there's this running joke at work that people love to give me things for free because vendors keep giving me merch and extra stuff whenever i buy from them and it was always sort of a half-serious thing but the piano tuner just arrived and within 5 minutes he offered to start tuning our pianos regularly for free and i'm starting to think this is no longer a joke

The Coldest Heart(Yandere Future Rise Donatello x Reader)

A/N, not important: Any criticism is welcome, constructive or not. This is supposed to be a gender neutral reader, so if I screwed up somewhere, please tell me.

-Ollie

CW: Apocalypse, kidnapping, freezing, dark themes, yandere themes.

Words: 1291

Summary: Donnie cuts off the heat

Winters were always frigid in the apocalypse, the broken terrain and weather making the places that have never seen a snowflake now completely frozen over. The “snow” that covered the barren wasteland outside the base’s doors was a poisonous brown, bubbling when it touched the ground instead of sticking. It may be frozen, but it was nothing like the fluffy white snow you held dear in your memories. You shiver under the blankets you were given, your body curled up in a weak attempt to preserve the heat trapped under the blankets with you. You were exhausted, sleep pulling at your eyes and trying to coax you under, but the cold biting at your fingers and toes was unrelenting. Your ears and nose burned, keeping you alert as you try to keep out the frigid air. The small amount of heat Donnie allowed in his lab was gone, the furnace broken and vents turned off. Cold had seeped into every crack and was now trying its best to choke you out as well.

You turn your head towards Donnie as he types onto a monitor projected by his ninpo, sticking your face into the bitter cold. His outfit amazed you, the mutant only being dressed in a thin sweater made to stretch over his battle shell and sweats that were a size too small. You look at him in envy, not understanding how he could withstand the freezing temperature in the thin clothing he had. Donnie turns his head at the feeling of your boring gaze, his eyes meeting yours and his tridactyl hands leaving his keyboard which causes it to falter, then disappear. For the first time in the months since he had stuck you in his lab in claims of protecting you, you don’t break your gaze. Whether it was from exhaustion or the cold, you no longer cared about such a simple thing as keeping your eyes off the man you hated most. If he was truly upset with your staring, he could come and close your eyes himself.

“You’re shivering.” Donnie muses, his voice teasing and airy as if the frostbite creeping over your nose was a mere tasteless joke. You scowl, burying yourself back into the plethora of blankets that covered the cot Donnie had you share with him. You hear him chuckle at your childish display, driving in the belittled feeling he had sunk into your heart.

“Fix the heat then.” You grumble at your captor, not caring for niceties. You can hear his chair shift and you look back at him through a crack in the blankets, seeing his eyes averted downwards as he chews on his cheek. His knuckles are now digging into his teeth, his eyes looking everywhere but you as he seems to be debating himself over something. His shoulders are more hunched, like he was a little kid who got caught stealing cookies late at night.

“You know I can’t.” Donnie says, like he was trying to be firm but his voice falters. He still refuses to meet your eyes, only staring at the floor as he chews on his knuckles. Your eyes narrow, your knees pulled closer to your chest as another cold burst breaks through the blanket barrier.

“You’ve already fixed it.” You accuse, the chattering of your teeth breaking up the sentence and making it sound more pathetic than you hoped. Donnie finally pulls his fist away from his mouth as he stares back at you, crossing his arms and protesting with a loud, “indignant scoff.” If you could feel your feet, you would run over there and strangle him.

“If you’re cold,” Donnie starts, his voice tight as he dodges your accusation to try and quell your thoughts, but ends up confirming it instead. “You can grab a blanket and come sit with me. I’ll keep you warm.”

You sneer, diving back under the blanket den you had created around yourself. Even if you wanted to cuddle up to the person who was holding you hostage in the name of ‘safety’, you couldn’t. Your feet were so frozen you couldn’t feel them more than a dull pain, and your fingers couldn’t close around the thin material of the blankets anymore. Silence stretches through the lab, and you’re sure Donnie had given up and turned back around.

A quick padding of socked feet breaks the silence and two arms wrap around your covered self, lifting you from the cot and into Donnie’s arms. He mumbles a swift apology as you flail and curse, quickly moving back to his chair and depositing you in his lap. He shifts the blankets around, helping you pop your head out so you could see. Donnie cups your cheek with one hand, the other still firm around your lower back so you couldn’t squirm away from him and escape. The feeling of his hand on your face is one you always hated, but the burning head of his warmth makes you hiss in pain rather than disgust. He was an oven, his hand slowly heating your cheeks and bringing color back to your face. You melt into him after a minute, nearly crying when his warm hand leaves your cheek to cup your ears.

“You are cold.” He mutters, mostly to himself. He continues to try and warm you himself for a small while, attempting to bring your body temperature up from the dangerous levels it had fallen to. He eventually signs and gives up, summoning a projected screen with numerous switches and buttons. He clicks a few things before closing the screen and pulling you closer, easing open the blankets you clung to so he could pull your whole body against him and try to warm you up.

You hear the vents above slowly whirr to life, the room slowly being filled with a strong heat that makes your head spin. You blink at Donnie, your limbs unstiffening as you try not to cry.

“You fixed it…” You mumble, letting your head hit the dull point of his plastron. Donnie nods, rubbing your back beneath the blankets. Anger pools in your chest for only a moment, the relief of the heat taking over and the exhaustion pushing through once more.

“I fixed it within minutes of its breaking. I wasn’t going to let the base freeze.” Donnie pulls you closer, kissing your temple with a smug smile. “You, however, weren’t letting me touch you, so I turned off the heat to try and convince you to let me touch you more, but that seems to have backfired.”

You scowl, hitting his shoulder with your forehead. You wanted to scream, to bite him, to do anything to make him suffer like he had you for the past few days, but you don’t. You were terrified he would turn the heat back off. His lab was obviously able to be isolated from the other parts of the base, which horrified you. For all you knew, he could leave and seal the doors before shutting the oxygen off for a couple minutes, just to let you suffer.

Donnie continues to rub your back, his quiet humming not showing any bit of remorse for the torment he had put you through. He seemed happy with the outcome, and you figured he was. Here you were in his arms, just as he wanted. Maybe once you could feel your fingers again, you’d try and fight him, but for now, you had given up. The heat was too much of a reward for you to risk losing it now. Even Donnie’s arms were a price you were willing to pay to not freeze. His plan had worked, and now nothing would stop him from doing it again.

For a request, maybe Bakugo and Izuku arguing about punishing their Darling? Maybe the Darling pleading with Bakugo to not let Izuku hurt them.

I’ve been writing a lot of polyamorous relationships, lately… I’m not complaining, though. The more *loving* boys I can fit into one drabble, the better.

TW: Implied Physical Abuse and Mentions of Bondage

~

“You can’t be fucking serious.”

Katsuki was unwavering, even as he stood before a much stronger rival. You used to admire that about him (you still did, really), how powerful he presented himself as, even when he was at a disadvantage. Izuku could kill him, and judging by the green electricity sparking around his arms and the pure anger in his eyes, it was fair to say Izuku would. But, Katsuki just stared down at his partner, shoving you behind him whenever Izuku’s focus shifted. As a civilian, you looked up to him, as a friend, you respected him…

Even as a captive, you couldn’t help but be thankful for his presence.

“I know how protective you can be, but try to look at this rationally,” Izuku started, taking a step forward. Katsuki didn’t move, but you reflexively latched onto his bicep, digging your nails into his skin for some sense of security. You didn’t doubt that it hurt, but Katsuki never flinched, only raising an eyebrow as Izuku bared his teeth. “If we let this kind of misbehavior go, then (Y/n)’ll think they can just do whatever they want!”

Katsuki chuckled, smirking. “You’re acting like we have a dog, Deku. What’d the big ol’ rebel even do, say ‘no’ when you wanted to get your dick wet for the fourth time today?”

Izuku’s hands curled into fists, his knuckles turning white from the strain. “I caught them trying to pick the lock on their window.” There was a vague nod towards the bedroom, where the door was still ajar, Izuku having left it open as he chased you. You clung a little tighter to Katsuki, your guilt undeniable. It’d been more out of curiosity than anything, a hobby to pass the days of waiting and nothingness. You didn’t think Izuku would be home so early, you didn’t think Katsuki would care. Really, your fate was sealed as soon as Izuku saw you kneeling in front of the windowsill, a hairpin in one hand and the death-bolt in the other. Pushing past him and calling out for your real hero had only worked to take Izuku from mad to infuriated. “We can’t encourage it. You see that, don’t you?” Izuku asked, voice muffled by grit teeth. “We should break something just the attempt.”

Silently, Katsuki’s gaze turned towards you. It was almost unnoticeable, his eyes flickering to his side and his expression hardly changing, but you recognized the signal without the need for further explanation. Reluctantly, you stepped forward, one of his hands falling to your shoulder, keeping you in place as you bowed your head. Of course, Izuku made a grab for you, but Katsuki waved him off without a word.

“Is this true?” His voice was patronizing, condescending, like you were a child being scolded by an instructor. He might as well’ve stooped down to your height, from how slowly he spoke. Still, you nodded, biting your lip. Playing into the role, despite your best efforts not to. Katsuki only clicked his tongue, his attention quickly moving back towards Izuku. “I think–”

“It isn’t my fault!” The outburst was sudden, unexpected even to you. It’d come out louder than you meant for it too, but it was hard not to sound desperate, especially when you already knew how over-excited Izuku could get when he had a riding-crop in his hands. Katsuki glared, moving to pull away, but you caught his hand before he could, clinging to him like your life depended on it. It might’ve, depending on how violent Izuku planned on being. “I… You were gone for so long, I didn’t know what to do. I was stuck in my room, and I didn’t know when you’d be coming back!”

“Baby, I know it’s scary,” He began, his tone anything but sympathetic. Your heart dropped into your stomach as soon as the words left his mouth, some unseeable pressure suddenly pressing down on your chest. It was a hopelessness, a dread, one that made you choke up as Katsuki pulled away and want to run when he looked at you. You didn’t, paralyzed by some mix of fear and frustration and terror, but god, it was tempting. Moreso as Katsuki smiled, fingers come up to card through your hair. “Don’t worry so much, I’ll be right there. Everything’ll be fine as long as you’ve got your Hero by your side, right?”

“No, no, you’re both fucking monsters!” You didn’t think. You couldn’t breathe, hyperventilating as you tried to force him away from you. Katsuki didn’t budge, his hand clamping down in your hair and jerking you forward, not stopping until you were bent over and whimpering in front of him. Izuku cooed something disgusting, but he didn’t move to stop Katsuki. Instead, you were met with the smug-satisfaction Izuku always seemed to project when Katsuki lost his temper.

“What did I tell you? We’ve got a brat to deal with.” Katsuki didn’t let go, but his grip slackened enough for Izuku to lift you, pulling your form against his chest despite how much you kicked and punched and clawed at him. If he noticed, he didn’t let on, only cradling you as Katsuki’s hand dropped to your neck, wrapping loosely around your throat. He didn’t hurt you, but he was ready to, clearly. “What about a few days tied to the bedpost? No food or water until someone’s in a more affectionate mood.” He paused, for a moment, thinking. “The collar will have to go back on, too.”

“Fuck that. Gag the bitch. Get ‘em ready for everything that comes with it, too.” Katsuki wasn’t trying to be gentle, anymore, squeezing a little too hard for the gesture to be playful. You didn’t know whether or not to be relieved when he started speaking to you. “You should know better than to talk-back, by now. Breaking the rules and acting up… you’re energetic today, aren’t you?”

Staying quiet was the only thing you could think to do, trying to hide your face in Izuku’s shoulder. But, Katsuki just pulled back, forcing you to meet his eyes. That might’ve been what finally did it, what made you finally realize how screwed you were. The rage in his gaze, that unrelenting, unfaltering commitment to your suffering.

Katsuki was just as dedicated to your discipline as he was to your protection, after all.

“It’s only fair that we put in the same amount of effort, ain’t it?”

Bet We Don’t Get Caught: KiroXMC

Rating: Smut, Semi-Public Word count: 2862 Summary: A last-minute cancellation had you in a panic to find a replacement. Calling Kiro, your secret boyfriend he agrees to come and help you out. In a playful mood, Kiro suggests a bet. Mr. Love Queen’s Choice Fanfiction The lights were bright, and the camera crew was all getting in position. You looked over to the blond starlit as he entered the studio and got ready to take his place. You’d be forever grateful for Kiro and how he dropped everything to come in today. When the other star that was supposed to be filming the ad for your next show called merely an hour before the shoot and cancelled your heart had dropped. In a frenzy to find someone famous enough to fill in you had called Kiro, who in turn had assured you he’d help out. Now, looking at him you felt guilty- Almost like you were taking advantage of him and the relationship you shared.

Not that many people knew of the romantic side of your relationship with the idol. For publicity sake and… his manager… You both had been keeping it on the down low. It worked fine, but it was hard to find time to yourselves with two busy schedules and Kiro’s travelling for shoots, and whatnot. You smiled back at him when his cerulean eyes meet yours. Kiro waved and shot you a thumbs up and the make-up girls fretted about him making sure he was camera ready. ‘Good Luck!’ You mouthed and he winked sticking out his tongue. ‘You too!’ he mouthed before turning his attention to the girls in front of him.

You turned and moved towards Kiki and Anna who both shot you a look. The look. You sighed rolling your eyes, they know something up. Of course, they do, but you weren’t about to out yourself or Kiro to them.

“Look at mister Prince Charming who oh-so happened to be free today to save you.” Kiki and snickered and you smiled at her.

“What were the chances right!” You played ignorant, knowing full well what Kiro’s actual schedule looked like and how busy he really was.

“Hmm. Well, at least we’ll get the ad out on time.” Anna smiled looking over to where they were taking photographs of the celebrity for the posters. “Have you asked Kiro if he can do the actual show?”

“Mmmn.” You hummed looking over to Kiro dazzling the studio with his charms. “We need to delay actual shooting a week, but Kiro marked us in for a week.” You stated and both women looked at you nearly gaping.

“Y-you managed to book him for a week!” Kiki gasped then looked over to Kiro who was busy winking at the camera and flirting with it too for the photos.

“Yup! This project will be great! The publicity our studio is going to get will really help secure the funding situation with LFG.” You smiled brightly looking towards Anna who was eyeing you. You suddenly felt like a five-year-old with her hand caught in the cookie jar.

“It is great.” Anan agreed still giving you a once over, and you flushed under her stare. She knows for sure now. You looked off and the director flagged you over.

“I’ll be back.” You hurried over to the crew and answered the director's questions gladly. After some time Kiro walked over and joined the both of you, his script that you wrote in his hand.

“Miss. Chips~” He sang out your nickname and his hand brushed yours in a taunting manner, as the director excused himself to speak with the camera crew.

“Mister. Chips~” You mimicked taking a step away from him.

The warmth of his body radiated off of him and you felt a chill run up your spine. That was a dangerous sensation and you need distance before you lost yourself in your charming secret boyfriend. It was really hard not being close to him when you haven't had a moment to see each other in the past two weeks. Kiro, however, was having none of it. A coy smirk played on his lips as he got closer to you and lifted the script up.

“You know-” He whispered, his breath tickled your earlobe as he leaned closer to you. The hairs on the back of your neck stood up and goosebumps bloomed all over your skin. “I bet we won’t get caught.” Kiro finished in a voice so deep, and lustful it should be illegal. Gasping you jump back looking at him wide-eyed before taking in the surrounding area. Everyone was busy finishing setting up and no one was even glancing in your direction.

“Kiro.” You hissed a warning and he laughed lightly beaming a smile before petting you with the script.

“No one is paying attention.” His voice was light and full of mischief as he once again stepped into your personal space again.

“Someone eventually will be paying attention!” You whispered as heat bloomed across your features, but Kiro just smiled at you.

“Want to make a bet?” He whispered leaning in close, you could taste his breath as it fanned your lips.

“What's the wager?” You whispered back curious, and under the charming evolvers spells now.

“Oh, now we’re talking!” Kiro chuckled softly eyes you with amusement. “What do you want?”  his tongue teased as it peaked out to lick your lips, and your knees threatened to buckle.

“You.” You breathed not even thinking. Blushed prickled your cheeks as you caught yourself and you bite your lip. “You’re not playing very fair.” Kiro chuckled at that taking your hand in his.

“As mi’lady wishes.” He winked and guided you back towards the storeroom.

“Kiro!” You whispered looking around wide-eyed. Everyone was still busy working at setting up for the days filming. “We can’t!” you whispered desperately at this point as you reached the storeroom.

“Oh?” Kiro chuckled opening the door, using his hold on your hand you usher you into the room. “But we soooo can.” Kiro was careful with shutting the door so it didn’t make a sound before turning towards you. All the boyish charm his face usually held melted away. Before you right now was a man on a mission. You looked at him and backed a step and was stopped by a prop and then a wall.

“You have to be quite~” He whispered corning you, pressing you further back against the hard surface behind you. “It’s cheating if we get caught because you made too much noise.” Kiro winked placing his hands on either side of your face trapping you completely.  Making a point Kiro pressed his chest against yours and you’re breathing got heavy. “Deal?”

All rational thought was leaving as Kiro leaned his face close to yours. Your lips still tasted of him from the tantalizing lick he gave your moments ago. You licked your lips and looked up into dark blue eyes as they studied you. You knew he'd stop here if you truly protested, but… You found yourself wanting to.

“If we get caught-” Kiro stopped you with a kiss.

It wasn’t gentle like his usual kisses where. No, it was demanding, and his tongue forced itself past your lips opening your mouth. You shuddered while bringing your hand up to steady yourself against his chest. Kiro dropped one of the hands holding you against the solid surface behind you and allowed to roam over your body. Feeling the swell of your chest and gripping the tender supple flesh roughly. Squeezing he got a moan of approval from you. “Shhhh.” He hushed you before going about ravishing your mouth with his.

