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unstable-samurai · 6 days

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Breathing This Calm Night - smut

Yunjin x Male Reader

ONE-SHOT

Tags: fluff, oral sex, one-shot, tightjob, penetration, k-idol, famous girl, secret relationship

A/n: This is my first request. Thanks @dav1233555 for the plot suggestion 🫡

The two of you were anxiously dragging yourself towards the end of the day. Slowly the hours passed, seeming to last longer than they should, while a hurried and hard routine was followed, with no time to even exchange a few messages.

But you were finally free, at least for now, from the mess that is a magazine of international relevance.

I am arriving

You read the message and smiled at the phone screen. It wasn't crowded at the restaurant you chose to have dinner at. You reflected for a moment, and thought there was a bit of madness in what you two were doing, but it was indisputable that it was genuine and pure.

Truth be told, this whole thing was real. And thinking that this could be a bit crazy (in other people's eyes, to be more precise) only made your panoramic view of society more bitter.

After all, what was so great about being a foreigner and dating a K-idol? Well, you weren't the guy who was going to change the view of an entire society, so worrying about it was useless.

At least there was some security that this relationship would not be leaked to the media. Well, you were in fact part of the fucking media. There was support from the magazine you worked for (not that you were the owner or anything), and at least no one on your team would poke your eye out. Some other editors you trust already knew about your relationship. It was one of the countless advantages of being in a high position in the company and having a strong influence on what happened inside. I mean, someone from the magazine could try to fuck with you, snakes exist everywhere, doing this in an attempt to self-promote or even abandon ship, handing over the leak of your relationship to another magazine or tabloid (in the headline the motherfuckers would find a way to use the word "affair", just because your previous relationship ended a month before you met Yunjin). But you would discover the funny guy so easily that there wouldn't even be any fun in solving the mystery. All it took was a single call to your father, simply the greatest editor-in-chief who worked at the magazine's headquarters. Already retired, but still exercising great decision-making power thanks to his long years of contributions to the magazine. Your old man was seen almost as a royal advisor or a wise monk where directors, managers and editors from various sectors of the magazine went to ask for advice and help. You were relatively shielded from leaks.

You noticed her approaching. Well disguised, with glasses, hair tied back and comfortable clothes. She looked like just another ordinary girl. You couldn't help but notice the NY Knicks sweatshirt you had given her as a gift, it was both of your favorite team.

She greeted you with a discreet hug. You still hadn't gotten used to the fact that you couldn't give a peck in public que in South Korea. In your perception, it was the most normal thing in the world.

"Hi, baby! How are you?" she asked you as she sat down at the table.

"Better now, honey. What about you?"

"The same!"

"Was the day as hard as always?" you asked.

"Definitely!" she replied. Yunjin seemed eager for this question. She continued, “In the morning I had rap class. By the way, I think I'm getting better. Oh, and in the afternoon I recorded my lines, like, over and over again. very specific of what he wants for this track. The music producer has a very specific vision of what he wants for this track. He apologized and admitted that it might take some time to achieve the desired result.”

"Well, I trust your talent. Remember that you and your group are dealing with a delicate concept. I have seen up close the production of albums that address intimate themes, it is always a challenge, but also a true work and certainly a amazing gift for the fans. You girls are going to do great."

Yunjin laughed, a little shyly.

"It feels like I'm talking to a music critic instead of my boyfriend."

"Well, you're actually talking to a music critic. Oh, by the way, I remembered that I won't be writing the article about Le Sserafim's new album like I said before."

Her expression was one of surprise. Yunjin asked:

"Is it because of me?”

"Yes." you answered honestly. “Well, look, love, I'm prioritizing our relationship and thinking about the future. If this is for real, eventually the press will hear about us together, and a review from me about my girlfriend's music group obviously it would make my opinion seem partial and biased. It's just to avoid future problems."

"Okay" She looked upset. "But I'll still want to know your opinion when you hear the album."

"I'm really looking forward to hearing it." You smiled, making her feel better. "I left the review about the new album for a good friend of mine to write. I really respect her opinion."

"I think we're in good hands. But let's stop talking about work for a bit!"

The waiter seemed to have heard Yunjin's speech as he appeared to save them right after she finished saying that. Yunjin had great taste in food, that's why she always chose the order for the two of you, you weren't the "culinary trailblazer" type; a few months in South Korea and you only knew five typical dishes (always returning to the arms of the big fast-food chains).

"Oh, I almost forgot to give you this!" You handed her a gift. "It had been on my lap for so long that I had forgotten I had brought it with me."

"Oh, baby! You didn't have to do that!"

She started to unwrap it.

"Hope you like."

You waited for her reaction. Yunjin smiled and made a cute little noise when she saw that it was a book (although she already knew from the shape of the gift wrap).

"You know I love reading! Thank you so much."

"It's The Alchemist. I know you love fantasy and this silly self-help thing. This book is a mix of both."

You saw her eyes light up.

"You're perfect. I love how well you know me. And self-help isn't silly, it's very good for evolving as a human being." she scolded you.

You shrugged.

"It's not the kind of thing I'd like to put on my bookshelf. But to each their own.”

She laughed.

"I'm still going to make you read one of these."

"Well, I've already read The Alchemist. And if I thought it was average, you'll think it's a masterpiece."

★

It was around 10pm when the two of you finally arrived at your apartment. Dinner was very good, especially dessert (that bingsu thing was really awesome), and by that night there was no more energy for more fun, it was preferable to have a good night's sleep so that the next day you could do something together. Even so, Yunjin hummed excitedly in the car on the way home. You appreciated all that joy.

