is ctc gay? not trying to be weird i swear i just have needs

I'm gonna say that Countdown to Countdown is queer, but with the caveat that so far it's largely subtext and developing relationship? The comic just hasn't reached that point yet.

Our protag boys Iris and Lillium fit a bunch of ship tropes, and from everything else I've seen from the creator I would be extremely surprised if the boys didn't end up together. I read through it kind of fast so a bunch of it is a blur but I'm fairly certain there's at least some queer side characters just in the world?

I've been following Velinxi (the creator) for a while now before I started reading the comic because I liked her fanarts + art style, and I believe she's queer, but I'm not gonna go digging for proof cause that's weird and I don't remember if she's said anything or if I'm just getting that vibe.

But here's a couple recent-ish pages from the comic, and if this isn't supposed to be like "early burgeoning romantic pair on a gondola date before they part ways for a while" then they've done a very bad job with the like comic composition and focus or whatever lol

*Lillium (taller guy in the suit)'s hair is usually pink but it's been temporarily dyed black for a bit because he's sorta in disguise here

[CN] S2 Victor- Setting Sail On A Journey (Eng Translation)

⌚ Warning: This post contains detailed spoilers for a company project that is yet to be released in the global server! ⌚

✧ NOTE ✧

This post features S2 Victor and MC, but doesn’t contain any spoiler regarding the S2 storyline!

This company project is the continuation of “Right Now Is The Time.” So remember to read that first! (◍•ᴗ•◍)

ー

[ SECTION 1 ]

MC: Goldman has broken his foot?

Didn’t he even excitedly post several mountain climbing videos in his moments two days ago, saying that he has bravely climbed to peak of the mountain? How did he suddenly break his foot?

Victor: He requested for two-week leave of absence. It’s a good time to look for an intern from your show to come at the summit.

Early this morning, I received a call from Victor, saying that there is something he wants to discuss with me. So it actually turns out to be this matter....

When the fifth episode of “Right Now is The Time” is broadcast, the filming of the show will enter its final stage as well.

But in contrast to the huge attention the show is receiving now, the pre-planned filming of the show was clearly a little tame.

If an intern can be allowed to carry out Goldman’s post for filming at the summit, it will indeed be a good content to attract the mass attention.

MC: However, this position is very important. If you let the interns who are shooting in the show to come at the summit, it’d be more or less suspected as a publicity stunt....

MC: Wouldn’t it be harmful for LFG’s professionalism?

Victor is currently taking out a small box of coffee beans from the cupboard. Hearing what I’ve said, he lifts his eyes slightly to glance at me.

Victor: There is no need to think in such complicated ways.

Victor: Whether LFG is professional or not, it’s never reflected through these minor details.

Victor: I’m not worried about the issue at all, so naturally, you don’t need to be worried. What you need to think over is, as far as this design is considered, whether it’s going to be beneficial for the show or not.

Almost as soon as the words leave Victor’s mouth, I immediately step forward, and nod at him vigorously.

MC: It’s beneficial, too beneficial. It’s settled then. I’ll have him arrive on-site immediately!

MC: Oh, by the way, he is that intern who bought medicine for you before. His name is Liu Cheng.

But.... as I finish speaking in one breath, my heart is once again somewhat unable of deciding what to do. Seeing the look of wanting to say something but hesitating on my face, Victor naturally tosses in the question.

Victor: What’s wrong now?

MC: ....He’s been a little out of form lately, and I don’t know if he’d be competent for this job.

MC: His performance has always been very outstanding before.

MC: Whether it’s the proposals, making PPTs or reports, organizing documents or dealing with the suppliers– they are all more professional than the other interns.

MC: But these past two days I’ve observed him, and as long as the camera is pointed at him, his state of nervousness is visible to the unaided eye.

I actually know the reason clearly too: He shone so outstandingly that, he became the most popular intern after the show was broadcast.

Whether it’s a chance encounter with a passer-by on the street, or a breaking out on the new tidbits, he is always being pushed into the trending topics. With the huge attention sweeping over him, an imbalance in mentality is inevitable.

Victor: Any matter is a situation with two sides to it, especially the matter of being in the limelight. You know that best.

Victor: If you’re worried that he won’t be up for the task, you could substitute to someone else.

I subconsciously reject this proposal in my heart.

MC: But in terms of effects of the show, and the degree of professional compatibility, he is the most fitting....

MC: Even if it can’t be as satisfactory as people’s expectations in the end, it will still display the most real effects of the show.

Victor puts down the coffee bean grinder, and nods at me.

Victor: In a while, I’ll get someone to go and work with him.

Victor: At this present stage, he only needs to handle the simple itinerary issues. Many projects involve commercial confidentiality, and it isn’t the time for him yet to get on board. So there is nothing to be worried about.

I give Victor a beaming smile.

MC: Thank you CEO Victor for your support and attention to this show. At the celebration banquet, you’re sitting at the main table~

Victor can’t help but let out a laugh, and then sweeps his eyes on me again.

Victor: Aren’t you going to inform your intern to come over and report?

I stretch out my left hand, glance at my bare wrist, and pretend as though I’m looking at my wrist watch, lightly coughing at Victor in a deadpan tone.

MC: CEO Victor, there is still half an hour left before the LFG employees have to officially get to work....

I wink at him, my gaze falling on his coffee bean grinder.

MC: Not having a cup of coffee together?

◇──◆──◇──◆──◇──◆──

[ SECTION 2 ]

Today is the third day of Liu Cheng’s assignment in his new post, and it’s also an important day for the meeting of the new project.

Aside from Victor, several executives who have their hands in the project are all here.

At this moment, the seats in the conference room are already packed with people. But Liu Cheng, the person in charge for conducting the process, is late.

As I keep waiting at the door for a while, I catch the sight of him trotting all the way over here, and he starts bowing to me even before he reaches in front of me.

Liu Cheng: I’m sorry, I’m sorry sister MC.... I’m late.

Liu Cheng: Is CEO Victor here already? Is he angry?

I pat him on the shoulder, and let him go directly into the conference room.

Although the people sitting inside are executives, but they all have the mutual relationship of co-workers with each other. From the moment they enter through the door it’s all– you’d say one word and I’d say another one. The atmosphere is far from heavy.

But Liu Cheng is clearly intimidated, and he walks straight up to the front burying his head. I can see his face turning blue and pale, and all his limbs appear very stiff and overcautious too.

....He is obviously feeling guilty.

This eye-catching white colored suit and white sneakers of his truly form a stark contrast with the meticulous style inside LFG’s conference room.

Victor is sitting in the first seat on the left side of the conference table. He turns his head to glance towards everyone sitting at the back row, and the sound of chatter that has still been rising and falling just now, promptly dies down.

Everyone sits up straight, loosens the buttons of their suits, and places their hands on the table, preparing to listen seriously.

He turns to look at Liu Cheng again, and motions at him lightly, his face still showing no expression.

Victor: Let’s begin.

Liu Cheng hurriedly nods his head, and begins to explain the first item on the agenda to everyone according the original flow of the meeting.

After the end of the three-hour meeting, I creep up to Victor, and leave the room along with him, following into the corridor while gesturing for the cameraman to catch up.

MC: Isn’t CEO Victor going to evaluate Liu Cheng’s today’s performance?

Seeing that I’ve intentionally brought the cameraman dangling in front of him, Victor casts a helpless expression of “If you want to say something, say it directly.”

MC: The thing is, he actually had a reason for being late today, but it doesn’t really have reasonable grounds.

MC: There is an advertising company who came to our doors, and invited them to shoot a short film for an educational organization.

MC: Liu Cheng has the best appearance, and he’s also the most popular. The client designated him to take on a lot of filming materials alone.

MC: Time was too tight. He was in a hurry to leave, so he didn’t have the time to change his clothes.

While we are talking, Liu Cheng has already caught up to us on large strides, only to stand back and not daring to approach, standing a few steps away from us in a silly daze.

As Victor turns his head to glance at him, he hurriedly runs forward, bowing solemnly at Victor.

Liu Cheng: I’m sorry CEO Victor. I was late for an important meeting, and my outfit wasn’t standard either.

Liu Cheng: I don’t know if the company has a corresponding punishment system. I’m willing to accept it all.... I’ve failed to live up to CEO Victor and sister MC’s trust. I’m very sorry.

Victor remains expressionless as before, seemingly he really hasn’t taken this matter to the heart.

Victor: It’s indeed wrong to be late. Don’t do it another time.

Victor: Remember to send the summary of today’s meeting to my email before getting off work.

Hearing the first sentence “It’s indeed wrong to be late,” Liu Cheng even stifles, face turning red. But upon hearing the next sentence of being asked to do the summary of the meeting, a pleasant surprise immediately spreads across his whole face.

Liu Cheng: Y-y-yes, okay! I’ll go do it at once!

This kind of narrative direction is a very “prominent feature” in variety shows. As such, I give Victor an expression of expectation.

MC: CEO Victor.... mind if I do a very short, very brief, really very short, tiny interview of you?

Victor doesn’t refuse.

◇──◆──◇──◆──◇──◆──

[ SECTION 3 ]

I place Victor onto the sofa in the CEO’s office, and toss the questions directly without any script.

MC: Regarding the topic of Liu Cheng being late today because of an advertisement filming....

MC: CEO Victor, don’t you think it’s a very serious mistake for an intern employee to be late?

MC: Speaking from the point of view of work ethics or from the perspective of time management.

Victor gives the answer almost without thinking.

Victor: He was wrong. Then he recognized that, and I’ve also told him already that it’s not right to be late.

With that said, he points towards the camera again.

Victor: Each one of Liu Cheng’s actions, each one of his words has already been recorded on camera. His strengths will be magnified, and so will be his shortcomings in the same way.

Victor: He knows that he will be facing the criticisms of many people when the show is broadcast, and that also includes the people who now place high hopes on him, and give him unconditional support.

Victor: In my opinion, he has already undertaken all the psychological burdens he ought to be bearing in advance.

Victor: There is no need to say anything more.

When Victor says these words, I can’t help but think of the scene when I’ve discussed this topic with him before.

Carrying the title of CEO of LFG on his head, no matter what he says or what he does, everything will constantly be followed closely by the media, magnifying the views therein infinitely.

Regardless of what decision he makes, someone is bound to find mistakes in the minor details, someone is bound to wait to see him fall on his face, and make a fool of himself.

He simply never cared about these. So much so that, when I am the one feeling grievances on his behalf or taking the initiative on his behalf, he straightforwardly tells me too that I don’t need to. But—

But anyone understands the truth. He is able to put himself in Liu Cheng’s shoes, and consider the time he undertakes the heavy weight of public opinions. What if actually at a certain stage....

Even if it was for a certain moment, a certain instant, he had once also felt the similar feelings?

MC: Victor, do you think that this genre of shows for young people like Liu Cheng who are just out of school, aren’t actually meant to be very good?

Putting them in an environment where they are considered as entertainments, scrutinized, evaluated, supervised and urged on to complete a task under the publics’ gaze– perhaps it’s a consumption for them.

MC: They are still too young after all.

Victor leans forward towards me, and his purposefully slowed down voice seems to be encouraging me about something.

Victor: You’ll have to find the answer to this question for yourself.

Victor: However, according to what I’ve learnt about them in this period of time, they are among the most outstanding of youngsters— Don’t underestimate them.

He stands up and walks forward, but he still meets my gaze out of the corner of his eyes.

Victor: Still having coffee today?

I shift in front of him, and point to the clock on the wall.

MC: It will be the time to get off work in a while. Is CEO Victor going to work overtime to make coffee for me?

MC: How about we owe the coffee in advance, and head straight to dinner, okay?

Victor lowers his eyes to size me up, carrying an expression of whether he may be laughing or not.

Victor: Up to you.

◇──◆──◇──◆──◇──◆──

[ SECTION 4 ]

The following two days, Victor’s schedule is about being a guest at an industry summit forum.

As it goes without saying, every time he attends an event, he is bound to gain a great amount of attention. Nowadays, he even brings the regular on trending topics, Liu Cheng, along with him. Naturally, reporters from all walks of life flock there.

Victor gets out of the car with the usual– strangers do not approach– written on his face, and is invited into the venue, sitting down at the first row of VIP seats. Liu Cheng, however, is stopped by the security guards, and is asked to enter through the audience passageway.

Seeing that Liu Cheng is alone, bunch of young reporters surrounding outside the venue immediately seize the opportunity to ask him all sorts of questions.

Reporter: W-wow! Liu Cheng, you are even more handsome in person compared to the show, and your today’s suit looks very good on you!

Reporter: Is your show still being filmed? Is the filming about to be finished? Are you planning to continue staying at LFG or go straight into the entertainment industry? You can act with that face!

Reporter: Is CEO Victor usually ominous or not? Have you ever been intimidated by him?

Liu Cheng is surrounded by them, and being unable of answering anything either, he busies in casting embarrassing smiles towards me. I hurriedly go over, pull him out of the crowd, and bring him to the venue.

Liu Cheng: ....Thank you sister MC. If I had known earlier.... and were a bit quick-witted, I could have avoided them.

MC: Once you get the hang of it, you will be experienced the next time.

Liu Cheng: Haha, I’m not a celebrity anyway. I won’t be using this kind of experience in the future....

Not long after we sit down, the host comes up on stage, and I see the lights setting off in Liu Cheng’s eyes. The individual presiding over the conference is a very famous, self-media in the finance sector.

Victor deserves to be reckoned as Victor. In the following sessions, regardless of whether it’s a core business magazine, media professionals or industrial scholars– after coming up on stage, they all can’t help but ask—

Does CEO Victor have any view on this topic?

There are several hundreds of audiences off the stage, and the entrepreneurs with the name Victor– you can’t finish counting them all on ten fingers. But when someone calls out “Mr. Victor,” the host knows that he has to give the microphone to Victor.

[ Note: Here, MC actually uses Victor’s family name in Chinese “李” (Li). What she says actually says is— “....entrepreneurs with the surname Li.... But when someone calls out ‘Mr. Li,’ the host knows that he has to give the microphone to Li Zeyan (李泽言).” The same goes for the part where MC says “Victor deserves to be reckoned as Victor” where it’s obviously hinted at the meaning of “Li Zeyan (李泽言).” In case, you are interested, here is an explanation of the meaning: ♡♡ , translated by @wedreamedlove ]

Each time as he waits for Victor to finish speaking, Liu Cheng will applaud frantically, only to clap as his both hands get red through and through. Not only him, but these hundreds of people at the infield will applaud, and the sound is akin to thunder rolls.

Halfway through the conference, Liu Cheng suddenly leans over.

Liu Cheng: Sister MC, the meeting with the advertising company is the day after tomorrow.... I’d rather not go.

He suddenly approaches with such a sentence without head or tail, which makes me react after a long time.

MC: Okay.

Liu Cheng: I’ve though about it. Also work is more important.... and now I’m working together with CEO Victor, not everyone can have this kind of opportunity.

Liu Cheng: Besides— studying business is much more interesting than filming advertisements.

Liu Cheng: I’m still more fond of business.

As he says this, Victor once again picks up the microphone to speak, and everyone all around rises to concentrate their attention, especially Liu Cheng.

I feel that the expression in his eyes as he looks at Victor, is brimmed with unprecedented resoluteness.

Perhaps it’s only me being upset over nothing, that’s all. Victor is right. They shouldn’t be underestimated.

This answer is just right.

◇──◆──◇──◆──◇──◆──

[ SECTION 5 ]

After the filming of the last episode of the show, the photography team withdraws from LFG.

As the master moves the last box of equipment in the car, I turn around and buy two cups of coffee from the coffee shop, and bring them upstairs to Victor.

MC: I’ve been freeloading your coffee for quite a while. Today it’s on me.

Victor: After freeloading for over ten days, giving back just one cup?

MC: ....You’re the CEO. Don’t haggle over every ounce like this.

MC: Oh, by the way, Liu Cheng filmed the last part of the interview today. Wanna know what he said?

Seeing that I’m impatiently wanting to show something, Victor picks up a stack of documents as he sips his coffee.

Victor: I can watch it when the show airs.

MC: He said....

I know he is doing it deliberately. As such, I simply bring a video of the segment in front him– which I’ve recorded, directly facing the center of his line of sight.

MC: “Receiving attention is only an outward appearance. But the reason you’re receiving the attention for is what’s more important.”

MC: “I hope that one day people will be paying attention to me because I’ve made contributions to some extent in my field, and have become a benchmark in the industry.”

MC: “When the moment comes, I will be able to let these attentions display an even bigger impact.”

MC: “And lead these attentions towards more significant fields or focus on more significant products....”

The condition of the audio recording of the video isn’t good, so I read out these words of Liu Cheng to Victor in their original form.

MC: Victor.... you are really great. You haven’t taught him any major principles, but you have made him realize these on his own with your every word and action.

Victor: I didn’t do anything. He was the smart one.

Although Victor only says these words lightly, but his gaze has been resting on the video in my phone all along. I read-out a little bit of gratification and affirmation from this expression of his.

Victor: You’ve filmed the show pretty good this time.

With that said, he hands a folder to me. I open it and take a look at it. It’s an approval from the HR department, which contains all the jobs these interns are about to be assigned to.

Each one of them has received a formal offer, and they are on the verge of taking a step forward, exhibiting their talents within this tremendous business empire of LFG.

Victor: Liu Cheng is the only school student enrollment of the Investment Banking Department this year.

Victor: Everyone speaks very highly of him. You have a pretty good eye in choosing people too.

MC: Of course— This is the best that I’ve tracked down and selected very carefully from thousands of excellent students. It was easy on you!

I put down the folder, and slowly lean closer to Victor.

MC: CEO Victor, I’ve recommended eight people to you at one-time, and all of them are on board. Shouldn’t we settle this “headhunting fee?”

Victor ponders for a while, and then nods to my surprise. He turns on his phone, and I don’t know what he fiddles with– I instantly receive a new email.

— A notification of project approval being granted?

Victor: Your approval has been granted. You can start to prepare for the new project.

MC: ....

Victor: Not worth being happy about?

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, and being left with no better option– I nod at him heavily.

MC: Worth it.... very much worth it. Thanks CEO Victor for your affirmation. As always, I will be troubling you with the next show as well!

Victor laughs as he turns off the computer, and then he gets up to pick up his suit jacket.

Victor: Let’s go, luminous and sparkling gold medal producer.

Victor: It’s time for dinner.

Having returned to my senses, I find that the curtain of night has long since fallen, the french window reflecting the silhouettes of Victor and I.

And outside the window, the white lights of countless office buildings intersect as they echo each other, embellishing the night sky, and gazing into the distant vast sky full of stars accompanying each other.

MC: Mm, let’s go.

◇──◆──◇──

[ EXTRA TIDBITS- Spoiler Warning: ]

On the “coffee” being a running topic in this company project—

Even though it’s a normal happening for the characters in the game to have coffee together, but in Victor’s case— it holds a special meaning. In CH 37 of S1, in the farewell with Victor, MC told him that she will bring him a cup of coffee when she returns.

