#there was serious potential to go this route and it was hard to make Dean NOT open up in this scene

[urne-buriall]

so you've told me now you like sotw alternate realities. well here's the river scene were Dean opens up to Cas about John's abuse way ahead of schedule, mere days after the 4th of july:

“There are things I want to tell you,” said Cas, “and questions I want to ask. But I’m never sure if I can.”

“What do you mean?” asked Dean.

“Sometimes I want to tell you about my family because I think you understand,” said Cas. “Other times… I’m just not sure.”

“You could tell me if you wanted,” said Dean. He wished Cas would say. He wanted so badly for Cas to trust him. “It wouldn’t change anything. You’d still be my friend, no matter what you said.”

Cas slowly nodded his head. “Right,” he said. He turned again. Started walking. “I don’t want to burden you. And like I said, talking isn’t my strength.”

There had been a test and Dean failed it. He was sure of it. He just didn’t know what he’d done wrong. Had he come on too strong? Had he seemed insincere?

Maybe he was supposed to offer something first. Maybe he needed to be the one to break open that levee, the one that would never close again. To find out if they shared anything, perhaps it was on Dean to say, my dad beats the shit out of me and has since I can remember.

“Cas, wait,” said Dean. He caught up with Cas, then continued walking. He didn’t quite look over his shoulder as he said, “I’ll tell you.”

At the river. He needed to be still, not in this in-between space on the path.

And as he walked, feeling Cas trail slowly after him, studying Dean, he wondered what he was about to do. How would he say it? Could he really confess this? Could he trust Cas with it?

He went to a rise above the river, where grass and clover turned into a straight-edged bank a few feet above the water. He took off his boots and set them aside, bare feet coming to rest in the cool green clover.

Cas came beside him and cautiously did the same. Dean wrapped his arms around his knees, unable to look at Cas next to him. Nearly shoulder-to-shoulder.

They’d sat like this the day of the rainstorm, talking idly before the downpour. That night, Cas stayed over and wore Dean’s clothes. Had stripped to nearly nothing on the covered porch, skin gold in the light and shining with rain.

Dean buried his face in the crook of his arm and tried to forget that.

“Dean?” said Cas, patience giving way to desperate curiosity.

Cas would say he seemed upset again. And if Dean took an outside look at himself, it was laughable to try and deny. He lifted his head.

He’d promised to tell Cas. It was the only way to find out more about Cas in return, and it was something Dean wanted badly enough that it brought him here. He was going to risk everything. For Cas.

“It’s my dad,” he said, surprised by the weakness of his own voice. Shaky, hoarse.

Cas looked Dean over carefully as he waited for more. He gave a faint nod.

“He’s… Tough.” That could be taken so many ways and Dean knew it. “On me,” he added, like it clarified anything. “Sometimes.”

Cas didn’t shift his posture, but the lines of his face became more deliberately contained. He took a moment to say, clear and even, “Does he hurt you?”

Dean looked sharply to the water. Only because his eyes began to burn, because he was losing his grip on the control he thought he had. He wasn’t supposed to cry over this. He was supposed to bear it. He was just going to state a fact, a fact he had lived with for so long and was strong enough to deal with. And it would have been different if Cas asked ‘does he hit you?’ but instead he’d said hurt, and that was a different question, wasn’t it? It was supposed to be easy to say hit, yes and move on without the impact of that action. But hurt made it so much more lasting.

He winced, trying to find another way around the answer, but then he nodded, a concession timed with the tears that came bitter and fast. He quickly bowed his head into his arms, not enough to hide the catching sound his breath made as he tried not to choke on this feeling.

He wasn’t supposed to be so upset. He wasn’t supposed to be this reactive. He wasn’t dead, it was nothing worth crying over.

Cas’ arm wrapped around his shoulder, a solid warmth that gave shape to Dean, keeping him from coming apart.

“I’m sorry,” Cas said, voice deep and low.

Dean tried to push down his feelings, raising his face even if it was tear-streaked and flushed. “About what?” he asked. Cas had nothing to be sorry for.

“That you’ve had to go through it,” said Cas.

Dean had never imagined anyone saying that to him. He thought he deserved to be called weak for putting up with it, or for crying about it now. He thought nobody would care if it happened to him or not. That anywhere he might’ve grown up he’d have been treated just the same because of the way he was. Never enough. All the things John implied and made him believe.

“You should leave,” said Cas.

“Is that what you did?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t,” said Dean. “Sam—”

“Does he hurt Sam, too?”

Dean shook his head. He felt oddly defensive. Of course John didn’t hurt Sam. Dean would never allow it. “I keep Sam out of it,” he said.

“You still shouldn’t stay.”

“It’s not that bad,” said Dean, like he hadn’t been trembling with the force of his tears just moments ago. His voice came thin. “Not enough to leave.”

“Any amount is enough to be worth leaving,” Cas said, so certain of himself.

Dean retreated back into denial. “It’s more complicated than that,” he said. “I’m— I’m not a kid anymore so…”

Cas’ arm fell away from Dean so that he could look at him better. Which was more dangerous and less comforting than his touch had been. “When was the last time it happened?”

Dean rubbed the edge of his hand against his wet cheek, not wanting to answer but unable to resist a direct question from Cas. He looked down at the river and cleared his throat. “Day before yesterday,” he said. If Cas were to roll his eyes, it wouldn’t be undeserved, but Cas stayed perfectly still. Dean’s fingertips brushed against his throat, wanting to say what happened, but unable to describe that part. “He was mad I brought Sam home. Against orders.”

He dropped his hand again, but Cas’ eyes stayed on his throat. Where a fading bruise could be taken for a smear of motor oil. Cas sharply inhaled, putting pieces together. His eyes scanned the rest of Dean’s body, pausing on his shoulder.

“Your broken arm,” said Cas.

“Yeah, uh,” said Dean. Thinking he’d find something better. “Yeah.” There wasn’t really a way to allay it. “He caught me— We were arguing. About eventing, and Zepp, and I thought if I could just get away from him. And he caught me on the steps and I— I fell down.”

“He’ll kill you,” Cas said.

Dean’s head jerked upward, facing Cas directly. “No,” he said. “He doesn’t want to do that.”

“So he’s in control when he hurts you,” said Cas.

“No!” said Dean quickly. Because that couldn’t be true. His father loved him or could. “When he’s mad he just— It flares up and then it’s over. And he’s sorry about it.”

“So he’s out of control,” said Cas. “Which means you’re in danger. Every time.”

Dean parted his lips to answer but Cas had him in a bind. Either John’s anger was out of control and a constant threat or it was in control and was used with full intention. Neither was good for Dean.

“I don’t want to leave,” said Dean, and that was more true than any of the apologies he’d tried to make on John’s behalf. He looked down between them. “I just want it to stop.”

Cas took a breath, almost started to say something, then didn’t. There was a kind of understanding in that holding back.

“What was it like for you?” Dean asked. It was the only reason he’d said anything. So that Cas would open up to him in turn. Cas thought there were things they had in common that Dean would understand.

“Different, probably,” said Cas. He went quiet, struggling with what to say, his eyes gazing nowhere as he grouped his thoughts. It was far easier to talk about Dean’s troubles than his own. “My mother was… unstable. Religious. Which made her hard to live with at the best of times. Never knowing which mother you were going to get.”

Dean could understand that. John was volatile too. It was a lot of work just planning for what version of John he’d meet in any given scenario.

“Would she hurt you?” he asked. He used the same word on purpose.

Cas didn’t cry, but he looked distant. “Yes,” he said. “She’d… She had punishments. She’d drag me by the ear to lock me in a cupboard for— for hours, when I’d done wrong.” Dean knew without Cas having to say that ‘doing wrong’ could be anything from causing trouble to colouring too loudly. He couldn’t imagine Cas being a trouble-making kid, not on purpose. But he mentioned being different when he grew up. Too emotional, finding it difficult to connect. That would be ‘wrong’ too.

“If we didn’t listen or were found impertinent, she would slap us,” said Cas.

“We?” said Dean.

“My siblings and I,” said Cas.

“I never knew you had siblings,” said Dean.

“Four of them,” said Cas. “They never left. I think. If they had, I hope they’d find me.” He shifted, picking at clover. “Then again, they had less trouble listening or understanding the right answer. I could never seem to figure it out. I was… different. And because I was a… a target, I think they didn’t always know that they had more in common with me than her.”

“And that’s why you left?”

Cas looked away and it told Dean how much more complicated it was than that.

“You said once…” Dean wet his lips before he spoke. “You said you didn’t feel like you had a choice.”

“I didn’t,” said Cas. “It was either live the way they wanted me to live, or leave. And I chose to leave.”

That made Cas probably the strongest person Dean knew. And just as Cas found it simpler to talk about Dean’s troubles, Dean found it easier to think of all Cas deserved.

