Connor is already running, the shout of lieutenant like the crack of a circus whip. Lieutenant, don't, that fragmentary summons. Nines isn't far behind him; the lieutenant is what Connor is responsible for, but Nines has a hunch that the don't belongs to him.
Sure enough, in the deafening racket of the break room, jostled by a herd of people gesticulating frantically in the air and screaming at them to stop-- Hank Anderson has his hands fisted in Gavin's shirt, hauling him nearly off of his feet.
Read 88 on AO3
Chapter 2 is up! This continues to be a leisurely yet incredibly unrelaxing stroll alongside the dysfunctional relationship of two assholes who can't figure out how to be alive. If you prefer the stories you read to have no plot, no development, no resolution, but just a vague sense of dread and the suspicion that no consequential human problem is truly surmountable, BOY HAVE I GOT A FIC FOR YOU💖
hey i just wanted to say that even 6 years on i still occasionally go through your entire reed900 art tag bc i love it so much!
Hello my love....... You won't believe in how many ways I have just fucked up in the last five minutes................. Suffice it to say that due to my haphazard misclicking, this post will now somehow have to serve as a response to you, @randomtotallyrealgirl, AND the anon who sent in the Happy Halloween message. I'M SORRY and I'm also sorry that I am in that stage of one's fandom existence where one's output only bears a vanishingly tangential degree of relevance to the actual fandom they are making output for. Like what is this, what do you mean this is reed900 fanart. But even when I am, as I am now, an irrelevant specter who only oozes out of the walls once in a thousand years to apologize, I love you still.
hello! i absolutely loved reading Les Mignardises (thank you for sharing it with all of us), and was wondering if you’d be open to sharing how you learned So Damn Much about food and drink and the pairings thereof? the whole fic was the literary equivalent of a feast for the senses and clearly came from a place of comfortable expertise (or at least extensive knowledge), and as someone who sits in that funky zone of being unable to drink but madly passionate about culinary conquests, i’d love to learn more! thank you!
I wish you could know how much this means to me! I wish that your mirror neurons could feel every stabby pang of joyful gratitude and keen inadequacy that your message has elicited in me! I wish that YOU COULD HURT IN PRECISELY ALL THE MARVELOUS WAYS THAT THIS MESSAGE HAS HURT ME!
Although you are much too gracious to put me in my rightful place, I think that I would probably be more accurately described as a... person on the enthusiast end of the thoroughly amateur scale, when it comes to food and wine. I can't say that I know all that much, where the rubber meets the road-- but I do love it, and I do intake a LOT of media related to it. Perhaps that's the only practical thought I have with regard to how to learn about food and drink; at a remove from professional hands-on experience, repeated exposure to media and actual food is the surest way there is of being more immersed in it! At the end of last year I made a list of the tv shows I'd watched in 2023, and it was just... various series of Taskmaster and then ALL FOOD/DRINK SHOWS FROM HEAD TO TOE. I guess it's sort of a lifelong hyperfixation.
Another less practical, but more theoretical thing is that I am of the party that believes that a poem is not like a frog; you cannot kill it by taking it apart. That's the way I feel about food and drink, too. Unlike the dissection of a living thing, I think that taking apart literature or a flavor profile into what you consider to be its component pieces is less about stopping its functions so that you can observe it. I think it's much more about the journey of attempting to ask a shaky, difficult, potentially unanswerable question: What about this makes you feel towards it the way that you do? Why does a poem, or a dish, or a drink, or a pairing, make you react the way that you react? It doesn't matter whether the answer you come up with is correct or not, because there's no such thing as a correct answer. It's that you're letting the question guide you through asking questions about yourself, and about the poem, the dish, the drink, the pairing. You're not any closer to solving anything, by the end of it, but you've asked good questions and you've allowed yourself the luxury of thought. Even outside of food and drink, I'm the kind of person who spends a ton of time thinking about why they like what they like. This is not necessarily a virtue! I've gotten into arguments with loved ones because I've demanded that they explain their tastes to me in detail! But we are who we are, and when I build an egg salad, I look forward to interrogating myself over what I'm doing with the mustard, the dill, the paprika, the potato chips.
I feel like the thread is getting away from me a bit because I am answering this on a hefty amount of pretty enjoyable Slovenian rosé. I suppose my point is, whenever I encounter a recipe, or a restaurant dish, or a glass of wine, I want to know what goes into it, and I wonder what it is about those pieces and that whole that makes me feel the way that I do. I like thinking about the layers of flavor in food and drink, what notes have earthy depth and which ones pierce up top, which are quick to hit the palate and which linger after you swallow, and what impression that tonal interaction of spatiality and temporality leaves on you. This kind of structuralist thinking is helpful for me, for example, in navigating pairing puzzles: sugar level in drink alongside spice level in food, acidity in drink alongside salt in food, tannin in drink alongside fat in food. Thinking about balance and relationality was a good starting point for me.
