#in case it's unclear the answer to how it's going is worse

[himbeaux-on-ice]

how it started:

how it's going:

#this is so fucked up i'm so sorry everyone #it came to me and i had to make it leave my head #in case it's unclear the answer to how it's going is worse #max pacioretty #mark stone #6167 #gmkm i am throwing rocks at your house (metaphorically) #i would have felt so much better if anyone could at least pretend to be happy in the situation this has become #if mark was smiling. he's always smiling in his nhl headshots. you'd think he would be happy to be back #and yet. aaaaand yet. boy. #posting this in the middle of the night and not tagging teams out of mercy #the first two headshots are from 2018-19 btw #technically how it started is a series of powerplay goals in the atlantic division nearly a decade ago but. semantics.

[mx-jinxous]

I wanted to get this out last night due to me being busy today with my bday, however I got too sleepy to function. Better late than never. I will try to take everyone to the best of my abilities, but depending on tumblrs restrictions I also have it up on my ao3 here

Chapter 1 l Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 |

The last time he felt this level of unclearness, had been when he beat his keg stand record, followed up with too many shots. He’d been a junior trying to chase popularity and ended up waking up on a stranger's bathroom floor. Safe to say the hangover felt shitty, like a knife tapping the inside of his skull in rhythm with his heartbeat. This was worse.

His body was freezing, which emphasized the aches that plagued his body. If he was honest with himself, he was surprised his body had fought off illness for this long. Not having a balanced diet or a proper shelter was a decent way to get sick and without insurance, he was just going to have to power through it.

A shiver rushed through Steve’s body, and the young man used all his strength to bundle the blanket around him. A hand stopped him when it pressed against his forehead, causing a groan to escape from him. He tried to bat the hand away, another hand pressing his back down by the shoulder. Someone was saying something, but the words were garbled like he was listening from underwater. It made the throbbing in his head worse and weighed down his body. All Steve wanted to do was go back to sleep.

Unfortunately, his visitors decided that that wasn’t on his schedule. He was grounded to alertness by gentle slaps to his cheek. With a growl, he attempted to slap the hand away, only for his wrist to come to a jolted stop. Against his body’s protest, he cracked his eyes open, expecting to see Gray. The man in front of him was far too young to be the security guard.

“Ah, there he is.” The man smirked as he slapped Steve’s cheek again before backing away.

“Careful guard, he is still ill.” A woman’s voice came from beside him, making the young man take in his surroundings.

The room was bland and dated by at least a few centuries, with nothing much for decor aside from a few chairs and a sofa. To be honest he felt like he was in an exhibit at the museum with a lack of character. If that was the case then he was going to be in a world of trouble with his boss.

Fingers snapping in front of his face brought him out of his head. The shaggy-haired man was looking irritated with him like he expected an answer. Steve only stared back, refusing to speak with how shitty he was feeling. Shaggy Man seemed just as stubborn, leading to just both of them staring back one another down. It came to a stalemate when the woman spoke up. “Guard, if you would please state your business. I am in charge of the captive and you are impeding my healing.”

“He does not require healing, not until we receive the answers, which is more important if I should remind you.”

“You can not interrogate a dead man. You are allowed three questions but do not trouble him. He must rest.” The woman seemed to mean it if the shaggy man’s silence was to answer. He glared at Steve, who was done with this conversation and wanted nothing but pain relievers and sleep.

“What is your name?” He rolled his eyes at the guard before directing attention to the doctor. “How did you get into the burial chamber?” His silence only seemed to anger the guard. “Answer now!” He growled, grabbing Steve by the forearm. He pulled his arm into view, pointing at his wrist. “Where did you get this!”

The glimmer of gold was all it took to recall the events of last night, his body filled with fear and anxiety, the young man trying to escape the bed. He was jerked back into place by the restraint on his other wrist, his eyes traveling to what held him captive. It was a cuff chaining him to the bed, keeping him trapped once more, at the mercy of these strangers.

“Focus!” The shaggy man growled, drawing Steve’s attention back to the guard. “How did you get this bracelet?!”

With a scoff, he pulled his arm free. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. I’ll gladly give it to you.” As to prove his point, the young man went to pull it off, only for it to stay fixed in place. He struggled with it before the guard threw his head back with a groan.

“It is magically locked in place you nitwit. Until we break the spell it will remain adhered to your wrist.”

“Magically? Is this some kind of joke? What are you going to do, pull a rabbit out of a hat?” He scoffed at that, glaring at Steve.

“Stop being ridiculous. Do I look like a summoner to you? Also, what would a rabbit do to solve your issues?”

“Wha-?”

“Alright guard, my patient needs healing and rest. Please allow me to do my job as I allowed you to. You can finish your interrogation once his health has returned to a more lucid place. I will call for you at such time.” Steve expected a retort, an argument to break out due to whatever drugs the guy had been taking. Magic wasn’t real, despite the bracelet being adhered to his wrist, or the night before with the statue. Maybe he’s just been sick and it was all a fever dream. Gray probably found him and he’s in some kind of historical hospital.

“Just keep him locked up and send for me when he is coherent again.” Without a response he left, slamming the door. The woman tutted before turning her attention back to Steve.

“I apologize for his attitude, he is just cautious. My name is Joyce, I am a healer. I have waited till you woke up before asking to heal you. I can do it magically or with traditional methods. I know some humans are averse to magical methods, however, it will relieve your ailments in time for the guard's second round of interrogation. I understand he will not be swayed again. The king requires information on how you got into the burial chamber. “

“You too? This is definitely a fever dream. There is no such thing as magic, it's all smoke, mirrors, and illusion.”

“Oh dear, you must have hit your head. I assure you I am a rather talented vitamancer and you will need all your strength. I am sure King Kas will be ruthless when he comes to question you.”

Steve froze. The nightmare seemed closer to reality at the mention of the statue. Had he been kidnapped by the marble man, taken to some crazed cult that believed in magic? It was too much to focus, covering his eyes with his forearm. He couldn’t bare to face the king, especially not in his current condition. He felt faint, the world spinning as he tried to calm himself.

“Oh sweetheart, do not panic. I will make sure you are well enough if you allow me.” Joyce held a hand up, glowing a faint yellow, and offered with a kind of smile. She seemed sincere, calm, and patient. She made Steve’s freezing body feel warm and he found himself nodding. He doesn't recall the next few minutes beside a glow before the world returned to dark.

Joyce left him under the guards at his door, nodding at the two as she warned them to leave the intruder to rest. Her robe dragged behind her while she strolled up the castle stairs, to the king's private office. It’s where he felt the most confident in addressing issues with his advisor before the court. To say she wasn’t surprised that the others were already there delegating to one another. Her arrival went unnoticed as the king's personal guard and guard commander were arguing. Kas stood, rubbing his temple, Joyce noting the headache that was forming.

“He has been uncooperative, delusional, and quite frankly an ass.”

“You were not there when the guard retrieved him. He looked like a traumatized wet dog. I highly doubt he is lucid enough to even register where he is.”

“Chris, Gareth, please calm your voices.” Kas groaned, looking up to see the newcomer. “Joyce, you have spent time with the intruder. What do you have to say about him?” Eyes dragged to the healer, one of the elders of the advisors, looking to her as the voice of reason.

“It is hard to say. He has been incoherent most of the times he awoke. The fever has taken a toll on him, affecting his memories. He seems lost on how he got here and magic as a whole. I did heal him and he is resting. The guards are aware that the only visitors outside this room are food delivered by the guards. Once he is awake and fed, then we shall be able to question him. You have my sign Liffey.” Joyce instructed.

“Understood, then I will personally accompany Gareth. If this stranger is working for Lord Vecna and infiltrated our walls then we will retrieve all the information possible with any means necessary.” Kas demanded.

“His clothing was certainly strange.” Gareth huffed.

“He will get a moment to state his case, I for one am looking to get some answers about our dead man walking.” Kas sighed. “Joyce, once he is alert and fed, calls for us.” The woman nodded, excusing herself. She left, taking a detour to the castle garden. In the center were her twins, Will and El, practicing magic. They were playing with a bush of roses, wilting before returning to their vibrant state. Unlike her eldest, the twins had been born as diviners, much like their paternal grandmother. Their father was the only non-mage in their unique family, her three children house unique magic.

She watched for a moment, enjoying the sight of the youngest taking joy in their magic. Looking off to an opposing garden corner, seeing her eldest, Jonathon backed against the gardener. Argyle was a down-to-earth Druid, who seemed to take a fondness for her son. Joyce knew the two were closer than friends, it was clear how the druid grew a flower and tucked it behind the younger healer's ear. Young love always warmed her heart, to see her children happy.

Pulling away, she called out for lunch, planning to check on Steve when they finished. She didn’t make it past the appetizer before Gareth came running into the dining hall, with a patrol with him. Joyce stood, concern painted on her face at the notice of their city gear. “What is going on?”

“I will stay in the castle. If he tries to attack then I will be here for the king.” With a nod, the young guard had the patrol out of the castle grounds.

———————

Tag list, if you’d like to be added (or I missed you) state so down below. There are some that would not allow me to tag, I did leave them in and I will look into it as soon as I can.

@steddieas-shegoes , @steddie-steddie @paintsplatteredandimperfect @roastingdragon @oblivion-void @just-a-tiny-void @lilangeldevil006 @swimmingbirdrunningrock @izzy2210 @weirdandabsurd42 @throwbackthrowaway @steve-the-hairrington @loser-of-hearts333 @croatoan-like-it’s-hot @gingersass @alto-delete @anaibis @limbs-are-optional @thephantomhood @itsall-taken @jamieweasley13 @imfinereallyy @yeahhh-suga @awkotaco24 @aliea82 @lifeisnotsobadonceyoustopcaring @stxrcrossed186 @emly03 @elviraenthusiast @siriusleeart @fxrgetmenott @amerikanskaya-krassavitsa @noctxrn-e @spicysix @renaissan-vvitch @lovelyscot @goodolefashionedloverboi @teelagurl558 @seilahtitania32 @sparky--bunny @dontslayfay @amrice @pluckedstrings @plyerice27 @vae1bixy @grtwdsmwhr @vacantwatchers @8em-em-em8 @stevesbipanic @commonxsenss @sani-86 @suikatto @callmesirkay @spideysteveloml @neeerdrage @quevadilla @p0lybl4nkk @thetrueghostqueen @ok-just-why @eyesofshinigami @oxidantdreamboat @platinum-sunset @milottadoodles @chillichats @kyysposts @bookworm0690

#steddie #eddie munson #steve harrington #stranger things #steve x eddie #SetinStoneSteddie

[geminialchemist]

Long post with Hazbin Hotel S1 spoilers!

While I don’t think it’ll happen, what I’d love to see from season 2 of Hazbin Hotel is an episode set in Heaven, directly after the events of S1E6 “Welcome to Heaven.” Preferably, this episode will be either the first or second episode of the season, with Adam still alive and kicking as Heaven prepares for the next Extermination Day.

Why do I want an episode like this? Simple. Because after what happened in S1E6, Heaven has to be in a lot of turmoil. I’m talking total chaos, protests in the streets kind of stuff. Think about it from the perspective of one of the winners. Hell, think of it from the perspective of Angel Dust’s sister in Heaven, Molly.

You’re Molly, and you’re dead, and end up in Heaven. Score! So you go searching for your twin brother, who died before you(probably, canon is unclear right now). You two were close, and you had the best relationship with Anthony out of anyone in your family.

You search for a while. A very long while. Heaven is a big place, after all. You don’t find Anthony anywhere. You ask around, and no one has seen or heard of him. Doubt builds up, as this can only mean one thing and you dread getting that answer. Finally, you go to the big name taker himself, St. Peter, and ask politely if your brother has been through the pearly gates, and you hear the worst news since you got to Heaven, he didn’t make the cut and is in Hell.

So now you’re asking around to find out if anyone has ever made it up from Hell and into Heaven. Surely someone has, right? But as you ask the angels and other winners around Heaven, you get a variety of replies, ranging from pity to some straight up laughing in your your face over the very idea that a sinner can be redeemed. The answer, no matter who you ask, is the same. A resounding “No.”

So, Hell is forever(whether you like it or not), and you’ll never see Anthony again. There doesn’t even seem to be a way to message sinners, or visit them. You don’t think he deserved his fate, but you can only hope that Hell isn’t as bad as everyone says it is, and that he’s doing well down there.

Then one day, someone from Hell is visiting Heaven, which is unheard of and is causing a ruckus. The Princess of Hell herself is here! After a song and dance number, you discover she’s here for a trial hearing about if a sinner can be redeemed or not. This is the best news you’ve heard in decades! You might have a chance to reunite with Anthony! You go to the trial, take a seat in the gallery of the courtroom, and what you find out is horrific.

Hell is worse than you thought. Your brother, Anthony, of all people, is the example the princess of Hell is using to make her case, and now he goes by Angel Dust, and is forced to be a porn star. Despite unknowingly passing every test that Adam and the Seraphim place on him, they still deem Anthony unfit for heaven, even as Emily argues against this, siding with Hell’s Princess. Why is the princess of Hell more concerned with your brother’s fate than Heaven, who are supposed to be the good guys?

