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(2) A Gentleman's Pursuit - Benedict Bridgerton x Reader
My Dearest Readers,
It is with great delight that I bring to you the latest scoop from the glittering world of the Ton. The Bridgerton household, known for its scandalous affairs and captivating dramas, is currently hosting a young lady who has turned the heads of not just one, but two dashing Bridgerton brothers.
Yes, dear readers, I am talking about none other than Miss Y/N, a captivating beauty who recently crossed paths with Colin Bridgerton during his adventurous travels abroad. It appears that their encounter left quite an impression on the young man, for he has extended an invitation for Miss Y/N to stay with the Bridgerton family upon her return to London.
However, what adds a pinch of excitement to this already intriguing tale is the unexpected inclusion of Benedict Bridgerton, who seems to have taken a keen interest in Miss Y/N as well. Rumors have spread like wildfire that the artistic and free-spirited Benedict finds himself captivated by Miss Y/N's charm and intelligence.
As the head of the Bridgerton family, Anthony holds the responsibility of finding a suitable wife to fulfil his role in society. Yet, whispers have reached my ears suggesting that he too has been caught off guard by the captivating presence of Miss Y/N.
As fate would have it, the first ball of the season is scheduled for tonight, and the atmosphere is thick with anticipation. Oh, dear readers, could it be that Miss Y/N has become the object of desire for not one, not two, but three Bridgerton brothers? The ball tonight shall undoubtedly provide an intriguing backdrop for Anthony to assess the qualities that make Miss Y/N so enchanting. Will she manage to sway the steadfast Anthony Bridgerton from his search for a wife? Only time will reveal the answer.
Dear readers, keep your opera glasses at the ready, for the unfolding of this captivating story promises to be a thrilling spectacle. As always, I shall keep my eagle-eyed watch on this romantic rivalry and bring you every bit of scandalous detail that ensues.
Yours ever faithfully,
Lady Whistledown
“Such tat she writes these days” Eloise spoke as she read the newest paper. “When had Anthony ever considered to take on a wife? Has he ever shown any intent to wed?”
“I intend to wed” Anthony spoke as he entered the room, causing Eloise to roll her eyes and continue on her reading. Violet advanced towards Anthony and sat him down. "Anthony," she said gently, "may I hazard a guess that Miss Y/N's presence in our household might have influenced your sudden resolution?" She looked over to Eloise as they both shared a glance of acknowledgement.
Anthony's eyebrows furrowed, and he shook his head slightly. "Mother, you know I have been contemplating this for some time. It has nothing to do with Miss Y/N's arrival."
Violet's lips curved into a knowing smile. "Oh, my dear boy, you may try to deny it, but a mother knows when her son's heart is stirred. I saw the way you watched Miss Y/N when she spoke yesterday, how your eyes light up when she entered the room. You cannot hide such things from me."
Anthony's expression softened, his gaze drifting towards the window as he collected his thoughts. "Mother, I cannot deny that Miss Y/N possesses a certain charm and intelligence. But to say that she is the sole reason for my decision to marry would be a vast oversimplification."
Violet nodded, her eyes filled with both understanding and a touch of mischief. "Of course, my dear. Matters of the heart are complex, and it would be unfair to attribute your desires to a single person. However, do not discount the impact Miss Y/N's presence has had on your thoughts and aspirations."
Anthony sighed, a mixture of annoyance and affection evident in his voice. "Mother, you have a way of seeing through me like no one else. But I assure you, my intentions to marry have been brewing long before Miss Y/N was set to arrive. I am simply ready to take on the responsibilities of a husband and further my role as the man of the household."
Violet's smile grew, and she reached out to place a comforting hand on Anthony's arm. "My dear son, I believe you. But do remember that love has a way of finding us when we least expect it. Perhaps Miss Y/N's arrival is a sign of destiny guiding you towards a future filled with happiness."
Anthony glanced at his mother, a mixture of uncertainty and hope in his eyes. "Perhaps, Mother. Only time will tell. For now, let us focus on the upcoming ball and the potential matches that await us there. Love or not, I am resolved to find a wife this year."
As the Anthony got up and left to attend to business Violet stayed sat, thinking. ‘love or not’, such a foolish statement she thought. She could only hope that all of her children could find happiness to the scale that her and Edmund had once shared, however fleeting.
-----
Later on in the day, as y/n passed through the hallways of the Bridgerton house she saw a gaggle of maids leaving Eloise’s room followed in short succession by a hearty cry of anger. Concern etched on her face, Y/N entered the room and approached Eloise, her voice filled with genuine care. "Eloise, what's the matter?"
Eloise let out a heavy sigh, her usually bright eyes clouded with a mix of frustration and vulnerability. "I just... I feel like I can never live up to Daphne's shadow," she admitted, her voice wavering with uncertainty.
A hit of sympathy hit within Y/N's heart as she realized the weight that her new friend had been carrying. With a gentle touch, Y/N took Eloise's hands in her own, offering a comforting squeeze. "Oh, Eloise, you are a remarkable person in your own right. Comparing yourself to Daphne, who has already found her place in society, is an unfair standard to hold yourself to."
Eloise's eyes glistened with unshed tears, and she let out a small, bittersweet laugh. "I know, Y/N. It's just... everyone expects so much from me, especially with Daphne's marriage to the Duke and her shining reputation. I feel like I'm constantly falling short."
Y/N's touch became more tender as she gently brushed a stray lock of hair behind Eloise's ear, a soft, understanding smile gracing her lips. "You are a force to be reckoned with, Eloise Bridgerton. Your intelligence, wit, and determination are unparalleled. Society may have its expectations, but it's up to you to define your own path and shine in your own unique way."
Eloise's eyes widened with a glimmer of hope, her doubts momentarily replaced by a flicker of possibility. "You truly believe that?"
"Without a doubt," Y/N replied. Eloise looked at Y/N, her friend's unwavering support providing her with a newfound strength. "Thank you, Y/N. Your belief in me means more than you know." Y/N enveloped Eloise in a comforting hug. "You're never alone in this, Eloise. Together, we can face anything that comes our way."
As they continued their preparations for the ball, the atmosphere in the room transformed. A renewed sense of purpose filled the air, the bond between Y/N and Eloise growing stronger with each passing moment. With Y/N's assistance Eloise finished getting ready for the ball and the two made their way downstairs. “Mother, where is everyone?” Eloise asked as she caught on to the soured look upon Violets face. “They have left, and we are late” she looked at y/n “Thank you for help, now come on you to. We must make haste!”
------
Y/N and Eloise descended the grand staircase of the Bridgerton house, their gowns shimmering in the light . The soft rustle of their skirts filled the air as they made their way to the ballroom, where excitement and anticipation hung palpably.
As they reached the landing of the staircase, Y/N couldn't help but notice the three Bridgerton brothers—Anthony, Colin, and Benedict—standing together, their gazes fixed on her in awe. Their jaws practically dropped, their eyes widened as they took in her beauty.
Eloise, catching the surprised expressions on her brothers' faces, turned to follow their line of sight. A mischievous smile took over her lips as she realized the effect her friend had on them. With a playful nudge, she whispered to Y/N, "Seems like you've left the Bridgerton brothers speechless, my dear friend."
Y/N blushed at the attention, feeling a mixture of delight and self-consciousness. She glanced at Anthony, whose usual composed demeanor faltered for only a moment, his eyes lingering on her form with a hint of admiration. Colin's expression mirrored surprise and intrigue, while Benedict's eyes sparkled with curiosity.
"Shall we continue, ladies?" Colin finally broke the spell, recovering his composure and offering his arm to Eloise. Benedict and Anthony swiftly followed suit, extending their arms to Y/N.
Y/N took a deep breath, gathering her composure and allowing herself to bask in the moment. She placed her hand delicately on Anthony's arm, her heart skipping a beat as their eyes briefly met. With a shared understanding between friends, she and Eloise stepped forward, intertwining their lives with the Bridgertons, ready to embrace the onslaught of suitors for the evening.
As they descended the rest of the staircase, the murmurs and whispers of the assembled guests filled the air. Y/N's presence, the epitome of grace and charm, had become a focal point of intrigue and admiration. The ballroom, with its shimmering lights and majestic atmosphere, seemed to come alive with a renewed energy.
The Bridgerton brothers, still captivated by Y/N's presence, exchanged glances, their amazement evident. It was as if a mysterious enchantment had woven itself around Y/N, captivating their attention and piquing their curiosity. Y/N, humbled by the attention, maintained her poise and grace, meeting the gazes of the Bridgerton brothers with a warm smile. In that moment, a silent understanding passed between them—a recognition of the undeniable allure that had drawn them all closer together.
#bridgerton#benedict bridgerton#fanfic#fanfiction#bridgerton netflix#bridgerton fanfiction#colin bridgerton#penelope featherington#slow burn#historical romance#angst#romance#lady whistledown#fanfic writing#benedict#bridgerton family#benedict bridgerton fanfiction#benedict x reader#benedict bridgerton x reader#a bridgerton story#anthony bridgerton#brimsley#queen charlotte spoilers#edwina sharma#agatha danbury#bridgerton spoilers#queen charlotte#queen charlotte netflix#farmer george#violet bridgerton
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endless au edits: the battle of the bands au nobody asked for pt 7
battle of the bands 2024: an honest op-ed
by jeremy elder
the six entries to battle of the bands 2024 have finally been announced. not only will we be seeing sad men in their 30s's favorite new band the chosen, known for their appearance on the netflix reality show 'up & coming,' but also four other groups who desperately wish they were as famous. this includes: ftc, renowned alternative-indie sad-girl trio; kolivition, known for making the music your mom turns off every time she walks into the room; coventry, the punk girl group equivalent of that pinterest quote 'we are the granddaughters of the witches you could not burn'; and let's do this, who... no, that's it. who? anyway, it's not like any of that really matters, because i've yet to mention the smosh reunion, aka the wet dream of every millenial who asks for a veteran's discount after surviving warped tour. a clear favorite to win, smosh is coming in with an army of fans and a near-decade of experience on these guys. good luck to what little competition they have.
in addition, i am thrilled to report that we now know the final lineup of judges. diehard battle of the bands fans - all two of you - will be thrilled to know that rhett mclaughlin and link neal of mythical will be back to judge yet another thrilling year of mediocrity. after winning ten years ago, those guys just won't let go of their glory days. (or maybe it's the other way around. blink twice if you need help, guys.) on the bright side, though, they've also introduced surprise judge jackie uweh. known for being one of the greatest performers of our generation, it will be uweh's first time judging a musical competition. i don't know what she's doing here and i highly suggest that she runs. and runs fast. the three will be the wonderful, charming, and dutifully impartial judges to this year's competition, and definitely will not be just handing it to smosh as a reward for their long-awaited reunion. (because ian hecox definitely wasn't signed onto the mythical label as a solo artist. it's not unfair at all.)
finally, the emcee and host of the event will be newcomer to the rap scene, trevor. if that name doesn't ring any bells for you - don't worry, it doesn't for the rest of us, either. the 24-year-old rapper was apparently responsible for mixing the beats on mythical's latest and edgiest album, which, due to the power of nepotism, made him a natural choice for this year's emcee. known for his "meme rap" (i am being so serious right now), trevor auditioned for the battle of the bands but, fortunately, did not qualify. thus, he will not be competing nor, allegedly, performing. though i have my doubts. i reserve the right to run screaming for the hills the moment they hand him a mic. the soundcloud musician (that's right - don't bother looking him up on spotify, you won't get anywhere) will be hosting the battle of the bands and the series of live shows leading up to it.
what does all this mean? well, it looks like this year is no different from the last, and predictable set-ups have means to predictable ends. nevertheless, i, your faithful and humble local reporter, will be making the trip to la with an all-access backstage pass in hand and reporting on the entire thing from start to finish. no rehearsal, live show, or, most importantly, complete disaster of a finale will escape my sight. rest assured that you have at least one decent and reliable eye witness to the whole fiasco. tomorrow marks my trip down to la - i'll be reporting live from the road. until then, i bid you adieu. may the best smosh - i mean, band - win.
#smosh#smosh au#fic#rpf#edit#mine*#aued*#au#jeremy#patrick#rhett#link#trevor#jackie#botbau#patrick and jeremy were not supposed to be in this! but alas!#jeremy e/lder do not rot my brain challenge level IMPOSSIBLE#long post
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Life drawing
Nude model!reader x art student!Zoro.
Modern AU. Sequel to The art model.
This fic is dedicated to @star-yawnznn.
*****
Zoro grins when, opening the house door, he finds himself face to face with a bag of delicious chocolate cookies, courtesy of your mother's bakery, that you're offering him with your arms raised, like a celebrant sacrificing to the Gods.
"You know, there's no need for you to bring something every time you come; you're already doing me a favour."
You shrug as you walk inside, letting him close the door behind you. "Even though he doesn't put on weight, eating so much can't be good for Luffy's health." you point out "And I know you like them."
"Well, they are good..."
You share a smile as you follow him towards the kitchen (like the rest of the house a spacious room, perfectly clean and tidy) where, without even bothering to ask, Zoro uses the enormous coffee machine on the counter to prepare a drink like he knows you like it.
Six months have passed since your first meeting with Zoro at the East Blue Art School, six months since you accepted his request to pose for him privately at home as well as in Shanks' class - your home, at first, since he needed to keep his interest in drawing and art, not to mention the fact he hasn't stopped attending the school years ago, a secret from his father. Unfortunately, last month your landlord has decided to host his niece in the flat's spare room, while she searches for a more stable accommodation. Even more regrettably, your new, temporary flatmate is an aspiring metal guitarist, who told you she needs to practice at least six hours a day if she wants to join one of the best bands in town, which means the place has not known a moment of silence ever since she put down her luggage, as well as her guitar, in the hallway.
Which is why in the last four weeks you have been the one going to Zoro's, instead of the other way around. It's a temporary solution, you have assured him, feeling guilty for the nuisance even though nothing of it was your fault, and hoping you will soon have the whole flat to yourself once more, even though your landlord's niece has not been as industrious in looking for a new place to stay as she has been in preparing for her musical career. You know how important his drawing classes are to Zoro, but he assured you it wouldn't be a problem: his father, a business broker who also manages a fencing school, has recently landed an important client that keeps him at work every day until late.
And so, your already familiar arrangement has changed, the location of your private modelling session shifting from your flat to Zoro's home. You don't mind - you actually like it, and not just because it allows you to get away from your flatmate's guitar for a while. You like going to Zoro's; you like Zoro himself, you have come to realize, and while you do not yet feel ready to confess your feelings, you enjoy spending time with him, and helping him to improve as an artist.
"How was your day? You had a double shift today, if I'm not mistaken." you point out as you accept the coffee Zoro is offering you, and listen as he tells you about his day at work, at the bookstore owned by his friend Kuina's father "You know, I'd be curious to see the shop one day, after you've told me so much about it..."
"You can come whenever you want; I can give you a discount, if Koushirou is not there." he offers, and winks at you; he's wearing a black shirt that makes the green of his hair stand out even more than usual, his three earrings dangling gently when he moves.
"Well, there was a book I was thinking about buying..."
Chocolate cookies, you both agree, go splendidly with coffee. You enjoy your break in silence, at ease next to each other in the kitchen lit up by the soft sunset glow; according to Luffy, Zoro doesn't make friends easily, and you are pretty proud you are now part of that narrow group - or at least, that he doesn't appear to mind you coming to his house.
