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#Compose my Essay free
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biggest pet peeve is when i show someone my art and they decide to give their own input like “oh if i were you i would change this” and “i think you should’ve done this or that” like. who asked? i’m showing it to you because i’m proud of it idc if you think it’s trash because i “should’ve put more detail into the this aspect so that blah blah blah” don’t care + didn’t ask
#just something that aggregates me#esp bc this person (older sibling) seems to believe that they have more authority over it bc they’re older#like. dude. i know you *used to* draw but i literally have more experience since you dropped it years ago#plus they have a bit of a complex where they think that ‘more realistic’ = better#like. that’s not how the world works i can draw cartoons as much as i wish and i’ll still have skill#just bc some of my art doesn’t looks as realistic as you’d like doesn’t mean that it’s bad#like some of my more cartoon-ish work will have hours of work composing and formatting the style#esp when i’m feeling meticulous about line work#going off a bit on this person ig. they’re not that bad. the whole ‘realistic = better’ thing is v low key but i can tell#it stems from growing up together and both of us drawing#so there was always a bit of competition to be better and the difference is that i always get what i want and will work for it#like drawing in all of my free time. obsessively really. you do not want to know how many old sketchbooks i have#and they don’t put effort into things like i do. even though they think they’re a bit superior they drew less than half the time i did#though if we’re being honest i think it’s an extension of their inferiority complex which stems from the fact that i’m younger#but was always better at things than them (school mostly. like. started college at 15/16ish and skipped sooo many grades)#and bc of that i was more praised/more highly regarded (when i wasn’t acting batshit and being a menace)#though tbh they’re probably a more stable person than me u don’t have to choose artistic realism to be better#only one of us will be able to survive in the real world and it isn’t me lol#sorry for like. analyzing my sibling’s behavior in the tags. my bad#but tbh i could write essays dissecting their behavior. they’re easy to read to me. everything about them is easy to figure out
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togglesbloggle · 1 year
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Your river post is basically impossible to read on dark mode
How bizarre. After some fixes, it now looks good on dark mode locally; please do let me know if there's still a problem on other devices.
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The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble
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Back in 2017 Long Island Ice Tea — known for its undistinguished, barely drinkable sugar-water — changed its name to “Long Blockchain Corp.” Its shares surged to a peak of 400% over their pre-announcement price. The company announced no specific integrations with any kind of blockchain, nor has it made any such integrations since.
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way
LBCC was subsequently delisted from NASDAQ after settling with the SEC over fraudulent investor statements. Today, the company trades over the counter and its market cap is $36m, down from $138m.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/textbook-case-of-crypto-hype-how-iced-tea-company-went-blockchain-and-failed-despite-a-289-percent-stock-rise
The most remarkable thing about this incredibly stupid story is that LBCC wasn’t the peak of the blockchain bubble — rather, it was the start of blockchain’s final pump-and-dump. By the standards of 2022’s blockchain grifters, LBCC was small potatoes, a mere $138m sugar-water grift.
They didn’t have any NFTs, no wash trades, no ICO. They didn’t have a Superbowl ad. They didn’t steal billions from mom-and-pop investors while proclaiming themselves to be “Effective Altruists.” They didn’t channel hundreds of millions to election campaigns through straw donations and other forms of campaing finance frauds. They didn’t even open a crypto-themed hamburger restaurant where you couldn’t buy hamburgers with crypto:
https://robbreport.com/food-drink/dining/bored-hungry-restaurant-no-cryptocurrency-1234694556/
They were amateurs. Their attempt to “make fetch happen” only succeeded for a brief instant. By contrast, the superpredators of the crypto bubble were able to make fetch happen over an improbably long timescale, deploying the most powerful reality distortion fields since Pets.com.
Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. We’re told that trillions of dollars’ worth of crypto has been wiped out over the past year, but these losses are nowhere to be seen in the real economy — because the “wealth” that was wiped out by the crypto bubble’s bursting never existed in the first place.
Like any Ponzi scheme, crypto was a way to separate normies from their savings through the pretense that they were “investing” in a vast enterprise — but the only real money (“fiat” in cryptospeak) in the system was the hardscrabble retirement savings of working people, which the bubble’s energetic inflaters swapped for illiquid, worthless shitcoins.
We’ve stopped believing in the illusory billions. Sam Bankman-Fried is under house arrest. But the people who gave him money — and the nimbler Ponzi artists who evaded arrest — are looking for new scams to separate the marks from their money.
Take Morganstanley, who spent 2021 and 2022 hyping cryptocurrency as a massive growth opportunity:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/morgan-stanley-launches-cryptocurrency-research-team
Today, Morganstanley wants you to know that AI is a $6 trillion opportunity.
They’re not alone. The CEOs of Endeavor, Buzzfeed, Microsoft, Spotify, Youtube, Snap, Sports Illustrated, and CAA are all out there, pumping up the AI bubble with every hour that god sends, declaring that the future is AI.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/wall-street-ai-stock-price-1235343279/
Google and Bing are locked in an arms-race to see whose search engine can attain the speediest, most profound enshittification via chatbot, replacing links to web-pages with florid paragraphs composed by fully automated, supremely confident liars:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked
Blockchain was a solution in search of a problem. So is AI. Yes, Buzzfeed will be able to reduce its wage-bill by automating its personality quiz vertical, and Spotify’s “AI DJ” will produce slightly less terrible playlists (at least, to the extent that Spotify doesn’t put its thumb on the scales by inserting tracks into the playlists whose only fitness factor is that someone paid to boost them).
But even if you add all of this up, double it, square it, and add a billion dollar confidence interval, it still doesn’t add up to what Bank Of America analysts called “a defining moment — like the internet in the ’90s.” For one thing, the most exciting part of the “internet in the ‘90s” was that it had incredibly low barriers to entry and wasn’t dominated by large companies — indeed, it had them running scared.
The AI bubble, by contrast, is being inflated by massive incumbents, whose excitement boils down to “This will let the biggest companies get much, much bigger and the rest of you can go fuck yourselves.” Some revolution.
AI has all the hallmarks of a classic pump-and-dump, starting with terminology. AI isn’t “artificial” and it’s not “intelligent.” “Machine learning” doesn’t learn. On this week’s Trashfuture podcast, they made an excellent (and profane and hilarious) case that ChatGPT is best understood as a sophisticated form of autocomplete — not our new robot overlord.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/4NHKMZZNKi0w9mOhPYIL4T
We all know that autocomplete is a decidedly mixed blessing. Like all statistical inference tools, autocomplete is profoundly conservative — it wants you to do the same thing tomorrow as you did yesterday (that’s why “sophisticated” ad retargeting ads show you ads for shoes in response to your search for shoes). If the word you type after “hey” is usually “hon” then the next time you type “hey,” autocomplete will be ready to fill in your typical following word — even if this time you want to type “hey stop texting me you freak”:
https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/provocations/neophobic-conservative-ai-overlords-want-everything-stay/
And when autocomplete encounters a new input — when you try to type something you’ve never typed before — it tries to get you to finish your sentence with the statistically median thing that everyone would type next, on average. Usually that produces something utterly bland, but sometimes the results can be hilarious. Back in 2018, I started to text our babysitter with “hey are you free to sit” only to have Android finish the sentence with “on my face” (not something I’d ever typed!):
https://mashable.com/article/android-predictive-text-sit-on-my-face
Modern autocomplete can produce long passages of text in response to prompts, but it is every bit as unreliable as 2018 Android SMS autocomplete, as Alexander Hanff discovered when ChatGPT informed him that he was dead, even generating a plausible URL for a link to a nonexistent obit in The Guardian:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/02/chatgpt_considered_harmful/
Of course, the carnival barkers of the AI pump-and-dump insist that this is all a feature, not a bug. If autocomplete says stupid, wrong things with total confidence, that’s because “AI” is becoming more human, because humans also say stupid, wrong things with total confidence.
Exhibit A is the billionaire AI grifter Sam Altman, CEO if OpenAI — a company whose products are not open, nor are they artificial, nor are they intelligent. Altman celebrated the release of ChatGPT by tweeting “i am a stochastic parrot, and so r u.”
https://twitter.com/sama/status/1599471830255177728
This was a dig at the “stochastic parrots” paper, a comprehensive, measured roundup of criticisms of AI that led Google to fire Timnit Gebru, a respected AI researcher, for having the audacity to point out the Emperor’s New Clothes:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-ai-ethics-research-paper-forced-out-timnit-gebru/
Gebru’s co-author on the Parrots paper was Emily M Bender, a computational linguistics specialist at UW, who is one of the best-informed and most damning critics of AI hype. You can get a good sense of her position from Elizabeth Weil’s New York Magazine profile:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-emily-m-bender.html
Bender has made many important scholarly contributions to her field, but she is also famous for her rules of thumb, which caution her fellow scientists not to get high on their own supply:
Please do not conflate word form and meaning
Mind your own credulity
As Bender says, we’ve made “machines that can mindlessly generate text, but we haven’t learned how to stop imagining the mind behind it.” One potential tonic against this fallacy is to follow an Italian MP’s suggestion and replace “AI” with “SALAMI” (“Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences”). It’s a lot easier to keep a clear head when someone asks you, “Is this SALAMI intelligent? Can this SALAMI write a novel? Does this SALAMI deserve human rights?”
Bender’s most famous contribution is the “stochastic parrot,” a construct that “just probabilistically spits out words.” AI bros like Altman love the stochastic parrot, and are hellbent on reducing human beings to stochastic parrots, which will allow them to declare that their chatbots have feature-parity with human beings.
At the same time, Altman and Co are strangely afraid of their creations. It’s possible that this is just a shuck: “I have made something so powerful that it could destroy humanity! Luckily, I am a wise steward of this thing, so it’s fine. But boy, it sure is powerful!”
They’ve been playing this game for a long time. People like Elon Musk (an investor in OpenAI, who is hoping to convince the EU Commission and FTC that he can fire all of Twitter’s human moderators and replace them with chatbots without violating EU law or the FTC’s consent decree) keep warning us that AI will destroy us unless we tame it.
There’s a lot of credulous repetition of these claims, and not just by AI’s boosters. AI critics are also prone to engaging in what Lee Vinsel calls criti-hype: criticizing something by repeating its boosters’ claims without interrogating them to see if they’re true:
https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5
There are better ways to respond to Elon Musk warning us that AIs will emulsify the planet and use human beings for food than to shout, “Look at how irresponsible this wizard is being! He made a Frankenstein’s Monster that will kill us all!” Like, we could point out that of all the things Elon Musk is profoundly wrong about, he is most wrong about the philosophical meaning of Wachowksi movies:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/may/18/lilly-wachowski-ivana-trump-elon-musk-twitter-red-pill-the-matrix-tweets
But even if we take the bros at their word when they proclaim themselves to be terrified of “existential risk” from AI, we can find better explanations by seeking out other phenomena that might be triggering their dread. As Charlie Stross points out, corporations are Slow AIs, autonomous artificial lifeforms that consistently do the wrong thing even when the people who nominally run them try to steer them in better directions:
https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future
Imagine the existential horror of a ultra-rich manbaby who nominally leads a company, but can’t get it to follow: “everyone thinks I’m in charge, but I’m actually being driven by the Slow AI, serving as its sock puppet on some days, its golem on others.”
Ted Chiang nailed this back in 2017 (the same year of the Long Island Blockchain Company):
There’s a saying, popularized by Fredric Jameson, that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. It’s no surprise that Silicon Valley capitalists don’t want to think about capitalism ending. What’s unexpected is that the way they envision the world ending is through a form of unchecked capitalism, disguised as a superintelligent AI. They have unconsciously created a devil in their own image, a boogeyman whose excesses are precisely their own.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to-civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway
Chiang is still writing some of the best critical work on “AI.” His February article in the New Yorker, “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web,” was an instant classic:
[AI] hallucinations are compression artifacts, but — like the incorrect labels generated by the Xerox photocopier — they are plausible enough that identifying them requires comparing them against the originals, which in this case means either the Web or our own knowledge of the world.