And even worse, you find out that every year, Adam and a bunch of angels under his command go down and kill sinners, just like your brother. Adam slaughters them, and doesn’t hide his enjoyment of his actions, even proclaiming his intentions of attacking the very hotel that is trying to rehabilitate sinners as his first target for the next extermination. And the head Seraphim, Sera, says and does nothing to stop him. She absolutely condones his monstrous actions.

Heaven has been killing people, committing genocide, for who knows how long? Denying your family, friends, and loved ones who didn’t make the cut a chance to change, and then murdering them? Anthony has only managed to survive by luck or skill, and now his head is directly placed on the chopping block after he’s gone through all this effort to get into heaven in the first place?

And now the courtroom is in shambles, angels arguing over this earthshattering news that Adam and Sera have been hiding from them. Even some of your fellow mortal souls are torn into two camps, one who thinks the sinners deserve whatever is coming to them, and the other like yourself who don’t want their friends and family in hell to suffer even more.

You decide to Hell with Heaven. Torches and pitchforks all around as over the course of a month you do everything you can along with your fellow likeminded angels and Winners to get the extermination canceled. Protests, threats, petitions, you try everything, but it’s all in vain as Adam gathers his troops and goes down.

Thats what I wanna see in the start of season 2, with the Heaven focused episode ending with Sir Pentious arriving in Heaven, proving a sinner can redeem themselves, and putting an end to the conflict. But just because Heaven decides to end the exterminations and work to redeem sinners now that there is undeniable proof walking/slithering among them, doesn’t mean it washes away their own sins. Sera can’t bring back the millions who were killed by Adam and his legions, who now will never have a chance to be redeemed and reunite with their loved ones in Heaven. Molly wouldn’t even know if Anthony survived the last extermination.

Let there be a shake up in heaven, let there be lingering resentment towards the angels for what they’ve done, let there be some kind of conflict or consequences for the actions Heaven took. I always hate when a show glosses over stuff like this. I want the final shot of this hypothetical episode to be Sera and Em sitting in that room, with protests right outside their door, discussing what needs to be done. Sera wanting to continue the exterminations, even if if it angers the winners because she believes its in their best interests, and Em trying to get Sera to change her mind, and call off the attack, only for Sir Pentious to pop in like he did at the end of season one, ending their discussion because now Sera doesn’t have a leg to stand on anymore.

You can even keep a comedic angle by having the Winners be terrible at civil protests because they’re all so goodie two shoes. They don’t want to throw a brick through a window, that would be rude and mean!

#hazbin hotel #angel dust #charlie morningstar #molly hazbin hotel #sera hazbin hotel #emily hazbin hotel #heaven hazbin hotel #hazbin angel dust #hazbin charlie #hazbin molly #hazbin sera #hazbin emily #hazbin theory #hazbin hotel spoilers

[blubberquark]

Your Code Is Hard To Read!

This is one of those posts I make not because I think my followers need to hear them, but because I want to link to them from Discord from time to time. If you are a Moderator, Contributor or "Helpfulie" on the PyGame Community Discord, I would welcome your feedback on this one!

"You posted your code and asked a question. We can't answer your question. Your code is hard to read."

Often when we tell people this, they complain that coding guidelines are just aesthetic preferences, and they didn't ask if their code followed coding guidelines. They asked us to fix the bug. That may be so, but the problem remains: If you ask us to fix your code, we can only help you if we can read it.

Furthermore, if there are many unrelated bugs, architectural problems, and hard to understand control flow, the concept of fixing an isolated bug becomes more and more unclear.

In order to fix unreadable code, you could:

eliminate global variables

replace magic numbers with constants

replace magic strings with enumerations

name classes, functions, constants, variables according to consistent coding standards

have functions that do one thing and one thing only like "collision detection" or "collision handling". If your function does two things at the same time, like rendering AND collision detection, then it must be refactored

rewrite deeply nested and indented code to be shallower

rewrite code that keeps a lot of state in local variables into special-case functions

use data structures that make sense

write comments that explain the program, not comments that explain the programming language

delete unneccessary/unreachable code from the question to make it easier to read or from your program to see if the problem persists

My own programs often violate one or more of those rules, especially when they are one-off throwaway scripts, or written during a game jam, or prototypes. I would never try to ask other people for help on my unreadable code. But I am an experienced programmer. I rarely ask for help in an unhelpful way. Almost never ask for help in a way that makes other experienced programmers ask for more code, or less code, or additional context. I post a minimal example, and I usually know what I am doing. If I don't know what I am doing, or if I need suggestions about solving my problem completely differently, I say so.

Beginner programmers are at a disadvantage here. They don't know what good code looks like, they don't know what good software architecture looks like, they don't know how to pare down a thousand lines of code to a minimal example, and if they try to guess which section of code contains the error, they usually guess wrong.

None of this matters. It may be terribly unfair that I know how to ask smart questions, and beginner programmers ask ill-posed questions or post code that is so bad it would be easier and quicker for an experienced programmer to re-write the whole thing. It is often not feasible to imagine what the author might have intended the code to work like and to fix the bugs one by one while keeping the structure intact. This is not a technical skill, this is a communicative and social skill that software engineers must pick up sooner or later: Writing code for other people to read.

If your code is too hard to read, people can't practically help you.

It gets worse. Unreadable code is sometimes unreadable because it is un-salvageable. It is hard to understand because there is nothing to understand, it would not work, and you need to go back to the drawing board.

Defensive Responses

This is not where the problem ends. Often, after a couple of rounds of back and forth, after questions like "Well, you say there is a bug, but can you tell me what you would want the code to do in the first place?", or "Is this a class or an instance? If it's supposed to be an instance variable, could you give it a lowercase name?" or "Could you give that variable _obj a more descriptive name? It looks like you are assigning different things to this variable in different parts of your loop. Perhaps you could use two variables with different, more descriptive names", you see a defensive response. The original question asker is not interested in making code easy to read, just in making it work. As I explained above, this is a confused way of thinking, because ill-posed questions and unreadable code make it difficult to impossible to make the code work, or to even understand what making it work would look like.

"Style is irrelevant." – This is by far the most common one. Since coding style, comments, variable names, and even re-factoring code into smaller functions do not affect the output, and thus not the correctness of the program.

"I asked for help with bugs, not style." – This is a variation on the first one. As long as there is no concrete and discrete bug, style feedback and questions for clarification can be discarded.

"This is too much work." – The original poster explains that making the code more readable is too much work for them, and fixing the bugs would be easier for others.

"Nobody will see the code anyway" – Nobody will see the code of the finished product, so it's irrelevant. Sometimes there are variations like "We aren't graded on code quality, only correctness" or "This is for a class project, nobody will depend on the code, so we don't need robustness."

"This is just throwaway code, it doesn't have to be good." – Like the previous one, this is frustrating to read because somebody posted the code on a forum for other people to read and asked them to understand it, and then said he doesn't care if it's readable or debuggable.

"I asked you for help." / "I am asking the questions here." – The original poster refuses to answer questions, because he asked, he expects answers, not questions in return.

"Don't blame me, I didn't write it" – We have completely left the realm of correctness and style now. The poster knows the code is unreadable, or doesn't make sense. He tried to protect his reputation. But he doesn't like the tone of the responses. Its not his fault the code doesn't make sense. It's not his fault if it doesn't work. Common variations are "This must be correct, it was the accepted answer on StackOverflow", or "I copied this from a tutorial", or "Don't blame me, this was written by GitHub Copilot". Often part of the problem is that the code has different parts written in different styles, or uses different data structures in different places, and both parts could benefit from a re-write to make them more consistent with each other. At other times the problem is that the code from the book is "correct" for certain purposes from the book, but not really suited for the problem at hand.

"I apologised already" – The poster is frustrated because he said "I am sorry I am a n00b" or "I am sorry for my bad English" already. Then somebody said his code is unreadable or his prose makes no sense. The poster sees readable code, or at least code that is readable enough to understand what the idea was, as a courtesy, as a social custom, not as something necessary to make the whole question and answer thing work. The same goes for a firm grasp of English. The poster apologised already that his English is bad, and you should just see past it. Dealing with this is especially difficult, because Q&A is framed as some kind of status game, and the poster is trying hard to save face already. Push-back will make him feel like he is losing face, and he will only get more defensive.

Causes

So where does the problem begin? Why do people write unreadable code, post it online, and get defensive? I think the answer is a combination of programming skill, social skill, and simplistic mental models.

Software Engineering is Difficult: Obviously, one root cause is that beginner programmers can't already write readable code from the start. Writing readable, well-factored code that is easy to debug, re-use, and adapt is something that comes with experience. Writing code for other people to read can only be learned after one has learned to write code.

Magical Thinking/Limited Cognitive Empathy: The most common and most direct cause of this phenomenon – the refusal to help others read your unreadable code – is not the unreadable code itself. It is the belief that it should be easy for experienced programmers to understand the structure of and intent behind a piece of code, even if the person who wrote it didn't. If you see software as basically magic, and don't see computers as soulless automatons that do what they do because they are built that way, then this is an easy trap to fall into. A variant of this works for language. If somebody is bad at English, or bad at the technical jargon needed to ask his question, he will often think that the question he thought up in his native Klingon was perfectly well-formed, and that other people should have no trouble reading his words, because they also think in Klingon, so they would translate it into a question that makes sense anyway.

Status-Consciousness: Many beginner programmers feel the desperate need to distinguish themselves from other beginners, and if they have been learning JavaScript for two moths now, they want to be seen as real programmers, not as children who play with Scratch and build Redstone contraptions in MineCraft. They want to be taken seriously. This reminds me of a five year old boy who stretches out his arm and tells me he is THIS BIG, and he is already FIVE, going on SIX, and he will go to SCHOOL soon.

Naive Mental Model of De-Bugging: Every program has a certain number of discrete features bugs, and when you remove all bugs, you end up with a program that works. This is of course nonsense. You can write a program that has an indeterminate number of bugs, or a program that implements an algorithm that doesn't quite work, or a useless program, or a program that does random nonsense.

With any luck, sooner or later, programmers will learn the technical side, and the social and collaborative side of software development.

#programming #python #forum culture #stack overflow #teaching programming

[tomorrowusa]

I suspect that the vegetative MAGA crowd is showing the effects of Long COVID on their memories. They have forgotten that Trump's horribly botched response to the pandemic triggered a recession and caused unemployment to spike. Let's not even get into the death toll for 2020.

Sore LOSER Trump left office on 20 January 2021. The 12 months prior to that consisted of one disaster after another.

Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman looked at "Trump-stalgia".

The Peculiar Persistence of Trump-stalgia

Soaring deaths aside, four years ago more than 20 million Americans were unemployed; Trump left office with the worst job record of any president since Herbert Hoover. Also, the country was in the grip of a violent crime wave, with murders soaring. Today, by contrast, we’ve just experienced the longest stretch of unemployment below 4 percent since the 1960s, and the violent crime wave — Trump didn’t cause it, but it did happen on his watch — has been rapidly receding. [ ... ] One common explanation of Trump-stalgia is that many people give the former president a mulligan for 2020, attributing all the bad things that happened in his final year to the Covid pandemic (and ignoring the extent to which Trump’s botched response to the pandemic added to the death toll). That is, when they say “four years ago” they actually mean “before the pandemic.” That surely explains part of what’s going on. But there are also problems with this story. If Trump gets a pass for the economic and social damage inflicted by the pandemic, why shouldn’t Biden get a similar pass for problems that manifested on his watch but surely reflected delayed effects of Covid disruptions? For example, ripple effects of the pandemic clearly explain a lot of the inflation surge of 2021-22. How do we know this? Because prices rose almost everywhere. Different nations measure inflation somewhat differently, but if you look at the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices, which is available for a number of countries, you find that cumulative inflation since the beginning of the pandemic has been almost eerily similar in the United States and in Europe. Also, Trump boosters aren’t consistent about sending 2020 down the memory hole. Trump claimed that he presided over gasoline prices of less than $2 a gallon, but this was true only for a couple of months in 2020 — a period when global oil prices were low because the pandemic had the world economy flat on its back.

Trump can't get away from his pandemic catastrophe. Telling Americans to drink bleach, take ineffective malaria pills, and stick ultraviolet lights up their butts certifies him as a two-bit quack. And it took him 50 days after the first COVID-19 case appeared in the US before he declared an emergency. Remember his infamous January 22nd comments on CNBC?

It wasn't "just fine".

As for now, feelings haven't caught up with the facts.

Trump-stalgia is undoubtedly a powerful force. Biden helped lead us through a time of turmoil — much of which happened even before he took office — to a pretty good place, with very low unemployment, fairly low inflation and falling crime. But many Americans seem unaware of the good news; for example, the drop in crime doesn’t appear to have broken through to public consciousness at all. And there seems to be a romanticized vision of what things were like under Biden’s predecessor, which somehow omits the terrible things that happened in 2020. So are you better off than you were four years ago? For most Americans, the answer is clearly yes. But for reasons that still remain unclear, many seem disinclined to believe it.

Good news is seldom reported. And when it does occur these days, you absolutely won't hear it on Fox News.

One thing that's certainly worse now is the situation regarding reproductive freedom. Roe v. Wade got overturned by the US Supreme Court in 2022. Though if Hillary Clinton had made those three appointments to SCOTUS instead of Donald Trump, Roe v. Wade would have been upheld by a 7 to 2 vote instead of being tossed.

