beautiful, interesting, modern

Here's the first part of the Daniel Ricciardo/Max Verstappen fic. Explicit. 4.8k words for the first part, 19k words all in.

I've finished the story and will be posting the rest of the parts in the near future. Ticking clock of the actual season threatening my imagined canon...

i was chatting with @magicalrocketships about orchids and i said i'd make a guide to save her googling.

here's the tl;dr

these orchids i'm showing here, phalaenopsis/moth orchids, just the typical ones you see all over, are really easy to grow

all the stuff you've seen with people obsessing over humidity and temperature and other finicky care requirements are for different kinds of orchids

the reason why you find these ones all over is because they're chill plants. they just need light and water.

bright light

water approximately weekly

it's going to be fine

they'll probably rebloom once a year. they don't take up very much space. pretty much no downsides! would recommend.

so, as we get into it, just as a super quick recap, this is an orchid:

the green leaves and the silvery roots are the actual orchid. that's what makes up the plant; those are the things that you need to keep alive.

the flower is just the flower.

I say this because I see people saying their "orchid is dead" when it's just that the flowers are spent. in fact, many places will sell orchids for $5 or less when the flowers are dead, which is a) a great price and b) quite a fun surprise to see what the flowers will actually look like when it does bloom again.

okay, so you'll bring an orchid home, it will probably be in bloom, and those flowers will last either hardly any time (sorry, you bought one that was already mostly done, try for ones with more buds than flowers - like the photos i've shown above - if you want to likely lengthen the blooming period) or a few months. but for sure the flowers will eventually die. that will always happen. it doesn't mean anything has gone wrong. But now that you've got your orchid...

care considerations

light

orchids need bright, bright light and probably want to be directly on a window sill. they do not want to be in aesthetic locations (the interior of a room, displayed on a table, far away from natural light)

it's really complicated to talk about light but generally speaking it's a lot darker indoors than you realize. these orchids don't want direct light but for most of us... our homes don't actually get direct light, because we're facing (in northern hemisphere) north or east, or even west or south but maybe there's a tree or something else blocking out the light, or there's an overhang about the window, or whatever.

if you genuinely get direct light, you could grow it back a few feet, but otherwise put it as close to the window as it can get.

north facing or basement units or anywhere that doesn't get much natural light might need to supplement with a growlight to get flowers.

substrate/ "soil"

(almost all) orchids are epyphitic, which means in nature they do not grow on the ground but instead up on trees or rocks. this means they have strong roots that need a lot of air.

to replicate this in pots indoors, grow orchids in a substrate mix designed for orchids. just grab whatever. a big box store will likely only have one option; a garden center might have different kinds with various sizes of bark better suited to different types of orchids. honestly, don't worry about it, anything chunky will be fine. ...for these orchids specifically. other orchids exist only to challenge us. good fucking luck keeping most jewel orchids happy for longer than a year.

typical mix will have big chunks of bark (replicating the trees they grow on, hold some moisture, will break down over time), sphagnum moss (holds the most moisture but needs attention to rehydrate if it dries out too much, will break down and become more acidic over time), charcoal (air flow, antibacterial, does not hold water) and/or perlite or pumice or some other kinds of little rocks (air flow, does not hold water, prevents compaction as the organic materials break down).

if they have the plant glued with a bunch of rocks and fake decorative moss, it's probably best to remove all that (it's creating a sort of air tight crust which is the opposite of what you want.

pot

either in a plastic pot with holes in the sides that you put into a catch pot (something to catch the water run off) or a all-in-one pot. I currently have some of mine in terracotta orchid pots - which also also work quite well for growing hoyas.

the side holes are for airflow and water drainage

the worst pot would be one with no holes, like not even drainage at the bottom. you don't want it to be like a bowl that collects water and smothers the roots. at an absolute minimum, water needs to be able to flow out the bottom of the pot.

watering

so now that we've talked about the substrate and the pot, we can talk about watering

if you have the orchid in a super chunky mix AND

if it's in a pot designed for orchids with lots of vents for air exchange

THEN! it's extremely difficult to over water your orchid. you've already done all the right stuff! watering is going to be fine.

just water until you see it come out the pot, like fully saturate the substrate, and then dispose of any water that may be sitting in the bottom of the dish. you're done. great job!

when the roots in the pot (not the air ones that are waving around having a dance party) are green it means they're hydrated - do not water. when they're silver, they're thirsty and want to be watered. the roots hanging in the air are always silver.

it's better to under water an orchid than over water it

if you under water, the leaves will get more and more wrinkly. first it's like grooves in the leaves, like wrinkles, then deeper and deeper lines until it just literally looks dried out. even then you can bring it back.

