronted the Gods themselves. Every other human culture is replete with such fantastical stories as well.

And today, we have comic book superheroes. Take Superman. I mean, the guy is basically a God with a human body wearing a blue jumpsuit and red underpants on inside-out. He is indestructible and unbeatable. And the only thing as sturdy as his physical fortitude is his moral fortitude. In Superman’s world, justice is always black/white, and Superman never wavers from doing what’s right. No matter what.

I don’t think I’m exactly shaking up the field of psychology by suggesting that, as humans, we have a need to conjure up these heroes to help us cope with our own feelings of powerlessness. There are over 7.2 billion people on this planet, and really only about 1,000 of those have major worldwide influence at any given time. That leaves the other 7,199,999,000 +/- of us to come to terms with the limited scope of our lives and the fact that the vast majority of what we do will likely not matter long after we’ve died. This is not a fun thing to think about or accept.

Today, I want to take a detour from our “make more, buy more, fuck more” culture and argue for the merits of mediocrity, of being blasé boring and average.

Not the merits of pursuing mediocrity, mind you — because we all should try to do the best we possibly can — but rather, the merits of accepting mediocrity when we end up there despite our best efforts.

BEHIND THE CURVE

Everything in life is a trade-off. Some of us are born with high aptitudes for academic learning. Others are born with great physical skills. Others are athletic. Others are artistic. Others can fuck like rabbits and never break a sweat. In terms of skills and talents, humans are a wildly diverse group of smelly creatures. Sure, what we end up accomplishing in life ultimately depends on our practice and effort, but we are all born with different aptitudes and potentials.

This here is called a bell curve. Any of you who have taken a statistics class and survived will recognize it.

A bell curve is quite simple. Take a population of people, like, let’s say people who play golf at least once a year. The horizontal axis represents how good they are at golf. Further to the right means they’re really good, further to the left means they’re really bad.

Now, notice that it gets really thin at the far ends of the curve. That means there are a few people who are really, really good at golf. And a few people who are really, really bad. The majority fall into the mediocre middle.

We can apply a “curve” in this way to tons of things in a population. Height. Weight. Emotional maturity. Wages. How often people like to fuck. And so on.1

For example, this is Michael Jordan dunking a basketball:

It’s well-known that he’s one of the best to ever do it. Therefore, he’s way on the right side of the bell curve, better than 99.99% of anyone else who has ever dunked a basketball. Few can compare.

Then you have this guy:

Obviously, he’s no Michael Jordan. In fact, chances are many people reading this right now could do much better than this guy. That means he’s probably towards the bottom end of the bell curve, an extreme on the other side.

We stand in awe of MJ because he’s more athletic than all of us.2 We laugh at the trampoline guy because he’s less athletic than most of us. Both are at different extremes of the bell curve. And most of us are the majority in the middle.

WE’RE ALL PRETTY AVERAGE AT MOST THINGS

We all have our own strengths and weaknesses. But the fact is, most of us are pretty average at most things we do. Even if you’re truly exceptional at one thing — say math, or jump rope, or making money off the black gun market — chances are you’re pretty average or below average at most other things. That’s just the nature of life. To become truly great at something, you have to dedicate time and energy to it. And because we all have limited time and energy, few of us ever become truly exceptional at more than one thing, if anything at all.

We can then say that it is a complete statistical improbability that any single person can be an extraordinary performer in all areas of their life, or even many areas of their life. Bruce Wayne does not exist. It just doesn’t happen. Brilliant businessmen are often fuck ups in their personal lives. Extraordinary athletes are often shallow and as dumb as a lobotomized rock. Most celebrities are probably just as clueless about life as the people who gawk at them and follow their every move.

We’re all, for the most part, pretty average people. It’s the extremes that get all of the publicity. We all kind of intuitively know this, but we rarely think and/or talk about it. The vast majority of us will never be truly exceptional at, well, anything. And that’s OK.

Which leads to an important point: that mediocrity, as a goal, sucks. But mediocrity, as a result, is OK.

Few of us get this. And fewer of us accept it. Because problems arise — serious, “My God, what’s the point of living” type problems — when we expect to be extraordinary. Or worse, we feel entitled to be extraordinary. When in reality, it’s just not viable or likely. For every Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant, there are 10 million scrubs stumbling around parks playing pickup games… and losing. For every Picasso or DaVinci there have been about a billion drooling idiots eating Play-Doh and slapping around fingerpaints. And for every Leo Motherfucking Tolstoy, there’s a lot of, well, me, scribbling and playing at writer.

THE TYRANNY OF A CULTURE OF EXCEPTIONALISM

So here’s the problem. I would argue that we have this expectation (or this entitlement) more today than any other time in history. And the reason is because of the nature of our technology and economic privilege.

Having the internet, Google, Facebook, YouTube and access to 500+ channels of television is amazing. We have access to more information than any other time in history.

But our attention is limited. There’s no way we can process the tidal waves of information flowing through the internet at any given time. Therefore the only ones that break through and catch our attention are the truly exceptional pieces of information. The 99.999th percentile.

All day, every day, we are flooded with the truly extraordinary. The best of the best. The worst of the worst. The greatest physical feats. The funniest jokes. The most upsetting news. The scariest threats. Non-stop.

Our lives today are filled with information coming from the extremes of the bell curve, because in the media that’s what gets eyeballs and the eyeballs bring dollars. That’s it. Yet the vast majority of life continues to reside in the middle.3

It’s my belief that this flood of extreme information has conditioned us to believe that “exceptional” is the new normal. And since all of us are rarely exceptional, we all feel pretty damn insecure and desperate to feel “exceptional” all the time. So we must compensate. Some of us do this by cooking up get-rich-quick schemes. Others do it by taking off across the world to save starving babies in Africa. Others do it by excelling in school and winning every award. Others do it by shooting up a school. Others do it by trying to have sex with anything that talks and breathes.

There’s this kind of psychological tyranny in our culture today, a sense that we must always be proving that we’re special, unique, exceptional all the time, no matter what, only to have that moment of exceptionalism swept away in the current of all the other human greatness that’s constantly happening.

For instance, here’s a five-minute video of nothing but some of the most amazing feats you can imagine:

The crazy thing is that every single person in this video, for their five seconds of incredible footage, likely spent years and years and years practicing their craft as well as dozens of hours of recording to just get that perfect five-second spot.

Yet we are not exposed to those years of practice. Or those hours of drab and failed footage. We’re merely exposed to each person’s absolute finest moment — possibly in their entire lives.

And then we watch this and forget about it within minutes. Because we’re onto the next thing. And then the next.

B-B-B-BUT, IF I’M NOT GOING TO BE SPECIAL OR EXTRAORDINARY, WHAT’S THE POINT?

It’s an accepted part of our culture today to believe that we are all destined to do something truly extraordinary. Celebrities say it. Business tycoons say it. Politicians say it. Even Oprah says it. Each and every one of us can be extraordinary. We all deserve greatness.

The fact that this statement is inherently contradictory — after all, if everyone was extraordinary, then by definition, no one would be extraordinary — is missed by most people, and instead we eat the message up and ask for more. (More tacos, that is.)

Being “average” has become the new standard of failure. The worst thing you can be is in the middle of the pack, the middle of the bell curve.

The problem is that, statistically speaking, pretty much all of us are in the middle of that bell curve almost all of the time, in almost everything we do. Sure, you might be a world-class putt-putt golfer. But then you have to go home and be a lousy father and get drunk on cheap beer faster than 90% of the population and piss the bed at night. Or worse, you could be Tiger Woods. No one stays exceptional for very long.