Remind people (repeatedly!) of who appointed the SCOTUS justices who made abortion nearly impossible in many states. In an age of short attention spans and low information voters, don't assume that everybody knows. Trump bragged about killing Roe v. Wade – his influence lives on through his awful appointments to the federal courts.

Most Americans probably couldn't pass those simplistic civics tests given to wannabe new citizens. Patiently explains how the system works – or is supposed to.

Even when times are good, people will still find stuff to complain about. As the late author Randall Jarrell wrote: "The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks."

Though this may not exactly be a "golden age", it beats avoidable pandemic dystopia, a coup attempt, and dreadful appointments to the federal courts. And it's certainly superior to having Trump back as a sleazy dictator on day one.

#paul krugman #trump-stalgia #covid-19 #pandemic #trump's botched pandemic response #reproductive freedom #us supreme court #joe heller #election 2024 #vote blue no matter who

[visarcana]

In celebration of the miserable realization that I haven't updated in more than a year

I was thinking of how this happened and if I REALLY have done so little on the fic. A lot is going on but that shouldn't be my excuse; I had difficult years before. So what was I doing for the past year?

I published the Folken oneshot here and here (phew, there's at least something).

I do have SOME version of ch 17 ready that I have continually worked on, it's just that it doesn't feel up to my standards. What is worse, I cannot figure out what comes after. I have the CONCEPT and major scenes but the plotholes could sink the whole thing if I'm not careful. I hoped to have this figured out before publishing the next chapter, I usually had, in similar situations before. I wonder if I should just risk it and just go ahead.

I have some scenes that do not exactly fit into the fic at this point BUT I WANT to have them. What do? Force them in there somehow (I did that in the past already)? Create a separate "fic" for them? I feel like such an inexperienced writer when things like this and the previous one slow me down while others can produce chapter after chapter much more regularly.

I did A LOT of translation last year, and it was the hard kind, the novel translation. You kinda have to employ your skills there as a writer, too, besides dedicating buttload of time and patience. Maybe I tired myself out and hit the limits of my creative energy? It certainly feels like it at times. This is something that took me by surprise, in the past, the translation fueled rather than impeded my writing.

I did have some very engaging fic talks with a few of the readers and friends, I'm really thankful for that. They were obviously about the stuff I had already posted but I guess it doesn't hurt to think on the past things again, quite often, an inspiration hits from that. Not to mention motivation, it's incredibly motivational to have someone care about your story, I don't think I even need to say that. I even was lucky to lay my eyes on some fanart for the fic and although I can't say I contributed there such a treat ALWAYS deserves gratitude and mention <3

The questions also helped me understand where my writing is unclear or where it may get confusing. Besides the answers, I had to even look up some photo references and even did some pencil sketches. Although they are not great, it's the only thing that I've drawn in long months.

So, in case someone else wondered about the same things, and since I have some of these answers typed out already (with some of them quite elaborate as usual), I will post the "questions" below.

If there is any interest in any of the answers, I will publish them here. I wouldn't want to spam you otherwise, I mean, I get that it's the new chapter people would want to read, if anything. I can't make any other promises but I'll keep working on that as well. Anyway, an update of this blog was long overdue, so I did at least that.

-- CHAPTER 16

What are “sliders”, “lum”, “Telandir” etc.? Basically, worldbuilding Q/A.

What does Van mean exactly when he says “There are four of you, and you will come down with me peacefully. Or there will be less… if you think you can outrun me.”

Is it “Cyro” or “Cyrien”? How old is he? How does he feel when Hitomi intercepts on him on the way to the command tent and what does his apologetic shrug at the end mean?

What is Hitomi wearing and why does no one pay much attention to her until she speaks up at the war council? Why do the soldiers call her “Private Sweetling”?

How does Van feel about the whole situation with the captives? Are Hitomi’s concerns substantial?

What really happened and what are the physical actions (and reactions) of the characters during the argument taking place in Van’s tent?

What is the meaning of Van and Folken’s conversation about Hitomi, when Folken says his brother “disappoints” him?

What is the meaning of Folken’s “what if I told you I’m done being useful”? What does Van’s reaction to that mean?

Why does Allen see younger himself in Van and what are his regrets?

What does Hitomi mean when she says “everything is shattered”? -- PREVIOUS CHAPTERS

Why does Hitomi so easily accept that Gaea was real after all, when she had been thinking it was a dream for several years?

Why is Hitomi so formal with Millerna at the start? Why is she starting from zero with some of the relationships like Millerna and Van?

Why do people call Hitomi “seeress” in VA?

Are Hitomi’s abilities gone? Why can Van dowse and can anyone do it?

Why does Dornkirk want to separate Van and Hitomi? What is the connection between Lenz’s tasks and the ch15 forest scenes?

Why was there not a scene revealing the reactions of the characters back on Earth to Hitomi’s disappearance?

#visarcana #progress update #concept sketches

[goodlucksnez]

In sickness and health

So glommy and I voice this freelance but we liked it so much we decided to write it out

Fandom: BNHA

Words: 4622

Summary: Hito//shi has always done things on their own. Never needed anyone, never wanted anyone, until he found his forever family. This is uncharted waters, he doesn’t know how to act or behave. This becomes even more unclear when he gets sick for the first time with his new family.

All characters are adults and in their twenties! This takes place in a headcanon pro-hero timeline where Sh//outa and M//ic are married and are are employed at a hero agency, and living together. They adopted shin//sou and e//ri .Shin//sou is over 18 the class 1a and class 1b is in a college age so everyone is 18+

MINORS DO NOT INTERACT

IN FACT GO AWAY!!!!!!!!!

Both Shota and Hizashi have been out on a war meeting and case for the past week. Hitoshi was given 3 jobs, to make sure Eri is safe, the cats are fed and the house doesn't burn down. They left on Sunday and today is Friday. On Sunday when saying goodbye Hitoshi swore he would do his best on catching up with classes and training even without Eraserhead teaching him. The week itself hadn’t been exactly hard in retrospect. Make sure every morning Eri ate breakfast as well as the cats. Then it was a quick drop at daycare and then a 5-mile jog to UA. Rinse and repeat.

 During the week it wasn’t like Hitoshi had time in the morning to make lunch so he mostly adopted the opportunity to work on classwork before he got home. After class picks up Eri, cooks dinner, and makes sure she and he does their homework and goes to bed on time, well for Eri he stayed up late working. The first few days they were working out the holes in the master plan but by Tuesday they got it down to a science. Wednesday a tickle started forming in the eldest throat, but that was fine some water or a hot drink and he would be good as new. As the days went on he grew worse and worse until the parents finally got home.

When Mic and Eraserhead walked in through the front door happily. 

“We’re home!” Sure the mission was tiring but all they wanted was to see their kids and be home with them. Eri got up from her spot on the floor giving her attention away to her parents instead of the current cartoon Hitoshi had put on for her. Hurrying over to the pair, Hizashi bends down and picks her up, and kisses her cheek.

“Hey, there sweetheart, nice to see ya again!” Eri giggles and smiles brightly at them, Eraser giving her some attention as well for a bit. Then they heard Hitoshi sneeze.

“Hep-Knngk! Welbcome home.” The congested eldest said from his spot on the couch. He had taken a small nap but when the front door opened, he tried to seem conscious. He smiled before sniffing back a thick strand of mucus. He picked up the book he was attempting to study and flipped to a normal page trying to seem normal. Unannounced to him the book was upside down, of course, the Pro’s saw through this weak excuse in a second or less!

“Hello, Hitoshi, what are you reading there?” The black-haired Pro asked before taking a few steps closer. The first thing that struck him was the completion of the adopted son. He was always a little pale but this was an absence of color. The bags under his eye are more prominent. His nose is a tinged pink and his eyes are watery. To put it simply, he didn’t look well and Shota had no problem pointing it out. 

 “Hitoshi, you don’t look well.” Of course, he wasn’t mean or harsh about it, actually quite gentle. This didn’t make Hitoshi drop his guard. He shrugged, brushed it off, and answered the previous question.

“It's the history textbook” Aizawa tried not to laugh at his teenager after he noticed the paper in his lap which was for his math class and questioned a little further to prove a point.

“So you need your history textbook for your math homework?” Hitoshi looked at his book, then his paper, back to his book, and came up with his best excuse.

“I needed to kndow the history of the quadratic forbmula” He ended his words with a wet yet thick-sounding snuffle and cough. He knew had been caught but still, something was there denying the fact he was unwell.

The Pro pointed at the book, “Even upside down?”. He went to say something before coughing wetly into his fist and Shouta could swear he heard a small whine from the student in front of him. “Alright kid, how about we keep talking in your bedroom, come on.” The purple hair kid drew in a breath from his mouth before swinging his legs over the side and standing up. The color seemed to drain more from his face and he swayed on his feet before taking the next steps down the carpeted floor to his bedroom.

Once they get to the door of the eldest Shouta places a hand on Hitoshi's shoulder. “Really what is going on, are you okay?” Shinsou takes a seat on the edge of the bead before running a finger under his redding nose.

 “As I said I am fide.”

Shouta takes a few steps to close the distance before sitting on the quilted fabric of the bed

 “Kid you don’t have to lie and act tough” he points at the door where a concerned long haired leather wearing pro is leaning, “we are here no need to be so tough.”

The kid sinks into himself more and musters a reply after a few more desperate sniffs. “Well you kndow the foster systeb,” he continued after coughing harshly, “if they see you as weak they take advadtage so you learn to hide weakdess pretty quickly.” He finishes the statement and then looks down at the carpet.

“I know I grew up in the foster system as well, but you have a family now and we all love you. Right now- '' he pauses when the kid sneezes harshly, “bless you, are worried, are you sick?”

Hitoshi recovering from the unexpected sneezes shakes his head admittedly, “d’No of course d’not it is probably just allergies or sobethig all I ne-hih sniff ugh sobe tea or sobething.” Shouta pushes further, “In the middle of winter?”

Hitoshi could see that he wasn’t fooling anyone but still didn’t want his fathers to think poorly of him. This time he couldn’t think of much to say other than.

“I dod’t wadt you guys to be dissapoidted, I’b already behind the others so I’b trying to do as bmuch as I cad.” Aizawa shook his head and folds his arms, he was not mad more so saddened.

“Oh Toshi, you won’t disappoint us, you’re doing the best that you can but. You can’t run yourself into the ground to catch up. You’ll just get worse and be even more behind. You need to take care of yourself. You are not a machine.” Hitoshi couldn’t look at his parents as he felt ashamed of himself for even getting sick in the first place.

“Hitoshi” Hizashi gently called out as he wanders over towards the bed, he sat down on the opposite side still giving Hitoshi enough room to stretch out. But he didn’t, Hitoshi sat in a rather curled-up and hunched-over position. Hearing his name, Hitoshi looked over at the green-eyed blond.

“We love you, okay, and as your parents, it's our job to take care of you. I know it's hard for you because you’re used to guarding yourself and being isolated-”

“But…I failed, I am barely passing classes 1-B let alone class1-A. I will never pass at this rate, I keep trying and everything I do, I do wrong.” He pauses to cough and regain a panicked breath. “ I push myself so hard and everyone is improving except me…am I that broken…if I am what did you see in me!!” He curls tighter into his ball and buries his head in his hands.

 Hizashi and Shouta hated to see their son like this. It truly hurt them knowing that all he wanted to do was prove himself worthy of being in the heroes course. With this, they got closer to Hitoshi and sandwiched him between them in a hug.  Wrapping their arms around his curled-up frame, both kissing him on the temple and softly reassuring him of his insecurities.

“You are not a failure Hitoshi, we will never view you as a failure.” “Yes, you are a very strong and capable guy, and you’re doing your best. You are not broken.” “What we see is a strong-willed, compassionate young man who’s willing to train his hardest to get to where he wants to go.” Rubbing his back soothingly in hopes of calming a teenager down. It broke their hearts to see Hitoshi so panicked. It reminded them of when he was younger and would have breakdowns because of the bullying.

The kind words and gentle affection did help Hitoshi calm down. He wiped his eyes on the back of his shirt before curling into himself and coughing harshly. He looked up into the loving and supportive eye of his adopted dads and finally admitted in a whisper. “Dad, I do d’not feel good.”

Shouta smiled and gave a reassuring shoulder squeeze. “It's okay kid, are you sick?”

With his eyes in a faraway gaze, he simply nods before directing a few half-sneezes into his shirt. 

“Hep-Knngk! Hih-hih Hep-Knngk!!”

“Bless you, I think you might have a cold, kiddo…so under the covers with you.” Shouta directs standing at the end of the bed. Hitoshi wobbles and then directs a cough into his arm before sliding under the patchwork fabric. “I’bm sick?” He looks heartbroken. 

Shouta nods. “Looks like it, kid, it could be just a bad cold.” He directs Hizashi to go get the thermometer from the hall closet. He turns on his heel and standing behind him is a wide-eyed white hair Eri. 

“Is big brother okay?” She asks with a voice pure and as soft as the first snow of the year. 

Shouta nods before adding “he is just has a cold.”

She tilts her head almost too far before she falls. Then asks “He has a cold, he looks hot.”