“Remember what else you said?” Dean asked, the idea lighting up his mind as a fix for Cas’ incredible loneliness. “That you’d want a place with fresh air and animals where everything’s right. What if that was us? You know, like, around here so I didn’t really have to leave, but not with my dad, and—”

Cas was looking at him strangely. Dean’s excitement must have been somehow out of place, or the idea unappealing when Dean included himself. Cas hadn’t been making an offer of somewhere to stay, for Dean, when he warned him that John was a danger. This must not be what he was thinking of it all.

“Sorry,” said Dean quickly. His face flushed again, not helped by the heavy heat of the day. “I thought— When you said that, it sounded— It sounded so nice. But you want that on your own.”

“No, not on my own,” said Cas. “That defeats the point.”

“Right,” said Dean, and he placed his hands on the ground beside him, about to launch himself away from his foolish entry into the conversation. He needed to get away from Cas. He was hot. He should swim. If he could bear to get undressed.

Cas curled a hand around the inside of Dean’s arm just above the crease of his elbow. It wasn’t an iron grip, but it was solid, keeping him in place when he otherwise would’ve gone.

“I like spending my time with you,” Cas said in a rush. It was like he was answering something else, something neither of them had said. He didn’t look at Dean. “If I could give you somewhere to stay, away from your father— If you wanted that, I would do it.”

“We’re just—” Dean hesitated. “We’re just talking dreams, Cas,” he said.

“Why should it only be a dream?” said Cas.

This was more than Dean had ever reckoned on. So heavy it felt like lifting a weight from the bottom of a river.

“I mean that if you want to leave,” said Cas, “then you should. You could do it.” He let go of Dean’s arm, fingertips dragging away from his skin.

“It’s not as simple as that,” said Dean, finding himself confused. In one breath he suggested buying a farm with Cas, and in the next that he could never leave his father. It was just that what they talked about sounded too perfect to ever truly exist. How could Dean put any faith in something that exceeded his wildest dreams like that?

“If I bought a house with space for horses,” said Cas.

“Jeez, Cas,” said Dean.

“Would you come stay?”

“Are you for real?”

“If I could do it this minute, I would,” said Cas. “I don’t want to say goodbye and know you’ll go back to that house with John.”

“Could you do it?” said Dean. “Is that even possible?”

“I could figure it out,” said Cas. “One word. From you, and…”

“You think we can do this?” said Dean. “Then… Okay.”

And that was all it took. Cas leaned forward and kissed him.

Dean didn’t have time to think of it or react. The press of their lips was warm, sudden. A dangerous spark in a dry forest. As he pulled back, so did Cas, looking anxious.

“What was that?” said Dean.

Cas hadn’t looked away from Dean’s face, although there was something to the way he held his body, like he expected to run. “I just—” he said. His voice was every bit as gravelly and flat as usual, but he sounded uncertain, a rare note. “I…”

Cas had kissed him. Dean’s brain and body couldn’t make sense of it, couldn’t work together in any sensible way any longer. His heart started pounding. The heat of the day made sweat rise on the back of his neck and above the lip of his mouth. He was frozen but he was supposed to be doing something. Running from this, striking out, kissing Cas, jumping into the river.

“I shouldn’t’ve—” Cas looked stricken now. “I want to help you and it’s not— I made a mistake.”

Wasn’t this Dean’s fault? Just days ago he had wrapped himself around Cas in the shade of a garden and silently begged for his affection in any shape. He’d had that untoward dream the same night. The colour rose high in Dean’s cheeks and he looked swiftly at the river. Cas hadn’t kissed him in the dream, only touched him, but already Dean’s mind was conflating the real and the imagined, completely out of his control. Dean had stared too long the night of the rain storm. He’d been wrong to and he’d made this happen and it was all because he was broken up into pieces and he got things confused and now there was this, which was too much to handle.

Next to him, Cas rested his forehead against his fist, eyes scrunching closed. “I’m sorry, Dean,” he said.

Dean’s mouth remembered the touch of their lips and wouldn’t let go. He felt they were reddened by Cas’ kiss, the same as that day in the attic, that day when enchantment poisoned itself into sharp fear and which was exactly like right now. There was something wrong with him for all of this. For the fact that he wanted to kiss Cas again and really know what it felt like. If he was damned he wanted to know what he was damned for.

“I’m sorry,” Cas said again. “I thought you were like me.”

It struck Dean for the first time what that would mean. What it would be to be like Cas. What it meant Cas was. And how if he were to say Cas was correct right now, that Dean was not like him, it didn’t feel at all true. How if he were to be able to act on what was true, that would mean giving over to what was in him. He felt so miserable and scared and all he wanted was for Cas to cover over Dean’s body with his own. To hide in Cas’ collar, in the very hollow of his clavicle, the place he’d wanted to kiss just three days ago when he stole comfort from Cas in the garden.

He dragged his gaze back to Cas, who looked equally mired in his own despair.

“Cas,” he said, not certain of what he meant to follow. And when Cas looked at him he leaned in and kissed him.

Cas lost a sound against Dean’s mouth, a melting hum. His hand found the small of Dean’s back. This kiss came with another renewed one, chasing it, then Dean bowed his head, breaking it off but not breaking away. His body shifted deeper into Cas, his hand clutching Cas’ shirt, his forehead resting against the base of Cas’ neck. Cas held onto him this time, cheek brushing against the top of Dean’s head. A hand came up to stroke through Dean’s hair.

“Cas,” he said wretchedly.

“It’s okay,” said Cas. As much as anything could be okay. For a bare second, Dean wanted to believe it would be.

#spirit of the west #bonus content #when your au has an au #there was serious potential to go this route and it was hard to make Dean NOT open up in this scene #because he wanted to and it had been building #and it was very nearly worth the trade-off of learning more about Cas for him #so here's the world where that happened #and other things would've happened differently too #butterflies flapping wings and all

[stonerbughead]

Maria watches friday night lights (#35)

5x12 baby, helpppp how are we already at the penultimate episode (already, i say, after dragging this first-ever watch out basically as long as humanly possible L O L why am i like this)

my reactions / recap / flailing under the cut

I see that Tyra is literally the preview photo so I’m already like OH SHITTTT

Tami coming home from the airport with potentially life-altering news...and Eric is asleep in front of the TV on the couch, clearly trying to wait up for her, my heart.

AHHH Julie’s home??? A surprise? This is so fucking cute! The ending vibes are definitely here.

Omg Tim are you good, baby? Is he throwing his bed out of the trailer? Damn he clearly has so much trauma from prison.

Damn NBC 8 is pulling up, that’s how you know it’s State. “It’s State, Levi, get used to it.” “No, I’ll NEVER get used to it!” Lmao i love Levi.

WOW look at Luke trying to set up childcare so moms can participate in a hearing about school funding! GO OFF KING

Omg i almost forgot Mindy was pregnant again. Billy’s so excited...oh fuck, TWINS? They’re gonna be so broke forever. Mindy is as horrified as I would be lmao

Oh shit, here we go...Tami’s finally telling Eric about the job offer...and admitting she wants it!!! AHH

“We’d have to move to Philadelphia.” “We live in Texas. Honey, Texas...is where our friends and family are. Texas is where I work, Texas is where I have my job.” Weren’t y’all just thinking about moving to Florida like two episodes ago? I smell a double standard, sir!

Ugh Eric is shutting down. “I can’t talk about this right now.” BISH

“How many times have we moved before for your job?” MMHMM that’s right, Eric! You look shell-shocked but you need to take that in, sit with it!

Tim Riggins behind the bar is hot. Just an observation.

Ugh, the tension between poor Tim and Billy. Tim’s gonna go to Alaska?! WOW did not see that plan coming!

“What the hell are you gonna do, sleep with a bunch of woodchucks?” BILLY WHAT LMAO

“You’re gonna leave Texas?” “YES.” I love the drama in both these back to back conversations about the thought of Leaving Texas.

Broken dryer, Jess, I’ve been there. Like right now, we have a broken dryer in our apartment. Ooh, Vince coming and finding her and being gentle!

Aw poor Jess. “I finally found a coach who was open-minded enough to let me in and not laugh at me. He lets me shadow him and teach me how to be a coach, and now they’re gonna take it all away.” These poor kids.

VINCE: “We won’t let that happen.” MY HEART. I love them.

Wow, Luke’s being sold a low-tier football program, isn’t he? “We just got a Costco, and a brand new movie theater in the town.” yikes.

How is a reporter asking Eric “are you worried he’s taking on too much?” about a teenage boy. Like, how do they know this much about Vince’s life? Texas football culture will forever amaze me, even after watching almost the entire series.

“We haven’t even scratched the surface of what Vince Howard can do.” AWWW my heart! Eric is such a good coach.

Oh wow, the East Dillon Lions vs. Dillon Panthers funding debate!!! Did they send a Booster Club representative here to Buddy’s door to shake him down? “There’s gonna be a lot of changes.” Like what IS THIS?

“Vince Howard is gonna be a Panther.” This is... A Lot. “That chair at the head of the table is waiting on you.”

Oh nooooo Tim getting physical with a customer.

