So my little brother and I are not allowed to be on the same team for family game night when we play games like Taboo, because most of the time we share a brain cell and the rest of the family has decided it's an unfair advantage. Today, I was trying to remember the word hummus but completely blanked, so what I said was: "Cabbage. No, hermitage" And my brother guessed "Brussels sprouts?" "No, it's a brown goo" I said, but my brother heard "it's a round goo" "Hummus!" he said "that explains the green from cabbage" "It was hummus, but hummus isn't green????" "Oh I was thinking of guacamole" So like. Even when he and I are thinking of totally different things we can still come up with the same word lol

August colorful column: AUgust special - The World Needs Your Highly Niche AU

During August, here in Wolfstar in Color we decided to celebrate AUgust - or, the existence of Alternative Universes in fandom. Because of this, we invited @fforsythiaaa​ to talk a bit about AUs from a literary point of view - and let me tell you, folks, we are beyond amazed and inspired by her words.

So we invite you to read the column that follows. If you want to know who @fforsythiaaa​ is, here’s a primer from herself: “I post about wolfstar, fanfiction as an art and experience, and whatever words, fanart, thoughts, tips, or anecdotes that I can't let go unshared.”

Read under the cut for the full column!

The World Needs Your Highly Niche AU

@fforsythiaaa​

I don’t remember when I found out that fanfiction came in AU flavor, but looking back, that was definitely the moment I fell head over heels for the fandom. Reading wolfstar come together, fall apart, orbit around each other, or weather the storm in a thousand different settings is amazing. It’s romantic to think that they would find each other no matter which plane of reality they’re on, and it’s satisfying to see their core traits manifested in so many different contexts. And considering JKR’s harmful views and actions, as well as how her views make it into the text, I’m finding myself much less inclined to interact with fics that are even canon-divergent. 

That said, there’s one thing that gets me so, so excited, and that’s when I see someone refer to a fic as a “highly niche” or “weirdly specific” AU. Stories that are specific to time, place, culture or identity are my favorite kind. It’s Remus and Sirius as scientists doing fieldwork together in a fellowship program in the mountains! It’s Remus and Sirius as communist organizers in 1920s Chile! It’s Remus and Sirius in a rural town impacted by the opioid epidemic! It’s Remus and Sirius as an architect and a contractor at odds on a very important and difficult project! (I made that one up, but if you write it, please, please tag me.) You’re telling me I get to read about these two starcrossed idiots and learn stuff at the same time? Count me in.

“But no one will want to read this,” the author will post. “It’s too specific, no one will be able to relate, and people won’t be interested in this kind of premise.” 

To which I say, unequivocally, I WANT TO READ YOUR HIGHLY NICHE AU. And what’s more, I think your highly niche AU is going to make the fandom a better place.

Let me start by saying that I completely understand why you think no one would be interested. People like stories that they can relate to; fewer people can relate to a very specific setting; therefore, fewer people would like a very specific story. Right?

The main problem with this logic is the assumption that people can only relate to stories that they have some prior experience with. With every story, the reader is learning about the time period, the place, the norms and rules and societies, and the characters. As readers, this learning is what makes reading fun, and as wolfstar fans, learning about these characters is the reason we read fic in the first place. So my logical conclusion is that the more we get to learn about Remus and Sirius and the world they inhabit, the more we enjoy reading. And in a highly niche au, there’s a lot of learning to do.

Full disclosure, I did not make this idea up. There was one post that made me think of Viktor Shklovsky, a literary critic who coined the term “defamiliarization.” They wrote something like: “I’m worried that all the details would be distracting for the reader and interrupt the story.” Shklovsky basically says that that’s the whole point. 

For extra credit, you can certainly read “Art as Technique” in its entirety, but I’ll dig up my literature degree and give you the gist. When you think you know something, you don’t really see it or perceive it. Think about a stretch of sidewalk you walk on every day. How much time do you spend noticing weeds growing up through the pavement, or where the concrete was repaired with a different material, and how much time do you spend just walking to work? Your brain skips right over the details to be more efficient. Art is meant to make us perceive the world instead of skip right to knowing it; it’s meant to make us notice those weeds and that concrete. Shklovsky says that the technique of art is to make objects unfamiliar so it takes us longer to perceive, to understand. In poetry, each unfamiliar word or detail is a rock in the path that makes us walk more slowly and look more carefully at a road we thought we knew. 

In your super specific AU, that niche setting that your readers aren’t familiar with is part of what makes reading enjoyable. You’re making us walk more slowly through Remus and Sirius’s story so we can perceive their character and conflict differently; that gives us more time to enjoy the story. You’re making us think differently about what the human experience can look like. 

That’s where I start making my argument that branching out from coffee shop and college AUs (which I also love dearly) is a positive step for the whole fandom. We know that representation of people outside the dominant culture is really, really beneficial (that’s another post, and also the whole point of Wolfstar In Color; if you want some Cliff notes to share with the class, check the classic Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie TED talk). When we’re in the habit of hearing lots of different stories instead of only one, we’re in the habit of being curious about each other; it’s much easier to build compassion, understanding, and solidarity when we genuinely want to know more about other people. 

But my push for highly niche AUs is not about filling AO3 with a thousand million stories that perfectly represent the lived experience of every individual reader (unless…?). It’s more about filling the fandom with enough different types of stories that people start thinking, “you know what? If their story belongs here, so does mine.” 

That’s how we make this space feel safe enough for people to participate, whether as writers, readers, or tumblr posters. It’s a much more effective way of demonstrating that the fandom values diverse voices than just saying platitudes about how everyone’s voices matter. Sometimes your existence is radical enough. We need it, and we want to hear about it.

So the next time you think about writing “literally no one asked for this highly niche au,” come back to this post and think again. I’m asking for you to give me an opportunity to learn new things. I’m asking for you to add one more reason for a budding author to think that maybe their fic belongs here, too, and maybe their experiences are more valuable than they thought. I’m asking for you to give me an opportunity to discover new facets of human experience with this painfully tragic and romantic pair as my companions. Here it is: I’m asking.

This may be an old article from 3 years ago, but these cultural aspects/observations still apply even today. And though this is strictly a Chinese perspective, a lot of these everyday life bits are observed in Overseas Chinese communities in countries such as The Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, etc. as well as countries heavily influenced by Chinese culture like Taiwan, Japan, and Korea.

I've always liked learning about other cultures and making comparisons between how things are done East vs West. Which probably stems from growing up with two cultures and Mom raising me on American movies xD

So the irony is if you asked me how many Chinese, Taiwanese, or Hong Kong actors I know, chances are I know as much as you do xD Like Jackie Chan, Andy Lau, and that's about it. But if you asked me about Western (specifically American and British) actors, then I have a useless brain dump of movie trivia and who was with who in what movie xD

Hmmm, both Taiwan and the Philippines are two distinct cultures but both look up to a certain country and are fascinated by that. In Taiwan's case, Japan and the US for the Philippines. In both cases, this is due to being under the rule of those countries in their history. Taiwan being under Japan for 50 years, and the Philippines being under Spain for 300+ years, followed by periods of American and Japanese rule. To put it simply though:

Taiwan is "mini-Japan with a very Chinese culture".

The Philippines is "former colony of Spain with lots of American influences".

But unlike the author, I've never set foot in any Western country, so my understandings are strictly what I've observed in media, which while it can be accurate, doesn't compare to actually experiencing the culture.

Some further elaboration on most points:

#1 We quite literally use chopsticks for everything. We use it to pick rice, viands, vegetables, fruit, smaller desserts, almost all the food you can think of.

But where do you put your chopsticks when you're not using them? Just put them on top of your bowl or flat on your plate. But do not ever stick them vertically. It's taboo, since it looks like incense sticks, which we use to pray for those who have passed, like our ancestors or during funerary services.

#3 The majority of Asia is obsessed with fair/white skin. In my time at the Philippines, I grew up watching all these Dove Whitening commercials and my classmates often commented on how fair my skin was, how they envied it etc. In Taiwan, girls often say they don't want to 變黑 (biàn hēi) 'become dark'. Japan and Korea too are not innocent of this either (if their beauty/skin products weren't a dead giveaway).

People here at Taiwan often mistake me for being from Hong Kong or Japan (as long as I don't speak Mandarin with my heavy accent xD). A Taiwanese classmate of mine joked that she often gets mistaken for being from Southeast Asia due to having a darker complexion. And while I laughed it off with her at that time, looking back, I now realize she was lowkey being racist. xD

And believe me Filipinas have mentioned literally being told 'your skin is so dark' here in Taiwan, or being given backhanded compliments like 'you're pretty despite having dark skin' and...*facepalms*

My point is, beauty is not exclusive to skin color. People who still think that are assholes.

#5 Not to say we don't have salt and pepper, but yes soy sauce and vinegar are the classic condiments you see on the table, be it at home or at a restaurant.

And if I may add, Taiwanese love their pepper. xD If you ever get to eat at a night market or a smaller "Mom n' Pop-style" restaurant here, some dishes/soups tend to add quite an excessive amount of pepper. Not like anthills, but quite liberally and way more than average. Enough that you see traces of pepper at the bottom of the food paper bag or swirling in your soup. xD

#6 I know this all too well from personal experience. In my years of studying at Taiwan, I always had roommates. 3 in my first school (I graduated high school in the Philippines pre K-12 so I had to make up 2 years of Senior High), followed by 2 in college, with the exception of 1 in freshman year.

My college did offer single person dorms but at around 9000 NTD ($324) per month compared to around 6000 NTD ($216) per semester. Because I wanted to save, the choice was obvious for me xD. But ah, this doesn't mean I don't value personal space, in fact I love having the room to myself, and since both my roomies would go home to their families every weekend, weekends were bliss for me xD

And you don't have to be friends with your roommates (that's an added bonus however), you just have to get along with them. I was quite lucky to have really great roommates all throughout my schooling years.

#9 In the Philippines, we do. Owing mostly to American influences and maybe being predominantly Catholic? xD

#10 *sigh* Chinese parents and parents from similar Asian cultures tend to put too much emphasis on grades, so much that kids could get sent to cram school as early as elementary. This is because what school you get into could literally affect your future job opportunities, and while that's not exclusive to any particular country/culture, I feel it's especially pronounced here in Asia. I'm really lucky my own parents weren't that strict about it. However, if your parents don't point the mistakes out to you, chances are you'll do it yourself, if you're an Asian kid like me anyway. xD It just becomes a habit.

#11 My family is an exception to this. xD We do say 'I love you' directly, but complete with the 'ah eat well ok?', 'don't scrimp on food', 'sleep well' and similar indirect words/actions of affection. We were doing 'Conceal, Don't Feel' before it became popular. xD

#13 I'm kind of confused about this but this has sort have changed over the years in which eye-contact is now more encouraged. But don't stare, especially at elders and authority figures. Sometimes it's just shyness though. xD And I've observed this with my own Taiwanese friend, especially when I'm complaining or ranting to her about something. xD I'm a person who likes to express my opinions strongly, which tends to scare/alienate some of the locals here, as doing so is kind of frowned upon. Thankfully, she does listen and offers her take on things.

#14 Ah this. xD In the Philippines, this is a common greeting known as beso-beso, and I freaked out too when an auntie did that to me. xD Needless to say, Mom lectured me later on what that was. ^^"

#16 Along with #3 another crazy beauty standard. In my view, people always look better with a little meat on them and when they're not horribly thin. Asia still has a loonng way to go with accepting different types of bodies if you ask me. This combined with modern beauty standards has made the pressure for women especially to 'look beautiful' higher than ever.

I know many people love them but please, starving yourself or glorifying eating disorders is never OK just to get this kind of 'ideal' body. I'm not part of the Kpop fandom, but even I think when idols get bullied just for gaining the least bit of weight among other insensitive comments, that's really going too far.

#17 'If you want to make friends, go eat.' <- I couldn't agree more. In the Philippines we have a greeting: 'Kumain ka na ba?' (Have you eaten?) . Similarly in Taiwan, we have 吃飯了沒? (chī fàn le méi), both of these can mean that in the literal sense but are often used as greetings instead. By then which invitation to having lunch/dinner together may or may not follow. Food really is a way for us to socialize and to catch up with what's going on in each other's lives. Not to say we don't have regular outings like going out to the mall, going shopping, etc. but eating together is a huge part of our culture, be it with family or friends.

And while I'm at it, some memes that are way too accurate good to pass up xD

Parents, uncles, aunties alike will fight over the bill xD

Alternatively:

You just space out until your name is called xD

My parents are guilty of the last one. Logic how? xD

#18 True. xD I like giving compliments out to people but I have a hard time accepting them myself, though I've learnt how to accept them much more now than before. We're kind of raised to constantly downplay ourselves so we often say things like 'ah no no' or 'I'm really not that good'. The downside of this of course is that it can come off as somewhat fake. xD

Again from personal experience, that same classmate who made the lowkey racist remark, she was good, she was on the debate team, was a honor student, knew how to mingle with people, but she downplayed herself way too much, while praising me but I honestly thought that she never really meant it from how she treated me. She wanted to keep me around her yet make backhanded compliments at me and she didn't want me socializing with my other classmate who is now my friend. *sigh* It was only after discussing this with one of my roomies did I realize how this 'excessive downplaying' might come off to people like me who more or less grew up with a more 'Westernized' mindset. I'm not saying brag about your achievements but don't be overly humble about them either, which can also be a turn off.

#20 We do tend to be a lot more realistic on how we view things, neither entirely optimistic nor pessimistic. We try to think of things practically and often analyze things on pure logic. A downside of this however, is that Chinese people can be overly practical. Taiwanese for instance don't like to 'find inconveniences' and generally keep to themselves, meaning, they won't help you in your hour of need even when they do have the capabilities. Sounds really harsh I know, but in my 6 years of living in Taiwan, while this doesn't apply to all the people, a lot of them really do only find/talk to you when they need something.

So for some people saying Taiwanese are 'friendly', that's BS xD If you ask me, Filipinos are infinitely more friendly, and again while not all, generally make more of an effort to help you when you need it. I really felt more of a real sense of community during my years growing up in the Philippines compared to Taiwan.

#21 Children do tend to stay with their parents well into college and adulthood, since Chinese families are indeed very family-oriented, in a lot of cases, grandparents often live under the same roof as us as well! And it really does save a lot of money. I see there's a real stigma in the US when it comes to "living with your parents", but that's starting to change especially because of Covid and having more and more people move back in with their parents.

Housing unfortunately is pretty much hella expensive no matter where you go, and Taiwan is no exception. Steep housing prices and the very high cost of raising a child (schooling + buxiban fees, etc.) contribute to a very low birth rate and thus an aging population like Japan. It's not uncommon to see both parents working in Taiwan.

#23 I'm an overthinker myself, but I totally agree with the author that the best is to strike a good balance between these two. Which I guess is why I love drawing or any other related creative attempts, it helps me be more spontaneous or well, creative! I like to remain intellectually or artistically inspired.

#24 Is French high school really like that? xD My friend did watch SKAM France and more or less got a culture shock from what was depicted on the show. I can confirm however that most high schools both in the Philippines and Taiwan require students to wear a uniform, only in college is everybody free to wear casual/civilian clothes.

#26 Ah this is part of our Asian gift-giving etiquette xD We always open gifts later after the event/meeting and in private. Never open them in front of the person who gave it to you or in front of others. This is to prevent any 'shame/embarrassment' that may result both to yourself and to the gift giver. I know this may come off as something weird since some people may want a more honest response or immediate feedback when it comes to gift-giving, but that's just how it is in our culture. You're always free to ask us though (in private) if we liked the gift or not ^^"

#28 I want to say the same goes to drinking, partying, and drugs however xD Those are things which are still frowned upon in our culture. And to be honest, whenever I see those in movies, it does kind of turn me off xD It doesn't mean that we're "uncool" or "boring", we just think that there are much better or healthier ways of "having fun".

#31 Is this true in France?! Man I would kind of prefer that instead of people being on their phones all the time xD This kind of goes with #20 in that Chinese are overly practical or logical, and don't read fiction as much as nonfiction. My Taiwanese friend is an exception though, she's a bibliophile who loves the feel of paper books compared to e-books, and it's a trait of her that I like a lot. Both the Philippines and Taiwan however have a huge fanbase when it comes to manga and anime though.

I'm all for reading outside of "designated reading" at schools especially. Reading fiction improves your vocabulary too, and can be quite fun! It helps you imagine and really invest in a world/story, and if you ask me something that I feel Westerners are better at, they're more in touch with their emotions and creativity, and are thus much more able to write compelling or original stories. Believe me, I've seen a fair amount of Chinese movies that rip off Western movie plotlines xD

#33 Nothing much to add on here..except that since I'm a "weird" person, Mom often jokes that she got the wrong baby from the hospital. xD

#35 True. While I agree with the care and concern that your fellow community can give you, the downside of this is we tend to only hang out with our own people, e.g Chinese with Chinese, Taiwanese with Taiwanese, etc. I've seen too that it's especially hard to make friends in Japan and Korea as a foreigner. Not only is there the language barrier, but the differences in culture too. In a way, Asians can be pretty close-minded on getting to know other cultures or actually making friends with people from other countries. I know this all too well being half-Taiwanese/half-Filipino, being neither "Filipino" enough nor "Taiwanese" enough. xD It's more of people here being too used to what they're comfortable with.

#36 Oh this is something I feel that Chinese students and other students from similar cultures should really improve on. xD How will people respect you if you don't speak your mind?

I felt bad especially for my Spanish teacher in college, granted it was an introductory course (Spanish I and II) but the amount of times that our teacher had to prompt a student to recite/speak even with clear hints already made her (and me too) extremely frustrated. The thing is, these are college students, I personally feel they don't have any reason to be so shy of speaking and technically by not doing so they're slowing the pace of the class too much and a lot of time is wasted.

Unfortunately you can't always be very vocal with your thoughts and opinions in most Asian cultures. I would say strive for that, but at the same time, play your cards well, especially if you're in a workplace setting.

If you made it to the end, thank you for reading and here's a cookie! 🍪 I'm not perfect and there's bound to be something I missed so please let me know if you spotted anything wrong. Feedback/questions are very much welcome and please feel free to share about your country/culture's differences or similarities!

The Joker x Reader - “Trapped” Part 3

Almost one year ago, someone tried to kill The Joker in a speeding car and Y/N pushed him out of the way, getting hit instead. With a fractured skull and broken bones, she was out of business for 6 months; when she finally recovered, The Queen of Gotham wasn’t the same anymore. Trapped inside her own mind and exhibiting severe cognitive impairment, Y/N’s life switched upside down without any hope of ever returning to normal.

Part 1       Part 2     Part 4     Part 5

Same day, later in the evening

“What are you doing, Pumpkin?” The Joker crawls next to you although he has an idea about why you look upset.

You’re on your tummy scribbling on a piece of paper and he can tell you are concentrating hard while working on the current project: writing down your name. Only got the first three letters then the rest went blank.

“I….I can’t think…” you intensely stare at the blue pen in between your fingers.

“Of course you can!” J reaches over so he can guide your arm since it’s clear you need help. “There you go… done. Now try to copy it bellow, alright?”

“Hm?”

“Try again Princess,” he taps on the sheet and watches Y/N struggling to imitate the word. “Well done!” The King of Gotham praises. “Wanna give it a shot with a few more simple words?”

“Mmmm…” you debate. “OK?...”

You analyze The Joker’s movements as he depicts four letter words, one of them getting your attention in particular.

“Love?” you smile, happy you deciphered the meaning.

“Yes, a basic…”

“Love?” you scoot over, more and more excited and it clicks for your boyfriend.

“It’s just an example for you to exercise and relearn how to write, understand? It doesn’t mean anything!”

You giggle and touch his nose with yours.

“Love!”

“No Pumpkin! I don’t love you, how did you get such atrocity from my note??!! It has no hidden meaning! I barely, from very afar, remotely, not even similar to love, sort of like you and that’s it!”

You snicker and quickly slide to grab the yellow teddy bear, whispering in its ear:

“Love.”

“Aren’t you listening Princess?? Don’t start fake rumors!!”

Still…Y/N lives on her own little planet and her damaged brain grasped a wonderful concept despite The Clown vehemently dismissing his actions.

“Serves me right for being supportive,” he grumbles and resorts to diversion, the best weapon against your new found logic.

“Wanna read to me?” he points at the pile of children’s books resting on the nightstand: they are the best to use in your present circumstance.

“… … Read?... ” you ask, confused.

“Here,” J picks a random publication and gives it to you.

Might as well fully take advantage.

“Spoil me!” he buries his cheeks in your cleavage, guiding your free hand towards his green locks.

You never figured out how he doesn’t suffocate with his face glued to your skin; sometimes he sleeps like that for hours. Must be a special talent.

“The … ummm… the…. The duck…” you read the first page and massage his scalp, frowning at the words you can’t make sense of. “Cross… … crossed?...”  

“Yeah,” The Joker’s mumbled voice agrees.

“… the… g-glass…” you stutter at the sentence.

“Grass,” J corrects you.

“Hm?...”

“Grass Pumpkin, not glass.”

“Ummm… grass…” you continue to read the best way you can and he rectifies your errors until no more sounds emerge: The King is softly purring, a clear indication he’s dreaming.

You toss the book on the floor, fed up with the difficult task of organizing your thoughts; pampering him is better. You slowly tilt his head backwards so you can kiss him: The Joker frowns in his daze and you pinch his butt, chuckling.

“What is it?” he opens one eye and you pull down on his boxers. “Princess, we had sex an hour ago. Do you think I run on batteries?” the complaint is fast to follow.

... … … Batteries?... …                                            

You jump from the bed and stump to the closet, fumbling around for a couple of minutes before returning to a puzzled Clown.

You stretch the elastic of his underwear, dropping two batteries you snatched from the flashlight inside.

“How… how long do we w-wait?” you innocently ask.

The Joker bites his lip, attempting to contain himself yet he can’t: he bursts out laughing at your quirky solution while dragging you on top of him.

“You’re the funniest and smartest person I know, Pumpkin!” he cracks up, actually convinced he’s telling the truth. “Who’s my clever girl, huh?”

He’s talking about a girl again…What girl?...