"Shall we?" you propose in the end; as much as you enjoy his company, the time at your disposal is limited, since you still have work to do for your classes tomorrow "You want to continue with what we were doing last time? I was lying on one side with a book in my hands..."
"Actually..."
"Yes?"
Suddenly tense, Zoro rubs the back of his head, hesitating for a moment as if not knowing how to broach a delicate subject. "I was wondering if this time we could do something a bit different."
Your sessions with Zoro, whether at his place or yours, usually follow the same pattern. Every two times, he asks you to assume a new pose: standing, sitting (on a kitchen chair, on a stool, on the floor...) or lying on the sofa, sometimes with an object in your hands but usually in a way that allows you to read or review your notes. Once you are comfortable, Zoro makes sure the room is well-lit, places a comfortable chair in front of you, retrieves his sketchbook and pencils from the suitcase he keeps them hidden in together with his art school books to make sure his father doesn't find them, and gets to work, drawing diligently for an hour and a half.
It is, in the end, more or less what happens during your classes at the art school; after all Zoro's drawing sessions are the reason you meet, the reason why he asked you to pose for him. You expected to do the same today as well, just like the many times you have met before; you didn't expect him to propose a change... and, you will reflect later on, you have no idea what this day has in store for you.
"What d'you mean?"
Zoro has turned his back to you, focused on the cups you used for your coffee and that he is now washing in the sink "Well... I was thinking today you could pose like you do in class."
"As in...?"
"Naked, yes. Unless, that... bothers you..."
It shouldn't, of course. After all, you have been an art model for six months, and by now you like to think you are quite good at it, since Shanks no longer needs to correct your posture and you can keep the most uncomfortable pose for a long time without complaining, even though the job is more tiring than it looks and in the end your muscles beg for mercy. Besides the fact that it helps you pay rent (you expected your landlord to lower it until his niece found another place to stay, since your apartment is not fully yours anymore, but the thought must have slipped his mind) and your bills, posing is probably the best job you have ever had.
You enjoy it, a lot, in a way you can't properly explain to someone who has never been in your place, and by now you are completely accustomed to pose naked, like you have done from the very first day. Shanks was right, there is nothing sexual, or inappropriate, in being an art model, nothing you should feel guilt or embarrassment for; if the students look at your breast, it is simply to make sure they are correctly drawing it, which is not always easy, and when a couple of months ago, Nami asked you whether you had put on a little weight (you had, no doubt, because of all the treats your mother brings you back from the bakery!) she assured you she only wanted to know because the shape of your belly and thighs had changed marginally and she really wanted to portray you as faithfully as she could. In the end, for the students it wouldn't make much difference if on the stool at the center of their semicircle Shanks had placed a potted plant or a teddy-bear, instead of asking you to sit there, apart from the fact that the human form has been the most popular art subject since time immemorial, and any artist must be capable to competently reproduce it.
You expected your sessions with Zoro to go the same way, which would have been even easier for you, since you would have been in your own home. Instead, the first time he came to your place he said you could keep your clothes on, because the naked body was harder to draw and he, unfortunately, still had to learn to correctly portray clothed people. He had no preference regarding the clothes you wore, and didn't mind to choose poses that allowed you to read or revise your notes during the sessions.
And now this. You should have imagined he would ask you sooner or later, you relect; Zoro's figure drawings have improved since you started posing for him privately, and by now he must feel capable of moving to something more challenging, which means that it is time for you to take your panties off for him - so to speak.
"Of course, if that makes you... uncomfortable, or if you'd rather have someone present..."
"Of course not; it's... all right." you hurry to answer after a moment of uncertainty; after six months of private sessions you had gotten used to posing with your clothes on, but after all it is nothing you haven't done a hundred times already "I didn't bring my night-gown, though."
Zoro gives you this ("It is clean, I swear.") and invites you to leave your clothes in the bathroom near the living room, while he prepares his things.
"I will be just a minute."
"Take your time. Just..." he hesitates, once more as if unsure of what to say, which strikes you as odd - Zoro is not a blabbermouth, but in six months since you met him you never had the impression he was too shy, or afraid, to say what is on his mind. By now you are, if not exactly friends, at least good acquaintances, and you never had troubles finding something to talk about; why does he seem so awkward all of a sudden? What delicate matter is he afraid to broach...? "Listen, you know I'm Luffy friend, do you?"
Considering that your friend's crew has practically adopted you ever since you started posing for their class, so much that you are routinely invited to hang out with them and they all came to your birthday party two months ago, the question sounds unexpected, and weird, at your ears.
"Of course. Why is that relevant now?"
"Nothing. Just... I'll wait for you here, ok?"
Still a little perplexed, you move to the bathroom, where you leave your clothes in a neat pile and refresh yourself; there is nothing more unpleasant than body odour when one is posing, naked or otherwise. Zoro's night-gown is, predictably, not exactly the right fit for you, which shouldn't be a problem, since you are going to take it off in less than a minute, but wearing it feels strange all the same... intimate, in a way. You had never worn a man's clothes before, or rather, no man had ever given you his clothes to wear, and having Zoro do it, even just to avoid having you walk buck naked around his house...
You chide yourself for those naive, childish thoughts, especially towards a man on whom you can no longer deny having a crush, and whose company you genuinely enjoy; you don't want Zoro to think he made you uncomfortable. You are here to pose for him, and pose for him you will, like the professional model you are; everything else doesn't matter... even though you have to admit, you like being alone with Zoro, having his attention focused on you. A secret, innocent joy you allow yourself to indulge in.
You wash away what is left of the make-up you had applied earlier, before heading to work, remain for a moment still, staring at your reflection and reminding yourself you are an adult and ought to behave accordingly, and then leave the bathroom.
Zoro is preparing your station in the living room, with a lamp near the sofa, on which you have already posed lying many times... after taking off your shoes, and nothing else. His sketchbook and pencils are placed on a little table near his favourite chair, retrieved from their hiding spot in the suitcase; propped against the chair's armrest are Zoro's three swords. He doesn't carry them around when he is at home, but, he told you, he always keeps them close, as if expecting to be attacked at any moment, even in the safety of his own home: it is a not uncommon habit among swordsmen, that his master (and father) accustomed him to since he was a child.
He turns, startled a little, when he hears you approach, and when he sees you wearing his night-gown he seems to have troubles swallowing for a moment. "So, uhm, everything ok?"
You wonder whether he expected you to have troubles taking your clothes off. "Sure. So... how do you want me?" you ask back; then, suddenly realizing how that question, that you must have posed a hundred times before, might sound differently from how you had intended it, you hurry to rephrase: "What pose do you want me to assume?"
Zoro asks you to lie in profile, propped on one elbow, with one leg stretched and the other partially bent towards your belly; the pose is similar to one Shanks asked you to assume for a class at the Art School last month, which leads you to suspect Zoro was not satisfied of his work of that day. He looks away, seemingly embarrassed, when he sees you take off his night-gown, even though he saw you do the same at the school a hundred times already.
You don't find it weird. In fact, it might be because you're doing it in a new place for the first time, but for a moment you feel awkward as well, almost as if that gesture had a different meaning, almost as if it mattered...
The night-gown passes from your hand to his; while your gazes don't meet, your hands brush against each other.
"Thank you."
"Yeah, no problem."
A moment later you are lying on the sofa, easily settling in the same position as a few weeks ago.
"Are you comfortable?" Zoro asks you, and you nod, by now used to the slight inconvenience of an unnatural pose, since no one, especially not at your age, has ever died from a stiff arm or a sore leg, and by now Shanks' class has drawn you in positions that wouldn't be out of place in the experts' section of a yoga manual.
"Yeah, don't worry. Can you take my book from my bag, please? I have an exam next week..."
A minute later Zoro is already sitting at his place, the sketchbook balanced on his knee, the by now familiar whisper of the pencil rubbing on the paper filling the room. As usual you remain still as a statue, face lowered on the pages of your book... even though your eyes keep rising to the young man in front of you; at times your gazes meet, and you could swear Zoro's eyes are smiling even though his expression remains serious.
You like this, you have realized for a while, this weird menage you have built together, the chaste intimacy of posing for a single artist and the innocent flattery of having his full attention focused on you - if only because Zoro wants to makes sure he draws the angle of your shoulder as faithfully as he can. You have no idea how long he will need your help for, or if he will ever decide he can do without your private sessions, but you are determined to enjoy it as long as it lasts, and to pose for him every time he asks you to, even if it means sacrificing the little free time school and work leave you; it is a very unexpected sort of relationship, perhaps an anomalous one, intimate and at the same time strictly professional, but you treasure it all the same. Zoro is not a particularly personable man, you have come to suspect, but you know he is fond of you, and appreciates you as a model and a person.
You can't help wanting more. But at the same time you are happy with what you have, and you hope it lasts.
Zoro draws in complete silence for a while, while you revise two chapters of your book, trying to make sense of your own notes.
"You are not cold?" he asks after a while, and you assure him you are all right; you have already noticed Zoro has turned the heating on, no doubt more for your benefit than his, since you are the one who can't simply put a sweater on if she gets chilly. You'll have to thank him.
"My father knows about you, you know." he adds, almost absentmindedly, and your are immediately alarmed.
"What?! He knows...?"
"Not that you pose for me, and I still attend the East Blue; he... he knows I had a girl over, that's it." Zoro explains, face momentarily hidden behind his sketchbook "Last time... I forgot to wash the coffee cups, and he noticed there was a trace of lipstick on the border of one."
"Oh, God, Zoro, I'm sorry..."
"That's ok." he assures you, while a sudden grin blossoms on his lips "He didn't mind, and I doubt he could ever imagine what we do. He just thought... you know..."
You force yourself not to smile. "... that you have a girlfriend?" you finish for him "And that you had taken advantage of his absence to invite her over?"
"Something like that, yes. I... I didn't correct him, I hope you don't mind."
You don't. "I don't." At all. Another small, innocent pleasure, part of a little fantasy you're probably too old for but that in the end doesn't hurt anyone; and truth to be told, you are happy to help Zoro, since you know how much attending the drawing school means to him. You return your attention to your book, but try as you might you really can't focus, let alone memorize the notions on the page in front of you, your eyes simply skimming the text without retaing any information.
And the fault is his. Well, it is yours, to be honest, since you are by now an expert model, not to mention a veteran student and an adult woman, and you should be able to ignore the presence of a man, no matter how handsome, and concentrate on something as important as an imminent exam. For God's sake, Zoro has never skipped a class at the art school, which means that you have taken off your clothes in front of him two times a week for six months! By now he knows your naked body so well he could draw it by heart, and he does need a model, even though his life drawings have improved, it isn't simply a ruse to... meet you in a more private setting and... and... and why are you fantasizing about that, now?!
Oh, God. You do like him, you realize suddenly, much more than you had imagined or allowed yourself to think until today. He is handsome, and athletic, and he has a beautiful smile, but in six months since you first met you have learnt to know Zoro, and to appreciate and respect him as a man and as a friend as well; you like how protective he is of his friends (and of you, given that time that a drunk man approached you as he was walking you back at the bus stop after a drawing session; Zoro drew the Wado Ichimonji and threatened to amputate any part of his body the man would touch you with) and steadfast in the pursuit of his dream, and kind-hearted towards those who suffer or endure injustice, even though those who know him less well wrongly consider him cold and selfish. You are attracted to him, and while you already enjoy being his model and friend, you do wish your relationship would develop beyond that... you wish to be important for him, to feel his gaze brush against your skin and know he is not simply wondering whether he drew your arm faithfully enough or he should start over.
"Shanks is very pleased with your progress." you mention after a while; unlike what happens during class at the art school, where silence is religiously kept from the beginning to the end of the class, Zoro told you he doesn't mind chatting a bit while he draws, and he is exactly the sort of conversationalist you prefer: no interest in small talk, and has always something interesting to say "I heard him saying that at the end of your last class."
Zoro is pleased, even smug, as he smiles and tilts his head to one side, as if to observe you from a marginally different perspective. "He did say I got better at life drawing, even though I shouldn't focus on that and neglect my other classes."
"I'm sure that won't happen."
"I hope not... and in any case, if I improved I also owe it to you. I haven't forgotten how much you're doing for me, (name)."
"I'm doing nothing, just staying still."
"You know what I mean. I know you'd have many better things to do with your time, and you're not even letting me pay you..."
"Zoro... we are friends." you point out, completely serious; you are now looking straight at him, so engrossed in your conversation to notice you have broken the first, cardinal rule for all art models: never change pose mid-session "You know I could never ask you money. I am happy to help you, since I know how much this matters to you."
Zoro looks at you; he has stopped drawing, even through you couldn't say exactly when. "We weren't friends when you accepted to pose for free."
"No, but you were Luffy's friend, which is equally important. Would you have accepted to be paid, if you were in my place?"
"Maybe I would have."
"No, you wouldn't have."
"No, I wouldn't have." he admits, and smiles at you, and you have never wanted to kiss anyone so much in your life "Anyway, I owe you, truly. Thank you."
You assure him you are happy to be his model, and you really are, so much that you hope your sessions will continue even now that his life drawings have improved; truth to be told, you'll happily spend the evenings of the rest of your life posing for Zoro... unless, of course, one of the two decides, or in your case finds the courage, to ask the other out.
"I think you changed position."
"Yeah, sorry." you admit as you lower your gaze once more.
"No, it's your arm."
"My arm?" you repeat, perplexed, since you hadn't noticed you had moved it "Are you sure?"
"Yes, you moved it when you used your hand to turn the page. Wait..."
Zoro stands, crossing the living room floor in a quick stride until he's keeling in front of the sofa; not looking at you (accurately not looking at you) he lifts your wrist with his fingers and moves your arm a few inches to the left. It's a completely innocent gesture, but you choose that very moment to unthinkingly move on the cushion, searching for a more comfortable position... and inadvertently pressing your chest against Zoro's hand.
His fingers are warm against the skin of your breast, the sensation clear, almost painfully so, despite the contact lasting less than a second. You gasp, more out of surprise than alarm, but that is nothing compared to Zoro's reaction: he jumps, retracting his hand as if he had burned himself, and his face has burst into flames as well, his usually tan complexion turning a bright red.
"Oh my God...!!"
"I'm sorry! I'm so sorry!" Zoro almost shouts; he moves back so quickly he almost trips on his own feet "I didn't do it on purpose, I swear..."
"It's ok; I'm sorry, it was my fault, I moved... in the least appropriate moment." you admit, feeling yourself blush as well; you have never felt so embarrassed, and so naked, in your life, not even during your first session with Shanks' class "Zoro, forgive me, I made you... uncomfortable..."
He sighs, unable to look you in the eyes, his face still bright red as he covers it with his hand, standing five paces from you. "No, the fault is mine. Shanks always says an artist should never approach a model without asking for permission, let alone touch them... especially if they are naked."
He lowers his hand, gazing at it as if he could read his future in the lines of the palm; that is the hand he touched you with.
"I shouldn't have asked you to pose nude; I'm sorry."
"I'm perfectly used to it, as you very well know." you insist, desperately trying to ease the tension.
"Yes, at the school; I thought... it would be different now that you're here..."
Silence falls on the room, and between the two of you, for the first time since you met an uncomfortable, somewhat charged silence that you don't quite know how to interpret... as if you were standing over the edge of a precipice.
"I thought... you wanted to practice drawing clothed people, because it was easier..."
