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maviezz · 1 month

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˚₊‧ა ☆ ໒ ‧₊˚Jealousy (Steve Raglan x fem!reader)

tags: smut, oral(m receiving), pet names, jealous william, fluff,

note: Steve’s quite subby here hehe. reader is in her early twenties, Steve on his mid-late forties. This contains mature content.

Word count: 1.4k

I stumbled upon the counseling center job almost by accident. Fresh out of college with a degree in psychology, I was eager to put my knowledge into practice. But job opportunities in the field were scarce, and I found myself settling for a position that was mediocre at best and not so well-paid.

As I settled into my role at the counseling center, I quickly realized that while the job might not have been the most glamorous, it had its perks. One of them was Steve Raglan, my boss. Tall, with a confident demeanor and a penchant for gold aviator glasses. His salt and pepper locks adorned his beard and hair, adding to his allure. He was the epitome of charisma.

Our relationship started off strictly professional, but as time went on, there was an undeniable chemistry between us. The more we worked together, the more I found myself drawn to his magnetic personality and charm.

Despite our best efforts to keep things purely professional, and also considering the fact that he was almost as old as my own father— it became increasingly difficult to ignore the growing attraction between us. Eventually, we couldn't resist the pull any longer, and our professional relationship blossomed into something more, resulting in a romantic relationship that neither of us saw coming.

"Steve, is everything good?" I asked, my tone laced with a hint of worry. I had come to his office to deliver some expedients, but I noticed he was silent, quiet even. It was highly unusual coming from someone as charismatic and outgoing as him.

"Yeah, everything's fine," Steve replied with a forced smile, but there was a hint of tension in his voice that I couldn't ignore. He glanced away, avoiding my gaze, which only added to my concern.

His response seemed a bit off, and as I glanced at him, I could tell that something was bothering him. Despite his attempt to reassure me with a faint smile, there was a tension in his voice that hinted at underlying distress.

“Are you sure everything's okay, love?" I pressed gently, my concern growing as I observed his troubled expression. "You seem a little... off today."Steve sighed, running a hand through his graying locks, his usual charisma momentarily faltering

“Yeah, I'm fine," he replied, but his words lacked conviction. "Just dealing with some stuff. Don’t worry, princess."I hesitated, debating whether to push further or respect his privacy. But as I met his troubled gaze, I knew I couldn't simply ignore his obvious distress.

"Steve, come on, just tell me what’s wrong," I urged gently, leaning in closer. "We’re supposed to trust each other, right?" My tone was soft but firm, conveying my sincerity and willingness to listen. I could sense his hesitation, but I hoped my words would encourage him to open up.

Steve shifted uncomfortably in his chair, avoiding my gaze. "It's nothing, really," he muttered, but I could see the turmoil behind his eyes.I sighed, sensing that there was more to it than he was letting on.

“Honey, look at me," I said firmly, gently tilting his chin up to meet my gaze. "I care about you, and I want to understand what's going on. You can talk to me."After a moment of silence, Steve finally spoke, his voice barely above a whisper.

“I just... I can't help but feel insecure sometimes," he admitted, his vulnerability catching me off guard. "I see all these younger guys around, and I can't help but wonder why you're with an old guy like me."

My heart ached at his confession, my lips curved into a soft grin, offering him a reassuring smile.

“Steve, you're not just 'an old guy' to me," I said sincerely. "You're kind, intelligent, and incredibly attractive. Age has nothing to do with it. I'm with you because I care about you, and I want to be with you."As I spoke, I could see the tension in Steve's shoulders begin to ease

"But—" Steve began, his voice trailing off, but I gently cut him short, placing a finger on his lips to silence him."No 'buts,' Steve," I said firmly, meeting his eyes with unwavering determination.

"I'll make sure you understand how much I love you," I whispered, my voice filled with sincerity, though laced with a hint of desire.Feeling overwhelmed with emotion, I slowly knelt down in front of him, maintaining eye contact as I reached for both of his thighs, slowly running my hands up and down over his pants, tickling the skin underneath

delicate fingers dug into the fabric of his pants, causing a shiver down his spine, making his cock twitch in its confines. "I’ll suck the jealousy out of you" I murmured sensually, my words coming out sweet and honey coated. My tiny hands slowly slipped inside his pants, grasping firmly at his leaky and aching erection.

"Look at you, could a younger guy possibly compare to this?" I asked in a low voice, barely above a whisper, as I leaned in closer. My hands continued to explore, tracing the contours of his length with gentle fingers, sliding my fist back and forth over the length of his arousal while running the pad of my thumb over the tip, collecting his sticky fluids for a taste.

"H-Hng~, Honey..." Steve panted loudly, clawing at the armrests of the chair, tighter and tighter...eyes rolling back into his head with an audible groan.

The hair on his forehead was damp with sweat and stuck to his skin, the small droplets of moisture dripping onto his face. His breathing was short and rapid, his body trembling under the exertion, his breaths coming in short, shallow gasps as I ran my tongue over every single inch of him—one hand stroking his swollen and sensitive balls while i bobbed my head eagerly.

The smell of sweat was growing thicker, permeating the atmosphere and making it feel heavy and oppressive. His breathing was becoming visibly more rapid and shallow, small whines and groans filled the room alongside lewd and wet sounds as my hands and mouth worked their magic on his aching dick.

"Does it feel good, honey?” I purred playfully as I pulled away from his length. my chin coated in saliva as I looked at him with a naughty, almost teasing grin on my face.

"F-fuck…oh God, yes..." Steve panted out a breath, spreading his legs further for more access. His entire body was tense with the exertion of each movement, the heat growing between us becoming intense. He could feel himself growing harder—if it was even possible— as he looked at me, each movement and breath he took becoming more passionate. “I’m gonna cum..”

his fingers tangled in my messy hair, guiding my movements to a certain extent. His grip was firm, yet gentle, he was holding my head with authority, while he was also encouraging me to take him deeper into my throat. I could sense him enjoying the pleasure I was giving him, encouraging me to go deeper until my nose made contact with his pelvic floor.

his hips bucked slightly, it was a clear signal that he was about to reach his peak. I could tell from the way he was moving and the sounds he was making, his body tensing and his breath coming in short gasps. I redoubled my efforts, taking him deeper and hollowing my cheeks harder to intensify the suction.

“Oh m-mhm~ princess” His body lurched forward, his muscles tensing and his body twisting slightly. A louder moan echoed throughout the room, the wet and sloppy noises growing louder as his thrusting became more erratic and sporadic. His body started to convulse slightly, his body jerking suddenly as he reached his climax. Thick and heavy ropes of cum coating my mouth and throat. the sweet and tangy taste enveloping my senses.

“Oh, baby…”I gently pulled away from him, standing up on my feet. His body now lay there limp and relaxed, his hair messy with a few strands sticking out of place. His lips were swollen and red from biting on them, his cheeks flushed from the intensity of the blowjob. He was panting heavily, a wide grin painted on his face as he came back down to reality. He laid there motionless, taking a moment to regain his breath and come back down to his normal state.

"Was this enough to reassure you, love?" I said with a softer giggle, unable to hold back the reaction to his messy and disheveled form.

And oh yes, it definitely did reassure him.

#william afton smut #william afton #steve raglan #steve raglan smut #fnaf #five nights at freddy's #william afton x you #steve raglan x you #William afton fluff

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mixelation · 6 months

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i love the minato in iwa snippet, but i gotta ask, how the hell did team 4 deal with that??? logically they know he’s a badass kage and all, but he has the presence of a baby kitten and a backbone of wet tissue paper, itachi at least seemed to be silently freaking out a bit there, but what about tori? deidara????

at this point none of them actually know what minato did, but all three of them are ready to go nuclear themselves. so when minato goes off, itachi just kind of assumes..... an itachi level of violence? he's freaked out by the sudden reminder minato could bend him into a pretzel if he wanted, but itachi also grew up with him and considers him relatively safe, so he's not as freaked out as he could be

for expediency i deleted some dialogue at the end. basically, minato was like "okay, who wants to go home, and who wants to go for a walk with me???" and deidara was like ME I WANT TO DO WHATEVER HORRIBLE THING TO IWA!!!!! and tori's exact wording was "ew." deidara is SO into fucking up iwa he gives zero thought to minato besides "cool, a coconspirator." tori does not get a thrill out of direct violence and she's too paranoid about being eaten alive to be like "oh worm you want this insane blood seal i have been able to do this whole time???" but at the same time in her brain she's still a glorified civilian and she doesn't differentiate between the danger minato poses vs itachi or deidara or even a rando jounin because she assumes once the power gap is big enough it's functionally the same as even bigger power gaps.

i think a team 4 debrief session would be fun though, to get everyone's reaction of "uuuum what the fuck, hokage-sama :)" and then also make minato unpack some of the insane bullshit team 4 did prior to his arrival. for example tori and deidara went out of their to befriend kurotsuchi, which is very darkly funny in hindsight. tori intentionally befriended mangetsu for strategic reasons and then cashed in her "manipulate the boy who likes you" card by weeping to him about how iwa kidnapped her sensei so kisame/kiri gets the story before iwa invents a justification. same people's limbs were melted off and a lot of brains were scrambled. in hindsight iwa was definitely trying to kill them IN the exam and none of them noticed until specifically asked about it. kushina reveals that despite being an active field jounin, she's never stayed the night in the hospital or had an IV, and this is the most insane revelation of the night

#kushina: well no i stayed overnight once when minato was stuck here but that doesn't count bc i wasn't a patient #itachi: oh was he sick or there from a war injury?#kushina: lmao nah i put him there #itachi:#itachi: you...... what #(if their positions were reversed in iwa... kushina would have done worse :) )#reborn au

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tallerthantale · 4 months

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What Does Aziraphale Actually Believe, Part 1: What Does it Mean to Believe Something?

