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johnnys-breastmilk · 1 year

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jump in the line | wally clark x male!reader

a/n — i know i said this was coming ‘soon’ but it was longer than anticipated- reader is AMAB but i don’t believe pronouns are used to address them

words — 5.4k

summary — With summer break in motion, the school feels empty and painfully boring. Luckily, there is a jock in the gym with a good distraction from the boredom.

warnings — smut, 18+ as usual, fingering, top!Wally Clark, bottom!reader, anal sex, ghosts wrapping before tapping

~~~

Wally had two problems—the rain and his loneliness. The rain kept everyone indoors as they didn’t want to come back inside, soaked and inconvenienced by the limited appealing clothing around the school. So a day was made out of it to give everyone a new challenge: find something fun to do inside. The limit was the sky, if you counted that as being the fiberglass tiles on the ceiling. His loneliness came from what he decided to do: shoot hoops in the gymnasium. The other spirits bided their time with more sedentary activities like watching the summer production crew work to cobble together a half-decent school musical for the fall or revisit the library to read the one new book added to the ancient collection, but Wally just couldn’t keep himself still and isolated himself to shoot baskets.

Today was your first rainy day at Split River High in your new life as a ghost. Only a mere seventeen days in and you already felt perfectly capable of being a ghost for the rest of your death because of one fun sentiment—being bored at high school, something that came naturally in a place like this. Charlie claimed that it was better than feeling regretful or upset about it since those feelings only reinforced the fact that you were bound to your roots forever. There was no way to put the school in the past or leave home, no risks to take or life to fail at pursuing. He talked you through the whole spiel, and you had no choice but to listen or fight against the laws of the afterlife. One seemed impossible.

After sitting through everything he had gathered from his time as a ghost, you told him your story. You died in the agricultural room, checking up on the baby chicks during a free period between classes when the wire powering their heat lamp caught fire. The door became blocked by the flames and the windows in the room only opened so far enough to get the chicks out, but they were far too slim of an opening to fit yourself through. It worked well to air out the smoke, but the heat is what caused you to collapse. You never saw your body in the aftermath, only hearing talk of how gruesome it looked as a few cops assessed the scene.

With the Ag-Room shut down until further notice, you were left to wander the hallways without any direction. Though, one sound rang in your ear—the sound of a basketball and squeaking shoes. Now Wally had three problems when he heard the door to the gymnasium open.

As you entered, you looked around at a place you hadn’t seen since before you died. The bleachers stayed inanimate and lacked the community’s spirit for that final game of the season, not being used by anything alive to warrant them looking less depressingly empty. It looked like the same gym you had taken classes in for the past nearly four years, but the jock made it feel new and different. He was a hidden detail among the same people, chalkboards, and desks you spent your entire school life staring at. You approached him, watching the gymnasium become a chamber for his skill to bounce off of. Every time the basketball struck the floor he added just a little more to his established skill set.

“Hey,” you spoke. He caught the ball as it bounced off of the backboard and towards him. The echo in the spacious room sounded the same, but his voice was in your ear.

“Hey, I was practicing my free-throw, but I’ll make room for another person,” he offered. He turned to face you, “And you’re the Fire-Kid, right?”

“Guilty,” you admitted. “I didn’t know I had a nick-name already.”

“It’s unofficial, we can totally change it. There’s a few I thought about—hottie, maybe? Actually, never—never mind. That made more sense when I was thinking it over.” He took a deep breath and extended his hand that wasn’t holding the ball. “Wally.”

“I know,” you said, taking him up on the handshake and giving him your name. His combination of impossibly short athletic shorts, a tank top with the same material as a sweatshirt, and Nike’s paired with socks reaching far up along his shins was almost a dead giveaway that he was from another time, but the name didn’t help much either as you knew it from the stadium outside. Wally pulled his hand back and moved the ball around in his hands like it was an extension of himself—he knew exactly how to hold and manipulate it for his own desire.

“You like animals, huh? Well, I know a little game called ‘horse,’ unless you’re too chicken,” he smirked.

You two approached one of the nets hanging at one end of the gym, “It’s not like I’m doing anything, just remind me of the rules?”

“Okay, so basically, one person shoots from wherever they want, and the other person has to replicate it. If the first person misses the shot, then the second guy can shoot wherever they want. Then, it flips until one person wins.”

“How do you win?”

“Shit, right. If you miss a shot, whether you're the first or second person, you get a letter, usually it goes until it spells out ‘horse.’”

“Okay, I think I get it,” you affirmed.

“Don’t worry, you’ll be fine. I’ll teach you as we go.”

It all made sense, given that your last gym class was only months ago at the end of the semester and you had played it then. There was one, and only one, thing that burned in your mind: “What about the loser? Is a letter the only penalty?”

“Let’s make it a little fun,” Wally proposed. You nodded. “Okay, so, every letter earned means the other dude gets to ask a question. It’ll help me come up with a better nick-name, so, the more embarrassing stories you share, the better. I’ll go first.”

“That’s unfair, I’m new to this and pretty much everything else.”

“You’re just mad that I won’t miss,” Wally dribbled the ball as he went some ways away from the net, a distance that you knew you couldn’t match.

“Wally,” you hissed. He kept backing away from the net. “Wally, that’s too far!”

“Nah, I’m just kidding.” He ran up closer to the net and made a shot. As expected by his almost professional and clean form, it sank past the net and smacked against the floor. He retrieved it and passed the ball to you, “Your turn.”

Taking the ball from him, you stood in the same spot he was at—at about the two-point line, judging by the markings on the floor—and hit the ball a few times against the floor to refresh yourself with its feel. The bumps on the ball felt the same as when you had a basketball unit and had acquainted your fingertips with the same rough edge for a whole week. Wasting no more time, you took a leap of faith into the air. Expectedly, the ball hit the rim of the net and bounced off toward Wally. That’s just how your luck had been recently, so you weren’t phased by almost making it in. He caught the ball as it ricocheted toward him.

He clapped at your failure, “And that’s H. Four more to go and I win.”

“Five more to go, and I win.”

“Okay, I like your optimism. But question-time! What did you do… after school?“ It sounded weird for him to talk about it in the past, since only seventeen days ago you would have been talking about future plans.

“The usual: sleep, a lot, and bury myself in homework,” you said as if you would be able to do either again. Could ghosts even sleep? Or was it all feigned for a twinge of normalcy? You would have to ask Wally if you managed to score anything against him.

He still had the ball in his hands, tossing it to you. “Cool, cool. What subject was your favorite?”

“Hey, one question only,” you reminded him.

“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours? Sorry, I meant—you know. Since I doubt we can go to the ag-room, and because I didn’t mean—yeah.” He looked nervous at his slip-up. It felt like he was overcompensating to hide something else, something with a little more weight than simply a poor choice of words.

“It’s fine,” you assured. Passing the ball to each hand as the conversation went on, your mind wandered until it came up with the most obvious choice. “Let me guess, gym?”

“Nah, history. But I liked all of them,” Wally crossed his arms now that the ball was no longer in his possession.

“Really? You weren’t laser-focused on football?”

He patted your shoulder, “Save that for when you make it in.”

As it would turn out, you did not make a single attempted shot for the next two turns and had to suffer through two more of Wally’s questions. The first time you missed, he asked: “What’s your favorite food?”

“That’s tough. I think I’m gonna say all of the above. Anything that isn’t cafeteria food sounds great right about now. What about you? Got any I-could-live-off-this-forever go-to?”

“Hotdogs, for sure.”

“Why?” This was the first time he didn’t protest a follow-up question and gave you a completely serious answer.

“Uh, well, me and my parents used to go up to my uncle’s apartment near the Camp Randall Stadium. The building was so tall that you didn’t even need seats to watch the game, so we would all sit up on the roof and look down into the stadium whenever the Badgers were playing. They usually had a grill set up so we didn’t have to walk down so many stairs, and that’s where it started.”

“What? Your love for football?”

Wally’s tone leveled out. He wasn’t telling a story anymore, he was recalling a memory, “No, it wasn’t about the field or the game, it was about the people around me. I didn’t really like watching the game, but it was something for us to do as a family. Plus the hotdogs were pretty great.”

After that, Wally seemed to be distracted by something but still managed to make another shot. You, however, couldn’t say the same. It pitifully bounced off the backboard and towards the stacked bleachers.

He snarkily asked while heading to retrieve the ball, “What do you think your chances are of winning?”

This time, you were the one to cross your arms, “That’s what you’re going to waste your question on?”

“I still have two more,” he stated. On his way towards you, he ran a hand through his hair, “We could always play pig, if you’re ready to see the hog.”

“Go for it, unleash the beast,” you encouraged and then, feigned, “I’m so scared.”

“You would’ve lost that one already, so maybe it’s good that we didn’t.”

After accruing three letters in a row without ending Wally’s streak, you finally made a shot from his determined distance. He gained a letter to his name, and you got a ticket to pick at his brain.

“Yeah, finally!” He cheered, coming up behind you and lightly smacking your ass. He sounded sincere, “Good job.”

“I got a good one!”

“Shoot.”

“What do you miss most from your house? If you had to pick anything for them to bring here so that you could use it, what would it be?”

“My homemade fleshlight and maybe my porno mags,” he vacillated. “I got all the quality material right here, though.”

“I’m serious!” You reacted before you could even process his comment. Even if he really thought of you like that, it would have had to be a joke.