Y/N peeks behind her and J reminds his baffled half:

“For God’s sake, Princess! I’m talking about you; you’re my girl! Can you get my phone?” he gestures at his mobile ringing by your pillow.

You give the cell to J, ignoring his conversation with Frost: you keep kissing him with the sole purpose of getting undivided affection.

“I guess Adam is here to pick up the cars you damaged,” he finally ends his chat. “Let’s go supervise the process. Don’t be disappointed, Pumpkin, we’ll have fun later. It’s your fault for destroying my collection!”

****************

The Joker watches his crew sweeping the concrete in the garage: broken glass, pieces of metal and debris scattered on the pavement after his vehicles were hauled inside huge trucks in order to be transported to Adam’s workshop for repairs.

“Thanks a lot, Y/N!” he growls, frustrated.

“Y-you’re welcome,” you serenely reply without a care in the universe.

“You’re the worst thing that ever happened to me, Princess!” he huffs at your indifference.

“Love,” you confess to the fluffy toy squished in your embrace.

“I heard that and it’s an aberration! Why do you keep persisting with this nonsense?! I’m literally stating the opposite!” J admonishes but who’s listening to him?

Not Y/N.

“Nolan is texting me,” he changes subject. “He wants me to meet him at his warehouse to inspect the boxes of ammo for the deal. Will you accompany me?”

“Hm?”

“Car ride?” The King of Gotham simplifies his request.

“U-hum!” you nod, preparing to enter the purple Lamborghini which luckily wasn’t in the garage when you smashed J’s cars.

“Frost, if you see me parked up the street in the driving alley, don’t come investigate, got it? This woman’s been pestering me for extracurricular activities, might not make it inside the mansion.”

“Of course, sir!” Jonny finds it wise to consent to his boss’s rambling.

“Tell everyone: if the Lamborghini’s rockin’, don’t come knockin’!”

**************

You’re sitting on J’s lap, completely blocking the arrangements happening at the table: you’re more preoccupied with your game than whatever it is they are negotiating about.

“What are you playing, Y/N?” Nolan curiously inquires because your thumbs are surely moving at a crazy speed on your cell’s screen.

“Hm?” you stop and gaze his way.

“What are you playing?” the man repeats.

“Mmmmm… Tetrixx Bricks.”

“What level are you on?” Nolan leans over, his eyes getting big at the revelation. “Holy shit, Y/N! How did you make it this far??! I’ve been striving to pass level 98 for a month!”

“She’s smart, that’s how!” your boyfriend sassily underlines.

“Do you think that you can help me?” the guy slides his phone in front of you.

“I’m sorry, is this a gaming party or a business matter?!” The Joker scoffs.

“Well, we’re pretty much done: we accepted the terms, we just have to move the merchandise in the morning.”

You are already matching the colorful blocks on Nolan’s game, his face ecstatic when the obnoxious song announces with great fanfare: “Level Up!”

“Holy cow!!!!” he shouts and you return his phone. “Thank you!”

“Hey Y/N,” one of the mobster’s henchmen dares to voice his demand. “Would you help me too? I’m stuck on level 76.”

“I’m dead on 105,” another goon mumbles under his breath, stepping in the line forming to your left.

J would normally cut off this useless waste of his precious time yet he can’t deny the gratification building up in his heart: heavens knows how it feels to be trapped inside your own mind and his girl has definitely battled unimaginable odds to be where she’s at right now.

Living with cognitive impairment is not easy, but she’s still here and it beats the alternative.

“Good job, Pumpkin!” The Clown boasts at the long string of cell phones parading through your fingers while you aid Nolan’s team leveling up on Tetrixx Bricks.

And somehow his hands are holding you tighter, not even bored with the random outcome of his meeting.

**************

You escaped on the terrace for a break and J is discussing the last details with your host: tomorrow you have a routine checkup, thus he has to wrap it up soon.

“Out of my way, half-wit!” Derek aka Nolan’s oldest son pushes you. Would he have done it if you were the same individual from almost a year ago? Nope. Apparently he believes he’s entitled to take advantage of Y/N since she’s alone outside.

“Why did Mister Joker bring you anyway?” he lights up a cigarette, annoyed. “Stupid monosyllabic bitch!” he ogles your summer dress, swiftly lifting it. “Are you wearing diapers?” he chuckles as you walk backwards, trying to process what he’s throwing at you. “Come on, show me!” he approaches and carefully scouts the premises to ensure you two don’t have company.

Perhaps the neurons in your brain are overcharged for the moment; nevertheless, they warn of imminent altercation: the dude’s a total douchebag.

“Are you shy?” Derek grins. “C’mon, lemme see!! Oooohh…fuuuuck…” he bends over in pain when your knee unexpectedly kicks him in the crotch: you used all your strength and he drops down, curling up in a ball. “God…dammit!” Derek shrieks at the defense he didn’t anticipate.

“I…I’m not wearing diapers!” you stammer and because he landed on the edge of the pool you roll him in the water also.

The loud splash makes The Joker wave at you, glad he eventually found you: he’s been searching around the warehouse for the last 5 minutes.

“There you are! Quit playing around, Pumpkin; we have a swimming pool at home!”

You rush by his side eager to bail before the asshole pops up from the bottom of the pond.

“Sushi for dinner?” J suggests and Y/N is not the type of individual to reject one of her favorite dishes.

“I…I love sushi,” you smile elbowing him. “Love.”

“Don’t start with me again!” The King barks at your obvious hint.

*************

“Are you eating the last piece?” he glares at your salmon roll.

“No,” you offer the treat to him. “You…you need it more,” Y/N verbalizes her concern regarding his well-being.

“Can’t disagree, Pumpkin. You exhausted me you naughty girl,” J pretends to be super tired. “What can I do? Princess wants, Princess gets,” he inhales, resigned.

You’re not focusing on his whining: frankly, your intellect has been challenged enough for today. You cuddle in his arms while he chews on his food and watch TV without paying attention to the movie.

“Don’t forget tomorrow morning you have your doctor’s appointment,” J mentions. “I have to stay and wait for the guns I purchased from Nolan; you’ll have to manage without me. I’ll send an escort, deal?”

“U-hum.”

“Don’t yawn, Pumpkin. I’m the one that should yawn,” The Joker scratches his thigh. “This move sucks,” he pouts and turns off the TV. “I have a better idea,” he chooses a kid’s book from the stack. “Read to me.”

You open the textbook and although your brain is overwhelmed, you still make an effort for his sake.

“Mmm… Rainy… sky… Skies?...”

“Yup,” he turns on his side and nuzzles in your hair.

“Float over…hmm… t-town…”, your voice echoes in the room, soothing a worn out Joker.

Strange he can’t properly rest unless you read to him: after all J barely, from very afar, remotely, not even similar to love, sort of likes you.

Also read: MASTERLIST

You can follow me on Ao3 and Wattpad under the same blog name: DiYunho.

My Five Most Influential

Someone asked:   Who are the most influential writers in your life?

Good question.

The broad answer is that one gets influenced many different ways by many different sources.  I enjoy poetry and song lyrics because they find ways of conveying the strongest emotional content in the most concise manner, music brings a sense of dramatic rhythm and fulfillment, the visual arts suggest ways of subtly adding many insights to a single strong idea, etc., etc., and of course, etc. (and that is also an example of a creative influence in my work).

But…to boil it down to those whom I most consciously made an effort to emulate, we find ourselves facing five creators that primed the pump.

This is not to say others whom I began following after them didn’t wield a lot of influence (thanx, Ernie, Bert, Jack, Bob, and Hank!) but these are the foundation of everything I’ve done in my career.

(And to those who notice a lack of diversity, I know, I know…but to be honest I have to acknowledge the truth, and the truth is for whatever reason, by chance or by choice, by fate or by fortune, these five dominated my sensibilities.  I trust that I’ve grown and expanded my horizons since then, but they’re the hand I got dealt.)

. . . 

Carl Barks

I loved ducks as a kid and my grandmother and aunt would always bring me a passel of duck-related comics when they came to visit.

There were some Daffy Duck comics mixed in there but while I know I looked at and enjoyed them, none of them stick in my mind like the Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge stories of Carl Barks.

Typically my grandmother would read these comics to me and I’d imprint the dialog and captions in my brain, replaying them as I looked at the pictures over and over again.

Barks never wrote down to his audience, and his stories covered a vast array of genres, everything from straight domestic comedy to oddball adventures to screwy crime stories.

Donald and his nephews encountered dinosaurs more than once (another big favorite of mine), and Uncle Scrooge setting out to explore the asteroid belt in order to find a new home for his fabulous money bin was another tale I loved literally to pieces, but A Christmas For Shacktown remains my all time favorite graphic novel.

I’ll concede there are better graphic novels, but none of them warm my heart the way that Christmas story does.

Barks showed it’s possible to combine heart (not to be confused with sentimentality or =yuch!= schmaltz), vivid characters, and strong, intricate narrative.  His plots where typically filled with unexpected twists and turns but his characters were always deeply involved in them, not just along for the ride.

He’s one of the greatest storytellers in the 20th century, and his work remains timeless enough to last for several centuries to come.

. . . 

Ray Bradbury

The first Ray Bradbury story I remember encountering was “Switch On The Night” in its 1955 edition, read to my kindergarten class towards the end of the school year.

This would place the event sometime in the spring of 1959.

“Switch On The Night” captivated me because it was the first story I’d ever heard that showed what could be seen in the dark that couldn’t be seen in the day.

Even as a child, it made me realize the night wasn’t scary, but contained wonders and insights we miss in the harsh glare of day.

I don’t recall if the kindergarten teacher told us the name of the author, and if she did it didn’t stick, but boy howdy, the story sure did!  Did it open the doors of the night for me, or was I already inclined to be a night person and it simply confirmed that as a valid identity?

I dunno, but I’m typing this right now at 12:24am.

And the thoughts Bradbury planted in little Buzzy boy’s brain stayed and grew and flowered, as you can read in my poem, “The Magic Hours Of The Night”.

The next time I encountered Ray Bradbury’s writing was in grammar school, certainly no later than junior high.  I was already interested in science fiction by that point, and had read “The Pedestrian” in one of my school English books (we weren’t taught the story in class; the teacher skipped over it for whatever reason but I read it anyway then re-read it and read it again and again).

Anthony Boucher’s ubiquitous 2-volume A Treasury Of Great Science Fiction was in my grammar school library and in it was Bradbury’s “Pillar Of Fire” (which I would later learn was one of his alternate Martian Chronicles and a crossover with Fahrenheit 451) and in that story he offered up a veritable laundry list of outré and outlandish fiction to be tracked down and read, authors to dig up and devour.

Oh, man, I was hooked.

So of course I began looking for all the stories and writers Bradbury listed in his short story but I also began looking for Bradbury’s own work and before you could say, “Mom, can I get a subscription to the Science Fiction Book Club?” I’d read The Golden Apples Of The Sun and A Medicine For Melancholy and R is For Rocket never once dreaming that at some point in the future the roadmap Ray plopped down in my lap would eventually lead to us being co-workers (separate projects, but the same studio at the same time) and friends.

There is a beautiful yet deceptive simplicity to Ray’s work, and even though he wrote his own book on writing (The Zen Of Writing) that has lots of good insights and professional tricks & tips, he himself wasn’t able to explain how he did it.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a good Ray Bradbury parody.

I’ve seen parodies that clearly are intended to evoke Ray Bradbury, but only in the same way a clumsy older relative might evoke Michael Jackson with a spasmodic movement one vaguely recognizes as a failed attempt at a moonwalk.

But, lordie, don’t think we didn’t try to emulate him, and while none of us fanboys ever came close, I think a lot of us did learn that less is more, that the right word carries more impact than a dozen paragraphs, and that there’s magic in even the most ordinary of things.

And of course I discovered the film and TV adaptations of his work, and in discovering them I also discovered that there are some things that just can’t be translated from one media to another, and that the light, effortless appeal of Ray’s work on the page (paper or pixel) can at best be recaptured with a good audio book reader but even the best dramatic adaptions -- even those by Ray himself -- are cold dead iron butterflies compared to the light and lively creatures flying about.

So eventually I stopped trying to write like him, and instead picked up the valuable lessons of mood and emotion making an impact on a story even if the plot didn’t make much logical sense.

Decades later I would become a fan of opera, and would learn the philosophy of all opera lovers:  Opera doesn’t have to make logical sense, it just has to make emotional sense.

Ray Bradbury, opera meister.

. . . 

H.P. Lovecraft

As noted above, Bradbury’s “Pillar Of Fire” tipped me to numerous other writers, first and foremost of which turned out to be Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

Okay, before we get any further into this, let’s acknowledge the woolly mammoth in the room:  H.P. Lovecraft was a colossal asshat racist.

He was a lot of other terrible things, too, but racist is far and ahead of the rest of the pack.

It’s a disillusioning thing to find people one admired as a youngster or a teen later prove to have not just quirks and eccentricities and personal flaws, but genuinely destructive, harmful, and offensive characters.

I’ve posted on that before, too.

How I wish it were possible to retroactively scale back that hurtfulness, to make them more empathetic, less egregiously offensive (in the military sense of the word), but that ain’t so.

We have to acknowledge evil when we see it, and we have to call it out, and we have to shun it.

Which is hard when one of its practitioners provides a major influence in our creative lives.

Here’s what I liked about Lovecraft as a kid:  He was the complete opposite of Ray Bradbury.

Bradbury’s instinctive genius was in finding the right word, the simple word that conveyed great impact on the story, drawing the reader into the most fantastic situations by making them seem more familiar on a visceral level.

Lovecraft achieved the exact opposite effect by finding the most arcane, bedizened, baroque, florid, grandiloquent, overwrought, rococo verbiage possible and slapping the reader repeatedly in the face with it.

If Bradbury made the unreal real, Lovecraft made the weird even more weirder.

And let’s give this devil his due:  The Strange Case Of Charles Dexter Ward and The Dunwich Horror are two masterpieces of horror and serve as the bridge between Edgar Allen Poe and Stephen King, not to mention his creation of Cthulhu and other ancient entities existing beyond the ken of human knowledge…

…oh, wait, that’s where the story simultaneously gets messy yet provides a convenient escape hatch for fans.

While Lovecraft created Cthulhu, he did not create the Cthulhu Mythos.

That was primarily the invention August Derleth, a writer / editor / agent and H.P. Lovecraft’s #1 fanboy.

Lovecraft had some loosely related ideas in his stories and several themes he revisited repeatedly (in addition to racism).

He also had a circle of fellow writers -- including such heavy hitters as Robert “Psycho” Bloch and Robert E. “Conan” Howard -- who picked up on his ideas and, as way of a tribute, incorporated them in some of their stories.

Derleth took all this and Lovecraft’s unfinished manuscripts and short ideas he jotted down and turned it into a whole post-mortem industry, linking all of Lovecraft and other writers’ tales.

And he did a damn fine job of it, too.

So much so that the Cthulhu Mythos has taken on a life of its own, and pretty much anybody can play in that cosmic sandbox now (including Big Steve King and a ton of Japanese anime) and so Lovecraft’s works have an enormous influence on pop culture…

,,,but Howard hizzowndamsef can be -- and is -- cancelled.

Derleth and various biographers downplayed Lovecraft’s virulent racism for decades, and I don’t think Ray Bradbury was ever aware of the scope and tenor of Lovecraft’s bigotry when he name checked him in “Pillar Of Fire” and other stories.

In a similar vein Bradbury didn’t know -- because thanks again to overly protective literary executors, nobody knew -- just how big a racist asshat Walt Whitman was, either.  It is one thing to call shenanigans on a Bill Cosby or a Harvey Weinstein or a Donald Trump because their egregious behaviors were noted long before they were held accountable, but quite another to do so on a creator who died while hiding their most awful behavior from thousands if not millions of fans who felt inspired and uplifted by their work.

It’s one thing to call out a contemporary bigot and not support them by not buying their work, it’s quite another when their bigotry has been shielded from view and fair minded, decent people have used their work to draw inspiration into their own creativity.

Of course, I had no way of knowing all this when I was in junior high and seriously began tracking down Lovecraft’s work.  

He possessed a flair of the horrific and unearthly that to this day is hard to match (but easier to parody).  He was a tremendous influence on my early writing (truth be told, I zigzagged between Bradbury’s stark simplicity and Lovecraft’s overarching verbosity, giving my early oeuvre a rather schizophrenic style) and the ideas he sparked still reverberate to this day.

If only he hadn’t been such a giant %#@&ing asshat racist …

. . . 

Harlan Ellison

In a way, I’m glad neither Harlan nor his widow Susan are alive to read this.

I cherished Harlan as a friend and greatly admired his qualities as a writer.

But damn, by his own admission he should have been thrown in prison for aggravated assault on numerous occasions (he was courts martialed three times while in the Army).

We’re not talking about arguments that spiraled out of control until a few wild punches were thrown, we’re talking about Harlan by his own admission stalking and ambushing people, knocking them unconscious or causing grievous bodily harm.

We’re talking about sexual abuse and humiliation.

We’re talking about incidents he admitted to which if true put people in life threatening situations.

And yet ironically, in a certain sense Harlan (a bona fide Army Ranger, BTW) was like the U.S. Marine Corps:  You’d never have a greater friend or a worse enemy.

I became dimly aware of Harlan in the late 1960s as I started diving deeper into literary sci-fi, transitioning from monster kid fandom to digests and paperbacks.  Harlan first caught my attention with his macho prose (years later a similar style also drew me to Charles Bukowski) in stories like “Along the Scenic Route” (a.k.a. “Dogfight on 101”) in which Los Angelinos engaged in Mad Max motor mayhem but soon it became apparent the macho posturing was just a patina, that the heart and soul of much of the work reflected great sensitivity and often profound melancholy (ditto Bukowski).

Harlan was a fighter, and again by his own admission, he acknowledged in his later years that he was not a fighter because his cause was just, but rather sought out just causes because he knew he would be fighting regardless of his position, yet possessed a strong enough moral compass to point himself in the direction of a worthy enemy…

…most of the time.

He hurt and offended a large number of innocent and some not-so-innocent-but-certainly-not-evil people.

He also helped and encouraged a large number of others, people who had no idea who he was, people who had no way of adequately reciprocating his kindness and generosity.

He defended a lot of defenseless people.

He also mistakenly defended a lot of terrible people.

If someone tells me Harlan was a monster, I’ll agree:  Monstre sacré.

What made his writing sacred was that no matter how outlandish the situation, Harlan dredged up from the depths emotions so strong as to be frightening in their depiction.

Skilled enough not to lose sight of humanity, outlandish enough to conjure up ideas and emotions most people would shy away from, Harlan hit adolescent Buzzy boy like an incendiary grenade.

Unlike my first three literary influences, Harlan was and remained active in the fannish circles where I was circulating at the time.  He regularly wrote letters and columns for various fanzines, including a few I subscribed to.

In a literary sense he stood, naked and unashamed, in full view of the world, and that willingness to go beyond mundane sensibilities is what made his work so compelling.

He certainly fired me up as an adolescent writer, and proved an amalgam of Bradbury and Lovecraft that got my creative juices flowing in a coherent direction.

I don’t think I ever consciously tried to imitate him in my writing, but I sure learned from him, both in how to charge a story with emotion and how to fight for what’s right regardless of the blow back.

I loved him as a friend.

But, damn, Harlan…you could act so ugly...

. . .

H. Allen Smith

Who?

Most of you have never heard of H. Allen Smith, and that’s a damn shame.

I’d never heard of him either until I stumbled across a coverless remaindered copy of Poor H. Allen Smith’s Almanac in a Dollar General Store bin in Tennessee in the late 1960s (it was a memorable shopping expedition:  I also purchased Thomas Heggen’s Mister Roberts and Let’s Kill Uncle by Rohan O'Grady [pen name of June Margaret O'Grady Skinner]).

Reading Smith’s editorial comments (in addition to his own essays and fiction he edited numerous humor anthologies) I realized I’d found a kindred soul.

Smith had a very conversational tone as a writer; his prose seemed off the cuff and unstructured, but he slyly used that style to hide the very peculiar (and often perverse) path he led readers down.

He sounded / read like a garrulous guy at the bar, one with a huge number of charming, witty (and delightfully inebriated) friends in addition to his own bottomless well of tall tales, pointed observations, and rude jokes.

Of all the writers mentioned above, that style is the one I most consciously tried to emulate, and one I seem to have been able to find my own voice in (several people have told me I write the same way I talk, a rarity among writers).

Smith was hilarious whether wearing an editor’s visor or a freelancer’s fool’s cap.  If you know who H. L. Mencken was, think of Smith as a benign, better tempered version of that infamous curmudgeon (and if you don’t know, hie thee hence to Google and find out).

Compared to my other four influences, Smith didn’t need to add the fantastic to his fiction:  The real world was weird and wacky and whimsical enough.

A newspaper man turned best selling author, Smith became among the most popular humorists of the 1940s-50s-60s…

…and then he died and everybody forgot him.

Part of the reason they forgot is that he wrote about things that no longer seem relevant (TV cowboys of the early television era, f’r instance, in Mr. Zip) or are today looked upon askance (and with justifiable reason; the ethnic humor in many of his anthologies may not have been intended as mean spirited, but it sure doesn’t read as a celebration of other cultures, viz his succinct account of an argument following a traffic accident between two native Honolulu cabbies rendered in pidgin:  “Wassamatta you?”  “’Wassmatta me’?!?!?  Wassamatta you ‘Wassamatta me’?  You wassamatta!”).

I’m sure I picked up a great many faults from Smith, but Smith also had the virtue of being willing and able to learn and to make an effort to be a better person today than he was yesterday, and better still tomorrow.

I’ve certainly tried applying that to my life.

Smith’s style was also invoked -- consciously or not -- by other writers and editors, notably Richard E. Geis, the editor of the legendary sci-fi semi-prozone, Science Fiction Review (among other titles).  Smith died before I could meet him, but while I never met Dick Geis face to face we were pen pals for over 40 years.

Geis certainly sharpened specific aspects of my writing style, but the real underlying structure came from H. Allen Smith.

Smith’s work is hard to find today (in no small part because whenever I encounter one in the wild I snap it up) but I urge you to give him a try.

