#as well as his past history of old school videos

[simplydnp]

I get the sense that Phil just likes to make “”weird”” stuff and has somewhat dialed back his weirdness due to his popularity and age. But I would love to see what an unfiltered 30 year old phil Lester video would look like. What stories does he want to tell? How does he want to tell those stories?

honestly i think phil is really good at playing out whatever his brain is thinking at the time. i think a lot of people struggle with ideas because they'll be seen as too 'weird' or 'strange' or even 'impossible', and what's neat about phil is he either doesn't have those boxes, or he's able to push through them in pursuit of creating the thing to its full potential. people describe him as creative, which he is, but i think it leaves out some of his best attributes as a creator. he's inventive--remember the countless trends and challenges that came from him that have swept the internet? he's fearless--and this doesnt mean that he's not afraid of anything (for phil its probably the opposite actually) but he does things despite the fear, regardless of the unknown. he's a relentless and passionate creator who likes to make things and values seeing them through to the end. but he's not naive either--he and dan have talked about each other being their harshest critics. it's not just that he's an ideas guy, he's a good ideas guy who knows how to make something flourish.

i don't think current phil is sitting in a box waiting for his chance to break free of his popularity. he could've stopped years ago, similar to dan, if he didn't want this. but he likes doing it. he gets to have his choice on which of his ideas turn into projects, without having the stress of Needing a brilliant idea and execution every week. right now i think a lot of his energy is focused on the gaming channel. as he's expressed to us a few times, it was him who really wanted it back, and he's been ready for a long time. dan's even admitted that he's been enjoying it, and i think a lot of that comes down to phil's creative directing. he loves the gaming channel and is so thrilled it's back--his own content has taken a step back in terms of upload regularity, and i genuinely don't think he could be happier about it.

i would love a big phil project, but i honestly don't see him doing a tour of his own unless he brings dan with him, and then why not have it be something they can do together? does that make sense? that seems to be his thought process about things. it's why i've suggested taskmaster cause it's a local thing that wouldn't keep him from home for a long while, but he does get to flex his creativity, intelligence, and humour.

i'm looking forward to anything phil does. his current project seems to be making dan happy and they're both having a lot of fun doing that

#i dont know if i answered your question anon. i think in some ways people play up the 'weird' side to phil bc he plays into it #as well as his past history of old school videos #firstly let me say i love when he's 'weird' #but i think the way i categorize it is less about a line between weird and not weird. and more of like a spectrum of zany #dnp are not mainstream guys. theyre self proclaimed nerds with pride. anything they make is gonna seem a little off Broadway #but it doesnt always feel that way for us #people inside the community #saying he's lost his weirdness/he's putting on a front is a bit. off. for me. especially considering its been 14 years #for most of his 'experimental' content. he's said it himself he was experimenting. i think he learned a lot and had fun #but i dont think its his personality and hes been trapped into this different persona ever since #anyway. i am yapping just like a dannie would so. thank u for your ask! #dnp #c.text #dan and phil #answered

[afictionaladventure16]

Safe & Sound (Tim Bradford x Adopted!Teen!Reader)

The Rookie Masterlist

Summary: While Tim and Lucy are on their first date, Y/N and Tamara face some challenges that ends with the realization that Y/N's past has come back to her new life.

Author's Note: I know Tamara technically doesn't find out that Tim and Lucy are dating until later on but uhhh this is fiction so yee. All requests are open!

Warnings: Mentions of fights and stabbing

Word Count: 4,630

You watched from the distance as your dad tried on different dress shirts in his bedroom. You had seen your father go on many first dates… maybe ‘many’ is an exaggeration, but that was beside the point, the point was that you had never seen him this nervous. He looked like a girl trying to find the right dress for the school dance, you couldn’t help but smile. He was in love. 

You pulled out your phone, sending a quick text to Tamara

 He’s a mess, you sent. 

A few seconds later your phone buzzed in your hands, 

So is she lol. 

You couldn’t help but let out a small chuckle, “What’s so funny?” Your dad asked as he gave you a quick glance. 

You shook your head, “you guys have no idea how nervous you both are.” 

He sighed, “Should I call her?” You gave him a nod. Tim gave you a smile, “First, what do you think?” he raised up a dark grey shirt next to a light gray one. 

You rolled your eyes, “Does it even matter?” 

“What if it clashes with her outfit?” He asked. After the two years you had lived with the man, this was the first time you had heard him say that phrase. 

“I think all that matters is that you both are enjoying the date,” you suggested. 

Tim looked at you with a smile on his face. After Isobel, he felt so lost within himself and somehow he found himself becoming a foster father to a young ten-year-old. It was only a year later that he began the adoption process. It was a long one, especially with the history with Isobel, he had waited a year and a half until the adoption was finalized. It was the best day of his life and he knows that there will be other days in his future that will try to complete, but he will always hold that day close to his heart. It was the day he learned how to be himself again, the day he learned that family didn’t always have to be by blood. 

Now you were fourteen, looking forward to your fifteenth birthday coming up soon. A day that Angela was so busy preparing for because she knew as a Latina that you had to have a quinceanera, and Tim always tried his best to help you grow within your culture. It was one of the main reasons why he learned Spanish. 

He let out a sigh as he reached for his phone, “do you-” 

“If you don’t call her right now, I will call her myself, but I will video call her so she can see-” 

“Alright, alright!” Tim chuckled as he dialed Lucy’s number. 

You walked out of the room, sending Tamara another text. 

I’m assuming you’re coming over with pizza? You sent. 

You know me too well. 

Ever since you met Tamara, she has been like an older sister. Maybe it was because the two of you were in the system and bonded over the traumatic shit both went through. Or because you both lived with cops that took you in and, although Chen is technically just her roommate, they were now your family. 

Tim walked out of his room minutes later, “Alright, I am just a phone call away. Don’t forget to let Kojo out and please tell Tamara I said hi. Um- Am I forgetting anything?” He asked as he began patting his pants pockets. 

“Keys and they’re in the key bowl by the door,” you stated as you scrolled through Netflix, Tim walked over to the key bowl, rolling his eyes as he grabbed his keys, “Bold of you to assume Tamara is coming over.” 

“Is she not?” He asked. 

“No, she is,” you smiled. 

“That’s what I thought,” he sighed, “Don’t open the door for anyone but Tamara. You know the drill, make sure it’s her before you even op-” 

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, Can you go already so we can get this whole Lucy and Tim being continuously nervous over with?” 

Tim took in a small breath, he couldn’t help but catch that you had called him by his first name. It had been two years already and you were still calling him Tim. Of course, he didn’t know how to tell you that calling him dad was okay with him and he didn’t want you to feel pressured to do so; but just hearing it would mean everything to him. 

He gave you a small nod, “Call me if anything, alright? And make sure to turn on the alarm when I leave.” 

“Yes, sir,” you watched as he walked out of the house, you waited for the sound of the lock before turning back around to continue your scrolling. 

Twenty minutes later, you heard the doorbell ring, which was then followed by a phone call. 

You quickly answered, “I assume you’re outside,” you said as you got up from the couch. 

“Your assumptions are correct,” Tamara said. You opened the door to let Tamara in. She had been carrying a bag, of what you assumed is junk food, along with a box of pizza. “Alright, so I found this new candy that you just have to try!” 

You locked the door behind Tamara, “Alright, but first I need a slice of pizza because I am starving!” You followed Tamara as she walked into the kitchen to put down the box of pizza. You instantly opened it and grabbed a slice, “I can’t believe I watched Tim go through every single nice shirt in his closet like he didn’t even do that on his first date with Asley!” 

“Oh, you think that’s bad? Lucy’s whole closet is now on her bed,” Tamara commented as she unpacked the bag of junk food. “Do you guys have sodas?” 

“Yeah, in the fridge,” you gestured towards the fridge. Tamara helped herself, as she always does when she comes over, and she came over quite a bit. “Why do you call your dad by your first name?” Tamara blurted out. 

You shrugged, “I dunno, I guess… I guess I just feel like I am not allowed to call him dad.” 

“But he adopted you” 

“Yeah, but… I don’t know. I’ve wanted to, I just feel like I lost the moment to do so since it’s been two years since the adoption.” Tamara opened the box for a slice of pizza, “Has he talked to you about it? Or Lucy?” 

Tamara looked down, “I know Lucy’s mentioned it. Something about he feels like he’s doing something wrong.” 

You sighed, “What do you think?” 

“I’m the last person you want to ask that.” You gave her a pleading look, and she let out a sigh, “Look, if it were me, the timing wouldn’t matter. He gave you a family, a home, he made you feel loved after everything you had been through in life… in a way, he gave you a second chance that not a lot of us get.” 

She was right and you knew that. It had meant a lot coming from Tamara since she never got the opportunity to get this chance. She would argue that she did when Lucy took her in, but in a way it was different. 

“Should I just do it randomly? Like just ‘Good morning, dad,’ just nonchalant about it?” You asked. 

“Something like that,” Tamara smiled, “You’ll know how to do it when you feel ready and I think you know that you are.” 

The two of you ate pizza and watched Game of Thrones for the next hour. At some point, you had gotten up and let Kojo out to the backyard, he had been whining by the door for a while.  Tamara had taken that opportunity to get up to grab some snacks when all the lights went out, you looked over at Tamara. 

“Whoa,” She exclaimed.

“This is fine,” you stated as you got up from the couch. “Tim usually keeps a flashlight in a drawer in the kitchen,” you walked over to the kitchen, rummaging through the drawers. It didn’t take you long to find the flashlight. You shined it at Tamara who had her phone flashlight on.

Tamara sighed as she walked over to the window, “That’s weird.” 

“What?” you walked over to her. You were quick to notice that the houses across the street still had power. 

“Looks like the neighbors next door also have power,” Tamara pointed out. You looked over at the neighbors to your left, she was right, “Did Tim forget to pay something?” 

You scoffed, “No, he’s pretty good at paying the bills on time.” 

The sound of the floorboard creaking caused the two of you to quickly turn your heads, “I didn’t move,” Tamara whispered. 

“Neither did I,” you whispered back. You felt your heart leap into your throat, “Maybe I should call Tim,” you whispered as you took your phone out of your pocket. As soon as you had unlocked it you noticed the no bar signal on the top right corner. “Fuck,” you whispered. Kojo was scratching at the door, whining to get back in. 

“What?” 

You showed her your phone, “I have no signal.” 

“W-what? How?” 

You looked around for something to use as a weapon, “I’ve heard Tim mentioned this before. Some people use jammers in order to block a phone’s signal.” 

“You think someone is-” You held up your finger, Tamara stopped talking. The two of you fell silent, listening to the floorboards creaking increasingly. 

“We need to get out of here,” you whispered. You glanced over at the door, “I’m gonna grab kojo-” 

“No, if Tim were here he’d want you out, Kojo can fend for himself,” Tamara stated. Tamara quietly walked over to the kitchen grabbing a pan that was on the stove. You slowly walked through the living room, you knew Tim had a bat lying around somewhere for emergencies. 

What happened next was a blur. One second you were looking over at Tamara as she inched closer to the front door and the next you were on the ground and you heard yelling. You fought back as the person who was attacking you pulled out a knife. You were trying your best to use the techniques Tim had shown you, but this man was tougher than you had ever imagined. You knew that it wasn’t an excuse, that even if he was tougher and bigger than you, you had to find a way to defend yourself. 

“I got the other one,” you heard another voice yell out. You hadn’t realized there were two of them. 

You looked over at where Tamara was, “Tamara, run!” You yelled out. You could see the hesitation in her, “Go!” 

Tamara felt like running would be the biggest mistake, but she knew there was no way of getting help by staying here. The second man inched closer to her, she swung the pan that she had in her hands, hitting the man in the head, it was enough to stun him so she could get a running start. She ran out of the house and into the neighbor's front yard, running up to the door; she began banging on it, “Help!” 

You, on the other hand, were trying to get out of the man's grip. You sucked in a breath knowing that you had to do something you never wanted to do. You opened your mouth and bit the man's arm as hard as you could, he let out a loud yell and let go of you. 

“You bitch!” he yelled out as he lunged towards you with his knife. 

You lunged away from him, trying to dodge the knife, but he was bigger than you and still quicker than you. You felt a sharp pain in your side, “What the fuck did you do, Rick?!” The other guy asked as he came back inside. “Do you have any idea what he’ll do to us if we bring her in like this?” You reached down to where you felt the pain coming from, feeling something sticky. The more you touched it, the more pain you felt. Your knees buckled and you fell to the ground. 

“Fuck,” the man named Rick, looked at the knife and then at you. “I-I can fix this.” 

“No! Forget it! It’s been compromised! We have to go, the other girl ratted us out!” The man began to make his way to the back door. “Let’s go!” he yelled out again. You lay on the ground, watching as the blurry image of them ran out of the house. 

~~

Tim couldn’t help but look towards the door every other second. Was part of him worried someone from the station would see him? Yes. But also, he had a habit of looking at the door every time someone walked in, especially when he was nervous. 

“Are you worried someone from the station is gonna walk in?” Lucy asked. 

“What?” 

“You are,” Lucy said in disbelief. 

“No, I-” 

“Wow.” 

“What are the odds?” 

Lucy rolled her eyes, “It’s likely.” She cleared her throat, she didn’t want to have this discussion right now. “So, Y/N’s quince is coming up, how is that coming?” 

“Good, good. I um probably going to be in debt for the next year so you can expect a nice Christmas card from us rather than nothing but emptiness inside.” 

Lucy chuckled, “Angela is running you dry with this quince.” 

“That she is. Anything Y/N wants, she gets. I swear she spoils her like she's her own kid.” 

Lucy smiled, “I’ve noticed.” Lucy’s phone began to ring, she took it out, letting out a small chuckle at the sight of the name. “It’s Tamara, the girls are probably trying to check in on us,” she rolled her eyes. “Should I let it go to voicemail?” 

Tim wanted to say yes let it go to voicemail, but there was a voice in the back of his head telling him not to. “Answer it,” he smiled, “Two can play this game,” he teased. 

Lucy placed the phone on speaker, “Before you even ask, yes we are still at the restaurant and no I am not bringing you leftovers, I know you guys had pizza,” Lucy said with a hint of laughter behind her voice. 

“Lucy,” Tamara cried out. 

Lucy and Tim’s facial expressions changed, “Tamara, what’s wrong?” Tim spoke up. 

“It all happened so quickly,” Tamara began. 

“Just take a deep breath, Tamara,” Lucy began, “What happened?” 

Tamara let out a soft sob, “Someone broke in the house. They cut the power and we had no way to call anyone. I-I ran to the neighbors for help, but Y/N was still inside, I-I’m sorry, I couldn’t get to her.” 

Tim felt his chest tightened, suddenly this world no longer felt safe. In all his years working as an officer, he never imagined this to happen. Yes, he was prepared for it, or so he thought he was, but now, this world was more of a menacing place than he had realized. 

Tim wanted to tell Tamara that it was okay, but he couldn’t, because to him, nothing was okay at the moment. He had failed the one promise he had kept to himself the day he took you in and that was to keep you safe. Now the one day he decided to be vulnerable and comfortable, it all came crashing down. 

Tim got up from his seat, “Where are you?” Lucy asked. 

“St. Vincents,” He heard Tamara say as he left a few bills on the table and began walking away. Lucy told Tamara that they’d be there in a few before catching up with Tim. 

“Tim,” Lucy began, you could hear the pain within her voice. “Tim,” Lucy pleaded. Tim quickly turned around as they got outside. “I’m driving,” Lucy stated as the exited the restaurant. 

“No-” 

“No,” Lucy exclaimed as she got in front of Tim, “you’re not in the right mindset to be driving right now.” Tim opened his mouth to argue with her, “I’m driving.” 

Tim closed his mouth and gave her a nod. They got into Lucy’s car and drove off to the hospital. Lucy broke a few laws that day, but Tim probably would’ve broken a hundred just to get there sooner. Tim didn’t wait for the car to be fully parked to hop out, he was already inside the emergency room making his way to the receptionist when Lucy made her way into the hospital. 

“My daughter was just brought in, her name is-” 

“Tim,” Lucy choked out, her eyes had landed on a horrific sight in front of her. 

“Lucy!” Tamara called out, Tim turned around just in time to see Tamara running over to Lucy. He looked around for you, hoping to see you running up to him, but his heart sank deeper every second that passed. He walked over to the girls, his eyes landed on what Lucy was focusing on. 

“Oh God,” he let out a shaky breath, as he watched nurses surrounding work on your wounds. He ran up to you, one hand grabbing yours and the other brushing the hair out of your face. “Y/N, sweetie, it’s me,” Tim began, “I'm here, okay?” he brought your hand up to his lips and placed a small kiss on them. He felt the tears begin to stream down his cheeks. “Is she going to be okay?” 

One of the nurses let out a deep sigh, “The stab wound barely missed one of her aorta’s by an inch, it did knick her one of her lungs causing her to loose a significant amount of blood.” one of the other nurses began to lift the handles on the side. 

“We’ll be needing to take her up to surgery now, to repair the damages,” another nurse said. 

Tim couldn’t find the strength to let go, but he knew he had to. “Tim,” Lucy began, “they need to take her.” She placed a loving hand on his shoulder. 

Tim felt tears begin to well up in his eyes, he placed a small kiss on your forehead, “We’ll get through this okay? You can’t leave me.” 

Lucy felt like the villain as she pulled Tim away from you, but she knew he wouldn’t have been able to do it on his own. 

Tim looked over at Tamara, “What happened?” 

Tamara let out a small sob, “I-I don’t know. One second we were watching Game of Thrones and the next the power goes off.” She took in a deep breath, “We decided it was safer to be outside of the house once we realized we had no signal, she wanted to get Kojo but I told her to just leave him outside and that’s when they attacked her. I should’ve stayed with her,” she looked at Tim with remorseful eyes, “I’m so sorry, she told me to run, but I should’ve stayed.” 

Tim shook his head, “No, you got help, if it weren’t for you, you both would’ve probably been worse off.” 

“Tim,” Lucy called as she spotted Sgt. Grey walks towards them. 

“Sir,” Tim began. 

 “I came as fast as I could, How is she?” he asked. 

Tim sighed, shaking his head, “She’s in surgery, the stab wound hit one of her lungs.” 