There are so many good wine education resources out there nowadays, I think you could get a lot of information about pairings even without needing to drink! (I used to listen to Wine for Normal People by Elizabeth Schneider a lot, though I fell off.) But even if you are more interested in putting dishes together rather than the drink side of it all, I think balance and relationality are equally effective markers for thinking about food alone. After all, that is pretty much the driving force of something like Samin Nosrat's Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat-- why elements matter, separately and together.
MY SLOVENIAN ROSE-INDUCED VERBOSITY ASIDE, I do need you to recognize that you have been very kind to me in sending in this askbox message, and that I would be more than delighted to keep bouncing thoughts back and forth with you on this matter, even perhaps with increased lucidity on my part in the future. I just think it's so neat that you read a story about Nines gritting his teeth for several months until he finally fucks Gavin through a dilapidated couch in the back of a failing restaurant... and then indulged me by coming here and allowing me to talk about food and wine. It's just so nice of you. Thank you. Tell me what you like to eat. Did I mention that I wish you could feel as scraped raw in the face of grace as I do in the wake of your message? SERIOUSLY I NEED YOU TO KNOW THIS, I WOULDN'T EVEN BE ON THIS PLATFORM OR IN FANDOM ANYMORE IF IT WEREN'T FOR YOU TALKING TO ME
Hey... hello.... do you have any like.... merchandise to sell or something... or do you accept donations may be
Because I admire your work (both writing and art) and I wanna throw money at you, you know
What would I do with your money, anon, except take it gratefully and yet continue to produce exactly zero fandom output.......... Mostly the exercise would just make you poorer and make me guiltier! Let us not do this to each other!!! Instead, while I shake my fist at work deadlines and keep adding endless bullet points about Gavin's self-destructive downward spiral to my Notes app, you might keep your wallet closed and know that it was the prudent thing to do. And then, depending on what time of day it is for you when you have done that, maybe you could toss a drive-by AO3 comment in the direction of me or anyone whose work you've enjoyed. It is, or at least it still is for me, a gift economy too. I love you and I will vanquish your enemies.
I finally got around to reading Fata Morgana, and let me preface by saying I wish I had more beautiful words to express how incredible the story and writing are, I have so much to say and not nearly enough comprehension to get it out atm but I hope this will do for now haha
few fics strike me quite the way yours often do, the way you write Nines and Gavin does them such justice, it's very inspiring, it's like you've picked them apart and splayed out what makes them up for us to see with so much ease, and my god the plot?! It in itself is wonderful and surprising, all around an amazing and well-written story
❤️THIS IS THE TRUEST VALENTINE❤️
@bumblee-bee I hope you are receiving federal funding for being so encouraging towards your local fic writers! You are a one-person National Endowment for the Arts and you should be honored as such! When my life is under control someday, I'm going to finish 88 and I'll only have you to blame for it.
It was such an honor to play around in Vape's ideas sandbox for the collab on Fata Morgana, and I'm so glad that you had a good time reading it-- makes me feel like maybe I didn't just kick all the sand out of the box and leave a bunch of candy wrappers lying around! Thank you, really. I'm so tender for GV500 and RK900 flipping off the United States government together while gunning it across the American highway with two pairs of teeny pointy dog ears flapping out of the windows of their Chevy Malibu. It genuinely brings me delight beyond measure that you enjoyed the story. YOU SHOULD HAVE TAX-EXEMPT STATUS FOR YOUR PATRONAGE OF THE QUESTIONABLE ARTS
My love! @bumblee-bee! How this delights me! First of all, equal parts congratulations and condolences on your recent infectious bout of reed900. But hot on the heels of that first point, please always know that no matter how long it has been since I have actually made anything for DBH, I am still in it, still thinking about it, still loving it. Every time you come home, you come home to a haunted house. I am the spirit in your rafters, rearranging your refrigerator magnet poetry to say some beautifully heartfelt shit like
trick or treat?? anyways i wasn't too sure if you were doing anything specific with asks for the spooky season, im knees-deep into baldur's gate 3 (vampire...love him) and i hope u are doing well! just pretend this is a calling card with a kind inquiries on your health and your blorbos ASDFJSLDKF happy halloween regardless!