To a large portion of the fandom, there has been a struggle to process many of the things Aziraphale has said and done. We look for ways to make sense of how he acts, and get frustrated by how the things he says contradict themselves. For someone with a background in cognitive psychology, the self contradictory nature of Aziraphale is not particularly surprising.

This is the first of a series of ten posts. Most posts will be going through the events of the story in chorological order. This first post is extra long and entirely psychology foundation, but I would strongly recommend reading through it, and if you can find the time after, I'd really recommend going through the links as well.

We are going for a bit of an adventure through about 3k words on the nature of consciousness, optical illusions, the dress, memory, false memories, unconscious bias, autism, trauma, cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, conspiracy theorists, propaganda, and deradicalisation.

This is from the perspective of cognitive psychology not clinical, it will not improve your mental health, and it has the potential to induce an existential crisis or several but it is worth it. Knowing how our minds work has a lot of utility beyond understanding Aziraphale, though making sense of him is hopefully a fun motivation.

Because I really am this much of a pedant, I’m going to quickly address the elephant in the room: Aziraphale does not have a human brain. However, since his behaviour lines up with real life human behaviour I’m going to approach this as if his mind essentially runs the way a human brain would run a mind, because that is how the story is written.

What is Consciousness?

Most of what our minds perceive, judge, interpret, think, remember, feel, ect… occurs in a mental space we have no perception of, often called the subconscious. Most people will have heard the term before, but I think most people misunderstand the scale of it and the power of it. The ongoing questions about consciousness vs. subconciousness aren’t in the form of ‘is the subconscious really a thing?’ No, the modern question is to what extent is consciousness really a thing?

Consciousness is an experience. What we think of as ourselves, the ‘central executive,’ the entity that we perceive ourselves to be, is a conglomeration of memories, thoughts, judgements, perceptions, and feelings that the rest of our mind produces for us to have at that moment in time. Much of it is approximately real, much of it is wholly fabricated to suit the moment. This is because there are major gaps in how much we can realistically perceive, understand, and remember at any particular point. It would be outrageously burdensome to actually process and load all the information for real, so our minds make up short hands and approximations for expediency, and feed that to us in a manner we experience as if it was directly perceived reality. That's a lot to throw at you, so I'm going to break it down.

Perception is an Assumption

To help get across how blended the construct of our experience is, let's consider the visual field. That is the representation of what we are seeing, or what we experience ourselves as seeing. Only a very small area in the centre of our vision is able to sense detail. The rest is only sensing vague cues of large scale changes. But we don’t perceive it that way, because we remember the detail that was there the last time the centre of our vision passed over that space, and our minds guess what details were probably there if we haven’t looked for a while. When something changes in an area we are constructing from memory and inference, we don't notice. The parts of our visual field that we are seeing in real time, and the parts that our mind constructs based on what it assumes is probably there are in no way distinct within our conscious experience, and that lets us navigate the world much more smoothly. The vast majority of what we visually perceive is constructed from memories and guesses. If those constructions weren’t incorporated into our vision, we would be massively visually impaired.

Even for things we are seeing with detailed vision, we rely heavily on contextual cues that make assumptions we don’t realise we are making. (If you only follow one link in this post, follow that one, it's a 43 second video.) Consider that objects that are a solid colour are not a solid colour in terms of the wavelengths bouncing off of them, as they get hit by light sources and have highlights and shadows. The distinction between seeing blue because that is the wavelength that hit the retina, and seeing blue because the greyish blend that hit the retina was coming from a sunny patch, and you can infer that the object was blue from the context, is seamless. Unless the context is missing, and that grey might actually be a white object in a shadow. Then it might be all seamlessly white in the visual field, just as if it was white light entering the retina. And that's how millions of people saw a blue and black dress, millions of people saw a white and gold dress, but very few people saw a grey and brown dress. Yes, the actual dress was blue, but my point is that the pixels weren’t. Bluish grey light hit all our retinas, but half of the viewers had a dark blue object appear in their visual field and half had a white one appear.

It is important to keep in mind that the vast majority of the time these context cues, assumptions, inferences, ect… put together a construct that works really well. The amount of resources required to keep our minds running is enormous and the size of our heads is a serious safety issue for people giving birth, even with all the energy saving assumptions and shortcuts. Given how much of our experience of reality is effectively an educated guess, we really are getting it right most of the time. Our minds are really good at what they do, these processes exist because it is adaptive to have them. Try to remember that, because it is going to be hard to hold on to that perspective as I move on from sensation and perception.

Working Memory

Our conscious experience is constructed for everything. Our thoughts, opinions, memories, that we have ‘with awareness’ is limited to what is, in that moment, loaded into a conceptual mental workspace called working memory, that can typically load about 7 things at a time. We can bring things from the larger library of remembered things into working memory by asking the part of our minds outside of our conscious awareness to give us the thing, and most of the time it will. But recall doesn’t always work. If the parts of our mind outside of awareness don't feed a thing into working memory, we can’t experience it, and they can feed something into our working memory if we want it there or not. The edges of what we think because it represents a coherent well considered world view consistent with our principles and values, and what we think because our minds fed it to us out of expediency or habit are just as seamless as the construct of our visual field.

Things that do enter into our awareness are often altered by the time they get there by influences that are not reported to our conscious experience. Most of the shifts are within the category of cognitive bias, and are not considered to be pathological, because allistic people have most of them to a substantial degree as a default.

There is a long list of identified types of cognitive bias. Learning about cognitive biases doesn't stop people from having them, because it isn't the conscious mind that has the bias. The information we perceive as the raw facts has already been edited by the bias before it is loaded into our working memory awareness.

We often give ourselves the impression that when our thoughts, opinions, and ideas are moved out of working memory, they are preserved for us in an archived state, and returned to our consciousness later as we left them. There is no basis for that. Memories are incomplete, fade over time, and are reconstructed to appear whole through inference the same as our visual field every time we recall them. Each recall reworks them a bit more, and with the right sort of nudge, they can be substantially altered.

Autistic people are resistant to cognitive bias, but not immune. In the field of psychology that resistance is often referred to as autistic people having a 'failure to engage top-down processing' which makes me roll my eyes into my skull, because that is essentially saying 'a failure to be cognitively biased.' The irony of that is not the whole picture though.

Just like how optical illusions happen due to the fact that the visual field is constructed mostly out of really good guesses because we can't process the full information in real time, cognitive biases exist because of the shortcuts we take that make quick thinking possible. Autistic people think more accurately, but we do it by processing a mountain of information exhaustively, and that doesn't happen in a timely fashion. When I say exhaustively I mean it in every sense of the word, and we can't turn it off for expediency even if we wanted to. There are life situations where that really is disabling, particularly when we are exposed to mass sensory information.

So far we have been talking about non pathological biases, errors, and limitations. Pathology is not required for us to end up with a heavily distorted picture of reality, and when mental illness is involved it is exaggerating the downsides of cognitive mechanisms that are present in everyone generally. These are differences of degree, not of kind. Predictable patterns of biased perception and thinking associated with symptoms of mental illness are referred to as cognitive distortions.

As much as our minds can feed us altered things to believe for expediency, they can withhold others. If it isn’t helpful to have this particular belief right now, or this particular value in this situation, our minds can fail to load it into our awareness at all, particularly if it goes against an active self-schema, (interpretation of the self.) The various ways this can happen are referred to as motivated forgetting by the more clinical style psychologists. For the purposes of understanding Aziraphale, I’m mostly talking about relatively short term motivated forgetting, conveniently not recalling a particular fact at a particular moment.

More deeply repressed memories that get wholly buried for years can be a thing…. But… The validity of long term motivated forgetting should not be taken as an endorsement of the practices that purport to retrieve those memories. Those practices can make you remember more things, but those things are unlikely to be true. Just as there is no dividing line between what we see in our visual field because light hit our retina and what we see in our visual field because it was there last we checked, there is no neurological difference between a real memory and a false one. That means if you use hypnotherapy to ‘recover’ memories of a trauma that didn’t actually happen A) there is no way to separate the false memories out later B) you have given that person trauma that is just as real as if those things had actually happened.

If we have features of ourselves that we aren’t at peace with, the mind can refuse to allow knowledge of that into conscious awareness. If what was expedient to believe now isn't expedient any more, the new iteration of the mind doesn’t need to load the memory of the old beliefs existing. If a previous experience conflicts with our current experience, the memory of the previous experience can be altered such that consciousness preserves the perception of continuity. (Link is a short video, waaatch iitttttt.)