"I did." Zoro admits, as he retreats to his chair; he picks up the scabbard of the Wado Ichimonji, his fingers idly fiddling with the strap "At first. To be honest, I have felt ready to shift to nude drawing for a while, but I didn't want..."
"You didn't want...?"
"Oh, hell!" Zoro exclaims, finally turning to look at you; he seems angry, even though not necessarily at you "I didn't want you to think I wanted to look at you naked! I know you trust me because I'm Luffy's friend, and that posing naked is the rule, but I was afraid you would think that I had... designs on you and would take advantage of our drawing sessions to... to..."
He stops mid-sentence, but he doesn't need to continue; he has said enough, more than enough, to make your heart skip a beat - or four.
"... listen, let's just forget it, all right? You can get dresses, I can start over..."
"And you do?"
"... sorry?"
"You have designs on me?" you quietly ask as you slowly change position once more, sit on the sofa and then stand, only partially using your arm to cover your chest "Not that you would take advantage of me, or try to hurt me in any way; I know you are not that sort of man. But... did you ever consider having me naked in your house, while we are alone, could change things between us?"
"I... I..."
"That something might... develop?"
Zoro's face is still burning; he is stuttering, something almost unimaginable for a usually collected, self-assured man, but it is sweet seeing him like this... and you would lie if you said discovering you can have this effect on him is not exciting.
"I would not blame you for it; the heart has rules of its own, like my mother always says, and it's not like I'm the woman of your best friend or your step-sister. Also, I must confess... I would be flattered. And very happy."
A few more moments of silence follow, as you let Zoro fully grasp the meaning of your words, and he seemingly gives you time to recant them or elaborate with limits and conditions - something you have no intention of doing. You have known Zoro for six months; too little to speak of love, perhaps, or to make plans for the future, but more than enough to know that you like and care for him, sincerely and well beyond his undeniable physical beauty. You want to be more than a model for him... and you want him to do more than simply look at you, studing the shape of your hipbone or the position of your elbow.
Much more.
You are so engrossed in each other neither hears the sound of the house door opening. Zoro turns towards you, delicately placing his sword back against his chair's armrest; he is in full control of himself once more, not smiling and still five paces away, but the intensity of his gaze, the barely controlled desire in his brown eyes, makes you feel as if you could already feel his hands (warm, elegant, used to both wield a sword and hold a pencil, capable of being both gentle and strong) brushing against your skin, caressing it, worshipping...
"Are you sure?" he asks in the end, taking a single step towards you "Because I'd really like to..."
"Zoro, are you home?"
The voice coming from the corridor outside the living room is masculine, refined and more mature than that of the young man in front of you; it expressed a simple question, the tone relaxed and devoid of tension, but both of you react as if a known criminal had just threatened to make the house blow up.
"My father." Zoro whispers, suddenly panicking; he looks back at the chair on which his sketchbook and pencils are still placed, close enough to the door anyone coming into the room would see them for sure. And if that someone is Zoro's father, the man who has no idea he is still attending the art school, years after demanding he withdraw, you don't even want to know what could happen... "Oh, God... cover yourself, quick!"
Zoro quickly grabs his night-gown, that he had left on the back of the sofa, and passes it to you; you take it, look at him, need just half a second to assess your priorities, and throw the night-gown on his chair, where it neatly falls covering his drawing tools.
"What...?"
A moment later the door opens. "Zoro, are you here? I just need... oh."
Until today you had only seen Zoro's father in pictures, like the one of the two of them at the fencing school hanging from the living room's wall, and you doubt Zoro had even told him about you, even just as a friend, at least until his father had noticed a trace of your lipstick on a coffee cup; therefore, this is your first meeting and God, you couldn't imagine a worst possible situation... nor, it must be acknowledged, a more memorable one.
Dracule Mihawk is a tall, very attractive man in his forties, with dark hair, a neatly trimmed bear, and beautiful bird-like eyes that earned him the sobriquet he is mostly known under. Zoro, who deeply respects him even though he still sees the older man more like a mentor and a future adversary than a father, told you he is gifted with an almost preternatural self-control, never letting himself be carried away by his emotions and very rarely reacting with joy, surprise or sadness when something unexpected happens.
You should perhaps be proud of yourself, then, since your presence in his house, and especially your state of undress, leaves the strongest swordsman in the world completely speechless.
"Zoro... what is happening?" he asks in the end, turning to look at his son "Who is this girl? Why is she... oh." he adds after a moment, averting his eyes "I see I'm interrupting."
Zoro quickly steps in front of you, who are staring at your feet as you desperately try to cover your most intimate parts with your hands. "She... she is my friend (name)."
"I see. I'll leave the you alone, I just needed to take some papers. I... apologize for disturbing you."
He nods at Zoro and then at you (who force yourself to reciprocate, fully aware that you must be red as a beetroot), turns, not noticing or perhaps not pay attention to the night-gown on the chair, and leaves, closing the door behind him.
For a whole minute both you and Zoro remain still as statues - or as models posing. "Do you think he suspected something?" you finally ask in a whisper, fearing your quick thinking was not enough to keep Mihawk in the dark. On the other hand, findinga naked girl in his home is technically not something the tutor of a young man should feel suspicious about...
"I... don't think so." Zoro answers slowly as he turns towards you; he is close enough you can feel the warmth of his body on yours, so close you could kiss him without having to move... "You... covered my drawing things instead of yourself."
"I did. Believe me, that was the most embarrassing moment of my life, but... I know how important it is for you to keep attending the art school, and that you don't want to disappoint your father, so I thought..."
Zoro grins as he takes your head in his hands; the purest affection shines in his brown eyes. He kisses you on the forehead and "I just want to make sure everything's all right." he quickly explains "He wouldn't take it out on you, he's not that sort of man, just... give me a minute, ok?"
"Of course. Can I take your night-gown if I hide...?"
"No."
You smile. "All right." you answer, and Zoro winks at you before following Mihawk out of the room. A couple of minutes, and pressing your ear against the door allows you to listen to the conversation between father and son.
"If you wanted to have the house to yourself for an evening you could have told me, Zoro. You're an adult, I would have had nothing against it."
"I know, just... I didn't really expect it to happen. And you're usually not at home at this hour."
"As I said, I had forgotten a few documents I had to look over with my new client. She's the girl you told me about, the one of the lipstick? Is she your girlfriend or...?"
A few moments pass before Zoro's answer; suddenly, you wonder whether he suspects you are listening. "Not yet; but I was planning on asking her tonight."
"Good. I don't mind if she stays the night, but if she doesn't, make sure your friend gets home safely."
Zoro promises he will. A minute later, the house door opens and closes, and soon after, Zoro returns to you, looking relieved but somewhat gloomy.
"Is everything all right?"
"Yeah, just..." Zoro smiles as he takes you in, still completely naked, clearly appreciating the view way beyond simply as a good subject for a portrait, but a moment later he sighs "I... don't like lying to him. I know he never wanted children, but he took good care of me for years; he deserves better."
"You're old enough to decide how to live your life, Zoro. I know your father is a swordsman, and I don't doubt he only wants what's best for you, but what's so wrong with liking to draw?"
Zoro tells you that for people like him and Mihawk, the sword is much more than a hobby or an interest, no matter how passionately one practices it - it is a call, a way of life, a purpose one has to focus all their energies and willpower on, and that leaves no space for anything else. "Truth to be told, the sword is my real passion; as much as I like drawing, that's what I have decided to dedicate my life to, the thing I would choose if I had to pick one. It's just..."
"Just...?"
"My parents could draw. They were illustrators, for books and advertising and other things; they taught me, and then since I liked it, they sent me to the school. I know I'm not as good an artist as I am a swordsman, probably not good enough to earn my living with that, but I do like it, and... and drawing makes me feel close to them. You know, as if they were still with me."
Zoro looks at you, vaguely apologetic as if he felt guilty for ruining the intimate moment you were about to share with his sad musings. You don't mind; if anything, you have discovered a new part of him, the insecure, uncertain heart of a young man torn between his dreams and obligations, between the devotion to his birth parents and the loyalty to the man who has taken care of him. A part of him Zoro probably does his best to keep hidden, because he is that sort of man, but that you have discovered, and you can't help loving it.
"What are you smiling about?" Zoro wonders as he rests his hands on your naked hips, his touch relatively chaste but possessive enough to make you shiver pleasantly.
"I was just thinking how happy I am Luffy convinced me to come pose at the school." you muse "I found a new job I really enjoy, some great new friends, and..."
"... and you met me? Is this what you were going to say?"
"Hmm, perhaps..."
You laugh; Zoro laughs with you. "I'd really like to kiss you now." he murmurs in the end; in the well-lit room, you can see he has blushed, just a little "If that's all right for you, that is."
"Of course it is."
Zoro's lips are hot against yours. You waste no time before kissing him back, messy and awkward at first, but soon your mouths learn to know each other, they find a rhythm to follow and pursue together, a wild, unrestrained dance that you feel already addicted to a minute later, and soon your tongue finds Zoro's in his mouth, and his moan of pleasure reverberates through your body.
"(name)... fuck..."
His hands are still grasping at your hips, his whole body tense; he's still restraining himself, not wanting to take more than you are willing to give, but the time for qualms is over, and you want Zoro to know that while this is not how you expected your relationship to begin, you don't regret it, far from it, and you have never desired anything and anyone like him, and his hands on your skin.
"Touch me, Zoro." you whisper, your lips still pressed against his "Please, I need you to touch me..."
He moans again, fierce and avid and hungry, as he takes your face in his hands and then lets an arm snake around your waist, pressing your body flush against his; Zoro is still clothed, but you can feel the effect your nudity has had on him through the fabric of his jeans. You roll your hips against his erection, just as his free hand descends to squeeze your ass, and you both whimper.
"Let's go to my room." he proposes in a whisper, and you eagerly nod. Zoro quickly retrieves his swords, while you hold his sketchbook and pencils against your chest, then offers you his free hand, and you let him guide you towards the corridor.
"In here."
The room is large but sparsely furnished, which you expected; the bed is the sort with the mattress, covered by a duvet, directly placed on the floor. "Nice." you comment as Zoro, whose hands are shaking slightly, retrieves the suitcase, to hide his drawing tools, from the closet. He turns, and grins - no, he smiles at you.
"I changed the bedding this morning."
"Which has nothing to do with the fact you wanted to ask me to pose naked, I'm sure..."
He doesn't deny it, but he laughs - an unexpected, happy sound that fills your heart with tenderness, and the desire to hear it again. Zoro places his swords next to the bed, to be grabbed at a moment's notice; you want to ask him whether he expects an assault during the night, but a moment later Zoro has started undressing, and it would be physically impossible for you to focus on anything else.
As you expected, he has the body of an athlete, without an ounce of fat, well-muscled shoulders and arms, a flat stomach... and a large scar marring his chest, clearly old but still evident enough to make you pause.
"Oh, God... who did this to you?" you murmur, your fingers brushing against the edge of the wound as you try to imagine how painful it must have been "Was it... during a competition...?"
"Not exactly. It was my father."
"What?! Zoro, he could have killed you!" you cry, appalled; he doesn't deny it, but looks distinctly blasé about it, as he explains he had officially challenged Mihawk, foolishly thinking he had even just a single chance of winning, and his teacher had to show him how tremendously wrong he had been.
"That seems... cruel... I mean, towards any students, and especially his own son..."
Zoro shrugs, as if he really didn't care, or perhaps challenges and duels between swordsmen followed rules you cannot understand. "I'm not saying it was pleasant; but it taught me a lot, and from that day, I have promised myself I would never be defeated again."
"Well, if you're happy..."
Zoro takes your hands in his. For a moment all you can do is look at each other, and while you are the one who had never seen the other naked before, you can see awe, and desire, in the brown eyes of the man who has seen you unclothed a hundred times already. He kisses you once more before accompanying you down on the bed, and from there your hands start moving, hungrily searching, caressing, stimulating, and a sensual symphony of moans fills the air. His lips close around your nipple, and you instantly forget how to breathe; your heart is pounding, a fire burning down in your belly, and you have no words to describe how much you want him, which means that you'll have to show him...
Zoro's erection is beautiful, heavy and proudly erect, soft green hair descending from his navel in a thin strip and surrounding the base; you look at him in the eyes as you play with it, your hand moving up and down around the thick column. Zoro sighs, a lazy and happy smile on his lips, as he bucks his hips. "Oh, God, (name)..."
"You like this?"
"I love this... oh, this is even better than I had imagined..."
He has to ask you to stop after a few minutes, and takes your hand in his. "I don't have anything to put on." he confesses, which startles you a bit.
"Oh."
"I'm sorry, I... never really needed them." he admits, as he rubs the back of his head, like you have already seen him do when embarrassed "I can... go buy some; there's a pharmacy across the street."
You reflect on it for a moment. "No; if you don't mind, I'd like you to stay." you answer in the end as you turn on one side, scooting even closer to him "We can... cuddle, that'd be nice as well."
Your idea is approved. In the next two hours you do much more than simply cuddle, exploring each other's body and exchanging your pleasure; you talk a lot, play, joke, and simply enjoy that intimacy and closeness you both want to experience together. Part of you is deeply disappointed you didn't get to have sex with Zoro, especially given you are almost embarrassingly wet and the touch of his hands is addictive, especially when you see his fingers disappear between your legs, but the evening is lovely all the same, your body and Zoro's locked in an embrace. You didn't revise for your imminent exam like you had planned, but given what you have spent the last two hours doing, you feel physically unable to care.
"I really like you, you know." he whispers in the end; he has found a pizza in the kitchen's freezer and now you're eating together on the bed, still naked like the day you were born, and it may be the company, but you feel as if you had never had a better meal. After all, you did tell him he could buy you a pizza as payment for your posing sessions... "Not just because I think you are beautiful."
There is a spot of tomato sauce on his lip; you smile as you clean it with your thumb. "You do?"
"Of course. And I think you're kind, and generous, and you care about your friends, and... what I'm trying to say..." he sighs, and then mumbles something unintelligible, but you don't mind, because you are confident you know already what he wants, because you heard him talk about it with his father, and you want it as well.
"I'd like that." you answer as you place the empty pizza plate on the floor next to the table and then lay next to him once more; it's not exactly the grand declaration of love you had hoped to receive sooner or later, but it is very Zoro, and because of this it is perfect "I'd like that very much."
"Are you sure?"
"Zoro, I don't know what else I could do to show you I like you as well. Now, I can't stay the night because I have class early tomorrow. What about we cuddle some more before I have to go back?"
Zoro happily takes you in his arms, smiling as you rest your cheek against his shoulder. "You know, a lot of artists are jealous of their models." he mentions, his fingers delicately playing with your hair "So I hope you won't let anyone else draw you, at least like this... and that you'll pose for me again."
"You don't have to worry." you whisper back as you turn in his arms; his hips press against yours, making you shiver pleasantly "I'll be your model, and only yours, as long as you want me to."
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Pride 2024 Specials!
Happy Pride! I’ve got a ton planned for June this year. Starting up, we have special tarot and oracle spreads available in addition to my regular offerings! Some of these readings have limited slots and will only be available during June, so check them out while you can:
PRIDE Inspirational Oracle Reading, $5.00 - Using my custom oracle deck, I will draw two cards for you which will provide an inspirational message from the source of your choice. That can be deities, ancestors, spirits guides, the Universe, or any other source you like. The theme is PRIDE: living authentically, loving yourself, and being proud of who you are.
Inspirational Oracle Reading (Non-Pride Ver.), $5.00 - Using my custom oracle deck, I will draw two cards for you which will provide an inspirational message from the source of your choice.
