Finding Bitty's vlog honestly was random happenstance. If there was anything non-random about it, it was Google's fault, not Kent's. He had the lazy, off-season thought that he wanted to make cupcakes for his teammate's daughter's first birthday, which their whole team was invited to. It was Google's fault because when he was searching for "cupcake recipe", "easy cupcake recipe", "quick cupcakes", "cupcake tutorial", and "easy cupcake tutorial" a Check Please video showed up more than once, despite its seemingly non-relevant title (Cake Mixes are Not the Devil!). It probably showed up for him when it wouldn't have for most people because its video description included the phrase, "Cupcakes so easy, even a hockey bro can make them," and some algorithm at Google knew, just knew, that this was exactly what Kent Parson was looking for.
"Here's my argument for cake mixes," a guy in a T-shirt with a bowtie printed on it said. "They lower the threshold for baking so that anyone, even people who basically never bake at all, can be personally involved in making the food they eat
"For this episode," the guy said, "I'm gonna introduce you to the epitome of non-bakers." In a sudden cut of video a tall, shy-looking Asian guy was standing next to him. He waved. "Chowder here is an amazing human being and a swawesome goaltender, and we are waiting for his first N-C-double-A shutout any day now." Chowder raised nervous, celebratory fists. "But he will be the first to admit that he really cannot cook."
Chowder cast his face down and mumbled, "I'm bad at cooking."
"But we're cooking today!" Bowtie said. "And it's not going to be anything like the pie I showed you in Episode 52." A small video annotation offered a link to "see the pie Chowder ruined for me :)" and the vlog's title flashed by.
"Today we're making cupcakes, and to show you just how easy it is we're out of the house and back in the freshman student dorms where you remember me being last year." Little boxes for different little videos, all featuring the same guy talking, showed up around the edges of the screen, but before Kent could see more than that they had the same white-and-red cupboards, they disappeared again. "Look Ma no spatulas, we're using the absolute minimum of equipment. Chowder, what've we got?"
"A fork," the goalie said, bringing it up to his chest and looking studiously fierce. The focus changed and he brought his hand up again, with another piece of silverware. "A knife." His fierceness sharpened. "And a spoon." His face was suddenly closer to the camera, adorably ferocious. "This is a tablespoon, but you can use a different type."
"And for equipment you can't steal out of a college dining hall," Bowtie guy said, "we've got a mixing bowl, a muffin tin, and cupcake liners." The items appeared behind him as he talked.
"You could steal a bowl from the dining hall," Chowder murmured, suddenly like an outtake. "You'd just have to empty the salad out of it."
"The hockey team would probably just eat all the salad out of it," Bowtie said thoughtfully.
"Yeah," Chowder agreed.
Kent watched it all through, the recipe just an added bonus, grinning. He favorited the video and bought cake mix on his next trip out.
When he was bored a week later he searched the guy's videos for muffin recipes and watched all the way through a grated apple and cinnamon oatmeal muffin recipe that looked like way too much work but was really funny anyway, because the entire time the guy (his name was Eric?) kept up a running commentary on what happened when rowdy football players tried to enter the kitchen at the same time as his great-aunt's extremely proper elderly Southern friends.
There was an actual suggested playlist of all the guy's videos in order, but Kent ignored them and clicked through the suggestions on the right-hand side. He spent an afternoon looking through a lot of different cooking videos, weaving between fitness-and-nutrition channels and fluffy cooking shows, wondering if MyHarto would think he was cool enough to do an episode with her, but he kept coming back to OMGCheckPlease.
One of the ones he watched, naturally, was "How Much Is Enough Pasta for a Hockey Team?" which began with Eric brandishing a sheaf of papers and saying, "As part of my attempts to reconcile with our team's nutritionists, I've actually obtained a copy of our recommended dietary intake," and ended with him slumped on the desk with exhaustion and despair, boxes of pasta piled into a wall behind him and bags of dried kidney beans sliding off his shoulders. When it was done Kent went down to the comment box and had already typed, "Protein shakes rnt rly that gross tho" when he looked at his own username and avatar above them, Kent Parson, and decided he didn't actually want to invoke the Internet hordes today. And it was too much work to switch to an anonymous account. He watched another video.