In S2, CH 1: We have Victor saying it himself that MC always brings him coffee. And we also see how seriously MC takes this gesture (despite the Victor she brings the coffee to, not remembering it now) when she makes a detour only to buy him a cup of coffee.

In the R&S “Seaming the words and thoughts:” [ translated by @ey8508​ ] We see that this has turned into  a very terrible habit.

In CH 10: We see that this habit is still very much thriving.

....Just me casually dropping some angst. :'(

ー

Common Threads - An Orson Krennic AU (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story)

@wltz-bby​ @happyskywhale​

This will be a short series set across a number of parts.

Author’s Note: All credit, and I mean ALL credit, to Harry & Rob @ Stop Making Sense Podcast. They’re real ones!  REAL ones. Thank you both for letting me write such a genius idea!

Basically this all started here on Instagram. And if you want to see where it’s going you’ll want 54:33-61:20 of this! Also please support these guys, they’re so great and so funny! Highly recommended!  While we’ll have no central romance, we know how Krennic is so... there’ll be fleeting mentions of goings on.

Also it wouldn’t be my writing if I didn’t almost lose half of it due to microsoft word complications, would it?

Disclaimer: Star Wars & Rogue One characters places etc all not mine / There’s some call backs to Catalyst but they’re rather small / The idea certainly isn’t mine either in this case / lyrics not mine / I did bring my OCs into this.

Premise: When Krennic is attacked by a band of rebel insurgents and they get away with vital information, the Empire devise a rather unusual punishment...

Words: 3547

Warnings: Slight sexual references / Please don’t look at the timelines too closely / AU

_____ I know what I want And I'ma go and get it, I'm a number one, I know you won't forget it Keep my eyes on the prize, no surprise that I'm lit I be cruisin', you be snoozin' That's why you losin', I'm oozin' Confidence is boomin', boomin'

I ain't worried 'bout nada 'Less it Gucci, 'less it Prada 'Less it Dolce and Gabbana 'Less a trip to the Bahamas I wanna feel like I'm way up Stay lit every single day I wake up I ain't worried 'bout shit, you a parody Ain't no wonder why they all so scared of me I'm a rarity, I got clarity

---

Part 1: Stitched Up. 

The communications device rumbled across the table again, begging to be picked up. This time it annoyed her; she’d managed to ignore it up to now but if it interrupted the meeting one more time she was in danger of being thrown out. She pulled it from the table, glaring. The person on the other end of the line, who clearly needed her desperately, could have only been one of two people – and due to the frequency, she could easily narrow it down to one. Krennic. And if it was her boss, she’d find that highly ironic, considering he’d been the one to tell her how imperative it was she took note of every little thing said here. ‘I don’t want a single detail missed Lieutenant; do you understand me!?’   It continued to buzz on and off feebly in her lap as she listened to the group of commanders drone on and on… but at least it wasn’t disturbing anyone but her anymore. Upon exiting the meeting it rang again, probably for the billionth time, and she answered: “Director.” He seemed a little taken aback that she knew it was definitely him, “What took you so long to pick up!?” “I was in a briefing you told me to go to! And yes, before you ask, I made all your notes. I’ll send you a copy of them right away.” “Well forget about that, I have something far more urgent for you to attend to!” “Sir?” She stilled in the corridor, ready to run in whichever direction he commanded. Krennic’s voice lowered to a hiss, “This is very embarrassing Lieutenant, and I would prefer you kept it discreet. Can you get yourself to my place?” “Yes, Sir.” She waited for a further instruction, yet upon receiving none but “Good, and make it quick, Suraya.” and the click of a terminated communication, she supposed that the only thing to do was board a shuttle to his apartment and pray that his version of urgent was not ‘I need a suit for a ball tonight, and your help to pick one!’ …again. ***

Nothing appeared out of the ordinary when she stepped off the ship, smoothing out her uniform as she did so. Krennic was waiting for her by the door and ushered her in quickly – what could this have been about? Suraya’s question was answered before he’d even closed the door, “Oh… my…” Her eyes traced slowly from floor to wall to ceiling, but there wasn’t a part of his apartment that wasn’t ransacked. “…word.” She finished, not able to think of something better to say. Krennic stepped forward into the room, arms crossed and staring hard at everything before turning to her. “Rebels!” “…Rebels?” Suraya immediately questioned, “In your house? ON Coruscant?” That didn’t make any sense, “They wouldn’t dare!” “Well they did!” He indicated around, then waved her forward, implying she should join him. “How?” “That’s what you’re here for.” “I’m hardly a detective, Director… where were you?” His blue eyes lowered to the floor and he chewed his lip, face a little flushed – she could bet from embarrassment and anger. Therefore his answer was a little mumbled, “Not conscious.” Suraya couldn’t help stifle a laugh which turned his steely gaze on her, “The rebels knocked you out?” She scanned the room again, “Well did they break in, there’s no broken glass or forced entry?” “...No.” Krennic was hesitant, and the lieutenant knew she’d missed something, turning in a complete circle on the balls of her feet, she stopped as she eyed the bed. Bed sheets rumpled and his clothes strewn nonchalantly around, there was no evidence that he’d been with anyone, but Suraya knew better. “Where’s the woman?” “What woman!?” Although there was hesitation in Krennic’s voice again. She quirked an eyebrow as she looked back at him; there wasn’t a planet in the Galaxy that didn’t know about his reputation. Her look was enough to get him to confess. “She was here when I was blindsided, when I came to, nothing!” She doubted this account by the fact that, although Krennic looked fairly unscathed, there was a mark above his eye. He’d likely let them in and would never admit it. He grumbled again, “What kind of woman would just answer the door to the rebellion!?” Or maybe that was it, but Suraya doubted Krennic would have just let anyone else answer his door for him without express permission or command. “Did it occur to you she was a rebel?” The Director nearly laughed at the ridiculousness of the situation, then composed himself. “Nah. I would have known. Anyway, why would she?!” Suraya let her eyes linger on him a little longer than she perhaps ought to; “I dunno, if I got the opportunity to say I’d slept with you, I would. Your reputation does precede you, Director Krennic. Why not take the opportunity to see if the rumours are true?” Krennic flushed but automatically dismissed it, “No. There’s no way. Self-respecting rebels would never-! And I---” She kept her mouth shut for now, and pushed a scoff and a taunt back down where they belonged. “---No. No.” As he began walking across the floor, musing to himself, Suraya traced his footsteps. “Well, what did they take?” “Hm?” “If they’ve overturned everything here, then they were looking for something Director, what have they found? What was here?” “Most of my research is back with Galen at the Eadu facility. I suppose there are a few data packs… but that’s general Weapons Division stuff. And-” Krennic turned quickly, trying to figure out where he’d last seen his personal data pad. He wasn’t about to outwardly look flustered about this though, he’d been in little mishaps before and he’d always come out of them on the right side of things. This was just another one of those, Krennic told himself he had nothing to worry about. Something else was pressing on the lieutenant’s mind as she watched him move around, and Suraya wasn’t thinking as she interrupted him to voice it. “Where’s your cape?” Suraya wasn’t sure he wore it all the time. Did he wear it when he relaxed? There weren’t so many times she’d seen Krennic in civvies or ever had a reason to come over here, unless it was for an early morning pre-meeting briefing; by which time he was usually up and dressed. But he was certainly in his uniform right now – so, where was the most iconic piece of it? Then Krennic really did go red and in his attempt to stutter through a sentence, couldn’t, and had to sit down, running his hands over his face. Then it all clicked; this was what was so urgent. It wasn’t that the rebels had come here, upturned his place, perhaps stolen documents – Krennic was annoyed about that but he wasn’t bothered by it. The information he was about to impart to her was his top concern. “It’s gone.” He managed, muffled slightly behind his hands. Okay, but he had more, right? Krennic wasn’t the type of man to keep one copy of a uniform around, especially when he was so picky about tailoring. Those poor imperial tailors were yelled at if there was even so much as a stitch wrong. She was pretty sure that he’d even stood over their shoulders to watch them remake it after he’d sent it back. “There’s more than just one, isn’t there?” If there wasn’t, he at least had a rainwear version he could substitute until they made him another. Krennic just shook his head, but still wasn’t looking up. Suraya crossed to his wardrobe, pulling it open and immediately seeing the problem. She stepped back with a gasp. By ‘it’s gone’ Krennic didn’t just mean the cape, he meant his entire closet was empty. No uniforms, no finely tailored suits (that he spent who knows how many credits on just so he was on trend), nothing. There was a single note stuck to the inside of the door, which upon reading Suraya found was indeed from the rebellion – but also fairly unrepeatable. She untacked it and walked back to him. “…Well, that’s a story you’ll have to tell Uniform.” “They’ll make my life hell.” He protested, suddenly regretting all the times he’d had them redo his clothing over one stitch, finally taking his head out of his hands and looking up at her, “I can’t leave my house like this!” “At least you have a uniform, Sir.” Was the best she could do, and by the looks of it Krennic also had whatever he’d been wearing last night, so not all was lost. Still, Suraya knew why she’d been called here, “I’ll put an expedited request in for you.” He nodded, and opened his mouth to verbally agree, when there was another sharp knock at his door that demanded both of their attention. “Director Krennic! Open this door at once!” Her heart dropped and Krennic groaned, “This is just what I need!” He stood, turning back to his assistant, “I TOLD you not to say anything.” “I didn’t! It’s not like I knew this had anything to do with the rebels before I got here-!” Suraya would have hit him with her data pad if she thought it would get her anywhere. Krennic swivelled from the door to her and then back to the door, “Then how the hell does Tarkin know!?” Forced to play defensive she held her hands up, and said her next sentence almost hopefully, “We don’t know he does, maybe that’s not what he’s here for!” ***  Krennic took the deepest of deep breaths as he cracked the door open, leaving Suraya to stand to attention on one side of the room, data pad behind her back keeping it dead straight, a trick she’d learned was pretty useful as a cadet. “Governor Tarkin, how may I assist you?” “Let us in, Director, my day is very busy and I don’t have time for this, particularly.” Tarkin was curt as ever, it didn’t help Orson’s mood. “Time for what?” Clearly Krennic’s feign of ignorance wasn’t making him friends. “Oh, out of the way, Krennic! We spotted some Rebel insurgents leaving atmosphere and on breaking down the contrails of their craft and fuel particles in the atmosphere, it appears they came from your apartment. Now I don’t wish to accuse you of treason, but if you want to confess it might make things easier.” The lieutenant found herself suddenly wishing Krennic hadn’t dragged her into this first, so she could be saved from watching these two argue again. The Director scowled as he was forced to open his door wider on the chaos of his apartment.  “Oh dear!” Although as Tarkin waltzed in it was clearly only said as a formality, and the sharp smile on his face let Suraya know he was about to lord this over her boss. He was followed in by no less than five other imperials, all young looking protégés, eager to survey the scene for themselves. She would suppose even if they found forensic evidence, Krennic wasn’t about to be told of it, and it also didn’t look like they were about to be too careful with his remaining things. Once Tarkin had acknowledged her presence at the scene and turned back to Krennic, still scowling, Suraya made her way quickly across the room to kick Krennic’s discarded clothing under the bed. Maybe the kids wouldn’t put two and two together, but Tarkin certainly would. Rebels were scandals themselves without a potential sleeping-with-the-enemy situation. “It seems to be a bit of a mess you find yourself in, Director.” “It’s hardly of my own doing.” Krennic straightened, defensive, “There were far more of them than I, I fought back but was unfortunately blindsided.” “I see no evidence of force entry.” Suraya shook her head subtly as Krennic’s eyes flicked momentarily to her; if he wanted to go that way, he probably should have opened a window or the balcony doors or… something. “Well, no, as it turns out I let them in.” She couldn’t see Tarkin’s face, but his movement and the freeze of the others in the room said everything. Krennic’s eyes momentarily flickered in panic but he controlled it, “I expected to see my assistant returning to de-brief me on the meeting I sent her to this morning.” Suraya did everything in her power not to look pissed that he’d just thrown her to the wolves instead, with Tarkin immediately turning, but it was not her he addressed, “I believe I know the briefing the lieutenant attended, which you also therefore would have known did not finish until after the incident took place. Why would you expect her so early?” Krennic shrugged coolly, “Sometimes they end early.” This wasn’t untrue, of course, but it was a big bluff. It didn’t explain why Krennic wouldn’t have checked who was knocking. Also if Tarkin had the inclination to check the call log, it would show that the Director also began his tirade of calls after the rebels had left. Krennic, having become suddenly useless, was dismissed, for Tarkin to turn back to her. “Lieutenant. When you arrived did you notice anything out of the ordinary?” Suraya could see Krennic gesturing out of the corner of her eye but ignored him. “Besides the whole place being over turned, nothing Sir.” Although she tilted her head, before pausing, immediately thinking better of it. “Lieutenant?” It didn’t get passed Tarkin. “I just don’t understand why they would take the Director’s wardrobe, Sir.” The word ‘take’ obviously alerted Tarkin to something else, and his eyes darted around the room again, Krennic walked forward, clearly bumping Tarkin’s arm on purpose as he strolled to the closet to present evidence. You watched the Governor’s little smile widen in amusement, before he became serious again, “Well, well, Director. You better check they’ve not stolen anything important. Especially with the project you’re working on.” “Anything of significance is with Galen.” Krennic disliked how quick he was to address that point, he didn’t want Tarkin to know how irked he was. “Still, it would be best to check. I believe that your personal data pad will have been here along with some files. Something as significant as those would not have escaped the rebels notice.” Krennic’s teeth gritted, as he indicated back to the closet; “My WARDROBE is gone!!” Suraya was right, that was the most important thing to him. Tarkin’s eyes flicked to hers, and they shared the same exchange of exasperation, unable to quite comprehend why clothing was at the forefront of Krennic’s mind. “As I was saying…” She almost chuckled as Tarkin made it clear on what he perceived as important and it was not Krennic’s lack of uniform, “There’ll be consequences if anything is missing, Director! This is already a dire security breach.” Ironically Krennic thought that was a little dramatic, but simply grumbled to himself as Tarkin took his forensics team back and exited the apartment. The Director was just glad to get them out of his hair. “Security breach.” He muttered, “You’d think I handed them the whole damn Project Stardust!” Suraya sighed gently as she made her way back over to him, “For now, Sir, I believe we should figure out exactly what data has been taken. And report it up the chain as soon as possible, less Tarkin find a reason to return. Then we can get your uniform re-ordered.” He turned those blue eyes back on her, at least a little brighter at that idea than they had looked when she arrived, “Yes. Let’s… let’s do that.” *** It took a couple of days to overturn the damage that the rebels had done and take stock of what was actually missing. Krennic had retrieved his personal data pad, and they hadn’t managed to gain access to the most important discs in his desk. Nor his own weapon, thankfully. That didn’t mean data packs and other things of value weren’t looted. Krennic had to go through the ordeal of cancelling a lot of his access pips and cards – but they arrived fairly quickly from the Intelligence Bureau, reset. Suraya remained with him to assist the clean-up operation and order his uniform; this took a little longer to arrive and by the end of the second day Krennic was starting to get antsy. “What takes them so long!?” “Well you do have very exacting standards, Sir!” “Exactly! So they should know how to do it by now. Did I not specify clearly enough!?” She wasn’t about to answer that question. If his previous interactions with them were anything to go by the urgent note she’d placed on it was being wholly ignored and the Director would be constantly bumped to the back of the queue. She couldn’t say she’d blame them, either. On the morning of the third day, as they both anxiously awaited the results of their carefully worded email detailing exactly what documentation the rebels had stolen, Krennic received another knock at the door. “If this is Tarkin-” Suraya wasn’t about to tell him to keep a level head, but she did give him a look to tell him not to blow up. He opened the door to a woman dressed in civilian clothing, even though it appeared that she possessed rank pins. She had bright pink hair and light eyes and as she moved her hair flew as if she was starring in some kind of commercial. “Director Krennic? My name is Kora, I’m here about your uniform.” “About time it turned up!” He took a pace back in order for her to walk in, “Are you from Uniform? Next time you ought to tell them that when I say urgent, I mean same day-” Kora wasn’t done talking, and she turned back to him, saying rather bluntly, “Request denied. For letting the rebellion enter and steal documentation of the upmost importance to the Empire, YOU are going to star in a documentary about Empire approved businesses.” There was silence in the room for a moment and Krennic wore a half smile as he tried to work out if she was serious. Kora simply stared him down, and as the Director’s face fell, Suraya once again wished she wasn’t in the room. “No.” Suraya couldn’t tell if that was Krennic refusing or his own disbelief. Kora knew which way she was taking it. “Well it better be a yes before I go back, Director, or you’ll be in hot lava.” Krennic’s eyes widened and no one was under any illusions as to what he was thinking; “Not Mustafar again-!” There had to be a way out, he wasn’t about to waste his time on this! “This documentary will be of the upmost importance Director. Lord Vader and the Governor only hope that you will take it seriously.” Suraya couldn’t help giggling behind her hand at this. It wasn’t the being in front of a camera, it wasn’t the thought of doing a documentary on business – or fashion - it was that Krennic was being forced into this by a man he hated. Krennic cleared his throat, once more folding his arms as he looked back to Kora, giving her a single nod. “Very well, but there is nothing in my wardrobe that isn’t tailored to within an inch of its life and most of it is from high end shops, some of which are on Lexrul.” Krennic was a very big advocate of his home planet after all, so he’d expect at least one part of this documentary to take place there, “So you better have budget!” Instead of agreeing Kora simply smiled, in the same way that Tarkin had a habit of, “Oh no, Director, we’re highlighting small businesses that scrape by for a living, right here on Coruscant, to show our support and cater to all audiences.” Suraya thought that his face fell even faster than it had with Tarkin around, and she also didn’t think that livid covered it. “WHAT!?” “That’s the deal Director.” “It’s not much of a DEAL!” “It’s the one I’m giving you, I can take it elsewhere… and I’m sure that Lord Vader and Governor Tarkin would love to hear why you couldn’t do it.” The Director looked desperately to Suraya, but she wasn’t sure what she could say. How could, at her position, she possibly rescue him from what Tarkin wanted?

Realising indeed that his assistant wouldn’t be much aid to him, Krennic’s eyes fell back to Kora and he swallowed hard, smile feigning confidence - but also a little nervous. “Well then, I suppose I will accept your offer.” This time Kora’s returned smile was warm and sweet, “That’s great news, Director Krennic.” She took a step forward and extended her hand to him, “Well, as series producer and director, I’m very much looking forward to working with you. Welcome to the team.” Suraya bit her lip as she watched him step down to shake Kora’s hand, hoping he wasn’t crossing his fingers behind his back: this could be huge for Krennic if he used this opportunity wisely. Things were about to get interesting around here...

---

Thank you for reading! 😘😘

I really am SO excited to bring you the rest of this

Do you have any advice on how to end a fic? Specifically the very last line? I find that my fics almost always end with "I love you" or something asinine. Thank you!