Six Months Ahead Tarot Reading (Six Cards), $15.00 - This is a six-card spread with one card for each of the next six months. See what's in store for the second half of the year! You'll get a card-by-card breakdown for each month with themes and expectations upcoming months. Only ten slots available.
Six Months Ahead Tarot Reading (Twelve Cards), $25.00 - This is a 12-card spread with two cards for each of the next six months. See what's in store for the second half of the year! You'll get a card-by-card breakdown for each month with themes and expectations upcoming months. Only five slots available.
Six Months Ahead Tarot Reading (Eighteen Cards), $35.00 - This is an 18-card spread with THREE cards for each of the next six months. See what's in store for the second half of the year! You'll get a card-by-card breakdown for each month with themes and expectations upcoming months. Only three slots available.
The inspirational oracle readings will be permanent offerings in my commission listings, but the six-month-ahead readings will only be available until June 30! If you have any questions about any of my commission listings, please feel free to send me an ask, DM, or a message on Ko-Fi.
And stay tuned for more! I have plans for a Pride-themed post about charming pins, flags, and apparel for protection, glamor, and more. Plus, new recipes for the Summer Solstice and a post of tips for hosting witchy gatherings! Lots on the way!
If you’ve read this far, congrats and thanks! You get a special coupon for discounts on commissions and shop purchases: Use code QUEERPRIDE2024-COMMS at checkout for 15% off commissions, and use QUEERPRIDE2024-SHOP for 15% off shop purchases. If you’re a monthly supporter, these coupons will stack with your existing discounts as an extra thank you for your continued support! (: These coupons are only valid through June 8, so consider them early bird specials. (EDIT: I was incorrect!! For whatever reason, the discounts won't stack, which is annoying. I'm instead updating the monthly supporters' discounts so they're 15% more!)
Again, if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out!
#aese speaks#tarot readings#tarot#oracle cards#paid readings#commissions#inspiration#pride 2024#queer witch#shop update
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May- K/S Newsletter!
(You can find the complete post in our newsletter. There is quite a lot of info so I only put the highlights!)
Dear K/S Friends,
Summer is upon us, and we have mail for you! This time our newsletter is dedicated to only two topics, but they are so important that they warrant their own issue.
1. KiScon 2024 – Hotel Reservations:
We are happy to announce that room registration for KiScon is officially OPEN!
Our venue, the Seattle Airport and Conference Center, is now accepting room reservations for KiScon 2024!
Basic Information About The Rooms:
There are two types of rooms available to book.
Rooms with one single king bed have a maximum occupancy of two people. Rooms with two double beds have a maximum occupancy of four people. Our group discounted room rate is $164 per night, plus hotel taxes and fees. Con group rates are good until the room block runs out! (See newsletter for specifics)
2. The KiScon 2024 Art Show & Auction
As KiScon 2024 is a hybrid con with an in-person AND online art show and auction, these traditional and much beloved parts of the convention are more complicated than they were at a purely online or purely in-person event. In the following, we are trying to explain everything as clearly and concisely as we can. Should you still have questions that have not been answered here, please get in touch with us at [email protected].
First things first, the art show and the auction usually have a certain overlap, but you can sell artworks at the auction that are not featured in the art show, and you can submit art to the art show that is not for sale. You do not need to be a registered attendee to submit art to the art show or to the auction!A. The Art Show
The art show aims to showcase a great variety of K/S fanart, trying to convey how rich in talent and creativity our fandom is.
To ensure that both in-person and online attendees can enjoy the show, it will be presented via a slideshow vid that will be accessible online throughout the convention weekend (and afterwards on our website). We will also show it on the big screen during the opening ceremony on Friday night.
In addition there will be space in the Rec Room at the hotel to host a small exhibition and show physical artworks that attendees bring to the convention in person. If you plan to bring physical artworks to the con, please do not forget to submit a photo or scan of it to the art show vid, so that our online members can also marvel at it.
For all submissions to the art show, please use our online form. Deadline: 15 September 2024.
B. The Auction
You do not need to be a registered attendee to offer items in the auction, but only attendees (in-person or online) are able to bid on items.
What is accepted for the auction?
Traditional, physical artworks:paintings, drawings, prints, but also three-dimensional artworks like sculptures, amigurumi, fibre craft, jewellery etc.
Digital artworks or hybrid artworks (e.g. a drawing on paper that you digitally altered afterwards); AI-art is not permitted, without exception. Digital items will be delivered to the buyer as high-resolution files; it is sensible to include clear information what rights the buyer acquires along with the artwork, i.e. what the buyer is allowed to do with the file (e.g. use it as illustration for their fic on the AO3? use it to prettify their website?)
Trek merchandise or collectibles (mugs, T-shirts, plates etc.)
Trek zines (especially rare editions), pro novels (especially hard-to-find ones)
The item must be K/S or K&S or Star Trek in general.
You must be the rightful owner of the item that you offer for sale or have express permission from the owner if you sell it for someone else.
In the case of artworks this means: you do not need to be the artist, but you need to be the current owner of the artwork; the artist’s permission is not needed.
(sorry folks, that's the limit for this post!)
#kiscon#KiScon2024#KiScon 2024#k/s#kirk/spock#spacehusbands#spirk#james t kirk#spock#thyla#my thyla my captain#t'hy'la#star trek tos#star trek aos#star trek snw
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The seductive, science fictional power of spreadsheets
Tomorrow (Apr 30) at 2PM, I’ll be at the San Francisco Public Library with my new book, Red Team Blues, hosted by Annalee Newitz.
This week, John Scalzi was kind enough to let me write a guest-editorial for his Whatever blog about the themes in my new crime technothriller, Red Team Blues; specifically, about the ways that spreadsheets embody the power and the pitfalls of science fiction at its best and worst:
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2023/04/26/the-big-idea-cory-doctorow-2/
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/29/gedankenexperimentwahn/#high-on-your-own-supply
Yes, spreadsheets. Marty Hench (the protagonist of Red Team Blues) is a 67-year-old forensic accountant who specializes in unwinding Silicon Valley financial frauds, a field he basically invented 40 years ago, when, as a PC-struck MIT dropout, he moved from Cambridge to San Francisco to recover the stolen millions hidden in spreadsheets.
Working through this book — and its two sequels, which travel back in time to the 1980s and Marty’s first encounters with VisiCalc and Lotus 1–2–3 — I was struck by the similarities between spreadsheets and science fiction.
While many people use spreadsheets as an overgrown calculator, adding up long columns of numbers, the rise and rise of spreadsheets comes from their use in modeling. Using a spreadsheet, a complex process can be expressed as a series of mathematical operations: we put these inputs into the factory and we get these finished goods. Once the model is built, we can easily test out contrafactuals: what if I add a third shift? What if I bargain harder for discounts on a key component? If I give my workers a productivity-increasing raise, will the profits make up for the costs?
These are the questions that anyone managing a complex system asks themselves all the time. Historically, the answers have sprung from intuition, from fingerspitzengefühl — the “fingertip feeling” of how a system’s components work and what their potential and limitations are. But intuition can calcify, become a rigid set of rules that increasingly diverge from the best strategy.
By contrast, spreadsheets yield a set of crisp, instantly tallied answers to any question you put to them. Change the input and watch as that change ripples through the whole system in an eyeblink. If you’re adding three more people to your camping trip, will the amount of additional water require renting another vehicle? No need to guess: just check and see.
This has a lot in common with science fiction, a genre full of thought experiments that ask Heinlein’s famous three questions:
What if?
If only, and
If this goes on…
These contrafactuals are incredibly useful and important. As critical tools, science fiction’s parables about the future are the best chance we have for resisting the inevitabilism that insists that technology must be used in a certain way, or must exist at all. Science fiction doesn’t just interrogate what the gadget does, but who it does it for and who it does it to:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/20/love-the-machine/#hate-the-factory
One of science fiction’s key methods comes from sf grandmaster Theodore Sturgeon: “ask the next question.” Ask a question, then ask “what happens next?” Do it again, and again, and again:
https://christopher-mckitterick.com/Sturgeon-Campbell/Sturgeon-Q.htm
This technique produces excellent, critical ways of interrogating technological narratives — check out this delightful example of the possible pipeline from self-driving cars to ransomware gangs to mutual aid societies to the reinvention of the train:
https://dduane.tumblr.com/post/715940904747352064/you-can-make-your-mercedes-ev-go-faster-for-60-a
The commonalities between sf and spreadsheets don’t stop there — sf and spreadsheets share pitfalls, too. A spreadsheet is a model and a model is not the thing it models. The map is not the territory. Every time a messy, real-world process is converted to a crisp, mathematical operation, some important qualitative element is lost.
Modeling is an intrinsically lossy operation. That’s why “all models are wrong, but some models are useful.” There is no process so simple that it can be losslessly converted to a model. Even the actions of the nanoscale transistors in a microchip, which toggle between “0” and “1,” are rarely in a state of “no voltage” and “voltage.” That clean, square-wave line that’s used to describe what happens in a chip is a lie — that is to say, it is a model.
The wave isn’t square, it’s a squiggly line that hovers around zero and around one. Under normal circumstances, “zero” and “zero-ish” is a distinction without a difference. But when computers go wrong, it’s sometimes because a sufficiently ambiguous “zero-ish” acts like a “one.” That’s true all the way up the stack. On engineering diagrams, the nanoscale lines that electrons travel along inside a chip are represented as sharp paths, the kind of thing a Tron-cycle would lay down. But in the real world, we get all kinds of weird effects at that scale — electrons sometimes tunnel through those lines, performing a spooky quantum trick that reminds us that Newtononian physics are also just a model.
Every real-world phenomenon contains qualitative and quantitative elements, but computers can only do math on the quantitative parts. This creates a powerful temptation to incinerate the qualitative and perform operations on whatever dubious quantitative residue is left in the crucible, often with disastrous results.
Remember during lockdown, when a pair of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign physicists produced a model of covid spread that predicted that the campus could safely reopen, predicting no more than 500 cases over the entire semester and no more than 100 cases at any one time? The physicists were openly contemptuous of their epidemiologist peers, saying that this kind of model making lacked the “intellectual thrill” of real science.
UI was so swayed by the crisp, precise model that they invited students back to campus — only to shut down again in a matter of weeks, with 780 active cases on campus and more rolling in every day.
The model reduced qualitative factors — like the propensity of undergrads to get drunk, take off their masks, and lick each others’ eyeballs — to a quantitative probability, using the highly precise, scientific technique of taking a wild-ass guess. That guess was wrong. The campus reopening was a super-spreader event.
Any model runs the risk of hiding the irreducible complexity of qualitative factors behind a formula, turning uncertainty into certainty and humility into arrogance.
Think of how we replaced contact tracing with exposure notification. Contact tracing has a qualitative foundation: public health workers establish rapport with infected people, win their trust, and get them to fully enumerate the places they’ve been and the activities they participated in.
By contrast, exposure notification measures whether two Bluetooth radios were within range of each other for a predetermined interval. It substitutes signal strength for a person’s own understanding of their experience. Now, people can be wrong about their own experience — we lose track of time, we misremember emotionally charged events, and so on — but that doesn’t mean we can substitute Bluetooth measurements for personal experience.
That’s why, despite all the clever privacy-preserving math and interesting analysis, exposure notification was a bust, something between a distraction and a false-confidence-generating disaster. Contact tracing ended the 2014 ebola outbreak. Exposure notification just wasted a lot of time:
https://locusmag.com/2021/05/cory-doctorow-qualia/
It’s just too easy to forget which parts of a model are based on guesses and which parts are based on ground truth. And even if you can keep track of those differences, it’s even harder to re-check the model’s ground truth to determine whether the underlying factors have changed. That’s how we got into so much trouble with collateralized debt obligations, which were supposed to be “risk-free” mortgage derivatives that could be safely insured and invested in.
The formulas behind CDO hedging were designed by some of the world’s smartest mathematicians and physicists, who simply assumed that market actors — from loan-originating bank officers to insurance underwriters — would act in reliable, predictable ways. They were so very wrong that they brought the world economy to the brink of ruin:
https://www.wired.com/2009/02/wp-quant/
This is also science fiction’s failure-mode: any science fictional “ask-the-next-question” exercise represents a series of guesses or speculations or maybe possibilities — but when you combine that guesswork with the deceptive certainty that comes from inhabiting a cracking story, it’s easy to mistake “guessing” for “prediction.”
Prediction is hard, especially about the future. The assumptions that go into a prediction are always incomplete, not least because human beings have free will and agency and can change the circumstances that go into the assumptions. The very best science fiction embodies this principle. I’m thinking here of the likes of Ada Palmer, an historian and sf writer whose deep historical knowledge informs her sf and her pedagogy at the University of Chicago:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/10/monopoly-begets-monopoly/#terra-ignota
Palmer is famous — even notorious — for her annual four-week undergraduate LARP in which students re-enact the election of the Medicis’ Pope. It’s four weeks of alliances, betrayal and skullduggery by the students, each of whom is enacting the agenda of a real-world Cardinal or other power-broker.
The final investiture is done in full costume at the university’s massive faux-gothic cathedral, and going into that climax, of the four candidates, two are always the same, because the great forces of history are bearing down on that moment to ensure that the champions of the two dominant power-blocs are in the running. But the other two? They’re never the same — because the agency of the actors jockeying for power change the outcome, every single time, in absolutely unpredictable ways.
Like any other model, sf is wrong, but sometimes useful. Thinking about jetpacks and flying cars is “useful” insofar as it gets us to interrogate how we think about cities, about mobility, about privilege and geography. But it’s not a prediction. Worse, the endless tales in which flying cars are presented a fait accompli is a gift to grifters raising money for the objectively stupid idea of flying cars. After all, we all know flying cars are inevitable, so it’s basically a risk-free investment, right? With flying cars just around the corner, wouldn’t it be irresponsible to build a city with mass-transit instead of helipads?
There’s a whole range of thought-experiments that got transformed into predictions and then certainties: self-driving cars, “general artificial intelligence,” infinite life-extension, space colonization, faster-than-light travel, cryptocurrency, etc etc.
Spreadsheets don’t just lead their users astray — they also trick their creators. The very same people who transform wild-assed guesses about hairy, unknowable outcomes into neat mathematical relationships are perfectly capable of acting as if those relationships are based on fact, rather than supposition. The Great Financial Crisis wasn’t just about people who didn’t understand the uncertainty in the hedging algorithm going all-in — the people who made those models were also fooled by them.
It’s very easy to get high on your own supply. I’ll never forget the sf convention panel I was on with Robert Silverberg about sf’s supposed predictive value, where the subject of Robert A Heinlein came up, and Silverberg sniffed, and, in that trademark bone-dry way of his, said, “Ah yes, ‘Robert A Timeline.’”
Sf isn’t just full of writers who mistake their suppositions for predictions — the canon is full of tales in which brilliant people can and do predict the future, with near-perfection. Think of Hari Seldon, the hero of Asimov’s Foundation series, who is able to forecast the future several millennia out. Or Heinlein’s first-ever story, “Life-Line,” in which a genius inventor destroys the insurance industry by creating a computer that can predict your exact date of death using statistical methods.