You took off your shoes when Yunjin took off her NY Knicks sweatshirt, leaving only a tight tank top on her body. You noticed that she wasn't wearing a bra by the way her breasts showed through the fabric of her tank top. You slowly approached her and grabbed her from behind, kissing her repeatedly. Yunjin wrapped her hands around your neck as she giggled at the series of kisses.

“Will you be my teddy bear tonight?” she asked sweetly. “I need your affection so much, baby.”

“Whatever you need, sweetie.” You said as you kissed her on the neck.

Things were heating up. Your hands slid down Yunjin's soft belly, heavy sighs escaped her mouth unconsciously.

“Look, we still need to shower.” she said.

"No problem." you answered.

“You're putting me in the mood. I'm warning you that if you keep touching me like this, you're going to have to go all the way to finish what you started.”

“And since when has this been a problem for me?” you asked as you led her to the couch.

You took off your shirt and belt from your pants. Yunjin took off her jeans, leaving only her tank top and adorable pink panties. Your hand slid down Yunjin's left thigh while you kissed her right thigh. That was more than enough to give her goosebumps. She had her legs wide open, waiting, almost begging, for you to touch that place. Instead of doing it right away, you decided to play with her a little, kissing and biting her inner thigh while using one of your hands to lightly massage her pussy through her panties. Your lips slid to Yunjin's crotch, where you licked the entire area, she reveled in the act, trying hard not to close her legs with the spasms she was having. It didn't take long for a wet stain to darken the pink of the panties. When you finally removed Yunjin's panties, you saw how wet she was. So horny that she couldn't wait for you, fingering her pussy slowly, opening it with her fingers so you could see how drooling she was; a successful action of provoking you. Then you realized how hard your cock was, pulsing in your pants, painfully tight, which made you hornier.

Without wasting any more time, you dived between Yunjin's legs, eager to taste her (that flavor that was becoming increasingly familiar and addictive… Part of your life. Yeah, we could put it that way), your tongue delighting in the taste and the cozy warmth of the inside of her pussy, while Yunjin moaned softly, digging her nails into the sofa cushions.

“I love it when you suck me like that, baby. You make me feel so good!” she moaned.

At one point she asked to stop because her lust was unbearable and that way he would have an orgasm in a short time.

“I want to feel your cock inside me now.” she said. You had just taken off your underwear when she added, “Wait, what if we fuck in the bathroom. Let’s save time, what do you think?”

Your response was to lift her off the couch and take her to the bathroom. You turned on the light with your elbow and, before you could think of anything, she said:

“Fuck me like this! Your cock goes deep into my pussy when you fuck me in the air.”

You kissed her intensely while you tried to fit your dick into her pussy. The feeling of your cock sliding inside Yunjin was wonderful. Upon realizing that your cock was well placed inside her, you grabbed Yunjin's thighs tightly and began to thrust into her energetically while she held onto you, moaning compulsively.

And Yunjin was right, your dick went deep in that position. You could feel her deep inside, the entire length of your cock was being used, and she loved it. When she announced her orgasm, you wanted to make sure it was intense and pleasurable, the way it made her roll her eyes, so you lifted her a little higher, grabbing her ass, while Yunjin wrapped her legs inside your arms, making her practically hang from you and her pussy is completely inside your dick.

“Oh God, Baby! I’m cumming!”

She trembled holding onto you, while you practically rubbed her pussy on your dick, always rotating it close to your body. It was just a shame that you couldn't enjoy her eyes rolling back at the moment of orgasm, you simply loved seeing her go crazy with pleasure, but there was also a certain contentment in just knowing that it happened.

You sat Yunjin down on the sink and there you started fucking her again, looking deeply into her eyes. At one point she looked at you with so much passion, so much desire that there was a sudden growing desire to fill her pussy with your load of cum.

“Hang me, love.” she asked affectionately.

Her hand wrapped around just over half of her neck, serving as support to fuck her even harder. Sweat running down both bodies, your gaze was lost between the mirror's reflection, her eyes, her tits and her expressions of pleasure. With the sensations highlighted, you realized how much you loved Yunjin and how much this feeling contributed to eminent pleasure during sex.

Holy shit! You were almost there.

You thought about how much you wanted to go deep into this, literally to the end, but you were without a condom and suddenly stopping the act to go get a condom at the end of the championship was a bit... discouraging.

But you have an idea.

“Stand up, sweetie” you said. “Let’s try something new.”

Yunjin got out of the sink, looking at you excitedly.

“Get in the shower stall with me.” you asked, opening the door.

"What do you want to do?"

“It’s nothing out of this world, but it occurred to me that you’ve never given me a tightjob, I think it’s time we tried it.”

She had some assumptions about what this position was, but you helped her anyway. Yunjin was a rather tall girl, so there were no problems for your dick to fit between her thighs, the result was perfect, nothing uncomfortable. You thought about turning on the shower to lube up a little, but her pussy was so wet and the continuous sweat running down between her thighs was already more than great. You grabbed Yunjin's waist tightly and she crossed her legs a little, squeezing your dick.

You began to thrust into her, your cock sliding back and forth as you dragged Yunjin's labia. So you discovered in the best way that this was very pleasurable for both of you. The internal heat started inside you again and gradually you lost yourself in that exciting sensation. As you approached the final explosion, you bestially grabbed Yunjin in every way possible, sliding your sweat-damp hands down her belly, squeezing her breasts and slapping her ass. You lost yourself in the voluptuousness that was Yunjin's body and- Fuck! She loved it. She loved being your instrument of pleasure, knowing that the person she loved so much reached maddening peaks of passion, desire and lust for her. A juice of feelings for an insatiable thirst.