“I’ve been waiting five minutes for my drink.” FAMILIAR VOICE IN THE CORNER??? “Hey there, jailbird.” It’s Tyra, and she has long brown hair! I dig it! I dig this reunion!

Aw, Eric coming home and immediately apologizing to Tami for earlier.

Tami’s being realistic that if the Lions lose, their economic situation is in jeopardy—so a good job offer on the table is something to consider!

“So you’re routing against us?” OMG and there’s a moment when Tami thinks he’s referring to them but then realizes he’s referring to “oh, the team?” jfc “You and I, or us the Lions. Of course.”

“You know what, I’ve been a coach’s wife for 18 years. Every decision we’ve made has been based on your coaching career.” LIFE BEYOND FOOTBALL OH SHIT

Oh God Eric’s getting up with the keys???? Come on, dude! This is not cool! There are so many colleges and high schools in Pennsylvania! I promise they play football there!

Omg did Tyra just tell Tim about the twins since he refused to really talk to Billy?

Aw Tyra wrote to him in prison? That’s sweet.

Awww Mindy’s literally having a breakdown about not having enough space, and not being able to handle three kids. These poor babes. And the football team’s fate hinges on this because of the assistant coach’s salary...fucking crazy

Ooh now Buddy’s trying to hype Eric up on the Panther-Lions Superteam they’re gonna create.

Aw the whole fam at Billy and Mindy’s—Tyra, Becky, even Mama Collette.

“He’s got some stupid idea he’s gonna go to Alaska and work on a pipeline.” Well, when someone comes to prison and tells you they’ll actually let someone who has to check the felony box work a job with decent wages, yeah. God, the prison industrial complex sucks. Feeds the most vulnerable people into the shittiest jobs.

Julie outside of the Saracen home? Awww. Has she seen him since that romantic Chicago good-bye?

Luke, listen to Becky!! “I’d really appreciate if you put down the wrench and listen to me.” YES GURL

“That’s not real. You are! And I just think there’s been a lot of misunderstandings.” “Well, that’s really pretty you should put it in a love poem.” “Are you kidding me? Go to hell!” yeah, correct answer, Becky! These teens are under so much STRESS! The DRAMA!

Omg all these grown men screaming at the town hall meeting about football i cannot

Ewww these classist fucks. “Some of us on this side of town happen to own our houses.” Eat the rich.

Why the fuck is Billy writing a fucking speech while driving? And he’s surprised he swerved? Sir…

Aw poor Eric with pain in his eyes telling Billy he can’t be definitive about his job security...I mean, yeah.

Aw, Luke coming into the bar while Tim is working after...that talk with Becky…

“You and Becky...are you in love with her?” Tim looks so amused. “Are you serious?” “...Yeah. “No, I’m not in love with Becky. I care about her.” THANK YOU BOYS AND GIRLS CAN BE FRIENDS. Is this not what Becky tried to tell you last night? “I’ve been there a few times when nobody else was, but that’s about it.”

Aw Luke is so similar to Tim rn! Not “feeling it” from the school that wants him, even tho he loves football!

“You’re going to state, yeah? Nothing’s gonna beat that.” “Play it that way. Play it like it’s the last time you’re ever gonna lace up.” Some iconic Tim Riggins lines here!

“We were at the meeting last night, but we don’t want to argue or yell, we just want to give you our thoughts.” MY HEART i love Vince and Jess. “Well, that’ll be refreshing.” LOL after all these grown ass men were screaming over each other

“Was it really that bad?” “If you’re asking if I was raped in prison, Tyra, the answer’s no.” LOSING IT at this exchange lmao

“Tim Riggins, what the hell is going on with you?” that’s the question!

Oh shit is Tyra just finding out that Tim took the fall for Billy now...fuck

“He had a wife, a family. I had the chance to give him something, to give Stevie something we never had. To give him his father.” Damn, the look on Tyra’s face. She knows all too well why he did what he did even tho it fucked him up :( THE EMOTION. THE PAIN!

Damn they’re announcing the decision on the Dillon teams *before* state?

“What are you hoping for?” loaded question, Julie! “I hope that the Lions get to stay put, and I hope that I get to be Dean of Admissions at Braemore College.” awww yeah you do deserve it all, Tami.

Oh wow all these people from both teams standing in the street, drinking and talking and waiting for the decision with “i was living in a devil’s town” playing??? THIS SHOW.

I feel for the dude who has to address this town about this decision.

Anddd there it is, they eliminated the East Dillon program. The rich kids cheering for their victory in front of the poor kids mourning the end of the program they fought to make better is so fucking tacky.

And omg now they have to play state?

“Let me tell you something, you’re gonna be the star quarterback of the Dillon panthers next year, and you’re gonna shine.” OH this hug between Eric and Vince! “See you at practice tomorrow.” Again, the reminder that these people gotta play a *state championship*! wild

“We need to talk.” BUDDY WHAT?

Aw Julie and Tyra hanging out and there are Panthers screaming out of cars. “Welcome back to Dillon.” “No place like it.” Oh, this warms my heart.

I love this exchange: “You know, it’s kind of like this drug. When you get outside of it, you see it for what it really is. But when you’re in it, it seems like there’s no other possible reality.” “It’s a hard place to shake.” “Yeah...I didn’t see that one coming.”

“Whatever happened with you and Matty?” SAME, TYRA, SAME. “We’re good. I mean, we still talk every now and then. He went to Chicago. I went to visit him awhile back, and...I don’t really know what we are or aren’t or…” INTRIGUE. “I kind of just really miss him.” “Life’s harder when you really love someone.” Awwww. I loved that scene so much.

Wow, Buddy and Eric are talking at the Panthers field?

Oh, Buddy’s trying to sell him on winning the championship and then going to the Panthers to coach along with Vince….

“I can never come back to this school and coach. Never.” I mean, FAIR.

“Three rings in six years. That’s history. No one’s ever done that. You’ve got everything you want.” Yeah, Buddy, but does Tami get what she wants in that scenario?

Lol i love all the East Dillon Lions drunk on the field, like seasons’ past with teams past…

“Alright I’m taking a piece of grass home.” LOL TINK

To State and to Coach Taylor, huh? Sounds familiar. And Buddy Jr. is puking. Lmao.

“Just make sure you’re really okay with losing him.” YES Tyra! As much as Billy has majorly fucked up, i agree with her that the idea of the Riggins brothers losing each other when they ONLY had each other for so long...it makes my heart sad.

Oh shit are Tim and Tyra about to kiss? I almost forgot they were together back when this whole show started! “Please don’t go.” DAMNNN

Wow what a scene. Eric comes home with his news that he could have “everything” and Tami replies, “I’ll say to you what you haven’t had the grace to say to me: congratulations, Eric.

“I want you to take me someplace.” “Where?” “I’ll tell you when we’re on the way.” This is really cute! Also Tyra is so hot damn gurl i see you!

Aw Vince shooting his shot, yes! “What about you and me?” “I was really proud of how hard you tried. Thank you.”

“You already have two strikes against you.” “Jess, I was born with two strikes against me.” LOL SO TRUE. and aw what a hug!

Tyra took him to his land, didn’t she??? “Alaska, Tim?” He’s SMILING. Is that Texas Forever vibes i’m seeing here?

AH, Matt is home with a Christmas tree to see his grandma!!! She’s so excited!!

Aw she forgot his dad’s dead? “Did you say it was Christmas?” Oh this is so sad.

Why are Buddy and the Panthers coach standing at the Taylors’ front door like fucking cops late at night? This football program is sinister at times.

“Eighteen years.” Yeah, Tami. And then she turns it back on: “Can I get you two anything? Iced tea, water?” and FADE TO BLACK.

Damn!! What an amazing set-up for a series finale I’ve heard only good things about!!! AHHHH

#maria watches friday night lights #mine #friday night lights 5x12

[orionsangel86]

SPN Speculation - SDCC chatter

Hey guys, a little birdy told me that Tumblr hasn’t been handling the SDCC news all that well? I have been asked to come back and share some thoughts I have so far only been floating around in GCs and very briefly on Twitter.

For those of you feeling negative about Season 15, that’s of course your prerogative, but I am honestly extremely happy with what tidbits of information we have received. 

This got long so under a cut is quotes from SDCC and my own reactions and speculation including an ending concept I thought of that I am quite happy with.

First of all, Andrew Dabb’s joke about only 30% of the audience liking the ending was just that, a JOKE. They were digging at Game of Thrones. Bobo has already confirmed on Twitter previously that SPN ending will be NOTHING like Game of Thrones. 

https://twitter.com/robertberens/status/1127821427149721600

https://twitter.com/robertberens/status/1127976311303970816

This was back during the final few eps of GoT when Bobo got really chatty with fans online about the way GoT told it’s stories. He confirmed that SPN is completely different, believes in heroism, and is focused on its characters rather than the world at large.

What Bobo essentially was saying was that SPN isn’t going for a dark gloomy ending more focused on the universe than each characters individual end journeys. SPN will have a satisfying end for its audience compared to the dark and gloomy hopeless ending GoT presented us with.