Cognitive Dissonance

Technically 'cognitive dissonance' refers to the discomfort of perceiving yourself to believe contradictory things, or perceiving yourself to be acting in a way that contradicts a belief. Generally people bring up the term to describe the behaviour and thought patterns people engage in to avoid that feeling. To put it simply, people reconcile behaving in a way that is inconsistent with their beliefs by changing their understanding of the world to suit their behaviour more readily than they change their behaviour to align with their beliefs, and people will creatively reinterpret information to prevent their beliefs from contradicting their sense of self. The Wikipedia page has many examples establishing these patterns. I want to emphasise a point here that is often overlooked; these are the entirely typical behaviours of mentally healthy people. Cognitive dissonance and the associated behaviours are not a pathology.

The deeper explanation of why these patterns occur is hard to swallow. ‘What we believe’ isn’t a real thing in the first place, at least not in the way we like to imagine. Just like consciousness, it is a temporary constructed experience. It would more accurately be described as what we are currently telling ourselves we believe. (But what about confirmation bias? Doesn't that mean people are rigid in their beliefs? Oddly, no. Hold that thought, I'll get back to it later.)

The phenomenon of our beliefs changing to accommodate our behaviour is described as ‘belief follows action.’ In the world of psychology, thinking a thought counts as an action. We act, and then afterwards construct an experience of having decided to act, along with the supposed basis. Our conscious experience represents the order the other way around, even in controlled settings where we can measure the actual order electrically. We do what we do, observe what we are going to do, or think a thought about a situation, then form an idea of what we believe in order to make sense of it after, and then construct a memory of ourselves having had the belief first. The actual reasons for our behaviour are not directly observable to us, and are more the realm of behaviourism than cognition.

What we have in our memory is a library of things we hypothetically can recall, can think, can know, that our minds draw from in order to put together a temporary construct of 'what I believe' that best suits explaining our actions to ourselves at that time, with little regard to if that explanation is accurate. That gets loaded into working memory, and we experience it as our worldview. Since cognitive dissonance is a feeling produced by having an experience of contradictory ideas and actions in our conscious awareness, and resolving cognitive dissonance is about eliminating that experience, often the easiest way to resolve cognitive dissonance is to simply not load a belief while a contradictory belief or action is occurring.

Nothing stops us from storing massively self contradictory beliefs in the library. It's fine as long as they aren't both bumping around our working memory space at the same time. Working memory capacity is generally only about seven things, so avoiding loading the contradictions simultaneously is actually pretty easy if none of them contradict our sense of self. When we load an opinion, we don't need to also load the basis for the opinion. So if someone believes in abolishing all taxes because no government organisation can ever be trusted, and also believes we should hero worship the police, because they say they serve and protect, they can load "abolish taxes" and "hero worship the police" simultaneously without having an experience of cognitive dissonance.

Do they really believe no government organisation can ever be trusted? They believe it when they need to rationalise hating taxes to themself, or hating a particular organisation. It's an option that can get retrieved from the library, and when it's in working memory it is everything we imagine a belief to be. When it isn't in working memory, it functionally doesn't exist to the conscious mind.

It's fun to take these shots at conservative politics, and there are reasons conservative politics is full of obvious examples, but I'm going to emphasise; beliefs functionally not existing if they aren't in our awareness is not a pathology. This is the normal behaviour of a typically functioning healthy human mind. Mental illness does not equal when people's minds do things we don't like, no matter how good our reasons are for not liking them.

Confirmation Bias, Conspiracies, and Cults

The fact that the library can contain contradictory things, and our minds can pick and choose in motivated ways what gets represented in consciousness when, doesn't mean the options are limitless. We usually need some degree of justification to put something into the 'things I can believe' library, though when it comes to miscellaneous factual information 'I heard some one say it' is enough of a justification an alarmingly large amount of the time.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to retain beliefs in the face of contradictory information. People often describe it as people being impervious to having their beliefs changed. I think people describe it that way because they aren't on board with belief follows action yet. If you want to change what someone believes, motivate them to change their behaviour first. Belief will follow action. It's not that we haven't studied it, it's that we don't like it.

We want the solution to be that we change people's minds with evidence. It doesn't work, because giving them the evidence, even if they fully absorb it, just gives them options for potential beliefs, and it won't go into their 'what I believe' construct without an incentive, especially if their social context incentivises against it.

Confirmation bias can prevent us from tossing out beliefs prematurely. If we see something that looks like it disobeys physics, we might look for magnets or wires before we decide gravity is fake. That is an adaptive feature, but like most adaptive features, it has limits and it has downsides. The biggest limitation is that it doesn't do a whole lot to stop us from adding new optional beliefs to our collection. The biggest downside is that the power of confirmation bias relates to how much the belief has to do with your sense of self, and nothing to do with how well supported it is by evidence.

When we are talking about intrenched political beliefs, or other ideas that heavily relate to our sense of self and community, things get relatively fixed as to our broad conclusions. However, our broad conclusions are only a small portion of what we believe. When people think about a person prone to extreme confirmation bias, they often imagine it being a matter of rigid inflexible thinking. But it isn't. Coming up with new reasons to discount seemingly contradictory evidence, reinterpreting older evidence, finding new ways to reach the same conclusion based on a new set of facts, ect..., is all very creative and fluid. Conspiracy theorists are known for this. What makes the conclusions different to the supporting evidence it that our conclusions are tied to or actions and our sense of self. For a conspiracy theorist, maintaining the gist of the conclusion preserves their identity and their place in the community. Everything else is changeable.

Remember, belief follows action. If we participate in an opinionated community, we will believe what makes that make sense. If our survival depends on continuing to be involved in a social circle, we will believe what makes that make sense. Deradicalisation (from hate groups) and deprogramming often requires providing people a whole reboot of their life while they are still in the very early stages of working on themselves. No matter what new information you expose them to, even if they absorb it into the library of things they can believe, as long as their life is dependent on the communities that radicalised them (to hate) their minds will be highly incentivised to keep rolling back to forming 'what I believe' constructs that validate those connections. Not because they consciously decide it's better, because the part of their mind outside of their awareness that constructs what they believe doesn't include all the options. Most of the time it only includes the SAFE options. Being willing to help get people out by offering community support BEFORE they have reworked themselves is the only way to make deradicalisation happen at scale.

Propagandist news uses the Firehose of Falsehood because most people are relatively limited in what rationalising beliefs they can spontaneously generate for themselves. A network spewing dozens of self contradictory reasons to keep your political affiliation provides viewers an array of optional opinions to keep in the library. It doesn't matter that they can't be true at the same time, as long as they aren't in working memory at the same time. The more options you have of what 'what I believe' can be, the more tools you have to rationalise staying on the team, and staying in the community.

Individual Differences and Differing Individuals

For most of us, our behaviour is pretty consistent, what we are willing to believe is moderately narrow, and therefore our constructs of ‘what I believe’ can get remade as more or less the same thing over and over. However, if you have a mind that can believe quite a lot of different things, is prone to whimsical behaviour, and / or spent formative years needing to act a certain way to survive, it can learn to produce quite a lot of very different constructs of ‘what I believe’ in order to rationalise a wide range of behaviour.

While extensive and empirical cognitive psychology underpins how it is conceptually possible for people like that to exist, the actual patterns of rotating belief systems and what causes certain people to have them more than others is a topic that it is hard to look at empirically. There are logistical issues when it comes to measuring beliefs that flip in and out of conscious awareness based on context even with participants who would enthusiastically and honestly participate, and in many cases these patterns show up in people who would never willingly subject themselves to treatment or evaluation, which would make it impossible to have decent data on them even if we had a good way to measure it.

Because of that, much of the discussion of these patterns falls into the realm of psychoanalysis, which is a mixed bag of philosophy that sometimes likes to represent itself as a science, and has a lot of problematic history. Having spent a lot of time around survivors of severe childhood trauma and being one myself, I do think modern psychoanalysis gets some things right. However, I do want to be transparent about the fact when I talk about what causes some people to be particularly susceptible to unstable beliefs, rationalisations, and motivated forgetting, and when I discuss how that plays out, we are leaving the realm of science and entering the realm of ‘this is what some people are like according to the people who have thought about it a lot.’

For most people our sense of self identity will contain the generated constructs of what we believe toward a relatively fixed-ish core set of very similar ‘what I believe’ options, though fixed core beliefs cause problems of their own. For people with certain trauma responses, the sense of self can be the source of tremendous instability. If the sense of self is fragile, threatened, terrorised, split, ect… the mind can get pretty cavalier about changing out beliefs, memories, and opinions to protect itself, and even switch out the sense of self. We can end up having wildly different self-schema in different circumstances. This self can't cope with this situation? New self.

The library of 'things I can believe' can contain things that would cause cognitive dissonance if paired with one self-schema, but works fine with this other one. An extreme form of this can present as dissociative identity disorder, however that is very rare and not what I am getting at. Most of the time differing self-schema or self-states aren't that partitioned, and share access to most memories.

With an unstable sense of self, ‘what I believe’ can end up being a tool on a Swiss army knife of possible belief systems that get taken out as needed, all while the conscious experience of the central executive maintains a seamless perception of a coherent and stable worldview. When people are like this, it is far more noticeable from the outside than it is from the inside, and that is by design. Having awareness of how unstable your own beliefs are wouldn’t be expedient, it would be cognitively dissonant, so you don’t know about it.

This pattern is a big part of what is going on with Aziraphale. There is a very broad set of things he can believe, but it’s down to the individual situation if he believes a specific one at a particular time. He won’t see it as him picking and choosing his beliefs, whatever he believes in that scene looks to him like the only thing he would ever believe, no matter the fact that he will believe something else the next day. There are also certain things outside of his awareness that he knows but won’t perceive, because they are dangerous to his sense of self, but those things can still impact his behaviour.

