I watched season 1 when it first came out so I'm hoping I wrote him accurately - I'm desperately due a rewatch.
Jack Reacher is a big man.
That’s the first thing anyone notices.
Not just tall—though he is, towering in a way that makes doorframes look like suggestions—but broad. Solid. Built like something that was never meant to be moved once it decided where it stood. When he walks into a room, space shifts around him automatically, like people feel him before they fully register why.
And you?
You noticed all of that.
But not in the way most people did.
You first saw him from across a diner.
He looked out of place—not because he didn’t belong, but because he didn’t care if he did. Worn clothes, nothing flashy, nothing trying to draw attention. But attention found him anyway.
It always did.
He sat alone, long legs stretched out, one massive hand wrapped around a coffee mug that looked almost comically small in his grip. His gaze moved slowly, deliberately—not nervous, not searching. Just aware.
Cataloguing.
When his eyes landed on you, they didn’t linger in a way that made your skin crawl.
They just… stayed.
For a second longer than most people would dare.
Then he looked away.
Like he’d decided something.
You didn’t expect him to speak to you.
Men like him didn’t usually approach. They didn’t need to.
But when you stood to leave, fumbling slightly with your bag—because of course you did—he was already there before you could fully recover.
Your elbow clipped the edge of the table.
The chair shifted.
And suddenly—
A hand.
Firm.
Steady.
At your waist.
You froze.
“Easy,” he said.
His voice was deep. Not loud. But it didn’t need to be.
It settled into your bones like it had always been there.
“I’ve got you.”
You looked up at him.
And up.
And—yeah. Up.
“Thanks,” you said, a little breathless despite yourself.
He didn’t let go immediately.
Not in a way that felt wrong.
Just long enough to make sure you were actually steady.
Then his hand dropped.
“You’re welcome.”
You should’ve left.
Probably.
Instead, you found yourself hesitating.
“So,” you said, glancing at him again, “you always catch strangers in diners, or am I special?”
There was the faintest shift in his expression.
Not quite a smile.
But close.
“Depends,” he said. “You always walk into furniture, or is today a special occasion?”
You huffed a quiet laugh. “Wow. Okay. So we’re judging now.”
“Observing,” he corrected.
“Rude.”
“Accurate.”
That almost made you smile.
You ended up sitting back down.
You weren’t entirely sure why.
Maybe it was the way he didn’t try to convince you to stay.
Didn’t push.
Just went back to his coffee like he hadn’t just stepped in at exactly the right moment.
“You’ve got a name?” you asked after a second.
“Reacher.”
“That’s not a first name.”
“No,” he agreed.
You waited.
He didn’t elaborate.
You tilted your head. “You always this talkative?”
“Only when necessary.”
“And this is necessary?”
Another almost-smile.
“Seems to be.”
It didn’t take long to realize something about him.
For all his size—for all the sheer presence of him—he moved carefully around you.
Not like you were fragile.
Like you mattered.
Like he understood exactly how much force he carried and made a conscious decision, every second, not to let it touch you.
When you stood again, he shifted automatically, giving you space.
When you walked beside him, he adjusted his pace without comment.
When your hand brushed his by accident—
He stilled.
Just for a second.
Like it meant something.
Later, when the world inevitably went sideways—because it always did around men like Jack Reacher—you understood the other side of him.
The part people whispered about.
The part that made grown men think twice before stepping into his space.
It happened fast.
Too fast.
A guy outside—angry, loud, too close, not taking the hint.
You stepped back instinctively.
And Reacher stepped forward.
Between you and him.
It was immediate.
Total.
“Walk away,” Reacher said.
Calm.
Flat.
The guy laughed.
Bad move.
“You gonna make me?”
Reacher didn’t raise his voice.
Didn’t posture.
Didn’t need to.
“Yeah.”
One word.
Certain.
Unshakable.
The tension snapped like a wire pulled too tight—and just as quickly, it ended. The guy backed off, muttering, deciding you weren’t worth it.
Or maybe deciding Reacher wasn’t.
Either way—
Gone.
Just like that.
You let out a breath you didn’t realize you were holding.
Reacher turned back to you immediately.