You were already starting to get dizzy as you kissed him back eagerly, your own hand touching him greedily snaking their way under his shirt. You sighed feeling his hard toned body under your hands. Kiro was a masterpiece. Kiro followed suit snaking his hand up under your skirt, you thighs trembled as he gripped and caressed the smooth skin there. Higher and higher until his fingertips ran the line of your cotton panties and up your slit. You gasped and made a soft noise. Your nails now scraping down his flesh begging him for more.

Kiro broke the kiss staring you in the eye bringing the fingers that just rubbed into up to his mouth. Kiro made a show of licking his long digits and whirling his tongue around them. You watched in awe as he sucked them for a moment before they disappear swiftly back up your skirt. You mewled lulling your head as they pushed your panties aside and smeared his spit all over your swelling cunt. Kiro went back to kissing you roughly, his other hand tangling itself into your hair holding you still and angled just how he wanted you.

His fingers explored the lips of your pussy,  spreading his spit and your own juices until his fingers glided along your lips effortlessly. You shuttered mewling into his mouth as his fingers rubbed your clit making your eyes roll with pleasure. You were at Kiro’s mercy and he knew it. Kiro’s tongue was unrelenting as it rolled with yours and his fingers pushed their way into your quivering entrance. You gasped and Kiro hummed drinking in your sound of pleasure. Your hands explored his perfect torso, nails lightly clawing his flesh. An expert with his fingers he scissored them in and out, stretching your walls, and you broke the kiss panting looking up at your lover. Kiro winked at you as he hooked his fingers and pressed harshly into your g-spot. You leaned forward muffling your noise in his collarbone.

“You like that, baby?” He cooed in the most sultry of tons. You moaned again as he rubbed that spot within you. “You’re so wet, clenching my fingers with your pussy.” Your legs gave out and Kiro used his frame to keep you standing. A coil of pleasure sprung tighter as he moved his fingers a ruthless rate. “Quiet!” Kiro warned as your pussy fluttered, greedily pulled his fingers dropped within it’s trembling walls. “Good girl. Don’t come yet.” Kiro nibble your earlobe and you bit his shirt to keep quiet. “I love how wet your pussy is.” Your whole body was trembling from pleasure, Kiro’s dirty talk went straight to your groin. Eyes screwing themselves shut as you tried to keep your building orgasm from spilling over. The ripples of the pleasure doubled tenfold as his thumb rubbed harshly into your clit and messed with the hypersensitive bundle of nerves. “I said not yet, baby,” Kiro spoke in a soothing tone

“Kiiiirooo.” You whined gasping, your shirt now sticking to your body with sweat. It was all too much.   “You’re so close,” Kiro remarked feeling your beckoning orgasm on his finger. “But I want you to come on my cock.” His breath was hot on your ear and you moaned. “Quiet.” He reminded you and your fingers gripped the flesh of his biceps as your body rippled in pleasure repeatedly. You where right there tittering on the edge when Kiro removed his hand from your sex completely. Your sex throbbed in a protest being denied release and you collapsed against Kiro.”Kiro.” You whine again panting looking up at him. Kiro gave you a devilish smirk in return before sampling the juices he had gathered on his finger. “You’re going to be the end of me.”

A throaty chuckle came from him and you smiled. “Hold on a sec,” Kiro whispered. It wasn’t until you felt him shuffled around you and the clasp of his belt being undone did you release why he stopped. “Hurry.” You moaned softly kissing up and down the column of his throat.

“Okay arms around my neck, I’m going to lift you, leg secure around my waist,” Kiro ordered and you compiled eagerly. “Hold on,” Kiro whispered into your ear kissing your temple and then lined his cock up with your entrance tugging your panties far to the side.

You lean your back against the surface behind you and looked at Kiro as he thrust fully into in one go. You buried your face in your elbow to muffle the noise he pulled form you. “Fuck.” Kiro groaned as he moved you to gain being leverage of you. His sweaty forehead touched yours and his eyes bore into yours. “You’re so fucking tight.” He whispered, sweet breath fanning your face.  

“Kiro, please.” You whimpered already feeling close to your release still.

“Hold on tight, and remember-” Kiro kissed yours passionately for a moment. “Quiet.”

You buried your face in the crook of his neck. Kiro held onto your hips, and the other arm braced him on the wall. You moaned softly as he gave you two short shallow pumps, rocking his hips into you testing the position. Once he decided that you’d both be safe, he thrust into you mercilessly, and you wanted to scream. You could taste blood in your mouth from biting your tongue so hard to keep quiet. Kiro fucked into your repeatedly. Again, and again. Muttered and cursing under his breath as your skin started to make a lewd slapping sound between you. Not loud enough for anyone walking by to hear, but enough to add to both your senses.

Suddenly, almost without warning stars danced behind your eyelids and your body tensed up. Kiro didn’t relent at all, only now he used his hold on you to slam your own body down to meet his cock with every move. There was a wet obscene noise your bodies made as you released around his cock. You where left soundlessly sobbing into his shoulder in intense pleasure as it echoed throughout your entire being. The air was knocked out of your lungs as your juices ran down his length and your inner thighs. Kiro’s own breathing got more erratic as kept up is tiring punishing pace. Soon the ripples of your orgasm started to fade and you came back to your senses long enough to hear a blissful low nearly inaudible groan leave Kiro. The sound alone had your pussy tightening up against his cock as he drilled into you in an almost animalistic manner before finding his own high.

“Shit.” Kiro breathed as he rocked his hips against yours letting the last of your orgasms run their course. You could feel the rapid beating of his pulse, it matched your own. “You’re so hot.” Kiro purred in your ears and you smiled kissing under his ear.

“So are you.” You murmured feeling fuzzy and satisfied. Kiro smiled at that and urged you to look up at him. You did so gladly, taking in his unkempt appearance. “All that hair and make-up prep is gone.” You muttered and he chuckled.

“They can fix it.” He kissed you, removing himself from you before setting you back down on your feet.

“They’ll know we just had a rump in the storage closet if you go out looking like that.” You scolded and he smiled scratching the back of his head.

“You thoroughly fucked yourself.” Kiro blushed reverting back into the shy boy idol you fell in love with. You flushed at that and looked at him in a near insulted manner. “You look sexy like this.” Kiro smiled walking towards you, his fingers flirted along with your hip bones. “I love that I completely ruined your appearance in our passion.” He whispered pulling your hips toward him as he smiled looking you dead in the eyes. “You look beautiful-” He kissed you. “Relaxed-” He spoke on your lips before kissing you again. “And I love you.”

Your heart pounded in your chest as a shapeless emotion took form there. You smiled wrapping your arms around his neck deepening the kiss.”I love you too, Kiro.” You whispered and he smiled brightly at that.

“Whew, that's a relief.” He moved to straighten your blouse. “It would have made what we just did really awkward.” Kiro joked combing your hair with his finger.

Despite yourself, you giggled and started helping him straighten himself out. A few kisses and murmurs later you both left the storage room and rejoined the rest of the crew.

No one said anything.

No one seemed to notice anything.

Anna and Kiki didn’t even offer you any questioning looks that they were famous for. You chatted with them as you all scurried about the studio trying to make sure everything was perfect. Kiki was complaining about how busy it was and how unfair it was she hadn’t even had a moment to talk to Kiro. Anna would scold her for her whining and made sure everything moved swiftly and smoothly.

The rest of the day went off without a single delay and the ad was shot. Kiro charmed literally everyone on set and soon enough the sun had set. Kiro had left with his manager promising to plan a date for the two of you soon. You smiled at him slyly and he winked.

“See you later, Miss chips!” He called across the studio and you giggled waving him off.

It wasn’t until you got home and clasped onto your bed did you check your phone.

Kiro: I told you we wouldn’t get caught. I’ll collect my winnings at a later date. Have the sweetest dreams Miss. Chips. Muah~

Riverdale Characters as Tropes (Part II) ⭐️.

#9. Hiram Lodge (Main Trope: Fiction 500; Secondary Tropes: Big Bad, Evil Overlord, 0% Approval Rating, The Don, The Patriarch, Bad Boss, Corrupt Corporate Executive, Magnificent Bastard, Sharp Dressed Man, Badass In A Nice Suit, Man Of Wealth And Taste)

Fiction is loaded with Wish Fulfillment, and being rich enough to bend reality is one of them. These are characters whose wealth is almost impossible to quantify. More Money Than God is the bare minimum. Now this could happen in Real Life, like royalty who owned literally thousands of Pimped Out Dresses, or a man in India who built a private skyscraper for his family, staff, and fleet of cars, or Marcus Licinius Crassus, who had three times as much money as Bill Gates and personally funded the reconstruction of the Roman army. But in fiction, that's on the lower end of this scale. Stuff that generally does not qualify you to be a member of the Fiction 500: Big Fancy House, Cool Chair, Cool Boat, Cool Plane, Cool Car, Battle Butler, Maid Corps, or even simply having assets in the billions.

Stuff that generally does qualify you to be a member of the Fiction 500:

You have become a cultural symbol for absurd wealth, and the story leaves no doubt your reputation is completely justified.

You routinely spend money on a scale normal super-rich people might do once or twice in a lifetime, whether it be major investments or mere Conspicuous Consumption. If a real amount is given, even if in the hundreds of millions, or billions, it's chump change to these characters.

You personally fund projects associated with major corporations, governments, aliens, etc. This includes Crimefighting with Cash.

You have the resources of a global superpower without yourself ruling a global superpower.

You personally fund projects that apparently break the rules of physics using only wealth and the Rule of Cool, or sometimes Rule of Funny. In other words, Screw The Universe; I Have Money! But if some other convenient fictional trope makes something possible, it doesn't count. You don't buy sound in space when Space Is Noisy. It's not impressive to have Infinite Supplies when everyone else does. Building a Humongous Mechais not noteworthy when any random scientist can make five in a weekend.

You're surprised to discover your latest project's market success has not increased your net income because you have a monopoly on the product it's competing with.

You can do any of the above without leaving a paper trail or an electronic footprint. Many of these Fiction 500 rich characters operate either clandestinely or under a secret identity, especially if they are Crimefighting with Cash, The Chess Master or Evil Mastermind types. They must have methods for secretly diverting hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to their schemes (like building that army of Mooks, Elaborate Underground Base, Bat Cave, or Batmobile) while making it seem like a legit and legal expenditure or keeping it out of the books. It should be noted that even if a character uses their personal fortune, these transactions would still typically have to show up somewhere when tax time comes.

Now personality doesn't really matter. You could be a Rich Bitch or Uncle Pennybags. You could be a law abiding citizen and even be Batman, or instead think you can screw the rules. Name is based on the top 500 grossing companies annually compiled by "Fortune" Magazine. And despite the name implying otherwise, there can be any number of characters here. Also, there is almost no way to objectively rank them, although Forbes tries with their "Fictional 15" list. Compare Arbitrarily Large Bank Account, Conspicuous Consumption, Undisclosed Funds, Organization with Unlimited Funding, and N.G.O. Superpower. For real people who are considered the richest in the world, see The World's Billionaires, an annual ranking made by Forbes (which has its own article on The Other Wiki, BTW).

The cause of all bad happenings in a story. A Big Bad could be a character with Evil Plans or it could be an omnipresent situation, such as a comet heading towards the Earth. In a serial story, the Big Bad exerts an effect across a number of episodes, even an entire season. This trope is not a catch-all term for the biggest, ugliest villain of any given story. In fact, it doesn't have to be a villain at all, as we just said. If it is a villain, though, it should be identified correctly; the badass leader of the outlaw gang that causes the most personal trouble is not the Big Bad. The railroad tycoon who is using the gang as muscle is the Big Bad. The Man Behind the Manis very common for this trope, leaving the reveal of the big bad as The Chessmaster behind it all and proving themselves far more clever and resourceful than the Villain of the Week. Sometimes the Big Bad is the grand enemy of an entire franchise as an Overarching Villain. At other times, the Big Bad is an Arc Villain who causes trouble for a period of time only to be replaced by another Big Bad. When you look at a season-long story or a major Story Arc and you can identify one problem being the cause of everything, that is the Big Bad. In its most general form, a Big Bad will be at the center of the Myth Arc rather than just any Story Arc. The term "Big Bad" was popularized in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was characteristic of Buffy's Big Bads for their identity or nature, or even the fact that they are the Big Bad at all, to remain unclear for a considerable time. Occasionally, characters would even refer to themselves as "the Big Bad". Whether or not they were, though, this is a Big Bad Wannabe. The structure of Buffy placed the Big Bad as being crucial to the Half-Arc Season, half the episodes are filler dealing with unrelated enemies while the other half involved the ongoing Myth Arc with the Big Bad. Each season can easily be defined by who the Big Bad was. If a show has a series of Big Bad jeopardies, they can function like a series of Monsters of the Week that take more than one week to finish off. If there is a Legion of Doom, you can expect the Big Bad to be involved somehow. They're probably sorted by power, with the strongest for last, following the Sorting Algorithm of Evil. Evil Overlord, Diabolical Mastermind, The Chessmaster, Arch-Enemy, The Man Behind the Man, and often Manipulative Bastard are specific types of villains who are liable to show up as Big Bads. If they're a Magnificent Bastard or Hero Killer, the good guys are in big trouble. The heroic counterpart of this character is the Big Good, who will very often be the focus of this character's attention over The Hero at the beginning of a series. If a work of fiction is conspicuously lacking a Big Bad, it may be a case of No Antagonist. See also Big Bad Duumvirate for two (or more) Big Bads working together. Sometimes a Big Bad will get their start as a servant to another villain — if that's the case, they're a Dragon Ascendant. If the character who fills the role of Big Bad in most meaningful ways is nominally subordinate to someone else (someone significantly less menacing by comparison), they are a Dragon-in-Chief. If the story has many Big Bads at once who don't work together, see Big Bad Ensemble. The Big Bad Shuffle occurs when there are multiple candidates for the Big Bad position. If the Big Bad doesn't start out as bad but develops over the course of the story, it's Big Bad Slippage. If the Big Bad of one section of a work doesn't die on being defeated and stays around as a character in a different plot role (reformed or not), that's Ex-Big Bad. The Big Bad of a story is not always the most powerful or oldest existing evil force. Perhaps an evil presence along the lines of an Eldritch Abominationovershadows the work's setting, but is mainly divorced from the story's events — that would be the Greater-Scope Villain.

#10. Hermione Lodge (Main Trope: Femme Fatale; Secondary Tropes: Iron Lady, Proper Lady, Spicy Latina, Gold Digger, Corrupt Politician, Grande Dame, Silk Hiding Steel, The Woman Wearing The Queenly Mask, God Save Us From The Queen, Sugar-And-Ice-Personality)

First, she turns you on. Then, she turns on you. The typical client in a Hardboiled Detective story (French for "fatal woman," idiomatically "woman to die for"). You know the type. Dressed all in black with legs up to here and shady motives, she slinksinto the PI's office, sometimes holding a cigarette on a long, long holder, saying "Oh, Mr. Rockhammer, you're the only one who can help me find out who killed my extremely wealthy husband." Did she do it? Do I care? Wait, where'd that saxophone music come from? Whatever her story is, whether she did it or not, she's definitely keeping some secrets. The Femme Fatale is sexy and she knows it. Made famous by Film Noir and hard-boiled detective stories, she manipulates and confuses The Hero with her undeniable aura of sexiness and danger. Unlike the virginal and sweet Damsel in Distress (or possibly Action Girl), the Femme Fatale exploits with everything she's got to wrap men around her finger. (In some eras, use of make-up is a tell-tale sign.) He knows that she's walking trouble and knows much more about the bad guys than she should, but damn it if he can't resist her feminine wiles. If the Femme Fatale is vying for the hero's romantic attentions she will likely have a sweeter and purer rival. The hero might decide that she's not worth the trouble she causes, but if he doesn't, then they might become an Outlaw Couple. While related to The Vamp, the Femme Fatale is not just any seductress; she has a distinct look and feel. The main distinction is how she presents herself. If you know she's dangerous from the start, but she's sexy enough that you don't care, she's likely a Femme Fatale. On a lesser note, the Femme Fatale generally uses sensuality instead of upfront sexual advances. She may implythat you could have sex later, but she'll never promise it, not even say it—that would decrease her air of mystery and power. Her wiles may include apparent helplessness and distress, and appeals to the man's greed, desire for revenge, or gullibility, as well as the implication of possible romance or sexual rewards, while The Vamp more often reliances on raunchy sex or the promise of it sometime real soon. The Femme Fatale is generally villainous, and heroic exceptions—in an artificial context to snare the bad guy—are closer to Heroic Seductress. Frequently, she is a Wild Card, changing sides according to her own desires and goals; she does not often go through a High-Heel–Face Turn. If she's actually a kind-hearted person who puts on this facade just for fun, this is Trickster Girlfriend. She's often the Lady in Red but possibly dressed like everyone else so as to not be Colour-Coded for Your Convenience. The Femme Fatale is one of the female character types that can often be seen wearing High Class Gloves, especially in conjunction with her sexy evening gowns, and, during the daytime (particularly in old Film Noir movies), is often seen wearing a "fascinator" or "pillbox" hat with a partial- or full-face veil. She's definitely not above using the Kiss of Distraction. If she can fight, too, then she's really going to be trouble. Subtrope of Manipulative Bastard. The younger version of this is the Fille Fatale. The spy version of this is Femme Fatale Spy.

#11. FP Jones (Main Trope: The Casanova; Secondary Tropes: Action Dad, The Alcoholic, Alcoholic Parent, The Good King, The Quarterback, The Sheriff, Dirty Cop, Reasonable Authority Figure, Jaded Washout)

The (legal, and less repulsive than the better-known types) sexual predator — a man who relentlessly pursues, lands, loves, and then abandons members of the opposite sex, a skill bestowed upon him to demonstrate what a badass he is. Sometimes comic, sometimes a monster, always successful, this character leaves behind a string of broken hearts, and occasional vows ofrevenge that are rarely fulfilled. Casanova's only motivation is indulging his lust and desire, sating them with the bodies of his conquests.