There’s something wild about this phenomenon, in which writers make stuff up and then assume that anything that cool must also be accurate. One tantalizing explanation for this comes from EL Doctorow’s (no relation) essay “Genesis,” from his 2007 collection “The Creationists”:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/41520/creationists-by-e-l-doctorow/
Doctorow tells the history of the Genesis story, which the Hebrews plagiarized from the Babylonians. In Doctorow’s telling, the Babylonian mystics who made up the Genesis story assumed that it had to be true, because they considered themselves to be nowhere near imaginative enough to have come up with something as great as Genesis. An idea that amazing had to be divinely inspired.
I like this because it’s a story of being led astray by humility, rather than hubris.
Imaginative exercises — whether or not they are assisted by mathematical models and self-updating digital spreadsheets — are powerful tools for thinking about the future we want, and to guide our attempts to make that future come true. All models are wrong but some models are useful, of course!
I’m on tour with Red Team Blues right now — I’m writing this post while waiting for my flight to San Francisco, where I’m appearing at the public library with Annalee Newitz tomorrow (4/30) at 2PM:
https://sfpl.org/events/2023/04/30/author-cory-doctorow-and-annalee-newitz-conversation-red-team-blues
One especially fun stop on this tour will be on May 5, at the Books, Inc in Mountain View, where I’ll be talking about the book with Mitch Kapor, the creator of Lotus 1–2–3, who knows a thing or two about spreadsheets:
https://www.booksinc.net/event/cory-doctorow-books-inc-mountain-view
The tour is bringing me to Berkeley, Vancouver, Calgary, DC, Gaithersburg, Toronto, PDX, Nottingham, Hay, London, Manchester, Edinburgh and Berlin — I hope to see you!
https://craphound.com/novels/redteamblues/2023/04/26/the-red-team-blues-tour-burbank-sf-pdx-berkeley-yvr-edmonton-gaithersburg-dc-toronto-hay-oxford-nottingham-manchester-london-edinburgh-london-berlin/
Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Mountain View, Berkeley, San Francisco, Portland, Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, DC, Gaithersburg, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!
[Image ID: A Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet with green-on-black, low-res type; its center has an irregular vignette revealing a space station.]
#pluralistic#el doctorow#parables#gedankenexperiments#contrafactuals#qualitative factors#quantization#collateralized debt obligations#cdos#science fiction#false precision#great financial crisis#models#spreadsheets#red team blues#the map is not the territory#warnings#prediction#fingerspitzengefühl
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By: Julian Adorney and Mark Johnson
Published: Jun 10, 2024
There’s a sense that the liberal order is eroding.
What do we mean by that? By “liberal order” we mean three things: political liberalism, economic liberalism, and epistemic liberalism.
Politically, it’s tough to shake the sense that we’re drifting away from our liberal roots. Fringes on both sides are rejecting the liberal principle that all human beings are created equal and that our differences are dwarfed by our shared humanity. On the left, prominent activists are endorsing the idea that people with different immutable characteristics (race, gender, etc.) have different intrinsic worth. For instance, in 2021, Yale University’s Child Study Center hosted a psychiatrist who gave a speech titled, “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind,” where she compared white people to “a demented violent predator who thinks they are a saint or a superhero.” In response to Hamas’ brutal attack on Israeli civilians on October 7, Yale professor Zareena Grewal tweeted, “Settlers are not civilians. This is not hard.” Across the political aisle, Dilbert comic creator Scott Adams called black Americans a “hate group” whom white Americans should “get the hell away from.”
If a core component of political liberalism is that all human beings are created equal, then many prominent voices are pushing us rapidly toward an illiberal worldview where one’s worth is determined by immutable characteristics.
Increasingly, members of both parties seek to change liberal institutions to lock the opposition out of power. Their apparent goal is to undermine a key outcome of political liberalism: a peaceful and regular transfer of power between large and well-represented factions. On the right, prominent Republicans have refused to concede Trump’s loss in 2020, and many are refusing to commit to certifying the 2024 election should Trump lose again. “At the end of the day, the 47th president of the United States will be President Donald Trump,” Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) said in response to repeated questions about whether or not he would accept the election results. On the left, prominent Democrats advocate for abolishing the Electoral College, partly on the grounds that it favors Republicans; and for splitting California into multiple states to gain more blue Senate seats. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Tina Smith (D-MN), among others, have called for expanding the Supreme Court explicitly so they can pack it with Democrats.
This disdain for democratic norms isn’t limited to political elites on right or left; it is permeating the general populace. According to a 2023 poll, only 54 percent of young Americans (aged 18-29) agree with the statement, “Democracy is the greatest form of government.”
Economic liberalism is also under attack. In 2022, Pew found that only 57 percent of the public had a favorable view of capitalism. Those numbers are even worse among young Americans; only 40 percent among those aged 18-29 had a positive view of capitalism. By contrast, 44 percent of the same age group reported having a positive view of socialism. Faced with the choice of which system we should live under, it’s unclear whether young Americans would prefer economic liberalism over the command-and-control systems of socialism or communism. And while young people typically hold more left-of-center views and often become more conservative as they age, the intensity of young peoples’ opposition to capitalism should not be discounted. From 2010 to 2018, a separate Gallup poll found that the number of young Americans (aged 18-29) with a positive view of capitalism dropped by 23 percent.
Epistemic liberalism is on the ropes too. As the Harper’s Letter warned, “The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted.” In recent years, even prominent intellectuals have been terrified of being canceled for daring to write outside of the lines set by a new and predominantly left-wing orthodoxy, adversely affecting out discourse. Again, this disdain for liberalism is more acute among young people: a 2019 survey found that 41 percent of young Americans didn’t believe that the First Amendment should protect hate speech. Furthermore, a full majority (51 percent) of college students considered it “sometimes” or “always acceptable” to “shout down speakers or try to prevent them from talking.”
As Jonathan Rauch argues in The Constitution of Knowledge, a necessary precondition of epistemic liberalism is that everyone should be allowed to speak freely, a precondition increasingly unmet in recent years.
In their book Is Everyone Really Equal?, Robin DiAngelo (of White Fragility fame) and Özlem Sensoy even challenge the foundation of epistemic liberalism itself: the scientific method. This method mandates that hypotheses be tested against reality before acceptance. “Critical Theory developed in part as a response to this presumed infallibility of scientific method,” they write “and raised questions about whose rationality and whose presumed objectivity underlies scientific methods.” Of course, once we jettison the principle that ideas should be tested by holding them up to reality, all we have left are mythologies and accusations. One of the great triumphs of the Enlightenment was giving us the scientific tools to more accurately understand the world, but those tools—like other facets of liberalism—are increasingly under attack.
So, what went wrong? Why do so many Americans, particularly young Americans, harbor such disdain for our liberal order? Why have we seen the rise of widespread social censorship, and why do books telling us that not all humans are created equal become mega-bestsellers? We believe a key reason is that too many proponents of the liberal order (ourselves included) have failed to defend our ideals vigorously. In the face of our complacency, a small but impassioned minority intent on dismantling the pillars of liberalism has been gaining ground, both within institutions and within the hearts and minds of the younger generation.
Why haven’t many of us stood up for our ideas? We posit two reasons. First, there is a sense of complacency: a lot of us look at illiberalism and think, “It can't happen here.” The United States was founded as an essentially liberal country. We were the first country to really seek to embody Enlightenment ideals (however imperfectly) from our birth. Throughout our 250-year history, despite fluctuating levels of government intervention in Americans' social and economic lives, we have never lost our political, economic, or epistemological liberal foundations. This long track record of resilience has led many of us to overlook the rising threat of illiberal ideals, assuming our liberal system is too robust to be torn down.
Adding to this complacency is the fact that many threats to our liberal social contract are largely invisible to those outside educational or academic circles. Cloaked in the guise of combating racism, Critical Race Theory takes aim at the liberal order; however, most people who haven’t been inside the halls of a university in the last 10 or so years may not be aware of this aspect. Critical Theory—including Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, Post-Colonial Theory, and others—generally opposes Enlightenment thinking, but its arguments are wrapped in jargon and mostly live in academic papers. For example, the book Is Everyone Really Equal? criticizes political, economic, and epistemic liberalism, but it’s not a mainstream bestseller; instead, it’s a widely-used textbook for prospective teachers. What begins in the academy often seeps out into schools and eventually permeates the broader society, and many teachers and professors of these ideologies explicitly describe themselves as activists or as scholar-activists whose goal is to turn the next generation onto these ideas. The threat is real, but the more anti-liberal facets of these ideologies aren’t exactly being shouted by CNN, which makes it easy to miss.
Second, as humans, we often abandon our ideals in the face of social pressure. Consider an organization consisting of ten people: one progressive and nine moderates. In 2020, each member starts to hear about Black Lives Matter (BLM). The progressive enthusiastically supports BLM, and loudly encourages his colleagues to do the same. What happens next illustrates how prone we are to jettison our ideals if doing so brings social rewards.
The first moderate faces a choice. He could thoroughly research BLM by investigating police violence nationwide, examining the evidence of systemic racism or system-wide equality, exploring BLM’s proposed program and what they actually advocate for, and making an informed decision about whether or not he supports the organization. But that’s a lot of work for not a lot of return. After all, his job doesn’t require that he understand BLM; the only immediate consequence is his colleague’s opinion of him. Consequently, he engages in what Nobel Prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman calls “substitution.” As Kahneman explains in Thinking, Fast and Slow, “when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.” For example, when participants were asked how much money Exxon should pay for nets to prevent birds from drowning in oil ponds, they did not perform an economic calculation. Instead, what drove their decision-making process was emotion: “the awful image of a helpless bird drowning, its feathers soaked in thick oil.”
Thus, the moderate engages in substitution. Instead of tackling the complex and difficult question “What do I think of BLM?” he asks himself an easier but more emotional question: “How much do I care about black people?” For any decent person, the answer is “quite a lot”—and so he signs on with his progressive colleague. The fact that he’s now supporting an illiberal ideology—one of BLM’s co-founders said in 2019 that “I believe we all have work to do to keep dismantling the organizing principle of this society"—never occurs to him.
When the next moderate is asked the same question about whether he supports BLM, he has the same incentive as his colleague to engage in substitution, but with added social pressure: now two of his nine coworkers support BLM, and he risks losing social capital if he does not. As humans, we are social animals. Sociologist Brooke Harrington explains that we often value others’ perception of us more than our own survival, as social ostracism in our distant past often meant death anyway. As she puts it, “social death is more frightening than physical death.” And so, motivated by the social rewards for supporting BLM and the fear of social punishment if he does not, one coworker after another agrees to support BLM.
Adding to our social calculus is the fact that we all want to be seen as (and, even more importantly, see ourselves as) empathetic. In the example of BLM, we don’t want to be perceived as racists. If this means going along with an organization that says that police “cannot [be] reform[ed]” because they were “born out of slave patrols,” then that’s a small price to pay. This same desire to be seen as empathetic (again, especially by ourselves) holds when we are called to cancel a professor for saying something insensitive, or to condemn cultural appropriation, or to read and praise books and articles claiming that liberalism has failed marginalized people and that a new, totalitarian system is necessary for their salvation.
But why shouldn’t we be complacent? Why shouldn’t we go along to get along, and let our values bend here and there so we can fit in with the new illiberal crowd? One reason is that the stakes are no longer trivial. There is nothing magical about the liberal order that guarantees it will always triumph. History shows us that liberalism can give way to totalitarianism, as it did in Nazi Germany; or to empire, as in ancient Rome. In England, new rules regulate what people are allowed to say, with citizens facing fines or imprisonment for saying something the political establishment does not like. In Canada, a new bill supported by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would criminalize speech that those in power consider hateful. The United States is not immune to these dangers. Our Constitution alone is not a sufficient defense, because laws are downstream from culture. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights can be interpreted by illiberal justices (and have been in the 20th century); and when this happens, our rights can erode very rapidly indeed. Our freedom is sustained not by our geography or even our founding documents, but by our willingness to fight for liberalism—to defend it in the court of public opinion.
If we’re going to preserve the freedoms we cherish, that is what it will take. We must find the courage to stand up for our ideals—to speak and act based on principle alone. We must be open to new evidence that might change our views, but at the same time resist having our minds changed for us. We must prioritize truth over popular opinion.
In essence, we must think and act more like August Landmesser.
[ Source: The Lone German Man Who Refused to Give Hitler the Nazi Salute (businessinsider.com) ]
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About the Authors
Julian Adorney is the founder of Heal the West, a Substack movement dedicated to preserving our liberal social contract. He’s also a writer for the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR). Find him on X: @Julian_Liberty.
Mark Johnson is a trusted advisor and executive coach at Pioneering Leadership and a facilitator and coach at The Undaunted Man. He has over 25 years of experience optimizing people and companies—he writes at The Undaunted Man’s Substack and Universal Principles.
==
Whatever its flaws, every alternative to liberalism is a nightmare.
#Julian Adorney#Mark Johnson#liberalism#liberal values#liberal ethics#liberal society#secularism#secular liberalism#classic liberalism#Enlightenment#Enlightenment values#The Enlightenment#political liberalism#economic liberalism#epistemic liberalism#epistemology#religion is a mental illness
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Headcanons for spending the Christmas period with the Scoobies:
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! ❄️
A/N: I think most main characters are mentioned, so there should be a little something for everyone (You seem to get on with everyone, you’re welcome).
She’s a long one, so it’s below the cut.
Warnings: Alcohol consumption and food mention. Also a bunch of super cheesy holiday cheer (yay).