“Fine, uh. My medals for all of this stupid shit.” He waved his one arm around to the various sports banners with the graduating classes' athletes front and center, along with several other banners and pennants hanging around that showcased the victories of the Devils and Bandits. Besides his name on the stadium, Wally’s name had been embroidered in a deep blue pennant hanging on the wall he stood facing away from. “It would make it feel like it was worth it a little more, you know?”

You sighed and looked at him with a certain understanding that some of the other students didn’t get. He could see it, and you could see him listening intently as you spoke as if he truly cared, “I do. I have a few F-F-A related things at home that I wish I could see now. My medals, my jacket for being in the after-school club, pictures of me and my friends, all of it. I wish it was here.”

“You can always borrow mine. Think of it as the honorary symbol for being stuck here with me and all of the others.” At that moment, an image popped into Wally’s mind that he could have captured in crystal-clear quality with a Polaroid. If only he had brought that to school on his last day. It was of you, with his jacket on and nothing else, grinding up against his leg—maybe rocking back and forth on the toe of his Nike’s or better yet, on his thigh. He would take that picture without hesitation and make it your first official memory at Split River. Now, his fourth problem had arrived in his blue shorts.

“Thanks.” You saw his eyes flick up from the ground to you. The effect of his gratitude lasted mere seconds as the ball came your way and vie sensations of winning reminded you as to who the jock was: your competitor. By some stroke of luck—or maybe a twinge of skill had finally come over you—you were able to make the ball into the basket twice and upstage the jock for a few moments. You got to ask your questions, but he was too busy congratulating you.

“Holy shit,” he marveled. “I know they said you went out hot, but damn! I didn’t think you had that fire in you!”

“Good to know I’m more than detritus.” You tried not to brag or even smile at the fact, just accept that you had him beat with a tied competition.

“Sorry, bad joke?”

“No, I just realized that we both have two letters left.”

“It won’t be that way for long.” Plopping himself onto the floor, he sat with the ball in his lap and his legs crossed to keep it from rolling away. “Quiz me!”

Mirroring him, you sat in the same style with your knees almost touching, “Okay, ever date anyone in high school—uh, here?”

“Nope, but it did allow me and my right hand to get to know each other pretty well. We even introduced lotion later on into the relationship.”

You let out a quick laugh, “Classy, Wally.”

“There was one chick, actually.” He didn’t look away when he said it, locking his soft brown eyes on yours.

You looked back at him, engaged, “Who?”

“That’s your fourth question.”

“Why didn’t you say it when I asked?”

He started to trace patterns over his thighs, breaking the contact your eyes held while he talked about the mysterious girl, “We never really dated or even touched each-other—it was right before the game that we even kissed.”

“Oh.” Oh, it was all you could say.

“I tried to move on from her, and it kind of worked. It took a while, but you’re here.” Wally looked back up again, lifting his whole head to do so.

You stood, “I think it’s my turn.”

“Right, sorry. Too T-M-I?” He tossed the ball up to you. You shook your head and walked over to take your shot.

Standing a decent distance away from the net, you tried to make it attainable for you to make a shot, and a little difficult for the athlete to replicate it. Since your skill was unmatched by his, it didn’t seem like there was a good place that would be hard for him to make it in.

Wally followed and pressed himself into you from behind, and went so far as to make himself level with your ear, “Don’t miss.”

He backed away from you to offer a fighting chance against him, and you took your final shot of the game. The ball veered off to the right with your throw, and he ran to intercept the shot before it hit the ground. He sweeps it up from the floor and jumps in the air to pass it under his leg and make a shot around the basket. It swished effortlessly into the net, and Wally let the victory get to his head.

“And in the match point. . . Clark makes the score!” He jumped around the court with sanguine behavior, everything else—mostly, his necklace—following with him up and down. The ball bounced off to some corner of the room since he didn’t bother to fetch it. “That tie had me worried.”

You approached him once he started to calm down, “Question?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you gonna give it to me?”

“I can, if you want,” he smirked.

“I do.”

“Uh, well.” He placed his hands on his hips, raising one almost immediately after to toy with and twist his necklace, “What’s something you’ve never tried before?”

“I never tried you.” What does he taste like? What does he smell like? “Or sex as a ghost.” What does he feel like? “Or any kind of sex in general.”

“Me neither.” Those two short words filled the small space between your lips. There was still a longing inside of Wally that competition couldn’t beat, as even now, he felt almost no difference towards it. He pulled you in for a kiss, and suddenly, it was gone. He had the confidence—the will—to lead you up to the heightened set of wooden bleachers. Wally guided you by hand, the texture still being rough and imperfect from his blazing glory night, and insisted that you close your eyes.

“I’ve been up here a million times, there’s no need for the show,” you protested.

He sat you down on a random line of benches and continued his antics, ignoring your complaints since he didn’t have anything smart to say back. The wooden planks creating the jagged pattern to form the bleachers were hard and unforgiving with little leeway for a task as delicately chaotic as fucking. Wally somehow made the imperfections surrounding your work, by keeping you spread across one bench while laying on your back. His necklace dangled so close to you that it almost turned to sandalwood oil from the heat. He smelled similarly of the same scent, rich in a tangled aromatic scent of sweat and sweet sandalwood.

All of the new things he got to try were a silver lining along the dark clouds outside. His hands roamed unclaimed places on your body, cupping things that deserved to be fondled and handling things with extra care that didn’t excite your body as much as you expected. Chills from his work never came, and you remained the same cold soul as before. The same could be said for his lip prints, marking your own pair, then moving to the side of your cheek and down your jaw with a softness only seen in the blurry images of a fantasy. Wally kissed like he was kissing for someone else, and not for himself, giving more than he took. He didn’t take skin between his teeth for a hickey but left it impacted with a feeling soaring straight up from his heart. It’s not like a hickey would have lasted long as a ghost, anyways.

“You’re cold,” he said as he leaned down to kiss your neck again.

Wally finished kissing your body seconds later and sat up at the foot-end of where you laid. You tried to spread your legs, letting one dangle off to the next row and bringing the other one closer to give him room between you, but he kept himself situated. He fished for something in the pocket of his insanely small athletic shorts, finding it hard to search through bunched-up fabric that exposed most of his thighs.

You waited for instructions, and as if he could immediately tell, Wally spoke. “Just. . . lay back and finger yourself.”

“Is mind-reading part of the ghost-experience?” You teased.

“Just do it.”

“Okay,” you listen, pulling down the bottoms you died in and the underwear that went with it. Wally tried not to steal a glance as he occupied himself, but couldn’t help it. His jaw goes slack for a moment as he sees you—natural and perfect. He assumed that he would have to put himself on the same playing field, and suspended his search for a little bit to stand up. He shimmied down the deep blue and vibrant white of the school colors to just reveal a combination of pasty skin and dark hair surrounding his cock. He reached down to continue his search. Finally, he pulled a condom from his pocket. “I’m going to try putting this on, if it fits.”

“Where did you even get those?” You hadn’t started preparing yourself for the dead jock, letting his interesting train of thought make you invested in his issues.

“Nurse’s office.” He holds out the packaging for you to look over—it’s a neon purple with different shapes in yellow, reminiscent of the eighties and perfect for the man before you. The size on the wrapper read that it was a bland XL on the cover in white. ”Can you believe they didn’t start handing these out until the nineties?”

Wally stuck the corner between his teeth and pulled, causing the wrapper to tear in two and the condom landed in his hand. He pinched the stuck-out tip of the latex in the center of the disk and pinched the rubber ring. The head of his cock passed the loop successfully but failed to actually get it down his length. In an attempt to make it slide down his cock, he tugged on the rubber band around the opening.

“That’s not how you—here.” You sat upright and your hands fly down to help him. Taking him into your hand, you hold him near the base and wrap your thumb and index finger around a part of his head over the condom’s band. Keeping your fingers around his girth, you slid them down, jerked them back up, and repeated the motion until a thin layer of latex covered most of his dick, reaching just shy of his base. “You keep rolling it down like that until it gets to the bottom. It should be tight with a little bit of give so you can slip it off after.”

Wally wraps his hand around the new layer of latex and marvels at the feeling. “Thanks for the sex-ed lesson, coach.”

“Didn’t they ever teach you that?” You asked, reflecting back on how even now, the school never really prioritized giving kids safe sex lessons. Most of the lessons were about getting any diseases, and what to do when you know you have it. It was all focused on the if’s and never the when’s.

“Nah, it was basically ‘don’t have sex or die.’ Glad I got to do the second one first and the first one now,” he smiled.

His explanation left you puzzled. Safe sex was such a priority during life but became meaningless after death. “Why even bother wearing a condom?”

“I don’t know. Why do we still eat?” He leaned in closer to you, hesitant to loudly state the actions taking place, “Why are we about to. . .”

Normalcy, that must have been what he was trying to get at. “Fair point.”

“I guess I should return the favor?” His hand finds your shoulder at a higher level than preferred and pushed it back until you are entirely laid into the unforgiving benches. They don’t quite capture your width, your shoulders peeking over the edges with legs spread out and dangling over either side, but Wally doesn’t let it stop him from motioning closer to you. Thigh cupped, he lifts a single leg to access your hole easier.

