OMFG CheckPlease

You are now officially missing out on the funniest and most fun m/m romcom with plot, stakes, and a happy ending.

READ JOHN RICH & THE BIG PICTURE

by Ngozi Ukazu

I am the New York Times bestselling author of check please

You will laugh. Guaranteed. No one has not laughed.

You like m/m romance.

Free website that's easy to use.

What is 007 Fest?

007 Fest is an annual month-long celebration in July of all things Bond!

The primary goals of 007 Fest is to create anything and everything relating to James Bond and to celebrate the fandom community. We will have prompts, activities, and hangouts in Discord to chill with other members of the fandom from around the world. 

This year, the storyline we are following is the MI6 leadership’s attempt to run some internal team bonding activities in a four-week event they are calling The A.N.E.M.O.N.E. Games. Each week will feature a different theme—Respect, Creativity, Courage, and Integrity—and have activities planned by different MI6 branches. With so many irons in the fire, the chances of it going smoothly are minimal. 

This is where you all come in! As various members of the MI6 staff or even outside consultants, you’re being roped into helping plan and execute activities, and prove that MI6 does actually have some sense of teamwork despite the usual chaos.

Each week in July, we will ask you to set personal goals for yourself. The overall goal completion rate in the Fest participant population will determine how well The A.N.E.M.O.N.E. Games go in the story. A little chaos isn’t awful, but by helping each other complete goals by the end of the month, M might be convinced that everyone deserves a raise.

For more info on 007 Fest, check out our collection of wordpress pages, but be aware that some of the pages are still 2025-specific.

I don’t write or art! Can I still participate?

Absolutely! If you want, you can only make social goals—hosting or joining watch parties or Discord chats, for example. 

We also have fun immersive goals/scavenger hunt activities that don’t involve writing or arting.

And if you want to make a “hold my beer” level of goal, we also offer prompt tables and other challenges!

You can also participate without goals during certain weeks or the whole month if you want! 007 Fest is as chill or as high-key as you want to make it.

How can I sign up?

Sign-ups will be open June 1st through June 15th! Just fill out the form and we’ll contact you around June 18th with more information. If you’d like to sign up after the 18th, you can, it will just take the mods a little longer to get you plugged in.

What’s new this year?

If you are returning to Fest, check out the updates here: https://mi6cafe.wordpress.com/007-fest/whats-new-for-fest/

and sometimes they come back when you least expect it, years later, even, and there's this sudden rush of relief like there you are, there you are, even though you barely knew each other.

there's a strange kind of love to it. i don't know you and i want to hold your hand across miles and time zones and oceans. i can still see the imprint of you in this community you left. you don't think anyone will notice or care when you're gone, but we notice and we care and we wish you well.

cr: evolverozanov

Backstage before the hockey romance panel at BookCon 2026, and Rachel tells me she loves Check, Please! and is Kickstarter backer.

THE LONG-AWAITED WEBSITE!!!!

It's not perfect- Strawpage's design tools are... not great- but I did my best to bring you all a Tumblr-free transcription of all my lessons. This is probably the most labor-intensive thing I've done for this page (next to the character polls). Four months of blood, sweat, and tears... and now, she LIVES!!!!

Some Notes:

I created it with the intent of Desktop use, so Mobile might have some issues. If it's not working on your phone, try desktop.

Out of the multiple browsers tested (Firefox, Google, Edge, Brave, Safari), Firefox had some issues sporadically.

I'm still going to post lessons on here, first. This page is priority to me, and the website is more of an archive.

The fonts are normal past this opening page.

I will be adding a portion to send funds soon, if'n you are feeling kind and generous.

The above is a video shared by smrchildsadness on Twitter, showing a person participating in a pride parade exchanging a pride flag with a person standing on his (am using his pronoun based on the TikToks/Tweets of what happened) doorway who had a Portuguese flag. There are sounds of cheers and crying and the two people hug each other as they exchange the flags. The man at the doorway then waved kisses to the crowd within the pride parade.

The Tweet says: "NO YOU DONT UNDERSTAND HE WAS WAVING THE PORTUGUESE FLAG BECAUSE HE DIDN'T HAVE A PRIDE FLAG AND THEY TRADED FLAGS AND HE'S SO EMOTIONAL TO GET HIS OWN PRIDE FLAG I'M EMOTIONALLY RUINED"

For context, apparently they were worried that maybe he's a nationalist because he was waving the Portuguese flag and some nationalists opposing the pride march were waving that flag. But upon interacting with him, it turns out he didn't have have a pride flag and he wanted to wave *a* flag in support of the pride march. So they had an exchange and now he has his own pride flag 😭🥹.

The image above is a Tweet by kunwara_ladkaa that says "I'm crying so much right now (Image taken by Manuel Fernando Araújo/Lusa)". The image shows the same man from the pride parade crying as he hugs his new pride flag.

The above image is a Tweet by dudz_zZzz that says "ainda não parei de pensar nele," which according to Google translate from Portuguese to English is "I still haven't stopped thinking about him." The image is a drawing of the person from the pride parade, crying as he hugs his new pride flag.

This elderly gentleman lives alone in Porto, when he saw the march coming up his street all he knew was he wanted to participate, so he ran home to get the only flag he had to wave as they passed by, when they did he was overcome with emotion and called over one of the activists, they hugged and exchanged flags, he felt so overwhelmed that he could only hold it and cry.

This isn't a story about a closeted elderly man, António lives and has been living alone for many years now and that little moment made him feel included in something for the first time in many years.

Says the article:

"The act was "of support”, guarantees the man, especially because “each one is as they are and we are all the same”. “The joy I felt at this moment. I cried,” he recalled, still emotional when looking at the photograph offered to him during this report.

However, even though it reached thousands of people, the moment screams a feeling of belonging, of joy and also a portrait of loneliness as a consequence of aging.

Behind that door, whose image spread across the country, António is the portrait of a condition that affects many others like him.  He lives alone, but the walls of his home are full of memories of a life shared and full of love. “Memories I preserve,” he stresses.

He's not gay, nor does he need to be to support and respect the cause.

“We all have the same color blood. We are all the same.”

Still with an emotional look glued to the photograph that immortalized his gesture at the march, António remembers: “I felt embraced by all of them”. After a sigh, he says: “See this photo? I want to take it to my coffin.”

cr: evolverozanov

Backstage before the hockey romance panel at BookCon 2026, and Rachel tells me she loves Check, Please! and is Kickstarter backer.

Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.

Sometimes, in fandom, we just want to write id-tastic fic that rolls around in tropes that might be viewed as problematic. But we don’t want to address the problematic side of things in this particular fanwork; we just want to roll around and wallow.

It is considered courteous to give readers a heads-up via use of AO3 tags. I propose a tag that signals that a given fanwork is for rolling around, not giving a measured evaluation of anything. The MCU has carved out a space for this sort of fic with the “HYDRA Trash Party” tag, for which I commend them. Trash Party is a bit too specific to cover all of the ground I’m thinking of here, though; I propose “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat.”

For those of you not familiar with Arrested Development, Michael Bluth finds a paper bag in the freezer labeled “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat.” He opens the bag, finds a dead dove, and reacts as follows:

[gif of a white man saying “I don’t know what I expected” in a deadpan manner]

The “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat” tag would essentially be a “what it says on the tin” metatag, indicating “you see the tropes and concepts tagged here? they are going to appear in this fic. exactly as said. there will not necessarily be any subversion, authorial commentary condemning problematic aspects, or meditation on potential harm. this fic contains dead dove. if you proceed, you should expect to encounter it.”