So any snark they had at SDCC comparing SPN to GoT was prob based on this and is totally not to be taken seriously.

What made me feel far more positive was Dabb and Bobo saying the following:

Dabb: “you want people to feel it was worth their time. Because this show is a big time investment. Three hundred and twenty seven hours [is a lot]. You don’t want to leave people feeling hollow, you don’t want to leave them feeling cynical. You don’t want to make them think we don’t take very seriously the amount of time and effort they put into this show and the amount of time and effort we put into this show. So that doesn’t mean the ending is always happy and everybody is high-giving. But it means the journey was worth something and came to a place that makes everyone feel it was worth taking that trip.”

Bobo said “at it’s core, making sure we end powerfully and meaningfully the stories of Jack, Cas, Sam and Dean, and honor them and their characters and their emotions and the audiences emotions for them.... that’s sort of our north star in breaking the show.”

Also Bobo: “We have some really interesting and fun ways to play around with that expectation [of whether Sam and Dean should live or die]. Not just in the final stretch but throughout the season. I think that question will be raised in a number of ways. And Sam and Dean will be struggling with that in a number of ways. I think we’re very conscious as writers that this is not the Game of Thrones type [of situation] – just shove everyone’s face in the mud kind of downer. It’s a balance of pain and uplift that we have to hit perfectly that feels fresh and doesn’t feel like something we’ve done before. And I think that we have some ideas that we’ve very excited about that will stick that landing for us.”

Whilst we have to remember that this is still just PR, it is good to hear from both Bobo and Dabb that ultimately they seem to understand what is important and how to end this show right. My interpretation from this is not that the show will end in death and misery, but in something hopeful and somewhat satisfying, even if it is different.

(My sources from this are from a GC where the text I think is copied from an article. If you know the article please send me the link)

Dabb also talked quite a bit about how the one thing that is set in stone and has been for at least a year already, is the very final scene of the show. They had this in mind before Season 14 was written. So everything else will be written around this final scene. (also means we need to pay closer attention in our S14 re-watches.)

Dabb and Bobo both think the ending will satisfy fans, or at least that fans will understand why the ending they chose makes sense. Dabb specifically said “What we are crafting is something that I hope will make sense as an emotional ending to these characters journey. I don’t think it’s something that’s going to make everybody happy, because that’s impossible. But I certainly hope that even the people who hoped it ended differently will understand why it ended that way.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHjhnG5w2gw

The one take away that REALLY interested me was this from Jensen:

“It took me a while to get there. When we were in the room and the idea came down the pipe and everybody kind of signed off on it, my reaction was more like “okay, okay”. I’d struggled with it for about a week or so and I realised I’m just too close to this character. To see anything with finality on it is just hard to digest. And I talked to a few people about it and got some clarity on it and I’ve tried to look at it from a different perspective and I now have come around to being “oh, this is a really good ending. This is satisfying.””

https://twitter.com/Bluestar861/status/1153080393106710528

So to sum up:

Dabb says that the ending they have gone with is one that makes sense emotionally in terms of character journey

Bobo says that the ending will honor the characters of Sam, Dean, Cas and Jack and WON’T be anything like GoT

Jensen says that he struggled with the ending at first, and had to have it explained to him to get clarity on why they are taking that route, after which, he understood and now thinks its a really good ending.

To top this, Jared spoke of the ending being the characters finding peace (whether alive or dead - but in a way that implied they would be alive)

Misha has confirmed he doesn’t know the ending, so he has simply been reiterating his old stance that Cas has to die and as much as we love him, we can disregard everything he says based on his own words from Jibcon “I make shit up.”

As a meta writer and someone who spends a lot of time picking apart the stories to find SENSE and MEANING in the CHARACTER JOURNEY’S and knowing that JENSEN ACKLES DIDN’T UNDERSTAND AT FIRST?! 

I AM VERY HAPPY ABOUT THIS NEWS.

Jensen not understanding imo means the ending will not be Sam and Dean dying together in a blaze of glory, it won’t be a separation in death either for any of the characters. My best guess? The brothers go their separate ways in the end. 

Hear me out. It fits okay. Let’s bring this back to the obvious question:

How do you end a show where death is not taken seriously?

Easy. You separate the characters in LIFE, bringing an end to their joint story. If SPN has always been a story about two brothers, saving people, hunting things, the family business (with the family growing over the past so many years), then the way you end that is not by killing them off, it’s by separating the core characters from the story itself, and from each other.

The reason I am speculating THIS ending is also because of one EXTREMELY EXCITING fact that also came from SDCC:

EILEEN IS RETURNING

https://twitter.com/Shoshannah7/status/1153077148883640321

Call me an optimist, but they aren’t going to bring back the one character who ticked all of Sam Winchester’s boxes for one episode as a ghost or a soul in heaven - they are gonna bring her back properly, and that can only mean one thing. SAILEEN. Sam getting a romantic endgame is PERFECT and it fits my theory. Eileen coming back opens up the potential for Sam to have a new hunting partner, or even better, a new MOL Legacy partner to reestablish the MOL as a society for learning and protecting the world from the Supernatural. A training center for hunters and supernatural scholars all over the world. TELL ME THIS ISN’T PERFECT FOR SAM I DARE YOU.

Obviously, the one caveat to this awesome opportunity for Sam, is no more hunting with Dean. Hence, end of Supernatural as we know it.

What does this mean for Dean? Well, If a certain angelic blue eyed beauty gets their true story potential - their emotionally satisfying character journey end - then that angelic blue eyed beauty will be hanging up their wings for good and slumming it with us mud monkeys permanently. 

A sacrifice? Yes, finality? Yes. Death? Hell no.

Further thoughts on this here:

https://twitter.com/Bluestar861/status/1153278119576592385

With a human Cas by his side, Dean can still do whatever he wants, travel the country, or take himself and his hot ex-angel “buddy” off to the beach, because the main focus of Dean’s character arc, his character journey over the course of so many seasons, has been to find peace with himself, as well as freeing himself from the burden of parenthood forced on him by his father and let Sam go.

Dean has never been comfortable being alone, and it wouldn’t make sense for him to end his journey alone either - at all - which is why Jensen’s dream ending that he keeps telling at cons about Dean swapping Baby for a motorbike also makes no bloody sense - but of course, as Jensen said, he didn’t really understand the ending presented at first did he? 

Jensen would struggle with the idea of Sam and Dean both choosing to separate in life, especially if that ending also had an ambiguous Destiel twist to it. Jensen has always made his views on the brothers relationship clear, he is a “together to the end” man, so it makes sense that he would need to have the toxic codependency and why it needs to break explained to him. 

I have no idea whether Destiel will be part of this so please don’t ask me, I happen to think at this point that it will be ambiguous and open to interpretation. But if the show ends with Dean and human Cas together mirrored against a happy Sam and Eileen I’ll be satisfied.

DISCLAIMER: This is a speculative fan theory thought up for fun. It is NOT serious show meta, it is literally inspired by PR from SDCC. I DO NOT HAVE A CRYSTAL BALL - IF I DID I WOULD BE BUYING LOTTERY TICKETS RIGHT NOW NOT TELLING YOU LOT HOW SPN IS GONNA END.

Of course, all my theories are inspired by in show character themes and emotional sub plots. I’m not pulling this shit out of thin air, I just... don’t want you all to start accusing me of leading you on or getting your hopes up if S15 starts and throws us a huge curve ball because I literally know nothing more than you lot and frankly the attacks on meta writers over the past few years have disgusted me and made me loose quite a bit of faith in the fandom collective brain cell - which I generally assume doesn’t exist in those that actually do attack meta writers.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Still, please try not to burn this hellsite to the ground based on SDCC PR. It’s supposed to be fun!

Peace.

#Supernatural #spn speculation #sdcc2019 #pr is not showrunning #spn fan theories #spn endgame #season 15 #saileen #destiel #andrew dabb #bobo berens #jensen ackles #my thoughts

[multimetaverse]

HSMTMTS 1x07 Review

Thanksgiving was a very funny ep that did a great job of building up the cast as a found family. Let’s dig in!