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web
“AI” is practically purpose-built for inflating another hype-bubble, excelling as it does at producing party-tricks — plausible essays, weird images, voice impersonations. But as Princeton’s Matthew Salganik writes, there’s a world of difference between “cool” and “tool”:
https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2023/03/08/can-chatgpt-and-its-successors-go-from-cool-to-tool/
Nature can claim “conversational AI is a game-changer for science” but “there is a huge gap between writing funny instructions for removing food from home electronics and doing scientific research.” Salganik tried to get ChatGPT to help him with the most banal of scholarly tasks — aiding him in peer reviewing a colleague’s paper. The result? “ChatGPT didn’t help me do peer review at all; not one little bit.”
The criti-hype isn’t limited to ChatGPT, of course — there’s plenty of (justifiable) concern about image and voice generators and their impact on creative labor markets, but that concern is often expressed in ways that amplify the self-serving claims of the companies hoping to inflate the hype machine.
One of the best critical responses to the question of image- and voice-generators comes from Kirby Ferguson, whose final Everything Is a Remix video is a superb, visually stunning, brilliantly argued critique of these systems:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rswxcDyotXA
One area where Ferguson shines is in thinking through the copyright question — is there any right to decide who can study the art you make? Except in some edge cases, these systems don’t store copies of the images they analyze, nor do they reproduce them:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids
For creators, the important material question raised by these systems is economic, not creative: will our bosses use them to erode our wages? That is a very important question, and as far as our bosses are concerned, the answer is a resounding yes.
Markets value automation primarily because automation allows capitalists to pay workers less. The textile factory owners who purchased automatic looms weren’t interested in giving their workers raises and shorting working days. ‘ They wanted to fire their skilled workers and replace them with small children kidnapped out of orphanages and indentured for a decade, starved and beaten and forced to work, even after they were mangled by the machines. Fun fact: Oliver Twist was based on the bestselling memoir of Robert Blincoe, a child who survived his decade of forced labor:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59127/59127-h/59127-h.htm
Today, voice actors sitting down to record for games companies are forced to begin each session with “My name is ______ and I hereby grant irrevocable permission to train an AI with my voice and use it any way you see fit.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d37za/voice-actors-sign-away-rights-to-artificial-intelligence
Let’s be clear here: there is — at present — no firmly established copyright over voiceprints. The “right” that voice actors are signing away as a non-negotiable condition of doing their jobs for giant, powerful monopolists doesn’t even exist. When a corporation makes a worker surrender this right, they are betting that this right will be created later in the name of “artists’ rights” — and that they will then be able to harvest this right and use it to fire the artists who fought so hard for it.
There are other approaches to this. We could support the US Copyright Office’s position that machine-generated works are not works of human creative authorship and are thus not eligible for copyright — so if corporations wanted to control their products, they’d have to hire humans to make them:
https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-office-reject-ai-generated-art-recent-entrance-to-paradise
Or we could create collective rights that belong to all artists and can’t be signed away to a corporation. That’s how the right to record other musicians’ songs work — and it’s why Taylor Swift was able to re-record the masters that were sold out from under her by evil private-equity bros::
https://doctorow.medium.com/united-we-stand-61e16ec707e2
Whatever we do as creative workers and as humans entitled to a decent life, we can’t afford drink the Blockchain Iced Tea. That means that we have to be technically competent, to understand how the stochastic parrot works, and to make sure our criticism doesn’t just repeat the marketing copy of the latest pump-and-dump.
Today (Mar 9), you can catch me in person in Austin at the UT School of Design and Creative Technologies, and remotely at U Manitoba’s Ethics of Emerging Tech Lecture.
Tomorrow (Mar 10), Rebecca Giblin and I kick off the SXSW reading series.
Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg
CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
[Image ID: A graph depicting the Gartner hype cycle. A pair of HAL 9000's glowing red eyes are chasing each other down the slope from the Peak of Inflated Expectations to join another one that is at rest in the Trough of Disillusionment. It, in turn, sits atop a vast cairn of HAL 9000 eyes that are piled in a rough pyramid that extends below the graph to a distance of several times its height.]
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marknee · 1 year
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bts fanfics i think shakespeare is rolling around in his grave about right now.
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chapter i. ✷ chapter iii.
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KEYS ON SEVERITY OF SHAKESPEARE’S STATE:
( ✮ ) — dude, what has that grave ever done to you?
( ♬ ) — i think we broke him.
( ✎ ) — he hasn’t moved in a while. should i check on him?
( ♛ ) — he’s deceased. again. dunno if that’s possible.
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THE SHAKESPEARE SERIES.
WARNING: keep in mind, some of these authors are very strict on the rule that no minors should read their work if they’re underage, and i will honour that. but, at the end of the day, i am not your parent. so, there’s that. but heed my warning wisely. any smut or 18+ content will be highlighted in bold.
NOTE: yes, this is a series now. exciting, am i right? i fear there are too many incredible fics on this app to fit them into one part, so this will be multiple parts — you can access the masterlist above! leggo.
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( ✮ ) CASTAWAYS — by @rmnamjoons
!! namjoon x reader | 25.5k !!
smut (18+) with plot, slow burn, fluff, angst if you squint, happy ending, so much teasing.
you ever seen the 2000 film ‘cast away’? the one with tom hanks and his inanimate volleyball named wilson? yeah, this fic is exactly what that film should’ve been. it largely lacked the existence of namjoon, and the undeniable sexual tension we were denied for a throwing ball.
namjoon’s characterisation in this is unreal. he’s so gentle and tender with his words, yet so rough and unforgiving within the sheets. you almost don’t realise it’s the same person, but am i complaining? not really. quite the contrary actually.
also, i like that it’s very realistic in some aspects. everything they do to survive on an island is exactly what you imagine yourself doing if you were dropped into their shoes, lost and fearful that any moment might just be your last.
though i went through years of scouting myself, i do not feel i am equipped enough to survive on a deserted island with an embarrassingly hot guy i met days prior. but if miss y/n can do it with less experience than i, then o ye of little faith.
i wish i could engrave this fic into my brain so i can read it whenever i please, so i guess i’m just lucky it exists here on tumblr for free. an honour, really.
@rmnamjoons has outdone themselves yet again.
( ♬ ) TAMPED — by @chimoona
!! jungkook x reader | 19.7k !!
smut (18+), fluff, humour, slow burn, mild angst/jealously, barista!au, lil bit of yoongi smut.
never mind shakespeare, this fic had me rolling around in my grave. and i’m not even dead.
if you had to choose any piece of advice to take away from this essay, let it be do not read fics like this in public. or in the presence of literally anybody. you will either a) start kicking your legs and squealing, or b) throw your phone and need a moment to compose yourself. learn from me, yes?
min yoongi is the funniest mf in this, especially in the way he teases the reader about not having been laid in a millennium. he makes this fic just an absolute treat to read. and the friendship with seokjin is so incredibly warming. you can feel the fondness they have for each other bursting through the pages (…screen? have i said that before?).
but, undoubtedly, what pulls everything together is the relationship between the reader and jungkook. it starts as toleration, then care, before it blooms into tenderness and finally, love. and you can’t get enough. of them and of the story.
you can’t help but fall in love yourself. definitely worth a read.
( ✮ ) ADJUSTMENT — by @yminie
!! hoseok x reader | 7.1k !!
smut (18+), fluff, chiropractor!hoseok, patient!reader.
the fact the authors note is, “promise it’s not a cheesy porno,” needs a mention of its own. it made me laugh, and it definitely lived up to that statement. it was better than a cheesy porno.
this fic alone at 7k does what some 20k+ fics fail to do. and that’s a talent, truly. i swear, there were moments i felt as if i was third-wheeling and intruding on something very private and very personal. i probably should’ve walked out that doctors room and left them to it.
i think i’ve said it before, but this is another great example of a good smut laced within a good plot. it was interesting, hooked you in, and left you feeling quite satisfied. content is the word i think i should say.
shame shakespeare never wrote smut, but also not really because we have authors like this who do it better.
@yminie, i’ll be keeping my eye on you. an incredible fic, really.
( ♛ ) WATERLOO — by @kinktae
!! art prodigy!taehyung x art student!reader | 13k !!
fluff, angst, some light smut, slow burn.
this was one of the first fanfics i ever read on this app. and that was what? a few years ago? wow. i’m old.
now, my memory isn’t incredible, but the fact this is one of the few fics i remember reading in a fandom i was unfamiliar to all those years ago, says a lot. about the story, the writing, and the author.
waterloo was like a soft push of the hand that guided me into the world of bts fanfics, and for that, i’m eternally grateful. i’ve never been one to dive into things straight away. i like guidance. i like ease.
so, my dear reader, if you have any friends who’re just getting into tumblr fics about bts and need that sturdy push, i solely advise you recommend this to them. but if not, this is a great fic to read otherwise.
it’s angsty, it’s cheesy, it’s cute, and it’s memorable. who doesn’t love an art prology taehyung? people who’re boring, that’s who.
( ♛ ) FROM EDEN — by @ddaenggtan
!! hoseok x yoongi x reader | 15.6k !!
greek god au, hades!reader, thanatos!hoseok, persephone!yoongi, smut, fluff, angst, violence.
anyone else go through a greek god phase? i consumed all those stories like they were my breakfast. and as you would have it, my favourite to read about was the story of hades and persephone, also known as the coming of spring and winter.
this fic is genuinely so addictive and it really knocks the tag ‘greek god!au’ out the park. it does an amazing job of representing the story we all know and love, while adding some adaptations of its own, giving the story a unique twist.
i would happily write a five thousand word essay on how much i adore bangtan as greek gods, but i fear what would become of me if i did. so i shall not. for both my sake and yours.
as shakespeare never said, but lady gaga did: talented, brilliant, incredible, amazing, show stopping, spectacular, never the same, totally unique.. etc.
and yoongi, for heavens sake, no pomegranates!
( ✎ ) VOID — by @btssavedmylifeblr (series)
!! bts x reader | 82k !!
space!au, science fiction, a lot of smut (18+), angst.
one of the reasons why i created this series is so i can do one of my favourite things ever: share what i love. i think there something so beautiful in the art of spreading appreciation. and usually, my friends were the ones who had to listen to these essays before you did, sweet reader. and this fic was one of those i didn’t shut up about.
by the end of my rant about this series, i don’t think they even needed to read it. i’d done it for them simply by talking. which is why, i will keep this short and simple. so i don’t do the same for you.
this series is so well thought out. every little detail, every hurdle in the road, every step seems to have been thought of before hand and it makes the journey that much more gripping. so, kudos to the author for that. extra brownie points.
every member has their role, their part, their moment in the story and they’re all indefinitely important and make up a team. alike bangtan, they’re all needed in order to make the ship work. without one, it’d be going down and they’d all be yelling timber. (love that song).
teamwork makes the dream work, people.
( ♬ ) PEACHES AND CREAM — by @snackhobi
!! jimin x reader | 9.1k !!
pure smut (18+).
let’s start with three words: lord have mercy. personally, i think that sums everything up pretty well. but if i left it at that, this wouldn’t be an essay now would it? so let’s continue.
the fact this fic was almost called ‘jimin and the fucking peach’ after james and the giant peach deserves extra credit for the absolute monstrosity of a laugh that escaped my mouth after reading that. a missed opportunity, truly.
honestly, jimin and his actions within this fic desperately need examining by a team of scientists in the study of inane methods to get someone’s attention because, and excuse my french, fuck me.
shakespeare was definitely giggling reading this. perhaps even kicking his legs. love that for him.
but, according to the key i put down for this fic, i also think we broke him. understandable, mate. same here. i’ll never be the same.
