Idk why every person on this site doesn’t stan Sean Dhooghe aka the shortest player in NTDP history he’s literally 5’2 and committed to Wisconsin so basically he’s unreal at hockey and is just the cutest thing in the world
Eric Richard “Bitty” Bittle would absolutely destroy the competition if he ever competed on cutthroat kitchen because he would seem to be this sweet little baker to the other contestants and then it would switch to the personal commentary and he would have this terrifying smile on his face and he would just say “my boyfriend is an NHL star and I have my own restaurant I don’t need the money I am going to win this” and then he just comes out and kills every challenge and is still this sweet little baker boy and everyone is stunned
when bitty wins he just smiles and congratulates the other competitors and he still acts so sweet and innocent and says he’s gonna go donate everything to charity and everyone loves him
alton brown has never been this impressed and scared in his life
Bitty would be great because you would think he’s sweet and adorable and about to get steam rolled into the first round, and then surprise, he is the definition of cutthroat.
“I used to play hockey with my husband back in College, and I kind of miss that feeling of completely crushing your opponents.” (Later on you find out his husband is an NHL player…)
“Tiffany thinks she can get into my head, but bless her heart, she has no clue what she’s doing.”
Also, imagine one of the challenges is them cooking with their families, and everybody is expecting him to bring his NHL husband.
Bitty looks at the camera and starts laughing. “Oh Lord, no, absolutely no. I love Jack and he has gotten a lot better at following instructions, but I came here to win and I’m afraid Jack just doesn’t have what it takes to work in my kitchen. I brought the big guns.”
Bitty introduces Moo-Maw, who looks like a delicate little old lady and is about 80, and everybody is side eyeing him because of his choice, and then the competition start and Moo-Maw fucking throws down.
The two of them are like a hurricane in the kitchen and while they cook they have enough time to gossip/share stories.
“When are you and Jack giving me some great-grandbabies Eric?”
“Moo-Maw please not now.”
“I am not getting any younger you know! I am old and who knows how much time I have left in this world,” she says while smashing nuts with the wooden hammer and making the whole counter rattle. The camera man takes a step back.
Jack gets interviewed and somebody asks what he thinks of that “not having what it takes to cook in his husband’s kitchen comment.”
He just look at the reporter very seriously and replies. “I once helped with thanksgiving dinner and I have never feared for my safety like I did that day. My only job was doing the mash potatoes.”
I need someone to write more of this, like, yesterday.
Bitty is a strong baker in general, but quickly apparent to the other participants is that he is incredible at any of the challenges involving having to bake using random ingredients.
The other participants notice this pretty quickly, and ask him his secret. He just laughs and explains that when you’ve got a team of random hockey boys filling the fridge with all sorts of random odds and ends that suddenly need to be cooked to avoid wastage, you learn to adapt. They all think he’s exaggerating until he tells them the story about the avocado, bacon and cheese muffins with tabasco and the zucchini and apple cake.
The best part is when the story makes it to social media and then the rest of the Samwell alumni from the Haus both confirm that these dishes really happened and want to know how come Bitty hasn’t told anyone about the Peanut Butter Banana Bread with Maple Glaze that he made that one time because he thought Jack sounded homesick.
(Jack explains to them that they are all dead to him because now his nutritionist has added this too to Jack’s banned food list. 😦 )
And then there’s this one time that the oven isn’t working right, and Bitty figures this out pretty quickly, but also manages to salvage his dish and go on to win the round.
Alton Brown: “…that oven was malfunctioning.”
Bitty: “Oh heavens, compared to old Betsy, that was nothing!”
Other contestants: <are increasingly convinced that Bitty is a baking witch.>
a Not Happy thought: the “you look so much like your father"s die off as harry gets older. by the time he’s thirty, he begins to miss it.
Implying both that people who remember James Potter are dead and that James Potter did not get to be old.
Harry Potter ran a hand through his hair, staring at his reflection in the lift doors. Was it him or was it beginning to thin?
Ginny used to tease him about it, when he nervously ran his hands over it out of old habits, saying he’d rub himself bald. She didn’t tease him about it now, though, which might mean it was actually happening.
He sighed; how old his reflection had gotten. The years passed and he knew that well enough, but each reflective surface still came at a bit of a shock.