A lot of people are afraid to accept mediocrity because they believe that if they accept being mediocre, then they’ll never achieve anything, never improve, and that their life doesn’t matter.

I find this sort of thinking to be dangerous. Once you accept the premise that a life is only worthwhile if it is truly notable and great, then you basically accept the fact that most of the human population sucks and is worthless. And ethically speaking, that is a really dark place to put yourself.

But most people’s problem with accepting being average is more practical. They worry that, “If I accept that I’m average, then I’ll never achieve anything great. I’ll have no motivation to improve myself or do something great. What if I am one of the rare few?”

This, too, is a misguided belief. The people who become truly exceptional at something do so not because they believe they’re exceptional. On the contrary, they become amazing because they are obsessed with improvement. And that obsession with improvement stems from an unerring belief that they are, in fact, not that great at all. That they are mediocre. That they are average. And that they can be so much better.

This is the great irony about ambition. If you wish to be smarter and more successful than everybody else, you will always feel like a failure. If you wish to be the most loved and most popular, then you will always feel alone. If you wish to be the most powerful and admired, then you will always feel weak and impotent.

All of this “every person can be extraordinary and achieve greatness” stuff is basically just jerking off your ego. It’s shit sold to you to make you feel good for a few minutes and to get you through the week without hanging yourself in your cubicle. It’s a message that tastes good going down, but in reality, is nothing more than empty calories that make you emotionally fat and bloated, the proverbial Big Mac for your heart and your brain.

The ticket to emotional health, like physical health, comes from eating your veggies — that is, through accepting the bland and mundane truths of life: a light salad of “you’re actually pretty average in the grand scheme of things” and some steamed broccoli of “the vast majority of your life will be mediocre.” This will taste bad at first. Very bad. You will avoid eating it.

But once ingested, your body will wake up feeling more potent and more alive. After all, that constant pressure to always be something amazing, to be the next big thing, will be lifted off your back. The stress and anxiety of feeling inadequate will dissipate. And the knowledge and acceptance of your own mundane existence will actually free you to accomplish what you truly wish to accomplish with no judgments and no lofty expectations.

You will have a growing appreciation for life’s basic experiences. You will learn to measure yourself through a new, healthier means: the pleasures of simple friendship, creating something, helping a person in need, reading a good book, laughing with someone you care about.

Sounds boring, doesn’t it? That’s because these things are average. But maybe they’re average for a reason. Because they are what actually matter.

https://markmanson.net/being-average

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dipulb3 · 4 years

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YouTube TV review: The most full-featured live TV streamer is no longer the best value

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/youtube-tv-review-the-most-full-featured-live-tv-streamer-is-no-longer-the-best-value/

YouTube TV review: The most full-featured live TV streamer is no longer the best value

Sarah Tew/CNET

Ever had a cable bill jump by 30% in a single month? That’s what subscribers of YouTube TV are feeling now after a price hike from $50 to $65 taking place July 31. While the service did get some extra channels in the form of Comedy Central, MTV and Nickelodeon, they’re not worth another $15 a month for most subscribers. YouTube TV is still the easiest live TV streaming service to use and the one with the most channels and best features, but it’s no longer our top overall choice. That honor goes to Hulu Plus Live TV, which costs $55 a month, has an excellent slate of essential channels and includes Hulu’s vast on-demand library.

More channels than any competitor, including PBS

Superb cloud DVR

Excellent on-screen interface and handy search bar

If you’re the kind of cord cutter who can stomach the $65 price, however, YouTube TV could still be for you. It’s easy to use, slick and fast on a variety of TV and mobile devices. Its cloud DVR is the best in the business, with unlimited storage and pretty much all the capabilities of a hardware DVR such as TiVo. And that channel selection is top-notch, including numerous cable staples and coverage of all four local networks — ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC — in most markets nationwide. (Editors’ note: CBS and Showtime are owned by ViacomCBS, which also owns CNET.) It’s also the only multichannel streaming service with local PBS stations. In short, you might not even miss cable.

YouTube TV is more expensive than Hulu with Live TV, AT&T TV Now and Fubo TV, but better than all three if you can handle the price. For people used to the myriad channels and easy DVR of cable or satellite, it may be worth the extra expense. For cord cutters who want more savings, however, we recommend Hulu Plus Live TV for premium users and Sling TV Blue at $30 per month for people on tighter budgets.

What do you get?

YouTube TV is different from YouTube, the free video service with more than 2 billion users a month. YouTube TV offers an experience similar to cable TV, with live channels and on-demand content available on a variety of devices. It works with Apple TV, Roku, Android TV, Chromecast, Amazon Fire TV along with numerous smart TVs, phones, tablets and web browsers.

The service operates in much the same way as competitors — there’s a program guide, a DVR and dozens of channels. But what really separates YouTube TV from other premium ($50-plus a month) services such as AT&T TV Now, Hulu with Live TV and FuboTV? Let’s take a look.

Services compared

Premium services YouTube TV AT&T TV Now Hulu Plus Live TV FuboTV Base price $65 a month for 85+ channels $55 a month for 45+ channels $55 a month for 60+ channels $60 a month for 90+ channels Total number of popular (top 100) channels 75 45 59 68 ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC channels Yes Yes Yes Yes Record shows for later (cloud DVR) Yes (keep for 9 months) Yes (500 hours, keep for 30 days) Yes (50 hours, 200 hours for $10 a month) Yes (500 hours) Step-up packages with more channels No Yes No Yes Simultaneous streams per account 3 3 2 ($15 option for unlimited) 3 Fast-forward through or skip commercials with cloud DVR Yes Yes No (Yes with $15 option) Yes

YouTube TV’s channel selection is excellent, with more from our list of 100 top channels than any other competitor. That said, more channels doesn’t necessarily mean more of what you want: Some services such as FuboTV lean heavily on sports while others are more wide-ranging. It’s best to check the list at the end of this article, which compares individual channels across services, to make sure you’re getting the channels you want.

Like Hulu, YouTube TV doesn’t offer any add-on channel packages, although it does have a handful of single-channel add-ons like Showtime, Epix, HBO and HBO Max to your subscription.

What’s it like to use?

YouTube TV’s user interface is fairly simple. There are three top-level tabs broken into Library, Home and Live. Library is where your DVR content lives. Home is where both featured and live thumbnails appear. The Live tab is a familiar-looking program grid which shows currently playing and upcoming shows. You can search for content from the top of any page, which makes it relatively easy to jump straight to the content you want. You can also perform searches with a compatible voice remote or Google Assistant.

You can connect to YouTube to watch related clips.

Ty Pendlebury/CNET

The service’s tie-in to YouTube proper is welcome — with YouTube originals included — though it could be more tightly integrated, especially on TV devices. For example, a content page appears when you press the Go To button on a show, and a Related on YouTube item appears at the bottom. It would be helpful to have thumbnails of related interviews and trailers appear more prominently on this page without having to delve into menus.

The DVR works well and includes the ability to rewind and fast-forward freely through recordings, even ones that aren’t yet completed. The Roku interface offers a 15-second skip by default while the Apple TV’s control system is even better. You can use the touch pad to scroll through videos — and it’s glorious! It’s so much fun and thumbnails make it relatively easy to home in on the part you want.

The DVR enables you to fast-forward and rewind, while Apple TV enables you to scrub through the timeline.

Sarah Tew/CNET

In the past, when a show appeared in a network’s on-demand library, it would automatically replace the version in your cloud DVR. That means you’d lose the ability to fast-forward through commercials. YouTube TV says it got rid of that restriction in October 2018, but some CNET readers have complained that it still occurs at times. Additionally, YouTube TV’s DVR is not truly unlimited. The shows expire after nine months, but this is still a lot longer than the 30 days you get with most rivals.