- Giles is, naturally hosted the big meal
- Nobody had any plans that year and so he just said that his door was open if anybody wanted to come
- But he had enough food planned out for the entire Hellmouth by then
- Xander was the first to agree, Christmas around his place was not what you would call festive
- Xander had taken to insisting you and the others did Christmas activities leading up to Christmas, you couldn’t tell if this was because he wanted to stay clear of his parents or not
- Either way, you always agreed. That night it was baking and assembling gingerbread houses
- His collapsed about twenty times before he gave in
- While you were fixing his and your own, he decided to convince you all to come on Christmas Day
- Willow reminded the room once again that she was Jewish and wouldn’t be celebrating Christmas
- But when Xander decided that it was less a celebration of Christmas and more a way to warm up your holiday blues together, she agreed
- So did you, Buffy and Dawn
- (It was a rare holiday season that had lined up where you were all single and without your family around)
- After finishing the gingerbread houses Buffy called Giles in to get him to judge the best gingerbread house
- When he stopped in front of the leaning tower of gingerbread that had been Xander’s effort everyone’s jaw dropped
- Xander cheered and gloated his way around the room, conveniently forgetting that it was technically your win
- You had done all the hard work after all
- Dawn sulked in the corner for the rest of the evening after not winning the contest
- Later that month, as Giles was still planning what had turned into a five-course meal at this point, you had been surprised by a visit from Angel
- He was surprisingly big on Christmas and had brought Christmas presents early, muttering something about an LA apocalypse between then and the big day
- He was annoyingly good at gift-giving, he’s more of a listener than a talker
- So you knew you had to get him something equally as good
- You had to race to the store that evening, having not even started your gift shopping yet
- You had Tara and Anya with you, bribing them into coming by buying them something at the Espresso Pump
- You had to get gifts for Angel and his team, you knew Cordy the best and you really missed her (and her high standards) so you needed to pick something very good for them
- The crowds were hard to manoeuvre through and Anya kept elbowing people off the sidewalk that wondered into her path
- It was why you had invited her, she was like a battering ram in these kinds of situations
- She also always had a knack for haggling
- You had found some dusty antique books for Angel and she managed to get the price right down for you
- (but she also warned that if you bought her anything discounted for Christmas you would be sorry)
- By the time you were done it was late and you still needed to wrap your presents
- You grin, having an idea
- You called up your friends, inviting them over to your apartment
- For a ‘gift wrapping party’
- Aka a Trick-your-friends-into-helping-you-wrap-presents-party
- Xander brought alcohol and some gifts for Angel’s team he clearly swiped from a gas station on his way to your place
- Willow had already wrapped hers (cos she loved giving gifts, not because she wanted to be involved Christmas) and she had helped with Buffy’s too
- but they both came for the party element
- (and… to help you obviously)
- Tara and Anya were already with you, seemingly in high spirits despite the three of you having to fight your way out of the mall
- You cranked the Christmas music up and everyone got their preferred drinks, some danced while the rest of you wrapped up your presents
- You had even bought Oz a little gift, knowing that Angel would no doubt see him in LA when he was touring
- You had always been close with Oz and you knew that although he wasn’t big on Christmas, you wanted him to know that you thought about him
- Angel ended up crashing, literally having heard your music from across town
- He was a bit hurt that you hadn’t invited him but once you explained why, you swear he smiled at you
- Maybe just for a split second
- But that was a Christmas miracle in itself
- You hugged him and loaded him up with presents for him and his team
- He was really grateful and you all partied through the night
- Angel seemed to relax and so did everyone else
- There were drinking games and a lot of bad singing to Christmas hits
- After recovering from your party and saying bye to Angel (and wishing him good luck for his apocalypse) you all piled round to Giles’ place
- You promised that you would help decorate
-You and Buffy were in charge of the tree
- While Anya, Tara and Xander were hanging paper chains
- (with anya and Xander fighting over the placement)
- Willow had joined Giles in the kitchen, watching the cookies that they had made
- Willow and Tara had been very close at your party the night before
- You decided you needed to do a bit of match-making
- You asked Giles to help you reach the top of the tree, getting him out of the kitchen
- When Buffy saw what you were doing, she instantly understood and winked at you
- Buffy went over to Tara, under the pretence of saving her from being stuck in the middle of another argument with Xander and Anya
- The witch went into the kitchen, unaware that it had been perfectly orchestrated by you and Buffy
- When you heard laughter coming from the kitchen your heart leapt
- You could only hope they were going to be together again
- By the time you were done, the house looked amazing
- Giles thanked you all with festive drinks and freshly baked cookies
- Everyone kept asking you what you wanted for Christmas, you were apparently notoriously hard to buy for
- They all groaned when you told them your only wish was for snow
- Some days, you were such a cliché
- By Christmas Eve, you had all of your presents wrapped and ready to take to Giles’ for the next day
- You had made a short trip to the hospital to visit Faith, none of you had been on the best terms when she was last conscious
- But you wanted her to know that she had someone thinking about her at this time of year
- You knew how lonely she had always been
- You left a Christmas card on her bedside table and replaced the grapes with ones you had freshly bought
- You squeezed her hand and told her she was invited to Christmas dinner the next day if she could hear you
- You ran more errands through the day, it was your favourite time of year so you didn’t mind one bit
- Most of it was ingredients for the ever-growing menu Giles had been
- He had a lot of spare time on his hands and he wanted to make it a good festive celebration for everyone
- You were laden with loads of bags, weaving through gravestones
- It was at this point you realised if any demon came your way you would be a great target
- You would not let go of the bags if your life depended on it, so a vampire could very easily overpower you
- Luckily though, nobody had stopped you
- Perhaps even demons had a little bit of Christmas spirit
- (Or, maybe, they had better things to do)
- You knocked twice on the door of the crypt before you entered
- Spike squinted at you before muttering something to the tombstone next to him
-Harmony removed the lid and popped out to greet you
- You weren’t necessarily close with them, but they liked that you weren’t threatening their lives every time you saw them
- So, they let you off on a lot of things that they wouldn’t with anyone else
- Namely, they let you live despite often walking into the crypt they were living out of uninvited
- “Oh, I’m glad you’re here Harm!” you found yourself saying, much to the room’s surprise (mostly your own)
- You reached into your bag
- (that was much more akin to Santa’s sack by now)
- You handed her a wrapped present, it was a unicorn figurine
- She ripped into it and squealed with excitement
- “Spikey, look! Look! Aw, how cute! I can restart my collection after my horrible minions destroyed the others”
- She pulled you into a bone-crushing hug, whispering ‘oopsie’ when you made a noise that told her she was suffocating you
- “Don’t encourage her, pet, she’s already sending me round the bend about the bloody trinkets” He groaned as Harmony released you
- You were building yourself up to say something to Spike but you weren’t sure how to go about it
- You clutched the (gift wrapped) bottle of spirits in your hand, took a deep breath and tried your best
- “Spike, It’s Christmas and because at Christmas, you tell the truth… I wanted you to know that it wouldn’t be the same if you didn’t come to Giles for Christmas Dinner”
- Spike wasn’t convinced.
-He insisted it was a stupid idea, but he did snatch the liquor-shaped gift you bought him to try and convince him to come
- Honestly, as annoying as he could be, it just wouldn’t be the same without him at the meal
- It was a time to have good-will to all men (…women, people, demons and even vampires)
- So you wanted him to know he was invited
- He nodded at your gift and then gestured towards the black stocking hanging against the corner of one of the nicer tombstones in his crypt
- “Lucky dip” He said, a sparkle in his eye that meant only one thing
- It was some kind of trick
- You shuffled over there anyway, knowing that if you didn’t Harmony could probably bite you from where she was stood
- Having a chunk bitten out of you wouldn’t be the best Christmas present
- You reached in, frowning as you felt around inside the sock
- You retrieved your ‘present’, frowning at the object in your hands
- It was a single, unwrapped lump of coal
- “Uh, thanks… Spike. See you at Giles’ tomorrow”
- It was that or an tangerine, so you had lucked out really
- By Christmas morning, you were super excited
- You had always loved this time of year and you were so grateful to your little Scooby family
- You dressed quickly and made your way to Giles’, catching Dawn and Buffy on their way too
- Dawn hugged you and listed all the cool things that she had received from Buffy and her Mom
- (Joyce was on a trip for the holidays, healthy and promising to make it up to her girls in the new year)
- She liked talking to you because you never appeared to just be humouring her, you seemed genuinely enthusiastic about her new gifts
- Buffy mouthed ‘thank you’ to you and linked her arm with you
- You had never seen her so carefree and you were so glad that there had been no evil plots this Christmas
- When you arrived, Giles was busy in the kitchen but he did greet you over the sound of an electric mixer
- Willow and Tara arrived soon after, holding hands which made you smile
- Xander and Anya had even managed to keep the arguing to a minimum when they sat on the sofa in front of you
- It was so cosy and warm in Giles’ living room
- There was a fire, helped along by the coal you had sourced from Spike
- The tree looked beautiful in the corner and everyone was in a good mood
- You couldn’t remember a time when you and your friends had been so happy
- You laid the table as Xander found something festive on the tv
- Willow and Tara had brought dessert and were discussing the recipe with Anya who was looking into trying human hobbies in the new year
- She was apparently going to start with baking
- You all tucked into the meal, it was so much food but the best you had ever tasted
- Giles had covered every single food group
- After you couldn’t possibly eat any more of Giles’ food, you pulled Christmas crackers that Giles had brought
- You all groaned at the terrible jokes and fought over the colour of the little hats
- It was late afternoon when Spike took you all by surprise and entered the house, slamming the door behind him
- He grunted a greeting and went straight into piling a plate high with food
- You and Xander had to hold Buffy back more than once
- And Tara hid all the sharp wooden objects from the immediate area
- Giles gave you a withering look when he figured out who invited the vampire
- You apologised but convinced him that it was Christmas... which was your excuse for everything at this time of year
- It was lucky they were all so fond of you
- When you asked about why Harmony hadn’t come, Spike snorted almost shooting mashed potato through his nose
- He was on his third plate and it appeared to have a blood-gravy poured over the top which you tried not to think about too much
- “Didn’t want to come. ‘Fraid her archnemesis over there was setting a trap to ‘kill ‘er to death’” He gestured to Buffy who shrugged
- She was still 50/50 on whether or not to stake Spike, stating it would be giving the world a Christmas present
- But after a quick look from you, she rolled her eyes and ripped a turkey leg from the centre of the table
- Later on, you all played party games
- You paired with Giles, hoping that he would let you coast through the trivia questions
- Buffy and Xander were a team
- And Anya had to join with Willow and Tara (who were much more interested in each other than the game – which irritated a very competitive Anya)
- Dawn and Spike joined forces and managed beat you all
- Ending in you all accusing them of cheating
- Although none of you could figure out how they did it
- The argument settled down eventually and you swapped presents
- You all had a lot of fun that year and promised that this would be a new tradition
- Except Spike, who claimed that he would eat you all given half the chance
- You ignored this and focused on all the positive things
- Everyone loved your gifts
- And you got some great things, your friends knew you really well
- But your favourite gift came from Tara and Willow
- They led you outside, whispering under their breath
- You frowned for a moment until you saw it
- The first flakes of snow started to fall around you
- You couldn’t believe it, it never snowed in Sunnydale
- Everyone raced outside, making snowmen and snow angels
- You even had a massive snowball fight, where Spike sulked and went home when he realised he couldn’t even throw snow at you all without getting a headache
- You played in the snow until it the magic started to wear off
-You all went back in and warmed up, watching films together wrapped in blankets until late
- You couldn’t stop yourself grinning as you leaned against one of your friends
- It was the best Christmas you could remember
#btvs#btvs x reader#btvs imagine#Buffy The Vampire Slayer#buffy the vampire slayer imagine#gn#gender neutral#gender neutral reader#Spike btvs#Buffy Summers#Dawn Summers#Rupert Giles#Willow Rosenberg#Angel btvs#ats#ats imagine#ats x reader#x reader#hc#tara maclay#faith lehane#anya jenkins#xander harris#oz#christmas#christmas fic
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Italy 24 Press News
Who is Chris Sanchez, the alleged lover of Meghan Markle is the former bodyguard of Obama and Bush
Monday 28th November 2022 07:49 AM
Christopher Sanchez is the man with whom Meghan Markle allegedly cheated on Prince Harry. For years active in the secret services, he has escorted President Bush and also Obama. Since he was a boy he dreamed of being able to do this job, since in high school he saw for the first time the movie “In the line of fire” where Clint Eastwood was an incredible bodyguard.
Christopher Sanchez, photo from LinkedIn
The name of Christopher Sanchez has now become famous after the gossip spread about the alleged flirtation that sees him involved with Meghan Markle, from which several years of difference separate her, although the precise date of his birth is not known. For years you have been involved in preserving the safety of well-known personalities, including former US President Barack Obama. While maintaining a certain confidentiality about his private life, this is what is known of the man who, according to the American tabloids, would have unleashed the marriage crisis of the Dukes of Sussex.
Who is Chris Sanchez, the bodyguard career
Born in Houston, Texas, Christopher Sanchez is the son of a firefighter and from an early age he developed a strong sense of duty, as well as a desire to do something with his life that was useful to the community. After attending university for a while, he decides to join the police force of his hometown, but after three years of service as a patrol officer in the toughest areas of the city, he decides to change his life and become a bodyguard . The desire to change jobs was already latent in Sanchez, since he watched the movie as a kid “In The Line Of Fire“, where Clint Eastwood played John Malcovich’s bodyguard, he had built the dream of one day joining the secret services.
Speaking on the Always Moving Forward podcast, hosted by ex-British soldier Glen Burton, Sanchez said he applied to a reputable intelligence agency to become a special agent, where he was employed and spent 14 “fantastic” years. In those years he was in the service of George W. Bush and Barack Obama:
I spent five years with the president and was lucky enough to be there during a transition, so I spent the last two and a half years with President Bush and the first two and a half years with President Obama. I was just grateful to be a part of it.
He now appears as vice president of the company Torchstone Global, which deals with security but in the private sector where, he said during the interview, the risk is even higher, because it is necessary to protect even the smallest details of one’s customers. And that’s how Sanchez got to Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle.
Meghan Markle’s alleged flirtation with Chris Sanchez
The indiscretion according to which Christopher Sanchez and Meghan Markle had a flirt was launched by the weekly InTouch, according to which the former actress and the bodyguard would have embarked on a relationship for some timealthough only six months ago he would have started his service as the couple’s agent.
The two would have been caught together by Prince Harrycalled from the school of little Archie who had not been recovered by the Duchess of Sussex at the end of the lessons.
The second son of King Charles III would have already considered the idea of divorcing, after a furious argument between the couple which took place in the luxurious house of Monte Cito, in the presence of Sanchez. No comments, so far, from those directly involved, but if what was declared by the tabloids were true, it would not be only the family of the Dukes that would be shattered, since Christopher Sanchez also has a family with two children behind him
Who is Chris Sanchez, the alleged lover of Meghan Markle is the former bodyguard of Obama and Bushhttps://news.italy24.press/trends/228800.htmlpl
Thank you! I am sure he is at a discounted price….😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
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Pi Day
Pi Day is on March 14, and any day that combines fun, education, and pie is a day worth celebrating! Pi, also known by the Greek letter “π,” is a constant value used in math that represents the ratio of a circumference of a circle to its diameter, which is just about 3.14….15…9265359… (and so on). Not only that, but the fourteenth of March is also Albert Einstein’s birthday, so all together it’s nothing short of a mathematician’s delight.
When is Pi Day 2024?
The beautiful constant pi (π) is celebrated by mathematicians around the world on National Pi Day on March 14.
History of Pi Day
To learn about pi, we need to go back a few thousand years and learn about this elusive number. The value of pi was first calculated by Archimedes of Syracuse (287–212 BC), one of the greatest mathematicians of the ancient world.
However, it was first baptized with the Greek letter as its name when William Oughtred called it as such in his works dating back to 1647, later embraced by the scientific community when Leonhard Euler used the symbol in 1737.
But how did Pi Day end up in a country-wide phenomenon? For that, we need to travel to the Exploratorium in 1988 San Francisco, where it was thought up by physicist Larry Shaw.
Shaw linked March 14 with the first digits of pi (3.14) in order to organize a special day to bond the Exploratorium staff together, where he offered fruit pies and tea to everyone starting at 1:59 pm, the following three digits of the value. A few years later, after Larry’s daughter, Sara, remarked that the special date was also the birthday of Albert Einstein, they started celebrating the life of the world-famous scientist.
Pi Day became an annual Exploratorium tradition that still goes on today, and it didn’t take long for the idea to grow exponentially, hitting a peak on March 12, 2009, when the U.S Congress declared it a national holiday.
Now, celebrated by math geeks all around the circumference of the world, Pi Day became a pop culture phenomenon, with several places partaking in the activities, antics, observations and all the pie eating they can.
Pi Day timeline
March 14, 1988
The Inception
Larry Shaw celebrates Pi Day for the first time.
March 12, 2009
It’s Official
The U.S Congress declared March 14 National Pi Day.
March 14, 2015
Super Pi Day
The first ten digits of pi were achieved on 9:26:53 a.m. (3/14/15/92653)
August 19, 2017
Legacy That Lives
Larry Shaw passes away as Pi Day leaves its mark on pop culture.
Traditions of the day
Pi Day gives math enthusiasts the opportunity to celebrate their love for numbers and the enigma that is the infinite pi.