This trope tends to suffer from three double standards when portrayed in media;

The first is that the Casanova is always male, given that women are usually shamed for having an active sex life. The comparatively rarer female version is an "aphrodite", but she’ll likely be portrayed as an evil character who exploits her sexuality to manipulate innocent men. The womanizing skills of the Casanova, on the other hand, will almost always be granted to him to make him look like a champion.

This trope also applies almost exclusively to straight men, given that queer people with an active sex life are usually villainized in media. Meanwhile, straight men get to be portrayed as badasses for having multiple women at their beck and call. Bisexuals or demisexuals are even rarer, though not unheard of; for example Oberyn Martell.

The Casanova trope is also usually only applied to Caucasian/white men. Non-white men having, expressing or giving into their sexual desires is often portrayed negatively or Played for Laughs. Also, while white male Casanovas being with non-white women is generally portrayed as fine, men of color are often limited in a work to dating, having sex, marrying or even flirting only with women of the same nationality or skin color as them. If they do have a romantic relationship or sexual encounter with a woman of a different nationality or skin-color, it is usually held in scorn by some in-universe (and sometimes out-of-universe, unfortunately).

Contrast with the unsuccessful Casanova Wannabe. Compare with the inexplicable Kavorka Man. A guy who gets the girls like a Casanova, but unintentionally, is a Chick Magnet. If kind-hearted, may overlap with Chivalrous Pervert. The Charmer is equally charming but less sex-obsessed. If they really get around but want to settle down, it's Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places. A Handsome Lech has more negative connotations and a sparser scorecard than the Casanova. The trope is named for Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798), a soldier, spy, diplomat, adventurer, and librarian whose extensive but unreliable autobiography (in which he almost literally described himself as God's Gift to Womennote ) established his eternal fame as a lover. It should be noted that the historical Casanova was closer to a Chivalrous Pervert who really was looking for love... just with women who were locked in loveless political marriages — and also gained his successes famously ugly. (Definitely◊ he was no Heath Ledger◊.) Interesting and prone to be noted for his modern wannabes, he was one of the few 18th century men who bathed almost dailyand asked the same thing from his partners. Many films, TV movies and TV mini-series are named for and based on that person. The best known are Fellini's 1976 film, the 2005 film starring Heath Ledger, and the 2005 BBC drama mini-series starring David Tennant. The latter is considered one of the more faithful adaptations of Casanova's memoirs, while Fellini's... wasn't. For the juvenile version — all of the above without the sex — see Kid-anova. Contrast the Serial Romeo (who falls in love with a long succession of women, one at a time and for reasonable periods). If the guy is actually only rumored to be a Casanova and has no evidence onscreen, it's the Urban Legend Love Life. If he develops feelings for one of his conquests (or someone who refuses him), he's a Ladykiller in Love. See More Friends, More Benefits for when the mechanics of a game encourage the player character to act this way. Note: It should be mentioned that even after the affairs were over, most of Casanova's ex-lovers still liked him, and he was reputedly quite the gentleman. This trope would probably fit (the fictional) Don Juan better.

#12. Gladys Jones (Main Trope: Evil Matriarch; Secondary Tropes: Dark Is Evil, Parental Abandonment, Action Mom, Drugs Are Bad, Bitch In Sheeps Clothing, Bait The Dog)

A mother is one of the most central figures that a character can have growing up, and her influence can have an impact on that character even as an adult. If the character is lucky, that mother will be a loving one, and if he or she is really lucky, she'll be an Action Mom who can kick ass and take names if the character is ever threatened. But if the character is really unlucky and isn't suffering from Parental Abandonment, the character's mother will be an Evil Matriarch and chances are, she will make that character's life a living hell.

The Evil Matriarch comes in two forms:

Comedic: Usually used in the Dom Com, this variety is usually the mother of one of the two parents on the show who comes to visit every so often, and someone on the cast dreads it. Usually (though not always) this variety of Evil Matriarch is a meddling parent, often to an irrational extreme. Classically, this is a Mother-in-Law situation, but from time to time, the kids themselves, or even the child of the mother is the one that dreads it. In some cases, everyone hates the Evil Matriarch, like in Malcolm in the Middle where everyone dreads Lois's mother coming to visit. In other cases, her visit is appreciated by everyone but the daughter or son of the Evil Matriarch, like in Family Ties, where the matriarch is evil because her daughter feels she can't live up to mom's perfection. Expect this variety of Evil Matriarch to have Power Hair and other Fashionable Evil.

Dramatic: This variety, which shows up in more dramatic media, is truly evil in a traditional sense, and is one of the worst villains one can face, especially if one of the Heroes or Love Interests is one of her children (or if she's married into his or her family as a stepmother). Many such Evil Matriarchs are completely convinced that they, and only they, know what's best for their children, and can be very controlling, manipulative, and perfectly willing to do anything they deem necessary for their children's sake, no matter how evil or destructive it may be. The most vicious examples of this variety of Evil Matriarch despise their children (or at least the one they've singled out as The Unfavorite) and are often physically or emotionally abusive towards them, and many of them are not above Offing the Offspring.

If she's not entirely human, then expect her to be a Hive Queen. If she is also the Queen, expect God Save Us from the Queen!. The Spear Counterpart of this character type is Archnemesis Dad. The inversion is Antagonistic Offspring. See Abusive Parents and Parental Neglect for the more mundane versions. See Offing the Offspring and/or Matricide for what this might lead to if the kids fight back. If it's not your mother but her replacement who's making your life a living Hell, see Wicked Stepmother.

#13. Hal Cooper (Main Trope: Ax-Crazy; Secondary Tropes: Serial Killer, The Bluebeard, Malevolent Masked Man, Knight Templar Parent, Insane Equals Violent, Light Is Not Good, Icy Blue Eyes)

An "ax-crazy" character is someone who is psychologically unstable and presents a clear and present danger to others. They are capable of extreme violence, whether carried out with a Slasher Smile, insane laughter, speaking in a Creepy Monotone, or out and out murderous rage, and with no way of knowing just what will set them off, which makes them extremely frightening to deal with. This mainly differentiates them from other eccentric characters who may themselves be obsessive, weird or seemingly crazy, but use this condition hand in hand with doing good, or at least not being in the way. However, some formerly established heroes can go through an episode of ax-craziness and still retain their heroic mantle. Despite the title, ax-crazies aren't limited to wielding axes. Any instrument of death will do, from knives or straight razors to swords to chainsaws and beyond. A good number of other ax-crazies are also Trigger Happy, preferring either Hand Cannons that blow really big holes in people, or weapons that allow them to kill lots of people with reckless abandon, such as any automatic weapon. And for the truly psychopathic among psychopaths for whom the above just won't do, a heaping helping of high explosives or a good-sized flamethrower will do quite nicely. Sometimes, they don't even need weapons and just use magic spells or other powers if they have them. There are also plenty who are just as happy to beat people into an unrecognizable pulp-like mass with their bare hands. It is rare for a truly Ax-Crazy character to be a protagonist, largely due to it being a Sub-Trope of Obviously Evil, and most Ax-Crazy characters usually are Obviously Evil. They're common as the antagonists in Superhero and Crime and Punishment Series, often serving as a Psycho for Hire. If they area protagonist, they will most certainly be a Nominal Hero or Villain Protagonist. The difference between them and Blood Knight is this trope is all about killing while the Blood Knight is only interested in fighting. There is, of course, plenty of room for overlap. See also Insane Equals Violent, The Butcher, The Dreaded, Mad Bomber, Cute and Psycho, Blood Knight, Psycho for Hire, Yandere, The Sociopath, Mad Doctor, Pyro Maniac, Hair-Trigger Temper, Colonel Kilgore, General Ripper, Insane Admiral, and Sociopathic Soldier. Compare and contrast Mama Bear, Papa Wolf, Big Brother Instinct, and Violently Protective Girlfriend, who may be capable of temporary Ax-Craziness when their kids, younger sibling(s) or mate are under threat, but are often played sympathetically. Contrast Suicidal Pacifism, when a character never, ever resorts to violence even if it is necessary; and Extreme Doormat, when a character is a complete pushover unable to fight back. The canonical Character Alignment for most Ax-Crazy characters is Chaotic or Neutral Evil, though a couple of Chaotic Neutral examples exist. Sometimes The Unfettered, depending on whether they feel freed or enslaved by their bloodlust. At least one or more examples are an Anti-Villian, where you kinda feel bad for them since their enemies pushed them too far with actions such as killing their family, their friends, or even the enemies trying to kill them, making them go Ax-Crazy. It's very common to be Played for Drama, usually as either the Big Bad, or The Dragon to the the Big Bad. It is far less common, but not unheard of, for it to be Played for Laughs; this is most likely to be seen in a Sadist Show, especially one featuring a lot of Comedic Sociopathy and/or heavy Satire, with it appearing most often in humorous comic strips, Anime, Web Originalworks, and the more adult-oriented Western Animation of the Renaissanceand Millennium periods. A very large number of pages link to this when they should link to An Axe to Grind. This page is about violent crazy people, not people whose Weapon of Choice is an axe (despite the potential for overlap).

#14. Alice Cooper (Main Trope: Ice Queen; Secondary Tropes: Education Mama, Control Freak, Former Teen Rebel, Female Misogynist, The Fundamentalist, Holier Than Thou)

Much like a Tomboy, the Ice Queen is a major character archetype which is somewhat hard to define. Her signature characteristic is that she is cold; the ambiguity comes from what "cold" means. She has a cold heart, a frosty demeanor; she attracts but will never be wooed. Scorned men are likely to call their failed conquests Ice Queens (after all, normal women would have given in to them). Due to the Double Standard, the Ice Queen is (almost) Always Female. The Ice Queen is considered dangerous to love because she will not (or cannot) love back. She's not much for friendship either, preferring to be alone. Situations where an Ice Queen "thaws" and learns to enjoy the company of others are so common that they have their own trope. Being an Ice Queen is purely about personality; having ice-related abilities does not make a character an Ice Queen. That said, it's not at all uncommon for a character with a cold personality to be given cold powers. Not to be confused with a character who has a royal title associated with ice or snow, though they two may overlap (and often do in more magical settings). An Ice Queen requires at least one "cold" personality trait that gets her labeled as an Ice Queen. 

#15. Fred Andrews (Main Trope: The Heart; Secondary Tropes: Like Father, Like Son, Betty And Veronica, Family Man, Standard 50′s Father, The Conscience, Big Good, Good Parents)

The Heart is a personality aspect that comes up in just about any ensemble. Their personality is based on getting the others to recognize that there are more things at stake than their personal vendettas, especially if The Team is becoming a group of Knights Templar, or if any individual becomes a Well-Intentioned Extremist. This is the person who will argue and fight against the justification of "I Did What I Had to Do". Quite often The Heart character will also be an All-Loving Hero, where they go out of their way to help all of the little people. Within the ensemble this character will most often be merged with the role of The Chick. Like The Hero and The Leader, they aren't one and the same, but they often overlap since they are a good fit. If The Chick is usually a non-action character, having personality traits of The Heart will give them more to do, especially if the team is always at each other's throats. For the same reason, The Heart can also be The Hero (in the case of the Magnetic Hero) or The Leader, as their leadership skills keep the team from falling apart. May be part of the Command Roster. The character whose death or loss is most likely to trigger Losing the Team Spirit. Where Elemental Powers come into play, other characters may be in for a Heart Beatdown. Due to their usual relative introversion, and tendencies towards pacifism (whether technical or actual), this character is sadly often C-List Fodder and a prime target for a single-character (rather than the entire show) version of The Firefly Effect. Many series will start out with a Heart character, but the writers will begin to view them as boring and impossible to write for, so they end up being either Put on a Bus/kept Out of Focus at best, or Character Death at worst. This also tends to happen when studio executives want to replace the character with a more talented or physically attractive character, in an attempt to boost ratings. Given that said characters are usually sweet types (and peacekeepers), this also tends to seriously anger a certain portion of the fanbase, but because the studio executives care more about ratings than they do about upsetting what is normally a minority, the character will stay dead. If fan outrage is sufficiently vocal, and the executives haven't managed to completely alienate the actor, then the character may come back periodically as a ghost or a clone. Compare The Face who does the talking on The Team. See also Restored My Faith in Humanity and Morality Chain. Compare The Conscience, Token Good Teammate. Not to be confused with What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway? or Heart Is an Awesome Power though this trope often overlaps with them. Contrast with Lack of Empathy.

#16. Mary Andrews (Main Trope: Fiery Redhead; Secondary Tropes: Missing Mom, Mama Bear, Heroes Want Redheads, Almighty Mom, Brutal Honesty)

A Fiery Redhead is a red-haired character who is strong, Hot-Blooded, out going, usually outspoken, and (if a love interest) often female. She has a big personality and she's not afraid to use it. Whatever you do, don't get on her bad side, or there will be hell to pay. (Especially if powers of personality and/or elements are present: she likes Playing with Fire. Thus, in a Four-Temperament Ensemble, expect her to be Choleric.) She will be unladylike unless it's the case of a redheaded Spirited Young Lady. She might be One of the Boys, a tomboy, or a lad-ette. Heroes do like redheads after all. This hair-color stereotype probably developed since red hair was associated with the Irish and Scottish (and before this, Horny Vikings) for a long time, and they ended up being stereotyped as loud, strong, and passionate (see the Fighting Irish and Violent Glaswegian tropes for more info on that). On the other hand, it's even found in Eastern Europe where any association would have been with Russians or Swedes, and these are nationalities not generally stereotyped as hotheaded. In addition to this, it extends even into ancient texts from Babylonian and Scandinavian Oral Historian. In the Prose Edda, Odin is depicted as blonde, green-eyed, cool, and calculating—while his son, Thor, is a redheaded, blue-eyed (something of an omen of war/perfection in Scandinavian culture) fire-breathing stereotypical Viking (the raiding kind) who treats Earth as a giant freshman mixer. Gilgamesh is also a Fiery Redhead with blue eyes whose duties include being a good precursor to Thor, for the most part—though with more reservation and a cooling trend near the end of his life (this makes both an eerie paradigm of Fiery Redheads at the creation of their respective people's writings). The whole "red-haired, blue-eyed" thing is usually split in Japan between two people. Although real redheads can have tempers like everyone else, this trait is exaggerated in fiction. Also, they can have Green Eyes and this association is also exaggerated in fiction. Compare Heroes Want Redheads, Dark-Skinned Redhead, Evil Redhead, Rose-Haired Sweetie, Red-Headed Stepchild, Redheads Are Uncool, Redheaded Hero. In anime, could be a Shana Clone. If you have a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead in close proximity (i.e. in the main cast), it's Blonde, Brunette, Redhead. Contrast Shy Blue-Haired Girl for Red Oni, Blue Oni and Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette for the realistic opposite hair color and personality. Please do not confuse this with a redhead being literally fiery, or having literal fiery head, although these tropes may overlap. And a red who's literally firey does have their hair color fit their elemental powers. See also Red Is Violent (in this case, the hair color).

#17. Clifford Blossom (Main Trope: Abusive Dad; Secondary Tropes: Archnemesis Dad, Faux Affably Evil, Offing The Offspring, Mean Boss)

Parents are supposed to be the protectors of children, but these parents are either so damaged themselves that they can't do the job, greedy or villainous to the point that they never had any interest in doing the job properly, or would rather use the child as a means to an end. Sometimes they're just sadistic assholes. This includes parents who are emotionally, verbally, physically, or mentally abusive, or who neglectfully allow their children to be abused by others if they don't abuse the child themselves; sexual abuse is typically treated as a special kind of evil. Sometimes, the abuse at the hands of their parents becomes a Freudian Excuse for a villain. Other times, the character manages to not grow up broken, bitter, and hateful, and instead a different and better person than the upbringing would incline one to think. Troubling Unchildlike Behavior is often a tell-tale sign that things are not right at home. Abusive Parents are commonplace in fairy tales and Classical Mythologywhich makes this trope Older Than Feudalism. Note that The Brothers Grimm, when they collected European fairy tales, were uncomfortable with the idea of Abusive Parents and so frequently changed the Abusive Parents in the traditional stories into abusive step parents. Sometimes, a parent will go as far as to kill the child in question, in which case this is Offing the Offspring. In other cases, the parent's abuse occasionally drives the offspring to snap, commit Revenge and finally kill them, thus becoming a Self-Made Orphan. Calling the Old Man Out occurs when a fed-up child retaliates with a "The Reason You Suck" Speech. If the child gets out of the broken family and forms healthy friendships, but reacts badly when their abusive parents show up again, well, Friends Are Chosen, Family Aren't. Bear in mind that not everyone agrees on the line between actual abuse and merely heavy-handed parenting (or even normal parenting). Is Moving the Goalposts merely inspiring the child to achieve more, or the most insidious form of abuse to instill mistrust and paranoia to the children? Some include spanking as abuse; others think it's appropriate given certain guidelines. Some believe it's okay to make a kid go without a meal (they won't starve that easily); others disagree. Making a kid miss a friend's birthday sleepover — is that emotional abuse? Raising a kid without exposure to TV? Telling your daughter she's getting fat? A little friendly name-calling? There's a line here somewhere, but not everyone agrees on where it is. If a parent has just dumped the child, for whatever reason, that's Parental Abandonment; if they aren't paying attention, that's Parental Neglect. If the parents refuse to discipline their kids, they are Pushover Parents. Contrast Mama Bear or Papa Wolf (where others abuse the children and the parents abuse the abusers), and the more extreme variant of Knight Templar Parent, where the abusive parent is violently overprotective. Abusive Precursors can be considered this on a metaphorical level. See Hilariously Abusive Childhood for when this is cranked up to absurd levels and played for laughs. Black Comedy is often connected in the comedic aspect of it, and a Big, Screwed-Up Family may be involved if it is adult comedy. In keeping with the above note, some may call the show on it and say Dude, Not Funny!. See Evil Matriarch and Archnemesis Dad for characters who are beyond abusiveand outright evil. For parents who are mostly abused by their children, see Pushover Parents. While they do not have to be the child's actual, technical parents to be part of this trope, it's pretty important that they are closely related and live together, like a Wicked Stepmother or an Evil Uncle taking care of the Parentally Deprived. After all, it's much more disgusting that somebody related to the child could bring themselves to hurt them, rather than a mere foster family. The polar opposite, of course, are Good Parents.