The width of his hand not holding your thigh is felt running along your crack, something that had him hooked as he searched for an opening. His longest finger found it in seconds, and quickly, he lowered the hand wrapped around your thigh to claw at your cheek, tearing it to the side for a deeper presence. Wally sunk a three-pointer’s worth of his finger into your hole, his middle finger up to his knuckle as the rest of his hand held him back. His finger beckoned a moan by raking it up and towards your prostate, then by pulling it in and out and twisting his whole arm to feel the game-night roughened texture of his finger carry on a longing from the night he died. Wally followed the string of motions a few more times until your reactions faded.

“Does that feel good?” He asked, looking for a satisfied answer.

“First time trying it, should. . .” You exhale, “. . . should it feel like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like, just do it again.”

Wally pushed his lengthy digit back in, raising it to the sensitive area, and pressing the pad of his finger to it. He kept it there for a few moments before pulling his hand away, taking his finger with it, and motioning back in less than a second later. His thumb brushes over the valley between your cheeks periodically, and you can’t help but shudder at his touch.

“Are you. . . ready?” The pause his question took made him come off as unsure, and the look he gave you—a quick glance from your eyes back to your ass, where he continued his maneuvers—reinforced it. He thought that he may have done too much, or not done enough, or even found himself on a mediocre middle ground, painfully stuck between the end zones of backing out and finishing the job. To his surprise, he managed to run the one-hundred and twenty yards, because you said yes.

Almost immediately, two hands wrapped around your ankles, and raised your legs with them, exposing your ass without the need for his help. Eventually, they found themselves dangling over his shoulders instead of either side of the bench, and he occupied the space that they restricted him from.

He positioned himself at your entrance, the protective latex coating around his tip greeted you with the feeling of a smooth, somewhat slick surface. Further up, he caught a glimpse of your hesitant demeanor. You couldn’t lie to yourself, or try to hide and play pretend. In the years when he could age, he was given some stunning accolades in categories other than sports. On the surface, a winning smile and eyes that cast a special spotlight on anyone lucky enough to find themselves under him, and down below, a horse cock. Tamed for the moment, but waiting for the paddock to open.

“Just try, uh, try to take it all.” He winced at his own words and let a sarcastic “sorry” slip from his lips.

A sudden pain rapidly stemmed from his entry—one from the depths of your subconscious knowing that the feeling is new and likely dangerously addictive, and the other coming from the actual source as his size stretches you out much more than a finger’s width. His skin is rough on yours when he settled in, but there was one thing that surprised you as he bottoms out with little left to give. With his hips pressed against yours, you took a sharp breath in.

“You good?” He asked, drawing his touch back. Wally fights to place a hand on you, keeping them hovered over your figure for a sense of distanced reassurance.

“You’re cold,” you spat out.

“I’m used to hearing the opposite.”

“And you’re big.” It came out sounding like a single word.

Wally looked relieved, using the opportunity to get into the rhythm of making jokes, “Yeah, I’m used to hearing that.”

You try to laugh through some of the pain. “No you’re not.”

“I’m not,” he admitted with a stupid smile on his face. His voice was hoarse once his hands started to creep over you.

His hands held on to your figure, those words of his distracting you from the pain of his first movement. Just as his charm had worked its way back into the atmosphere surrounding you, his desire to fuck had also found its way in. And that’s exactly what he did. His stance stayed relatively the same—Nike blazers stuck in place and used them to pivot forward, thrusting himself more into you than he already was. His hips melded to supple ass-fat. As he slipped into a tempo with swaying hips, he heard the smacking that came from the quick collision of your ass and him. It sounded like the percussion beat supporting the ensemble of moans falling from his mouth.

Wally’s motions caused you to rock back and forth along the bench, shifting on the smooth plank. His routine shortens to quick plap, plap, plaps against you, unlike the longer blows he had given you moments prior. His breathing stepped up into larger huffs and draws of breath that pierced the air.

There was one thing you noticed about Wally while the room was only filled with those noises. He acts like he’s almost at a loss for words—unusually quiet when the notions of sex finally kick in, feelings and all. Wally’s communication during it centered around noises and acts over his verbal personality. He grunts and barely speaks, crying words and praises with abandon midway through. He took a hand from your love handles to run it through his hair, and then it fell on your leg. His hand was warm—almost slick—from the heat building around the both of you.

Your gaze floated from his hand falling on the leg going over his shoulder to his face; he looked like he was breaking a sweat. He noticed you looking at him directly, and his soft eyes looked animalistic as he doubled over you. He brought your legs closer to your chest, curling you in on yourself. He got so close that you could feel his breath ruminating against your skin.

“Am I—” he breathes, “—still cold?”

His breath isn’t and his skin almost looked like it was glowing, like he could be alive. You shake your head in response, the bundles and knots of pleasure in your stomach making it hard for a few words to come out.

With his new leverage, he fucked you harder, pressing as deep as he could go. His face contorted and stretched without the worry of wrinkles when he became overcome with pleasure.

Wally came, pressing himself into you one final time as his release sprayed all over the inside of his condom. Drops of release splatter over your torso in brief, irregular spurts. They seem to disappear seconds later, leaving no trace of anything that had happened. When Wally pulled himself out of you, you could feel the friction and intimacy quickly vanish. His dick still looked hard, but there was no aftermath. No trace of anything that had happened. His condom wasn’t filled or stretched out at the tip with a pool of come; it was as if he never fucked you. But you still retained the memory and the experience.

Even your own fatigue from being on the receiving end of his pounding lasted mere minutes. Still, you leaned your head back and turned to peer around the gym, taking a breather. The balls hanging around in nooks and corners of the room returned to the carts that they had never left, and everything was back in its original place on the unaltered, metaphysical level. The other spirits could never know, and they would never know, thanks to the universe's ways.

Wally took note of you looking around the gym, “You know, I think that next time, we should be a lot messier. Wouldn’t be our problem to clean, would it?”

#school spirits #wally clark x you #wally clark #wally clark x reader #wally clark x male reader #milo manheim #milo manheim x male reader #can milo manheim get some recognition puh lease #school spirits x reader #school spirits x male reader #gay #fanfic #x male reader #x reader

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pastafossa · 9 months

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Happy Birthday and a merry 6 years to TRT! 🎂 🎁 🎈 🎉 🍰

🕯 🕯 🕯 🕯 🕯 🕯

Some FUN TRIVIA FACTS:

TRT's sun sign is VIRGO and its moon sign is LEO!

After 6 years, its current wordcount is 932k words. If you put that in size 12 arial font, single-spaced, this would come to about 2000 pages, and even more if the pages were the usual mass market paperback size!

TRT is now 40 in cat years!

The Man in the White Coat is my tribute to the Mad Scientist trope common in scifi, which is one of my favorite genres!

It is old enough developmentally to tie its shoes! Keep going, TRT!

Ciro is partially inspired by John Marcone from The Dresden Files!

TRT shares a birthday with literary great Agatha Christie! Maybe I'll introduce poison-based murder into the fic in her honor...

The idea of seeing threads came to me after seeing a meme about red threads tying soul mates together. Everything that came after - the other threads, the thread world, how it works, is unique to TRT!

TRT is now longer than War and Peace, and Crime and Punishment combined! So if you've read all of TRT so far, then you have the perfect middle finger to anyone who tries to say you can't focus on longer stories!

The inciting penguin documentary that Foggy drunkenly watched (which led to him declaring Matt and Jane 'penguins') was about Adelie penguins specifically!

Jane has a leather jacket because I love leather jackets and think all badass characters should have a leather jacket! And so you should you! EVERYONE DESERVES A COOL LEATHER JACKET.

The long hiatus between Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 was because I had life things pop up. During that hiatus, I realized the plotline/ending needed some work, so I spent those two years outlining, and I also wound up doing a bunch of additional novel writing classes just because I wanted to learn. A lot of this wound up influencing TRT!

The grey threads are one of the only threads that no one has solved yet!

There are absolutely some bad people working for Cyrus James. There is also a guy named Kyle. He is there not for Evil Purposes (tm) but instead because this was the only place he could work that would allow him to pay off his student loans.

When I started TRT, I thought maybe 5 people total would read it. I was told five people total would read it by some shitty people. So I wrote it expecting five total people would read it, and told myself at least I'd enjoy it, and I could use it to learn. In other words: I had ZERO idea TRT would take off like this. None. Nada. Zip. AND LOOK AT US NOW, BABY. FUCK THE HATERS, 6 YEARS AND GOIN' STRONG.

Based on my outline, we're a bit over halfway to the end!

I hope you enjoyed these TRT funfacts. And I hope you know: this fic isn't just me. It's you, too. This fic has become so much larger than just me. It's the TRT playlist you've sent songs in for that keeps me inspired when writing. It's the fanart I look at to give me a boost. It's your sweet comments and likes and kudos and messages that encourage me when I'm sick or depressed. It's the people who've made friends over this fic, or who've been inspired to write fic themselves, adding beautiful works to the community that we all use to keep going. It's all of this love for both TRT and Matt, and I'm so happy that I've been able to contribute in at least a small way in keeping Charlie!Daredevil love alive even after the show's been gone for years now. I love you all so, so goddamn much. I love this fandom. I love TRT with all my heart. Thank you so much for being a part of these past six years through cancelations, through your high school and college years and beyond, through my ups and downs of moving and sickness and fiberglass and pandemic craziness, through late night chapter drops and wild twists and turns.

And I hope the next few years as we enter the second half of this story are just as amazing!

#the red thread

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adobe-outdesign · 2 months

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Has wormadam been reviewed yet?

(Mothim has already been done here.)