Oh, sorry, I meant to step away from tumblr but then, from across the wide expanse of the American prairie, I heard "Astarion" whispered like a secret into the wind, and less perhaps like a wolf at the scent of a deer worth hunting, or even like a deer at the scent of a wolf worth knowing, but like a bolt of lightning who has found something precious to set on fire, I was Called.
@qserasera I can't actually even talk about BG3 at this precise moment because I'm on my phone and I have months' worth of pent-up screaming that cannot be typed on a touchscreen, but please know that there is months' worth of pent-up screaming within me. I will never produce anything for that fandom and I don't even really count myself to be in it, but I've thought about very little else (and definitely read in nothing else) for the past seeming eternity and a half
I won't even tag this post with BG3 because this isn't worth archiving in quite that way, but talk to me about the horrendous depths of your Ancunin Problems
HEAR YOU NOT THE HOWL THAT EMANATES FROM THE SPACE BETWEEN THE FESTERING WORLDS? WHAT USE HAS A CHASM FOR TRINKETS? WHAT DOES OBLIVION KNOW OF HUNGER SATED? SHALL I BEG FOR A SNICKERS BAR AT THE DOOR TO HIS HOUSE AT R'LYEH, WHERE DEAD CTHULHU WAITS DREAMING? IÄ! IÄ!
THE VILEST OF TRICKS IN THINE THRICE-BEDAMNED SACK OF TRICKS, WITCH. UNLOOSE THY WORST. WARD OFF FOR ME THE DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS; BE THOU SO VILE THAT NO OTHER VILENESS CAN EVER TOUCH ME. TRICK, EATER OF THE NEW MOON! TRICK, I SAY!!
Rest of messages in thread not included for reasons of mortifying inadequacy on my part! Anon you sent this in on August 22. I just want to type that out loud so that I can nail my shame to my front door like Martin Luther with his 95 Theses, except every thesis is "Nat can't fucking answer a single thing in an even vaguely timely manner". I would say I'm sorry for what I have become, but the truth is that I was ever thus. I'm sorry for what I have always been.
I'm sorry as well that it is so hard to find me across platforms because I have a thousand different usernames! Some of it used to be intentional, but intent or none, it functions as a real pain in the ass and I apologize. I've been trying to address this issue via the sidebar link on this blog and the cross-platform links in the author's notes on AO3, but we could have avoided all this if I had just stuck to a single identifying name. Still, DESPITE MY BEST EFFORTS TO THE CONTRARY, I'm so glad that you found me! Not least because it has led to you sending this absolute conflict-free lab-grown diamond necklace of messages! Thank you so so so much 😭💕 It's hard for me to explain this in a sensible manner, but my slowness in answering genuinely is in large part because the message means so much to me. I want to save the act of answering for a moment when I can feel articulate enough to do some justice to the kindness you have shown me, but then it's 10PM every night when I finish writing work emails and I am incapable of stringing two words together. Tomorrow, I think, I will try again! And then it's another 10PM and another 10PM and more than two months goes by before I have to accept that I will never feel articulate enough to respond the way that you deserve. That would be true at any other time of day, besides!
But thank you. I hope that you can stick around for the frustratingly glacial pace at which I do anything at all; what I lack in output, I make up for in stubbornness. One day, 88 will be a complete fic, even if I have to break my own bones to do it. (Please don't ask me the perfectly legitimate question of why broken bones would facilitate fic writing. It is a statement about the strength of my resolution, but it is an incomprehensible statement.)
This is such an interesting question! HOW DID I? I'm combing through my (admittedly blurry) autobiographical memories, but I can't seem to find a particular originary point for reading. Saying "I've always been a reader" is so boring, and it implies a certain kind of relationship with literature that I don't think I actually have-- I didn't particularly gravitate towards reading at the expense of other activities, and I read such a hodgepodge mixture of stuff that I can't fathom what it was about the act of reading that I actually enjoyed. And now, well, I read almost exclusively for work, to the degree that the thought of reading for pleasure makes me recoil.
The writing, I do have an originary point for. I was in elementary school, and my class had recently held a small creative writing competition; we were at an age where it was embarrassing to try very hard to achieve anything, so I blew it off, because I had to perform coolness due to it not coming naturally to me. Our homeroom teacher announced the winner, and asked that they read out loud their winning entry for the rest of the class. They did, and I remember thinking very clearly: This is fine, but I could do it better if I tried.