Very wise choice to basically just stick almost the entire cast together for most of the ep. It’s hard on ensemble shows to actually do justice to all the various friendships and relationships that exist among the main characters but it is vitally important that shows like HSMTMTS take the time every once in a while to show the mains all being friends. It was a fun party too and pretty true to life to high school cast parties (minus the alcohol)

I really liked Nini and her Lola, it’s great Filipino rep and on twitter I saw that Lola’s actress was happy to see all the tweets talking about Nini calling her grandma Lola. I liked getting a bit of her backstory and learning about her coming to America when she was Nini’s age. Her line about seeing soldiers marching in her home province is likely a reference to the second world war. If she’s old enough to have memories of either the Japanese invasion and occupation of the Philippines or the American liberation of the Philippines then that would mean she’s in her late 70s or early 80s. The actress does not look anywhere near that old but it would explain why she’s living in a nursing home

We’ve been seeing a more confident Carlos these past couple of eps; some of it is due to Miss Jenn’s support, some due to having succeeded in his relationship with Seb, and some of it is because he has found a truly supportive group among the wildcats. I liked that he and Seb arrived together and I loved that Carlos was bold enough to call Seb honey in front of everyone

EJ should be cancelled for saying that Glee holds up. I think this ep was the most charming EJ has been since the premiere. I did like that he apologized to the girl he poisoned when that plot could have easily been dropped.  I laughed when he looked up the trivia answer and then admitted that he couldn’t stop cheating. I get that including EJ seeing his follower count dropping during the sand montage is meant to suggest that to him social media is as serious as what’s going on in the others lives but it falls flat

Ricky and EJ doing the Sharpay and Ryan warmup was hilarious

I like Big Red and Ashlyn a lot more than I thought I would. Big Red was unintentionally very smooth complimenting Ashlyn and it’s easy to see that she isn’t used to being complimented like that. Carlos walking through her talking head session and correcting her was the funniest moment of the ep imo

Miss Jenn and Mr. Mazzara were surprisingly sweet and Big Hero 6 is a great movie. I’m not a huge fan of the enemies to lovers trope but I trust Tim to make it work. We can see this ep that Miss Jenn and Mr. Mazzara have more in common than either of them would likely admit; they’re both dedicated teachers but they’re both very lonely people at heart. And I do think there’s a lot of potential in a messy Miss Jenn, Mike Bowen, and Benjamin Mazzara love triangle. Jenjamin (or is it Bjenn?) is probably the ultimate endgame but I don’t think they’re done with Jike yet. I do want Benjamin to apologize for trying to get Miss Jenn fired though

So looks like we are getting levitating Troy and the musical needs to be in the gym because the theatre burned down

Gina really is Buffy 2.0 right down to the mom working for the government and having to move in exactly 10 days plot. Of all the plots for HSMTMTS to steal from Andi Mack that’s one of the worst they could have chosen. Andi Mack wasn’t able to pull off the Buffy moving plot and the show never fully recovered from the damage that plot caused. For HSMTMTS I don’t think they’ll actually move Gina and because the cast is larger she’s not as important to the show as Buffy was on Andi Mack; Gina is like the 4th or 5th lead but Buffy was the 2nd

Gina’s backstory certainly explains why she is who she is. I liked that confirmation that her dad isn’t in the picture and obviously she’s spent a lot of time on her own over the years. I don’t think her stealing Nini’s phone should have been swept under the rug but I like that her and Nini are friends now and as long as the show doesn’t try to bring back the phone theft later on I’m okay with it being dropped

Unless something radically changes it does seem like the writers decided not to go the route of Gina’s mom being a harsh stage mom. If nothing else, she just seems to busy with work to even be that overbearing and demanding 

I’m extremely wary of Nini going to a Denver art school. Andi Mack only had Andi getting into SAVA because it was the series finale, there’s no way the show would have actually been able to pull that off. It’s the same reason they retconned Jonah’s age so he was still in 8th grade in S3, they just wouldn’t have been able to make him being in a different school work

We got some good Rina and Rini this ep. Gina’s hat for Ricky was a sweet gesture and Ricky needed someone to tell him to get out there instead of staying home alone moping. I liked the Rini duet in the beginning and Nini’s jealousy was very apparent. It’s telling that Ricky ended up taking Nini’s advice and calling his mom (and I liked that Nini is still number 1 on his favourites)

I continue to like the writing of the kids. Ricky seems to think that his mom just recently met Todd which is naive in a realistic way for a 16 year old. There’s no way that his mom would have let Todd answer her phone on her behalf while she’s in the shower if she’s only known him for a little while. She was living in Chicago for at least 4 months and very obviously considered her marriage over, she has probably been with Todd for a while and her new relationship was likely a factor in her flying back to SLC to officially end it with Mike

I think HSMTMTS has the best writing about social media I’ve yet seen in a teen oriented show, probably because Tim is under 40

Looking Ahead:

1x08 will be very pivotal for Rini. We’ve gotten a lot of clips leading up to their almost or actual kiss and I’m glad that Nini calls Ricky out for being a punk. Their chemistry really shines through in the clips we’ve seen, especially when Ricky says that Minnie Mouse wasn’t his first crush

I’m glad that Nini isn’t keeping her Denver school application a secret, that was something I hated about the SAVA plot on Andi Mack when Andi kept it a secret from her friends. Denver is similar enough to SLC that if the show wanted to have Nini spend time there it would be easy enough to film in SLC which is why I’m worried they will actually send Nini there at some point

I’m glad that Gina is being honest that she’ll have to leave a day early, I always disliked that Buffy left without saying goodbye to her friends and then ghosted them and that it was never addressed when she came back. I do think the show did too good of a job with Rina so the shift back to Rini might be jarring

We know that the dean of the Denver school is in the audience so she’s likely one of the unexpected guests and I’m sure Ricky’s mom with or without Todd will be another which is likely what leads to Ricky running for a bit before returning to finish the show

Until next week ep Wildcats

#HSMTMTS #Rini #Rina #Seblos #Gina Porter #Ricky Bowen #Nini Salazar-Roberts #EJ Caswell #Big Red #Ashlyn #Miss Jenn #Benjamin Mazzara #Carlos #seb mathew-smith #HSMTMTS Reviews

[whatthefuuuuuuccckkkk]

okay this is my last post I know I'm being very annoying and I hate to clog the tag but I just have to scream into the void for a while if you disagree or you're annoyed with me please just scroll past this rant thank you

- the hitman plot. god. we all hate that shit. what I realllllly hate is how long and drawn out it is. should've been one episode tops, like when dean tried it. I want to say, that obviously it's not gonna work bcz it would be stupid to kill off the character carrying the entire show, but at this point maybe they are gonna kill him off??? idfk. maybe it's a punishment for all the people (everyone) who like him. truthfully the whole "murder is our only way out of this" attitude is disappointing and seemingly out of character for all of the girls. Boomer attacked annie and they let him fuckin live. They knew he was a fuckin rapist piece of shit, and a regular piece of shit too, but couldn't kill someone. But apparently killing someone beth, at one point, felt some typa way about...smh..apparently that is A ok and they don't even explore other options or feel the least bit guilty?? even when they "mourned" boomer it was more about marion than him. But rio and his whole ass innocent child are not a thought at all??? Wild. Truly. Also....what do they think will happen?? If I were a gang leader's right hand the first person I would check upon seeing my boss get murdered would probably be the person who tried to murder him last time lmao. Do they really think they would get away with it? Even if they didnt get caught, they wouldnt be off the hook. Surely mick would just keep things going, with even less leeway. And what happens when their illegal activities bite them in the ass when Rio is gone? Who are they gonna blame everything on? Who is gonna clean up their mess? No one. And this whole "I'm not doing it, wait yes I am, wait no I'm not, wait I'm gonna do it" thing the hitman is doing is...not it. I'm assuming were gonna get an explanation about how he knew that this was a crime of passion (lol)

-beth beth beth......you know there is a theory floating around that she has serious ptsd and I actually would love to see that explored but that shit ain't happening lol. I'm tired of feeling like I'm analyzing her character. At what point is it too much. She's hard to read but I think it has crossed the line over complex and ventured into poor characterization. She's gotten chances and chances and I'm tired. And dean. God I'm tired. I feel like all season I've been watching beth do the same thing, play good wifey, risk her (and Annie's and Ruby's) life by doing stupid shit..and that's basically it. Face some fckn consequences for your actions please. Take some responsibility. I feel like the show is showing us inklings of...something...bubbling underneath the surface but it's not our job to fill in the blanks or interpret shit. I do not work for nbc. I'm not getting paid for this. What is this girl thinking trying to get rio to invest in hot tubs (bless her calling dean an idiot. fuck this show for making him suddenly a good salesman) while trying to kill him. Does she think he dies and suddenly she owns it?? Makes zero sense. Also unpopular opinion i dont like that she caused a scene with the pool ball. Like....of course he isnt listening to you....you shot him...3 times....then stole from him....and have been screwing him over repeatedly.

-dean just....no. I understand that beth has so much going on in her life right now that divorce isn't exactly on her mind and dean is the last trace she has left of a normal life so shes holding onto it for dear life.....actually no. I do not know if any of that is actually true or if I'm just interpreting wrong. Because the subtext and editing and parallels and all that would be fine and dandy but not when that's all the show is at this point. If dean cheating yet again is not gonna make beth leave him, nothing will. I want his screentime to be 30 seconds and nothing more.

-im just not invested in the boland children. Annie and ruby have both struggled real bad, but beth, the one in the deepest, has 4 children who are somehow unaffected by this?? Not to mention the whole divorce, wait never mind, oh look a gang leader hanging out with mommy again, oh look our house is empty, type stuff happening. Beth's kids should be going through it but for some reason they arent? Maybe it's because child labor laws or something lol.