YouTube TV won’t save you as much money

At $50 YouTube TV was very attractive, but as the service has added more channels it also added further costs. When you add that $65 monthly fee to the $50 you’re already paying for internet, it means you’re paying over $110 a month. Many cable TV providers will give you a TV-and-internet bundle for around the same money.

Prices vary a lot, of course, and with cable you probably have to pay rental equipment fees, taxes and other extras. And cable providers usually reserve the best bundle pricing for people who sign a contract. The same goes for new “streaming” offerings such as AT&T TV and Comcast’s Infinity Flex.

Like Hulu with Live TV, Sling TV and others, YouTube TV is contract-free, so you can cancel at any time. Streaming services also have other advantages over cable. They’re easier to watch on phones and tablets, for example. At $65 per month, however, you’ll have to be coming from a relatively expensive cable bill to realize substantial savings with YouTube TV. In the meantime, give Hulu Plus Live TV a try.

The service comes with a comprehensive program guide.

Sarah Tew/CNET

Should you get YouTube TV?

If price is no object, YouTube TV is my favorite live streaming service, but the value proposition will be tough for a lot of people. If you don’t want to be beholden to a traditional cable company — and can get a good broadband-only internet package on the cheap — it’s Hulu Plus Live TV that offers the most compelling package right now. It has an improved interface (finally) and a good mix of channels for $10 less a month. For serious cord cutters on a budget, however, Sling TV is a better bet, especially when paired with an antenna or even AirTV 2.

Channel lineups compared

Channel Hulu with Live TV ($55) AT&T TV Now ($55) Fubo TV ($60) YouTube TV ($65) Total no of top channels: 59 45 68 75 ABC Yes Yes Yes Yes CBS Yes Yes Yes Yes Fox Yes Yes Yes Yes NBC Yes Yes Yes Yes PBS No No No Yes CW Yes Yes Yes Yes MyNetworkTV Yes Yes Yes Yes A&E Yes $ Yes No ACC Network Yes No Yes Yes AMC No $ Yes Yes Animal Planet Yes $ Yes Yes BBC America No $ Yes Yes BBC World News No $ $ Yes BET No Yes Yes Yes Big Ten Network Yes $ Yes Yes Bloomberg TV No $ No No Boomerang Yes Yes No No Bravo Yes Yes Yes Yes Cartoon Network Yes Yes No Yes CBS Sports Network Yes $ Yes Yes Cheddar Yes Yes Yes Yes Cinemax $ $ No $ CMT No $ Yes Yes CNBC Yes Yes Yes Yes Appradab Yes Yes No Yes Comedy Central No Yes Yes Yes Cooking Channel $ $ $ No Destination America $ $ $ No Discovery Channel Yes $ Yes Yes Disney Channel Yes Yes Yes Yes Disney Junior Yes Yes Yes Yes Disney XD Yes Yes Yes Yes DIY $ $ $ No E! Yes Yes Yes Yes EPIX No $ No $ ESPN Yes Yes Yes Yes ESPN 2 Yes Yes Yes Yes ESPNEWS Yes $ Yes Yes ESPNU Yes $ $ Yes Food Network Yes $ Yes Yes Fox Business Yes Yes Yes Yes Fox News Yes Yes Yes Yes Fox Sports 1 Yes Yes Yes Yes Fox Sports 2 Yes $ Yes Yes Freeform Yes Yes Yes Yes FX Yes Yes Yes Yes FX Movies Yes Yes $ Yes FXX Yes Yes Yes Yes FYI $ $ Yes No Golf Channel Yes $ Yes Yes Hallmark No Yes Yes No HBO $ $ No $ HGTV Yes $ Yes Yes History Yes $ Yes No HLN Yes Yes No Yes IFC No $ Yes Yes Investigation Discovery Yes $ Yes Yes Lifetime Yes $ Yes No Lifetime Movie Network $ $ Yes No MLB Network No $ No Yes Motor Trend Yes $ Yes Yes MSNBC Yes Yes Yes Yes MTV No Yes Yes Yes MTV2 No $ $ No National Geographic Yes Yes Yes Yes Nat Geo Wild Yes Yes $ Yes NBA TV No $ $ Yes NBC Sports Network Yes Yes Yes Yes Newsy No No $ Yes NFL Network No No Yes No NFL Red Zone No No $ No NHL Network No $ $ No Nickelodeon No Yes Yes Yes Nick Jr. No Yes Yes No Nicktoons No $ $ No OWN No $ Yes Yes Oxygen Yes Yes Yes Yes Paramount Network No $ Yes Yes Science $ $ $ No SEC Network Yes $ $ Yes Showtime $ $ $ $ Smithsonian Yes No Yes Yes Starz $ $ No $ Sundance TV No $ Yes Yes Syfy Yes Yes Yes Yes Tastemade No $ Yes Yes TBS Yes Yes No Yes TCM Yes Yes No Yes Telemundo Yes Yes Yes Yes Tennis Channel No $ $ Yes TLC Yes $ Yes Yes TNT Yes Yes No Yes Travel Channel Yes $ Yes Yes TruTV Yes Yes No Yes TV Land No $ Yes Yes USA Network Yes Yes Yes Yes VH1 No Yes Yes Yes Viceland Yes $ Yes No Weather Channel No $ Yes No WE tv No $ Yes Yes

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muthur9000 · 7 years

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Ridley Scott’s quotes

RIDLEY'S ORIGINAL IDEAS FOR A SEQUEL “It certainly should explain what the Alien is and where it comes from…That will be tough because it will require dealing with other planets, worlds, civilizations…The Alien may be one of the last descendants of some long-lost self-destructed group of beings…in many respects it’ll be more interesting [than the first movie], from a pure science-fiction stand point. We’d get into speculative areas, deal with two civilizations.” “There were no speculative scenes or discussions about what the Alien was and all that sort of thing either. I believe that audiences love those, especially if they’re well done. They give the threat much more weight…" “I was amazed that no one asked me about this mysterious element of the film, but if you would have asked me in 1978, I would have gladly explained that, in my mind, all this alien ship could be was a battleship...they missed one of the biggest questions of all, which is: who’s the big guy? Who’s flying the ship, basically? And where are they going? And with what? Why that cargo?”

RIDLEY'S ORIGINAL IDEAS FOR A PREQUEL "All I was doing was turning the chapter and opening the door, because why would that creature have a cargo like that? What was his intention? I used to blindly call it a battleship… I was never really happy about the layout of the eggs on the floor, but that's the way it was when we did it at the time, and when we actually built the eggs they were sitting in rows, a bit like pineapples, and it was a specific layout, so clearly this was a hold of some kind for some reason, and so you may as well open it up and tell - well it's that, and it's deadly. Then the biggest question becomes why, and who would conceive of these things, and where were they going? This is a whole new story." ON THE DIFFICULTY OF SCIENCE FICTION FILMS "Being able to say, 'anything goes', that's also very dangerous, because anything goes becomes rubbish if you don't watch it. An therefor you've still got to create your own parameters for a three act play. You have still got to create your own rule book, because otherwise it's like, silly. That's always been my problem with most films, unless they re reality based. To do science fiction at a high level is tricky. History is straightforward because I'm re-telling a story and I've got points of reference. Science fiction, there's no points of reference. It's all brand new." THE 'CREATION' PROLOGUE OF PROMETHEUS "… the sequence at the beginning of the film (Prometheus), that is fundamentally creation. It’s a donation, in the sense that the weight and the construction of the DNA of those aliens is way beyond what we can possibly imagine,” Scott said. Adding that the planet isn’t necessarily Earth, he says, “No, it doesn’t have to be. That could be anywhere. That could be a planet anywhere. All he’s doing is acting as a gardener in space. And the planting that life, in fact, is the disintegration of himself."