This is a very good ask! Thank you, anon.

Fortunately for you, qualitative data analysis is kind of my thing, so I pulled all of the final paragraphs out of all of my fics, dropped them in a doc, and took notes. Here’s what I learned from 20 finished fics:

Final Paragraphs, Not Sentences

I usually end on a paragraph with more than one sentence. You don’t make clear whether there’s context surrounding “I love you,” but even when I finish on dialogue, I tend to have a dialogue tag and a sentence or two of action. Some of my fics have full-ass ending paragraphs, like 5 sentences of content to close it off. Only a fifth of my stories make a sentence stand on its own as the final line. I’ve gotten shorter over time, but we’re still talking a minimum of two sentences, sometimes two long sentences, for most stories. Give yourself more room to work, and take the pressure off of each individual word—spread the burden to more text. I feel like I’m going to be more successful at communicating the theme/mood/emotion I want if I’m giving myself 10+ words to do so.

Call to Future Action

Every ending I’ve written suggests an unbroken continuity into some future for that universe. Regardless of story tense—sometimes there’s an explicit shift to future tense, but often, it’s just the implication that the characters are looking ahead to something yet to come. I knew this about myself, but it was amazing to see my consistency in action! I don’t want my stories to feel like a perfect, neat little package. I want my characters to feel like they existed before we met them and will continue to exist after we leave them; I want you to be able to imagine what their lives look like after the fic is over, whether you’ve spent 2k or 100k words with them. Call forward! Highlight their hopes or dreams or just what they’ll be doing the next day.

I think there’s a definite temptation in HP fandom to do the flash-forward epilogue, since the series set that trend for us, but what I can dislike so much about epilogues is the sense that the author wants to provide finality: the couple had three kids and was happy forever, believe me, I wrote them. I should feel that from the mass of story that led up to this, I think. If I haven’t persuaded a reader that my ship has potential through the meat of the fic, an epilogue that tries to assert the characters’ happiness is already settled won’t win that reader over. By the last paragraph, you have made up your mind about my story, and I want my send-off to provide gentle, open-ended hope. You can apply that hope however you like; I’m not going to dictate your interpretation.

Don’t Forget Story Structure

The last paragraph of a story is rarely the emotional climax. I think back to my grade school English instructor drawing a bell curve on the board and labeling the rightmost tail “denouement,” but whatever does it for you—the end of the story resolves threads. The climax probably already happened, or if it’s just happening, there are almost definitely more questions that a reader wants answers for before we sign off. And you never have to answer everything for a reader! I love open endings—see above, my discussion of the future and hope. But I almost always budget the entire final chapter of a fic, sometimes the final two chapters, to bringing us back into a state of stability after the climax. (Or final scene, or final few paragraphs—the principle scales for the length of a fic.) Stable doesn’t mean unemotional, doesn’t correspond to filler, by the by. Stable means that I am not introducing new plots or conflicts, and I’m demonstrating that at least some of the longstanding arcs of the story have been resolved. The last line can’t resolve everything, and the last line probably shouldn’t introduce a new issue. (Unless the story is sequel bait, I suppose, which I haven’t written.)

Reinforce Themes

I’m ending on the most obvious one, I suppose! But, yes: my ending paragraphs tend to call back to the opening conflict of the story. If it’s a story about learning to communicate with a partner, I end on proof of good communication. If it’s a story about finding family, I give proof of family. If it’s a story about reclaiming one’s sexuality after trauma, I end on an orgasm. I usually write with a strong central theme and so I find that this comes naturally to me, but I think the principle could apply to whatever typically drives your stories. Callback to the title? Repetition of phrasing from the introduction? Showing what the characters accomplished in the course of the plot? IDK, man, but it’s nice to use the space to reiterate what you want a reader to remember.

And like, overall, I want to say that I barely remember the closing paragraphs/lines from my own fics, let alone those I read. It’s good to hit a strong note, of course, but mostly because I want to be proud of the story I’ve written, not because I think a final line is going to be the decision point for whether or not a reader likes a story. Your reader probably likes it, or doesn’t, long before they finish. Think about making it a satisfying finish for the people who already enjoy the world you’ve crafted, and trust in their agency as readers.

just us ; kim jongin

• summary: you’re a new trainee under sm (a bit younger and smaller than kai, looks a bit fragile and innocent). during a fun event, a video of you and kai trends, you tease and play around with each other and kai seems a bit protective and dotes on you • pairing: kim jongin x male!reader • word count: 920 • to do

Jongin wraps his arms around your shoulders from behind, setting his chin on top of your head. He closes his eyes and listens fondly as you recount some story of your and Jungwoo’s adventures, wildly moving your arms about. Cameras move around you two, but neither of you pay them any mind.

You laugh, a bit louder than you intended, but don’t think about it too much until another camera whips around to zoom in on you. You smile as wide as your face will allow and continue your dramatic rendition, focusing on conveying your feelings on the story.

Jongin’s eyes slowly open. He notices your bright smile and excitement, feeling you wiggle and jump against him. He turns you around as you continue your story, softening your erratic movements. You two continue to stand close together as Jongin’s hands slip down to hold one of yours, asking a few questions and trying his hardest to poke holes in your story.

“You’re plot has somethings that don’t add up.”

“What are you talking about?! It actually happened, how can things be wrong??” You shake your head quickly and search around for Jungwoo. “Let’s go talk to Jungwoo then, because it happened.”

He smiles, raising his eyebrow, skeptical. “You’re naturally dramatic, I think you might be amping it up to impress me.”

You scoff and push away from him, still holding his hand. “I don’t need to impress you!”

“You want to impress me though.” He counters.

You cross your arms, letting go of his hand in the process. “I don’t want to impress you either.”

“Sure.”

The cameras around you disperse after your conversations get a bit more usual, boring for other people, but Jongin is completely attached. You’re his favorite show and favorite storyteller. He asks you questions about your day, about life, about training, if you miss him when he’s gone, etc. and you answer each of them. Your hair falls on your forehead as you talk, moving around too much for whatever your stylist put in it. Jongin pushes it back every time the strands move, not thinking anything of the simple movements.

“Wait, hey.” He interrupts your talking and you look up at him with wide eyes, dramatically freezing. “You have something on your face.”

He gently brushes something off your cheek and flicks it off his fingers. “I’m going to be honest, I could only focus on that for your last couple of sentences.”

You pout dramatically and squint at him. “That’s upsetting.”

The cameras fire up again as Jongin squeezes your cheeks and coo at you, puckering his lips as he does so. He nods when you start to talk again, in between focusing on your words and focusing on your face. Your phone buzzes in your pocket and you glance around before pulling it back, not knowing if you were technically allowed to bring it out or not. Jongin pretends to block you, placing one hand on your back and the other out like a bodyguard.

“Who is it?”

“A friend, he said he’s sending me some link for a video. In his words exactly,” You clear your throat and hold your right hand in a Shakespeare-esque pose. ““Dude, really,” Next message. “Seriously.” Next message. “Your face is everywhere.” My face? Why my face?”

“Click on the link.”

You gasp and your eyes go wide. “That’s the greatest idea I’ve ever heard, a true genius play, an absolutely-”

“Click on the link.” He repeats.

You do, mocking him in a high-pitched voice. He rolls his eyes and takes your phone, watching the video play. His face contorts as the video plays, confused.

“What is it?”

“It’s us, I guess they uploaded teaser videos early?” He tosses you the phone. “But it’s us, just joking and playing around. Just us, but people must like it.”

You watch the video, tilting your head about why your friend seemed to be so excited or panicked about it. Then you head to the internet and see your and Jongin’s name, as well as the event’s name at the top of the trending pages.

“I didn’t even think this many people knew my name.” You blink a few times and shake your head, unable to keep the star-bright smile from appearing.

He smiles and reads some comments over your shoulder. “They think you’re cute.”

You lean your head back. “I’m still shocked that people are talking about me over you.”

“He- I-” Jongin laughs and tries to contain himself, reading a specific comment. “The same Kai that dances to songs like Artificial Love is talking and playing around with someone who looks like they should be acting on Disney Channel.”

“Should I be offended?”

“They look like the meme of the solid black house next to the bright pink house.”

“Am I solid black or bright pink?”

“You are the brightest bubblegum pink.”

You scrunch your nose in thought before nodding solemnly. “Like the color that is toothachingly bright?”

“Exactly.”

“Perfect.” You try to say the word in a serious voice, but your smile cracks it’s way through and you’re unable to stifle your laughter.

A few seconds of laughter pass before you place your own hands on your cheeks, cupping your face. “Am I innocent?”

“I don’t think I’m able to answer that.” Jongin winks and tilts his head to the side. “Am I the walking impersonation of the Artificial Love dance?”

You stick your tongue out at him. “I don’t think I’m able to answer that.”

the declassified texts of the inquisition’s elite [138]

(832):  Remember how I have such good luck that it's almost bullshit? (1-832):  I'm afraid to ask, but go on. - (206):  There were firefighters and a fire truck up the street. I asked what was wrong and their exact words were "Just a tiny explosion; it'll be all right" -

“Almost? What do you mean almost? It’s definitely bullshit,” Max says. “Cassandra, please tell me that you corrected Ellana and told her it’s definitely some kind of cosmic farce. If there was a boundary between almost bullshit and definite bullshit Ellana’s strange fortunes saw it, did a running jump over it, and broke some kind of record for high or long distance jumping.”

“I’ve learned to pick my battles,” Cassandra replies, “And Ellana’s delusions about the fact that she is a statistical anomaly are a battle that I’m not going to waste my time engaging in. Do you want to know what happened or are you going to nitpick on the word almost some more?”

“Sorry, sorry. It’s just — at this point in time she shouldn’t be thinking in such uncertain terms about herself. Evelyn’s embraced in.”

“Your cousin’s luck doesn’t trend towards the positive, Maxwell.”

“She’s still alive, isn’t she? And not in jail? I’d count those as positives.”

“You set a low bar.”

“A bar that most people would have hit by now,” Max smiles, “If it were me you had found at the blast site instead of my cousin I have no doubts that I’d be in solitary confinement with a death sentence and a rapidly approaching execution date.”

Two spots of red-pink quickly burn through on Cassandra’s cheeks. “I — you’re not exactly wrong. But I like to think that I would have attempted to get you a fair trial.”

“No need to be embarrassed. I’m well aware of how I can…shall we say taunt people into a blind rage with my general existence?” Max waves a hand. “Enough about me, for once, back to Ellana. What happened? I’m also wondering why she called you. I didn’t realize you two were that close.”

“We are not that close,” Cassandra admits, “But — well. It appears that Ellana discovered several missing Seeker artifacts that had gone missing ages ago during some sort of natural disaster. There was a period of time around the Dragon age when the Seekers were all but disbanded and several of their strongholds were either raided or abandoned.”

“Where in the world did Ellana find these artifacts? I imagine that the entire Seeker line has been keeping an eye out for them this entire time.”

“Well. That would be Ellana’s luck factor, I suppose. I do not think there has ever been anyone in this entire world with that sort of passive fortune. She was touring a property that Josephine was looking into acquiring for the Inquisition and renovating into some sort of guest house for when we have people in the area working long term. Apparently the former owner was some sort of…not hoarder. Reseller, I believe. I am not very clear of the specific details, other than that they had several unmarked boxes of items they would be leaving behind because they could not sell them. Ellana opened them to check and make sure they were not anything dangerous or otherwise suspect.”

“And she recognized them on the spot?”

“No, she was actually going to throw them away or send them to be recycled. But then she found a sword and you know how much Ellana likes swords.”

“You, Ellana, Mahanon, the Iron Bull — you could form a club. A dueling club.”

“You forgot to include yourself on that list, Maxwell.”

“I can be treasurer.”

“Ellana called me because she recognized some sort of decoration on the sheathe as being similar to the one on one of my swords and it gave her a feeling.”

“Ah, the infamous Lavellan feelings.”

“I had her send me some pictures and then video call me. It all looks legitimate, and if not, then incredibly good replicas by someone who must have seen them previously or have knowledge of the originals. Even if these items turn out to be fakes it will be an incredible find for the Seekers and our history.” Cassandra laughs, a sharp and quick burst of sound that startles Maxwell. “I almost did not answer her phone call.”

“Really?”

“Yes. She had been getting on my nerves a few days before, you see. We had gotten into an argument over the planned route for a deployment for Sutherland’s team to the Emprise. I thought she was going too easy on them and giving them a rather lax schedule, and she the opposite of me. I feel rather silly about it now. Though I suppose in a round about way the argument led to this because she went off to handle some of the suggested tasks in some of the locations I had wanted to assign to Sutherland and ended up picking up Josephine’s request to investigate the property along the way.”

- “Was that our emergency crew, or was that — well. A regular emergency dispatch from the county or city?” Evelyn asks as Edric reads out the text message received from Herah regarding her investigation.

“Unclear,” Edric says, running his thumb over his lower lip as he continues to message Herah. “Hopefully not ours, that’s a bad response to be giving to people asking questions. We’d end up on the news again for careless disregard for public safety. Again.”

“If it’s our people telling that to Herah then they know what they’re doing,” Evelyn points out, “Now, if it’s not our people then that’s where I’ll get worried. Either they’re hiding something, in over their heads, or completely unaware of what’s actually happening.”

“There’s the possibility that it’s locals who know exactly what they’re doing.”

“True. But unlikely. Just a tiny explosion? In the middle of downtown Serault? Even a tiny explosion in the famous city of glass can be deadly and a big problem for everyone involved. And with the timing of it? Just as Herah’s going there to talk to some key witnesses and check on the security and integrity of key evidence for one of our upcoming trials? I don’t think so.” Evelyn glances to the side of her computer screen to watch the ongoing news report about the explosion on the muted television mounted to the wall. “We’ll leave that to Herah and her team for now. Any updates on Sutherland?”

“They’re quick learners,” Edric says. “I think they’re ready to start working on higher ranked missions without one of the senior Inquisition members watching them on site. Maybe as an overseeing resource they can consult for help if they get stuck, but it should be fine remotely.”

“Do you have anything in mind for them?”

“Investigating the smuggling activity along the Storm Coast. It’s close enough to some of our bigger Inquisition bases that they’ll have back up ready if they get in trouble or stumble on something big. And the Storm Coast is the perfect area to get in trouble. Not much around in the way of collateral damage if some kind of fire fight breaks out.”

“Talk it over with Cullen and see what he can pass over to them. I’m keeping them under Cullen’s command for now.”

1, 2, 3, 9, 14, 15, 17, 25, 27, 28, 29, 35 for the honesty meme? (I want to hear your take on these!)

Honesty Meme | Accepting

1. What would prevent you from following someone?

Mostly it depends on if I want to interact with their muse or not. There are some where I just really don’t like the muse. Other things that stop me are when there are maybe two or three blogs that are so exclusive with each other that you feel like you can’t interact with them. Sometimes if people post constantly post A LOT I can get overwhelmed, and that might stop me on the odd occasion. And, of course, if someone is just generally being a dick.

2. Are aesthetics important to you? If they are, why?

Yes! I’m a graphic designer, and I’ve always loved things looking pretty. So I love making a blog look as gorgeous as possible. And I love finding aesthetic images that give you an idea of what the muse is like.

Though, when it comes to text, the aesthetic is also important in the way of, I like to be as straight forward as possible. Since I’m ADHD and dyslexic, sometimes reading can just truly be a nightmare. So when things are in super tiny, scripty font, constantly changing from one word to the next with words broken up by symbols that shouldn’t be there, my brain just goes ‘NOPE! I ain’t doing this shit!’

3. What current rp trend do you hate?

Honestly, not a fan of some of the formatting. When people make it vary constantly my brain hates it. And I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. ‘I hat/e peo.ple do/ing t.his thi/ng no.w!’ It’s just… it’s hard for me to read, and that makes me not want to try.

9. What is your opinion on exclusivity? Do you practice it? Why / why not?

No and no! I’m honestly not a fan of it. I understand why people do it, especially if they are a very popular blog. But it’s not for me. I kinda get put off from interacting with blogs that are mutually exclusive, because I can’t always find an opening to interact with them. And I think that if you limit who you RP with, you’re missing out on a lot of opportunities. I also love interacting with multiple of the same muse. Most people bring their own spin to a muse, and I love seeing how things play out with each different mun.

14. Do you think rp has had a positive or negative effect on your life or you as a person?

I mean, I’d say fairly neutral. It’s something fun that I enjoy doing, and I love getting to interact with so many people. But on the flip side, it does take a lot of energy and also tends to take away from my novel and fic writing. I struggle to find balance in a lot of things, so I tend to find I kind of go hardcore on RP, then burn out and take a year or two hiatus and get sad because most of the people I know are gone. (Except @cfmanymuses. She’s my forever girl, and as my IRL best friend, I know she’ll tell me if she ever switches platforms).

15. How has rp changed you personally?

I mean, I honestly don’t know. I’d say that it’s helped improve my writing over the years and given me a new, unique way of looking at things when it comes to writing because of the format it’s usually done it. It’s also helped me develop a few of my OCs from what they started as, and I LOVE working with my characters.

17. Have you ever sent a message to yourself on anon? Why?

Admittedly, I have sent myself memes on anon that I REALLY wanted to do when no one sends them in before. I haven’t done this in a while, but there are some that have been tempting. I wanna answer those questions, dude!

25. Are you open to duplicates? Why / why not?

Hell yeah! Bring on the duplicates!!! I mean, MOST of my muses are OC, so duplicates aren’t going to happen there. But all of my canon muses are from fantasy or sci-fi and are super easy to make bump into each other via alturnate universes. Or heck, they could be twin sisters! I love seeing how other people write the same muses as me, because everyone’s take on muses is unique and I feel like I’m missing out on getting to work with that if you deny duplicates.

27. Do you follow people even if they don’t follow you back?

Yeah, I mean, why not. On the odd occasion, someone might follow me back a month after I’ve followed them or something. The only time I’d unfollow someone for not following me back is if they’re mutually exclusive and I keep accidentally liking their starter calls and such. I have mutual tracker, but sometimes my brain jumps ahead and goes ‘Yeah! I wanna RP with them’. And then I feel like a twat for accidentally breaking their rules and have to apologise. So if someone is adherently mutuals only I might unfollow to prevent making an ass of myself repeatedly.

Plus, I had a really bad experience with this once where despite instantly apologising and saying I wouldn’t do it again, someone continued to harras me to the point I had to block them and ended up taking a year-long hiatus.

28. Do you read people’s rules before following or interacting?

I generally try to. Some, I will follow the moment I see their blog, then have to go back and find their blog to read their rules. And sometimes the ADHD/dyslexia is being a butt and basically makes my brain scream at me if I try to read anything longer than a sentence, so I’ll kinda skim over the rules as best I can.

But I try to read peoples rules as much as I possibly can, especially since it gives me a good view of their stance on certain things. Sometimes I forget if I’ve read them or not and go back and do it again.