“You alright?”
There was no edge in his voice now.
Just that same steadiness from before.
“I’m fine,” you said. “You?”
A flicker of something—amusement, maybe.
“I’m always fine.”
“Right,” you said. “Big scary man. Totally fine.”
He looked at you for a second.
Really looked.
Then, quieter—
“Not scary.”
You blinked.
“No?”
“Not to you.”
It wasn’t a question.
It was a statement.
Something in your chest tightened.
Because he was right.
He was a big man.
Built like something dangerous.
Capable of things you didn’t even want to imagine.
But the way he looked at you?
The way he stood just slightly closer than necessary, like he’d already decided you were under his protection whether you asked for it or not?
There was nothing scary about that.
“Good,” you said softly.
His gaze held yours.
Steady.
Grounded.
“Good,” he echoed.
And when his hand brushed yours again—this time not by accident—
the role of the person in the passenger seat is not only navigator but secretary as well. you have to type up the drivers messages to random ladies on facebook about cbd cream & google whether that billy joel song was the theme song for that show or not
If your lover lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, it will be necessary for you to go to Hong Kong. Perhaps you will spend your life there, and never see Chicago again. And you will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, airlines, earthquake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.
Every day I handle more money than I will ever make. Every day.
At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.
At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.
“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.
The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.
I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.
I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.
I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht.
i wrote this while i was working at orlando’s walt disney world parks.
i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.
as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.
disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.
at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.
i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.
i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.
not to oversimplify an extremely complex discipline but if i had to pick one tip to give people on how to have more productive interactions with children, especially in an instructive sense, its that teaching a kid well is a lot more like improv than it is like error correction and you should always work on minimizing the amount of ‘no, wrong’ and maximizing the amount of ‘yes, and?’
for example: we have a species of fish at the aquarium that looks a lot like a tiny pufferfish. children are constantly either asking us if that’s what they are, or confidently telling us that’s what they are. if you rush to correct them, you risk completely severing their interest in the situation, because 1. kids don’t like to engage with adults who make them feel bad and 2. they were excited because pufferfish are interesting, and you have not given them any reason to be invested in non-pufferfish. Instead, if you say something like “It looks a LOT like a tiny pufferfish, you’re right. But these guys are even funnier. Wanna know what they’re called?” you have primed them perfectly for the delightful truth of the Pacific Spiny Lumpsucker
I was in martial arts for years, and in particular I kinda specialized in working with the younger kids.
The two Big Rules when instructing younger students was-
1. Compliment before Critique
2. Don’t say ‘but’, say ‘now’
Praise kids on what they get right first, especially if they are struggling. Like OP said, kids don’t like to engage with people who make them feel bad. They need encouragement when learning new things.
Number two boils down to this. If you tell a kid a compliment, then say “but you need to fix this”, that ‘but’ completely negates your compliment. It’s gone. It was canceled out like adding a negative to a positive.
Using “hey, that punch is looking great, now let’s focus on your stance” doesn’t verbally cancel out the progress they’ve made. It’s like they’ve checked off something on their list of stuff to work on.
Wording can absolutely make or break a child’s motivation and interest.
Honestly I use all of these to teach vet students too. I think people in general respond better to positivity in teaching. Not coddling, but acknowledging when a student got part way to the right answer, or had a good thought process, is something I’ve found keeps students engaged and builds confidence, which encourages them to keep going instead of shutting down and just “getting through” a lab or a rotation
Over twenty years ago my big brother got me a job at a Taco Bell in the St. Louis suburbs-West County. He warned me that it was the “gay Taco Bell”, but since I was coming from the “gay Howard Johnson’s” I wasn’t shocked. It turns out it was the black trans women Taco Bell complete with black trans women in management. And they’d worked out an arrangement with the local teen Narcotics Anonymous group so that twice a week we would shut down the drive thru and the dining room and exclusively serve 60+ teens in various stages of recovery. And many of the women I worked with were in various stages of being out or transitioning and they were from all generations from teens to over 50. One woman I worked with had a regular corporate job presenting as a man 9-5 Mon-Fri and then came to Taco Bell and worked 6pm -2am Friday and Saturday night so she could be herself surrounded by other black transwomen in those stolen weekends. And we had customers come from all over the metro area because they knew they could be themselves in the dining room. I only worked there from 1999-2001 but for young me, this was a vital, formative experience. Some of the girls came from north city all the way out to the “gay Taco Bell” on Manchester in west county because they heard it was safe to work there. Like- I know times have changed but they haven’t changed much in 20 years. I’m still convinced that for lgbt youth, finding a job at your city’s version of the “gay Taco Bell” is key to survival.
