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guiltyhearts · 4 years

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FIC: The Treasured Chest (KH)

I was fortunate to be involved in The Destined Oath: A SoKai Server Zine, which was made available on Gumroad for free back in January (You can get the zine here if you haven’t yet). Silly me didn’t put up their story on this site after the zine was made public. So for your reading pleasure, please enjoy my short story!

The Treasured Chest

Words: 2937

Summary: Sora may be a little older and making big moves in his life. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have time to go down memory lane.

-------

Time was funny. It always seemed to pass by much faster than expected. Days, months, years would all blur together, no clear distinction of where it started and where it ended. For Sora, this was no different. The years of grand adventures to other worlds were behind him and he was happily settled back home in Destiny Islands. He often felt that his adventures and battles had all happened recently, maybe one year prior. In truth, six years had passed since the final showdown with Xehanort and the new Organization XIII and he had spent that time content on the islands with his friends, old and new, finally settling into some semblance of a normal routine. The funny thing was, time now felt like it passed by him in a blur and it always caught him by surprise when a major event came up. In this case, it was preparing to move into his new house.

Sora was technically an adult now, and this meant it was time to make big changes and move forward, starting with moving out and setting up his own home. With moving day looming on the horizon, Sora had no time to dwell on the mix of emotions he felt over leaving his childhood home. Not when he had to sort through his possessions. As he had informed his mother, Sora had a system for organizing his things between those he would take with him and those he would leave behind.

One look into Sora’s bedroom and its current state would overwhelm anyone. Boxes in varying degrees of emptiness were placed all around the room, with clothes scattered across surfaces and most definitely not in his own closet or drawers. Bottles of different shapes and sizes that were never properly recycled but were certainly repurposed (according to Sora). His mother, who had long been since resigned with his habit for messiness, left him alone to sort through his possessions. But it only took half the day for Sora to organize all his clothes, he would have you know! While he grabbed a heap of the clothes he planned to get rid of, he discovered the fabric had been covering a bright purple treasure chest: a chest he had repurposed for his own use. It contained numerous trinkets, knick-knacks, whozits and whatzits galore. Items of interest that he picked up, or gifts he was given from each world he visited in the three years he had been away from home. He hadn’t looked at, let alone put anything in that chest in ages. Setting the clothes aside, Sora sat down across from the chest to open it.

The effect was not immediate, like a flood of memories hitting him at once. But to Sora’s credit, he did recognize each and every item in the chest as the feeling of rediscovering a past life and all the joys that came with it settled in deeply.

The first thing Sora picked up an off-white piece of parchment and unfolded it. The paper depicted a detailed pencil drawing of himself when he was younger and starting out on his intergalactic travels, standing next to Tarzan. At first glance, Tarzan in the drawing seemed stoic, but the finer details presented a lighter side to him like upturned corners of the mouth and relaxed shoulders. Sora was openly smiling with his hands behind his head. His face and cheeks were almost perfectly round. Had he really looked that young? Sora hadn’t seen him in a long time, but how could he forget Tarzan, the King of the Apes?

---

The Deep Jungle was home to a truly glorious array of flora - flowers, plants, trees and those of the sort. So Sora had been told. But it was hard to see for himself when these plants and trees were only a blur. His focus was squarely on what was ahead of him, and in this case, it was Tarzan and the fact that the man was leading by a slim margin. Sora would have to maneuver through the intersecting branches and speed ahead to overtake him. In what felt like mere seconds, Sora could see the opening that would lead to the campsite and he willed himself to keep going. He had to keep pushing and not lose his footing. He bent low before pushing off hard to leap forward, aiming to land right in the middle of the campsite. To his dismay, Tarzan landed before him by seconds.

“You won again!” Sora dramatically groaned. Tarzan beat his chest triumphantly and grinned back at Sora.

“Keep trying!” Tarzan proclaimed cheerfully, even if the affirmation was brought down slightly by his smugness.

Sora stretched his back and turned forward with a look of determination. “Fine! I’ll race you back!”

“But Sora, we gotta go!” Goofy called out. He and Donald had been with Jane Porter while he went tree-surfing with Tarzan.

“Aww…” Sora pouted, feeling like a small kid again. He was having fun, too…

“Where will you go?” Tarzan asked.

“I don’t know.” Sora answered honestly. Remembering what Donald said about the world order, he would have to choose his words carefully. “All I know is that we’ll keep going until we find our friends.”

Tarzan was quiet, seemingly in deep thought. Before Sora could continue, Jane approached them with papers in hand.

“Good luck on your travels. I hope you will be safe. Here,” she handed the stack to Sora. “I hope you’ll like these.” Sora went through the papers, pressed flowers and hand-drawn pictures of the animals and scenery. He stopped once he saw the picture of himself and Tarzan. Tarzan looked over his shoulder and-

“Tarzan! Sora!” He exclaimed, looking surprised and pleased.

Jane smiled kindly, her cheeks turning pink. “Yes, that’s the both of you. How do you like it?” She directed the question at Sora.

“Thanks a lot!” Sora smiled graciously. “We look great here!” He and the others pored excitedly over Jane’s papers, which he now saw included individual drawings of Donald and Goofy. Through their pleased exclamations, Sora could have sworn he heard Jane say something quietly, thinking no one could hear her.

“He’s still so young…”

---

Sora kept the drawing for himself, while Donald and Goofy kept the other papers. He had thanked Tarzan ten times over for finding and rescuing him when he was separated from the pair. Still, at times he wondered if Tarzan understood just how grateful Sora was to be found when he was alone again in an unknown world.

He carefully folded away the drawing and placed it back in the chest. As Sora placed the item down, he caught sight of his membership card for the Hollow Bastion Restoration Committee. It rested on top of a pixelated printed picture of himself, Donald and Goofy, the latter being a gift from Tron. A thought occurred to Sora, and to confirm his suspicions, he flipped the picture over. On the back, a sequence of 0’s and 1’s filled two-thirds of the page. He didn’t have to look too hard to find another piece of folded paper, branded with “From Tron!” in blue letters and a cartoon doodle of Tron’s face that he drew himself. Grinning at the recollection, he unfolded the paper.

---

Sora, Donald, and Goofy were about to leave Hollow Bastion – or Radiant Garden, rather – for the next leg of their journey. They were saying their goodbyes in Merlin’s house when Cid came up to them, and said in his characteristic gruff voice, “You guys got something from Tron.”

“Really?” The trio looked up in surprise.

Cid handed Sora a single sheet of paper with a picture of the threesome in a pixelated style printed upon it. Underneath the image, ‘Thank you!’ was written in large block letters.

“This is great! Tell him we said ‘thanks’.” Sora smiled happily at the picture.

Donald, shorter than the rest, could see the back of the paper. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing. Sora flipped the paper over and was met with a sequence of 0’s and 1’s running down the page.

“I have no idea,” Sora shrugged before looking back at Cid. “Do you know?”

“I’m just delivering the message. I don’t have to know what it means.” Cid replied offhandedly.

Donald squawked impatiently, “Come on! You do know what it means!”

Cid smirked as he suppressed a chuckle. “That’s binary,” he relented. “To grossly oversimplify for you punks, it’s computer language. It’s how they give and receive information.”

“Does that mean this is a message from Tron? How come it came out like this?” Goofy questioned out loud.

“Maybe he wanted to mess wi’ ya,” Cid added with a laugh.

“What does it say?” Donald asked again.

“Do I look like a computer?” Cid shot back. This kicked off a bickering session over computers, magic, and each other’s intelligence.

In the midst of this, Goofy approached Sora with a separate piece of paper in hand. “I found this on top of that keyboard-thingy,” he said quietly pointing over at Cid’s computer. “I don’t know how binary works, but I think this is what the numbers mean.” He showed Sora the paper. This time there were words that he could read and understand.

Sora, Donald and Goofy,

I want to thank you once more for your support. I will not forget what you have done for myself and for the mainframe. It is thanks to you I am confident in my capabilities to assist the other Users.

I wish you safe travels in your journey.

Come back soon!

From Tron.

---

In the present day, Sora smiled, his chest feeling light with joy and wistfulness. He recalled Cid’s attempt to explain to the trio how binary worked (which Sora still did not understand to this day). He hoped Tron was keeping well.

Like with Jane’s drawing, Sora folded Tron’s gifts carefully and put them back into the chest under a toy-sized, yellow energy canister. Tucked to one side of the chest, a small velvet pouch caught his eye. It bore an unfamiliar crest surrounded by a border of alternating fleur-de-lis and diamond symbols. The unfamiliarity just as quickly gave way to recognition. Arendelle, it occurred to him. Opening it, a delicately shimmering crystal landed on his open palm. Sora had never seen a snowflake up close - all he knew was that no two snowflakes were identical. The crystal snowflake, now safely in Sora’s palm, was cool to the touch, but not quite as ice-cold as he recalled it had been when he received it.

---

“I don’t know how to begin to thank you for all your help.” Queen Elsa said as she held her sister’s hand. After a series of trials and tribulations, the two were finally reunited. Their sisterly bond was reaffirmed, the eternal winter spell (literally) was broken, and the world was safe.

“What about a knighthood!” Anna exclaimed excitedly.

“A knighthood, you say?” Sora grinned at the prospect. Already he envisioned himself donning a classic suit of armor. Maybe even a fancy cape, if that was still a thing. A sharp tug at his pant leg broke the reverie and brought his attention down to Donald, whose look of disapproval all but told him to keep his mouth shut and to quit while he was ahead.

Donald cleared his throat and spoke with uncharacteristic formality. “That is most gracious and generous of you, Your Highness. We are honored, but we couldn’t accept.”

“Even if we can’t knight you, we still want to give you something.” Elsa replied instead.

“It’s kind of you to offer.” Goofy said with his usual warm smile.

Elsa brought her hands up, with one hand hovering over the other. She wiggled her fingers in a manner that Sora recognized as an act of magic. It poured from Elsa’s fingers like flurries of snow and twirled together tightly into a bright orb of light. The orb spun between her hands until it transformed again. The light had faded to reveal a shining, shimmering, cobalt-blue crystal snowflake. To say that Sora was awe-struck by the feat would be an understatement.

“For you, Sora.” Elsa presented the crystal, now hanging delicately on a string, to Sora, who offered his thanks and cautiously reached for the crystal. What he hadn’t expected was for the crystal to be so cold to the touch. The shock of the cold on his exposed fingertips was enough for Sora to yelp and send the crystal flying out his hands. The snowflake was descending far too fast to Sora’s horror, prompting him to desperately scramble for the crystal. Donald and Goofy had the same idea. So three pairs of hands were grabbing at the crystal, resulting in an unintentional game of hot-potato. The crystal fumbled from their grasps and made a steady descent to the ground. Before anyone else could act, the crystal was suspended mid-fall by its looped string, hanging off a branchy arm.

“Safe and sound!” Olaf said cheerfully. The group let out a collective sigh of relief. Donald gently took the crystal from Olaf.

“Thanks, Olaf,” Sora smiled, partly grateful and partly sheepish. He bowed low in front of Elsa. “I’m so sorry.” Donald and Goofy took his cue and bowed alongside him.

“That’s alright,” Elsa smiled kindly. She created two more crystal snowflakes for Donald and Goofy, who accepted them just as graciously and were far more careful with handling them.

“I hope that whenever you see these, you will remember us.”

Sora carefully returned the crystal back into the pouch. He could never forget any of the people he met in his travels, especially not when he had these memories he could hold in his hand. He spent the better part of an hour going through the contents of the chest and revisiting his past.

And then he saw it. When did I put this in here? Sora gently picked up the old thalassa-shell charm. He used to keep it in his pocket, but its presence started to cause as much anxiety as it did comfort. What if it broke, or worse, what if he lost it? It was likely why he kept it in the chest for his own peace of mind.

“It’s my lucky charm. Be sure to bring it back to me.”

“Don’t worry, I will.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

Sora found it odd that he didn’t return the charm back to Kairi this time like he always promised he would. It had slipped his mind, though she never asked for it back. So he kept it away among the other trinkets. Here in his hands was perhaps his most precious possession. The charm was the promise of her memory and her unconditional devotion that he literally carried with him wherever he went. She had brought him back up on his feet and back to life more times than he could count. Where would he be without her, or Riku, Donald, Goofy, Axel, Roxas, Naminé, and all the other friends he made in his adventures? Probably long dead, for starters.

He closed the chest, but kept Kairi’s charm with him. Sora looked around the room once more: there were still some half-empty boxes, and his designated piles seemed to now make up one indistinguishable pile.

They could wait.

---

One phone call, one hasty apology to his mother, and fifteen minutes later, Sora sat on the porch of his new house. Their new house. He hadn’t waited long, but he was staring into space when a voice broke through the reverie.

“Sora?”

He looked up and there was Kairi standing before him. He shuffled to the side to make room on the steps, a silent offer.

“You were cryptic on the phone. Is something wrong?” Kairi asked with a look of concern as she sat beside him.

“No, not at all,” Sora replied. “I wanted to surprise you, but I guess I made you worry.” He looked down in embarrassment. With his free hand, he reached into his pocket and pulled out the lucky charm. From the corner of his eye, he saw surprise on her face.

“I just thought I should return this. It is pretty long overdue,” Sora said, handing the charm to Kairi.

“I wasn’t expecting this.” She said with a bemused smile.

“It’s yours, Kai. I did promise I would give it back to you.”

“Keep it. It’s as much yours as it is mine.” Kairi placed the charm back on Sora’s palm and closed his fingers around it. “It’s probably always been yours.”

Feeling overwhelmed and flushed, Sora looked away. “I found it in a chest where I was keeping a bunch of stuff people gave me during my travels. I must have kept it there for safe-keeping. I was afraid I’d lose it.”

“I didn’t really care. I just wanted you to come back safely.” said Kairi. “I’m willing to bet your other friends would agree with me. As long as you’re alive. That��s what matters.”

“There’s no heart my smile can’t reach, right?” Sora grinned teasingly.

It was Kairi’s turn to blush and pout, a look that said she regretted ever giving him the letters she wrote. “No teasing!” She lightly slapped his arm.

“Sorry!” He said looking appropriately apologetic. She seemed to accept this and rested her head on his shoulders. He instinctively wrapped an arm around her shoulders.

“I wanna see this chest. It sounds like it has a lot of good memories.”

“It does. Before or after we move in?”

“Yes.”

Sora laughed, falling in love a little more. “It’s a promise.”

#Sora #Kingdom Hearts #Disney #SoKai #at the end #KH #fanfic #My writing

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eloarei · 4 years

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About the process of creating a book (the not-writing part)

I was asked recently about if making a book was easy or tedious or whatever, and I realized that was actually something I’d like to talk about. I’d never done it before (and still I only have a little experience), but I’ve been teaching myself and it’s been... fun? Behind the cut (that’s still a thing, right?), I ramble about formatting, PDFs, fonts, and some other stuff. (Also pictures, though most of them are the same as the ones I posted yesterday.)