This is a story that is immensely unflattering to me-- or rather, it's a devastatingly accurate portrayal of me. It contains all the seeds of my worst qualities as a writer and a human being: competitiveness in something I consider myself to be proficient at, the need for external validation, baseless arrogance. But when I found myself being so hideously jealous of that kid, it wasn't primarily jealousy over the fact that they had won something; I was jealous that they had this stage time to show people what the world looked like to them. I felt robbed of the chance to connect with people in that way. Of course, no one robbed me of anything -- I chose to pretend that I was too cool for school -- and there was absolutely no reason to think that I would have won the competition and gotten that stage time for myself, even if I had tried as hard as I could. But still, it got me writing. Not because I had anything to say, but because whatever banal cut-rate shit I would end up saying, I just wanted someone else to hear it and tell me that I made sense to them. That's still why I do it, I think.
Seeing as how my twitter is just my tumblr with 100% less overwrought rambling, I can't decide whether you had a worse experience or a better one than binging this blog instead! On the one hand, I can't recommend the overwrought rambling; on the other hand, what's left after the overwrought rambling is excised is still just a lot of mid art determined to insist that dick jokes comprise an entire genre of creative output. IT'S DISMAL EITHER WAY! But it's too late for you! (Thank you.)
Anon!!!!! The very FACT THAT YOU SENT ME A ONE PIECE MESSAGE!!! My past in One Piece fandom is a really deep cut in that it very rarely comes up on this blog, so I'm super pleased that you thought of me!!!!!!!!!! 💖
Tragically, I have still not watched it. I KNOW, PLEASE DON'T THROW ME OUT OF THIS PORTHOLE. I agree wholeheartedly with you-- I'm thrilled that it got new fans into OP, and that it was made with so much visible love! I wouldn't say that I'm someone who is ever looking for live action versions of stuff -- if push came to shove, I'd probably admit that I don't necessarily see the inherent appeal of live action adaptations -- but it makes me truly happy to hear all the enthusiasm and praise for this one!!! Me not watching it yet mostly has to do with the aforementioned "it's 10PM when I finish writing work emails" problem.
As someone who is unfortunately very well-acquainted with what I am into (or so I must presume, by the sheer miracle of you sending me an OP message), it probably comes as no surprise to you that the single most affecting piece of promotional media that I encountered was a teaser clip from the Baratie arc. Anon when I tell you THE BREATH CAUGHT IN MY THROAT. THE BARATIE SHOT LIKE A RESTAURANT SHOW!!!! THE BARATIE!!!!!!!! WHERE MY SON WAS RAISED! HIS FISH-HEADED NURSERY! MY SON! THE DARLING OF THE BARATIE! A KITCHEN PACKED TO THE GILLS WITH SHORT TEMPERS! THE THORN IN THEIR SIDE! THE APPLE OF THEIR EYE! CRADLED TO SLEEP BY THE WATERS THAT TOOK HIM IN! GENTLED TO WARMTH BY A COMMERCIAL GAS RANGE! THE BRINE-SWEET CHILDHOOD HOME OF MY SON!!!!!
One Piece was so early for me that I can't even distinguish what came first, my Sanji bias or my commercial kitchen obsession. What remains crystal clear is that I am predictable in my perversions. I will watch it, anon. Someday hopefully soon.
Your instincts are animalistic and your deductive reasoning skills are razor-sharp! And you were completely correct! Although, I do have to confess, there are more than enough typos and grammar mistakes to go around in things I've written... fics, sure, but also just... comments and tumblr posts and whatnot. My wake is LITTERED with errors. With fics I can go in surreptitiously and tend to them hoping that no one has noticed, but with alarming regularity I will edit a comment reply being like "Sorry to drop this notification in your inbox... I just spotted a typo and I had to fix it..." so you know, you were more lenient than you needed to be in your assessment of my punctiliousness, but you were STILL COMPLETELY CORRECT.
That having been said, you're probably somewhat off the mark with regard to my vibes as person! I mean, I'm not an intentionally bad person, you know, I don't go around being a provocateur, but mostly it's just that people tend to reserve a lot of the energy it takes to be amiable for the real-life relationships they have. Me, I treat all the people in my life like dirt and then I come on the Internet and kiss all the babies in town. (That's a joke! I don't treat the people in my life like dirt! But certainly I enjoy explaining myself or pontificating at length much much less in real life, and maybe something of that willingness to keep talking can read as amiability online. )
As a person who is DEFINITELY IN MY WALLS, could you earn your rent and hang out with my cat while I am away?? Saba keeps throwing up from boredom / loneliness / a desire to protest my absences, and I am as concerned about his GI tract as I am tired of blotting the rug.....................
(💓You are very sweet and this message was a big serotonin boost, thank you)
No! I didn't! That dating sim mockup remains, as it began, a one-off joke about grabbing Gavin by the throat more than anything else kjfld;hgkld If anyone passing by right now wants to hit up @kenoa-ajisai-no-niwa about putting something together, that would be awesome!