#this is the star trek i wanna see#like when somebody asked gene roddenberry why piccard was bald#because wouldn’t they have found a cure for male pattern baldness by then?#and he was like ‘no by the 24th century no one will care’#i wanna see that attitude with disability and neurodiversity#it’s not that we’ll have a magic cure for everything#there’ll always be something new#but disabilities and neurodiversity will be celebrated and seen as part of the norm#it will be accomodated#so blind people can serve in star fleet#and so can people in wheelchairs and autistic people and people with prosthetics and people with chronic illnesses (via @hunterinabrowncoat)
This episode ends with Geordi saving the planet by using something derived from the technology found in his visor (an adaptive device that lets him sense things around him). So a disabled man literally saved the lives of an entire culture that wouldn’t have considered his life worth living, using technology they would have never deemed necessary without the presence of his unique needs.
My favorite thing about this episode is that, while the rest of the characters are taking a more Star Trek philosophical approach to this situation, calmly debating the good and bad points of this colony built upon eugenics, Geordi is just seething. Troi is having a romance with their flippin’ president, but Geordi never hesitates on his morals. He’s always aware that this world’s supposed perfection is built upon the despicable philosophy of killing people like him. He barely even bothers to hide his anger as he has to work alongside their scientists. He’s snappish and short-tempered and bitter, clearly only working with these people because lives are at stake. When he discovers the solution is based on his VISOR, he is viciously triumphant, his joy at saving the people boosted by a bitter sense of righteousness that these people were only saved because someone like him was allowed to survive.
And even though this anger and bitterness are very un-Star-Trek-like approaches to diplomacy–it works. The scientist who works alongside him is the first person who decides to jump ship and leave the colony behind. She sees the stagnation of their bland “’‘‘‘‘utopia’‘‘‘‘‘ and realizes that diversity and adaptation create a much better society. And while the other Enterprise crew members have some wishy-washy lament over how this will destroy this planet’s ‘‘‘culture’‘‘, Geordi never waffles. He has far too personal a stake in this to lose sight of the fact that peoples’ lives are more important than any high-falutin’ philosophical justifications. The episode might waffle over the Prime Directive points of this society’s decline, but Geordi’s perspective is the one showing clearly why it needs to die.
love House MD because House is the MAIN CHARACTER at that hospital and there's no attempt to hide this. as the viewer you are fully aware that those nurses in the elevator are just extras. the boss's entire schedule consists of yelling at him. the head of oncology would rather prescribe him controlled meds and flirt than practice oncology. his team's only desires are to fuck him and strangle him, often at the same time. every other doctor at the hospital might as well be a cardboard cutout.
the walls are glass, the better to see him through. he limps around, commits malpractice, and serves cunt.
someone said House has somehow figured out he's in a medical drama and everyone has plot armor so he does what he wants knowing there's no consequences
per anon’s request, i present to you THE best version of beatrice’s monologue in much ado about nothing. i thought about cropping this but decided this scene must be watched in its full glory
What’s really cool about this is this is the first version of this scene that I’ve seen where the tone doesnt whiplash wildly which is so hard to do!!! Bc it’s a scene that comes directly after some rough public shaming and it is both a love confession scene and a scene where a woman asks someone to kill someone and the love confession IS funny but Beatrice’s monologue is not. A lot of the other versions- even well beloved ones like the 2011 version with David Tennant and Catherine Tate- do this scene and there is emotional whiplash, audiences often laughing when Beatrice begs Benedict to kill Claudio. To see it done this way??? Oh my god the line read on “if a were a man, I would eat his heart in the marketplace” DESERVED that cheet
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