Some of it was pretty incredible and worth watching just to see the artistry happen, like oh holy fuck, soufflé. Some of it was funny. Some of it mentioned his hockey team. He was on a Division I team, go figure, though he was smaller than Kent. Some of it talked about figure skating, and at one point Eric fell over trying to prove he could still stretch his leg out on the counter.
And then "How To Make An Omlet Without Really Crying" opened and it was dim, with a bright patch of sunlight on the wall behind him throwing Eric into even deeper shadow, but he still looked really tired, propping his face up on his hands. "Reason number seventeen to hate Jack," he said, sounding gravelly. "He woke me up. At 4am. To skate at Faber. On a Sunday." He sighed and squeezed his eyes shut against his tiredness. "Because Jack Zimmermann works harder than God."
The bottom dropped out of Kent's stomach. He hit his spacebar to stop the video and took it off fullscreen and scrolled down to see the video description, which said nothing about Jack. The comments were LOLing about something in the video or sharing ham and cheese omelette recipes and Kent was almost about to swear he'd misheard it, or that it was some other Jack Zimmermann, when he saw a commenter with a Red Wings av: but ur sooooo lucky to get to practice with zimms!!! that guy should be in the nhl right now, unlike some people! its worth missing a lil sleep!
"Fuuuuck," Kent whispered, scrolling back up. He'd kind of got the impression that this guy went to Harvard, a "fancy Northern college" where he could get "New England apples" where the school colours included lots of red. But... no, the pennant in the background, when Kent squinted, definitely said SAMWELL.
He looked at Eric's tired face and remembered something from one of the videos he watched before that struck him now with new significance: Jack hates my guts. He just does.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2016-04-20 04:30 am (UTC)Finding Bitty's vlog honestly was random happenstance. If there was anything non-random about it, it was Google's fault, not Kent's. He had the lazy, off-season thought that he wanted to make cupcakes for his teammate's daughter's first birthday, which their whole team was invited to. It was Google's fault because when he was searching for "cupcake recipe", "easy cupcake recipe", "quick cupcakes", "cupcake tutorial", and "easy cupcake tutorial" a Check Please video showed up more than once, despite its seemingly non-relevant title (Cake Mixes are Not the Devil!). It probably showed up for him when it wouldn't have for most people because its video description included the phrase, "Cupcakes so easy, even a hockey bro can make them," and some algorithm at Google knew, just knew, that this was exactly what Kent Parson was looking for.
"Here's my argument for cake mixes," a guy in a T-shirt with a bowtie printed on it said. "They lower the threshold for baking so that anyone, even people who basically never bake at all, can be personally involved in making the food they eat
"For this episode," the guy said, "I'm gonna introduce you to the epitome of non-bakers." In a sudden cut of video a tall, shy-looking Asian guy was standing next to him. He waved. "Chowder here is an amazing human being and a swawesome goaltender, and we are waiting for his first N-C-double-A shutout any day now." Chowder raised nervous, celebratory fists. "But he will be the first to admit that he really cannot cook."
Chowder cast his face down and mumbled, "I'm bad at cooking."
"But we're cooking today!" Bowtie said. "And it's not going to be anything like the pie I showed you in Episode 52." A small video annotation offered a link to "see the pie Chowder ruined for me :)" and the vlog's title flashed by.
"Today we're making cupcakes, and to show you just how easy it is we're out of the house and back in the freshman student dorms where you remember me being last year." Little boxes for different little videos, all featuring the same guy talking, showed up around the edges of the screen, but before Kent could see more than that they had the same white-and-red cupboards, they disappeared again. "Look Ma no spatulas, we're using the absolute minimum of equipment. Chowder, what've we got?"