honestly, it's surprising how much orchids can handle getting dried out except then you remember they're up on a tree so like, yes, obviously need to be able to handle not having a ton of water.

if you over water, the roots will rot. they'll turn brown and smushy. the leaves will go yellow and die. once over watered, you'll need to unpot, trim off all the rotten roots, and try again. I've tried this with rescue orchids from the plant store and i got one to come back but one didn't. you really need at least a few inches of roots that are still healthy.

anti-ice agenda

so like number one, there's nothing magical about the amount of water that's in two ice cubes that makes it the "correct" volume of water. how big are your ice cubes? how big is the orchid you're watering? how much sun is it getting? what time of year is it?

number two, orchids never hang out near melting ice caps irl so it's not like they want to have something that's literally freezing cold. if anything, they'd much prefer being watered with nice, gently warm water.

number three, the best thing you can do to care for literally any plant is pay attention to it. trying to "hack" plant care by following a prescribed routine will work some of the time under some conditions. but plants need more water when it's hotter and less water when it's darker. if you play attention to the plant, lift it up, feel how heavy the pot is. oh, it's still really heavy? probably saturated with water; no need for more. or vice versa. if you look at the leaves - are they getting wrinkled? or are they nice and plump? maybe the leaves have gotten a little dusty and it's time to wash off the plant in the sink. maybe you've got some pests you need to take care of. maybe what you thought was a new root is actually the start of a bloom stalk! how exciting.

the point is, it's 100% of the time going to be better to pay attention to your plant and respond based on what the plant is actually doing instead of trying to follow an internet hack

fertilizer & flowering

you can buy fertilizer for orchids (I sometimes use a diluted one as a foliar spray) but honestly it'll probably be fine and i wouldn't worry about that too much. maybe in year two or three. first year, they've for sure already pumped your orchid with fertilizers at the greenhouse. part of the first year is just letting the plant recover from what they did to it to prepare it for sale.

these orchids usually start making flowers in the winter (like december). the flowers start with something that looks like a root but is more green and then just keeps growing.

once the bloom stalk/flower spike appears, it takes a month or two or three for it to make buds and then flower.

i've heard that usually an orchid has to grow two+ new leaves before it will flower again. in my experience, i'd say that's true for the orchids that were new to my home. you'll almost definitely see new leaves and new roots grow before you get flowers.

will almost certainly take a whole year after bringing your orchid home to get new flowers; might take two.

you don't need to stake the flowers. they just do that for space-saving and aesthetic reasons. like it's fine to stake them. it's just not something the orchid requires.

once the flowers are done, cut the bare bloom stalk back to the first node and they often bloom again from the same bloom stalk.

the reason why it's good to do this is that it's more energy for the orchid to grow the flower spike from scratch, so by you're letting the plant be a lil lazier to just rebloom off the spike it already grew. lazier = more likely to happen :)

once i also had an orchid grow a kiki (bady orchid!) from the bloom stalk!!!

if you don't cut back the spent flower spikes it doesn't cause trouble but eventually they turn brown and look like dead sticks.

in conclusion, i think these are very fun plants to grow with a high reward to work ratio. of all the plants I have, this type of orchid is definitely in the easiest tier because they don't require much effort and are, broadly-speaking, forgiving of mistakes.

William Nylander/Original Characters, William Nylander/Morgan Reilly | Explicit | 6,000 words

William grows up. Or, ten people William scened with and one person he didn’t.

[other years]

i actually wrote five stories this year, and then i've got four wips currently on the go, so... i'm back, baby!

Come Down, Come Back Ted Lasso, 2400 words, pre-Jamie/Keeley/Roy. Teen for canon typical content.

Box to Box Player Ted Lasso, 8600 words, Roy/Jamie, explicit for sexual content.

Remove the Cause but not the Symptom Ted Lasso, 4300 words, Roy/Jamie, mature for talk about sex and actual bondage.

Twist Me Something Good (Make It Strong Enough, Last Long Enough) Hockey RPF, 19,000 words, Morgan/William from the Leafs, extremely explicit kink and sexual content.

Five Nothing Hockey RPF, 5400 words, winners room with Brady, Matthew, and Timmy from the Senators and Panthers. Explicit violence.

five stories, 40,000 words (and another 16000 written in WIPs I'm actively working on). I'll put my musings about each story under a cut.

Just To See How That Felt | Brady Tkachuk/Matthew Tkachuk | explicit (hockey RPF) | 6,700 words 

How about 5,400 words of Brady supervising a winner’s room with Timmy and Matthew after the November 27th Panthers v Senator’s game?

hey there, can I interest you in 19,000 words of Morgan Rielly/William Nylander explicit kink?