( ♛ ) OH MY GOD, THEY WERE (QUARANTINED) ROOMMATES — by @ot7always
!! jungkook x reader | 22.8k !!
college!au, roommates!au, fluff, smut (18+).
the absolute audacity.
the reader really has the gall to sit and complain about what unfortunate circumstances she’s in, all the while she’s stuck with the jeon jungkook of all people. i cannot deal. i wish my quarantine trapped me inside with one of the hottest men on the planet.
apart from that, how can you not love this fic? rhetorical question, dear reader. you can’t.
the undeniable sexual tension that lingers throughout the entirety of this story builds up, like lego pieces on top of one another, until it finally falls and breaks into two. and you can’t reject the satisfaction of it all.
i was lucky enough to have read this two years ago (three now as i’m writing this) while we were actively going through lockdown, and it does an amazing job of describing everything we were all feeling during that time. bored, worried, confused, lonely, frustrated, and horny (…just saying).
it made things a bit more bearable. and it’s got shirtless jungkook.
( ✎ ) THE WAY TO YOUR HEART — by @joonary
!! yoongi x reader | 9k !!
fluff, humour, office!au, coworkers!au.
the fluffiest fluff that ever did fluff. bet you shakespeare never said that in his life. shame. at least i beat him in something.
believe me when i say i was grinning like an idiot the whole time reading this, with my cheeks lightly aching. with this app filled to the brim with angst and heavier stories, this fic was like a breath of fresh air. a warm, hearty homemade meal after a rough day out in the merciless world.
if you’re in need of a hug but aren’t the physical touch kind of person, the solution is right here, my friend. this fic will rejuvenate your system and make you feel a whole lot better. believe me.
also, can i just say. the author made an impeccable job of leaving me even pickier about attributes of my future spouse than what i started with. like, how am i supposed to explain to someone i want a partner just like this exact, specific version of yoongi? like. i mean this one. all i’ll say is it proves difficult.
@joonary is the shakespeare we needed. instead he wrote romances disguised as tragedies where both parties die at the end. what the fuck.
( ♛ ) STUCK WITH YOU — by @taleasnewastime
!! seokjin x reader | 29.6k !!
strangers to lovers, smut (18+), angst, fluff.
is anyone else surprised @taleasnewastime is here again? ‘cause i’m not. her work is next level (naevis? is that you?). and i’m not ashamed to say i stalked the entirety of her masterlist after this masterpiece. hint, hint, nudge, nudge, people.
the chemistry etched within this fic is off the charts. everything is there. the banter, the tenderness, the angst, the longing to accept love, the grief. all wrapped into a bundle and gifted with a side of heartache and woe.
we all need a person like seokjin’s character in our lives. someone who lifts us from dark times and (re: figuratively) throws us into the light. i fear helps might be a better option of wording. am i right?
this story dragged my hopeless romantic ass on a one-way skydive to pain. and that’s without a parachute. it was more of a free fall, really.
and i’d most definitely do it again.
( ♬ ) WRAPPED TOGETHER — by @lemonjoonah
!! namjoon x reader | 18k !!
christmas!au, romance, drama, smut (18+).
you know those people who don’t listen to christmas music during the rest of the year because they swear it brings bad luck? well, they must hate me, ‘cause i’ll happily stream michael bublé’s christmas album in august if i have to. probably explains my bad luck too. great.
my point is, whenever you may be reading this post, whether it’s rainy october or sunny july, this fic is worth all the so-called bad luck.
it’s got the christmas spirit. the jolly music, the beautiful lights, the festive mood. and it’s got namjoon. it’s got namjoon, people! if that’s not tying the knot, then i don’t know what is.
in all seriousness though, i religiously come back to this fic whenever the holidays hit and the radios all over the uk start charting mariah carey and wham!. and it’ll cure any holiday blues.
@lemonjoonah may yet pop up again in this series. their work is definitely worth the time and read(ing?).
( ✎ ) HERE COMES THE BRIDE, ALL DRESSED IN PRIDE — by @hansolmates
!! jungkook x reader | 17.3k !!
fake dating!au, fluff, crack, mentions of cheating.
“boy, i, boy, i, boy, i know, i know you got the feels.” the feels, twice. literally the first song that came to mind when i finished this fic. and twice never lie.
unpopular opinion (i think?), i’m a sucker for when y/n is petty in fanfics. i love a good revenge story, especially when it’s rightfully deserved, pristinely plated and justly served. you know, all classy like. and this had all that in the bag.
the relationship in this fanfic was so respectful and i loved that. they considered each other’s feelings towards what they were getting into, so that gets a gold star for communication and consideration from me. yass healthy relationship!
shakespeare cannot relate. hence why he’s tagged under ‘hasn’t moved in a while.’ he’s flabbergasted such things exist. since he killed one of the parties in the only healthy relationship he ever wrote. like, bro?
an amazing story yet again from @hansolmates if you’re in need of that satisfaction. (not like that you pervs. i meant revenge).
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awakenedsalamander · 5 months
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So I’ve been wanting to write about this for a long time (my friends can probably attest to the fact I will talk about it unprompted) but I can’t find it way to do so concisely. Here’s my best try.
Is Mage: The Ascension (in its presentation of the Technocracy in specific) anti-science?
I don’t think so, not anymore. But I want to explain why. By the way, I have to imagine that this won’t be all that accessible if you don’t have much knowledge of Mage, but you’re free to stick around if you want to.
So, here’s the thing— the Technocratic Union is pretty much a stand-in for the advancement of the scientific method, “the Enlightenment,” all that. The whole point in the first edition of Ascension is that the Union is science, the science that dispelled notions of magic, and that this is a Bad Thing. They are oppressive, heartless, and cold. The villains, plain and simple.
In later editions, this gets softened, partly due to the notion of “Science is a conspiracy the elite uses to rule the world and keep you down” becoming less fun and more toxic as it gained more sincere believers, and partly because fans really liked the Technocracy.
I think the common read is that Ascension then took the direction of the Technocracy being anti-villains— the Union has noble goals, and many of its members are sincerely brave and compassionate, but ultimately it is too extreme, too callous. It has to be stopped.
This is, to be fair, an improvement over “science is evil,” but “science is too dangerous,” is still not great. And for a long time, this was my view on Mage: The Ascension. Fun ideas, maybe, but the core conflict of the game was just too reckless a portrayal of what seemed to me like a mirror of real-world conspiracist ideology.
And to some extent, I still think that. Especially in the early editions, this is a very fair critique. That said, the game still spoke to me as I looked into it, and for the longest time I wasn’t quite sure why. A piece of it was my own opening up to the notion of our subjective viewpoints affecting our reality— something that deserves its own rambling essay— but a related part of it was me realizing that there was something about the Technocracy that rung true to me, despite my misgivings. And I think I figured it out.
See, the Technocracy isn’t a stand-in for the scientific method, but for scientism.
If you’ve not heard the term, “scientism” is a controversial (we’ll get into why a bit later) pejorative term for the belief/perspective that science, as a body, composes essentially all useful and/or reliable knowledge about the world.
Notably, those who critique scientism rarely hold the view that scientific knowledge is bad or even inaccurate, just that it is an incomplete model of reality. This is not an anti-science position, but a skepticism towards the trust people place in its ability to solve every mystery. Vaccines, for example, are great! No one can reasonably dispute the benefits and efficacy of vaccination. When it comes to medicine, the scientific method has done incalculable good— the lives saved by vaccination alone are countless.
To be against scientism, then, is not to argue that medical science is a failure, or overrated— but to point out that there is more to life than being healthy. Everyone should be glad we have learned so much about treating illness and alleviating suffering. But what of having a sense of purpose? What about love and compassion and justice? What about satisfaction, having gone through a life worth living?
Again, none of that is to say that science or the scientific community is the problem. But if you take the Technocracy as an example of scientism gone to an extreme, one in which things like kindness and equity must be left behind in favor of only the virtue of material knowledge, I think Mage: The Ascension starts to really work.
(I originally intended to write a MUCH longer piece including references to the military-industrial complex, the rise of automation and AI, as well as the increasingly algorithmic nature of culture but this is so long already. And yet I worry I said essentially nothing. C’est la vie.)
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gffa · 5 months
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I finished Rise of the Red Blade this morning and I think I genuinely liked it, to the point that I started mentally composing essays about the main character's journey and the parallels she had with other Star Wars characters and how so much of this book supported everything I've been saying about the dark side and what it does to people, as well as unreliable narrators, and even things where I thought they might be swerving into unfair critical territory on the part of the narrative wound up ultimately being almost delivered to me on a silver platter for how I was fucking right. But I don't think I would recommend it and would even anti-rec it to fellow Jedi fans who have had their nerves scraped raw, unless you are into sharp-edged female characters as much as I am. This book is for all the fans who want a hot mess of a female character who is allowed to be cruel and mean and wrong and all up in her head and unreliable and have moments of absolute yearning that made my heart ache for her and moments of awesome and that she gets to fail and be consumed by the dark and her story is worth telling. If I can love Anakin Skywalker through his descent into the dark, I can love Iskat Akaris through her descent into the same place. This is a book about what it's like to choose the dark side, to believe she's right and that she's free and that she'll get everything she wants--except it's all just kind of nothing in the end. She believes so strongly that the Jedi wronged her, that they never cared about her, that their beliefs were empty, but she says this deep in the dark side and everything we can see outside of her perspective shows that they were trying to help her, she just isn't allowed to go around embracing anger and violence. And it's a book about how mental illness makes it hard to see things clearly. As someone who has struggled with it for my entire life, who only really began to make progress once I accepted that my brain lies to me when it tells me that my friends and family find me to be a burden and would hate me if they knew the real me--ohhhh, do I see a lot of myself in Iskat Akaris. And it's a book about how it doesn't half-ass that descent. She gets to be genuinely cruel. She gets to be genuinely whole-hearted about her beliefs in the dark side have set her free and is good. She gets to be genuinely a giant ball of uncontrolled emotional thorns that she uses to hurt herself as much as other people. This is a book that's not afraid of making its main character unlikeable and, through that, making her beloved to me. If you're not into a book with sharp edges and hissing lies about the Jedi, then skip this one, just don't even read this review, because it's not going to change your mind. But if you're like me and love drama and love when a narrative doesn't actually spell things out for you, but provides all the context you need if you actually watch what the Jedi say and do, not what Iskat says they say and do, it delivers a story that I think supports my view of the Jedi pretty well. This is a story about choosing the dark and all the darkness that comes with that. It's not nice, it's not gentle. I mean, it's still a Star Wars book, but if you like awful women getting to actually be awful in ways that you can sympathize with, the ways that male characters so often get to be, then I genuinely enjoyed this book for that.
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summertimemusician · 6 months
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Linktober Day 9
Deity
*sneezes after downing coffee* Well irl stuff got in the way so I'm way behind my original schedule for these and for Linktober but here we go with another arguably short one, fuelled purely by self indulgence, headcanons, spite against my linguist essays that kept me from keeping to schedule, severe sleep deprivation, a shout out to the Ender Lilies soundtrack and Majora's Mask soundtrack, and Nintendo for not clarifying anything about the lore so I'm snatching what I can and making it my own lol. Look, when you fíxate so much on details the Zelda team doesn't elaborate on you have to fill in the gaps with what you can.
As always can be read as romantic or platonic, technically in a LU context but not explicitly in it by itself.
The Lord of the Mountain liked hearing people sing.
In a way, it wasn’t a surprise, Hylia and the Golden Three each had their ballads and symphonies and minuets, each splendid and with cuts of their divinity in it, Farore was fond of lightning and forest alive minuets, and you could swear Farosh sparked just a bit brighter when one would him the beginnings of the Minuet of the Forest near their spring, Din was fond of boleros, fiery and alive and howling with the echo of flame touching earth that made a shine run through Dinraal’s scales, Nayru, in contrast, was much fonder of blizzard and river quiet serenades, the songs of contemplation at first snow ringing clear when Naydra curled around it’s spring, content to be free of Malice.