Burmy is a pretty fun concept. The line is based off bagworm caterpillars, which, as the name implies, build little cases around themselves using whatever materials they can find as a form of camouflage. Burmy's different cases don't affect anything at this stage, just changing depending on battle environment, but they come more into play with Wormadam later on.

Visually, I like the look of the different cases, but I find the body structure to be a bit weird, with a long structure coming off the top of the head and a vaguely beak-like mouth. It's one of those things where the body shapes start to become a bit too abstract for my taste.

autism creature

As for the cases, I find myself liking the sandy cloak form the best. The plant cloak is fine but lacks a clear structure, and the trash cloak looks nice but doesn't really read as trash (plus the fact that it's insulation raises questions, like how you're able to get this form in PLA).

Wormadam is female-only, which is accurate to actual bagworms; the females remain wingless after pupating and stay in their cases, while the males become winged moths.

I do like Wormadam's design a lot more than Burmy's. The head structure looks less odd, the long pointed beak works a lot better especially with how it pokes out over the top of the casing, and they don't have the weird "legs" that the plant and trash Burmys had. Between the three, the trash is nicest visually but still kind of struggles conceptually, while the plant is strongest overall.

Wormadam also expands on the line conceptually; the cloak is now a permanent part of their bodies, and influences what typing they become—grass for plant cloak, ground for sandy cloak, and steel for trash cloak. I feel like the steel typing's a little out of place for fiberglass installation, but then again I'm not sure what type would make sense other than normal or something.

This mechanic is my only real problem with Wormadam—the idea is that the cloak becomes part of their bodies, but it still looks like it's just inside of a cloak. I wish that this could've been reflected in the designs more, like making the cloak cover the entire body so only the eyes poke out or something. Not a huge deal, just something that might've helped it out conceptually.

Anyway, overall, some great concepts here with decent designs. I'd honestly like to see more forms in the future; now that the games are more open-world, it would be neat to get a snow cloak form after battling in a wintery environment or something.

#burmy #wormadam #pokemon #pokemon reviews

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diabolus1exmachina · 1 year

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BMW M1 Turbo (the extraordinary case of the BMW M1 with 1000 hp)

Ignore the livery. Or don’t ignore it. Like with every other Jägermeister racing car, it might be hard to actually walk past this orange beast without giving the standout paint job at least one glance. It was designed to attract attention, just how Günter Mast — the man that gave his OK to race cars with the famous stag on the bonnet — intended. The truth of the matter is, however, that this particular car’s convoluted history is as complicated as the story of the BMW M1 itself. Therefore this car is not what it seems to be, as the orange Jägermeister livery stems from the imagination of the man that rebuilt the car, the legendary M1 whisperer Fritz Wagner. And if you ask anyone at Jägermeister headquarters about the car, they will potentially reply with a polite letter from their legal department. To paraphrase Samuel Beckett: there’s nothing funnier than tragedy. And so, the story of the BMW M1 could be perceived as one of the automotive world’s funniest. The car was originally designed with the ambition to create the greatest, mid-engined racing car of all time. One that would beat Porsche’s dominating 935 in the all-important Group 5. A masterpiece made of speed and German reliability which, in reality, became a car that had to be reverse engineered to be sold for the road. All because of changes in racing rules and homologation, which stipulated how many cars had to be produced before a particular model was allowed to hit the track. The production number of 400 cars — which seems so minuscule by today’s standards — turned out to be the first problem on a long list of unfolding disasters.

In essence, the life of this beautiful, light, well-made machine that had been designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro, who reworked Paul Bracq’s original prototype, was plagued by bad luck and bad decisions. The fact that Lamborghini — who were supposed to produce it at their factory — went bust because of copyright fraud and embezzlement of funds didn’t help. However, it was the rushed solution to disperse production all over Europe that was the final nail in the coffin. Marchese built the car's tube frame, TIR molded the fiberglass, Italdesign mated the two and installed the interior, then the M1 was shipped from Italy to Stuttgart, where Baur would install the BMW hardware, after which in Munich BMW Motorsports would do the final touches and quality control. It made the M1 almost a quarter more expensive than any equivalent Ferrari or Lambo sold at the time. Case closed.

British generals in the second world war would often joke that Germans were not very good when it came to Plan B. This might be true. In the end, even if BMW’s head of Motorsport Jochen Neerpasch, the brilliant man that he is, thought of a way to market the M1 with the Procar series, in which F1 drivers like Niki Lauda, Clay Regazzoni, and Nelson Piquet would race the cars against privateers, as a prelude to the weekend's Formula 1 race, too few examples were made for the car to ever officially leave Group 4 as was originally intended. Later on, those teams who managed to finally race in Group 5, years after BMW abandoned the programme in order to enter to F1, found the M1 simply uncompetitive. Even the twin-turbocharged models built by Schnitzer, which developed 800 hp and more from their straight six engines, were plagued by problems. his finally brings us to this particular, rather unusual example. It was allegedly built for the famous Walter Brun racing team, who later on won the Group C World Championship with a Jägermeister-liveried Porsche 956. Brun’s friendship with Paul Rosche, the man who turbocharged the BMW 2002, gave rise to the idea of installing the M88 turbo engine originally planned for the March Group-5 car into a modified M1 Procar chassis wrapped into Group 5 bodywork. However, the car was never raced. Why? Even at BMW no one knows. Particularly good news considering that back in the day, when this 1090 kg machine was put on a dyno, it put out 1000 hp and 930 NM of Torque. A reading obtained just before the machine broke while the car apparently still wanted to keep going. Now in the hands of a new owner who intends to race it regularly, it will have plenty of opportunity to shine. And so a new chapter unfolds…

#BMW M1 Turbo #Jägermeister #porsche #Ferrari #lamborghini #Group 4 #Niki Lauda #Clay Regazzoni #Nelson Piquet #Group 5 #Walter Brun #Porsche 956 #BMW 2002

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hungrydogs-if · 8 months

Note

Fakeout makeout? Fakeout makeout.

(pretty please, dear author? 🥺)

oh boy you're getting some text now, nonny. you've opened the floodgates for one of my favorite tropes.

also these are a bit ambiguous and abrupt but i hope you enjoy! also all in the same setting.

dane

a wall catches your back just as a rough hand settles on the nape of your neck, cold rings a stark contrast to the sudden heat of his lips on yours. the beard scratches your chin as he holds still, the broad expanse of his torso shielding you from those prying eyes that settle on your darkened forms in the dimly-lit alley. you hear a distant voice mistake you for just a couple of drunken lovebirds, and you feel the chuckle that rumbles in his chest through where your hand is pressed against it. the footsteps recede until there is no other sound than your intermingled breathing, and the hammering of your heart beneath your chest. the fingers release your neck and trail over to tug at the lapels of your jacket, gripping it just for a moment longer before he pulls away with a laugh and a smile, his words a husky rumble in the darkness; "close call, huh?"

mona

she is swift when the footsteps approach, pulling you into an alcove with strength you know only she possesses. in the darkness you hear her ask, "do you trust me?" but she knows the answer. nimble fingers snake around your throat, sharp nails gently scratching into sensitive skin right below your ear and warm, plush lips press against yours as you stumble back against the wall. her thumbs soothe the edge of your jaw, and the taste of black cherries lingers on your lips as the darkness swallows you. the beam of a flashlight passes overhead, and in that brief moment you freeze, the hand that now rests on her hips tightening in response. she pulls away, whispers a reassuring hush, amber eyes glinting in that brief luminous glow. as the footsteps grow distant, she offers you a final caress across your cheekbones, and you know you're safe once again.

sam (no kiss, hugs instead)

their fingers are cold wrapped around your wrist. labored breaths escape both of you, and the feeling of hopelessness creeps closer with every footsteps you hear approaching further behind. a sudden diversion of your path makes you stumble, leg catching a stray debris and you feel gravity meeting you. the pain never comes, a soft body trapped beneath yours as you lie on top of them, heat radiating off overexerted bodies hiding in the shadows. when the footsteps grow louder, they panic, wide eyes darting from you to the alley, and suddenly your body is pulled towards them in an impressive feat of strength. they hug you tight, and you, too, let your head rest against their shoulder as you return the embrace. you stay there for what feels like hours until the night is once again quiet, and you've never enjoyed the silence of the city quite as much as you do then, held tight in those arms.

thirteen

stray lights reflect off a visor when they tilt their head, eerily quiet, like death itself. a miniscule raise of their chin is all the warning you get before gloved fingers curl around your forearm, and the world shifts on its axis. a wall welcomes you with a harsh pain, and you bite your tongue not to make a sound. in a rush, your vision goes dark. the smell of leather invades your senses, the sensation of a warm palm over your eyes a sudden shift. the hollering continues, echoing down the narrow alley, but the impact of what you know is fiberglass on asphalt steals your attention. a questions forms on your lips, your own fingers reaching for the hand planted over your eyes only to be pushed aside, pinned to the cold wall by your head. the questions are swiftly silenced by something rough - lips not at all soft, but scarred, with a deep gouge across, leaving the sensation bizarre, asymmetrical. before you can collect you thoughts, the cold fiberglass of a Helmer grazes the bridge of your nose, and the warm leather disappears from your eyes, leaving you blinking at your own reflection in that infernal, abyssal visor. the phantom sensation still lingers on your lips, and they lift a finger to their face in a shushing motion, only then releasing the hand still pinned to the wall.