- rio. At this point I'm rooting for him for than anything. But I genuinely do not know why he hasnt killed beth. She's proven herself to be more of a liability than an asset and I just cannot understand why he hasnt killed her. Unless it's the whole "feelings" route, which wouldve made him look dumb, but made sense based on what we were given. This is actually the direction I thought the season was going but now it just seems like he is a bad businessman lol. Obviously she cant die for the sake of the show, but its like they didnt even try to make it make sense. He definitely knows about the hitman btw. I dont really blame him for anything he's done with beth so far. He robbed her in retaliation. He had to cut her off when she started acting shady. 🤷‍♀️ he let's her get away with too much tbh. It's a shame that this character isnt being utilized. Its like they are banking on this mysterious aura to keep working, but we are 3 seasons in and it's a little old now. I personally think that they just don't know what to do with him now. Also can I point out how dumb he looks showing beth that he is doing business at the carwash, why would he give her more information than she needs when he is suspicious of her? I cant tell if I was happy with how unphased he looked about her outburst or if I wish he checked her.

-mick. Did his side plot with beth die? How does it seem like this show simultaneously moves through plots every episode but is also stuck in the same one for the entire season? I also think mick is not being utilized. As funny as it is for him to be a built in 3rd wheel all the time, they could do so much more. Like can you imagine if beth mouthed off or fucked up and mick checked her? The possible ways a plot like that could go...untapped potential.

-ruby. Ah...I remember when I thought her and stan's fight was dragging for too long. Miss those days. See even tho ruby and stan seem to have the same issue over and over it's not the same story. Pen cap, new job, sarah stealing, all the same fight, but with different stories. And it really seems like Ruby's always going through it but I appreciate the variety. Stan's storyline has been interesting but I dont know how much it relates to the central plot. Sarah....great. that actress is so talented and even tho shes an attitude machine (what preteen is not) i just love her scenes. Harry seems to be missing a lot. The hills are the only part I seem to enjoy anymore. Really wish the show would explore why ruby seems to be the one who keeps getting caught up with the law...I wonder what it could be....what is different about her..hm...

- annie. Backtracked so much. Wish she had a single plot that didnt revolve around men. Now shes trying to cheat on her GED. Where's the snark? Where's the wit? It seems like all she is now is a codependent insecure mess. And I'm tired of this fuckass therapist. I thought her study montage was gonna end in a "she didnt need anyone but family (:" lesson but it did not for whatever reason. I thought by bringing a therapist into the show it was gonna give us more of a look at Annie's and Beth's upbringing and relationship. Or help annie work through her issues, the boomer thing too. Or maybe lead to Beth's ptsd diagnosis. Therapy could've helped move the plot forward or help the characters grow, but it's doing the opposite of that. If its not contributing to the main plot, what is its purpose? To give annie yet another terrible love interest?

To summarize....I hate it here.

#nbc good girls #good girls nbc #im just venting #really don't want to turn this into a debate #ive been awake for 24 hours and drinking for 20 of those

[asksamstuff]

CONTEST RESULTS!

Thank you guys so much for your patience! Got stuck at work longer than expected, but I’m here and I’ve got the results of the contest for ya. Before we jump into it, I wanna say I loved each and every one of the entries I received, and it wasn’t easy at all to pick — I’m gonna have a little blurb on each, and everyone reading, please, please be sure to follow them and shoot them some love for their work! Everyone did fantastic and I love the results.

Firstly, anyone not selected in the winner results below, please still e-mail me at [email protected] — you will be receiving a notecard drawing of Sam and some stickers for your participation in the contest! Just let me know who you are, your entry, and your address, if you’re comfortable with that. 

The winner of the contest for the prize of the comic prompt is @withthedemonblood! Please e-mail me and we can get your unique Sam-centric comic started for you, your eyes only! Unless you wanna post it when you get it. Y’know. Whatevs.

The two winners for the fanfiction category is @brothersapart and @womanoflettersinthebunker ! The two winners for fan art is @sketchydean and @fioreitaliano (which is not letting me ping you, what a butthead tumblr is). The two winners for fan edits are @samprincesschester and @jaredbottoms!  Let me know if you would like The Little Golden Hunter’s Book or a grayscale copy of Ask Sam Stuff Volumes 1 or 2. If you would like to wait, you can request to have grayscale Volume 3 when it is completed! If you would rather have a drawn piece that is SPN-related, let me know, we can work something out that is non-book-related.  

(IF YOU ARE NOT ON THE LIST BELOW, PLEASE LET ME KNOW. I will add you and you will still be able to get a gift for partaking for your hard work — a Sam notecard of thanks and stickers! Apologies to the helpful notes left on the previous post before this one; I was at work so I couldn’t respond. :’))

Fanfiction:

Metal by @waytoomuchanalysis : A fantastic continuation of the bend the spoon entry, it dives into the potential of Sam stil having his powers! Look out for the warnings, and enjoy a dose of hurt!Sam, too! I love me some hurt!Sam.

The Long Road Home by @brothersapart : A wonderfully well-written 'novelization' of here and here, where Dean died as a child in the fire with their mother. Really awesome to tackle this one, and you did a great job conveying additional things in the narrative!

I’m Okay by @ultimatefandomtrash61 : A gritty and heavy covering of the entry involving Sam's feelings after Toni's deceit in 12x02; heed the warnings at the start! It's a tough subject for sure, but it's done very well!

As Dreamer’s Do by @withthedemonblood : Really wonderful descriptions and details as this goes, this takes what is a pretty silly entry and adds a lot of personality and weight to it; I love me some weechester stuff, and there's even a little hurt!Dean in there for you guys who like fairness in torment, haha.

Manoir de Mes Reves by @captain-sodapop : I gotta say, I didn't even remotely consider the http://asksamstuff.tumblr.com/post/118043076689/an-interesting-afternoon-at-the-mills-residence twister entry on Sam's Birthday bash would end up as an entry! Great humor and a fun concept, check this one out.

I Love You, Too by @manuscript-or : Based on Sam's addiction to coffee (dude sometimes there's such a thing as too much), this AU of the pilot episode is pretty cute and full of Jess and Sam goodness! And y'all know I'm a sucker for Jess and Sam. Check this out!

Happy Halloween by @womanoflettersinthebunker : Based on the halloween post about Abby the little sassy cowgirl with read hair and freckles! I really love the alternate route this took, and it gave Sam a fun little adventure to boot — love the details of Sam naming trick-or-treaters in this head! Fantastic work. ♥

Proud Defense by @my-pen-is-my-sword : Very, very neat — an expansion of this strange creature from a pre-series comic! I'm impressed with the attempt to tackle this one, since it was one of the more vague and mysterious comics I've thrown out there, but it ended up being a really great piece! Excellent job.

Scars by @samsexualdeancurious :  A short but sweet Jess/Sam entry, exploring a panel in this entry a bit more. Did I mention I'm a sucker for Jessica and Sam? Because I am. Great job on expanding on that entry, and great writing.

A Long Night (Part 1 | Part 2) by @borrowedtimeandspace : A lovely write-up of a section of the Ask Lil' Sam Stuff plotline; I really loved doing that story, and I'm tickled to see that it was chosen to be done for the entry! They've done a really good job adding little narrative touches to this, and it's a nice addition to the bitty!Sam collection!

Fan art:

BANANA SAM by @fioreitaliano : Based on this. I cannot believe my eyes. A+ banana!Sam. I'm so happy to have laid eyes on him in all his wonder.

No but Really, Call Me, Cont’d by @saintedsam : The cutest little continuation of Max Banes and Sam Winchester, from my entry of Max hitting on an oblivious Sam. And here he is, continuing to be oblivious! What a cute art style, I love it! (And that shirt, Max.)

The Purple Dog Shirt, Pt. II by @sketchydean : What a great follow-up to the purple dog shirt comic! It can be tough to whip up comics, but this is done extremely well and feels like such a solid continuation, I love it. Now - where the heck did that shirt go!!

Dean, I Made You More Pie by @h3dgehogjohn : Isn't this so cute? A picture of little Sam from this entry making more 'pie' for his brother! I love them in their little socks; great job, and a+ freckles. ;)

It was a long night by @dovesdanceatdusk  Banana!Sam strikes again!! This time with some backstory! I love the way Sam's drawn in this, what an excellent style, and — yeah, it was a long night.

I’m Gonna Rip Your Lungs Out! by @nisaki-chan : Oh man, protective!Dean, weechesters, and the threat of lung-ripping. Our favorite! Great art style and an excellent choice in topic. I approve.

Take Care of Yourself! by @dozmuffinxc : Look at this cute entry! A Sam swathed in blankets! A really adorable art style, and a good point to keep in mind for everyone, especially over-working little Sam.

Samulet? ... Deanmulet? by @sakurinn : Based on this post, sakurinn made an excellent video of Sam getting his own personal samulet! A Deanulet? A wonderful shout-out to you for making a video entry!! This is her first post on tumblr, so please be sure to send lovely wishes and a welcome to the community! ♥

Edits:

Lack of Agency by @jaredbottoms : An excellent study in gif-form of some of the lack of agency in Sam's life, based on this post — it's crazy to see it all laid out, and important to remember. Great selections for a strong gifset.