Sgt. Grey shook his head, before turning to Tamara, “We’re going to need your statement if you’re up to it, if not we can always wait for tomorrow.” 

“I think after all they’ve been through, I think it’s best if we wait for tomorrow,” Lucy chimed in. 

Tamara gave him a nod, “Tomorrow it is.” Sgt. Grey stated. He looked over at Tim, he noticed he hadn’t said much. His eyes were focused on the double doors where they had just wheeled you through. He walked closer to Tim as Lucy and Tamara walked over to some nearby chairs to sit down. “How are you holding up?” Sgt. Grey asked. 

Tim shook his head, “I wasn’t there.” 

“And you won’t always be there,” Sgt. Grey confirmed. “You can’t always be there, it’s one of the things we have to get used to when being a parent. We have to hope we raise them with enough knowledge so they know what to do in situations like this.” He let out a sigh, “trust me, it isn’t easy.” 

Tim nodded, “I’ve noticed.” 

“You let me know if you need anything,” Sgt. Grey gave Tim a soft smile before walking over to the nurse's station. Tim walked over to Lucy, sitting down beside her. No words were exchanged and somehow he preferred it this way. Lucy held his hand, squeezing it every once in a while as if she were checking in on him and he would squeeze back. 

Tim felt like he had been waiting for days when in reality it had only been an hour. His eyes never left the double doors that were ahead of them, his body would jump every time someone would walk through them. 

Eventually, a man in scrubs walked through them, his eyes scanning the lobby of people waiting to be seen or waiting for a patient. “Family of Y/N Bradford?” He called out. 

Tim quickly got up from his seat, “I’m her father,” he quickly stated as he walked up to the man. “How is she?” 

“Hello, I’m Dr. Avery, I was the lead surgeon. I am happy to say that the surgery was a success,” Tim let out a relieved sigh. “We’ll need to keep her for a few days for observation of course, but she’ll be good to go home after.” 

Tim smiled at the man, “Thank you, when can I see her?” 

“She’s in recovery right now, I can only allow one visitor,” The doctor stated. 

Tim looked at Lucy, “Go, we’ll come back in the morning,” Lucy said. 

“Do you mind stopping by my place and picking up Kojo? I think Y/N would kill me if she knew he stayed the night outside.” 

Lucy let out a small chuckle, “Yeah, we’ll pick him up.” 

“I’ll have you follow me,” the doctor gestured for Tim to follow him. 

Tim followed Dr. Avery to the recovery room, he knew this hospital too well to know where he was going, but he never thought he would have to be here for a reason like this and he never wanted to be in this hospital again unless it was for work. Once he got to the room, the doctor left to finish up some paperwork. 

Tim sat beside the bed, he gently held your hand. You looked so fragile to him as if you were a newborn, he was scared that one wrong move would hurt you. He waited by your bedside throughout the night. The morning sunlight began to peak through the windows, causing him to wake up. He gave you a small glance, sighing once he realized you were still asleep.  

He leaned back in his chair, closing his eyes once again, hoping to get some extra sleep. 

You began to stir, you could feel the pain in your abdomen and you heard beeping. Slowly opening your eyes, beginning to realize that you were now in the hospital, the last thing you remember was watching the two men run out of the house. “Dad?” you called out with panic in your voice. 

Tim’s eyes darted open, “Hey,” he said as he sat up in his chair. He grabbed your hand, he was overjoyed that you were awake, but also overjoyed of the fact that you had just called him dad for the first time. Although he was trying to hide his excitement because he didn’t know how to react to it, he had been waiting for this moment for so long and now it was here but the situation was overshadowing it. 

“How are you feeling?” He asked. 

“Like shit,” you stated. 

You winced as you tried to sit up, “Let’s try not to do that for now, alright? I know you’re uncomfortable, but I can get the nurses in-” 

You waved your hand to stop him, “No, I’m fine.” 

“You want to talk about what happened?” He asked. 

You shrugged, “It all happened so quickly. The lights went out and Tamara noticed that the neighbors had electricity and that’s when we tried to call you, but our phones had no signal.” 

“Looks like they used a jammer,” Tim speculated. 

“That’s what I thought, we decided to leave but I wanted to get Kojo-” 

“Kojo can take care of himself,” he stated. 

“Tamara said you would say that, but someone attacked me as I got into the living room. Tamra was already at the door and she hit the other guy with a pan before running to the neighbors. I used all the techniques you taught me,” you felt tears well up in your eyes, “I tried-” 

“Hey, hey, it’s okay. You fought back and you’re alive. That’s what matters right now,” Tim placed a kiss on the top of your head. 

“I remember one more thing,” you began. “When the guy that attacked me stabbed me, the other guy got mad. He said ‘Do you have any idea what he’ll do to us if we bring her in like this?’ in those exact words.” 

Tim felt the panic rush through his body, if his gut was right, he knew what these men were talking about. “Do you think they were planning on taking me?” You asked. 

Tim didn’t want you panicking, he didn’t want you to feel like you couldn’t be safe because someone was looking for you. “I don’t think so,” he began, “But Angela is on the case, you’ll tell her what you told me and we’ll get this straightened out.” You nodded, “Now, how about we talk about the elephant in the room.” 

You looked at him with a confused expression “What elephant?” 

“You called me dad,” he smiled. 

You rolled your eyes, “I can go back to calling you Tim.” 

He chuckled, “No, no, it’s about time you called me dad. I was starting to worry you weren’t going to.” 

“I felt like I lost my chance to do so,” you confessed. 

“Honestly, if you had waited twenty years to call me dad, I would probably be sad that you waited twenty years but, overjoyed that you did,” he smiled.

“Be honest with me,” You began. “There isn’t anyone from my past that’s looking for me right?” You hadn’t spoken about your past in a few years, it was something you wanted to leave behind. “The last thing I need is these fantasmas (ghosts) coming back,” you added. 

Tim sighed, “I don’t know, but you have me there and I can promise that from here on out–” 

You shook your head, “You can promise to keep me safe but let’s face it, you’re not there with me when I’m at school or when you’re at work.” 

“You’re right, I’m not. But I’m a cop. I have my ways and I know you too well.” 

You smiled, “Yeah, I think you do.” 

“Plus, if anyone does kidnap you, they’ll return you in two minutes.” 

Your face turned into shock, “Wh-what?” 

“Trust me, I don’t think they’ll be able to stand the twenty questions they’ll be getting from you or even the karaoke. I give them two minutes before they return you,” you let out a small laugh before you winced in pain. Tim sighed, he knew no matter what that he was going to protect you, and if he failed to do so, he was going to do everything he possibly could do, to get you back. 

#The rookie fanfic #tim bradford x reader #tim bradford x y/n #the rookie #tim bradford x teen!reader #tim bradford x adopted #tim bradford angs #tim bradford angst #tim bradford x adopted!teen!reader #tim bradford imagine #tim bradford x lucy chen #tim bradfor x you #tim bradford #dad!tim bradford x teen!reader #tim bradford x teen!reader angst #tim bradford the rookie

[blueiskewl]

Lost and Found: Bottle Hunter Digs Extraordinary Farmland Treasures

Tom Askjem is a time traveler. Every May to November, he disappears into the bowels of the earth, descends to depths of 13’-plus, and returns to the surface with treasure—bottles and glassware from farming’s past.

After 1,800 pits and hundreds of thousands of relics, Askjem is equal parts archeologist, thrill seeker, and mole. Muscle on dirt, the North Dakota farm boy has turned an addiction into a career, multiple books, and a captivating YouTube channel with millions of views. However, Askjem seeks more than glass.

“I’m digging for adventure, history, and love,” he says. The past is in these holes and there are countless numbers of them across farmland.”

Time to hunt with a master.

The Infection

On the flats of extreme eastern North Dakota’s Traill County, Askjem, 32, prepares for a dig trip. “No mountains and no hills in the Red River Valley,” he describes. “You can see your dog run away for days. The land is mostly featureless, other than a few big cottonwoods and shelter belts where farms used to be.”

A mop of blonde hair sits atop a 6’-tall, lanky frame as Askjem saddles his pony—a Honda Civic. At the current mileage rate, the Civic will be junkyard fodder before it has a scratch: 60,000 backroad miles added to the odometer in the past six months.

Askjem piles layers of gear into the trunk, including three of each tool for insurance: shovels, pronged garden forks, trampoline pads, probe rods, buckets, plastic scoopers, trowels, tents, sleeping bags, blankets, pillows, air mattresses, clothes, and waterproof, Redwing leather work boots.

“It never gets old,” he says, wearing a wide grin. “I caught the infection when I was a kid.”

Digging Bodies

Pushed from the Grand Forks area by the historic Red River flood of 1997, Askjem moved to a farm outside Buxton at six years young. The main property was an 1878 homestead—a progression from sod house to log cabin to the present standing 1898 farmhouse decked in Victorian-era woodwork and hardware.

Surrounded by history, including the skeletons of old wagons and rusting machinery, Askjem explored a 5-acre patch of woods on the property, and chanced on a garbage dump: pop bottles and trash.

Askjem dug.

“I went deep and found stuff going back to 1898. When you’re a kid living in the country, there’s no going down the street and there’s no hanging with friends to play video games—you make your own adventure. I started hitting up all the farmers I could find for leads.”

Behind the wheel of a rattling go-cart, Askjem sought Buxton old-timers and collected tips on abandoned houses. “They all helped me,” he says. “Nobody cared where I hunted because I was just a little kid exploring for all the right reasons.”

“I’ve still got an elementary school journal with an assignment describing my weekend,” he adds. “I wrote, ‘Me and Mom dug up old bodies.’ The teacher marked my paper out of concern,” Askjem describes, with an easy, deep chuckle. “I meant to spell bottles, not bodies. But it shows I was truly hooked.”

Indeed. Wonderfully hooked.

Soft Landing

Why are bottles buried under farmland and old house sites?

Prior to plastic and synthetics, glassware held everything: medicine, hygiene products, alcohol, soda, and beyond. Glass was it.

Additionally, prior to waste disposal services, homeowners discarded trash on-site—in back yard outhouses, trash depressions, burn pits, and wells or cisterns. In short time, the various ground receptacle spots were filled and forgotten.

“Let’s say, for example, a family moved in around 1880,” Askjem explains. “That site likely has two or three outhouse locations prior to World War l. The outhouse spots filled up at a rate according to family size. I dug one farmhouse site that had six outhouses in a 10-year span. Folks went into the outhouses and threw away bottles: medicine, opiates, beer, whiskey. It was convenient and private, and had a soft landing, and got covered quickly. Even now, the bottles often are still preserved.”

“Generally, these houses also had a burn pit and/or dump pit. In the early days, they burned all trash in the stove for heat. Also, homestead bucket wells were filled up with trash and bottles once they were replaced by pump wells. Cisterns also were eventually filled up, but most of those are associated with houses in town.”

And the sites remain, he emphasizes, hiding intact relics beyond the reach of farm machinery or tillage equipment.

X Marks the Spot

Location. Location. Location. Other than a tip or invitation, how does Askjem find dig sites?

X marks the spot, at least in the county courthouse or public library. He spends winters poring over early property transaction documents. “I look at lot sales. If several lots sold for $100 each in 1880, but one sold for $1,000 in 1885, the price climb tells the story and likely represents a building location.”

“I also read old newspaper archives, looking for hotel or business advertisements,” Askjem continues. “Then I can look up the proprietor’s name and keep tightening the scope, narrowing down the exact building location.”

“Every single house is different, but generally, in the countryside, outhouses were 30 paces out the back door. In the city, where most lots were 140’ long, outhouses could be as close as 5-10 paces.”

Confident of a site’s potential, Askjem first asks for permission to dig from the landowner. “Property owners are always so kind to me and I don’t hide anything I find. They’re curious about what is in the ground, just like anybody else.”

Second, he grids out the site. “I put down markers 2 paces apart, maybe 20 paces long. I push probe rods into ground and feel for compaction differences. Depending on the location, I’ll call in and have utility lines marked out for power and gas.”

Decked in Levi’s and a tank-top, it’s time to tunnel.

Claustrophobic Comfort

Shovel in hand, Askjem descends into a layer cake of dirt: black topsoil to brown-colored clay to telltale ash to a use layer containing treasure.

“Generally, I go deep to find old items in quantity. The earliest bottles were used to the last drop by farmers and thrown out empty. Therefore, when they froze in brutal Dakota winters, the glass didn’t break from liquid expansion.”

As Askjem extracts glass vessels from the dirt and grime, his encyclopedic knowledge registers with each find. He recognizes the type, manufacturer, and age. Ink bottles, hygiene bottles, medicine bottles, beer bottles, soda bottles—and far more spill from the holes.

“I find patented medicine bottles across the country, but my favorite are soda bottles because they are unique to their locale and have character. The old soda bottles are usually marked with the bottler and town name because they were returnable.”

The outhouse pits are typically 6’-deep at home sites, with an average size of 6’-by-4’-by-3’. “I’ve dug ghost towns, dug saloons, train depots, and pool halls that were 12’ long, 4’ wide, and 8’ deep. I remember a hotel pit that was 20’-by-20’ and 8’ deep. There was a military fort with pits behind the barracks that was 12’ long, 4’ wide, and 13.5’ deep: That was a week’s worth of digging.”

Askjem’s subterranean realm provides no comfort to the claustrophobic. At 8’-9’, he braces the holes with woodwork. “I’m in a solid clay base that doesn’t cave, but I have a healthy respect for the ground’s limitation. Sometimes, it looks like I’m digging a rabbit hole.”

Preserved in nature’s freezer, the artifacts unearthed by Askjem often are in phenomenal condition.

“Pieces of newspaper can still be read; bottle labels are legible; white lime used in decomposition is visible; and undigested seeds are everywhere. Even 120-year-old human waste sometimes is perfectly preserved and still smells like hell. I wear a hydrogen sulfide respirator in those cases.”

“It’s all there; almost like it was dropped yesterday.”

Ghosts in the Ground

In 2022, Askjem began chronicling his digs via a YouTube channel, Below the Plains, and soon captured millions of views. At two posts per week, he gins footage at a steady rate to feed the algorithm, a tough task considering the ground in his geography is frozen from mid-November to mid-May.

Additionally, Askjem has written two in-depth books (Nebraska Soda Bottles 1865-1930 and A History of North Dakota Bottling Operations 1879-1930) and has more on the way. “I put the bottle prices in the books because they can sell for a whole lot and I always tell the landowners. Listing prices draw criticism, but that’s important to me because it helps preserve the item, and preservation of history is what drives me.”

Covered in dust or mud at the end of each day in digging season, Askjem is highly respectful of what he finds—almost reverent after 1,800 digs. “I appreciate everything I uncover because it represents a part of someone’s daily life and existence. There’s nothing wrong with coveting bottles, but I’m really in those holes for the moment of discovery.”

Even when not digging, Askjem is on the move, surfing on the coasts or river diving for lost cargo. In the decades to come, will he continue burrowing into the past? “Twenty years from now, I hope I’m still digging and there’s nothing I’d rather be doing right now.”

“There’s not an infinite amount of lost bottle sites, but there’s certainly an incredibly high number,” he continues. “There were 300,000 homestead farms in North Dakota with a minimum of one well, one outhouse, and one trash dump. And that doesn’t include towns where most of the population lived. There are millions of these sites in North Dakota and far more in other states.”

Respect to a freewheeling hunter like no other. Bottles draw the eye, but ghosts draw the heart: “The moment never gets old when you uncover a bottle and find that history,” Askjem adds. “Never.”

By CHRIS BENNETT.

#Lost and Found: Bottle Hunter Digs Extraordinary Farmland Treasures #Tom Askjem #glass #glass bottles #ancient glass #ancient artifacts #archeology #archeolgst #history #ancient history #history news #treasure #treasure hunter #antiques #bottle hunter #long post #long reads

[thenamesblurrito]

so it's uh been awhile. you might wanna click for clarity, especially for the kitty cat on the right. everyone here except Chromedome is a size null!

Grandus has been a champion of various martial arts since long before the Stratocracy was ever founded, with grace belied by his size null bulk. his particular specialty is a type of wrestling originating from his home planet Caminus, but he's lived on Cybertron a long time, working with Yoketron to teach and record martial arts as much as he can. under the current regime that looks down on such "violence", preserving this information is pretty important. when Yoketron decided to chip in as a benefactor for the JAAT, Grandus himself actually took a teaching position in physical education. the self-knowledge and body confidence he passes on to his students is unexpectedly engaging, almost enough to get some of them to stop gossiping about whatever relationship he may or may not have with pop star Rosanna.

whether or not his students were sports fans before, Eject is going to make sure they leave his class with a new appreciation for the glorious art of physical competition. an unmatched master of sports history and science, he can tell you the play-by-play of every Cube match in the past fifty million years without looking anything up, just as much of a terrifying information sponge as his twin, and equally terrifying on the field despite his extremely small datacube frame. given the cultural importance and how there's a sport for every function, he's actually got quite a bit of teaching material to cover even for the less active students. while he does have a Conjunx, he's not exactly in love with Chromedome like Rewind is, only married to him because of the way twin sparks work. they get along well enough, but he and Rewind have agreed that should they ever pick up an Amica, it'll be somebody Eject adores himself.

Chromedome is honestly a little confused as to how he wound up here in the first place. before, he was a psychiatric recordkeeper and ethical inspector. then his Conjunx Rewind got it into his head that he'd be just the perfect candidate to help out that new school Jhiaxus was trying to open, and Chromedome abruptly found himself a teacher of psychiatry. it's quite the change of pace, and honestly much less depressing to talk with a bunch of bright younglings than pore over yet another case file of horrific medical malpractice. he's an average size 2 car, but that's more than tall enough to pick up both his Conjunces with ease, if the two of them ever stood still long enough to nab.

he may not be JAAT faculty, but Rewind is ever-present anyway. both to check in on his twin and Conjunx or friends like Blaster, and also to get the freshest scoop on all the juicy stories this school spawns constantly! he may be tiny, but he is The star reporter of Iacon--no, Cybertron! nothing can stand in the way of getting that snippet, that quote, that blurry video, that first hand experience broadcasted to the world, even when his support staff Raindance and Grand Slam lag behind! information, he wants information! it all goes into his own alt mode storage as a datacube, making him quite the encyclopedia. the Stratocracy has tried and utterly failed to censor him, so instead they've relegated him to the function he has always excelled at, although with the way he is "accidentally" platforming the heroes and their dangerous ideals, they may be regretting letting Rewind run wild...