Just brace yourself for things we might consider incorrect today.

. . . 

So there’s my top five. 

With the exception of Carl Barks and Ray Bradbury, none of them are without serious flaw or blemish (though Smith seems like a decent enough sort despite his fondness for X-rated and ethnic humor).

In my defense as an impressionable child / teen, I was not aware of these flaws and blemishes when I first encountered their writing (primarily because in many cases efforts were made to hide or downplay those aspects).

The positive things I gleaned from them are not negated by the negative personal information that came out later.

I can, for the most part re the more problematic of them, appreciate their work while not endorsing their behavior.

Ellison can only be described in extremes, but his fire and passion -- when directed in a positive direction -- served as a torch to light new paths (his two original anthologies, Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions, pretty much blew the doors off old school sci-fi and belatedly dragged the genre kicking and screaming into the 20th century).

Lovecraft I can effectively ignore while finding entertainment value in the Cthulhu Mythos.

But I must acknowledge this isn’t the same for everyone.

For example, as innocuous as I find H. Allen Smith, if a woman or a member of a minority group said, “I found this in particular to be offensive” I’d probably have to say, yeah, you’re right.

But I can still admire the way he did it, even if I can no longer fully support what he did.

. . . 

By the time I reached high school, I’d acquired enough savvy to regard to literary finds a bit more dispassionately, appreciating what they did without trying to literally absorb it into my own writing.

I discovered for myself the Beat generation of writers and poets, the underground cartoonists of the late 60s and 70s, Ken Kesey, Joseph Heller, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. LeGuin, and a host of others, some already alluded to.

Some, such as the Beats and Bukowski, I could enjoy for their warts and all honest self-reflection.

Yes, they were terrible people, but they knew they were terrible people, and they also knew there had to be something better, and while they may never have found the nirvana they sought, they at least sent back accurate reports of where they were in their journeys of exploration.

By my late teens, I’d become aware enough of human foibles and weaknesses -- every human’s foibles and weaknesses, including my own -- to be very, very cautious in regarding an individual as admirable.

While I will never accept creativity as an excuse for bad behavior, if a creator is honest enough and self-introspective enough to recognize and acknowledge their own failings, it goes a long way towards my being willing to enjoy their work without feeling I’m endorsing them as individuals.

It’s not my place to pass judgment or exoneration on others bad behavior.

It is my place to see that I don’t emulate others’ bad behavior.

Every creator is connected to their art, even if it’s by-the-numbers for-hire hack work.

Every creator puts something of themselves into the final product.

And every member of the audience must decide for themselves if that renders the final product too toxic to be enjoyed. 

    © Buzz Dixon

Code’s Top 5 TS Fics

[***Let me know if I’ve missed anything on the Content Warnings!]

[**Do Not Ask Authors for Updates!]

[*Leave these authors Comments, please and thank you!]

The Consequences of Sound by Acantha_Echo 

Status: Incomplete, Work In Progress

Summary: Anxiety hurts Thomas. It's just what he does, what he has always done. It's not what he wants. He only wants to protect him but that is easier wished for than done. When the opportunity to prove himself opens up to him, he grabs it, for once not caring about the consequences. Things go downhill from there. The fall, rise, fall (and rise again) of Virgil.

Relationships: Prinxiety, Platonic LAMP

CW: Toxic Friendships, Headaches and Migraines, Anxiety Attacks, Manipulation, Depression, Unsympathetic Deceit, Unsympathetic Remus

My thoughts: This fic is So Freaking Good, my friends. It has real estate in at least 86% of my brain. I love going back to reread my favorite parts, and sometimes when I’m rewatching episodes I’ll catch myself thinking of the fic. Right now it’s the Christmas episode bc I’m in big time daydream mode about what the current arc is going to bring. It’s got big Found Family energy, and I eat that stuff right up. It is so heart-warming to watch Virgil grow closer to them. And, yeah, the Prinxiety owns my ass. It is some real Slow Burn shit, and the little glances and soft interactions.... oh goodness. And there’s suspense too, with all the barriers Virgil has built, and the secrets he keeps. For the love of everything, give this fic a try. 

To Build A Home by AValorousChoice

Status: Completed

Summary: "There was a long silence as Virgil processed the words, his eyes darting between the pair of them. “Y-You-” he swallowed heavily. “You want to adopt me?” This was a joke. Surely, it was a joke. Nobody ever wanted him. Nobody had ever shown the slightest bit of interest in adopting him. Virgil never believed he was good enough for a loving family until the day that Patton and Logan walked into the orphanage.

Relationships: Logicality

CW: Child Abuse, Alcohol and Alcoholism, Panic Attacks, Car Accidents, Swearing, Homophobia, Minor Character Death, Animal Abuse, PTSD, Violence, Murder, Attempted Murder

My thoughts: Another Found Family for y’all. So this one is a kid!fic, which I don’t read a lot of, but have found some Really Good ones over the years. I grow really attached to characters when it feels like I’ve watched them grow up. Probably has to do with my love for character development, though not every kid!fic will have that. This one, actually, takes place over the course of less than a year of Virgil’s life after Logan and Patton adopt him. It deals with trauma and finding a place Virgil feels he belongs and is equally full of hope as it is fear. Again, watching Virgil grow close to his family - Patton, Logan, Roman, and some marvelous OCs - is so precious. And shout-out to Roman in this one bc he is the cutest, weirdest freaking kid you will ever read, and I would protect him with my life. The next one in the series is actually all about him and advances forward to when they’re teens (at which point I come across a lot of moments where I’m like “omg they’ve grown so much my heart”).

(i’d never) want once from the cherry tree by ace_corvid 

Status: Completed

Summary: Of all the notable Youtubers active today, none are perhaps as popular as Roman Prince, beauty guru extraordinaire. From small beginnings, rising popularity from his vlogs brought him to the fame he never doubted he’d relish in. But also on the up and up is the conspiracy theory and cryptid lover known by his online alias ‘Virgilant’, who reveals little about his personal life and shies from the spotlight.Despite clashing fandoms and their own preconceptions, they're dragged into a somewhat whirlwind collaboration between channels. Sparks fly, but with Virgil desperately afraid of coming out and pining for his room mate, can anything really happen? With Logan, Patton, Remy and Deceit along for the ride, watch as fear of being who you really are blossoms into something new… With more than a little romance along the way.After all, is there anything more terrifying than showing the world who you are? Alternatively; a meta media fic following the journey of Youtubers, who just so happen to be characters we know and love.

Relationships: Prinxiety, Logicality

CW: Anxiety over Coming Out, Fandom Discourse Commentary

My thoughts: The funniest thing in my GD LIFE. Get this; they’re all in character, but the author has amped up their chaos levels times 100. They are undeniably themselves and it’s to an extreme. I freaking love it. And the multimedia style is so entertaining. It keeps the story at a fast pace and creates a great setting and diverse character interaction. That interaction includes banter and absolutely absurd and relatable content. Everyone’s friendships are undeniable bc they’re constantly roasting one another but you can tell they’d kill for each other. So good. This fic is so good. Please go read.

lavender for luck by lovelylogans

Status: Completed

Summary: Virgil's uncle can cast spells, and read fortunes, and hear houses talk through their noisy creaks. Virgil's father had, too, when he was alive, and their mother before them. Virgil was born with the family's tawny eyes, the family's pale skin, and the family's magic. And the people they fall in love with—or, at least, the ones who love them back—all die, which is why Virgil knows he can never take the chance of having that for himself. A Practical Magic inspired au

Relationships: LAMP

CW: Implied/Referenced Character Death, Parental Death, Spiders, Animal Cruelty, Swearing, Arguing, Physical Confrontation 

My thoughts: Magical realism, secrets, excellent characterization. The border between reality and magic in this AU is seamless. I love the normality of magic in these types of stories, and this one didn’t even have magic as a Thing for most of the world. Magic wasn’t a regular thing, yet the author made it so normal to Virgil’s life... it was phenomenal. And the character interactions... they are so sweet on each other omg. And it isn’t really rushed either. There is time skips, but they don’t break apart the fic too harshly, instead enhancing the time they’ve gotten to know one another. Deceit’s character is so much fun too. He doesn’t take shit, but he also really cares. And the whole uncovering Virgil’s life is so interesting, both what we know and the characters don’t, or stuff we don’t know and Virgil won’t talk about. It creates excellent tension. So I guess I have to go read Practical Magic now (which this fic is based off of) and you have to go read this.

dreams are the second form of reality by Flooftheriver

Status: Incomplete, Work In Progress

Summary: Roman’s creative capabilities stretch further than anywhere any of the sides realise he can go- sometimes even Roman himself. He can craft intricate worlds from nothing, invent people out of mere whispers of an idea, all for the purpose of filling the night with adventure. His dreams are so strong in fact, that they can unknowingly pull others in, bending them to the will of the story he is creating. So what happens when he dreams up a Prince, and finds he needs somebody to play the role?

Relationships: Prinxiety, Logicality

CW: Possible Character Death, Weird Shadow Monsters, Minor Violence, Blood and Violence

My thoughts: So it’s set in canon in place of AA. Which means we get some lovely angst in the form of Virgil thinking everyone hates him. And I’m super stoked to watch him get that Acceptance he deserves. You know what we call that? Growth. Let’s get that character development y’all. For now, however, he’s in Roman’s dreamworld and trying to make sure Roman doesn’t realize it’s actually him or he’ll get kicked out of the best thing in his life. So we have secrets, which creates great tension, and things going... strange in the dreamworld. Also, the Prinxiety is cute as heck - loving that slow burn holy crip - alright go read it.

Heartbeat

Harumichi angst for everyone! This is the fic that’s been rambling about in my head for quite a while now and I finally got tired of it running itself into circles, so here it is. Inspired, as all of my Harumichi fics are, by @docholligay.

Michiru did not pray. It seemed a rather pointless endeavor, when all was said and done. 

Either deities didn’t care to exist and thus her pleas were heard by no one or the deities that did exist were cruel and she didn’t particularly care to draw their attention.

However, desperation can sometimes make even the most skeptical into a temporary supplicant. And standing amidst the wreckage of all that she had held dear, surrounded by the bloodied and broken bodies of those she had cared for, she couldn’t stop the unspoken prayer from sweeping through her, like a wave crashing on the surf. 

Please. Not this. I’ll do anything.

A heartbeat.

Then Sailor Pluto was standing in front of her. For a moment they stared at each other before Pluto stepped to the side, revealing a door behind her. “Queen Serenity wishes to speak with you,” Pluto said, waving her hand at the door which opened to blinding white.

It took a moment for Michiru to realize that the fear that had risen inside her was not her own. Or, no, not quite her own. There were sense memories that Michiru sometimes felt, when transformed. Things that the Sailor Neptune in her past life had known so well or remembered so strongly that they carried over into Michiru. 

They had never been all that strong. But the fear that rose inside her felt like a tsunami crashing on the shore. Vivid and powerful and uncontrollable, attempting to drown everything in its path. Michiru knew very little about her past life, besides the reflexes and feelings that sometimes rose within her, but she now knew this: whatever else the previous Sailor Neptune had been, she had been terrified of Queen Serenity. From the offhand comments that the cats and other Senshi had made--and even more importantly what Minako didn’t say--Michiru had no doubt that there was good reason for this fear. 

But Michiru had spent most of her life learning how to shape her emotions into submission; to obey her and not the other way around. And she was not going to allow emotions that were not quite hers to sublimate that. So she didn’t pause as she walked forward, taking deliberate steps around the bodies on the ground, special care taken not to notice who, in particular, she was stepping over. And, in the end, it hardly mattered what Queen Serenity may or may not do to her; anything was preferable to the alternative of staying here and now.

Her foot left grass and landed on white marble, as she stepped through the time gate, hearing it shut behind her. She continued to walk forward, refusing to turn her head or her eyes from the path in front of them. She had no way of knowing if the Queen was watching her and, if she was, Michiru wanted her to know that she was unimpressed with the display of opulence around her. Ahead of her, a silvery white wooden door stood open, Serenity clearly awaiting her arrival.

She stepped into a library. She saw movement out of the corner of her right eye. She turned. She saw silvery white hair. And then she found herself on one knee, her head bowed low. 

Some things become so ingrained in one’s soul, Michiru knew from experience, that they become reflex.

She did not wait for Serenity to give her permission to stand. The rage boiled inside of her, roiling with the idea that her past self had been so indoctrinated to bow to the woman before her that even now, hundreds of years and an entire life away from Serenity, the instinct had been so strong that Michiru had not been given even a chance to fight it. 

She stood in one fluid motion, head held high, face placid, steadily meeting Serenity’s eyes. Queen Serenity smiled, benevolent and beautiful, the soft tilt of her lips spoke of sympathy and kindness. The memory inside Michiru quailed but Michiru did not need that to see the sharp teeth behind Serenity’s lips.

“Ah, Sailor Neptune. I’m sorry to see you again under circumstances such as these,” Serenity said, her smile growing softer and more sympathetic, her fangs growing longer. 

“As am I, Queen Serenity,” Michiru replied, biting back the ‘your majesty’ that nipped at the tip of her tongue. Queen Serenity was not her liege anymore. Michiru was already in service to one queen of the moon, she did not need or want another. 

Serenity’s face didn’t change but Michiru knew what it looked like when one bared their fangs without showing their teeth. “Sailor Neptune, Sailor Pluto has told me of what has passed in your time, your world. It is unacceptable, I’m sure that even you will agree.” Michiru thought that this, perhaps, might be the only thing she and Serenity would ever agree on.

Michiru didn’t reply; she didn’t need to.

“Sailor Pluto and I have talked at great length on the best way to circumvent your mistakes. The plan with the most likelihood of success involves traveling to the past in an attempt to change things. Are you amenable to this plan?”

Michiru paused. Thought. And then said, “If Sailor Pluto has agreed that this is the best of all possible options, then I shall do it.” 

Serenity smiled and it was not kind. “Then it is decided.” A heartbeat. “However, to make your chances of success more likely, I have prepared a gift for you.” Serenity turned to the desk behind her, on which a box the size of a children’s shoe box sat, white and closed with silver ribbon. She picked it up gently, as though there was something fragile inside, and turned around, holding it out to Michiru.

Her smile was merciless. Her fangs dripped with poison.

Michiru took the box.

She had no doubt that whatever she found in the package would be helpful; she did not think that Serenity would lie when it came to the continued life of her daughter and bloodline. But Michiru also knew that she had been right; deities, should they exist, would indeed be cruel and it did one no good to receive their attention.

Michiru opened the box.

Inside lay a human heart wrapped in silvery-white threads of magic, steadily beating as though it did not realize that it had been taken from the chest meant to house it. Michiru very carefully did not react, as she looked back up at the queen standing before her. 

The queen’s smile had not changed. “A tool for you, Sailor Neptune, meant to divine the secrets in the hearts of those around you. It will reveal the monsters to you, so they do not take you unaware. You need only hold it in your hand for it to whisper its secrets to you. Once you return to the past, none but you will be able to see it.”

Serenity did not tell her to pick it up. Michiru did so because to do otherwise would be admitting weakness in front of Serenity.

Immediately a whispery voice echoed in her head, as she stared at the queen, “She wants to hurt you; she wants to see you suffer.” Michiru had not needed the heart to tell her that, but it was confirmation that at least what Serenity said was true: it did reveal the monsters around her. “I’m sorry,” the heart whispered.

It is not the snake bite that does the deadly damage, it is the venom.

There are some things, upon the knowing, which will break one beyond all sense of repair. 

The brain knows this and so it begins to work. Smoothly and deftly, the process needed to follow one logical thought to the next folds in on itself, over and over again, an origami of paths from one truth to another.

The heart, held safely and gently in Michiru’s hand, feels so terribly familiar. 

Fold. Smooth. Bend.

The whisper is strange to hear in her head, instead of with her ears.

Fold. Smooth. Bend.

The heartbeat sounds strange, out in the open, instead of being cradled in a warm moving chest.

Fold. Smooth. Bend.

Thoughts folded until the shape was so complex it was hard to divine the beginning or the end. Michiru tucks it all into the very deepest recesses of her soul, taking great care not to look at its shape, as she nods once to Serenity. “You have my gratitude, Queen Serenity. I promise that I will not let this future come to pass again.”

“I’m sure it won’t,” Serenity replies. It is a threat. It is a promise. Her fangs are still dripping with poison. This queen of the moon is not her daughter; she does not give second chances to those who disappoint her.

Without another word, Michiru turns and leaves. She does not look back. The heart beats in her hand, strong and firm and rhythmic, and whispers, “This place is wrong. Home. I miss home. Where is it? I don’t remember…”

A heartbeat. The origami deep inside Michiru folds into itself once again before sinking even deeper.

Michiru walks through the time gate, heart in her hand, and does not look back.

Kang Daniel - Yearning (Sequel to ’Addicted’)

Genre: Angst, this one isn’t smut but it is quite suggestive at the beginning so read at your own discretion

Note: So, for Daniel’s birthday this year, I decided to finally write the sequel to ‘Addicted’!!! ‘Addicted’ was one of my all-time favorite stories and I know that it is one that a lot have enjoyed. For a long time I was asked to write a sequel for it, but I felt like I wasn’t ready at the time? But I finally got some inspiration for it!

I hope that this is a good sequel and ending. I think I had really high expectations for myself on this one, so I’m really worried about it. I hope that it is still enjoyable for everyone. ;;

Also, a very happy birthday to Daniel today! He’s such an amazing man and is too good at his job as a bias-wrecker from the very beginning ;;  I think today will be the day that I just promote him to being an official bias alongside Ong and Jisung X3 Thank you for being such an incredible muse, Daniel!

Anyway, I’m sorry if this is not a perfect sequel, but I hope that it is something that everyone can still enjoy. Please feel free to let me know what you think! Enjoy!

- goodnightkisseu’s admin / ashley <3

Those familiar lips that shaped so perfectly to yours, that knew exactly where to kiss along your neck to make you want more. Those large hands that always traveled the length of your body before the settled and gently framed your hips as he pulled your closer to him. This feeling that was something only he could give you, had eluded you, only haunting your dreams on the nights when you were lonely and missed him. Now though, these feelings that had only been figments, were back in your life almost on the daily. You knew exactly what you were in for whenever Daniel showed up at your doorstep.

After your one night stand, Daniel had been messaging you more often, asking if you were busy. If you told him you weren’t, the male was instantly at your door that night. You never asked why he wanted to see you. You never talked about your days, because as soon as his eyes locked with yours, no further words were exchanged. He would be on you in a matter of seconds, your back learning to find comfort in the wall next to your front door. Sometimes you would managed to get fully undressed. Other times you were too hungry for each other to do so. Sometimes you would make it all the way to the bedroom, and other times… well, you just had to be a bit creative, the couch becoming the most comfortable alternative, though not the easiest. This had become your relationship with Daniel. From lovers, to exes, to hook ups.

And yet, though you were physically satisfied, never had you not been when you were with Daniel, you also couldn’t help but feel empty every time he left you.

You were still in love with him. There was no denying that. These were only supposed to be hook ups and nothing more. That’s definitely what they were for Daniel. Whenever he showed up, it was because he needed to relieve the stress from his tight work schedule. Yet, you couldn’t stop yourself from feeling more than just the physical connection between the two of you. Your heart would swell whenever he said something sweet, even if they were hollow words. Your mind would wonder what he was up to during the day. Your body would crave for his touch whenever he wasn’t there. He had completely taken over your being just like he had when the two of you were together. Your everything yearned for him, to be with him.

Still, you knew it was stupid. You were the only one that felt this way and you would often berate yourself for caring for someone that no longer felt the same about you. Every night that Daniel left your side, or when you would wake up alone, you would tell yourself that what you wanted was never going to happen. However, it was hard to deny how you felt, suppress what you wanted. You felt like you had to get a straight answer from Daniel about what the two of you were, and with very little hesitance you brought it up to him that night.

“Daniel…” you started softly, seeing his shoulder flinch and body tense in the dim light. On some nights, you would actually be so tired that you would fall asleep. On most nights however, you would often pretend to be in a deep slumber, as it made your heart ache just a little bit less whenever he left in the middle of the night.

He made a small noise in acknowledgement, but his actions never ceased, still reaching over the bed for his boxers as he stood to pull them on, along with his jeans. You lazily let your eyes scan of his form, committing it to memory again. His broad shoulders, toned torso, and even the little scratches that you had left on his back last week. You knew that after you asked the question that was on your mind that it was unlikely that you would see him again, so you did what you could to remember what you could, while he was still in front of you. Again, it was dumb, but you couldn’t help yourself.

After a bit of silence, you finally spoke. “What… what are we?” you finally asked. The words were simple, but they were so hard to say.

“What do you mean?” he replied, answering your question with a question. It was his usual response to you when he either didn’t want to give an answer.  It was the answer that you had expected from him.

“I’m talking about this, Daniel, our hook ups,” you said. Though you were playing it off as nonchalantly as you could, on the inside you were a mess. There were answers that you wanted, things that you needed to happen, but luckily, the logical side of your brain kept your emotions in check. “Is that all we’re going to do? You… you have no intentions of us getting back together?”

Those words got Daniel to stop. He had been sitting on the edge of your bed, with his shirt his hands, seemingly frozen by what you had just said. His actions told you that he knew that you would eventually ask this question, but it seemed that it didn’t occur to him that it would happen any time soon. After a moment, he left out a heavy sigh, his arms finding movement again as they pulled his loose shirt over him. He found his way to his feet again and he turned to finally look at you. You weren’t sure if he had intended to, but his eyes had definitely given you a once over before he looked away. “Look, I know what you want me to say, but I don’t have an answer for you. I’m sorry,” he replied, keeping his answer curt before he picked up the rest of his things and left the room.

It was your turn to be stunned by his words. Much less the content of them, but how cold they sounded. It wasn’t until you heard the front door close that you seemed to regain control of your body. With a heavy sigh, you rolled over in bed, pulled your limbs closer to your body. You knew that this was the answer that was to come, but it still hurt. His cold words only made your heart ache more, pining for the one thing it couldn’t have; his love.

