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mianavs · 3 years

Text

Gezellig

You were the warmth that only another person could give

Kenma x f!reader

a/n: kenma is definitely my comfort character~

wc: 1.8k

It started with an apple pie recipe.

Kenma was editing his latest play-through video for a new video game when the craving for his favorite food creeped up on him again. He considered going to the nearby bakery that sold decent mini apple pies but a glance at the clock on his computer put an end to that idea—it was midnight and the bakery had been closed for three hours.

Normally Kenma would have settled for the day old pastry on his kitchen table but the craving for apple pie had plagued him for a while now. The reason? His neighbor had baked one a couple days ago and Kenma couldn’t stop thinking about the delicious aroma that had seeped through the walls into his unit.

A hasty thought crossed Kenma’s mind and he got up from his gaming chair to wander into the kitchen. He scanned the counters until his eyes landed on the two large apples Kuroo dropped off along with other groceries Kenma let spoil more often than not. The presence of the main ingredient spurred his impulses and Kenma fell back onto his couch as he scrolled through YouTube for an easy apple pie recipe. His perceptive eyes were immediately drawn to the golden crust of the pie on your thumbnail and his fingers clicked on your video without a second thought.

In the end, Kenma never got to making the apple pie and instead binge-watched every video on your ASMR cooking channel until he passed out at five in the morning.

Kenma knew he was obsessed when he turned on the notification bell on your channel. He loved the simplicity of your videos. There wasn’t any cheesy background music or obnoxious text. Your videos were intimate and comforting with the natural sounds of your cooking or baking and the high-quality recordings. More often than not, Kenma found himself unwinding to your content after a stressful meeting with the board members or a difficult gaming session. In fact, the more he watched your videos the more he found himself closing his eyes and imagining himself in your kitchen listening to the sizzling of the sautéing vegetables or the whir of your mixer combining the ingredients of a cake. It wasn’t necessarily hard to do since the layout of your kitchen was very similar to his own.

He should have found it suspicious when his neighbor’s cooking seemed to predict the video you would upload next but Kenma wasn’t one to dwell on unnecessary things like that. So when his neighbor cooked a delicious smelling recipe, Kenma would crave it the next day and ordered it to eat while he watched your nimble hands cook a similar dish.

In the two years Kenma had lived in his unit, he’d never crossed paths with his foodie neighbor. Although considering his line of work, Kenma supposed it wasn’t too surprising. He spent most of his time in his office and only when out when necessary. So when his doorbell rang and it wasn’t Kuroo with groceries or takeout but a young woman with a sheepish look on her face, Kenma froze like a deer in headlights.

“Hi! Umm…I’m your neighbor,” she introduced herself and awkwardly held up a small bowl. “Do you have some salt I can borrow?”

“Uh…yeah, come in.” Kenma replied stepping aside to let her in. There was a softness about her demeaner that drew him in and it wasn’t until her eyes blinked at him in confusion that he realized he’d been staring.

“T-this way.”

As Kenma led his neighbor to the kitchen he wracked his brain for the location of the salt container Kuroo had bought for him to use despite never having cooked a meal in his life. It took a couple of tries flipping through cupboards before he found the large salt container and handed it to his neighbor.

“Thanks!” She accepted it and began pouring some into her bowl. “Y’know your kitchen is a lot like mine but way cleaner!”

“I don’t really use it,” Kenma admitted. “I find it kind of intimidating…cooking.”

“It is at first but it gets easier the more you do it.” She smiled as she handed the salt back to Kenma and he couldn’t help but admire the way her entire face seemed to smile. Her eyes crinkled into crescent moons while the apples of her cheeks framed her gummy smile endearingly.

“I guess that applies to a lot of things.”

“Yes, it really does! I’m a firm believer in practice makes perfect.”

With that she thanked Kenma profusely and apologized for the intrusion before slipping on her shoes and walking out the door. While it may have only been a few minutes, the impression she left on Kenma lasted much longer. He went outside more just so he could run into his nice neighbor who would always strike up a conversation with him about anything. And while he was normally not one for small talk, it never felt forced around her. She had a knack for making even the dullest subject a compelling topic and Kenma quickly looked forward to those moments outside their apartment complex, in front of the convenience store, or outside her unit.

But even those short conversations Kenma has with his neighbor reveal very little about her. So when Kenma gets a notification from your channel and opens YouTube, he drops his phone when your thumbnail picture isn’t food but rather his neighbor that he’d grown fond of. Kenma’s eyes dart to your shared wall as he comes to terms with the fact that his favorite content creator and his pretty neighbor are the same person. It takes a couple of minutes for the initial shock to pass and another twenty minutes for him to play the video in the comfort of his office and with his headset on.

You’re all smiles as you announce a giveaway to celebrate one-hundred thousand subscribers. You introduce each of the five prizes and explain each one in detail. They’re all cooking tools from one of your sponsors that Kenma recognizes from your previous videos. When you’re describing the rules to enter, the similarities between your apartment and his are glaringly obvious now and Kenma can only shake his head in disbelief. The video ends too quickly so he watches it another ten times almost convincing himself that it’s to understand the rules of the giveaway and consider each of the products despite knowing he’d never actually enter.