ABOUT THE ENGINEER SHIP DESIGN IN THE PROLOGUE "They tried to say (to me), why wouldn’t they have the croissant (Juggernaut) at the beginning of the movie? I said, well, considering that saucer is probably at least 10 million before this, why the hell wouldn’t they have changed the design of the spaceship." ABOUT THE PROMETHEUS MISSION "They are going somewhere, but the destination is undisclosed, because it is top secret" ABOUT THE ENGINEERS "In a funny kind of way, if you look at the Engineers, they’re tall and elegant … they are dark angels. If you look at [John Milton’s] Paradise Lost, the guys who have the best time in the story are the dark angels, not God." "…they’re such aggressive f**kers … and who wouldn’t describe them that way, considering their brilliance in making dreadful devices and weapons that would make our chemical warfare look ridiculous? So I always had it in there that the God-like creature that you will see actually is not so nice, and is certainly not God." Hall of heads (in Prometheus) is a rounded, earthy room. Scott told us the faces might be those of apostles, wise men — a superior people, while production designer Chris Seagers revealed that the heads were meant to give a sense of history and gravity to the sacred place… a place where the Engineers stored their information. "…Covenant gets us a step closer to who and why was this thing designed to make human beings. And if you think it’s them,” Scott said, gesturing to the monolithic figures of the Engineers surrounding us (hall of heads), “you’re dead wrong.”

WHY WERE THE LONGER SCENES CUT IN PROMETHEUS? "I think what's good about it is that we tell enough, but not too much…there were longer scenes, and I think fundamentally when you go in too deep, and the running time, well not necessarily the running time…you have got one hour introducing elements and everything, this and that, before significant physically kicks in, so I thought that's enough. In the original Alien there was 47 minutes before John Hurt looks into the egg…and then it kicks off and starts its own engine. There was about an hour on this one and I thought that was time enough."

WHAT WAS THE PURPOSE OF THE LV-223 INSTALLATION "In the story we confront one of these characters who is called an Engineer, who is of a race, that if we do a sequel to this prequel, we’ll find out who this race was and where they are. Because they are not of this planet, where we are right now (LV-223), and we will find out during the story, that actually this moon…I always parallel it to, I believe, the British in the second World War developed anthrax. All their experimentations went on in this place in - I believe in the Irish channel - which is like any old power station which is an atomic nuclear reactor, which is locked up for the next 500-600 years because you can’t cleans anything of anthrax. So I always think of and refer to it (LV-223) as the Anthrax Island of this race called the Engineers" WHY THE ENGINEERS WANTED TO WIPE OUT HUMANITY AND START OVER "…if you look at it as an “our children are misbehaving down there” scenario, there are moments where it looks like we’ve gone out of control, running around with armor and skirts, which of course would be the Roman Empire. And they were given a long run. A thousand years before their disintegration actually started to happen. And you can say, “Lets’ send down one more of our emissaries to see if he can stop it. Guess what? They crucified him."

"If the planet went wrong, they would want to wipe it clean. But that could take 500 years. When they revisit – because different visitors would come back and see we’re not doing so well – they would look at these human beings that are jerks, that are killing the planet, killing themselves, can’t settle down, they’re like a bunch of children. We should wipe it clean…We will drop some of that stuff and wipe it clean. It could come in the form of a plague. In effect, the thing that is dropped is a plague. It kills everything beneath it, but it is insidious and spreads everywhere. It will take about a year, and you have got nothing left except flora. No fauna. The meat is gone."

WHY DAVID WIPED OUT THE ENGINEERS IN COVENANT "Remember, an Engineer tore his head off. So the Engineer has proven to be an enemy of him (David), and whilst he stood there in wonder at the Engineer when he initially saw him, Peter Weyland over stepped the mark. His request was simply about mortality…the Engineer was kind of disgusted by that, because that was a question beneath his species. And so he killed Peter Weyland, and in effect killed David as well. So David comes back from that clearly not liking the Engineers."

"...That's why he drops it on their city, because he hates them. He has no respect for Engineers and no respect for human beings."

THOUGHTS ON SHAW "When you are philosophizing about the reasons for life, faith, God, it's always tricky because you don't want to get into long dissertations. And the trick of filming, which is so wonderful about film, is you can actually have a conversation between a father and her daughter, and she says 'how do you know it's beautiful?', and he says 'because it's what I believe Elle, what do you believe?'. And she looks over to this guy who's in her cyber sleep that shouldn't be there, and then you are off and running. So now you know that this is a person who has faith in the hereafter and certainly faith in her maker. She believes in God."

THOUGHTS ON DAVID "The predecessor of Ash is David"

"In this one the idea to have David was not just useful, it was essential. Don't hide the fact that he is a, don't make him a revelation. Robots aren't a revelation anymore. Better to say, that's a really strange film, what the f**k is he? Weyland says he's my favorite son, but he has no soul, but he will have endless life. So in a very matter of fact way, we are talking about a creation…"

"..if it's completely cyber, how deep can that relationship go…can the cyber thing have feeling for you? We don't know, because it depends how sophisticated it is, and it also depends on how well you treat them. So you are re-polishing the whole notion of artificial creation, and that can become a serious relationship."

"There is a lot of good information where he talks about creation. Idle hands are the devil's work. Come look at my success. So gradually you are aware - Oh my God, he designed this muther f**ker - rather than it came from the Engineers. It came from him, but he needed to use their black, deadly cleansing lotion (laughter)"

THOUGHTS ON WALTER "David was so successful that Peter Weyland made quite a few. Then Walter was part of that process, he was a follow through which you learned through the movie, except there were various governors on him. He had an emotional governor and never hurt a human being. So he could turn on David in like a heartbeat, as one creature to another and have them go at each other, but he would never attack another human being."

ON THE DAVID/WALTER SWITCH "You knew Walter was David fairly early…That's why I had him go there and turn and look around (when David appears in Walter's clothes after the fight at the edge of the plaza, he turns and looks back with a strange look on his face)…in that moment, AI or not, I am a very logical person. So I'm thinking, wait a minute, you mean he cut his hand off, changed his clothes, cut his face open before going out there? So I was thinking, if I just do it, it'll fly by, because I think you are sandwiched between so much reason to get out of there, and then the appearance of the alien, it will get forgotten. So that's sometimes where you cheat, as a playwright. So it's about 20 minutes that I cheated with…if you only found out (it was David) when he was tucking her in (Daniels), you have not enjoyed the possibility that something is wrong."

ABOUT THE ULTRAMORPH (deacon) "(in Prometheus) I left the xenomorph out, and tried to evolve int the first step of how it begins again, with that deacon (the ultramorph), and that's the precursor to what happens." "It is a precursor to what was designed as the Alien (Giger)"

ABOUT THE NEOMORPH "You get an unarmored - Alien was always a hard shell. Think about a cockroach. A cockroach is kind of beautiful when you examine one. Any insect is beautiful. So the alien was a beautiful insect with a hard shell. So that means its armored to a certain extent. But the Neomorph is soft, a little bit like us humans. We're pretty weak actually. If I prick you, you'll bleed and go 'oh my God' and you could die. So were not very strong. So the Neomorph is a bit more vulnerable but its an evolution from human DNA."