And for the first time in this ambiguous dance with Daniel, you felt tears welling up in your eyes. You weren’t over him, but you knew that, by all means, he was over you.

========

Just as you had expected, Daniel didn’t message you again after that night. It was a little painful, and though you tried to deny it, you were definitely hurt. Still, you tried to not let it affect your outward appearance to your friends and coworkers. You thought that Daniel dropping you like this, would be your chance to just stop cold turkey. Maybe you could finally get back to where you were before you saw him again, before he turned your life upside down like he always did.

But you weren’t so lucky.

You had been walking home from dinner with your friend when you finally saw Daniel again. At first you had thought of just turning tail and running, but you told yourself that you had to confront this head on if you wanted to move on for good. At least that was what you told yourself, before you saw her. Wrapped around his arm was a girl, possibly a little younger than the two of you were, and she was beaming up at him, with the biggest smile imaginable. He was giving her a small smile, his eyes forming into those crescent shapes. It was the way that he used to smile at you. Honest to god you had thought that you had just stumbled upon a different happy couple, that your eyes had deceived you into thinking it was Daniel, but when your friend had pointed it out it was indeed him, that pain in your heart intensified.

It seemed like he had officially moved on… and you were stuck. It was just like the first time the two of you broke up. It was happening again.

Unsurprisingly, with the way that your friend was waving and Daniel’s observant nature, it didn’t take him too long to spot the two of you. However, when he saw you in particular, he stopped mid-step. The girl next to him, seemingly a little drunk, asked him what was wrong, but he didn’t give an answer right away. You felt a tight grip on your heart in that moment, and when your friend urged you to go over and say them, you couldn’t bring yourself to do it. Instead you told her that you had to get going and turned to get out of that situation as quickly as you could.

Everything was still the same. You were always the one running away, and you supposed you would keep doing so until your heart found a way to fix itself. However, as you were so focused on getting out of there, what you didn’t know was that a familiar pair of puppy dog eyes never looked away from you. He wanted you to come back…

========

You worked hard in the following month to try and get yourself back to normal. You didn’t want to think of how much pain your heart was in, and so you buried yourself in your work, planning out your upcoming graphic novel. It was a good way for you to escape the real world, submerging yourself in your world of fantasy, in the lives of your characters that had gone through more difficult things than you had. You got to help them through their problems, something that you couldn’t do for yourself, and you had to admit, you found it fulfilling in a way.

During that time you had also made it your mission to not have any contact with Daniel, if you could help it. Still, you did get a message from him from time to time, asking if the two of you could talk. You never answered him back. You knew he was only asking to talk, but you didn’t trust yourself to be around him yet. Given your usual track record with each other, you were afraid where it would lead you this time, what type of trouble you’d get your heart into. So you just continued on with your life, pretending that you hadn’t gotten those messages.

Today you had decided it was time to work outside of the apartment and the office. It had become routine for you to just go from home to the office and back, and it was getting a bit drab. You decided to venture out and go visit one of your favorite cafés. It had been a favorite spot of yours in college, the relaxing ambiance always had a way of making your creative ideas blossom, and you thought that it could help you through one of your character issues today. You ordered your usual latte before you seated yourself at one of the tables, pulling out your tablet and started to work. You had been lost in your own world that you almost didn’t hear someone calling out your name. It wasn’t until the voice got much closer, when the individual was in front of you, did you pull yourself out of your world…only to be shocked by who stood in front of you.

Out of surprise, your tablet pen went flying out of your hand and landing squarely at his feet. You stopped in the moment, wondering if you should bend down and get it, but the male was already on it, picking up the small black pen and handing it to you, your hands momentarily touching. A shiver ran up your spine in that moment. Honestly, what were the chances of seeing him, here, today, on the one day you decided to work outside of your usual comfort zone? The universe was really messing with you today…

“Daniel…” you said quietly in response, your brain still trying to process it all. Your response seemed to shock him a bit. Maybe he was expecting a bit more?

“I didn’t know you still came here,” he said quickly, knowing that if he didn’t say something fast that you just might have gone running out of there like you did the last time he saw you. Taking the opportunity, he asked if he could sit, and it seemed like you had regained your bearings because you gestured to the chair, allowing him to share the table with you.

“I used to come here all of the time even before we started dating. Of could I would still come here now,” you said, your words a bit flat. Honestly, you had been working so hard to forget him, to ease the pain in your heart. But seeing him again only made those painful feelings come rushing back. You had to remind yourself in that moment of that girl he was with. You were not someone that was important to him anymore. You had to forget. “Look, if it bothers you that I come here, I can find another place to do my work. I’m sure there are plenty of coffee shops in the area.”

“Anyway, I should get going. You’re probably here to meet someone and I don’t want to intrude,” you added as you reached to pack up your things, sliding them into your bag before pulling it onto your shoulder. Your hand gently reached for your coffee cup and you were about to head right out the door when you heard Daniel calling your name. Thing was, you weren’t expecting it. He didn’t sound angry, he didn’t even sound neutral. It was almost as if… he said your name in pain.

“Please… please don’t leave. I came here because I thought I could find you. I really need to talk to you…” he said, his words soft. His tone was full of regret, full of sadness, and this pulled at your heartstrings so violently that you couldn’t move. Your brain told you to leave, to forget about him, but your heart and body wouldn’t let you. They told you to stay, to hear him out… and they always won. They always betrayed you when it came to Daniel.

Against your better judgment you caved and walked back to the table, sitting yourself down across form the man that had broken your heart on many occasions… and was still breaking it now.

“What do you want to talk about?” you asked, though you couldn’t look at him. Your eyes were fixated on your coffee cup, and honestly on anything that wasn’t Kang Daniel.

He had gotten you to stay, and what he really needed to do was not screw up this next part. But truth be told, Daniel was having a hard time finding his words. Honestly, over the last few months he had missed you. Not just the physical contact with you, but just… you. He missed seeing you. He missed messaging you. He missed you greatly. And it was something that he hadn’t been willing to admit at first. He wanted to keep thinking that the two of you were only meant to hook up, that it was all that was left of the two of you. But the more time you spent together at night, the more that he knew it was more than that. That he did indeed want you back.

Thing was, Daniel was never very good with his words, so when you confronted him about what you were, he didn’t really know how to answer you. He didn’t know how the two of you could try again without ultimately repeating the same thing that had happened before. So he opted not to answer you, something that he knew ultimately ruined his chances.

Yet here you were, giving him a chance and he didn’t know what to say. But he had to say something. What if you got up and left again? “I… I want to talk about us. I… I want to try again.” His words weren’t smooth, but they were what he felt. 

“Daniel, what are you even asking me right now?” you retorted. Hadn’t he already told you that he didn’t know if he wanted to get back together? Wasn’t he seeing someone else? So why was he saying these things to you? And why did your stupid heart keep hoping that it was true?

“Look, please don’t leave. Please just hear me out,” he pleaded, watching as you settled in the chair in front of him. “I know I’m not a great person. I asked you to break up with me because I wasn’t happy back then. I was shitty for asking you for a one night stand when I knew you weren’t over me, but the truth is, I wasn’t over you either. I… I felt something for you that night, and I wanted to see you again. So I kept calling you because I felt like something was missing. I wanted to be with you,” he explained. You could tell he was struggling with his words, as if he wasn’t entirely sure they were right either. “But when you asked me if I wanted it to be more, I couldn’t answer you because I was afraid it would all happen again. I was afraid that we would repeat what we did before and I didn’t know how to stop that. So I just… stopped everything…”

You sighed gently, your hands resting in your lap as you looked over at the male. “Daniel, even if that’s the case, aren’t you seeing someone right now? You know that isn’t fair to her, and you know for a fact that I’m not that type of person.”

Daniel gently shook his head. “That night… you misunderstood. She’s a girl from work that’s been interested in me for a while, but I never made any moves on her. She was a bit drunk that night from the company party and I was just trying to get her home. I know that’s not what it seemed like to you, but that was what was going on. There’s nothing going on between us, and I’ve been trying to get in contact with you to explain myself. You haven’t been answer though…”

“And for good reason, Daniel,” you retorted, your emotions getting the better of you in the moment. “You’ve been messing with me ever since we saw each other again. My heart has been a mess, my brain can’t stop thinking about you, my mind can’t focus. And every time I get off track I have to keep reminding myself of how much pain you caused me the last time so that I can stop thinking about you!”

Your outburst stunned and silenced the male across from you. You could tell that he didn’t know that it was like this, that this was how he had made you feel, that he had caused you so much pain. Though you didn’t know exactly what was going on, you knew that Daniel was shocked and trying to think of his next move… which was not one that you had expected. He gently rose to his feet, a meek smile on his lips as he gripped his coffee cup. “I-I didn’t know that I made you feel that way. I’m… I’m really sorry. I’m sorry if seeing me again, like this, was painful for you,” he said slowly. “I promise I won’t bother you anymore.” And with that, he quickly excused himself, leaving the coffee shop and a very stunned you behind. You weren’t sure how you thought this was going to end, but it wasn’t like this…

========

Honestly, Daniel just up and leaving like that bothered you for days on end. You knew that he never liked confrontation, but he was the type that liked to work stuff out. The fact that he just up and left like that, it was strange. Had your words been harsher than you had intended? The more you thought about it, the more it bothered you to the point where you knew you had to get to the bottom of it. So here you were, standing in front of his apartment, unannounced, just to try and sort out your strange interaction. If it were anyone else you probably wouldn’t have even tried, but again, when it came to Daniel, your heart was willing to do a lot of things.

You gave his door a gentle knock, almost hoping that he wouldn’t be home so that neither of you had to face each other… but that wasn’t the case. Instead, Daniel answered the door, still in his suit from work, his tie slightly undone and his shirt collar open, making you think some really inappropriate things in that moment, though you kept them at bay for the time being. This was not the time for that.

His eyes widened when he realized that you were in front of him and your name gently left his lips. Yeah, you were just as surprised as he was that you were there. “Do you mind if I come in? It’s a little cold out here,” you said gently, and without any hesitation, he moved to the side to let you in.

Even though he had readily let you into his home, you could tell that your sudden appearance made him a bit apprehensive. You felt the same honestly. You weren’t sure what you expected to come out of things, but you were here, and there was no turning back.

“Why are you here?” he finally asked when his curiosity go the better of him.

You gave a gentle sigh. “I felt bad that you just ran off the last time we talked. I wanted to make sure that I didn’t upset you with how angry I got…”

“I was at fault for that. You know that wasn’t your fault. I shouldn’t have brought up something like with you. You deserve to move on, to be with someone better,” Daniel admitted.

“Funny to think that you think that there’s someone better for me when my stupid heart can only think of you.” Your words sounded bitter, but it was more a realization of this situation that you and Daniel had gotten yourselves into. The both of you still felt something for each other, but had gone about it all in the wrong way. It made the situation worse and here the both of you were, trying to pick up the pieces.

“About what you said last week, were you telling the truth?” you asked. “Do you really want to try again?”

He looked up from the ground, his ears perking up at your words. He didn’t answer right away, but he did give you a small nod. “I meant every word. I have missed you, and I do want to try again if you’d give me the chance,” he said honestly, his demeanor showing you that he wasn’t lying.

“Look, I can’t promise that we’ll work out a second time. I can’t even promise that I’ll be accepting right away, but I would be willing to try too. I’ve… I’ve missed you too,” you admitted out loud for the first time, watching as Daniel slowly approached you.

He gently took your hands in his as he rested he forehead against yours. “I’ll do better this time, I promise.”

“All I ask is that you try,” you replied, and he gently gave you a kiss on the forehead before moving away from you, leaving you a little confused.

“The night is still young,” he finally said when he was back with jacket in hand. “I want to take you out,” he offered.

“You don’t have to do that, Daniel.”

He shook his head in response. “No, I want to. I want to take you on a proper date again.”

You rolled your eyes at him, knowing that he wouldn’t take no for an answer. “Where to?”

“I was thinking some jjigae?” he said, immediately breaking into a smile as you gently punched his arm.

“What, so you can spill soup on me like you did on our first date when that cute cat walked by?” you retorted, the male leading you out of the apartment and locking up.

“I promise that I won’t do that this time. Trust me,” he told you. And though you joked with him about how little it meant to trust him again, you knew that your heart had already given into its yearning for him. There was no guarantee that this would end well, that the two of you would work out. But sometimes, starting over was worth the risk…

today, i smile;

shin hoseok | what nobody told him about being in love is that it can’t just go away, and sometimes, it never really leaves in the first place. a continuation of hate me now. | 3.9k words. | angst, eventual happiness. based off “I smile” by day6.

a/n: originally, I wasn’t planning on continuing this little drabble, but I decided after a little day6 marathon (and a completely free weekend!) that this was warranted. also shout out to @wonhopes bc she mentioned wanting to write a sequel for hate me now just as i was writing the sequel. for hate me now. hehehe :)

Usually, people aren’t supposed to wake up to nightmares, rather from them, but Hoseok had somehow been the exception today.

The sun wasn’t falling from the sky, the government wasn’t being overthrown, and as far as he could fathom in his groggy mind, he wasn’t dead and in hell. In fact, Hoseok woke to a gentle sunrise and a warm bed, nothing out of place as it had been for the last year. He still had two eyes, two ears, and a mouth, and he felt pretty healthy to say the least. Yet, in the way that we all do when something has been going right a little too long, there’s a feeling of inexplainable dread hanging over his head the moment his eyes open that autumn morning. It’s only when he grabs his phone to check what had happened while he slept that he realized just why.

(1) Unread Message(s)

received: 8:22 a.m., september 4th, 2017 

(y/n): are you free?

Hoseok thinks his mind is playing tricks on him when that’s the first notification he sees on his lockscreen, the background ironically displaying a neon sign that reads “say goodbye to the past”.

He slides the notification to the right and his a feeling of nausea starts to settle in his chest when he realizes that his mind isn’t playing tricks on him, that in fact before that very question you’d sent, there were still the remains of your messages to each other before that fateful day a year ago. The ones he hadn’t had the heart to delete. 

He quickly checks the time once he makes himself sit up in bed, his sheet falling and exposing his bare chest to the cool air of his room. He feels a shiver run down his spine (and he can’t even say it’s due to the temperature) when he realizes it’s only been ten minutes since you’d sent that. His mind can only focus on the fact that ten minutes ago, you’d promptly risen for what he had hoped was a restful sleep, grabbed your phone and willingly texted him first thing. And of all things… asking for his time.

Hoseok’s mind practically short circuits trying to think of what to say, the very simple responses “yes” or “no” being lost on him just at the mention of your name. what could he really say? Would it even be enough? What exactly were you asking for, anyway?

hoseok: today? I should be. why?

He waits with baited breath, a feeling of uneasiness filling his stomach as he watches and blanks on what to say or think. There you are, on the other side of the phone, and he thinks for one horrid second that you might have accidentally texted him and that you’d only come into his life for just a few moments, only to leave him disoriented and in his feelings for the rest of the day. It had to be an accident, it had to be.

(y/n): good! I wanna get coffee with you, at that place on peach street? it’s cool if you don’t wanna but I’m free this morning and we should catch up

Was he missing something? Maybe he’d slept his way into an alternate universe where you’d broken his heart and not the other way around, or maybe a universe where you were just distant friends and hadn’t seen each other in a few weeks. He couldn’t come up with any logical reason the girl he’d broken the heart of would want to catch up with him, why she would feel she should catch up with him. You were always funny like that. He just couldn’t find it in him to laugh.

hoseok: when should I come?

(y/n): now, if you’re good. I work nearby it now so I thought it’d be a good place to meet up

hoseok: i’ll see you in 15

(y/n): drive safe!

He stares a little too long at your last message, chalking it up to your kind nature and nothing more, and even as he feels like he can taste last night’s dinner in his mouth at the thought of seeing you again after so long trying to be okay without you, he has to face the music because he’d already sealed his fate. He could handle a measly coffee date, that’s all you asked for. He owed you that much.

He’s been sitting in the window booth for a total of four minutes before he starts to feel nervous again.

He’d carefully checked the cafe the moment he had entered, in the darkest, simplest clothes he could find because he didn’t dare wish to stand out more than he had to today. When he had found you nowhere, he had taken a seat near the windows, where a clear view of the busy street outside allowed him a chance to focus on anything but what was coming for him. He spent his time counting people, counting pets, counting smiles, counting anything that moved to occupy himself. 

He felt dumb sitting there alone, tugging the sleeves of his black turtleneck over his large hands every time the door to the cafe swung open and you didn’t walk in after. He could hear your soft voice scolding him in his head (”Don’t pull your sleeves like that! It’ll stretch!”) but he couldn’t stop. Maybe if he waited a little longer for you, he’d disappear into that turtleneck completely.

For a moment, Hoseok contemplated sending a follow up text to you just in case you couldn’t make it after all, or maybe in case you’d forgotten altogether? But he hadn’t had a conversation with you in over a year until that very morning, and he didn’t want to make any sudden moves in fear of fucking everything up before it had a chance to be. He didn’t know what he might say that could make or break this opportunity, but he wasn’t taking any chances.

He’s just about to pull the neck of his sweater over his mouth and nose when the door swings open, and this time, his heart stutters in his chest when his expected disappointment turns into surprise.

You walk in, and it’s like a movie or something the way you look around for him, shining like a ray of sunlight or something more magnificent. Your cream coat isn’t buttoned up, billowing in the breeze of warm air that hits you the minute you enter the cafe, and he realizes with a frown that not one thing you’re wearing he’s seen before. From your sweater to your jeans to your boots, you’ve completely changed, and he recognizes nothing about you. Even your haircut is different, clean and neat and fitting for someone like you. You look so much better than you did when you were with him, and he’s glad. You look happier, freer.

The minute you see him, your mouth turns into a smile that surprises Hoseok into smiling back, and he bangs his hand on the bottom of the table in an effort to wave to you. He ignores the stinging despite the harsh lip bite he gives himself as you walk over, your voice soft and even the way you speak is lighter, “Hoseok! You look well!”

Hoseok finds it in him to finally pull his sleeves back to his wrists and raises his head to look at you, “You look beautiful.”

The words flow out of him against his will, and while your eyes flash with something that’s nowhere near happy, you quickly regain your composure and laugh it off, and Hoseok relishes in the sound even though he knows it’s fake, “Thanks, I guess.”

He remembered a time when your response was different.

“So, how are things?” You start, working your coat off your shoulders and setting your bag to the right of you. 

Hoseok wracks his brain for an answer, something that wouldn’t sound pathetic or boring or too pleasant, “Oh, well… I haven’t changed much. I’ve been visiting family a lot lately. I recently got a promotion at work, and I’ve got a cat now.”

Your eyebrow raises at this and you chuckle, “A cat? What’s the name?” “Rin. He’s a cuddler and I have the scars to prove it.” At this, Hoseok raises his arm and pulls down his sleeve to reveal white cuts along his skin, all very clearly due to the claws of an enraged cat. The sight makes you shake your head.

“That’s why I told you we should have gotten a dog.” “Psh,” Hoseok falls back into the booth’s seat with an easy smile, “dogs are overrated. It’s cats that’ll rule the world one day.”

You make a face of mock disgust, “I’ve never heard such blasphemy in my life. I’d rather die with the dogs, thank you very much.”

Hoseok is about to make another cat elitist remark when a waitress makes her way over, and the two of you fall into ordering something to eat instead of starting world war three (though, you’re very tempted to not let it go).

It’s several minutes later, when you have a warm tea in your hands and Hoseok is eating a parfait that you decide to speak once more, having observed the muscles in his body no longer tense like they were when you first saw him. “You really do look well, Hoseok. I’m glad.”

Hoseok’s movements come to a halt, mouth full of yogurt and spoon digging for a blueberry when you say this. He tries really hard not to look you in the eye, instead focusing his gaze on your delicate hands holding your teacup, “So, how have you been?”

You, in turn, try not to feel hurt when he brushes off your comment, “Ah, things are really nice. I moved to a small house a little out of the city, and like I told you, I got a new job at a firm up the street. I’m an assistant so some days are pretty hectic, but I’m having such a wonderful time, Hoseok. It really feels like the job I needed, you know? I’m also going out more. I’ve been clubbing almost every other weekend with my friends.”

Hoseok nods, a bit surprised at the sound of you clubbing, “Really? You used to hate clubs with a passion before.”

Your smile turns a little tight, “Feelings change, apparently.”

Hoseok swallows the lump in his throat and shrinks back into his seat as if to escape the nasty feeling arising in his heart. The guilt weighs a ton, even twelve months later, it seems.

“It’s nothing major, Hoseok. I just like letting loose. Something I had no idea I liked before. Now that I have a bit of free time on my hands, it’s riveting. I’m sure there are things you’ve found out you actually really like too.” You bargain, the awkwardness in the air growing by the second. It doubles in size when Hoseok doesn’t reply for a minute.

You’re seconds from taking back your words, feeling bad for bringing up what was clearly still a tough topic. It was you that had called him here, you who had dug up all the bad memories that had followed your painful breakup, and it was you now making what was supposed to be a simple exchanging of words turn into a game of “who had moved on more?”. Hoseok beats you to it, however, “What else are you up to?”

“I… I’m dating someone.” You start tentatively, fully prepared to change the subject if he showed discomfort.

Yet, to your shock (and slight disappointment), he doesn’t show anything at all but a tough face you know all too well. It hurts you that he’s trying to play brave right now, “Tell me about him.”

You don’t exactly know where to start, whether to indulge about his interests and hobbies or to describe him physically, so instead, you start telling him the story of how you two met. You explain how the new job allowed you to meet Eunwoo, the person tasked with showing you around the workplace and getting you settled into your job. After a few bump-ins at the coffee machine, he had made it known that he was attracted to you and thus you began to date. It was nothing serious yet, but you liked him and he you, and it was the first time in a year that you’d felt romantic feelings for someone other than your ex sitting across from you at this table.

As you talked, Hoseok listened attentively, picking up on the details about how Eunwoo was an adventurer, someone who liked to go the extra mile. He lit up the room and everyone followed him, something that made a lot of people jealous of you for dating him. You had expressed it didn’t bother you that much; he wasn’t anything like you’d ever had before, and you admitted it was an exciting prospect to consider. He was, as Hoseok listened, nothing like him. And that was probably a good thing.