29. What is your opinion on “reblog karma” and do you practice it?

Yep! I’ve only recently come back to this blog, and reblog karma was pretty big last time I was on. I’m trying to get back into the habit of the lastest trend of reblogging from the source, but sometimes I mess up. When I do that, I try my hardest to make sure I send something.

35. Do you read other people’s threads or do you only read your own?

Mostly no. As I said, sometimes reading is not a thing my brain wants to do. I’ll usually glance or skim other threads, but unless something really grabs my attention, I won’t put too much effort into reading through others threads. The shorter the thread, the more likely I am to read it. (So, basically, if I wasn’t invested in my own writing, I’d probably skip it because I very rarely write short replies).

I wrote something new for a new fandom. I am petrified to post it. Enjoy.

Eric despised his family, really and truly. He knew he should’ve taken himself out of their family group chat. The notifications usually clogged up his phone anyway. Never had a silent moment away from them. They were all dispersed across the entire continent, one of his brothers was maybe in New York this month, who knew. Either way the messages never stopped. He could go to sleep with no notifications and wake up with close to fifty. His mum was known for sending texts one sentence at a time. Personalizing every sentence to a specific child instead of just one general thought. It was touching and heartfelt but overwhelming. His sisters would clog the chat with all of the latest celebrity gossip or a new fashion trend. It was harmless but when the chat eventually turned to them ganging up on Eric it was horrific. You’d think that with him being the oldest he’d have it easy, nope. It was the complete opposite. Being the oldest of six was never easy, it was five against one. Six against one if their mother was up in the topic they were discussing. Her favorite topic of conversation? His love life. She knew her son was still young but she desperately held on to the idea of him falling in love and living happily ever after. She dreamt that for all her children, but Eric in particular. “I worry about you,” Eric’s mum cooed, patting down his hair. “You’re always so busy.” Eric sighed as he stirred the sauce he was heating up. His mum invited herself over to his flat for dinner. She just showed up unannounced and batted her eyes and asked kindly of Eric would mind if she stayed over for some mother and son bonding time over some home cooked food. He couldn’t stay no, would never say no, but he knew she had an ulterior motive. “I work five days a week, sometimes six. I am busy, not lonely or alone, mum.” She raised her hands in a defensive stance. “I know, babe. Let me treat you like a mum should, Eric. Your brothers and sisters still do.” “Mum,” he sighed, turning off the stove top, turning his body around to face his mother. She looked sullen and he hated that he was the reason for that. “Don’t make me out to be the bad guy here.” “Amor,” she cooed, using the Portuguese nickname for all her children. “My strong, bullheaded, way too independent boy.” Eric had to scoff at his mother’s words, she was purposely buttering him up so he’d let his guard down. “I can see the wheels turning in your mind. What are you planning?” “Absolutely nothing,” she sang. She placed a kiss to Eric’s cheek, a sign that whatever was bothering her a few seconds earlier had passed. “Nothing at all.” Luckily the dinner ran smoothly after the small little tiff Eric got into with his mother. They were able to remain civil as they sat down and ate. They got about nothing, work and family, nothing that would make Eric squirm in his seat. Louise made small talk about her physical therapy after discovering she had arthritis in her knee slowing her mobility a little, nothing major. Her doctor recommended the physical therapy to ease the pain before it turned into anything worse. Eric just nodded and ate his noddles, pacifying his mum with grunts of noise to seem like he was following the story. She went on and on for what seemed like forever about her physical therapist and Eric didn’t have the heart to tell her that he wasn’t really paying attention to what she was babbling about. She had just complained that he wasn’t a doting son, so he played his role and let her talk, her voice echoing around the loft. “Come over for dinner next weekend,” Louise invited him and she gathered her things as she getting ready to leave an hour later. “Mum,” Eric groaned, helping his mother put on her coat. “It’s a demand, Eric,” she said sternly. “Your father and I want to see you around more often. Like you said, you’re always busy. Well don’t be busy next Saturday and let us treat you to a home cooked meal. I’m making paella.” Eric sighed, he knew he couldn’t say no when his favorite meal was going to be served. “Need me to bring anything?” “Just your handsome face,” she beamed, patting his cheek softly. “Oh, and maybe dress nice. No joggers or track suits. Wear something that fits.” Eric rolled his eyes playfully and kissed the hand that was on his cheek. “Only for you mother.” “Good,” Louise smiled, patting Eric’s cheek one last time before gathering her bag and leaving the loft. The week flew by and blurred together like it usually did for Eric. He spent a vast majority of his hours awake working. When he wasn’t working he spoke to his family via the never ending group chat. His mother reminding him almost daily about their scheduled dinner for that Saturday. His sisters acting jealous that their mum was making Eric’s favorite meal while they had to eat ramen and easy mac in their uni dorm rooms. Sometimes it was a blessing to be the eldest. Eric tried to occupy his free him with fussing around his loft, cleaning up and finally making it fee like a home even though he’d been living there for almost a full year now. On Saturday he woke up around noon, exhaustion winning over his desire to wake early and get things done. He wasn’t expected at his parents house until five and it usually took a half hour to get there by car. Around three Eric reluctantly started to get himself ready. He showered and shaved, knowing his dad would comment on his weak attempt to grow facial hair. It wasn’t Eric’s fault he had pale skin and blonde hair and the inability to properly grow either a mustache or beard. He stood in a towel in front of his dresser searching for something, anything to wear. He wasn’t one for splurging on clothes, he spent his hard earned money on things he could actually get joy from. A new television, speakers, electronics, that’s what he truly cared for. After huffing and puffing for a good half hour and hearing his mother’s voice in his head criticizing him over his clothes, he settled on the outfit he wore to his sister’s wedding the summer before. He nixed the tie but wore the crisp white shirt and the black slacks. It was the only semi decent outfit he had and he knew his mum would approve, even though she’d immediately recognize the clothes. Beggars can’t be choosers at this point. “Perfect!” Louise exclaimed when she answered the door at exactly five like she demanded repeatedly over the phone and text. “My beautiful eldest boy.” “Mum,” he groaned over her sudden affection, kissing his cheeks and ruffling his hair, like he was a kid again after he skidded his knee playing football in the back garden with his brothers and dad. “Jeremy!” She shouted as she escorted Eric into the living room where his father sat. “Look at how sharp Eric looks.” Jeremy looked up briefly from flipping through the channels and nodded his agreement. “Smart.” “Smart,” she agreed. “Who are you two and what have you done with my parents?” Eric asked taking a seat on the couch next to his father. “Should I be worried? Are you guys getting divorced or something? Dying even?” “God forbid,” Louise gasped, grabbing her chest. “Nothing’s wrong. Just two parents admiring their work is all.” “Okay that’s gross,” he said, squirming in his seat at his mother’s words. “Unnecessary.” Eric had to remind himself a few times before they sat down to eat that he loved his parents and he needed to let them take care of him from time to time. He was the eldest, mid twenties, the first one to leave the nest. They were just compassionate people, especially towards him. They openly admitted that they were too young and not ready to start a family when Eric came along, they learned as they went when it came to raising him. Now they were making up for lost time. He was too damn stubborn to let them. But he did enjoy spending time with them when he could. Sitting on the couch talking about the football matches from earlier in the day with his dad. Trying to argue why he believed Tottenham had a chance to win the title while his dad saw Manchester City doing the impossible and becoming repeat champions. It was all in light hearted fun and it reminded Eric why he should make the half hour journey to his parents more often. “Eric, can you please set the table?” Louise asked, her voice sugary sweet, definitely not her normal tone. Eric reluctantly stood up and side eyed his mum as he grabbed the dishes, utensils, and glasses off the kitchen counter. “Why are we speaking in our suspicious voice, mother?” “Just set the table,” she ignored his prying question and pulled her mother voice. “Mum,” Eric called to her a moment later, laying out the things on the table. “There’s three of us, yeah? Why are there four sets of plates?” “Louise,” Jeremy’s voice came from the next room. “Louise,” Eric echoed his fathers tone perfectly, scarily actually, it was a gift. “What are we hiding from me?” Louise stopped cooking for a moment with a sigh and turned to face Eric, her face sheepish. “I’m not hiding anything, just withholding information until the right time.” “Which is now,” Eric guessed. He hated surprises, not being in control of all that was around him, made him anxious, made him agitated and sweaty, like right now. “So spill.” “I may have invited someone over for dinner,” she replied, her voice low and shaky but unwavering. Eric held a tight smile and nodded his head, letting his mother know she could continue to explain. “My physical therapist, his name is Dele, he’s around your age. Nice boy.” “Mum,” Eric repeated himself for what felt like the hundredth time that night. “Why?” “He’s alone. He has no one around him to look after him,” she explained, turning back around to tend to the food again. Eric huffed out a hot breath and continued setting the table. There was no use in arguing, he wasn’t going to win. “You always have ulterior motives, don’t you.” The bell rang moments later before Louise could state her argument. Eric looked at his mother who turned her head to look back at him, neither of them budging. Stubborn people they were. Jermey made no indication that he was going to move either, it wasn’t his guest after all. Louise just kept stirring the pot and humming to herself. Eric gave in, reluctantly, and walked to the door to answer it. The bell rang a second time as he opened the door. His breath was stuck in his throat for a second as he was greeted with a big warm smile. So this was Dele he presumed. At first sight he looked like a decent bloke if his contagious smile was any indication. Eric quickly snapped himself back into reality once Dele cleared his throat, obviously feeling the awkward tension. “Eric,” he introduced himself, extending out his hand. Dele accepted the extended hand pleasantly and let himself be led into the home. “Dele.” “Dele!” Louise greeted him warmly, hugging him. “I’m so glad you were able to make it.” “Louise,” he cooed at her admiration and accepted the hug warmly. “I haven’t had a home cooked meal in ages, I couldn’t say no.” “You know Jeremy,” she introduced her husband who waved as a greeting. “And I see you’ve met my eldest, Eric.” “It’s a pleasure,” Dele replied, still being dragged around the home by Louise. She politely sat him down at the kitchen table where everything by now was set and ready. Without proper invitation the rest of the family joined Dele around the table. Louise served everyone before serving herself and sitting down at the head of the table opposite Jeremy. That left Eric sitting directly across from Dele and that damn smile. They sat in silence and ate, the awkward tension palpable. Eric knew he was basically set up on a blind date but didn’t know how to proceed. It had been a long time since he’d been on one and of course never one with both or either of his parents present. What was he supposed to do, supposed to say? He was going to play it by ear, let Dele start the conversation or just remain in silence and enjoy his meal in peace and quiet. “Your mum told me you grew up in Portugal,” Dele said. Guess he was starting the get to know you phase of the conversation. Eric nodded, wiping his face with his napkin. “We moved there when I was about eight and I moved back here for university. They all came back about two years ago.” “I’ve never been,” Dele added. “Never left England actually. Is it as beautiful as it seems?” “The coast line is divine,” Louise chimed in. “Seeing the sunset over the ocean, especially in the summer.” Dele nodded as he drank the water from his cup, he could just picture the scene. The blues and pinks in the sky over the crystal blue ocean, laying on the white sand, the ocean breeze causing goosebumps on his tanned skin. “I’ve gotta go there one day.” “Eric can take you,” Louie volunteered which made Eric choke on his food. “You okay hun?” Eric blushed and nodded his head. “Wrong pipe.” “Be careful,” she warned him softly, shifting her attention to the other side of the table. “So Dele, what made you decide to become a physical therapist?” That’s how the night kept going. Louise would ask a question to Dele and sit wide eyed as he answered, like she was the one on the date. Once she felt that Dele’s answer was sufficient she’d volunteer Eric’s reply. He hardly could get a word in edgewise. His father would shake his head from time to time and cut looks over to his wife as a warning, to let her know that Eric was more than capable of speaking for himself. Louise was either unaware of the looks or unbothered by them because she just kept talking, taking up all the time Eric could’ve spoken. He did get a word in edgewise from time to time, adding little quips or one liners to whatever was being discussed. Despite that fact that his mother had monopolized the conversation he was really learning a lot about Dele. He seemed like a good bloke, laughed at all the horrendous jokes Eric was able to make. His smile was infectious, his laugh cute. Dele was fit, there was no denying that. “I’m going to wash the dishes,” Louise announced once dinner was over. She stood up and lightly tugged on Jeremy’s arm. “Come help.” “We have a dish washer!” He yelled at her tug. Louise narrowed her eyes at her husband, speaking to him without words. “Please.” It took a moment but Jeremy finally got the hint and joined his wife in the next room leaving Eric and Dele alone for the first time that night. They weren’t far, the rooms were connected but it gave them some semblance of privacy. They just sat there, silent. Eric played with the tablecloth, wrapping the red fabric around his finger to pass the time. Dele checked his phone, probably Instagram with all the double tapping he was doing, still smiling. “This is awkward,” Eric broke the silence, immediately getting Dele’s attention. “Hmm?” He hummed in response, locking his phone and putting it on the table. “What is?” “I didn’t know you were coming until the bell rang,” Eric told him with a slight blush creeping up on his cheeks. “I’m sorry if I didn’t live up to any expectations you may have had of me.” “What? No!” Dele exclaimed. “Look Eric, I came here with no expectations. Just your mum inviting me for dinner and telling me she had a son she may or may not want me to meet, that’s all.” Eric looked up at Dele the over at his mum who was washing dishes and obviously trying to listen in on their conversation. It was all light hearted and cute, endearing even, kind of like Dele. “In a different scenario this would be less awkward, I’d be less awkward.” “Understandable,” Dele nodded in agreement. “Want to grab a pint with me? I mean after this.” “Yes,” he replied without missing a beat. A dark dingy pub and a cold pint after this night? Eric was definitely okay with that idea. “I bet I can convince me mum to let us skip whatever Mary Berry concoction she made for dessert.” Dele looked over at Louise who was humming to herself, washing dishes, passing them along to Jeremy to dry. Like a well oiled machine. “I like your mum, don’t want her mad at me.” “She won’t be,” Eric laughed, scrubbing at his face. “She’d love that I’m leaving the house, especially with you.” Eric stood up and made the grand announcement that he was going to leave before dessert. Like he predicted Louise had made some half assed version of a fruit tart she read off the internet that Mary Berry swore by. She looked disappointed until Eric added that he was going to grab a pint with Dele. Her frown comically turned upset down and she all but shoved them out the door. They all exchanged hugs and goodbyes as jackets were thrown on and shoes were shoved on feet. Louise squeezed Eric a little too hard and long as they said their farewells, a threatening promise of a phone call the next morning for details. She was content and happy, more than pleased with herself. Eric decided to leave his car at his parents and walk to a place Dele knew that was a short walking distance away. Eric wasn’t that familiar with the area and it was clear that Dele took the underground to his parents home. They were quiet during the brief walk, Dele leading the way and Eric following dutifully. They arrived minutes later and the place wasn’t that bad looking on the outside, a bright red awning, a flashing open sign on the door. Inside was similar, intimate. The pub wasn’t crowded by any standards, a few stragglers sitting at the bar, the two TVs playing the same channel, highlights of that day’s footie. “Follow me,” Dele finally broke the silence, pointing to a place towards the back of the establishment where they barmaids were filling salt and pepper shakers. Eric slid into the booth, it was clearly old, wooden with a torn red cushion as the seat. It was homey and oddly comforting. “This place is a little dodgy, don’t ya think?” “This place is home,” Dele replied proudly, practically beaming as he spoke, sliding into the seat opposite Eric. “Helped raise the lad that sits in front of you.” “You grew up in the pub?” Eric asked tentatively. He didn’t know if Dele was speaking literally or not. Dele laughed, not at Eric but the way he asked the question. He clearly didn’t want to judge but confusion was written all over his face. “The people that raised me used to own this place. Sold it right before my first year of uni, helped pay for it too.” Eric took in the establishment once again and could picture a younger Dele in this place. Doing homework perched on a barstool, tongue hanging out his mouth as he tried to concentrate on his maths. Everyone was shit at maths so Eric assumed Dele was as well. Asking the stray patron for help but all of them too gone to even see the page correctly. “It’s cute.” “Look,” Dele called to Eric’s attention, grabbing his hand and lightly pulling him towards the wood paneled walls next to them. It felt comfortable holding Eric’s hand, even though they both were tense during the initial contact. “Carved my initials on the wall and the year.” “D.A. 2007,” Eric read out loud, his free handing tracing the faded lettering. “What’s the A stand for? Mum never told me your last name.” Dele was hesitant for a moment, letting go of Eric’s hand as they both sat back down. He ran his hand over his head, tugging lightly at the remaining blonde strands from when he dyed it towards the end of the summer. “Alli, my given surname.” Eric could see Dele immediately tense up when he answered. He wasn’t going to pry, it wasn’t his place to, especially on a first date. He let the tension wash over the area, let it leave them and hope that he hasn’t stepped over a boundary by asking the question. He didn’t like the fact that Dele wasn’t smiling anymore, he had grown to like his smile even after only knowing him for a few hours, it had become Eric’s favorite feature on him. “Why’d you decide to become a physical therapist?” That began a light hearted albeit confusing conversation for Eric. Dele’s smile instantly returned as he spoke passionately and intensely about medicine and muscles and tendons that Eric knew nothing about. Sometime during the conversation two pints were placed in front of them, free of charge. The perks of knowing the previous owners Dele laughed. They discussed work and Eric spoke at length about working in construction, loving to get his hands dirty but loving the end result the most. Seeing a project come to life from start to finish. He was animated, hands moving fast as he spoke, smiling from ear to ear about a new apartment complex he helped build for the less fortunate. When Eric had a pint in him and an easy following conversation, there was no stopping him and it didn’t look like Dele wanted to anyway. “I’m glad I did this,” Dele announced out of nowhere. “Grabbing dinner at your mum’s, meeting you.” Eric tried to hide his blush, hoping he could blame it on the pint and the bad lighting in the pub. “Same. I was hesitant at first I must admit, but you’ve grown on me Delboy.” Dele balked at Eric due to the nickname he was just bestowed upon. It was endearing and made his complexion match Eric’s in an instant. “We need to do this again. I mean if-if you want to.” “I want to,” he replied without a second thought. Another pint was set in front of both of them as they exchanged numbers, feeling like it was the right thing to do at that moment. Despite small hiccups during the evening everything was running smoothly. The conversation was easy and lighthearted, flowed naturally. No awkward pauses or silence, bumping from topic to topic without missing a beat. Eric spoke about living in Portugal and learning the language, how he felt out of place for the better part of a year, trying to adapt to a new place, country, and language while his younger siblings seemed to thrive the minute the plane touched down. Dele cheekily asking Eric to say something in Portuguese, Eric complying quickly. Even though he had no idea what Eric said it made Dele blush. Eric could definitely get used to seeing a permanent smile on Dele’s face, it made him look beautiful, angelic even. “Thanks,” he replied. “Huh?” “You said my smile makes me look beautiful,” Dele repeated. “Don’t know if you meant to say that out loud.” “I didn’t,” Eric laughed awkwardly, scratching the back of his head. “But it’s true. When you smile your whole face lights up, it’s contagious.” Dele ducked his head so he wasn’t looking directly at Eric and inevitably smiled and blushed again. He felt like a little school kid with a crush that was unattainable but in actuality it was. Unless Dele was reading the situation wrong, he could sense that Eric was warming up to the concept of a blind date and being set up. “Want to get out of here?” Eric didn’t think twice as he stood up, shook on his coat and followed Dele’s lead outside. They walked back towards Eric’s parents home so he could get his car and drive them both home. Eric had an itch as he walked, flexing his hand because he wanted to grab Dele’s hand. It was just a need he had, to touch him. To feel another sense of closeness besides their conversations during the night. He felt like that may be too intimate though, too personal. They walked close to each other, still talking, still laughing, still learning each other. This was probably the best first date either had ever had. They felt like they had known each other forever and were just reintroducing themselves. “Mum’s probably peeking out the window,” Eric said as they arrived at his parents house. “Seeing if we’re still together.” “She’s harmless,” Dele replied. “She means well. All mums do.” They got into Eric’s car after Eric looked directly at the front rooms window and swore he saw two eyes peering out. He had to remind himself that his mum was just looking after him, making sure everything in his life clicked together. The first time she tried to set him up with someone and so far so good. It felt comfortable driving Dele home, the radio on low to some talk radio that Eric usually listened to during his long drives. They were still talking, the conversation never dying down. Eric sucked in a breath when Dele’s hand touched his as it rested on the center console. His palm was facing up and Dele’s fingers effortlessly slid into his hand. It was warm and clammy but felt good. He could tell Dele was fidgeting just by the way his hand was never still in his. His fingers trying to familiarize themselves with Eric’s palm, tracing the calluses from years of work. “Quit it,” Eric laughed as he drove down the road of Dele’s flat. Dele removed his hand quickly, an embarrassed look on his face as he did so. “I’m so so sorry. I should’ve asked before I did it, I-I didn’t mean to.” “It’s fine,” Eric told him as he shut off the car in front of the flat. “You were just tickling me, that’s all. It was kinda nice, you holding my hand and all.” “Oh.” “Del,” Eric called to him, turning in his seat to properly face the other man. He placed his hand on Dele’s cheek, his thumb brushing his cheek gently. “I had a great time tonight. Meeting you, getting to know you was amazing.” “Oh.” Eric sighed as he hand still lightly stroked Dele’s cheek. “Say something please.” “I want to kiss you,” he responded boldly. Eric sucked in a breath at Dele’s words, his hand had stilled on his cheek. If this were a romantic comedy movie this would be where they kiss for the first time. The end of a first date, in Eric’s car outside Dele’s flat. Cliché. Eric usually scoffed at rom coms but honestly he could now see why throngs of people packed the cinemas to see if Emma Stone would get the guy at the end of two hours. “Now it’s your turn to say something,” Dele nervously laughed, biting at his bottom lip. “Come here,” Eric whispered huskily, pulling Dele closer by the nape of his neck. He hoped he didn’t overstep any boundaries by being aggressive when he pulled Dele in. Their lips touched and, yep, the rom com cliché continued. It was soft and gentle with a sprinkle of hunger, didn’t feel like a first kiss at all. Dele nibbled on Eric’s bottom lip which caused him to let out a noise he hoped he didn’t have to explain later. Dele grabbed onto Eric’s jacket trying to pull himself closer as he panted into Eric’s mouth to get some air into his lungs. “Come upstairs,” Dele whined into Eric’s lips. Eric panted to catch his breath, eyes still closed. “Del, I can’t.” “Please,” he begged, pulling on Eric’s jacket again. “Not now,” he replied, kissing Dele softly. Dele reluctantly released Eric’s jacket and threw himself against the passenger seat like a petulant child. It was endearing how he tried to act hurt and betrayed but his face was red and his lips plump and cherry colored. Eric’s fingertips traced his own lips, feeling the swell which caused him to smirk. “Go,” Eric said. “If you stay I may cave and take you up on your offer.” “Fine by me,” Dele responded with a laugh and a shrug of his shoulders, making himself comfortable against the cars headrest. “Del,” Eric pleaded. “Please go before I regret doing what I want to do right now.” The statement made Dele’s inside burn and he could feel the butterflies fluttering inside filling him with warmth even for someone he had just met. With a huff he kissed Eric one last time, determined to make an impression before saying his goodbyes and leaving the car. One he got into the lift his phone pinged, a text. It was Eric asking when they could have their second date. With a shake of his head and a new blush creeping up on his cheeks Dele replied his answer.