And of course Hylia had her ballads and lullabies, perfectly fitting to her display of divinity, of honey days and vast bird like wings, of ambered summers to come and to pass and dazzling solar storms of starlight and sunlight sparking through the human form of her descendants and heroes. So in a way, you weren’t surprised at all that the Lord of the Mountain – Satori, with a familiar touch of londsleite divinity, the hunt of the woodland beasts and diamondscar adoration for the Hero of the Wilds, similar in glory to the Light Spirits petrichor and vermeil fondness for the Hero of the Twilight – liked to listen to people sing. What you were surprised was how it attempted to follow along, it’s head across your lap the second you sat down in the clearing, a gentle hum on back of it’s throat, an owl’s cry and a cicada’s humming and faintly, chirring purring as presses it’s faces into your hands, a gentle request for petting.
It was adorable, even with the faint notes of the chill of clear spring water on winter and the livewire feeling of magic, like holding your hand too close to a flame but not quite touching it.
A low chuckle brushes against the back of your mind, a feeling like biting on ice, the prowl of a wild beast and the build up of lightning and light used to create his blade, the amused affection of a warrior reconvening with their brother in arms, you think you see the bone ivory of the Deity’s hair on the side of your vision, though you know he’s not physically there, ‘He likes you.’
You hum, gently patting behind it’s ears, pushing through the chill, gracefully not mentioning the burning with a smile at the mythic being’s faint chirring, birdsong and the wind through cherry blossoms that sparkle like rose quartz, “Well I quite like him too, I can see where it’s gentleness comes from.”
The ghost of a touch over your hair, the caress of lightning striking over your skin and the hair on the back of your neck pricking up and the crisp cold of winter, the chill of the ending and the flame of a new dawn, of new days, the phantom of magnolias and spring water on your tongue. The fragrance of pine, daffodils and blood soaked lilies on ashen fields on your senses, gentle and careful, marking but not claiming, ‘Only because it’s you, beloved. It’s not something easily given.’
You sigh, shakily composing yourself, you let yourself relax into the phantom sensation. Of hopes and dreams and healed suffering, of the divinity of hunt turned into protection and lightning given form, of tangled timelines and crystalized memories, “I know. It does not change my opinion, either way.”
To be the subject of a god’s care and regard was dangerous, after all. For the human and the deity in question, you know the stories from your world well, of the effects of Hylia on First and Sky, of Twilight and the personification of the Twilight Realm and the spirits of his land, of Wild and clawing from death’s embrace into that of the wilderness.
Knew how the fact the Fierce Deity’s mere proximity causing pain on those who changed him into hunting for hunt’s sake into protection for the sake of someone else cut deeper than even the ever encroaching entropy all beings must one day face. It was no wonder the Song of Healing was his creation, to want to ease the burden.
You gladly grant him some peace, in turn, even if it wasn’t much. It’s the least you can do, for always having his ways of watching over your heroes.
“Join me? We can make a duet.”
You feel more than see him shift, ephemeral, fleeting, gentle against the edges of your existence, as foreign to Hyrule as your own, sparking over your spine as you feel ozone and rust on your teeth. Satori is humming again to match the rumble of thunder in the man’s voice, the heralding of songs of war and elegies for the dead, ‘Of course, though I’m afraid I do not know many songs, besides…’
“It’s alright,”, you smile faintly, there’s a white ocarina in his hands, as he leans, a spectre against your side, “I’ll teach you some of my own, though you’ll have to forgive me if I don’t remember all the lyrics.”
‘It would be my honor to learn.’
You think he smiles, from the fluttering of something ancient and long forgotten against your side.
You sing to Satori and the Chain, a small respite of familiar and forgotten tunes, the Lord of the Mountain hums along. The Fierce Deity’s song cutting through any nightmares that may ail your heroes for another night.
When the dawn of a new day comes, the feeling of divinity against your skin feels just a bit more obvious, sinking into every crack of your being like a shroud, falling over your boys like a veil, reflecting the breath of eternity over Hyrule.
(First gives you a look that’s half exasperation, half understanding. Sky pointedly sticks to your side as Time looks you over, markings deep with vibrant color. You shrug with a helpless smile as you feel the lightest brushes of Hylia’s fond days of gold and starlit summers days against the Lord of the Mountains warm, luminous affection and the Fierce Deity’s smug, but content lonsdaleite smile.)
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count-fungula · 5 months
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My thoughts on the Captain (and Havers)
The following essay will contain spoilers for all of Ghosts (S1-5) and its companion book, 'The Button House Archives'. I have been a huge fan of Ghosts for a long time now, and like many others have found great comfort in the character of the Captain! So here I am constructing all of my thoughts regarding everything we've been told via series 5 and 'The Button House Archives' into an essay because I am SO NORMAL.
Don't you just love it when The Gays™ are tragic? I do. It's a shame it keeps happening to us but I love me some angst, so who am I to complain? I gotta say, when I first watched 'Redding Weddy' a few years ago, I was instantly attached to Cap and the tiny but significant sliver of backstory we had about this goofball. I think I also went a bit nuts. The whole 'the love of my life is LEAVING ME to go somewhere potentially DEADLY and I'm not even fully aware of the situation' got to me, OK? And not too many years later, the Captain's heartbreaking death is revealed and oh did you hear about the companion book because that makes everything all the more harrowing. More on that later.
Let's start out with the facts before I delve into my analysis and headcanons. The Captain was stationed at Button House from at least early 1940 to July of 1944. Wiki says his regiment probably designed weapons. Cap met Havers when he joined in April of 1940, but he soon left for North Africa on 5th June of the same year.
He died in 1945 after the war, at Button House, where decorated officers were having a reunion. But like anyone who is inexplicably drawn to another, Cap used his wits and snuck in, to reunite with the love of his life. Then he died. Now it's obvious Cap had feelings for Havers, but it has been of my opinion for a while that he never understood them, not for a long, long time. Not until he was dead, anyway. But you know who did know? Havers, of course. He literally says it in 'Carpe Diem'. Remember that, it's important for later. A popular headcanon about Cap is that he is autistic, and as an autistic person, yes. Yes he is. This is where my GALAXY BRAIN HEADCANON will begin. >:)
Probably the most common autistic trait is the difficulty on picking up social cues. This often results in a lot of awkward behaviour, miscommunication and a lack of awareness as to how one presents to others (can confirm). I definitely see this in the Captain, and I think this is a key part of his character.
Now I know that every autistic person in society, one way or another, will feel different from the moment they become concious of the fact that they are alive. (If you didn't feel like this, I am very happy for you and feel free to tell me). So the Captain knows he's different. Probably. He just doesn't know why, and it's in more ways than one. But, of course, everyone else knows he's different too, not least Lt Havers. But compared to the Captain, Havers isn't oblivious. He's far more self aware, and understands how society will treat Cap if anything gets out (I'm also taking it as Havers being queer too, but he know's what he is and that he can't show it). From the flashback in 'Carpe Diem', it is clear how much more composed Havers is than Cap. Remember that Cap is autistic -- whether or not her learned to mask, it's ineffective. Granted, he's also trying to hide a complete emotional breakdown after seeing Havers for the first time in 5 or so years, but he is a complete mess as soon as he's comfronted. That wasn't in his script. So why is this important? I think when Havers came to Button House, within those few months it was clear to him that his C.O had a huge crush on him and didn't even know it. And if he stayed around too long, someone else would notice. I mean, just look how flustered Cap gets in his 'Redding Weddy' flashbacks!! And yet Havers remains polite, composed, hidden. So in order to protect the Captain, he left. To the front lines, where he knows Cap can't follow. From his point of view, it was probably the safest option for Cap, whome he probably cared about but just wasn't allowed to show it. OUCH. I'm sorry. I'm also going to make it worse.
'The Button House Archives' holds a series of diary entries from the Captain, most of which pertain to front line strategies. However, there is one page, dated June 6th 1940. It's torn out and crumpled (as this post pointed out) and it's SO SHORT. Shorter than any of the other entries. The silence is deafening.
The first half reads "Havers left yesterday. For Africa. Nothing I could do to dissuade him." The sentences are quick, and ends abruptly. And the last half reads "It will be over by Christmas. I'm sure of it." The man was YEARNING. Havers was only gone for a day and Cap already missed him enough to write about it.
They are so tragic, and I only hardened the blow by thinking way too far into it. ANYWAY, this essay was a long time coming, from the moment I went close to delirium with "this character is literally me" (he isn't, but I respect me-from-three-years-ago's feelings) to now where I no longer have to wait in anticipation for the death story of a fictional WW2 officer. Huge thank you to anyone who soldiered through the whole thing!! And @j-bird-blogz, I know you wanted to see this :)
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demonic-ritualist · 8 months
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Episodes 69-71 Analysis
Now that Ada’s mini manifestation plot line seems to be over (for now) I have decided to do an in depth analysis of episode 69-71 including ALL my thoughts and theories. Spoilers for all of nevermore until episode 72. Also I have decided to go character by character so feel free to skip to any part you like!
Morella
A trait about Morella I don’t see many people talk about is how much of a hypocrite she can be. During the Mystery Manor arc a student “asked for a quiet death but Morella denied that letting her be eaten alive by Prospero’s rats. Prospero literally calls out this behavior, saying that she and Pluto sat by and did nothing while countless students suffered horrible deaths yet they still come out of this feeling like the better person. Now she does redeem herself in that episode, what frustrates me is that this behavior continues in other episodes.
During this entire arc she could have stepped in and saved Prospero at any point (That’s literally her spectre’s purpose). But she didn’t. During the first few episodes she tells Lenore that she doesn’t want to be friends with fake people. Yet now she walks around with Annabel’s group.
I’m not saying Morella has bad intentions or anything. There is no doubt that she has good intentions. It’s just her cowardice that stops her from meaningfully helping people. Judging from what we know about her and her past interactions she will probably have an arc where she learns to stand up for herself in order to do the right thing.
I’m also not saying that her deed in Mystery Manor meant nothing. I’m just saying that in terms of her character arc there is more to be done.
Annabel Lee
In terms of writing my favorite character in Nevermore is Annabel. The fact that she can be seen as both a heartless monster and a woman hurt by a misogynistic society is so interesting to me. Her devotion to Lenore shouldn’t be a justification for her manipulative behavior but when talking about her it can’t be ignored.
Montresor doesn’t see any problem with Prospero potentially dying. In his eyes -if anything- this is a big achievement. How does Annabel respond? Not he’s our friend, not he doesn’t deserve to die. Her answer is “ What a short-sighted notion.” The reason she’s saving Prospero is because he’s crucial to her plan.
I know a lot of fans interpreted Annabel comforting Prospero as a sign of her caring. I didn’t really interpret it that way. After fixing his hair her first instinct is to tell him to compose himself because people are watching. Annabel will do anything for Lenore, everyone else to her are just pawns. Even if she did empathize with Prospero she still told him to compose himself because him doing that will push her towards her goal.
Montresor
Montresor’s a pretty simple character. Out of the entire cast he’s the only straight up villain (Ada might qualify for this category very soon). We don’t know enough about The Deans to properly evaluate them, Prospero just wants a good grade and Annabel, despite all her manipulation tactics, will do anything for Lenore.
Like I said earlier Montresor doesn’t see any problem with Prospero dying. While Annabel goes and confronts Ada he chooses to stay hidden. When the fight ended he took the opportunity to manipulate her.
You see unlike Annabel he’s pretty shortsighted. He doesn’t plan for the long term. If he sees a good opportunity he jumps at it.
Prospero:
I’ll be upfront and say that I wasn’t originally going to talk about him in this essay. I learned more about his backstory but I also feel like I learnt nothing new about him. Like nothing really surprised me or made me think.