Thank you for reading though! The future posts will be a lot more to do with the story, and probably about half the length each.

Post 1/10

End Note: This post is the most likely of the set to be revised in some way. That is because the concepts I’m seeking to get across here are very hard to digest even for people within the field of psychology. Finding ways to more effectively communicate these aspects of how our minds work is a bit of a passion project for me, so if you see areas that are confusing, bits you want more elaboration on, questions that are unaddressed, ect…, please let me know. I am very interested in working out more methods of getting these ideas across.

If you are interested in reading further into the subject outside of my internet ramblings, Wikipedia pages, and think piece articles, I would recommend getting ahold of a cognitive psychology textbook as a place to start, the internet has ways.

#good omens #aziraphale #ineffable husbands #good omens meta #what does aziraphale actually believe

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marksbear · 1 year

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Hi! Can i request yandere soldier 76 and gabriel reyes with a big himbo reader who really nice to everyone and always do anything to help his friends?

Hey I hope u are doing good! And of course you can have this I love himbo readers! Hope you enjoy!

YANDERE SOLDIER 76 & YANDERE REAPER X HIMBO READER

When H/n first joined overwatch everyone loved him.

He was a fan favorite. He was strong, very tall, extremely attractive and a sweet personalty.

Even though he was (class name) he will always sacrifice himself for others and mostly tries to make sure everyone is okay without even caring about the mission.

Most members of the team were a bit imitated by the big man. But that feeling was quickly gone when Tracer saw him pick flowers for the sick Mercy.

Reyes didn't make an effort to talk to the male only watching and studying him from afar.

Morrison was the man who recruited Y/n. So him and Y/n had a close bond that angered Reyes. Reaper hated the way Soldier would look at you, the way he touched you hell even the way he talked to you.

Both of the men grew possessive of Y/n. The two would often argue about you and the arguments would last hours until Ana had enough of hearing them bicker.

Soon enough the men finally made an "Agreement." Basically that Y/n was theirs, but he just doesn't know it yet.

The two would always talk to Y/n at the same time. The three would talk about all sorts of things. Reaper wouldn't talk much he was more of a listener but would still let his presence known. Soldier would talk back and forth adding his own topics and comments. While Y/n would talk the most rambling about anything that crossed his mind.

One day the trio's daily conversations were interrupted by D.v.a.

"Heyy~ Y/n buddy! Can you go to the game store I was talking about last week and buy me this game?" D.v.a asks with a sweet smile with puppy eyes.

"Of course! But don't worry i'll pay for it. Just send me the picture of the game." Y/n gets up not seeing Gabriel's pissed off face. "Bye guys! I'll see you later." Y/n says before leaving.

Gabriel and Jack watch the big man leave then they look at each other not exchanging a word.

As soon Y/n comes back they stalk him back to D.v.a's room. Y/n knocks on the door humming a random tune to himself. "Y/N! You got it! Please come in!" The young girl asks jumping up and down expediently holding the game her friend bought.

"Can't...Maybe tomorrow. I told widowmaker that i'll be her target practice whatever that means. Tell Genji and Lucio I said hi!" Y/n says smiling at her before leaving to go do his promise.

The next day.

Reaper stares at the shirtless Reinhardt with hatred burning in his eyes. Both Y/n and the large German were shirtless leaning onto each other during breakfast.

Reaper knew nothing was going on between his "Boyfriend" and the German, but god it didn't stop his mind from wondering why the both of you were shirtless leaning on each other.

Solider glares daggers towards Reinhardt clenching the fork in his hand as he watch Reinhardt wrap his arms around Y/n.

Later that day it was team training.

Everyone was working outside y'know testing out new tricks, regular work out, teaching people new things etc etc.

Everything was going well until well H/n got hurt. And I mean hurt badly.

Y/n looked around to see if there were any support heroes that could help him out. Y/n was losing tons of blood, so he ran to reaper with all of the strength he had and passed out on top of him.

Reaper acted fast stopping Y/n's bleeding with some nearby bandages and picked him up leaving the training field while Solider 76 follows. Reaper carried Y/n all the way back to his room opening the door and setting Y/n down by a nearby chair.

Jack rushed in the room shutting the door and locking it before checking up on his boyfriend.

Y/n slowly gets back to his consensus not hearing anything Reaper and Soldier is saying. It's all muffled and loud to Y/n.

"Gabe?" The nickname causes the two men to pause their argument and turn to Y/n. "Yes?" "Am I going to die? Sombra always tells me that I'm gonna die from my clumsiness and I was wondering if that's true?"

The two men think the same thing. "Does this kid believe everything hes told?"

Jack begins to reassure Y/n that hes not gonna die and comfort him giving him praises about his bravery.

"Mhm. And besides Jack and I wouldn't let our boyfriend die." Reaper says boldly standing more closely to him. "Boyfriend? Were boyfriends? I thought Me and Junkrat were dating. We kissed a few hours ago and that's what couples do."

"What" Jack and Gabriel say in union staring at Y/n with their eyes wide. "Yeah? I call him babe while he calls me sweets." Reaper opens his mouth probably going to shout and curse, but before that Jack stops him and takes a lighter choice. "Y/n. You can't be doing that. It's cheating on both of us. And it's very rude. So to avoid all that how bout you mostly stay and hang out with us. We are dating so technically for you not to be a bad boyfriend you have to do what we say."

Y/n thinks for a moment before nodding his head yes. "Does that mean we have to kiss now?" Reaper and Jack exchange a look before nodding.

Y/n stands up and bends down to Jack's level giving him a light kiss on the lips before turning to reaper kissing him as well.

"Now I only have two boyfriends correct?"

"Correct Y/n."

Timeskip!

Since that day Y/n mostly spends his days with his boyfriends. Always giving them little flowers he'll find outside.

Most of the team were happy for the three of them and supported them.

But few members knew. Something had to be up.

Ashe was quick to notice something was wrong with Y/n. Y/n had stopped coming to talk with Bob. Even though most people didn't care about that Ashe knew something had to be wrong. Y/n talked to Bob for hours on end almost everyday to the robot and now he stopped visiting.

Lucio and D.v.a sees the way Jack and Reaper acts from afar when someone is talking or spending time with Y/n. They were always somehow there. Hell they were even at the mission Y/n was on.

Sigma knew something bad was going to happen. Y/n and him were partners for a mission one time and Y/n had accidentally rambled to Sigma about the way his boyfriends would tie him up to a chair and leave him there for days. Sigma immediately started to warn others, but half didn't care and only thought he was crazy.

It was a team mission. Every single overwatch member was in it at an all hands on deck type of mission. But surprisingly soldier 76 as well Reaper doesn't show.

The whole fight was gruesome and dirty.

And well H/n. Well H/n was being H/n. He was saving people left and right not caring about his own body and only caring for others.

He brought many of his team members to safety if they got hurt and other regular citizens.

H/n body was overworked and he pushed through it until it was finally over.

The team all stand side by side with each other many people interviewing them and thanking the heroes.

"H/n. I was wondering if you feel pressured as the new guy to thrive and show everyone that you belong on the team? Since your performance today was top tier."

Y/n head was pounding trying to figure out the words for the answers and his body sways around feeling heavier and heavier.

"Uhm... I don't feel anything at the moment besides the headache. But i'm not trying to show off my speed or my strength. I'm just trying to help the people I care for most. Uhmmm yeah." Y/n answers with a little struggle trying to get everything out as fast as he can.

"Another question for H/n! Are you seeing anyone serious in the moment. Because it was sightings of you with a mysterious woman in a questionable position."

Y/n looks around like did he hear that correctly. Y/n just hands the mic to Lucio lowering his head down.

Epic Timeskip!

By the time Y/n gets back to the overwatch base he lays on Winston begging him to take him to his room.

Winston doesn't argue and carries the big man to his room where his two boyfriends are waiting.

Once the two arrive Y/n slides off of him wishing him goodnight before unlocking the door and walking in shutting and locking it behind him.

The place is quiet and dark.

Y/n walks to his bedroom taking off his hero costume before putting on more casual clothes. Y/n basically collapses on the bed breathing heaving and nervously when he feels eyes on him.

"Y/n. Who is she? DON'T even bother lying because I already know." "My ex..." "And why were you with your ex?" "Because she wanted to ask me something..." "Mind explaining why she was on your lap." Reaper takes Y/n's arms tying them up as Jack ties up his legs.

"I don't know! She said she missed me! Please gabe! I don't wanna do this again. It wasn't my fault." Y/n pleas feeling himself getting picked up off the bed.

"I know cariño~ I know. Just that me and Jack are gonna pay her a visit." Reaper sits Y/n down tying up to a chair before picking up the chair and taking it to a closet.

"This is for your own good Y/n."

"We know what's best for you."

THE END!