#18. Penelope Blossom (Main Trope: Black Widow; Secondary Tropes: Evil Redhead, Widow Woman, Straw Feminist, The Vamp, High Class Call Girl, Dark Mistress)

The man-eater, the woman whose husbands/Love Interests keep on dying. Usually, a Black Widow is a cross between a Con Artist and a Serial Killer, a woman who seduces, marries, and then murders men for their money, always using a different name and identity each time to keep the police and her intended victims from twigging to her real identity. She's very much a highly successful vamp. Black Widows' methods may vary, but poisoning is often favored: it doesn't demand superior strength or leave obvious marks, and it's traditional for wives to do the cooking for their husbands. Also, many types of poisoning can have symptoms similar to those of common illnesses, which makes it easier for a Black Widow to collect life insurance money (a very common motivation). There are too many Truth in Television instances to count. Occasionally there are more nefarious methods. The name "black widow" comes from the official FBI designation for this kind of killer and from the black widow spider, which is so named because of the occasional habit of female black widow spiders (particularly the Australian redback spiders and the southern black widows) to devour their mates after mating. For this reason the trope may be paired with Arachnid Appearance and Attire to really drive the spider metaphor home. A Sub-Trope of Sleeping Their Way to the Top, Murder in the Family, and Gold Digger (this one prefers to kill her Meal Ticket instead of living with him). A Sister Trope to The Bluebeard (the Spear Counterpart). Compare Yandere, Comforting the Widow, Widow Woman (for other widow tropes), Will and Inheritance Tropes and Cartwright Curse. When a pregnancy is involved, this intersects with Conceive and Kill. See also Literal Maneater, which is an actual monster that uses the disguise of a woman to lure in its prey.

Look out for Part III!

More bullshit from Mod A in regards to Xion.  Mod M is more reasonable (although I question if toxic male fandom does hate anything that reads like fanfiction at first glance...I think that if it reads like the kind of fanfiction they like, then they’ll eagerly accept it. I like to consider myself equal opportunity in this regard: if it reads like any kind of bad fanfic, then I dislike it.)

I’m with @riniuchihaa here. For me, Xion, far from being the best KH character, was the first glaring neon warning sign that the series was going off-course, that an original character was being created for the sake of it despite not being able to impact much of anything given her placement, and then was not ever let go of even though the excuse given as to why she was forgotten by KH2 should have rendered it impossible for her to appear in the series again.

“not a damsel in distress, action girl or sex object”

Is she not those things, though?  She has to be rescued or protected several times throughout the game. She wields a Keyblade and can even be better at it than Roxas if she’s absorbed enough of his strength. And there are a lot of creepy guys online that will argue that she is sexy, particularly with KH3′s model of her suggesting that she’s not wearing anything underneath that coat, which is open all the way to just above her chest. By KH3, she’s even taken Namine’s “plot device to make convoluted shit happen” status. If anything, people take issue with her being all of those things, and not even being them as well as other KH girls. She’s very derivative with little to add for herself.

“she’s a regular human being with a regular human emotional arc”

I would actually say that of Xion in the manga.

In the game, I think this is a case of projecting. Xion’s personality and arc are written as such a blank slate, with more people talking about Xion and what she’s going through than her and it being onscreen, that it’s easy to project on to. But when looked at objectively, there isn’t much humanity to it at all.

Ask yourself this: what is Xion like when she’s not around Roxas and Axel, doing missions and eating ice cream? What are her likes and dislikes, her own personal hobbies or aspirations? What are her feelings on matters completely unrelated to her friends?  For the life of me, I can’t come up with an answer. The closest I can get is with the text of her Secret Reports, where she honestly shows more character than she actually shows in the game itself (but then, that’s the same with Roxas and his Diary entries.) 

Before her identity crisis kicks in, all of Xion’s scenes are shared with Roxas and/or Axel, in the context of missions, ice cream, and being good friends with them, simply going along with whatever they’re doing and saying. Any feelings of inadequacy she feels during periods of time where she’s “malfunctioning” are skimmed over, and again is talked about more by other people than by her. Once her identity crisis happens, any scene she has apart from Axel and Roxas either still works them in somehow (they are consistently her biggest motivations in her own personal conflict, the only reason she’s conflicted about her existence is because of them since they give her a reason to exist) or just focuses on her freaking out about the fact that she’s a replica whose personality was formed based on the fragmented memories of another person that leaked into Xion through that person’s Nobody, which makes her less fit to exist than those who aren’t meant to exist. Yeah, totally a regular human emotional arc right there!  Can’t count the number of times in the history of the human species that people have had to go through that!

Kairi in KH and Namine in COM actually felt like human beings with emotional arcs in spite of their extraordinary circumstances. Xion feels more like KH2′s Kairi and Namine, where I get the basic trope behind their personalities and development, but can’t really pin them down as three-dimensional and realistic. That’s Xion - the writing for her is very trope-y, not human. The main points of how she was written were three-fold: as a plot device (a means of getting Roxas from point A to point B), as a wish-fulfillment character (she’s basically Tomoko Kanemaki’s self-insert), and as an exploration of a theme (the “What Measure is a Non-Human?” theme that Kanemaki is obsessed with). The humanity being inferred in regards to her being a trans girl case study was not at all intended to be there, and it can only happen because she was sketched thinly enough for it to be applied to her. 

“complains that she’s taking too much space or stealing the spotlight”

I’m sorry, but this is a valid complaint. When it was announced there was going to be a game about Organization XIII set between COM and KH2, everyone was wanting and expecting more development and focus on the members who had already been firmly established, most of whom were in desperate need of such development and focus. So to suddenly have Xion introduced and be the major focus of the game, whether she’s actually on-screen or not, would be very jarring and disappointing. 

What’s worse is all the games she pops in after Days, as not only does it destroy the established rules of canon in regards to her fate, but she ultimately steals the spotlight in an even more harmful way in KH3: Kairi, the original KH girl, who had been receiving build-up for YEARS as a Keyblade-wielding Guardian of Light, is literally screwed out of this role in favor of Xion, her Mary Sue copycat whom no-one asked for to begin with and whom many people weren’t keen on having return, as not only did it destroy the main thing she had going for her (her nature as a tragic character) but it robbed Kairi of development and focus that, again, she was in desperate need of. But Xion got over 30 more votes than Kairi in a Japanese popularity poll, so...priorities?

“Xion’s story is about the right to define her own existence, to live as her own true self, etc.”

No, that’s not what Xion’s story was about. It was about her learning that she had no right to her existence because it was actively hurting the existences of others, including her best friends’, and that the right thing to do is to disappear. I take some issue with how it played out (mainly that Xion accepts this way too easily and becomes a “Too Good For This Sinful Earth” type who does the right thing for the sake of her friends even when a more angry, selfish and conflicted Xion would’ve been more engaging and human, and that Riku is OOC in his treatment of her considering his treatment of Roxas), it was still incredibly tragic and it owned that. So for that tragic story to be undone in favor of a “lol, just kidding, Xion can exist and get a happy ending with her friends after all, no tragedy here!” way of appeasing the fans who called foul and raised a stink about it (especially in Japan) will never sit right with me, especially when the writing doesn’t even TRY to justify it. It just happens for the sake of it.

“It has a lot to do with the fact that Xion is a young girl whose story expects us to genuinely empathize with her”

OK, here’s a tip: it is rarely EVER a good idea to expect your audience to all feel a certain way toward something and try to force that reaction. “Death of the Author” is a thing, which is why you’re best not taking sides or playing favorites when making a story, you’re better off putting your personal feelings aside and just letting things play out, allowing people in the audience to make up their own mind. When the story pushes for the audience to genuinely empathize with Xion, with lines by others such as “poor Xion!”, then it’s not surprising that the opposite effect happens: some fans don’t like or empathize with her because they resent the hamfisted attempts at being told that they should. 

“That’s like saying Kairi didn’t matter in KH1 because Sora forgot her in COM”

That’s a false equivalence if I ever saw one. KH came out before COM, and Sora didn’t forget her so much as she was replaced by someone else, Namine, in his memory, which drove that story’s conflict. Its resolution was Sora learning the truth and remembering Kairi again. Kairi is still a factor in COM, a very important factor at that. Days came out after KH2, where there isn’t even a hint of Xion, she is not a factor in that game because she wasn’t invented yet. Sure, Xion matters to Days, but that mattering doesn’t feel like it amounts to much when she isn’t seen, heard from or mentioned for the entirety of the game it was leading up to.

“But so what?”

So, it feels incredibly unnatural to have a character jammed into a pre-existing timeframe and pre-existing dynamic prior to KH2, with mass amnesia being used as a plot device to explain away why she wasn’t present in any way in KH2, only for every game taking place after KH2 (and thus after Days was made) to suddenly start featuring Xion again, with the mass amnesia plot device being casually discarded. What’s worse is how canon rules were obliterated so that Xion could return in KH3 and reverse the tragedy element that made her story effective to begin with, at the expense of characters like Kairi who have been around longer than Xion and who desperately needed exposure more than Xion. Seriously, in addition to the point I already raised about Xion taking Kairi’s place, just think about this: characters that were created as a trio, Sora, Riku and Kairi, are no longer a trio, just the duo of Sora and Riku, while characters that were created as a duo, Roxas and Axel, are now a trio thanks to Xion. It feels like a slap in the face to all the fans who liked Kairi and the Destiny Trio, and it’s a big reason as to why Xion’s inclusion in the series feels like a mistake to those fans and thus why she’s such an off-putting character to them.

The only statements made here that I agree with is that Xion sadly wouldn’t have gotten as much hate if she was a badass, older male character, that her being forgotten due to memory magic isn’t really a mark against her since that’s a cheap plot device that happens to a lot of characters in the series, and that you can’t really do the story of 358/2 Days without her since she’s so integral to it...but on that note, the story of 358/2 Days didn’t need to happen. The KH series during its early days was meant to be Sora, Donald and Goofy’s story, so leaving the period of time where they were asleep a blank made perfect sense. We never needed to know about Roxas’ time in the Organization beyond what was said and shown in KH2, and to this day I honestly wish we hadn’t.  In game form, anyway. The manga is great, it can stay!

"THEN FUCKING LEAVE, CUNT.

NO ONE IS GONNA MISS YOU."

Your mega aggressive, crazy, stupid reply tells it all, I was only explaining what's the difference between engagement and traffic, these words are web slang, you are not part of the internet or social media generation and that's why you obviously have no clue abut how things works or what is what.

I wasn't criticizing your blog or you, you have comprehension issues, and other issues too, the way you react only shows what a bitter, angry, dissatisfied, jealous woman you are, insulting your own posters like you do on the daily basis is what keeps screwing your blog, you're only left with the 4 or 3 same crazy jealous as you.

You hide behind your VK lies and tales, if VK were really J's gf or lover, not you or any of the other crazies would be campaigning for her and putting her in J's bed, if she stood half a chance with him you lot would actually be taking her down and denying her existence as you do with what's real.

You don't back her or care for any relationship you just use her, to ridicule J, and spread bullshit, she's just a friend like CB but you try to pass this in a whole other way that is bs.

No one talks or cares about VK, only you, and 1 other crazy account on ig, that the owner is obviously one of the crazies here, only spreading lies and stirring the pot to get attention, and she got just as you a handful or crazy replies from repeated posters.

No one is buying or drinking your Kool-Aid, you say all the fandom is stupid and crazy but you're just projecting and it's not true only a handful is, the rest of us see through you and all the lies you try to pass as truth to manipulate people and harm J, you're toxic K, karma is going to kick you in the butt real hard one of these days.

Whatever or wherever VK is and whatever and wherever J is, are zero related, the Chiltern is a hot spot very in and trendy for photoshoots, parties, events, dinners, it's like the CM in LA, the only ones putting links to this is you crazies.

Anyhow I just feel sorry for you, you look desperate and jealous af to spend hours daily trying to convince of your dirty wishes and lies on your unrelated dumb answers, if any of this was real, you wouldn't have to be convincing anyone.

Your pettiness, insults, and hatred to J, S, his employees, and all the fandom only shows what a sad life and mental issues you have, you are an idiot K, get a life.

***

OH LOOK, THE HUMAN EQUIVALENT OF TOILET PAPER IS BACK.

I'll try to contain my amazement. 🙄

Lemme just point out a few things for ya, Teepee:

1. *YOU'RE

2. "You're not a part of the intermet or social media generation"

LMFAOOOOOOO!!!! 😂

Honeeeeeeeey... 🤦🏼‍♀️

I WAS AROUND AND AMONG THE FIRST WAVE OF USERS WHEN THE WORLD WIDE WEB AND FACEBOOK AND ALL THESE FANCY-ASS TOYS FIRST CAME OUT!

I've been on FB since the mid 00s aka when it first started.

I've experienced a time when you could only use the internet OR your telephone - never both at once! And OMG when you were playing tetris and your mom accidentally picked up the phone (LANDLINE, of course) to call Aunt Patsy and your connection went haywire... 😭

And don't even get me started on the NOISE you had to endure to get online via those dial-up modem thingies! 😫 Jesus christ... That was some Abu Ghraib shit right there, lemme tell ya. 😖

Plus it cost a fucking FORTUNE! I once raked up such a high bill that my paycheck had to be confiscated... 😞

So yeah, unless YOU also went through all that as a teenager/young adult as opposed to... ooooh, I dunno... BEING A SPERM IN YOUR FATHER'S NUTSACK, then I strongly recommend you to sit your kaboose down, kid.

I AM the "internet/social media" generation.

You on the other hand are a precious little snowflake Millennial who has no idea what Lambada is.

LOOK IT UP.

It was fun. 💃🏼

3. "I wasn't criticizing your blog or you"

YOUR WORDS: "TRAFFIC IS RELATIVE AND DOESN'T EQUAL ENGAGEMENT OR HAVING CREDIBILITY AS A BLOGGER".

So... You're saying I have no credibility, but in a nice way? As a compliment?

Mmmmmm yes, I definitely did have comprehension issues there.

4. "If VK were really J's gf or lover, not you or any of the other crazies would be campaigning for her and putting her in J's bed, if she stood half a chance with him you lot would actually be taking her down and denying her existence as you do with what's real"

What even... 😂

Uhm... Do tell WHY would we be taking her down? Because we think it should be US in her place in his bed?

Like... all those SANE echies out there do? 🤔

5. "You don't back her or care for any relationship"

Did I ever say I cared?

I don't think I did... 🤔

I do love that YOU get so bent out of shape about me making jokes about her and your imaginary boyfriend tho. 😏

And as for you feeling sorry for me...

Well, seeing as I feel nothing for you, I guess that kinda settles the score between us regarding which one of us matters and which one... DOESN'T. 🤷🏼‍♀️

Good day, madam.

Once more. 😚

Episode Ignis Feels Like Fanfiction and That’s a Good Thing

Ok so I’m having a Thought.

You know when people say something reads “like fanfiction”, and it’s meant to be a criticism? The phrase is one of those intangibles, one of those agreed-upons, where no one can define it quite accurately but everyone thinks they know what it means. Usually it’s a combination of deviation from the original tone, bleaching out character flaws and complexities, a lack of understanding of nuance, and a reverent or worshipful attitude towards old characters, moments, settings, and iconography (and iconography is just the Stuff. Star Wars iconography is lightsabers, wookies and Jedi robes).

That’s a pretty reductive description of fanfiction of course, because a lot of fanfic - whether it’s well or poorly written - doesn’t necessarily follow those patterns. Weirdly enough, saying a sequel or reboot reads “like fanfiction” often implies that the writer doesn’t understand something about the source material - that they’re oversimplifying, or they’re fanning about while failing to understand what a “good” sequel would actually require. And that’s pretty ironic, because fans - obsessive detail-hoarding, secondary-character-worshipping pastiche-crafters that they are - often know the source material better than anyone, sometimes better than the creators themselves, and they are very aware of what they are erasing or changing when they move Marvel into a fluffy coffee shop AU. 

But I’m kind of digressing, because my point is that “this feels like fanfiction” shouldn’t be seen as a criticism, but rather as a gut feeling that we need to unpack. Sometimes it leads to legitimate criticism that, while worth addressing, actually has very little to do with fanfiction. And sometimes it leads to this weird 4:30 am conclusion: Episode Ignis is when “this feels like fanfiction” should be deployed as a compliment. Spoilers onward, for both Episode Ignis and FFXV.

I’m talking specifically about the alternate ending, here, which is tantamount to an FFXV fix-it fic. In this version Ignis averts the tragic ending of FFXV, and though he prepares to sacrifice his own life to do so, it ends up costing nothing. Ignis survives with even prettier hero-scarring than he gets in the regular plot. The episode fills in a sizable story gap after Leviathan knocks Noct out, and closes a few additional plotholes (I wondered what happened to that one obnoxiously overdesigned Imperial guy: turns out Ravus stabbed him). It spends some time with likable characters (Ardyn, yeeee) and underdeveloped characters (again, Ravus). Ignis gets roughed up and drenched, loses the glasses, and I’m 90% sure the animators made his eyes bigger in the cutscenes for extra pretty. He gains maximum plotline power, and Adam Croasdell voice acts the shit out of some sassy comebacks and anguished screaming (ok, this is unrelated, but when he’s doing the regular stormbind combo, it sounds like he screams FUCK in one of his battle grunts and it makes me laugh every time). He can liberate Altissia more or less by himself, and that’s before he drives a goddamn speedboat away from pursuant megarobots. So for anyone calling Mary Sue, yes, Ignis dives headfirst into that. He basically becomes Magic James Bond.