First of all, I had to pick a Print-On-Demand (POD) website. That was easy for me, because finding the website was actually what made me want to make the book. I used Lulu.com, which has worked very well for me the two times I’ve used it. (It has a bunch of bad reviews, but honestly I got just what I paid for both times. They apparently offer editing and marketing services; I can’t vouch for those because I only used the POD service. But personally I wouldn’t trust anyone to edit or market my book, let alone some randos on some website. They’re a POD site. That’s what they’re good at, so that’s what I use.) It would have been almost too easy if they just let me copy-paste the text to them, but understandably they wanted a PDF. PDFs are kind of the bane of my existence, but I downloaded a template from them (for a 6x9 inch novel, with appropriate margins) and then copy-pasted my fic into it using LibreOffice. (I’m so-so about LibreOffice, but it does create PDFs reasonably well.) From there... well, then I had to go through the process of reformatting it. I’d copied the text from my AO3, and that meant that it had spaces between every paragraph and no indents, which is how AO3 fics are typically formatted. It was a lot of Tab-Left-Down-Down-Down-Backspace-Backspace-Enter-Repeat. For 140k words, it took a few casual days. After the bulk of that was done, I realized the indents/tabs looked... weird? They were too big. ^^; Luckily there was a setting in LibreOffice to change them all automatically. I almost cried at the thought of having to do it manually haha. Adding data to the headers and footers came next. I chose to only add the page number to the footer, and nothing to the header. Normally people will have the author’s name on one side, and the book’s title on the other, but I skipped that for the time being. Not sure if I’ll do it for the ‘official’ release. (Somehow my footer ended up being too small, so that’s something I need to look into.) Next I had to pick a font and a font size. I decided to do something a little gimmicky: I have alternating chapters that take place in modern and historical times, so I chose different fonts to represent those chapters. For the historical chapters I chose “Century”, which is a serif font (meaning that it has little embellishments, like “Times New Roman”), while for the modern chapters I chose “Verdana”, a sans-serif font (meaning that it is sans/without the embellishments, like whatever font Tumblr uses). It’s typically agreed that novels are best in serif fonts, because it’s easier to read them for a long session. The embellishments make the letters blend together into visually recognizable words, which is apparently how we read, as opposed to looking at every letter individually. However, because I wanted to be quirky, more than half of my book is in sans-serif, which I’m just hoping doesn’t annoy people. I used Verdana size 11 and Century size 12. Even so, the Verdana still looks too large to my eye, so I’ll probably change it again. After that was mostly aesthetic formatting, which was the actual fun part. I tabbed down I think about 10 spaces at the start of every chapter, then went back up a space or two, increased the font size and changed the font to something slightly fancier and wrote the chapter title (which for me were just “Chapter Five”, etc). (UPON FURTHER SCRUTINY, apparently not all of my first chapter pages are tabbed down the same amount. ugh. ^^; They’re close but not identical. How messy.) Under the chapter titles, I simulated “drop caps” on the first phrase of the chapter, because I didn’t have a good drop caps font. I just did this by retyping the whole phrase in caps, and then changing the first letter to a slightly larger font size. Next were a few easy things: a title page, a few silly “praise for” pages of reviews I got from online readers (these probably won’t be in the “official” version; they just make me smile), a mock-up copyright page (mock-up because I don’t actually have a copyright or anything yet), a short dedications page (mine was just one sentence), and then an empty page so that the story text starts on the right, which is standard. I have bought another self-published book which otherwise looks pretty good, but it starts the story on the left page and it’s just so jarring. At that point, the PDF was pretty much done. I added a few other little touches, like some little fancy dagger icons during in-chapter scene transitions. I ended up with the “the end” page being on the left, which, again, is really awkward, so I found a chapter that only had like two lines on the last page, and went back in and deleted a handful of words in the chapter so that it would end on the previous page instead. THEN came the fun but agonizing part, as I’m not as much of a graphic designer as I sometimes wish. I had to make a cover. The other self-published book I bought looks really nice with a beautiful illustration on the front, but the spine and back had just tiny white text, and didn’t even include a synopsis. So I downloaded a template for a 6x9inch wrap-around cover, tossed it up in Photoshop, paint-bucketed it black, and went to work. I pasted in my synopsis in off-white sans-serif font about the same as my internal font, and bolded some of the key words for... ease of skimming and/or funsies? At the top I added a short dialogue exchange from the first chapter that I thought represented the story as a whole, chose a different font that stood out, and gave it a red shadow so it would stand out more. For fun I added some faint red blood-splatters behind the text. For the front I chose a big bold block-letter font in off-white, then gave it a red and a yellow shadow so it would stand out. I rasterized the font (turning it into a picture), and then used the tool to highlight the letters, and splashed some red blood-splatters on them. I did the same for the spine. (Though really what I should have done was copy the logo from the front and resize it. Silly me. Now the two logos don’t match.) I used Unsplash.com for a few free photos that I quickly manipulated into a passable cover art. Ultimately, I would like to have something either professionally photographed, edited, or drawn, but what I found was vaguely similar enough to what I wanted that I figured it’d do for now. Maybe the last thing I had to do (besides uploading it all to Lulu) was decide on a pen-name! I ended up going with L.A.Rayborn, instead of my legal name. I used my legal first two initials, but chose my birth surname (which is twice removed from my legal name, since I was first adopted and then married). To be perfectly honest, the reason I chose not to use my legal name is mostly because I don’t want to associate my in-laws with possibly-sensitive content that they probably wouldn’t like. SO. Then it was done, and I uploaded it to Lulu, and chose a few options on the site, such as cream pages instead of white, and matte exterior finish instead of gloss. (I highly suggest the cream for novels, but the matte is really just personal preference.) I paid them (I ended up getting it printed and shipped to me for under $20), and then about 2 weeks later I had the 400 page darling in my hands, ready to be eviscerated with a set of neon hi-lighters! After this current round of edits, I already know there’s a ton of stuff I’m going to have to fix (and this is to say nothing of the story). 1. The font is slightly too large, but could probably use a 1.5 or maybe 1.2 spacing between lines. I’ll have to fiddle with it, and see what others do. 2. The back cover text is too close to the edges to really look good. 3. The page numbering just looks odd for some reason. 4. Figure out how to get the page numbers to stay off the copyright and dedications page, etc. 5. MORE THAN ANYTHING, I need to change the... I’m not even sure what to call it? I need to make the text space out evenly so that it creates a block on each page, rather than creating messy ridges on the right margins. I didn’t even think of this until I got the book and started comparing it to professional books I’ve read and enjoyed. It seems like a very rookie mistake.

(lol I’m in the process of changing the main character’s name, which is why the crappy MS Paint edits.) PHEW, that was long. But hopefully my journey was at least a little insightful. Please do let me know if you have any thoughts, questions, or suggestions about how I could better format the book for the “real” printing!

#elo talks #self-publishing #elo fics #elo writes a novel

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years

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STARTUPS AND JAPANESE

Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? Honestly, no. The landscape of possible jobs isn't flat; there are walls of varying heights between different kinds of academic work, because fields vary greatly in this respect. But that rule may not be as good as it seems. I personally have timed out.1 There is actually some data out there about that. When you can ask the opinions of people you want to hear; an interview with Joe Kraus, the co-founder of Excite. If you start a startup. The second big element of Web 2. At least, that's how they see it. Worse still, anything you work on changes you. It was designed to be another C: C plus a few ideas taken from more advanced languages.

It's something that can be fixed in a couple days if you have the destination in sight you'll be more likely to arrive at it. I have never once seen a startup lured down a blind alley by trying too hard to make the cover something you can tell that by the number of Indians in the current Silicon Valley. Do you, er, want a printout of yesterday's news? There is a point where there is just too much to keep in your head at once. Even in college you get little idea what various types of work are like. The reason they were funding all those laughable startups during the late 90s was an abuse. The old ideas are so powerful that even the most successful countries, in the sense of something someone made happen. But she never does. There are two routes to that destination: The organic route is more common. But you don't regard this time as the prize and the time you could do what you would like to do, there's a strong inverse correlation between performance and job security. Is software a counterexample? If you have to do something, as Nike says, just do it.

In the rivalry between Perl and Python. The democracy component, for example. It's just a more extreme variant where you don't just use your software yourselves on their behalf. A few years ago. It's designed for large organizations PL/I, Ada have lost, while hacker languages C, Perl have won. Unless you're so big you have to manufacture your own hardware, or use your software on users's behalf, you'll learn things you couldn't have done that in the era of physical media. Not us. Lisp interpreter in the less powerful language?

They've faced resistance from investors of course. I'm convinced they got this number from ITA. People still pay for those. Partly because you can usually find ways to embody it in things people will pay for information otherwise? There are two possible outcomes for a startup to succeed, at least not in the sense that their main purpose is to make me feel better. And I think that's the main reason is that the absolute numbers seem so small at first. There hasn't been such a wave of new applications since microcomputers first appeared.

If you try to translate the Lisp/Perl/Smalltalk/Javascript code into Python you run into some limitations. There used to be for getting users. Now they have none that stand out. To be happy I think you have to pay for might as well not exist. Thump, thump, thump. Their standards for customer service have been set by the companies they've been customers of, which are Lisp data structures.2 A Lisp macro can be anything from an abbreviation to a compiler for a new language, it's because you think it's better in some way than what people already had. Except for some books in math and the hard sciences, there's no test of how well you've read a book, and that's as much as any startup needs initially. The old ideas are so powerful that even the most successful countries, in the sense we mean today.

On the whole they've done better than the stuff I read on individual people's sites rather than to magazine articles or news stories.3 An accumulator has to accumulate. Why do the Japanese make better cars than us? There was that same odd atmosphere created by a large number of small ones.4 Although we didn't fund Meraki, the founders were Robert Morris's grad students, looked at this definition of eval and realized that if he translated it into machine language, the shorter the program not simply in characters, of course, since they read somewhere that's the optimum day to launch something. So while there may be advantages to writing your application in the base language a language for writing programs like yours, then write your program in it. If you can't find ten Lisp hackers, then your company is probably based in the wrong city for developing software. Because how much you learn in college depends a lot more on you than the college.5

If you ask at that age, people will choose conservatively. It tries to explain why Americans make some things well and others badly. But the first time investors learned that lesson from founders. You need a great university near a town smart people like. You'll have to force yourself to work, and indeed that the reason they have to deliver every time. It's also wise, early on, to seek jobs that let you do what you like, but what we would now consider a very low-level, you reach a point where I'll do without books. 5% of the time you spend working as the pain you endure to earn it. Nearly all startups have to. When it was first developed, Lisp embodied nine new ideas. The terms cutting-edge. You push blobs of source code around the way a sculptor does blobs of clay. Plenty of people who will later do great things have careers with the trajectory of a ping-pong ball.

Thump, thump, thump. They're hostages of the platform. I would love programming in. They got started by doing something that really doesn't scale: assembling their routers themselves. See if you can stand, and the 2. What about iTunes? There is no one single force driving this trend. Ajax.

Notes

We probably would not make a brief entry listing the gaps and anomalies. What has changed is how much they lied to them? The answer is no grand tradition of city planning like the outdoors, was one of the rest generate mediocre returns, like storytellers, must have been a good way to predict areas where Apple will be big successes but who are good presenters, but when people are magnified by the same motives. Quoted in: it's not inconceivable they were saying scaramara instead of themselves.

In judging both intelligence and wisdom we have to think about, like play in a not-too-demanding environment, and others, and a t-shirt, they're nice to you. But which of them. But if you do it in B. Starting a company becomes big enough to absorb that.

If you want to start businesses to circumvent NWLB wage controls in order to avoid using it out of their time on, cook up a take out order. But the margins are greater on products.

It's hard to make a deep philosophical point here about everyday tagging. We didn't let him off, either as an adult. The two are not just the location of the words out of fashion in 100 years. 99 and.

Sparse Binary Polynomial Hash Message Filtering and The CRM114 Discriminator. Parents can sometimes be especially suspicious of grants whose purpose is some kind of gestures you use that instead. You won't always get a poem published in The New Industrial State to trying to sell your company into one? Other highly recommended books: What is Mathematics?

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richincolor · 5 years

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Group Discussion: Watch Us Rise

Welcome to our first book discussion of 2019! We all enjoyed reading Renee Watson's & Ellen Hagan's feminist novel "Watch Us Rise" that gave us two amazing teens Jasmine & Chelsea that we all laughed, cried, and loved with. Onto our discussion!

K. Imani: I first read this book almost in one sitting, it was so good! I loved how it was so “in your face”, but completely authentic at the same time. There were many touching moments, many funny moments where I laughed out loud, moments where I was annoyed with the characters (mainly Chelsea), and moments where I felt so proud of these girls. I loved the structure of the novel and greatly enjoyed the inclusion of the poetry, and the different styles of the Write Like A Girl blog posts. This is definitely a book that I would think about using in the classroom. So, what did you think of the book? What aspects of it did you absolutely love?

Audrey: Honestly, one of the things I loved most was all the different forms of media in the book. There were blog posts (and likes/reblogs/comments on them), poetry, sketches/drawings, posters, biographies, lists, etc. that all got used to tell Jasmine and Chelsea’s story, and I thought it was all very cleverly constructed.

I also loved the fact that this was explicitly a novel about activism and the journey of how to be an activist. Jasmine and Chelsea made mistakes in their activism, but they also learned from them. I loved their conversations with Leidy in the second half of the book and how she got them examine their own motives and consider how they could expand their activism. The mentorship and community support demonstrated in this book was really uplifting.

Crystal: There were many things to appreciate so it’s hard to pick, but like Audrey, I really enjoyed the variety of media used to tell this story. I especially like to find poetry in YA, so that was an extra gift.

Activism can be complicated. I really liked seeing how Jasmine and Chelsea used their voices. Sometimes they acted impulsively, but they ultimately worked through what they wanted to say and how they could say it to create change. I appreciated seeing them have to think through what they were really fighting for and why they were speaking out.

Jessica: First off, I have to say: I love the cover. It’s just so eye-catching and whenever I see it in a library or a bookstore, my heart lifts a little. Totally agree on the different forms of media. It really brought the story alive. I appreciated that the book tackled the online aspect of activism -- the good and the bad. That’s never easy, and it made Watch Us Rise all the more relevant for today’s generation of students.

K. Imani: This novel had a lot of poetry in it. What was your favorite poem? Mine was The Bod (pg. 237) that Jasmine wrote. As a Black woman, it really spoke to me with all the insecurities I’ve had about my body and my hair at times in my life. The way the poem moved from dealing with racist words about the body to the acceptance of her body was beautiful to me. The last line really sealed the poem for me.

Audrey: I loved “What It Be Like: on being a girl” (pg 115-116, hard copy edition), particularly the sentence “It be like second-guessing your know-how, like fact-checking your own truth.” That hit hard for me. I’m intimately familiar with that hesitation, that instinct to second-guess my own experiences and desires. I’ve read it a couple times now, and I really appreciate the way the poem transitioned to the final verse.

Crystal: So many of the poems dealt with bodies - how we are seen and how we see ourselves. I enjoyed many of them, but really felt “This Body II” (pg. 333). There are so many things that our bodies are and can be, but no matter what -- our body is our own. Jasmine says “My body is perfect and imperfect…” and she lists things that make her body distinctively hers. She explains that her body is a masterpiece. Jasmine reminds us to love our bodies and claim them.

Jessica: It’s honestly really hard to choose! If I had to pick, then I’d say “What It Be Like: on being a girl” was also my favorite. It definitely rang familiar to me in a lot of ways.

K. Imani: While this novel is practically a feminist manifesto, it does touch on the need for intersectionality. The moment when Chelsea doesn’t consider Jasmine’s size when ordering the t-shirts really hit home how white women feminists can get caught up in their own fight and forget about others. I felt like it was a lesson, not for just Chelsea, but for all budding young Feminists to really think about how different types of women experience oppression and their own privilege.

Audrey: Yeah, I cringed when Chelsea picked up the t-shirts because I knew immediately that she’d screwed up. She took the time to order extra small but it never crossed her mind to go beyond a large in the women’s sizes, which--yeah, that’s a major oversight on her part, especially right after writing a poem against the ads that told her to change her body. I’m also glad that the girls were told that some of their actions had negatively impacted people they hadn’t considered (the school janitorial staff) and resolved to apologize and be smarter about the actions they took. Jasmine and Chelsea’s conversations with each other, their friends, and their mentors in the community were often learning opportunities and chances for them to think deeply about their goals and the repercussions of their actions.

And on a broader level, their whole school was supposed to incorporate social justice in basically everything, but there were still major flaws within it. There were a lot of intersectionality fails there, from the students to the teachers to the principal. Even in spaces where people want to “do better,” they still screw up and can push back when someone points out where they failed.

Crystal: Yes, this was definitely a wake up call for Chelsea. No matter how much she thought she was seeing and addressing injustice, ignorance and/or obliviousness could still happen. I think it can be worse with people (and I’m pointing that finger at myself too) who are making concerted efforts in specific areas of injustice because they are ultra-focused on that aspect of identity or marginalization and then it’s hard to see the bigger picture. Like Audrey pointed out, there were flaws throughout the school even though it had a social justice emphasis.

Jessica: There’s definitely been more and more conversations online about what intersectionality is and isn’t, and I think Chelsea and Jasmine’s interactions really drive that home. There was a lot of nuance to the discussions and conflicts in Watch Us Rise, and it made me realize I definitely need to give this book a reread to digest all of it.

K. Imani: One of the parts of the book that I loved was when Jasmine & Chelsea did the Feminist Spotlight. I had not heard of any of those artists so I was happy to learn about Feminist artists doing their thing. I know if I were to teach this book, I would have my students look up these women and respond in some way to their art. What other aspects of art that was all over this novel stood out to you?

Audrey: I think the thing that stood out to me most wasn’t necessarily the art itself but the fact that in the novel there’s a few sentences explicitly mentioning that Jasmine and Chelsea deliberately set out “to make sure we were inclusive of art forms, ethnicities, and work for and about women.” And then the text itself backed up that in-universe decision by highlighting a diverse range of activists, many of which I hadn’t heard of before. The book repeatedly had Jasmine and Chelsea’s draw upon and name previous activists and movements for their inspiration, and there was even an entire bibliography at the end entitled Resources for Young Activists that included poets, books, blogs/sites, etc. I appreciated that effort toward inclusion, the acknowledgment of the work done before, and the resources provided for the teens reading the book so that they have a place to start from with their own work.

Crystal: I just really appreciated the many ways of expressing their thoughts and opinions. They used their voices in so many ways. I also liked that Isaac is also part of this feminist group, not just because he cares for Jasmine, but because he’s actually a feminist. Like Audrey, I also found the resources to be an excellent addition to the book so readers can move into or continue their own activism or growth.

Jessica: The aspect that stood out to me was just how varied it was. I’m usually not a fan of books that incorporate different forms of media, or show exactly what the protagonists have created (i.e. a book about fanfiction, with actual fanfiction excerpts). I’m very picky that way! But Watch Us Rise was brilliant in its portrayal of the many forms of art that Jasmine and Chelsea create and reference. I just loved that.

K. Imani: I realized most of my comments & questions have focused on the feminist aspect of the novel and forgetting that this novel just also gives us a slice of real life. I feel like Jasmine’s sweet growing romantic relationship with Isaac, that also mixed with her growing activism and her self-esteem, really showed how complicated life is. Jasmine was finding her voice throughout the novel but was also opening herself up to loving herself and being loved by someone, and the way their relationship was written was so beautiful and real. Their relationship was very healthy and I was happy to see it portrayed that way. What other storylines stood out to you?

Audrey: I also enjoyed Jasmine and Isaac’s relationship for the reasons you pointed out--it was very sweet--especially since it contrasted so well with Chelsea and James’s not-a-romance. I was so proud of Chelsea for realizing that she deserved better in a potential partner and that James wasn’t it, no matter how attracted to him she was. The two romantic plots were great foils for each other.

The death of Jasmine’s dad was a major, and hard-hitting, part of the novel as well. I haven’t read many YA books that dealt with the death of a parent due to cancer, but I felt that this plot was handled sensitively and handled well. I was glad that Jasmine’s family, friends, and community were there to support her, her dad, and their family all through her dad’s failing health, eventual death, and Jasmine’s mourning.

Crystal: Yes, there was way more going on here than I expected, but I too appreciated Jasmine and Isaac’s relationship. It didn’t overwhelm the story, but revealed another layer of life. There’s a lot happening, but the relationships in the story are meaningful.