Roadmaster is a familiar face to many at the JAAT already, both to old friends like Thunderclash and folks she's never met. she's the host of popular nature show Quintessential Creatures, teaching viewers all about weird and wonderful wildlife. she was forged on Caminus long enough ago that her original records have been lost, but she's traveled everywhere since then, and her animal-wrangling bravery often makes people think she must be from Carcer instead. by all appearances she's slowing down now, letting her assistant Servo take on more responsibility, and this teaching position at the Academy is just perfect. she gets to affectionately nag a gaggle of fellow teachers many millions of years her junior while surreptitiously instilling revolutionary ideals and a love of nature in dozens of impressionable young minds. her walker transforms to become the cage on her enormous transport truck alt mode, most often used to haul rehabilitated mechanimals back to their natural habitats.

Meowgatron is a rusty tabkey who came up and sat on Roadmaster's clipboard one day and has been her darling pet ever since. he is, in a word, an idiot, and yet surprisingly good at finding his new favorite person Starscream to sit on and purr, no matter where he's hiding. rusty tabkeys like himself have lava lamp radiator alt modes, and many stressed students find petting his warm, blobby body very soothing. it almost makes up for his daily yowling sessions when he gets himself stuck inside a desk somehow.

#faculty #grandus #eject #rewind #chromedome #cdrw #roadmaster #meowgatron #transformers #transformers redesign #macaddam #cyberfauna #TF:SNAP #tf original continuity

[sebsdaniel]

12 Questions about F1 through the years

I was tagged by @twinkodium Thank you sm girl! This one's my fave so far <3

I tag whoever wants to do this in F1blr <3

1. Who or what got you into F1?

My dad. He grew up in a racing/car family and automatically transfered that love to me when I was just five days old and he held me up in the hospital to show me the German GP of 1999 on TV. We always joke I've watched F1 since I was born, which is no lie. Since then, we've seen almost every race together. We've also gone to 15 F1 GPs together.

2. Who was the very first F1 driver you supported? Do you support them now? Have your opinions on them differed or stayed the same since then?

Michael Schumacher. My dad is a Jenson Button fan and he's convinced I started supporting Schumi just to annoy him. I don't fully remember why I chose Michael, but my best guess is I fell in love with the red car that kept winning. I love him still and still hope he gets better someday.

3. Who’s your current favourite F1 driver?

After 16 years of supporting Sebastian Vettel, I ended up supporting Max Verstappen in 2023. My dad's been supporting him ever since his debut, and made him his main since Jenson retired. However, I didn't get there that quickly. I adored Max when he began F1. Got annoyed with him a lot in 2018 and 2019 when he kept having run ins with Seb (fave bias I guess), but once 2020 I grew to adore him and in 2021 I fell in love. He'll never reach the same level for me as Seb did in my heart (he's my hero after all, since I was 6), but I love him sm already.

4. Is there a driver pairing or pairings you support? What made you attracted to that pairing in the first place?

I love so many F1 duo's, but my two faves are Sebastidan and Lestappen.

Sebastidan got me out of my high school depression phase in 2017. I remember feeling extra down when Seb lost his chance at the title that year in Japan. I was so frustrated and watched video's of them as teammates the whole day. I've adored them since and while they aren't a fanfavorite, I can't help but enjoy the bits and pieces we still get from them.

Lestappen. I got into them last year during their - sadly short - title fight. The history they have, the connection, is something so unique. They also seem to become better friends with each passing month. I'd love to see them as teammates someday.

5. Do your parents, siblings or relatives have a favourite team and/or favourite driver(s)?

Dad's a Max and RB fan. He hates Mercedes and especially Toto. His past faves are Senna, Hill and Jenson. Mom has watched F1 since she's been with dad (1985), but never got into it. She always liked Nico Rosberg though!

6. Do you have any favourite races? Are there any that stand out to you the most?

Belgium 2014 as it was my first live GP. Belgium 2018 as it was the first time I saw Seb win live. Abu Dhabi 2012, which was epic Abu Dhabi 2021, I'll never forget that day Brazil 2008, it was mind blowing.

And probably many more!

7. Do you have a favourite circuit? Can be from the past or from the current calendar.

Spa. It's my home track which I've been visiting since I was a toddler. And Zolder, for the same reasons.

I also adore the Red Bull Ring, Yas Marina circuit and Monza.

8. Have you ever been to an F1 race in real life? Feel free to tell us your experience going to one if you like.

15 in total! 14 times the Belgian GP (would've been 15 if it weren't for 2020) and 1 time the Austrain GP. It's always amazing! The organisation of Spa has changed for the better as well!

9. Have you ever met an F1 driver in real life?

Several times the whole grid before 2020, because it wasn't as difficult to get close to them. In Spa they organized hours long signing sessions at la Source for everyone with a weekend ticket. Since then I've seen them mostly from a distance. The closest I've come to talking a while to someone was Charles in 2018, Seb several times and Daniel also a few times. I still get butterflies thinking about it <3

10. Do you have a favourite F1 car? If so, what is it?

RB19 (2023), it's such a precious car <3 Seb's 2010 RB. The Ferrari from 2004. Brawn GP car from 2009.

11. Do you have a favourite one win wonder?

Not really. Unless, you count Oscar's sprint win from last year.

12. Do you have any favourite quotes from the F1 world? This can either be inspirational or hilarious.

‘If you no longer go for a gap which exists you are no longer a racing driver’ - Aryton Senna -

'Enjoy these moments. We know they won't last forever.' - Sebastian Vettel -

'Enjoy the butterflies' - Daniel Ricciardo -

'If I get a few more, I think I'll headbut someone' - Max Verstappen -

'God might be with him, but he's no God' - Max Verstappen -

Thank you so much for this tag, hun <3

#f1 #sebastian vettel #max verstappen #daniel ricciardo #charles leclerc #sebastidan #lestappen #tag game

[sunflowervoltwentyeight]

Hello! Happy 28th! Very excited to share my March 2023 fic rec! All of the fics below are so amazing. In no particular order, enjoy!!! 

Golden by shaylea (128k)

Harry is fully dressed when Louis returns to the room. He’s slumped on the edge of the bed, fingers twining awkwardly around the edge of his pink flounces. “Can I come?” he blurts when Louis opens the bathroom door. Louis freezes. “What?” “North. With you,” Harry clarifies. “If you’re going north, could I come too?”

On a rainy night in Auckland in the middle of his world tour, popstar Harry Styles loses his ability to carry on. Instead of continuing to Sydney and the rest of his tour, he seeks sanctuary with Louis Tomlinson, a man with a macadamia nut farm and a mysterious past.

I’ll Fly Away by @juliusschmidt (122k)

Harry and Louis grew up together in Lake County, Harry with his mom and stepdad in a tiny cottage on Edward’s Lake and Louis in his family’s farmhouse a few minutes down the road. But after high school, Louis stuck around and Harry did not; Harry went to Chicago where he found a boyfriend and couple of college degrees. Six years later, Harry ends up back in Edwardsville for the summer and he and Louis fall into old patterns and discover new ones.

ft. One Direction, the local boyband; Horan’s Bar and Grill; families, most especially children and babies; Officer Liam Payne; many local festivals and fireworks displays; and Anne Cox, PFLAG President.

Mine Would Be You by @crinkle-eyed-boo (114k)

Louis blinks his eyes open, his eyelids fluttering as the room swims around him. He takes several gulps of beer once he confirms that he’s definitely not hallucinating, that the very first portrait Harry Styles ever painted of him is hanging on that wall.

Louis stares at the wall, his heart jackrabbiting in his chest as he realizes that there’s not just one painting of him, there’s five, the portraits lined up like they’re some sort of storyboard depicting the rise and fall of his deepest love. His greatest heartache. A pain that cut him so deep that he left the fucking country, severing all ties with his life in New York, now suddenly surrounding him as if he’d never left.

Fucking shit motherfucker fuck.

Louis returns to New York City five years after he left it – and the love of his life – behind. He didn't intend to see Harry again, but fate has a funny way of pulling them together, whether they like it or not. After making a begrudging truce, they both start to wonder: Would it be so bad if history repeated itself?

You’ve Got My Devotion (Hate You Sometimes) by lucythegoosey / @harryrainbows (95k)

Harry was in the biggest boy band in the world. He was also one half of the best (or worst, depends on who you ask) kept secret relationship in the music industry.

Now, almost five years on, after One Direction has broken up, and Harry and Louis' relationship has as well, a video threatens to put everything at risk.

One determined Irishman, a massive publicity stunt and two begrudging exes are all it takes to bring One Direction back to life and maybe, just maybe, Harry and Louis' mangled love life too.

Or: Harry and Louis are forced to fake-date after an old video from when they were dating emerges.

Wild Love by purpledaisy / @harrydaisy (130k)

“Good,” Julia says, clearly pleased to have them both uncomfortable and unable to look at each other. “Now, I only have one more question before you can go. What are you planning to do when this experiment ruins your friendship?”

“We said we’d stay friends no matter what,” Harry says smoothly, his chin lifting in defense.

“That was our one thing going into it,” Louis agrees. “Stay friends no matter what.”

Julia raises a perfectly manicured brow, “That’s all fine and good. But I hope you realize your emotions aren’t going to realize this is an experiment in the end. If one of you falls for the other and finds out those feelings are not reciprocated, you’re not going to be able to laugh it off as a social experiment. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do this, I’m just hoping you’ve considered all of the possible outcomes.”

- AU: Two best friends try to date each other for forty days. It's supposed to be fun until emotions make it complicated.

Part one of Wild Love

Never Slows Down by purpledaisy / @harrydaisy (28k)

“Maybe we should just have one place instead,” he says. “Just move in together.” It’s heavier out loud, the first time either one of them has made an outright mention of it.

Harry keeps his back turned, the running water of the sink the only sound. Louis wants to say something stupid, something like, “Just kidding,” or, “Wait, no, that’s not what I meant,” but he doesn’t. Now, out loud, lingering, he doesn’t want to change the words he’s just said or the implication.

It must only be a few seconds but it feels like a lifetime before Harry turns off the water and turns to face him again. He swallows and shrugs, “Uh, yeah, maybe.” He meets Louis’s eyes only briefly before checking his watch. “We should go soon,” he says turning to leave the kitchen. “I’ll grab you a jacket.”

Part two of Wild Love

Being of the Jealous Kind by zita17 / @louisandtheaquarian (24k)

A-list actor Louis Tomlinson and his partner fashion photographer Harry Styles weather the storm that is Louis’ fake relationship with his costar in the lead up to this year’s Academy Awards.

Featuring a fluffy teenage meet-cute, an angsty wine drunk Harry melting down over pap pics, Louis habitually overusing the word “baby,” and cameos by a vintage Umbro sweatshirt, the peace ring, and one hell of a Larry hug.

Or the justice for To Be So Lonely fic. Based on the lyrics to TBSL and a prompt where “Louis has to fake date some celebrity, while his boyfriend Harry sits at home.”

Starry Haze, Crystal Ball by you_explode (10k)

Freedom. Harry’s not sure what exactly it means anymore. For him, for Louis. Personally. Professionally. Musically. There are so many layers to it, and it feels like as he gets older, the thicker those layers become.

Non-AU. A brief look at 2020 and the journey Harry and Louis are on with their careers and closet. Inspired by the Devil card.

Drifting, Weightless by dinosaursmate (45k)

“We’ve been asked to do a gig,” Niall said slowly. “Harry and Liam are completely up for it, I am too.” “Alright. What’s the catch?” Louis asked with suspicion. “It’s, um…” Niall cleared his throat. “So, Juliana was contacted by this themed cruise company, and they want us to do a four-day One Direction cruise.” The words hung in the air as Louis’ right eyebrow slowly crept up and he fixed Niall with a stare. “Absolutely not.” Louis rolled his eyes. “You’re essentially asking me to go on a working holiday with my ex. Stranded on a boat in the ocean for four days.” “Cruise ships are huge! You don’t have to see him in your down time.” --- Harry and Louis are exes with benefits until they're not, and the Mediterranean Sea might just be the perfect place to work through some unresolved issues.

#28th appreciation #larry fic rec #fic rec #read #2023 fic rec

[taz-ma-raz-skylar]

I tried my best to translate the interview from Tikitakas!

( Mario Espinosa de los Monteros took the interview and uploaded it on March 29, 2024 08:42 CET)

Taz Skylar, the canary who triumphs on Netflix: "One Piece gave me an interspatial rocket with which I travel between planets"

The actor reviews his life with Diario AS and tells how he has left everything he had, several times, until he played Sanji, one of the protagonists of the series.

Personality, desires and ambitions are always cooked on a low heat. The pillars that support an individual are built brick by brick. The pillar of the past seems to be over, but every second something new is added. The one of the now is the closest and the most fictitious, because it gets out of hand before it can touch it. And the one of the future is raised by a ghost. That's how complex the reality is. Taz Skylar makes it simple: he steals his own bricks and assembles an excavator. It puts it in sixth gear, rams and destroys everything. Then, he collects the debris and begins to build again: a pillar in the shape of a scriptwriter, another with the appearance of an actor, another as a surfboard manufacturer. "You don't have to know everything, you just have to know what the next thing you have to do."

Taz plays the chef Sanji in the adaptation that Netflix has made of One Piece, the best-selling manga in history - so say the Guinness records - but to get there he has had to give a few strokes to his life. Today it is difficult to present it, but we will say that, among all things, he is a great actor who has been reinventing his life since he had the power to do so.

When we remember the life of Taz, who at 28 years old is still insultingly young, we see the times he has done and undone his way. His father is an Arab of Lebanese origin born in Sierra Leone, and his mother from Yorkshire (England), but he was born in Tenerife. As a child, "I didn't have too many friends" and "I spent all day on the internet, reading and watching videos." He was an introverted person who began to cook his imagination. He wasn't good at soccer or basketball, he was afraid of water and didn't run fast. The school wasn't his thing. He was diagnosed with dyslexia. Now he parachutes on Sundays, he is a black belt in taekwondo and has four series in production.

Leave everything to get somewhere.

At only 15 years old he started the excavator: he found an escape form in surfing, left school and went to Australia to repair boards. My whole life has been that. I'm leaving school and I'm going to Australia. I get there and look for my life. I'm running out of visa. Where am I going now? To California, come on. Then where? To San Sebastian." In this last city, capital of Guipúzcoa, he came to settle. "I was 18 years old and a little house, my car, a schedule that allowed me to train and travel." But he changed it to go to London "to live in a house shared with five people that had leaks on the roof and a bucket in the corner where the water fell." He wanted to be a screenwriter because he told the stories of the surfers to sell the boards. He broke with everything.

"When I went to Australia I didn't have much to lose, at most I was thrown there. But I was fifteen years old and I didn't look starving, someone was going to give me food and water." That's why, when he left San Sebastián, he felt that he was sacrificing something for the first time. "In London my bed was an Ikea sofa bed with a sleeping bag on top. I remember getting there and saying 'what the fuck did I just do'. I threwat everything I had in the trash and changed it for that, simply because I would like to be a screenwriter." Why did you hesitate that time, after years of knocking down pillars? "It's harder to give an axe to your life when it's tolerable. That is, it is easier to cut the head of nothing to achieve a lot, than to cut the head of something with the possibility of staying in nothing. There's the danger, in having something." Well, cutting heads on their way to London.

Question: Would you have gotten to where you are without maintaining that attitude?

Answer: "No, crazy, not at all. If I hadn't kept it, I don't know what would have happened to me. Basically I have a very intense energy, I have analyzed it a lot and I am aware that, if it were not because I have the ability to put my energy into positive things, I could easily have ended up badly, a person very addicted to things that are not good. Luckily I'm addicted to good things. If it weren't for this attitude, I could easily have been in a circle of bad things."

The beginnings in London were difficult. The change to urban life, too. Taz wrote and wrote. He enlisted in the Army reserves, but suffered a traffic accident and did not pass the medical exam. Then, he wrote and wrote, and released a play called Warheads, which explores the life of a soldier before and after the war and the post-traumatic stress it generates. Warheads was nominated for the Olivier (the most prestigious theater award in the United Kingdom) and the leaks of his house, the sleeping bag and the Ikea mattress made sense. Now yes.

Q: You say that Warheads changes your life completely.

A: "Yes. It was the moment when I felt that I could take the world outside me and put my will on it. In England, theater is very important for culture and Olivier is a literary prize for a very cultured person. For me, as a person who felt with an uneducated complex for not having gone to school, for always having spelling mistakes and for having a way of writing that no one understood, it was like an 'ah, I don't have to be intelligent in the conventional way to be able to aspire to have a prize'. Suddenly, everyone around me took me seriously. A door was opened that led to another staircase that led to another floor. I saw very new things and I was able to enter rooms that I had not entered before."

Q: If that changes your life, what does One Piece do with it?

A: "Warheads gave me a car. I was walking through life, and suddenly I had a car. One Piece took the car, threw it through a ravine and gave me an interspatial rocket with which I travel between planets. I talk all day with my best friend Vincent about how absurd it is and the number of opportunities and beautiful things we can do now. We are not taking it as if it were normal. We look into each other's eyes and say 'I can't believe this is happening'. And that's happening every day."

"But the One Piece thing was very fast. When One Piece announced the characters, that night I was at the theater in London doing a play, and when I entered the dressing room during the break, I saw my cell phone doing 'backflips' (it makes a gesture of an uncontrollable spiral with my index finger). I was followed by 1,000 people per minute. The transition from the car to the rocket was very fast, from one day to the next he had 200,000 followers. Although followers are not a way to govern your life, there I could see the difference so instantaneous. When the promos came out, people began to recognize us more, but in the Canary Islands they still asked me if I was still making boards. He was completely alien. But when the series came out, we already had the rocket mounted and they pressed the button. When I returned to Tenerife, the fruit shop asked me for photos."