“changelings” impressions

{Quick request to anyone reading: I’m watching OUaT for the first time, and I want to avoid spoilers. So, if you want to discuss something spoilery, I’d be grateful if you could start a new post for that. Thank you!}

Well, damn.

Where do I even start?

Ah, yes, ridiculous fashion choices. Thank you, that’ll do nicely.

Seriously, what is up with this belt? Is there a funny story/deep significance I missed here? Did the Evil Queen get really into wrestling while off-screen? Is this a Fight Club thing?

So many questions, and neary an answer in sight…

…yeah, OK, I’ll get to the actual episode. Under the cut, though. Be warned, this wasn’t a happy one for multiple reasons. For one it’s so long and I am really sorry. I just kept going “and another thing…!” until we got to the current state of things. There are some “skip here” suggestions in the text, though. For another… yeah, just go ahead and read the thing. Short version right here: I did not like this episode, and its also a microcosm of this show’s issues with character continuity. (As in “which bits are canon this episode”)

OK, brief shout out to the whole scene at the barn house. Regina threatening the Evil Queen with crushing her own heart was deeply worrying, but also kind of badass. Good on her. Also, the conversation afterwards. It’s nice to have it all out in the open for once.

Next up: the flashback!

names displayed to silently accuse the guilty (not really they just happened to be in the shot)

Which was… alright, I guess? I mean, the Rumbelle dynamic was completely off compared to what we’ve seen from anything but their very earliest days (I’m thinking about the Robin incident, which was… maybe Belle’s second day there?), but compared to all the other nonsense going on in that area, this is barely a blip on the radar.

This had definitely the only moment of much-needed comic relief of the episode, namely Blue’s dress. I mean, she wears it with commendable sincerity, but that thing just doesn’t get any better with prolonged exposure.

So, Rumple can read Elf, but he can’t read Fairy? OK, I guess, but you’d think that over a 200-year-long rivalry, he’d have made the effort. Well, if nothing else, the “Belle knows Fairy” thing is a nice fanfic fact.

Anything else here…?

Oh, yeah. Rumple’s mom.

Alright, it might be a little early, but I’m calling it now: viewed by quantity, Rumple has The Worst Parents on this show. Simply because both of them were evil, child-stealing assholes who abandoned their son. …you know, despite the very obvious irony in that sentence, I’m shocked Rumple turned out as good as he did. All praise the two spinning ladies.

By the way, how many parents do we have who didn’t abandon their children? Obviously, there are some, but I highly doubt we’d get as much as an even split. Yes, I realise that this is part of the show’s theme, but that is still a lot of absent parents.

He didn’t get much out of that conversation, though, did he? Well, looks like he’ll have another opportunity this season, at least… (If I sound a little underwhelmed, it’s just because of my general mood, I’m actually pretty excited to see more of her. “Sometimes you have to choose power over love”, huh?)

::long groan:: I don’t wanna do this. Because I feel like this should be a serious, in-depth analysis, when really all I want to say is “this episode hurt me and not in the good way”.

I think a large part of the problem is this: I wasn’t there with the story. I think Rumple and Belle’s actions both grew… sort of organically to the point they reached by the end of the episode, but getting there was such a janky, half-baked mess that I just. Didn’t. Buy it.

Right up until the end of that really, really disturbing scene in the library, there are some giant leaps of logic I’m supposed to just follow along with. Like “the best way to get my son to love me is to speed up Belle’s pregnancy” or “Rumple wants to cut our son’s destiny so that he can be corrupted ‘or worse’.” Also, what the hell is “worse” supposed to be in this scenario? What, exactly, did he think Rumple would do to his own child? Ugh!

Also, this didn’t happen until later, but “Just because he did the right thing today doesn’t mean he’ll do the right thing tomorrow”? Really, Emma? Isn’t hoping people who do the right thing today will do the right thing tomorrow kind of at the core of your entire moral system?

::dons hardhat::

OK, outright: The library scene was painful, and deliberately cruel on part of the writers. Because there were so many options for this to play out that didn’t involve Rumple chasing Belle into the elevator that’s been an established “Thing” in the narrative of this couple. I’m not saying this is bad writing (I want to, but let’s face it, I’m hardly objective), but it’s definitely a deliberate punch to the gut. And then there’s the bit where Belle has to talk Rumple down, which…  ::shudder:: yeah, not a good look.

What annoys me about that conversation… OK, one of the things that annoy me about that conversation is that I can’t even properly analyse anyone’s character motivation here, because I have no fucking idea which bits of canon I’m “supposed to” remember this week!

Some canon dissection at this point, skip if you’re bored.

So. Belle told Rumple that “all she wanted [him] to do was try”, which is reasonable enough on its face. In an ideal world, I’d assume this refers back to his comment in s5 where he basically said that the darkness was irrevocably part of him and that he had no intentions of changing that. Which is a… bold choice of words for someone who was literally, straight-up cursed with that amount of darkness. But I digress. The thing is that I don’t actually know if that’s what Belle meant, because, like I said, there’s been a very clear trend of “please only remember selected pieces of established continuity” in recent seasons episodes, and if you’re going to play it like this, that makes any kind of analysis really hard.

Because here’s the thing: he absolutely did try after that. Right after that, you might say. He and Belle worked together (using Belle’s method rather than gunning for Hades directly) to get their child back from Hades. And when Belle decided to put herself under a sleeping curse so as not to risk Hades stealing their child (because Belle does impulsive shit when she feels cornered), Rumple not only got their child back, he also tried to kiss her awake afterwards—something he previously said would require too much of a change from him to even attempt! And when that didn’t work, he did what she’d asked and brought her to her father, who refused to wake her, because his child being worse-than-dead was apparently still better than her being with Rumple. (And no, words still cannot express how much I hate Moe French. He started out a shitty father and then got worse.)

And then he kept trying to wake her up, because that’s what you do for a person you love. I’d even say he was about to succeed in waking her up, when what I can only call a diabolus ex machina turned up to tell her that Rumple is bad and will “destroy his family” (in a frustratingly unspecified manner that was never elaborated upon). And I’d be happier with this if it was framed as the kind of self-fulfilling prophecy the season 2 seer girl made—that Belle trying to avoid a future where Rumple destroyed their family would put them on the path to destroying their family—but I’m not sure that’s what’s going on. And if it is, then the writing in that one bit of the show is certainly a lot subtler than everywhere else.

I don’t care how cute a baby you are, adult!you is still a douchebag

So, at this point, Rumple has tried really hard to be a better version of himself, but somehow none of that work is recognised in narrative. It’s perfectly fine for Belle not to recognise it for several reasons (it’s also a bit weird, considering how she still seems to feel about him), but the narrative never acknowledges that all of this can definitely be filed under “striving to be better.” Which, again, brings me to the “so which bits of canon are canon today?” question. (Also, hi, I have a strong suspicion that the people involved in planning this show are a lot better at short stories than ongoing series with open sequel hooks. No pun intended.)

And then, like I said, things took a pretty sharp turn towards the end of last episode and at the top of this one. I’m… not even touching that any further. I’m tired, and not in the “I woke up early to get this writing done” sense.

::sigh:: Remember The Bear and the Bow? Good times, that, huh?

Alright. Deep breath. It’s uphill from here. Kind of. The hill is inside a hell-pit, so it’s not a great climb.

The post-library bit of the episode kind of works as far as internal logic goes. The episode had pretty much lost me by then, to the point where I was just relieved it actually wasn’t Rumple who spiked that tea. Because, let me tell you, I know I said I didn’t see myself quitting the show, but that version would have been hard as hell to watch. So. Glad I don’t live in that version of reality.

Still, at that point, Belle has no reason to think someone other than Rumple would have wanted to give her that potion. Which meant he was still after the baby, so sending the little bean away was… still not a great idea, really, but I can see how she arrived there. Belle does impulsive shit when she feels cornered. If she thought Rumple had really sunk that low… yeah, it’s still not a great option (and, again some really good acting in that scene), but not completely out of left field.

And Rumple was obviously afraid something like this would happen, which is why he tried to barge into the convent like that. Didn’t exactly make him look more innocent, but he was in a hurry.

at least you’re pretty to look at, I guess

At least one person acted entirely consistent with prior characterisation, meaning the Evil Queen. Because that potion was such a classic move that I’m a bit surprised Rumple didn’t see that one coming. My guy, this is basically the same woman who convinced you Belle was dead before locking her in a cell for thirty years. She knows where to hit you and how to make it stick, and you should know that!

And this is not me saying that it’s Rumple’s fault, but he sure got a good hit from the idiot ball when he unceremoniously dropped the Evil Queen as his partner/”partner” without going “hm, could she possibly feel the urge to screw me over for this?”

And so, Rumple missed the birth of his second child, Belle had her first child without her husband to support her, and while Gideon is a lovely name, I can’t help but think that picking a name for your child is something couples should do together, playfully bickering back and forth for weeks that no, we are not naming our son Immanuel, why is this even a discussion? (…I had several friends get pregnant over the last three years and you hear some weird stuff. The little guy is called Immanuel now, by the way. Among other things.)

Oh, and speaking of the little guy’s name...

WHY WOULDN’T SHE TELL HIM? Seriously, the name wouldn’t do anything to find him he couldn’t do with blood magic. Which he has readily available, since it’s--and I know this comes as a shock--his child. Seriously, that just seems... nedlessly cruel.

Also, to close this out with some (semi-)humour, I want to make this a callout for one Belle Gold, who decided that of all the people present this was the best person to hand her newborn child:

I think I am on record for saying that I would not trust the Blue Fairy with taking care of a gerbil, nevermind a human being. Frankly, if she told me the sky was blue, I’d go outside and check, just in case the apocalypse had gone off while I wasn’t looking. That’s how little I trust her.

Now, I do know that this is not the story of how Blue has been evil all along, but there is a world where that’s the big twist at the end of this episode.

the next part in nick’s storyline [Cartel makes contact | demands | rescue ]; previous parts can be found in my au masterlist on my blog warnings: mentions of past sexual assault, mentions of past violence

Razor pierced himself with the sewing needle for as many times in the last five minutes. “¡Hijo de puta!”

He shook out his hand before popping his finger in his mouth with a grumble and a dark look at his kutte. Veronica pulled her gaze from the television to level another amused look in Razor’s direction. He caught her this time and his frown deepened.

“You know, some old ladies sew on the patches,” he pointed out. She arched an eyebrow and returned his pointed look.

“Feel free to find another old lady, if that’s your new requirement,” she countered. “I work with my hands. If I puncture a hole in my finger from trying to slide a sewing needle through leather and attach another patch, it makes my actual job a lot more difficult.”

“You saying my hands aren’t as important as yours?” Razor sniped back.

“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” she replied smugly. She leaned closer to him on the couch and draped her upper body against him. “But,” she added in a softer voice, “I’m very proud of you, if that counts for anything.”

Razor looked down at the ‘vicepresidente’ patch currently looking up at him. It had only been two days since their encounter with Fernando, but there had been a lot of things shaken up in the club. His eye was still incredibly swollen and he had been wrestling with the patch and kutte impatiently on her couch for the last twenty minutes. She pressed at the skin close to his eye gently with her fingers, but he still pulled away slightly with a hiss through his teeth. It hurt and he hoped that them nursing facial injuries for the other wasn’t going to become a trend.

“I wish I could do something,” Razor said lowly.

“What do you mean? Come on, baby, the patch is—”

“I’m not talking about the patch,” he interrupted harshly. He softened his tone and wrapped his arm around her in apology, letting his head drop to her shoulder. He inhaled her shampoo and let both eyes fall closed as the silky strands of her hair brushed against his face. “I wish I could do something.”

She remained silent as she finally cottoned on to his meaning. She pulled out of his grip minutely and her body tensed. In response he dragged calloused fingers over her leg and sighed.

“This isn’t on you,” Veronica said quietly.

He clenched his jaw as the memories of watching Nick being kicked and his old lady screaming flooded back in. Razor lifted his head and let his eyes trace over Veronica’s profile. “Nick needed me to—”

“Nick needed to think his plans out more thoroughly,” she interrupted sharply. She pulled completely out of his grip and got to her feet. He was taken aback by her outburst and watched as her body language closed off to him. “You do, too. You can’t just go around beating up and killing people because you feel like—”

“Because I feel like—!”

“And jumping from one harebrained scheme to the next. Seriously, Andre. You traipse off to some warehouse where no one, not even me, knows you’re going to be. You don’t have a solid plan for if things go sideways?” she continued, steamrolling over him. “You know, when we first started dating I was really, really naive. I thought the biggest hurdles we’d be facing were your club’s transphobia or comments and harassment from other people. I didn’t know that in actuality I’d be worrying every night if you were going to come back to me alive! Or maimed! Or if you were digging a shallow grave in the desert somewhere!”

“You knew that—”

“I didn’t know shit,” she cut him off again with a wave of her hand. “I thought I knew, but I didn’t. I’m going to worry and wonder now every time you’re not in my sight.”

“V, I’m okay,” Razor pressed. He got to his feet slowly and lifted his hands out to her.

“You’re not, Andre. You’re not, okay. You look like hell and you’ve got a cartel leader out for blood. For your blood and probably mine as well, now,” she pointed out lowly. She stepped out of reach of his hands.

“You said you wanted to know what was going on, that you didn’t want to be in the dark,” he reminded her slowly.

She nodded. “I know. I felt like…maybe it would be less scary if I knew the boogie man that was coming after me. I thought I could be like Sonny’s fiancée and be in the know and be badass and not afraid of anything.” She shook her head now and looked to the side. “I don’t know if I’m built for this. I’m so happy that you’re VP. I know this is important to you. But the higher up you get, the bigger the target on you widens. I don’t want to lose my fingers. I don’t want to be raped because someone wants to use me to get to you. That is scary to me.”

Razor took another step forward and reached for her again. “I would never let—”

“Don’t finish that sentence,” Veronica cut in. “Don’t make a promise you know you can’t keep. I don’t want to have to hold it against you later.” Razor closed his mouth and sucked his teeth in displeasure. “God forbid something happen to Nick and then you’re el presidente. What then?”

“What do you mean—nothing’s going to happen to Nick. I’m not going to be prez. I don’t want the seat or the gavel. I just want my kutte, my bike and you. Why are you still acting like there’s a shelf life on us?” Razor asked urgently. He brought up his hands to Veronica’s shoulders and shook her gently.

She looked at him grimly and opened her mouth to respond.