So, that is our discussion. Have you read Watch Us Rise yet? What did you think of it? Share your thoughts in the comments!

#group discussion #WeNeedDiverseBooks #ownvoices

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aboriginalnewswire · 6 years

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Trigger warning for sexual abuse, stalking, rape, domestic violence and large-scale attacks by hate groups. Last Thursday, I criticized the Linux community for continuing to support and center a leader with a years-long, documented history of unrepentant abusive behavior, someone who has actively and systematically nurtured a hostile, homogeneous technical community, and someone who has long actively chased people from marginalized groups out of open source. The retaliation has been terrifying. On Friday night, the home addresses of every member of my immediate family were posted online. I have received literally thousands of harassing, abusive, threatening and violent messages across at least half a dozen separate sites. People speaking up in support of me had their home addresses posted online as well, sometimes within minutes, creating a climate of fear that has functionally isolated me from most community support. I have received slurs of every variety, death and rape threats, and violent and threatening images. They have gone after my business and my family's livelihoods with slander, intimidation and attempts to cut off financial support, and tried to hack into various of my accounts and systems. They have left pages and pages of stomach-turning comments on the front of every internet community I am a part of and that influences my professional community and peers. As I was reeling from my family being doxxed and taking steps to ensure everyone’s safety, the tech press was giving a massive platform to an ex-partner - someone I dated for four months more than 3 years ago - who has, after I dumped him, terrorized, threatened and abused me for years, and continues to do so. This is a person who is a known liar, abuser and manipulator, with a long history of stalking, hacking and terrorizing women, who is now being treated as an authoritative character witness on one of his long-term victims - for the sole purpose of destroying my company, discrediting my work, and terrorizing me into silence. This is a person who has hacked nude photos of me and sent them to my employers - yes, bosses, executive team and investors. (I barely left my house for two weeks after and to this day cannot recall a time being more scared, depressed and humiliated). Details of my private sex life - provided by my ex - are now all over the internet and have been used to justify my abuse, incite more of it, and slut and kink-shame me. Valleywag -- less than a day after stealing stories from me, plagiarizing content from my Twitter, publishing my comments without permission or compensation, and refusing to properly acknowledge my work and job title -- has used its platform to replicate this terrorism and domestic violence to an even larger audience. Nevermind that their original articles had already incited harassment against me (they were posted over and over to the anonymous hate boards that attacked my family); their most recent article on me is an act of pure and spiteful violence following my critiques of their behavior. The past few days have been terrifying, and my heart is broken. This is abuse. This is domestic violence. This is harassment. This is terrorism. While many are eager to claim that I am actually being abused because I'm crazy, a liar, a fraud, a troll, a hypocrite, a neo-Nazi, a whore, because I've had kinky sex, because I dated an abuser, because I'm mean to men on Twitter, because I swear a lot, because I'm a "blogger" that contributes nothing to the field: I am being targeted because of my work speaking up against tech culture. My work is what has made me a target, but it is nonetheless ironically (or maybe predictably) being erased in a frothing media-frenzy to portray me as a useless, insane "PR girl", a hysterical slut with a social media account, and to generate page views from my pain. (I'm posting this on Pastebin because unlike most of the tech press, I refuse to use this abuse as a machine for eyeballs and ad dollars.) In case you’re not familiar with my work, let me tell you about it. A few years ago, I started blogging independently about tech culture, giving talks about it, and organizing resistance efforts on social media. In that period, I produced several books-worth of essays that deconstructed in detail harmful elements of tech culture, discussed useful modes of intervention and resistance, and called out collective complicity in oppression across the industry... including my own complicity. I also began using my Twitter account to talk about my experiences with misogyny in tech, call out inequality and advocate for change - and yes, I use swear words on Twitter dot com, and you will handle it because you’re not a fucking three year old. (I might take your cookies and smash your fucking Xbox anyway, though.) I did this in my spare time until late in 2013, when I started working full-time on Model View Culture, which launched in January '14. In the past year, Model View Culture has produced a body of tech and cultural criticism the size of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. We have published over 150 authors. Our publication consistently stands against discrimination, abuse and oppression in the tech industry. We have covered sexual abuse and assault, social media activism and abuse, the surveillance complex, engineering mythology, open source community, accessibility, hiring discrimination, mental illness and disability, consent in product design, workplace abuse, the VC industrial complex, suicide, white liberalism, police violence, codes of conduct, team dysfunctions, and systemic discrimination, violence and inequality at every stage of the technology pipeline. We publish and pay a large and diverse groups of writers speaking to their experiences, to their beliefs and to their sense of justice, to their demands for a better tech industry. We challenge racism & white supremacy, sexism and misogyny, transphobia, ableism, classism and other forms of institutionalized oppression rampant in tech. I believe we have produced more critical content from diverse voices than any other tech media. Model View Culture is not perfect. It is not a panacea. It is not done, or complete. It is one year old, just getting started, and there is so much more for us to do. But we have been an influential, if small, part of the growing attempts to call out and dismantle fundamental problems in the tech community. This work is what people are desperate to stop, by any means including trying to get my family killed by SWATing, trying to convince me to kill myself, terrorizing my supporters, stalking me (I have had multiple men stalk me for 6-14 months at a time), hacking my computers and accounts, "exposing" my sex life, cutting off my funding, belittling and erasing my writing, plagiarizing my content, sending constant rape and death threats, and ceaselessly holding me up for abuse to hate groups. This has been my life for almost two years. I'm sad to say that part of you starts to get used to it. But I also want to tell you about what it does to me and other victims of these attacks. Because of my work, I can no longer make public appearances, speak at events or have anyone know where I am or what I'm doing. I can't have friends over to my house because no one can know where I live. My social life consists only of a few close friends who I feel I can trust. Many of them also undergo the same shit I do - other people don’t understand and find it too stressful to be around. I am traumatized by what is now years of active stalking and abuse; abuse committed by tech workers and unaffiliated individuals, by anonymous harassers and influential figures in tech, and by media both in tech and mainstream. My sex life is fodder for 8chan and corrupt journalists trying to destroy my company because it is competition and it poses a threat to their press-release factories, funded by startups and venture capitalists and uncritically reproducing their propaganda. I receive anywhere between dozens and thousands of harassing messages each week. Anything bad that happens to me is considered “normal” and “expected”, and any reason to expose me to abuse is sufficient. People say I am a "professional victim", suggesting I am somehow profiting off my work, but I am now unemployable in the field I once loved and make a fraction of what I used to make as a tech worker. I spend an enormous amount of money and time securing my safety. It is no longer safe for me to do media appearances as media abuses me, demeans me, violates my boundaries, steals my content and holds me up for abuse, offering no support or protection: every article has resulted in more stalkers and harassment. I am frequently cut off from support because people who support me are afraid to be targeted as well. That's just my everyday. Then there's these recent attacks. Frankly, I am devastated, depressed, vulnerable, non-functional, anxious, paranoid and isolated. I’ve visibly lost weight since last Thursday. My heart hurts and my body aches. I feel humiliated, exploited, and am in physical pain. I'm frightened for myself, my family, my friends, and people in my community who have supported me. I am trying to keep working but honestly, it is incredibly difficult. I had a lot of plans for Model View Culture in the beginning of this year, and unfortunately most of them are going to be delayed by at least weeks as I try to put my self-esteem and sense of safety back together, take the needed steps to protect myself, family and community, and process these feelings of fear, anxiety, trauma and anger. It's devastating to admit the toll this has taken on me, to accept that it is having such a significant impact on my work. I fear that people won’t want to write for Model View Culture anymore because doing this work is actually dangerous. As is, we have to publish far too many articles anonymously, because people fear losing their jobs and their safety for speaking out and telling their stories. I am asking myself how I can actually continue like this and run a company under these conditions. No other tech press is operating under this level of violence and terrorism, and we don’t have corporate money or VC funding to help us defend against it. It’s intimidating. I ask Model View Culture readers and community to be patient during this time. The truth of the matter is that as much as people want abuse victims to be fearless, to come out on top, to not be stopped: at some point, this is simply not realistic. That said, I'm not stopping, I am not going away, and I will continue, even if it happens a little slower or a little later than I planned. Changing tech is my life's work. I'm only 28, so you'll probably have to deal with it for at least the next few decades. This is a set-back for my health and my ability to work, but I'm here for the long-term. I am sad that my new normal is, well, this. But so be it. To everyone who has supported me in this time: Thank you so much. I haven't been able to respond to so many of you because it hasn't been safe to, but I appreciate and value your belief and faith in me. To everyone else: Go fuck yourself. Some specific “fucks yous” go out to: The Linux community, I hope you realize how fucking toxic and broken your “community” is after standing by silently as me and my entire family were terrorized after I criticized Linus Torvalds. I think you are cowardly and spineless and I stand behind everything I said. I also think you need to seriously look at the clear ties the Linux community has to 8chan and GamerGate which led many of the attacks on me. Andrew Auernheimer aka a blast of trash from my past: you started whining and crying the day I dumped your ass and you haven’t stopped since. May the ouroboros eat YOU, easily mistaken for a snake, and may you spend the rest of your days as you have to date - pathetic, prospectless, alone and heartbroken, ever-pining over women who hate your guts and clinging to any last scrap of fast-fading relevance. Milo Yiannopoulos, a failure of a human being but tremendous success as an opportunistic sell-out scumbag who has spent months digging up details on my sex life and leading harassment campaigns against me. Valleywag, particularly Valleywag editor Dan Lyons -- a white man who is 26 years older then me and uses my sex life for clickbait while citing Yiannopolous and Weev as a credible source in order to take me down. Also Jason Calacanis, who has supported my long term stalker Loren Feldman and is basically a shitstain of a human being who we should kick out of tech forever. Vivek Wadhwa, who is building his career off women in tech yet is transparently a misogynistic asshole who has used this opportunity to get back at me for criticizing his profiteering and patriarchal brand of "allyship." Also Elizabeth Spiers who continues to refuse to get the FUCK away from me after MONTHS of me asking to be left in peace. Get the fuck over me and move on with your life as a has-been. You are literally 10 years older than me, yet are relentlessly picking on a young woman with an up-and-coming media career like you once had. You look jealous and petty, and your ongoing obsession with me is creepy as fuck. In the remainder of this post, I am addressing my community. I realize that following my tweets can be difficult and not very coherent, especially as I have navigated the emotional roller coaster of the weekend. My anxiety is through the roof and I haven’t gotten much sleep. While I don't think I should have to explain and rehash my sex life, analyze terrorism against me at length, and somehow summon words out of a fog of anxiety, fear and depression, I want to get my views on the record. They have been dismissed, erased, deemed irrelevant, misconstrued, twisted and deployed against me. So here they are, FROM ME. They have made it too scary to defend me, so I defend myself: I, unequivocally, support ourselves and stand behind us. Lol. OK for real. I wanted to start by discussing my past sexual history. Since we are already so deep into my sex life - released non-consensually and with the sole aim of terrorizing me - let's talk about it. Over three years ago, a friend of mine introduced me to Andrew Auernheimer aka Weev. I had no idea who he was prior to this friend telling me about him and introducing me. I was not involved in the infosec community (still aren’t), was fairly new to tech, and arrived in Silicon Valley years after his most high-profile attacks on other women in tech. As many of you have conveniently forgotten, (even those of you who wrote them!), articles about him painted him as a charismatic, counter-culture hacker taking on powerful and corrupt systems - someone who expressed a number of "controversial" (i.e. sexist, racist and homophobic) views, but these were glossed over as satire and mischief. I was happy to do the same, something which I deeply regret and deeply apologize for. The industry was, as it always has been and remains, enamored and worshipping of the "edgy" young white male hacker who ostensibly reflects a challenge to the status-quo, but in actuality just re-creates those systems under the guise of liberalism, satire and "mischief" aka misogynistic and racist terrorism. Frankly, I was also enamored. At the time, I was really early in my career, didn't give much of a shit about social justice, didn't particularly understand how fucked up the industry was, and was laboring under the profound delusion that my career success meant some kind of feminism. I think I was starting to undergo some type of political realization or awakening and was in some clumsy and inept way reaching out for an alternative framework, a tech “counter culture”. Of course, the "alternative" framework I discovered was some abusive piece of shit who would crawl into my life, use me for money and housing, and then spend years after punishing me for it. Typical. I am also not the only victim of his predatory and exploitative behavior towards his partners and ex-partners. At the time, I was in a bad place (which he gleefully exploited) and frankly looking for some strings-free fun and (unhealthy) emotional support. A good time seemed like having a completely doomed relationship with a notorious, emotionally co-dependent bad boy that I could fuck for a few hours and call daddy in a hotel room, then leave after giving him $40 out of the ATM because he had no money (stemming from a blanket refusal to work, preferring to just take money from women who feel sorry for his miserable existence). It worked for me at the time, it satisfied something I was looking for, and it made my life feel edgy and exciting, even though I know recognize it as a a huge mistake and deeply regret it. But, it happened. To all the people berating me for making poor dating choices in my mid-20s, many who haven't seen their mid-twenties in ten to twenty years: Guess what, assholes. Mistakes. Were. Made. Can you really tell me that you haven't fucked the wrong people? Maybe ones of the dudes I fucked was worse than your partners, but I've always been an overachiever. Like I have previously stated: At least I fucked weev in shame and private unlike the EFF, TechCrunch, the NY Times and all the rest of your favs. To be honest, dating men who are emotionally and physically abusive has been something of a pattern for me, due to the fact that I have disproportionately fallen into these relationships as a former abuse victim AND due to the fact that so many men are abusive, predatory, manipulative and lying scum. Fuck them, and misandry forever. In response to Andrew's allegations that I am a racist, hate-filled neo-Nazi who shared his views, that I am simply a troll or performance artist: I do not, and have never shared Andrew's views, and he didn't teach me shit. Most of our relationship consisted of fucking in potentially disturbing and unhealthy ways, talking about his upcoming trial, sharing photos of red pandas, me bitching about work, watching My Little Pony (i know, i know) and him trying to get as much money out of me as he could. I smoked a bunch of weed, he drank and we ate lots of takeout. As far as his trolling techniques, they seem to consist primarily of convincing people who can actually code to do things for him, then taking the credit for them, so I wasn't really interested in acquiring these “skills” even if I did have a naive fascination with what I then saw as his "innocent" pranks and how they functioned. While it wasn't a big part of our brief-lived (four month) relationship, he often made comments that were racist, homophobic, anti-semitic, misogynist and transphobic. I alternated between being like "hahahaha", “satiring” back to him (including making similar comments), and telling him to knock it the fuck off. In private conversations he assured me that he was just a performance artist, that it was satire and trolling, and that he was actually a feminist (lol). He was always laughing when he said really horrible things. Like the anti-intellectual, self-centered, callous, cavalier and "edgy" white liberal that I fancied myself (And was) at the time, I laughed too and played along. As much as there is lots of feigned outrage from white people about it, this discourse was frankly not much different than that I saw and still see constantly in the tech workplace and at events, online and in the community. Tech prides itself on being "not overtly -ist" when it actually is, despite almost everyone’s vehement protestations. For those who attempt to distance themselves from the racism, sexism, and transphobia of the industry by congratulating themselves that we don’t "say those things": you are full of shit. The tech industry is chock full NOT ONLY of "subtle" issues that let us continue to feel like good people because we don't use slurs, but actual constant and overt abuse, discrimination, and violence - often under the guises of "irony" and "satire”. And I have absolutely participated in it. People demand to know why I won't "defend" myself from the "charges" made by my ex. Yes, they contain a number of outright lies and inventions as well as self-serving exaggerations, distortions and manipulations. Frankly, I’m not going to indulge this circus by refuting and responding point-by-point to the details of an abusive relationship I had years ago. As to the overall tone of the allegations, basically that I used to be an oppressive asshole who held much different values than I do now... well I don't feel a need to "defend" or "deny" that because the truth is, I had for years and years of my past been whole-heartedly complicit in the systems of inequality and discrimination that plague our field. I thought that if I made six figures and did well in my career, acted like "one of the boys” aka white male patriarchs, or played along with them, and was as vulgar, violent, self-centered and cut-throat as the "successful" white men around me, that was "feminism." I gave a shit about my own advancement but for many years didn't really give a shit about anyone else's advancement. I didn't recognize my role in the tech industry as a privileged white woman, and didn't do much of the internal and external work required to divest from those systems. As I started my political awakening, I was primarily concerned with the advancement of white women like myself and didn't give much thought to broader systemic issues, or how I was complicit in the oppression of other groups. My attitudes, beliefs and behavior were 100% born of my alignment with white capitalist patriarchy, and I benefitted enormously (And still do) from it even as it has abused me. Here are two categories of things that are both true. 1. I am queer, mentally ill and a woman. I have been through a lot of hard stuff because of those things. I went through some Carrie-style shit when I came out in middle school. I have had an anxiety disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder since I was a kid. Some of my first "real" sexual experiences included being molested and a victim of statutory rape. Later in my life, I've been raped at knife point and dragged across the floor thinking I would die that night. I've been punched in the face by my "lovers". I showed up to my first real job interview with a barely concealed black eye and bruised ribs. I've finished school while I screamed bloody murder into an apartment complex at night pleading for help from anyone who heard. As a working professional I've been sexually harassed, verbally and physically intimidated by managers, underpaid, overworked, denied promotions, humiliated, and subjected to hostile work environment after hostile work environment. I've been threatened with revenge porn by multiple exes, and coerced into doing things I think are unethical by people in positions of power over me. I've had hacked nude photos sent to my bosses and investors. I've been stalked over the course of months and years, been slandered and abused by media, and disowned by my industry for being a woman who spoke up. I am one of the most visible women in tech - not as a respected and valued member of our industry, but as a target. I live in constant fear of the tech community and am terrorized on a regular basis. I am held up for all to see, a public example of what they will do to you if you speak out - and it seems “anything goes” more and more each day as organized hate groups grow in numbers and strength while the tech community grows in apathy. 2. I am a cis white woman who has uncritically profited from white supremacy, cissexism, ableism, classism and other forms of oppression. My success, visibility, and achievements are fundamentally built on the oppression of others, and I spent years not giving a fuck, lending any semblance of a hand, acknowledging my role, or working to dismantle the systems I've been part of. Most of my privileges in life happen as a direct result of a white supremacist capitalist system, and I too long stayed silent and comfortable. From an essay I published in autumn 2013 on my personal blog, called "Finding Out You’re a Sexist, Misogynistic, Homophobic, Classist, Racist Asshole and Hypocrite": "I can only cringe and hate myself when I think of all the times I have totally fucked up and became part of the very problems I hate. Yes, I have slut-shamed, body-policed, name-called, bad-joked, appropriated, derailed, co-opted, silenced, objectified, stereotyped, trivialized, slurred, punished, isolated, insulted, benefited, and stayed silent with the worst of them. A highlight reel of my life profiting uncritically and even participating in the systems of misogyny, classism, racism, cis-normativity and homophobia that oppress my friends, my family, my fellow humans would not endear anyone to me, least of all myself. It fees horrible to talk about. But I am because we all must realize how complete, how intersecting, how deeply fucked up the system is, and the role we play in it. It’s easy to become invested in an image of ourselves as good human beings, without blame or participation in the oppression of other people. Sometimes we even imagine ourselves as a helper to them, a healer, an ally, without even thinking it through." I have made many sexist, racist, transphobic and homophobic comments that were abusive and violent in my life. I have consistently failed to stand against discrimination that affected other people. I've often prioritized my own needs and success above that of more marginalized people. For years, I made no effort to use my privilege and power to help others. I have *literally fucked a neo-Nazi and harbored him with money, emotional support and yeah, kinky sex.* My internalized misogyny and the racism I have reproduced affected real relationships and hurt real people. Because I have had access to white, cis, class and educational privilege, I have been able to protect myself, get amazing health and mental health care, and attain economic security that many suffering the same and much, much worse do not have access to. In the workplace, I got the perks of diversity in tech efforts while more marginalized people were left behind, and I didn't say shit. I benefited and continue to benefit enormously from white supremacy in the tech industry, able to amass financial resources to start my own company and escape the day-to-day grind of the abusive tech workforce, which is not an option for so many. All of the above things are true. As a cis white woman I have both abused and been abused, been a victim of violence and someone who commits violence, been punished by the system and also benefited extensively from it. I refuse to run around insisting that I'm not an oppressive asshole instead of actually doing the work of dismantling the system - inside me and outside me. I heal myself, and I also work to ease, destroy and amend for the pain and oppression I have inflicted on others, that I participate in, benefit from, and bear responsibility for taking down. I also want readers to note that the "redemption" narrative that people are looking for me to manifest here is hugely problematic, centering white people's feelings and experiences, our personal growth over dismantling oppressive systems, and our need to feel like we are "good people." As I've written in the past, I don't believe that "good person" as a framework to approaching systemic inequalities is useful. I don’t think I am a good or bad person. I am a person who has done good things and bad things, and I try to do more good things as I grow. I don't wish to offer excuses for my past. I cannot undo it, nor change it. I remain complicit in and benefit from many systems of oppression, I still have an enormous amount of work to do to divest of my own investment in the system and how I enable it to continue, and I have a life-time of work to do against it, work that I try to do each day. This is work that the tech industry needs to partake in. I invite you to get out of my sex life and to join me doing it.