Shouta laughs before turning to face her. “No a cold, it is an illness.” Hizashi, who has returned with the thermometer, blocks her way. “Make sure to not play too closely with him.” 

Hitoshi pipes up “Hey Sunstar, can you do me a favor?” He pipes up and his voice is rough with congestion. She nods eagerly to help. “Great you are the man of the house now you need to make sure, the cats get fed, you get fed and you eat a green thing for me at every meal, can you do that for me superstar?” 

Hizashi gave Aizawa the thermometer while he gently ushered their little girl out of the room. Leaving Aizawa and Shinsou alone. He walked around the bed and held it out. Hitoshi looked down at the device confused before looking up at Aizawa. He sighed before saying ”Under the tongue for 3 minutes.” He nods and puts it under his tongue and leans against the backboard.

After a minute he starts to stir and mumbles, “sniff dad hih-”. 

“Yes, keep it under your tongue.” He turns back to his son and sees his eyes are closed and his nose is red and twitching…On no!

Hitoshi stammers out “hih- sneeze!!!”  Shouta grabs the tissue box on the nightstand and hands it out to him. “Can you hold it?”

He shakes his head before turning to grab 4 tissues and sneezes three times.

“excT'chEHHH! hii–excT'chEHHH!hih-hi excT'chEHHH!"

“Bless you! That should be enough time for the thermometer, let's see.” The screen flashed a red 99.9. “A small fever but with medicine, it should be okay.” He glances at the purple-haired kid in bed. Poor guy, he doesn’t look well.

Shouta hands him a small cupful of the dark liquid. “Okay kiddo, normally we would have DayQuill but right now we only have Nightquil, however, it should help with that fever of yours.” The shaking kid takes the capful but just looks at it as if wondering what to do.

“Have you ever taken medicine before?”  

“No,” Hitoshi sniffled after answering. “Okay, this is some medicine it should make everything a little better. I will get some soup in the meantime you just get some rest.” 

Again the kid looks confused before managing a strained “Soup? Why?” 

Eraser sighed before standing and heading to the light switch. “It is a good way to regain fluid as well as get you to eat.” The teen nodded before turning and stifling a set of sneezes.

The poor kid he’s going to give himself a headache or a sinus infection if he keeps doing that.

“Hey Hitoshi does not do that, you are going to make yourself worse.” Aizawa then gave the other a soft smile before saying. “Get some rest, I will be back later with some soup.”

Hitoshi laid down his eyelids, getting very heavy before darkness overtook him.

What seemed like hours passed in the blink of an eye and the next thing Hitoshi knew he was waking up feeling worse than before. The light was still on in the hall, so it could not be nighttime. What was he doing? Why was he in his room? With a sharp cough he remembered. Oh right he was sick at least that's what his adoptive father told him. He groaned as he got out of bed and slowly with a shiver touched his feet on the carpeted floor. ‘but he was stronger than this he could get through it he said to himself in a hushed manner, his voice congested and gravy. He stretched quickly ignoring the sharp pain that tickled his nose and throat before heading to the door gradually. 

As he entered the brightly-lit hallway the tickle manifested in his nose he quickly brought his hands to his face to try to combat it, but it was too late. As he breached the entryway of the living room he doubled over with some harsh sneezes that tore his throat and made him cough.

“excT'chEHHH!hih-hi excT'chEHHH!”

The dark-haired man who was sitting on the couch quickly turned before offering a rushed blessing. “What are you doing out of bed?” 

“Can't sleep anymore,'' he pointed at his face before sniffling wetly “congested.”The older man sighed before standing up with a groan and heading over to the swaying son. “I'm sorry buddy come on let's get you to the couch before you fall.” Eraser helps the oldest walk to the couch before sitting him down and grabbing another blanket off of the coffee table and putting it around the kid.

The kid looked miserable, his nose was red and chapped, his eyes dull and glazed over and his complexion was that of a very ill person. Shouta felt his heart twinge a small moment of regret and pain. He thought to himself ‘how can I help then’ , he remembered on some of his bad allergy days what Mic had done for him and I thought it sprang to his head. 

“I know buddy this sucks hey I have an idea that might help I want to go get a few things okay,” He says as the kids slowly nod he wasn't a hundred percent sure he actually heard him but he went up anyway to the medicine cabinet grabbing both a Neti Pot another box of tissue as well as some Vaseline.

When he returned he sent the items he carried on the coffee table and Hitoshi just looked at him confused. “What the hell is that,” he replied, his voice congested. Eraser replied by filling the Neti Pot with saline solution. “This is a Neti Pot. I am going to try to help your congestion. Tilt head completely over to one side. This relies on gravity to work.  While breathing through your mouth, I’m going to gently pour water into one nostril.  The solution will then begin to drain out the other nostril.” 

The kid looks at him dumbfounded. “I know this sounds scary but it should help.” He points at his face.” I use this during allergy season when my sinuses are all clogged but don't worry it is sterile. It should help clear you out a bit.”

The kid replies with a wet sniff before wiping his nose on his hand. The poor thing looked so worn out. 

Shouta grabbed the small bucket to catch the water and told the kid to turn his head to the left. “Now this is going to feel uncomfortable but you will be fine just keep breathing.” 

He tips the neti pot up so that the water begins to flow into his nose. Hitoshi begins to feel the water moving through his sinuses, which is a strange sensation for him. He thinks to himself “Don’t panic. Focus on breathing through your mouth.” Eraser keeps reassuring him. “That's right, great job, almost done.” As he finishes with the right side he hands a few tissues to Hitoshi. “Blow” he commands. He does it with a wet disgusting sound. They repeat this on the other side which ends with Hitoshi coughing a little of the salt water up which he spits out quickly before turning to Eraser with pleading eyes as if to say not to do this again.

Eraser pats him on the back “you did so well we don't have to do that again. One more thing then you can rest before the soup is down in an hour.” He takes a small Q-Tip and the vaseline and holds them out to him. This is like lotion. It should help with the soreness as well as any chappedness. I am going to put this around your nose okay.” Hitoshi nods before wiggling his nose and sniffling. Eraser opens the scent-free bottle and dips in the Q-Tip before exiting with a Big glob of Vaseline on the end he starts around the corners of Hitoshi’s nostrils which are slowly becoming redder and redder by the second before slowly going around the nostril and the septum. Almost immediately his nose reacts and he takes a few hitching breaths before stammering out, “Dad…Himbguh hhhdahh…HDTSSCHH! Hehhkisshhhue! HxxSCHHhiew! Hehh…hihhdtSSHHh! Ihdtshh! Hehh…HEHSHHHhih!”

He pants before covering his face with his hands. “I’mb Sorry I did- Hih didn’t mean to, Oh…oh fuhh- fuck. It hehh-ehhH…EhhhtSHHhue! HghhhSCHhiew! KSSSHh! Hh-hehhh…hehhdtCHHiew! guhh…it… heh… it tickles so mbuhhh…hahh…HihhhTSSCHhiew! Isshiu! Hehishhhu!” 

Eraser grabs a handful of tissues before wiping Hitoshi's nose. “Bless you sorry I didn't know you were so sensitive”, he paused when Hitoshi started hitching again, “got any more in there?”

ihh’IHHSHH! Hehh…Fugk…HEH dtx SCHhu!” He finishes with a stifle and covers his face before blowing his leaking nose with the tissues Shouta is handing him. “I have never sneezed so b’much in’d b’my life dad, sorry.”

Shouta feels his heart break “No, need to apologize you are sick it happens, you feel any better?” He asks while putting the vaseline down. He rubs his nose which is going to become raw at this rate, he replies with a very congested no before continuing, “Can you put the lotion on, it feels better.”

Shouta nods before asking, “Are you sure that was a pretty intense reaction?”

Hitoshi nods so Shouta takes the Q-Tip gently as he can quickly go around the poor inflamed nose. It does twitch but Hitoshi does not sneeze. ‘Thank god’ Shouta thought to himself before helping the both of them stand and walking back to his room. “I will wake you for some soup but just rest. That was a lot and I'm sure you are tired”. He nods his eyes already closed, Eraser can hear a small snore by the time he shuts the door. 

The next time Hitoshi wakes up is by Shouta carrying a bowl of steaming liquid on a tray. Hitoshi feels himself tense up as Shouta comes over with the soup. Maybe he’s gotten hungry enough to eat or he is worried after he does Shouta will realize what a pain he is and want to get rid of him. He nods and slowly moves to start eating it. The hot broth is soothing on his throat. He can feel his nose threaten to run again and he’s sniffling even more as he continues to eat.

  “When’s the last time you ate kid?” This question made Hitoshi think for a second and that made Shouta sad. 

“I think like Tuesday” Now the raven-haired man was rather shocked, it was Friday! 

“Toshi it's Friday” “I d’know” Sighing, the teacher shook his head knowing the other didn’t truly need to be lectured. So he let him eat the soup without fuss. 

“It's good,” Hitoshi commented, Shouta smiles before continuing.

 "'It's homemade soup. After dealing with All Might and his immune system you pick up a few things." 

Hitoshi nods again, finishing about half the bowl before setting it down on the tray. The heat and steam feel good, but it’s started to have another undesired effect. He sniffles hard against the back of his hand before the tickle becomes too much. And it’s going to be a mess. Fuck. He pinches his nose shut as he succumbs to a sneezing fit. “ihh…gXT…huh. ndh…hh…H’gt…nXt’shh huhh…” He lets out a shaky breath, ears popped and congestion crackling behind them. “Ow”

When he opens his eyes Shouta is handing him some tissues. “Bless you, you shouldn’t do that, it will make you worse. Let them out, no one here is going to be upset with you. In fact”, he continued while pulling out a purple half piece of cardstock, “you already have some mail” He winks and Hitoshi looks at the child drawing of him and Eri holding hands.

In the Foster home he never got along with other stereotypical males but he never had a younger sister before, this was something entirely new when he came to this household. Very quickly he realized he would do anything to protect her.  As tears came to his eyes and he sniffed back congestion he looked at the picture of the two of them. It was a poorly drawn stick figure messy with crayons and glitter but still, this was the nicest thing anyone had done for him in a long time and he fought back tears. When he opened the folded card, what could only be described as a mountain of glitter spilled out all over his lap and the tray of soup. 

The inside is covered in glitter, ‘Eri must have used a whole tube’ He thinks as he runs his hand absentmindedly across his face. The card reads ‘my big brother, I feed the cats, and daddy and papa brushed my hair, they did not do it the way you do it, so get better so you can brush my hair again. Love Eri’. He smiles and wipes his nose again. He smiles and looks up at Shouta before a strong tickle overtakes him and he finds himself being thrown forward by the force of the sneeze. 

“HehhISHHhue!! Hrshh'Hhuu!” He did not have time to cover so the pile of glitter from the card in front of him exploded out not only onto the bed covering not only him but the man who adopted him. He looks up bracing for a slew of curse words and maybe some pain but is met with laughter. Shouta Aizawa is laughing. It takes a second for him to realize that he is staring. The image in front of him is pretty unbelievable.

Shouta Aizawa, who can disarm a classroom with one glance, and can erase the quirks of anyone he sees, is covered in a fine layer of pink glitter covering his face, beard, and half his torso. And who is now laughing softly at his son of course with no mal intent more so he just found it funny. 

“Bless you that one snuck up didn't it.” He says laughing. Hitoshi can't help but smile. Shouta begins wiping his shirt and then he pauses and a blank stare crosses his face. His hand comes up to his nose and tries to wipe away the glitter that is plastered to him. His eyes blink a few times before he quickly takes his shirt and directs a harsh fit of sneezing into it. 

“HiHH! Hig’xxshHIEEW! h-hUuh huusshhhTCHuu! HiiihHDShooo! Mnng bless, snFFF!” Shouta lets out a set of strong, wet sneezes, quickly soaking the top of his shirt before he grabs tissues and tries to blow his nose while speaking. “Whew sorry, Hitoshi I'm okay.”

Hitoshi feels his stomach drop. Did he get his dad sick? Surely that had to be the case in all the years of knowing Aizawa he had only heard him sneeze a handful of times mostly due to allergies or Hizashi playing too rough. Hitoshi finds his voice after another set of harsh sneezes from Shouta arrives. “HiHH! Hig’xxshHIEEW! h-hUuh huusshhhTCHuu! HiiihHDShooo!”

 “Bless you dad... Did I get you sick?”

Shouta pauses, his eyes watering, and quickly shakes his head causing more pink glitter to fall. “No, no .no I am fine, some glitter caused this, you did not get me sick.” He notices the frightened expression on his son. “Even if you did, I would never blame you, don’t beat yourself up.” standing up he shakes off a good handful of glitter onto the ground before yelling to Hizashi to get the vacuum. “You did nothing wrong kiddo, your only job right now is to–Hih -hi-hold on,” he turns and directs a few sneezes over his shoulder. “Hihh KSSHH! Mnnff~ Hidsshhhhiiiew! Issh- itshh- hisshhh! Hnnn~ H-huhhh hiiizZZDSHhh!” He sniffs before continuing “Ugh sorry I will have a word with Eri about the glitter next time, your only job right now is to rest, we do not want you to get worse and we have to go to a doctor.”