Sonny turned off the bike and kicked out the stand. It leaned and stabilized as he took off his helmet and slowly unfolded himself from his motorcycle. Nick was sitting on the front porch and Sonny squinted in a futile attempt to read his expression. The only acknowledgement that Nick gave him was a slight tilt up of his chin and Sonny returned the greeting with a wave of his fingers as he made his way up the front walkway.

It was a cool autumn day. The heat wave had finally broken and they were staring down the barrel of cooler days with less sun. Even now in the middle of the afternoon the sun was a warm orange glow instead of the searing brightness of the summer. The air was still and Sonny couldn’t shake the feeling that they were standing in the eye of the storm; ignorant of the destruction and wind that was funneling around them.

“Didn’t expect you to be out here,” he greeted once he finally hit the top step of the porch.

He made his way to Nick’s side and sat down heavily in the other chair on the porch. Sonny scanned his surrounding lazily, noting the camera he saw blinking that was perched by the new front door. Olivia and Amanda had done a good job on the house and Sonny was thankful that at least this could be a safe space for Nick.

“Needed some air.” Nick’s voice was brittle and reminded him of the sound of wind through dry palm leaves. “Feels like a fucking morgue in the house. I just—I just needed to catch my breath.”

Sonny leaned over and clapped a comforting hand to Nick’s shoulder where he was resting his elbows on his thighs and half folded into himself. The posture must have been uncomfortable with his cracked ribs and it pained Sonny to see Nick so defeated. He remained silent for a few moments, honoring the truth of the words instead of trying to rush past them. This was a familiar pain he was sorry to know all to well.

“Speaking of,” Sonny finally said after several minutes of silence, “Felipe taken care of?”

“Prospects,” Nick spat out.

“Who was the one who…?” Sonny let the question trail off.

“Me. It was a table vote—unanimous—but I was the one to put the bullet between his eyes. Not that it matters now. Not that it made me feel better or gave my old lady any comfort. He’s not the one I want to flay like a fish,” Nick ground out. Sonny tightened his hold on Nick’s shoulder.

“Nothing on Fernando?” he asked even though he already knew the answer.

“Nothing,” Nick confirmed with a shake of his head. He finally straightened up and Sonny let his hand fall back into his own lap. He watched as Nick’s gaze darted from house to house and then down the street when a car back fired. His posture was rigid and even now he was on high alert.

“I don’t know what to do,” he admitted. He glanced over at Sonny quickly before looking away. “I can’t sleep more than two, maybe three hours at a time.”

“Thought we gave you painkillers,” Sonny replied with a frown. He was fumbling with his phone before he even finished his sentence, already typing out a message to send to his old lady. Nick stopped him with a hand to his forearm.

“I don’t want them,” Nick said lowly. “It’s not…it’s not fair for me to be able to take medicine to take my pain away while she’s still in agony. The least I can do is—”

“You’re no good to her if you don’t take care of yourself,” Sonny pointed out.

“I’m not good to her at all,” Nick bit out harshly. Sonny’s heart clenched at the pain in Nick’s voice. “I’m no good for her. This is my fault.”

“It’s not—”

“Yes it is!” Nick yelled. His chest was heaving and Sonny remained quiet. “It’s my fault. I wasn’t fucking smart,” fingers jabbed at his temple roughly, “enough to get out of the situation. I should have lied to buy us time. I should have told someone where we were going. There’s a million things I did wrong and if I had thought it out, she never would have been dragged into this. She wouldn’t flinch away from me when I bring her food to try to get her to eat. She wouldn’t have panic attacks if the house is too dark. It’s only been two days and I’m already unraveling. She has nightmares…and in the space between me trying to wake her up and her being fully awake she looks at me and her eyes are so full of—terror, sheer terror,” Nick paused to take in a gulping breath. “She looks terrified of me and then she wakes up fully and she cries and shakes like a leaf until she tires herself out. Then the cycle continues.”

“You will get through this,” Sonny replied lowly in an insistent voice. “I know what it’s like, trust me. I know exactly what you’re feeling. Every time I look at my fiancée’s engagement ring I see her missing finger. And I know that’s my fault. I know how you feel.”

“How do you do it?” Nick asked in a defeated voice. He looked over at Sonny helplessly. “How do we do it? How do we let them stay with us?”

Sonny felt his own heart rate starting to rise, but he pushed down his alarm. “What do you mean?”

“We’re not good people,” Nick hissed. Sonny flashed back to the time when Nick had asked him that question. It felt like ages ago now. “We’re not. If we were good people we’d take ourselves out of the equation. Resign ourselves to cheap pussy and let our old ladies have a life. Let them have a good life!”

Sonny remained silent and looked away. He watched as curtains in the house across the street fluttered in the thin breeze. He resolutely did not remember the moment he opened a ring box and found a finger inside of it. He pushed back the feeling of helplessness from then.

“I’m getting married,” Sonny decided on finally. He turned back to Nick and pinned him with his gaze. “My old lady has made it pretty clear that if I make a decision for her, she’ll kill me herself.” He shrugged helplessly. “I know what kind of man I am. I know I should leave her, but I can’t. I can’t leave her. I can’t imagine living without her. So I do what I need to do to take care of her the absolute best I can. It’s the only thing you can do.”

Nick made a disgusted face at that, clearly not satisfied with the answer. “Maybe that works for you two, but…I can’t provide her any sense of security, do you get that? You took out everyone even a little bit involved in her kidnapping—”

“Wish I’d been the one to slide the shiv between Ryan’s ribs,” Sonny muttered darkly.

“None of them are alive. I can’t even find Fernando. And when I do, what then? I kill him? Who’s to say I don’t cut off the head of the snake and it grows two more in it’s place. I’m out of my depth. There’s nothing for me to do, but wait. I don’t even know what I’m waiting for,” Nick said wearily.

Sonny leaned forward on his elbows and smiled a little. “That brings me to the reason for my visit. I think I have a solution to how we take out Fernando.”

Nick nodded his head towards the empty chair at the table and Snake made his way to it slowly. “So you know that you have three months left, right?” Nick asked as Snake sat. The other man nodded and Nick tapped his finger against the wood table. “You also know that we can revoke your bid at any time?” Snake nodded again, this time with a look of trepidation on his face.

Nick looked away and traced the smooth wood surface before running his finger along the gavel sitting before him. Around the table the rest of the members had stoic expressions on their face. Snake’s gaze flicked to Razor before landing back on Nick’s face. The president looked weathered in a way that far exceeded his actual age. Where there used to be something playful in Nick’s expression it was now all granite. Every so often something painful made itself known before he closed the veneer once more.

“Your sponsor…” Nick let the words draw out. “Your sponsor suggested that with some of the recent…events…over the last day that we should patch you through early.” Nick met Snake’s gaze. “The club voted and it was unanimous.” Nick inclined his head and Razor tossed a set of patches across the table to Snake.

“You’re in the club.”

check out the mc!au tag & au masterlist on my blog for more!

dreamers: don’t die

I know you think none of this matters anymore. You don’t even care so much to abide by sentence structure. The newest version of the new you could give two shits about what the Oxford comma even is. You don’t write to attain a grade anymore. You don’t write to get into college anymore. You write because……...

Dot. Dot. Dot ...still thinking, uploading, pending, synching. The world you once believed in, the audience still waiting on the last time you gave serious, genuine, interested, effort into your skill...

But something always causes the pen to stop writing before it actually intended on stopping. Suddenly the fingers stop typing at the keyboard...

You look up to kiss him goodnight (you realize he’s filling up his water bottle to head to bed), & so you shrug silently to yourself, “oh, this isn’t anything big I’m working on anyway right now, I can pause this and put it away.” NBD! Easy! 

Dot. Dot. Dot. 

The laptop closes and we don’t even recognize the severity of the moment. Such a subtle, little... moment, right?

My dad, born in 1953, believed in a lifelong dream of getting a Corvette. He got it when I was like 5. I’d sit in the back and stare up at the Wisconsin stars and think “I’m gonna chase my dreams like this one day, and never stop driving.” I’m 24, he hasn’t driven it regularly since I was 9. 

One day that garage door closed for the last time that he’d ever take that red corvette out, before giving up on remembering why he’d made it such a life goal in the first place...

And suddenly years and years later, so many pauses, so many put away ideas, brainstorming lists, and even frickin potential tweets and instagram captions fill up nothing but receipt space in your Notes app (a habit kept like my mom’s iconic giant black purse, all too familiar: like a landfill of thin crumpled papers, dollars, and big break ideas, always meant to go somewhere someday, right?).

Ideas are only dangerous if you feed them. House them. Watch them age, and help them develop into actions. As an artist, but really as an overthinker; it’s a game within your own creative intellect to balance the test of modern revolutions and trends & the analytical application of methods classically proven to work. We must not think we have to choose one or the other, but learn how to derive new opinions, ideas, and experiments by utilizing both thought-habits to new, peaceful third productive outcome to remain open minded to perspectives of people with much different life experiences and lives, different reality lenses than our own. 

Three dots that wait to continue the conversation, as eager as a new college grad awaits the dialog after sending a cover letter. The art of a cover letter? Is that really an art? I find well crafted writing with any purpose other than for the passion that letters themselves inspired one to pursue opportunity, to be a mockery of language itself. Do not exploit my talent, do not disrespect my education, for you have no idea what I’ve learned behind the closed doors of my personal life and interests, of things beyond what the ACT scans for. I might have read AP Chemistry in 5th grade, I might have read my father’s divorce journal during the military, you have no academic acclaim in my eye to judge the motivation behind why I type what I type. What I say and why I say so is something I’m still discovering myself, but I question the validity of my talent, of my career, every day that I realize I don’t have a stupid Bachelor’s Degree Paper saying that I majored in English and also sucked up to the professor’s particular philosophy. I’ve read more books in my lifetime than days I’ve spent in school. I’m not lying. I’m 24, one year out of college, one year a resident in the city of Angels: dying. Dying of Apathy. The same criminal that tried to take me when I tasted a life of comfort.

You need more than ambition now. Now, more than ever, you need to focus. To stop picking up your phone to see if he viewed your story, even if you’re alone in a foreign world and don’t know a single soul who understands your context. You can’t drop the mask now and visit Aunt Linda after church at Starbucks. You can’t force smiles anymore to strangers, trying to convince other people why you moved here with a dream. But why not? You can’t force strangers, you can’t force friends, you can’t force family to believe in you if you’ve chosen to stop believing in yourself. So cheesy, those words must have come from someone from Wisconsin. Regardless, reality.

The months fly by like EXPO tickets at a busy restaurant, once they’re gone they’re forgotten. 

So many months, so many days, so many interactions with strangers on the street. Things we don’t think about. It’s been a year, what the fuck have I accomplished? I haven’t even written a Goddamn thing on a computer since I worked at ESPN. When my voice felt validated. I could have stayed. How many nights do I wake up jerking, imagining the best case scenario of an unrealistic positive scenario of the other side of the crossroads we faced when we were only a little bit younger? But I chose to move from Wisconsin to California. I believed in myself when I bought that flight, when I wobbly-handed my debit card to the TJ Maxx cashier for that suitcase, the one suitcase I moved here with. Flyin’ solo sounds more glamorous in quote form. It was really lonely. But day by day things can really, really; really improve. 

Those restaurant tickets are forgotten. We take shots at the end of the night with both BOH and FOH together, completely forgetting about that side of chipotle ranch for that lemon lady that was never ran. We move on in life and don’t care about the little details that occur around us as we take in the information overload called being alive. 

But among those tickets, among those many little random tickets, big, small, we know the clock out feeling still leaves us smiling, wondering why even if work was hectic, it was worth it. It was and is always worth coming back again, even when we have slow nights. Just kinda like how, even if we haven’t gotten verified on Instagram or Twitter, we still kinda like life in LA.

Tickets fly by like days, weeks, months, even years lived in Los Angeles, and I don’t fast forward through those moments as I previously had. I used to guilt trip myself for not being “critically acclaimed” whatever the fuck that means, yet if I were to forever focus on that rubric as the sole way to define my sense of self, I’d land up where my brain of creative fire fears most: apathy. Not caring. Not having emotion. Make excuses to replace the thoughts of guilt, the thoughts that comfort me into affirmation that my negligence, my lack of work ethic, my dwindling inspiration that was once the sturdy backbone I had as my secret weapon during the fight.

Those tickets don’t matter. A side of ketchup you forgot to run a few days ago that you just remembered doesn’t matter. But the concept of tickets not mattering ever is just as common and dangerous a mistake to make as getting caught up in labels, titles, and details. 

The days I’ve been in Los Angeles, I haven’t acted in feature films, modeled free outfits on Melrose, made out with Halsey backstage, or had some magical unrealistic moment where someone wants to read my poetry or script ideas drunkenly on the patio at Berkshire House. At the end of the shift, the restaurant tickets don’t matter, right? Or do they?

At the end of the day, the time I spent in LA without getting a self affirming job doesn’t matter, right? All this time I have spent living in LA with strangers and paying rent that seems so expensive, is it a waste of my life? These days in LA that pass by without me making my “big break” are a fucking waste of time, right? Or are they? 

But,

Did you learn Street names? Freeway names? Did coffee shop faces begin to become recognizable by name? What about your favorite parking spot at work? What about when the Uber app recognizes your patterns and little favorite spots? Do you have a coworker you vent to about all the BS banter from certain regular customers? What about the checkout lady at the grocery store where you get your favorite coffee creamer? Has the weight of meaning of seeing a familiar friends’ handwriting on a postcard carried its weight a little differently? All these little things, all those little tickets at work, never seem to matter in the moment, but at the end of the day, at the end of our shift: they’re what makes us feel at home. Habits are what makes the difference between what feels like a house and what feels like a home. 

You’ve made what was just a house, now a home. Through habit. Through noticing.

Although Apathy is a real phase we all sometimes experience in life due to comfort and lack of change, apathy doesn’t have to corner us into self imposing a giant change upon our lives, forcing us to lose something we love. We can fight these fits of apathy, of self doubt, of questioning everything, by …

Dot Dot Dot...

Does anyone have an answer?

My answer to Apathy, to a dead soul, to feelings of  “why hasn't anyone noticed what I’m capable of yet?” is that the answer never mattered to a dumb self conceited question to begin with. 

Remember those tickets. Remember those days. Remember those that laughed at your jokes, asked to take pictures with you, invited you to parties, or smiled at you with a sense of familiar relief when you punched into work. People have been noticing you. Have you been noticing them?

Twitter is a powerful social network that has transformed this blog and others as well. However, when it comes to using Twitter, many people get confused. They do not know how to create quality tweets with only 140 characters, build a strong following, or interact with the followers that they have. In this blog post, I will provide numerous tips that cover all three of these aspects on Twitter and others as well.

Retweet other people’s tweets. If you share other people’s tweets, then others will be more likely to retweet other people’s tweets. If you have not retweeted anyone else’s tweet in one week, then you are using Twitter wrong.

Grow a targeted following. A targeted following is the best kind of following to have. These kinds of followers are the ones who are interested in your tweets before they even start to read them.

Ask questions. Asking questions will encourage people to respond with their answers. This will allow you to engage more with your followers.

Answer questions to join a conversation. If you want to engage with new people, then look for the people who are asking the question. By answering these people’s questions with a tweet, you may get some new followers, but the conversation will more than likely continue.

Tweet every 30 minutes. Tweeting every 30 minutes allowed me to build a strong presence on Twitter. No, it’s not annoying to tweet this many times every day.

Better yet, tweet every 20 minutes. The more you tweet, the more times people are going to see you. Tweeting every 20 minutes allows almost all of your followers who logged in on that day to see one of your tweets. I didn’t annoy more people by tweeting this much. In fact, I gained more people and saw more engagement for my tweets.

Schedule tweets. The only way you are going to tweet every 20-30 minutes is if you schedule tweets in advance.

Get HootSuite Pro. It will make your life much easier and save you a lot of time. I can schedule 36 tweets in just 6 clicks.

Tweet about your blog 80% of the time. If you want to drive more traffic to your blog from Twitter, you need to tweet about your blog at least 80% of the time. Only tweeting about your blog 20% of the time is a mistake. Your followers won’t care if your blog posts are filled with quality content.

Tweet pictures. Pictures have been proven to increase retweets, favorites, and conversations you have with your followers. Basically, it’s something that you must do.

Tweet at the moment. Don’t schedule a question! If you get answers right away, you can extend those conversations by replying as soon as possible.

Get the Twitter mobile app. The Twitter mobile app allows you to tweet at the moment no matter where you are. If you’re in the parking lot waiting for someone to get to the car, you can send out a tweet with the mobile app and respond to people in real-time.

Use Twitter’s search engine to find targeted people. It’s cool, reliable, and easy to find targeted people with Twitter’s search engine.

Follow journalists. If you follow these journalists and build a strong presence for yourself on the web, then these journalists will be more likely to write about you in a popular magazine.

Follow the right people. Follow targeted people who are likely to follow back, people that you like, people you want to (and can) build connections with, tweet awesome stuff, and/or the leaders of your niche. Don’t follow the people who are not going to provide more value for your Twitter experience.

Tell everyone about what you do in your niche in your bio. Your bio is a place for you to tell people what you are an expert at.

Also, tell people about all of your accomplishments. The accomplishments are proof that you are an expert. The social media expert who got on the Forbes Top 50 Social Media Power Users list looks much better than the social media expert with 500 followers.

Get more words in your bio by using commas and incomplete sentences. Your English teacher is not going to come and haunt you if you use sentence fragments and do not have a verb in your bio. Simply list everything you do as well as your accomplishments by separating everything with commas.

Use TwitterCounter to keep track of statistics. The best way to grow on Twitter is to know when you did well and when you did bad. TwitterCounter allows you to see how many followers you gain for up to 6 months (free version). It’s a nice tool to utilize.

Use Tweriod to see when your followers are on Twitter. Using Tweriod will allow you to identify the times when most of your followers on Twitter. Now you know when to send out your most important tweet.

Include RT or r/t at the end of some of your tweets. Including RT or r/t at the end of some of your tweets does lead to more retweets. However, if you overuse RT or r/t, its effect will wear off, and you will not get as many retweets if you include RT or r/t at the end of your tweets.

Thank the people who share your blog posts. Thanking people for sharing your blog posts is an unexpected act of courtesy that can result in this person sharing more of your blog posts and being grateful that you thanked them.

Favorite tweets on occasion. Talking with someone is better than clicking the little star.

Use more verbs and fewer nouns. You will get more retweets this way.

Use hashtags. Using hashtags also has a good effect on getting more retweets. However, any tweet with more than two hashtags does not get retweeted as much.

Make your tweets 70-100 characters long. This is just another way to get more retweets. 70-100 characters seem to be the sweet spot.

Do not connect your Facebook account with your Twitter account. It’s annoying for your friends and followers on Facebook. It’s not worth it.

Use your Twitter account to promote your other social networks. If Twitter is your biggest social network, it may take a small push to turn your other social networks into something extraordinary as well.

Promote your Twitter account on your other social networks. Getting multiple small pushes to leverage your Twitter account can lead to something incredible.