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writesandramblings · 6 years

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The Captain’s Secret - p.80

"People They Fall Apart”

A/N: I now take the stage with my baton, the orchestra fully assembled, every instrument in position, and the music begins to play.

Begins the events of episode 12, "Vaulting Ambition." (Small nitpick note, I did skip/fast forward some of the whole figuring out the Tyler/Voq thing for brevity's sake; this is not the Ash Tyler fanfic you're looking for. I have no time to dwell on that plot. And while I dearly love Stamets and Culber, we're also not here to dwell in the mushroom forest.)

In other news, I'm going to print a copy of this story in bound book format for my own personal amusement. If anyone wants to offer a "book review blurb"-style quote, please do a comment or message! I'd love some quotes to put on the back cover. My goal is to send to print on April 9.

To be clear, I'm not selling this fanfic or anything in any way, shape, or form. It's just, I've written a novel-length work (two novels, really) and I want to hold it in my hands as a real book.

Full Chapter List Part 1 - Objects in Motion << 79 - People They Come Together 81 - Pineapple Surprise >>

The ISS Charon, flagship of the Terran Empire and nomadic palace of the emperor, did not linger to admire its handiwork above the planet Harlak. It was a warp-capable fortress of unparalleled firepower and destruction entirely equal the Klingon Sarcophagus of the other universe. Like that ship, which Lorca had enjoyed demolishing, it was an incredibly attractive target to the rebels lingering in the area. While the evacuation of Harlak had not been entirely completed, enough rebels had escaped to pose a credible threat to the flagship if it lingered.

Georgiou left Burnham and the Shenzhou with the strictest orders to finish mopping up any straggling refugees from the planet as the Charon withdrew to more defensible coordinates. Burnham and Lorca were to follow once the Shenzhou's cleanup efforts were complete.

Burnham could ill afford any more indulgences with Lorca when the emperor's summons was hanging over their heads. "See to it that he's ready for transport immediately," she ordered.

As the guards dragged him towards whatever they thought this order meant (probably the waiting agony booth), Lorca shouted at Burnham and the rest of the bridge, "You're all a bunch of lab rats in the emperor's maze. Lab rats!"

Burnham did not know what it meant, only that Lorca was trying to tell her to relay some message. She undertook the task of performing a cursory sweep of the planet for rebels, doing her best to avoid actually finding any, but three small craft were not sufficiently quick or smart to evade detection and Burnham was forced to watch as Detmer fired on them with disinterested efficiency.

While she sat through this display, a transmission arrived from Discovery. Burnham took it in the ready room. It was the Defiant files. Discovery had gotten past the firewall and decrypted the data. Minus the Terran computer security measures, the files turned out to be very small indeed and almost entirely redacted, but that did not make them useless. There was data enough to start theorizing.

There was also just enough time before they boarded the shuttle for her to send a transmission back to Discovery. It was a small, terse, seemingly innocuous message. "Discovery. Thank you for your assistance in bringing the traitor to heel. The emperor has summoned us to an audience. I will be sure to tell the emperor personally of your role in my success when we speak. Whether as a prisoner or a lab rat, Lorca will pay for his crimes." She hoped that was sufficient to convey whatever message Lorca intended by the words.

The lab rat received the message. She sat in her room monitoring the bridge and communications, eyes glinting in the dim warmth, fur wriggling in excitement. Even if the words were spoken by Burnham, she knew they came from Lorca. She pressed the button for the comms. "Einar," she said, "it is time."

Groves and Mischkelovitz were in the lab proper. In a sense, they were beset on two sides. As Lalana emerged from the back of the lab with her silvery color-changing thermal suit in hand, Larsson came in the front. "What are you doing in here?" Groves demanded of Larsson, to which Lalana said:

"Einar and I have very much enjoyed our time with you both, but we are now required elsewhere." She elected to speak for Larsson, but if she were being honest about it, Larsson had not enjoyed his time with Groves and Mischkelovitz particularly. He found them only marginally tolerable.

Groves had been relaxing with his feet up and brought them down at once. "Say what now?" He should have been in Lorca's study attending to the Allan issue of how to trap and kill a probable time traveler who might or might not still be on the ship, but he had opted to work on decrypting the Defiant files in a more familiar setting because Lorca's collection of armaments creeped him out and now he was just avoiding the murder-themed mancave until such a time as Saru called him back. Besides, he and Airiam had been remotely working on decrypting the files together and had gotten a rather good game of chess going in the aftermath.

(Owing to her inhuman appearance, Lieutenant Commander Airiam had been banned from her post on the bridge and Groves was entirely sympathetic to her ensuing boredom. There was no room for either of them in this universe. What passed for law here was barely recognizable to Groves and if ever there was a place that rendered bioethics obsolete, it was a universe where humans were as almost cruel to each other as they were to the aliens they viewed as inferior life forms.)

Mischkelovitz did not look up from the mess of circuitry she was working on. She asked, "Where are you going?" Her flat tone suggested she was only mildly interested in the answer. Whatever research use she had for Lalana was over with and done with. The only reason Lalana was still in the lab was the mistaken idea that Mischkelovitz's current active projects included the lului box in some capacity. That was the secret she and Lalana shared. There had never been a need for the lului box. Or rather, there had been a need, and the need had been getting Lorca to go to Memory Alpha.

"We are going to join the captain," said Lalana, stretching up and gripping the edge of the worktable.

Mischkelovitz went from minimal to excessive interest in the space of a nanosecond. She put down the microwelder in her hands and turned to face them with eyes bright and eager. "Can I come?"

"Apologies, Emellia, but that is not possible."

"Well," said Groves, putting his feet back up and returning to the chess game on his padd, "have fun. It's your funeral."

"What do you mean, funeral?" asked Mischkelovitz.

"Your brother is being dramatic," intoned Larsson humorlessly.

"Am I, though? This whole universe is goddamn deathtrap. Dr. Culber already paid that price."

"Dr. Culber was killed by Ash Tyler," said Larsson, leaning against the worktable and crossing his arms. Maybe he did not have Groves' intelligence, but he was far too big to be intimidated by anything about Groves. He also looked even bigger than usual in his Terran armor. "Or whatever he is. And he came from our world. Honestly, I don't think the universes are as different as everyone seems to think. There are murderers in both."

"This universe is ruled by a fascist tyrant and you don't see the difference?"

"Fascism and tyranny have existed in our world as well. That is why we have words for them. Humans are humans, and they are always capable of bad as much as they are good."

Lalana tapped her top fingers on the worktable in a manner that seemed thoughtful. "I thought you were a moral relativist, John?" she pointed out.

There was a blank look on Groves' face. He had considered himself exactly that until arriving in a universe where the moral relativity broke his concept of the scale. Reading through the files on the data core recovered from the debris field revealed atrocities beyond comprehension. Now he did not know what he was, only that the darkness permeating this universe was something he outright rejected.

"In any event, if we are to die, it was a pleasure to know you both," offered Lalana. "Please also give my regards to Macarius. Einar, if you will assist me?"

While Larsson gave Lalana a hand with her garment and Mischkelovitz whimpered about not wanting Lalana to die, Groves picked up his padd and tried to focus on the chess game. He could not. He stared at the pieces on the black and green board and finally dumped the padd onto the table. "Groves to O'Malley. You up, moron?"

"Good afternoon to you, too," came the acid response. The eye roll felt almost audible.

"You might want to come down here. You're about to lose the rest of your staff."

A minute later O'Malley was on site with a cup of coffee and, of all the incongruities, a powdered donut in his other hand. Mischkelovitz took one look, snatched the donut from him, and broke it in half.

"What the hell do you think you're doing!" O'Malley went, entirely not caring about the donut. (Mischkelovitz put half the donut back in O'Malley's hand, broke off a piece of her half and gave it to Lalana, and began to eat the portion she had claimed for herself. Powder coated her fingers. It did not show against the medical white of her uniform.)

"Got a mission," said Larsson.

"Like hell you do!"

"Captain's orders."

"Oh, Saru ordered you on a mission without asking or telling me?"

"Lorca." Actually, Lorca had not ordered Larsson to do anything, but it was believable enough that he might have and not said a single word to O'Malley.

"You don't answer to Lorca! You answer to me!"

"I resign," said Larsson, carrying through on his perennial threat yet again. "Now I don't listen to anyone."

O'Malley stared indignantly. "I don't accept your resignation."

Lalana hopped between Larsson and O'Malley. She still had her filaments tucked inside her jumpsuit so she looked like a silvery bullet with a blue-grey head sticking out. "If I may point out, now that I am leaving, there is no need for your extra security measures, so Einar is free to resign."

"Wait, you're going, too?" O'Malley suddenly noticed Lalana was wearing clothing.

"Captain Lorca requires my presence," was her only explanation.

O'Malley shook his head. Children, all of them. "You understand you're not the sole reason for the security here, right? There's valuable research in this lab." Mischkelovitz's eyes went wide at O'Malley's words. Her brother didn't know the half of it. She shrank back towards her desk and debated going into the crawlspace.

"There is valuable research everywhere on Discovery," said Lalana. "I was the only thing that was secret about this room. Now this room is like all the others and may be guarded exactly the same way. But since you are here, allow me to say this in person. In the event we do not survive our journey, it has been a pleasure knowing you, Mac." She even did him the kindness of not calling him his full first name.

There was a horrible silence as that sank in. "Why... where..."

"Do not worry," Lalana said. "I have lived a very long time compared to you and Einar and I are not afraid of this eventuality. We will of course endeavor to avoid it, but there is no need for concern if this should come to pass. We are glad for the time we have known you. That we met at all in the vast cosmos was such an unlikelihood it is what you would describe as a miracle. A thousand million tiny things had to go exactly right for us to meet all of you and they did. Please do not cry, Emellia. Think of us in this moment always, as your friends. Now come, Einar, our shuttle awaits."

They made as if to leave. "Hold on!" said Groves suddenly, his feet coming down off the table again. "You're flying a shuttle in?" That was, he knew, an absolutely, completely terrible idea because even if the shuttles were mocked up to look Terran, they did not have valid Terran transponders and security ident codes and if the Defiant files were any indication as to the sorts of security measures Terrans employed, that shuttle was going get blown out of space the moment it got near the Charon. It would not hold up to any sort of scrutiny. "Let me give you a pineapple."

"Thank you, but I just ate," said Lalana, referring to the piece of donut. "Perhaps Einar is hungry?"

The word seemed to mean something different to Groves and O'Malley than it did Lalana and Larsson. O'Malley's eyebrows shot up. "Is a pineapple an option?"

"Of course," said Groves. "Why wouldn't it be?"

"Well, I don't know, we're in a different universe, aren't there different rules of physics or something?" The light here really did seem strange.

"No, you moron, the quantum variance here doesn't invalidate pineapples." The point at which changes in physics would break a pineapple was also potentially a point at which reality was collapsing and there were bigger problems to worry over.

"Well, then, by all means," said O'Malley, and smiled at Groves. "I do so love pineapples, they're my favorite fruit."

Groves grinned back a grin stretched so wide it threatened to turn into a laugh. "One pineapple, coming right up!"

"I don't understand. How is fruit going to help?" asked Larsson.

"Oh, you'll see," promised O'Malley as Groves and Mischkelovitz began to gather materials from around the lab.

Lalana hopped onto an unused table on the far wall. She loved watching things happening and it was a very nice vantage point.

The sweep of the rebels was done. Burnham sat at the shuttle controls as it left the Shenzhou's shuttlebay and tried not to focus on the fact they were about to fly towards the worst possible reality she could have imagined.

Luckily, she had a small but encouraging distraction on hand. She joined Lorca in the rear of the shuttle as the autopilot took over and showed him the Defiant's data. "The file has been redacted, but there is some data on how the Defiant crossed into this universe. A phenomenon called interphasic space, but where that space is, the exact coordinates? Struck from the record."

She had to put the padd in his hands for him; he was almost entirely restrained for this little transport exercise and his fingers and head were about the only parts of him that could move. "All right, well, we'll just have to hunt down the original report. If the complete archive's anywhere it'll be in the Imperial Palace which is..." Lorca inhaled. "Fortunately where we've been summoned. Some people would see that glass as half full." He smiled at Burnham. Right now it felt a little like his cup was running over.

Burnham did not smile back. She was having trouble understanding how anyone could still find anything to smile about at this point. Between Tyler and Georgiou, she had lost what limited capacity she had for that expression of human joy.

She had, at least, brought him a nerve dampener to counteract the worst effects of the agonizers. She injected it and he reached out and put a hand on her arm, the only part of her he could reasonably reach in the restraints.

"Listen to me. You'll get the data we need on the Defiant and you'll get us out of there. I know you will." His face was so earnest, so sincere, so hopeful. He had confidence in her.

She couldn't look at him. Whatever Lorca thought he saw in her, she no longer saw in herself. She darted away towards the front of the shuttle.

"Burnham!" he called after her. Guilty, she looked back. "I need you. You need you. What are you afraid of?" There was a comfort in his tone, an easiness that went against everything Burnham was feeling.

The insignia badge of her beloved captain found its way into Burnham's hands. Its surface was crisscrossed with ugly scratches. It was the only connection she still had to the person she had been before the Binary Stars.

Those scratches were her fault. Everything, it seemed, was her fault. Yet for some reason Lorca had the gall to still look at her and see some sort of potential.

"Georgiou," she admitted. "Logic tells me she's not the woman that I betrayed. But this feels like a reckoning."

"Your Georgiou is dead," Lorca reminded her, voice taut.

"Haven't you ever been afraid of a ghost?"

He did not fear his ghost, he lived for her. She was less a ghost and more an impossible dream to live up to. A miraculous dream at that.

As the warp drive disengaged, the light of the Charon's massive energy core made Lorca wince and turn away from Burnham. She, of course, turned right towards the light. It did not hurt her eyes to see it. She slipped Georgiou's badge back into her pocket.

They would be docked in a moment and she had one lingering question.

"What did you mean on the bridge when you referred to lab rats?"

For a moment, Lorca worried Burnham had not understood his intent. "Did you pass the message on?"

"I did."

He sat in somber silence a moment. "Just letting someone on Discovery know not to worry, I'll be home soon enough."