HOW SHAW FIGURED INTO DAVID'S EXPERIMENTS She was integral to what David carried out later (breeding the xenomorph)." ABOUT PROMETHEUS 2 "There were questions that remained unanswered: Where did the ship come from? Who was the pilot? What was his cargo? And why does human DNA play such an important role for the alien? Not to answer that, I thought was crazy. The first step to unlock those secrets was then Prometheus."

"In the story we confront one of these characters who is called an Engineer, who is of a race, that if we do a sequel to this prequel, we’ll find out who this race was and where they are. Because they are not of this planet, where we are right now (LV-223)"

“Yes, but it (link to LV426 and Alien) won’t be in the next one. It will be in the one after this one or maybe even a fourth film before we get back into the ‘Alien’ franchise… The whole point of it is to explain the Alien franchise and to explain the how and why of the creation of the alien itself. I always thought of the alien as kind of a piece of bacterial warfare. I always thought that that original ship (Juggernaut), which I call the croissant, was a battleship, holding these biomechanoid creatures that were all about destruction."

"I think what's good about it is that we tell enough, but not too much...You don't want to elaborate any more than that. And then they are off and running. It's topped by a terrific moment, when she says 'do you mind', and she puts his head in the bag. She's never going to put his head on top of that body, because when she does he will become deadly again…it ends with 'I'm still searching'. You don't ask, how's she going to live? She isn't going to sleep? What's she going to feed on, what's she going to drink? You can get into all that, but then it becomes Robinson Crusoe, and that's another film." "I’d love to explore where the hell [Dr. Shaw] goes next and what does she do when she gets there, because if it is paradise, paradise can not be what you think it is. Paradise has a connotation of being extremely sinister and ominous." "So I’m now going to the next one (Paradise), which is the next evolution directly connected with the first one, which was…Shaw, when she repaired Michael Fassbender (who was) in two pieces, and we’ll kind of pick it up there and it will evolve."

“The beast is done. Cooked. I got lucky meeting Giger all those years ago. It’s very hard to repeat that. I just happen to be the one who forced it through because [the studio] said it’s obscene. They didn’t want to do it and I said, ‘I want to do it, it’s fantastic. But after four [Alien films], I think it wears out a little bit. There’s only so much snarling you can do. I think you’ve got to come back with something more interesting. And I think we’ve found the next step. I thought the Engineers were quite a good start.” Scott said viewers could expect to see Prometheus 2 follow Noomi Rapace’s Elisabeth Shaw and Michael Fassbender’s decapitated android David in their mission to find the Engineers’ home world and find out why the human-like creatures want to destroy mankind. “[We’ll] find out how he gets his head back on,” he joked, adding that several drafts of the screenplay had been written.

"It starts off with a very grand idea—or a grand question, really. Who are they and why did they create such evil biology and bacteriology? And [in creating], to protect themselves from what? So the questions are answered there, or rather, beginning to be answered in Prometheus 2."

"…You can't have a person go off into the galaxy, and have a person who's still got his head off. Once that head goes back on, he's really dangerous, but he's also very seductive. So maybe he will persuade her to help him put the head back on."

"With Prometheus 2 what I'm trying to do is reintroduce a fresher form of alien in the third act."

ABOUT THE CHANGE IN DIRECTION BY BRINGING THE XENOMORPH BACK IN COVENANT "…Because everyone said I missed the Alien. I said, really? And I said, OKaaayy (rolling his eyes). So I came back on…its actually 5 steps, you see 5 steps (5 stages of the alien). Pretty nasty." "..comments were, that actually they missed him (the xenomorph)…they missed the evolution…so I thought we had better include it and try it out, so this (Covenant) is the trail run"

"It went straight up there, and we discovered from it that [the fans] were really frustrated. They wanted to see more of the original [monster] and I thought he was definitely cooked, with an orange in his mouth. So I thought: ‘Wow, OK, I’m wrong’. The fans, in a funny kind of way – they’re not the final word – but they are the reflection of your doubts about something ... and then you realize ‘I was wrong’ or ‘I was right’. I think that’s where it comes in. I think you’re not sensible if you don’t actually take [the fans’ reaction] into account."

“Years ago, I kept mulling over what Alien 2 could be. I was fiddling around with some ideas. I was always fascinated with why this thing [the xenomorph] would be made, by whom, and for what purpose? ...I think I have to go again. We will see who made it (the xenomorph), and why. That’s what’s interesting.”

The planet it (the xenomorph) was on – and I was looking at the dark side of the moon – would be called Paradise. Paradise is a very ominous word…In a way it is Prometheus 2. It’s exactly the same story. But it was always in the works to be called that [Alien: Paradise Lost]. Is Prometheus actually taking us off course from where I’m going, which is actually backing into the first Alien... I’ve even got connections with Ripley [in this], but I’m not telling you what.

ABOUT ALIEN: COVENANT AND THE FUTURE MOVIES

"I don’t know. [I’ll make] maybe two more [films], or maybe one more, I don’t know…" "..comments were, that actually they missed him (the xenomorph)…they missed the evolution…so I though we had better includes it and try it out, so this (Covenant) is the trail run" "If this [Covenant] is successful, and then the next one, and then there will definitely be three more." "There will be another one before we kind of literally and logically, clockwise, back into the rear back head of [the original] Alien…It will go Prometheus, Awakening, Covenant.. fairly integral where this colonization ship is on the way...." "There will be three or four different players coming in to investigate, one of which will be the Engineers arriving back to find their planet decimated…Those ships (Juggernauts) come and go on regular intervals. I see them as the gardeners of space…where we go next is obvious. Were gonna actually go to the planet... "When that’s finished there’ll be another one and then another one, which will gradually drive into the back entrance of the film in 1979. So in other words, why was this space jockey there and why did he have an Alien inside him? And those questions will be answered.”

"We are heading towards the back end of the first Alien, so that may be feasible (bringing a young Ripley in). I don't think it will…Ripley is going to be "somebody's" daughter, obviously…We are coming in from the back end, right? And you know the time constraints, of …what is the time between this film, where we leave David going off into tending for that colony. I think we are probably two films out from even considering her." "…we can come in at the back end of the first Alien. But what I think we've unearthed is a much larger, bigger universe and story, so I think it will be some time before we ever reach the backend of the first Alien. It's still evolving now. I'm already having another one written right now, let's call it Covenant 2. That's with John Logan and we've already got the three act plan on where it's going to go and where it's going to connect, but it's evolving and getting bigger all the time. I don't know where it will end!"

"I always thought the journey would be very much embedded, at least 50% in religion. Security blanket. You can go there next. When I get there, I'm looking at the colonies and what happens, and how it disintegrates…it's being written now, the sequel to Covenant…John (Logan, the writer) is a very good playwright. What I love is he lays out the three acts immediately up front in simple skeleton form. So you are staring at that and that's the point where real discussion and details and starts to get embedded".

"They (colonists) will go there (Origau 6), they will evolve, and they will form a new world." "Whether we bring Daniels back or not in the next one…she has to come back..I'm not sure that's the right thing" "It's about a 10 page thing (Covenant 2) and it's being worked on right now. It will evolve logically into the next place, of course…and after that I'm not telling you…we can bring it back to talk about the creation, inevitably about God, and da, da da, da da…so the (Alien) universe is doing that (makes a flying gesture), and you can go on. I think I have woken up a monster."

"Whether we bring Daniels back or not in the next one…she has to come back..I'm not sure that's the right thing". "we're writing [a sequel] now, as we speak. I'll be filming that within 14 months." "…The alien franchise should be into War of the Worlds by now. That's where I'm going…they (Fox) don't know it yet, but that's what were doing, Fox." ABOUT THE DERELICT JUGGERNAUT IN ALIEN

"It's a vehicle. It doesn't look like it crashed. It looked like it may have had a forced landing, but it landed. And why did it land, and why was the pilot damaged? Because something had gotten loose in the cargo, and had evolved, and taken him out. And so, what could that be?…Had he set up a distress signal that we in our 21st century electronics had caught technology that was a million years old."