“Oh baby! I’m gonna cum! I’m gonna-”

Without any warning, Yunjin began to move her hips in a rhythm that immediately took you to the precipice of pleasure. The soft, hot, wet, suffocating skin of her thighs dancing over your cock. This was too much for you. When you came, you hugged Yunjin tightly, holding her as if your life depended on it, giving in to inconstant and uncontrollable moans close to her ear. The frantic thrusts lost their rhythm, going deeper and slower through Yunjin's thighs. She held your arms affectionately, waiting for your breathing to become less labored before kissing you.

"I love you." You said to her.

The phrase was so loaded with something that covered your feelings at that moment, and you wished she was the woman of your life and would never leave your side.

"I love you too!" said Yunjin when she found a way out of your tongue. “Baby, you don’t know how much.”

“This took longer than expected. Let’s take our shower.”

“Yep! Let's go."

You turned on the shower. The hot running water was invigorating, even more so being next to Yunjin, you didn't know that sharing certain intimacies was so special until you finally did it with her. you soaped Yunjin's entire body, she helped you wash your back and you shampooed her hair, gently massaging her scalp; it was cute how it relaxed her, she seemed so surrendered to you in that moment, and just a few months ago you were sitting across from her and the other Le Sserafim girls, asking incisive questions about the creative process of their latest album. That's where it all started, after all. And who could say where it would end?

“Hey, baby, let me shampoo your hair now.” Yunjin said with a goofy smile.

Nobody, you thought. Nobody could say.

A/n: sorry for any grammatical errors 😅

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hannyoontify · 11 months

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how your relationship with seventeen was revealed

warnings | reader wears nail art for minghao's part

notes | reader is also an idol, kinda unrealistic in some parts but whatever js let me have this one LMAO, not proofread

seungcheol – an interview

he thought it was high time to reveal your relationship to the world. after (a lot of) discussing with you and receiving your permission, he mentioned you during an interview for a magazine shoot. the question was smth around the lines of "what do you do when you have a particularly bad day" and cheol casually said "i go to [name] for comfort. they're a really special person to me and always cheer me up whenever i'm feeling down. i'm lucky to have them." with an absolute love sick smile.

safe to say, twitter almost crashed after that interview was released and you confirmed it on a livestream js a couple days later. (both pledis and your company were not happy but fuck them)

jeonghan – your hair color

your company's very big on self-expression when it came to physical appearance, so they never forced a hairstyle / makeup / clothes on you or your members. you were free to dye your hair however you wished, and you mostly kept it natural. until you met jeonghan. a couple months into your relationship with him, jeonghan came up with the idea of matching hair colors. he often had to dye his hair for comebacks, and instead of dying your entire head, he suggested that you would only get a single, visible strand of hair dyed in the same shade. you loved the idea and no one really noticed, not even your own company, until a eagle-eyed carat pointed it out on tiktok. the entire kpop community knew you and jeonghan were close since you both guest mc-ed together before and one of your members were close with seungcheol. and it seemed legit. the entire internet blew up and it even became a trend among couples. your companies both released a statement just a few weeks later, confirming the allegations.

joshua – his podcast w/ vernon

there was a question sector of the podcast he hosted with vernon where carats could submit questions via twitter and he and vernon would answer them. he saw a question that asked about their thoughts on your group's most recent comeback, and vernon managed to sneak in a few praises, complimenting the composition of one of the bsides before shua began a word vomit of praise, specifically for you. he complimented how much you improved since the last comeback and how good you looked in the music video, the teaser photos, the most recent stage, basically everything. he was so busy talking that he didn't notice the massive side-eye vernon was giving him and once he stopped talking, joshua physically slapped a hand over his mouth because oops.

no worries though, you thought it was funny and thought it was high time that the two of you revealed your relationship. joshua got clowned for it a lot though, especially by vernon.

junhui – instagram

the two of you tried your best to time your posts so nothing seems suspicious. for almost a year, your pictures from cat cafe dates to museum dates and late park dates went unnoticed by fans. that is, until your group went to japan recently for a short trip for promotions and jun tagged along since he had no schedules for 2-3 days. you found a cute convenience store during a late night walk with him and took pictures. some on your own, some of only him, and some together. except this time, the two of you forgot to talk beforehand and you both posted the photos on the same night.

your manager scolded you for being so careless, but truth be told he didn't actually care. he thought it was funny and only had a word with you because as your manager, he had to. (he already knew beforehand and thought you guys looked super cute together)

hoshi – seungkwan

you and hoshi were having a movie date night but you guys weren't particularly in the mood to actually watch a movie so the two of you just fucked around the whole night, prank calling different members to see how they would react and watching instagram reels (because hoshi swears by them and thinks they're better than 'that stupid clock app'). (the funniest reaction you got so far was mingyu, who was half asleep when you facetimed him and asked him if his refrigerator was running. when he responded with a groggy 'yes', hoshi said that he better go catch it and mingyu actually dropped his phone to go catch it.) the next victim was seungkwan, who you didn't know was doing a weverse at the same time. when seungkwan received the incoming facetime call from hoshi, he grinned and decided to accept the call by showing the camera his phone screen. what he didn't expect was to see hoshi's arm wrapped around you and his chin tucked onto your chin when he answered the call.

when seungkwan accepted the call, the first thing you saw was a reflection of you and hoshi, and you recognized the familiar flow of comments flying past the unfamiliar phone screen at an incredible speed. you dropped hoshi's phone in sheer panic and glanced over at your boyfriend who looked as equally panicked, his jaw basically reaching the floor. poor seungkwan began fumbling for a random excuse but it was too late now. the cat (tiger) was out of the bag.

wonwoo – via the company

wonwoo never thought there was a point in hiding your relationship from the public. he was with the person he loved and what a few jobless netizens had to say about your relationship wouldn't change that. after a couple months of 'testing the waters' and seeing how far the two of you would commit to the relationship, wonwoo just straight up went to the ceo of pledis and went 'yo i'm dating [name] from [group name] and you can't stop me' (with your permission of course, and you did the same thing) after a lot of discussion with both your ceo's, the companies agreed to simultaneously release a statement to the public about your relationship with wonwoo.