Jamie/Roy | Mature | ~ 4,400 words

“Well, what’s the kinkiest thing you’ve ever done then?” Roy has something to teach Jamie about waiting and wanting. 

Content warnings for mild kink.

Roy Kent/Jamie Tartt | extremely NC-17 | ~ 8.6K words

Had Roy actually thought Jamie would capitulate just because he’d asked? Afterward, knuckles bruised, smeared with Jamie’s sticky blood, it seemed so unlikely. But that meant that Roy would have to admit to himself that the fight had been what he was looking for all along. Roy and Jamie, mid-finale, featuring Roy’s toxic masculinity. (But he’s trying.)

This was inspired 50% by the line in the original script for the episode Rainbow (not included in the show) where Roy takes Isaac to the apartment block where he grew up and said "No. It's shit inside. Horrible place to grow up." And 50% by any number of interviews where Phil Dunster has gone on and on about his big bum.

i was really surprised when i looked on my stats page of AO3 to see that i had posted over 450,000 words of fanfic. that's several novels worth of fic! i spent some time looking over what i had posted (a bit revealing, lol, might talk about that another day) and i realized that i'd only ever imported a very few of my bandom fics to AO3.

this whole time, i've felt like i wanted to avoid anything i wrote in bandom, just chalked it up to being embarrassed about my early writing in a normal way. but i thought about it for a little while and realized: it's not just normal feelings of having grown past being a very-beginner writer. i feel deeply and overwhelmingly ashamed when i think about bandom, because people were fucking horrible to me about my writing.

i had lots of kind fandom friends and certainly lots of very generous folks who left positive feedback, but my memory of that was completely overwhelmed by the amount of cruel and objectively bullying things that i saw people say about my writing, myself, the way i presented myself online. how every little thing i said was interpreted and how they perceived all of that manifesting in my writing.

the fact that most of it was anonymous made it worse. it really fucks with your brain to feel such animosity without any context. that's the power of anon memes. the person who posted whatever shit comment could have been someone i thought was annoying right back. if i had seen the post under their username, maybe i would have been able to rationalize their seeming hatred of me with context of past interactions we'd had. or it could have been someone i cared about and deeply respected. i'm quite sure that some amount of the people posting shit were people i thought i liked.

people on the anon meme would talk about how i looked, but i had only ever posted pictures of myself under friend lock, so i knew that some number of people on the anon meme were people i thought were friends. were they also the ones saying the mean shit? one night someone screencapped a friendlocked post and shared it. the person told me afterward that they had left their computer open at some fandom party and it was someone else who had put my post up. so then i also knew that people i thought were friends were sharing things that i didn't want shared with a larger group who for sure seemed to hate me. how humiliating to imagine a person who can't stand you going through your friend locked posts, seeing your photos, the personal posts, the vulnerable things you didn't want to share.

it's actually hard to really understand, now, how the majority view (or at least the majority view as I believe it) was that people were allowed to say anything they wanted, and if it hurt your feelings that was just your own fault for reading it. i was consumed with the shit people said about me. meme-talk is just jargon and i know it likely didn't mean much to the people posting it, but it's actually really fucking awful to see people say the want to come after you with a nailbat or that they hope you die in a fire. i would stay up all night feeling literally sick about the stuff i read. maybe some people can know they're being talked about and ignore it, but i was 21, deeply invested in fandom, and there wasn't a fucking chance that i could just not look.

i would have really appreciated someone saying this at the time, so i'm just going to say it now: it's not your fault if you're hurt by people saying nasty things. of course many of us feel compelled to see what people are saying about us; that doesn't mean it's our fault when our feelings get hurt. being a beginner writer or even an experienced writer who just isn't that good doesn't mean you deserve to be ridiculed. it's wonderful that you wrote a story. it's a gift that you posted it for other people to read.

other than the personal satisfaction that comes from the act of writing (limited, very limited; writing sucks), the only "reward" for writing fic is positive feedback. it truly baffles me that people can see fanfic, a wonderful thing that's created only from a place of love -- love of the canon, love of the fandom community, love of creating and writing and thinking and sharing -- and think: fuck that author, fuck their story, i need to make sure that they know what a terrible job i think they did. that goes from bookmark an author's story with "not recommended" to leaving rude comments (anonymously or not) to talking about fic in any public fannish space where the author can easily find it to just outright bullying the fuck out of someone on an anon meme.

i don't need to feel ashamed that a lot of the things i wrote (and write!) kind of sucked. the shame is with people who choose cruelty as their form of fannish participation.

OT3 (Jamie/Keeley/Roy), PG-13, 2,500 words.

Jamie Tartt is here, he’s there, he’s every fucking where. Immediately following Mom City.