Taz plays Sanji, the cook of the crew of the pirate ship on which the One Piece manga is based, which is something like a 'Japanese-a-ye' comic. Netflix has made an adaptation of the illustrated work to a Live Action, a series with real actors. His character is one of the best known, most beloved, most charismatic. In the previous video, Taz puts a black belt on the character he plays. His character fights with kicks, so he had to learn martial arts in record time.

Q: You added the taekwondo to your list of things to learn

A: "I feel many times that I do everything in a mediocre way, but I don't do anything very well. There's something very nice about that. I took the taekwondo as an example for this. Because when you get your greatest growth is from white to black belt, but once you are in black, the improvements become very difficult, as if very perfect. That is, I go from 0 to 10 from white to black, but the 11th, which is perfection, I am not so interested, only in some aspects. I don't think you can have an 11 in everything, maybe in your life you can only have an 11, or two at most. But not everything can be an 11. I have a lot of fives, a couple of eights, a few ten, and I still don't have an 11, but that's what I'm in."

If we attribute each copy sold (more than 500 million) to one person, the readers of One Piece would considerably exceed the population of the United States and would be more than 10 times that of Spain. In the face of this mass phenomenon...

Q: Are you afraid that Taz will become Sanji? That the character stars with you?

A: "Yes, it is not a fear as such, but it is something that all of us (the rest of the actors of the series) have in mind and to which we are all vulnerable. But look, if that happens, not so bad, because we won't be able to complain about a life like that, it's still a beautiful life. In my case, since I have never fallen into what people thought was going to fall, I have a feeling that it is not a real problem for me. I may be wrong, but between the first and second seasons of One Piece I have made a series and two movies that have nothing to do with the character of Sanji. I have four series in production that have nothing to do with the world of One Piece. I don't say it in an arrogant way, but confident of myself or aspiring to be sure of myself."

Q: The Live Action of other series have not been as successful as yours. Why One Piece, yes?

A: "Two reasons based on my analysis. Matt Owens, the showrunner and lead screenwriter, is a true fan of the anime, he wants the anime with all his heart and the anime knows it better than most fans."

Taking care of the smallest detail, the producers of Live Action contacted One Piece content creators to ask them about the production and script of the series. One of them was Artur - The Library of Ohara, who helped in "the process of writing the script, mainly for the story, the 'Easter Eggs' and the timeline." He appears several times in the podcast 'Radio Pirata', where he demonstrates his knowledge and, ultimately, why he received a call from Netflix.

Taz continues explaining the first reason: "Matt, while making the series, put his artistic opinion on it, and at the same time kept everything he loved about intellectual property. That's not something that everyone can do. It wouldn't have been the same series without Matt, he knew deeply what he wanted from each character and who was going to play it. He took great care of us and gave us the tools to bring from the characters what we wanted. I went one day and I told him 'Matt, I want to do all the fights, I don't want to be bent'. I tell him like a 25-year-old boy who has never gone to school, who has not studied theater or done action dubbing in his fucking life. He took and looked at me with all the confidence in the world and said: 'Okay, let's do it.'"

Q: And the second reason?

A: "The cast of actors, the set of what we five are, is the other reason. I'm sorry because we're all very different, but since only one of us is missing, it's not the same in interviews, organizing anything, recording... The fact that we are different makes us complement each other perfectly. There is something very special that happened with the symbiosis of the five of us, we are really friends, which is not something as common as you would expect in this world. We are really friends and we take great care of ourselves both inside and outside the series."

Two weeks after the premiere, Netflix announced that a second season of One Piece's Live Action would be filmed. There are many important characters left to appear, protagonist characters who will be incorporated into the second season.

Q: Is that good relationship and connection between actors a requirement to be part of the cast in the second season?

R: "It's a good question. Yes, I know that's part of the conversations, but we don't decide or think about who it will be. We hear the conversations and talk inside them (Taz laughs, he seems to remember something). And in those conversations we see that it is very important that the people who join form a good part of the family, but that is as much work of the actor who comes new as ours. It is a basic decency to give a good welcome to people who arrive new."

Q: Have you felt pressure when adapting One Piece?

A: "From the moment we started, from the first moment, everyone reminded us of Death Note. People close to us tell you a little jokingly and don't realize the severity of what they are putting in your head. They are telling you, in a casual way, that there is a possibility that these three years of your life in which you have bled to dead for something, are absolutely worthless. We had to manage that at all times within ourselves, going to work firmly believing in what we were doing and in the people with whom we were doing it. Three years militants. The time comes when you can't do any more work and what you've done is what's left, and you can only wait until what you did with others is enough so that they don't cut your head (laughs). But I want to clarify that the fans are very enthusiastic and most of us supported us from the first moment."

The creative process and convincing a mother

There's something curious about Taz and it's the number of times he laughs per minute. Smile when we bring ut more serious topics. He smiles when he almost misses something about the new actors. He smiles as he recalls anecdotes with the fans. But it changes to a serious face when we talk about the actor's creative process. In the premiere of the movie Gassed Up, he said that he only wanted to be part of projects that his mother could enjoy.

Q: I think it's the most ambitious goal anyone can have, always to convince a mother!

A: (Laughs) "I think I meant something a little more different, but what you say is true. I wanted to say that, since I do not come from this world (that of interpretation) I see it as my secret weapon because it gives me a real perspective on what we do in art. Sometimes we do a cult of certain things that I think is important and productive, but it can be elitist. Although I can appreciate and understand some more complex or cultured things, my mother doesn't have to appreciate them."

Q: In an interview you told the journalist that, if I had met you as a child, I would never have imagined that you would end up this way. And you, would you have imagined yourself like that?

A: "Yes. It's a good question, bro. And yes. So much so that I was alone, and I had no friends, I stayed all day on the internet, reading and watching videos. My life was a fantasy and it said 'it would be beautiful to do what I saw in an action movie'. I remember watching skydiving or surfing in movies and telling my mother 'that would be beautiful to do'. But I was never going to do it. I had fantasies of doing things that I was afraid of at the same time. But when you think about doing something, there's always a part of you that thinks it's not going to happen."

Q: The fear of taking a risk

A: "Yes. No one gets into this industry without aspirations to make a living from this. To have a beautiful life, to take care of your family... But there is a large part of you that has in mind that it is quite likely that you will not get it. If you asked me when I was little that I was going to be older, I wouldn't have told you that I would, I would have told you that I hope something handsome."

Q: What if I ask you now?

A: I hope to be something better than I am now.

#taz skylar

[deaddee-anime-brownfanlady]

LACKADAISY Pilot Short Review & Thoughts: INDIE Animation Greatness.

Okay, so I've just recently gotten finished watching the latest new indie animated pilot short: Lackadaisy. Honestly, I truly and seriously loved this 27-minute long film of bootlegging kitties' adventure! Now for those who are super new to this short and overall story of the Lackadaisy world, the short takes place in 1920s America specifically in St Louis Missouri during the prohibition era when all things alcoholic were OutLaw and where most of the characters consist of anthropomorphic cat people in this story.

The title comes from the name of the café also covered as an underground speakeasy "The little Daisy Café " or for very special Partons and guests that want to get their illegal drink on known as the Lackadaisy speakeasy. All in all, the business hasn't been like it used to be for the little once glamorous speakeasy, leaving our main cat trio of trouble of the short to dig up some much-needed booze. We got the highly chaotic also artistic wild spirit, wacky, smart but slightly dimwitted sweet grinning nut Rocky Rickaby. His baby-faced sweet and super adorable well mannered but deeply repressed rage Tigger happy cousin Calvin "Freckle" McMurray ,and last but not least little miss firecracker and sweetie full of spunk Ivy Peppers.

On the revival competitor side that is Marigold. We got our Cajuns sensations siblings danger duo the Savoy: Serafine and Nicodeme, And last Mr. Tuxedo always serious catman and professional "cleaner" extraordinaire Mordecai Heller who has some past history with the Lackadaisy staff & it past owner. Now a little details on what and why I enjoyed this film.

The Animation: Lackadaisy overall animation is fantastical amazing, like UGH from the impressive shading and lighting within the backgrounds from the way the characters eyes are super luminescence in the dark and really gives that feline aspect. To the intricate little details such as the characters very realistic cat ear twitching and other behavioral cat traits like the tail movements and fizzing of the fur when scared or startle, some criticism I've seen in the Live Chat in regards to the left in sketch/guidelines within the characters is that it's distracting. But personal for me I liked the added in sketch linework, it deeply reminded me of super old school classic Disney animation or seeing old traditional animationing videos on how they did things back in the day.

The Voice acting: I swear the voice casting in this was excellent and very on point. Each of the voice actors really fit so well into each of their characters, from Michael Kovach great voice work as Rocky who you can tell was really enjoying himself, to Channel Awesome Malcolm Ray as Nico and Benni Latham as Serafine and ProZD also known as SungWon Cho very nice and fantastic voice work as Mordecai and Belsheber Rusape as Freckle and Ashe Wagner as Mitzi, Lisa Reimold as Ivy. Just overall real good sounding Voice work.

The Story: Now when it comes to overall story, I liked how it was basically more of a standalone type of storytelling in its own kind of separate reality then what's currently going on in the comic thus far into it. I can maybe see others who've been following the webcomic for far longer might dislike certain changes in the pilot that differ a bit from the comic, but I can get why they went with it this way so it probably would be easier for newcomers to jump into it. While certain parts did felt a bit underwhelming & might not be super perfect, I still enjoyed the energy and pacing of this short. I felt they did a really good job as a pilot showcasing the premise /concept and some of the characteristics of the main cast, although not all of them...but I felt it did a nice enough job of giving you a taste of these characters and making you want more of them & find out what's their story is. Either way love how the pilot plot was this mini but disastrous bootlegging adventure of Rocky, Ivy and Freckle getting into trouble barely escaping with their lives all for some nasty tasting booze.

Final Thoughts: While I might not have been following this project or webcomic since early DeviantArt or back during the mid-2000s to 2010s ( even though I wished I got into it much earlier) as long as others have. But even as a somewhat new fan of this indie piece of work and incredible artsy, I truly really come to love Lackadaisy so much and I deeply hope that this pilot short will paved the way for even more crime-fulled animated kitties adventures in the future.

Please Check Out LACKADAISY and give it all the love and support it can get because I want more Booze stealing lawbreaking Cats to see!

#indie animation #adult animation #animation #lackadaisy #animated pilot #animated film #animated shorts #2023 animation #2d animation #animated short film #animated films #lackadaisy cats #youtube animation

[sapphyreopal5]

Wait, Ive only just heard about Gen and Daneel possibly using black magic...Now, I have never liked Daneel Ackles, she just gives bad vibes but I thought Gen was okay. Now that Im reading more into this whole conspiracy, I'm starting to think this is maybe true. Could you explain some reasons why you think Jensen and Jared's wives would be using black magic? Thank you so much.

Hello Anon thank you for stopping by. So I see you recently came across my posts about them doing black magic and perhaps some other posts. Well, I am aware Gen and Danneel both have fibbed about their personal history or at the very least exaggerated things.

Danneel lied about which Christian branch she was part of growing up and from what I've heard where she grew up too. Also, in a video Danneel did, she admitted the hardest thing she's ever done in her life was getting the abortion she did years ago. Based on what others have speculated, this was when she was with her ex Riley and assumingly so was his. Really, with Danneel what you see is what you get. She has barely ever hidden who she is, which is clear in how many more anti Danneel bloggers used to be on Tumblr and how many notes anti Danneel posts get on here still (mine included) compared to Anti Gen posts. According to several stories I've heard and past posts of hers, she was extremely territorial of Jensen and has apparently made some fans cry in the past.

Gen on the other hand tends to play nice with social rules and this is why she tends to fly under the radar a lot more easily. Gen I think exaggerates things like how horrible it was transitioning from California to Montana when she was like 12 years old or so. Also, "Oh what a HUGE mistake it was going to boarding school with my brother", I'm sorry but give me a break girl, you made that choice. She did admit she's not troubled like her Wildfire character Kris Furillo was however. Gen generally flies under the radar because people don't really look into her podcasts or even her blog she used to post on a lot NowandGen.

Now, onto why the wives would partake in black magic. Let's be honest here, a vast majority of their followers on social media damn well follow them because of who they're married to. Funny timing of me getting this ask this morning, as just yesterday I took the liberty of looking at some statistics regarding how many of Gen's followers follow Jared and vice versa as well as with Danneel and Jensen. Interestingly enough, all 4 of them joined Instagram August 2015, which can be found in the "About Account" tab after hitting the 3 dots on the upper right hand corner of the profile in question.

For some reason, the following statistics info wasn't available on Jensen's page but was on Jared, Danneel and Gen's profiles on Instagram.

As you can see below, 88% of Gen's followers also follow Jared and 90% of them follow Jensen. I know this is not an exact figure but Gen has approximately 1.4 million followers. To put some of these numbers into perspective, 88% of 1.4 million equals about 1,232,000 or 1.2 million.

For Danneel, about 55% of her approximately 1.2 million followers also follow Gen and 92% of her followers also follow Jensen. Gen has a little more followers than Danneel, thus why it says 50% of Gen's followers also follow Danneel. 92% of 1.2 million is 1,104,000 which also reads in short as 1.1 million. Now Jensen has 11.6 million followers on Instagram. Taking the 1,104,000/11.6 million and you see that 10.34% of Jensen's followers also follow Danneel.

You go on Jared's and you won't see Gen on there. You will see that 54% of his followers also follow Misha and 85% follow Jensen. Taking this 1.2 million/6.5 million, this makes it so that about 18.9% of Jared's followers also follow Gen.

If we want to look at Jared vs Jensen just for shits and giggles, 85% of 6.5 million gives us 5,525,000. This means about 48.04% of Jensen's followers also follow Jared.

So just what the hell do these numbers above mean? With my playing with numbers here, it can be deduced that what people say about Gen and Danneel with the whole "if it weren't for their husbands, no one would know who they are" sentiment critics have seems to hold water based on the Instagram statistics. I mean I could've told you all this was true but you know, people like numbers so let's give it to them. Make it so they shut up, go outside and touch grass to "ground" themselves as Gen might say 😂 Sorry couldn't resist! As for the big difference between Jared's 6.5 million versus Jensen's 11.5 million is for multiple reasons but also at this point Jensen and Jared have some different audiences now also.

Danneel I think saw Jensen at some point before he ever stepped foot on the set of Supernatural. If you believe what other seers on here have said about Danneel, it's been said she used her tarot deck to determine if she should be with Riley or with Jensen as far as who is going to be wealthier or something like that. It's been said the cards told her she will live a more extravagant life with Jensen than with Riley. For Danneel, it was more or less wanting a handsome husband who also is wealthy. Who doesn't?

As for Gen, she supposedly never watched Supernatural prior to auditioning according to this Rise Together podcast she did with Dave Hollis back in Nov 2020. However, I have this inkling she has done witchcraft also for a long time like Danneel has but just doesn't outwardly say it. I think the black magic actually started with Peggy Rometo, the childhood psychic who told Gen when she was younger that her husband will be a producer one day, is intuitive, etc. (or should I say "Intuitive Expert"). Kinda interesting that Jared doesn't follow her on Instagram but Gen and Charlie both do. I get we're not all obligated to follow whoever our significant other does, but shouldn't Jared be more curious about this psychic friend of Gen's mother who Gen says was so right about her husband?

Honestly, I think Jared can be perspective at times but I will agree with this Anon who brought the Bathroom Chronicles Episode 11 podcast to my attention, where Gen and Peggy talked about Peggy's predictions of who Gen would marry one day that he seems more naïve and trusting than he should be. If you ask me, truly intuitive people do not trust a good chunk of people and often can sense when things are "amiss" but what do I know, right? I'm sorry but as much as I adore Jared as a person, he really trusts people too easily and the wrong people in that too.

Bottom line, why would these 2 do black magic on their husbands? It boils down to greed and because let's just face it, Gen built her little empire piggybacking on her husband and her "family image", just as Danneel's career these days mostly consists of riding her husband's coattails. It's much easier to ride on someone else's behind to live an easy life of luxury you didn't earn than it is to earn it yourself like their husbands did. It takes drive, motivation, ambition, and enough intelligence and at times charisma to achieve that kind of lifestyle if you aren't born into it. Gen from my understanding is from a wealthier background than Danneel is, which makes this more interesting. Both of them however come from easy backgrounds and have had relatively little struggles (and in my opinion even less talent, brains, and skill) in their lives.

I will say that based on how things have played out and are still, I believe that it's more likely Gen is trying harder to make it so her husband dies younger (multiple times getting COVID and generally getting sick a lot, car accident he was in, etc.) than Danneel is who seems to be trying harder to keep her husband around. Outwardly Gen is trying to make it look like she cares about him a whole lot as I and others talked about.

As an added bonus, I find it funny as hell how JUST last night also one of my best friends and I were talking about how we don't think Gen and Jared are having much sex anymore and then this morning this Mamoosh libido supplement shows up as yet another one of Gen's advertisements this morning. Honey, we know you two are probably not getting it on much anymore for multiple reasons so who are you taking it this supplement for? Trying to keep your easy cushy lifestyle with Jared by promising him more sex? "See honey yet another supplement but this one specifically to make me want sex more, let's try to stick this out longer". Gen honey your and Peggy's, as well as Danneel and her mom's black magic ain't gonna last much longer. Get over it....

#anti jenneel #anti genevieve #black magic #witchcraft #anti elta

[beardedmrbean]

A former Maryland mayor and well known LGBTQ activist, convicted earlier this year in a heinous child pornography case, was sentenced to 30 years in prison on Monday. 

Patrick Wojahn, who resigned as mayor of College Park, Maryland, on March 2 before his arrest, pleaded guilty to 140 charges related to child pornography as part of a deal struck with prosecutors. He was sentenced to 150 years total, with all but 30 years suspended, but still will be eligible for parole in 7.5 years under state law, The Washington Post reported. The conviction came after investigators linked an account sharing illicit images to his government email address.

"I do sense the remorsefulness," Prince George's County Circuit Court Judge Karen Mason said of Wojahn on Monday during an emotional hearing when prosecutors read hours of victim impact statements. "And I do know you take responsibility."

Authorities say the 48-year-old uploaded and shared dozens of photos and videos depicting explicit child sex abuse, including the rape of prepubescent boys by adults, to social media apps in January, The Post reported. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children notified Prince George’s County Police Department of the social media activity in mid-February.