woozi – his lyrics

we all know woozi projects everything that's going on in his life through his song lyrics. yk those posts where people are like "i need someone to break bruno mars' heart again" bc his breakup songs are so good? it's like that. the latest seventeen comeback is FILLED TO THE BRIM with love songs and everyone and their mother is like "what the fuck is going on" because woozi's written love songs before but not like this??? the lyrics seem so much more deeper and personal, and the listener can almost feel woozi's heart and soul being poured into the lyrics and melody. woozi personally denied anything on a weverse live but people caught on once he released a mixtape of a love song and the lyrics contained a physical description of a person that was a little too similar to you.

minghao – books (and nail art)

minghao likes reading books. you like reading books. that doesn't mean you're dating, right? so many people in the world love to read books, that doesn't automatically make you lovers, right? ... right, except you read and post about the same books minghao reads and recommends to carats. even then, that could've been a coincidence, right? you just have similar taste in books.

wrong. you made a silly mistake of saying on a live how all your favorite books were recommended by a super close friend that you held dear to your heart. still, you can just be friends with minghao, right? wrong again because fans noticed that you had matching nail art with minghao's, the signature 8/infinity sign on your nails. there was no point in being in denial any longer.

mingyu – instagram

another silly little mistake. he recently came back from a trip with just you and him, and naturally, he wanted to upload some photos to instagram for his lovely fans to foam at the mouth scream over (he knows the power he holds). he was lying in bed (next to you), ready for bed as he scrolled through chose different photos to upload. what he didn't realize was that he had also clicked on a photo of you and him kissing in the dark, under a streetlight. it was a classic, romantic kiss. his hand was resting on your lower back, your arms wrapped around his neck as he dipped you, your leg held up by his other hand. almost immediately after posting, mingyu set down his phone and went to sleep in your arms.

the next morning, he woke up to about 56 missed calls from his manager, a BUNCH of weverse notifications, and 300+ messages from the seventeen group chat (that came back to life for the first time in almost a month and it wasn't js seungcheol talking to himself)

dokyeom – weverse live

dokyeom is surprisingly not shy when it comes to his relationship with you. after a few serious discussions, the two of you ventured out to the streets of seoul in broad daylight, your hand tightly entwined in his own, but no tabloid or news outlet seemed to catch whiff of it. dokyeom was frustrated because he wanted to show you off to the world, tell everyone that he was yours and you were his, but no one was bothering to expose it. so he decided to take this matter into his own hands. after receiving permission from both companies, he started a weverse live–with you. the two of you sat side by side, awkwardly waiting for more and more viewers to enter the livestream. obviously the entire internet went insane when dokyeom held his hand in yours and said with a proud smile that the two of you were dating and would appreciate all the love and support. and the internet officially lost it when he pressed a kiss to your cheek, which made you blush intensely.

it was cute, and even his manager–who was sitting behind the phone–was smiling as he watched the two of you together.

seungkwan – an entertainment show

similar to joshua. a couple members from your group were guests on a show that seungkwan was a regular cast of to promote your upcoming comeback, and of course they already knew that you were dating him. before the recording, they were teasing him (they're all already very close) and kept mentioning your name, which made seungkwan turn into a bright red tomato. during the recording, when it was time to promote your group's most recent comeback, your group members stood in the center of the room and gave a little sneak peek to the choreo of the title track, which seungkwan followed to with on the side (people didn't notice this until the airing of that episode–and an fyi, this was before their official comeback). and when the time came to the talk about the production process, seungkwan immediately began to ramble about how much you improved on your live singing and how proud he was of you. he also talked about how you talked to him about how much you struggled with the change of concept and how you pushed through those hard trials. he also couldn't forget about how good you looked and how the concept change looked really good on you and the new makeup look accentuated your eye color. at the end of his very long speech, seungkwan realized what he just did and sank into his chair with his bright red face buried into his hands.

vernon – vernon being vernon

vernon did a vernon and randomly revealed it on a weverse live, almost giving his poor manager a heart attack. he was reading through the comments when he randomly said 'by the way, i'm dating [name] from [group name]' HIS POOR MANAGER. HAD A MINI HEART ATTACK BEFORE TURNING OFF THE LIVE IN A PANIC. the following day, pledis released a statement, confirming vernon's impromptu confession.

dino – dispatch

my poor boy was the only one who fell victim to dispatch 😭 he was so careful not to get caught because he didn't want you to receive any backlash. specifically went on dates later in the day so the two of you wouldn't be as easily recognized, trying to stay home as much as possible, covering up as much as you both could. but eventually, dispatch caught the two of you hugging at the entrance of the hybe building at 11 pm. first, weird. why were they watching you guys at 11 pm. second, seungcheol was so relieved that the secret was finally out because he was running out of excuses as to why dino was almost never at home anymore.

reblogs and feedback is always appreciated ^-^

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fyorina · 2 months

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(uh, this is rlly long im so sorry qwq)

OMG THAT LAST CHAPTER HAD ME FEELING SM CARINA U CANT DO THIS TO ME !!!! LITERALLY THE FIRST FEW PARAGRAPHS IN I HADTA WALK AROUND BC I WAS SO OVERWHELMED I LOVED IT SM !!! N THOSE LAST FEW LINES. DONTDOTHISTOME I S A W THE "BEAST AU COMPLIANT" TAG ON UU IM GONNA SOB MY EYES OUT DURING IT I JUST KNOW !!!

gonna leave some of my fave few lines n my thoughts abt them from this chapter (ok these arent all of em, bc if i put all of em it'd be the whole 50k words of this series SO ITS JUST THIS CHAPTER)

"because how could he possibly belong amongst people who are so unfailingly good that it makes his tainted heart stick out like a sore thumb?"