Hitoshi’s blood runs cold. He stammers out “Doctor?” Shouta nods

“If it gets worse  we might have to.” Hitoshi shakes his head vehemently. “d’No d’no doctors, please d’no.” “Woah kiddo calm down, breathe.” 

He did everything in his power to keep himself grounded, but every time he tried to grip the blankets or pillows, his body suddenly felt weak and the shaking got worse every minute. He hated the audible whines that came from his mouth when he tried to keep himself from panicking, but he couldn't help it. He knew that, yet he hated it anyway. 

“Easy, breathe I’m not going anywhere.” Hitoshi struggled but took a breath. Over the next few minutes, they sat together and eventually he calmed down. And sank against his pillow exhausted. 

“Good job kid that’s it, rest. I won’t leave till you're asleep. Okay”

He went to move and Hitoshi asked: “Can Mic come in, I’bm sniff okay but I have a question for him.” Eraser nodded before grabbing Mic, filling him in quickly as they walked back to the room.

Hizashi walked into the room. “Hey little listener, not feeling too great. He said as he sat down and rubbed his arm. “Can you sing to me?” Hitoshi asked in the softest voice. Mic sat up straighter “Oh course little listener at least someone appreciates the arts in this house. Ahem…” he begins to sing softly. As big of a personality as he has he knows what the situation calls for and begins to sing a lullaby from one of Eri’s TV shows. 

Calma, Calma,

Calma mi nino,

Everything's alright,

The thing you fear is no longer near,

No need to be so frightened!

Calma, Calma,

Calma, ¡Calma!

With that Hitoshi fell back to sleep with ease. Snoring softly from the congestion in his nose.

#sneeze #sneezy #snez #sneezefic #mysneezefic #Fic #fanfic #my fanfic #myfanfic #My fic #shinsou hitoshi #bnha shinsou #aizawa shouta #bnha aizawa #mha aizawa #bnha shouta aizawa #bnha present mic #bnha erasermic #erasermic #e/rasermic

[nowis-scales]

Do you prefer Three Houses or Engage?

Whew, okay. I am happy to answer your question, but please be prepared for me to talk a lot, because I have a lot to say on this topic.

I haven’t played all of the routes of Three Houses. At this point in time, I’ve played Verdant Wind and Crimson Flower. As for Engage, I’ve played all of it (though my playthrough posts sure make it look the other way around, heh). From this perspective, it might seem like there is a possibility for a bit of bias here or there. And while I agree that that could be true…

In this specific case, however, I don’t think it matters. I greatly prefer Engage over 3H.

Now, I should start off by pointing out that some of the stuff I say is going to be hyperbolic. I’m at a point where I’m quite jaded with 3H and many of its fans. There’s only so much discourse and disrespect a girl can take before she becomes a little disenchanted with the subject in question. That being said, though… honestly, none of that stuff affects my overall view. It’s mostly just about the way I might be delivering the message.

The thing to understand about me is though I love video games, if it’s a video game with a story as a major point, it automatically becomes the most important part. I enjoyed both 3H and Engage, but… the best way I know how to put why I would choose Engage over 3H is that while both have their share of writing problems, 3H’s bother me that much more.

To me, it just seems like Koei Tecmo and IntSys had this wide scope for 3H and couldn’t narrow down on what they were doing. And yeah, stones in a glass house comin’ from a Fates fan, I hear the people — but for all that 3H gets called this morally grey masterpiece, half the time it just seems like the “grey morality” comes from the fact that they couldn’t agree whether or not EdeIgard was in the wrong. In developer interviews, Kusakihara of IntSys, calls her the villain. Her route is referred to as one where you bulldoze everyone else to get what you want. It’s not exactly flattering, yet that same interview also states her popularity with the creative team. In my playthrough posts of CF, I know I mentioned to the point of annoyance that she rarely, if ever, faces a proper consequence or sacrifice for what she wants. And in Hopes it only seemed to get worse, with the developer interviews there actually confirming that she is actively happier than she ever was in Houses… Even her ending in Azure Gleam, which is sexist and disgusting, can be read as being in her favour, because how can you accuse her of anything anymore? She looks like a grown woman, but she’s mentally a freshly teenage girl! No more consequences! It feels like they’re just constantly flip flopping between “oh she’s right” or “oh she’s wrong”, which is not something you want from a perpetrator of conflict in the narrative. One minute they’re saying she’s villainous, and the next there’s a convenient & unclear excuse that tries to make her a good person for doing it. If something doesn’t favour whatever the devs wanted to highlight in that moment, it just gets unceremoniously swept under the rug. The Agarthans are proof enough of that. That’s not grey morality, that’s just being indecisive and, quite frankly, the opposite of impartial in Koei’s case.

That’s another problem that gets me about 3H’s story. I hate, hate their supposed “worldbuilding” trick where they just throw out minor details about like, a country’s problem with sexism or a group of people like the Almyrans or the Dagdans and just… never elaborate. I’m particularly interested in the Nabateans and the sexism of Adrestia myself, but are those points that ever get elaborated on? No, because it’s time to talk about crests and the crest system, which could have been an interesting look at classism if the concept actually stood up under scrutiny. It is very difficult for me to believe that there is some specific-to-Fodlan classism issue going on when Crests don’t determine whether you become or stay noble. Byleth is not immediately noble once it’s acknowledged that they have one, and Constance’s house fell in spite of it. Considering the possible marriage option for Ingrid in her paralogue, being nobility is not even the only way to ensure success in society. And all this is without even acknowledging the ridiculousness of the idea that the Nabateans would want to perpetuate a system that was actively soaked in the blood of their own. It just feels like, rather than engaging more clearly with how the crest system would actually work and subsequently be attacked, it just becomes this abstract thing that all other interesting thoughts get sucked into, without any concept that it’s real aside from EdeIgard and Sylvain mentioning it. I don’t feel passionately about it, it’s just kind of something that’s there. It could have been interesting to execute, but the way they went about it just doesn’t make it seem real to me — so, again, any attempt at a morally grey conflict there is lost on me.

And then there’s the problem with tell don’t show. I’ve seen people saying that Engage has this too… but 3H is god awful for this. The whole time I was playing Engage, I just remember thinking how much I loved how naturally emotional everything was. When you fight Hortensia again in the Solmic castle, the fact that she’s crying that she just wants her family back is sad. It’s natural. You don’t feel like the game is holding your hand, trying to make you to feel upset on Hortensia’s behalf. You don’t need to be told that Hortensia is trying so hard to be independent and strong and leaderly. You can just hear it in the way that she instead whimpers about how nobody will give her what she wants. You can tell that she’s angry that she cannot emulate her father or Ivy, and that she can’t get Ivy to do the things she wants her to do when it should have been so easy in theory. The way she reacts to the situation laid out before her shows us that yes, Hortensia has been through a lot the last little while and is getting to a breaking point where we might be able to help her. It’s what makes it that much more cruel when Zephia mind controls her to rip her away from us. 3H’s kind of pale in comparison at times, really.

The best way I know how to explain how 3H kinda flops at this is to continue picking on EdeIgard a little (sorry). I’ve rambled about it before, but presumably in an effort to show the legitimacy of EdeIgard’s suffering at the hands of the Agarthans in Crimson Flower, they put in this scene where she sees a rat and gets scared. The implication is supposed to be that there were numerous rats in the dungeon where she was kept when she was being experimented on, and that she now has a trauma response to them. However, when you actually get to the scene, her reaction is obscenely unrealistic — because it’s about being cute. This is a trauma response she’s supposed to be having, and Byleth can tease her about it. When responding to the stimulus of the rat, she doesn’t even respond with intense fear or anything symptomatic of the actual mental illness she would probably have. She just screams, and then tries to act like it didn’t happen, but of course she gets all blushy about it. It is entirely ingenuine, and I can’t just bring myself to emotionally invest if they only know how to give characters subdued, acceptable reactions or have them just tell me that something made them sad or scared. Just hearing that this character has had a sad life — and, conveniently, almost all of them have had a sad life — doesn’t make me feel emotionally connected to them. Representing the more human parts of that struggle does.

Bottom line, I shouldn’t feel like the game is holding up an “APPLAUSE” style sign that says “BE SAD” whenever the characters talk about things that have happened to them.

These are three big things that I just feel really tamper with my enjoyment of 3H to its fullest extent. The game just makes me feel too micromanaged, like it doesn’t trust me to be smart enough to pick up on the things it wants to say. For all that people say it’s the best story FE’s done in years, I would actually disagree on that. It’s the characters and the lore that carry this game. The story is just not that well-organized, nor is it willing to give you any sort of space.

That being said, I do not dislike 3H! At the moment I am… admittedly incredibly sick of it, but I don’t dislike it. There are plenty of things that it manages to do well! Like I just said, I think the lore is really interesting. The Nabateans in particular have always been a subject of interest for me, because there’s something so intriguing to me about them sort of being a parallel being to humanity, but still being so viciously discriminated against. The conflict between Duscur and Faerghus was also pretty attention-catching, and while I’m not super crazy about how the Insurrection of the Seven is portrayed, I do like that this is a kind of political conflict that they would confront.

In fact, the fact that this game does try to confront the more political side of things is another thing I like about it. Whether it does this well all the time is a different situation entirely, but just the fact that they decided to put this in is something I enjoy. One thing I know that I instantly enjoyed about Persona 5 that was also reflected in 3H was the way it brought up how the socio-political issues were affecting the society that everyone was living in. Each country had its own individual problems, with Adrestians struggling with sexism & classism, the Faerghans with their unstable government and newly developed tendency toward anti-Duscurian racism, and the Leicester Alliance with its imbalance/disagreement between people and the doubt surrounding its new leaders. To have these things helps us better understand what the characters are going through, as well as the causes for a war. It also makes the world feel more alive, because now we know what kinds of things each group is up against. It develops them. I’m still not a fan of how sometimes these things are just brought up and dropped in favour of one thing or the other, but there is often enough thought in them to make it most of the way, and that most of the way is awesome.

As for the characters, they have to confront a recruitment mechanic that completely throws their motives out the window at times just to conform to a specific narrative… and they still turned out pretty good, so that really speaks to how great they are! There is a lot of detail to put into each character’s life, and for the most part, the devs took care to make sure that everyone had a tie to someone. If they didn’t, then that felt intentional in some way. Relationships in particular really humanize characters, and I feel like 3H took that into account. I know I said it eons ago, but I’m still so delighted that we know about Maya Kiersten. Other FE games don’t tend to give these minor characters that a main character loves a name, but here we are, getting all kinds of details about her. Same goes for Holst and Rodrigue. It’s fun, and I really like that this happens. It also intrigues me that some of these characters aren’t total angels, and have their ugly sides as well. I need to put this in big bold lettering, but I do not condone the racism of Hilda or Ingrid. However, I do think that it’s an interesting addition to each of their characters. With the ways they are otherwise portrayed, it is possible that you could get too rosy of an image of the two girls. Their own racism undercuts that, it makes them feel more realistic, because bigoted people aren’t all one-note. They can seem otherwise kind and dependable, and still not be able to separate their head from their ass when it comes to being considerate of others. It fleshes them out. Details like this do add a little more to them, even if I wish they would actually explore them more in the context of the world as well. Racism that doesn’t get improved or worked upon is just racism for realism’s sake, and why should people who experience irl racism have to deal with that? They’re very aware of what the real world looks like, thank you.

The thing about 3H in comparison to Engage is that it just trips so many more times. I didn’t know what it was about Engage that just caught me, but once it had me, it had me. The emotional influence was definitely part of it, which I already mentioned, but I think another thing that I just liked in comparison was the fact that it didn’t try as hard as 3H did for some of that stuff. Thematically yes, Engage is more straightforward and doesn’t pile on the angst quite the same. It’s lighter and doesn’t take itself painfully seriously. Nonetheless, the stuff it does try to do comes out beautifully. It (for the most part — we need to have a whole other post about Alcryst) knows when to make you laugh, when to make you feel sad, and when to instill feelings of suspense or hope. It cares deeply about its characters and seeing them to the end of their journey. I never felt like I didn’t know the thesis of the game, and I almost never felt like there was a moment where I really wished they would just tell that part of the story differently. The whole thing just felt very carefully put together to me, and made for a better impression overall because there were no conflicting accounts of what was meant to go on based on the writer at the moment. I could tell that the game trusted me to draw my own conclusions. It made for a much more fun experience, because I love finding these small things woven in by the developers and mining them out like little gems. That’s part of the reason why I love Fates so much. While everyone else is complaining about how awful it is, I get to be searching for and finding all of these amazing parts that just got totally missed. I love stuff like that.

The worldbuilding in Engage is also something that I feel was a lot stronger. Things don’t just drop off. Tensions between Brodia and Elusia, for example, constantly inform the way the characters approach situations. Even conversations that are supposed to be silly, like that of Étie and Goldmary, are informed by that tension. Characters don’t forgive and forget everything that happened to them in relation to their societies just because they’re working together now. Citrinne doesn’t forgive Yunaka for her assassinations right away, she remains suspicious of her for a long time. When Ivy plays a part in the summoning of the Fell Dragon and ends up being part of the reason why Morion was killed, Alcryst holds a grudge against her — even though Ivy was part of the solution for the rest of the group, and even though Ivy herself turns out not to be a Fell Dragon worshipper at all. Things like these are constantly informing the plot and the characters. They don’t just disappear when it is inconvenient for them to exist. This is just one of many examples, but it really made the conflict feel like it was distinct, and thus was more meaningful when they came together.