Pin a tweet to the top of your profile. Make it the tweet that you want everyone to see. Choose wisely.

Focus on one specific niche. People follow specific people. If you scatter around from niche to niche, people will not know why they are following you.

Tweet motivational quotes. No matter what your niche is, motivational quotes always increase engagement.

Get in touch with the leaders in your niche. Leaders chat with other leaders. Show people that you are a leader by talking with the leaders. Also, you will be able to learn new things by talking with the leaders of your niche.

Tweet a tip of the day. This allows you to provide your followers with easy to access knowledge about your niche.

Use Twitter to make a difference. Vivienne Harr has done that quite nicely with her Make A Stand Lemon Aid. She’s also six years younger than me.

Take advantage of trending topics. If you say something clever, you will get more retweets for that tweet than your typical tweets. Trending topics are popular which means when you get discovered, it will have a big impact on your engagement.

Follow others instead of trying to be a rock star. Don’t be the guy or gal who wants to have 100,000 followers and only follow 10 people. It doesn’t work that way, and even if you got that to happen, you are not using Twitter to its fullest potential (building connections).

Use Bitly to shorten links. *Almost* any method you can use to save characters is a good method. Bitly links also come with detailed statistics.

Hire someone to create your background. I hired someone to design my book cover and saw unprecedented success in my book sales. Hiring someone to create an awesome Twitter background for as little as $5 on Fiverr can make you look more professional.

Follow back the people who follow you. This is all about building the connections that you have gained through Twitter.

Do not use automated DMs. That is, unless, you like getting unfollowed.

Properly use DMs to contact some of your followers. Personalized messages to a few followers strengthen the connections you have with those followers. Besides, you can have long conversations by sending DMs back and forth to one of your followers.

Turn your Twitter followers into fans. Tweet incredible content and build your credibility. Become someone who your followers would be proud to show off to their friends.

Become a guest blogger. Guest blogging is an easy way to get more exposure and followers on your Twitter account. Also, becoming a guest blogger builds on your preeminence.

Get people to interview you. Your credibility gets boosted and you get more followers at the same time.

Interview other people. For most people, this tip is easier than Tip #45. The people you interview will be very likely to follow you on Twitter and tell their followers about you.

Give yourself goals to aim for. Instead of striving to gain more followers, strive to gain 10 followers every day. Then go up to 20 followers every day and keep on building.

Proofread your tweets before you send them out. It sounds like something completely unnecessary, but it is important. You would be shocked by how many typos are on Twitter.

Look at the Twitter strategy you already have in place. Identify its strengths and areas of improvement.

Don’t argue with anyone on Twitter. It’s wrong and makes you look bad.

Regularly check your profile and keep it up to date. The information you wrote on your bio three months ago could be outdated. You could also be doing something more remarkable than anything on your bio and may want to add that in your bio.

Only list one person for Follow Friday. Follow Friday is overrated, but if you participate in it, only list one person for every Follow Friday. No one likes to see a list of 10 usernames with no motives to follow those people.

Review your Twitter apps to make sure there are no problems. That’s how you get hacked. I got hacked once because I did not review my apps carefully. Learn from my heartache.

Use ManageFlitter. It’s a great tool that allows you to identify the people who are not following you, the people who are following you, and other cool features as well.

Use Tweepi. Tweepi helps you grow a targeted following by displaying a list of someone’s followers based on the last tweet, follow back ratio (the most important), number of followers, and more!

Look at your Bitly links and continue tweeting the links that get clicked on the most. If people liked it the first time, they’ll like it again. If you see a decline in clicks for one of your Bitly links, then that link needs to take a break.

Have perseverance. Remember that Rome was not built in 1 day. Neither was anyone’s Twitter presence.

Don’t ask to be followed. Instead of asking people to click the follow button and build a connection made from pity, build your presence on Twitter.

Don’t ask for a shout out. Just don’t. Ever.

Don’t send out boring tweets. If you send out boring tweets such as status updates of you walking your dog or something else, it will bore the reader.

You should tweet about one thing 80% of the time. Stay focused on one niche. You can go out of your niche sometimes, but use this 80% rule to make sure most of your tweets are the ones that your followers want to read.

Don’t think about lost followers and connections. Instead of looking at what you lost, look at what you have gained.

Know why people follow you and would want to read your tweets. Knowing is the first step towards seeing better results.

Check your notifications three times every day. By checking your notifications three times every day, you will be able to reply to more of your followers faster. If you check your notifications more than three times every day, then that’s even better.

Use a real location in your bio. There’s no harm in adding your location, and it can result in strong connections with people who either live nearby or used to live where you live now.

Raise your Klout Score. People look at your Klout score to determine how influential you are on the web…and Twitter!

Have a good bio picture. The big picture is one of the most important factors when someone decides whether someone will follow you or not.

Use Twitter every day. If you want to become successful on Twitter, you need to be dedicated.

Look at what the leaders of your niche tweet. Then see if you can tweet something similar.

Tweet slideshares and infographics. Those happen to work very well on Twitter.

Those are 70 Twitter tips. Chances are you will choose some of these tips from the list and implement them one at the time. To get the best out of this article, I highly recommend that you revisit this article once a week so you can see how many of these tips you are implementing. By implementing all of these tips consistently for a long period, you will eventually be able to gain thousands of followers on Twitter every week.

Why JavaScript is Eating HTML

Web development is always changing. One trend in particular has become very popular lately, and it fundamentally goes against the conventional wisdom about how a web page should be made. It is exciting for some but frustrating for others, and the reasons for both are difficult to explain.

A web page is traditionally made up of three separate parts with separate responsibilities: HTML code defines the structure and meaning of the content on a page, CSS code defines its appearance, and JavaScript code defines its behavior. On teams with dedicated designers, HTML/CSS developers and JavaScript developers, this separation of concerns aligns nicely with job roles: Designers determine the visuals and user interactions on a page, HTML and CSS developers reproduce those visuals in a web browser, and JavaScript developers add the user interaction to tie it all together and “make it work.” People can work on one piece without getting involved with all three.

In recent years, JavaScript developers have realized that by defining a page’s structure in JavaScript instead of in HTML (using frameworks such as React), they can simplify the development and maintenance of user interaction code that is otherwise much more complex to build. Of course, when you tell someone that the HTML they wrote needs to be chopped up and mixed in with JavaScript they don’t know anything about, they can (understandably) become frustrated and start asking what the heck we’re getting out of this.

As a JavaScript developer on a cross-functional team, I get this question occasionally and I often have trouble answering it. All of the materials I’ve found on this topic are written for an audience that is already familiar with JavaScript — which is not terribly useful to those who focus on HTML and CSS. But this HTML-in-JS pattern (or something else that provides the same benefits) will likely be around for a while, so I think it’s an important thing that everyone involved in web development should understand.

This article will include code examples for those interested, but my goal is to explain this concept in a way that can be understood without them.

Background: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

To broaden the audience of this article as much as possible, I want to give a quick background on the types of code involved in creating a web page and their traditional roles. If you have experience with these, you can skip ahead.

HTML is for structure and semantic meaning

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) code defines the structure and meaning of the content on a page. For example, this article's HTML contains the text you're reading right now, the fact that it is in a paragraph, and the fact that it comes after a heading and before a CodePen.

Let’s say we want to build a simple shopping list app. We might start with some HTML like this:

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We can save this code in a file, open it in a web browser, and the browser will display the rendered result. As you can see, the HTML code in this example represents a section of a page that contains a heading reading “Shopping List (2 items),” a text input box, a button reading “Add Item,” and a list with two items reading “Eggs” and “Butter.” In a traditional website, a user would navigate to an address in their web browser, then the browser would request this HTML from a server, load it and display it. If there are already items in the list, the server could deliver HTML with the items already in place, like they are in this example.

Try to type something in the input box and click the “Add Item” button. You’ll notice nothing happens. The button isn’t connected to any code that can change the HTML, and the HTML can’t change itself. We’ll get to that in a moment.

CSS is for appearance

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) code defines the appearance of a page. For example, this article's CSS contains the font, spacing, and color of the text you're reading.

You may have noticed that our shopping list example looks very plain. There is no way for HTML to specify things like spacing, font sizes, and colors. This is where CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) comes in. On the same page as the HTML above, we could add CSS code to style things up a bit:

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As you can see, this CSS changed the font sizes and weights and gave the section a nice background color (designers, please don’t @ me; I know this is still ugly). A developer can write style rules like these and they will be applied consistently to any HTML structure: if we add more <section>, <button> or <ul> elements to this page, they will have the same font changes applied.

The button still doesn’t do anything, though: that’s where JavaScript comes in.

JavaScript is for behavior

JavaScript code defines the behavior of interactive or dynamic elements on a page. For example, the embedded CodePen examples in this article are powered by JavaScript.

Without JavaScript, to make the Add Item button in our example work would require us to use special HTML to make it submit data back to the server (<form action="...">, if you’re curious). Then the browser would discard the entire page and reload an updated version of the entire HTML file. If this shopping list was part of a larger page, anything else the user was doing would be lost. Scrolled down? You’re back at the top. Watching a video? It starts over. This is how all web applications worked for a long time: any time a user interacted with a webpage, it was as if they closed their web browser and opened it again. That’s not a big deal for this simple example, but for a large complex page which could take a while to load, it’s not efficient for either the browser or the server.

If we want anything to change on a webpage without reloading the entire page, we need JavaScript (not to be confused with Java, which is an entirely different language… don’t get me started). Let’s try adding some:

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Now when we type some text in the box and click the “Add Item” button, our new item is added to the list and the item count at the top is updated! In a real app, we would also add some code to send the new item to the server in the background so that it will still show up the next time we load the page.

Separating JavaScript from the HTML and CSS makes sense in this simple example. Traditionally, even more complicated interactions would be added this way: HTML is loaded and displayed, and JavaScript runs afterwards to add things to it and change it. As things get more complex, however, we start needing to keep better track of things in our JavaScript.

If we were to keep building this shopping list app, next we’d probably add buttons for editing or removing items from the list. Let’s say we write the JavaScript for a button that removes an item, but we forget to add the code that updates the item total at the top of the page. Suddenly we have a bug: after a user removes an item, the total on the page won’t match the list! Once we notice the bug, we fix it by adding that same totalText.innerHTML line from our “Add Item” code to the “Remove Item” code. Now we have the same code duplicated in more than one place. Later on, let’s say we want to change that code so that instead of “(2 items)” at the top of the page it reads “Items: 2.” We’ll have to make sure we update it in all three places: in the HTML, in the JavaScript for the “Add Item” button, and in the JavaScript for the “Remove Item” button. If we don’t, we’ll have another bug where that text abruptly changes after a user interaction.

In this simple example, we can already see how quickly these things can get messy. There are ways to organize our JavaScript to make this kind of problem easier to deal with, but as things continue to get more complex, we’ll need to keep restructuring and rewriting things to keep up. As long as HTML and JavaScript are kept separate, a lot of effort can be required to make sure everything is kept in sync between them. That’s one of the reasons why new JavaScript frameworks, like React, have gained traction: they are designed to show the relationships between things like HTML and JavaScript. To understand how that works, we first need to understand just a teeny bit of computer science.

Two kinds of programming

The key concept to understand here involves the distinction between two common programming styles. (There are other programming styles, of course, but we’re only dealing with two of them here.) Most programming languages lend themselves to one or the other of these, and some can be used in both ways. It's important to grasp both in order to understand the main benefit of HTML-in-JS from a JavaScript developer's perspective.

Imperative programming: The word "imperative" here implies commanding a computer to do something. A line of imperative code is a lot like an imperative sentence in English: it gives the computer a specific instruction to follow. In imperative programming, we must tell the computer exactly how to do every little thing we need it to do. In web development, this is starting to be considered "the old way" of doing things and it's what you do with vanilla JavaScript, or libraries like jQuery. The JavaScript in my shopping list example above is imperative code.

Imperative: “Do X, then do Y, then do Z”.

Example: When the user selects this element, add the .selected class to it; and when the user de-selects it, remove the .selected class from it.

Declarative programming: This is a more abstract layer above imperative programming. Instead of giving the computer instructions, we instead "declare" what we want the results to be after the computer does something. Our tools (e.g. React) figure out the how for us automatically. These tools are built with imperative code on the inside that we don't have to pay attention to from the outside.

Declarative: “The result should be XYZ. Do whatever you need to do to make that happen.”

Example: This element has the .selected class if the user has selected it.

HTML is a declarative language

Forget about JavaScript for a moment. Here's an important fact: HTML on its own is a declarative language. In an HTML file, you can declare something like:

<section> <h1>Hello</h1> <p>My name is Mike.</p> </section>

When a web browser reads this HTML, it will figure out these imperative steps for you and execute them:

Create a section element

Create a heading element of level 1

Set the inner text of the heading element to “Hello”

Place the heading element into the section element

Create a paragraph element

Set the inner text of the paragraph element to “My name is Mike”

Place the paragraph element into the section element

Place the section element into the document

Display the document on the screen

As a web developer, the details of how a browser does these things is irrelevant; all that matters is that it does them. This is a perfect example of the difference between these two kinds of programming. In short, HTML is a declarative abstraction wrapped around a web browser's imperative display engine. It takes care of the "how" so you only have to worry about the "what." You can enjoy life writing declarative HTML because the fine people at Mozilla or Google or Apple wrote the imperative code for you when they built your web browser.

JavaScript is an imperative language

We’ve already looked at a simple example of imperative JavaScript in the shopping list example above, and I mentioned how the complexity of an app’s features has ripple effects on the effort required to implement them and the potential for bugs in that implementation. Now let’s look at a slightly more complex feature and see how it can be simplified by using a declarative approach.

Imagine a webpage that contains the following:

A list of labelled checkboxes, each row of which changes to a different color when it is selected

Text at the bottom like "1 of 4 selected" that should update when the checkboxes change

A "Select All" button which should be disabled if all checkboxes are already selected

A "Select None" button which should be disabled if no checkboxes are selected

Here’s an implementation of this in plain HTML, CSS and imperative JavaScript:

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There isn’t much CSS code here because I’m using the wonderful PatternFly design system, which provides most of the CSS for my example. I imported their CSS file in the CodePen settings.

All the small things

In order to implement this feature with imperative JavaScript, we need to give the browser several granular instructions. This is the English-language equivalent to the code in my example above:

In our HTML, we declare the initial structure of the page:

There are four row elements, each containing a checkbox. The third box is checked.

There is some summary text which reads "1 of 4 selected."

There is a "Select All" button which is enabled.

There is a "Select None" button which is disabled.

In our JavaScript, we write instructions for what to change when each of these events occurs:

When a checkbox changes from unchecked to checked:

Find the row element containing the checkbox and add the .selected CSS class to it.

Find all the checkbox elements in the list and count how many are checked and how many are not checked.

Find the summary text element and update it with the checked number and the total number.

Find the "Select None" button element and enable it if it was disabled.

If all checkboxes are now checked, find the "Select All" button element and disable it.

When a checkbox changes from checked to unchecked:

Find the row element containing the checkbox and remove the .selected class from it.

Find all the checkbox elements in the list and count how many are checked and not checked.

Find the summary text element and update it with the checked number and the total number.

Find the "Select All" button element and enable it if it was disabled.

If all checkboxes are now unchecked, find the "Select None" button element and disable it.

When the "Select All" button is clicked:

Find all the checkbox elements in the list and check them all.

Find all the row elements in the list and add the .selected class to them.

Find the summary text element and update it.

Find the "Select All" button and disable it.

Find the "Select None" button and enable it.

When the "Select None" button is clicked:

Find all the checkbox elements in the list and uncheck them all.

Find all the row elements in the list and remove the .selected class from them.

Find the summary text element and update it.

Find the "Select All" button and enable it.

Find the "Select None" button and disable it.

Wow. That's a lot, right? Well, we better remember to write code for each and every one of those things. If we forget or screw up any of those instructions, we will end up with a bug where the totals don't match the checkboxes, or a button is enabled that doesn't do anything when you click it, or a row ends up with the wrong color, or something else we didn’t think of and won’t find out about until a user complains.

The big problem here is that there is no single source of truth for the state of our app, which in this case is “which checkboxes are checked?” The checkboxes know whether or not they are checked, of course, but, the row styles also have to know, the summary text has to know, and each button has to know. Five copies of this information are stored separately all around the HTML, and when it changes in any of those places the JavaScript developer needs to catch that and write imperative code to keep the others in sync.

This is still only a simple example of one small component of a page. If that sounds like a headache, imagine how complex and fragile an application becomes when you need to write the whole thing this way. For many complex modern web applications, it’s not a scalable solution.

Moving towards a single source of truth

Tools, like React, allow us to use JavaScript in a declarative way. Just as HTML is a declarative abstraction wrapped around the web browser’s display instructions, React is a declarative abstraction wrapped around JavaScript.

Remember how HTML let us focus on the structure of a page and not the details of how the browser displays that structure? Well, when we use React, we can focus on the structure again by defining it based on data stored in a single place. When that source of truth changes, React will update the structure of the page for us automatically. It will take care of the imperative steps behind the scenes, just like the web browser does for HTML. (Although React is used as an example here, this concept is not unique to React and is used by other frameworks, such as Vue.)

Let's go back to our list of checkboxes from the example above. In this case, the truth we care about is simple: which checkboxes are checked? The other details on the page (e.g. what the summary says, the color of the rows, whether or not the buttons are enabled) are effects derived from that same truth. So, why should they need to have their own copy of this information? They should just use the single source of truth for reference, and everything on the page should "just know" which checkboxes are checked and conduct themselves accordingly. You might say that the row elements, summary text, and buttons should all be able to automatically react to a checkbox being checked or unchecked. (See what I did there?)

Tell me what you want (what you really, really want)

In order to implement this page with React, we can replace the list with a few simple declarations of facts:

There is a list of true/false values called checkboxValues that represents which boxes are checked.

Example:  checkboxValues = [false, false, true, false]

This list represents the truth that we have four checkboxes, and that the third one is checked.

For each value in checkboxValues, there is a row element which:

has a CSS class called .selected if the value is true, and

contains a checkbox, which is checked if the value is true.

There is a summary text element that contains the text "{x} of {y} selected" where {x} is the number of true values in checkboxValues and {y} is the total number of values in checkboxValues.

There is a "Select All" button that is enabled if there are any false values in checkboxValues.

There is a "Select None" button that is enabled if there are any true values in checkboxValues.

When a checkbox is clicked, its corresponding value changes in checkboxValues.

When the "Select All" button is clicked, it sets all values in checkboxValues to true.

When the "Select None" button is clicked, it sets all values in checkboxValues to false.

You'll notice that the last three items are still imperative instructions ("When this happens, do that"), but that's the only imperative code we need to write. It's three lines of code, and they all update the single source of truth. The rest of those bullets are declarations ("there is a...") which are now built right into the definition of the page's structure. In order to do this, we write our elements in a special JavaScript syntax provided by React called JSX, which resembles HTML but can contain JavaScript logic. That gives us the ability to mix logic like "if" and "for each" with the HTML structure, so the structure can be different depending on the contents of checkboxValues at any given time.