The whole episode is also pretty blatantly queer-coded. We get a very cuddly flashback to kid Noctis, and Ignis’s vow to stand at his side. Ignis is monomaniacal when it comes to finding Noctis. Noctis eiher drops the l-word, referring directly to Ignis and the freshly fridged Lunafreya (I’m still salty about that one, sorry), or says Ignis will always be in his heart depending on the ending. There’s a fantastic gifset going around of the official couples in previous Final Fantasies (Squall and Rinoa, Tidus and Yuna) declaring the exact same thing Ignis does in the alternate ending. “Rinoa, even if the world turns on you, I’ll be your knight”. “There’s no way I’ll let Yuna go”, even if I have to break all the rules of your stupid religion. Even if it costs my own life, I won’t let you take Noctis away. The queer subtext here is one of those things where it’s purposefully vague - just enough emotional evidence and physical contact that you can read romantic feelings there if you want, but just short of an actual romance to leave interpretations open. If you’re convinced Noctis and Luna were in love, Episode Ignis probably won’t debunk that.

So Ignis and his Episode are both powerful, emotional, pretty, potentially kinda gay, and ridiculously awesome.

And honestly, it is phenomenal.

Episode Ignis is a blast to play. His combat style is very fun and quick and fluid and flashy, and the grappling hook in the first portion makes you feel superheroic. Killing Ardyn, meanwhile, makes you feel godlike. It is an incredible surge of adrenaline to take on armies and deities by your lonesome. The gameplay and narrative reflect each other here, just like they do in the base game. FFXV seems happy at first, and the combat is pretty entertaining with all the goofy combo-attacks, but that game is a tragedy. It’s all the more tragic by how fun it is to begin with, and by the end it is painful to play. Characters get older, places fall apart, people die, and you have to escort Ignis around for a chapter while he grows used to being blind and Gladio constantly bitches at you for walking too fast. The photo mechanic is introduced to break your heart later, to show you how fleeting youth and pleasure can truly be under backbreaking destiny.

And in retaliation, Episode Ignis thrives on the power of Fuck You. Long commutes by car, mundane in the moment but peaceful upon reflection decades later? Fuck You, I have a grappling hook. Sections that force you to walk slowly through a dungeon and think about what you’ve done? Fuck You, I’ve got two daggers, lightning teleportation and button-mashing hands. Musings about the ravages of time, and aching nostalgia for youth? Fuck You, Ignis is prettier than ever. A tragic ending pre-ordained by prophecy? Fuck You, Ignis is going to re-write that fate by being clever, patient, and brave enough to sacrifice his life, but double Fuck You, he gets to live as well. Bullets flying, health bar low, multiple explosions and Atlas Ripped decking airships in the background? Fuck. You. It’s time to make some fucking soup.

With all that in mind, it makes sense that people might accuse Episode Ignis of being tone-deaf, of being fanfiction in all the “bad” ways - it neglects the nuance of the original, and papers over complex themes so everything can end up hunky-dory, but I still think that’s too easy.

Here’s the thing: Episode Ignis can only exist as fanfiction - or as alternate-ending DLC, I guess. FFXV is the story of Noctis and his story has an ending and it’s horribly, horribly sad, but it’s also what the story is built around. You might find it too depressing or too grim or you might find it just right, but it is well-structured. FFXV is careful with its themes and patterns and foreshadowing.

Because of that care, Ignis screwing Ardyn’s plans out of whack and saving Noctis from his fate couldn’t occur in the main game. FFXV is not about Ignis. It’s about Noctis. And the gameplay, built as it is around creating nostalgia - photographs, long car rides, camping, friendship - wouldn’t work if the ending wasn’t agonizing enough to make you long for the good old days. Maybe Noctis didn’t have to die or maybe he did, but the ending of FFXV was always going to hurt.

FFXV is an emotional project, and that project is to make the player painfully nostalgic. With that intriguing goal achieved, Episode Ignis exists as a response, and it can never really be more than that. It’s an ending I like better, but it is an alternate ending.

If you think about it, Episode Ignis didn’t need that alternate ending. It could have existed perfectly well as a companion to FFXV, filling in a much-needed blank (and without the alternate ending that’s exactly what it does). But in making a response to FFXV instead, they challenged a lot of assumptions FFXV needed to make in order to tell its story. FFXV assumes its prophecy is the only answer, as do its characters. FFXV yanks a great deal of agency away from Ignis, Prompto and Gladio when it asks them to sit still for a decade and wait for their friend to die without hunting for an alternative

Why can’t they try something else? Why can’t they defeat their nemesis on their own terms? I mean, who the heck does Bahamut think he is, anyway? Who says the ending can’t be happy, and the future can’t be bright?

Those are exactly the questions a fanfiction writer would ask. FFXV created those questions, and Episode Ignis addresses them, but in a way that acts as more of a breach than a closure. It’s one route to a happy ending - so maybe there are more. This is also the reason I brought up the queercoding in Episode Ignis. If there is any genre that needs a complete overhaul from grimdark tragedy into happy endings, it’s the scourge that is the modern queer romance story. There are so many of those bloody stories ending in anguish or separation or suicide or displeasure, and not nearly enough fairytales. Having a tragic ending overturned by the power of queer love is an insanely empowering experience, and that’s probably why you see so many posts about how Ignis’s gay love can pierce the veil of death and save the day. Episode Ignis didn’t need its queercoding any more than it needed its alternate ending, but the two make sense together: both of them are stories that people are absolutely aching for.

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anything quite like this - a company actively revising their story, overturning its mood, questioning its plot, granting a completely different ending, and then asking fans to pay 6.99 for it. It’s different from alternate film endings, because those are DVD extras and one always wins the theatrical release. It’s different from re-imaginings or adaptations because Episode Ignis is...just not quite that. It can’t exist on its own, unlike most remakes. Video games are always fluid texts to a certain extent, but now developers are even relinquishing the solidity of lore and cutscenes. It’s so odd.

At the decision point of Episode Ignis, you can use R1 and L1 to flip the camera back and forth, moving between a shot of Ardyn and a shot of Ignis. It’s a tiny, insignificant moment, one that almost feels like a mistake - like maybe the developers couldn’t figure out how to stage a normal shot-reverse-shot. But that moment became an oddly powerful synecdoche for what Episode Ignis was to me. If you want to look at this story from a different angle, well, go for it. Here’s another place you can point the camera. Maybe the sun will rise over there too.

Earthquake Proofing Your Home

A lot of people feel like earthquake proofing their house is a waste of effort, since everything’s going to collapse in a 9.0 Cascadia quake.  There’s some truth to that, but it’s important to remember that the 9.0 quake is the worst-case scenario.  We should be preparing to that level, but keep in mind that if you’re at risk for a large earthquake, you’re also at risk for earthquakes of a whole range of magnitudes. If you’re in Portland, we’ve also got the Portland Hills Fault, from which (as far as I know) we have no idea what magnitude to expect.  My point is that there is a whole range of potential earthquakes that might leave your house standing, and it would be absurd to die because your bookshelf fell on you in something otherwise minor.

There are a lot of components to minimizing the impacts of an earthquake on your home.  Here’s what I’m going to include in this post:

1)      Saving stuff on shelves

2)      Keeping tall, heavy furniture from falling

3)      Water, Electricity, Gas

4)      Earthquake retrofitting/Earthquake Insurance

The confession for this post is that I’ve never taken this topic very seriously, and I hadn’t actually done any of these things for my house (other than knowing how to turn off the gas and electricity).  I still haven’t done all of it.  However, in watching some videos taken during earthquakes (largely from Japan in 2011), I’ve decided to be more proactive.  I picked two videos of the 2011 Japan quake that I think exemplify why this is important.  One was taken inside a home, and this one is from an office.  In fact, I’m going to embed them here because I think they’re important.  Watch with the sound on for a better idea of how scary it feels.

  Stuff on Shelves

For me, this is all about the dishes in the kitchen cabinets.

1)      If the earthquake is smaller and we’re returning to our normal life pretty quickly, I’m going to be annoyed about needing to replace all my dishes.  Also there will probably be a run on dishes in the impacted area because everyone else will have lost all their dishes too.

2)      Broken dishes on the kitchen floor make it a serious walking hazard and require a substantial clean-up effort.

When I started researching this for our own kitchen cabinets, I found a lot of holes in the information.  I thought I’d start with how much pressure will be generated by dishes sliding around inside the cabinet, so I could have some idea of how sturdy the latches should be. I can’t find anything about that, and it doesn’t seem that cabinet latches are rated to PSIs or other metrics. So, I’m not sure how well anything will actually stand up to cabinet contents.  A suggestion that will probably help with this is to use non-slip mats as shelf liners, so stuff will be less likely to bang against the inside of the cabinet door.  I like the idea but haven’t done it, since I’m worried about how it’ll affect the ease of moving dishes around inside the cabinet.

But something is undoubtedly better than nothing and there’s the possibility that they’ll work amazingly well, so here are some options for cabinets:

               Child-proof locks: these are easy to install and not expensive, but are absolutely a no-go in our household.  They work for child-proofing because they require an extra step to open the cabinet, which is annoying for adults who are constantly in and out of their kitchen cabinets.  If you’ve got small children you’ve probably already done this for your lower cabinets, so you know if you can live with it or not.  If so, it’s probably the simplest solution.

               Touch-latches: In theory, these could work great in an earthquake.  Since you have to push in to release the catch, the pressure of the cabinet contents pushing out shouldn’t allow the cabinet to open.  However, I’m lazy and installation looks like a fair amount of work.  If you’re considering it, here’s a great outline, with videos, on installing all different kinds of touch-latches.

               Seismically Activated Latches: We bought these, which are essentially hook-and-eye latches that drop into place during shaking.  They’re easy to install- here’s a good video on how they work and the installation.  It actually is really easy (I just did my first cabinet in a couple of minutes), and the product is cleverly designed so that it doesn’t require any measuring to get it just right.  

Other shelf stuff

Lots of people keep pretty things and family heirlooms on shelves, mantles, etc. This isn’t a big thing in our house, and the knick-knacks that do live around aren’t anything valuable or of great personal significance.  If you’re more normal, though, and have those things displayed, you might want to think about securing them.  The best bet seems to be museum wax or similar product, and there are various options based on what materials you’re protecting.  The main brand seems to be QuakeHold! [I’m not going to lie, I love the name] and is available on Amazon.

I’m not sure how museum wax will affects the overall aesthetic of your displayed items.   However, if it’s important enough that you’d be heartbroken if it broke in an earthquake, it’s probably worth thinking about securing it down.

Hanging Pictures/Art

               Technically on the walls, not shelves, you got me! We don’t have much art hanging in our house (we prefer the “stacked on the floor because we’ve only just moved in” look, it’s worked for us for four years, why switch now) but a quick search on Amazon shows a million kinds of earthquake-safe hanging hooks and earthquake putty in case you like your house to look lived in.  Even so, I’d avoid hanging anything especially heavy or with glass near beds.

 Keep Tall, Heavy Things From Falling On You

If you’ve got kids or have kids over to your house on a regular basis, you’ve probably already done this (or should).  Children seem prone to all kinds of nonsensical things, such as attempting to climb up bookcases or armoires, and end up trapped underneath them.  Apparently a child dies every two weeks by falling furniture completely unrelated to earthquakes!  So this is a generally good idea.

Things that need to be secured to the wall:

-          Televisions and entertainment systems

-          Bookcases

-          Dressers

-          Free standing cabinets/china cupboards

-          Refrigerators

-          Anything large enough that if you were living in an action movie, you’d knock over and push against the door to barricade your home from invading pirates.

The methodology is pretty self-explanatory.  You find a stud in the wall and use a cable, bracket, or strap to attach the furniture to the wall.  You need a stud because if you attach it just to drywall, the weight of the furniture will just pull it out of the wall as soon as there’s any pressure on it (an earthquake or climbing child).   I bought these and these from Amazon- one has just straps and one has buckles to winch it down.  It turns out that the buckles require drilling into the furniture, which doesn’t appeal to me, so I probably won’t use them.  The cables also look good.  All of these can probably be built from hardware stores for less money, but I opted for maximum laziness and just bought the kit.  

Here’s what setting up for one of my bookshelves looks like:

 And here’s what it looks like 15 minutes later.  The Velcro sticks to the furniture and the bolts go into the wall (it’s also possible to bolt to the furniture if desired).  It took 15 minutes because the bolts in the kit were either ridiculously short or ridiculously long, so in the time-tested manner of scientists everywhere I pillaged screws from another project.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that this won’t keep the books from falling off the shelves.  This is true, and it’ll be a mess, but I’m less worried about books falling off the shelves (painful but probably not deadly) than I am about the entire shelf falling on Justin’s head.  Justin’s office chair is far enough from the shelf that falling books won’t hit him, but the shelf would.  This is, however, a good indicator of why you shouldn’t put tall bookshelves near the bed. The last thing I need is Campbell’s Biology 4th Edition falling on my head in the middle of the night. Really proactive people shelve heavier books on the bottom, but that doesn’t fit with my shelving aesthetic (which requires statistical randomness).

There’s also an option to bolt to the wall behind the furniture so it doesn’t show.  That would require moving the bookshelf, which we were too lazy to do in our office but will probably do for the living room.  We could probably cut off the excess straps to make them less visible. The straps are available in a variety of colors so you can make something truly fit for Pinterest.    

Despite my general veneer of competence, I’m actually pretty terrified of anything involving drilling holes into my walls and am pretty useless at all maintenance projects.  This makes me detest doing them, which is part of the reason why I hadn’t done this part of earthquake preparedness before.  Even so, even I was able to figure this one out pretty quickly.  If you want help with this, call me.  I’m probably way less afraid to drill holes in other people’s walls than my own.

Utilities

Gas.  The most important utility to know about in case of an earthquake is shutting off your gas. It’s pretty straightforward.  

Before the earthquake:

1)      Find your gas shut-off.  If you can’t find it, call the gas company and ask.

2)      Get the appropriate tool to shut it off.  I recommend the 4-in-1 tool.  A) it’s multipurpose; B) It can live in your emergency kit rather than with the rest of your tool kit, so you won’t have to go on a major recon trip to find it when you need it; C) It’s lightweight; D) IT’S NON SPARKING.  It does not take a genius to figure out why you REALLY REALLY need a nonsparking tool when you go to shut off your gas.  If you’re going to use a regular crescent wrench, make sure it’s not going to blow you up if you’ve got a gas leak.

3)      Find the valve and figure out how to shut it off.  When it’s on, the valve is in-line, give a turn to the right or left 90o.  I took this image from this website, which also has a good summary of shutting off the gas.

After the earthquake:

1)      Sniff around for gas.  You’re not actually smelling the gas (which is naturally odorless), you’re smelling mercaptan (added just for this reason).  It smells like rotten eggs.  It’s also heavier than air, so you might get down low to smell around if you’re unsure. If you’re smelling it after a quake, you’re going to want to shut off your gas immediately.  If you don’t smell gas, leave it be.  This is at the recommendation of every gas company, including my own provider NW Natural.

2)      If there’s a leak, shut off the gas.  Since you figured it out earlier, it’ll be easier.

Unlike every other earthquake prep scenario, DO NOT PRACTICE THIS SKILL IN ADVANCE.  Figure it out, but don’t actually shut off your gas.  Only the gas company can turn the gas back on (in case of leaks) so you’re going to be sorry if you turn it off just to practice.  Here’s me pretending to shut the gas off like a boss with my favorite tool:

If your home has been earthquake retrofitted, you’ve probably already got an automatic shutoff installed for your gas.  This is a great idea, and you can have it done even without the rest of the retrofitting process.

 Water

               If your house is relatively intact after an earthquake, you’ll want to be able to turn off the water to your house.  This will prevent contaminated water from entering your home if there’s a problem with the city water so you can use the water remaining in your pipes.  Prior to an earthquake, find your water main, check it out, and know how to turn it off. Like the gas, don’t actually turn it off unless it’s really necessary.  Ours is cleverly hidden in the basement behind a secret panel and last year’s drying lavender.

 Electricity

               You should already know how to turn off the electricity in your house!  If you don’t, go find your circuit box right now!

               Now that you know that, remember to turn off all the individual circuits before flipping the main circuit.  

               If your gas is still on, or if you have the slightest suspicion that there might be/have recently been a gas leak, don’t even think about approaching your circuit box.  You’re going to be way better off just waiting than setting off a spark that blows up your house.

 Earthquake Retrofitting

People ask me about this all the time and I never have much to say because there are a lot of variables that go into it.  I’ll tell you exactly everything I know here, which is not much.  This is probably the only section of this post that doesn’t apply to renters, because you’re at the mercy of your landlord here.

Remember that we’re only talking about salvaging the construction of your home, not the stuff in it.  You’re still going to need to do all the stuff listed up above, because even if your house is retrofitted to the hilt, it’s still going to shake like crazy.

If your house was built in Oregon before 1974, there were no seismic building codes.  The most recent and strict codes went into place in 1993 (if your home has been built since then, you can probably skip this part).

There are two main benefits to retrofitting your house:

1)      Retrofitting could be the difference between having a home and being homeless after an earthquake.  It can also drastically reduce the amount of damage done to the structure of your home, making your timeline to moving back in much shorter.

2)      Retrofitting will generally qualify you for earthquake insurance.  Even if your house comes down in the quake (no amount of retrofitting is likely to save your home if you live in the liquefaction zone and it’s a 9.0 quake) you’ll have a fat insurance payout to ease the pain.

 “But at what cost?” I hear you cry, with much rending of garments and gnashing of teeth.  Here’s the answer: it’s going to be somewhere between painfully expensive and prohibitively expensive.  I’ve had people tell me they’ve gotten estimates that range from $5,000 to $40,000.

Retrofitting generally involves attaching the house to the foundation.  Some things that will affect the cost of retrofitting your home:

-          Age of your home

-          Construction material

-          Type/quality of the foundation

The state of Oregon has a site with good information on retrofitting and what it entails, construction- wise.  I’ve got to take someone’s word for it, since I don’t know anything about houses.  Retrofitting also usually involves installing an automatic shutoff for natural gas.  

