my reading addon is waiting approval for firefox and chrome im so nervous. please approve my addon i think it could help at least one other person as much as it's helped me...
it's an accessibility tool i made for myself because i needed it, which basically lets you focus on one sentence at a time as you read large blocks of texts (books, articles, etc.). it offers different highlight styles, some of which use gradients to help guide your eyes from the start of the sentence until the end. you can move forward and back pressing the buttons or using ALT + left and right arrow keys
if you use it and you find it helpful please tell me about it so i can have the motivation to keep improving it. i love knowing people use my tools
[ID. Two gifs of the accessibility tool in action. They highlight one sentence at a time for ease of readability.
The first gif shows the tool cycling down the paragraphs, from sentence to sentence, in a thick yellow highlight.
The second gif shows the different highlight styles such as; a thick yellow, a thinner yellow, no highlight at all, a gradient highlight, blocky tri-color highlight by line, and colored text by line. End ID.]
I’m a college student struggling with brain fog due to medical issues, I’m definitely going to try this out next time I’m working on one of my reading heavy courses :) a lot of my books are accessible via some website cloud thing on a browser because owning things isn’t real anymore. this looks like something that will really really help me.
[Image one: closeup on someone’s hand opening a can of Coca-Cola. Image two: Landscape photo of Yellowstone National Park, two mountains in the background and a buffalo in the lower right hand corner.]
Nights at The Hard Deck just got a lot more interesting.
Warnings: alcohol consumption, The reader is referred to as she/her, with no physical description, (please let me know if you'd like me to tag anything please), I grew up in an Army household so some of my Navy knowledge may be slightly off base (no pun intended)
This one-shot will exist in the same universe as other one-shots I have planned. But, they can all be read entirely independently.
Word count: 1.3K
Masterlist | talk to me about Jake and Tyler
Friday nights at The Hard Deck are always busy. Sailors and pilots all stopping by on their way home from base eager to let loose, that's to be expected. What he's not expecting is to walk in on a bachelorette party in full swing.
In a Navy town, it's not completely unheard of for last-minute bachelor and bachelorette parties to fill the local dives, but the larger-than-normal crowd and the young woman dancing on one of the tables has Jake rolling his shoulders back before he settles into the night. He'd been looking for a chill vibe, a cold beer and a few rounds at the pool table. But, he won't complain about a night of flirting, he fancies his odds in a room full of jealous bridesmaids and tag chasers.
Rooster and Coyote seem to have gotten a head start if the empty glasses, or the girls they're helping line up shots at the pool table are any indicator.
Leaning against the bar Jake waits patiently for Penny to finish making a tray of shots. Lemon-coloured liquid poured from the silver shaker he's so rarely seen used at The Hard Deck, into sugar-rimmed 1 oz glasses. His eyes follow the tray over to the crowd of already tipsy ladies all dressed up to celebrate the blonde in her “bride” sash and tiara. But his attention lingers on the woman who laughs brightly as she raises the tiny glass for a toast.
“To the bride! I think I speak for everyone when I say that we love you so much, and we're all so excited for this next chapter of your life!” The rest of the party cheers in response, “Now, let's get drunk and start drinking something that's not just sugar”
She's quick to down the lemon drop shot, quickly licking the drip that rolls down the back of her hand. She's sun-kissed and glowing even under the dim overhead lights. She must be from the area, not just passing through. The music is loud and the bar chatter is louder, and she's stunning as she moves her hips to the sound stepping down from the table. She's licked away the sugar rim on the glass by the time she makes it through the crowd to lean at the bar next to him. It's only when Penny sets a beer in front of him that he realizes he's been staring at the mystery girl.
She's even cuter up close. And for the first time in a long time, he's speechless. Several recycled one-liners rattle around inside his head, but not a single one feels like it's worth the breath. Something about the way she moves through the room, either unaware or intentionally disinterested as several other patrons turn their heads to look her way, tells him she'll have no trouble shooting him down. Regretfully, it only makes him more intrigued.
And as if she couldn't get sweeter, the scent of her perfume or her shampoo, or the hell if he knows knocks him back. Brown sugar and vanilla. Of course, she smells like sugar. He scolds himself as he replays the image of her pink-tongued and unctuous in her attempt to clean the syrupy glaze dripping across the back of her hand. He may be a self-proclaimed flirt and widely identified playboy but he does do his best to be a gentleman. Despite his attempts to think of church surgeons, or his mother's lectures, geography lessons, or complex aerodynamics, he knows it will be ages before he's able to completely erase the surprising saccharine bar room sight from his mind.
“Whiskey, please,” she asks Penny, “and thank you for making those shots”.
“For you girls it's no problem,” Penny insists, sliding the glass of whisky across the bar.
If he bothered to look up he'd catch her raking her own eyes across his form, paying attention to read his name badge, and trace his pins in an attempt to keep herself from ogling his broad shoulders, and strong arms. The khaki uniform does him all sorts of favours. Penny gives her a knowing smirk as she slides the whiskey across the bar.