Eunwoo would know what he wanted the moment he wanted it. He wouldn’t confuse himself and end up losing the one thing he loved most.

“…and yeah,” you say and take a breath, a small smile on your face, “my friends love him.” 

Hoseok thinks, against his better judgement, that once upon a time your friends loved him too. “He must be a keeper then. I’m glad you’ve found someone who makes you feel alive, (Y/N). I… I only want you to feel loved.”

You look up from your tea with a jerk, and he looks up too, thinking something was wrong. Your breaths come out quick all of a sudden, eyes blazing as they stare into his own. They’re still so warm and familiar, almost like you never stopped looking in them. Almost like you hadn’t been dreaming of them every night for the last year. 

You stare and stare, trying to get a grip on your breathing when Hoseok pushes himself up from his seat and grabs some napkins from the table to hand to you, and you look at him in confusion before he points at your face, “You’re crying.”

Just as instantly as he says it, you become aware of the warm liquid trailing down your cheeks and making you gasp in embarrassment. They’re rushing from your eyes in an outflow, not contained even as you try to force yourself to stop, the surface of the napkins you press under your eyes quickly become damp and you think there’s something wrong with you for a minute, but it’s just the stunted sadness that had been creeping up on you since last Sunday, the sadness that made you ask him out this morning in the first place.

“I-I’m sorry, Hoseok,” he hates that you even think to apologize right now, knowing it was all his fault you were crying in the first place, “this is probably so awkward for you. I don’t mean to act like a weird, obsessive ex or anything, and I know you’d much rather be anywhere else than here talking to me about how I’ve ‘moved on’ but… I needed to see you once more to make sure.”

“Make sure of what?” His eyebrows screw up in confusion. 

“I needed to make sure I wasn’t in love with you anymore… so I could finally move on. But seeing you… seeing you still the same, still lovely as ever… no amount of what I change will ever make me forget how fucking lovestruck I am for you and probably always will be. What I felt for you was colossal. Hoseok, I swear my heart is going to break in two if I try to pretend I never loved you and still don’t.” 

A range of emotions hit him at once, watching you fumble to appear fine as people nearby start looking over to see what the problem was. To save you the embarrassment further, he slides out of his side of the booth and into yours, turning his broad shoulders until you’re shielded from nosy ears and prodding eyes. You seem to be thankful for it because you sink a little when he does it, but at the same time, you shift away from him as far as the booth would allow. He doesn’t blame you, but boy does it sting.

“Don’t… don’t force yourself to stop loving me,” he hates how asshole-y it makes him sound, but he quickly keeps talking, “don’t force anything in life, okay? Especially not feelings. If you love me still, that’s… that’s fine. It hurts probably, I know, but it’ll fade one day. You’ll keep dating Eunwoo and find out he’s a fucking great guy who you deserve to have, and he’ll help you forget all about me. There’ll come a day when you think about me and laugh instead of cry. People move on. It takes time, but it happens.” He has to greatly resist the urge to cradle your cheek in his large hand and pull you into a hug, because he knows it wouldn’t help you at all.

Still, he wishes.

You wipe at your face with the sleeves of your sweater, “I know, I know. I just wish it didn’t. I wish I could flip a switch and-” “And it would all go away? I understand.” 

At this, you scoff bitterly, “Isn’t that exactly what happened for you? One day you decided you didn’t love me anymore and it took you two months to say it?”

Hoseok, somewhere between horrified you’d think so and understanding that you would, frowns so hard you give him a funny look in return, “It… it came fast, I admit… but things aren’t what I thought they were when I first felt indifferent toward you. My first thought was, yes, I wasn’t in love with you anymore. My feelings for you had dwindled and everything felt heavy when we talked about our future together, something I was once so adamant about… but I realize now why that was. And… and maybe it was my mind telling me I wasn’t ready, or maybe it was my broken heart trying to save me from disappointment again. I still don’t really know what made me feel that way for so long, but I never… never fell out of love with you. Not really.”

Your lungs inflate to their full capacity but they stay that way, something in you too afraid to exhale, because this sounds way too similar to a dream you’d had more than once over the last year. “What… what are you saying?”

“I think I sabotaged myself,” Hoseok bitterly laughs, leaning into the seat with a heavy sigh, “I guess I thought that everything was going too well. Back then, that used to be a sign that everything was about to go to shit and I think I felt indifferent toward the situation and not you. I felt like if I didn’t break it off, you would, soon, and I didn’t know if I could take that feeling again. Not with you.”

It sounded pathetic to him, now that he was saying it out loud. He really fucked up, didn’t he? 

“That’s… that’s terrible, Hoseok.” 

“I know. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“But I’m glad you told me.”

Hoseok turns to look at you, blinking and lost, “You are?” 

Your tears have long since stopped, and now you sit up straighter, leaning slightly into the boy even as he fidgets nervously, hands fumbling under the table in lieu of something to do, “Yes. Because a year ago, you wouldn’t have told me at all. You say you haven’t changed but you’ve matured. You know more about yourself now. I’m proud.” 

Hoseok himself can feel tears beginning to pool at the edges of his eyelids, so he turns his head away from you just in case they break away before he can stop them, but he stops himself midway. Because, really, what progress would he have been making if he tried to hide himself away from you just moments after you’d told him you were proud he hadn’t before?

“So I guess this is where we are now. Still loving each other. What messes we are, right?” He laughs cynically to himself, “we seriously don’t know how to break up.”

You laugh back anyway, despite the way his face is downturned and how much you hate to see it that way, your hand coming up to cup his cheek as you ignore the small breath he releases when you do, “We do, we just do it differently than everyone else.”

“Are we going to leave it like this?” Hoseok’s expression is a tad desperate, wet brown eyes watching yours for an answer before your lips would give him one. He leans into your touch when you start to inch your hand away, so you decide to leave it there for the moment.

“I think we should... for now, at least. Like I said, I’m living a different life right now, and you are too. I think you’ve spent too much time focusing on relationships that you haven’t had time to love and repair yourself yet. So let’s do that. Let’s love ourselves and find out who we are and go from there. We don’t have to isolate ourselves from each other but… let’s put this on hold, hm?” You let your hand fall and he doesn’t make a move to follow it this time, his expression soft. He nods with a smile that doesn’t resemble the forced ones he’d been giving, and it makes you smile yourself.

Just then, you feel your phone vibrate in your pocket and you pull it out, finding that it’s your boss calling, and you can only guess what that could be about. You look up to Hoseok and he seems to get the hint, scooting out of the booth silently as you do the same with your jacket and bag in hand. You’re about to dig through your purse to throw some money down for the tea when Hoseok stops your hand, a gentle look in his eyes, “Say it’s one on me. An apology for making you cry this early in the morning.” 

You shoot him a grateful smile and whisper a parting to him before answering your phone and raising said phone to your ear as you make your way out of the cafe. Hoseok quietly settles back down into his seat and watches you walk through the window, mouth moving a mile a minute as you discuss God knows what with your boss. Hoseok is about to go back to his parfait when something glints in the morning light.

A gold necklace hangs around your neck, something he hadn’t noticed before when he’d been sitting right across from you. A piece he’d bought you two years ago for your anniversary, something he had expected you to pawn off the minute you moved out of his place.

To you, Hoseok had changed despite his belief he hadn’t. To him, you hadn’t changed much at all, despite your belief you had. 

There would probably still be nights where Hoseok would wish for you and what you used to have, and those nights would probably hurt just as badly as they had before, but something felt different about today. His shoulders felt a little lighter, and the future felt a little less bleak. Today, he could smile and… maybe. Maybe... it wouldn’t hurt all that bad.

Undeniably Important Chapter 9: Coincidences?

I’m bored and hyped up and cannot study for the life of me, so have chapter 9 everyone! Hope you all enjoy!

Chapter 1 – Chapter 2 – Chapter 3 – Chapter 4 – Chapter 5 – Chapter 6 – Chapter 7 -- Chapter 8

2:45 pm

Anxiety could not believe his eyes. Everything that Logan had theorized about him were real situations that he could testify to. From the Fight or Flight response, to the feeling of nervousness, and even the butterflies in Thomas's tummy. Logan had even gone so far to say that Anxiety could quite possibly represent Thomas's body as a whole. Involuntary functions included. Some of the descriptions the Logical trait gave, made Anxiety slightly sick to his stomach, but at least he was giving a thorough description of his investigation.

Logan even referenced a curve. Something about relating productivity to Anxiety and that he is needed in performing everyday tasks. Anxiety didn't fully understand it, but it wasn't his job to.

The darker aspect continued to skim his theory. All the information was there. Logan truly did believe that Anxiety was more than just anxiety. He had described it all so well that even Anxiety himself was beginning to believe that he was more than what his name suggested. The darker trait found himself slightly smiling as he read more of the information on the page, but suddenly his face fell as he realized what he had done.

He hadn't trusted Logan's words. Anxiety needed proof, but sometimes in friendships proof is what breaks the bond more than strengthening it. But, there were times Logan was just as mean to him as Roman was. Maybe, Logan deserved it. Anxiety closed the notepad and looked at it sorrowfully lost in his own thoughts. Now, no one could trust him. Not even Patton.

He had let down the one aspect that actually believed in him. And now...he might lose a potential friend. He knew what he had to do, but surprise surprise! He was anxious. Don't get me wrong, Anxiety is no coward. But when it comes to facing challenges, it takes him awhile before he musters up enough strength to own his actions. And facing Logan? Granted he was the logical trait and he couldn't feel much anger, but you never wanted to be on his real bad side.

Anxiety shuddered. He thought about the different ways he could approach the situation, but they all seemed to end at the same place: complete loss of trust. In frustration, he gently tossed the notepad to the other side of the bed and was about to go back to his music, when he gave the notepad one final glance. In the end, he was very glad that he did. It was not only his saving grace, but everyone else's.

From that one glance he gave, he noticed the notepad had opened to a page that lied in between the blank pages towards the back of the pad. Written on that page was one single word. A word that spoke volumes to the one reading it.

Choices.

Anxiety's eyes widened. He was only a second ago trying to comprehend why Logan would write something completely out of the ordinary in such a random place, but then something struck him.

It wasn't Logan's handwriting.

It was his own.

A half an hour earlier...

Logan roused slowly. He had taken a short rest after opening Patton's presents and putting them in their proper places. Now that he was awake, he could begin to get ready for the dinner tonight. He thought about the tie that Patton had given him in one of the gift boxes. It was a deep blue with pictures of all breeds of puppies and dogs on it. As much as he hated to admit it to himself, he really liked that tie. Now, would he ever wear it would be the next question to ask.

He thought for a moment. Patton gave him the tie and the fatherly aspect was probably expecting him to wear it tonight. Logan's thought process was as follows: he was given a gift, it is impolite to refuse a gift or not use the gift for its intended purpose, and because they were going somewhere somewhat fancy, it was acceptable to dress occasionally. There. He had reasoned with himself that it was ok to wear the gift.

Logan got dressed into his normal 'teacher' outfit, but instead of his signature blue tie, he replaced it with the gift tie. He straightened himself up and looked in the mirror. The dog tie didn't look half bad on him. It was very eye catching though and Logan was slightly nervous of the comments he would receive from Roman and Anxiety. But as long as Morality was happy, it shouldn't matter too much.

In letting his mind wander, Logan had not realized that he was smiling into the mirror. When he saw his lips curving upward, it scared him so much he hopped backward an inch. He shook his head in disbelief and reaccepted his straight face. After combing his hair, he sat down at his desk and reopened his notepad. He had already looked through it once before he fell asleep, but he just wanted to make sure nothing was out of the ordinary. Seeing it out of his possession this morning had really nerve-racked his brain.

He flipped through the Theories section and opened it up to a page with no label. This was something that he had begun writing this morning before the Outfit War. The events of the previous night like his encounter with Anxiety and the spilled milk had caused him to ask a question that many overlook in their day to day lives. Wanting to remember where he left off from earlier, he began to read quietly to himself so he could regain his train of thought.

3:03 pm.

"The human being can be divided into roughly four parts: the mind, the heart, the spirit, and the body." Anxiety read.

"Each has their own, unique role and are very different from each other. But there is one thing that they all have in common: they can all be affected by the same outside sources."

"These outside sources could be mental, physical, emotional, and even spiritual in some scientific cases. Here is an example of a physical outside source. If someone were to be punched by another person, a bruise would appear and their body would be noticeably affected, but so would the person's mood and thought process. The person then will have to think of a way to respond to the situation they are in and decide if they will fight back, run away, or take an alternative course of action." Anxiety scratched his head thoughtfully.

"An emotional outside source could be hurtful or encouraging words. When heard, they either build or tear down one's ego, affecting the mood, thought processes, and eventually the productivity of the body for usually the remainder of the day."

"All four sides of the human being are needed every second of every day and often work together like a team. There are times, however, when it is not an outside source, but an internal source that affects the person. These sources are but not limited to: negative thoughts, internal injuries, disabilities, sickness, and the list goes on. When these occur, it normally has a larger impact on the person, because it puts a strain on the relationship of the four parts. When uniting to fight an outside source, the human has a better chance of survival because the foundation is holding strong. The same cannot be said when fighting an internal source because if just one of the four is acting up, the results could be damaging to the human. Or even fatal if one of them happened to no longer exist."

Anxiety let his mind rest for a second as he turned the page. This was a lot of information to take in. Logic certainly owned up to his name.

"The human brain is built to learn, gather information, and rewire itself accordingly to its surroundings and the situations it experiences. It does this through the different problems it encounters. Normally, the problems that happen outside of the human being are the experiences that shape them into who they are today, however; This is only true if all four sides are considered one human being. If, for some reason, the four parts are 'allowed' more leeway, they can begin to explore their limits on their own without needing the other sides' help or approval. Essentially, it just means it is easier for the human to break apart inside because harmony is not as easily obtained."

"In the case of Thomas, we are still Thomas and he is still us. We only figuratively gained a conscience because he personified Roman, who was able to work inside of Thomas's imagination and create the mind palace. The mind palace is the loop hole inside of the pocket dimension. Roman was not able to expand Thomas's imagination directly to accomodate us, but the mind palace had already existed between the fourth and fifth dimensions. (see chapter 5 for explanation on this part) Patton's, Anxiety's, and my parts of the brain registered the mind palace not as imagination, but as a bridge to the fourth dimension and to other unknown areas of Thomas's mind. This is why we he can summon us voluntarily, or we can 'pop' in on him when he leasts expects it."

"But because we can do all of these fascinating things, we need to be careful. I have been able to find no sources that state that other people were able to achieve this sort of understanding. Thomas must be a special case. His decisions influence the real world on a very large scale, but now ours can too. We can act unbeknownst to Thomas, even though he is involuntarily controlling us. This means that everything happening inside the mind palace can be considered an internal source. Not only that, but outside sources also affect his sides more than they would have originally. It is undeniably important that now more than ever we practice good teamwork and be responsible for everyone's-"

The writing stopped there.

Anxiety felt as if he had ridden a roller coaster that just stopped working half way up the drop-off. Be responsible for everyone's...what? Wait. No.

He rummaged through the blank pages of the notepad until he found the one page the pad had opened to earlier.

Instead of tossing the notepad in frustration like he did earlier, he chucked it at the wall in complete bewilderment. Thump!

"WHAT THE HELL!?"

1 minute earlier...

"It is undeniably important that now more than ever we practice good teamwork and be responsible for everyone's-" This was where Logan had left off. Satisfied that he remembered where he was going with his newest theory, he picked up a pen and wrote the last word of the sentence.

"...choices." He was about to write the next section when he noticed something odd. The ink hadn't come out of the pen and onto the paper. There was no evidence he had even tried adding another word. He raised an eyebrow, tried shaking the pen, and then preceded to write the word again. Still nothing came out. This was a pen that came from one of Morality's gift boxes, so it should be very new and easy to work with, unless it was a prank.

Logan rolled his eyes and grabbed a random sheet of scratch paper from his desk. In the corner of the paper, he drew a heart with the pen. To his surprise, the ink came out perfectly fine. Logan scratched his head.

"Strange." He whispered to himself. Again, he tried to write the same word on his notepad. Again it didn't work. His gaze shifted between the pen and the notepad.

"Is this a joke?" His mouth slightly agape as he stared at the page in utter disbelief, but was shaken out of his thoughts when he heard a muffled thump.

Thump!

"WHAT THE HELL?!" It was Anxiety's muffled shout coming from his room. As expected, Logan could hear Patton's door swing open and his footsteps while running to the darker aspects room. The conversation between Anxiety and Patton could not be heard clearly, because Logan was still in his room. Patton was more than likely just checking to make sure Anxiety was okay.

Logan refocused on the notepad in front of him. He had to get to the bottom of this new mystery. He checked the clock in his room.

3:16 pm.

Logan grumbled. He didn't have enough time to do a thorough research process on the notepad before dinner, but at least he could get started on it. After pulling out several things he needed from various places around his room, he began the process of deductive reasoning. He tried to think of all the possible probabilities that this effect would have been caused by. But little did he know, he was still missing one important piece of evidence. Anxiety still had the real one.

4:17 pm.

Thomas was sitting on his couch when a car pulled up into his drive way and sounded its horn. He jumped off the couch, grabbed his wallet, grabbed his keys, and walked out the door making sure to lock it behind him.

"Hey Sanderstorm!" It was Joan. "You ready to go?"

"Ready as I'll ever be!" Thomas walked up to the car and got into the back seat with Leo.

"Where we going Thomas?" Talyn looked behind the passenger seat at their friend.

"Mahzu Sushi and Grill!" Thomas said confidently.

"Alright. Here we go!" Joan drove off and the friends laughed all the way to the restaurant.

Taglist: @mewsicalmiss @here-to-vent @anonymous-snake @cup-of-blue @storytellerofuntoldlegends@cookieartcannon @thagrinbery @ts-sideblog @protecterofalltheaus @pasteries-and-portugal @justanotherpurplebutterfly@remmythepegasis @leesacrakon @kitsuneprideleader@fancifulfox @dolphin-squirrel @evilmuffin @petunia9402@greymane902 @we-get-it-youre-adorable @withoutfandomsiamnothing @irrelevantbutfabulous @allmycopshowsarecancelled @virgils-jacket @just-fic-me-up@evanisonfire @fandomsandnonsense7 @novagalaxy4real (Let me know if you want to be tagged. :) )

P.S. (I’m very proud of how this chapter turned out!)

9 Steps to Writing Blog Posts That Engage and Transform

How I Write My Blog Posts

  You may be wondering how I write my blog posts.  It's a process that generally follows the same path, though sometimes outside influences may change the path a bit. In this post I’ll take you through my process.  You may find it helpful, but remember it's never about the process.  Your approach may be different than mine, but that's OK.  Do what works for you. What you always have to remember is that your audience wants to be informed and educated.  Keep your posts interesting and provide information on topics that are of current interest and timely . This doesn’t apply to just blog posts.  You could use the same process for creating your other web content including your YouTube videos or podcast episodes.   My First Step is Pretty Logical, I Select a Topic   I'm presently writing three blogs.  The Better Business Alliance is my main blog, however I also address two topics with my other blogs that are also important to me.   Accessibility International and Sustainability International are written to address two topics that should matter to all of us.  The topics of Accessibility and Sustainability are important and affect all of our lives. The topics I choose to blog about in each blog are either points that are of particular interest to me, or need to be discussed because of their importance for all of us.   My Better Business Alliance blog is mainly focused on helping business owners develop a Digital Marketing Strategy to help them grow their business.  Digital Marketing may seem to be an overwhelming task for most small business owners.  It's not, if you approach it by breaking it down into a number of related steps  for successfully marketing your business. My blogs teach people how to do things.  The majority of my posts are “how to” content.  If you have a different style of blog, you may follow a different path for developing your post topics.   Consider the Needs of Your Readers   While many of my topics come out of readers’ questions or problems, sometimes I just write about something that I feel will help and inform the reader.  It's important at this step and take a moment to think about my reader’s situation.  I will write a couple of sentences about who I'm trying to reach and how they may view the topic that I have decided to write about. By putting myself in the reader's mindset, I am better able to write with empathy and write a post that is truly relevant to my reader.  It's also important to consider what the reader will do after reading the post. If I'm writing about a problem, I might wonder if my reader's have the same problem.  How would they feel about the problem?  What have they tried to help them solve the problem?  What has stopped them from solving the problem in the past?  How can my post help them solve their problem? Before you even begin writing, you should think about what your call to action will be.  This will shape the headline, your introduction, how you compose your post's body, and how you reach your conclusion.   Create Your Working Title   Once I have selected my topic and considered how I want to approach my reader's perspective, I like to come up with a working title. Creating my working title often helps me develop a unique angle for the post.  If I'm working on an idea for my Accessibility International blog, I may want to help my readers better understand the need for alternative text. Most of my reader's may have some grasp of what alternative text is.  However, the correct use of alternative text in the many different situations where it is appropriate and necessary are very diverse and sometimes difficult to understand.  Communicating the uses in a cogent and correctly worded titl is an important step for writing the blog post and telling what your reader's need to know. It's important to keep in mind that this is just a working title.  After completing the post, I will revisit my title choice and tweak it.  Occasionally, it will be changed several times, til I have the title for my post that best expresses what I am trying to communicate to my readers.   Outline Your Post   This is when I list the main points I want to teach someone in my post.  It doesn't require a lot of writing here.  It's normally just the main points in a Word document on my computer. During this process I am examining the identified problem, brainstorming answers to the questions and solutions for the problem.   This involves outlining the steps a reader must follow to solve their problem or master a new skill. It's like building the skeleton of your post, where you will add the muscle at a later time.  Many of the bullet points which I have created often become subheadings in my completed post.   By developing the main sections and then the subheadings for each section, your post begins to take shape.  Many times I will have more points than I'll use in my finished post.  I'll begin to remove the weaker or less relevant points which allows me to focus on the more important things that I want to say. Now I'll take a little time to arrange the remaining points into the most logical order.  Many bloggers seem to skip this step.  But sorting your information into a logical order is a very important step.  You need the points you cover to each build on the information provided by the preceding section.  This will make a noticeable difference to the readability and quality of your finished post.   Critique Your Outline   With your outline finished, it's a good time to ask some questions you may have about your developing post.  Will my readers find my post informative and useful?  Will readers have a positive reaction when they read it, or will they just think it is okay?  Is it groundbreaking, will it change reader's lives in any way?  After people finish reading the post will they still have questions? Now is the time to ask these questions.  Instead of waiting until you have finished writing the entire post.  Then if you find that there are possible gaps or weak ideas in your post, you can take the time to do the additional research which may be required.   Write the Introduction   Some bloggers write their post and then write the introduction.  However writing the introduction first often  works best for me.  It helps me establish the proper tone for my post and allows me to get into the mindset adapting to the natural flow of writing my post. Much like the working title, the introduction often shapes the direction of the post.  My introduction is usually one to three paragraphs long.  But again like the working title, I go back to edit the introduction after finishing the post. As you write the introduction, consider your reader and their situation, question or problem.  Show them you really understand how they feel. If you can show some empathy in the first few lines of your post, you’ll make a deeper connection with your reader.  And they’ll want to read the rest of your article. This is also a good point to paint a picture of how the reader will benefit from reading your post.  What will they be able to achieve after reading it?   Expand on the Main Points   With your outline written, it's time to write more on each point to create the main part of your content.  You just give each of your points the additional content and facts beyond what you’ve already written. Keep your reader in mind while you write. What problem are they trying to solve?  As they read your post, imagine what they are wondering about at different points in your post?  Will they be confused while they read?  You want to ensure that your post makes sense and does what is intended. By now it’s probably clear that I write my posts in the order that people will read them.  I begin with the working title, then the introduction and move on to writing the body of the post.  This works best for me, however you'll have to adjust and do what works best for you.   Write the Conclusion and Your Call to Action   Writing a great blog posts requires that it also must come to a conclusion.  I create this after writing the main part of my post, and it's a matter of recapping what I've taught readers during the rest of the post. I’ll restate the problem or question I set out in the introduction, and remind people what I’ve tried to teach them.  I’ll also summarize the main points to refresh the readers memory.  It’s then really important to give readers something specific to take action on.   Go back to whatever you identified as your reader's need, and clearly state what you want them to do next.  My call to action might be encouraging them to try out the technique they’ve just learned, or to leave a comment or interact in some way. Don’t give them several different things to do here.  And make sure your call to action flows from the goals of your blog and this particular post.   Add Depth and Appeal to the Post   At this stage of the process, I look for things I could add to make a post even better.  I might want to include a story or anecdote which would add to what I have written.  Or I might add an image or embed a video that would add relevance to my post.  Charts and graphics could illustrate a key point in your post, making it easier to understand. You could even add a quote or an interview that would add another perspective to your post to lend it further credibility.  This is about making the post better, and ensuring that it looks good and has plenty of visual interest. Edit and Proofread the Post   With this final step, it’s important to go over your post one final time to make sure you haven’t made any mistakes or typos.  Allowing some time between when I write and when I edit is also important.  I feel that we use different parts of our brains for critical thinking and editing. You don't want to waste all your hard work by publishing a post that’s riddled with errors and mistakes.  Quality control matters, so make sure you have sufficient time to edit and proofread. You could also get someone else in to help you at this stage of the process.  It could be a fellow blogger who you swap posts with, or a professional editor or proofreader.   Visit Our Web Accessibility BlogVisit Our Business Sustainability Blog