Through their investigation, police determined a social media account with the screen name "skippy_md" belonged to Wojahn, FOX 5 DC reported. 

By means of a subpoena, investigators found that Wojahn's College Park government email address was listed as the recovery email for the Kik account. Wojahn's phone number and home IP address were linked to the account, according to authorities, who say the ex-mayor used a virtual private network to mask his location when accessing the account. 

More explicit images were also found on the social media app Telegram.

OKLAHOMA HUMAN TRAFFICKING SUSPECT ARRESTED, ALLEGEDLY USED FAKE ID TO AVOID DEPORTATION FOR 2 DECADES

Court records show Wojahn was indicted in March by a grand jury on 80 counts of possessing and intent to distribute child pornography, which were amplified to 140 counts in May through a superseding indictment. He pleaded guilty in August to all 60 counts of distribution of child pornography, 40 of possession of child pornography and 40 of possessing child pornography with the intent to distribute. Of those kids depicted in the hundreds of photos and videos Wojahn possessed and shared, law enforcement identified 52 child victims, some of whom are now adults, in collaboration with the Justice Department’s Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force Program and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Their victim impact statements read in court detailed struggles with extreme anxiety, paranoia, poor sleep, trust issues and a sense of safety, and some said they have been stalked and forced to move their current families and children of their own after being exposed as victims of online child exploitation. 

The judge cited Wojahn's own past as a victim of sexual abuse and also heard declarations of support from 16 people in the courtroom who spoke about Wojahn’s history of public service before deciding to refer the former mayor to the Patuxent Institution, a treatment-oriented maximum-security prison in Maryland.

Wojahn himself addressed the courtroom Monday to apologize. 

"I know I contributed to that, and I’m deeply, deeply sorry … I recognize the damage I have caused," he said, according to the Post. 

"I want to be the person they know me to be," he said to the community, before addressing his husband, "I love you, too, very much."

Wojahn, a staunch LGBTQ advocate and graduate of Georgetown University Law School who joined a lawsuit with his now-husband against the state of Maryland in 2006 to make marriage a right for same-sex couples in the state, had served on the College Park City Council for eight years until he was elected mayor in November 2015. He served in that role for seven years until his resignation earlier this year. 

#nunyas news

[richincolor]

New Releases for November 2023

We have eight titles on our November release list. There's quite a mix with a few contemporaries, some romance, a fantasy, a super hero story, and a thriller to look forward to this month. Here's a peek.

With or Without You by Eric Smith Inkyard Press

All’s fair in love and (food truck) war.

Everyone knows Jordan Plazas and Cindy Ortiz hate each other.

According to many viral videos of their public shouting matches, the Plazas and Ortiz families have a well-known food truck rivalry. Jordan and Cindy have spent all of high school making cheesesteaks and slinging insults at each other across their shared Philadelphia street.

But the truth? They’re in love, and it’s all just an act for the tourists.

When the fake feud lands them a reality tv show pilot, Jordan and Cindy find themselves having to lie on a much bigger scale. Trapped between pursuing their dreams or their love, can they find a way to have their cheesesteak and eat it too?

Gorgeous Gruesome Faces (Gorgeous Gruesome Faces #1) by Linda Cheng Roaring Brook Press

After a shocking scandal that abruptly ended her teen popstar career, eighteen-year-old Sunny Lee spends her days longing for her former life and cyberstalking her ex-BFF and groupmate, Candie. The two were once inseparable, but that was then—before the tragedy and heartache they left in their wake.

In the here and now, Sunny is surprised to discover that Candie is attending a new K-pop workshop in her hometown. Candie might be there chasing stardom, but Sunny can’t resist the chance to join her and finally confront their traumatic history. Because she still can’t figure out what happened that horrible night when Mina, the third in their tight-knit trio, jumped to her death. Or if the dark and otherworldly secrets she and Candie were keeping had something to do with it . . .

But the workshop doesn’t bring the answers Sunny had hoped for, nor a happy reunion with Candie. Instead, Sunny finds herself haunted by ghostly visions while strange injuries start happening to her competitors—followed by even stranger mutilations to their bodies. In her race to survive, Sunny will have to expose just who is behind the carnage—and if Candie is out for blood once more—in Linda Cheng’s spellbinding sapphic thriller that will have readers screaming and swooning for more.

Static Up All Night by Lamar Giles & illustrated by Paris Alleyne DC Comics

VIRGIL (aka STATIC) can do amazing things with his vast array of electrical abilities, but instantly mending a broken heart isn’t in his skill set.

Virgil Hawkins has just gone through a bad break up. He can’t get over his ex, so his best friend Richie has an idea for how to distract attend a music festival in their city of Dakota. But wouldn’t you know it—his ex is in attendance. And that’s just the beginning of his troubles.

A series of encounters and events leads to an all-night adventure involving super villains, a diner, a reluctant rapper, and a size-changing kleptomaniac, as well as Virgil’s frequent bad decision making. But in the end, with the help of his friends, Virgil will find he can move on from a broken heart.

Wish of the Wicked (Wish of the Wicked #1) by Danielle Paige Bloomsbury YA

For centuries, the enchanted members of the Entente have worked in tandem with the Three Fates—the Present, the Past, and the Future—to maintain destiny across the Thirteen Queendoms. But when Queen Magrit learns of her untimely demise from Hecate, Fate of the Future, Magrit burns Hecate at the stake and decrees death to all Entente in order to live forever.

But some survive, including sixteen-year-old Farrow, who hatches a dangerous plan to seek revenge. Along the way, she finds herself falling for the one person who could ruin everything. With life and love hanging in the balance, she must decide who to trust and what’s most important: living in the past or forging a new future.

Bestselling author Danielle Paige launches a brand-new fairy godmother origin story full of intrigue, magic, and romance.

Artifacts of an Ex by Jennifer Chen Wednesday Books

When Chloe Chang gets dumped via USPS after moving across the county from NYC to LA, her first instinct is to throw her box of memories in the garbage. Instead, she starts buying other teenagers’ break-up boxes to create an art exhibit, Heartifacts. Opening night is going great, until she spots Daniel Kwak illicitly filming his best friend’s reaction to his ex’s box. When she tries to stop him, an intense discussion ends up launching a creative partnership and friendship… and a major crush for Chloe.

There’s just one problem: Daniel is dead set on not being another rebound.

Five times he’s been the guy who makes the girls he’s dating realize they want to get back with their ex. And he refuses for there to be a sixth. She insists she’s over her ex, but when he shows up unexpectedly with his new girlfriend, it turns out Daniel was right. She isn’t ready for a new relationship.

She throws herself into making Heartifacts successful, but flashy influencers threaten her original vision of the exhibit. To create the exhibit she’s always wanted, Chloe needs to go back to basics, learn to work with artists in a more collaborative way, and discover what love can be. Only then will she convince Daniel she’s truly ready for everything they could be to one another.

Didn’t See That Coming by Jesse Q. Sutanto Delacorte Press

A hilariously fresh and romantic send-up to You’ve Got Mail about a gamer girl with a secret identity and the online bestie she’s never met IRL until she unwittingly transfers to his school, from the bestselling author of Dial A for Aunties, The Obsession, and Well, That Was Unexpected.

Seventeen-year-old Kiki Siregar is a fabulous gamer girl with confidence to boot. She can’t help but be totally herself… except when she’s online.

Her secret? She plays anonymously as a guy to avoid harassment from other male players. Even her online best friend—a cinnamon roll of a teen boy who plays under the username Sourdawg—doesn’t know her true identity. Which is fine, because Kiki doesn’t know his real name either, and it’s not like they’re ever going to cross paths IRL.

Until she transfers to an elite private school for her senior year and discovers that Sourdawg goes there, too.

But who is he? How will he react when he finds out Kiki’s secret? And what happens when Kiki realizes she’s falling for her online BFF?

Kingdom of Without by Andrea Tang Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

When Zhong Ning’er takes the job, she expects a smash-and-grab burglary she’s doing to make rent and help out a friend. What she doesn’t expect: a sad-eyed army boy who dreams of insurrection, a former rebel leader trapped inside a secret lab, a group of aspiring revolutionaries who are first collaborators, then compatriots, and then, perhaps, friends.

But this is Beijing, nearly a hundred and fifty years after General Yuan Shikai successfully declared himself emperor in 1915. His descendants rule the country from their seat in the imperial city, their gendarmerie—the Beiyang Army—run the streets, aided by cyborgs and the Brocade Guard. Walls have risen, dividing the city into districts called Rings—nominally only by geography, but in truth by class. Earthquakes devastate the northern farmlands, crops drown in the southern typhoons, and all over the country people are hooked on a drug they call Complacency.

As a Sixth Ring girl who watched previous uprisings crushed brutally by the court, Ning’er isn’t much of an optimist, and she’s certainly no revolutionary. But that might not be up to her—as the stakes get higher, the time for passivity is quickly running out, and she must decide if she wants to sit idly in her cynicism, or embrace the breathless, terrible possibility of hope.

The Crimson Fortress (The Ivory Key Duology #2) by Akshaya Raman Clarion Books

In this thrilling, action-packed sequel and conclusion to the critically acclaimed Ivory Key duology called “a dream”* (Booklist, starred review), royal siblings Vira, Ronak, Kaleb, and Riya battle vengeful enemies, centuries-old mysteries, and their own personal demons in order to save their country from ruin.

The search for the Ivory Key has brought royal siblings Vira, Ronak, Kaleb, and Riya closer than they have been in years as they try to restore magic and stability to Ashoka. But despite finally getting their hands on the long-lost key, uncovering its cipher has proved more complicated and dangerous than they ever expected.

Their missions force them to split up and disperse them across Ashoka and beyond. When a rash decision by the council strips Vira of her power, her journey to reclaim her throne takes on new meaning. Kaleb travels to the neighboring country of Lyria to uncover its emperor’s motives and meets a prince seeking answers of his own. Ronak’s efforts to escape his arranged marriage and exonerate his brother lead to a series of risky deals that only bring him closer to what he’s running from. And Riya’s newfound power has turned unpredictable, but her search for answers only raises more questions.

When their attempts at decoding the key release an ancient power, the siblings must align to face the past and save their future once and for all. In a quest that culminates in a deadly labyrinth, there’s only one way they will succeed: together.

#new releases #young adult books

[leebrontide]

Secondhand Origin Stories, Chapter 1

I'm posting a chapter a week till we're done, as I prepare book 2 in the series for release!

For details about the book, an index of chapters, and content warnings check out the information post!

Chapter 1

Opal shifted in the hard plastic chair in the humid, cinderblock room, leaning to peer past the scratched riot glass to the door beyond. Two half-cubicles down, a woman was arguing with her husband through the g1lass, tears on her face. Opal was pretty sure she’d passed the woman here a few times before. Most of the inmates at this facility were in for the long haul. A lot of them were altereds from the same line as her dad. You got to recognize the people that actually kept up their visits, for as far as the prison was from the city.

The door opened, and Opal leaned a little further forward, forehead to the glass. She grinned. Maybe it was a little forced, but she always had to show him she was at least OK enough to fake it. This visit more than ever. She let her dark skin light up with the flitting little pink bioluminescent lights he’d recognize as a good mood, but waited until he was close enough that she wouldn’t have to yell before she actually used words. The guards didn’t like it when they used ASL, but his cochlear implant was ancient by now, and fritzed out a lot. “Hi, daddy.” 

She was 18. Too old to call him ‘daddy,’ really, and she would’ve looked weird to anyone watching. Opal was dense and well-muscled. She looked like some kind of hardcore weightlifter. Not someone who called her father ‘daddy,’ collected pretty stationary, and liked reading romances from the 1700s. But as long as they kept their voices low and conversational, and avoided gestures, nobody cared what they were saying. Everyone here was used to Nick Flynn, his bio-lights like the briefest flares of stars against the almost midnight black of his skin. Most of the Detroit line altereds had bioluminescence, which meant a lot of the inmates had it. Opal, with her wide-set black eyes, squared jaw, and high cheekbones, could not have been any more obviously his daughter.

He offered her a bright smile, not quite as forced as hers. “There’s my graduate! How’s it feel?” The smile dimmed. “I’m sorry I wasn’t--”

“Quit it,” she interrupted. She didn’t like to disrespect him by interrupting, but it turned her stomach every time he apologized for not being at home where he wanted to be. She didn’t want to be the reason he regretted what he’d done to end up here. She tried to lighten the mood. “Anyways, I’m bringing the experience to you.”

He raised his eyebrows. She wasn’t allowed to bring her phone or any electronics in with her, so she couldn’t show him the low-res video of her particular dot among the 2,000 other dots in a line getting their pieces of paper. But she was allowed to bring in a clear plastic backpack, sold especially for prison visits. She unzipped it, pulling out the slightly dented mortarboard hat she’d retrieved off the grass after she returned her own graduation hat to the rental place. His grin lit back up as she put it on her head and paused to pose, showing it off. “I have brought you your very own recent-history reenactment.”

He slow-clapped, leaning back in his chair, a faint hint of pink flitting across his features. 

“First, we sat through two hours of speeches.” She leaned back suddenly in her chair, staring up at the ceiling as if boredom could actually kill her. The hat almost fell off. She sat back up. “Then they started calling names.” She pretended to be excited for a second, then drooped back again, slower this time. “Then, the big highlight of the day--” She schooled her expression into polite, attentive interest, turning to the side as if there was actually someone there. She mimed taking the diploma before recreating the fast, sweaty handshake she’d gotten. She nodded a thanks at the invisible principal, then looked back at her dad, sitting back in her chair again. “And that was the big, exciting day.”

“You forgot throwing your hat,” he pointed out. 

She shook her head, taking the rumpled thing off. “Hat-throwing was punishable by fines and being ejected from the ceremony. Can’t have anyone losing an eye to this terrifying weapon.”

He looked dismayed. “You serious?”

She smiled ruefully, nodding. 2,154 students graduating. Apparently that was too much hat chaos for the school’s higher-ups. He sighed in aggravation. “That’s bullshit.”

She laughed.  “Well, you can write them a nasty letter.”

“Think I’ll wait ’till after your sister graduates to piss them off.”

“She and Aunt Tessa will be out next weekend.”

“Why didn’t you just wait and come out with them?”

Her gut did a little flip, and she licked her lips. She didn’t let the nervous violet lights flare up around her temple like they wanted to. But he knew the tell, and sat up straighter. “I got a bunch of money from Grandma and everybody at my graduation party. I priced it out. With what I already saved, I’ve got enough for a bus to Chicago, plus living expenses for two months, and a bus home, if I need it.”

His eyes snapped shut, and he stopped breathing for a second. She held her breath with him. They’d both known this was coming. She’d just expected it to take longer. Dim purples and yellows, almost invisible under his skin, shimmered anxiously, but disappeared as he exhaled. He didn’t have the kind of deliberate control over the lights that Opal and her sister did. When he opened his eyes, he nodded. “OK. Bigger day than I thought, then.”

She didn’t know what to say. “Yep.”

He nodded again, eyes slipping off to the side. He wouldn’t look down in front of her. He looked back at her. “You remember, baby. If they don’t take you, that’s on them. Not you. Don’t go taking any stupid risks to impress them. They aren’t worth that.”

“You are.”

This time his smile was tight. “Forget that. I’m a man. I can make do on my own.”

It was an old argument, but she was sucked into it, the same as ever. “You shouldn’t have to.” She didn’t raise her voice. She’d learned that lesson a long time ago.

He scowled, shifting uncomfortably. “Don’t start. You do this for you if you’re gonna do it. Nobody else.”

“Tch. Pretty bad superhero if I do it for myself.”

“Well, don’t do it for me.”

“I’ll do it because I can,” she said. She’d dreamed of being a superhero her whole life. It’d just taken on a different urgency after her daddy was arrested. 

“Gonna be a while before I see you, then.”

“I included the phone charges in my budget. You can call me whenever.” It was harder to fake being cheerful now. She didn’t really want to. “If it goes good, I’ll have money to visit before too long.”

He nodded, but didn’t say anything. For all either of them knew, it’d be years before she saw him again. And email wasn’t allowed at this facility anymore. Phone calls were an inconsistent “privilege.” She changed the subject. “Gonna miss you.”

“Miss you too. But I’m proud of you. Do your best, baby.”

She bit her lip, and made herself smile, even if she knew he could see tears in her eyes. 

She’d save lives, use the abilities she’d inherited from him for good, and use the fame and respect from her position to do something about the conditions for people like her daddy. There were too many of them.

Opal was going to be a superhero.

* * *

Issac woke up with a crick in his neck and corduroy stripes imprinted onto his face, as the saxophone wail he’d trained himself to wake up to blared from his phone. He didn’t answer it-- didn’t need to. Martin was listening. He rubbed his face, squinting in the daylight he could have sworn wasn’t there a second ago. “Wh-- shit. What time is it?”

Martin didn’t need sleep. Which made him even more of an obnoxiously chipper morning person than Yael. “Almost breakfast time.”

“You let me sleep for two hours?”

“Why not? Your essays and applications were already sent. The work on the nanites can wait.”

The trashier gossip blogs called Issac a “super-genius.” Which was inaccurate. As the kid of an altered, his genes had been scanned before birth. Just like his biological sister, his genes were totally unaffected by the procedure that turned his dad into LodeStar: Leader of the Sentinels. 

Those gossipy blogs almost never even mentioned that his mom had a doctorate in biomedicine and an MBA. Issac knew who he took after. Dad might be the leader of the Sentinels, but Mom and Aunt Jenna had built the super-powered cybernetic limbs that had brought LodeStar to the next level. Had given him flight, and kept him in the field longer than any other superhero.

And now Issac was going to follow in their footsteps. The nanites he was making would be the game-changer for brain injury treatment. The ability to repair damaged neurons according to pre-made programs. They weren’t quite ready yet-- his micro-fabricator sat silent on Jenna’s dining room table-- but they were well on their way.

Issac did deserve to get some sleep. It’d be good for his brain.

He rolled over, trusting the amped-up microphone on his phone to pick up his voice, even half-smothered against the back of the couch. That was the only way Martin could hear him in here-- Jenna’s old apartment was a dead zone for the speakers and microphones Martin used for communication everywhere else in the family home. “Tell Mom I’m not coming to breakfast.”