I feel like these episodes served to humanize him and make him more sympathetic. Going forward I feel he will start to experience doubts about his mindset which will cause a lot of conflict between him and Annabel specially. Previously Annabel could always count on him being there to help them get a high grade. But if he starts experiencing doubts Annabel’s plans might need an overhaul.
Ada:
Where we left off, Ada was desperately clinging to this image of the upper class. After this arc I can’t say much has changed.
The reason Ada is so attached to Annabel and Prospero is because they serve as validation to her. If people as put-together and posh as them are friends with me then I must be posh too! If this plotline means anything it’s Ada losing faith in her idols. It's Annnabel and Prospero denying Ada the right to continue living this fantasy.
Episode 69 is the first time Prospero graphically assaults her. Any other time Ada could brush off his uninterested demeanor as him being shy but for the first time ever she has to acknowledge that her image of Prospero is false. That he doesn’t love her.
What caused Ada to return to her human form is Annabel calling her and her behavior hideous. Ada values Annabel’s opinion over everything else so to be told that she’s hideous and unladylike must be one of the most soul crushing things ever. After breaking down she pleads for Annabel to take back what she said but Annabel (justifiably so) refuses. Adding even more salt to the wound.
After this Ada is approached by Morella and Montresor. The reasons for why she pushed Morella away aren’t clear but I will be giving my own take on why.
One possible reason is that Ada doesn’t see Morella as an equal. As episode 38 establishes, Ada also doesn't see Morella as ladylike. Ada also never took her seriously. She will stick up for her without thinking but she never really tried to get closer to her like with Lenore, Prospero and Annabel.
The second reason; after being abandoned by Annabel the only thing Ada wants is to have someone reaffirm that she’s ladylike, have someone make her feel good again. If Morella were to comfort Ada she would try to hold her accountable for her actions. Morella wouldn’t blindly compliment her like Montresor later does.
Montresor does that. He immediately calls her pretty like Ada wants him to. He immediately gives her the validation she wants and doesn’t try to hold her accountable for her actions.
In conclusion Ada wants love and validation. When Prospero and Annabel fail to satisfy her need she moves onto someone else and the toxic cycle then continues.
Conclusion:
With the Mystery Manor arc I feel like we have seen a change of dynamic. While Annabel's group have been the top students, Mystery Manor showed that the misfits can effectively compete with Lenore being the first ever student to ring the bell. Not only that, episodes 69-71 marked a blow to Annabel’s group’s reputation. So going forward they will be in a tough spot.
Also I didn’t talk about Ada’s backstory at all. I was originally going to but after seeing so much content about it I decided against it. I don’t really have anything new to add to that conversation.
Another thing I want to adress I feel like a lot of people were disappointed with how episode 71 ended. I personally wasn’t disappointed. I enjoy Montresor X Ada as a PLOT DEVICE. I enjoy the types of conflict you can derive from it. I enjoy the way it progresses Ada’s character arc. People who see it as a cute and fluffy ship should GET OUT.
That's about it. This essay took ages to make. I swear to god EVERY TIME I THOUGHT I WAS DONE I FOUND SOMETHING NEW TO ADD. Please take that complaint as a compliment as to how good this series is.
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carolyntheeggo · 5 months
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Here’s some dark academia things I’ve actually done:
Got in a heated argument about wether Leonardo DaVinci was gay or not with my history teacher
Ran through really heavy rain with a couple classmates because we were running late to class
Annotate the schools copy of the bible
Play smash or pass with my friends but with the RE teachers.
I keep a locked folder of my own poetry in my notes app
Start rowing in my free time
Using anything but glue to stick worksheets in my books, just to piss of the teachers I don’t like.
Found a dead moth during sport, completely intact, so I took it home and preserved it. It now sits on my kitchen table.
Asked the ‘scariest’ biology teacher to preserve my dead moth (he couldn’t)
Crochet scarves and gloves for my classmates
Cram-study on weekends
I bought 142 books from the school library sale and carried them home myself
Stayed late in RE class so I could take the test we have the next week.
Copied off the person-sitting-next-to-me’s test for the past three weeks.
Discussed with friends how to set the pendulum (a big swinging ball in the science block) on fire
Tried to set my exercise book on fire in Science
Got banned from the library for making a throne out of books for 6 months
Printed the Wikipedia pages of all existing poisonous plants for my science final
Im on first name basis with half the lunch staff
Joined the school council, and started a suggestion plan.
Joined the Jewellery club (cult)
Wrote an essay on the top ten sluttiest composers
Dropped 5 paper balls into a teacher’s coffee without her noticing. (She drank it)
Got my hands on the lunch room floor plan so I could plot a way to sneak into lunch first.
I start crying when I get anything below a 70% in a test
Take the bus daily to school
Joined the Art club
Studied hard in Latin and I’m now top of the class with extra work to do
Laugh with my friends about the erotic subtext of the Cambridge Latin textbook
Wrote in concerning detail about torturing and killing a family member for my English homework.
Pissing of my German teacher so much that she cussed me out in German and the dude sitting next to me wrote it all down
Constantly either shaking or stuttering
Reading banned literature in front of the headmaster
Dropping my bag down from the third floor to the first when waiting for a lesson
Emptied my pencil sharpener on unsuspecting Yr7s.
Ranked types of radiation by personal preference.
Climbed out of a window to return a book the the school library
Cried when I got an A-
Got 100% on my Spanish end of year by copying off of different people.
Hit a year7 with the school bible
Revised on top of a support beam in the main corridor and threw bits of a pen at people
Yelled very loudly at some year7s after they nearly suffocated me in the lunch queue about how that are brave little cunts to be groping their superiors.
Made a secret handshake with my Latin teacher
Asked to take more subjects than what was allowed
Rowed so hard and so often that I couldn’t walk straight for a week.
Scaled a fence to get a random tennis ball
Finally punched that one annoying kid™️ in the nose (broke it)
Killed majority of the schools water flea supply.
Bought steel toe capped school shoes and kicked people in the shins with them.
Was given a pink rubber chicken who I named Gavin.
Deciphered a crochet pattern from Catalan to English (I don’t know a word of Catalan)
Thank you.
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hannahssimblr · 3 months
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Chapter Sixteen (Part 2)
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As final term goes on I seem to have a lot less time to socialise than I used to, spending late evenings in the computer room polishing off my digital art piece, or down in the life drawing studio compiling my best drawings from the year, or in the library composing my critical cultures essay, hours spent pouring over books to cite, researching and learning all about my chosen topic, which is the fashion and textile of Asian tribes. 
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For most of this time I am alone, but for the times I amn’t, it’s because I’m with Dean. Whenever he has time off work he’ll join me in the lab or the studio or the library and we’ll sit there together silently working through the evening, ankles intertwined beneath the desks as we pore over books about contemporary ceramics, ancient civilisations, Iranian cinema, pop art and the frescoes of Pompeii. The clocks change in late March, and even as April comes and the sky is bright until late into the evening, we stay until the sun goes down and the light fades from the room and all that’s left is the fluorescence from the lamp on the table between us to light the pages of our books. 
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“Do you ever get sick of this?” He asks me quietly one evening as I organise my bibliography on my laptop. I lift my head to look at him, hand fisted on his cheek as he stabs his own keyboard with one finger. “Sometimes.” I say. “But I think my essay is finally coming together.” 
He huffs. “It’s so stupid that we have to do this writing shite, this is supposed to be a fine arts degree.”
“Yeah I get that but it’s also an academic degree. There has to be some sort of essay portion, I don’t think you’ll ever get away without having to do it.”
“I’m terrible at writing.” He frowns. “And I’m so sick of reading these stupid books about fucking pottery, the words they use are such bullshit, it’s like these writers are having a contest to see who can make their book the hardest to understand.”
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Dean’s education, as I’ve learned, is a touchy subject for him. He left school when he was fifteen because he had either some difficulties learning or a lack of interest. It isn’t clear to me which, but either way he struggles now because of it. I tried to ask him about it before but I only ended up irritating him and he shut down, so I’m careful before broaching it again. “If you need help with anything just let me know.” I say. 
“I don’t.” He goes back to typing something aggressively onto his laptop for several minutes before he whacks the backspace key in frustration and sits there with the heels of his hands dug into his eye sockets. I clear my throat nervously. “Dean, like, I mean it if there’s anything I can do-”
“I don’t need help.” He repeats. “As in, I don’t need you to help me, do you not get it?”
“I get it.” I say quietly. I try to go back to my own citation list but I seem to have lost where I was, my focus having been thrown by him. I scroll back up to the beginning of the bibliography and start checking it again. After several more minutes, he sighs and drops his hands back to his lap, and while I don’t dare look over at him, from the corner of my eye I see him drop his head and shake it from side to side. “I’m so sick of this.” He says. “I’m so tired of spending all of my time in this building. I just go from college to work and back to college again over and over. Everything is shit.”
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“I know it’s hard right now.” I attempt. “But soon it’ll be over and you’ll have so much more time to relax during the summer. At least then when you’ll only be working in Primo you’ll have every afternoon free.”
“Yeah.” He says flatly. I know that it’s more than just pure exhaustion with him, more than just college. It’s his family, his father’s death, his sister, his aunts, all of these things that I can’t even begin to relate to or even know how to comfort him about, things that feel so far out of the scope of my experience that they only serve to remind me of the worlds between he and I, a terrain between us that I can’t traverse. It makes me feel weak, small, ineffective and childish. “I don’t know how to make you feel better.” I tell him. 
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He sighs and beckons me towards him. “C’mere.” He says, and when I hesitate he repeats himself. “C’mere.” I get out of my seat and walk around the table to stand in front of him. He slides his hands around my waist and links them at my back, and then rests his cheek against my belly. For a moment I’m not sure what he wants me to do with him, but he hums with approval as I lift a hesitant hand and run it through his hair, the dark roots an inch long now and the bleach turning brassy yellow, beginning to grow long over the tops of his ears. It’s so silent in the empty library, nothing but the buzz of the lightbulbs and the gentle whirr of Dean’s laptop fan. He lifts his head and kisses my ribs, gazing up at me with honey coloured eyes that I am immediately knee deep in. Despite the sharp anglesthere really is something so lovely about his face. He takes me by the hips and pulls me easily down onto his lap.
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“What?” I whisper. I stroke my thumbs over his dark brows and kiss him gently on his nose, and he looks back at me, eyes travelling over my body as he says “just let me kiss you.” He lifts my hands away from him, and the feeling of his fingers on my wrists makes my skin tingle with awareness. Heat flashes in his eyes and the weight of his gaze makes my breath catch in my throat, and when he kisses me he crushes his mouth against mine so suddenly that I want to gasp. He lets go of my wrists to hold my face and I’m free to touch him again, so I sink one hand into his thick hair while the other sweeps down his chest, then his hands grasp at my waist and pull me even closer to him. 
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“Is this helping?” I murmur as he begins kissing my throat, and I’m sure that he can feel the flutter of my pulse against his lips. 
“Mhm.” He says, and guides me backwards so that the table edge presses into the base of my spine. He lifts me off him so I’m sitting on it, impatiently shoving his laptop and his books out of the way to make some room. I pull back to look at him, enjoying the way that his gaze sweeps over me before he takes me by the jaw and kisses the side of my mouth, his hands travelling to my chest, breath shuddering out of his nose as he captures my mouth again. “The things I want to do to you…” He says between hungry kisses. “If I told you about them they’d make you blush.” He moves his hands underneath me so he can hold me to him, right in the place that he wants me, his knee sliding between my legs until I can feel his thigh…
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“Wait.” I whisper. 
His voice sounds hoarse and strained. “Evie… please.”
“We can’t be doing this here. Not in the library.”
He sighs against my collarbone and I feel him resign then, resting his forehead in the curve of my neck. His hands return to my waist. “Okay, it’s just, I think we should keep going.”
“And I think we need to stop.”
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He sighs heavily and slumps back into his chair, his mouth a little swollen from kissing me, his amber coloured eyes expectantly fixed on my face as if waiting for an explanation, and I don’t really know what to say, so I just repeat myself. “Not in the library.”