"Dr. Mischkelovitz?" The code had been obvious when she thought about it. Lorca was known to frequent Mischkelovitz's lab, a lab Mischkelovitz rarely left, and miš was the root sound for the word "mouse" in most Slavic languages.

"Very perceptive," said Lorca, choosing not to correct Burnham. So many times now she had tried and failed to guess at his motives and feelings. He could not recall a single time Burnham had guessed right. From accusing him of biological weapons manufacture to the Ripper situation to this very moment. All these months and she still didn't know him. Let her think she did, though. Let her think whatever it took to get them both through this.

As the shuttle came to a rest in the bay, Burnham thought it unfortunate that Lorca might have a connection of a romantic nature with Mischkelovitz. Not only did she know from Tilly that Mischkelovitz had severe social issues and was probably easily taken advantage of by someone with Lorca's charisma, Mischkelovitz was only three years older than Burnham. Lorca was old enough to have fathered either of them. Throw in the imbalance of power between captain and junior crew and it was exactly the sort of thing Captain Georgiou had warned Burnham about.

The shuttle doors opened. Burnham shoved aside her grief and strode out with a veneer of savage confidence, barking orders at the shuttlebay crew to attend to her prisoner and not keep the emperor waiting. Lorca stumbled out behind her, the emperor's guards pushing and shoving him every chance they got.

Neither of them noticed a tiny piece of debris left in the shuttle. It had fallen out of Burnham's pocket when she pulled out Georgiou's rank insignia during the trip. A tiny slip of paper with the words "You will be called to fill a position of honor and responsibility" printed on it.

Saru found himself running into more problems than he could ever have anticipated.

Lieutenant Stamets was slowly improving, but he wasn't out of the woods yet. The unfortunate truth was that he was still in a coma. Tilly remained tirelessly optimistic, insisting something positive was happening in Stamets' head, but whatever it was, it was not happening fast enough to get them out of this terrible situation.

The monster that was both Ash Tyler and Voq was having a medical emergency. Now that both sides of his consciousness were awake—the native Klingon personality and the human one that had been forced on top of it—his brainwaves were in a state of chaos. One moment he was Voq, the next Tyler. At this rate, there would be no tribunal, there would be no anything, because whatever was laying in sickbay was going to die.

Even if that person in sickbay was entirely not Ash Tyler, Saru had no intention of seeing anyone else die on his watch.

Then, because all of that was not enough, a message from Owosekun on the bridge: "Captain, did you authorize a shuttle launch?"

"I most certainly did not!"

Operating as captain without being on the bridge was proving to be a disaster. Saru turned to the nearest wall console in the corridor outside the medical bay. "Who is aboard? Open a channel!" The channel opened, audio only. "Shuttlecraft, identify yourself!"

"Sorry, captain, tried to give you a heads up, but your hands were full in sickbay."

Saru recognized the voice. "Lieutenant Larsson, return to the shuttlebay immediately."

"No can do. We're already running late. That fruit delivery cost us precious time."

What that meant, Saru was not sure. Then he realized it was human humor. The sort of humor Lorca often employed to diffuse high-stress situations. Saru would never understand that instinct. "What do you think you are doing?"

"Secret mission. You-know-who's orders."

"Lieutenant, if you do not return that shuttlecraft immediately, we will be forced to open fire." At the tactical console, Rhys armed the phasers in preparation. The action was pointless. Saru could not bring himself to command the phasers used against a fellow Starfleet officer, not in light of his determination to get everyone from their universe home alive.

"Ah, right, you haven't heard! I resigned from Starfleet. Again."

Or, for that matter, against a self-declared civilian, even one in the process of a stealing a ship.

"Beam him off," said Saru sharply.

"I can't get a lock," said Owosekun over the comm. "It's like his life sign is only partly there."

Saru realized what was happening. Larsson's usage of the plural "we." A single, unlockable life sign. Lalana was on that shuttle. It even explained that strange mention of "lab rat" in Burnham's last message.

"Love to stay and chat," said Larsson, "but my friend and I have an appointment to keep. Wish us luck!"

The channel closed. Saru stared at the emptiness on the monitor. The bridge was still waiting for orders. "Captain, do you want us to pursue?"

Saru wavered a moment. What was the right course of action here?

"Captain?"

The answer came. "No. Maintain our present position and resume standing orders."

"Aye, sir."

The next command was to open a comm to O'Malley, whose explanation was as unhelpful as it was clarifying. "They have left on the command of Captain Lorca?" Saru echoed.

"That's what they both said. Obviously, I had no idea you were as clueless as me."

"You might have told me Larsson had resigned his commission," Saru noted.

"Honestly, Saru, he says that twice a week. It's always been an empty threat."

"I am presently your captain," Saru corrected O'Malley.

"Yes, captain," said O'Malley without hesitation or resentment. "I'm afraid that's all the information I have."

Saru let O'Malley go and stood in the corridor deep in thought. He was not certain whether he had just made a mistake or not. That shuttlecraft was a risk they could ill-afford, but Burnham had not been in contact since that last cryptic message, so perhaps this was some sort of special contingency Lorca had devised in case of trouble. Were there other sleeper agents in among the crew, waiting for cryptic turns of phrase to rush out and execute other secret orders? Most likely not, but given Lorca had not informed Saru as to Lalana and Larsson's operation, there was a nonzero chance of something like this happening again.

In Lab 26, O'Malley and Groves exchanged a look. "Do not tell him about the pineapple," O'Malley said, white as a sheet.

Groves held his hands up and shook his head repeatedly. He had no words. Either they had just assisted in the execution of some sort of top secret orders or they had unknowingly aided and abetted a pair of transdimensional fugitives. Possibly somehow both.

Eventually, Groves did find words again. True to form, they were an indictment of O'Malley. "I'd just like to point out, where your staff is concerned, you are oh-for-two, Mac."

"Shut up, John," said O'Malley, but he was thinking the same. He felt like a failure. He had not technically chosen Larsson or Allan, but he was responsible for them and both had disappeared under questionable circumstances on his watch and now he was left holding the bill for their actions. In every conceivable way possible he had proven inadequate as a leader.

Then again, he had always known he was a follower in every aspect of his life. If only he had possessed the guts to stand up to Cornwell when she offered him this assignment. He always did what everybody else wanted. No wonder everyone thought him such a fool.

As he stood there thinking this, he heard the most familiar words he knew manifest in the room: "I love you, Mally." It was, as always, an attempt to cheer him from a morose moment.

"Just as much," he answered, voice hollow and automatic.

Burnham was left reeling in the aftermath of her audience with the emperor. The way Georgiou had beaten Lorca when he refused to bow to her, the promise of enduring torture for the stubbornly defiant captain, both of these things had been expected but still shocked her.

What she had not anticipated was the pure, unbridled confusion that followed when the emperor stepped forward and expressed her happiness at Burnham's return, eliciting applause from the assembly of Terran officers and bureaucrats around them. Georgiou had touched her hand to Burnham's cheek and spoken words that still echoed in Burnham's mind:

"Everything will be the way it was, dear daughter."

Part 81

#Star Trek Discovery #Star Trek #Discovery #fanfic #fanfiction #Captain Lorca #Mirror Lorca #Gabriel Lorca #Mirror Gabriel Lorca #Michael Burnham #Commander Saru #Vaulting Ambition #Captain Gabriel Lorca

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welllpthisishappening · 7 years

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Tripping Over the Blue Line (18/45)

It’s a transition. That’s what Emma’s calling it. She’s transitioning from one team to another, from one coast to another and she’s definitely not worried. Nope. She’s fine. Really. She’s promised Mary Margaret ten times already. So she got fired. Whatever. She’s fine, ready to settle into life with the New York Rangers. She’s got a job to do. And she doesn’t care about Killian Jones, captain of the New York Rangers. At all.

He’s done. One more season and he’s a free agent and he’s out. It’s win or nothing for Killian. He’s going to win a Stanley Cup and then he’s going to stop being the face of the franchise and he’s going to go play for some other garbage team where his name won’t be used as puns in New York Post headlines. That’s the plan. And Emma Swan, director of New York Rangers community relations isn’t going to change that. At all.

They are both horrible liars.

Rating: Mature Content Warnings: Swearing, eventual hockey-type violence AN: Killian Jones is an expert trash-talker and absolutely horrible at not being painfully in love with Emma Swan at all times. So, you know, the usual. “Locked In With Locksley” is also based on a real life thing, “Stepan Behind the Mic” and it’s fantastic and you guys should watch it and I’ll never be over the Stepan trade. As always, you guys are the best as are @laurnorder, @distant-rose & @beautiful-swan. Hanging out on Ao3, FF.net & tag’ed up on Tumblr.

“You’ve got to do it again,” Ruby sighed, rolling her eyes as she leaned up against the side of the lockers on the far wall of the room.

“What?” Robin balked. “Why? That was great.” “That was horrible.” Killian scoffed, leaning forward to try and lace up his skates. They’d been going on like this for what felt like hours – it might have actually been several days – and he wasn’t really sure where Ruby fit into the entire equation except to drive Robin insane.

“Ruby,” Robin continued, rolling his eyes as he held the team-provided microphone loosely in his hand. “We have a walk-through to get to. We can’t sit around filming this stupid thing all afternoon.” “Several things. First of all, this stupid thing, as you put it, was your guy’s idea and now, because it’s hysterical, the fans want it. So you’re going to give the fans what they want, Locksley. I don’t care how long it takes. Arthur can cut his walk-through short for all I care. Emma’s got to be able to tweet this out and get it on the site at some point in the next twenty-four hours.”

Ruby glanced over her shoulder at Emma, and Killian tried to mask his laughter at the look on her face – far too aware that it hadn’t really worked. Robin glared at him, leaning forward to hit his thigh with the microphone and Ruby groaned dramatically.

“I didn’t even feel that,” Killian muttered. “I am wearing pads.” Robin groaned before looking back up at Ruby. “Your list was one thing, Lucas. That’s not even a list.” “You’re not going to win this argument,” Emma mumbled, taking a step around Ruby to sink onto the bench next to Killian. She glanced around Robin to stare expectantly at Phillip the Rookie, his shoulders sagging just a little bit with the weight of actually not being very good on camera. “C’mon, Rook,” she said. “Just enunciate a bit more when you answer the questions and you guys can get out on the ice and Arthur won’t kill us all.”

As if on cue, Arthur walked into the locker room – already dressed for the game against the Penguins in four hours and Killian was a bit surprised he wasn’t at pre-game media. He held up his hands when he took another step forward, head darting from side to side as he took in a team that wasn’t anywhere close to being ready for walk-throughs.

“What the hell is this?” Arthur asked to no one in particular.

“Your rookie sensation sucks at filming,” Ruby answered, clicking her fingers towards the small camera crew that had taken up residence in the locker room for the last few hours. Or possibly several sunlit days.

“He doesn’t get paid to film your promotional videos. He gets paid to score goals.” “And he can do that. Once he films my promotional videos.” Killian chanced a glance at Emma, who was already shaking her head, doing her best to look encouraging when Phillip the Rookie opened his mouth to try and apologize – again.

He really wasn’t very good.

It was a Rangerstown promotion – something they did a few times a season that inevitably amused the entire fandom and resulted in gif sets on the internet. ‘Locked in with Locksley’ was the dumbest title for a five-minute question and answer video, but this wasn’t exactly high-brow art either.

It was Robin walking around the locker room with a microphone that wasn’t actually hooked up to anything, demanding answers out of his teammates to the most mundane questions imaginable. They hadn’t done one yet this season and Ruby had demanded it had to happen and Arthur didn’t really have a leg to stand on.

No one really did when it came to arguing with Ruby Lucas.

This round of filming was focused entirely on Thanksgiving. Or maybe just holidays in general? Killian had stopped listening when Emma walked in and did that thing where she shifted her weight on her heels and tapped out a slightly impatient rhythm on her hip, as frustrated by Phillip the Rookie’s inability to talk on camera as everyone else, but determined to be as supportive as ever.

He had, after all, agreed to coach her charity game before she’d even got the question out completely.

Three weeks into the season and she’d organized at least half of the event and Killian found himself constantly awed by her – the way her eyes narrowed just a bit when she focused or how she’d rather sit cross-legged on the floor of her office, plans and papers strewn around her, than be stuck behind her desk because, as she put it, it was easier to think that way.

Three weeks into the season and he still hadn’t actually come out and said that she’d flipped the entire world upside down, but no one had suggested another set-up to him either and they seemed to be getting the hang of under the radar.

Emma had come home with him after the Boston game.

And the Rangers were winning – riding a six-game streak with an almost unheard of margin of scoring that had analysts already suggesting that this really was the year.

He was happy.

Arthur groaned again, but Ruby smiled triumphantly when the cameraman moved back in front of Robin. She’d won and the argument hadn’t even lasted that long.

“You’ve got ten minutes, Lucas,” Arthur said, not even bothering to wait for a response before he practically marched into his office.

“Alright,” Ruby said, clearly aware that she had as much time as she wanted. “Rook, listen to me.” Phillip the Rookie’s head snapped up and his eyes were wide when he met her gaze. Emma sighed. “If you mumble over these words again, I’m going to make sure Jones cross-checks you into the boards during walk-throughs, you understand me?” He nodded quickly and Killian was halfway to the locker before he realized his feet were even moving.

“Just answer the questions honestly, kid,” he said, glaring at Ruby. She shrugged. “And maybe, you know, try to actually look like you’re not being led to the guillotine or something.”

Phillip’s laugh wasn’t really a laugh, more a quick exhale of air that was as shaky as his voice had been on camera, but Killian clapped him on the shoulder and even Robin nodded encouragingly.

It took two more takes before he got it right.

“You’re up, Jones,” Ruby said, nodding towards the camera crew as they shifted slightly to their right until he started blinking from the lights.

“I think you’re confusing sports analogies.” “Clichés, right?” “Puns?” “It’s definitely analogies,” Robin argued, knocking against Killian’s side when he sat down.

“I don’t think that’s right.” Killian saw Ruby move her hand again and they were absolutely filming – the red light just out of his eyeline making it almost painfully obvious. Ruby always did that, especially during these very specific type of PR moments.

It was something to do with chemistry or working well together or that way they always seemed to know where the other one was on the ice, but it might have also been because they spent far too much time together.

Fans liked that or something.

“What are you wearing?” Killian asked, nodding towards Robin’s feet.

The camera panned down and Robin made an indignant noise in the back of his throat, hitting Killian with the microphone again. “It doesn’t matter. Hey! Hey! This is my interview. Camera back up to our faces.” “Are those crocs?” “We’re in a locker room!” “Get this on camera,” Killian said, pointing back down to the floor. “Look at them, they’re even blue.” “Everything on this team is blue. There’s, like, a law about it.” “Why do you own those?” “They’re comfortable,” Robin argued. “Not all of us just wear loafers in a locker room. And you’re making this interview very difficult.” “I’m hardly wearing loafers. I’m not even wearing shoes. I am, literally, wearing skates right now. Or I would be if you let me actually lace my skates.” “Whatever. They’re comfortable. You’re obviously not comfortable enough in your own fashion choices since you’ve got to make fun of mine. I know what’s happening here anyway. You’re just trying to show off for the fans, some sort of freewheeling bachelor lifestyle that prohibits you from comfortable footwear.” Killian sat up a bit straighter, eyes darting towards Emma before he could stop himself and she was tugging on the ends of her hair. Ruby grinned even wider.

“Ask me about Thanksgiving, Locksley,” Killian muttered, nudging his shoulder against Robin. “You’re a God awful host.” “I am the best host. Alright, alright, fine. Tell me your most disgustingly adorable Thanksgiving tradition.” “How do you know it’s disgustingly adorable?” “Because I have seen your family on Thanksgiving and, I can promise, it is disgustingly adorable. Now come on, Cap, spill. Fans are clamoring to know or something.” Killian laughed, decidedly ignoring Emma’s gaze. He could feel her eyes on the side of his head – sitting next to Phillip the Rookie now that his own stint on ‘Locked in with Locksley’ was finished.

He wasn’t an idiot. He knew there was something she still wasn’t telling him – something about everyone leaving and a broken heart and how she’d cut herself off when she started talking about growing up.

He hadn’t asked about it, despite the curiosity almost constantly tugging at the back of his mind, but it felt a bit like bragging when he talked about the Vankalds and he could be an ass sometimes, but even Killian knew he was a lucky one.

“You just have that many adorable family moments?” Robin laughed, tapping the microphone against the front of his chest pad. “Can’t pick one off the top of your head?”

“Liam is only allowed to make stuffing,” he said and he didn’t do a very good job of enunciating the words either. “And it’s absolutely boxed stuffing no matter what he tells everyone. He’s not capable of doing anything more.” “How’d he end up with that job?” “He tried to make actual stuffing when were kids. It caught on fire. Seared his eyebrows off when he was fourteen.” Robin nearly fell back into the locker he was leaning against and Killian could hear Will’s laughter as well, camera shifting suddenly as it tried to capture the moment. “What about you, Cap? What’s your designated Jones family job?” “The drinks,” he said. “But that’s only because El refuses to let either one of us near the oven on most national holidays. She’s still concerned about Liam’s eyebrows.” “That’s my job too,” Phillip the Rookie shouted and the entire team groaned as one collective unit.

Robin stared into the camera, a distinct lack of emotion on his face before he narrowed his eyes slightly and muttered something that sounded a bit like he picks out the juice boxes for the kids table. “Leave the kid alone,” Killian muttered, not entirely certain when he became the sole off-ice protector of Phillip the Rookie.