STOP NO DONT DO THIS TO MEEEEEE throughout the whole fic u perfectly captured his thought process n how he denies his own capacity for change n how he HAS changed from when he was 18 BUT THIS LINE MADE ME TEAR UPPPPPP

"He is so completely and irrevocably in love with you that Dazai doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to live in a world without you. The thought alone makes his skin crawl and his chest cave in."

self-explanatory

“Are you calling me ugly?”

u gorgeous, gorgeous man ilysm yes you look like a rat but i'll swaddle u up in blankets n clean u up

the whole graveyard scene. DO YOU WANT ME TO CRY HELLO

“You were a kid, Osamu. You’re not some incarnate of evil for ending up where you did, you were failed by all of the adults in your life,”

ok nvm crying this hit me like a truck

"Humans cannot live without a heart, so if he’s to give you his, it’s only fair that you give him your own—though realistically, yours has already been his for a long time."

i feel like this mightve been ur fave line, but if it wasnt IT STILL IS MINE BC OH MY GODDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD QWQ

ranpos lil rant was so funny he's literally me frfr

“Yeah… ha, look at us, in jail at the same time! Couple goals, huh?”

i giggled

PLS READER INVITING EVERYONE JUST TO AVOID GETTING INTERROGATED UMMM RELATABLE LMFAO

these are just some of them BUT JUST IN GENERAL, UR WRITING IS JUST MAGICAL ITS EVERYTHING IVE EVER WANTED TO READ N I LOVELOVELOVEEEE THIS SERIES N ALL UR WORKS (n u /p) SM !!! I CANT WAIT FOR UNREAL UNEARTH, I JUST KNOW IT'LL BE AMAZING !!!

RED HOW MANY TIMES MUST I TELL YOU NOT TO APOLOGIZE I LITERALLY ADORE YOU IM GOING TO WEEP OMG

honestly the first scene of dazai’s pov was one of my favs to write because it pisses me off so much whenever he’s excluded from the ada panels in the manga fjsjdjsjjd so i NEEDED the opportunity to hit home that that is his FAMILY idc what asagiri says the ada is that boys family and he deserves it 🥹🤞

UGHHHHH STOP BECAUSE WHENEVER I WRITE CANONZAI ITS SO HARD TO KEEP ON THAT THIN LINE OF HIS INABILITY TO ACCEPT HIS OWN GROWTH WHILE ALSO HAVING HIM ACKNOWLEDGING ODA’S LAST WISH FOR HIM SO I REWROTE SO MANY OF HIS POVS SEVERAL TIMES BECAUSE I FELT LIKE I WASNT GRASPING IT ALL PROPERLY

the graveyard scene was one of the 3 scenes i started writing for 🥹 i literally was weeping when i finally got to it

AND ALSO THE YOU WERE A KID LINE UGHHHHHHHH BRO when i tell you that’s something that i literally want to scream at him and shake his shoulders like he was FOURTEEN WHEN MORI BROUGHT HIM IN AFTER HIS ATTEMPT !!!!! FOURTEEN !!!!! HE WAS A BABY IT MAKES ME SO SAD WHEN HE FRAMES HIMSELF AS SOME IRREDEEMABLE MONSTER WHEN HE ONLY TURNED OUT THE WAY HE DID BECAUSE HE HAD NO ADULTS IN HIS LIFE SETTING HIM ON THE RIGHT TRACK ugh im gonna weep again i will always be dazai’s #1 defender, i will fight him himself idc he was only a lil baby :’)

oh my god fun fact i actually almost deleted that line about the heart, i don’t even know why like i was rereading it right before i post and i second guessed myself because i was like ‘i don’t think it rlly flows’ but then i decided against removing it because i liked the line in general SO IM WEEPING AGAIB

bro ranpo needs a promotion for real the headaches this man must get because of people not listening to him 💀

HDOSJDJSJDJJD THE COUPLES GOAL LINE WHEN I TELL YOU I SNORTED WRITING IT HELPPPPP I WAS GIGGLING SO HARD

RED ILYSM IM BUNDLING YOU IN THE SOFTEST BLANKETS AND GIVING YOU A FOREHEAD KISS

i’m so excited for unreal unearth like honestly it’s my pride and joy, i’m so pleased with how my beast!dazai characterization has come out so far and i’m hoping everyone else is going to like it too 🥹 if not ill simply die HAHAH JK JK JK no but really i’m so very excited for it

#ᡣ𐭩 carina’s love letters #ᡣ𐭩 from user: cheriiyaya

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nimata-beroya · 1 year

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(IDs in alt text)

It's Friday again, which means it time for some self-promotion. This week, it's yet again another Mando fic. It's basically a series of small canon scenes (the one that I like the most of each episode) told through Din's and Grogu's eyes (almost always alternating POVs). It's very slowly updated, but if you need a small dose of fluff with a space tin-can dad and his smol green son, go and check it out.

SANDAWUNI VA UMTIDAGIR (Unbreakable Bond)

Chapters: 3/ 30

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Warnings: No Warnings

Words: 2,089

Relationships: Din Djarin & Grogu

Characters: Din Djarin, Grogu, IG-11

Additional Tags: Canon Compliant, Collection of missing scenes headcanons and different POVs, Father-Son Relationship, Accidental Baby Acquisition, Force-Sensitive Din Djarin, POV Alternating, I'll write one chapter per episode and I might add some in between, My intention is writing short chapters, I managed that with the first but promise nothing with rest, I know myself and my tendency to write and write and w, Canon-Typical Violence, More tags will be added as fic progresses

Series: Part 3 of The Adventures of The Mudhorn Clan

Summary:

The life of Din Djarin, beroya of the Mandalorian covert in Nevarro, turns upside down the moment he accepts the commission from the client. The quarry he's after is like any other he has hunted before. He doesn't expect to form a bond for a lifetime, neither the things he's willing to do to protect the foundling.