"…he’s (the space jockey) one of the group that had gone off and his cargo had gotten out of control…because he was heading somewhere else and it got out of control…and actually he had died in the process, so that would be the story there. That ship happened to be a brother to the ship that you see that comes out of the ground at the end (of Prometheus). They are roughly of the same period give or take a couple hundred years, right? Other than that, there’s no real link except it explains, I think, who may have had these capabilities, which are dreadful weapons way beyond anything we could possibly conceive, bacteriological drums of shit that you can drop on a planet." "In the original, it was a biomechanical weapon. I imagined it to be on board a war ship that had to leave its course and had to land. Perhaps it crashed because one of the aliens had escaped. The weapon was then sleeping at the crash site, waiting for someone to pass."

“I wanted a fossil, almost,” said Scott regarding the Space Jockey’s integration with his technology, “one which you’d have a hard time deciding where he leaves off and the chair, on which he died, begins.” “I always wanted to go back and make an Alien 5 or 6, where we find out where they came from and go there and answer the question, who are they? Mars is too close, so they can’t be gods of war, but the theory in my head was, this was an aircraft carrier, a battlewagon of a civilisation, and the eggs were a cargo which were essentially weapons. So right, like a large form of bacteriological/biomechanoid warfare.” “This Space Jockey I’ve always thought was the driver of the craft...[He is] a perfect example of Giger’s mind, which is ‘where does biology end and technology begin?’ because [Giger] seems to have grafted the creature into what was essentially a pilot’s seat. But clearly from here, this is where the [warning] transmission would emanate from, probably in an automatic transmission… maybe one of the eggs had been disturbed and a creature had got out, had attacked the rest of the crew, don’t ask me where they got to, but he’s pretty gruesome…” DID THE COMPANY KNOW ABOUT THE ALIEN EGGS IN THE DERELICT JUGGERNAUT? “I think any corporation that sends probes into unknown territory is going to think of the possibility of finding something new,” he said. “I’m sure that the crew members on all its ships would have been briefed to bring back anything of interest. It would be part of one’s job to bring it back. An alien, of course, would be of top priority. This particular corporation didn’t have a preconceived notion that an alien would be found on this mission, much less the particular Alien that is brought onto the ship. The idea of bringing it back alive would not have been on the minds of the corporate executives when they first received the alien transmission. They just had high expectations when they ordered the Nostromo to investigate – it was purely out of curiosity.”

THOUGHTS ON THE ALIEN

"Loose on the ship, this new alien begins to lay eggs in the bowels of the ship. It lives to propagate and must find food for its offspring - in this ace the crew of the Nostromo upon who the young aliens can feed their eggs until a new host comes along and prods the eggs. Then the cycle begins all over again." "What gave us the cocoon concept was that insects will utilize other's bodies to be hosts of their eggs. That's how the alien would use Dallas and each of the crew members it kills. This explains why the alien kills them one by one. It wants to use each person as a separate host each time it has new eggs…The biological make up of humans was useful, however, for the alien eggs to feed on…"Omni: Screen Flights, Screen Fantasies. “Like a butterfly or an insect, it [the Alien] has a very limited lifespan in which to reproduce itself … [it] only has a limited life cycle of, maybe, four days like an insect … the Alien lifeform lived to reproduce … [Ripley] killed it, but it would have died soon anyway.”

THOUGHTS ON THE EGG-MORPH SCENE IN ALIEN “What gave us the cocoon concept was that insects utilize others’ bodies to be the hosts of their eggs,” Ridley said in 1984. “That’s how the Alien would use Dallas and each of the crew members it kills. This explains why the Alien doesn’t kill everybody at once, but rather kills them off one by one: it wants to use each person as a separate host each time it has new eggs.” "Loose on this ship, this new alien, begins to lay eggs in the bowels of the ship. It lives to propagate and must find food for it's offspring - in this case, the crew members of the Nostromo, upon whom the young aliens can feed in their eggs until a new host comes along prodding the eggs. The life cycle begins all over again" "The scene which was cut was one in which one of the crew discovers the bodies of one of the others being used as food. It was just too gruesome."

"They are morphing, metamorphosing…they are changing into, being consumed, I guess, by whatever the alien organism is, into an egg." THOUGHTS ON ASH Ash was programmed with a human ‘back-story’, though he was well aware of his artificial nature: “That was a consideration I had to deal with. There are a number of ways of approaching it, but the possibilities come down to either letting him know or programming him so he thinks he’s human. All the space in between was open, but we went with letting him know. If we had decided to keep it from him, there were all kinds of things we could have done, from programming him to know at a certain point, like an emergency, or even putting a complete memory in him that would give him a complete background – parents, schooling, brothers, the whole thing.” “We theorized that the Alien would feel or understand that Ash was a construction of robotics, however complex and strange, Because Ash wasn’t human, he’d have been no use as a host for its eggs.”

"It all start with 2001…HAL was one of the most genius ideas of Kubrick, where the machine takes over. Then I had to do a film called Alien, and in there we had a great idea of having any corporate vehicle or vessel of such magnitude and cost, would have to have a company man on board. Better if the company man is an AI, and nobody on board knows who the AI is. It's always kept a secret. Because everyone looks human, no one knows…Ash is in fact the after runner of David and Walter."

THOUGHTS ON THE NOSTROMO CREW “I guess if you spend a lot of time together in space the camaraderie will gradually disappear, and each person will become isolated with their own thoughts and their memories of where they’ve been and where they’re going to. And therefore, all of the characters are designed as not really being comrades. There’s a kind of cold relationship amongst all of them.” “I think the crew members of the Nostromo seem spirited only because of their argumentative nature, which is due to the fact that they probably can no longer stand the sight of each other. It wouldn’t matter how it was all worked out in the pre-voyage stage, where a computer probably determined the compatability of the unit; like all crews in confined spaces, they’d get on one another’s nerves and would be cutting each other’s throats in six months’ time. I tried to glean as much as I could from present-day astronauts who go through preparing for prolonged periods in space. I then factored in ten years in space and tried to envision how a character would react to going off for that kind of period. Obviously it would raise all sorts of psychological problems above and beyond claustrophobia and melancholia.” “I loved the minimal dialogue, the minimalist characterisation – what do you need to know? Once this thing is loose, I don’t want to have scenes talking about mum and dad back on the planet.” "you can’t afford to have love affairs in deep space. If you do, you immediately have two groups aboard. The pair who are in love and the rest of the crew. That’s the beginning of problems unless you are a space pioneer and settle down with your family.” "There was a line through the movie which had a … more by innuendo than anything else, that there was something going on between Dallas and she [Ripley]. And then later, I thought what was really curious was -could be interesting- there was something going on between her and Veronica, which I thought was far more probable. I mean a hundred years from now, you know, that’s certainly not gonna be remarkable in space. In fact, in space relationships are probably gonna be discouraged, and if you have the need for sex, it can be with either gender. Really doesn’t matter, right?”

“Veronica was always great at barely controlled terror. Catatonic terror. She’s always like, two steps from a heart attack, which I think she finally does at the end – have a heart attack.” "I wanted Lambert to get sucked out of the ship through an opening about the size of a keyhole. Not a very heroic ending – but dramatic. We couldn’t afford it, besides, I couldn’t work out in those days how to squeeze a body through a hole that big.” ON THE AGE OF THE NOSTROMO "Speaking of the Nostromo’s technology, Ridley Scott said in 1979 that “the machine that they’re on could in fact be 60 years old and just added to over the decades. The metal-work on it could be 50 years old.” That means it is much older than the Prometheus and Covenant.