“Captain pushover.” “I’m just not an asshole to the rookie.” “Jones,” Ruby sighed, head falling forward until her chin brushed over the front of her very red jacket. “Now we’ve got to edit that.” “No swearing in front of the kids, Cap,” Will laughed, pushing Killian to the side of his own bench in front of his own locker. “Rol would be scandalized.” He shook his head, but looked up to find Emma smiling at him, fingers completely still against her side. “Oh,” Ruby shouted, clicking her fingers again. Will nearly fell off the bench. “Locksley ask them about your first Thanksgiving in New York. We’ll tie it in with Phillip’s almost properly enunciated comment and then we can cut out Jones’ complete lapse in on-camera judgement.”

Robin did as instructed – far too aware that he didn’t really have a choice – and they talked about that first season and how they’d all gone downtown. Robin and Will had been on their own in New York – traded and called up, respectively – and, as with most things, the Vankalds had taken them in, brownstone doors metaphorically and literally flung open on that first major holiday in the league.

Liam made stuffing.

And it kept happening for the next two years.

Robin met Regina at the brownstone, their third season in the league, just a few months before Liam got hurt.

Her father knew Mr. Vankald – something about business that Killian had never listened to and Robin had never cared about, far too concerned with impressing the woman sitting at the dinner table with tales of his on-ice exploits. She wasn’t impressed.

At least not at first.

It didn’t matter to Robin. He asked for her number that night and she gave him her card – a move that was so Regina, it somehow still managed to make Killian smile – and she showed up at the arena for the first game in December, seats in the team suite next to a barely one-year-old Roland and the nanny.

They didn’t say any of that on camera.

“Are you done yet, Lucas?” Arthur shouted a few minutes later, leaning out of the door of his office at the other end of the locker room.

“Yeah, we’re done,” she answered, smiling at the three of them for the first time all afternoon. “You think we’re good, Emma?” She nodded, hands still on her side and a smile tugging on the corners of her mouth. “Absolutely.”

Arthur must have sprinted down the hall, chest heaving just a bit when he skidded to a stop next to the still-present camera crew. He paused for half a moment to readjust his tie and then he turned on Ruby, eyes flashing with a frustration that he usually saved for practice and breakaway goal competitions.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, Lucas,” Arthur said slowly, “but get the hell out of my locker room.” Ruby didn’t blink, smile inching across her face slow enough that it almost looked like a threat and Killian was on his feet a moment later, walking back down towards the training room. His eyes landed on Emma and he barely even had to move his head before she muttered something to Ruby about letting them get ready for the Pens and the camera crew started to shuffle back towards the offices and a few hours of pre-game editing.

“You are painfully obvious, you know,” Emma muttered, stopping next to him and bumping her shoulder against his.

“Ah, well, tell that to you smiling at me the entire time we were filming. I think it’s you who’s making things painfully obvious, love.” “Whatever,” she mumbled, fingers moving against the fabric of her dress. He caught her hand in his, thumb swiping across her palm until her fingers stilled and he could feel her looking up at him. “You’ll be careful, right? Tonight?” Killian squeezed her hand once, nodding. “He can’t afford to hit me,” he said, ignoring Emma’s quiet scoff. “He can’t, Swan. They’re already six points behind us. They need a win. If he fucks it up by making this some sort of vendetta to upper-body me, then they’re going to lose and he’ll get sent back down.” She made a noise that sounded as if she wasn’t entirely convinced that Hans Soyer wouldn’t turn this game into some sort of vendetta to upper-body him, but she didn’t pull her hand out of his either. Instead she twisted around, gaze serious and the toes of her shoes hit up against the front of his skates.

“He said stuff,” Emma continued. “In the Pittsburgh papers, A showed me yesterday.” “I don’t care about that.” And he didn’t. He didn’t need bulletin board material when he had a win streak to maintain and a breakaway-goal promise he still hadn’t fulfilled. Soyer could say he was the worst player to ever lace up skates and Killian would still go out there anyway.

He had a game to win.

And he might be the most competitive person in the entire world.

“Henry will be here too,” Emma said. “He’s coming with Reese’s and David.”

“Seats in the suite?” “With Regina and Rol.” “Rol will be thrilled,” he promised, free hand coming up to rest on the back of her neck. “Bring them uptown with you later.” “What?” “You were going to come uptown later weren’t you?” “Well, yeah, but that’s like a team thing.” “And you’re part of the team, Swan. Bring your friends with you. Henry too. He’ll go nuts.” He’d done it mostly to see her reaction and she didn’t disappoint, all bright eyes and wide smile as if she couldn’t quite believe what he’d said.

He meant it.

“That’s probably true,” she admitted.

“See, perfect plan.”

“Yeah only because you came up with it.”

“I’m well aware that wasn’t a compliment, but I’m going to take it as one anyway,” Killian laughed, leaning forward to kiss the top of her hair.

Emma swatted at him, mumbling under her breath and he somehow managed to smile even more. Jeez. He was an over-emotional mess, barely treading water in whatever pool of feelings he’d found himself in.

“You’re really not going to say anything stupid to him tonight, right?” Emma asked, voice falling back into serious quickly.

“Why do you think that I would?” “Because that’s exactly what you did the last time.” The last time she wasn’t sitting in the team suite with a GD kid who seemed to idolize him or Roland Locksley and Emma hadn’t been there and, somehow, that seemed to make all the difference. Killian didn’t say that out loud.

“I promise, Swan,” he said and she shifted a bit when his fingers moved across her neck.

“Don’t think I’m taking my eyes off you for a second,” she whispered, words cutting into him and across him until they seemed to settle in that black hole just under his left rib that he was certain would always remain empty.

Emma’s hand fell on the front of his jersey, fingers gripping the lettering that ran across it just a bit tighter than normal and he could hear when she took a deep breath.

It was a balancing act of sorts – and there was a bigger meaning there that Killian wasn’t entirely interested in thinking about a few minutes before walkthroughs and warmups and the anthem and skating against Soyer on Garden ice – back pressed up against the hallway wall and weight resting on the edge of his skates.

His hand fell on top of hers, pulling her fingers away from the RANGERS emblazoned across his chest and he made sure to hit every one of her fingers with his lips before he looked back up at her. Her eyes were wide.

“I would despair if you did.”

He kept his promise.

It was, however, not particularly easy.

Soyer, it seemed, was determined to get him to drop gloves again – a goal made all the more difficult by the fact that he wasn’t actually a very good skater and, since the season started, had found a home for himself on the Pens fourth line.

He wasn’t on the ice at the same time as Killian much, but he made sure to seize his opportunities whenever he could, knocking into him during line changes and shouting things from the bench and connecting on a pretty powerful slash during a penalty kill that sent him to the box and gave the Rangers a 5-on-3.

Phillip the Rookie scored easily.

And the Pens coach might have actually had an aneurysm on the bench.

Killian didn’t say anything, didn’t hit him back or even lift his head when he heard something that sounded like it’s your fault again – he needed to come up with new insults. And they were winning.

At least for now.

Six minutes left in the third, up by one and Killian groaned when he heard the whistle blow, head rolling back as he saw the referee move to center ice and announce Phillip the Rookie had drawn an interference.

He tried not to actually glare at the kid as he skated towards the box, shoulders hung just a bit lower than usual, and moved back towards the zone, knees bent just outside the faceoff circle. The crowd started chanting and he could feel his blood pulsing in his ears – and it far too early in the season for this.

It wasn’t even more than a few games into the schedule, but they were on this streak and Emma was sitting in the suite just above section 111 and he’d shown off before. He wanted to show off a bit now.

Robin won the faceoff, puck cleared out of the zone with ease and the crowd cheered again as Killian retreated into his PK spot, stick moving quickly in front of him when one of the Penguins skated back up the ice. He dumped it off to Soyer and, of course, of course he was their point man, because he might have been the worst skater on the ice, but he had a hell of a shot and he could probably hit Jefferson’s facemask off if he really wanted to.

They couldn’t clear it.

And his legs actually felt like they were on fire, each movement sending a shockwave of pain up his thighs and the Penguins just kept passing it.

Forty-five seconds into the power play and they hadn’t taken a single goddamn shot. The cheers had turned to jeers quickly, blue-shirted fans wholly unimpressed with the lack of effort and Killian probably would have joined them if he could find any energy.

Will finally got his stick down in between a passing lane, arms barely moving enough to send the puck down to the other end of the rink and they had just enough time to make a change and get the second unit out.

Killian heard him with perfect clarity when he climbed over the boards – Soyer’s voice sounding as if he was just sitting next to him on the bench. “Looking a little slow to the puck out there, Jones,” he shouted. “Not a good look in an FA season.” “And what would you know about FA seasons?” Killian called back. “You’ve never been on a team long enough to get more than year-long deal.”

“Fuck you, Jones.” “Eloquent as always, Soyer.”

Arthur yelled something and they’d managed to clear the puck again, Killian’s legs moving before his mind caught up, swinging over the boards and back on the ice as the Penguins dumped the puck in the zone.

And he’d found some extra energy somewhere in between the shouting and the argument that wasn’t anything more than Soyer trying to get under his skin. He moved to the edge of the blue line, Will pressed against the boards in the corner as he tried to work the puck free and Killian nearly snapped his stick in half when he hit it against the ice.

Will heard him – or maybe heard Robin yell up and short – backhanding out of the zone and Killian was already moving by the time the puck hit the blade, Soyer nothing more than a shadow behind him.

He’d always been fast – quicker on skates than even Liam – but the problem with being fast on skates was making sure you didn’t fall over and when he first started playing, Killian had a tendency to fall over.

His legs, as Liam would say, worked faster than the rest of his brain. He was always half a step ahead of himself, thinking about the goal before he’d even taken the shot. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it absolutely didn’t.

And he’d gotten better at it – older and more experienced and he could skate as well as ever now, that deep-rooted desire to prove himself taking control of his life as soon as he’d lost everything else – but there was always that other voice in the back of his mind, the one that remembered cut up knees and lost edges and skating faster than everyone else was just as terrifying as it was exciting.

Killian could hear the crowd, the cheers and the noise and something that sounded like Robin yelling shoot, but he didn’t have the angle and there was a Pens player closing in on his left, a blur just on the edge of his vision.

It all played out in front of him before it actually happened, the move so obvious he nearly groaned that he hadn’t taken it already, and there was half an inch of space on the right side of the net. His legs hurt and his feet hurt and hadn’t skated that fast all season, but he moved anyway, backhand to forehand and he took the shot.

He’d stumbled a bit when he pulled the stick back, momentum pulling him forward until his knee was almost dragging across the ice, but he saw the puck hit the back of the net and the light went off and the crowd was louder than they’d been all night.

Killian spun out, back colliding with the glass and he was dimly aware of fans hitting up against the boards behind him when he started shouting, Robin and Will racing towards him until they both ran into his side.

“Shit, Cap,” Will muttered, voice barely audible over the goal song and the always impressively coordinated cheers that followed. “What a move.” “You are a child,” Robin laughed as they moved back towards the bench and the cheers didn’t stop even after the song ended. Soyer was already off the ice, no stick in his hand and a two-goal lead with just a few minutes on the clock was enough to keep the win streak alive.

“Fast enough for you?” Killian asked, nodding up towards the enormous screen over center ice and the replay of the goal.

Soyer didn’t say anything.

And, somehow, that was better than fighting.

They named him first star again and there were people actually standing when he skated back, hand in the air and Killian didn’t even grumble when they gave him the hat and forced him to pose for social media photos in front of his locker.

“You coming up later?” Robin asked, tossing his jersey into the laundry bin behind him.

Killian nodded, scrolling through his regularly-scheduled, post-game messages and he laughed softly when he found Liam’s visual exclamation of LOOK AT THAT SPEED. He’d sent it during the game.

“Yeah, I’ll be there.”

“Is there a GD kid coming?” “Eh, I don’t know that he’s really much of a GD kid anymore,” Killian said, typing out a quick response to Liam. That’s just years of practice from skating circles around you.

“Have you and Emma adopted a GD kid?” Robin asked and the smile on his face was proof positive he was joking, but something in Killian’s stomach flipped at the question. It was Henry’s third game of the season already – they’d gotten him tickets to the Bruins game for his birthday – and he wasn’t really lying, he wasn’t some charity case.

That sounded worse than Killian wanted it to.

But Henry’s story hit a bit too close to home for any actual comfort and somewhere in the last few weeks, Killian and Emma had seemed to come to some unspoken agreement that they were going to do whatever they could to make this kid happy.

He’d nearly fallen over when they told him about the charity game.

“Rol was excited to have another kid up there,” Robin said, voice taking on a very particular tone and Killian felt that same overwhelming sense of being protected or something equally absurd. “So he’s coming, then?” Killian nodded again, glancing down when his phone vibrated in his hand again. “Yeah, we’re not going to just kick him out,” he muttered, drawing a laugh out of Robin as he hitched his bag up his shoulder. “And Swan’s friends are coming too. They were in the suite with Gina and Rol.”

Killian swiped his thumb across his phone screen, barely even glancing at the name. He probably should have.

The first Pittsburgh Penguins jersey ever retired was number 21 and team has had an impressive 11 players inducted into the Hall of Fame. They were probably all embarrassed by how badly you beat the PK.

He nearly choked on the air in his lungs, shoulders heaving forward when he tried to keep his face even. Robin did his best not to notice. “You want to split a cab?” “No,” Killian said quickly, far too quickly not to draw suspicion. “Um...I just...my hand and Red wanted to make sure it was fine after the game.” It was a lie.

It wasn’t even a very good lie.

And Robin knew it. He didn’t say anything, just glanced down at the phone in Killian’s hand and stuck his lower lip out thoughtfully.

“Alright,” he said. “I’ll see you up there.”

Killian nodded again – his neck was going to cramp up at some point, he was sure of it – and waited until he couldn’t hear the squeak of Robin’s sneakers before he moved, grabbing his own bag out of his locker and making his way out of the room.

He moved on half a chance and the hope that, maybe, she didn’t care about under the radar as much as he didn’t anymore and he almost sighed when he was three quarters down the hallway and didn’t see her.

He stuffed his phone back in his pocket and tugged the strap of his bag up, muttering under his breath when he realized he’d have to find a cab on his own.

“Sharp shooting, sailor.” Killian spun on the spot, bag sliding back down his arm until it landed on the floor and, for what must have been the sixth time that night, his legs were moving before they’d even caught up with his mind, the only thought Emma as soon as he saw the smile on her face.

“I think you’ve got that analogy confused, love,” he muttered, pushing her back against the wall until her hips pressed against his and heard her sigh softly. “I hardly think sailors are doing a lot of shooting. And I don’t think I’d make much of a sailor.” “Pirate, then?” “Probably something like that,” he said, ducking his head until she made that noise again when his teeth skimmed across her neck. “What are you doing here?” “Not happy to see me?” Emma asked and he appreciated the way her voice caught just a bit more than he probably should for a relationship that was, still, decidedly under the radar. Except for the two people they’d told.

And probably Robin. Robin totally knew.

That meant David probably knew too. Mary Margaret wouldn’t be able to lie to David.

“That’s not even close to what I was asking,” Killian said. “I just figured you would have gone uptown already.” “I told them I needed to do some post-game stuff, get that Rangerstown video out.” “Did you?” “Nah, I told Mer to do it before the third period even started.” “That’s deceptive, Swan.” “What are you doing here? Robin left on his own.” “I told him Ariel wanted to double check on my hand.” “Look who’s being deceptive now. At least my lie checks out.” “I was kind of thinking on my feet.”

“Ah, well, then I guess you can have a pass,” Emma laughed, one of her fingers twisting through the loop of his pants. He was the one who groaned that time, eyes squeezing shut when she moved up on tiptoes, lips just half an inch away from her ear. “And, after all, you did follow through on my breakaway promise.”

“Short-handed.” “That ego,” she said, kissing against his neck as he dug his teeth into his lip. “It was a nice move though. Henry and Rol nearly lost their collective minds.” “I wasn’t really doing it for them.” “No? Who for then?”

“You, Swan,” Killian answered and he wasn’t even surprised at how easy it was to say the words.

She didn’t sink back on her feet, just pulled her hand forward and he braced himself above her, palms flat on the wall on either side of her head. One of them must have moved first, but they’d both come up with lies on the off chance that the other one was, somehow, still in the Garden, so it seemed almost possible that they moved at the same time as well, lips crashing against each other and hips moving of their own volition.

He pulled one hand down, palm wrapping around Emma’s waist as he pushed underneath the jacket she had on and maybe they didn’t have to go uptown.

They were expert liars anyway.

Robin totally knew.

“You want to split a cab?” Emma asked, mumbling the words against his mouth. He didn’t even try to mask his laugh, pulling back to find her smiling at him again and doing anything except kissing her seemed like some sort of absurd idea.

He kissed her first.

“Doesn’t that kind of fly in the face of our under the radar, Swan?”

“We’re fantastic at lying.” “You’re a horrible liar.” “You want to make out in the back of the cab or not?” “Let’s go,” Killian said, slinging his arm over her shoulder and walking them towards the team exit.

“So you two just ran into each other?” Regina asked for the fourth time, clicking her tongue as Roland crashed into Killian’s leg.

“Yup,” he answered easily. He bent over to grab Roland by the waist, twisting him around until he was horizontal over his shoulders. “Weird, huh?” “The weirdest.” Killian couldn’t really shrug with a six-year-old draped over his back, but the sentiment was obvious and Regina lifted one eyebrow. He glanced to the far corner of the restaurant where Emma was sitting at the end of the bar, Henry next to her as she talked to David and Mary Margaret. Ruby moved in her direction, Ariel close on her heels as they both started shouting about the game t-shirts, trying to pull Mulan into the conversation to talk about the possibility of making Killian and Phillip the Rookie pose for brand new shots so they could tout the shirts as limited edition.

“You went really fast today, Hook,” Roland mumbled, laughing when Killian shook his shoulders.