More fics: here and here

Chapter I: The Connection

In retrospect, Din could have never imagined how much this job would change his life. But he should have if he had listened to that nameless energy, that sixth sense that pokes him from time to time. As a child, he was more attuned to it, but after the droids' attack in Aq Vetina that killed his parents and he was taken in by Mandalorians, the link with it faded almost altogether. It only resurfaced in his most dire moments to give him the necessary edge to pull himself out from sure demise.

Yet, since Din accepted this quarry from the Imperial, the pickling in his chest came back with vengeance and has been constant. The closer he gets to the asset, the stronger it becomes. It's as if he has an inner tracking fob for his prey.

His energy within burns brighter than ever, the moment when he opens the pod. It collides with another, much stronger and incandescent. Unprepared for the power clash, Din stumbles back. His astonishment doubles up, becoming aware that the asset he was tasked to find is a small creature—a child.

The knowledge rubs wrong on him on so many levels, making his jaw twitch.

"Wait… they said fifty years old." Din cannot stop watching the asset, as if with the power of his stare he can make it grow. He has no qualms about catching bounties when they're adults. His principles make an act of presence, though, when dealing with kids. The Mandalorian creed has instilled in him that children are precious. They're the future, and as such, they need to be protected.

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#fic back friday #mare writes star wars #sandawuni va umtidagir #the mandalorian #din djarin #grogu #canon compliant

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gojo-x-reader · 3 years

Text

Red String of Fate

Relationship(s): Gojo Satoru x F!Reader

Warnings: slight swearing, slight manga spoilers

Tags: Soulmate AU

AO3 Link: here

Words: ~2.3k

Request: “Hello I'm actually not sure if I'm supposed to put put my request here? well, if its not supposed to be here, then please ignore it. Anyways, can I ask of you to share your thoughts on Soulmate AU w/ Gojo around 12 to 16 yrs old where he can see signs of who's soulmate is whos meeting his possible fiance who turns out to be his soulmate (I asked that age bc first meeting! he's from a noble clan and its really weird he doesn't have fiance or something) Sorry if its confusing and Thank you!”

Gojo Satoru was twelve years old when his Six Eyes began showing him the red strings of fate. Every person’s string was different. Some of them stretched on for what seemed like an eternity, almost seemingly never reaching the other end. Others were shorter, connected to the person they stood next to (whether they knew of their existence or not). And unfortunately, on some, Satoru could see the end of the string, but it dragged behind someone, unconnected to another human.

Satoru had told his mother about the strings as they appeared. Those are strings that lead one to their soulmate, she had explained to him. Everyone has a soulmate, but not everyone is in love with theirs. There are different kinds of love in this world.

Satoru’s parents were soulmates, but they did not love each other; that much was clear from how his father treated his mother. He never hit her or anything, but he didn’t treat her like an equal; more of a vessel that gave birth to an heir. He only interacted with his wife when necessary, the two not even sleeping in the same room at night.

For that reason, Satoru was scared to meet his own soulmate. He had one, that much was clear by the bright red string tied around his left pinky that stretched on for kilometers. He didn’t want to end up like his parents.

Gojo Satoru was fourteen years old when his father announced that he would be marrying you, a girl from the Kamo clan. You were the youngest daughter in the secondary branch of the family, just a year younger than him. Tomorrow, the two of you would meet for the first time.

You were nervous about tomorrow, for several reasons. Number one, you had heard the rumors about Gojo Satoru--the first member of the Gojo clan to be born with the Six Eyes and Limitless, the two inherited techniques of his clan, in a hundred years or so. That meant, in a nutshell, he was much stronger than you could ever hope to be, as someone who hadn’t even inherited the Kamo clan technique (which is why you were being shipped off to another clan). Number two, you had heard rumors of his personality, somehow both cold and carefree at the same time, but one hundred percent a horrible personality to be combined with your timid and quiet nature. And number three, you almost resented him because now you were stuck in an arranged marriage and you saw how well that worked out for your parents.

Tomorrow arrived, and the maids dressed you up in the finest of kimonos, hair ornaments, and even makeup. You weren’t particularly into girly interests, more interested in training for when you enter Kyoto High in a few years; the feeling of foundation and lipstick felt foreign on your face.

You arrived at the main hall, escorted by your uncle (the head of the Kamo family), your parents, and a few maids. You normally didn’t wear a kimono often, except for very special occasions, and you have never been in one for this long. Graceful, you were not, and tripped a few times because of the geta chosen for you to wear with the kimono. Each time, the maids were swift to grab ahold of your arms and stabilize you. They even helped you sit down as you awaited your future fiance and his parents.

Gojo Satoru’s parents arrived before he did. They apologized on behalf of their son, citing that he was on he was back from a mission. You were jealous, he wasn’t even in high school yet and was already being assigned missions. While you weren’t powerful in comparison to Gojo Satoru himself, you could still hold your own against your older cousins and had a decent amount of cursed energy.

Gojo Satoru’s parents seemed nice enough, but the chemistry between them resembled that of your own parents; they tolerated each other, but that was it--no love, no spark, nothing. You wondered if his parents were also put into an arranged marriage. You could sympathize, but you also secretly hoped that the two of you wouldn’t end up like your parents.