“If not in the library then where? This is where we always are lately.”
“It’s not true, we go to the park together, we’ve gone to the cinema and to the harbour that time.”
“If we did what I wanted us to do in any of those places then we’d be arrested.”
I feel my cheeks flushed with heat. “Oh, well, I know, but-”
“And I’m not allowed in your apartment either, you’ve made that clear, since you’re hiding me from your housemate, and you won’t come home to my house either.-”
“You live in Kilbarrack.” I reason. “It’s too far away.” He also lives with three very intimidating sounding men with intimidating nicknames, one in particular that they ominously call Bones who I don’t feel ready to be in the presence of.
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“So what do you want from me?” He insists, struggling to keep the impatience from his tone. The impatience that’s been steadily growing over recent weeks. “What is this to you?”
I hesitate. “We’re just getting to know each other.”
“We’re not really, not in the ways I want to get to know you. I just don’t get it. You’re so open with me about everything, your art, your family, your friend Kelly from school who was mean to you, why is it so easy for you to show me all those parts of you but when it comes to sex you’re a closed book?”
“Because that’s private. I’m the kind of person who likes to wait a while.”
He leans forward with his elbows on his knees and looks right up into my face from beneath me. “It’s been a while.” He tells me. “And I don’t get it.”
I cross my arms over my chest. “Why does it have to be all about that for you? Can’t we just keep doing what we’re doing?”
“No.” He says. “Because you aren’t my girlfriend.”
“So unless I’m your girlfriend, it’s impossible for you to care about parts of me that aren’t the ones hidden by my underwear?”
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“No, Evie.” He says, letting out this intense, frustrated little sound as he clenches his fist and throws his body back into the chair again. “Stop twisting everything and acting like the victim, I’m just asking you why you’re so closed. It’s not like you’re a virgin with no experience.”
I nod. 
“So is it something about me? Is there something off-putting?”
“No!” I cry. “It’s not that, it’s nothing to do with you at all, I just get nervous.” Distantly, I hear my phone buzz from inside the pocket of my coat that’s draped over the chair behind me. I ignore it. 
Dean continues. “So let’s have something to drink first, let’s just relax and I promise that I’ll be nice to you, I’m not trying to hurt you.”
“I know you’re not.” I say in a quiet voice, and he takes my hand, softening his expression as we interlace our fingers, his thumb gently stroking up and down the inner part of my wrist. “Look, Evie.” He says. “If you don’t want to, just say that, and it’ll be grand. I’m not here trying to force you to do anything. I was just asking the questions.”
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“I want to.” I say, and the way he looks at me makes my stomach lurch with anticipation and unease all at once. “But not right now, not tonight, and not here.”
“Okay.” He says, watching me carefully. 
“On Thursdays.” I swallow. “My housemate always stays over at her boyfriend’s house in Clonskeagh. I’ll be alone.”
“Thursday.”
“But if I chicken out and I don’t want to do it…”
“Obviously, Evie, then we don’t have to.” 
“Okay.”
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He smiles. “Look, I’m going to go home now, I’m tired of being in this building, I feel claustrophobic in it, and my neck hurts.” He stands up and I move out of his way as he snaps his laptop shut and begins gathering up all of his books to put them back onto their corresponding shelves. I stay leaning on the table and watch him as he does it. “It’s going to be fine.” I say, and he looks over his shoulder at me. “Your essay.” I clarify. “You’ll get it done.”
“Oh, that.” He says. “It’s just about the last thing on my mind.” Stuffing his laptop back into its case he says “My essay will be… whatever it ends up being, like. If I cared about it I’d probably be staying here longer. Here, are you gonna leave too? Do you want to walk to the bus together?”
“No, I think I’m going to stay another while and just finish up what I was doing.”
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“Fair enough. I’ll see you tomorrow, so.” He takes me by the neck and plants a kiss on my cheek. 
“Bye.” I say to him, and he waves over his shoulder as he exits through the swinging doors and is swallowed into the dark hallway. 
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Sighing, I resume my place in front of my laptop, jiggling my finger on the touchpad to wake it, and the screen flicks back to life and displays my bibliography in the exact disappointing state that I left it in. I start moving things around more, checking for spelling mistakes, and then I suddenly remember that I missed a message on my phone earlier, and eager for another chance to procrastinate I dive into my coat pocket for it. I feel my heart expand a little bit when I see a message from Jude. 
Rate me? 
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Following the message is a mirror selfie of him in his Top Gun costume. He’s doing a very Tom-Cruise-accurate pose, turned to the side with his shoulder to the mirror, his arm lifted to give a thumbs up to the camera, but also to show off the big red white and blue TOMCAT patch that he ironed onto the sleeve. We’ve talked extensively about this costume over recent weeks, trying to figure out the best ways to make it as authentic as possible, not because there’s a prize for the best costume or anything, but because, as Jude explains to me, he has an insatiable need to be the best at everything he does. 
“It’s a sickness.” He told me last week. “I absolutely cannot be outdone.”
I grin at the photo, feeling proud, and partly responsible for how well it turned out, seeing as I was the one who searched Ebay for three out of the six patches on that costume, getting a kick out of finding the ones most like those from the film and for the best prices.
Just to tease him, I text back:
6 out of 10. Where are the aviator shades??
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He replies just a moment later with another photograph, this time of him wearing them, doing a silly duck face. It looks like he’s out already, as there’s a handful of people around him out on the city streets, random arms and legs and elbows filling up the edges of the screen.
Happy? 
Yep, now that’s a 10 out of 10. 
Because it covers more of my face, is it?
Yes 100%, uggo. 
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And when he texts back again I forget all about my essay. Thumbs zooming over my phone keyboard, mouth quirked up in a smile as I think of a hundred clever things to say to him, texting, laughing and texting until my laptop screen gives up waiting for me and fades back to black. 
Beginning // Prev // Next
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marbleheavy · 3 months
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Books That Rocked My Shit and Should Be Added to Your 2024 TBR
i love love talking about the books i’ve read and as the year approaches it’s close, here is a list, in no particular order, of books that really did numbers on me and should be added to a new year tbr!! it’s a mix of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction/memoir
1. Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History RF Kuang
Robin Swift, a Cantonese orphan, is adopted by an Oxford professor and trained for years in linguistics and languages so he can become a student at Oxford University at the Royal Institute of Translation (Babel). Babel handles all of the British empires linguistic concerns and, most importantly, it’s magic. Silver bars are inscribed with words that mean the same thing in different languages and the meaning lost between the translation enchants the bad. At Babel, Robin befriends his class, three other non-traditional Oxford students, and starts to see how Babel is used to serve the empire. He gets involved with the Hermes society, an anti-imperialist secret society, and gets caught between them and Babel as Britain declares war on China.
You know this book was gonna be on this list. It’s actually kind of cheating because I read it for the first time last year but I did a reread this September and my god, it’s so stellar. It’s a very fresh concept that revolves around the classical and the tension between those two is just delicious. My post structuralist heart that believes our world is composed of language was just beating out of my chest this entire book. Oh!! And don’t even get my started on the alternate/sub/second title!!!!
2. Why Religion? by Elaine Pagels
Elaine Pagels is a scholar of religion who has done extensive research into early Christianity and Gnosticism, and is known for her involvement and study with the Nag Hammadi documents, a collection of texts discovered that are thought to be early Christian and gnostic gospels. Using her robust academic background, Pagels explores her personal relationship to religion through a series of essays in this memoir-esque book. She writes about her time being religions and non-religious as well as the profound hardship and grief that she experienced throughout her life that led her to ask “Why religion?” and find her own answer.
This book is phenomenal. I was introduced to it in a religion course I took this semester and it has fundamentally changed my relationship to religion, even as someone who considered themself to be more or less an atheist. Pagels’ writing is intelligent and poignant but not difficult to understand. This isn’t a scholarly work and I would call it more of a rumination than an argument. The main note I have for potential readers is that it is very Christo-centric and also doesn’t spend much time with biblical canon, but considering this is a memoir and not an attempt to rationalize religion for anyone other than Pagels herself, I was not put off by it.
3. Bad Fruit by Ella King
Chronicling Lily’s life after graduating high school and starting at Oxford, the book revolves around her relationship with her mother. Her mother, from Singapore and with a troubled past that Lily begins to understand, becomes increasingly erratic and unhinged. As she does, Lily follows in her footsteps as she seeks to appease her mother while also trying to break free from her control. The central mage in the book is a cup of spoilt orange juice that Lily always tastes first to make sure it’s right for her mother.
First off, fruit. You know I’m always down bad for a book with fruit is the main motif! This is such a fantastic book exploring mother-daughter relationships, inherited trauma, and cyclical abuse. It’s devastating but never heavy handed and the writing is really fantastic. I think about this book all the time and how every character is so well written and so intensely fallible but never denied humanity.
4. She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan
A fictionalized retelling of the Hongwu Emperor, the story follows a young girl who assumes the identity of her brother, Zhu Chongba, after he dies. The original Zhu was promised greatness and in the wake of his death and to survive alone, the new (and perhaps real) Zhu joins a monastery. The story is set during Red Turban Rebellions against the Mongolian Yuan Dynasty and after many years at the monastery, Zhu joins the Red Turbans and rises among the ranks all while she attempts to conceal her deception. The story also follows General Ouyang, a Mongolia general, as he struggles with his own status among the Mongols and his hatred for Zhu. The book follows the interpersonal struggles of the characters while the overarching war between the Red Turbans and the Mongols rages on and, often, intersects with the personal.
I read this book in two days and was just beside myself. My synopsis can’t even begin to cover the complexities of this book, it is trusty one of my favorites I’ve ever read. It is SO good. There were moments where I was left gaping at the page, I was so enthralled!! I’ve heard some people didn’t vibe with the pacing of the book because it spans so many years, but I read it’s o quickly that it wasn’t an issue for me. The way that gender and sexuality are handled in this book was so well done and very much a reminder that queerness and the experiences that come with it aren’t always able to be articulated, especially by contemporary language and labels. And the parallels between characters!! Zhu and Ouyang!!! I really don’t think anything I can say can do this book justice because it’s just fab. Really spectacular!!
5. Bright Dead Things by Ada Limón
Ada Limón is the current poet laureate of the United States and this is an earlier collection of hers. This poetry collection explores identity, place, and loss with an overarching feminist oomph. The books is in four sections, each embodying a different experience or theme but all interconnected. Limón’s writing is clear and vivid and her command of language is incredible.
This collection is fabulous! Although not my usual pick, Limón’s style radiates off the page and her skill is so obvious in every poem. She is so aware of space in all her poems and every word is picked with precision. Even in the moments of loss and grief that Limón writes about, her optimism is tangible and infectious. “How to Triumph Like a Girl” is one of my favorite poems ever and seeing it in context with the rest of the collection gives it so much more life. If you’re new to poetry, I would definitely check this out!! If you’re a regular poetry reader, you should also check this out!!
I have a million more books I want to talk about but this feels sufficient!! If you end up reading any of these or already have, PLEASE talk to me about it!! wishing you all a joyous and well read new year <3
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Down in the (link)dumps
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On September 27, I'll be at Chevalier's Books in Los Angeles with Brian Merchant for a joint launch for my new book The Internet Con and his new book, Blood in the Machine. On October 2, I'll be in Boise to host an event with VE Schwab.
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Back when I was writing on Boing Boing, I'd slam out 10-15 blog posts every day, short hits that served as signpost and public notebook, but I rarely got into longer analysis of the sort I do daily now on Pluralistic. Both modes are very useful for organizing one's thoughts, and indeed, they complement each other:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/
The problem is that when you write long, synthetic essays, they crowd out the quick hits. Back in May 2022, I started including three short links with each edition of Pluralistic, in a section called "Hey look at this" (thanks to Mitch Wagner for suggesting it!):
https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/01/reit-modernization-act/#linkdump
But even with that daily linkdump, I still manage to accumulate link-debt, as interesting things pile up, not rising to the level of a long blog-post, but not so disposable as to be easy to flush. When the pile gets big enough, I put out a Saturday Linkdump:
https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/
All of which is to say, it's Saturday, and I've got a linkdump!