#x male reader #male reader #overwatch x male reader #overwatch #reaper x male reader #soldier 76 #soldier 76 x male reader #the bear club

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frogblast-the-ventcore · 3 months

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Some early field-expedient solutions to extended magazines, devised during the Vietnam War to offset the limited capacity of the then-standard 20-round magazines for the M16 family of weapons. Created using captured Chinese "flat-back" AK magazines and modified to fit into an M16 magazine well (as well as modifications to the feed lips), these modified mags could hold 35 rounds of ammunition, nearly double the capacity of the standard magazine - however, anecdotal evidence suggests that sometimes only 30 rounds were loaded, likely to lessen feeding issues/jamming potential. This was a field expedient modification that largely ceased being implemented when proper 30 round M16 magazines were introduced in 1969 - 1970.

#vietnam war #guns #firearms #5.56mm #m16

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kolibripilled-canine · 6 months

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[ AEON OPM 'KLBR' / SUP-B / FIELD MAINT. ]

In addition to the procedures described in OPM 'KLBR' 23.7.11 persona degradation can be delayed with consistent rebooting of the biological component. This may achieved via the application of chemicals (OPM 'KLBR' 23.7.09) or via the field expedient technique described below:

1. Locate the high pressure-side oxidant pipelines located on either side of the units neck

2. Place hands* on either side of the unit's neck, butts of the palm placed together and the tips of first and second fingers on top of the high pressure-side pipelines

3. Apply inwards pressure with fingertips, avoiding placing pressure on the unit's respiratory pathway as this may cause permanent damage

4. Hold until the unit resets. This will be indicated by it's eyes rolling back in it's head. Once this occurs, release pressure immediately. Do not restrain the unit as convulsions may occur.

5. Monitor boot up procedures.

* In certain circumstances a Gestalt or superior Replika unit may need to use a single hand to initiate the reboot procedure. In this case, which may be impossible for units and Gestalts with smaller hands, the tips of the first two fingers should be placed on one pipeline, and the tip of the thumb should be placed on the other.

#signalis

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hawnks · 3 months

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The whole affair takes just a few minutes. Bloodletting is an expedient process, for a practiced hand. If Pietro has learned anything, in his field or in his life, it’s how to cut deep.

Kelsi watches him with an unaffected gaze. Some days he thinks she wouldn’t care if he bled out fully, right in front of her.

But she, too, is a scientist. Her curiosity wins out over apathy.

“Is this really necessary?” she asks, watching as his wrist drips and drips into a jar.

Pietro shrugs. The hungry plants sit on a shelf to his right, swaying and writhing at the scent of fresh food. It’s only been a week since he fed them last, but at this size they’re always hungry. His body can’t produce enough to keep them sated — at least, not if he wants to keep living, after.

He presses a handkerchief to his wound, starting the methodical feeding process. A large dropper-full for each plant, their maws already open and waiting for it.

“I used to feed them directly from the source, but that seemed a bit too…intimate.”

Kelsi scoffs. “Your attachment to the specimens is a product of poor self control, Dr. Pragma,” she says. “They’re not your friends, or your enemies. They’d eat you without remorse, because that’s what they do.”

Pietro pauses, lips pursed as he watches a plant nurse at the dropper, swallowing down the flow eagerly.

“But that’s just it,” he says. “Consumption itself is a form of intimacy. That’s inescapable. A law of nature, itself.”

Unconvinced, Kelsi comes up beside him, watching the plant with that same emotionless look she gives him. To her, it’s all patterns, numbers. Everything exists as a part of a wider ecosystem, slotted together like cogs in a machine.

Her smile is unkind; it makes his knees weak.

“Maybe you’re just a pervert,” she tells him.

Suppressing the urge to kiss her, he grabs one of the pots off the shelf. Kelsi is close enough now that it’s simple to pass it into her arms, pulling away too fast for her to give it back.

It wriggles, mouthing at the first thing it can latch onto, her loose shirt. This is the last one to bed fed, and it’s grown restless, impatient.

Pietro unwraps his arm, tucking the handkerchief between his teeth as he thumbs at the wound with his free hand, exacerbating the blood flow.

He lets it pool for a second before tipping it over the pot, clutched against Kelsi’s chest. He’s so close that she can smell the sharp scent of it, and his own, unique scent beneath, a disquieting bouquet. She imagines she can feel the warmth of it too, the same temperature as her own body, as it ribbons down into the plants mouth.

Pietro presses harder, coaxing more, letting out a sharp breath at the sensation. It doesn’t hurt, per say, not after everything he’s been through. But the feeling is intense, insistent.

Between them, the plant coils and yawns wide. If it was capable of it, Pietro thinks it would be smiling.

He glances at Kelsi, ardent, steady. She’s looking back at him.

He thinks, maybe, if he pressed the oozing wound to her lips, she would sip him, too.

He thinks, maybe, she would let him feed her.

He grows woozy before he can find out. Pulling away, he wraps his wrist again, sinking onto a nearby stool with a breathless sigh.

It takes another second for Kelsi to turn, replacing the plant in its proper spot on the shelf. Her back is to him. She makes no move for another, long moment.

Then she says, “Clean yourself up, Doctor. You’re a mess.”

#Pietro IS a pervert. but first and foremost he is a scientist.#tw blood #tw yandere #I’m so sorry that this is literally about blood #love as consumption baybee 😎#a study in devotion

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pruning-the-minds-garden · 1 year

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Hypnokink Basics: Special Techniques (pt 3)

Special Techniques

Introduction

This final section focuses not on inductions, but on the other stuff that hypnotists do or use as part of their hypnokinky scenes to make them go. Like the prior two sections this list is by no means inclusive, but just covers four of the more common and popular "adjunct" or "secondary" techniques that are often seen alongside hypnosis itself in the hypnokink community. That's not to say they are less important or less effective - many will tell you that these can be even more profound than traditional hypnosis itself, when properly and assiduously applied - but they do push the boundaries of what is hypnosis in some cases, or in others are simply techniques that are used alongside hypnosis to make it more effective.

Like the more modern inductions, many of these techniques can be traced to the work of Milton Erickson, or to his students, or to other modern hypnosis innovators. Although you might not know it to walk into to offices of some hypnotherapists (though that is changing), the field is growing and changing as neuropsychological research advances farther and farther. These techniques reflect that. They use more modern language that is at times more accessible, but is also more expedient, and is sometimes as informed by the needs of stage hypnotists or hypnokinksters as it is by needs of hypnotherapists.

Since a lot of the same caveats as covered the modern inductions covered these, I won't belabor this introduction any more, and instead move on to the four techniques covered today -

(by the by, sorry for the lack of direct examples on the last two. They are somewhat disperse techniques that don't lend themselves to discrete examples, and so I reasoned that the best way to give an easy example might be to link a reliable source who talked about them. It's paid, so I understand that reduces its utility for many, but she's in the community so that's something)

Fractionation

Example

If you have ever gone through a trance where your hypnotist brought you rapidly and repeatedly into, and out of, trance and felt absolutely wasted afterward then you have experienced fractionation. It is that process of dropping down into and then coming back up toward wakefulness and then dropping down and then coming back up (and down and up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down and... you get the idea), and each time you do it feels like you drop a little bit farther and come up a little bit less far. This works on a couple of different principles all at the same time.

First, it works on the principle of exhaustion. Every time you change state, every time you more from one mental 'place' to another, that takes some amount of mental focus or energy. That means that doing so repeatedly will quickly drain your mental reserves, and make you more sluggish, more prone to just going along and giving in, getting more and more relaxed. That will cause your mental defenses, such as they are, to drop that much more.

Second, it works on the principle of acclimation. It is kind of like walking down a footpath in the woods. The more you walk it, the smoother and better, more well-trodden, it becomes. The more you go into and out of trance, the more you get used to going into and out of trance, and the better at it you become. The more natural it becomes, the more able you are to do it more quickly. And, the more often you do it at the suggestion of that hypnotist specifically, the more comfortable you are doing so in the future. It is a quick way to build up a level of familiarity with a partner, provided that they are comfortable ceding that level of control - or become comfortable (see last paragraph) after they grow exhausted following multiple prior rounds of fractionation - to you.

Third, it works through controlled pattern breaks. Fractionation and Confusion (see last part of this series) are kind of like peanut butter and chocolate - they go very well together - and if you establish a pattern of up down up down up down up down up down and then down down down... well your partner might just find themselves very deep indeed. The one constant in their experience up to that point, the thing that has stayed the same, has been your voice and your suggestions and so they have followed them... and they have grown very accustomed to doing so without thinking. Going from "down up down" to "down down down" might seem a small change, but to them subjectively it probably just took them into somewhere within the Earth's mantle, if you have a solid rapport with them.

Put all of those factor together, and Fractionation can be a very powerful tool to introduce after the induction is complete. It's not much use when there is no trance state or rapport whatsoever to build on, but provided there is that foundation it can be very helpful. That's why it is commonly called a "Deepener" although the concept of trance depth could merit a series of articles unto itself.