angel

"what did you do, what did you do" the words are spoken in a panic, two strong hands on your shoulders in attempt to shake the answer out of you. hazel eyes burn into yours, wild and frantic. searching for an answer you can't articulate. a frustrated growl comes from them as they pace, hands running through their hair. your brain doesn't catch up with your movements before you've shedded the telltale jacket off your shoulders, quickly discarded on the ground, swallowed by the shadows falling around you. your hands are on their body before you realize, and the grunt of impact is swallowed by your lips when they tumble against the harsh wall. you feel angry fingers curling into the collar of your shirt, freezing there as voices call out from beyond the darkness. their lips are soft, cold in the frigid evening air, and you feel the snarl in how they mold against yours, if only for a moment before the sounds of angry pursuers vanish and you're roughly shoved back. meeting those furious eyes is a sight, and in the low light you see no hazel, only blown pupils glaring daggers at you.

#asks.#dane.#mona.#angel.#sam.#thirteen.#i've been working on this for a long time #aorry for the massive delay #and different writing styles #there was a long break between the first three and the rest lol #enjoy though!#hopefully #not beta read

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ausetkmt · 4 months

Text

Meet the ‘sisterhood’ making noise — and history — for Mardi Gras

At the edge of the square, members of the St. Mary’s Academy Cougar Marching Band stood stone-faced as they awaited the parade in tight formation. The band’s drum majors, Gilbrelle Stokes, 18, and Charland Thibodeaux, 17, stood at the ready, blue whistles in their mouths, as they prepared to direct the school’s 150-member marching unit, complete with a band, color guard, majorettes, flag team, dancers and cheerleaders.

Thibodeaux, a senior who has been marching with St. Mary’s since the third grade, was unfazed by the pressures of commanding such a large group.

“I always feel ready,” she said. “I been doing it so long.”

Marching band culture in New Orleans is ubiquitous, with groups performing at parades, weddings and funerals alike. Most locals can name their favorite high school bands, which are a highlight of Carnival season for all. School marching bands also serve as a training ground for the pipeline of talented professional musicians who steadily emerge from this birthplace of jazz.

“Band is a culture here unlike any other place,” said Pamela Rogers, 66, St. Mary’s president and acting principal. Sharp. Witty. Thoughtful. Sign up for the Style Memo newsletter.

“Bands define schools,” she continued. “And everyone knows we’re the girls with the skirts.”

St. Mary’s Academy’s skirt-wearing band first formed in 1937, making it the oldest Black girls band marching in the city. Today, it is one of just a handful of all-girl bands to regularly appear in Mardi Gras parades.

The school opened its doors in the French Quarter in 1867 and is still run by the Sisters of the Holy Family, a Black Catholic order founded by Henriette DeLille in 1842. DeLille, a multiracial nun (and current candidate for sainthood), believed in providing education for girls of color even when doing so was illegal. St. Mary’s was the first secondary school for Black girls in New Orleans.

This year, the St. Mary’s band will don new skirts for the first time since 2005, when its blue and gold uniforms had to be replaced after Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters destroyed the school. The new skirts are a touch shorter than those they are replacing — a move staff hoped might increase student interest in the band. They’re still quite long though, even by Catholic school standards.

This Mardi Gras season also marks the first time Raynice Crayton, 27, will be at the band’s helm. A St. Mary’s alumna who joined the band as a seventh-grader, Crayton has already more than doubled band membership during her short tenure as director.

The group’s 52 players have varying levels of experience, from novices to passionate musicians, and they range in grades from fourth to 12th. In New Orleans East, where the school’s campus has been located since the 1960s, Crayton spends hours teaching girls the 10 tunes they will perform this Carnival, ranging from traditional music to a Janet Jackson song to the group’s favorite this year: “Talking in Your Sleep” by the Romantics.

“A lot of people don’t understand this, but band is a sport,” Crayton said.

The group’s schedule is packed tight, with the band performing in eight parades this Carnival season over the course of just two weeks, in addition to their regular school obligations and band practices. Parades last hours and typically happen rain or shine. The girls must traverse tightly packed 3.5-mile routes, all while carrying heavy instruments, entertaining rowdy crowds and dodging beads, puddles and occasionally horse manure.

The Cougars carry fiberglass sousaphones, which are lighter than the traditional brass, and use smaller-size bass drums. Gayland Thibodeaux, 53, a nurse, St. Mary’s alumna and mother to the band’s drum major, provides medical support to students along the parade route. She carries the requisite wraps, bandages and medications, plus some extra “girl stuff” in case of emergency.

High school bands have been a part of Mardi Gras festivities since the 1930s, though predominantly Black bands like St. Mary’s were not welcomed into some well-known parades until the 1960s. This weekend, the girls marched in Endymion, one of Mardi Gras’ largest and most well-attended parades, a decades-long tradition.

Ra-Saiya Lovick, a 13-year-old seventh-grader who is new to St. Mary’s, said this will be her first time marching in Carnival parades, a lifelong dream. Lovick, a cymbal player, is thrilled to share the experience with her all-girls band.

“It’s so cool, because you don’t see no boys around. It’s no boys drama,” she said. “It’s like a sisterhood.”

n a city famous for its music, few local institutions have nurtured young Black female musicians quite like St. Mary’s.

The Original Pinettes Brass Band, founded in 1991, originated at the school and today plays regularly across New Orleans and beyond. Still, the band’s tagline – “the only female brass band in the universe” — is indicative of just how far there is to go.

Two years ago, Troy Sawyer, 44, an award-winning trumpet player and music educator who grew up marching with the all-boys St. Augustine band, founded Girls Play Trumpets Too in response to the gap he saw between how girls and boys fared in the New Orleans music scene.

“For a long time, I felt like girls and women could not play the trumpet on the professional level, because I didn’t see any doing it,” he said.

Sawyer’s organization aims to teach girls about overlooked female musicians in history while also fostering their musical skills.

In New Orleans, such skills can be more than a hobby: Crayton, the St. Mary’s band director, received a full-ride college scholarship for her tuba playing.

“When I joined the band, it was always, ‘Boys play tuba, boys play drums,’” she said. “So those were the first instruments that I went to, because you already counted me out.”

Back on the parade route, Rae’Lynn Walker, a 13-year-old eighth-grader, was excited to play her weathered sousaphone for the thousands of onlookers awaiting the bands. The instrument – now held together with a bit of tape – is the same sousaphone Crayton played when she was a student.

“We’re making history,” Walker said with a smile. “And the crowds notice.”

On St. Charles Avenue, Marie Bookman, 60, shouted, “Girl power!” as the Cougars marched by her. Bookman, a former magistrate court commissioner, said she loves seeing an all-girl band.

“It gives them the opportunity to reach higher goals,” she said. “They can compete with the men, and not just cheer for them.”

Crayton hopes the band will continue to serve that purpose for many decades to come.

“We are not here to see the parade,” she reminded her girls before Sunday’s long march. “We are here to be the parade.”

#Meet the ‘sisterhood’ making noise — and history — for Mardi Gras #https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/meet-the-sisterhood-making-noise-and-history-for-mardi-gras/ar-BB1ib5Kx #Black Musicians Matter #Black History Matters #Black Women Matter #New Orleans #louisiana #Mardi Gras

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scarlettgauthor · 1 year

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[to the tune of Tom Cardy's Big Breakfast]

I don't regret ordering the BIG BATH TUB I know I'll feel so good when I'm... INSIDE THE BIG BATH TUB

OKAY SO if you've read anything I've ever written you might be aware that I have a deep and abiding love of a Big Bathtub. Tragically, this was something I did not have access to in my personal life, as the house we bought had a baby tub for babies who don't like baths. Seriously, this thing was 15" tall on the outside and maybe had 12" of soaking depth if you were lucky. I still took baths, but I complained about it the whole time.

No more.

Now I have Big Bathtub!!!! Look at it! LOOK AT IT!!! I can get my boobs AND my knees underwater at the same time! I'm gonna be making cauldrons of lady soup in there! My 6'1" wife is gonna be able to take baths and be comfortable!

If you can't find me, look for me in the Big Bathtub.

(Don't look for me.)

"Scarlett!" I hear you (a rhetorical device) saying, "I love that for you, but I am also jealous! How do I get a Big Bathtub of my very own?"

Well, my friend, if there's one thing I love more than Big Bathtub, it is oversharing about home improvement projects.

SPECIFIC MONEY TALK TO FOLLOW

Given how absolutely fucking impossible it is to find any guidance online about how much this shit costs when you're just starting the research, I'll start here: This cost us $11,466.16 and took two days to install. We live in a very high COL area, and from what other research I did and estimates we got, $10-12k was about what we could expect to pay for a new bathtub and shower surround that wasn't The Same Fiberglass Shit We Already Had, AND we would have had to bring in multiple contractors.

Some necessary background: My wife and I bought our house about eleven years ago, when house prices in Seattle were at a historic low. My mom gifted us money for the down payment, which was a huge privilege, but if she gifted us the same amount of money now it would buy us precisely jack and shit. We have the stability we have due to a rare combination of privilege and luck, and I am grateful for it literally every day.

The incredibly low price we bought this house at also allowed us to manage to stay afloat through our last seven-ish years of chronic under-employment. I won't get deeply into the details, but we spent a lot of time in a place where buying myself a package of nice butter was a luxury I had to plan for. A little over a year ago my wife got a really good job (after a year of unemployment) and this summer I got a much-overdue promotion at my day job and a significant raise! Between those two things, we've finally been in a place where we can save money for house projects instead of going into debt for them, which still seems like a fucking miracle! It hasn't gotten old yet! I don't know if it ever will!