A Quick Summary of My Process

  Here’s a quick recap of my blog post writing process from start to finish: Select a topic Consider the Needs of Your Readers Create Your Working Title Outline Your Post Critique Your Outline Write the Introduction Expand on the Main Points Write the Conclusion and Your Call to Action Add Depth and Appeal to the Post Edit and Proofread the Post   That’s my workflow.  Perhaps you have an extra step, or do things in a different order.  Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.   Develop Your Own Workflow   Regardless of your workflow, it’s important to pause along the way and be consider the process.  Keep thinking about who’s reading your content.  The reader with the questions, problems and feelings.  If you can show you understand them, you’ll create a real sense of connection. So don’t just think about creating content.  Think about crafting it, and taking care and time to make it the best it can be.   Read the full article

Vader Strikes Back - Prologue/Thoughts

So I should be working on my sequel to the tumblr posts of Luke and Vader saving the Galaxy that became the actual fic Back from the Future and I thought I had it all planned out. I was going to draft a fic about 11-12 year old Luke and Leia Skywalker having some summer adventure, meeting up with some of the Original Trilogy characters with different life stories living in this Brave New Future that Luke and Vader created. I had thought out some conflict points, was working on getting my characters in my heads, playing logic games about what and how people would be different in this new present when another idea hit me.

What if it wasn’t Vader that died killing off Palpatine when he and Luke faced him down with Fives, Chatterbox, and Hardcase? What if it had been Luke who died? 

Sometimes I hate my brain.

Now I should be working on my Luke and Leia story (tentatively titled “Rogue Twins: a Skywalker Story” -- I know, I know, I am silly in naming my fics) but I cannot get it out of my head.

What would Vader do if Luke had died? And all I can think of is from Mace Windu’s perspective. (And I barely have any idea on how to write from his POV, his voice and character elude me!) But that is what I see. Mace trying to figure out what happened: the rogue Jedi Luke is dead killing Palpatine, but the Sith, he is still alive and the clones are hiding him/covering for him. No one knows where he is but there is a pile of suspicious bodies turning up and they are all turning out to be co conspirators of Palpatine. And Mace is trying to find him and following behind the destruction in Vader’s wake and he talks to everyone, one after another, always ten steps behind Vader.

Because Vader falls into a Pit of Despair. He has failed AGAIN. Oh, Padme has lived. He has twins-- no, Anakin has twins, Vader has nothing. He lives but his son is gone. His daughter was never his to begin with. His Padme is dead. The galaxy is in shambles and he is alone.

And the image won’t leave me alone when I should be working on the sequel, the domestic adorable sequel. Instead all my mind and my muse keeps giving me is angst. ANGST! 

I see the 501st rallying around Vader. Luke’s students trying to do what Luke would have wanted them to do, protect and help support Luke’s father. Rex would finally distract Vader by doing what worked best for Luke: point Vader and his mountain of rage at an appropriate target and let Vader be. And so Rex reminds Vader of his plans for Tatooine and let us just say the campaign is bloody. It is shock and awe. It is brutal. It is what Vader was known for after 20 years of serving an Empire than never existed. The clones didn’t realize how much Luke tempered his father and so they try and fill the void as best they can in Luke’s honor.

I see the clones in general decide that Vader is adopted as one of them. That is what Luke would have wanted. When the Jedi Order comes calling, they don’t say anything. “Vader? Vader, who? Sith, you say? No, can’t say we’ve seen any Sith, General Windu. Not since the war ended. Perhaps if you provide a description?” And Mace will just give them the Eye, like really? A description? They guy’s image is plastered all over the holonet and you need me to give you a description. But no, the clones will not be helping the Order find Vader. Hells, they even try to warn him off. (99 would totally gently tell Mace off).

And the Council wants to find him. In unraveling Sith treachery and they have gotten it into their heads that that means hunting down the one wild card left-- Vader. 

Obi-Wan isn’t interested in their Sith hunt at all. First of all he is helping Anakin and Padme and then he is on Mandalore and he is just done with all this shit, y’know? Anakin has severe PTSD (his son from the future is dead at the hands of his mentor, his Sith self is out and about in the galaxy with his men killing people) and Padme is not doing much better. Second, Obi-Wan in this story having actually watched the holonet vid of Palpatine’s and Luke’s death recognizes Anakin’s fighting style a light year away (he trained the boy for over a decade, he is not blind) and he knows who Vader is and what he must have lost. He cannot kill Anakin, any Anakin past, present or alternate future.  He won’t do it. Not when Vader helped defeat Palpatine. He will not help the Council find Vader now when all Vader seems to be doing is taking out the last of Palpatine’s puppets with extreme prejudice. 

But that doesn’t mean Obi-Wan doesn’t watch the news fearful of the day Vader crosses over the line. Because if he does, then someone will have to go after him and Obi-Wan fears that day and fears what the Order/the Force/Anakin/his own conscious may ask him to do. 

So Obi-Wan doesn’t tell Mace anything, even when the man comes to Mandalore to talk to him and to Ventress trying to find out what Vader is up to. Obi-Wan doesn’t tell Mace who Vader really is/was. 

And Ventress would laugh in Mace’s face. Outright laugh at the idea of Mace hunting down Vader and taking him out. She doesn’t mince words. Mace is a dead man if he challenges Vader. And Mace would be all “How do I know you’re not working with him, his apprentice? How do I know the Separatists haven’t just found a new leader and war is still going on and you are about to attack the Republic at its most weakest?”

And Satine is having none of this, you hear? There is PEACE. Luke insisted the war is OVER and his name and in his memory that is what they are going to have. She isn’t having anyone or anything jeopardize that even if it means going toe to toe with Windu and the Order. She throws him off the planet. He protests, Mace looks to Obi-Wan to support him or to leave with him. Hells, Mace looks to Vos to back him and his Council mandate up and both men are like, “No, no. We’re just fine. We’re staying right here. The Duchess said YOU have to leave. We are here to see the Reconstruction Accords signed, thank you very much.” 

Mace then goes to Serrano. That doesn’t work much better than confronting Ventress. Vader isn’t there and Dooku makes it clear he has given his parole to Luke and he hasn’t broken it so there is nothing the Council can do to him. Dooku also points out Mace would be well served staying very very far away from Vader if he wants to continue breathing.

Mace doesn’t listen. He keep searching. He finally tracks down Senator Amidala (he is stonewalled and sent on wild goose chases for weeks by her aides and her friends and even Ahsoka!)

Ahsoka isn’t going to help. At first she thinks Vader has lost it without Luke by his side and is too dangerous to be left to his own devices, but then Tarkin shows up in pieces and other evidence surfaces of those willing to help back Palpatine and then news of Tatooine reaches the holonet and Ahsoka sees how it affects Anakin. She looks down at the twins in their crib and recognizes the rogue Jedi in the little baby boy asleep next to his sister. Nope, if she follows after Vader it will be to help him as Rex and the others clearly are, not to kill him for the Order. And since when did Jedi become assassins? Luke would definitely have something to say about all that!

The Noghri take Mace unawares when he tries to enter Padme and Anakin’s home one night. They decide not to wake the family and only bother to tell Padme of the intruder after breakfast the next morning. Padme insists she can handle it so Ahsoka and Anakin take the babies off on a picnic and Padme sits down to a reluctant meeting with Windu. 

I don’t know where this story goes from here. I don’t know WHY I seem to have this in my head only from Mace’s perspective. I have always found him very very hard to write without dissolving into simply inappropriate “bashing” of a character. (The only one harder for me is Clone Wars/Prequel Obi-Wan, that man is like the Hamlet of the Star Wars universe). I don’t know why I can’t write this from Vader’s perspective. I don’t know why I can’t focus to write my true sequel with the Skywalker twins.

But I have this scene in my head of Windu facing Vader at some point in time. Perhaps Depa and her Padawan are with him. Perhaps some of Mace’s men are with him too (not sure how that works logically). Perhaps he has convinced them that he just wants to talk to Vader but it turns nasty and violent and Windu expects his troopers to help subdue Vader but Vader has the 501st with him and the troopers aren’t down with that, they aren’t down with that at all and there is a hell of a fight. (Or maybe that is too dramatic and silly and out of character but damn it, it is in my head).  

Windu loses the fight and would have lost his head the way Dooku did in Episode III except something stays Vader’s blade.  Some sense of something, or someone stops him. And then . . .

I don’t know. I just can’t seem to stop thinking about this alternate storyline but I am not sure any of it makes any logical sense. So the question is do I go down this rabbit hole and follow Vader alone without Luke wherever that story goes or do I refocus on my sequel?

Decisions. Decisions.

DOING PURGO

© I David Kitchen assert ownership to the following work.

DOING PURGO

  I wasn’t even Catholic, so it’s not like I had signed up for the whole concept.

They tell you-

You die

You get to know your ultimate destination right away. Heaven or hell

If it’s going to be heaven you may have to do time in purgatory first. It’s about getting yourself cleansed before you can enter Heaven and get The Everlasting Joy.

That’s what they tell you back in life. Especially that bit about being personally judged the minute you die so you know right off there and then where you are going to end up…ultimately. They don’t publish stats, but I’m guessing most of us end up here in purgatory for some time…except there is no time. That’s the big catch. We don’t have time here.

On the upside, it’s not like medieval paintings. Being whipped, impaled on spikes, boiled in oil…and it never has been. I’m guessing that was a case of blasting out the terror in ways that people could get and understand. Stick to the rules or you’re going to spend eternity having a great long spike hammered through your innards.

We do suffer but what they give you is endless (risk assessed) Ennui alternating with Nausea. Back and forth sometimes two nausea’s followed by five ennui but ‘overtime’ it averages out to fifty-fifty. That’s what they say. The orderlies on the desk as you come in tell you. “It’s exactly half and half”. What they don’t tell you is we don’t have time here. It’s just a kind of suspension where things come and go. No sun up or sundown. No seasons or weather worthy of the name. You can’t say “tomorrow this chunk of nausea will be completed and then I’m doing some ennui for five weeks. Then in five years I’m out and got everlasting joy”. It would be a lot easier to do if that was the case. Instead, we just have this suspension. A prorogation of living

It really cracks people up when they first come in. I saw it when we were on standby shortly after arrival and waiting for allocation. The fog and silence not yet in place. The newly arrived recently deceased asking for a statement of goals they have to achieve to demonstrate sufficient cleansing has happened and therefore progress onto the place after this can occur (that’s what we call it). The orderlies doing the induction sessions just keep saying, “it’s not like that. No one is going to give you goals. We can’t describe it, you will just have to wait and see. Then you will know”. Then we, the recently died all laugh. That’s just a habit thing. Nothing in it. Just the empty mechanics of laughter

So it goes on. Sometimes it’s the same Ennui. That night you had to spend at the airport in Toronto where nothing was open apart from the sushi bar. When you sat down for a while then walked around and sat down again. No Wi-Fi and anyway no mobiles. I get that one a lot. Other times it’s like the dismal November days you used to have when the year was almost out and any interest or energy had gone. Just sitting around and waiting. And that boredom and absence of sensation were so unbearable that the thought of twanging the back of your hand with an elastic felt attractive. You get so near going crazy that you can imagine welcoming The Nausea’s when they come round again. It’s got to be better than Ennui. But that’s just memory fooling you and you remember the instant that it starts that the nausea is much worse than the ennui. Back in life, nausea might be mainly dizziness or wanting to vomit or an intense headache but here it’s all three and all at the same time. They give me (or I select without knowing it) at that time when I went to the old cinema in Headingley in Leeds. I’d taken a girlfriend to see the film, Watership Down. Awful nausea came over me at the cinema, her as well. Both of us together while we were watching the Bright Eyes scene (where Art Garfunkel sings the song).

Heightened sensations all around. The rotation in my brain, losing all independent balance. Having to hang onto things to stay standing. Worst of all the feel of the sick wanting to come up but not being able to. Wave after wave of spasms from gut to gullet. So strong that they felt like they might turn me inside out. Guts on the outside.

We got across Leeds by bus to our flat above the hairdressers in Harehills. The pair of us lay there for days waking and sleeping, throwing up into buckets arranged around the bed and then falling back into filthy sheets and waiting for the next wave to well up. On the third day, the monster was a little subdued but I could barely hope it was over. We were so awfully weak afterwards. Lifting a glass of water seemed more than was possible. We lay propped up on the filthy pillows and gazed at the ceiling or the far wall. Awful, awful. Then inched into sleep. I get to relive that episode regularly for my Purgo but it’s not half as bad as the other one I won’t talk about.

What’s the hardest thing, and this needs some thinking about. is that there is no sense or order to anything. The episodes (I suppose torture of a kind) seemingly come and go of their own accord with seemingly not a second between one and the next. Back in life, time progressed from A to B, there were schedules and causes, now we just waft about. How much time has passed I cannot tell, No one can because there is no time only suspension, and flashes of repetitive memory and perception.

And there is no logic either. None of these ghastly things relates in any way to the bad things we are supposed to have done in life. There is barely time to think about one's supposed sins. Even when I’m on the Ennui, one would assume there would be endless opportunity to think about regrets (or indeed lack of regret, but now there is just flatness and energy absence. Your thoughts only circulate around immediate sensations… from the chair, your back and stomach. The ground under one's feet. The sensations, violent or enervating fill the space, and no greater thoughts can break through. I do want to think, to try and remember what it was that might have resulted in me being here. I’m buggered if I know.

But no, we don’t get any of that. We just hang around and sensations (dull to the point of absolute enervation or violent and convulsive pass through us). Seemingly without end.

There are other souls. We do sometimes see each other. It’s like encountering people in dense fog when you’re walking up on a high moor somewhere. A face and then a body will emerge out of the grey-whiteness and come toward you. They will say “how do” or “hello,” and you answer back the same and carry on. That’s all that is possible. It’s like our mouths are only loaded with those words and nothing else. No option for conversation.

I do have a regretful thought. One that prods me like a sharp stick. Why had I not asked more back in the induction room when the orderlies were there for us to talk to? I know what I would have said now, “Who do you have to impress to get out of here?”

It is not clear how one might impress. There is seemingly just no cause and effect and no way to anticipate the end so it’s driving me crazy. I suspect there is no structure of authority that can say “well done” and “On you go to The Everlasting Joy and Glory”. There is just me and I can’t reach myself.

It’s at this precise moment the obvious dawns on me. I am having thoughts. Proper ones and have been doing for some time (so there is time again). It’s like the last bit that realised this is the part responsible for knowing such things. The awareness has come upon me like sap rising up through a tree.

The fog blows off, and I am back in the prison library where I once worked. It’s familiar as always. The bookshelves, the library orderlies counter, the office behind me to the right. The green button on the wall we press for assistance when it all kicks off. The locked doors at either end of the room, but now there are no keys at my hip and that gives me unease.

I am not on my own. I sense a presence or three over at the orderlies counter. They speak politely, “Please come across Mr Ryan, Everything is ready, time is going on so we need to make a start. It should not take long”

The three figures are dressed in lightweight blue polyester jumpsuits that look to zip up at the front. Besides that, I cannot remark on much. They are close to amorphous. No not totally true. They are like balloon people but the balloons are long and silvery. They protrude at the point where the head, arms and feet might have been. There is nothing to discern that indicates individuality. They are Amorphoids. That’s the name I give them. The name choice came from nowhere and is a little shocking. My thoughts are flowing again and I am able to create. Wonderful.

The Amorphoid in the centre is resting a leg on the table and a voice emerges from the end of it. “Hello, Mr Ryan, and welcome. Let me say at once, Thank you for spending your Purgatory with us. It means a lot. Here at Pergo Cleansing, we endeavour to deliver a safe, effective and a truly cleansing Purgatory experience in partnership with The Universal Order and XOX. How is ya feeling?”

I move to speak but it’s hard to draw out the words. The mechanism is sluggish “I am good thank you. Just feeling a little odd”. My own sound shocks me. It’s squeaky. Bugger. This would be an excellent time to have gravitas.

“Superb, excellent. Glad to hear that. Now let’s crack on. We have all got things to do. I need to tell you upfront there has been a problem with your Purgatory. This is rare, and we are constantly working to ensure it never happens again, but it did happen in your case. But you are very rare. We lost your records, and because of that we are not one hundred per cent sure why you are here”

My innards convulse and force upwards a wretched primal wail.”OOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAA”.  It’s of me but not by me. Or that’s how it feels but then the two things merge and become one. I am reconstituting.

Amorphoid Number 1, goes on like nothing happened. “We do have a tag though and that’s the most important thing, it’s just the case notes themselves that have disappeared. They give the background information, like potential exacerbating or mitigating factors and of course the judge’s directions for eternity”. My rib cage expands and contracts wildly. Forcing air in and out. I hear sobbing. That is probably me.

“And you were put into the Soul Cleansing Phase without a discharge date. This is something we call a ‘Never Ever Event’, and when such things happen they need to be investigated by senior operational managers. That does not directly affect you but I just wanted to say there will be a thoroughgoing Route Cause Analysis and a report will go to the Senior Management Team hear at Purgo Cleansing. Lessons will be learnt and memo’s circulated to be read out amongst all team leaders and front line staff”

Rage spreads up through me like leaping forest fire, I stand and tip over one of the heavy chairs and a low flat table. I am roaring like the Incredible Hulk. No one responds so I shrug lean against the wall near the True Crime Books.

Amorphoid Number 1 continues. “Given our possible mistake…we can’t at this point rule out sabotage, yes but let’s call it a possible mistake. We want to have a quick hearing now and get things back on track and operating as they should be. It’s in everyone’s best interest…yours and ours… to get your Purgatory back within the framework of the appropriate system. As The Universal Order and XOX always say “one departure from protocol need not spoil the pudding”. We need to make progress now though. There is a brief and partial summary of your sample offence on the chamber tag. The Date of the offence was the 24th of November 1978. Location: A nurse’s home at Meanwood Park Hospital. And the offence classification is-

I-Insincerity in major life decisions

1.1 Nota significatione. A lifelong tendency to imitate actions of characters in film, TV media or books

1.2 Notable instances not included in this sample charge. Thinking himself to be like Woody Guthrie, Che Guevara, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Rod Stewart, Paul Newman, John Steinbeck and Bruce Springsteen…and posing around like he was them.

1.3 Circumstances of the sample charge: The accused set out to replicate an e…

 Okay, the tag is torn there, so we need to know what you did on the 24th November 1978 and which fictional or real-life character you were imitating when you did it. That’s what we need to know before we can dispose of your case”.

“Oh come on!” my voice sounds like the voice of XOX, which I played in a school play one time. I was a teacher of sorts for a while. I had to adopt a deep echoing voice and blast out from the wings, “Francis rebuild my church” with gravitas and force. It worked well and I got positive comments afterwards. The play was about St Francis of Assisi.