I also just generally feel like the cultures in Engage ended up being more unique as well. I’ve played the entirety of Crimson Flower and Verdant Wind, as well as about 8 chapters of Azure Moon, and I’m not sure I could do as much to show how the cultures vary as much as I could with Engage. However, to give credit where credit is due, one could argue that the cultures of the Alliance, the Empire, and the Kingdom are less distinct than Elusia, Solm, Lythos, and Brodia because 3H’s conflicts need to build up to the final concept of uniting Fodlan. Nonetheless, the whole point of the nations breaking up from being just Adrestia is at least partially because the cultures are too different, and even if they weren’t… This would still just be more proof of my point that EdeIgard gets stuff weighted towards her. Therefore, I kinda prefer to think that it is not as much of a deliberate choice because the purposeful interpretation is straight up glorifying the imperialism element of the game. It’s just different in the case of Engage, where the differences and similarities are there with much more explicit purpose. The peace of Firene is played quite like the freedom of Solm, for example. Both nations have this seemingly leisurely thing that they value above all else, and it’s something that they know must make them seem overly gentle or carefree to outsiders. Nonetheless, once you start to spend time with characters like Céline and Timerra, it becomes clear just how viciously they fight to protect their people’s right to having those things in their lives. And this, of course, isn’t the only similarity, nor is it the only difference. If you need to see more of what I mean, emblemxeno made a great post on this that might help fill in some more gaps. It’s stuff like this that makes me prefer the way Engage executes its worldbuilding, because you can feel the way the countries influence each other, as well as the things that come innately from themselves. It’s not quite the same as Fodlan’s sort-of similar cultures. The ideas from each place don’t bounce off each other quite the same, so I find they’re not as entertaining to observe.

I could probably keep going on for awhile longer, but the answer to this ask is like… probably way more than you bargained for when you initially sent it, so I might leave it off at that. Any further, more specific questions can always be sent at a later date! I’m certainly not opposed to getting more asks after all ;)

At the very least, hopefully I was able to shed some light on my opinions on the contrasts between 3H and Engage, and why each one either does or doesn’t work better for me. Thanks for taking the time to ask!

#3H spoilers #fire emblem engage spoilers #fodlan fault-finding #shut up about del

[lavender-long-stories]

Spoilers for Lavender Letters | Chapter 1 | Rated M

Hinata thumbed through the mail, pausing on one with familiar government postage. She took that one out for herself and left the rest. 

“More mail from you’re degenerate?” Neji pulled it out of her hand.

Hinata snapped it back before he could pull it out of her reach. “We’re not having this conversation again.”

Neji frowned at her. He wasn’t happy when Hinata signed up for the prison pen pal program. She knew because he reminded her frequently. “He is a…”

“Murderer, I know.” Hinata finished for him. “I knew when I started writing to him. I knew last week when you told me and the week before, and I’ll remember when I write him back.”

Neji sighed, collecting his bag to leave. Hinata waited for him to say something else, but this time he was going to let it go. 

Hinata tore the seal to get to her letter. She had long since learned to read chicken scratch, or maybe he just got better with time. The letters were long rambles, sometimes over multiple days, that didn’t usually have a point, but there was something there, even if he wasn’t doing it intentionally.

It started when Hinata was in university with a clipboard someone asked her to sign as she came out of class. Hinata hadn’t really been paying attention. She thought that she was signing up for a policy for prisoners to be able to send more letters to their pen pals, not become one. Putting her address down should have been a red flag, but she was in a hurry. 

Hinata thought about not responding when she got the first letter. In fact, she almost didn’t read it when she saw the name on the letter. No one could escape Hidan’s name on the local news while his case was ongoing. It didn’t help that he was erratic in court, and there was a new story every week about something he shouted disrupting the trial or boldface claimed on the stand.

There was a debate on whether Hidan was actually insane or if his theatrics were just for an insanity plea, but he did brutally murder several people and desecrate their corpses. That was insane in itself.

What made Hinata pick up the letter and respond was a nagging in her gut because she knew one of the victims, and it may make her a horrible person, but she was happy to hear they were dead. The creep from her first internship that she never felt comfortable around. A married man that sat a little too close, putting his arm around the back of her chair, and she knew she wasn’t the only one. He didn’t try anything worse with her, but that didn’t mean that he didn’t try it with the others. There were also rumors that he was skimming from the company, so no one was really sad to see him gone. 

It made her wonder if Hidan knew.

It was a question she had never asked, and it was an answer she couldn’t really determine from his ramblings because it was similar to his theatrics in court. He said what he wanted to, when he wanted to, with very little filter. 

It was unclear if there was ever a motivation for what Hidan did, even replying to her. At first, he complained about how ‘prude’ she was with her wording and speech. He could tell she didn't like it even if she never scolded him specifically for his language. It made her laugh when he started writing out the swear and then scribbling it out for her ‘delicate eyes.’ So at least, he considered being considerate.

Hidan was a bastard, but he knew he was a bastard. At least he wasn’t lying to himself. 

“Aren’t you late?” Hiashi’s voice called from down the hallway.

“I’m heading out now,” Hinata told him. “Have a good day.” Hiashi didn’t respond as he disappeared back down the hall. Hinata wasn’t expecting anything, but hope would get the better of her once in a while. 

Hinata collected her bag on her way out the door with a sigh. She would have to respond to the letter when she got back.

--**--

Hidan laid back in his creaky uncomfortable bed and tried to drown out the usual sounds of prison, including his cellmate’s annoying way of flipping pages. If you were audibly sliding the page across another every single time, it was deliberate. Fuck him.

Mail came in the morning, and if his little pen pal was as predictable as usual, she would have replied already, and tomorrow would come faster if he fell asleep. His eyes fell on his small portion of the world plastered on the wall with her little doodles and the pictures she sent. He only had one picture of her, the university ID picture that was originally sent with her first letter. It had been a few years, and she was older. He knew she had cut her hair. He didn’t really care how she looked. It would make the mental picture more complete. 

It started out funny, the convicted serial killer signing up for a pen pal program. He chased the first few people off, but this girl never stopped sending a letter back. Even when he was purposely trying to get on her nerves, she just scolded him and eventually just ignored the parts of his letters that would annoy her.

Hidan got the picture. He wasn’t chasing her off. He wasn’t going to get to her. Hinata knew who and what she signed up for, and he wasn’t going to surprise her. It took a weird pressure off of him to keep the act up. Hinata never asked him why or how he did any of his murders and squashed his theory that she was writing a book. She could have made one by now if she just collected and printed the letter he sent over the years. It would probably be that long. 

Hidan always wondered if the last one he read would be the last one he would receive, and he would have to find something else to make his prison life interesting. He’d be damned if he was going to do something stupid like get a degree in here. There were a few dumbasses who thought they might get their life sentence overturned by showing they ‘changed.’ 

Speaking of damned, the edges of his collage were Jashin symbols, along with the one he was going to get in trouble for carving into the wall… again. He sighed, laying his head back. He wanted to sleep, damn it!

--**--

Hinata tucked her hair behind her ear as she crouched down at one of the small desks in her classroom. She pointed at a mistake on the page and waited for her student to make the correction. “Good job.” She praised as she stood back up to continue looking around at the children’s work.

Kids this young wore her out, and her father hated that she was teaching primary school and not university classes, but she would take helping blow a few noses and being patient with tantrums over being hit on by students to get better grades. She had enough of that during her teaching assistant days to last her for the rest of her life. 

Now she just had to worry about the occasional single parent and the, unfortunately, more common married parent, but she rarely had to talk to parents.

Hinata felt a light tug on her skirt and crouched down to another desk. The little girl held her hands up to show her broken pencil and pouted. Hinata could help the smile that spread across her face. Children were so pure and simple. “That’s okay. We can get you another one. Pink, green, or blue?”

--**--

Hidan crossed his arms, waiting for his state-appointed hour of sunlight and fresh air to be over. Then he could go back to his cell while everyone else went off to do chores. 

Why wasn’t he doing chores? Simple, they didn’t want him to. He got banned from cleaning for spraying cleaner in someone’s face because he wouldn’t stop talking, then the next time for trying to drown someone in a toilet. He got banned from laundry for trying to put someone in a drier to see if it would be a fun ride. The rumor of him being a cannibal kept him from the kitchen, and maybe that one time, he successfully stabbed someone with a spoon. In his defense, he didn’t know it was going to work as well as it did. 

All things he told Hinata and all things she never asked a reason for, and sometimes he did have reasons. She seemed to assume he had a good reason, or they ‘must have done something too.’ To be fair, prison didn’t have a lot of completely innocent people, so maybe she was assuming the worst of everyone.

Hidan was nudged and broken out of his thoughts to scowl at Kakuzu holding out a pack of cards. “Stop praying and play with me.”

“Piss off,” Hidan grumbled. Kakuzu liked one thing in life, money. It’s what got him in prison in the first place. An embezzlement case. He wasn't embezzling. He killed the man embezzling from him. Which, in Hidan’s opinion, was a ‘play stupid games, win stupid prizes’ situation. Just because it was rare to get murdered for white-collar theft didn’t make it safe. Only after looking into his business did the police realize all the investment money for the business came from people who had mysteriously had someone in their life missing.

When asked, Kakuzu admitted that he had been a hitman for hire for years and had the records to prove it. He went through a few cellmates before they were jammed together. His body count was beyond impressive, so Hidan at least was happy with the match. He couldn’t stand the whiny bitches that were in for beating their wives or selling drugs. You got caught doing something stupid. Suffer in silence.

Kakuzu just smacked his arm with the deck again. “Come on. I need you.” Kakuzu wanted him to cheat at cards with him, and he wouldn’t mind it if it weren’t what he did every single day. 

“Greed will send you to hell.” Hidan shot over his shoulder, knowing that it would make Kakuzu grind his teeth.

“We are already here.” Kakuzu shot back.

Hidan shrugged. “Maybe you are.” Prison was probably where Hidan belonged, and might as well enjoy it. 

Lavender Letters

Pairing: Hidan x Hinata Rating: M for Violence and Strong Language

Description: Hinata signs up for a prison pen pal program and is assigned to Hidan, a serial killer known for his brutal murders. Hinata becomes friends with him despite his crass nature. And, oh yeah, they kill her father.

Tags:  Romance  |  Fluff and Angst  |  Hurt/Comfort  |  No Relationship Abuse  |  Happy Ending  |  Alternate Universe - Modern Setting  |  Prison Pen Pals  |  Serial Killer

#hidahina #hinata hyuuga #hidan #hyuga hinata #full chapter #lavender letters #tw: blood

[thelampisaflashlight]

Some mild venting below the cut, nothing too serious, but this makes it easier to scroll past. It's a long one, so just know that if you decide to dive in. Messy family stuff.

So two of my siblings are not really talking right now, they're not fighting, but they aren't in active communication.

For the sake of this post, we're call them Alice and Sue.

Alice is the older of the two -and the eldest sibling of the four of us- and the one who, as I understand it, the main cause of this dead air so to speak.

Out of the lot of us, Alice is the most like our mother in terms of temperament.

This is both a good and a bad thing, and, while not wholly her fault, it does lead to situations such as the one we're currently dealing with; Alice has recently had to leave her house and move into an apartment, and to top it all off, her husband, my brother-in-law, is in the hospital again.

So my aunt, we'll call her Jen, found out about this and offered to help her retrieve her belongings from a storage unit, because my aunt knows better than to undertake this task alone, she asked me if I would be willing to help out.

I said yes, as I haven't seen or talked to my sister in five years -she doesn't have my number, I don't have hers, I have offered to have Jen give it to her, she never got back to me, it is what it is- and figured there are worse ways to waste a Sunday.

Anyway, Sunday came and we had to reschedule last minute because of timing, not a problem, we're doing it this weekend instead.

Well, Aunt Jen asks me to see if I can't find other people to help out, and I say, "Yeah, I'll ask our brother and see if he can swing it."

And then she asks me about Sue.

Now, I already know Alice has issues with Sue, the details of which are... unclear.

The best I can explain it, is that Alice maybe has some resentment towards Sue that doesn't extend to our brother and myself since we're A LOT younger -talking two decades, folks, not one, but two-, whereas Alice and Sue are more or less a year apart.

Pretty much from jump street these two haven't gotten along, and while it may now go both ways, I have been told that hasn't always been the case, but my source on that is biased.

Read: the source is my father, who is neither Alice nor Sue's biological father, this is important for later, and he greatly favors Sue, as Sue was often mistaken for his child, whereas Alice greatly resembles our mom.

Anyway, Aunt Jen suggests the idea of having Sue help move Alice into her new home, and I express to her, not in a roundabout way, that I did not think it would be a good idea.

Which, of course, lead to questions, ones that I couldn't possibly know the answer to, and ones I was uncertain of whether or not *I* should be the one to answer.

Well, Sue found out I was going to help Alice move and she was...

Fine with it?

We talked a bit about it and she asked how long it had been since I'd seen Alice, and we talked a bit about her feelings on things.