Flush on that success, earlier this this fall I got quotes for an addition on the house (something we've wanted almost since we moved in, since it's 800 square feet and has just the one tiny bathroom) and learned it would cost AT LEAST 150% MORE than we paid for this house in the first place!!! Like we could buy a whole-ass house in a cheaper area for the cost of adding on to this one! HAHAHAHA NO!! 😭😬

After a couple days of crushing disappointment I decided this meant we could pursue smaller improvements to make the house we have into a house we love, and first on the list was Big Bathtub!

Being generally handy people (ask about the shed my wife built sometime) we looked at buying a nice tub at a showroom and having a plumber install it, but plumbers don't install shower surrounds. Okay, so we figured we could probably install a shower surround? And my dad (a retired general contractor) could help? But this isn't a kitchen counter, this is a bathroom, and in this house we don't fuck with stuff that need waterproofing. We decided we wanted someone who could handle the whole thing, so I requested quotes from remodel contractors but they all told me my project was too small!

Enter Bath Planet. They're a one-stop shop that does custom full bath surround installs with a ton of options. The sales guy who did the estimate had color and material samples with him and dug through all the options to get me the deepest bathtub possible. This sucker's 22" tall! The cost included wrapping the entire window so the sill would be waterproof! If there was damage to the subfloor, they'd repair it before installing the tub at no additional cost! The warranty is really good!

(Oh man I've become such an adult.)

Not gonna lie, the quoted price was 😬😬😬 when he was done, but we couldn't argue with the quality or convenience and we were looking at a cost of close to $7k if we bought a big tub, had a plumber installed it, and then DIYed the surround (with no guarantees about how long that would make our only bathroom unusable!) so we bit the bullet and put down a deposit.

In related news, my wife and I are giving each other very few presents this Christmas, since the tub was our main gift 😂 Our savings are... Very depleted right now, so we're gonna have to hunker down for a few months to rebuild before we can think about any other house projects or expensive fun stuff, but what we lack in money, we make up for in bathtub!

As far as the timeline went, we got the initial quote on 9/20, put down our deposit that day, and then the install happened over 12/6 and 12/7. The installer was great, the work happened exactly as it was supposed to, and now we have BIG BATHTUB.

This was a wall of text, I know! If anyone has questions I didn't answer here, though, I'm happy to answer them. It's so rough trying to find home reno information out on the wide internet, and contractor websites are worse than useless for the purpose.

Meanwhile, I will be in the Big Bathtub.

#home improvement #CW: money #BIG BATHTUB #personal

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ghostbird-7 · 3 days

Text

Pt 1.

Every grey haired man he walks past lift their heads and they’re Jim and they’re bleeding and this time he killed him for real, and Jim may have been a bastard and a traitor but he’d taken Ethan in when he was shards of fiberglass and bulletproof vests which don’t goddamn work and he’d had this way of holding his face in his hands and from his wrists to his fingertips he could cover his whole head and he felt young and small and fragile and new. Claire, on the other hand, is never at the bus stops or the supermarket, but she shows up in his dreams just the way she did in the mornings after Prague, soft and big eyed and mussed, and made him feel settled and together, and looking back all he can feel is nauseous because the two of them were constantly mistaken for twins on missions and when he was deployed his trainer had winked at him and clapped him on the shoulder and said “he likes them young” and he hadn’t understood what he had meant. Had never felt more like a changeling than in those first weeks at the IMF, when it had felt like everyone was speaking in codes he hadn’t been briefed on, and he always felt like that anyway so his general comprehension had gone from 70% to 30%, Jack would’ve said 26% and laughed

Before his first honeypot Ethan couldn’t stop his hands from shaking so Jim had put one of his right at the point between his neck and his shoulder and squeezed twice. He’d said something too, but from the time that he did that to when his target kissed him he heart nothing but static. When he got back Jim had said he was good, and if he was just a little less of an agent his whole body would’ve swayed towards him. He didn’t see Claire and her sad eyes watching him from the doorway, wouldn’t think about what Jim had said to her to get her on board with it all until later. He thought it was probably ‘good’ too. They always were too damn alike. When he gets back from Langley Luther says he did good, focusing on a computer that even he can tell he isn’t doing anything on. Ethan freezes, and breathes, and counts the tiles, and when he’s done deliberating on there being 46 or 47 Luther’s looking back at his computer, but he knows that he looked because he never says it again. Agent Dunn is the next to, he won’t stop saying it as he’s careening through the side streets of Shanghai. Left, good. Forwards, forwards, really good, you’re going to take your next right. He doesn’t mind, settles into a place he hasn’t been since before Prague. He’s not a person anymore, he didn’t grow up and he won’t grow old. He isn’t even Ethan Hunt. He’s just running, and he’s good. Later he’ll reason that he was concerned about Julia (which is true), that it wasn’t face to face (which is true), and if it happened again which it wouldn’t because Benji is a technician not a field agent, he’d have the same reaction as he did with Luther. (Completely, impressively incorrect) He’s just gotten inside the highest building in the world from the outside, and he’s pretty sure he has a concussion, and Benji with frantic eyes and frantic hands pulls him towards him by the back of his neck and says “good” and Ethan. Hm. Ethan is fine. Ethan is better than fine, actually. Ethan’s having a great day. He can hear Luther laughing in his ear from across the world, and hopes he understands it’s nothing personal.

#this started out as a 5+1 and evolved from there #lost motivation and am now posting it to convince myself to finish it because I do like it #anyway this is part 1 of what I’ve got #mission impossible #Ethan hunt #Benji Dunn

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actionableinfidel · 3 months

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I hold these truths to be self-evident

I guess I am officially back on Tumblr now. I am totally not sure how the 2018 nsfw purge did shit, because I am still seeing full-on porn all over this place (of course, everything *I* try to post gets flagged still)

I see an awful lot of disingenuous shit on here, still, too. So, in a concerted effort to be transparent, here's some things I think about when posting:

1. FUCK. YOU. I don't necessarily mean that to be offensive, but if you're already triggered and writing your Congressman before even reading the rest of this sentence, then there ya go. The internet is a big damn place, with a lot of big damn personalities, and exactly NONE of that affects you. Grow the fuck up, scroll past it if you don't like it. I honestly don't care, I don't post to Tumblr for your edification. If we click, that's awesome, but if you want to go bitchmode on me about what I post, better put your big girl panties on because I will swing back. I will be amicable and discuss anything, but if you choose to jump the fence and run at me, don't expect anything less than to get dropped like a sack of potatoes in front of everybody. Just move on.

2. I like trucks. I like quads. I wear boots and jeans. I live in a small town. I grew up working a farm and find girls who aren't scared to get dirty hot as hell. I would rather drive out in the middle of nowhere, drink beer and bourbon in the sun and fuck on the tailgate than go vacation in some lavish hotel. And if that's your definition of a redneck, well then that's your take on life. It might surprise you to find out that I have two degrees, was a BioMed engineer before moving back here to sell doors and windows because my parents got sick, that I have to keep building bookshelves in my house because I keep filling them, and that I can just as easily rebuild your Harley as I can talk about how DeToqueville is becoming reality or how we know that FliK proteins determine the length of bacterial flagellum but we don't really know how just yet. Just because someone prefers the simple life doesn't mean they're simple.

3. I love my country. I am a combat veteran. I own guns. I believe in the system as it was created, and believe we need to get back to it. Now that we have that out of the way, I seriously hate Joe Biden. Jump to any immediate conclusions there? Well, guess what - I seriously hate Donald Trump too, considerably more, in fact. I hate that no one worth a shart wants to pursue the job anymore, because sweet baby Jesus on a saltine are things fucked around here. No one actually wants to accomplish anything, it's just one big cock-measuring smear campaign after another. I'm right, you're wrong. There ya go, folks - that's American politics today, no substance or integrity to any belief other than glass cannon egos and it's a far fucking cry from how we should be. We are broken af right now.

4. Speaking of guns, I love them. I love beautiful women. I am amused like a motherfucker at the trend of sexy, barely clothed women holding firearms, because it's stupid. I love nice tits in a deep-cut, skin tight top as much as the next y-chromosome totting testosterone geyser, but guess what you dipshit poser fucktard? Guns are different out here in reality than they are on Xbox. The first time an ejected casing goes down that shirt and burns those perfect tiddies? IRL game over. It's a stupid trend. Don't get me wrong, I'm still going to look, but I'll laugh every time. Get dressed, be safe, and actually learn how to use it, then I'll get turned on by a hot girl with a gun.

5. And, last but not least, my trucks. My dream car isn't made of fiberglass, the doors don't lift, there's no neon, and I don't have to strain my back to get into it. I want an old steel Chevy squarebody like most want a Lambo. It's just what I have always wanted - I'm a pickup guy. What cracks me up is all the hate between brands on the internet. Here's what you really need to know about domestic pickup trucks: Since about 2014-2015, no one makes a decent truck. Buy American because it's American if you want, but don't go swinging your little peepee around because of it. They all suck anymore. Call me a commie all you want because I drive a Nissan after years and years of American trucks, but they're just plain shit now. Sorry, I want to spend my money on Buffalo Trace and Ariats, not poorly manufactured truck parts designed to fail and over-inflated labor rates.

TL/DR: Don't be a dick, I don't care about your politics, I love it when you take off your clothes unless you're shooting, and I'm not impressed by your talking shit about trucks. Let's just have some fun.