Rapid/Instant Induction

Example (video - for the record I'd call this "rapid" not "instant" but the distinction is pretty vague and pointless)

For when you want to "get to the 'good' stuff" (unless you're like me, and the trance is the good stuff) as soon as possible or walk up to someone and have them as putty in your hands within five seconds flat, there is nothing quite like a Rapid or Instant Induction. There are a number of different techniques for these, and there are people who are particular experts in those techniques, but the general basis comes down to three factors: 1) Establish yourself as a confident and trustworthy, or credentialed, person as quickly as possible 2) Assert that the person will drop into trance in a manner that does not allow them to question that 'fact' 3) Interrupt the process of their questioning it through some sort of physical or verbal process in order to get them to give up the fight and just give in

What that often looks like is walking up to a person with a confident sparkle in your eyes, looking them in the eyes, assertively saying "Sleep!" and then pushing their head over backwards while catching them by the small of their back. They are so caught off-guard by the physical disruption that they don't have time to question whether they should "sleep" (i.e. trance) or not and so they just... do. That is obviously situational and depends on the person being placed in trance, the relationship they have with the person doing the trancing, how that person delivers the line and the touch, the place that everything happens and a dozen other nuances, but it works often enough that it gets its own entry here and is plenty fun to do for people who enjoy it. Also, you have examples like the handshake induction shown at the link, where the hypnotist tells their partner what is going to happen and essentially allows them to hypnotize themselves. If you watch, between the second and third handshake, when the hypnotist says "and you will stay standing..." and other verbiage like that... that's not an induction, that's a suggestion. She's already in enough of a trance that she's responding to suggestions for him.

All of that may well seem like magic, and that is why instant inductions are so often the province of stage magicians and stage hypnotists, but they are really a blend of three things - confidence, trust, and a pattern interrupt. You can use any number of different manifestation of those three things to get it done, but that's what it all boils down to.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP)

I don't have an example for this one and will instead link to "Kinky NLP" by sleepingirl

NLP is a bit of an odd creature, because it has such a woolly definition. In the broadest possible terms, it is a suite of techniques that use the way we talk about things to reframe the way we think about things, as a kind of in-language extension of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. It also overlaps with conditioning/brainwashing to some extent.

One common technique of NLP is called an "Incantation," though hypnokinksters might better know it as a "mantra." Repeatedly saying something that you want to be true or to make true about yourself - "obedience is pleasure," "I am a good doll," "I am my Master's perfect fucktoy" or whatever you might want as part of your kinky dynamic - can gradually, over time, make it more and more true and transform your mind. It can reprogram your brain, bit by bit. This has limits, of course, in that there are certain things that are hard-wired into your brain that are unlikely to change, but there are many more than you think that are not. Using something like this does not require a hypnotic induction to work. It might benefit from one, or from being in some other altered state (heightened arousal or the edge of orgasm, for example), but it doesn't require any of that in order to work. All it needs is motivation, and to be used with regularity over time.

A second technique which is often poached from the NLP playbook by many hypnotists, and many (pardon me I feel a bit ill) "pick-up artists" is "mirroring." This technique is, essentially, to help build rapport with someone more quickly by mirroring their body language, word choice, and so on - taking a drink whenever they take a drink, using the same words they do when describing things, etc. I bring it up because this is an example of a technique that, when used carefully, thoughtfully, and in moderation can be very helpful... but when used thoughtlessly and carelessly, can be less than useless.

For example, if you start mimicking every action of a person to whom you are speaking, leaning in altogether too close for comfort, using their exact body language, their precise word choice... that's incredibly creepy. Don't do that. The way I employ mirroring is more targeted. If I notice that a partner consistently uses a certain word to describe something in trance - they see a "scarlet" ball of light, for instance - then I make sure to use that word, not some similar word like "red" or "crimson" when I describe that same thing. However they tell me they experience trance, that is how I describe the experience back to them. If they make it clear that they want [x], [y] and [z] in trance, then that is not only what I want, that is what I am enthusiastic to provide (though that's because of my own personal proclivities as much as it is any mirroring on my part, but it does serve the purpose).

Conditioning/Brainwashing

I don't have an example for this one and will instead link to "The Brainwashing Book" by sleepingirl

Another topic on which a whole book could (and has! See above) be written. Conditioning is the process of gradually altering the mind into a form that differs from wherever it began, according to some agreed-upon plan. That sounds really broad and like it could mean a million different things, because it is and it could. You could condition someone to be totally submissive to you and unable to not do what you tell them to do. You could also condition someone to be totally unable to orgasm except under certain conditions. You could condition them to be a perfect housemaid and derive sexual pleasure from their daily chores. You could condition them to do, be, and think almost anything you can imagine - the sky's the limit (but remember consent!).

The process is gradual and always takes some time, and it always needs to be highly tailored to your specific goals and your specific partner, but generally conditioning is split into two branches - "operant conditioning" and "classical conditioning."

Classical conditioning involves associating involuntary responses (the 'classic' example being salivating from Pavlov's dogs) with an external stimulus. Essentially, you link that neutral stimulus (say, a finger snap) with an involuntary response (say, an orgasm), through a conditioned response. This is done through repeated association. Pavlov made his dogs salivate by giving them food and then ringing the bell, until it got to the point that he could simply ring a bell and they would start salivating. In the other example, after enough times masturbating and needing to ask permission, only being allowed to cum when you snapped your fingers... well, you get the idea. This might not result in a spontaneous orgasm from snapping your fingers, and the effect may (will) extinguish with time if not regularly reinforced, but depending upon the subject and the exact means of conditioning the results may vary dramatically.

Operant conditioning, on the other hand, involves associating voluntary behaviors (the classical example being pressing a lever) with external stimuli. In this case you might give a partner a trigger that causes them to feel a pleasurable sensation all over their body, or to feel a deep sense of happiness or satisfaction when you utter the words "Good Boy/Girl/Toy" - and then, utter those words whenever they obey you. That will cause them to feel good whenever they obey you, which will lead them to obey you more and more, which will lead them to feel better, and then even if the trigger does extinguish at some point obeying you might have at that point become second nature to them. That is a fairly simple and straightforward example, and it goes much farther than that - being as there are four distinct types of operant conditioning and various ways in which it can be done - but that gives you an idea of what can be accomplished with it.

Conclusions

With this series I've really only scratched the surface of the techniques that are out there in the hypnosis and hypnokink space, that are available for one partner to take mental control and wrap mental bonds around another. Like any other form of bondage, though, the foundation of hypnotic bondage is and must be one of consent, rapport, and safety. If it is not that then you are risking the safety and health - mental and physical - of your partner. Don't do that. It is not worth it. Just like it is not worth rushing into shibari only to get nerve damage, it's not worth it to rush here only to wind up with other forms of it. If I've emphasized nothing else, let me emphasize that.

This is a wonderful kink and community and it can bring people incredibly close to one another, in ways that few others things can. It can feel sometimes like hypnosis and hypnotic bondage creates a real mind-to-mind bond, a kind of rapport that is almost impossible to replicate by other means... but that special bond must be treated with the respect, concern and ultimately responsibility that it deserves. It's a powerful thing, being able to snap your fingers and give someone a mind-bending orgasm or to control their body like a puppeteer. Don't forget that, and while you are having those fucking fantastic experiences, take the time to do it safely.

This article is part of my Index of Writings on Safety & Consent (in the other writing section at the end)! Click the link for the rest of my articles on the topic.

This will take you to Part 1 on Classic Inductions

This will take you to Part 2 on Modern Inductions

#hypnokink #hypnokink basics #consent #safety #techniques #hypnokink community #special techniques #fractionaction #rapid induction #instant induction #no-induction trance #NLP #neurolinguistic programming #conditioning #brainwashing #operant conditioning #classical conditioning

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contentment-of-cats · 3 months

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An Axxilan's Progress: Ripple

No action takes place in a containment field. Death Squadron was the post of choice for ambitious officers. Nobody lacking five years of naval experience even got assigned. The qualifications for senior staff were stringent, but invariably someone knows someone else and they end up being piped aboard anyway. The IHC also found it an expedient way to remove certain officers without the awkwardness of inquests. However, there were highly competent and effective officers who would do anything to avoid being reassigned.

Sartan was willing to take a punch as often as needed to keep his Flag Captain, demoting or promoting as needed. When he put on the white of a Grand Admiral, he was nursing a real beauty mark of a black eye as every single time Fir Piett poked his nose above lieutenant commander there was a communique from personnel demanding his transfer. Moreover, other officers were starting to copy the methodology. Most flags and not a few captains if gathered in one place would appear to have been in a dive bar brawl. If one wanted to keep one's best officers, a little pain was involved. The 'Piett Maneuver' began to spread into the Army and it really could not be allowed to stand.

Vader consulted with Tarkin. The man fully approved of Piett's focus on piracy and smuggling along his methods of dealing with them. For a man of Tarkin's ambition, he was quite clear-headed about what he termed 'strategic demotions.'

"There is a general sentiment, my Lord, that Death Squadron is for gloryhounds, the well-connected, and the determined ladder climber." Captain Veers was a man to speak his mind. "They are using the ICMJ to get what they want. The flags want to keep their best men, the best men want to stay where they feel they are of better use."

"And since the regs state that a transfer order must include current rank, the admirals are playing a shell game. The Grand Admirals are a good idea, but they are canny men, focused on results, and are mentoring like-minded men." Tarkin added, "Piett is willing to be demoted to zygote if it will gain him what he wants, or even to be discharged so that he can go back to chasing pirates around the Hegemony."

It was agreed. All they had to do was wait and Veers would handle the ops. Ascension Week meant a lot of celebrating, and Piett was reliably going to be at an establishment near Royal Imperial Academy called Dorto's. Buckets of beer, platters of meat for Outer Rim diets, and dancing - frequently on the floor, but also on top of the bar and tables as well.