“I’m sure that’ll go over well,” Martin answered from Issac’s phone. Why had Issac taught him sarcasm?

“She’s the one who told me to get my college application essay done ASAP!” he argued, flinging one arm out in a gesture exhaustion turned into a limp flail. His knuckle brushed crinkled paper shoved under the couch. He ignored it. He was used to ignoring all the little leftover reminders of why Jenna’s apartment was empty.

“About that--”

Issac opened his eyes, glaring into deep blue corduroy. “Don’t even start. You already sent them out. Spare me the lecture about ‘inappropriate subject matter.’ It’s too late.” 

As a synthetic intelligence with zero biological components, Martin didn’t have lungs. But that didn’t keep him from sighing. Issac interrupted Martin’s lecture before he even got going. They’d been over this the night before. And the day before that. Issac sat up, rubbing feeling back into an arm that seemed even less happy about being awake than he was. “We’re about to revolutionize like five fields of medicine and micro-robotics, Martin. If you think I’m going to just not mention that to colleges--”

Martin interrupted right back. “I was going to tell you there’s been a miscommunication. Your father’s voiced plans to join you this morning for breakfast, to help you with the essay. It seems your mother didn’t intend for you to stay up all night finishing them, and then send them off without either of your parents looking them over.”

Issac blinked, then lay back down, and moaned his objection into a throw pillow. It wasn’t like Issac hated his dad. He wouldn’t keep his little display case of LodeStar action figures in his room if he hated the guy. It was just that Issac was stubborn and brilliant, and his dad was pigheaded and bossy. Pigheaded and bossy were fine traits for the leader of the oldest and most respected superhero team in the US, but it made for a lot of lecturing for anyone caught in a subordinate role like “son.”

“Four more months,” Issac reminded himself. He took a deep breath. “Just four months, then I’m getting the hell out of Dodge.” He gave in. Swung his legs off the couch with resignation. Mom had given up on banning him from all-nighters, but he was expected to show up at breakfast, come hell or high water. And he couldn’t be caught leaving his aunt’s supposedly empty old apartment. He could only get away with using this place at all because Martin was the building’s security system, and Issac had talked him into it.

Issac ran his fingers through his sleep-tangled mass of brown curls. He’d better get home before Mom asked where he was. Martin couldn’t lie. He could obfuscate with the best of them, but he couldn’t lie.

Issac didn’t know what would happen to Martin when Issac left for college. Issac was the only one who realized what Martin was-- not just an advanced, learning security system, but a genuine synthetic intelligence, the most sentient and complete in the world. Kept secret only because Issac could lie, and because Martin had pleaded with him not to tell anyone what he really was-- a person. Jenna had been gone by the time Issac had figured it out. And Martin hadn’t really been... this... before then.

Issac got up to wash the coffee mug he kept in here, unplugging the flash drive that held his data and shoving it in his pocket. He used Jenna’s old apartment as a refuge, but he touched as little as possible, and never left a mess. 

“Aren’t you going to be lonely when I leave?” Issac knew Martin’s code better than anyone but Martin himself, at this point. Martin was programed to be interested in, and invested in, people. In the eight years since his first activation, that imperative had grown into real social impulses. He sent Issac interesting articles and funny memes throughout the day, dropping them into his email when Issac was occupied or accompanied.

Since Martin’s substantial electronic “brain” lived in the central column of the Sentinel Plaza, and what passed for his “body” was 24 stories tall, Issac was pretty sure Martin would find it hard to attend classes or keggers. Issac’s research partner wasn’t coming with him.

“I can acquire phone lines. I’ll call you.”

Issac tried to lighten the mood. “What, are you afraid my dad will try to adopt you, and you’ll be stuck with his little speeches forever? You’re only eight, Martin,” he chided, wagging a finger. “You should have proper parental supervision.”

The joke fell flat, as he reminded them both that Jenna, who’d originally made Martin, wasn’t here to take care of him like she should have been. Issac set the mug down and headed back to the couch, but Martin’s tone was musing, not hurt. “You know, I’ve been thinking about that. If we conceptualize Jenna as my mother…Then really, as the other person who ‘raised’ me--” Issac stopped dead, not liking where this was going. “You could be reasonably be described as my father.”

No. Nope. There was so much wrong with that. Like how he considered Jenna a mentor, nearly a parent, and did not have a kid with her. Like how Issac was all of 10 when Martin was activated. Like how Issac didn’t want to be described as a teen father, even if the “kid” was a 24-story supercomputer with a smart mouth and an impressively nuanced understanding of neuroplasticity. 

Like how Issac was leaving, and if Martin was his son, what did that make Issac for going?

Damn it, he was operating on two hours of sleep and hadn’t had his morning coffee yet. He was not up to dealing with this. He tried to settle his breathing, glad that from here, Martin couldn’t detect Issac’s suddenly soaring blood pressure. “Don’t get mushy on me, twerp. You’ll fry your circuits with that sap.”

He grabbed his phone and headed out the door, back into the central courtyard, where Martin couldn’t answer him without being overheard. Issac wasn’t ready for that conversation.

* * *

Jamie poked her cereal unenthusiastically. Mom always poured her way, way too much. As if enough healthy cereal could make Jamie grow the way 16-year-olds were supposed to. Maybe make up for the growing her 15-year-old self had neglected. It was a hope Jamie theoretically shared, but she suspected any growing she had left to do was likely to disappoint.

Light streamed in through the bank of picture windows, glinting off a 24th story Chicago skyline, ricocheting off various gleaming marble and glass surfaces in her home, and poking her right in the eye. She squinted, tilting her head the other way, only to get a different ray bouncing off her dad’s bionic arm and into her other eye. Would it kill him to get some sleeves? She decided looking down at her cereal was her only safe option. 

He was 54 years old, fully old enough to have given up on tank tops. But, being age-stable, he looked like he was in his mid-20s, barely older than Issac. His curling brown hair hadn’t shown a single strand of gray that Jamie could see. He had proportions that bordered on ridiculous, with the top half of him forming a shape like a generous pizza slice with a head and arms. Granted, part of that build was due to the way his cybernetic arms mimicked body-builder arms, but that didn’t make Neil Voss look any less like a bizarrely stylized old-school comic book character.

Mom poured herself another coffee. Mom was elegant, if not exactly pretty-- tall and still slim at 56, with high cheekbones and perfectly manicured eyebrows. Jamie guessed she was considered reasonably good-looking for her age, but good-looking like a person, not like a cartoon. Mom had on a dove gray suit, heels that put her at or above the eye level of most men, and the graying version of Jamie’s fine strawberry blonde hair pulled up into a sleek ponytail. Her manicure and makeup were flawless, and carefully curated to be the classic versions of current trends.

Jamie had managed one of her brother’s old flannels over a baggy t-shirt, cargo pants, and ballet flats. She owned plenty of makeup, but she only wore it for special occasions, since she still couldn’t get close to applying it as well as her mom did, and there really wasn’t anyone here to notice or care. Her little kit was mostly an array of concealers in shades between paper-white and manila, and looked more like a filing cabinet than anything. She kept her hair short enough that she didn’t have to fuss with it much, but had at least tried to pick a cool-ish cut.  

Jamie eyed the coffee pot enviously as her dad poured himself another cup. Jamie was the only resident of the whole building whose place setting was never graced with a coffee mug. Just a couple caffeine-induced palpitations and everybody had to panic about it. “I bet I could work up to being able to drink coffee. I could start with mostly milk and a little coffee, and build up a tolerance.”

Mom raised an eyebrow. “You don’t even like coffee. You make faces every time I give you a sip of mine.”

Well, that was hardly the point. “Issac didn’t used to like coffee. Now he drinks like six cups a day,” Jamie pointed out.

Dad’s tone was so gentle, it felt brittle. “Issac doesn’t have the same sensitivities as you.” Jamie couldn’t get over the way he seemed to think he was breaking bad news to her every single time he brought up her health issues. As if, wow, gee, she hadn’t noticed any of them before now. 

Now that she thought about it, maybe Dad had been the main person fussing over her pulse the last time she’d tried coffee. He was probably at the heart of the conspiracy to deny her the caffeine the rest of the country ran on. 

She could almost swear he didn’t used to be like this. He didn’t used to treat her like a bundle of liabilities. He even used to say that Jamie was just like him. But it seemed like the older she got, the younger she looked to him.

Jamie went back to poking her cereal. Family breakfast was as close to a sacred ritual as her gentile mom got. Picking fights was absolutely not allowed. 

Mom handled the subject change for her. “Speaking of sensitivities, how are Talon’s girls doing? I heard Anna was in for chemo again.”

Jamie was content to switch topics. Altereds from every line-- every type of alteration-- were prone to strange, obscure health problems, since they had bodily systems normal people didn’t. Talon was on the Santa Fe superhero team. Like Dad, he had super-healing. Unlike Dad, he’d passed his superpowers on to his kids. 

Most of the other kids of superheroes had superpowers. And most of them were younger than Jamie-- young enough to think Jamie was cool just because she was a little older, even though she dressed bad, never went anywhere, and never did anything. Jamie moderated a little closed book-club forum for them, since a lot of them were as bored and isolated as Jamie was. None of them were allowed on social media. Most of them went to online schools. And a lot of them weren’t lucky enough to have siblings in their families’ bases. Jamie didn’t usually care about books for 12-year-olds, but it was a small, easy thing she could do for them. “I don’t think she even minds anymore. Last time she only stayed for about two weeks. She just saved up a few shows to marathon and finished the book club book early.” Jamie sincerely tried not to be envious of a sick 12-year-old. But Anna bounced back from cancer and chemotherapy faster than Jamie could shake a stomach flu. 

Mom and dad both shook their heads, frowning. Mom tapped her plum-colored nails on the white marble of the kitchen peninsula while dad tried to reorganize the universe by frowning, with superhuman strength, at his fork. “Thank G-d you and Issac are healthy.” 

Jamie heard that a lot. The assumption was that she herself would pick her current body over an altered version. She didn’t think anyone had ever actually asked her if she’d trade in generalized frailty for super strength, speed, endurance and healing, even if it came with greater risk of serious complications. She was pretty sure she’d get a lengthy lecture on thankfulness if she ever did answer a question like that out loud. She was expected to be grateful for her dubious good health. And since her wish to grow up to be a superhero had gone from cute to sad years ago, she’d learned to keep it to herself.

She’d tallied it all up, once. She’d put mom down as the responsible party for Jamie’s anemia, shellfish allergy, hellish periods, low blood pressure, absurd proneness to sunburn and freckling, overbite (now corrected), acne (sort-of now corrected) and nearsightedness (also now corrected). She’d placed the blame for the asthma, wussy stomach, mild scoliosis, low bone density, and susceptibility to gingivitis on Dad’s pre-alteration genes. Dad didn’t actually have to deal with any of those things anymore, though. Which was why Mom was now Jamie’s favorite. Whether that was fair or not.

Her brother Issac had gotten acne and a cross-bite. Science had saved him from the acne better than it had saved her, and could have saved him from the cross-bite if he wasn’t a baby about going to the freaking dentist.

Dad patted Jamie’s shoulder, light enough to be an insult to Jamie’s ability to sit upright on a stool. He didn’t look at her, though. These days, he always seemed to be looking over her head, instead of directly at her. As if it pained him to have to look so far down to see her. He addressed Mom. “So, Tillman, where are you hiding my other offspring? If he doesn’t show soon, he’s going to have to wait for me to get up before I help him with that essay.”

Mom made a face. They’d been divorced since Jamie was less than two years old, but they were a lot closer than most divorced couples. They sort of had to be, as neighbors living in the same high-security building. “Were you up all night again?” 

“Justice never sleeps,” Dad quipped back halfheartedly. He did look a little rumpled, and his eyes were bloodshot. A little strained, now that she looked closer. Which was odd enough to be interesting. They hadn’t had anything more than a two-day mission in months. Why should he be worn out enough for it to show? He’d seemed OK on TV yesterday, during that interview.

MARTIN interrupted. “Mr. Voss, Dr. Tillman. I have just received a direct communication from Secretary Bridgewater asking me to inform you that he intends to come to the residential floors of the Plaza shortly to speak with you and the other Sentinels.”

Jamie choked on her cereal. The head of the Altered Persons Bureau did not make house calls. Jamie didn’t think he’d ever even been to Sentinel Plaza, even though 20 of its 24 floors were APB offices. He worked out of the DC branch. Yael hadn’t ever even met him, and he was xyr uncle. He was like the Wizard of Oz-- invoked and referenced, but never seen. She managed not to drown in her breakfast and cleared her voice for action “Why?”

“He declined to provide that information,” MARTIN intoned.

“He wanted me to be there?” Mom clarified, glass halfway to her mouth.

“You were specifically requested, yes.” 

It was rudely last-minute, and Mom had a medical technologies conglomerate to run, so Jamie expected concern or irritation. She didn’t expect the amount of alarm on both her parents’ faces, or Dad’s furiously muttered “Shit,” as he started to get up. “MARTIN, tell Drew and Solomon to come over--”

This was the sort of chance Jamie had been waiting for. An opportunity to take a stand.

“I’ll get Issac!” Jamie volunteered, jumping off her bar stool. She knew what happened next. Something was happening, so she, Yael, and Issac would be shunted off to some obscure corner of the residential parts of the tower and told to stay put.

She bolted down the hallway, trusting that her parents’ interest in discussing this without her there would keep them from wondering why she was in such a hurry to get Issac. She’d get Yael, next. If she was going to turn this into an opportunity, she’d need backup, and fast. 

She banged her knuckles on Issac’s door hard enough that they stung. No answer, but the shower was off. “Issac!” she called through the door, banging it again. 

The door swung open on an damp and irritated older brother. His usual trendy outfit was marred by the way his ubiquitous headphones-- placed just behind his ears, but blaring jazz music-- made his wet hair stick up like the scruff on a poorly-manicured purse dog. He looked exhausted, which meant he looked cranky. “You look like crap,” Jamie commented.

Issac raised an eyebrow. “Thanks. Hi. What do you want? I’ll be at breakfast in a second.”

“Secretary Bridgewater is gonna be here ‘shortly.’ Here in the house levels.”

Issac frowned. “Yael’s uncle?” 

Jamie nodded. She could just about see the gears turning in Issac's head. “And he wanted to talk to Mom and the whole team, so you know it’s something important. He wouldn’t come all this way to talk about finances.”

Issac frowned. “He didn’t say why?” 

She shook her head. “But Mom. Which means finances, huge policy change, a threat to the tower, or--”

“Or one of us,” Issac finished. Jamie nodded. That was why they had to act fast. “Shit,” he muttered. “OK. Go…tell Yael or something.”

He moved to shut the door. She shoved her foot into the doorway-- and winced, as reclaimed wood connected with thin canvas shoe-- but it kept him from closing the door. She dropped her voice to a whisper. “Issac! This just makes it even more important that we stick together. If this might be about us, we deserve to know what’s going on. And you know they’re going to try to shut us up in Dad’s apartment or something--”

He paused, curious but hesitant. “Yeah. They do that.”

Jamie warmed to the subject immediately. She hadn’t been sure Issac would hear her out, but she knew he hated information being kept away from him. And there was a lot of information being kept away from them. Like where, exactly, Jenna had gone. Like where their own dad was, when he’d sometimes disappear for a day or two without the team and without appearing on tv. Like how nobody would talk about Yael’s parentage, even though they all already knew! That last one was especially insulting. “So we should do something about it! Take a stand. Right?”

For a moment, she thought she’d lost him. She prepared herself for another hurried pitch, but there was an extra spark in his eyes that stopped her. She remembered it from the Great Hanukkah/Christmas Gift Investigation of 2026 and the Puppy-Smuggling Attempt of 2025, plus a few other illicit escapades the three of them had pulled off or attempted over the years. They were mostly too old for that kind of thing now. She didn’t need to know what her presents were ahead of time.

But this-- this was worth breaking rules for. Especially if it really was about them. He grinned at her. “All right, Jamie. Way to grow some balls.” Jamie gave him the expected eye roll at his grossness. He punched her arm, and graciously ignored her minor stagger. This time, his suggestion was part of their conspiracy, rather than a dismissal. “Go get Yael.”

Perfect. If Jamie and Issac were in on it, there was no way Yael would sit on the sidelines. Jamie grinned back at Issac, then ran off to complete their team.

* * *

Yael's fist connected with Papa’s face. Xe darted backwards, out of his range.  At near seven feet tall, xe had far superior reach compared to his six feet, five inches. But he was faster. Yael noticed too late that xe’d been focusing too much on his fists, and he’d snuck one of his legs behind xyr. A sweep and a shove, and Yael was flying backwards across the room.

Xe hit the ground in a controlled roll that only stung for a second, and was back up, fists ready, in one racing heartbeat. Dust motes swirled frantically in the morning light between them. Yael was relieved to see a grin on his face. Xe laughed at1717 xyr own mistake to distract him from the few spots of glossy gunmetal gray xe’d felt seep out of xyr skin the moment xe’d hit the ground. 

Sparring with the Sentinels was critical for xyr training. But sparring with Papa was sometimes more like a super-powered game of tag. It would stay fun, as long as he didn’t see those silvered spots. He’d learned to not freak out at xyr shape shifting, but any sign of xyr exoskeleton would grind the match to a halt, and he’d bolt.

But he hadn’t seen. For once, xe was thankful for the straight sheet of nearly black hair that xe usually resented for the way it looked nothing like Papa’s dark gold waves. Xe’d had it cut over and over again trying to make it fall even a little like his, but it wasn’t happening.

At least Yael's hair could cover for xyr occasional silver slip-up.

He laughed, because xe laughed. The booming sound echoed in the huge, empty training room. The others would just be getting up and having their breakfasts, but Yael and xyr papa had been awake for hours. Xe’d have to find Drew later and try to talk him into a match. At least with Drew, Yael had some chance of winning. It helped to balance the productive ass-kickings xe got from Papa.

Yael hurtled forward, but ran right into a solid, but not especially painful, punch to xyr kidney. That was a point in Papa’s favor, but he’d had to move in closer to do it, and xe threw a well-formed side kick at his stomach as he tried to get out of range. He was still too fast. But xyr foot at least grazed his shirt! It was close enough to a victory for Yael to crow a triumphant “Ha!”, bouncing on the balls of xyr feet.