You poured tea for your future in-laws, hands shaking slightly, a few drops of tea spilling. As you sat the teapot down, in came Gojo Satoru himself, dressed in a simple black kimono, but the sash was not tied tightly. His hair was touseled, and stained with either dirt or blood (you hoped it was dirt). Despite his unkempt look, he was gorgeous, with bright white hair and eyes blue like the sky matching neither of his parents. Despite the color differences, he took mostly after his mother with her soft features.

When he made eye contact with you, he froze, looking down at his left hand, and then back to you. Before you could even greet him, he immediately fled the room, both his parents calling after him, leaving after him.

That was a bit painful; your first time meeting him and he leaves immediately seeing your face. You weren’t sure how your self-esteem would recover after that blow.

About twenty minutes later, Gojo Satoru’s parents came back, empty-handed without their son. He refused to meet you, but they promised he would come around eventually. So, your family said your goodbyes and left the Gojo estate.

Once your family arrived back at the Kamo estate, your uncle slapped you across the face, blaming you for what transpired with the Gojo family. It was your looks, your lack of femininity that obviously scared your fiance away. Not even makeup or the finest materials could fix it.

So what, if you weren’t “feminine”? Being “feminine” doesn’t exorcise curses, now does it?

You grumbled an apology, leaving to your room and locking the door behind you. You started crying, ruining the makeup that took the maids hours to do, but not even bothering to care. It took a while to get out of the kimono, but you changed into sweatpants and a large T-shirt and left the offensive material on the floor. Neither of your parents bothered to check in on you, but the head maid did. She cleaned up your makeup and brought you some of your comfort foods. She was more of a mother to you than your own, and you were always grateful for her in your life.

The next time you would meet Gojo Satoru, there would be hell to pay for embarrassing you like this.

Gojo Satoru was sixteen years old when he next met his fiancee, this time on the battlefield rather than mitigated by their families. Kyoto was short by one for the Kyoto Goodwill Event, so you were allowed to join as the sole first year. You were glad for the opportunity because that meant you could finally pay back Gojo Satoru for the embarrassment you felt two years ago.

You were told you had great potential as a jujutsu sorcerer, already being promoted to Semi-Grade 2 as you entered Kyoto High. Of course, you weren’t even close to your fiance who was promoted immediately to Special Grade upon entering Tokyo High. While the power difference between a Semi-Grade 2 and a Special Grade was immense, you weren’t going to let that stop you. You held a lot of pain in your heart for how Gojo Satoru rejected you from one glance, refusing to ever see you again that day.

This was Gojo Satoru’s first Goodwill Event, as last year he was only a first-year and the spots were full from the second and third years last year. Since last year, Kyoto had won, the event was held at your school. Not a single second or third year at Kyoto believed they even had a chance to win this year, as Tokyo has not one but two Special Grade students this year participating in the event. There was only one Grade 1 sorcerer on the Kyoto side, a third-year, while the others were a Grade 2 or Semi-Grade 2. The goal was to stick together; power in numbers. While the two monsters Gojo Satoru and Geto Suguru could take out the entire Kyoto team singlehanded most likely, the others on the Tokyo team were rather weak, at only Grade 3.

So, the Kyoto side would stick together, avoid conflict. The goal was to exorcise curses, not necessarily fight each other.

The six of you stuck together, exorcising curse after curse. It was strange, as several minutes passed and you hadn’t even encountered one of the Grade 3 Tokyo sorcerers. You felt the hairs on the back of your neck stick up, then a voice behind you announcing, “Hello~”

You turned around quickly, barely able to avoid an attack. There he was, Gojo Satoru in the flesh. He was much, much taller than last time you saw him, now towering over you like a tree. On his (admittedly) handsome face was a smug grin, his bright baby blues peeking out behind round black shades. He held his hands in his pockets in a carefree manner. Almost not like he just attacked you and your senpai.

You glanced back briefly. While you were somehow lucky to avoid the attack from your fiance, your senpai behind you was not. The attack left them unconscious, back against a tree and blood running down their head.

While reading headfirst toward your fiance probably was not a good idea, only rage flowed through your head. You may not have inherited your clan’s cursed technique, you inherited a similar technique but more closely to your mother’s Zenin clan’s technique. You could manipulate shadows, not to summon shikigami, but rather to form weapons.

You summoned the shadows to form a sword, raising it to strike Gojo Satoru. But it reached just centimeters away from his body before stopping, almost like an invisible forced kept it in place, unable to move it further. You stared at your hand in surprise.

“Now, now, is that any way to greet your fiance?” Gojo Satoru asked, grin widening.

“Are you really though?” You asked, jumping back cautiously before he could ready another attack. “You didn’t even want to meet me two years ago.”

He placed his hand onto his chin in thought. “Hmm, I suppose that’s true. Tell you what, land a hit on me and I’ll tell you everything.”

“Bastard,” you called to him, switching your shadow weapon to a bow and arrow, pulling back the shadow string, and releasing it toward him.

Gojo Satoru held up two fingers as the arrow stopped in mid-air, much like your sword earlier. “I don’t think that’s my name, sweetie. Bad luck for you today. Seems like we’re just a bad match.”

You were frustrated. How the hell was he doing that?

A siren sounded out through the forest. The match was over; Tokyo won, only because Gojo Satoru had distracted the Kyoto group while Geto Suguru handled the stranglers and the remaining Grade 3 sorcerers were able to exorcise more curses than your side.

Gojo Satoru disappeared before your eyes, but you heard a whisper in your ear from him, “I’m feeling generous. An hour before the individual matches tomorrow, meet me in the garden. I’ll explain everything.”

So, that’s how you found yourself out in the garden at 8 am, shivering from the morning chill. The garden was huge, but somehow you figured your fiance would be able to find you.