Veers had heard the descriptive 'kicking and screaming' to characterize extreme reluctance, but never through he'd actually get to see it. In addition to kicking and screaming there was also biting and stabbing. Lots of stabbing. Where did all those knives come from? And that holdout blaster? And the ghostpepper bomb? Then there was the doonium pipe and highly effective blows to the knees.

Short was also angry along with fast and Max earned four broken toes, but brought in his man.

#maximilian veers #firmus piett

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raposarealm · 1 year

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Today is release day for the Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection!

WE MADE IT, FOLKS!!

Yes, I know we're celebrating the game's re-release, but I took a character from the anime for this event -- specifically, Oozono Yuriko, shown here in Cross Fusion. This piece is based on the final fight in episode 19 in Stream, taking place on the hospital roof. I... didn't know whether I could show other characters in the shot, so it's probably not as apparent, but for context, her opponent here not pictured was Bombman. Honestly, the whole scene is a lot shorter and less relevant than I thought (there's another unrelated fight in the same episode that kinda overshadows this one,) but it stuck in my memory regardless. [Insert a joke about my regular medical field-related rambles here.]

Yuriko isn't my favorite character, but she is still one I'm fond of, and one I feel gets picked on a little too much sometimes. Like a number of the anime cast, she kinda got the short end of the stick in terms of... everything, so I guess I'm doing my part to try to make up for that. Somehow.

This piece is super late, due to a number of issues; most notably, this month I've had problems both with chronic pain and mental health, and it's kinda hard to draw when you feel like you've been hit by a bus. The other issue was the good five or so drafts I had before landing on this particular composition, and the sheer amount of digital art and editing skills I had to learn very quickly. The sketch was drawn digitally here, but everything from the refined underdrawing to the coloring were done traditionally, with multiliners and alcohol markers. It's by far my largest piece in a couple years at least, possibly overall. (Yeah, I know it looks kinda simple, but inking buildings and other structures with a normal ruler is harder than it looks, I've learned.) There's a few errors here and there due to both exhaustion and expedience, but I think it's acceptable enough.

Here's to a new breath for the series, and here's to all the folks who've worked so hard on this collaboration!

Plug in, transmission!

#MMBNLCCountdown #Rockman Exe #Megaman Battle Network #yup it's going in the english tag #Oozono Yuriko #Cross Fusion Needleman #Cross Fusion #rapo draws #tags in reverse order this time #anyways here's to me being able to finally play games 2-6 #and here's to me getting stuck at airman's labyrinth(dungeon? stage?) again #locked and loaded let's rock and roll!#IT'S NOT EVEN 5AM AND THERE'S ALREADY OTHER POSTS FOR THIS UP TOO #bruh i was expecting posts at like 10am or something not before sunrise #speed posting i guess

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paulgadzikowski · 7 months

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In the past at The Hero of Three Faces, and at Arthur, King of Time and Space, there've been times of personal stress when I've maintained daily or near-daily updating only by the expedient of going on what I like to call a sketch hiatus, when for a time instead of even attempting to produce full comic strips I update with sketches or other bits on a low-effort theme. At Three Faces the line between a sketch and a scripted cartoon strip can be blurry, but generally a sketch signifies a landmark in chronological order, and/or presents a gag not deemed strong enough to carry a cartoon or presents no gag at all; and is identifiable by being drawn on a panel field shaped like a page torn from a spiral sketchbook. Usually when I go on sketch hiatus I try to at least put in a little animation but no promises.

As I've been posting intermittently at Tumblr, I've been looking after my 90-year-old mother lately. It's got to the point where she needs more specialized help than I can provide and the transition period where that help is being recruited and set up is going on now, complicated by an entirely unrelated issue of her phone company leaving her without service for a month and a day and counting.

So, as of 10/2/23 and for an indefinite period until further notice, except for Fridays when comic strips come off the summer buffer you can expect sketches every day.

#hero of three faces #behind the scenes #sketch hiatus #looking after mom

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pb-dot · 9 months

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WIP Wednesday: The Coal Wars pt. 2

Welcome back to my recap of the history of the disastrous Coal Wars that led to the status quo of The Clockwork Boy. Pt 1 is here, and the TL:DR is that the empire of Imelia got greedy with its colony subjects and got a chain of declarations of independence thrown in their faces for their trouble. When we left off, the Imperial Council ruling in the stead of the recently deceased empress, had just ordered a full-scale invasion of the empire's largest former colony, Pelia.

Before we resume with the grim business of war, it is expedient to speak briefly of private concerns in the Imelian conflicts. While the chief benefactor of the colonial riches was the imperial government, a cluster of canny merchants had also gotten their fingers in the colonial pie. Trade in luxury goods and parts for steam contraptions to the colonies and whatever resources could be picked up for cheap back to Imelia brought in a tidy profit for the enterprising merchant.

One would expect the war would bring a swift stop to these trade routes, but if anything it accelerated them. Granted, the blockade and subsequent invasion of Pelia put a stop to much of the trade that way, but the trading companies compensated by investing in consolidating their real estate and industry holdings in Imelia proper, as well as the minor colonies growing more hungry for the goods they could provide as the shipments of goods from the companies associated with the Imelian government ceased. There were murmurs that the trade company fleets also carried intelligence on Imelian troop movement, but although treason was suspected, nobody was ever able to prove it.

Now back to the war at hand. The invasion of Pelia did not run into the quagmires that the earlier invasions in the minor colonies suffered. Pelia's government met them head-on as the Imelian strategists had expected, but unfortunately for the Imelians, they brought new weapons to bear that were more than a match for the Imelian steam-powered armies. Pelia had developed gunpowder and gunpowder-powered firearms that Imelias steam-powered tanks and comparatively primitive infantry did not hold any intrinsic advantage over. Granted, the heavy armor of the steam-tanks deflected all but the luckiest of musket shots, but just about anyone with two hands and two eyes could be trained to use a musket, and the flexibility afforded to musketeers on foot meant that the Imelian forces frequently found themselves outflanked and caught in crossfire.

While the losses of steam-tanks, walkers, and artillery like the crank-catapult and rail ballistae remained low, the Imelian infantry losses were immense. Field medics discovered to their horror that even a stray musket shot to a limb could be debilitating, or even deadly. Even so, the Imelian military was backed by an economy that had reached its absolute zenith only a short while ago, and thus, with immense losses buoyed by steady shipments of new soldiers from Imelia proper, Imelia pushed in from the initial landing at the rocky shores of Pelia towards the industrial capital Meor, intending to secure Meor's bountiful coal mines for the war effort.

The Imelian army progressed slowly in their campaign, struggling to protect their supply lines from Pelian harassment tactics. As such, the compounding manpower and morale losses quickly became all but unmanageable, and a new problem arose in the shadow of the mounting losses. Put simply, the professional soldier was becoming a rare commodity in Imelia as the nation poured every drop of their accumulated military might into a war they still believed wholeheartedly they could win. This led to a blossoming market for mercenaries, as well as the Imelian government instituting a draft for the first time in the nation's history.

The drafts were far from popular among the populace. In general, support for the war was low and still sinking with every shipment of rationed supplies and fathers, brothers, and sons with little to no hope of returning. "The ships to Pelia are heavy when they leave, and very light when they return" as a popular folk song from the period put it. There was, however little respect for this sentiment in the halls of government, where the Imperial Council was starting to realize the grim nature of their situation.

Put plainly, the Imperial coffers were empty, and had been empty for some time as the expensive wars with the minor colonies had all but bankrupted them in the first place. The foray into Pelia was funded by a conglomerate of private lenders and creditors, backed by the promises of lucrative land grants and trade routes once Pelia was brought to heel. The sheer sluggishness of the war had taken both lenders and councilors by surprise, and the question of how the repayment of the empire's debts was to be made in the case of a white peace, or even worse a full Imelian defeat, was becoming a hot-button topic.

The negotiations and maneuvers between the imperial council and their debtors grew into a theatre of its own. Sales of war bonds and collections of war taxes were put into effect but failed to extract much value from the impoverished, and greatly diminished, working class and ultimately only expanded and solidified the capital class' grip on Imelia. Wide programs of austerity were pushed through every political and legislative barrier at the behest of the debtors, but these did little more than delay the inevitable. With wide opposition to the government making tax collection all but infeasible, and the coffers of the colonial nations being solidly out of reach, there was seemingly no hope of Imelia avoiding bankruptcy at best.

Even in this atmosphere of utter despair, it wasn't until news of the siege of Meor breaking due to massive desertion from the Imelian troops that the debtors took matters into their own hands. It is unknown to all but those that were there that day whether the private security force representing a group of Imelia's aimed to overthrow the government for their masters, or whether the plan was merely to repossess the contents of the Imperial Palace as a down-payment on the nation's considerable debt, but the outcome was at any rate the same. Fighting broke out as loyalist Imelian forces clashed with the mercenaries, and by the time the dust had settled, every member of the Imelian Imperial Council was dead, as well as the vast majority of their direct supporters.

With the death of the council, the last vestige of government in Imil was now eradicated. The throne, such as it were, was free for the taking, but given the nation's unenviable position with scores of routed and wounded soldiers overseas as well as a thoroughly gutted public sector lacking public support, it was more of a white elephant gift than such power usually was. The de facto leader of the debtors, Mitchell C. Orthon made a public statement that "As far as We are concerned, the nation of Imelia is as of today defunct. As the representatives of your landlords, bosses, and betters, we encourage you to peacefully resume working, anon."