He remembered the first time he looked in a regular mirror and saw his father staring out. Not approximations of his father, not the oft-comment of “you look just like James” from some adult, but actually looked in the mirror and saw the same man he knew from photographs.
And he remembered when he looked in the mirror and his father was gone and he was back to approximations. Looking like James Potter never had a chance to.
It was a morbid way of counting birthdays. This year I’m older than my father got to be. This year older than Remus and Snape. This year older than Sirius. In a few years he would be older than Alastor Moody.
No one ever said he looked like his father anymore.
The doors opened onto the floor for The Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes. The Department had two settings: chaos when some magical mishap had to be brought in to be dealt with, and silence when everyone was off tackling the mishap in person. Today was the latter but that was fine. It was James’ turn on desk duty, which was the reason he’d come down, brown bags in hand. It was the only time he could ever seem to wrangle his oldest son for lunch.
Only when he got to the desk, a young witch – a child who hardly looked old enough to be at Hogwarts much less to have graduated from it – smiled up at him.
“Mr. Potter! I have a message for you from your son. They had a catastrophe that really needed his expertise so he had to go.”
Harry gave a small smile. “You’re new, aren’t you?”
She nodded. “Just started last month.”
“Ah. First thing you should know is to never believe James Potter, especially when it comes to desk duty. He’ll do anything to get out of desk duty.”
She gave a smile you would give to an elderly relative doling out advice. “I will remember that next time.”
Oh well, if he was playing the role already, might as well commit. “And don’t let him push you around or beg off. He’ll always have a good reason but you’ve earned your field time like anyone else. And since I brought it down, you can have his lunch.”
That got a laugh as she took the bag. “Thank you. You’re welcome to join me…?”
He waved her off. “No, no, I have paperwork to deal with anyway. But thank you.”
He was about to turn back when she spoke.
“Y’know, it’s remarkable. I would’ve known who you were from a mile off.”
Harry raised an indulgent eyebrow. Four decades had dimmed people’s immediate recognition of him as The-Boy-Who-Lived, especially among the younger crowd, but it was hardly an uncommon occurrence. Still, he acted as if he didn’t know what she meant. “Oh?”
“Oh yes. You look so much like James.”
Time seemed to stop after her words. He didn’t breathe or blink, everything paused in a moment of both newness and familiarity.
Then it was done but the weight of his shoulders had eased a little bit and he gave a brief but genuine smile. Then he laughed. “Don’t say that to him; he’d be mortified.”
“I’ll remember that if he tries to put me on desk duty again then,” she teased.
Harry chuckled and waved and got back on the lift. When the doors closed and he saw himself again, he decided it didn’t really matter much if his hair was thinning. He could do with less of it anyway.
this is lovely
That went somewhere far happier than I expected it to go, whew!
Anonymous asked: Hi! I’m writing novel and I’m having a really hard time figuring out filler events. I’ve got basic things that happen but nothing is really that exciting, to be honest. It’s just basic interactions with a group of around ten people. I guess I’m not really sure what my point of the novel is and I know I want it to mean something more than an abstract representation of who I am.
Well, you never want to have “filler events” in a novel, because all they do is waste time, and readers don’t like to have their time wasted.
Instead, do this:
1. Choose a conflict for your story.
Conflict is the engine which drives the story forward. Without it you have a flat story. It sounds complicated, but conflict is just the struggle that the story is all about. The conflict of Harry Potter series was the struggle to defeat Voldemort. The conflict of The Hunger Games series was the struggle to defeat the Capitol (first by winning The Hunger Games, then by winning the rebellion.) And the conflict of The Lord of the Rings series was the struggle to destroy the One Ring and bring peace to the land. But a conflict doesn’t have to be so grand–it can be as simple as the struggle to survive your senior year of high school, the struggle to make friends in a new town, or the struggle to win the heart of the cute guy who runs the yogurt stand near your work. Whatever you choose, this struggle–this conflict–will fill out your story and give it the point that it’s currently missing.
2. Choose a goal for your characters.
Conflict is the struggle itself, but the goal is the point the characters are struggling toward. In The Hunger Games, Katniss wasn’t really looking to defeat the Capitol so much as she just wanted to survive. It just so happened that in order to do that, she had to thwart and then defeat the Capitol. If your conflict is the struggle to survive the last year of high school, the goal the character is struggling toward might be to get good grades and stay out of trouble. The goal is tied to the main conflict but is more personal to the character.