Sue was pretty forthcoming with her reasons for not helping Alice, initially joking that she was being petty, but the truth is her reasons are not, how to put it?

They were valid reasons.

From having helped Alice move two times prior, her lack of communication/not initiating conversations, and...

...Not helping with their dad's end of life care and/or involving herself in the discussions about what they would be doing with him, but then delaying the internment indefinitely due to the chosen date not working for her personally.

Basically; Sue is tired of being the one having to reach out, and Alice is not inclined to asking for help/does not offer help when it is requested.

You're allowed to say you don't want to/can't help, but when it's a continued cycle of, "Can you...?" "No." it does tend to cause a rift.

But my aunt Jen doesn't see it that way.

She thought that maybe if Sue helped out this time, that maybe SHE would come around to talking to Alice, and that that would repair things.

I put it kind of bluntly when she asked again today and just said, "I can't be playing the middle man between these two, and I don't think it would be appropriate to force them to interact under stressful circumstances such as this."

Because, really, they might be my sisters, but they're both grown adults with jobs and families of their own, and I'm a twenty-something single nerd whose main priorities right now are not getting sick and being able to afford cat food.

If they want to talk, they'll talk, and if not, it's not my job to nudge them together, nor should it be.

It also does not help that I, too, am somewhat biased towards which sister I "like the best", but that's because one has been more present in my life and helped raise me after our mother passed, so I cannot act as a neutral party either.

It's impossible for me to go, "Well, let's hear both sides-" because I have only known one side of it for most of my life now, and that side almost adopted me when my home life was unstable as a child.

You see what I'm saying?

So when my aunt asked me why they weren't talking, I kept it as neutral as I could manage, coming from the position I am.

I want to help Alice, because she's my sister and she's needs the help, but I'm not going to drag Sue into it, because it wouldn't be good for anyone involved.

I wish I could say I can wash my hands of this situation after Sunday, but I also don't know how Sunday is going to go.

But we'll see.

And that's all you can really do.

#lamp rambles

[deadbnnuy]

Spotted Death: Chapter 4, I Have No Eyes, Yet I Must Weep.

As the sun dimmed in the sky, day taking its leave, Johnathan sat idly by the bridge where him and Wolf had sat previously. He fiddled with the paper in his hands, and looked up at the horizon...

This... was the first good day he'd had in a long, long time... even before the collider incident, it seemed he was often overlooked in favor of those more charismatic. Too shy to speak out about being ignored, he often just stayed alone, involuntarily solitary.

After the incident, it only got worse. It seemed that now people were just repulsed by his very existence... if he could cry, he would.

He sighed and stood up, holding the paper between delicate fingertips, as he walked around the empty city streets aimlessly, nowhere to go, nowhere to be. He was frankly surprised he could be of use anymore.

His subconscious planted a seed of doubt in his mind, what if Wolf wanted the credit for taking down Spiderman? What if he was being used again? He hoped against hope itself this wasn't the case, but he couldn't help but wonder. Even if it was the case... at least he'd be useful.

While walking around, he passed the gates of Alchemax, he stopped to stare up at the main building from behind the wire fence. A hopeful career that turned out to be the end of everything... No, no, he wouldn't let this be the end. He isn't letting that take him down.

He felt rage boil inside at him as he looked at the building, fists clenching. He picked up a rock, and chucked it as hard as he could at the building, a grunt escaping him as he did.

It smashed through a window, sending shards of glass into the building and triggering the alarm system, he gasped and tensed, then ran off before he was caught in this act of impromptu vandalism.

He returned to the main part of the city, glancing behind himself every now and then. "Shouldn't have done that... should not have done that." he muttered. He nervously rubbed the surface of the paper in his left hand, he still hadn't put it down. The alarm of the Alchemax building could still be heard nearby.

"So much for being smart, huh, Johnny?" He spoke to himself, sighing, nervously messing with his hands. This good day was taking a south turn quickly...

Johnathan felt something cold on his back, a drop of rain... As if the very world itself despised him, it slowly began to rain in New York. He felt like sobbing. And yet, a man with no eyes cannot cry. No matter how badly he must.

He looked at the paper with his newly made friend's number upon it for a moment, the blank, expressionless spot that replaced his face conveying nothing, offering no identity to the destroyed man. Droplets of water like the tears of the earth itself dampened the paper, the blue ink of the pen leaking down trails of raindrops in the wrinkled paper.

"..."

He sighed and walked down seventh street and into the phone booth, it was cramped, confined, and frankly smelled... bad. He fished a quarter out of his side and hesitated, before sticking it into the phone's coin slot. A soft "clink" was heard as it went into the coin collector of the machine. He picked up the receiver and dialed the number written on the now crinkled piece of paper.

It rang as he waited for his companion to answer the phone, he nervously tapped his foot as he waited. "..."

"Y'ello?" His voice was muffled on the other end, something playing in the background, the poor audio making it unclear what the background noise was. Johnathan hesitated.

"... Hi, uh- Wolf." He timidly said

"Hey. What's up, dude? Y'need somethin'?"

"No-- well... yes. I... need to ask something. It's important."

"Well, go on." The background noise ceased.

"Uh... can I... uh..."

He awkwardly cleared his throat, feeling guilt building in his chest. He only just met this guy, he didn't wanna seem like more of a loser than he probably already did.

"... You need a place to stay?" Wolf asked calmly, as if able to read the scientist's mind. Johnathan stood there in mild shock before responding sheepishly. "... Yes."

"Right then. Stay where you are, I'll be there." Wolf said calmly. "You're not... pissed, yeah?" Johnathan asked with trepidation. "Nah. Be there in 5."

"... Thanks."

"No problem dude."

#The Spot #self insert x canon #Spotted Death #Heehoo time to cry #lovelies <3

[dogsliampaynedoesntinstagram]

Hi Ralph. So I follow a lot of celebrities and they all share things ranging from about their family and friends, pets, interests, hobbies, thoughts and feelings etc. Whether it's on social media or on podcasts or interviews. It made me realize how Harry gives us nothing but the same jokes told over and over again or comments he makes that are so unclear and open to different interpretations. It can work in his favor like pleasing all parts of his fanbase but now it's starting to work against him like his comments in RS, at the Grammys and Venice film festival. How much longer do you think he can go on being a blank canvas for everyone to project on to? If he keeps making these ambiguous comments then I can see the backlash getting worse. When do you think it'll become a problem? Will it work for his long term career? How can he get around it?

Anon 2: Why do you think Harry is committed to saying nothing? This isn't really to do with politics but the political talk did remind me how he barely gives us anything lol and what he does give us around album promo feels really scripted. Other celebrities I follow, no matter how famous they are, tell stories about their life and experiences. Even if it's something so small like an embarrassing moment at a show or a fear they have or how they enjoy spending their weekend. We very rarely get that from Harry. We get snippets about him from others. Like Harris Reed, Harry Lambert, Alessandro talking about Harrys' views on fashion. His chef talking about what he eats on tour. A gym worker talking about how much he works out. Or we get things like. A book he has in his back pocket, him wearing merch from a TV show. At his shows he repeats the same stories over and over again. I just wonder why we don't get much from him? I did wonder if it was tied to his closet. That because he's hiding such a huge part of himself, he's decided to give us nothing. But he's just very different to other celebrities who do share part of their lives, no matter how small. Do you have thoughts why?

Anon 3: #And his reluctance to say anything in every interview he's ever done Why do you think that is? I find it really interesting. I don't know any other celebrities in the public eye like Harry who keep to themselves so much. I don't expect celebrities to be entirely truthful but most do open up about something like Taylor on sexism, Ariana on being called a diva, Justin on his mental health issues and how religion saved him etc. Most have opened up about some kind of struggle or have talked about their childhood or family or career or goals or whatever. There are endless examples from musicians and actors. Harry barely speaks about anything in detail. Just a few lines here and there and often repeated ones. When it comes to fashion, which is a big part of Harry, it is mostly people doing the talking for him (Harry Lambert, Harris Reed, Alessandro Michele etc). It's often that case with everything. We learn things about him here and there through other people. Like in the Vogue photo shoot of him in the dress. No doubt it was really important to him but he barely spoke about that. He always shows support for the lgbtq+ community but doesn't talk about it, other than expressing his sadness over a shooting. He can talk about the lgbtq+ community without revealing that he is part of it. All I can think of is that he doesn't say much because virtually everything about him is tied to his closet, sexuality and gender. Perhaps he feels that he can't say what he wants to say so he'd rather say nothing at all. I have a gut feeling that he is struggling with his closet. If he does want to CO then I hope that one day he gets to experience that. All the CO stories I've read from musicians and actors have said that they don't regret it and it was worth the damage it did to their career because they can be truthful to themselves.

***********

I think this is a really interesting set of questions anons and I'll try and answer them some (sorry for taking so long, so each time I started a draft there was a new anon talking about this same question).

I think there's a couple of different angles to look at this. The first is the issue of fandom surveillance. A lot of the way that celebrities create a sense of intimacy and share minor details about their life is through social media. But if you have a fandom who will find where you are and match skirting boards - then there's a real risk in doing that. So I think a lot of the avenues for sharing aspects of himself are cut off.

The other point that people have mentioned is that I think Harry is legitimately terrified of saying things. I thought what he said about reading Jon Ronson's "So You've Been Publicly Shamed" was really interesting. I think that's underlined by him saying that he's read that and he feels more comfortable saying things - and then how little he's said. I also think that it's worth saying that while I think there's probably a lot going on for him in terms of speaking

I also think the response to the Grammys and Rolling Stone - were both in response to him trying to say something that was true to him (unlike the Venice Film Festival). Both were exacerbated by the fact that he didn't say what he was trying to say very well. But I think his experience is that when he tries to say something he isn't understood.

In terms of Harry being closeted - I think it's a factor in all of this, but only part of what's going on. The fandom surveillance part is obviously an issue if he's closeted. But it's also an issue, because he's a person. I think his experiences drive a sense of a need for privacy.

In terms of not saying things - I do wonder if the impact here is complex. The first thing he ever said in his very first interview after X-factor was that he had a crush on a boy. That decision has had quite a significant impact on his life - and I think it's very possible that it's the consequences of what he did speak about when he was very newly famous that have had such consequences for him.

In terms of how these things interact. I think from a purely rational point of view - both from his as a brand and also what he wants to experience from the world - not saying anything makes sense. But I don't think that's all that's going on - I also think his feelings about saying things and not saying things - being seen and not being seen run pretty deep. So if being someone people project things onto becomes unsustainable - I don't know that it'll be that easy for him to do something else.

#Oh Harry #I welcome other people's thoughts as well #One thing I'd love to know #if he actually believes he's revealing himself with his music

[thatautisticadhdfeel]

So anyways. That complaining I wanted to do! (This got long)

As anyone who followed this blog for a while before my surprise hiatus (which probably went unnoticed bc Kit kept posting) likely knows, something is horribly wrong with the wretched sack of flesh I am forced to inhabit. I’m not complaining about that right now, I’m back to complain about the medical system.

I worked for a bit in the spring, and was in the process of starting a new job early this fall. After struggling for weeks against email anxiety, I had a realization. Why the hell am I looking for a job when I feel so horrible physically? So I gave up on that job (correct choice. My physical state got worse before it got better) and decided to take another stab at getting medical treatment.

So after talking about my constant pain and suffering for nearly an hour (and developing a spectacular headache by the end), my doctor decides to send me back to the neurologist about the headaches (unclear how helpful this will be), run some more blood tests, and if the blood tests didn’t find anything she was gonna get a second opinion on what else to try.

Okay, great. We’re testing new things and maybe the neurologist will at least be able to prescribe something helpful. Not expecting much from the tests but maybe the second opinion will have a better idea.

Go to the lab, get four vials of blood drawn. They changed the tape they use to hold the cotton ball in place after, and the new tape actually stuck to my skin so that was something. Wait for results.

Doctor calls… to schedule up a phone appointment to go over the results. I become cautiously optimistic that there might actually be something to discuss.

Phone appointment. All the tests were negative. I guess I’m glad I don’t have an autoimmune disease (that would show up those tests, at least) but I’d also like to have an answer. Oh well, I knew this was the most likely outcome. So what’s next?

Apparently, fucking nothing, other than the previously agreed upon visit with the neurologist. The second opinion didn’t have any ideas, so I guess she had no choice but to give up and start saying shockingly unhelpful things like “maybe try to exercise more” and “depression causes pain” (probably didn’t help my case that when she said this I lost the fight against tears and my mother had to finish the call for me) and my absolute favourite, “the only thing that this sounds like is fibromyalgia, but you’re really young for that” (then why bring it up at all? What drives a medical professional to say things like this? How could a loving god allow this phone call to happen)

So being told all that stuff fucked me up for a couple days making me wonder if I was just exaggerating all my symptoms and making a big deal over nothing, until I remembered that I can and have pinched my brachial plexus (an injury typically associated with high speed collisions such as in contact sports, or car accidents) by sleeping on my side, and I’m pretty sure depression doesn’t cause that.