Unashamed, his eyes follow the intriguing girl back across the room lingering too long on the back pockets of her little denim shorts.
He's no stranger to wooing pretty girls in bars. He won't brag, but he's got an admirable success rate when it comes to finding a partner for the evening (and he's never heard any complaints). But, something about this girl is different. She's not just pretty, but she's stunning in a girl-next-door kind of way that damn near knocks him off his feet. The way she talks with her friends, and laughs without hesitation has a smile forming on his own face and he feels like a damn idiot for watching her from across the room. She pays no mind to any of the pilots or other patrons who mosey over to shoot their shot with her and the rest of her party, but she accepts every challenge that comes her way at the dartboard and the pool table.
“What's wrong hangman? Cat got your tongue?” Penny laughs, “I was sure you were going to try to chat her up”.
The truth is for the first time in a long time he feels like he might be out of his depth. Like a schoolboy with a crush on the new girl in class.
“The night is still young,” he shrugs.
But the night flies by, he drinks his beers, and laughs with his own friends, makes his own bets, but never crosses the room.
She buys her own drinks, and corrals her drunk friends safely into the backs of taxi cabs, calling out for them to text her when they get home. And when closing time rolls around she settles her tab and says goodbye to Penny with a hug, and a reminder that she'll see her later.
Jake goes home alone, the thought of the sugar sweet girl on his mind.
When he returns to The Hard Deck next it's a week later. He saunters in with a grin. a bet with Rooster and Phoenix waiting to be won at the pool table, and an ice cold beer with his name on it calling for him.
He heads to the bar first, leaning waiting to be served when he smells the hauntingly familiar smell of vanilla sugar. He's damn near certain his heart stops when she turns around behind the counter, a megawatt smile on her when she says, “hey, what can I get you?”
“Whiskey. Neat. Thanks Sugar,” the name rips off his tongue before he can stop it.
“Coming right up hot shot,” she laughs.
“It's ‘Hangman’, actually. But you can call me Jake”.
She hums, setting his glass in front of him, “you were in here last week, weren't you”?”
“Sure was,” he confirms, allowing himself to memorize the way she leans back against the middle counter, her arms crossed; so calm and so cool. He suddenly feels the need to swallow hard, his cheeks warming under her directed gaze.
“You won a lot of money off of my friends,” he offers when she says nothing else.
She shrugs, “it's a habit I can't seem to break”.
He hopes she never does. Watching Payback and Coyote empty their wallets had been the highlight of his week.
“Well, maybe when your shifts over, you can come and try your luck with tonight's crowd, Sugar,” Jake offers. It's a feeble attempt at flirtation compared to his usual routine, but none of his words seem to be coming out right, his mind going blank each time he looks at her in her jeans and white tank top. Thoughts of lemon drop shots, short shorts, and table dancing fill his mind. Suddenly he's 13 again, asking a girl to the school dance with a racing heart.
“I'm here ‘til closing,” she tells him, saving him from his spiral. She sorts her station and wipe down the bar top, “but don't worry, I'll be able to watch you show off from over here”.
And with that she gone again, moving down the bar to help another customer.
Nights at The Hard Deck sure just got a lot more interesting.
Today's Supernatural's 19th birthday. I think it'd be nice to hold a fest on the 20th anniversary: September 13, 2025. It's been a long time coming and we should give it a very happy twentieth birthday.
Let me know if you'd like to participate and we'll try to get something going.
Even as their colleagues in Gaza are deliberately massacred, Western journalists continue to play along with the IDF.
Throughout this war, those journalists have mostly ignored that Palestinian reporters are being killed, or even that they are reporters at all. With Western journalists largely prevented from entering from Gaza for these past 10 months, many of them have responded not by looking at the constant coverage by Palestinian journalists inside Gaza but by pretending that those reporters do not exist. Christine Amanpour, for example, lamented in April that “journalists are not on the ground in Gaza” who can show what’s happening there. (When she was corrected about this, she clarified that she meant “independent, Western journalists.”) A report from Rafah in December by CNN’s Clarissa Ward was sold to audiences as an “exclusive look at life in war-ravaged Gaza,” as if Palestinians had not been revealing what is going on in Rafah since October.
What’s almost worse than this erasure, though, is that the few Western journalists who have been able to enter Gaza have almost exclusively done so by embedding with the Israeli military on heavily supervised excursions into the Strip. The IDF decides where the reporters go, what they are allowed to see, and whom they are allowed to question.
Rather than challenge this obviously propagandistic situation, reporters from outlets like The New York Times and NBC News have instead dutifully played along. The benefit for Israel is clear. Witness a February dispatch in The Wall Street Journal, where the paper’s correspondent brought breathless reports from inside Hamas tunnels under the devastated city of Khan Younis that the Israeli army was more than happy to give access to.
Israel has done nothing to earn this level of trust. Throughout this war, its government has lied consistently, endlessly, in absurd ways without stopping for breath before announcing the next lie. Its credibility is beyond question in that it has none.
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