3. Figure out your character’s motivation.
Motivation drives the character through the struggle, toward the goal. It’s the reason that they want to win the struggle. It’s why they do everything that they do. Why did Katniss want to survive? Because she wanted to take care of her loved ones. Why does your character want to get good grades and stay out of trouble all year? Maybe success means parental permission to backpack across Europe over the summer. Once you choose your character’s motivation, your character’s actions will make more sense.
4. Decide on an antagonist.
You can’t have a struggle without an opposing force. If you had a tug o’ war with people on only one end of the rope, they would pull the rope and instantly win. They would have nothing to struggle against, and it would be boring. But if you put people on the other end of the rope, pulling with all of their might, now the people on the other end of the rope have something to struggle against. The antagonist is the person, people, thing, things on the opposite end of the rope. Every time your character starts to gain ground in the tug o’war struggle of your story, it’s the antagonist’s job to yank hard on that rope and cause your protagonist to lose ground. The motivation provides the pull from the character’s end, the antagonist provides the pull form the opposite end.
The antagonist can be a super villain, it could be a well-meaning but overstrict parent, it could be bullies, a catastrophic weather event, an evil dystopian government–whatever you want. And it doesn’t have to be something bad. It just has to be something which, for whatever reason, creates obstacles to whatever goal your character is trying to reach.
5. Choose obstacles.
Once you’ve settled on your antagonist (or antagonists if you have more than one), you need to figure out what obstacles will best stand in your protagonist’s way. You should choose some they can tackle easily, and some that will throw them off their game. Sometimes they will fail and come back at it a second time and triumph. If your antagonist is a strict teacher, perhaps the first obstacle is a pop quiz which your character aces without batting an eyelash. But maybe the next obstacle is a group assignment–which is bad news for your character who doesn’t play well with others. The group assignment goes south and results in a D grade for the character. So, the character has to figure out how to tackle that bad grade and bring it up. Perhaps they choose to do extra credit which fails to get the grade up above a C. This is an “all is lost” moment for the character, but then maybe they do something great in class and the teacher awards them with more extra credit, which brings their grade up to a B. Your protagonist is ready to pack their bags from Europe when they find out that the final exam will account for a whopping 75% of their grade–mom and dad require all A’s for the trip to be a go… can your character do it? The uncertainty as your character attacks each obstacle is part of what keeps the reader turning pages.
When you’ve done all of the above, you’ll find that your story comes together much easier and that you suddenly have much more to write about. This is just the tip of the iceberg, but it’s enough to get your story to a much better place. 🙂
So you’ve got this bitch-ass fitted sheet that you would normally pile into a ball and shove into a closet so you won’t have to deal with it, yeah? Well. Quit acting like a piece of linen is better than you are. You can make a fitted sheet bend to your will. And here’s how…
First, put your sheet on the floor. Stand above it for a few seconds so it knows who’s boss.
Then, put your hand in the lower left corner so that it’s inside out. Do the same to the lower right corner.
Now, your lower left and right corners of the fitted sheet should be inside out. (Shoutout to Amy Poehler, love your work).
Then, take the lower left corner (that’s still inside out) and tuck it into the upper left corner. It should look like the picture above once you’re done. Then, do the same with your right corners.
It should look something like that. Right now, she’s your friend at the end of a good night out. Doesn’t look really bad, but you know she deserves better.
Pull at the corners until you get something like this shape, as it makes it easier to fold. You’ve given your friend some plain white bread and a glass of water. She’s looking much more presentable now.
Now, pull in at the elastic until you make a rectangle. You’ll want to tuck and smooth the excess fabric away from the elastic seams and towards the closed edge of the fitted sheet.
Once you’ve got a (semi) neat rectangle, fold the the top of the sheet down about a third of the way through. I like to fold the upper part of the sheet down first, because it’s not as straight of an edge as the bottom. You can find your own meaning within that description.
Now, fold the lower portion of the sheet on top of the part you’ve already folded down.
Fold the left side of the sheet into the middle, and then fold the right side of the sheet on top of what you just folded.
Congratulations. You just made a fitted sheet your bitch.
just moving along like everyone else 