#I don’t even know what to tag this as #probably some medical shit that my brain is to fried to figure out the correct words to trigger tag for

[rays-animorphs]

Wanting out isn’t a Cassie only thing in fact — Marco wants out in book 5, Rachel considered leaving in idk 7 I think, again Tobias was flat out suicidal in book 3, which is not primarily about wanting to leave the fight but would have that effect. Also, Ax’s personal honor crisis in book 8 effectively involved him leaving the Animorphs and having them all go “yeah, not happening”, which was good for Ax because he fully expected his mad dash at vengeance to kill him, but what I mean is there’s definitely a pattern of tries to leave/gets sucked back in. Even paragon of heroism Elfangor gets a desertion/reenlistment storyline. As far as I can tell, only Jake so far has not, and the only characters who have gotten leave? yes storylines are ones who were new to the story — Erek gets to opt out of the actual violence side of the war in book 10 and David, well, doesn’t get anything he wants but is definitively out of the Animorphs as of book 22.

I think these can all be understood as variants on a theme. Elfangor iirc gets basically strongarmed by the Ellimist. Rachel gets a lighter touch persuasion that sticking around can make a real difference. Marco…his situation is perhaps open to interpretation, whether it was more about him getting a bigger perspective or simply that what mattered to him (his family) was no longer pulling him out of the battle but instead pulling him in. From where I stand it looks like the latter, in which case Marco had the war follow him home in a much worse way than Cassie did.

(Actually Jake has a very gentle moment of wanting out in book 1. After they escape the construction site, Jake just wants to forget. It’s Tobias driving the plot forward there, he’s the one who morphs first and convinces Jake to try morphing. It’s unclear what would have happened without Tobias pushing Jake back into the conflict. You could argue that doesn’t really count. For one thing, they didn’t even have a name for themselves yet.)

So, there’s variations on how strongly they’re pulled back, and variations on what kind of place the attempt to leave is coming from, from “eh understandable” to “incredibly self-destructive”, but interestingly, none of them seem to be wanting to leave from a genuinely good and healthy place or one firmly grounded in their values. Erek leaves because the psychological pain of killing was too great. Marco wants out because his dad is fragile and he thinks (with good reason) his dad couldn’t handle him dying — and I think Marco’s dad’s recovery is essential to him not expressing an interest in opting out after that point. He doesn’t stop being the second-guesser, but he does always go through with things after that…although, come to think of it, I don’t remember Marco taking on the role of the one who complains that the plan is “insane” in any of the more recent books, so maybe he did stop being the second-guesser after all.

Elfangor leaves because his faith in his people is shattered by his interactions with Alloran, and his faith in his ability to do more harm than good is shattered by him (inadvertently) contributing to the rise of Visser 3, and what happened to Arbron probably didn’t help either. And while it’s completely understandable that he leaves the war, the narrative presents it as a mistake, and his return as heroic. And I think this is the general pattern in all of these instances: fighting is heroic, leaving is often completely understandable, but never actually the right decision. (I don’t have to agree with the narrative to accept that that’s what it’s saying.)

So, Cassie.

Was I still an Animorphs?

Yes.

It meant I would have to fight sometimes. But being an Animorphs might also let me find other small victories for peace. Amid all the conflict and fear and rage, I could still look for the enemies who might become a friend.

It wasn’t a perfect answer, but it was the best I could do.

That does support the idea that the big deal of book 19 for Cassie was not saving Karen from being Controlled, so much as it was saving Aftran from being a Controller. (Again, I’m not agreeing with this stance, I’m attempting to accurately understand what the book itself is trying to say.) This is also backed up by how we see much more of Aftran as a person in the narrative than Karen as a person.

I think it’s meant to be a story about how Cassie got overwhelmed by the immediate visceral amount of violence involved in fighting the war, left, and found something that allowed her to feel OK with coming back (in the book’s view, doing the right thing.)

But…there’s over 30 more books to go, and it’s possible that this book will look different in the context of the full story. We’ll see.

#animorphs book 19 #animorphs

[niemernuet]

😈😈 you have been visited by the brainworm demon, hope this message haunts you all day and gives you unforeseen amounts of psychic damage *muah* (<- this is both a kiss and an evil laugh, just in case it was unclear)

~~ okay but what about a justin who‘s still pissed about the world‘s selection process, now that gino dnf’d more than ever, but he‘s also too good of a friend to bring it up with gino, but the energy has to go somewhere, so he just so he just goes to daniel‘s room and acts like an ass until dani gives in and bitches back and they start wrestling a little too roughly and okay maybe dani gets hard when justin puts his hand on his throat… oops.

Silja, oh my god. Your message is like a nutella-crêpe in this shitty week, and I don't know how I can thank you 💘😘 I have also been thinkin about the weird tension that must now exist in the gs-team, and you are so right that Daniel should absolutely sacrifice himself for the greater good.

Careful, +18 under the cut. (I love you forever and always ❤️)

The door missed Daniel by a hair, and he pressed against the door to the claustrophobically small bathroom as Justin dashed past him into the room.

“Please, come in,” Daniel said, and rolled his eyes.

“I am going to KILL THEM ALL!” Justin bellowed, and whirled around. Murderous rage shone in his eyes, and his hands were balled to fists.

Daniel calmly closed the door, and walked back to his bed where his book lay abandoned. “It was bad luck,” he said, his eyes already scanning the next sentence, and laid back down on the soft mattress.

“It’s not!” Justin howled, and slammed his fists down on the rickety table under the television. “He’s been getting worse and worse in Super-G the longer the season goes, while I got better and better! Without that damn surgery, I’d have outperformed him long ago. I should have started! It was my right!”

Daniel sighed inwardly, and grabbed the bookmark from the nightstand. He knew from long lasting experience that there was nothing he could do but let Justin’s anger run its course, and had braced for the impact since Gino had missed that fateful gate after the sharp turn only a few minutes ago.

“And…what? Are you going to tell him that?”

“Of course not!” Justin yelled at him.

Daniel nodded. “Good.”

“I’m going to tell Krugi! That Austrian prick has it in for me, and I’m no longer going to…”

“No no no!” Daniel cut Justin off, and put the book on the nightstand so he could aim his undivided glare on Justin. “Absolutely not! You are not throwing away your future because Gino missed a gate.”

“It wasn’t just the one gate!” Justin snapped. “They don’t want me to succeed. They think I’m never going to be any good so they don’t even give me the chance to prove myself!”

He crossed his arms, and stared gloomily into the distance. Daniel watched him, half amused but completely fond of Justin’s stubbornness. There had been people, nobody Daniel cared about, who had asked him how he coped with Justin’s hair-trigger temper, that short fuse that could explode at the most unforeseen times. The truth was that Daniel loved it like everything else about Justin. He never held a grudge for long, and made peace as easily as he started a fight. Also, he was breathtakingly sexy in every situation but especially when he was burning with a fury that seemed to take over his whole body. Right now, that fire seemed to get dangerously low though, on the verge of being suffocated under heavy melancholy, and Daniel had to think of something to keep it burning.

“To be fair you most certainly didn’t inspire too much confidence in them after your first race.”

Justin’s eyes turned wide, and he stared at Daniel as if he had slapped him across the face. “In a discipline that I haven’t practised seriously in the last five years!” he answered, and with every word got louder until he was almost screaming. With two steps he was by Daniel’s bed, and propped his hands on the pillow of either side of his head. Daniel grinned, and it did not need more. Justin’s kiss was rough and heavy, teeth scraping over Daniel’s skin and his tongue darting wildly in Daniel’s mouth. Daniel moaned, and grinded against Justin as he clambered on the bed, and sank down on Daniel’s crotch. He pulled away from Justin, panting and laughing as Justin’s hands wandered through his hair and down his cheeks.

“First gate,” he whispered, and the growl Justin gave as an answer ran straight down to his dick while their mouths clashed together again.

“Fuck you!” Justin mumbled into Daniel’s mouth. “Let’s put you on downhill-skis.” His hand left Daniel’s cheek, searching for a way to get rid of Daniel’s shirt but only finding his throat.

And Daniel froze.

“Let’s send you down a Super-G track in front of the world,” Justin snarled, and pressed his lips on Daniel’s again before he realised that something had changed. He stared down at his boyfriend with an exasperated look, and moved his hips tentatively over Daniel’s crotch, eliciting a drawn-out moan from Daniel.

“Seriously?” Justin asked. “I’m trying to be angry here.”

Daniel panted, his whole body still tingling from the shock Justin’s rough touch had sparked. His hands wandered over the rumpled covers, along Justin’s body until he caught his hand, and guided it back to his throat, forcing Justin’s fingers to clamp down into the soft flesh.

“Don’t let me disturb you,” he croaked. Justin chuckled, and silenced Daniel’s new moan with his lips.

“Sssh!” he muttered, pressing their foreheads together. His hips kept moving over Daniel’s , pushing against his painfully hard cock over and over again, and his mouth caught every moan, every curse from Daniel’s lips as he begged for relief. “Quiet! What if people heard us?”

“Let them!” Daniel panted. “Justin…” His hips shot up, searching for relief from Justin. “Please…”

His vision blanked when Justin pushed down once more, the friction from Daniel’s pants scraping along his dick, and new jolts of electricity ran up and down his spine. He came in spurts, pinned down into the mattress by Justin until all tension had left him. The stale air of the small hotel room felt like an icy gust of wind when Justin’s hand left Daniel’s throat, and he tenderly nuzzled Daniel’s cheek while Daniel gathered his breath.

“You have no idea how hot you just looked,” Justin whispered in his ear.

Daniel raised his arms, and pulled him down into a hug. “Are you still angry?” he asked, and softly moved his hips a little bit. A soft hiss escaped him when his overstimulated dick touched against Justin’s erection.

“A little bit,” Justin confessed.

“That means we can’t stop yet,” Daniel said, and kissed him again.

#thank you thank you thank you ❤❤❤ #ask #answered #alpine skiing #justiel

[guiltycorp]

Just did a deep dive into your genshin posts to get a feel for your thoughts on things and I'm still unclear but xD I did just want to comment about one of your recent posts. I hate that traveler is so silent on things like finding out about Kaeya. Especially since they have added canon lore stuff that matters in the main story (not just side stuff) to events (like that Scara had the gnosis and was MIA). Finding out sword stuff about Kazuha's family was cool but missing it isn't the worst

(2) Having archon quests like 1.4 and then getting the chance to confront Zhongli and us getting nothing (especially after getting nothing after fixing Liyue...), proceeded by getting several encounters with Venti and not confronting him at all despite 1.4 mentioning him in the "next time we see Zhongli or Venti..." option is just so frustrating

I'm actually really glad that you read through so many of my posts, it feels nice that even the older ones are still of interest to someone 🥺 Honestly I know I can be over-critical at times, but Genshin still fascinates me as a piece of media. Like, it both goes much further when it comes to writing quality than a gacha game would be expected to go, but also it.. sucks. It has an amazing cast of interesting characters, but then it does so little with them that you're left questioning your choices in fiction. Like, I recognize a lot of the themes and tropes which are also prevalent in other games and anime, but I think Genshin really does have its unique and in-depth take on it. So it's a shame that it can't quite reach the level of actually being good.

But to be fair to the Traveler... 1) Overall writing of Genshin suffers from pacing issues due to its gameplay and content release plans, I get why writers sometimes have trouble reconciling certain things even if it IS frustrating. And yeah, events are in that nebulous space where they sort of maybe happened in-canon but also not necessarily, so the game kind of awkwardly ignores most of what we learn through them. 2) But in case of Kaeya!

The Traveler already seems to have suspected something since this is clearly an answer to a pointed question, and they don't ask this of anyone else, so it's likely that the Traveler recognizing Kaeya's nationality isn't meant to be something surprising. Plus Kaeya's answer clearly shows that he isn't interested in further discussion, so it kiiiiind of makes sense why the Traveler would drop the issue. Kaeya already threw the Traveler a bone when he updated them on the Abyss Prince(-ess), but this doesn't look like a man ready to discuss his homeland or how it was destroyed. By the way, note how this kind of thing never happens anymore! Characters don't actively seek out the Traveler to tell them stuff, which also feels really awkward. 3) The 'next time we see Zhongli or Venti' thing was inexcusable. Like why phrase it like that? Even worse, going to Inazuma was given the flimsiest excuse, when it would make more sense to at least go to either straight to Sumeru or Snezhnaya for more knowledge. Like, the game didn't give us any reasons why traveling there would be more difficult than the isolated Inazuma or why Inazuma would be the logical next step. 4) They could have at least mentioned in the events that Venti or Zhongli are super avoidant and difficult to find, only appearing when it suits them, but nope, if we want to find them we just Go and Do That. 5) Another side of this is that there are plenty of characters who should be suspecting the Traveler themselves of being inhuman and overall a very strange being, but so far only Albedo vocalized his suspicions. To say nothing of Paimon! The Archons most probably recognize what she is, and I bet once the reveals about her come they will be like 'oh yeah we knew all along'. Which would be, once again, kinda weird. 6) I think this is both a case of not having clear enough plans for the future plot and also the unfortunate 'no spoilers!!' disease. I honestly believe that the game would play much better if the characters' intelligence wasn't put down like that, and if more of them just said what they think. Not much would change really!

#tbh i skipped kazuha's event lol #im unfortunately very uninterested in everything inazuma related #and about your last messages - #yeah the whole discourse was funny to me at first but now im just irritated #ask #anonymous #genshin #text