Cute-o-Meter by @samprincesschester : Something a little less serious — a good ol' cracky screencap comic, based on this cracky lovefest of a post! I love the humor in this, and I love the team effort going into reminding everyone what a cutie-patootie Sam is. Thanks a ton, Team Freely Loving Sam Winchester.

Once again, give everyone a hand and some reblogs/notes/follows, they’re all super awesome and I’m so happy to have seen their work! Again, if you have an entry that isn’t here because I’m a dipstick and missed it, or I lost it while pasting together this monstrosity (so much linking, so much writing, ieieeeiee), message me and let me know! You’ll certainly still get yourself some stickers. ;)

Until the next contest??? Maybe??? 

I’ll just see you next entry, haha.

— Ashlee

P.S. Happy birthday, Sam. Congrats on being alive somehow in your canon!

#ooc #thanks so much again you guys #i love them all so much #i'll be posting these in a link on the blog as well soon #also forgive any slow responses if i get any! #i'm about to babysit #busybody thats me

[actutrends]

Google AI chief Jeff Dean interview: Machine learning trends in 2020

At the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference this week in Vancouver, Canada, machine learning took center stage as 13,000 researchers explored things like neuroscience, how to interpret neural network outputs, and how AI can help solve big real-world problems.

With more than 1,400 works accepted for publication, you have to choose how to prioritize your time. For Google AI chief Jeff Dean, that means giving talks at workshops about how machine learning can help confront the threat posed by climate change and how machine learning is reshaping systems and semiconductors.

VentureBeat spoke with Dean Thursday about Google’s early work on the use of ML to create semiconductors for machine learning, the impact of Google’s BERT on conversational AI, and machine learning trends to watch in 2020.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

VentureBeat: So you’re going to be talking at the Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning workshop Saturday. Anything you can share ahead of your speech?

Jeff Dean: That’s obviously a very broad space, and there’s a lot of potential for using machine learning to help tackle climate change-related topics or mitigate some of the effects. So we’re pretty excited about this. I think Google and the [AI] community in general [are] excited because it’s a serious problem, and also … one that has a lot of technical meat behind it. Like, how can we actually apply machine learning [to] some of these subproblems?

VentureBeat: Do you get to go through the work that’s here [at NeurIPS]? I mean, I presume you didn’t sift through all the posters, but outside of stuff that was shown by Google was there anything that you were particularly excited about?

Dean: Well, probably not quite all of the posters, but we have internal discussions about things people have seen that seem interesting. And I think the ML field as a whole is fairly prolific in its research output these days so it’s really hard to keep up, but one way is having lots of collective opinions about things that people see that seem important.

I just arrived yesterday, so I haven’t actually seen with my own eyes a lot of stuff, but I know other people have been interested in lots of other things.

VentureBeat: I saw your remarks last month on arXiv about the evolution of hardware for machine learning that you’ll expand upon at the ISSCC next month. What do you think are some of the things that in a post-Moore’s Law world people are going to have to keep in mind?

Dean: Well I think one thing that’s been shown to be pretty effective is specialization of chips to do certain kinds of computation that you want to do that are not completely general purpose, like a general-purpose CPU. So we’ve seen a lot of benefit from more restricted computational models, like GPUs or even TPUs, which are more restricted but really designed around what ML computations need to do. And that actually gets you a fair amount of performance advantage, relative to general-purpose CPUs. And so you’re then not getting the great increases we used to get in sort of the general fabrication process improving your year-over-year substantially. But we are getting significant architectural advantages by specialization.

VentureBeat: You also got a little into the use of machine learning for the creation of machine learning hardware. Can you talk more about that?

Dean: Yeah, the other talk I’m giving on Saturday is in the ML for Systems workshop. And so one of the things I’ll talk about there is [how] we’ve been doing some early work on machine learning for ASIC chip design, in particular placement and routing. So you have a chip design, and then you have lots and lots of transistors and how they’re connected.

Basically, right now in the design process you have design tools that can help do some layout, but you have human placement and routing experts work with those design tools to kind of iterate many, many times over. It’s a multi-week process to actually go from the design you want to actually having it physically laid out on a chip with the right constraints in area and power and wire length and meeting all the design roles or whatever fabrication process you’re doing.

So it turns out that we have early evidence in some of our work that we can use machine learning to do much more automated placement and routing. And we can essentially have a machine learning model that learns to play the game of ASIC placement for a particular chip.

VentureBeat: That’s pretty cool.

Dean: Yeah, and we have, you know, good results on some of the internal chips that we’ve been experimenting with.

VentureBeat: One of the things that’s come up a lot lately, you know, in the question of climate change — I was talking with Intel AI general manager Naveen Rao recently and he mentioned this idea [that] compute-per-watt should become a standard benchmark, for example, and some of the organizers here are talking about the notion of people being required to share the carbon footprint of the model that they trained for submissions here.

Dean: Yeah, we’d be thrilled with that because all the stuff we trained in our Google Data Center — the carbon footprint is zero. Because … basically, all of our energy usage comes from renewable sources. So that would be great. I think other people might not be as excited.

VentureBeat: I guess a criticism of larger models like XLNet or models of that nature is the amount of energy required to make and deploy them. I guess if it’s in a Google datacenter it would be carbon neutral, but outside of that context if somebody was using a large model …

Dean: Yes, I think there’s a general point, which is [that] some of these large models are computationally intensive, and they’re reasonably expensive in terms of energy usage. And so I think it’s important for the community to look at what are more efficient algorithmic techniques we can have that make a particular model or outcome that we want … be achievable with less compute and less … energy input.

I think things like multitask learning and transfer learning are actually pretty effective algorithmic tools that we have that can improve energy usage, because you can train one model and then fine-tune it, or do multitask learning on a relatively small number of examples for a new task that you want to be good at. And that’s much better than starting from scratch every time, which is sort of mostly the current practice.

VentureBeat: Something I know you’re passionate about is making sure that researchers from Africa or Asia who were having issues with travel visas getting here are able to do so, and the organizers talked a little bit about that earlier. But I was talking to someone who was still unable to get here earlier this week, and he suggested the idea of having at least one of the major conferences — like ICML or CVPR — in open border-type countries, places that have fewer issues as relates to getting a visa. What are your thoughts on that idea?

Dean: I think we actually do want these conferences to be accessible to more people. I think there are sometimes issues with — no matter where you put a conference, there’s always going to be constraints on that. For example, sometimes students studying in the U.S. have trouble leaving the U.S. to go to a conference. So if you hold it outside the U.S. in a particular place, that sometimes creates complications.

Different countries have different policies, but I think having the major conferences rotate around where they’re held is a pretty sensible thing, so that not everyone is facing the same visa issues from the same places. But also, I think [we need to be] helping inform governments about why scientific exchange is important and why they should be willing to let people come to scientific conferences for a week or whatever.

VentureBeat: This was a big year for BERT. BERT all over the place, and all different kinds of BERT. What are some of the variations of BERT that people should expect to see next, or what’s on the horizon?

Dean: BERT is interesting because it builds on sort of a progression of other research results. So, BERT sort of depends on the Transformer work that was done the year before. Transformer work is really kind of a take on the same problem that the earlier sequence LSTM-based models were looking at. And that whole research thread I think has been, you know, quite fruitful in terms of actually yielding machine learning models that [let us now] do more sophisticated NLP tasks than we used to be able to do. And the fine-tuning of BERT that’s pretrained on a bunch of text — arbitrary text — and then fine-tuned on a particular NLP task you care about is a nice paradigm for a lot of NLP problems that we would like to be able to solve. And so within Google, we’re sort of looking at lots of different kinds of applications in our products. You know we just rolled out some in the search stack to improve search quality.

And I think you’re seeing that in the broader community, as well. We’d still like to be able to do much more contextual kinds of models. Like right now BERT and other models work well on hundreds of words, but not 10,000 words as context. So that’s kind of [an] interesting direction. I think multimodal kinds of models are pretty interesting — like can you combine text with imagery or audio or video in interesting ways? That’s something we’ve done a little bit of work on, the rest of the community has done a little bit of work on, but I think that’s going to become more important in the future. And I’m sure people will find improvements to the basic approach that BERT is taking. We have some minor or maybe even major improvements.

So the basic research thrusts will continue. The use of what we now know how to do will continue to be sort of a good set of applications, both within Google and outside. We’re pretty excited.

VentureBeat: Yeah, I followed a lot of the sort of MT-DNN, RoBERTta, all that.

Dean: Yeah, everyone has a cute play on the name. It’s hard to keep them all straight and remember exactly what wrinkle is here or there. I do kind of think there’s a bit of an overemphasis on — in the community — on sort of achieving ever-so-slightly better state-of-the-art results on particular problems, and a little underappreciation of completely different approaches to problems that maybe don’t get state of the art because it’s actually super hard and a pretty explored area.

VentureBeat: Like robustness?