ABOUT QUESTIONS NOT DIRECTLY ANSWERED “The clues are there right through (in Prometheus). I do hope they don’t write essays about this in thirty years time. I’d rather they got it now. It’s all there if you are looking. It’s quite subtle.” ON CRITICISM OF HIS FILMS "I don't make films for other people. I make films for me. And so far its pretty good, because I'm still here after 35 years. So there's a great expression, 'f**k you very much'."

ABOUT FILM SUCCESS AND PROFIT "The global world market place is changing…entertainment looks attractive when you read about the few films that makes these insane amount of money, but what they (investors) don't know is that they don't always do that. There's a level going about it on the business side, and that's not necessarily the box office. If it does fine in the box office, that's OK. But - it will play for years on television, reissuing DVDs…and so on, and so on. So there is an industry just in that…a lot of the revenue comes in from that over the years…The important thing to do is make it."

#Ridley Scott Quotes #Alien #alien covenant #alien: covenant #prometheus #nostromo #covenant #david 8 #david8 #walter #elizabeth shaw #daniels

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you-got-a-crush · 7 years

Text

Pick Pocket

✨I’M BACK! Hi guys summer is here and I am so happy to finally have some free time on my hands to write more, and I’m so excited! Keep sending requests and asks because I’m here to answer whatever you throw at me, and since I’ve been gaining even MORE followers ((wow wth 500?? I’m still in awe from just the first 10)) I’ve been thinking about doing a face reveal? Tell me if you think that’s a good idea or not cuz I love hearing all of your feedback! Without further ado, here’s the first imagine of the summer!✨