Amorphoid Number 2 slammed down his right leg on the table. “Who do you think you are talking to? We are the Purgatory Tribunal. Think for a moment about that for a moment before speaking again. Cooperate or we will bring in an administrative sentence”. No explanation of what that might be was given but I got the vibe.

“Okay, I had seen a film called ‘That’ll Be the Day’, starring Ringo Starr and David Essex. Came out in 1973. The David Essex was a bit of a wayward lad. Clever but a bit of good looking bastard and one for the lasses. Always wanting to be on the wild side of life. Worked on the dodgems at a fairground and before that as a Blue Coat or something at a holiday camp. That kind of thing. Well after living out on the fringe like that for a while his mum gets him to come back home and make a go at fitting in and being a good, responsible man. He courts a girl he knew before and they plan on getting married but on the night before the wedding he has it off with her sister or best friend or something. In the back of a van. He gets married the next day, but we know this man is never going to stick at it. So that’s what I did. I sort of felt I wanted to copy him. I was only twenty-one. I know it sounds daft but at the time it was like I was paying tribute to the character. I’m not even sure we did it, have sex I mean we were so drunk”. I laughed a bit there and looked for a sympathetic response but of course, there was just blankness.

“Had you done anything similar that same week or was it just that last night before the wedding”. These were the first words for Amorphoid Number 3. She swung her left leg over the table to speak. Why am I thinking it’s her? Do they have ‘hers’ and ‘hims’? She does sound more sympathetic though. I will concentrate on her.

“I am afraid I had been doing it all the previous week. Asking different women I knew to sleep with me, but they all said: “No, you have made a choice now stick with it”. It was only on the last night that one lass gave in. We were both very drunk. No one knew about it except the Lesbians next door. The ground floor in the nursing home was mostly lesbians, first-floor heterosexual women and top floor men (mixed).” I don’t know why but I was starting to feel good about myself, and making no effort to disguise it.

“You lack integrity and authenticity”. That’s plain and spoken from your own mouth”. Amorphoid Number 2 had a trace of a Yorkshire accent. He was good at being judgemental. He or it continued “Don’t you see how shallow and narcissistic your actions were?”

Those words cut through and shuck me up. I was in trouble, and my big mouth was giving them the ammunition they needed to bang me up in Pergo forever. I decided to try the humble tack. “Your honours I was barely more than a kid. I might have been twenty-one, but I was more like seventeen in the head. I was just experimenting with what kind of person I might be. I did become a good husband later on”.

Yorkshire Amorphoid was not having any of that. “Mr Ryan, remember this is a sample charge. We don’t have access to notes on the other instances but there must have been episodes of similar behaviour for you to come here. Now think about that and let’s get real shall we”.

Soft-spoken and possibly female Amorphoid cut across, “Mr Ryan, we are keeping in mind the errors that have occurred in your case and want to be as fair as we can, but you need to help us. We value integrity and authenticity very highly here. You are giving the impression you don’t know what those two words mean. There have been cases where we had gone easier on a murderer than someone who cheated at cards because the killer believed in what he was doing and then felt true remorse when he realised his error. Please pause and take note, you are not giving a good account of yourself”,

I am in trouble, how can I climb out of this hole and get back on track? It’s like I’m scrambling up a crumbling bank of soft earth. “I wanted to be different”. The words got out before I could trap them.

“Go on”, says softie Amorphoid, tell us how you could be different by copying others”. That stung. She was not what I thought she was.

“Okay, I take your point. This was all pretty narcissistic and shallow stuff, but I was like in a supermarket shopping around for a persona that I liked. I never told my wife what I’d done and I was never unfaithful again. She was though. Twice. Once with an Australian she met in a cinema cue, the other time with an accountant that wrote poetry”.

“Mr Ryan, stop digging”

I was directed to a cubicle at the edge of the room. The walls looked like a black and white abstract patterned Formica table my mother once had. I sat at the chair and looked into the patterns. They were reforming into musical notes. This was not in the library when I worked here. It would have been inappropriate for reasons of security. Then I was called out by the Amorphoid Tribunal Chair and as I left the cubicle I looked around and the whole library was reforming into a shoebox shape constructed of the same Formica material. “Please come back in Mr Ryan, we have a decision.

“It’s one of our maxims, here are Purgo-Cleansing. Start off with justice and then temper it. Our aim is redemption, not ruination. We don’t aim to metaphorically flog someone until they buckle at the knees and fall like a broken horse. No, we want you to walk out of Purgo cleansed and remade and ready for progression to the better place. Taking a broader view we must acknowledge mistakes as well. The loss of the case notes in whatever way it happened. The failure to follow checking procedures and the unclassified Purgo Cleansing phase. If you are happy to sign this release form we are pleased to offer you a fairly unique Purgatory package. It does the job with only the mildest of torment. Do you play the guitar?”

I was going to be a special kind of orderly. I would stand alongside the others at the reception desk where new arrivals showed up and were processed. I was to sing to them. Country and Western songs. The most insincere ones. I would literally sing the insincerity out of me. Morning, noon and night, except of course there was no time. One thing was different. I would know when I was cleansed and ready. My guitar would show it. It would turn green by degrees, and I would be summoned by a person yet to be recruited to hold my guitar against a painted deep green square upon the wall and when they matched my insincerity would be gone from me and I would be free to go.

So that’s how I got my job as ‘Country Singer in Residence in Purgatory’. Funny how things turn out. I watch the crowds roll by each day and I sing out to them.

Songs like “Will the Circle be Unbroken”

“I was standing by the window

On one cold and cloudy day

When I saw the hearse come rolling

For to carry my mother away

 Will the circle be unbroken?

By and by Lord, by and by

There’s a better home awaiting

In the sky Lord in the sky”.

 My songs are the last ones they hear before their torment. Despite anyone’s intentions, I can see that some people like what I’m doing and their hand goes to where their pocket once was to feel for loose change…but of course there are no pockets in shrouds.

 I do maybe twenty songs in a revolving cycle and then some spot features like-

Mr Bojangles. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band “He jumped so high” I love those words.

Hank Williams. Jambalaya. Joyful

Even some Galveston, Glen Campbell (“I close my eyes and dream of Galveston”).

I get to make all my own song choices as Pergo- Cleansing doesn’t really have a feel for the genre and I just sketch in a note or two on a song supposed insincerity in the logbook. Bit of a doddle really and I get to think clear thoughts; something I love so much now. The guitar is just a pale lime green but there is progress and it’s painless. I’m thinking of incorporating some Dylan. Maybe ‘Angelina’. It’s got a line which I think is apt.

“My right hand drawing back, while my left-hand advances”. Something like that.

Maybe we will meet one day. If we do, just shout out a request.

Last night was a disaster. Nothing short of one.

Let’s not sugar coat it nor try to pretend it’s other than what it was.

It will have profound effects on our football club in due course; when the window slams shut and our EU exit is formalised, our ability to sign promising young players from European leagues will be severely compromised. That’s the reality.

I’ll spend the day angry over this, of course I will.

English working class communities, locked in the prejudices unleashed by Brexit, have put that selfish and self-destructive idea before everything else. They have elected a brazen liar and a party which will take their votes and then remove from them everything Tory austerity didn’t already take over the past nine years.

It’s like Sevconuts embracing Dave King for his honesty and leadership.

It’s like rewarding Gerrard for failure with a new deal.

I cannot fathom it, but I do know they will reap a bitter harvest for it.

The thing is, this decision took such a shattering break with logic that I wouldn’t be surprised if Johnson or some other heartless toerag turned the same trick in five years.

Since the 2017 vote, my exasperation with Jeremy Corbyn grew to the point where, long before last night, I knew one of the silver linings of this morning would be his retirement from front line politics and his return to the allotment.

I like the man. I value the things that make him a brilliant spokesman for all the causes he espouses and cares about.

But as the leader of a political party, he was a bust.

This is a political era characterised by viciousness; his preaching of a “kinder, gentler politics” was lunacy.

The enemy lied at every turn.

Its media arm battered this guy from one end of Britain to the other.

The charge that he was a “terrorist lover” couldn’t be made stick in 2017. The charge that he was an anti-Semite was untenable if you looked at the evidence … but more importantly, those things did not matter a damn to the average voter except in the most symbolic way.

Those communities who turned their backs on Labour last night because Johnson seemed to offer them a way to “send the immigrants home” don’t give a monkeys about the plight of Britain’s Jewish population. Many of these white, working class, pro-Brexit English voters probably harbour far more anti-Semitic feelings than anyone close to Corbyn ever has or will … but it was the way Corbyn reacted to the charge, and others like it, that sealed his fate.

All Corbyn had to do, right at the start, was threaten to sue anyone who even suggested he might harbour anti-Semitic views.

Project anger.

Project loathing of all those who tried to use that as a weapon against him.

Do the same with all those other smears.

Appear willing to chew nails and spit blood.

Corbyn should have been channelling his inner bastard.

That’s what the moment called for. The public will forgive almost anything – Johnson is one of the most mendacious individuals ever to hold high office and the electorate knows it and doesn’t care. But he’s seen as a strong leader.

Corbyn’s real problem was that he was weak.

Kinder, gentler politics is weak.

The enemy was using every weapon in the arsenal.

You cannot defeat that by appealing to the better angels of their nature.

You beat it by hitting them back. Hard.

You don’t bring a straw hat to a knife fight. You bring a bayonet.

Anything less and you’re done.

What does this have to do with football, you might ask?

Plenty, as it happens.

Brexit, as I said, is going to screw us good and proper unless the game in this country has real, and truthful, leadership, and if you reckon Rod Petrie is the visionary who’s going to deliver that then you’ve been sleeping. This moment requires something else.

The SFA should be getting together with the FA down in London to start lobbying Johnson right now before the chance to protect football slips away. It requires both organisations to bring in someone with real heft to do the heavy lifting; fortunately, there are candidates.

These candidates have to love football.

They have to understand the politics of the game.

And they have to understand the game of politics itself.

One of them is Andy Burnham, but he might be a tad busy as Mayor of Manchester.

Fortunately, we do have an alternative, someone with experience of high political office and who also knows football having served as the chairman of a major club.

His name? John Reid.

If the SFA brought him in to do some of the lobbying I’m sure that would send a clear message, and provide a little gravitas.

Of course, Sevconia would trip out of its nut at the very idea of it.

But the idiot children over there need to be told to sit down and shut up.

Scottish football has pandered to those goons for far too long. They were exactly the people Regan talked about when he predicted “civil disorder” in the event of Sevco not being allowed into the league. They block reform in the game here, because no-one wants to get on their wrong side.

Well how’s that working out so far? Scottish football remains stuck in the mud.

Their financially doped team might have “restored some pride” in our game – this is the media line – and boosted the national co-efficient, but the elements of “moral hazard” are all too evident in their club policies; they’ve just handed new deals to three of their over 30’s and to Gerrard himself.

King might be on the way out, but there is no sign whatsoever that they are preparing to embrace fiscal reality far less discipline, and their crazy actions still represent a danger not only to themselves but to the wider game here.

The dust has settled on the Resolution 12 thing. But there is a case in front of the SFA that remains live and a major decision that needs to be taken. Celtic is content to let things percolate. This is another example of “kinder, gentler politics” that has thus far produced no results. The Resolution 12 campaign itself was hamstrung by the fact it allowed Celtic to drag its feet on making a decision until time bars were in place and other elements had run their course.

Weakness, in many forms. And our club looks weak because it hasn’t even proposed a reform agenda let alone pushed for it.

For too long we’ve waited for other people, or for God knows what … this game is bereft of leadership because Celtic won’t step up, and I sometimes think that Celtic won’t step up because the support hasn’t pressed them enough.

Kinder, gentler politics.

“We have left this in the hands of the SFA.”

Trusting those for whom trust and honour and keeping their word means exactly nothing.

When does it end?

It’s time to confront the big issues … and that does mean facing down the rabid lunatics of Follow Follow, so delusional they believed they could remove the SNP from every Scottish seat they held if they simply urged “unity” on the “PUL community.”

Look how that turned out.

Believe me, we’re not dealing with masters of the dark Machiavellian arts here.

We’re dealing with Peepul who’s handful of brain cells rattle when they walk down the street.

There are people who, like me, back independence and think that the SNP’s thumping result last night will make Boris Johnson realise he has to listen to Scotland … this is Sevco level delusion.

There is no point in hoping these Peepul will stay quiet. They were in uproar last night because the SFA wished them well in the game against Young Boys … think about that for a second.

Yet we pander to them., and the game panders to them.

The Celtic board wants you to trust the corrupt jokers at Hampden who have presided over a total shambles and who are stumbling into the effects of Brexit with their eyes shut.

Trusting the SFA to do the right thing now when we know their sordid history and the shameful way they behave.

Strength only respects strength.

If you show weakness you’re done for.

It has taken a monumental, cataclysmic UK election result to slap some people within Labour out of their pathetic stance and their lethargy. The next five years in Westminster politics will be a bare knuckle brawl, which is what the last two should have been.

Too late now, of course, for millions of people and the communities which will be devastated.

And at Hampden last Sunday Celtic beat a financially doped basket case club by a single goal, then went down to ten men and conceded a penalty.

The commitment of the players and the quality of our keeper prevented a confrontation between Celtic fans and its board as to why they allowed another Ibrox club the latitude to cheat its way to a major trophy at our expense, by defying financial gravity like the last one did.

There would have been no sign of “kinder, gentler politics” on this blog or on any of the others.

The writing on the wall would have been too big to ignore.

It’s still there.

Anyone choosing not to see it, time to open your eyes and look.

Crossing your fingers and hoping for the best doesn’t work. Relying on those who have proven themselves unreliable is to court disaster.

Our club needs to lead and give this game a shake.

If the board isn’t prepared to do it then perhaps it’s time we gave them a shake instead.

Our cup win yesterday continues our utter dominance of the hapless Ibrox NewCo … but how well do you know the history of our successes over them? Try our new quiz and find out. You can click this link or on the first question above .. 

https://ift.tt/2PhqAW6

Reefer Madness

Cycle 5, Day3

Well, you probably could’ve seen this coming, but in a twist that will surprise no one, I’ve recently started experimenting with a dangerous, unproven drug that could have severe long-term medical consequences. And medical marijuana.

With 3 brain tumors, I’ve used a lot of complementary medicine to great effect - like neurofeedback, exercise, diet, etc. Which is not the same thing as “alternative medicine” (it’s the combination of the two). I’d argue that an untested, unproven, potentially-lethal chemotherapy regimen - no matter how-well calculated (now that I think of it, this might be setting an unhealthy bar for trust in relationships - “Do I trust her enough to calculate a dosage and administer a toxin to me?”), probably counts as, at best, “complementary” medicine, particularly since I’m still on the Temodar. I have probably ranted at length in previous posts about how much I hate Temodar. We’ll talk more about that at length here, but first, when I was first admitted to the clinical trial, I asked about all the substances available to lessen the radiation-chemo side-effects. I was told that, for the study drug, they only recommended marijuana or related substances as a last-resort. I shrugged, played by the rules, and forgot about it until Shrink mentioned it as a possible treatment for Temodar.

So, I hate Temodar, partially because of the nausea factor, but more because it causes what is called “chemo brain.” That’s an odd sort of fog of forgetfulness, lack of concentration, inability to multitask, etc. You should be worried about it because 17-75% of all cancer patients complain about it sooner or later (it’s actually most well-documented in breast cancer survivors), and sometimes it’s permanent. With Temodar, it’s awfully hard to tell whether it’s just a toxic substance that’s undoubtedly swirled around in my brain, whether it’s a cumulative sleep-deprivation effect, or whether it’s the fact that, whenever I take Temodar (these are the horse pills you take at home right before bed), I tend to wake up at 2 am with itchy-brain (a unique and weird combination of physical discomfort, anxiety, and nervousness where you have to get up and do something)(I’ve double-checked all my medical contact numbers on my phone, written the first few chapters of a novel, and, more usually, just worried myself). Anyway, I’d kinda just resigned myself to the idea that the first five of each cycle would be near-complete misery (I don’t even drive on those days, that’s how little I trust myself on Temodar) when Shrink recommended medical marijuana for Temodar days. This was eventually okayed by the warlocks, under the following rules: 1. Not on infusion days (those are amazingly unpleasant to be sure, but thanks to zofran, they’re survivable)(I made it 36 hours after an infusion, just to give everyone a little breathing room) - the stated logic here is that they don’t want to make associated hallucinations worse. Which, now that I have them, makes sense, but, at the same time, just saying, “We don’t want to mix an experimental substance with a substance about which there’s not a whole lot of conclusive research” would work fine. 2. No swapping of drugs without explicit wizard-related permission. 3. Do some homework, make an educated purchase, and keep everyone informed of all things in my system at all times (again, this isn’t really a major policy change). Senior Warlock also warned me to be wary, that it’s a largely unregulatd industry, so you’re not exactly certain what you’re getting, and, as a new segment of the health-industrial complex, there’s all kinds of snake-oil salesmen.

Right, so, homework. There’s over a hundred different cannabinoids, with all sorts of various claims. The two with, from what I could tell, the most research on them are THC (that’s one of the fun cannabinoids that makes you hungry and/or enjoy Phish concerts) and CBD (that’s not a “fun” one, but it treats a lot of the symptoms of chemo)(it also counter-acts a lot of of the psychedelic effects of THC). I’d be fine going with an all-CBD product, but there’s some research (not a whole lot, but some) that THC makes chemo more effective for brain cancer (which is good for my long-term prospects, but, I’m not wild at the thought of Temodar eating through my frontal lobe more efficiently. As it turns out, this was almost unneeded, for reasons we’ll see shortly. This should not be read as an endorsement, instruction manual, or scientific study. In other words, don’t read this, try something really dumb, then blame me.

Even though marijuana is technically legal in CA, and medical marijuana’s been legal here since 1972, I wound up going to a dispensary nearer Mother Dearest, both for convenience, and because the place had an established reputation as both a medical and legal dispensary. First observation; it amuses me to imagine that the neighbors - who are all lovely, but very standard, middle-class (I’d hesitate to use the idiom “straight-laced” because it’s ungenerous, but it’s not totally inaccurate) - live literally within 20 miles (as the crow flies) of places where virtually any sin or vice that you can put a price-tag on can be had. I’m not passing judgment (there’s a reason a lot of illegal industries are illegal, and, even when legalized, there’s usually a few other logistical/legal warnings).

Anyway, if you haven’t been to a dispensary, but enjoy weird, unique experiences, I’d go, with the warning that window-shopping is strictly forbidden, and there are (unarmed) guards. The modern, quasi-legal drug dealer offers a lot more to the discerning customer than the past. I quickly abandoned the idea of smoking after seeing a variety of suspicious vaccuum-sealed substances and hearing Senior Warlock’s warning about no unified regulation or enforcement (plus, one of my neighbors is a cop; I didn’t feel that waving the cape in front of the bull was a good idea)(also, the thought of having to roll my own joints seemed ludicrously out of my league). At that point, Mom took over entirely (I’ve noticed she has a tendency to do that - whenever there are minor health decisions to be made or when we’re on unfamiliar turf, she grabs the wheel)(Sorry, Mom). I got asked how I felt about vaping (that Keith Moon and Jimi Hendrix would be sad to think that humanity would couple drug usage to cell phone chargers), and then found myself the proud owner/user of a (possibly) 1:1 THC-CBD pill. Paid for with cash, since the dispensaries are legal, but the federally-regulated banks don’t accept that filthy drug money (where was that moral certainty when they were laundering money for cartels or lying about the value of a mortgage, one asks).

And now we fast forward to last night, when I looked at the label on the bottle; there should be a German word for the moment a person with a health background realizes they forgot to look up recommended dosages.. I decided to start with one pill (that’s 5 mg THC, 5 mg CBD). I down it, then take my other bed-time drugs, then wait a full hour (you have to do this with chemo - mostly, it’s to give the zofran time to dissolve. You literally do not take chemo until you’re about to leap into bed, otherwise you’ll get...uncomfortable.

First of all, let’s look at the communist menace

If it looks like a rather boring pill, I’ve romanticized it. I noticed, in that hour period between taking my non-puke-up-the-chemo, that it had the psychedlic effect of Tums. Anyway, 11 pm rolled around and I went to bed, then I woke up at 3 am. However, instead of sweeping the walkways or researching story ideas, I just kind of lay there for a while. Okay. At 4 am when I started twitching, I grabbed another tab (that’s 10 mg of both) and woke up at 7:45 am. Near-8-hours’ sleep. that’s as good as it gets on Temodar. The bigger shock was realing not only was I hungry (as I usually am when I wake up) but I felt almost normal and not-completely hung-over at all. As far as the grooviness of the pill, I’ve gotten more potent highs  watching Star Wars trailers (unless a sudden ability to snarf down a whole bushel of bananas id exciting. Still, I’d woken up, and my first thought wasn’t “Oh, something’s wrong,” Which automaticallly and dramatically improves any day.

contradiction

WHAT IS A PARADOX

A paradox is a statement that contradicts itself or a situation which seems to defy logic. That's a simple definition of paradox.

Often premises can be proven false which rectifies the contradiction. Sometimes they are just play on words, however, some paradoxes still don't have universally accepted resolutions.

On this page you can find several good paradox examples to tease your mind.

Paradox Examples

1. LIAR PARADOX (EPIMENIDES PARADOX)

This is a well known paradox written by the great stoical logician Chrysippos. The poet, grammarian and critic Philetus of Cos was said to have died of exhaustion attempting to resolve it.

1 A Cretan sails to Greece and says to some Greek men who are standing upon the shore: "All Cretans are liars." Did he speak the truth, or did he lie?

2 A week later, the Cretan sailed to Greece again and said: "All Cretans are liars and all I say is the truth." Although the Greeks on the shore weren't aware of what he had said the first time, they were truly puzzled.

If someone says "I always lie", are they telling the truth? Or are they lying?

2. DOUBLE LIAR PARADOX (JOURDAIN'S PARADOX)

This version of a famous paradox was presented by English mathematician P. E. B. Jourdain in 1913.

The following is written on opposite sides of a card:

Back side:

THE SENTENCE ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THIS CARD IS TRUE.