First up, a musical interlude. I've been listening to DJ Earworm's amazing mashups since 2005 and while I've got dozens of tracks that shuffle in and out of my daily playlist, the one that makes me wanna get up and dance every time is "No One Takes Your Freedom," a wildly improbable banger composed of equal parts Aretha Franklin, The Beatles, George Michael and Scissor Sisters:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaboIeW1A_4
I defy you to play that one without bopping a little. I think it's the French horn from "For No One" that really kills it, the world's least expected intro to a heavy dance beat.
Moving swiftly on: let's talk about fonts. I remember when Wired magazine first showed up at the bookstores I was working at in Toronto, and my bosses – younger men than I am now! – complained that the tiny, decorative fonts, rendered in silver foil on a purple background, was illegible. I laughed at them, batting my young eyes and devouring the promise of a better future with ease, even in dim light.
Now it's thirty years later and I'm half-blind. Both my my decaying, aging eyes are filmed with cataracts that I'm too busy to get removed (though my doc promises permanent 20:20, perfect night-vision, and implanted bifocals when I can spare a month from touring with new books to get 'em fixed).
Which is to say: I spend a lot more time thinking about legibility now than I did in the early 1990s, and I've got a lot more sympathy for those booksellers' complaints about Wired's aggressively low-contrast design today. I'm forever on the hunt for fonts designed for high legibility.
This week, Kottke linked to B612, a free/open font family "designed for aircraft cockpit screens," commissioned by Airbus. It's got all the bells and whistles (e.g. hinting) and comes in variable and monospace faces:
https://b612-font.com/
B612 arrived at a fortuitous moment, coinciding with a major UI overhaul in Thunderbird, the app I spend the second-most time in (I spend more time in Gedit, the bare-bones text-editor that comes with Ubuntu, the flavor of GNU/Linux I use). A previous Thunderbird UI experiment had made all the UI text effectively unreadable for me, causing me to dive deep into the infinitely configurable settings to sub in my own fonts:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/UserChrome.css
The new UI is much better, but it broke all my old tweaks, so I went back into those settings and switched everything to B612, and it's amazeballs. I tried doing the same in Gedit, but B612 mono was too light for my shitty eyes, so I went back to Jetbrains Mono, another free/open font that has 8 weights to choose from:
https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/
Love me a new, legible font! Meanwhile, a note for all you designers: the received wisdom that black on white type is "hard on the eyes" is a harmful myth. Stop with the grey-on-white type, for the love of all that is holy. This isn't 1992, you aren't laying out type for Wired Issue 1.0. Contrast is good, actually.
Continuing on the subject of software updates: Mastodon, the free, open, federated social media platform that anyone can host and that lets you hop between one server and another with just a couple clicks, has released a major update, focusing on usability, especially for people unfamiliar with its conventions:
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/09/mastodon-4.2/
Included in this fix: a major overhaul to how you interact with posts on servers other than your home server. This was both confusing and clunky, and the fix makes it much better. They've also changed how sign-up flow works, making things simpler for newbies, and they've cleaned up the UI, tweaking threads, web previews and other parts of the daily experience.
There's also a lot of changes to search, but search still remains less than ideal, with multi-server search limited to hashtags. This is bad, actually. Thankfully, we don't have to wait for Mastodon devs to decide to fix it, because Mastodon is free and open, which means anyone with the skills to code a change, or the money to pay techies to do it, or the moral force to convince them to do it, can effect that change themselves:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/
Case in point: Mastoreader, a great new thread reader for Mastodon:
https://mastoreader.io/
Every time that guy who owns Twitter breaks it even worse, a new cohort of users sign up. Not all of them stay, but the growth is steady and the trendline is solid:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/11/of-course-mastodon-lost-users/
It's the right call: while there are other services that promise that they will be federated someday, promises are easy, and there's world of difference between "federateable" and "federated." As GW Bush told us, "Fool me twice, we don't get fooled again":
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/06/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again/
One big difference between the kind of blogging I used to do in my Boing Boing days and the long-form work I do today is the graphics. When you're posting 10-15 times/day, you can't make each graphic a standout (or at least, I can't). But I can (and do) devote substantial time to making a single collage out of public domain and Creative Commons graphics every day:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/25/a-year-in-illustration/
I am not a visual person – literally, I can barely see! – but my daily art practice has slowly made me a less-terrible illustrator. I got in some good licks this week, like this graphic for the UAW's new "Eight-and-Skate" work-to-rule program:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/21/eight-and-skate/#strike-to-rule
That graphic was fun because all the elements were from the public domain, or fair use. I love it when that happens. I've spent years amassing a bulging folder of public domain clip art ganked from the web and this week, it got a major infusion, thanks to the Bergen Public Library's Flickr album of high-rez scans of antique book endpapers. 86 public domain textures? Yes please! (Also, the fact that Flickr has one-click download of all the hi-rez versions of every image in a photoset is another way that it stands out as a remnant of the old, good web, not so much a superannuated relic as an elegant weapon of a more civilized age):
https://www.flickr.com/photos/bergen_public_library/albums/72157633827993925
Speaking of strikes: there are strikes! Everygoddamnedwhere! After 40 years in a Reagan-induced coma, labor is back, baby. The Cornells School of Industrial and Labor Relations' Labor Action Tracker is your go-to, real-time observation post as hot labor summer turns into the permanent revolution. As of this writing, it's listing 968 labor actions in 1491 locations:
https://striketracker.ilr.cornell.edu
There's no war but class war and it was ever thus. Brian Merchant's forthcoming book Blood In the Machine is a history of the Luddites, revisiting that much-maligned labor uprising, which has been rewritten as a fight between technophobes and the inevitable forces of progress:
https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/brian-merchant/blood-in-the-machine/9780316487740/
The book unearths the true history of the Ludds: they were skilled technologists who were outraged by capital's commitment to immiseration, child slavery, and foisting inferior goods on a helpless public. You can get a long preview of the book in Fast Company:
https://www.fastcompany.com/90949827/what-the-luddites-can-teach-us-about-standing-up-to-big-tech
Merchant also talked with Roman Mars about the book on the 99 Percent Invisible podcast:
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/blood-in-the-machine/transcript/
If that's piqued your interest and if you can make it to Los Angeles, come by Chevalier's Books this Wednesday, where Brian and I are having a joint book-launch (I've just published The Internet Con, my Luddite-adjacent "Big Tech Disassembly Manual"):
https://www.eventbrite.com/o/chevaliers-books-8495362156
Where is all this labor unrest coming from? Well as Stein's Law has it, "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop." 40 years of corporate-friendly political economy has lit the world on fire and immiserated billions, and we've hit bottom and started the long, slow climb to a world that prioritizes human thriving over billionaire power.
One of the most tangible expressions of that vibe shift is the rise and rise of antitrust. The big news right now is the (first) trial of the century, Google's antitrust trial. What's that? You say you haven't heard anything about it? Well, perhaps that has to do with the judge banning recording and livestreaming and not making transcripts available. Don't worry, he's also locking observers out of his courtroom for hours at a time during closed testimony. Oh, and also? The DoJ just agreed that it won't post its exhibits from the trial online anymore. You can follow what dribbles of information as are emerging from our famously open court system at US v Google:
https://usvgoogle.org/trial-update-9-22
If the impoverished trickle of Google antitrust news has you down, don't despair, there's more coming, because the FTC is apparently set to drop its long-awaited suit against Amazon:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ftc-poised-sue-amazon-antitrust-163432081.html
Amazon spent years blowing hundreds of millions of dollars of its investors' cash, selling goods below cost and buying up rivals until it became the most important channel for every kind of manufacturer to reach their customers. Now, Amazon is turning the screws. A new report from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance details the 45% Amazon Tax that every merchant pays to reach you:
https://ilsr.org/AmazonMonopolyTollbooth-2023/
That 45% tax is passed on to you – whether or not you shop at Amazon. Amazon's secretive most favored nation terms mean that if a seller raises their price on Amazon, they have to raise it everywhere else, which means you're paying more at WalMart and Target because of Amazon's policies.
Those taxes are bad for us, but they're good for Amazon's investors. This year, the company stands to make $185 billion from junk-fees charged to platform sellers. As David Dayen points out, Amazon charges so much to ship third-party sellers' goods that it fully subsidizes Amazon's own shipping:
https://prospect.org/power/2023-09-21-amazons-185-billion-pay-to-play-system/
That's right: as Stacy Mitchell writes in the report, "Amazon doesn’t have to build warehousing and shipping costs into the price of its own products, because it’s found a way to get smaller online sellers to pay those costs."
Now, one of the amazing things about antitrust coming back from the grave is that just the threat of antitrust enforcement can moderate even the most vicious bully's conduct. Faced with the looming FTC case, Amazon just canceled its plan to charge even more junk fees:
https://www.reuters.com/legal/amazon-drops-planned-merchant-fee-ftc-lawsuit-looms-bloomberg-news-2023-09-20/
But despite this win, Amazon is still speedrunning the enshittification cycle. The latest? Unskippable ads in Prime Video:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-22/amazon-prime-video-content-to-include-ads-staring-early-2024
Remember when Amazon promised you ad-free video if you'd lock yourself into shopping with them by pre-paying for a year's shipping with Prime? The company has fully embraced the Darth Vader MBA: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it further."
That FTC case can't come a moment too soon.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/23/salmagundi/#dewey-102
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youre-ackermine · 2 months
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Hi Val
1. Who are your top three favorite attack on titan characters? Why?
12. Favorite titan shifter (female titan, war hammer, armored, etc)?
15. Free space: What can you say about your OTP?
Thank you for your reply
Hi Kiyoshi ✨
Thanks for your questions!
<><><><><>
1- Who are your top three favorite attack on titan characters? Why?
I already answered here.
12- Favorite titan shifter (female titan, war hammer, armored, etc)?
My favourite titan is the War Hammer Titan, hands down. Elegant & thin, it doesn't use brute force to fight but rather its special abilities. Being able to bring any weapon you need into shape is a superior skill imo.
As much as most of the Titan Shifters are interesting characters (I think about Reiner's turmoils & fascinating double personality for example), my favourite is Pieck. She's loyal, kind & caring towards the Warrior candidates or the soldiers who work with her, she's smart & composed. Well, maybe she reminds me a bit of Levi in some aspects of her characterization.
15- Free space: What can you say about your OTP?
Ah Levihan [sigh] 💚💜
I could write an essay about them! Two great, amazing characters! I love them with all my heart as individuals, as friends & as a ship. You can't imagine the impact they have on my everyday life. They're my comfort characters. Their relationship is so deep & amazing, they understand, support, help, complete each other. They work perfectly as a team. They care for each other deeply. They can be themselves when they're together.
(+ they're both gorgeous & sexy af!)
For me, Levihan is everything ❤️
<><><><><>
Have a nice weekend ✨
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wishingicouldfly · 1 year
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Harry Styles is a Mermaid
Disclaimer: I am sure I’m not the first to report and share these links and images. I thought people would find this interesting, so I’m sharing my foray down this rabbit hole. I’d welcome any additional links or thoughts related to Mermaids and the LGBTQ community.
If you know anyone that should be credited for pictures here, let me know. None of them belong to me.
***
In November 2014, Harry Styles had the image of a mermaid tattooed on his left forearm. The bare-chested siren joined multitudes of other nautical themed tattoos that litter his body. 
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A few days after the new tat appeared, he responded to a question at a meet and greet. 
“I am a Mermaid,” he said. 
I started the research on this post when I saw the gif with his quote about being a mermaid. Rest below the cut.