Since 1988, the day has been celebrated at the San Francisco Exploratorium. The first celebration was organized by Larry Shaw, who worked as a physicist at the center. The staff participated by marching around the exploratorium and consuming fruit pies. This tradition has lived on since. Math lovers talk about math, host get-togethers, and have pi recital competitions. In schools, teachers arrange scavenger hunts, pie bake sales, and even Pi Day workouts to stimulate more interest in learning and practicing mathematics. Those folks who work in food marketing also love to get involved, so keep your eyes peeled for some discounts, deals, and freebies on pies, it’s going to be an extra tasty day.
By the Numbers
14th – of March is also Albert Einstein’s birthday
31.4 million – the world record held by Emma Haruka Iwao for calculating the most accurate value of pi.
4 – the number of months it took Emma Haruka Iwao to calculate the most accurate value of pi.
70,000 – the number of decimal places of pi memorized by Rajveer Meena in 2015.
10 – the number of hours it took Rajveer Meena to make the world record.
3.125 – the original number used for pi by the Babylonians.
22.4 trillion – the number of digits calculated by Swiss scientist Peter Trueb, using a computer.
24 – the number of hard drives on the computer used by Peter Trueb for calculating pi.
700,000 – the number of years it will take to recite the 22 trillion digits of pi.
15,000 – the number of digits of pi memorized by Mark Umile in the U.S.
Pi Day FAQs
Why is pi important?
Pi is very important for calculations in math, engineering, construction, physics and space exploration. Many often consider pi the most important number in all of mathematics.
Which pie should I bake for Pi Day?
Any you’d like. We do not play favorites when pie is concerned. Pies are really simple to make and can be made with several sweet or savory fillings. Apple Pie, Chicken Pot Pie, Pizza pie, be our guest!
Are there any places that give Pi Day deals?
Check restaurants, supermarkets and bakeries over on the Internet for special Pi Day deals. Places like Whole Foods, Boston Market and several pizza chains across the country have special day-long sales.
Pi Day Activities
Enjoy pie of course: Pi is a homophone of pie: the 2 words are pronounced similarly, but are spelled differently and mean different things. Celebrate Pi Day by eating lots of pie! Pizza, cherry, apple, you name it!
Throw a potluck party: Everyone loves to show off their family pie recipe. Make it a potluck and everyone will be inclined to bring their favorite pie to Pi Day, whether it's a pizza pie, a pot pie, a savory pie, or a sweet pie. Make a playlist that features songs like "I Like Pie, I Like Cake" and "American Pie.”
Try making a new pie: Ever tried to make a pie before? Now's your chance to bake your very own. Not into the sweet stuff? Don't worry, there are various savory pie recipes out there so that everyone can enjoy the warm buttery flakiness that comes with a fresh baked pie.
5 Facts About Pi
People compete in memorizing it: Rajveer Meena has the record for memorizing the most decimal places of pi at 70,000.
It’s used as stress tests for computers: Computing pi is a kind of “digital cardiogram” for computers.
A Givenchy men’s cologne is named pi: So you can smell like pi too if you are the intellectual and visionary kind.
It has other names: Pi can also be named “Archimedes’ constant,” or “Ludolph’s number.
It has been used by heroes: Spock foils the evil computer by having it calculate pi’s value in Star Trek’s episode “Wolf in the Fold”
Why We Love Pi Day
Pi is infinitely cool: Pi (π) is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter — and amazingly for all circles of any size, pi will always be the same. Pi is an "irrational number," meaning its exact value is completely unknown. Scientists have calculated billions of digits starting with 3.14159265358979323…, but no recognizable pattern ever emerges. We could continue on and on until infinity and we'd still have no idea what digit might emerge next.
Pi sounds like pie: If you are a nerd that likes pies this holiday is pretty much the best combination of the most interesting things in life: pie and mathematics. And of course that means that in order to celebrate abstract mathematical items that are somewhat irrational the obvious solution is to incorporate pie into the holiday.
Pi links mathematics to the real world: Maybe when you were in math class, you stared off into space wondering why on earth 'logs' or 'proofs' mattered so much. Pi is the answer, well at least, one of the things that links math back to real world uses. Because pi is linked to circles it is also linked to cycles, things like calculating waves, ebb and flow, the oceans tides, electromagnetic waves and much more. In addition, many natural world phenomena can also be calculated with pi — like the shape of rivers, the disc of the sun, the spiral of DNA and even the pupil of an eye.
Source
#Vancouver#Whistler#travel#original photography#vacation#tourist attraction#landmark#cityscape#architecture#public art#summer 2023#Canada#British Columbia#Quesnel#Whitehorse#Houston#Napa Valley#Bend#Pi Day#PiDay#3.14159#14 March#USA
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And Then There Was Her
This is for Writing Workshop Week 2: Paying Attention that is being hosted by @bettsfic on @books
Summary: Lena makes her usual morning walk until she runs into an unfamiliar face
As Lena looks out her window, she sees that it is raining and sighs.
“It has been raining the last month since I have gotten to National City. Whoever said that it never rains in southern California must not have lived here full time.”
She came to National City to escape Lex with his constant manipulation and torture. She just wanted a fresh start outside his overbearing shadow. However, Lena had fallen into the same routine.
As she heads out, she notices the same old things. The gray sky emptying tons of rain on her shoulders prompting her to hurriedly open her red umbrella. As she walks, she sees the mail man trying to hurry from house to house with his parka not doing a good job of protecting him from the elements.
“I am surprised she hasn’t gotten a cold by now,” Lena muttered as she kept on walking.
After she passed the houses, she starts seeing the different businesses around town and her usual fellow commuters. There was the lady in the yellow raincoat and same colored boots walking while looking at her cell phone. She bobs and weaves around the other commuters.
“I still don’t get how she is able to read that thing without bumping into anyone,” said Lena shaking her head.
She hears screaming in the distance. It was the local butcher arguing with his wife again. The screaming always have to do with what the specials of the day are. Today, they were arguing about whether they should have a discount on spare ribs or cow tongue.
Lena shuddered and said, “Whoever thought cow tongue was a good idea?”
She breathes a sigh of relief when she reaches her destination: Noonan's. It was the best breakfast location in the area.
Once she got inside, she quickly got in line. She sees that the same three people are ahead of her today. A man in a blue suite talking on his phone about an upcoming court case, a man listening to his headphones, not really aware of his surroundings, and a young mother trying to wrangle in her toddler while she tries to place her order.
Lena decided to do what she always did when she realized she would have a long wait, read work emails. She was able to complete two by the time she gets to the register.
“Do you want your usual, Lena?”
Lena winced when she heard her name. She didn’t like that the staff had become overly familiar with her to call her by her first name. However, she knew she shouldn’t be surprised since she was in this place every day. Sometimes, she visited twice a day.
Lena sighs and said, “I do want the usual, but I also want to get the cake special that you were offering.”
“Oh, you mean the free birthday cake if you can prove that it is your birthday?
“Yup, that is the one.”
Lena didn’t usually celebrate her birthday. Her family found that sort of thing very trivial. However, this was her first birthday on her own and didn’t have anyone controlling her. She wanted to celebrate her independence and dammit she wanted to do it with cake.
“So, that special was very popular especially since we gave the option to order and verify your birthday online. All of our cakes are sold out for the day.”
“What!”
“I know. We didn’t think the promotion would do this well. We are extending the promotion to tomorrow if you wouldn’t mind waiting until then.”
“It would be too late then,” said Lena softly trying to hold back tears.
“It is always the same. Nothing every goes my way.”
“Actually, she can have my cake.”
Lena turned around and was stunned by who she saw. It was a woman with long wavy blonde hair and bright blue eyes that were unfortunately partly hidden by her glasses. She was wearing a pink wavy dress. The thing that stuck out to Lena was her smile. It could light up the room.
“Oh, I couldn’t take your cake,” stammered Lena.
“What is wrong with me. I never get this tongue tied.”
“It is no trouble at all. I had originally got this for my sister. Her birthday is today. I was supposed to meet her, but her fiancé surprised her with first class tickets to Paris last night, and they will be gone the next two weeks.”
“At least let me compensate you for the cake.”
The woman chuckled. It sounded like music to Lena’s ears.
“Honestly, you would be doing me a favor. Noonan’s cakes are good, but I doubt it will last until my sister gets back.”
The woman handed her over the cake.
“Thank you so much…. What is your name?” stumbled Lena over her words.
“My name is Kara.”
She held out her hand. Lena felt herself blushing.
“Idiot! It is just a simple handshake. Get yourself together!”
“My name is Lena.”
Lena felt her pants vibrating which jolted her out of the conversation.
She answered her phone and snapped, “What!”
“I am sorry Miss Luthor. There was an incident in the lab…”
“Say no more. I will be right there.”
“Of course, the one day I meet someone interesting I can’t stick around.”
Lena looked up sheepishly at Kara and said, “I ummm… have to run….work stuff. I umm… hope I see you around.”
She started blushing hard as she quickly exited the restaurant. She had never met anyone that has made her feel this way before.
“Is this what it feels like to have a crush?”
Lena mulled over that single thought as she walked to her job not realizing until she got there that she walked through the cold rain without an umbrella.
#tumblr writing workshop with betts#dc comics#supergirl#dc universe#kara danvers#lena luthor#supercorp#kara danvers x lena luthor#writers on tumblr#supergirl fanfiction#supergirl fanfic#supercorp fanfiction#supercorp fanfic#dc comics fanfiction#dc comics fanfic#writing prompt#writing#creative writing
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Does anyone want 345 GB of John Oliver? Because I have just spent the last couple of weeks gathering 345 GB of John Oliver, organizing and labeling everything with the original air date and show and episode titles/guest lists (honestly, that took more effort than just downloading it all), and then uploaded it to a Google Drive. A Google Drive where I get the first three months at a discounted rate, so it’ll definitely stay up as long as that. No promises after that, because the price will go up and I don’t think I can afford to pay monthly to maintain that. But I’ll see how it goes. If anyone does get this link and wants to keep what’s in it, definitely download it to your own hard drive because it won’t stay up indefinitely.
I’m not going to post the link publicly for obvious reasons, but if anyone wants this link, you just have to message me. Don’t be shy if we don’t know each other or talk on here or anything, I’m happy to share with anyone who wants it. All I ask is that you don’t share the link publicly either, that makes it more likely that it’ll stay up for as long as I keep paying the fee, at least.
This Google Drive has most things where John Oliver was a main writer and/or creator, and also appeared in it. And then it has a folder for all the acting roles he had after moving to America – so anything where he plays a character, rather than “as self”. And there’s a folder for just everything I could find from pre-move to America – panel show spots (TV and radio, though TV is just Mock the Week), radio stand-up spots, an article he wrote for The Times in 2003, videos I took off YouTube, that stand-up show he did with Andy Zaltzman that they released on The Bugle, that one time when he sat at a desk across the room from Armando Iannucci and read out fake news stories. Three different sitcoms where he appeared in one episode each, for one scene each. One time in 2001, he turned up on a sitcom that starred Ardal O’Hanlon as an alien superhero, but John’s only role was to come in for about one minute and ruin Hugh Dennis’ day. In one episode of a different 2001 sitcom, which starred Thick of It Minister and noted child pornography collector Chris Langham, John's entire role was to fuck with Robert Webb for one scene and then sit in the background of some others, looking at computers from the 90s. Is this something you would like to see? Then send me a message!
Here is a list of things that are not in my Google Drive:
- Any of his “as self” appearances, post-move to America, that aren’t in John Oliver’s own show (one where he was the host, or a writer like on The Daily Show). Interviews and other guest appearances on talk shows or podcasts – gathering all that up would take the rest of my life, so I haven’t bothered.
- Last Week Tonight season 11, after episode 1. As I write this, episode 1 is the only episode that’s out, so of course nothing past there is uploaded. As more episodes come out, I’ll try to add them, but I don’t want to commit to that, so I don’t know how much will go up.
- The stuff I haven't been able to find from his pre-America days. That means the lost section of his "as self" IMDB page, as indicated by my MS Paint yellow circle:
I have all the pre-America stuff on his IMDB page that's not in that yellow circle, so please let me know if you know where to find the lost yellow circle files.
This, which I would say has now become my biggest white whale in terms of lost John Oliver media:
A Radio 4 show from May 2005 in which John Oliver and a runner-up for the Perrier Award in 1987 talk about the election for eight episodes. With writing credits to a young Andy Zaltzman, a young Mark Watson, a slightly less young but younger than he is now Robin Ince, and a guy who was in Chris Addison's sitcom and is married to Margaret Cabourn-Smith. And some people I haven't heard of. I don't hold out a lot of hope for finding a copy of this show, but obviously, if you have a lead, do let me know.
He also did a Radio 4 sitcom about an orchestra with Lucy Montgomery and some people I've never heard of in 2004. I bet it's terrible, I'd love to hear it.
Oh, and John Oliver doesn't actually appear in this but I've heard Andy Zaltzman describe some stuff that Zaltzman and Oliver wrote for Bremner, Bird and Fortune that I've never been able to find.
Other than that, I have most things. Please send me a message if you would like access to that, you can send a non-anonymous ask if you prefer that but it just can't be anonymous because then I can't reply privately.
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—Fics by allwaswell16—
[ 30k - 39k ]
You're the Light (series) [E, 39k, boss/employee, fic post]
Part One: You're the Light [E, 31k, fic post]
Before beginning a new graduate school in the fall, Louis Tomlinson decides to spend the summer working in Chicago as an editor’s assistant for the Chicago Tribune newspaper and staying with his old college roommate. What he finds on his first day of work is a tall, gorgeous editor named Harry who has the most beautiful green eyes he’s ever seen—and who also happens to be his new boss.
Part Two: past our satellites [E, 7k, fic post]
Harry Styles has never been happier in his life. He has his dream job as a photo editor for The Chicago Tribune newspaper, and he’s excited to spend the holidays with his boyfriend, Louis. He may be a little panicked about the prospect of hosting a Christmas Eve dinner for both their families, but nothing will stop him from creating a perfect holiday season for Louis. Not even a difference of opinion about the Chicago Cubs, an allergic reaction to a Christmas tree, a frozen solid turkey, poor knife skills, a vegan guest, smoke alarms, reminders of certain male models, or the missing three little words someone longs to hear.
Or a little holiday story from the 'You’re the Light' universe.
If I Loved You Less [E, 36k, historical, fic post]
Beautiful omega Louis Tomlinson is set to make his come out in London society and determined to find a mate in his first Season. With the help and protection of his oldest friend, Lord Niall Mendes, he takes Society by storm.
Being a wealthy and titled alpha means Lord Harry Styles has grown used to avoiding unmated omegas...until now. This Season he finds himself at every Society event just for a chance to speak with the omega with the flashing blue eyes.
Louis has the aristocracy at his feet and all the suitors he could hope for, but his secrets may ruin his chance at a love match.
Bitter Ends Turn Sweet (series) [E, 34k, kid fic, fic post]
Part One: Bitter Ends Turn Sweet [E, 30k, fic post]
It had been four years since Harry first heard the song his ex wrote about him and far longer since they broke up. He forgave Louis long ago, and now his life was focused on his career, his family, and especially his son, Max. But Louis was back in Chicago, after all this time, and he’s not an easy man to ignore.
Or a songfic inspired by the song Chicago
Part Two: In Time [M, 2k, fic post]
Harry's uncertainty about their relationship began before he ever stepped foot on the plane to Amsterdam.