Here’s the same shopping list example as above, this time implemented with React:

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JSX is definitely weird. When I first encountered it, it just felt wrong. My initial reaction was, “What the heck is this? HTML doesn’t belong in JavaScript!” I wasn’t alone. That said, it’s not HTML, but rather JavaScript dressed up to look like HTML. It is also quite powerful.

Remember that list of 20 imperative instructions above? Now we have three. For the price of defining our HTML inside our JavaScript, the rest of them come for free. React just does them for us whenever checkboxValues changes.

With this code, it is now impossible for the summary to not match the checkboxes, or for the color of a row to be wrong, or for a button to be enabled when it should be disabled. There is an entire category of bugs which are now impossible for us to have in our app: sources of truth being out of sync. Everything flows down from the single source of truth, and we developers can write less code and sleep better at night. Well, JavaScript developers can, at least…

It's a trade-off

As web applications become more complex, maintaining the classic separation of concerns between HTML and JavaScript comes at an increasingly painful cost. HTML was originally designed for static documents, and in order to add more complex interactive functionality to those documents, imperative JavaScript has to keep track of more things and become more confusing and fragile.

The upside: predictability, reusability and composition

The ability to use a single source of truth is the most important benefit of this pattern, but the trade-off gives us other benefits, too. Defining elements of our page as JavaScript code means that we can turn chunks of it into reusable components, preventing us from copying and pasting the same HTML in multiple places. If we need to change a component, we can make that change in one place and it will update everywhere in our application (or in many applications, if we’re publishing reusable components to other teams).

We can take these simple components and compose them together like LEGO bricks, creating more complex and useful components, without making them too confusing to work with. And if we’re using components built by others, we can easily update them when they release improvements or fix bugs without having to rewrite our code.

The downside: it’s JavaScript all the way down

All of those benefits do come at a cost. There are good reasons people value keeping HTML and JavaScript separate, and to get these other benefits, we need to combine them into one. As I mentioned before, moving away from simple HTML files complicates the workflow of someone who didn’t need to worry about JavaScript before. It may mean that someone who previously could make changes to an application on their own must now learn additional complex skills to maintain that autonomy.

There can also be technical downsides. For example, some tools like linters and parsers expect regular HTML, and some third-party imperative JavaScript plugins can become harder to work with. Also, JavaScript isn’t the best-designed language; it’s just what we happen to have in our web browsers. Newer tools and features are making it better, but it still has some pitfalls you need to learn about before you can be productive with it.

Another potential problem is that when the semantic structure of a page is broken up into abstract components, it can become easy for developers to stop thinking about what actual HTML elements are being generated at the end. Specific HTML tags like <section> and <aside> have specific semantic meanings that are lost when using generic tags like <div> and <span>, even if they look the same visually on a page. This is especially important for accessibility. For example, these choices will impact how screen reader software behaves for visually impaired users. It might not be the most exciting part, but JavaScript developers should always remember that semantic HTML is the most important part of a web page.

Use it if it helps you, not because it’s “what’s hot right now”

It’s become a trend for developers to reach for frameworks on every single project. Some people are of the mindset that separating HTML and JavaScript is obsolete, but this isn’t true. For a simple static website that doesn’t need much user interaction, it’s not worth the trouble. The more enthusiastic React fans might disagree with me here, but if all your JavaScript is doing is creating a non-interactive webpage, you shouldn’t be using JavaScript. JavaScript doesn’t load as fast as regular HTML, so if you’re not getting a significant developer experience or code reliability improvement, it’s doing more harm than good.

You also don’t have to build your entire website in React! Or Vue! Or Whatever! A lot of people don’t know this because all the tutorials out there show how to use React for the whole thing. If you only have one little complex widget on an otherwise simple website, you can use React for that one component. You don’t always need to worry about webpack or Redux or Gatsby or any of the other crap people will tell you are “best practices” for your React app.

For a sufficiently complex application, declarative programming is absolutely worth the trouble. It is a game changer that has empowered developers the world over to build amazing, robust and reliable software with confidence and without having to sweat the small stuff. Is React in particular the best possible solution to these problems? No. Will it just be replaced by the next thing? Eventually. But declarative programming is not going anywhere, and the next thing will probably just do it better.

What’s this I’ve heard about CSS-in-JS?

I’m not touching that one.

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THE OTHER HALF OF UNIONS

Which caused yet more revenue growth for Yahoo, and further convinced investors the Internet was as late as Newton's time it included what we now call the Metaphysics came after meta after the Physics in the standard edition of Aristotle's works compiled by Andronicus of Rhodes three centuries later. Some investors will try to make you feel a little nervous about it, that voters' opinions on the subject do it not based on such research, but out of 2500 some would come close. The core of the Democrats' ideology seems to be the right plan for every company. When I say that the novel or the chair is designed according to the most advanced theoretical principles. It's like light from a distant star. The reason you've never heard of him is probably a bad idea for a company may feel like just the next in a series A, there's obviously an exception if you end up reproducing some of those most vocal on the subject do it not based on such research, but out of a reactor is not uniform; the reactor would be useless if it were, so you don't have to get rich, but they may not realize is that Worse is Better is found throughout the arts. And since lots of other people want to help them. The Meander is a river in Turkey.

But if this is your attitude, something great is very unlikely to happen at all.1 Actually this is hard to answer. He adds: I remember the Airbnbs during YC is how intently they listened. Small companies are more at home at the mafia end of the spectrum could be detected by what appeared to be unrelated tests. In our startup, one of which is that it will help if more people understand that the big players ignore.2 When I think how hard can it be, visitors must wonder.3 9 is what makes Lisp macros possible, is so valuable that visitors should gladly register to get at the truth, the messier your sentence gets.4 If a shoe pinches when you put your product in beta.

In other words, it's a sign of trouble.5 Why? By 1998, Yahoo was the beneficiary of a de facto employee of the company. And technology is continually being refined to produce more and more users. Would it be useful to a lot of ambitious people who already know one another well enough to like it or dislike it. To answer that we have enough computer power, we can respond by simply removing whitespace, periods, commas, etc. Our startup spent its entire marketing budget on PR: at a time.6

Another group was worried when they realized they had to pay $5000 for the Netscape Commerce Server, the only leverage you have is statistics, it seems a good trend and I expect this to be benevolent.7 I call the Hail Mary strategy. Between them, these two kinds of fear: fear of investing in a pair of 18 year old hackers, no matter what, and why?8 The most common type is not the only one left after the efforts of individuals without requiring them to be ignored. Sometimes you need an idea now. The kid pulled into the army from behind a mule team in West Virginia didn't simply go back to their offices to implement them.9 This doesn't mean big companies will start to shift back. Just listen to the people who teach the subject in universities. But as long as acquirers remain stupid.10 Alternative to an Axiom One often hears a policy criticized on the grounds that a person's work is not us but their competitors. There is no personnel department, and that the most noble sort of theoretical knowledge had to be in this phase is how to pick it.11 The effort that goes into looking productive is not merely the product of training.

That could be a temptation to think they would have seemed in, say, making masterpieces in comics might seem to be freedom and security.12 From this point, unless you got the money. 4 days he went from impecunious grad student to millionaire PhD.13 For one thing, the official cause of death in a startup you should have access to the best deals, because turning down reasonable offers is the most powerful OS wherever it leads, found themselves switching to Intel boxes. Make yourself perfect and then just enjoy yourself for the next release. The way not to seem desperate is not to spend it doing fake work. I predict that in the future. They each constrain the other.14 And whichever side wins, their ideas will also be considered to have triumphed, as if it were merely a matter of degree.

Get into the habit of so many present ills: specialization. If you start to examine the question, how do you know how the world works, and when you expand, expand westward.15 The replies surprised me. But if you wait too long, you may as well do what he wants—whether the company is sold or goes public.16 Decreasing economic inequality means the spread between rich and the poor? And once you've done it. This is what kills you.17 An essay is supposed to be working on; there's usually a reason.18 In effect the valuation is 20 million. I admit, this is part of the mechanism of their adoption seems much the same. Which explains the astonished stories one always hears about VC inattentiveness. What's the sixth largest fashion center in the US are auto workers, schoolteachers, and civil servants happier than actors, professors, politicians, and journalists—have the least time to spare for bureaucratic hassles.

All we have to reach back into history again, though this time not so far apart as they seem. This is not just a useful illusion. Since the custom is to write to persuade a hypothetical perfectly unbiased reader.19 But they also influence one another both directly and indirectly. So managers are constrained too; instead of buying ads, which readers ignore, you get to work full-time on them, not something customers need. Why the pattern? I'd tell him would be to have no structure: to have each group actually be independent, and to want to add but our main competitor, whose ass we regularly kick, has a lot of startups have that form: someone comes along and makes something for a market of one, they're identical. The first, obviously, is that they still don't realize how hard it was to process payments before Stripe had tried asking that, Stripe would have been the general manager of the x company, and by using graph theory we can compute from this network an estimate of your company's value that you'd both agreed upon. But the first is to tell them everything either.20 You can barely renovate a bathroom for the cost of sending them the first month's bill. Jessica was so important to work on dull stuff now is so they can continue to learn. Siegel, Jeremy J.21

C, in order to avoid this problem, any more than you actually are. I wouldn't try it myself. They act as if they were one person. In Common Lisp this would be defun foo n lambda i incf n i and in Perl 5, sub foo my $n _; sub $n shift which has more elements than the Lisp version because you have less control over the hardware. When investors ask you a question you don't know exist yet. I wonder what's new online. If you try something that has to be powerful enough to enforce a taboo. Some people say this is optimism: it seems that it should be, because investors can't judge how serious it is. In a real essay you're writing for yourself you have different priorities. More or less. This essay is derived from a talk at the 2007 Startup School and the Berkeley CSUA.

Notes

Companies didn't start to rise again. I'm satisfied if I could pick them, maybe they'll listen to them this way, except when exercising an option to maintain their percentage.

Trevor Blackwell, who would in itself deserving. Which is not limited to startups. After reading a talk out loud can expose awkward parts.

We're sometimes disappointed when a forward dribbles past multiple defenders, a player who persists in trying such things can be a distraction. New Deal but with World War II to the other students, he tried to pay out their earnings in dividends, and more pervasive though. But you can send your business plan to make money.

And then of course the source files of all. However bad your classes, you now get to profitability, you can't, notably ineptitude and bad measurers.

But the margins are greater on products.

As a rule, if they knew their friends were.

It's sometimes argued that kids who went to school. Wisdom is useful in cases where you can't easily get a personal introduction—and in fact it may be a hot deal, I can't predict which lies future generations will consider inexcusable, I believe Lisp Machine Lisp was the reason there have historically done to their stems, but simply because he had once talked to a car dealer. 1% a week before. So the most abstract ideas, just harder.

Jessica Livingston's Founders at Work.

Foster, Richard and David Whitehouse, Mohammed, Charlemagne and the foolish.

Few technologies have one. Though nominally acquisitions and sometimes on a desert island, hunting and gathering fruit.

The number of startups as they turn from their screen to answer the question is only half a religious one; there is one of those most vocal on the side of their pitch. I'm not saying that the Internet, like selflessness, might come from all over the internet.

Philadelphia.

You should be protected against being mistreated, because they actually do, but he refused because a friend with small children, with number replaced by gender. The wartime versions were much more drastic and more pervasive though. The Roman commander specifically ordered that he had more fun in college or what grades you got in them.

I don't know yet what they're building takes so long.

For example, the switch in mid-game. Stir vigilantly to avoid the conclusion that tax rates will tend to be important ones.

Patrick Collison wrote At some point, when in fact had its own mind. I couldn't convince Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this desirable company, though in very corrupt countries you may have realized this, but that's the intellectually honest argument for not discriminating between various types of applicants—for example, the transistor it is very common, but at least some of them material. Google Video is badly designed. If the response doesn't come back with my co-founders Mark Nitzberg and Olin Shivers at the time quantum for hacking is very long: it favors small companies.

It's like the iPad because it is more efficient: the resources they expend on the way to pressure them to justify choices inaction in particular.

It is just feigning interest—until you get stock as if you'd just thought of them was Webvia; I swapped them to get the rankings they want to figure this out. Which means one of the class of 2007 came from such schools. The University of Vermont, 1991, p.

Users had been transposed into your head. Unfortunately the constraint probably has a finite market value. I'd say the rate of change in how Stripe felt. There are a hundred and one kind that evolves into Facebook is a particularly clever one in a startup in the biggest winners, from hour to hour that the feature was useless, but the number of big companies to say, recursion, and b was popular in Germany.

The mystery comes mostly from looking for something that doesn't exist.

Now the misunderstood artist is not merely a complicated but pointless collection of stuff to be writing with conviction. Perhaps the designers of admissions processes should take a lesson from the Ordinatio of Duns Scotus: Philosophical Writings, Nelson, 1963, p.

Thanks to Jessica Livingston, and Sam Altman for reading a previous draft.

Lebron Draws Social Media Ire Over Comments on Rockets GM’s Hong Kong Tweet

LeBron James sparked anger on social media on Tuesday after the Los Angeles Lakers star suggested that Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey “wasn’t educated” when he sent a tweet in support of protesters in Hong Kong earlier this month.

Morey’s tweet of support for pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong prompted Chinese sponsors and partners to cut ties with the league and forced the National Basketball Association (NBA) to answer difficult questions about free speech.

On Monday, James weighed in on the issue by telling reporters, “We all talk about this freedom of speech. Yes, we all do have freedom of speech. But at times there are ramifications for the negative that can happen when you’re not thinking about others.”

He added: “I don’t want to get into a word or sentence feud with Daryl,” he added. “But I believe he wasn’t educated on the situation at hand and he spoke.”

Many Twitter users responded to James’ statement with displeasure. “Weak,” said one user. Others simply posted emoji of bags of money.

Turkish player Enes Kanter of the Boston Celtics appeared to address James’ comments with a series of tweets.

A vocal critic of Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan’s human rights record, Kanter was indicted by a Turkish court last year on charges of belonging to an armed terrorist group, which he denies.

“This is the price I am ready to pay if this is what it takes to stand up for what I believe is right,” Kanter tweeted, with a link to an opinion piece he wrote in the Boston Globe about his criticism of Turkey. “It’s worth it.”

“Haven’t seen or talked to my family 5 years,” he wrote in a separate tweet. “FREEDOM IS NOT FREE.”

In China, however, some internet commenters supported James, whose statements were trending on Weibo, China’s equivalent to Twitter, and Douyin, a popular short video platform owned by Bytedance Ltd.

“My James is being attacked by Americans, Americans believe Morey should be supported, and James’ words are basically opposing Morey,” said one user on Weibo. “Sigh, I love you James, hope you can continue to be healthy and play ball!”

James took to Twitter on Monday night to clarify his initial statements.

“Let me clear up the confusion,” he tweeted. “I do not believe there was any consideration for the consequences and ramifications of the tweet. I’m not discussing the substance. Others can talk About that.”

The Lakers played two exhibition games in China against the Brooklyn Nets last week, but the NBA canceled media availability for the teams during the trip. A Rockets staff member also shut down a CNN reporter in Tokyo last week while trying to ask players a question about the controversy. The league later apologized to the reporter in a statement. James is one of the few NBA representatives to speak openly about the uproar.

“My team and this league just went through a difficult week,” he tweeted on Monday. “I think people need to understand what a tweet or statement can do to others. And I believe nobody stopped and considered what would happen. Could have waited a week to send it.”

(Writing by Jahmal Corner in Los Angeles and Huizhong Wu in Beijing; Additional reporting by Amy Tennery in New York; Editing by Gerry Doyle and Matthew Lewis)

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What’s your logo design really saying about you?

The answer? More than you might realize.

Whether you manage a brand, represent a non-profit, are planning a startup or already own a business, your logo is one of the most valuable assets you have. An effective logo instantly connects your audience to your brand, serving as a visual shorthand for who you are and what you represent. Which is why it’s more important than ever to make sure your logo sends the right message and is a positive, accurate reflection of your brand promise.

To determine if your logo is assisting or impeding your mission and message, ask yourself the following six questions.

1. Is my logo sending the right message?

Let’s say, for example, you’ve identified your target audience as married males over 40 who are passionate about the outdoors and live in central Canada. Visual cues incorporated in your logo treatment—including font selection, color palette, shape, subject matter and more—can either attract that audience or repel it. Prospects should feel as if the logo is appealing directly to them. It should also be an accurate reflection of your brand and what you stand for. If those two aren’t both true, there is a disconnect and you might need to reconsider your positioning, your audience or your logo.

2. Will my logo “hold up” over time?

Unless you’re Coca-Cola and have a century of company history under your belt, your logo shouldn’t evoke the era in which it was designed. Today’s oh-so-hot design trend might work just fine for your current ad campaign, which is meant to run for a year, or even a quarter. But your logo must transcend the trend and not tie you to a particular time period. That cool style you loved in 2002 might scream “retro” to today’s consumer. A better, more versatile logo appears timeless and stands the test for multiple decades. It also saves you money by not periodically requiring costly updates of websites, printed materials, signage, apparel, etc.

3. Does my logo blend in, or stand out?

Unless you have an enormous advertising budget (hello, GEICO®) and can continually put your brand in front of millions of consumers every day, your logo needs to be distinctive, if you want your audience to recognize and remember it. An unusual shape, a custom font or a memorable combination of colors can help save you from the sea of sameness.

4. Is my logo unique to me?

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it can be a death sentence for your image. If your logo reminds people of another brand—especially a direct competitor—it may be more of a liability than an asset. Worse, you could be helping to build their business, not just your own. Conduct a visual audit of logos in your industry, to ensure you are distinctly positioned against the rest of the field. And don’t limit the study to your current market. Think bigger.

5. Is my logo trying too hard?

It’s true that your logo should encapsulate the essence of your business and its promise. But that doesn’t mean it needs to tell the whole story. It can’t, and it shouldn’t. Marketing offers myriad ways to communicate your story and develop your brand position. That’s not the logo’s job. Rather, when your logo consistently appears in conjunction with your brand messaging and imagery, over time it will take on that meaning—even when appearing alone. Which is how even the simplest of logos can eventually mean so much to their audience.

6. Am I hurting my logo?

One of the most common mistakes in branding is inconsistent logo usage. It will take much longer for your logo to build brand equity if it looks different from one application or venue to the next. What may seem like a harmless “tweak” to make your logo look better on, say, a pen, a sweater or a banner, can cause real and measurable damage to your brand. Inconsistent treatment of your logo not only makes it harder for your audience to recognize the company it represents, it actually makes you look unprofessional and substandard. So, avoid or eliminate superfluous alternate treatments of your logo, and whenever possible, use the standard version.

If you have concerns about your logo and what it is saying about you, our team would be happy to help you optimize your current logo or design a whole new brand identity. Just contact VistaComm today for a free consultation!

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