#tumblr #new blog #tldr #country life #country living #welcome to my blog

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eyepool · 3 months

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HOW FIRST CONTACT WITH WHALE CIVILIZATION COULD UNFOLD

In 2020, Gruber founded Project CETI with some of the world’s leading artificial-intelligence researchers, and they have so far raised $33 million for a high-tech effort to learn the whales’ language. Gruber said that they hope to record billions of the animals’ clicking sounds with floating hydrophones, and then to decipher the sounds’ meaning using neural networks. I was immediately intrigued. For years, I had been toiling away on a book about the search for cosmic civilizations with whom we might communicate. This one was right here on Earth.

Sperm whales are the planet’s largest-brained animals, and their nested social structures are immense. About 10 whales swim together full-time as a unit. They will sometimes meet up with others in groups of hundreds. All of the whales in these larger groups belong to clans that can contain as many as 10,000 animals, or perhaps more. (The upper limit is uncertain, because industrial whaling reduced the animals’ numbers.) Sperm whales meet just a fraction of their fellow clan members during their lifetime, but with those they do meet, they use a clan-specific dialect of click sequences called codas.

I recently visited the paleontologist Nick Pyenson in his office at the end of a long corridor of fossils at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. As we hefted a sperm whale’s skull out of a fiberglass crate, he told me that the clans likely date back to the Ice Age and that a few could be hundreds of thousands of years old. Their codas could be orders of magnitude more ancient than Sanskrit. We don’t know how much meaning they convey, but we do know that they’ll be very difficult to decode. Project CETI’s scientists will need to observe the whales for years and achieve fundamental breakthroughs in AI. But if they’re successful, humans could be able to initiate a conversation with whales.

—Ross Andersen, in The Atlantic

#whales #language #ai

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advanced-shrimp · 2 years

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Top 7 Horrors of the Flesh

//cw: flesh. thalassophobia, entomophobia, existing in a physical way, trypophobia//

7. The flesh, that is very far away from you in space.

Deep in space there is a warmth. If you held your hand against it, you would feel it radiate, you would feel skin and hair and perspiration – everything so human – radiating into nothingness, moving and squelching from nothing to nothing. The flesh is unending. A planet of flesh, a moon of flesh. It seems to have no mouth, no eyes, no openings, no endings. It is perfect and round and it’s pores flare under your fingers, and you can push the veins in when you find them. Perfection can exist on different scales. Perfection exists in the beauty of radiance in the cold of space, the satisfaction of meat in the emptiness of the galaxy.

You could be killed by it, but it would not be a murder of passion. It does not understand you – and you do not understand it and neither of you have a desire to dig deeper. So you do not.

You do not reach to find it, and it will never reach to find you.

6. The thing, that is deep in the ocean.

In the ocean it waits. Long arms, millions of sharp teeth, an even sharper mind. It hungers for flesh, and more than flesh: violence. It rushes from the depth to ships above – humans invading its home. It crushes them in lethal hugs, it digs its thousand mouths into the wood, tearing holes – holes that, when found by scavengers, will be rationalized into nothingness. If one managed to survive and take a piece of the thing, they would not be believed. We are too eager to shout down the doubters, those who have seen something the rest of us do not want to know. We will never find out what it is, but we will be satisfied with not knowing.

Your existence is fickle next to its endless hunger and for once your flesh may be the answer to its question. It waits in the depths, it can wait forever and maybe you can hide forever from it.

5. The hounds, that wait outside of your home.

Out in the dark there glow little lights. They come in pairs, the pairs all in respectable distance from each-other. They watch. Their eyes are wide – their mouths fill with drool. It drips past their teeth – designed to tear through your flesh. Shaped to leave an impact on this world. You could have an impact on them the way they have one on you – become their whole world for but a moment – your last moment. How fleeting, how beautiful.

They are vast. They are uncountable. They move as one but act as many. The hounds are coming. The hounds are coming. The hounds are here.

Their teeth gnash in hunger, it is only your selfishness, that keeps them miserable. What else is there to say?

4. The wasps, that eat through your walls.

You hardly notice it at first. You are busy, you don't tend to sit in silence – and now that you do you hear it, you wish you could sit in silence again. Instead what you hear is crunching, slow and particular. You have to imagine their mandibles, ever so slightly hairy. Biting and crushing the material of your walls. You hear the buzzing of their wings, the drumming of it against what you thought was impenetrable brick and insulation. The density of most woods, of drywall is lesser than that of the average human cell. But don't worry – they can eat even through fiberglass, which can pride itself with a higher density than your average cell.

It tortures you, the thought of their legs, their pulsating bodies. The mandibles. The gnashing. The crunching. The horrible noises, you hear them even when you're not home. You cannot help it – your body remembers the sound, the feeling of goosebumps and raised hair on your skin.

They are so personal, so close to you and yet you can't see them. Not yet.

3. The ticks, that have dug into your skin.

It starts with a walk through high grass. It starts with an unexpected encounter. You feel the movement under your clothes and you brush it off as nothing much. Sure, you searched quickly with your hand and found no irritant. Therefore, it was a play of the mind. You cannot help but feel paranoid anyway.

When you arrive home and inspect further, you find them. And when you do, you find them en mass. They do not move, not anymore. They've found their permanent homes. Buried into your skin. You did not feel when they dug into your skin with their horrid little mouth-parts – but now you cannot help but notice it every time you move, every time your clothes rustle against them, every time you brush any part of yourself against any objects. They consume your blood and your mind. And they didn't even need to cover your skin entirely – just a bit.

Pay no mind to the blood however, you'd require ~9090 ticks in order to drink you dry – that would cover not even 0.1% of your skin. Pay mind perhaps instead to the 20 or so diseases ticks can potentially carry.

2. The eggs, waiting under your skin.

There's always flies around. The pests are irremovable from our lives. We can hardly imagine it without them. They cross us all the time – and this time it changed you.

It carved it's way into you with its feather-light touch. Its eggs are incubating under your skin. The way it bulges and blushes around the irritated area. It itches, but you try to not run your nails over it. You know it runs the risk of infection every time you scratch and you suffer through the agony of not scratching – it burns and screams in your mind, the simple solution glowing before you. With all your restraint, it gets infected anyway. It bleeds milky puss. It leaks a sticky yellow. Almost opaque, but not quite.

Is it the maggots within? Or your nails? Your body in protest?

All you know is that it is irritated, it is protesting and so are you. You are at war with the parasite eating away at you.

It bulges more, tiny little pockets of life under your skin – until they burst and the tiny irritants worm free.

They leave behind a myriad of holes, glowing and bleeding. You are stuck with it.

1. Your body.

You live within the final horror. You have no other choice. Your consciousness is endless and it is trapped in a finite body. You have an expiration date. You exist physically and you have no way to tap out that doesn't end you.

You are forced to witness and stick with every horror that is committed to your body. Your mind may try to protect you but it can only try.

There is always something, some creaky joint, some leaking somewhere, an irritation, a feeling. Some unexplained – most unnecessary. Your body gets sick without your consent, it aches without your consent, bleeds without your consent.

You are helpless.

Your demise could come without warning, it could be inflicted upon you, or it could come at random.

But it is going to come.

And we stopped fighting it.

We committed the greatest sin of all: Apathy.

What else is there to do, after all?

#writing #my writing #horror #flesh #thalassophobia #entomophobia #trypophobia

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nickgerlich · 8 months

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Shoot And Leave

In the rush to return to some semblance of normalcy in the post-COVID era, we have resumed traveling. And I mean traveling with reckless abandon. Forget about high gas prices and air fares, we’re just doing it anyway.

The big trend this summer was a European vacation—not the movie, but your own vacation. Personally, I drove 14,000 miles on three long trips, and went to Costa Rica. Pent-up demand was certainly driving all of us.

But a new problem has emerged in this digital era: overtourism. Essentially, the problem is this: People are flocking to tourist hotspots, taking and posting selfies, leaving without spending any money (or very little), and then, thanks to social media, inspiring others to visit also. It’s a cycle that some cities are now trying to combat by imposing tourism taxes.

And it is not much unlike the congestion tax we see in places like London, whereby drivers pay £15 per day to drive into the congestion zone. Some cities are charging $5-$10 per day for the privilege of day tripping. I doubt they will deter people though, especially once you factor in the cost of getting there in the first place. What’s another $10?

Overtourism is also happening locally. The Cadillac Ranch opened in 1974 as an art installation that the Ant Farm creative team developed and then sold in concept to Stanley Marsh 3. A few years ago, I interviewed the two surviving members for a feature that appeared in ROUTE Magazine. They never intended for the cars to be spray painted; that just happened organically. Located along I-40 a couple of miles west of Amarillo, it is reported to have more than two million visitors each year. It was even moved in 1997 from its original location a few feet west of the new Sam’s Club, to allow room for the city to grow.

So popular is the place that TxDOT had to install concrete jersey barriers to separate the Frontage Road from the freeway (to keep people from just driving through the grassy median to get there). I always scratched my head over why Marsh (who died in 2014) never monetized the place. That all changed two years ago when his family trust (to whom he had bequeathed the ranch in 2013) put a merch trailer onsite. The trailer sells t-shirts, caps, and the usual trinkets, as well as spray paint.

Duh. That was an easy one, because, as rumor has it, until then, the Home Depot at Soncy and I-40 was reputed to have the highest spray paint sales of any store in the chain.