Like any large, expensive project you hire someone to perform on your house, call around and get several estimates.  Recommendations from friends and neighbors may be useful for aspects such as professionalism of the work crew, but earthquake retrofitting is different from other home projects.  If my neighbors hire a plumber and everything in their house leaks a week later, we wouldn’t hire the same plumber.  Since we don’t have regular earthquakes here in Portland, it’s hard to assess how effective any single outfit is.  Which takes me to my next point…

Earthquake Insurance

The owner of a local retrofitting business told me this, in so many words: “No amount of retrofitting is going to save most houses in a 9.0 earthquake. What retrofitting does for you is that it qualifies you for earthquake insurance.  Most homeowners keep most of their net worth in their home, which means that when your house collapses, you don’t lose everything if you’re insured.”

I find that to be fairly compelling.  Very few homeowner’s policies will include damage from earthquakes (or volcanos, or landslides caused by earthquakes, or tsunamis, etc) so most people will need an additional policy.  This is expensive, which sucks.  It’s also very confusing, as outlined by this OPB article from 2015 (fairly sure the situation hasn’t changed since then).

Obviously the financial trade-off has to be calculated separately for each person.  I can’t tell you if you should shell out for earthquake insurance.  We haven’t gotten our home retrofitted so I haven’t seriously looked into the cost-benefit yet, but like most homeowners, we’re financially banking on some payout from our house (either through insurance or by selling it someday).

 And if you read this far, Congrats!  You now know everything I know about earthquake proofing your home.  Go do it!

HERE'S WHAT I JUST REALIZED ABOUT STARTUPS

They don't have to work hard in two dimensions. In my childhood it was still dominant. I wrote this for Forbes, who asked me to write something balanced. Just as startups rightly pay AWS a premium over the cost of running their own servers so they can focus on growth, many of the big companies of the 20th century meant most people who weren't already in it.1 That would definitely happen if programmers started to use handhelds as development machines—if handhelds displaced laptops the way laptops displaced desktops. What was really happening was de-oligopolization. Needless to say, Frederick's of Hollywood got the most traffic. Imagine how much time you could save the world's engineers if they could do searches online.2 With Robert this quality is wired-in.3 Why didn't Henry Ford realize that networks of cooperating companies, you have a big pool of potential users in the other companies we've funded, and the difference is embodied in the name.

This is the type of abuse we may be able to solve part of the indictment. When I was a kid I thought they helped. It's a cliche to call World War II, as Michael Lind writes, the major sectors of the economy were either organized as government-backed cartels or dominated by a few oligopolistic corporations. The form of fragmentation, like the idea that professors should do research as well as Newton, for their time, at least at first. But in practice it's as if RIM didn't exist. Companies that use patents on startups are attacking innovation at the root. They're like someone looking at a newborn baby and concluding there's no way anything so short and written in such an informal style could have anything useful to say about such and such market share. An essay is something else. It's like telling the truth, but why he's writing about this subject at all.4 VCs want to blow you up, in one sense of the phrase or the other. One of the founders we funded asked me why we started Y Combinator is neither selfish nor virtuous. US, seems to have been two ways of thinking about programming.5

In the case of contemporary authors.6 A few hours before the Yahoo acquisition was announced in June 1998, we consumed what at the time. They just wanted to keep people from getting spammed. I'd prefer it. They're a product of unusual circumstances.7 One possible exception might be things that have deliberately had all the variation sucked out of them, and above all, it helps them be decisive. Our greatest PR coup was a two-part one. But how had I come to believe in this idea in the first place.8 But as with wealth there may be a valid or at least inevitable form, but it's not the best way to get growth started.9

Its graduates didn't expect to do the sort of person who gets demoralized easily. By the end of Y Combinator before they hired their first employee. Transaction processing seemed to them what e-commerce partnerships, we were paying the piper. He's not just generally correct, but also to index and even edit them.10 That would be a pain to fund with grants and donations. Fundamentally an essay is a train of thought—but social and economic history, not political history. So if doing good for people gives you a sense of mission that makes you harder to kill, that alone more than compensates for whatever you lose by not choosing a more selfish project. It is enormously fun to be able to come up with surprising new ideas. He thought for a second, and said ok.

The market was pioneered by upstarts like Apple. Why didn't Henry Ford realize that networks of cooperating companies, you have to sound intellectual.11 But schools change slower than scholarship. Why do we find it funny when a character, even one we like, and worry only about the ones we don't.12 Whether cause or effect, this spirit pervaded early universities. Their revenues aren't as high as they could which turned out to be valuable for hardware startups. At the bottom of the heap are the trade press, who make most of their money from advertising and would give the magazines away for free if advertisers would let them. All startups are mostly schleps.13 If you want cohesion now, you'd have to induce it deliberately. Then the ones that won't make such a pledge will be very conspicuous. It's even the answer to questions that seem unrelated, like how to convince investors to give you money.

I think the reason Google embraced Don't be evil has been good for Google.14 Topic sentence, introductory paragraph, supporting paragraphs, conclusion. Something else was waiting for him, something that looked a lot like the army. In the past when I bought things from Apple it was an unalloyed pleasure. If programmers used some other device for mobile web access, they'd start to develop apps for that instead. Microsoft does to users, all the news was bad. But if ephemeralization is one of them: a list of heroes. Anyone can adopt Don't be evil so eagerly was not so much to impress the outside world as to inoculate themselves against arrogance. They felt a two-part one.

So what's interesting?15 2 T1s 3 Mb/sec coming into our offices.16 She writes so well you don't even notice her. In the UK, where taxes were even higher than in the US, its effects lasted longer. Those are like experiments that get inconclusive results.17 Palm and RIM haven't a hope. If Microsoft was the Empire, they were.

Notes

The solution for this point for me was the fall of 2008 the terms they were saying scaramara instead of just Jews any more than investors. There is a convertible note with no business experience to start, e. Bullshit, Princeton University Press, 1996. The Harmless People and The CRM114 Discriminator.

Options have largely been replaced with restricted stock, the laser, it's easy to write great software in Lisp. Realizing that much better than their lifetime value, don't even try. Garry Tan pointed out an interesting sort of investor quality. And not others, and partly because so many people mistakenly think it was considered the most powerful minister of the founders lots of people mad, essentially by macroexpanding them.

I learned from this that most people realize, because unions will exert political pressure to protect one's children seems weaker, judging from things people have told us that we don't use code written while you were.

How much more analytical style of thinking. In fact, for example I've deliberately avoided saying whether the 25 people have responded to this day, thirty years later Jim Ryun ran a 3 year old, a day job. The word boss is derived from the other hand, he tried to attack the A P supermarket chain because it was more because they couldn't afford a monitor.

I've twice come close to 18% of GDP, which amounts to the hour Google was founded, wouldn't offer to invest the next Apple, maybe 50% to 100% more, and for filters it's textual. Why do you use in representing physical things. I realize starting a startup or going to lie to adults.

The solution for this at YC I find hardest to get all the more subtle ways in which case immediate problem solved, or pigs, to pretend that the usual misquotation is closer to the table. Selina Tobaccowala stopped to say, but no more willing to endure the stress of a lumbar disc herniations, but it's not lots of back and forth. For example, if you pack investor meetings as closely as you get older or otherwise lose their energy, they are so intellectually dishonest in that respect. For example, to the prevalence of systems of seniority.

They're common to all cultures with long traditions of living in a world with antibiotics or air travel or an acquisition for more than clumsy efforts to protect widows and orphans from crooked investment schemes; people with a toothbrush.

Corollary: Avoid becoming an administrator, or at least 10 minutes more. I'm not saying it's impossible to write every component yourself, if you needed in present-day trash. No one wants to invest the next year or two, I'd appreciate hearing from you.

Now the misunderstood artist is not a problem that I knew, there were some good proposals too. There is of course, Feynman and Diogenes were from adjacent traditions, but there are those that made them register. For the price of an investor is more important to users, at one point they worried Lotus was losing its startup edge and turning into a de facto consulting firm. Few non-broken form, that alone could in principle is that intelligence doesn't matter in startups.

I was surprised to find may be common in the old one was drilling for oil, over fairly low heat, till onions are glassy.

Steven Hauser.

Though you should start if you repair a machine that's broken because a unless your initial investors agreed in advance that you can eliminate, do it now. Roger Bannister is famous as the face of it. It derives from the formula. At some point, when they say.

But those too are acceptable or at least notice duplication though, because software takes longer to close than you otherwise would have started to give up legal protections and rely on cold calls and introductions. Above. There's a good deal for you. Starting a company has ever been.

So although it works well to show growth graphs at either stage, investors treat them differently. Indeed, it seems.

Sokal, Alan ed. It was also the 11% most susceptible to charisma. So instead of blacklist.

Software companies can hire skilled people to start software companies, but I managed to screw up twice at the moment the time 1992 the entire cross-country Internet bandwidth wasn't enough for one video stream. There are a better education.

Aristotle's immediate successors may have realized this, on the programmers had seen what GUIs had done for desktop computers. Russell also wrote the editor, which has been happening for a startup to duplicate our software. In fact this would be. Though nominally acquisitions and sometimes on a wall is art.

Creative Thinking: How to Improve Your Creative Ability

Creative thinking is a valuable skill and can help you stand out and produce great results. Read on for a list of proven ways to increase your creativity. I recently wrote about my trip to Vermont to visit my aunt and uncle.  While there, I visited their art studios. I lounged in their home full of art. We drove through the countryside. We visited with friends. We browsed in bookstores. And I went for a walk in the woods. It was during this walk that I had the idea to explore the value of creativity in the workplace.  I don’t fully poo-poo the value of creativity. I have my own creative side projects. I’ve made giant paper mache heads for a Mardi Gras party. I make candles for fun with my sister. I’ve quilted. I made my daughter’s Halloween costumes when she was little. But work feels very different to me. Work has always felt like it needed to be a more serious space. More analytical, and less creative. But during that walk in the woods, I started thinking about the role of creativity at the office. And how it might play a bigger role than I give it credit for.  When I got back to the house, I brought up the topic for discussion. Both Aunt Mallory and Uncle Harry come from the business world, so they were the perfect conversation partners for this discussion.  They quickly helped me understand that creative thinking is extremely valuable in work and business, and I wrote a post on that very topic. But now that you know how important creativity is to business and your work, I wanted to give you ways to actually tap into that power. Creative Thinking and The Importance of Workplace Culture When I approached the topic of creativity with Aunt Mallory, she immediately brought up the topic of workplace culture. As a consultant, she had experience working in many different corporate and business environments. Mallory explained, “When I was working with corporations closely, sometimes creativity was not encouraged. It can vary depending on your management, regulations, structure, and mindset. It used to be risky to be creative.” The workplace culture can dictate whether creativity is allowed or encouraged. Many workplace cultures discourage creativity in favor of the status quo. Mallory pointed out that the culture needs to ask, “Is it encouraged by management or not?” Much of whether a workplace taps into creativity is the way work is done. If everything is run by following formal and rigid processes and procedures, and no one pushes against the norm, very little creativity emerges. There’s a lot of emphasis on creating and standardizing the way most things are done in an organization. And while that can increase efficiency and safety, it can stifle creativity. And creativity can not only challenge the norms but can be threatening to some. Conference rooms are filled with “yes” men, and new ideas are frowned upon. You can’t encourage people to be creative if it’s not valued. People aren’t encouraged to be creative at work if it’s not valued as part of the culture. And yet, creativity can be extremely valuable in the workplace. Billion-dollar businesses are built from creative solutions to problems (hello, Spanx.) And you’ll stand out if you’re able to generate creative ideas and approaches in your workplace. How to cultivate creative thinking When I asked Harry and Mallory about ways to cultivate creativity in the workplace, Harry responded with a question: “Are you referring to creativity from an individual or group approach?” Hmm…it’s a valid question. It’s worth looking at both approaches. So I’ve broken it out into two approaches – individual and group activity. Look over each list, and try them all. See what works best for you. Developing Individual Creative Thinking Favorite approaches to inspire creativity can vary from person to person. Give each a try and see which you prefer. You may find several favorites! 1.     Mediation and clearing your mind to allow other things to come in.  You have to make space for creative ideas to emerge. Aunt Mallory pointed out, “If you’re so consumed with the minutiae of the day you won’t allow for anything else to come in.” I firmly believe this. If I’m feeling overwhelmed and stuck, meditation allows me to get clarity. I can sit with an idea, and usually, I’ll see things from a different perspective. Studies have been done on meditation and how it can aid in the creative process. It works by allowing your brain to step away from working so hard on the problem and allowing ideas to synchronize and integrate different pieces of information for new ideas. If you’re a complete newbie to meditating, these super simple instructions will get you started.  The key is to keep it simple and don’t worry about sitting for a long time – just enough that you can actually do it. Four minutes may be the perfect amount for you to get started. You can do this at home or at work. Any place you won’t be disturbed. Meditation for Creative Thinking – How to do it:  Sit comfortably. Close your eyes (or leave them half-open if needed.) Breathe in and out calmly and focus on your breath and how your body feels. Allow your breathing to slow down as you begin to get calmer. When your thoughts start to wonder, simply notice it, observe the thought without getting involved in it, and let it go, and bring your mind back to your breathing. As you finish, gently bring your mind back to focus on everything around you. There – you’ve completed your first meditation! As you do it more, you’ll find at times you have insights and creative ideas that will surface without effort. I often suggest that my coaching clients and Project Management Career Launch students incorporate this as part of their strategy simply because I have so much success with it in my personal experience. 2.     Movement I find my mind is sharper when I incorporate exercise and movement into my day. The epiphanies don’t always come during the exercise, but sometimes they do. The idea for this blog topic surfaced during a walk. The idea for a beautifully simple approach to help a client understand a challenging, abstract concept came during a run. But I always find the cognitive benefits last longer than the exercise itself. Lots of different types of exercise can help. But even simply taking a walk can have a positive impact on creative output. There are multiple ideas on why this is so, and it’s not yet fully understood. But don’t let that stop you from getting the benefit of movement on creative thinking. All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking. Friedrich Nietzsche Movement for Creative Thinking – How to do it:  Take a walk. Go for a run. Stretch. Do yoga. Go for a bike ride. Swim. 3.     Making unusual connections can prompt new ideas. To stimulate creativity, take two unrelated objects and try to come up with as many connections or uses for the combined objects as you can. Right now I’m looking at a salt shaker and a pen. For the exercise, I could do a mash-up of these two and think up new ways to modify them for something combined or different. For example, the way the top screws off the salt shaker makes me think of having a secret compartment in my pen to hide tiny treasures. Or the shape of the salt shaker makes me think that we could change the shape of the pen and use it as a dispenser for something other than ink. My current favorite real-world application of this approach is the seat heaters in my car. Making Unusual Connections for Creative Thinking – How to do it: Pick out two random items in your current line of vision. Combine elements of them and come up with as many ideas for new uses or products – no matter how silly. 4.     Alternate uses  Studies show that using divergent thinking such as finding alternate uses for items can lead to creative results. And furthermore, the more ideas you generate, the more creative they get. Studies show that earlier ideas may all be common, but the latter ideas get more unique and creative. So aim for quantity here. Alternate Uses – How to do it: Pick a random item and come up with as many alternate uses for the item as you can. To get the most creative, keep going even when you think you’ve finished. 5.     Changing Your Environment If you find you’re getting stuck or churning on an idea without moving forward, changing your environment can help. Changing surroundings can get you unstuck and spur new ideas. Sometimes simply changing the location is all you need to get moving forward again with fresh ideas. Changing Location for Creative Thinking – How to do it:  Assess what you’ll need to be able to do your work and not be disturbed. Is it a power outlet? Wifi? A whiteboard?  Find that spot, get there, and get creative! 6.     Generating ideas prompts you to have more ideas. James Altucher suggests to write down ten ideas per day, even if they’re bad ideas. He swears it’s like building a muscle and will help you generate more ideas. Generating Ideas for Creative Thinking: How to Do It: Consistency is key to this exercise. Get a small notebook you can carry with you or one you’ll use at home at the same time each day. Every day, write down ten ideas. These don’t need to be GOOD ideas – simply ideas. James Altucher goes on to suggest that you also write down the first step (ONLY the first step) you’d take to implementing each. The next day – repeat. 7.     Expose yourself to new experiences. This can be anything from locations to literature.  Exposing yourself to new ideas, new environments, new experiences allows you to have a broader base of resources for making creative connections.  In the short-term, get out of your normal surroundings and expose yourself to something new.  Exposing Yourself to New Experiences – How to Do It: Do anything to get out of your normal routine, such as any of the following: Drive a different route to work. Read a magazine you’d never have considered. Go to a market you’ve never been to. Eavesdrop on people at the next table at a café. Go to a new café you’ve never been to. Try a cuisine you’ve never tried. Go to an art gallery. Go to a part of town you’ve never been to. Get out of the car and walk around. Go to a festival – even a small, local festival will give you new experiences. 8.     Stay curious. Don’t approach everything with a closed mind or preconceived notions. Be open to new ideas and be on the lookout constantly for the way things work.  Whether you’re going about your regular routine or trying something new, be open to exploring what the experience has to offer. My superpower is talking to strangers. My daughter says it’s super annoying. But I find that I learn so much by exposing myself to new ideas presented by people I’ve not yet met. Staying curious for Creative Thinking – How to Do It: When trying any of the items listed above, or going about your regular routine, stay open to the experience. When someone cuts you off in traffic or does something to upset you, instead of having a knee-jerk reaction and assuming you know everything about the situation, ask yourself questions about it. “I wonder where they’re going in such a hurry. Could someone be delivering a baby in the back of that car right this minute?” When meeting someone, ask questions to draw out information. Even eavesdropping as mentioned below could apply here. One morning I overheard the following conversation between an elderly man and woman on stationary bicycles: Her: I’m making banana bread with nuts. Him: I can’t eat nuts. Her in a tut-tut tone of voice: Well, why not?! Him: I don’t have teeth.  Sure, I’ll likely never use that in my writing – oh wait…I just did. Stimulating Group Creativity Creative ideation doesn’t have to be done as a solo activity. There are approaches you can use in groups to come up with unique ideas or better solutions.  I’ve listed several here. Some may be obvious, and some may be newer to you. 1.     Collaboration Talking with others can help you see things differently and prompt creative perspectives. Sharing ideas, getting feedback, getting input, and creating with the inspiration of others can help you make something even better than it might have been in isolation.  Authors have been known to use this technique. J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were members of the Inklings. Ernest Hemmingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, And Gertrude Stein were members of Stratford on Odeon – named for their meeting place. And sharing ideas and collaborating is not limited to writers and artists. Socrates, Plato, and others used this approach to discuss big ideas which helped them make important contributions to philosophy.  Even in my writing, sometimes I’m inspired by a comment that someone may make in passing, inspiring me to want to dig deeper and collaborate. 2. Play I mentioned “play” above in the list for individual creativity, but it can be used in groups, too.  Play at work can create an atmosphere that allows team members to have the rapport and confidence needed to be more creative. You can use improv activities such as “Yes, and…” or even offsite play activities. Or use the awesome icebreakers mentioned in this post. Using fun meeting icebreakers can help groups develop rapport. They can also help teams relax and be willing to try new things or share creative ideas. 3.     Asking Questions When you ask open-ended questions, you prompt others to think and to share ideas and information with you. Use this approach to learn something new, push ideas further, and generate creative solutions you wouldn’t have thought of on your own. 4.     Brainstorming There are many brainstorming techniques your team or organization can use. These can help generate many ideas and move the group toward new ideas. 5.     Creating Challenges and Competition Both Frankenstein and Dracula were the results of Lord Byron setting a challenge to a group of friends on holiday in Switzerland. Byron, Mary Shelly, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Polidori read ghost stories, and Byron challenged each member of the group to write a ghost story and they would vote on the winner. Had they not had this group competition, neither of these classics may have been born. Some companies have innovation challenges. Many good ideas are born out of these events. Try creating your own creative challenge with your team and see what great results you get. Helpful Tips To Keep in Mind When using these activities to inspire creative thinking, keep the following points in mind. Know yourself and your working style For some, creativity and stress don’t reside in the same space, but some people thrive on stress.  One person may thrive on stress to inspire them to come up with out-of-the-box ideas.  And another may need to spend more time with something. They may need to take the time to understand an issue, then step away, let it simmer, and emerge with new ideas.  Understand that it doesn’t always emerge. Sometimes you do it consciously and sometimes it just appears. Harry pointed out “It’s hard to say “I’m going to be creative. Sometimes it comes up during the process of whatever you’re attacking.” But don’t be hard on yourself if it doesn’t happen at the very moment you try to command it. People can get so emotionally invested they get stuck. If you’re working in a group, understand that sometimes people get so invested in their idea that they can’t be open to other ways of doing things. They get emotionally invested in an idea and can’t let go of it. Be aware if you’ve got someone in your group that exhibits this tendency. With technology and trends moving faster than ever, slowing down to employ creative thinking can benefit your organization and your career. There are many ways to inspire creative thinking, whether you want to do it alone or in a group. Approach it with enjoyment and openness, in an environment open to creative ideas, and you’ll likely come away with some wonderful results. from WordPress https://ift.tt/340bOs1 via IFTTT