A week after your giveaway video, Kuroo comes over with food and drinks after a business trip. A meal and a couple of beers later, Kenma opens up to Kuroo about you and the fact that you’re not only his favorite YouTuber but his neighbor as well. The liquid courage spurs him on and Kenma talks about your gorgeous smile, soft-looking hair, and your laugh that goes from a giggle to a cackle within a matter of seconds. Always the observant friend, Kuroo notices the persistent smile on Kenma’s face as he goes on about you and urges his best friend to ask you out on a date. The thought of spending hours with you is enough to get his heart racing but his insecurities never fail to rear their ugly heads and Kenma dismisses the idea as quickly as it comes up.

Kenma drinks even more to drown his insecurities and fantasies of you while Kuroo drinks with him knowing it’s best to support him quietly like this. When the last drop of alcohol is consumed, the two friends are completely drunk and Kuroo crashes in the guest room while Kenma stumbles to his room and collapses on his bed as the world spins around him.

Your image comes to mind but it’s too hazy for Kenma’s liking so he pulls up your giveaway video and watches it for the hundredth time. You’re so happy about your channel’s milestone that Kenma can’t help but smile like a fool as you thank your subscribers profusely. It’s with lowered inhibitions that Kenma is able to scroll to the comment section and write out how much your channel means to him.

The sound of multiple notifications stirs Kenma awake to a terrible hangover. He rubs the sleep from his eyes and focuses on his blindingly bright screen to see what the fuss is about. There’s a message from his publicist asking if he’s okay but before Kenma can reply he gets a notification from your channel; however, it isn’t the typical one that lets him know you’ve uploaded a video. The notification is a heart reaction to a comment and Kenma’s heart is in his mouth as his shaky finger taps on your giveaway video.

He doesn’t have to scroll far to find his comment because it’s the first one with ten thousand likes and three hundred comments to boot. Completely mortified, Kenma reads through the comments that have a wide range of reactions. Some gush about how cute it is for Kodzuken to fanboy over your channel while others express their disappointment that their favorite gamer actually likes cooking ASMR. While they are unnerving, it isn’t the comments that worry Kenma but the little red heart you’d left on his comment.

While he doubts you knew who he was before, this comment and the crazy feedback will definitely pique your interest enough to look him up and find out who he really is. Scared of facing you, Kenma holes himself up in his apartment. To get you out of his mind, he buries himself in work and video game streams and turns off the notifications for your channel.

After a week of not hearing anything from you, Kenma thinks he’s in the clear until one evening he opens his door expecting his takeout only to find you.

You’re a sight for sore eyes and Kenma’s heart hammers in his chest as your eyes soften and you break into a smile. The aroma of cinnamon and apples wafts up to his nostrils and you raise your mitted hands to reveal the same pie that had drawn him to you in the first place.

“Your fans mentioned you like apple pie,” you explain with a chuckle. “And I still owe you for the salt.”

“My…fans?” Kenma asks, still stunned you’re talking to him despite the comment fiasco.

“Yeah, you see I needed a reason to visit my neighbor and ask him out. Luckily, he’s a famous streamer with lots of fans.” Your confidence almost hides flush on your cheeks that deepens the longer Kenma stares at you in shock.

“…Unless you don’t want to go out-“

“I do!” Kenma blurts out. “More than anything.”

Your entire face breaks into a smile. “Well then how about a pie date?”

With a stomach full of butterflies, Kenma lets you into his apartment for the second time only this time he knows what he feels for you and is comforted by the fact that you feel the same way.

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muzaffar1969 · 7 years

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http://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Evan Denmark acted in a lot of high school productions. Looking back, the biggest challenge of his theater career in Sandwich, Massachusetts, wasn’t performing in front of an audience — it was sticking to his scripted lines. He caught himself improvising constantly. Now, as the president of Roadkill Buffet, MIT’s premier improv comedy troupe, the MIT senior has hit his stride.

��Roadkill Buffet is the greatest thing that I have done at MIT,” says Denmark. “It has taught me that you have to be ready for anything. You have to be able to take any suggestion and turn it into something funny and entertaining. And it’s forced me to really think on my feet, all the time. That has kind of transitioned into my life mentality.”

A technique critical for Denmark when he performs improv is “yes, and-ing” — agreeing with and building on the suggestion of his improv partner. “That is kind of a life thing too, just ‘yes and __.’ And trust your partners. Trust people around you to support you, and vice versa,” he explains. Denmark takes this approach with creative projects, research, and international travel, through which he exposes himself to new experiences and often documents them on camera.

Perfecting portraits

Denmark took his first coding class in his first semester at MIT and decided he wanted to be a computer scientist soon after. Now a senior majoring in electrical engineering and computer science, Denmark has focused much of his time on applying computer science to computational photography and computer graphics.