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

It was late, and darker than what you had originally planned. Even so, you tried to shake off the uneasy pit growing in your stomach and continued to walk as confidently as you could out of your school and back to your house. Originally, the study session was only supposed to last a few hours after school, which yeah I guess it did only last until 6:30, but the winter sky made the sun creep towards the horizon faster than when these study sessions first started. Nonetheless you hitched your backpack further up your shoulder and decided that it’d be better to spend as little time outside as possible from the growing chill in the air. Of course you remembered all of the books and movies and stories on TV about bad things coming from taking the short way and going through the rough part of town or the busy city alleyways, but this area wasn’t that bad, and those sorts of things don’t happen to people like you, who has always had about average grades, average experiences, average looks, average life basically. You’ve taken this route before, many times actually, so this should be easy-peasy, and faster than usual so you’d be able to get home just in time to call Y/F/N to ask about whether she got any further with the guy she’s been seeing lately. Walking a bit faster down the busy streets back to your house and farther from the safety of school you were met with the flow of traffic and people making their way home from a day of work, most seeming friendly enough. But just making sure that nobody were to give you a weird look and kidnap you, you decided that keeping your head down was the best option, at least for now. Occasionally you’d look up to check signs and lights to see whether you were going the right way but other than that the bright lights and faces of the people went by in a blur, almost so fast that you didn’t notice the person coming towards you looking behind their shoulder, and ramming themselves into you. Hard. You stop almost in your tracks nearly falling over, brushing your hair that flew into your face, and look up only to come face to face with Y/C/N, “Hey, watch it… oh sorry Y/C/N, I didn’t-” He quickly weaved his hand into yours, cutting you off, “I’ve been looking everywhere for you Y/N! Where have you been?” You tried to hide the slight blush that crept across your face and ears and fumbled around with an answer. Your eyebrows knitted together in confusion at this sudden warmth from the person who’s never uttered a word to you except to ask for a mere pencil on time in middle school. You never really talked to him because he was known to get into trouble, which I guess could be sorta hot at times, but you’ve heard your fair share of stories about him getting expelled and yelled at by teachers to know to keep your distance, no matter how popular he was. He must have sensed your confusion as he led you in the other direction, leaning down closer to your ear he lowly muttered, “Follow me, and don’t ask any questions - there’s no time.” His breath grazed your face and sent shivers down your spine in the already chilly air, “I-I’m so confused wha-.” "Were you even listening to what I said? God out of all people…” He trailed off, running his free hand through his hair and checking behind the both of you anxiously. While questions and emotions were running through your head faster than Usain Bolt, he suddenly caught you off guard by randomly shoving you both into an empty alleyway. He pushed you down behind a dumpster and sat down next to you abruptly. In the darkness could only barely make out his silhouette, but it was hard to imagine this boy who usually had a cheesy smile stretched to his ears laughing and back talking to teachers be here, sitting next to you with lines creasing his forehead and hunched shoulders looking nervous and tense. "There’s no time to explain the whole situation, but long story short, I may have done a bad job at pickpocketing, which surprisingly, pisses some people off when they find your hand down their pants searching for their wallet,” he laughed dryly, looking around the dumpster to the street, “Yeah I guess pops didn’t do a very good job of teaching me how to get out of this sort of situation, so I guess we’ll just have to figure this out for ourselves,” Anger flashed across your face, “Wait, wait, wait, hold on for one second, what’s this ‘we’ stuff? What do you need me for?” He glanced quickly at you, only to return to scan the alleyway, “Cover? Accomplice? I dunno, maybe if they saw me with someone else they would be less likely to suspect me? At this point I have no idea.” "This sounds like a you problem,” C/N turned slightly more toward you, still scouring the entrance of the alleyway, “Well now it’s both our problems, so just chill and let me think.” You paused, considering the pros and cons of asking, but asked anyway, "What I don’t understand is your need to pickpocket innocent people,” you said with more confidence, making him stare you straight in the eyes for the first time since he grabbed your hand, “No wonder that guy is mad as hell, I’d be too if something like that happened to me!” He smirked slightly but you felt a change of tone in his voice, somehow turning even colder than before, “Who are you, my mom?” "But it’s wrong! And illegal! And dangerous!” "I can do whatever I want okay, the sooner you shut up the sooner we can get out of… this whole thing.” You thought back to when you once were talking with your friends about him and you had imagined what it’d be like talking to C/N outside of school, with just the two of you together. Usually it involved him laughing at all of your jokes and you using your amazing flirting skills to win over his heart, but definitely not whatever this was. Not at all like this actually. A couple of minutes passed, each passing minute feeling like an hour, especially with the newfound thought of hour close the two of you were together. Thankfully, or maybe not so thankfully, he didn’t seem to notice, or care even. Whenever you managed to steal a glance at C/N’s frame, your eyes having adjusted to the darkness, you could feel the wheels turning in his mind. You, of course, with never dealing with anything like this, pulling a blank at what to do. Half of you even thought to just stand up and walk out. Suddenly C/N’s harsh voice snapped your mind back to the situation at hand, “Okay I think have a plan, might not be 100% perfect, but we can improvise along the way.” Before you could even open your mouth to ask what it was, he dove right in before you, “Alrightie so, fun fact, I actually knew that guy, small world right?” He scratched the back of his head nervously and ran his hand through his messy hair, “Anyways, I don’t really have that great of a past with him, since the last time I was running away from him it was because I may or may not have stole from this store that he owns-” "This is pretty bad then,” you stated, cutting him off. "Um yeah no shit Sherlock,” he rolled his eyes but continued to talk as if you never interrupted him, “Well, I know this part of town pretty well so if we lay under the radar by cutting through the alleyways we can get back to my house without leaving an obvious trail and manage to stay out of the way of old man Jenkins back there,” He must have noticed your slightly worried face and quickly added, “Don’t worry I’ll try to get you back to your house, I just need you to be my cover.” "Well my house is back that way,” you began, pointing back by where C/N ran into you, “and how do you know I’ll even trust you?” "One, who wouldn’t trust this lovely face?” He answered, motioning towards his cheeky grin, “And two, you don’t understand my levels of talent, so prepare to be amazed.” He took one last glance to the entrance and quickly stood up, motioning you to follow suit, “Oh and by the way, could you tell me your address?” You reluctantly told him where you lived, and with a quick nod he started to lead you in and out of random alleyways and streets that must have used to be thriving, but now we’re almost deserted. You’d never been on this side of town before so you kept your guard up, darting your eyes over every object and jumping at every noise. Suddenly you heard a sharp noise, like a can being crushed underfoot, "Hey, um, sorry to deter you C/N,” you sheepishly said, tapping on his surprisingly but not not so surprisingly hard back, “but I have this crazy feeling that we’re being followed,” He scoffed and barely took notice, keeping his fast pace as if you hadn’t spoken. You decided to try again after you heard more noises coming from behind, drawing closer, "Hey, me again, I really really feel like someone following us and I think you should probably take some notice to it,” Again, nothing, just a short grunt and a change in direction into a different alleyway. The hair on the back of your neck stood on end, and you felt more afraid than you ever had in your life. You decided to channel that fear into ticked off-ness, “Fine if you don’t care, then don’t care, but if we die it’s your fault,” He huffed loudly in exasperation and turned around, still walking backwards, “As a matter of fact…” He suddenly stopped and you rammed into him for the second time this night, before you could react and yell some more at him, C/N threw you behind him. When you regained your balance and looked up you saw a burly man that looked like he came straight out of a gang. His broad shoulders flexed as he grinned madly and cracked his knuckles. As the shadowy man got closer you whispered to C/N, panic evident in your strained voice, “This is bad,” "You said that already.” He whispered back, not taking his calculating eyes off of the approaching threat. "I thought it was worth repeating.” "Look who we have here?” He spoke as if his words were coated in a thick layer of sickly sweet honey, “Robin Hood and Maid Marian, how sweet.” His voice suddenly laced with a thick layer of ice and you saw his beady eyes glint, “you’ll pay for what you did, I don’t let little shits like you run free, I can’t let you running around stealing more stuff from me, or anyone else,” C/N’s voice quickly piped up, “Robin Hood, never been called that one before, what’s next? Aladdin?” “Don’t be a smart ass boy,” there was a quick flash of silver as his fingers curled over the handle of the knife, “I won’t hesitate to give kids like you a lesson.” "Whatever you do just don’t hurt her,” C/N’s voice came out hard and commanding, you felt his hand grasp yours tight as he pushed you even further behind him, “I stole from you, not her,” "I guess that’ll be my decision to make,” It all happened in slow motion. You watched as the guy who followed the both of you lunge forward with the small knife in hand, C/N pushed you hard and as far away from the guy as he could, making you stumble to the ground with the air taken from your lungs. When you looked up gasping for breath you saw the guy on top of C/N, struggling to wrestle the knife out of C/N’s hand while also inching it closer to C/N’s exposed neck. You with whatever voice you had left you yelled to C/N, and silently urged him to beat the older and much heavier man. "Y/N!” You heard him grunt from where he was on the ground struggling, "Run! Get away!” There was no way you could just leave him, even if it meant not getting badly hurt by this guy, who could definitely take you down if he wanted to. You made a split second decision, and suddenly remembering the backpack still strapped to your back, and the heavy books inside, you shakily stood up. Adrenaline surged through your body, giving you a kick of strength and energy. With the burly man’s back to you, you leapt closer to him swinging your backpack at his balding head. The man looked You grimaced as you heard contact to his skull. The blow was harder than you expected. The man fell backwards and there was a sickening sound from when his back and head fell backwards onto the hard and dirty concrete. The knife clattered to the ground. You did it. Before you could react, your knees buckled under you and the ground suddenly started to sway. You just knocked a man out cold with your freaking backpack. You would’ve laughed if this were a movie, but now all you could feel was numb. Then his eyes met yours, and you felt a feeling of calm rush over you, and with unspoken grace C/N slowly rose and helped you back up. Slowly, with no words spoken, the both of you hobbled the way to your house, thankfully only a short distance away. The tension in the air was thick, and the shock still was settling into your skin. At a snail’s pace C/N led you back to your house. There was only one light left on inside the house, and the only sound was the soft padding of both your feet on your driveway. At the front steps you both stopped, not really knowing what to say. He looked down at his shoes and shoved his hands into his jean pockets, “Hey Y/N, I just want to say, thanks… for what you did back there. I’d have to admit it was… pretty cool,” You didn’t know what to say, so you gave a dry laugh, “Yeah anytime…” There was another long pause, “I feel bad for leaving him just lying there unconscious, we didn’t even check if he was breathing.” He met your gaze, locking his now soft eyes onto yours, “I don’t think he died, I’ve had my fair share of fights, and I know what what, don’t worry,” he surprised you by pushing a strand of hair behind your ear, caressing your face lightly, “now you’re safe and home so you don’t have to worry about me anymore,” "Don’t say that, you say that you’re used to this sort of stuff, but you shouldn’t be,” your mouth moved before your brain could comprehend what you were doing, “You were really brave back there, and I promise I won’t gloat about being right about being followed.” A small smile crept over both of your faces. Another pause as you suddenly remembered that you had told your parents that you’d be home almost immediately from school. You snatched your phone from your backpack to see what looked like millions of missed calls and texts, causing you to grimace. You snapped back to his face when you heard him give a short cough, "By the way, I’m really sorry…” he took a deep breath, moving his hand to your hand, “for everything, the fight, me snapping at you, just… everything.” Again, you felt at a loss for words. You couldn’t just say no it’s alright because in reality it really wasn’t, you couldn’t get the image of the man’s limp body and it smacking hard against the trash ridden ground. Instead you gave him another small smile, hoping that your eyes showed what you were thinking. He inched forward, his other hand grabbing onto your arm, pulling you gently closer. All of the emotions from the night came washing over you, the fear, the nervousness, the anger, the confusion, and now, the sudden urge to seal it all. The sudden feeling that this was fate. You realized that this was the guy that chose you out of all people in the crowd, that yelled at you to run away from the threat of death, the guy that had the perfect answer for every comment. You thought of all of the random times you felt someone in class watching you, only to turn around and see him laughing with his friends. Or the times that you’ve made awkward eye contact in the halls. Or the times where he’ll look like he’s walking towards you, but suddenly backtrack. All those times you just thought that it was him making fun of you, or being mean, or… Now it all made sense. His shining eyes twinkled in the moonlight and echoed your emotions, how did you not know? “How long?” He chuckled and barely spoke above a whisper, “A pretty long time, to be honest,” Your noses were not merely centimeter from each other, “Why not ask?” "You wouldn’t want a rough guy like me, bad grades, bad friends, stealing, barely scraping by…” His eyes went downcast as he trailed off, the twinkle in his eye now gone. Slightly frustrated, you grabbed his shirt collar and broke the distance, your lips locked onto his soft ones. He smelt like cologne and mint and his hair felt so messy and surprisingly soft and his lips were slightly chapped but you didn’t care. You broke the kiss abruptly, noticing the dazed look in his eyes, making him look more like a young boy than the brash and harsh guy that no one ever messed with. “You really shouldn’t make assumptions,” "Oh believe me, now I definitely, won’t,”

#AHHHHH #crush imagine #crush #imagine #bad boy #badboy #I'm so excited!!!!#send requests fam #500 #six

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