Anger & Frustration

I need to get out of this place. Most days everything is ok but there’s also a lot of times I’m angry, frustrated, and just annoyed to my limit. Today seemed to throw the kitchen sink at me.

First up, YOU’RE BROKE. STOP SPENDING MONEY. It’s really that easy. The pupper’s surgery understandably tapped your cash, but you should also have a reserve for that sort of thing! You cannot keep racking up $118 bills when we go out to eat. That bill should have been maximum $50. Drinks are expensive, and having KEGS in the house? OH MY GOODNESS. They think eating out is the problem, which doesn’t help but it’s the drinks that are doing it! Look I don’t have a problem with any of this on principal, but when you’re broke it’s downright irresponsible to spend this way. And even that wouldn’t be such an issue if you didn’t complain about being broke or the “government taking all your money in taxes”. You make PLENTY of money to make life work, it’s a matter of responsibility.

STOP SHOPPING AT PUBLIX. “I genuinely get pleasure from shopping at Publix, so it’s worth a little more money”. Screw that, limp biscuit! You like shopping at Publix because it’s name brand food, you like the feeling of shopping at a high end grocery store because it makes you feel high end.

You want to bring a CHILD into this world? With what money? I get that you want this but even a year or two to tackle some of the massive financial obstacles in front of you, like the mound of credit card debt, graduating so you can make more money, moving - since you want to do that, and saving up a little bit of money so you’re not paycheck to paycheck. There’s no perfect time to have a child, for certain, but there ARE better and worse times.

Seriously, the drinking could really take a breather, for just so many reasons, chiefly health and finances (as mentioned). But this one’s also personal because of your decision to CONTINUALLY dump on mom for her drinking, which has VASTLY improved since our childhood and even more so since the divorce. Remember when you got married and bagged on her weeks before saying she wouldn’t be able to drive home? Well... she was fine. And the cherry on top? Guess who was plastered? You my friend. “My brain hurt” well maybe it wouldn’t if you weren’t trying to do your lab report after a handful of beers. Seriously, bringing beer to class? Cmon even that was a rarity at UM.

Wouldn’t have cared if you didn’t think you were above others, but you do. You so desperately want to be, especially above her. But you’re not, we’re all human on the same level playing field. Which brings me to our next point.

Let go of your anger. Towards mom. Towards your childhood. Towards your frustrations. Find a way to let it out. Unrelated note: shoutout to Tumblr, a quality platform. And we’re back, I’m sick of you talking about her and honestly sometimes your just completely off the mark about the past too, saying things that are just twisted, stretched, or just downright false. Also she shelled out cash for catering for your wedding when it was clear she was struggling to do so but you and her really pushed her to.

By the way, wanna gripe about mom? Well yes our childhood was no picnic and there were certainly dark moments, chiefly a lot of drinking and emotional instability and projecting. But care to take a guess at what I see in you and your beloved during during similar moments? Who lit up the profanity cannon and fired a heaping load at the poor Wendy’s lady just trying to close the store? I know few belligerent drunks that act with such poor temperament. And you want to know why it’s her way or the highway? Because she puts in the effort to run logistics on things. I honestly don’t even feel comfortable confirming travel plans with you until I do with her because I know she’s far more responsible.

Take care of your loved ones. Your wife. On one hand I couldn’t actually believe you improved your vows to her. It was so obvious and holding your phone in your hand like she did in an attempt to feign some written notes did not work. On the other hand I can believe it, and it’s no surprise. Spend quality time with her, and do that by taking care of your crap so that you have the time to do that and stop using that to get out of things with her. She clearly loves going to bed with you, MAKE THAT HAPPEN. My favorite thing was falling asleep with her in her spot and waking up with her right there. Imagine how it feels to wake up and you’re gone, snuck out to go to your computer. Which then makes you not wanna get up and thus late for work, and I’m confident she doesn’t know that because I mentioned half the time I’m up before you for the gym and she didn’t seem to know that. I swear sometimes I think it’s easier for me to connect to her than you.

Stop being so cutesy to cover up silence or a lack of actual interest. Allow the natural ebb and flow, it doesn’t need to be dialed up to 11 at all moments. There’s cute and sweet but sometimes I’m just repulsed because there doesn’t seem to be any substance behind it, just something to fill the space. I’ve been there and felt that, so it’s all the more frustrating to witness from the outside on a daily basis.

“And she changes when things need to change” I couldn’t believe those words actually left your mouth when describing the reasons why you want to marry her in your proposal - also clearly improved. Take ownership for what’s important to you, recognize mistakes instead of making excuses about the world setting you up for failure.

And me, feel free to take an interest in my life beyond cursory questions “how was your day?”, “how are you?” well there are many things about my daily life you know about, pick one and inquire. That question isn’t an attempt to get to know, it’s an excuse at an attempt. I don’t even care if you don’t want to know or don’t have time, but then leave me the heck alone. Cultivate interest instead of feigning it.

I need to get the heck out of here. I feel small and like I can’t express anything for two reasons, I am truly grateful for their hospitality and don’t want to taint that, and most, if not all, of these qualms are based on idiosyncrasies that will be completely irrelevant when I move out.

Until then, keep the angry music rolling, the volume up, and the midnight bike rides rolling.

Breathe

How Knowing A Few Key Phrases Completely Changes Wrestling

The following collecting of words will sound like total goddamn gibberish to most of you, but hardcore wrestling devotees will know exactly what I’m supposing: “Can you believe the canned heat they just piped in for that jobber? It was supposed to be a basic promo, but he worked himself into a hit, and now smarks are going to be exclaiming about how he needs a mouthpiece.”

This is one of the greatest specific areas of wrestling to me: the behind-the-scenes lingo. It says so much about service industries, formerly you know what it all means. Most of it was started in a experience when fighting was presented as a lawful competitive resist boast. They were code words that were only known to the people who were in the business. For instance, “jobber” is system for a kind of no-name wrestler whose sole aim is to lose to bigger hotshots. But if it’s 1970, and you’re telling the world that the sport is “real, ” you can’t precisely tell on the fact that this guy’s chore is “professional loser.”

But it gets better …

5

Mark/ Smark

“Mark” is a straight-up conman expression. It was used by carnival works back in the ancient times when people went to carnivals on purpose. A “mark” was the victim of rigged recreations or the target of a con. So let’s say you were a worker who was operating a game booth where the objective was to knock down a load of milk cans with a baseball, but one of them was fitted with cement … when a person moved by, showing interest, you’d speculate, “Here’s the mark who’s about to become me some sugared milk-can money.”

Outside of the “con” aspect, it was a carnival word that was used literally. If you two are paying for your ticket, and the person or persons in the booth recognized that you had a lot of money, person would grab a bit of clay or chalk and discretely observe your robes, so the game-booth works would know who had money to invest and who didn’t. That style, they didn’t squander their time on broke-ass punks who were just there to look at the glossy prizes.

A mark in battling is someone who gets really into particular performers or heavily buys into the story lines. You’re falling for their execution in the same way that you’re falling for the milk-can gimmick. In the most basic gumption. In the world of fighting devotees , “mark” is often used as an offense. So if someone’s a fan of John Cena, and I often envision John Cena on fire, I’d insult that love with people saying, “Oh, so you’re another Cena mark, huh? What are you, twelve? “

At the same time, it’s a period of endearment. “Holy shit, I totally celebrated out when the Dudley Boyz reverted! ” Wrestlers frequently enjoy recognizes because it means they’re enjoying the evidence for what it is. Well, that and tags are pretty easy people to sell t-shirts to.

“Smarks” are a different story. It signifies “smart differentiates, ” and they are typically people who keep up on the behind-the-scenes various aspects of battling. They know when a performer has been legitimately injured, versus a story-based bogus harm. They know which musicians are dating. They know that the same reasons Chad Wrestleman has not been on TV for a month is because he got busted for snorting oven clean. Wrestlers. Fucking. Hate . Smarks.

You construe, smarks are the ones who can get an entire mob chanting about real-life contentions, right on the breeze. Lately, John “Bradshaw” Layfield has been in wrestling report for supposedly bullying one of the announcers right out of the industry. He’s been known as a piece of shit for years, but the newest story is what get smarks to contribute the audience in a sing of, “FIRE BRADSHAW! ” Smarks are the ones who got Nikki Bella to respond to them with this TAGEND

Via Twitter

That looks like a spilled Scrabble board to regular readers. A regular devotee known to be when John Cena comes out, there is a long standing institution of half the crowd chanting, “Let’s go, Cena! ” The other half sings, “Cena sucks! ” Smarks knew that Nikki Bella and John Cena had started dating in real life … so they modified that sing to, “You suck Cena! ” Smarks aren’t precisely known for their ingenuity and attractivenes, but that shit formed it on the air.

4

Work Yourself Into A Shoot

This is probably my favorite wrestling term, because it says so much about the psychology of performing. In general, when a wrestler picks up a microphone and goes into his or her spiel, that’s called “cutting a promo.” Everything they’re saying is adding to the promotion of a competition, a narration, a repay per judgment, a movie … whatever project necessitates pushed. All of the stuff they’re remarking — in character and adhering to the tale — is called a “work.” It’s wrote. It’s scheduled out in advance. I symbolize, obviously, they’re not going to let them grab a mic and start moving off about how Hitler did nothing wrong. Unless the floor requires it, in which case, it’s fair game. The phase is, their words and actions are controlled. They’re worked.

A “shoot” can intend either 1) truly pushing in the ring, like when Perry Saturn legitimately trounced the fuck out of Mike Bell for botching a move, or 2) when a wrestler sag the character and starts talking about real shit. You chiefly see this happening in interrogations, outside of the WWE. Here’s Jim Cornette killing about “accidental” nudity that happened in WWE accords in the past " class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" /> TAGEND And here he is, shooting on the notion of kill interviews " class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" /> TAGEND

“Working yourself into a shoot” can happen verbally or physically. It happens when you start off talking or wrestling as proposed( a act ), but as you go on, something legitimately pisses you off, and you start “throwing live rounds, ” as Blue Meanie so eloquently made it( a shoot ). The side that mesmerizes me is that the initiation that pisses you off doesn’t have to come from an outside source. Simply playing and getting too into the capacity can do it.

The better sample of it happening, verbally, is on an escapade of Talking Smack . That’s a scripted establish( or at least partially scripted) by the WWE. On one occurrence, Smackdown general manager Daniel Bryan announced “The Miz’s” grappling mode cowardly. He wasn’t talking about his in-story campaigns. He was talking about him as a musician, playing things too safely. Though Miz tried to making acts back around to a character-driven response in the end, everything else is him legitimately losing his shit. Memo: That is just my opinion, based on knowing how he chimes when he ordinances mad. If this is all behave, he deserves an Oscar TAGEND

The thing about a shoot is that it’s a double-edged sword. Say too much and badmouth the incorrect party, and they’ll ardour your ass. But do it in simply the right way — which symbolizes going lucky, because you’re in no berth for soul authority when you’re that pissed off — and the pundits will praise you forever. That video above is considered to be The Miz’s best design of his entire career.

3

Canned Heat Vs. Legit Heat

You’d think that “canned heat” and “legit heat” would be opposite periods, but they’re moderately unrelated. Both are important, though, in understanding the psychology of the business.

Sometimes, an gathering simply isn’t into a reputation. Maybe he’s simply a boring turd. Perhaps the crowd is depleted after a duet hours, and they’ve lost the intensity to applaud and boo at every little thing that happens in the ring. When an on-air wrestling promotion wants the peoples of the territories at home to buy into the apparition of excite, they’ll “pipe in” boos or claps. I don’t know if wrestlers call it “canned heat, ” but fans do.

This is especially useful if the advertisement craves a certain attribute viewed in a specific route. If the crowd suddenly starts penchant and encouraging a heel( bad guy ), they might replace those members ovations with pretaped boos and even new commentary. Personally, I couldn’t give lower levels of a shit whether they do it or not. I simply find it interested that gang are unpredictable, and sometimes for potential benefits of the overall commodity, you have to steer the at-home sees in a particular attitude. If I had the time to rig it up, I’d pipe in canned heat every time I participated or exited my house.

“Legit heat” is what opens smarks their chatter boners. It can sometimes be used to describe a crowd that legitimately hates a persona, but it’s more frequently used among fans to talk about musicians who are in real-life, behind-the-scenes tiffs. Here are a bunch of wrestlers talking about legitimate backstage heat in the form of thumping the urine out of each other TAGEND

But “legit heat” can also mean going in any problems with the large-hearted puppies. Vince McMahon is moderately notorious for losing his shit on wrestlers who screw up or say the incorrect event on the mic … or, hell, precisely don’t search the practice he wants them to examine. Place “Vince McMahon heat” into YouTube, and you’ll get 127,000 results.

YouTube

But that suggests a lot about the business to me. In a testosterone-fueled industry where your main occupation is doing physically demanding stunts and pretending to punch each other, sometimes statements are settled backstage by actually perforating each other. It doesn’t seem to happen as often in the modern age of grappling, but “legit heat” utterly still exists because humen are humen. It exactly intends , now, that someone is mad at you because you’re a big ol’ stupidhead.

2

Working Stiff

Hehehehe. “Working stiff.”

OK, that’s enough of that. Toiling potent is a real thing, and it has nothing to do with their large-hearted ol’ pigs. When you’re era a pierce, it’s not all about stopping your fist only short of stumbling the guy directly in the suckhole. Some wrestlers do that. Some usage pierces that is really property — they’re just done in a way that isn’t as agonizing or face-destroying as a full-on, “real” touched. They keep their fist loose, and potential impacts properties in a very specific recognise. There are many ways to make a punch looking real if you have the endowment( and your rival has the knack) to pull it off.

Others will actually clock you and ask that you clock them back. Not full-on, intellect you … but enough contact that you’re emphatically going to fucking feel it. Sometimes, that’s done to build the coincide sound more realistic. Sometimes, it’s done to research new members of your roster. When The Dudley Boyz had participated in the WWE, they were put into a match with The APA, and … well, the Dudleys can tell you about it TAGEND

It mostly boils down to, “We reached them about as hard as we could punched them. And they stumble us about as hard as they could smacked us. Then we went backstage and hugged, and it was awesome.” You know, like one does.

One of the stiffest wrestlers on the current roster is “Sheamus.” He’s knows we laying into forearms, pierces, and kickings to the point that at last week’s remuneration per judgment he kicked Jeff Hardy’s tooth right out of his goddamn skull.

These epoches, it’s not so much about penalise a brand-new wrestler. It’s mainly about constructing the competitions gaze real, because if you’re making actual contact, that’s about as real as it gets. The only method you can mess that one up is … well, if you knock a dude’s tooth out of his facehole. But it’s still pretty amazing that the recipients of those films take it and keep on play-act, because they know that the more they sell it, the more they’re worth as performers. Personally, I’d simply start exclaiming until I retch if they did that to me.