"A fork," the goalie said, bringing it up to his chest and looking studiously fierce. The focus changed and he brought his hand up again, with another piece of silverware. "A knife." His fierceness sharpened. "And a spoon." His face was suddenly closer to the camera, adorably ferocious. "This is a tablespoon, but you can use a different type."
"And for equipment you can't steal out of a college dining hall," Bowtie guy said, "we've got a mixing bowl, a muffin tin, and cupcake liners." The items appeared behind him as he talked.
"You could steal a bowl from the dining hall," Chowder murmured, suddenly like an outtake. "You'd just have to empty the salad out of it."
"The hockey team would probably just eat all the salad out of it," Bowtie said thoughtfully.
"Yeah," Chowder agreed.
Kent watched it all through, the recipe just an added bonus, grinning. He favorited the video and bought cake mix on his next trip out.
When he was bored a week later he searched the guy's videos for muffin recipes and watched all the way through a grated apple and cinnamon oatmeal muffin recipe that looked like way too much work but was really funny anyway, because the entire time the guy (his name was Eric?) kept up a running commentary on what happened when rowdy football players tried to enter the kitchen at the same time as his great-aunt's extremely proper elderly Southern friends.
There was an actual suggested playlist of all the guy's videos in order, but Kent ignored them and clicked through the suggestions on the right-hand side. He spent an afternoon looking through a lot of different cooking videos, weaving between fitness-and-nutrition channels and fluffy cooking shows, wondering if MyHarto would think he was cool enough to do an episode with her, but he kept coming back to OMGCheckPlease.
One of the ones he watched, naturally, was "How Much Is Enough Pasta for a Hockey Team?" which began with Eric brandishing a sheaf of papers and saying, "As part of my attempts to reconcile with our team's nutritionists, I've actually obtained a copy of our recommended dietary intake," and ended with him slumped on the desk with exhaustion and despair, boxes of pasta piled into a wall behind him and bags of dried kidney beans sliding off his shoulders. When it was done Kent went down to the comment box and had already typed, "Protein shakes rnt rly that gross tho" when he looked at his own username and avatar above them, Kent Parson, and decided he didn't actually want to invoke the Internet hordes today. And it was too much work to switch to an anonymous account. He watched another video.
Some of it was pretty incredible and worth watching just to see the artistry happen, like oh holy fuck, soufflé. Some of it was funny. Some of it mentioned his hockey team. He was on a Division I team, go figure, though he was smaller than Kent. Some of it talked about figure skating, and at one point Eric fell over trying to prove he could still stretch his leg out on the counter.
And then "How To Make An Omlet Without Really Crying" opened and it was dim, with a bright patch of sunlight on the wall behind him throwing Eric into even deeper shadow, but he still looked really tired, propping his face up on his hands. "Reason number seventeen to hate Jack," he said, sounding gravelly. "He woke me up. At 4am. To skate at Faber. On a Sunday." He sighed and squeezed his eyes shut against his tiredness. "Because Jack Zimmermann works harder than God."
The bottom dropped out of Kent's stomach. He hit his spacebar to stop the video and took it off fullscreen and scrolled down to see the video description, which said nothing about Jack. The comments were LOLing about something in the video or sharing ham and cheese omelette recipes and Kent was almost about to swear he'd misheard it, or that it was some other Jack Zimmermann, when he saw a commenter with a Red Wings av: but ur sooooo lucky to get to practice with zimms!!! that guy should be in the nhl right now, unlike some people! its worth missing a lil sleep!
"Fuuuuck," Kent whispered, scrolling back up. He'd kind of got the impression that this guy went to Harvard, a "fancy Northern college" where he could get "New England apples" where the school colours included lots of red. But... no, the pennant in the background, when Kent squinted, definitely said SAMWELL.
He looked at Eric's tired face and remembered something from one of the videos he watched before that struck him now with new significance: Jack hates my guts. He just does.
"Poor buddy," Kent said. "I know that feel."
Then he pressed Play.