Papa chuckled, shaking his head. His guard dropped to signal Teaching Mode. “That’s not a strategy, dove. When you’re fighting real enemies, I don’t want you getting hit just so they’ll get close enough for you to hit them. With reach like yours, there’s no excuse.”

Yael stayed in stance, but waved a padded hand airily, pretending that it was a plan and not a side effect of distraction. “No one heals faster or better than I do.” As far as superpowers went, xyr pedigree was unmatched in the US, and difficult to rival even on a global scale. Xe was the sole second-generation member of the Heavenly Rule line. And aside from xyr, there were only two first-generation members left alive. 

He rolled his eyes, but his smile didn’t falter. “Oh, what I’d give to be seventeen and convinced of my own immortality again. Try not to take too much after me, princess.”

Yael hated that xe still looked for ways xe took after him. Still looked for any similarity in their features, even though xe knew they wouldn’t be there. Xe understood why they were missing. He called xyr birthparents his siblings as a mark of love, not genetic relation. They were from the same alteration line and had grown up together, but weren’t any more biologically related than Yael was related to Drew, or Neil. Xe could mimic Papa’s features, if not his colors, and had, privately. But he knew xyr face. There was no point in pretending they looked more alike than they did. 

It was obvious that everyone living in Sentinel Plaza knew exactly who Yael got xyr genes from. Not that any of the adults would talk to xyr about it. They always told xyr to talk to Papa, and he avoided the subject with the kind of urgency he usually reserved for avoiding machine gun fire. 

Xe’d given up trying to force the issue. Was trying to be patient. But xyr taboo exoskeleton and its ability to manipulate temperature and make ice out of thin air was way too useful to ignore in a real fight. And xe was 17-- adulthood was right around the corner.

Of course, the marketing team would want to riff off those powers for xyr superhero name and costume. Yael had come up with several superhero brands for xyrself already. “Mercury” was xyr favorite this week, since it was associated with temperatures and a highly malleable form. Xe’d even sketched some costume designs. But Mercury was more of a light silver color, whereas the exoskeleton membrane was closer to hematite. And there was already a Hematite out west. 

MARTIN interrupted from overhead, and they both dropped their stances. “Excuse me. Secretary Nodiah Bridgewater is en route to the building and is expected to arrive ‘shortly’ to converse with the Sentinels and Dr. Tillman.”

Yael gaped at the ceiling. 

“What?” Papa croaked in a tone that ripped xyr attention from the ceiling to him. His expression was filled with an intense, intimate fear. His eyes flicked to xyr, giving him away. He only lingered on xyr for a moment, but Yael felt exposed to the spine as xe saw him catalog the gap where their family resemblance should be.

His voice snagged between apology and command. “Stay here.”

That hurt way more than any punch xe’d ever buckled under. In one instant, xe’d been assessed, and come up short. “I want to meet him!”

Nodiah Bridgewater was the only other surviving member of the Heavenly Rule line, Papa’s only remaining sibling, and one of the only living people who’d known Yael’s birthparents well.

He clearly expected the objection, but was pulling off his protective gear without looking at xyr. “Now’s not the time.”

“Not the--?! This is the first time in my life we’ve been in the same building together!”

“That should tell you this is serious, and I need to talk to him.”

“Then talk to him.That doesn’t mean that I can’t--”

“No, Yael.”

Xe reached xyr hands out entreatingly. “I won’t get in the way, I swear--” 

He gave xyr a stern glance, with some unknown fear bubbling under the surface. “Stay. Here.” 

He turned. His broad back made a psychological barrier as solid as if he’d bricked xyr in. As he reached the gym’s door back into the central corridor, he nearly ran over a panting, flush-faced Jamie. “Oh. Jamie. Good.” He looked back down the hallway. “Where’s your brother?” 

“He’s coming.”

Papa nodded, sidestepping Jamie’s tiny body as she slipped sideways into the room.  Yael’s hands clenched to fists, and xe headed after him, but Jamie was moving as purposefully as Papa was, and xe only got a few steps before bird-boned fingers stopped xyr in xyr tracks. Jamie looked up at xyr meaningfully. She didn’t say anything until they heard the elevator ding its closed-door signal.

Xe growled and turned on xyr heel, heading semi-obediently to a bench and stripping off xyr training gear. “Why’d you stop me? Do you know who’s coming?”

“I only stopped you for a second. Issac and I think we need to show a sort of…united front. The three of us.”

“To do what?” Nodiah. Right here in the building. One floor up, with Yael stuck down here. Xe forced xyrself to slow down, or xe’d shred the glove xe was trying to get off.

“To tell them we’re tired of them excluding us from everything! We think Bridgewater is here because of one of us-- I mean, probably you, but--”

Xe stopped. “Me?”

“And they’re still trying to keep you from knowing what’s going on.”

“You think he’s here to see me?”

“Well, it makes sense. You’ll be eighteen in October, and everybody knows you’re going to be a Sentinel. He is the head of the Bureau that handles that.” That did make sense. And Nodiah might see every adult in the tower as some kind of parent to Yael-- that was how he and Papa had been raised, after all. Yael’s mind jumped over everything xe’d done in the last year-- or, no-- in the last few years, that could impact xyr uncle’s impression of xyr. There were too many-- and xe had no idea which of them he knew about. Did he know about the childhood wall-wrecking tantrums? Did he know xe had defended Issac when they were kidnapped three years ago? Did he know how? 

Issac appeared, damp, disheveled, and with one shoe. “And that’s my eviction,” he proclaimed. He waved a slice of toast. “Cold toast. One slice. This is what she gave me.” He took a bite of it, continuing with his mouth full. “What kind of parent gives their teenager a single slice of cold toast for breakfast?”

Yael sighed, spiking a padded glove against the ground spitefully. “One who wants said teenager out from underfoot right away.”

“Pretty much,” Issac agreed. “So are we doing this, or what?”

Jamie piped up. “I think we should figure out quick what exactly we want to tell them--”

Issac interrupted dryly. “How about ‘this is bullshit’?”

Yael bounced xyr leg impatiently. “We don’t have time for a deep discussion. Who knows when he’s going to get here?” 

“MARTIN?” Issac prompted.

“He has pulled into the parking garage,” the system answered.

Yael's breath caught. If xe didn’t get permission now, xe’d end up looking like a kid throwing a tantrum when Papa told xyr ‘no’ again in front of Nodiah. No good. “Then we need to get moving.”

So Yael got moving. Issac followed with long strides, and Jamie scrambled. Xe took the small staircase that linked the three residential floors, taking the stairs four at a time. Xe wouldn’t usually make Jamie scramble, but the window here was so small--

They came out to the top floor through the unobtrusive door between Drew’s apartment and xyr own. The top floor’s central courtyard was large, well-lit, and filled with plants. Doors to each apartment made a pentagon around the courtyard, which had a column of elevators in the middle. Yael only saw Neil, walking across. He stopped, squaring his shoulders, raising his chin, and adopting the look of someone ready to have an argument he didn’t want to have. So Papa had warned him, already.

Xe reorganized xyr body. Slimmed xyr hips, squared xyr jaw, flattened xyr chest out, and even gave xyrself a little more length to xyr legs and spine. Twinges of pain flared all over xyr body at the sudden stretch, but it was worth it to meet Neil looking every bit as strong and immovable as he himself was.

Neil’s voice was even, trying stiffly to smooth things over. “Yael, we can talk about this later, right now--”

Issac cut in. “Right now, you want us out of the way.”

Neil tried again. “Until we know--”

Yael interrupted this time. “Until we know what? Whether or not he’s my uncle?”

Drew came around the elevators in the center of the room. He was the only one left on the team who could show his age. And right now, every year showed. “Yael, fuck’s sake. Now’s not the time for infighting.”

Drew was the most reasonable person on the whole team. He was the only one left who wasn’t actually and directly a parent. Yael always thought that made him a little easier to talk to. Xe turned to him. “I don’t want to fight. But he’s probably coming to talk about me. And I want to be there for that. He’s never even met me-- why can’t I be there?”

Jamie spoke up unexpectedly, her voice thin but a little too loud. “We all want to be there, if it’s going to be about one of us.”

Issac’s voice wasn’t thin at all. Yael could have wished xyr strongest supporter sounded less muleish. “We’re staying.”

Melissa and Papa appeared from the Tillman apartment, completing the assembly. She spoke first, no anger or fear in her voice, only well-worn certainty. “No, you are not.” She focused on her daughter. “I thought you were helping out, not staging a riot in the courtyard.” 

Xe appealed to xyr papa again. Xe was running out of time and options. “It’s not a riot. We just want to be involved when important people are talking about us.”

“No. Now do what you should have done the first time.”

The words ripped out of xyr before xe could grab the strength to hold them in. “Why are you trying to hide me?”

Papa flinched. Even Melissa flinched. He knew xe’d seen it, and tried to cover it with bluster. “I don’t owe you an explanation.”

“Yes, you do!” Jamie argued.

Melissa's voice layered on top. “Jamie, keep your voice down!”

Once Melissa raised her voice, it was all over. Neil and Melissa were arguing with Jamie and Issac. Papa wasn’t paying attention to anyone but himself. Drew was, for reasons Yael didn’t catch, arguing with Papa. No one would hear xyr words. Xe locked them down. Xyr questions were too hard for xyr to waste when nobody would notice. Xe looked down at xyr feet, squirming restlessly in xyr yellow boots. What else could xe do that’d be fast enough to matter?

Xe focused on not being silver.

A fast twitch of movement grabbed xyr attention. Jamie’d stopped mid-sentence, head whipping around to look towards the elevators and freezing in place like a rabbit who’d been spotted.

The elevator door opened to Secretary Nodiah Bridgewater.

* * *

Read the next chapter here!

#SHOSweekly #free books #writeblr #writing #queer books #queer characters #queer author #ya books #na books

[ausetkmt]

https://t.co/Aw6AMY3eW5?s=09

Florida school ‘segregated’ Black students for talk on test scores, parents say

Black students at a Florida elementary school were singled out and pulled from class for an assembly about how it was a “problem” that they had performed poorly on their standardized tests, school district officials said Wednesday. The incident drew outrage from parents and prompted an investigation by the school district.

Only Black fourth- and fifth-grade students at Bunnell Elementary School in Flagler County, Fla., were taken out of class on Friday for the assembly on how to improve their grades — even students who had passing grades. Students were selected to attend based on their race, Flagler Schools spokesman Jason Wheeler told The Washington Post on Wednesday.

Black teachers showed the students a typo-laden PowerPoint presentation titled, “AA Presentation,” which noted how Black students had underperformed on standardized tests for the past three years. On the slide titled “The Problem,” the school district identified Black students as “AA,” or African Americans, in its assessment of their low overall scores, according to the presentation obtained by The Post.

The incident has drawn backlash from parents who were not alerted about an event that had “segregated” their 9- and 10-year-olds. Some say their children were told in the assembly that they could end up dead or in jail if they did not do well on their upcoming tests.

“It told my child that she was not good enough,” Jacinda Arrington told WOFL, a Fox affiliate in Orlando. “The color of your skin means that you are not good enough, when, in fact, she’s one of the smartest kids in her class.”

Another parent, Alexis Smith, told WFTV, an ABC affiliate in Orlando, that her son was panicking after the assembly. She said he asked her, “So I’m going to die, I’m going to get shot, I’m going to go to jail if I don’t do right?”

The school district is investigating how Black students were the only group that attended an event aimed at encouraging improvement in test scores. As an incentive, the students were promised meals from McDonald’s, Flagler interim superintendent LaShakia Moore said in a statement Tuesday.

“While the desire to help this particular subgroup of students is to be commended, how this was done does not meet the expectations we desire among Flagler Schools,” said Moore, who is Black.

Moore added that after speaking with Donelle Evensen, Bunnell Elementary’s new principal, “it is clear there was no malice intended in planning this student outreach.” But, she said, “sometimes, when you try to think ‘outside the box,’ you forget why the box is there.”

On Wednesday, Moore posted a video apologizing to parents.

Evensen did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday morning. County School Board Chair Cheryl Massaro told The Post that while the event wasn’t intended to hurt the Black students or their parents, the School Board did not know about the plans for an assembly and would have advised against having only Black students in attendance.

“We know it was wrong, and it shouldn’t have happened. It wasn’t a great idea,” Massaro said. “It’s sad that it was segregated by race because that’s not fair. But that’s what happened.”

Wheeler said that no information has been given about what exactly was said in the assembly, specifically the claims from parents that students could end up dead or imprisoned if they didn’t perform better.

The event and the backlash to it come as Florida has dramatically changed its standards on how race and history are taught in the classroom.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, and his administration have faced strong criticism over a new policy that requires teachers to instruct middle-school students that enslaved people “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” DeSantis’s administration has also blocked a high school Advanced Placement course on African American studies from being taught and pushed through the “Stop Woke Act” to limit discussions on race in schools and by corporations.

Wheeler told The Post that what happened at the elementary school had “nothing to do with education initiatives from Tallahassee.”

The elementary school is in Bunnell, Fla., about 75 miles north of Orlando. About 19 percent of the public school’s students are Black, and roughly 70 percent of the total enrollment are classified as economically disadvantaged, according to U.S. News & World Report. Evensen was named Bunnell’s principal last month after four years as an assistant principal at the school.

It’s unclear how many Black students were pulled from their classes for the presentation on Friday.

The state grades students on standardized tests between Levels 1 and 5, with 5 being the best score. As part of the presentation, the school said that 32 percent of its Black students scored at Level 3 or above for math and language arts. The school noted that 41 percent should be at Level 3 or above, according to state testing guidelines.

One slide said that Black students could improve their scores if they “commit to earning at least a Level 3 or higher on all standardized assessments” and “concentrate on passing all curriculum based assessments with at least a 75 percent or higher.” High-performing Black students were also called up by teachers and presented as examples to their peers who needed improvement, parents told WESH, an NBC affiliate in Daytona Beach.

Those students who show improvement, and win individual assessment matchups, “will have a meal from McDonald’s,” the school said in its presentation.

An in-school suspension supervisor also attended the assembly with two Black teachers, according to the Daytona Beach News-Journal.

Massaro, the School Board chair, said the assembly should have included all of the students who scored below Level 3.

“If we had done this and there was information about it to the parents, then it would have been a cross-section of everyone,” she told The Post. “There are White and Asian students who also don’t score well.”

Moore emphasized Tuesday that the school wants its parents and guardians to “actively participate in their children’s educational successes,” saying it was wrong not to alert families about plans for an assembly targeting Black students.

“Without informing them of this assembly or of the plans to raise these scores, our parents were not properly engaged,” she said in a statement. “… [F]rom this point forward, all of our schools will engage our parents, no matter what group or subgroup their children may be in, in our continued efforts to raise achievement among all students.”

But some parents are still upset, noting that the assembly targeting their Black children should have never happened in the first place.

“No other child needs to ever experience being singled out, being targeted, being discriminated against because of their color,” Francine Howard, whose daughter was in the assembly, told First Coast News.

“It’s 2023, and they segregated our babies,” Arrington said.

#Florida school ‘segregated’ Black students for talk on test scores #parents say #florida #Black History Matters #Black Students #Youtube

[man-kills-everything]

Hi!

9, 11, & 31? Feel like they fit well with your blog theme :)

9. What CD did you play to death as a kid? Two specifically come to mind for me American Idiot - Green Day This was the first album I really remember owning at an early age way back 20 years ago. I spun that album to death and Green Day was the first band/artist I really got into at 5/6 years old. I remember getting the Bullet In A Bible live album/dvd at a local supermarket around this time and just sitting in there stunned watching the live show.

Now You're Gone: The Album - Basshunter How do I explain this one... this album as well as several other songs/artists of a similar nature (SCOOTER ARE YOU READY?!?) brings me back to the innocent days of 2008. Becoming 10 years old, going to primary school, hanging out with friends, playing video games, just living life and vibing. They will always bring me to being that young child again

11. What song has the most relatable song lyrics to you? History of a Boring Town by Less Than Jake has hit hard fairly recently. It might be due to current circumstances with struggling to find employment following my redundancy last year and being in my own head a bit and longing for the days of the past. Primarily the things about a boring life and a boring town, my friend circle isn't dragging me down and is pretty cool and supportive haha

31. What’s a show that everyone loves that you didn’t? I haven't been able to get into Skins. I guess that is sacrilege especially on here as I know a certain character is worshiped like crazy by certain blogs I have similar music tastes too (cough cough Effy) but whenever I've sat down to actually watch the series, I just couldn't really get into it.

Saying that I'm always willing to give it another shot. For instance for the longest time I could never really get into Peep show as it just freaked me out a little bit. It just really unsettled me and I never "got it" however within the last few months, I finally decided to hunker down and give it a shot and it finally clicked with me and I absolutely love it

Thanks for asking :)

[sonicphobia0601]

Well... I guess it's time for me to be serious. This marks the seven year anniversary of my dad passing away. I still remember the date.

February 11, 2018. I was in my dad's room, watching videos on YouTube and playing Sonic Dash on my tablet. With zero explanation, at 4:30, I lost complete interest in what I was doing. It was raining. My mom came home that night and told me the bad news. That night, I said goodbye to my dad for the last time.

We had his memorial gathering on his birthday. It was supposed to be his sixtieth birthday. A lot of people came to see my family, including the kind of family I don't like giving attention to.

Enough pity on the past!

Why don't you show how you grew as a person? I know you miss your dad, but show what happened afterwards!

Okay then.

2018: Dad died. The beginning of my development of personality started here. After my dad died, I only took one day off from school. I had prom on my 18th birthday and was the only time I pulled a complete all nighter due to attending prom and post prom. I graduated high school that year with cum laude. I start college living on campus that fall. And let me tell you, it's not 100% like the movies. I was on the Cheer team and accidentally discovered my love for horror, playing a bunch of FNAF. I start playing Sonic games, discovering that I actually loved Sonic. Yes, I wrote fanfiction at 16, but it was cringe and trauma dumping at its finest.