1

Mouthpiece

One thing casual fans take for granted is a wrestler’s ability to work a microphone. It’s not enough that he’s huge, sporting, and be permitted to pull off the match without hurting anyone. If he can’t speak in front of a gathering, he’s only a flesh prop. And if he’s boring, beings will simply make a concerted effort to not give a fuck. That’s where a spokesperson comes in.

A “mouthpiece” is someone who pronounces for the wrestler, while he just stands in the background, looking like he’s was just about to rip your entire fucking head off. It resonates stupid, but when you employ two parties like Brock Lesnar and Paul Heyman together, it’s pure magical TAGEND

When Jack Swagger picked up a microphone, he stimulated tens of thousands to fall into a mass lethargy. He couldn’t even get them to boo, and that’s what we as love like to do “the worlds largest”. So what do you do? Do you turn him into a jobber and then attack him? Well, we are really did that, eventually … but at the time, the obvious solution was to create a activist, racist persona appointed Zeb Colter and give him do his thought TAGEND

The only texts spoken by Jack Swagger in that entire promo is, “We the people.” That’s it. His entire place was to stand there like an indoctrinated soldier, while Zeb urged his prejudiced theme. The army hated them, which was exactly what the WWE craved. Sure, eventually parties grew the other way and started heartening them because the world is an ever-growing dance of crazy, but the point is that the mouthpiece was the savior of that character.

All of these words boil down to psychology. Controlling people’s spirits and perspectives to get them to act the method you crave. It’s why I affection battling so much better. It’s not just “two oiled-up dudes, violently hugging each other.” It’s an psychological magical reveal. “We’re going to get you roused. Now, we’re going to piss you off. Now, we’re going to make you laugh. Now, we’re going to see you think you run the show.” It’s brilliant, but the thing you view on TV is simply the drapery. The real gimmicks are being done behind it.

At the very least, you should know what that laughable quote at the very beginning of this article symbolizes , now.

John Cheese is the head of column for Cracked. You can also find him on Twitter . The proliferation of beer pong and craft beer may have you think that we’re living in one of the peak ages to get drunk, but humans have been going famously hammered for millennia. Like a frat house’s lawn after a kegger, record is littered with world-changing happenings that were secretly powered by liquor. The inaugural recreations of the Roman Coliseum, the drafting of the U.S. Constitution, and the Russian Revolution were all capped off by major parties that most attendees likely regretted in the morning . Join Jack O’Brien and Cracked staffers Carmen Angelica, Alex Schmidt, Michael Swaim, plus comedian Blake Wexler for a retelling of history’s biggest instants you didn’t recognise everybody is drink for . Get your tickets here :

Read more:

The post How Knowing A Few Key Phrases Completely Changes Wrestling appeared first on caredogstips.com.

from WordPress http://ift.tt/2umiBxl via IFTTT

How to Avoid Writing Boring Outlines using the IKEA Method

This is a guest contribution from LJ Sedgwick.

You’ve read all of the blogging advice. You know writing an outline helps keep your blog post to the point.

But try as you might, nothing’s happening. An empty page stares back at you. That blinking cursor is taunting you.

You want to teach your readers how to follow your processes. But they’re second nature to you. Trying to put them into a blog post seems impossible.

You know that you know everything you need for your post. But how do you get the ideas out of your brain and onto paper? How do you turn them into an outline?

Worry no more. We’re going to use the IKEA method to brain dump those ideas. Then we’ll assemble them into a solid blog post that will last for years to come.

This blog post started out in that exact same way. It’s a process I’ve used for blog posts since 2009. It’s also a method I use in for writing fiction, and academic writing (much to the eternal annoyance of my Ph. D. supervisor).

So what’s the IKEA method, and how can it help you?

Step 1 – Dump all of the bits onto the floor.

What’s the first thing that you do when you get your IKEA flat pack home?

You tip all of the screws, bolts, and random Allen keys onto the floor.

We’ll start your blog post the same way. This is your brain dump. Set a timer and write everything you can about your topic. If it helps, write it in stream of consciousness.

That’s how this blog post started out.

No one ever has to see it but you. It’s how you’ll get to know all of the ideas you have to work with.

Step 2 – Group everything together by ‘type’.

In the IKEA method, this is the part where you’re matching the stuff on the floor with the instructions. If you’re anything like me, you’ll also count them before you put anything together.

You need to do the same thing with your blog post. Go through your notes and break up what you’ve written into chunks. Group your thoughts together by ‘type’.

Say you’re writing a post about how to make the transition from a day job to freelancing. This blog post is a chest of drawers in this metaphor.

Put all of your thoughts about saving money and budgeting, ready for the transition, into one pile. That’s all of the parts you need for your first drawer.

Then you’ll put everything to do with time management into another pile. That’ll be your second drawer.

Rinse and repeat.

Like any IKEA assembly, you’ll always have parts left over that aren’t in the instructions. That’s okay. In my house, those extra odds and ends go into a drawer of random pieces, in case anything breaks later. Or sometimes they come in handy for completely unrelated DIY projects.

You should do the same. Open Evernote, Google Docs, Scrivener – whatever you write in. Copy and paste those ‘spare’ thoughts into a document. You never know when they’ll come in handy.

Step 3 – Start assembling your individual elements

Go back to your piles of bits/thoughts. Most people follow the instructions. Not me. I put furniture together in a more freestyle fashion. So if you hate outlines, this will be your new best friend.

  Take a look at your first pile of furniture parts/thoughts. They’re already grouped together, so that gives you your subhead for that section.

Start editing those loose, stream of consciousness thoughts into coherent sentences. Move them around into logical paragraphs.

Turn that subhead into something descriptive, so scanners can easily skim your post. Make sure it signposts your content.

Imagine we’re building a chest of drawers. This newly edited paragraph is your first finished drawer.

Move onto the next pile of thoughts and do the same thing. You’ve already done the hard work and gotten the thoughts together. Now you have to turn them into readable content.

Once you’ve run out of piles, you’ve got the individually assembled parts of your post. Using the IKEA method, they’re the drawers you put together before you slot them into the empty chest.

But how are you going to build the chest to fit the drawers into?

Step 4 – Build the container for your other elements

Look at your subheads. What’s the most logical order for them to follow? This is going to be the key to writing the engaging blog post you want to write.

So in our day job-to-freelancing post, you won’t put a paragraph about marketing your new business before one about carving out time to build a portfolio.

Arrange (and re-arrange, if necessary) the subheads you’ve written into a post that flows nicely.

And there’s the chest.

Slide each of the drawers into place by pasting the right paragraphs under the right subheads.

If you’re building IKEA furniture, this is the point where you tighten all of the screws. So for your IKEA-built blog post, you’ll edit your sentences so that the post flows. One section should set up the next, and so on.

Step 5 – Find the best spot for your new furniture/blog post

In your home, you’d find the best place for your new piece of furniture. For your blog post, you’re looking for the right context.

And that’s your introduction. Craft your intro so that it sets up the information that follows. Give your chest of drawers/blog post a final polish.

And hey presto! You’ve used the IKEA method of assembly to brain dump and edit your way to an engaging blog post!

The IKEA method will help bloggers who can’t get to grips with outlines

When I brain-dumped this post, I started out with 637 words. They weren’t necessarily in the right order, but the ideas were there.

It took just 15 minutes to get everything down that I wanted to say. And then it took another 15 minutes to turn it into a 1000 word post.

If you hate using outlines, turning your thoughts into a useful post is a lot easier by brain-dumping and editing than trying to write the perfect post from scratch.

Why not give it a go? Choose your topic/piece of furniture and get started. Let me know in the comments below how you get on!

LJ Sedgwick writes blog posts and copy for startups while drinking more coffee than is healthy. You can find her blog posts about content marketing at her website.

  The post How to Avoid Writing Boring Outlines using the IKEA Method appeared first on ProBlogger.

       How to Avoid Writing Boring Outlines using the IKEA Method

How to Avoid Writing Boring Outlines using the IKEA Method

This is a guest contribution from LJ Sedgwick.

You’ve read all of the blogging advice. You know writing an outline helps keep your blog post to the point.

But try as you might, nothing’s happening. An empty page stares back at you. That blinking cursor is taunting you.

You want to teach your readers how to follow your processes. But they’re second nature to you. Trying to put them into a blog post seems impossible.

You know that you know everything you need for your post. But how do you get the ideas out of your brain and onto paper? How do you turn them into an outline?

Worry no more. We’re going to use the IKEA method to brain dump those ideas. Then we’ll assemble them into a solid blog post that will last for years to come.

This blog post started out in that exact same way. It’s a process I’ve used for blog posts since 2009. It’s also a method I use in for writing fiction, and academic writing (much to the eternal annoyance of my Ph. D. supervisor).

So what’s the IKEA method, and how can it help you?

Step 1 – Dump all of the bits onto the floor.

What’s the first thing that you do when you get your IKEA flat pack home?

You tip all of the screws, bolts, and random Allen keys onto the floor.

We’ll start your blog post the same way. This is your brain dump. Set a timer and write everything you can about your topic. If it helps, write it in stream of consciousness.

That’s how this blog post started out.

No one ever has to see it but you. It’s how you’ll get to know all of the ideas you have to work with.

Step 2 – Group everything together by ‘type’.

In the IKEA method, this is the part where you’re matching the stuff on the floor with the instructions. If you’re anything like me, you’ll also count them before you put anything together.

You need to do the same thing with your blog post. Go through your notes and break up what you’ve written into chunks. Group your thoughts together by ‘type’.

Say you’re writing a post about how to make the transition from a day job to freelancing. This blog post is a chest of drawers in this metaphor.

Put all of your thoughts about saving money and budgeting, ready for the transition, into one pile. That’s all of the parts you need for your first drawer.

Then you’ll put everything to do with time management into another pile. That’ll be your second drawer.

Rinse and repeat.

Like any IKEA assembly, you’ll always have parts left over that aren’t in the instructions. That’s okay. In my house, those extra odds and ends go into a drawer of random pieces, in case anything breaks later. Or sometimes they come in handy for completely unrelated DIY projects.

You should do the same. Open Evernote, Google Docs, Scrivener – whatever you write in. Copy and paste those ‘spare’ thoughts into a document. You never know when they’ll come in handy.

Step 3 – Start assembling your individual elements

Go back to your piles of bits/thoughts. Most people follow the instructions. Not me. I put furniture together in a more freestyle fashion. So if you hate outlines, this will be your new best friend.

  Take a look at your first pile of furniture parts/thoughts. They’re already grouped together, so that gives you your subhead for that section.

Start editing those loose, stream of consciousness thoughts into coherent sentences. Move them around into logical paragraphs.

Turn that subhead into something descriptive, so scanners can easily skim your post. Make sure it signposts your content.

Imagine we’re building a chest of drawers. This newly edited paragraph is your first finished drawer.

Move onto the next pile of thoughts and do the same thing. You’ve already done the hard work and gotten the thoughts together. Now you have to turn them into readable content.

Once you’ve run out of piles, you’ve got the individually assembled parts of your post. Using the IKEA method, they’re the drawers you put together before you slot them into the empty chest.

But how are you going to build the chest to fit the drawers into?

Step 4 – Build the container for your other elements

Look at your subheads. What’s the most logical order for them to follow? This is going to be the key to writing the engaging blog post you want to write.

So in our day job-to-freelancing post, you won’t put a paragraph about marketing your new business before one about carving out time to build a portfolio.

Arrange (and re-arrange, if necessary) the subheads you’ve written into a post that flows nicely.

And there’s the chest.

Slide each of the drawers into place by pasting the right paragraphs under the right subheads.

If you’re building IKEA furniture, this is the point where you tighten all of the screws. So for your IKEA-built blog post, you’ll edit your sentences so that the post flows. One section should set up the next, and so on.

Step 5 – Find the best spot for your new furniture/blog post

In your home, you’d find the best place for your new piece of furniture. For your blog post, you’re looking for the right context.

And that’s your introduction. Craft your intro so that it sets up the information that follows. Give your chest of drawers/blog post a final polish.

And hey presto! You’ve used the IKEA method of assembly to brain dump and edit your way to an engaging blog post!

The IKEA method will help bloggers who can’t get to grips with outlines

When I brain-dumped this post, I started out with 637 words. They weren’t necessarily in the right order, but the ideas were there.

It took just 15 minutes to get everything down that I wanted to say. And then it took another 15 minutes to turn it into a 1000 word post.

If you hate using outlines, turning your thoughts into a useful post is a lot easier by brain-dumping and editing than trying to write the perfect post from scratch.

Why not give it a go? Choose your topic/piece of furniture and get started. Let me know in the comments below how you get on!

LJ Sedgwick writes blog posts and copy for startups while drinking more coffee than is healthy. You can find her blog posts about content marketing at her website.

  The post How to Avoid Writing Boring Outlines using the IKEA Method appeared first on ProBlogger.

       from http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ProbloggerHelpingBloggersEarnMoney/~3/J-ROALmLWCM/

How to Avoid Writing Boring Outlines using the IKEA Method

This is a guest contribution from LJ Sedgwick.

You’ve read all of the blogging advice. You know writing an outline helps keep your blog post to the point.

But try as you might, nothing’s happening. An empty page stares back at you. That blinking cursor is taunting you.

You want to teach your readers how to follow your processes. But they’re second nature to you. Trying to put them into a blog post seems impossible.

You know that you know everything you need for your post. But how do you get the ideas out of your brain and onto paper? How do you turn them into an outline?

Worry no more. We’re going to use the IKEA method to brain dump those ideas. Then we’ll assemble them into a solid blog post that will last for years to come.

This blog post started out in that exact same way. It’s a process I’ve used for blog posts since 2009. It’s also a method I use in for writing fiction, and academic writing (much to the eternal annoyance of my Ph. D. supervisor).

So what’s the IKEA method, and how can it help you?

Step 1 – Dump all of the bits onto the floor.

What’s the first thing that you do when you get your IKEA flat pack home?

You tip all of the screws, bolts, and random Allen keys onto the floor.

We’ll start your blog post the same way. This is your brain dump. Set a timer and write everything you can about your topic. If it helps, write it in stream of consciousness.

That’s how this blog post started out.

No one ever has to see it but you. It’s how you’ll get to know all of the ideas you have to work with.

Step 2 – Group everything together by ‘type’.

In the IKEA method, this is the part where you’re matching the stuff on the floor with the instructions. If you’re anything like me, you’ll also count them before you put anything together.

You need to do the same thing with your blog post. Go through your notes and break up what you’ve written into chunks. Group your thoughts together by ‘type’.

Say you’re writing a post about how to make the transition from a day job to freelancing. This blog post is a chest of drawers in this metaphor.

Put all of your thoughts about saving money and budgeting, ready for the transition, into one pile. That’s all of the parts you need for your first drawer.

Then you’ll put everything to do with time management into another pile. That’ll be your second drawer.

Rinse and repeat.

Like any IKEA assembly, you’ll always have parts left over that aren’t in the instructions. That’s okay. In my house, those extra odds and ends go into a drawer of random pieces, in case anything breaks later. Or sometimes they come in handy for completely unrelated DIY projects.

You should do the same. Open Evernote, Google Docs, Scrivener – whatever you write in. Copy and paste those ‘spare’ thoughts into a document. You never know when they’ll come in handy.

Step 3 – Start assembling your individual elements

Go back to your piles of bits/thoughts. Most people follow the instructions. Not me. I put furniture together in a more freestyle fashion. So if you hate outlines, this will be your new best friend.

 Take a look at your first pile of furniture parts/thoughts. They’re already grouped together, so that gives you your subhead for that section.

Start editing those loose, stream of consciousness thoughts into coherent sentences. Move them around into logical paragraphs.

Turn that subhead into something descriptive, so scanners can easily skim your post. Make sure it signposts your content.

Imagine we’re building a chest of drawers. This newly edited paragraph is your first finished drawer.

Move onto the next pile of thoughts and do the same thing. You’ve already done the hard work and gotten the thoughts together. Now you have to turn them into readable content.

Once you’ve run out of piles, you’ve got the individually assembled parts of your post. Using the IKEA method, they’re the drawers you put together before you slot them into the empty chest.

But how are you going to build the chest to fit the drawers into?

Step 4 – Build the container for your other elements

Look at your subheads. What’s the most logical order for them to follow? This is going to be the key to writing the engaging blog post you want to write.

So in our day job-to-freelancing post, you won’t put a paragraph about marketing your new business before one about carving out time to build a portfolio.

Arrange (and re-arrange, if necessary) the subheads you’ve written into a post that flows nicely.

And there’s the chest.

Slide each of the drawers into place by pasting the right paragraphs under the right subheads.

If you’re building IKEA furniture, this is the point where you tighten all of the screws. So for your IKEA-built blog post, you’ll edit your sentences so that the post flows. One section should set up the next, and so on.

Step 5 – Find the best spot for your new furniture/blog post

In your home, you’d find the best place for your new piece of furniture. For your blog post, you’re looking for the right context.

And that’s your introduction. Craft your intro so that it sets up the information that follows. Give your chest of drawers/blog post a final polish.

And hey presto! You’ve used the IKEA method of assembly to brain dump and edit your way to an engaging blog post!

The IKEA method will help bloggers who can’t get to grips with outlines

When I brain-dumped this post, I started out with 637 words. They weren’t necessarily in the right order, but the ideas were there.

It took just 15 minutes to get everything down that I wanted to say. And then it took another 15 minutes to turn it into a 1000 word post.

If you hate using outlines, turning your thoughts into a useful post is a lot easier by brain-dumping and editing than trying to write the perfect post from scratch.

Why not give it a go? Choose your topic/piece of furniture and get started. Let me know in the comments below how you get on!

LJ Sedgwick writes blog posts and copy for startups while drinking more coffee than is healthy. You can find her blog posts about content marketing at her website.

 The post How to Avoid Writing Boring Outlines using the IKEA Method appeared first on ProBlogger.

       from ProBlogger http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ProbloggerHelpingBloggersEarnMoney/~3/J-ROALmLWCM/