A prequel/timestamp to the fic Bitter Ends Turn Sweet
Part Three: Yours and Mine [T, 1k, fic post]
Louis goes to the library with his favourite people, his boyfriend Harry and his son, Max.
A Bitter Ends Turns Sweet timestamp
Heart Beat [E, 33k, kid fic, fic post]
Hideaway Haven is the place that Louis has always called home. It's also the place that Harry had tried to leave behind him. When Harry returns to start a music academy in his hometown, he finds himself face to face with his high school crush—and his charming daughter who wants to learn to play the drums.
Only [E, 33k, soulmates, fic post]
Although Louis Tomlinson lived most of his life on the most remote island in the world, now he’s ready to leave home, attend university, and maybe have a chance at finding his soulmate. Prince Harry Styles reluctantly leaves London for yet another diplomatic visit, this time to the tiny island of Tristan da Cunha.
Or the one where the electric touch of Louis’ soulmate isn’t enough to discount that he's a bit of a dickhead.
The Library Universe (series) [E, 33k, library, fic post]
Part One: Staring Across the Room [E, 26k, fic post]
Harry Styles has a great life. He’s a children’s librarian at the New York Public Library, he’s got wonderful friends, and he loves cooking, green tea, yoga, and his collection of bow ties. He doesn’t mind that his life seems a little structured, maybe even a little boring. But when Louis Tomlinson joins the library staff as the new Installation Coordinator, things become a lot less predictable. Louis gets under his skin right from the start, bossing Harry around, making noise during story time, and eating the last cupcake in the staff lounge. Louis may be almost offensively attractive, but Harry will not be succumbing to Louis Tomlinson’s charms, even if the rest of the library staff have.
Part Two: Staring Across Barcelona [E, 7k, fic post]
From his first day working at the New York Public Library, Louis has pushed Harry’s buttons. Now that they’re in love and living together in Harry’s tiny NYC apartment, he pushes his buttons in a much more enjoyable way. Harry is ecstatic to go on their first romantic vacation together to Barcelona to see the sights and all the amazing art. It’s also the perfect time for him to propose to Louis. However, everything may not go quite according to Harry's plans…
A sequel to Staring Across the Room from The Library Universe.
From the Start [E, 32k, fake relationship, fic post]
Louis has no idea that one act of kindness will cause his life to spiral out of control. But that's what happens when his new friend fake proposes to him and a video of it goes viral.
When the Sun Won't Let You Sleep [E, 30k, Antarctica, fic post]
Four years ago, Louis Tomlinson left the UK to live on an Antarctic research station for reasons best left in the past. He’s carved out a life for himself on the ice and has dedicated himself to his research, his friends, and especially the Halley VI research station. He’s less than thrilled when he learns that Harry Styles, a glaciologist from another base who once broke his heart, will be coming to Halley, and he’s definitely unprepared for the upheaval Harry brings with him.
[Back to masterpost]
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Saying thank you over and over will never feel like enough. I cannot be more grateful to everyone who showed up to my subathon event this weekend. What I expcted to be a 1 day event became 3, the max goal of 50 I thought we'd reach with goals for 75 and 100 written as jokes became... well... On Friday you guys hit all the goals and you were still giving subs so I wanted to make more goals so the subs counted towards something and I let you guys in chat decide with me and for some reason you guys wanted merch of my ocs. So we made those extra goals. And we hit them all on Saturday. So we made more goals. And we hit all those on Sunday. So we made more goals. And we hit one more of those on Sunday. And I am blown away. Look at the the original subathon plan compared to what we ended up with. I thought at most we'd get 50 subs, and we ended up with 232!
I kept saying it during the subathon, but I'll keep saying: Thank you all so much. Whether you gave any subs, bits or Ko-Fi donations, whether you chatted or lurked, whether you just came along for the ride, thank you all so much. The majority if not all of this money raised is going into my moving out fund. For those who haven't been on stream I've been trying to get over staying scared and silent and have been opening up about currently living in an unhealthy household with an abusive family member and while I was aiming to move out within the next few years it's becoming apparent I need to get out of here a lot sooner and my current goal is to move out within a year. My Patreon is the majority of my income and thank you so much to my Patrons. As I always say in my Youtube outros if everyone who followed me gave me just £1 a month on Patreon that would help me out so much and allow me to move out and keep making audios, make more content, and make it in a better environment.
I have a lot of work to be getting on with now. We reached certain goals that mean I now have to get to work making keychains of Ambrose and Arden and stickers of all of my audio OCs, as well as art earned by the individual incentives and giveaways. If you qualified for any of the incentives or won any of the giveaways please reach out to me via Twitch, Tumblr, Discord or Twitter so I can get to work making your rewards. The keychains and stickers will be up in my Etsy shop when done and I'll make an announcement for them. If you gave any subs, bits or donations during the subathon event because we reached the 175 subs goal you're all entitled to a discount for my Etsy shop. I will try and reach out to everyone to give them the discount code but if don't receive one from me and you should please reach out to me.
Streams will be back to normal on Friday for more Alice Madness Returns, no stream on Saturday this week but there will be one on Sunday for the 40 sub goal reward as I will be playing Toontown Corporate Clash with chat, teaching anyone the ropes and helping them complete tasks. We've still yet to decide on a date for the Discord community game night but it'll within the next few weeks. My Discord is Patreon exclusive and we have a lot of fun in there. Starting in October I'm hosting watch party nights every week for every other month, meaning we did every week in October and then we'll be doing every week in December. The theme for December's watch parties is 'fairy tales' and we'll be watching musicals and ballets that fit that theme.
As always my Ko-Fi donations, audio and art commissions are open. I have a Patreon and an Etsy shop, and just watching my videos here gives me ad revenue.
Thank you again. I don't know what else to say. These three days of streaming have been the most fun I've had in a long time. Thank you to everyone who came along. I hope to continue creating content for you all. I'm so grateful for your kindness and generosity. ❤️
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Murder Drone Theories
Murder Drones is a series on YouTube made by Glitch productions and Liam Vickers and is currently my favorite series. With the new episode, Cabin Fever, I want to talk about my theories over murder drones. I've got my inspiration from the YouTubers Unhelpful Commentary, Tyromaniac and RemGames.
Many different systems are used to identify drones, murder drones, etc... here are the ones I know of:
Names. The most obvious one is that worker drones have given names to themselves (like Nori Doorman and Thad). I don't think that they had names when the humans were still alive on Copper 9, they probably started using names when quick communication was needed to escape from the disassembly drones and ideas of individuality started to form.
Planet naming. It is known that the planet where the worker drones live is called Copper 9. This name has two parts: "Copper", which refers to a metal and "9", which is a counting number. The full name, Copper 9, might refer to the ninth planet marked for mining copper. A less likely theory is that this is the ninth planet visited by the Copper team.
Worker Drone ID. At the time-stamp 9:19 of Heartbeat, you can see Uzi's teacher playing solitaire. If you look at the bottom-left corner you can see WDID: #2342. This is probably the name that is used for these drones before they were naming themselves. 2342 seems like a low number of worker drones given that at least nine planets have been visited and mined by drones before him. It is more likely to me that this is the 2342th worker drone on the planet Copper 9.
Designation. A murder drones designation consists of two parts: a single letter which is used for communication and a string of 1's and 0's with an x somewhere in the middle which is used for identification. Example are N-0X0010010 and S-010011X01.
Group ID. Each Murder drones group has their own group ID. These are written with the name of the administrator of the group first (like CYN and ISA) and then with four letters for which I don't know the meaning of. Examples of this are CYN-MYKX (with N, J and V) and ISA-MMAC (with S and others I don't know about).
Absolute Solver. The Absolute Solver program uses its own IDs for identifying its host. There are three-digit numbers. Known examples are 676 for J, 048 for Yeva (Doll's mother) and 002 for Nori (Uzi's mother). If Liam Vickers uses the same system as he used for his series Design, then that means that the first digit is used to identify the class. J and possibly all murder drones are then in sixth class, who are drones that are capable of producing poisonous substances, like nanite acid. The drones Yeva and Nori are in the zeroth class, who are known for matter distortion on the molecular level, we can see Doll doing this in episode three where she teleports and makes exact copies of knifes, which she probably got from her mother, Yeva. In episode four it is shown that the bugs also use this method of identifying drones and thus we can conclude that these bugs, or at least some of them, were made for the drones infected with absolute solver.
I think that these were all of them. If I missed one, please tell me.
I want to talk about the bugs a bit because no-one else will. There are robotic bugs that you can see frequently crawling around in various places in the series. Most of them are not cleaned, meaning that removing bugs from a place is part of cleaning a place. As shown in episode four, Cabin Fever, the purpose of some of these bugs are to help drones infected with the absolute solver virus. We can see some kind of emotion from these bugs like being afraid when Doll comes home, being surprised though I can't remember when and being grateful when Uzi repairs one. Further evidence for these emotions is the third option that a bug in episode four gave to Uzi, who was mistaken for 002 (Nori). The choice was to "end my suffering (promo discount expired)". The fact that it mentioned suffering means that the bug is at least capable of that emotion. What we so far know that the bugs can do is crawl on walls floors and ceilings and being able to chat with people. I can't make a good guess for what the purpose is for these bugs or why they exist in the first place.
My second theory is that Cyn has infected N, J and V with Absolute Solver while they were still in the haunted mansion. They were close to humans when becoming AS infected. These humans didn't execute them or used their normal method of getting rid of this infection, but they instead send them to Copper 9 after hearing that humans were wiped from that planet and that there is now no-one there to stop AS from spreading, possibly upon request from JC Jenson in spaaaaacee!!!!
This post is getting too long. Bye!
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They’re Back! Araiso Private High School Student Council Executive Committee Vol. 1 Scene 5
Click here to listen to the track on youtube.
Summary: All's well that ends well. The three new members of the Executive Committee get a taste of the exciting school life they’ve been longing for, even as they impress the old-timers with their efficiency.
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Matsubara (sighs): The Student Council election went off without a hitch.
Ainoura: And we’ve completed the enrollment of the new members for the Executive Committee.
Murota: Thanks to Fujiwara’s quick thinking, we averted a crisis which would have spelled an end to the existence of the Executive Committee.
Fujiwara: Enough with the empty praise already. Even after what I did, you guys are still treating me like a spare.
Tokito: What are you sulking about? How disgusting.
Katsuragi: He’s just depressed because guys with better looks than him have joined the Executive Committee.
Tokito: What’s that supposed to mean? Hey, there’s no need to feel down, Fujiwara.
Fujiwara: Tokito-senpai...! 🤩
Tokito: In the first place, I, the universe’s Number One handsome idol, have always been in the Executive Committee anyway. You’d be Number Three at best.
(Fujiwara gasps in exasperation. A chime, similar to one heard when praying to a picture of the dead displayed on a Buddhist altar, resounds.)
Ainoura: Ah, Fujiwara just dropped dead on the spot.
Matsubara: That reminds me – where are Osamu and his friends?
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Ryuunosuke: Ah, look out, Shuuji! Stop tottering like that!
Shuuji: Why am I being made to carry the heaviest stuff?
Osamu: That’s obvious. It’s because you’re the strongest one among us.
(Someone slides the door open.)
Ryuunosuke: Hey, you old-timers! This is not how you should be treating us!
Kubota: Welcome back.
Shuuji: Damn it! My hands hurt!
(He and the other two drop whatever they are carrying.)
Ainoura: Oh, that’s a lot of stuff. So you’ve been out shopping?
Murota: You’ve brought this many plywood planks too.
Katsuragi: Of course they’ve. From now, we need to prepare the stage props for the Snow Queen play. Everyone, get to work!
(The others comply with sighs of resignation.)
Katsuragi: What about the expenses claim for the material?
Osamu: We found a hardware store, a woodworker and a dressmaker in the neighborhood which offer the required material at low prices. Moreover, since we were buying in bulk, we successfully negotiated for a fifty-percent discount. In the end, we reduced the total cost to approximately sixty-two percent of the budget.
Ainoura (whistles): Well done! Can you put together a detailed statement of the expenses?
Osamu: I’ll have it done in five minutes.
Ryuunosuke: And so, with a small portion of the money we saved, we bought everyone ice-cream!
Tokito: Oh, how thoughtful of you. I’ll have thecrispy chocolate cone!
Shuuji: Ah, that’s unfair of you to go first.
Tokito: Old-timers ought to get the first pick. Isn’t that obvious?
Kubota: Ah.... this one looks delicious – it’s miso ramen flavored. Wanna give it a try?
Osamu: I’d be fine with the rum-and-raisin ice-cream.
Matsubara: The green tea ice-cream’s mine, okay?
Murota: Is the banana-flavored one sweet?
Ainoura: Yay! The chocolate chip ice-cream’s still left.
Fujiwara: W–what about me?
Katsuragi: Hey you guys! Eating is fine, but get on with the work while you’re at it.
Ryuunosuke: Here you go – a strawberry-flavored ice-cream for you, Katsuragi-chan.
Katsuragi: Er, thanks. You’re definitely cut out to be a host, Ryuunosuke. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_and_hostess_clubs#Host_clubs]
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(Sounds of hammering and woodworking.)
Tokito: Still, this place feels cramped now that there’s more of us.
Kubota: It’s become more lively too, so that’s not really a bad thing, is it?
Tokito (laughs): That’s true.
Kubota: I hope that someday, even when we’re no longer here, this place will still be filled with boisterous members working together like this.
Tokito: I’m feeling a bit envious of them.
Kubota: Are you now? If it’s you, no matter when and where, you’ll always be able to enjoy life to the fullest, won’t you?
Tokito (laughs): Naturally. If you doubt that, why don’t you try confirming it yourself?
Kubota: How shall I do that?
Tokito: Just stay by my side and watch me.
Kubota: The whole time?
Tokito: The whole time.
Fujiwara: You two! Don’t get lovey-dovey there!
Shuuji: Eh? What are you talking about?
Katsuragi: It’s nothing. You’ll get used to that sight before very long.
Ryuunosuke: Won’t you help us nail these planks in place, Tokito?
Tokito: Yeah. Leave it to me.
(Someone slides the door open.)
Student: Hey, Executive Committee! The first-years from the soccer club just got into a large-scale brawl at the school entrance!
Ainoura: Ah, and at such a busy time for us too!
Tokito: Right on! Let’s go, Kubo-chan!
Kubota: Okie-dokie.
Ryuunosuke: Wait a minute–
Tokito: Chamu, Tatsu, Shuuji – you guys come along too. [Tatsu: Ryuunosuke’s nickname, likely written with the same kanji as the one for Ryuu.]
Shuuji: Eh?
Matsubara: Nothing beats a hands-on training, does it?
Fujiwara: What about me?
Murota: Odd jobs are worthy undertakings too.
Katsuragi: I don’t mind you guys going off to stop the fight, but come back promptly as soon as you’re done.
Osamu: Give us twenty minutes.
Katsuragi: That’s too much. Fifteen minutes would be more than enough.
Kubota: Well then, let’s start the countdown. (runs off with the other guys)
Ryuunosuke: They’re fast–
Tokito: You guys are slow!
Katsuragi: Good grief. It’s just impossible to find the time to get tired of life while hanging out with you guys.
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(Round brackets): actions and sound effects. [Square brackets]: translator’s notes or clarifications. Double asterisks **: Stuff I am not sure of. Suggestions for improvements and corrections are more than welcome.
#私立荒磯高等学校生徒会執行部#Araiso Private High School Student Council Executive Committee#wild adapter#drama cd#minekura kazuya#translation
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