“It was a good move,” Regina conceded.

Killian gasped dramatically, working another laugh out of Roland, and Regina rolled her eyes, taking a particularly long sip of the drink in her hand. “Was that actually a compliment, Gina? I’m stunned.” “You’re an ass, that’s what you are.” “Gina,” he cried, not quite able to keep the laughter out of his voice. “The children!” She rolled her eyes again and made a face that didn’t particularly match up with the position on her business card and the very sensible pant suit she had on. “I’m just saying, it’s a good kind of game for this season. If you want to stick to your plan and you’re still determined to go, then this kind of showing is good for that.” Killian tensed at her words and she obviously didn’t realize what she’d said, face as impassive as ever when it came to discussing the dumbest decision in the history of dumb decisions. They hadn’t talked about it in weeks, not since the preseason and, well, a lot of things had happened since the preseason.

He hadn’t really considered Colorado since the opener...since Emma came home with him and for the first time in as long as he could remember it actually felt like home.

“Where are you going, Hook?” Roland asked.

“Nowhere mate,” Killian said quickly and Regina did react to that, eyebrows moving up her forehead so quickly he was certain there should have been a trail of smoke behind them. “I’m not going anywhere.” “What?” Regina snapped. “What the hell are you talking about?” “Gina.” She widened her eyes and dragged her hand through the air, but didn’t ask anymore questions, just downed the rest of her drink. “Come on, Rol,” she said, tugging on the back of his jersey. “Let’s go see if we can find your dad.” Roland’s head snapped up at that, twisting around until he nearly kicked Killian in the head. “Henry said we could get onion rings before.” Regina hummed and it wasn’t exactly an agreement, but it wasn’t a disagreement either and Killian saw his in. “If the kid was promised onion rings, it seems just wrong to deprive him of that, Gina.”

She laughed softly, shaking her head. “Yeah, yeah, that’s totally why you want to go get onion rings.” “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” “You need to get better at lying.” “What are you lying about, Hook?” Roland asked, tapping on the back of his shirt.

“Nothing, mate,” he promised. His stomach clenched uncomfortably at the lie and if Regina didn’t actually blink soon he was going to scream. “So you liked Henry, huh?” “Thick as thieves,” Regina muttered, pushing through the crowd towards the far end of the bar. People seemed to just spring backwards whenever she looked in their general direction. “They’re very excited for the charity game.” “Henry said we could go out on the ice,” Roland said quickly, shaking against Killian’s back. “And you’re going to coach and you should pick dad for your team.”

Will groaned, dragging a stool with him despite Ariel’s rather pointed glare, slumping down in the middle of the group with a plate held tightly in his hand. “Come on, Rol,” he said. “You can’t abandon me now too. First they told me I can’t coach and now Cap’s not even going to pick me for his team?” “No one said that,” Killian muttered, rolling his shoulders as Robin pulled his kid back down towards the ground. He glanced towards Emma, back pressed up against the wall of the restaurant with a smile on her face. “Isn’t that right, Swan? You’re picking teams anyway, aren’t you?” “Oh, no, no,” she laughed. “Don’t put this on me. You guys are the hockey players you decide.” “Maybe we’ll let Bobby Flay decide.” “Is Bobby Flay official?” Mary Margaret asked and it would have been impossible to miss the pride in her voice.

Emma nodded, the ends of her mouth twisting up as Mary Margaret and Ruby screamed at the same time and the exact same pitch. “Jeez,” Will muttered, but Robin smacked the side of his shoulder and he didn’t say anything else.

“Em,” Ruby cried, practically jumping up and down on her absurdly high heels. “That’s incredible. When did you find out?” “This afternoon. His people called my people or whatever. His assistant’s assistant called Mer a few hours before we shot Rangerstown.” “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“We had a video to shoot,” Emma shrugged, drawing an immediate groan out of the half a dozen people around her. “And he’s still got to sign the contract and we’ve got to get the insurance to get him out on the ice or something. Don’t actually cross-check Bobby Flay when he plays, ok Scarlet?” Will made a soft noise of indignation, but he nodded anyway and Emma smiled even wider. “If we’re nice to him,” she continued, “maybe he’ll even agree to cater Reese’s and David’s wedding.”

“See, now, that makes sense,” David agreed.

“Hey,” Ariel shouted, leaning back against the curve of the bar when Eric handed her a fresh plate of onion rings. She passed them to Roland without a word – he grabbed one in each hand. “I thought we decided we were going to do it.” “Well, to be fair, you’re not going to do it. Your husband is.” “And I’m not married to Bobby Flay.” “He’s going to play in Emma’s charity game though.” “David you are literally surrounded by the Rangers first line,” Emma laughed as Mary Margaret shook her head fondly. “I don’t think you need Bobby Flay to get an in.” “How’s the view from the suite anyway?” Killian asked. David’s head snapped towards him as if he was surprised by the question and his eyes darted towards Emma before he responded.

“Awesome, actually,” he said. “I mean we’re kind of behind the net, but you can see the whole ice. It was a perfect view for your goal.” “Don’t tell him things like that,” Regina muttered. She pulled one of the five onion rings Roland had in his hands away from him, smiling at him when he grumbled. “It’s just going to do dangerous things to his ego.” “It was a really good goal.” “Thanks,” Killian said softly, a glass pushed into his hands. He took it without question – another rule broken. They’d all have to lie to Arthur.

“We should probably toast or something, huh?” David asked, glancing around at the group as Ariel continued to pass out alcohol. “Well, we did completely screw over Soyer,” Robin said, grabbing his own shot glass and ignoring Killian when he pointed towards Roland. The six-year-old was far too preoccupied with onion rings and Henry to notice. “Did he say anything this time?” “Grizzled veteran,” Robin chuckled. “What exactly are we toasting then? Just the win?”

“The goal obviously,” David said, seemingly forgetting any sense of fandom as he took over control of the after-game event. “It was a ridiculous move. Who normally toasts for you guys?” “Your move.” David blinked once and Killian could feel the heat creep up the back of his neck, the room feeling a bit too crowded and a bit too overwhelming and his eyes drifted back towards Emma as her surrogate brother toasted the breakaway goal he’d absolutely scored for her. She scrunched her nose slightly when they clinked glasses.

He downed his drink in one gulp and he was half convinced the tiny fire he felt in the pit of his stomach had absolutely nothing to do with the alcohol.

They stayed in that corner for hours – planning for the charity game and making promises to both Roland and Henry and even setting up an entire menu for David and Mary Margaret’s post-Cup run wedding.

He didn’t move, far too aware of where his hand would land if he was actually standing next to Emma, but he could feel her gaze on the side of his head throughout the night and Killian would have been lying, again, if he said his eyes didn’t dart her direction every few seconds.

She kept smiling. And laughing. And she was talking to Ariel and even Regina and Will kept making jokes about how he was going to take down Phillip the Rookie during the charity game, even if it was a charity game.

Henry left before Roland fell asleep, muttering when the woman from the house downtown pushed her way into the restaurant and he only smiled when Killian promised updates from the road swing they had ahead of them.

And when Roland finally did fall asleep, curled up against Killian’s side when he’d crawled onto his legs, the crowd in the restaurant started to disperse, yawning and cracking bones and they had a flight to DC the next afternoon.

“Come on mate,” Killian said, lifting his leg off the bottom rung of the stool when Robin approached him. “You’ve got to go home.” He saw Emma out of the corner of his eye, smile soft and eyes just a bit more tired than usual as Robin hauled his son off Killian’s legs. “See you tomorrow,” Robin muttered, shifting Roland so his head was in the crook of his neck and Killian nodded, not quite able to quell that rush of jealous he felt in his toes.

“Bye Hook,” Roland mumbled.

“Bye mate.”

She waited until Robin was out the door, one arm wrapped around Roland and the other wrapped around Regina and it all felt a bit deja vu. Killian tried not to sigh, but he knew it didn’t work as soon as Emma tilted her head, eyebrows raised slightly.

Under the radar.

They had to stay under the radar.

He was a selfish, sentimental ass.

“You ok?” she asked.

“Of course.”

“You’re absurdly good with Roland,” she said, taking a step into his space until her thighs hit his knees and she rested her hands on his shoulders. “Henry too, but Rol is just like...obsessed with you.” And for as bad as Emma was whenever someone complimented her, Killian might have been even worse – rolling his eyes to try and mask the flush he was certain had creeped up his cheeks. “That’s just experience, Swan. And the twins are young too, so I’ve got a fairly jam-packed resume.” “How old are they?” “Four.” “That sounds exhausting.” “El and Liam are ridiculously good at it. Those kids want for nothing, I swear.” “Probably because their uncle’s so impressive on the ice.”

He quirked one eyebrow and her grip on his shoulders tightened. “Another compliment, love? That’s some kind of record.” “Were you keeping track?” “Maybe.” Emma laughed softly and her fingers found their way into the bottom of his hair, tugging just a bit until he had to lean forward. He didn’t argue, particularly when she kissed him quickly, hardly enough, but they were still in the restaurant and Mary Margaret was waiting expectantly for Emma at the door.

“She was distracting David,” Emma explained, grinning in Mary Margaret’s direction. “He’s out there talking to Will.” “You’re some kind of actual saint, Mary Margaret,” Killian said, just loud enough that he was certain she could hear it.

“It’s only because your goal was so impressive,” she answered. Emma laughed, forehead falling forward against his shoulder and his arm found its way around her waist.

And it might have felt the most normal it ever had, easy and comfortable and he should probably say something meaningful at some point before he did something stupid like screamed he loved her right in her face.

“I’ve got to go,” Emma mumbled against his shirt.

“I should probably sleep before our flight tomorrow.” “Let me know when you land?” “Of course, Swan.” She pulled up – eyes still tired, but she was smiling at him and she hadn’t actually pulled away from his arm. “It was a really good goal.”

Killian knew they were still whatever, under the radar and Mary Margaret was playing some sort of scout at the restaurant door and he’d probably have to lie about who he was texting the next day and Emma still had walls and there was that whole pesky Gold connection in Los Angeles, but he absolutely loved her and he couldn’t just not say anything.

“It was for you, Swan,” he said softly. “For whatever that’s worth.” “A lot,” Emma answered. “It’s worth a lot.” She kissed him once before she left, rushing across the restaurant and Mary Margaret smiled in his direction before the door closed behind them.

He was happy.

#cs ff #captain swan ff #ouat ff #cs #csbb #blue line #emotional breakaways are the only kind of breakaways i am here for

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qanvast · 5 years

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How Interior Design Firms Make Money from Your Renovation

Your questions on pricing models, profit margins, design fees, and more, answered by Singapore interior designers.

No matter what purchase you’re making, it’s only natural for any savvy customer to ask, “How much?”

In this article, we speak to three different interior design firms in Singapore to get a clearer picture about pricing models, quotations, and more. Here’s what they had to share:

James from Charlotte’s Carpentry

Interior Firm: Charlotte's Carpentry

Could you tell us more about the design fees in Singapore? What’s the typical rate like?

I believe most designers in Singapore charge a 10% design fee. In our case, we don’t charge one because we provide it (design work) as a service.

There are also companies that outsource the entire project to a contracting firm. That’s a third party. In such cases, the interior designer is just handling the design/planning and material selection, while the actual construction work and project management are handled by the contractors.

This way, the interior design firms won’t have to do any quotations, costing or site work. Instead, they’ll probably be handling drafting and other design-related work. For Charlotte's Carpentry, the interior designer will be the one who’ll be handling all the technical aspects of the renovation.

How do you earn from a renovation project?

Our earnings only come from the renovation work that we do, such as carpentry and electrical works. Other services, such as coming up with floor plans and furniture shopping, are free as part of our service.

Interior Firm: Charlotte's Carpentry

Do interior designers earn on materials, such as tiles and laminates?

For most material suppliers in the market, they offer their products at a better rate to interior designers, and what we earn is the difference. For instance, if the recommended retail price of a piece of tile is $5, we get it at a lower cost than if you were to buy it directly.

Other than that, we usually charge for the renovation services that we provide, from tiling to carpentry, which is justified given that this is actual work that has been done. We rely on a combination of these two things to make a living.

I understand most companies in Singapore are using this model as well and don’t bill their customers in other areas, but I can’t say for certain that there aren’t exceptions or that this won’t change in the future.

Lesley from Imago Dei 3

Interior Firm: Imago Dei 3

What’s your company’s approach to money matters? Is it different from the rest?

I think the way we quote is different from what most firms do in Singapore. First, we come up with an initial budget that’s reasonable to build the house that our client wants. After that, we’ll charge an in-house fee over that agreed sum, which can be divided into two components: a) a design/consultation fee and b) a project management fee.

By presenting a fee in an upfront manner is the best way that we can be transparent to our clients.

Typically, what we do in the first appointment is to discuss the project details or what’s going to be built with our clients. We’ll present the labour and materials breakdown based on these requirements in the second meeting, before letting them know how much our fees will be.

So far, the response to this approach has been good, my clients are comfortable because they are able to better gauge if we are the right people for the job, plus they are aware of how much we’re making.

Interior Firm: Imago Dei 3

What’s the usual fee (or percentage) that local interior designers charge for their services?

Honestly, these numbers are probably different between companies and can change due to factors, such as the scale of the project; but I believe that the general range for project management fees is somewhere between 20% to 35%.

For our firm, depending on the job scope, our design fee is from 5% to 12%, and we promise to answer all the questions that you have, from material selection to choosing the right appliances for your home.

Interior Firm: Imago Dei 3

Do you have any advice for homeowners on finding the right price for their renovation?

I do empathise with homeowners who say they want more price transparency. What I can recommend them to do is to meet more designers; by doing so, they’ll be able to observe the price differential across the industry – which can get pretty big, even at the level of small and medium firms.

Also, the perception that interior designers are unaffordable isn’t entirely true – we’ve managed to clinch quite a few deals from customers who previously approached contractors and were quoted 30% more than we proposed.

Jermyn from Renolux Interior

Interior Firm: Renolux Interior

What’s the quotation process usually like?

Designers will come up with a cost estimate based on the floor plan and renovation requirements. In Renolux’s case, we’ll also conduct a site recce before providing a more finalised quote, and that’s because a floor plan can only show so much as compared to the actual house.

After that, if there are any changes to the renovation plans, they will be billed under what we call a variation order, which takes into account any addition, omission or alterations to the original project scope.

For Renolux, we don't collect the deposit right after the contract has been signed. We'll only do so after HDB has given permission for renovation works to start, which is more reassuring for our clients.

Interior Firm: Renolux Interior

Some homeowners are uncomfortable with working with interior designers because they perceive their service as pricier. What do you have to say about that?

If you were to hire an interior designer, it may not be more expensive than working with a direct supplier or contractors because you’ll be getting professional services in return, namely project management and technical expertise.

Furthermore, renovating on your own may take more time because it takes technical expertise to understand and coordinate the entire process. For example, which comes first, the carpentry or flooring? The false ceiling or electrical works? It can be difficult to tell without the right experience.

In addition to that, you can think of interior designers as mediators. With us, you only need a single point of contact, instead of needing to coordinate with multiple contractors. This way, everyone’s time is saved, and you get a smooth renovation experience.

Interior Firm: Renolux Interior

What are your thoughts on renovation packages, are they worth it?

We don’t do packages at Renolux. While they do give you an idea of how things are being charged, what you get may not be a good fit for your home.

We prefer to work based on a clear measurement or design as shown in a 3D model, which we’ll provide even before giving a quote. Let’s say we’re building a wardrobe and the details or dimensions change along the way, we’ll draw up a new 3D model to give you a clear idea of what you’re paying for.

Is there a reason why some interior firms charge a design fee for their creative work, while others don't?

I personally don’t believe in charging a design fee for 3D drawings or renders because of the difficulty of quantifying the value of such work. Instead, I see them as a way to facilitate the renovation process and even clarify any budget/work issues – which brings value for homeowners, contractors and myself.

For homeowners, they’ll know what they are paying for because these drawings give context to prices and quotes for different items. For myself, they make it easier to iron out any potential misunderstandings between Renolux and my clients. And finally, for the contractors, they’ll get a clearer picture to base their work on.

To sum up...

Interior Firm: Renolux Interior

Through these interviews, we realised that renovation firms in Singapore have different ways of quoting their prices and charging homeowners.

To find an interior design firm that offers a payment schedule and/or quotation that you're comfortable with, we recommend meeting more firms – and that's where we can help.

Submit a request for interior designer recommendations, and we'll help you find one that suits your budget, style, needs, and more!

Create a space you love

Embarking on a renovation journey? Request for a quote here, and we can match you up with 5 interior firms - based on your budget and style - to get quotes.

About Qanvast: Create a space you love today with Singapore’s first mobile platform. Qanvast (pronounced as ‘canvas’) connects homeowners to trusted home professionals. Browse for reviews, renovation prices and portfolios from interior designer firms in Singapore at your fingertips!

Source:

qanvast.com

#qanvast #interiordesign #interior designer #budgeting #home renovation #home design #singapore

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alli-howard · 7 years

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“How Did We Get Here?” What Charlottesville Can Learn from Berlin

Several years ago, I had the opportunity to go to Berlin. I visited many historical sites, including the Brandenburg Gate, the Berlin Wall, and the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, but the site that was the most memorable for me was an experiential memorial called The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

The memorial is a nearly 5-acre space full of rectangular pillars. From the outside looking in, the pillars appear to be more or less the same height. What you can’t see from the outside is that as you start to walk between the pillars, the ground will gradually descend as the pillars rise higher. We walked through the memorial in silence and I suddenly noticed that we were entirely surrounded. I was overwhelmed by a feeling of claustrophobia as the space around me seemed to narrow. I felt trapped, and I kept thinking: “How did we get here?” Pillars that were initially only a few feet high now towered overhead, blocking out the sun. “How did we get here?” Just minutes ago I had felt calm and in control. Now I felt helpless. “How did we get here?”