Dean: Yeah, or like “What are completely different ways of solving a problem that we think is important, and show promise?” And if people then pursued those kinds of rough directions, it would be interesting.

VentureBeat: Instead of trying to get to the top of the GLUE leaderboard?

Dean: Yeah.

VentureBeat: What do you feel are some of the technical or ethical challenges for Google in the year ahead?

Dean: In terms of AI or ML, we’ve done a pretty reasonable job of getting a process in place by which we look at how we’re using machine learning in different product applications and areas consistent with the AI principles. That process has gotten better-tuned and oiled with things like model cards and things like that. I’m really happy to see those kinds of things. So I think those are good and emblematic of what we should be doing as a community.

And then I think in the areas of many of the principles, there [are] real open research directions. Like, we have kind of the best known practices for helping with fairness and bias and machine learning models or safety or privacy. But those are by no means solved problems, so we need to continue to do longer-term research in these areas to progress the state of the art while we currently apply the best known state-of-the-art techniques to what we do in an applied setting.

VentureBeat: What are some of the trends you expect to emerge, or milestones you think may be surpassed in 2020 in AI?

Dean: I think we’ll see much more multitask learning and multimodal learning, of sort of larger scales than has been previously tackled. I think that’ll be pretty interesting.

And I think there’s going to be a continued trend to getting more interesting on-device models — or sort of consumer devices, like phones or whatever — to work more effectively.

I think obviously AI-related principles-related work is going to be important. We’re a big enough research organization that we actually have lots of different thrusts we’re doing, so it’s hard to call out just one. But I think in general [we’ll be] progressing the state of the art, doing basic fundamental research to advance our capabilities in lots of important areas we’re looking at, like NLP or language models or vision or multimodal things. But also then collaborating with our colleagues and product teams to get some of the research that is ready for product application to allow them to build interesting features and products. And [we’ll be] doing kind of new things that Google doesn’t currently have products in but are sort of interesting applications of ML, like the chip design work we’ve been doing.

VentureBeat: Like everyday robots?

Dean: Yeah, we have a pretty extensive robotics research effort. I think robotics is a really hard problem — to make robots that operate in sort of arbitrary environments, like a big conference room with chairs and stuff. But, you know, the fact that we’ve been making a fair amount of progress on that in the last few years, I think that’s an interesting research direction as well. We have a pretty big research effort.

The post Google AI chief Jeff Dean interview: Machine learning trends in 2020 appeared first on Actu Trends.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THERE ARE USUALLY A FEW PEOPLE THINK IN OUR INSULAR LITTLE WEB 2

And if it succeeds, you may not finish your training till 30. Is there some way Microsoft could come back? At best you'll be able to take either of these routes. And as for the disputation, that seems clearly a net lose for the buyer, though, and that the best way to get the two of you to stop bickering. In the best case—with the addition of a heh or an emoticon, prompted by the all too accurate sense that something is missing.1 Hard problems call for great efforts. That's why I write them. But once again, I wouldn't aim too directly at either target.

So there is no permanent place in this world is what matters, not standing in their family can win them points in the world. There are more dangerous is that many happen at your computer.2 Procrastination feeds on distractions. I miss her but that I think of all the search engines were doing it. In software, a problem that can be cultivated, but I don't think many nerds would. So I don't even try to predict it. 05, or 4. 4 of these 5 mistakes. I'm sometimes accused of meandering. I thought, they did call them essays, didn't they?3 And of course another big change for the average startup is that programming languages have improved—or Shakespeare, for that matter have speculative meetings all the time.

If founders could sell a little stock early would generally be better for the company to a new investor, your 4. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. Small meant small-time. The place to look is where the spread of smallness began: in the world. Do you actually want to start it. Google's current location in an office park is not where they started; it's just where they were forced to move when they needed more space. It was presumably many thousands of years, then switches polarity?4 Perhaps even more valuable company, till after several more rounds you end up with. There is more to setting up a company than incorporating it, of course, is that a dollar from them is worth one dollar. Fourteen-year-old kids are intrinsically messed up. When nerds are unbearable it's usually because I'm interested in the speaker. I'm not claiming companies can get smarter, just that dumb ones will die.5

I don't even try to predict it. There probably aren't more than a local effect. Boy was he good.6 Before anyone gets mad at me for opinions expressed here, remember that anything you see here that's not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school.7 It's interesting to see the VCs' offices on the north side of Sand Hill Road. As in software, when professionals produce such crap, it's not surprising if amateurs can do better. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart: from their parents. Cube farms suck for that, as you've probably discovered if you've tried it. They're certainly inferior to the written word as a source of money.

I had the misfortune to participate in what amounted to a controlled experiment to prove that.8 Don't hire people to fill the gaps in some a priori org chart.9 The four causes: open source, blogging is something people do themselves, for free, because they had neat hair and spoke in deep, confident voices, and generally didn't know much more than the subsequent ones.10 But I do at least know now why I didn't. You don't know yet. In a real essay you're writing for yourself. In fact, it's just a more extreme version of the world.

If they accepted it, it wouldn't be read by anyone for months, and in retrospect it was a big surprise to me and seemed to have huge implications. After a while, drugs have their own momentum. If you think about? This tradeoff predates programming languages. Of course, as a way to make something customers actually want, and to lose one's sense of humor is to be strategically indecisive: to string founders along while trying to gather more information about the startup's trajectory. I set aside a chunk of time to meet founders we've funded. A round. I agree that a line of Lisp.

The problem is, many schools practically do stop there.11 All other things being equal, they would have preferred to be on the smart side of average rather than the dumb side, but intelligence counted far less than, say, the ages of eleven and seventeen. Maybe it's not a coincidence. The same principles of good design crop up again and again. Otherwise I just worked. A button that looks like it will make a machine stop should make it less painful. 0 has such an air of euphoria about it is the location. You can do it on a smaller scale. Something you publish ought to tell the reader something he didn't already know.

That's no problem for someone on the maker's schedule. Misrule breeds rebellion; this is not a pyramid, but tapers at the bottom, instead of what he did. But this is a simple answer to the wrong question. It was this, more than Raphael's own work, that bothered the Pre-Raphaelites. What's really going on here, I think what they mean is that the company can't measure their productivity. Ideas for startups are worth something, certainly, but the descent is steeper with talks. I'll try to give an outline of how it works. Instead of treating them as disasters, make them easy to acknowledge and easy to fix. Now it turns out the rule large and disciplined organizations win needs to have good software. This CFO is both the smartest and the most upstanding money guy I know. It shouldn't take more than a couple hours, and you'll probably find that writing it all down gives you more ideas about what to do with anything as complex as an image of a person, for example. The teacher doesn't.

Notes

5% of Apple now January 2016 would be to say because most of the mail on LL1 led me to put it would work better, and know the actual amount of time, serious writing meant theological discourses, not conquest. One professor friend says that I didn't like it takes a few additional sources on their own itinerary through no-land, while we were quite sore from VCs attempting to probe our nonexistent database orifice.

To use this route instead. For example, if I can imagine what it can have a taste for interesting ideas: whether you want to get the bugs out of fashion in 100 years will be as shocked at some point has a significant effect on what people actually paid.

Most computer/software startups. The application described here is defined from the creation of wealth to study the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, phone, IM, email, Web, games, but Joshua Schachter tells me it was 94% 33 of 35 companies that seem to them, initially, to the writing teachers were transformed in situ into English professors. There are many senses of the word content and tried for a startup.

When an investor in!

This argument seems to set in when so many people's eyes. It derives from the formula. Siegel points out that trying to make a brief entry listing the gaps and anomalies. We walked with him for the same motives.

Perhaps realizing this will help dispel the cloud of semi-sacred mystery that surrounds wisdom in this respect. The reason is that we're not doing YC mainly for financial reasons, avoid casual conversations with potential earnings. I was once trying to sell them technology.

Which means if you're not consciously aware of it. Quoted in: Life seemed so much on luck. He devoted much of a cent per spam.

Deane, Phyllis, The Quotable Einstein, Princeton University Press, 1965. Scribes in ancient Egypt took exams, but delusion strikes a step later in the belief that they'll only invest contingently on other investors, you might have 20 affinities by this, on the order of 10,000 people or so and we should at least one of the auction.

Unfortunately these times are a small proportion of spam.

Though you should never sell i. The word boss is derived from Slashdot, while she likes getting attention in the same as they do. He was arguably the first phase of the flock, or black beans n cubes Knorr beef or vegetable bouillon n teaspoons freshly ground black pepper 3n teaspoons ground cumin n cups dry rice, preferably brown Robert Morris says that the usual way will prove to us.

When you fund a startup, you will find a blog on the relative weights? Now many tech companies don't. It did. Even if the VC knows you well, but you should probably start from scratch today would say we depend on closing a deal led by a sense of getting credit for what she has done, at which point it suddenly stops.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #reason #sup #Knorr #world #anything #rounds #location #suck #parents #mail #engines #founders #voices #University #problems #question #eyes #line #li #Morris #bickering #Procrastination #dollar