Alas, people have taken to painting anything and everything, including the dirt, the road, the fence, and even the jersey barriers. On weekends, there is a traffic snarl along that stretch, with dozens and dozens of cars parked helter skelter. Tourists do their thing, take selfies, and post them.Then the cycle continues.

Good on the Marsh family trust to finally figure out how to separate people from a little bit of their money, but not all places are as lucky. When selfies in unique places become a prize unto themselves, a trophy for having been so cool as to seek out those places, there is always the risk that visitors will shoot and leave.

Wouldn’t it be nice if even just 10% of those Cadillac Ranch visitors stopped long enough for fuel or a meal? Better yet, how about lodging? I bet most people just keep going, though.

I am particularly guilty of this. Heck, my Facebook profile pic is of me standing by—wait for it—that familiar row of painted Cadillacs. And I have done this in many other places. It was no different from when we went to Carhenge in western Nebraska a few years ago. Snap snap snap…and off we went.

My passion is photographing roadside America, specializing in vintage neon signage, but also including the 1960s-era fiberglass Muffler Men and other oddities. Often I will shoot a selfie after I have finished doing my usual photo documentation. I seldom stay long enough anywhere to spend money, though. Some of the most common questions I am asked are “Did you eat there?” and “Did you spend the night there?”

If I did that, I would never be able to photograph as many things as I do.

As for cities and states that are tourism magnets, it is often a love-hate relationship. You hope people linger long enough to spend lots of money, but at the same time, you begin to loathe the traffic problems tourism can create. Just try to drive through Orlando Florida any time of the year. Or, to pick on a city closer to home, Albuquerque during Balloon Fiesta.

Then there is the case of China, the second biggest economy in the world. When I took my Chinese-born daughters there in 2019, we shot and posted tons of photos. While the notorious “Chinese Firewall” keeps residents from accessing western media, all it took was a VPN pointed at Hong Kong for us to dodge that bullet. And I suspect that the Chinese are good with this, because we basically became their pro bono advertising agency.

Ah, but China just lives with congestion. Bring it, baby, and bring lots of US dollars.

If anything, we can thank smartphones, social media, and always-on internet for putting a lot of this into hyper-drive. I don’t see things getting any better, short of another pandemic (please, no). Just don’t hog the space. Take your selfie and get out of the way. We’ve all got influencing to do.

Dr “Among The Worst Offenders” Gerlich

Audio Blog

#marketing #overtourism #tourism #travel #selfies

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pastafossa · 2 years

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Hey!! Now I’m straight up terrified every time I read the word fibreglass - do you have a post explaining how all of this happened and how we can avoid it?

Typed out the answer, and if you'd also like to see the posts as they occurred in real time, I've gathered them all up:

Major Fiberglass Nightmare Posts Sections

Answering the question now and it’s long so imma put the wall in

Honestly I can't say I don't relate because I'm kinda traumatized by the fiberglass now and therefore experience a certain amount of visceral chills every time I hear someone say the word. Ironically, it started really innocuously with this post here which was just a brief, casual, entirely unsuspecting update that I threw out for anyone interested, and from there it just began to spiral. That's why there's no real easy way to jump from part one to two and three, because for a little while there was no realization that anything was wrong. Essentially ya'll got to watch me breathe it in, get sick, and then discover in real time that my entire room had been coated in fiberglass dust. It's almost surreal looking back at those early posts now, tbh. How This Happened: The house I moved into is almost 100 years old so my attic bedroom had no insulation (unlike the rest of the house), since a lot of that space up there was DIY'd, but there was no reason to think this phase of reno would be any different than the other phases. Hell, I hired the (well rated) insulation company for spray-in insulation, and had no plans for fiberglass, which is why I left a lot of my stuff up there uncovered. I was told that was fine, and this would be easy - they'd come in for one day, punch a few small holes in the walls to spray the insulation in, then patch the holes up. I didn't need to cover or move anything, and I'd be able to sleep up there that night. And in fairness, they did that right. Those areas are fine. But there was a section of the walls that had weird joists and that section couldn't use the spray-in. That's where they decided to use fiberglass, and that's where they fucked up. And they fucked up in so many ways, all of which essentially piled up on top of each other to make this into a real nightmare.

These are the things the shitty company did that I'd warn people about if they're looking to avoid a similar situation:

They left the floor vents uncovered/unsealed, which blew the fiberglass dust around my room. They also left my portable AC unit blowing, AND my fan, which worked with the vents to essentially blast the dust up into the air and blow it all over and across every surface.

They were, I believe now, in a rush to get things done in one day. Before I could even ask if I needed to take things out of my room (or at least cover them), they'd already taken the fiberglass up. Taking things out like my bed or my furniture, my plushes, my clothes on their hanging racks, would have taken up time. So instead, they left it all uncovered and exposed to the dust. This is a huge one - so much of this could have been prevented if they'd taken my things out (or even let me take them out!) so that all that would have needed to be cleaned was the floor and walls. I also wouldn't have lost any of my belongings.

They lied about ease of cleanup. Despite the fact that they put on tyvek suits and respirators and gloves to install the fiberglass, they told me that there'd be 'just a little dust' for me to cleanup as it settled over the next few days, and that all I had to do was sweep and dust. As I found out later, this isn't just bad advice - this is actively dangerous advice. Anyone cleaning up fiberglass should not, under any circumstances, try to dry sweep and dust - this just throws the dust up into the air. The INSTALLERS are meant to clean everything up with heavy-duty vacuums with HEPA filters, as well as clean up using a wet-mop. Whatever you're using to clean has to be either wet or a powerful, HEPA vacuum, because anything else will throw it in the air.

Oh hey, so you're also advised to wear a respirator (please remember they also told me I could sleep up there THAT NIGHT - which essentially left me to breathe in fiberglass unprotected), gloves, and goggles to deal with the fiberglass. None of which I was told. I was just told, repeatedly, even after calling the company to tell them about all the fiberglass dust, 'it's just a little dust, you just need to sweep and dust a little. It's safe.' Rot in hell you lying fuckers

According to my friends who have experience in contracting - you are not meant to be the one to clean fiberglass up. It never, ever should have been left to me. Fiberglass is a hazardous substance, it is fucking vicious, and it requires knowledge and training to clean up safely, which the company should have done for me. You can try to clean it up on your own, and some people have to because they either don't have a company nearby that can do hazardous cleanup or because they can't afford it, but it's a nightmare that takes ages (*gestures at how long it took me even with help*). I'm not sure I'd ever have been able to get that room cleaned up on my own.

In short, if you're looking to avoid this happening: at this point if you're ever looking to have insulation put in, do whatever you can to avoid fiberglass. There are easier, safer alternatives. If you do wind up needing to have fiberglass insulation put in:

Make sure the company or person you use has experience with fiberglass. The ones who knew what they were doing have been baffled at just how badly the insulation installers fucked up my room. Do not be afraid to ask them questions - ask them what their safety precautions are, ask them how they'll keep it contained, ask them about cleanup. Hell, tell them you have sensitive lungs if you think it'll help them take it seriously.

Get your shit out of the room, first off. EVERYTHING. Just in case there's a fuckup. Do not assume they'll do everything right. This will also ensure it's as easy as possible to mop and wipe down the walls from end to end.

Make sure the air vents are closed (and a good insulation company will make sure those vents are closed). You want the dust to be able to settle. Don't allow a fan or ac unit to run up there, either, obviously.

Invest in a decent flashlight (you'll need to hunt for the dust and strands of fiberglass) and a good HEPA air filter to pull that shit out of the air if it's there.

I don't care if they say they vacuumed and cleaned. Examine it, hunt for fiberglass, and then run through cleanup even if you find nothing. Mop from end to end, wipe down the walls and all surfaces with something wet (in all my research, vinegar helps break down fiberglass, so invest in some for cleaning and mopping). Do this for days. Wear a mask, good gloves, long sleeves and long pants to protect your skin if you even THINK there's some dust left. Shower the second you leave that space - and shower cold to start. You need to close your pores to stop the fiberglass strands going any deeper, and only after a few minutes should you let the water warm up some to wash away any remaining strands.

Document document document. I'm not just talking pictures. I'm talking video, too, of any issues you find. Record any phone calls if it's legal in your area, and if it isn't then write down EXACTLY how the conversation went with dates and names and times. Get shit in writing, save emails so you have a paper trail ("I'm just emailing to confirm the details of the conversation we had about -insert issue-"). Cover your bases because if you wind up with a company like mine, they'll happily fuck you over and you'll be left holding the bag like I was.

In short... fuck fiberglass. And I hope the above helps if you ever need anything done with fiberglass. It is absolutely not something to fuck around with, and I am still having to throw things away RIP nightstand i finally gave up on and threw out yesterday. Sadly a lot of it could have been prevented if they'd had even a modicum of care, and yet here we are. Hopefully I can use it to help other people avoid the same nightmare happen, though.

Major Fiberglass Nightmare Posts, Part:

#ask response #the ongoing fiberglass nightmare #i'm reaching the end but it's been such a goddamn disaster #hopefully all of this *waves* helps #i'm so fucking sick of fiberglass and I'll never let that shit into my house again for what it's worth #RIP nightstand i had to throw out the other day because i just could not get the dust out of the crevice #like is fiberglass USEFUL yes #it does its job as intended #but it is such a nasty insidious vicious substance #it may not cause cancer or shit but it's painful and miserable and it gets everywhere and it's a nightmare to clean #imo better to avoid if at all possible and if NOT possible to avoid then take every gd precaution you can

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