Harry Styles’ Mermaid Tattoo — The Real Reason Behind His New Ink – Hollywood Life 
I’m not going to tell you why he said he’s a mermaid. I don’t know what it means to him. I have no idea. Maybe he simply likes mermaids. Maybe he feels like it matches the themes of his and Louis’ other nautical tattoos. I can't pretend to know.
“Mermaid” as a theme, though, has a decades long association with the LGBTQ community. And I think that’s interesting in light of the imagery that Harry himself has shared and seems to connect to.
Like, that time he wore a shirt with a famous line from The Little Mermaid.
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Or in 2019, when he dressed as Ariel for a Saturday Night Live photoshoot.
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Did Harry Styles REALLY say 'I am a mermaid'? Truth behind viral photo and his Ariel look for 'SNL' | MEAWW 
Or his his whole video for Music for a Sushi Restaurant: 
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I’ve seen the Little Mermaid probably dozens of times. My child and I watched it a lot when she was growing up. And while I always knew it was an allegory for being different, I didn’t think about the deeper meaning as it relates to the LGBTQ community until more recently.
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According to this article from the Smithsonian, 
The central story of The Little Mermaid is, of course, 16-year-old Ariel’s identity crisis. She feels constrained by her patriarchal mer-society and senses she doesn’t belong. She yearns for another world, apart from her own, where she can be free from the limits of her rigid culture and conservative family. Her body is under the water, but her heart and mind are on land with people. She leads a double life. She is, essentially, “in the closet” (as symbolized by her “cavern”—or closet—of human artifacts, where the character-building song “Part of Your World” takes place).
Source: 'The Little Mermaid' Was Way More Subversive Than You Realized | Arts & Culture| Smithsonian Magazine  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/little-mermaid-was-way-more-subversive-you-realized-180973464/
The Disney version was written by writer-producer-lyricist Howard Ashman and composer Alan Menken. 
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The character of Ursula, though, is the real LGBTQ icon. “Conceived by Ashman, Ursula is based on the famous cross-dressing performer Divine, who was associated with the openly gay filmmaker John Waters. As scholar Laura Sells explained in a 1995 anthology of essays, Ursula’s “Poor Unfortunate Souls” song is essentially a drag show instructing the naive mermaid on how to attract Prince Eric (who is conspicuously uninterested in Ariel and most content at sea with his all-male crew and manservant Grimsby). “In Ursula’s drag scene,” Sells wrote, “Ariel learns that gender is performance; Ursula doesn’t simply symbolize woman, she performs woman.” (same source as above).
A gay man in 1980s America, Ashman had personal experience with the culture wars over “family values” and gay rights. The “Reagan Revolution” marked the arrival of the long-brewing marriage of the Republican Party with conservative Christians and included a platform that was unfriendly to gay rights, to say the least. President Reagan ignored the AIDS epidemic that swept the nation (refusing to appropriate any federal funds for research or treatment), and Republicans in general claimed the “gay plague” was God’s punishment for homosexuality. Ashman saw the film as an opportunity to advance a social message through the medium of “family entertainment.” The last thing Americans would expect from Disney was a critique of patriarchy, but sure enough, Ashman’s The Little Mermaid is a gutsy film about gender and identity—a far cry from the staid Disney catalog. (same source).
Anyone who was around in 2015 knows about RBB/SBB. But if you didn’t, the Rainbow Bears (RBB/SBB, largely assumed to be created and curated by Harry and Louis) mentioned Divine on December 1, 2015. Just after they posted about her, Harry tweeted a lyric that alluded to Divine. See below. 
Credit to @SkepticalLarrie
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There’s a whole other rabbit hole you can go down about John Waters (openly gay film director) and Divine and Pink Flamingos (Pink Flamingos: A Queer Beginner’s Guide to Family, Style and Not Giving a Sh*t | by Joe Corr | Medium. https://mandysweats.medium.com/pink-flamingos-a-queer-beginners-guide-to-family-style-and-not-giving-a-sh-t-fa9aa3e6c96f
Here’s another article that talks about The Little Mermaid being important to the LGBT community.
How The Little Mermaid Found A Place In The Hearts Of LGBTQ Fans | HuffPost UK Entertainment (huffingtonpost.co.uk) 
There was a lot of speculation about Harry being potentially cast as Prince Eric in a live action version of the Little Mermaid. I’m not sure how serious those rumors were, but I can imagine based on all of this research, that he might have found the Prince wasn’t the character he related to most.
Harry Styles fans upset over 'Little Mermaid' reports | CNN https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/14/entertainment/harry-styles-little-mermaid-trnd/index.html
To go even further down the rabbit hole, go all the way back to the original story. The Hans Christian Anderson version has a tragic ending, that doesn’t end with the mermaid happily ever with the prince. There is some speculation that the story was an allegory for an unrequited love that Anderson had toward a straight acquaintance.
The Little Mermaid Is Really About Unrequited Gay Love | by Tamara Mitrofanova | Lessons from History | Medium 
I also want to point out that Mermaids is a UK based charity organization, that “supports transgender, nonbinary and gender-diverse children and young people until their 20th birthday, as well as their families and professionals involved in their care.” About Mermaids - Mermaids (mermaidsuk.org.uk) https://mermaidsuk.org.uk/about-us/
All of this could be coincident to the true purpose behind what Harry’s tattoo means to him. We will likely never know its exact meaning to him. 
But as time passes, and we see Harry waving various LGBTQ flags and hinting at being in the community himself, I think it might bear remembering that he said he WAS a mermaid. And I think that’s beautiful, Harry.
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m0r1bund · 11 months
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another mile-long sketchpost, huh, lore. image captions and essays about the walking existential nightmare are under the cut. Read on below or at m0r1bund.com ▶︎
[Images: Many many sketches of Frey and the Oracle of Caeres.
The first few doodles show a very different Oracle than we’re used to. Row 1 depicts the Oracle in digital ink washes. She’s a black silhouette, hanging from the ceiling by a great mass of wires and threads. They fan out from her head like hair, chaining her to her surroundings. She’s posed differently in each vignette: hanging upright, bound with her hands behind her back, and reversed, like the ‘hanged man’ tarot card.
The next drawings show an Oracle who has seen better days. He looks more like a shambling wraith than his typical well-groomed self, with singed robes, cracked glasses, and a grisly gash across the chest that exposes his ribcage. His face is gaunt, cheeks hollowed out like a mechanical mask. Most striking is his hair, which fans out in all directions like a maze of red arteries, reaching beyond the borders of the page.
The Oracle is a little more put-together in the next doodle, although her hair is still an unruly web of threads and wires. Frey charges bravely into the mess, brandishing a brush. Kairos looks uncharacteristically concerned about this as her hair envelopes her.
Following shortly is a drawing of Frey with a fistful of the Oracle’s hair, which she diligently brushes. The Oracle buries his face in a pillow, looking nervous. He says “You’re taking out the entire CIN-38 annex… My surveillance arrays will take weeks to recalibrate…”
A nearby sketch shows Frey with a flathead screwdriver, negotiating with some exposed machinery in the Oracle’s stomach. The Oracle glances away and fingercombs her hair tersely.
The last bit of tomfoolery shows a more typical Oracle of Caeres, who is cracking an amused smile at Frey. Frey seems to have weaseled her way out of prison, but not the binds on her wrists. The Oracle comments “My, my, all tied up by the strings of fate.” Without warning, Frey whips around and tries to headbutt the Oracle. He steps out of the way, unfazed.
Finally, there are some sharp, graphical drawings of Frey and the Oracle. They’re rendered in black and white, with splashes of red and yellow.
The first drawing shows Frey breaking free of a birdcage, while the scar over her eye is still fresh and bleeding. She’s composed so that she fits neatly into the negative space of the broken cage. Behind her, yellow canary wings are drawn on tangents with her outstretched arms, and two geometric feathers lie under the cage.
The second drawing shows the Oracle, hovering in the center of the page. She is a black silhouette with no expression behind her circular glasses lenses. Her hair fans out around her in blood red, neatly snaking around the contorted silhouettes of several Archivists. They’re in agony, limbs locked at unnatural angles as they cry out. Each one is speared through the chest by a single, red hair. ]
◆◆◆
Was playing around with the idea of the Oracle being a secutor in disguise, but then I went back and forth on it for a while, because it ruins the fun of her being unknowable. But also it's whatever, it literally does not matter and I’m having fun thinking about it. Maybe the Oracle of Caeres should submit to the Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known. Maybe that would fix her.
I’m not 100% sold on who he is or where he came from. I think it would be funny if he was some warlord’s court wizard advisor who failed upwards by making the most outlandish predictions that somehow came true, and now everyone expects him to know things, but his deep dark secret is that he has zero predicative power and is just making shit up as he goes. Orrrr maybe even he can’t explain why this gift came to him, or how he got here.
Either way, the Empire eventually became unhappy with the idea that their puppet might someday die, or retire, or try to run away. So they did back-alley surgery on him and entombed him in an estate-sized prison-computer for 4763654837573 years.
To improve her intuition, she was hooked up to the most sophisticated surveillance array known to man, i.e. the red strings of fate, i.e. bad cable management, i.e. her ‘hair.’ Each thread is an individual sampling instrument so sensitive she can feel a pin drop on the other side of the known universe. Thousands of them are trained in every direction, on just about everything worth knowing. With these, she collects the massive amounts of data needed to run her complicated models and make predictions.
The threads are also tools of manipulation. They can slip unnoticed through skin and bone, and join with nerve tissue to send false signals or intercept neural impulses. This augments her foresight with an uncanny sense for what’s going on inside the heads of those around her. That said, it’s tricky to take readings without alerting the victim that something is wrong. Incoming signals can rarely be parsed in detail, beyond flickering images or vague emotional impressions. This kind of surveillance is often unnecessary, anyway, when the Oracle’s methods of indirect sampling are more accurate and reliable.
It’s also much easier to “read” someone's biomechanical augmentations than their nervous system. Convenient that these modifications are so popular in the Archive, because the Oracle needs to watch his back around other Archivists the most. On the flip side, this means that unmodified individuals are like black boxes to him—not worth the trouble of such invasive sampling.
Outgoing signals are even less precise. The Oracle’s power of suggestion is real, but it’s not accomplished by pulling strings. It is very difficult to mask these signals as normal impulses, and on the whole it feels Very bad and Very wrong to be puppeted around by them. Really, the most he does with them is change his appearance (a honed skill; virtually nobody notices that anything is different) or make people go away (no need to practice, because the discomfort is the point.)
Incidentally, there’s nobody left who remembers what she did before she dabbled in soothsaying. What happened to them? Don’t worry about it.
…She’s kind of subsuming the ghost at this rate LOL
◆◆◆
Have also been rotating Frey in my brain. She’s a little weird because, like Reyes, she’s one of the few Imperials with no biomechanical augmentations. Initially I was like “well, that’s a fun coincidence.” But then I extrapolated, because of course I did.
Normally you accumulate modifications over time, in her line of work. The ceaseless, grinding machines inevitably claim bits and pieces of the engineers who work on them, what with the famously ethical labor practices of the Empire. Even without some kind of grisly workplace accident, it’s desirable to get rid of your squishy bits, because it makes you more useful.
For this reason, I think Frey started out as a proverbial canary in the coal mine. Without any biomechanics to protect her, she would have served as an early warning system for gas leaks, radiation, and other environmental hazards.
It’s morbid work, but there’s tradeoffs that make it appealing to some. For one, it was in everyone’s best interest that she didn’t die. She also received better healthcare than probably everyone on the factory floor, and the chop docs were even discouraged from doing any ‘experimental operations’ when nobody was looking. On the flip side, the foreman won’t wait for you just because you don’t have the PPE your peers do. Frey would have to do 10x the work, 10x faster, 10x riskier just to keep up.
How does she feel about all that?
… Eh.
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