After the fall of Imil, it didn't take long for the nation of Imelia to disintegrate completely. Some cities and regions declared independence and have been warring and bickering over claims on Imelian land with their neighbors ever since, other cities merely collapsed, causing an exodus into neighboring countries, nations, grand manufactories and others. Imil, however, stayed a city without a nation. The considerable presence of private armies and mercenaries on the payroll of the late government's debtors kept a sort of peace in the city, and, as things settled down, the fertile lands outside of the city.

Little changed for the population of the city formerly known as Imil between the late days of The Coal Wars and the early days of the enforced peace of the debtors. Granted, there were no policemen or taxmen to be found, but that had been the case for several years at that point as the austerity measures had all but annihilated the police force, causing mass resignations and brain drain to various private security contractors. There were no taxes, which was a nice reprieve from the punishing war taxes that had been levied, but the average citizen found that their earnings didn't reach much farther given this lien, given that their employers, inevitably citing "recent times of crisis," cut wages across the board. Landlords were also considerably emboldened by these developments, and would often charge their tenants an additional "safety fee," in essence extortion.

And this is the sorry state of the once-great city that we meet at the start of The Clockwork Boy. Some minor trends changed between the equilibrium post-collapse and the current day such as the construction of the debtor's seat of power, The Spire, and how further consolidations left the owners of industry and other means of production also owning considerable amounts of real estate, leading to the rise of "company blocks," essentially flophouses for factory and workshop workers in the crummier parts of the city, one of which houses our hero, Jake, before his life gets turned upside down a couple of times.

Now, you may ask me "Hey, Peebs, isn't this just an overengineered explanation for why the setting operates under an anarcho-capitalistic system?" to which I would reply "Anarcho-capitalism is a contradiction in terms, but yes, that is essentially what this is."

#writing #hearts in clockwork #the clockwork boy #worldbuilding #politics #war #imperialism #colonialism #Tumblr's been acting odd with this one so if it pops up twice I am sorry but this is on Tumblr.

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inquisimer · 3 months

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the burning comes first

Some classic "mage who has never been Purged before gets that Fun Experience" for the first day of @febuwhump. The prompt was helpless and you can read it on AO3 here!

Female Lavellan/Solas | Rated T | 1326 words | CW: canon-typical violence

Surrounded by Red Templars, the Inquisitor collapsed.

She fell mid-swing and her staff skittered beyond reach across the icy scape of Emprise du Lion. Not that she was attempting to fight anymore. Like a fish out of water, she gasped, gaped, one hand clutching at the high collar of her armor.

Without regard for the enemies still bearing down on her, Irosyl scrabbled for the buttons over her throat.

The world was sharp and harsh and piercing. She did not exhale but her lungs went flat and she could not fill them up. Against her knees, the snow cut like diamonds, each individual flake a knife in her skin.

She reached for the Fade and met…nothing.

“Fenhedis,” she gasped, or tried to. When she opened her mouth, only a wheeze escaped. Watching her reflection grow larger and distorted in the chest plate of an approaching Templar, she realized: she was going to die. Her staff was out of reach and she could not call the Fade, could not even lift herself up off her knees. She was going to die.

Lethanavir, friend to the dead, be friend to me. Guide my feet, calm my soul, lead me to my rest.

The Templar raised his sword and brought it down, arcing straight at her exposed neck. Irosyl closed her eyes.

But the steel did not cut into her skin.

Instead, a harsh clanging, too loud and too close. When she opened her eyes, she saw the purple haze of a barrier over her body, though she could not feel its usual buzz. Standing above her, Cassandra batted the Templar away. Her shield had taken the blow that would have ended Irosyl’s life.

“Inquisitor, move!”

She tried. Every instinct in her body screamed at her to flee, but her legs were leaden and the air around her was like moving through molasses. She threw herself to the side, but moved only an inch.

Her defender remained, but Cassandra's patience bowed under Irosyl’s lacking response. Having to stand over the Inquisitor's prone body limited her maneuvers and they’d only just been holding the field, even with Irosyl up and fighting.

"Inquisitor—“ she started, but her fruitless plea was lost as a wave of force slammed against Irosyl. Ass over tea kettle, the elf went flying.

She slammed into a snowbank and fell limp, like a rag doll. Squeezing her eyes shut against the sunlight—too bright, burning bright, it hadn't been so bright a moment ago—she could do nothing but pray.

Minutes later, or perhaps hours or perhaps days, a shadow darkened her closed eyes. When no one grabbed her and no blade struck, Irosyl risked a glance.

"Solas," she said. It came out as an unintelligible groan. Knelt before her, several feet between them, Solas winced.

“Ir abelas," he said quietly. "May I touch you?"

Irosyl frowned, opened her mouth to tell him of course, then thought better of it and nodded instead. Still, he hesitated.

"I am going to help you sit up," he said carefully. "If it is too much, indicate however you can and I will stop."

What was he on about? Healing in the field was rarely so delicate—they needed it frequently, and expediently. She jerked her head in a semblance of a nod. Hopefully it conveyed that he should get on with it.

Gently, stressfully gently, Solas grasped her shoulders. At once, she understood.

Fire flared where his fingers touched her and not the kind that licked pleasure to her belly. Like thousands of ants walking across her skin, like a druffalo on her chest. Too much, too intense, even as light as he kept his touches. She screwed her eyes shut to block out the light once more.

Solas muttered ceaseless apologies and as soon as she was propped upright against the snowbank, his hands vanished from her arms.

"Seeker, a lyrium potion!" His voice blared like a signaling horn in her ear. Why must he shout?

Bottles clinked around the Seeker's smooth accent, calmer now after the battle. "What has happened? Is she injured?"

Irosyl heard Solas' huff like a boom of thunder, wincing even as she smirked.

"She is not behaving this way by choice, Seeker." His voice softened. "Irosyl? Can you open your eyes?"

Slowly, she did. Just a crack. The sunlight glaring off the snow and ice was still too bright, but manageable as long as she looked through her lashes. Solas uncorked the lyrium potion and held it to her lips. The cold glass rim made her wince.

"Ir abelas," he repeated. "Drink—it will help."

He tipped the vial back and she drank hungrily. She was not unfamiliar with lyrium potions—the Dalish might use them sparingly, but the Inquisition had no such compunctions. Particularly with the amount of battle magic they worked. In general, the potion buzzed like supercharged carbonation on her lips. If she let her mana get foolishly low, it might leave a low burn in the back of her throat. Strength would flow into her limbs like a rushing river.

This did not feel like that.

Her mouth, her tongue, her throat were on fire. It licked through her useless limbs and her whole body tensed like a puppet on a string. She surged up and gasped—

Ice. The air she inhaled was painfully frigid and somehow that made the fire worse, not better. Distantly, she noted that the potion was helping—her lungs accepted a full breath—but the process was blindingly painful. Tears pricked at her eyes as she swallowed the last of it.

Static surged from her heart, coursing through her veins out to her extremities and back again. Casting aside the empty vial, Irosyl grasped at the snow around her, reaching for something grounding.

Solas caught her wrists. "Do not try to cast," he urged her. "Ir abelas, lethallin. It will pass."

Like a candle snuffed, the energy surge from the lyrium potion snapped. Irosyl fell weakly back against the snowbank, but this weakness was familiar, that of an overdone workout or casting fatigue. On a greater magnitude than she’d ever experienced, but her blinding panic abated as she sank into the familiar pain. Solas pressed another lyrium potion into her hands.

“Drink this as well,” he ordered in a tone that brokered no argument. “I will explain to the Seeker.”

“Explain what?” Irosyl croaked, relieved to hear her voice, however cracked and grating. “I—you know what happened?”

“You don’t?”

“No!” she wheezed, doubling over coughing. “I’ve never experienced anything like that.”

Solas hummed. Rather than walking away, he beckoned the Seeker over.

“Inquisitor, are you well? What happened?”

“She was Purged,” Solas said. “Possibly Silenced at the same time.”

“Are you certain? I’ve never seen such a severe reaction.”

His words sent a different kind of chill down Irosyl’s spine. Straight out of her Keeper’s cautionary tales or her own horrific nightmares. Uncorking the lyrium potion, she took a swig to wash the bitter taste from her mouth.

“It is not uncommon in those who have little exposure to Templars or their abilities.”

“Fucking shems.” Irosyl downed the last of the potion; this one slid down her throat with just the usual buzz. She flexed her fingers and found that when she lifted her head to glare at Cassandra, it gave her no trouble.

“I saw her aspect vanish entirely from the Fade,” Solas continued. “It is…an unpleasant sensation.”

“Understatement,” Irosyl muttered. Doubt twisted the Seeker’s face, but there was no arguing with the Inquisitor’s hunched, broken frame. Her lips parted around something—another argument, an apology? But she faltered.

“I will find a place to set camp,” she finally said. Solas nodded.

“That would be best.” He held his hand out for Irosyl to take and pulled her to her feet. She had to lean nearly all of her weight against him to remain upright. “The Inquisitor needs to rest.”

#febuwhump2024 #febuwhumpday1 #dragon age #dragon age inquisition #solavellan #oc: irosyl lavellan #irosyl x solas #ws: the old life haunts the new #violence & injury #my writing #dragon age fanfic

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