Face side:

THE SENTENCE ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THIS CARD IS FALSE.

. BARBER PARADOX (RUSSELL'S PARADOX)

Analogue paradox to the 'liar paradox' formulated by English logician, philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell.

In a village, the barber shaves everyone who does not shave himself/herself, but no one else.

Who shaves the barber?

4. LAZY-BONES PARADOX

If destiny designed a master plan which defines everything that is to happen, isn't it useless, for example, to go to a doctor? If I am ill and it is my destiny to regain health, then I will regain health whether I visit a doctor or not. If it is my destiny to not regain my health, then seeing a doctor can't help me.

How could you question the presented opinion?

My Favorite Sophisms

1. CROCODILE SOPHISM

A slim crocodile living in the Nile took a child. His mother begged to have him back. The crocodile could not only talk, but was also a great sophist and stated, "If you guess correctly what I will do with him, I will return him. However, if you don't predict his fate correctly, I'll eat him." 

What statement should the mother make to save her child?

2. IS IT POSSIBLE TO GIVE WHAT WE DON'T HAVE?

Sophist: "Yes, greedy man gives his cash with sorrow. However, he doesn't have the cash with sorrow, so he gives what he doesn't have.”

3. WHAT IS BETTER - ETERNAL BLISS OR A SIMPLE BREAD?

What is better than eternal bliss? Nothing. But a slice of bread is better than nothing. So a slice of bread is better than eternal bliss.

A few sentences from life - funny paradox quotes

1 Nobody goes to that restaurant; it's too crowded.

2 Don't go near the water 'til you have learned how to swim.

3 The man who wrote such a stupid sentence can not write at all.

4 If you get this message, call me, and if you don't get it, don't call.

5 ADVERTISEMENT: Are you an analphabet? Write a letter and we will send you free of charge instructions how to undo it.

Think about these

1 Let's say there is a bullet which can shoot through any barrier. Let's also say there is an absolutely bullet-proof armor which no object can penetrate. What will happen if such a bullet hits such an armor?

2 Can a man drown in the fountain of eternal life?

3 Your mission is not to accept the mission. Do you accept?

4 A girl goes into the past and kills her Grandmother. Since her Grandmother is dead, the girl was never born. If she were never born, she never killed her grandmother.

5 If the temperature this morning is 0 degrees and the Weather Channel says, "it will be twice as cold tomorrow", what will the temperature be?

6 Answer truthfully (yes or no) to the following question: Will the next word you say be 'no'?

7 What happens if you are in a car going the speed of light and you turn the headlights on?

8 I conclude with this challenge:

9 Let the God Almighty create a stone, which he is not capable of lifting!

What are some of the most famous paradoxes?

72 Answers

Dean Yeong, Writer on DeanYeong.com

Answered Sep 19, 2016

The Paradox of Choice

One of the biggest dogma runs like this:

If we want to maximize our happiness, the best way to achieve it is to maximize our freedom.

That is because freedom is in and of itself something valuable, worthwhile and essential to every single one of us. It sounds logical.

When we have freedom, we can use it to do things that maximize our happiness, we’re not taking orders from anyone, and no one needs to make decisions on behalf of us. And the way to maximize freedom is to maximize choice. Most people want to make more money not because they want the cold hard cash, but money actually brings more freedom to our life.

The more choices we have, the more freedom we have. The more freedom we have, the happier we are. No one is ever questioning this.

The top goals most people have today are certainly not job security nor stable relationship and happy family. Most people want to have more freedom to choose how they spend their life in their own term.

Indeed, we are bombarded by endless choices today:

• There are more than hundred of degree programs up to choose from a wide range of colleges and university nowadays.

• Our smartphones come with billions of applications up to download.

• We have hundreds different type of salad dressing when we walk into the grocery store.

All of them should make us happier since more choice means a happier life. This belief is heavily and deeply embedded in our day to day life. But does more choice really lead to more happiness?

. . .

The Negative Side of More Freedom

I’m not suggesting that more choice and freedom are bad to us. There is no argument on how more choice changes our world positively, and we all knew how more freedom brings us more happiness in the personal level.

So, let’s dive right into the negative impacts of more choice brings to us.

(1) Too many choices produce procrastination and paralysis.

Just imagine what would happen if Apple actually launches 100 different models of iPhone in a year. The sales will definitely drop, why? Because there are too many models to choose, it makes it incredibly hard to make a decision and actually picks one.

The problem of it is not about the iPhone’s quality here, but the hassle customers need to go through to make the right choice. The more choice we have, the harder for us to choose. And most people will simply walk away due to the difficulty in making a decision.

The best example is a big majority of startup failures. Most startup failures aren’t caused by the lack of resources or market size, but the lack of focus of the founding team. Smart people with great ideas and endless resources have more choice, which is not always a good thing. In this case, more choice produces procrastination and distractions to focus on the most important matters at the moment.

(2) The opportunity cost leads to comparison and dissatisfaction.

Now, you have 5 oranges to choose from, one of them is the best orange you will ever have in this world. And this is the only chance for you to have that, if you miss it, you will never be able to get your hand on the world’s tastiest orange in your lifetime ever. How is that make you feel?

More choice produces higher expectation to each and every option you have. We now know there is a world’s tastiest orange out of the five, but our brain will assume all the five are the tastiest. Even if we don’t think so, rationally and logically, we assume we will pick the tastiest one, and we can’t accept anything less than that.

But even if you’re incredibly lucky to pick the best, you might think it’s not perfect, because you can never know how the other four oranges taste like. The opportunity cost of the other oranges leads to dissatisfaction in us. This happened a lot in many areas of our life. Some people will think their spouse is not the best because there is always a better one, even their spouse is actually the best for them.

. . .

Eliminate Options and Choices

The more choice we have, the higher our expectation to every choice. The higher the expectation, the harder for us to choose. After we make a decision, we compare our choice with the other alternatives and assume what we have is somehow less attractive, even our choice is the best choice we can make.

The solution to this problem is clear. We first need to break the dogma we believe in so much. More choice does lead more happiness to a certain point, but it’s never linear; more choice after that point, it’s clear that we become more miserable.

We should trim down the choices we have by focusing on the most important thing. Here are a few examples you can implement into your daily life now.

• Focus only on one business idea or career goal, put in all your effort and time to build that up first, before you hop to the next one.

• Remove the other productivity app in your smartphone, you only need one. In fact, you need a pocket-sized notebook and a pen.

• Be content with what you have and who are already with you, appreciate your marriage, make an effort to see the good in your spouse and focus on giving, not receiving.

• Set only one fitness goal, you can’t build mass, cut fats, boost strength, improve endurance, and train for mobility all together at the same time.

• Niche down your targeted market when you’re crafting your marketing campaign. So you can provide what your customers really need, and talk to them using their language.

If you have made a choice before – for your career, relationship, or finance, focus on the choice you had already made. Stop comparing your decision with other alternatives. Instead, focus on what you decided before and make the best out of it.

. . .

The Fish and The Aquarium

We are like a fish in an aquarium. The size of the aquarium dictates the freedom we have, and some of us see it as our constraints. To grow, we need a bigger aquarium. Unfortunately, what most people are trying to do is breaking the aquarium. Without it, you’re a dead fish.

With the advancement of technology today, we are open to limitless choices. Thus, we want to believe that we could have limitless freedom so we can be happier. But limitless freedom is never a good thing. Yes, we do need some freedom to expand and grow, but without constraints, we will have no direction, no standard, no plan, and certainly no happiness.

https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-of-the-most-famous-paradoxes

con·tra·dic·tion

[ˌkäntrəˈdikSH(ə)n]

NOUN

contradictions (plural noun)

a combination of statements, ideas, or features of a situation that are opposed to one another: "the proposed new system suffers from a set of internal contradictions"

a person, thing, or situation in which inconsistent elements are present: "the paradox of using force to overcome force is a real contradiction"

the statement of a position opposite to one already made: "the second sentence appears to be in flat contradiction of the first" · "the experiment provides a contradiction of the hypothesis" synonyms: denial · refutation · rebuttal · countering antonyms: confirmation · reaffirmation

A contradiction is when to things have a variance with each other. There for, it basically means compare and contrast facts. For example, a contradiction between a cat and a dog is that they are a completely different species and have a completely different phenotype and genotype. 

So there far, there's an example of a contradiction.

Speakers of a given language know that when a certain statement is made and is true, if another statement is made that contarvenes the first one, then its false. 

Example: 

My younger brother is the only child in our home. 

Analysis:\ 

My younger brother means (+ sibling) 

The only child (- sibling) 

Hence the statement contradicts itself

a contradiction is like an oxy-moron. Like, an anti-absorbant sponge or jumbo-shrimp. they cancel eachother out

yahoo

http://bibviz.com

bible contradiction

Birds are awesome! Now let's go kill some birds because they are the worst kind of animal on earth!

yahoo

有个卖矛和盾的人，称赞他的盾的坚固：“任何锋利的东西都穿不透它。”一会儿又赞美自己的矛，说：“我的矛锋利极了，什么坚固的东西都能刺穿。”有人问他：“用你的矛来刺你的盾，结果会怎么样呢？”那人便答不上话来了。刺不破的盾和什么都刺得破的矛，这是不可能同时存在的,所以这就是自相矛盾。

https://baike.baidu.com/item/矛盾/6442

中国近代最主要的两大矛盾：1、外国侵略者和中华民族的矛盾；2、封建主义和人民大众的矛盾。这两对主要矛盾及其斗争贯穿整个中国半殖民地半封建社会的始终，要弄清两对矛盾之间的关系，要把握以下几点：

第一，帝国主义和中华民族的矛盾，是最主要的矛盾。1840年的鸦片战争之后，中国沦为半殖民地半封建国家，帝国主义逐步的开始瓜分中国，割占我国领土，索要战争赔款，中国人民生活在水深火热中。在帝国主义面前，中国内部各阶级、除一些叛国分子外，能够暂时地团结起来举行民族战争去反对帝国主义。这时，民族矛盾特别尖锐，阶级矛盾暂时降到次要和服从地位。

第二，封建主义和人民大众的阶级矛盾，同样不可调和。帝国主义勾结、扶植封建势力作为它们统治中国的支柱，封建势力本身就是剥削阶层，对人民进行高压统治，再加上各种战争赔款以苛捐杂税的形式加在人民头上，人民的反抗在所难免。

第三，近代社会的两对主要矛盾是互相交织在一起。帝国主义往往与中国的反动统治阶级结成同盟，共同压迫中国人民，封建主义甘当帝国主义统治中国的工具，这时中国人民往往采取国内战争的形式去反对帝国主义和封建主义的同盟，而斗争的矛头主要直接地指向中国的封建政权，这时阶级矛盾就上升为主要矛盾，民族矛盾退居次要地位。当国内战争发展到从根本上威胁帝国主义及其代理人中国封建地主阶级统治的时候，帝国主义势力甚至直接出兵，镇压中国人民，援助中国的反动派。这时，帝国主义和国内封建主义完全公开站在一条战线上。

1、“生前”与“死前”   老师讲到“死”这个字时说：“生“和”死“是一对反义词。根据生死轮回的观点，生和死二种状态不断在转换。生的以前是死，死的以前就是生。小明这下就不明白了：老师，那为什么一个英雄人物去世后讲他活着时的先进事迹时总是讲他“生前”如何如何，而这明明应该讲“死前”才对啊！    2、“果然”与“果不其然”

    老师讲课说：“果然”就是“结果就是这样”，“不出所料”的意思。例如气象预报说明天要下雨，到了第二天真的下雨了，我们就可以说“果然”下雨了。小明又问了：那么“果不其然”是什么意思呢？老师未加思考着马上回答：顾名思义么，“果不其然“就是”结果不是这样“，是”果然“的反义词么。小明又问：那么同样是天气预报，同样是第二天下雨，怎么播音员叔叔说：“果不其然“，下了一场雨。我听来听去，还是“果然”的意思，那么加上“不”和“其”二字不是画蛇添足吗？老师语塞。    3、“救”与“灭”   老师正在解释“救”字：救，就是让濒临消亡的人或物重新恢复生气所采取的行动。例如抢救病人啊，抢救历史文物啊，等等。小明又不明白了：昨天我在电视里看到一幢大楼火烧得越来越大，这火一点也没有“濒临消亡”的迹象，那为什么要去“救”火，而不是灭火呢？老师无法回答，只好说：救就是灭，灭就是救。不待小明继续再问，赶紧夺门而出了。    4、“非”与“不非”   老师说：“非”和“不”字一样，是否定词。用了它，后面的意思就颠倒了。小明想起了上星期天在商店里看到的一位大姐姐，倒有点不懂了。事情是这样的：一对恋人在商店珠宝柜台前，男的看着价值不菲的钻戒面有难色，而女的一边摇着男的手一边说：我非要么，我非要么，你不买就是不爱我。小明直纳闷：这大姐姐嘴上说不要（“非“要），但行动却是一定要，看来真是书没念好，”非“是否定词都不懂。    5、“浮”与“沉”    自然课的老师正在解释浮力，说：木头比水轻所以会浮上来，铁块比水重，所以沉下去。注意，“浮“总是向上的，”沉“总是向下的。小明又有话了：我老是在广播和电视里听到，什么经济指标一会儿”上浮“了，一会儿又”下浮“了，”下浮“怎么个浮法呀？

http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4d42ff3f0102eass.html

so we best on,boats against the curewnt,borne back ceaselessly into the past.

from  the great Gatzby

Do you know why people like violence?It is because it feels good.Humans find violence deeply satisfying,but remove the satisfaction,the acts becomes hollow.

who am i? am i a hero? a criminal?

from imitation game

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/12/03/the_imitation_game_fact_vs_fiction_how_true_the_new_movie_is_to_alan_turing.html

contradiction：是矛盾、对立的意思,在逻辑上,要么是A要么是B,不可能既是A又是B.

paradox：则是“似是而非”,含有诡辩的意味,有时令人难以厘清.

https://www.zybang.com/question/a95a895c15c01b810d157bf23b24791f.html

contradiction”能被翻译为“矛盾”的吗？

已有 2759 次阅读 2014-12-3 00:10 |个人分类:教育|系统分类:观点评述

1. “矛盾”典故的由来

“矛盾”这个典故出自《韩非子.难一》：楚人有鬻矛与盾者，誉之曰：“吾盾之坚，物莫能陷也。”又誉其矛曰：“吾矛之利，于物无不陷也。”或曰：“以子之矛，陷子之盾，何如？”其人弗能应也。在中国能够数得上家喻户晓的故事，“矛盾”这个典故肯定是当仁不让的。

2. “contradiction”能否被翻译为“矛盾”这个问题的由来

西方逻辑学（Logic）有三条基本定律：同一律（the law of identity）、矛盾律（the law of contradiction）和排中律（the law of excluded middles）。“contradiction”能否被翻译为“矛盾”这个问题，笔者最早是从被誉为日本思想大师小室直树所著的《给讨厌数学的人--数学的奥秘&生活》一书中知晓的。小室直树在书中从“矛盾”典故中提出两个命题：[1]

命题 A：这支矛可以刺穿任何的盾

命题 B：这块盾可以抵挡任何的矛

“正如韩非子所说的，命题A和B不可能同时皆为真。但是，命题A和命题B可以均为假”。

3. 讨论

这个问题，笔者向所带的大三本科生和一些老师介绍的时候，他们一方面露出吃惊的表情，另外一方面也有一些人迷惑不解。笔者在此顺着小室直树先生的观点，做一番较为详细的解释。

3.1 西方逻辑学（Logic）中“contradiction”的含义

设有 命题 A和命题 B。如果命题 A和命题 B满足如下条件，那么，就称命题 A和命题 B之间的关系是“contradiction”：

(1) A = true, B = false;

(2) A = false, B = true

从上两个表达式可以合理推论出，如下（3）、（4）两个表达式是不可能成立的：

(3) A = true, B = true

(4) A = false, B = false

3.2 “矛盾”典故中“矛盾”的含义

采用小室直树先生从“矛盾”典故中抽取的两个命题：

命题 A：这支矛可以刺穿任何的盾

命题 B：这块盾可以抵挡任何的矛

当“以子之矛，陷子之盾，何如？”真的发生的时候，会出现如下两者情况：

(1)矛能够刺破盾

这种情况只能证明 命题B = false，但是不能证明 命题 A = true。说明这点很简单。假如盾是白纸做的，一根竹签就可以刺穿盾。显然，竹签不会是世上最锋利的矛。

(2)盾可以抵挡住矛

这种情况只能证明 命题 A = false，但是不能证明 命题 B = true。说明这点，同样简单。假如矛是茅草做的，即使盾是白纸糊的，这种矛也是刺不穿这种盾的。总之，不论是上面哪种情况，都无法实现当一个命题为假的时候，另外一个命题必然为真。

从上面的讨论可以看出，“矛盾”故事中的“矛盾”，不是logic中的“contradiction”。

小室直树先生还在其著作中介绍，受“矛盾”这种中国哲学的影响，日本人在赠予财产处理方面，与美国人是大相径庭。在明治维新之前，日本人向下辈赠予财产是可以反悔的，而美国人是不能反悔的。为什么两国对于财产赠予的处理反差这么大的呢？小室直树先生认为欧美的私人所有权的特性是：“(1) 私人所有权就是对个人所有物具有全面且绝对的支配权；(2) 私人所有权的存在是观念性、逻辑上的决定”。换句话说：小室直树先生认为，正是西方逻辑学的这种“contradiction”，导致西方私人所有权具有“神圣不可侵犯”的特征，从而催生出了现代资本主义。与此对应的是，日本人因为接受了中国的“矛盾”而非西方的“contradiction”，导致日本一直无法建立具有“神圣不可侵犯”的私人所有权，从而日本无法诞生现代资本主义[2]。直到后来日本人选择“脱亚入欧”，才解决了中国“矛盾”哲学对于日本人步入现代文明社会的困扰。

鉴于逻辑一词和很多其它汉语词汇都是从日语词汇中“反哺”过来的，因此，将西方逻辑学中的“contradiction”翻译成为“矛盾”，很有可能也是出自日本学者之手。中国学者引进逻辑学的时候，对于“contradiction”也没有仔细推敲，导致对逻辑学最核心和最基本的概念的误解，一直流传至今。其实，“矛盾”典故中的“矛盾”，在西方逻辑学中属于“opposite”（对立），而不是“contradiction”。在唐朝的时候，日本人还是中国人的学生，但是，现在日本人在科学和技术方面的水平，中国与之相比还有相当大的距离。究其原因，从日本学者和中国学者对待“contradiction”正本清源的态度和具体做法，就可以“一叶知秋”了。

笔者最初从小室直树先生的著作了解到这个问题的时候，当时还是非常震惊的。因为，笔者在所受的二十多年的教育过程中，任何一位大中小学老师从未提及过这个问题，中国的各种教育家、数学家写的文章和编写的教科书，都从未涉及到这个问题。可以说，包括笔者在内的中国人，一直被蒙蔽着。不过，那个时候笔者以为是翻译者的问题，没有意识到是汉语本身的问题：汉语现有的词汇中，包括“矛盾”这个词汇在内，没有一个词汇能够完整准确表达“contradiction”在逻辑学（logic）中的含义。

亲爱的读者朋友，如果你明白和同意“逻辑学是所有学问的基石”这个观点的话，看到逻辑学（logic）中的核心概念和思想，无法用汉语准确表达的时候，那么，你还会对汉语像现在这样留恋的吗？

亲爱的读者朋友，如果你渴望和追求自由、民主与法治的现代化文明，知道了中国“矛盾”思维对于建立真正私有产权的巨大阻碍，那么，你还会对汉语像现在这样留恋的吗？

中国的数学及科学事业及成就不说比肩欧美，就是与“挥之不去”的近邻日本相比，其差距也是巨大的。除了众所周知的政治体制、科学体制等体制方面的原因外，更深层次的原因就是祖宗遗产之一汉语带来的巨大阻碍。试想，所有学问的基石“contradiction”都无法用汉语准确表达，我们中国人用汉语学习现代数学及科学怎么可能比肩欧美人的呢？

汉语在现代数学及科学方面的表述缺陷，用笔者老家乡里话说就是“不过窍”。意思是做某件事情，不能将其做得非常好的原因，是对这件事情的原理没有掌握透彻导致的。有软件工程知识和经验的人都会知道，软件系统的bug，如果不去发现和改正，那么，这个bug将会永远存在于软件系统之中，不会自己改正。自然语言从抽象意义上讲，也是一个应用软件。自然语言存在的bug，我们不去发现和纠正，那么，这个bug一样永远存在于自然语言系统之中。这一点，正如“太祖”所言：“扫帚不到，灰尘不会自己跑掉”。

4. 结论 

对于“contradiction”能否被翻译成为“矛盾”这个问题的答案是否定的。

正如眼下的改革被视为新长征一样，那么，现在也到了对汉语进行第二次新文化运动的时候了！如果改革新长征缺乏对汉语的进一步改革，那么，改革新长征一定会被夭折！被夭折的原因不是什么“亡我之心不死的海外反华势力”，也不是什么“地富反坏右”或“走资派”，而是祖宗的遗产之一—汉语！悲乎！

http://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-39840-848032.html

根据韦氏字典的解释：

contradiction的解释是a situation in which inherent factors, actions, or propositions are inconsistent or contrary to one another。

表示的是一种事物之间矛盾的状态，或者做法。“顶嘴，杠头”也是这个词。

而conflict的解释是：fight,battle,war.

表示冲突，一般指的是人之间或者军事上的冲突。是一种战争状态。

给你造俩句子：

The boss will not tolerate any contradiction。老板不能容忍有人顶嘴

Armed conflict is likely to break out between the two countries

两国之间将爆发武装冲突 

参考文献：在线韦氏字典

Contradiction consists of a logical l incompatibility between two or more propositions. It occurs when the propositions, taken together, yield two conclusions which form the logical, usually opposite inversions of each other. By extension, outside of classical logic, one can speak of contradictions between actions when one presumes that their motives contradict each other.

高更 颜色

Edvard Munch   强烈 表情和线条，强烈的色彩

Tiffany Bozic   梦幻和细节，材料

Kim Noble  too much styles and personalities