I am the way that I am, so I would only really feel comfortable writing for the game, rather than drawing-- but division of labor aside, I'm just generally anxious about collaborative ventures like this occurring at this stage of the fandom life cycle. I've been part of a few late-fandom projects of this nature, and they've all sort of... dissolved into tears. There's no established graceful way for someone to lose interest in a fandom and step away from their collaborative commitments, you know? The project falls apart without them, but it's also difficult to ask someone to keep putting their time and labor into something that no longer interests them, and won't earn them college credits or a paycheck.
When a fandom is young, there's enough energy in the air to push a project to the finish line, right? Several years into a fandom, I can't help but feel that these projects tend to sink into a kind of "Well... it's a lot of work... and who are we even making it for, anyway... is it worth doing all of this just so that we can get like three comments" is-there-anyone-out-there morass. That's not a rule, of course, just a regrettable pattern that I've personally experienced-- but it's what comes to mind for me, as I ruminate on the possibility of this hypothetical dating sim.
...And yet, I'd still probably write for such a hypothetical dating sim, if it were to hypothetically exist
To fully lean into the KUSO MISO GRAND PRIX vibes of Gavin unzipping his race suit while ill-advisedly wearing nothing underneath, here it is in a larger size! By god, Nines will get this man to pole position and make him sink slowly down on said pole, inch by excruciating inch. This one goes out to the anon who sent in the message about body pillows 🫡💕
Anyone unzipping a boiler suit automatically gives me yaranaika? vibes, but I THINK THAT'S FUNNY, SO WHO'S LAUGHING? Me. I am the one who is laughing
Fowler doesn't understand why the entire test run of these godforsaken posters completely sells out during presale. He's torn in so many different directions: grateful awe that Nines seems to have really landed on something, confused horror at what the general public are into, slight concern that Cyberlife Racing is objectifying Gavin for the sake of the profit margin, further concern that Gavin is actually pretty on board with being objectified, full stop
Anon I love you passionately, never change. I want you to have this:
WE AS A SOCIETY KEEP CASTING NEIL NEWBON IN ROLES WHERE HE INEVITABLY, SOMEHOW, EVEN WHEN HE IS A CHARACTER IN A FUTURISTIC STORY ABOUT ANDROIDS SET IN A MAJOR METROPOLITAN CITY, GETS FUCKED BY A BEAR
You must be mistaking me for someone else... I never made anything of the sort.......... Thank you very much for sticking around, and for being so kind 🥹💓
There is NOTHING SWEETER TO MY EARS THAN THE RALLYING CRY OF "CANON DOESN'T EXIST"! COME LOVE RESTAURANTS WITH ME, ANON. JOIN THE COMMERCIAL KITCHEN FANDOM. BE IN THE FANDOM OF COOKING AS A CONCEPT. Gavin having a minor knife accident and the entire kitchen being thrown into an overblown frenzy of panic... Going on the road with a food truck as the restaurant gets renovated to put in wine storage... Nines realizing that he needs to study mixology and contacting a very confused Allen to demand tutoring... Gavin being hired out for a private catering gig in a mansion and getting run so ragged by the end of it that he just takes a three-hour nap on the parlor couch halfway in Nines's lap... Gavin later being mortified to discover that he has done so... R E S T A U R A N T S
💕💕💕I'm sorry for putting such a lovely message behind the cut, @bumblee-bee! But this is what comes of being so kind that looking upon you is like looking directly into the sun. I am too embarrassed to face you out in the open. I'm so so SO so glad that you are enjoying Les Mignardises! I don't think I'm even capable of truly conveying the full extent of my gratitude, but that fic means a lot to me (too much to me, really) and it genuinely moves me to hear that you are having fun with it. I still think of myself as someone who primarily contributes to fandom through fic; with each passing day, this becomes more and more untenable a self-concept -- if that's true, where the fuck is the writing to show for it? WHY DO YOUR FIC UPDATES TAKE LITERAL YEARS, NAT? -- but still, some stubborn part of me wants the fics to matter, you know. Thank you so much.
And of course it's fantastic that you've made your way back to the fandom!!! YISSSS BE ENFOLDED BACK INTO THE LOVING CLAWED EMBRACE OF THIS HELLPIT
Was thinking about Westerns, and so was thinking about The Quick and the Dead, and also was thinking about how weird it is that I've never drawn Wolfwood. lbr every Wolfwood is a good Wolfwood to me, but I'm very fond of Stampede Wolfwood atm 🥰
Is there a different character in this movie that is actually a preacher who runs an orphanage? Yes. Do I just like the Lady's outfit a lot? Absolutely yes