“In the future I want to be an innovator of the visual arts, with respect to technology. To become a technical artist, if you will,” Denmark says. While interning at Pixar Animation Studios last summer, Denmark built tools for modeling artists to use to when creating animations.

“So I wasn’t directly making each frame the movie, but I was allowing for the artist to make the features that you see in the movie. I like to do things like that. I have always liked to draw, and I have always liked to explore in the visual arts. Combining that with computer science is a really powerful, cool, tool,” Denmark says.

Denmark also spends a lot of time building tools at MIT. As part of the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) with Associate Professor Frédo Durand of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Denmark built a tool for detecting the angle of someone’s face, which could be used, for example, in portrait photography.

Depending on the shape of a room or environment, and the pose of a subject, a camera flash can bounce off the surroundings and produce unanticipated shadows, often making for a poor picture. Professional photographers combat this with intuition, pointing their flash a certain way for the light to “bounce” predictably.

Denmark’s tool was part of a larger effort to discern the best lighting for shooting portraits by understanding the space, finding the face, and automatically pointing the bounce flash. One part of the team built a sensor that could detect the geometry of the room. Denmark focused on building a tool that could detect facial orientation. “When you look around the room we can see exactly where your face is looking, so we can point the bounce flash in the correct direction,” he explains.

The project was presented at the 2016 SIGGRAPH conference for computational photography and computer graphics. “Maybe in twenty years, when you have your camera, you could press a button and it would automatically point your flash in a certain direction. Similar to how now on a camera when you hold it down, it autofocuses,” he speculates.

Filming the unfamiliar

When interning at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution the summer after his freshman year, Denmark worked with fellow interns from around the world. After realizing that he had never actually left the Eastern time zone, he came back to MIT determined to travel, and to travel somewhere challenging. He decided to go to India. “I was like, ‘put me out of my comfort zone and make me feel uncomfortable. Challenge me. Let’s go,’” he says. “I think being uncomfortable is pretty exciting.”

Working with the MIT-India program in MIT’s International Science and Technology Inititatives (MISTI), Denmark interned at Infosys, a technical consulting company in Bangalore, the following summer. There he developed a tool for reading text from very poor-quality images.

He also launched his YouTube channel, Grape Soda Pin, a name that comes from one of Denmark’s favorite Pixar movies, “Up.” In the movie, one character gives her more timid husband the cap of a grape soda bottle, mounted on a safety pin, inviting him to join her on future travels and declaring “Adventure is out there!”

“I tried to structure each video on a certain aspect. One was about food, one was about customs in India, one was about an adventure I had the past weekend,” Denmark says about his YouTube videos. “I wanted to focus it on things that were different about India than the United States, in not just a silly way.”

“Once I went to India I got hooked on traveling. I got hooked on this cultural exploration. Then I went to Jordan, because I was like, ‘I want to get part of a region that everyone is talking about, but no one wants to go to. I want to be on the ground, I want to be in the Middle East.’”

For his last Independent Activities Period, Denmark pitched a plan to combine travel with video-making. He returned to Jordan and traveled to Israel to film promotional videos for the Global Teaching Labs. He then journeyed to Nepal to film a short documentary about MIT alumnus Ram Rijal ’12, who founded the Bloom Nepal School in 2013. The school was devastated by the 2015 earthquake and is still in the process of rebuilding.

Denmark met Rijal over Skype several weeks before he left the United States, and began planning some of the aspects he wanted to capture in his video. He spent his first several days in Nepal without pulling out a camera, observing the school, the teachers, and the students. He interviewed and filmed members of the school community, and felt his interview style loosening up over the course of the trip.

“I really learned how to manage and create my own project on a global scale. It is amazing that two years ago, if you asked me to do that, I would have had no idea what to do. It’s amazing what MISTI can do in that sense. At the same time, I became a much better director and filmmaker,” Denmark says.

Eyes open

This semester, Denmark is taking a new D-Lab class, EC.750/EC.785 (Humanitarian Innovation), which focuses on places in the world where humanitarian aid is distributed, such as Syrian refugee camps, and working with people affected by war, conflict, and natural disasters to use innovation and design to improve their lives.

Denmark credits MISTI with opening his eyes to perspectives and problems outside of his experience. “If I didn’t have MISTI, I wouldn’t be taking that class. It has allowed me to see the various problems of the world, a very small fraction of those problems, and now want to be a part of them,” he says. “MISTI has changed my life, really.”

Denmark will return to work at Pixar after he graduates in May. “I am very excited to go back to be in an environment that is really a combination art and tech,” he says. “It’s a pretty unique place. Similar to MIT, at Pixar people are incredibly diverse in the sense of their skills. They do a lot of really cool, different things.”

March 29, 2017 at 09:18AM http://ift.tt/2nfCb6M from Kate Telma | MIT News correspondent http://ift.tt/2nfCb6M

#AI

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