2019: I befriend the class snitch (big mistake), got gaslit by both the head of the special needs program along with the class snitch. Ended up alone. Had a mental breakdown that resulted in me getting suspended indefinitely (not proud of myself). Slowly figured out that I wasn't exactly straight.

2020: Remember that suspension from 2019? Well, it cost me a scholarship but it is a blessing in disguise... Because while I was suspended, I was not allowed on campus. And we all know what happened in March of that year. I completely avoided a tactical nuke because of my suspension. It turned out, my old college had a big outbreak of COVID. I honestly enjoyed the first part of COVID because it was quiet and no overstimulating activity happened outside. Got myself a temporary job at a gym as a custodian. It was nasty but the people there liked me. I completed Portal 2. And I attended a Halloween wedding that year. I dressed as a plague doctor for the XDs. That was fun. And I start writing on Wattpad.

2021: Uh... I'm not talking about what transpired here. But long story short, if you are drinking alcohol, GO SLOWLY. You'll thank me later. And that was when I learned of Poppy Playtime. I thought it was an April Fools prank by Zamination. It wasn't. Had fun playing it. And I start college in a community college. I decided to try Archive of Our Own as an outlet for my much darker stories.

2022: I kept getting misgendered online. So I started using they/them because of the obvious mistake. So now I figured out I'm pansexual and nonbinary.

2023: I entered the Billie Bust Up fandom because I found a short on YouTube, specifically one of Barnaby. Got curious. Fell in love with the game. Rest is history. Started a cosplay on Barnaby. Taught myself how to stim discreetly. (Yes, I borrowed Fantoccio's face pat stim)

Now, here we are. 2024. I wonder how much I would grow.

#growth #bbu barnaby #poppy playtime #sonic

[ihavedoorinsurance]

big long post abt bokutachi-kun bc i have worms

so. a little over a week ago, SoapOpera46 (or Yoli-chan) blessed us with this video and i would like to talk abt it at length. piece by piece. this is the true definition of sadan. so much so that it's going under a readmore (if those even matter anymore. i hear fumblr truncates posts automatically?) anyway

full disclosure: i didn't plan any of this. what's to come is basically word puke, off the top of my head, with no organisation or structure to it.

you won't be interested in this unless you're clinically insane. if you're looking for worthwhile opinions on the video, i recommend browsing the comments section. they're short, sweet, and easy to read. nnnnow, without further ado.....

I KU ZO

i'll start off saying i don't know shit about Dream (YUME-SAN as he is so graciously credited in the vid description)! not a damn thing! all i know is he's a Minecraft YouTuber, and up to just yesterday i didn't even know he made music! what seems to be very emo music if this song is anything to go by.

i looked up the lyrics seperately bc tbh i couldnt extrapolate anything from that singing. bokutachi-kun's a star talent and all bless his heart but i needed expert assistance. also according to the blurb at the bottom of the page i referenced, this song references the struggles of depression and ADHD! and myopia, most tragically of all.

here's a student copy.

what to note before we forge onwards: this is contextualised to us by Yoli-chan as a look into Bokutachi's history, saying she: "feeling it fit bokutachi-kun no past very much!!!"

i'm not sure how far in the past this is, but i have some vague ideas pinned on the information that, expressed by Episode 10, Raku and Koneko have already graduated (or dropped out of i'm not discounting that) college by the time the mainline story is in effect.

you also see these silhouettes

of what i assume to be the girls? at around 1:22, so i'm giving it anywhere from 6 to 14 years ago.

and if that seems like a wide ratio that's because it is!! i have no way of knowing what year of high school he's in, when exactly he graduated, how long it's been since then, or anything. i mean he's a fairly young man so i'll take that into account but that hardly helps

(also grant that none of the story takes off until after Raku and Koneko have left college long enough for Raku to call her fellow alumni "old" friends....also wtf what did they major in i've been asking this for years..you don't see them with jobs ever I MEAN PERHAPS KONEKO MAJORED IN NURSING THE COVID PSA DOES INDICATE SHE IS A PROFESSIONAL SO IDK)

but damn if any of that actually matters. you can't even peg the year by identifying hiis fatback monitor and Windows 98 ass OS

he is using some..EQUIVALENT of early msn messenger, maybe that puts this in the ballpark of 2000-2003

ik the Covid PSA isn't like properly canon or anything but i'll bet Raku is still using Win98 well after the OS's discontinuation anyway (it went out of service in 2006 if that helps.)

so if Bokutachi's old enough to be in any year of high school in 1998-2000 (assuming this computer is any indication. it might not be!), i'd wager a guess he's anywhere between 24-30 years old by the time NNSG properly starts (again assuming, that 2010 is the actual year the show takes place. once again, it might not be! it's at least post-Hatsune Miku, judging by the Christmas episode). this leaves room for college, but i doubt he went.

kind of what i already assumed, but it's fun trying to put these pieces together.

also can i just say i'm intrigued by the "nya, rawr" adlib in the beginning? that is Hitoshi's Thing, as we well know, but additionally, in the very beginning of the video, there is a box of pocky on the floor of the hallway.

pocky would happen to be one half of Hitoshi's favourite breakfast (plus ramune. this fuck drinks soda and eats cookies for breakfast what is wrong with him.), so i wonder if he had some knowledge of Hitoshi already this early on. we're operating on the premise that this is Bokutachi's younger self singing, right? did Hitoshi go to his school? we don't see him anywhere unlike Raku and Koneko, so idk. maybe "nya, rawr" is just a popular, cool phrase to say in Amerijapan.

potential cool thing: the one pocky stick upside down and sitting outside the box but near it might allude to Bokutachi himself. you do get the feeling he's lonely throughout the song, he's not got one close relationship with a real live person. not in school, not at home...

let's start talking about these lyrics.

I wear a mask with a smile for hours at a time Stare at the ceiling while I hold back what's on my mind And when they ask me how I'm doing I say, "I'm just fine" And when they ask me how I'm doing I say, "I'm just fine"

--

so i like this set of frames

you see him happily chatting away, but abrubtly he gets tense and stops himself. only after his mood swing is acknowledged does he try to perk back up and affirm to whoever's asking that he's "just fine". clearly he feels some kind of pressure to bottle up his emotions.

the facade begins to wane slightly here: despite the open ears he remains reticent. another thing: he seems to just be very guarded when he's around people. like physically!

you see him holding himself in the midst of confrontation here, earlier he'd balled up his fist because he got upset thinking about something too long... his stance in general is very tight in public, from what i can tell.

here, he's got his arms firmly placed at his sides as he turns away from whoever it was that confronted him earlier. shortly afterwards when he's sure he's not being looked at, he drops his little half smile.

in the first image of this post, again at around 1:22-1:25 you see him holding his bookbag straps and powering through the hallways the longer he continues to walk, like there's a sense of urgency there.

and here, he's around people that are likely just minding their own business but he's just. not comfortable in any way. the song mentions at this point:

"Always bein' judged by a bunch of strange faces Scared to go outside, haven't seen the light in ages"

even though it seems he's being ignored for the most part. everyone who's addressed him thus far in the song has only ever asked him if he was okay. i have to wonder if he's being gossipped about behind his back for being an outcast and is well aware of it.

"haven't seen the light in ages" strikes me as metaphorical. light as in hope. light as in a reason to keep going.

ALSO I WOULD LIKE TO TAKE MOMENT TO HIGHLIGHT THESE LYRICS

But the fact is I can never get off of my mattress And all that they can ask is "Why are you so sad, kid?" (Why are you so sad, kid?)

--

my guy has been in bed all day long, just awake and in bed dawn to dusk, tossing and turning unable to get to sleep. or even will himself to get up. he hasn't eaten, drank, brushed his teeth, showered, just. bed. and the first thing his (probably) legal guardian thinks to ask him when he FINALLY manages to find some strength is why he's so sad.

it'd be nice to interpret that in a compassionate way. i think best case scenario, his guardian(s) don't know how to help him and want to talk with him. approaching the subject of utter disengagement from the world is difficult when you haven't lived it, and i can't imagine mental health resources are plentiful in early 2000s Amerijapan.

but also he doesn't seem to trust his legal guardian(s)?? he's just as guarded with them as he is with strangers, look at this at around 0:56

he looks anxious trying to address either of them. the way he's looking back and forth between them it's like he's trying to get a word in edgewise but can't.

they're not particularly given identifiable features. they look fairly similar to the "strange faces" he sees judging him, except they're bigger. they cast a longer shadow and they're no comfort to him at all. helps that the lyrics accompanied are:

"And it just keeps on pilin' It's so terrifying"

--

which implies to me he's constantly in the habit of racking up shames in his legal guardian's eyes. like they pick at him frequently and find reasons upon reasons to scold him, and remind him of everything that's going wrong. maybe the pressure he feels to perform normalcy is derived from them, because if someone finds something "wrong" with him, they're going to pick and pick and demean him and lose faith in him. and that hits too close to home for him.

(i'm willing to bet he is/was physically punished too. like, shot in the dark, but that makes sense to me with how stiffly he walks and how clammed up you see him around ppl. i might be projecting though but hey. never said i was sure.)

I'D LIKE TO ACKNOWLEDGE THAT MY GUY IS JUST CHRONICALLY ONLINE TOO

morning to night, he finds himself whiling away HOURS on the computer. time spent online (on messaging clients and what have you) outweighs time spent on homework, and studying, possibly eating. anything else that might beg his attention is forgotten.

anything else that might stress him out is forgotten when he turns on the computer. he can mask (OHOHOHOHO) his struggles online because there's no burden of expectation or obligation.

there's a freedom in his anonymity, in how he can choose his company, and lie about being happy, and they'd believe him. no-one asks questions. there's no pressure. and that makes him "happy" so to speak.

i say that because only when he's messing around online do we finally see him peaceful enough to go to sleep. the fog on his brain is lifted when he turns himself into this person that's full of confidence and takes life easy. and even though he might be faking it...

Been wearin' a smile for so long, it's real So long, it's real, so long, it's real

that'll happen to you when you use another skin to cope with your own shortcomings. i'm acutely aware of this in particular. this might be what some people refer to as irony poisoning? when you do something enough times, even if it's only for show, it becomes habit, and your habits aren't you as a person, but they can certainly shape you.

i wonder if he joked about dark sshit like kidnapping people and committing felonies, etc. to try and make himself let go of the fear of being judged by others. make himself stop feeling empathy so he'd stop acting so careful, thus unchaining himself from his own thought paralysis. plenty of people do that (and some become criminals later on, go figure)

anyhow later on we have a mental breakdown from about 1:31 to 1:39 with:

But I've been places So I'm okay-ish, so I'm okay-ish Yeah, I'm okay, bitch"

--

coupled with what seems to be a violent start from a dream of some kind?

not sure if this dream IS or is connected to the following scenes of walking through the school hallways + out in the grass, but that would actually make a lot of sense considering "haven't seen the light in ages" compared against his internet addiction. like he found a distraction and thus has little incentive to leave. i imagine he's skipping school and holing up in his room or something.

the effects of what he's doing seem to be catching up with him. you can see him high strung when he gets out of bed, and when he answers to what's likely his guardian(s), it snaps him.

i get the impression he either woke up with all this tension, then realised he slept through the morning and made it worse, OR. the dream sharply reminded him of his current circumstances and THAT made it worse.

maybe he's spiralling because he feels powerless. to stop himself from making bad decisions, from disappointing people, from pushing people away, from underachieving, from misusing his time, from taking his life for granted, from being alone...challenging these doubts about your own agency over your life is tough when you don't know where to start and also you're a teenager.

he's clearly wracked with despair over this but can't act in his own best interest due to closing off all avenues to recovery thanks to never opening up to anyone. god the more i think about it, the more i consider "why are you so sad, kid?" to be accusatory. if you feel singled out in being honest, of course you'll try to avoid that.

also note:

But the fact is I need help, I'm failin' all my classes

damn straight.

jesus that report card. look at that thing, that is straight Fs all the way down. i mean we know he hasn't been doing his homework but god ALL F'S??? IN EVERY SUBJECT????? you'd think he wasn't going to school at all, which kind of lends itself to my idea that he's just altogether not going. or when he is there, doing literally anything else but the work. god damn. relatable

that combined with his outburst, that epic door slam?? that might be what pulls him into the doctor's office later on. like his legal guardian(s) are just sick of his shit and so they get him psychoanalysed.

A FINE ANALYSIS FROM DR. ^w^ PHD, FUCKING "NORMAL JA NAI", WHAT A GENIUS ASSESSMENT. I'M SO GLAD THEY COULD TAP INTO THE HEART OF THE ISSUE AND ADDRESS THE ROOT CAUSE OF HIS SUFFERING IN A THOROUGH AND SPECIALISED MANNER. BASED

no seriously even though that shit kills me every time i see it, i like the implication that they only vaguely diagnose symptoms, write a prescription, and send him on his way. like what's really wrong with him is being overlooked by professionals because the mental health awareness just isn't there. as exemplified by:

"They think that I need glasses"

which is a lyric i laughed at but also...that's kinda true to life. you'll say to your school's counsellor, everything that sings to the tune of someone with executive dysfunction. a spectrum disorder even. and they'll be like

"hm. move em up. they cant see the board that's why they're not taking notes right. have you talked to an ophthalmologist". offering bandaid solutions for bigger issues. and speaking of bandaid solutions, DRUGS

"I just really wish that I could pass this (Wish that I could pass this)"

That's what the mask is That's what the point of the mask is"

SDGLKMFKFKLDHNFGJKNGVF I RAN OUT OF IMAGE SPACE LMAOOOO

okay so basically from 1:49-1:59 Bokutachi goes through a moment of crisis where he laments his fate of being labelled as "NORMAL JA NAI". either he doesn't like the things the medication is doing to him or he's skeptical of taking them at all. regardless those shits are going inthe TRASH. my guy is like "fuck big pharma" out here

he is not in a stable frame of mind at all throughout this video. who knows if those pills would have helped. we'll never know because he doesn't trust them. he doesn't want to think of himself as someone who needs that kind of thing.

as far as he's concerned he doesn't! he has his chat group, he has FUCKING MINESWEEPER; if he were to try and "fix" himself now, what would happen to those spaces? would he still be able to navigate them? find the same joy in them as he once did? they're all that matters to him! he's become accustomed to the isolation and this is his only reprieve (read as: escape) from a hostile environment.

(how hostile it really is, that's sort of up in the air. i'm thinking he's got the makings of a dude with some kinda cluster A disorder. ADD and autism are also on my mind, depression because of the song's origins itself, but eh. i digress.)

you can see him calm himself down once it's time to boot up the computer again at 2:00.

so it would seem, he's already given up on trying to be more than what he is right now. change is scary though, i don't blame him. especially when you feel like it's being forced on you when you didn't ask.

maybe this is him trying to regain some kind of control, but...in a decidedly unhealthy way. by sticking his head in the sand and acting like nothing's wrong. burying the idea that he needs help makes him feel less like a problem that needs to be solved and more like a well adjusted person that's just misunderstood.

at 2:09 he pulls out his planner (i refuse to believe that's a smartphone LIKE COME ON THE TIMELINE. PLEASE) and you can kind of watch his stomach churn knowing there's shit to do but his alter ego doesn't care.

his alter ego isn't concerned with that bullshit. "nah i'll have time. i'll do it later. and if i don't get it done tonight, who cares? nothing's gonna happen to me and i don't gotta answer to anybody. i'm not scared." he's developing an apathy to responsibility b/c it frustrates him he can't manage it.

i have to ask if this is where his rebuke of social acceptability took root.

you even see him at around 2:21-2:26 pull out his medical records and write "daijoubu" next to the diagnosis. which also slays me but next to "NORMAL ja nai" it kind of reads like "not being normal is okay".

that's a perfectly fine stance to have when you're just a little kooky! just a tad silly! eccentric even! i don't know if that's something you should be saying to wave away EVERYTHING that could be affecting you (and potentially others if it goes unchecked), just because it makes you uncomfortable to stare it down! that's dangerous!! particularly when you don't know your limits

i'm also kind of loving 2:28-2:32??? where he raises his head to his legal guardians and he's smiling for the first time in front of them.

but now we're well aware all his smiles are performative. he's wearing the mask for them now too.

the fake it 'til you make it policy seems to be his safety net. in order to avoid being treated and seen like a walking blemish, something to be fixed, he's slowly grown to be more comfortable acting well to do, or at least unaffected. then people leave him alone. when he's loose and devil-may-care, he's allowed to be himself. which would be fine if that were honest.

in truth, he's extremely emotional. he's sensitive. he's scared and wound up. he's angry and he's self conscious. he cannot function in the way the world wants him to, and he can't stand his own inaction in the face of his self-inflicted demise. but when that's too shameful to bear, you don't seek anyone out. imagine how much more painful it would be to have someone see you flounder. they'll poke fun. they'll judge.

it's like he sees the world telling him to be better, and his response is to create what he thinks is an objectively better person. even though at the end of the day he is still who he is.

i wonder if he starts wearing that mask permanently because at one point he'd become aware there was no running from himself. with this being his only way to reconcile his failures, it was inevitable.

we end the animation with him going to sleep and his maegami "masked" self looming over the end credits. smiling is equated with wearing a mask consistently throughout the song, so i find the image of him going to sleep with a smile on his face pretty solidly telling me that he's starting the transition into becoming the Projected Bokutachi as opposed to Plain Bokutachi.

this is the beginning of his descent into a more dangerous, yet exciting and outgoing person. he is mentally unwell and owning it. i don't know what happened between high school and the NNSG plotline (or god forbid, what happened between childhood and adolescence), but here we definitely introduce some catalysts for his face-heel turn.

and now i have even more reasons to reconsider this little rat man's true motivations and character depth.

arigatou gozaimasu Yoli-chan (੭*ˊᵕˋ)੭* ੈ♡‧₊˚

#nnsg #nyan neko sugar girls #nnsgposting #bokutachi-san #no one is going to read this!! and what's more i actually highly encourage that you don't!!!! #look at this shit is longer than the Half Blood Prince #im really just rambling but like god damn you dont understand #how good it is to be validated with this #after eight years my curiosity has been rewarded #and now to go even further beyond and make even MORE fanfic #god i should show off my theory if were going this far with it right #yeah ill do that. at some point though not tonight #i need fresh brain