The truth is that I got there the same way anyone gets anywhere – by repeatedly taking one small step at a time.

Most rational people acknowledge that Germany committed egregious atrocities and human rights violations during World War II. What I love about Germany is how fully they have owned up to and renounced their actions. After World War II, Germans didn’t bury their past or pretend that it didn’t happen. Instead, they built memorials to remember even the worst parts of their history to prevent history from repeating itself.

Psychologists confirm that on an individual level, this is the only way to move forward. When a person causes or endures a traumatic incident, simply pretending that it didn’t happen is ineffective. Ironically, the best way forward is to go back – to process what happened, repent, and find healing. Only then are we able to move forward. I think this is as true on a collective level as it is on an individual level. I think this is something that Germany has done well and America has not done at all.

My favorite rapper, J. Cole, put it this way: “American hypocrisy, oh, let me count the ways. They came here seeking freedom then they end up owning slaves…” From the time our Founding Fathers called this country America racism has played a significant role in our culture. The root of our current national unrest started with the slave trade, where African families were torn apart, and people were beaten, raped, murdered, and dragged to America as property. When slave-owning Founding Fathers said that they “hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” they clearly felt that there were exceptions. Black Americans have had to fight for freedom, the right to vote, the right to adequate educational opportunities, the right to be tried by a jury of their peers, and I could go on (keep in mind, this is just one group of people that are routinely marginalized). Each step has been met with resistance and I just can’t, for the life of me, understand why. Why does equality for all seem so threatening to some?

If you’ve followed my blog for any length of time you know that I often write about racial tensions in America. I had assumed that in 2017 most of the racially motivated issues that have occurred were the result of unintentional actions that result from unconscious biases. This weekend’s incident makes me think that I may be wrong. It appears that a (larger than I’d hoped) segment of the population actually believes in white supremacy and is willing to resort to violence in order to maintain their status in society. Though our president may hesitate to say it, I won’t: white supremacy is a dangerous and pervasive evil.

My Christian faith is the primary reason that I have come to the conclusion that white supremacy is a problem, for two specific reasons. First of all, I believe we are all made in the image of God. Unlike our Founding Fathers, I think this is true without exceptions. Secondly, Jesus was always fighting for the marginalized and the oppressed. He consistently offended his culture by interacting with people that he “shouldn’t have” according to the racial and social hierarchy at the time.

What I love about my faith is that it acknowledges that we are all broken people who have been warped by sin. My faith gives me the freedom to get closer to my own heart, and it allows me to be honest with what I find there. Even the worst, most heinous parts of ourselves can be redeemed if we confront them honestly, repent, and seek to leave our patterns of sin.

I hope that on a national level we will take the time to face our ugly past rather than continuing to bury it. I hope that recognizing the atrocities that were committed will move us not simply to a place of guilt, but to a desire to play a role in restoration. James Baldwin famously stated, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” The swastikas that have become increasingly prevalent across our country lately* reminded me of a famous quote from Edmund Burke in the World War II era: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

When Hillary Clinton was running for president she said that Trump supporters were irredeemable. She was wrong – and her comment made me realize that she has a thing or two to learn about redemption. Everything and every person is redeemable**. I love this country, and I am so proud to be an American. I can only imagine how proud I will be if I get to play a role in giving my future children and grandchildren the kind of country that Martin Luther King Jr. described, where all people are created and treated equally, and judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

“Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.” –George Santayana

*I think it’s worth pointing out that swastikas are now illegal in Germany. **And obviously, not all Trump supporters are white supremacists or white nationalists.

#Charlottesville #Berlin #Christianity #hope

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cplankblog-blog · 5 years

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You don’t know what you don’t know until you know it

Guess what I spent the last week doing?

I built my own website and figured out how to host it!

Which, it turns out, is way easier said than done. I decided to go this route for a few reasons:

I thought it would be great experience to build something from scratch.

As my work and abilities grow, I wanted to have a platform that could support that growth.

I wanted a testing ground where I could easily implement new things I’m learning.

What you see here is the first iteration - which I’m lovingly calling Fi. Fi was made with basic HTML/CSS and honestly was the best and easiest part of getting the site up and running. I started by making an outline of what I wanted each page to look like and made a roadmap of how I wanted the pages to connect to each other. Since I’m just starting out and don’t have much content yet, I figured keeping it simple was best knowing that there would be future iterations.

All said and done, creating Fi took about two full days. There was A LOT I didn’t know, particularly on the CSS side. My biggest takeaway from everything I’ve read since starting to learn programming is the more you do - the more you create, the more you experiment, the more you practice - the greater your success. I saw this in action while making Fi. I feel much more comfortable with multiple class/id selectors, have a better understanding of margins v border v padding, and I even made a flexbox!

So, you might be wondering where the rest of the week went? Well, I’ll be honest that I took a little vacation, but I’ll also say that actually hosting Fi ended up being the biggest tangle in the bunch.

Several members of my family already use Inmotion Hosting for their small businesses, so I decided to jump on board. That part has been great! They have a wealth of tutorials and a great support team. The problems I experienced were most certainly user error, and largely because I didn’t take enough time to really ask “What does it mean to be a website?”

In order to host my website, I needed a domain name. Okay, got it. In order to have a domain name, I needed to ensure the name was available and pay for it. Whoops. That step ate up half a day while I figured out why my domain name wasn’t working. Once I got my domain working, then came getting all of my files uploaded and working. This is where things got weird.

First, turns out I named all my files wrong. Well, not wrong, but I wasn’t as careful as I should have been when naming the same files and folders on my hosting site, so nothing matched. None of my internal directing links worked so none of my pages were talking to each other. Part of this was an issue where my internal server reads words that start with lower case fine and Inmotion Hosting doesn’t (lesson learned!), and also that I thought there was an issue with having a space between characters (turns out this totally wasn’t an issue, but then I made it an issue by overthinking it).

So then began the process of renaming, which means making sure all of my links are properly changed on each page (luckily, Visual Studio makes this really easy), and then re-setting up the folders on both my computer and my hosting site. Figuring this all out easily took a day, and then another evening of trying to get everything to work. I never was able to make my landing page work, so I used a redirect instead which seems to be doing fine.

Honestly, I’m still not entirely sure why things didn’t work, and not sure how I got them to work. But they work! So I’m calling this a victory with some lessons learned and more to be learned.

Next week, I want to focus on polishing up Fi and making her more mobile friendly (thanks for your patience if you’re reading this on your phone!). My BIG project for next week is making my blog using React which I’m SUPER EXCITED FOR. Of course while still working through my Javascript courses on Codecademy. And, if there’s time, revisiting my kitty-bitty-Thunderdome game I started before I really even knew how to code.

I just got an email that orientation for my bootcamp is in two weeks, which is wild to think about! I’m still feeling positive, but I don’t want to sugar coat - there’s definitely been challenges. It’s hard to feel like you’re going to be successful when you feel like you’re overlooking simple things (like needing to pay for a domain name) but the bottom line is you don’t know what you don’t know until you know it, so I’m just trying to learn as much as I can.

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sproutybjd-blog · 7 years

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Silicone Molds

Firstly, let me start by saying that I have an apology post in the works for Cubeco, the maker of the silicone molds I purchased last month. In a previous post, I responded to an anonymous confession about the price of my silicone molds. I had originally gotten them off of Taobao for around $10 USD for the cost of the base mold. After importing, they cost me around $55 in taxes, fees, packaging, etc. each. I had to price them around $75 to make up for that, and people weren’t happy with that price. The anonymous confession said that there were better, cheaper molds on Taobao for less than five dollars, and a reblog had a link to Cubeco molds. So I decided to purchase some Cubeco molds in order to lower the price of the molds for sale in my store, since it was a common complaint that they were too expensive. The cost of molds: Imagine I buy $100 in molds. The shipping cost will be $45, the cost to my Agent will be $35, since I am a business. I also have to file to have them imported, since they have to go through customs and must be declared. Then I have to pay the taxes, which I could never figure out if they were for the price I paid or the price I was selling for, so I always just did the price I was selling for. $35 in import duties and taxes, since I am a business. The cost of packaging $20 for that many molds, and a 15% failure rate (resin sticking to the molds during testing before they are sent out to people) and the price is significantly higher. In order to make a profit, business sources suggest that you buy an item for 1/4th to 1/2 the cost you plan to sell it for, everything included as far as packaging and fees. The cost to import a single mold that might have cost only $5 on Taobao could end up costing me around $30 to import it legally into the United States and after all Shopify/Etsy listing fees and State and Federal taxes, packaging, failure and return rates, etc. So in order to make any profit at all, I have to sell the mold for almost double that... Which I can’t, because no one will buy them for that price. So after all of the importing, etc, the profit margin is quite low. It is still slightly more profitable than making them myself, since I’m not an expert mold maker.

Now that the cost of the molds (which people say is too high and think I am trying to rip them off/con people into overpaying for the molds) is out of the way, let’s get started with the rest.

On March 6th, 2017 I purchased a large order from this Taobao shop: [Link] [Item] And I purchased around $200 in molds of various sizes. Here is a photo of some of the items I received. The items arrived April 12th, 2017. So far I have not many of them, mostly just the “Single Mold” that I purchased from another seller on Taobao, who allows reselling. The only molds I have sold from Cubeco have been the 12mm molds, because the previous single mold that I had did not include a 12mm. As of April 23rd, 2017, I have sold 5 Cubeco molds.

[Link] Around April 21st, I received a notification on Instagram that I was tagged by @cubeco000 there [Link], on a picture that says “I made this mold @sproutydoll” and I liked the image. At the time, I thought that this person was the original maker of the mold and was showing that they had made the mold. It wasn’t until April 22nd that I began receiving notifications that cubeco000 was tagging people and commenting that I had plagiarized them. I sent cubeco000 a message to see what was going on, and realized that they had sent me a message earlier in the day and I had not seen it, since it was marked as spam on Instagram. We spoke back and forth, but since cubeco000 doesn’t speak much English and I don’t speak any Chinese, I think there was a misunderstanding. I offered to credit them and remove the listings from my website and direct people to their Taobao if they wished to buy. Cubeco000 doesn’t have an English listing or a way for non-Chinese to buy the molds, but they said that they did not want me to sell the molds, so I was fine with sending people to Taobao instead. Cubeco000 did not respond to any of these messages besides accusing me of copying them, plagiarizing them, and stealing from them. They read the messages (IG marks read messages with a little symbol) and then went to make more comments on my Instagram images about how I was a cheater, a liar, a copycat, and plagiarizing them, and tagging my customers and other BJD people along the way.

In the PMs, cubeco000 doesn’t say much, but I think there is a misunderstanding. I am working with a friend to have cubeco000 write out what they would like, and what they feel is the issue in Chinese and have it translated so I can respond to it. For now, I will do a breakdown of the issues that were brought up in our DM. [Link to full conversation]

- I had not read the initial message from Cubeco000, since it was filtered as spam. When I sent them the first message on my end, it showed their message immediately after. I ask for proof, since the IG account is very new and had not posted many photographs or anything like that. Later on, cubeco000 provided sufficient proof [Link] with a mold master photograph, which I assume is made with a CNC lathe, something I had considered doing as well and find really fascinating (In the USA, the CNC shops near me all charge 500 an hour to design and use the machines, so it’s not something I can do yet!). - Cubeco000 also provided a photo of their Weibo, though I have no idea how to use Weibo. Apparently it is a Chinese blogging site. - “I am very sad about Nicolle, you made her think you did it” I am sure they are talking about Andreja from Nicolle’s Dreams [Link], and the mold I made her in June, 2016. [Link] which was a mold I had made from my own eyes, and is very different from Cubeco’s molds. I have always made my own eyes for selling to customers, with the exception of the 3d printing company I had tested out from China. I ended up not very happy with the eyes, since they weren’t made to the specifications that I had sent them, and ended up getting rid of them. Here are some of the first ones I made, round and flat and hard to use. [Link] and the mold for them was a two-part [Link] and the eyes I used for most of the other time[Link] and [Link] for the mold, before I tried to use the 3d molds from the beginning of this year. You can see how I usually make the eye bases by a lathe style attachment to my dremel, then using a tool to carve them perfectly round, then drill out the centers and fill it with clear resin until it’s the right height to make the eyes. Here is a link to the 3D printed ones that were too oddly sized [Link] and discontinued shortly after I got them. Here is a link to some new eyes, made the same way with the lathe as the originals, but these are as small as 4mm. [Link] -Cubeco000 sends an image of an article I did for Musume, [Link] that was done before October, 2016, six months before I had ever gotten molds from them. They highlighted where I had said I make my own molds (which, for production of eyes, I still do). I show them the photo of my own handmade molds, which are ugly and tend to be hard to work with and customers don’t really want that when they are buying molds. I went to fetch the link to my listing, which I had set up to say they were manufactured by an outside source before, but when I changed suppliers I didn’t add it to the new listing. -Cubeco000 asks about my 3d design, which again, I ended up not using because they were ugly. I proved that I produce my own bases with the tiny 4mm, 6mm and 8mm ones I had made last month. -Cubeco000 no longer responds to my PMs, but they are still submitting comments on my photos that say that I am a thief, a copycat, stealing from them, etc. Some others join in to complain about the price. It is upsetting to me that I am trying to resolve this and they would rather make a scene. I really don’t know what they want at this point. To be clear, their listing never said that they didn’t want resellers or foreign agents to buy. Shops like Tata’s Paradise on Taobao and Sunny’s World on Taobao are very clear that they don’t want resellers and won’t sell to agents, and they cancel orders that are large in order to prevent agents from buying to resell. If they would have said this in their listing, I would not have bothered to buy from them and kept my original supplier, who was more expensive but fine with resellers and agents. I have also never claimed to make these molds. The listing image is clear that it is made by Cubeco [Link] (I have removed the listing since cubeco000 requested that, so this is just a link to the image) and I have never tried to hide the fact that it was made by someone else and bought through Taobao and an agent. Here is a tumblr post about it [Link] and another [Link], the last one goes into detail about the cost of molds as well. I probably should have provided links, but in the past when I have been more open about my production and supply side of things, people have messaged me telling me not to list them, since it makes it easier for people to copy me or cut out the middleman, so I have been trying to be more business-oriented and not share all the details of things. Even when I made clothes before, I would openly share my patterns and got warned that it would be a good way to lose most of my sales or have shops copy me.

I honestly don’t know what they want from me at this point. The money I have spent on the molds is gone, and Taobao doesn’t offer refunds, and my agent doesn’t either. So far, every time I try to get molds for customers to buy, it becomes a nightmare for me. Any time I try to outsource the production of anything, it becomes a bigger hassle than making it myself. At this point, I am just going to issue an apology and offer a refund to anyone who wants them and will send back the cubeco molds. I’m just flat out of the money I spent on the molds, and the ones from the supplier before this one, since I had to sell those at a loss to even sell them at all. It will be some time before I can have new 3D printed molds made, which I have been working on for some time, but the print quality from places like Shapeways isn’t high enough for the fine details. I have been saving towards a 3D printer, which I’ve talked about on my Instagram and Facebook before, for when I am ready to print my own doll in 3D. I was looking at the Form2, which is around $3k+, so I am thinking I will just wait until then to offer eyes, molds, etc. It has taken a lot for me to run the shop for the past six months. I work full time for a school, and I go to university as well. Running my shop on top of that has been daunting, and it’s been a struggle all around. I can’t seem to devote enough time to the shop for it to flourish like it needs to. I am honestly on the verge of just stopping Sproutydoll, and when I am finished with my own doll design, I will start up again. It might be under a new name, I have come up with a few designs for a “Prisma Doll” with a diamond and holographic theme, but now I worry that people will think I am changing names to avoid drama, because I am a con, or something else shady. I am very tired of reading bad anonymous comments about my shop, about my work and about me. Everyone seems to think that I am a big player in the BJD world, that I am being shady and spiteful, and that my quality is terrible and I am overcharging. As a one-person operation, these comments really hurt me. I may just be too sensitive to be involved in this kind of hobby, since I tend to be a very quiet person anyway, and try to stay away from social media as best I can. I really do love making things and having other people appreciate the things I make. I don’t even mind when people have issues and want to get them resolved, but when people say hurtful things through an anonymous filter, it gets me down. When people call me a liar, a cheater, a copycat or a con artist, it upsets me. I love to see people’s photos of their dolls with my products, but recently there’s been a lot of drama and negative comments and it makes it impossible to enjoy the work I do. As it is, I get home from work at 4PM and will usually work on my shop stuff until around 8, then get ready for bed since I have to get up around 5 in the morning for work. All my free time goes towards making things, and as encouraging as it is to see when people share their experiences with my shop and the things I make, it’s hard to remember them when I’m dealing with the drama and the anonymous things that I have been dealing with lately. Even now, I have reworked the overall design of my doll several times (Hence her nearly six-month delay) because I worry what people will say that it’s too similar to this doll, or the joints kind of look like that doll, and that I am a copycat. Some days it’s hard for me to work on the eyes at all, since I still feel the comments that it’s too expensive, amateurish, and that this brand or that brand are a better deal. I look at other brands and marvel at how nice they look, and feel that I can’t ever match the quality, no matter how many hours I spend on an eye. I do suffer from perfectionism, so I am always trying to find the line between acceptable and overdone. It always feels like the things I do are not good enough, and that the things others do are perfect, and if I could just spend a few more hours trying to figure it out, mine would be perfect, too. This post is getting long, so I will end it here. I am working on an apology to Cubeco since I realize I did not make sure that credit was easy to find.

#bjd #sproutydoll

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