“Yo,” he called out, startling you from your thoughts. “I didn’t think you’d actually come.”

“I don’t think highly of you,” you admitted. “You embarrassed me two years ago and my uncle thinks I’m a disgrace to the family now.”

“Yikes, that seems a little harsh. Not like I annulled the engagement or anything. I just was going through some good ole teenage angst then, nothing more.”

“Still going through some ‘teenage angst’?” you questioned.

“Oh, you know, just the normal amount. I died a few months ago and it reset me back to typical teenage angst levels.”

“You what? ”

“But that’s a whole different story. We’re talking about why I left two years ago after seeing you.” He brought a finger up to his lips. “This is top secret. Can’t tell anyone.”

You nodded.

“So, my Six Eyes. I’m sure you’ve heard all about them, being in the Kamo clan and all. It turns out I can also see the red string of fate that brings soulmates together. My parents are soulmates, but they have a shitty relationship.”

“Okay.” You could relate, your parents also have a shitty relationship.

“And they’re the only pair of soulmates I’ve ever known. So,” he grasped his left pinky in yours, “when I saw that red string of mine connect to yours, I panicked. Didn’t want to be forced into a relationship with my own soulmate and end up like my parents. Call me a sappy romantic, but I wanted to meet you and get to know each other on our own, not because we’re in an arranged marriage.”

You couldn’t help but blush. Here was Gojo Satoru, your fiance, one of the strongest jujutsu sorcerers in the world, proclaiming that you were his soulmate. It seemed ridiculous, but you didn’t think he was lying. Suddenly, all the resentment for that time a few years ago left.

You took your pinky out of his, looking away from him in embarrassment, then stated, “There’s nothing that says we can’t do all that while still being engaged. Lets.” You took a deep breath, looking straight at those brilliant blue eyes past his sunglasses, then continued. “Let start over. Get to know each other the right way and see where this takes us.”

He grinned. It was the first time you saw him smile with pure happiness behind it. “I like that idea, soulmate.”

#gojo satoru #gojo satoru x reader #gojo x reader #jjk #jjk x reader #jujutsu kaisen #soulmate au

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sweeethinny · 4 years

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FIC COLLECTION

First of all, I'd like to say that here are all my fics - at least the ones that I tagged correctly and managed to find - and since there are many, I had to put them all bellow the cut, I hope it gets better this way :)

The fanfics with ** in front, are fanfics that I wrote recently

HP HEADCANON

HAPPY HOUR - HBP MISSING MOMENTS: One of Hinny's happy hours during HBP (T)

THE LAST MOMENT: What happened the day before Harry left - for the last time - with Dumbledore (M)

CHRISTMAS MAGIC: It's Hinny's first Christmas after the Battle, and they find a different way to celebrate (M) AO3

WHERE’S HARRY AND GINNY? : Harry and Ginny have spent some time away, so when they finally have time alone, they enjoy it until the last moment. (M) AO3

**LAST NAME: ‘I will be Mrs. Potter finally. You will no longer be the only Potter in the world. How do you feel about that? Ready to share your last name?’ (T) AO3

LAZY DAY: It's just a lazy day at the Potter house (G)

**PETITE: 'I read in a gossip newspaper that said that you are too big for me.’ (G)

THROUGH OTHER EYES: We see them... but through other eye (T)

COMFORT: Harry was never hugged or comforted after a nightmare, so when one of the children asks for it, he doesn't quite know what to do. (G)

GREEN EYES: Ginny always wondered what was behind those green eyes. (G)

SUCCUMBING: Harry can't get his beautiful and creative wife out of his mind. (M)

THE FIRST TIME OF THREE: How Harry found out he was going to be a dad. for the first time (G) THE SECOND TIME OF THREE: How Harry found out he would be a father a second time (G) THE THIRD TIME OF THREE: How Harry found out he would be a father a third time (G) AO3

TELLING THE NEWS: Harry knows that now more than anything, he cannot die, not when he will become a father, and for that, he needs to tell Ron the news (G)

GIN-GIN IS THE BEST: Gin-Gin is the best godmother Teddy could have (T)

THE FIRST POTTER: The first - of three - Potter babies to be born! (T)

**SKIN: Harry wanted to be able to show Ginny, through his eyes, how beautiful she is, and how all this insecurity with her body after giving birth to James is not necessary. Since he cannot do this, he tries in other ways. (T) AO3

**FEAR: 'Doesn’t it bother you?’ Ginny looked at him. 'Doesn’t it bother you to think that… that the world is so big and everything is so much bigger than James? That we are like two giants to him? Our garden must seem infinite through his eyes.’ (G)

JAMES AND HIS 15TH MONTH BIRTHDAY: Ginny is distraught when she realizes that her son will be 15 months old. The same age when Harry became an orphan (T)

THERE’S STILL A LOT OF SPACE: James Sirius is growing up, and Ginny wonders if there is still room for her, in his heart (G) (FLUFFFFF)

JAMES’S SICK: James is sick, and this is disturbing Harry's peace (G)

**GOLDEN DRESS: 'I feel like today is going to be different,’ Ginny promised, holding Harry’s hand and making him look at her. ‘And maybe we can do everything you wanted to do when you saw me in the gold dress for the first time?’ (T)

DEVIL IN DISGUISE: Ginny talks like an angel, walks like an angel, and acts like an angel. But Harry knows that she is the Devil in Disguise (T)

HARRY'S PROMOTION: “You know that if I’m getting this promotion, it’s thanks to you, don’t you?” (T)

**DISNEY: Draco and Astoria go to Disneyland, and Draco proves to be a man who doesn't like roller coasters (G) AO3

**THE COUPLE OF THE YEAR: The two were arm in arm, walking in silence like two kings, without even seeming to notice that everyone stopped to watch them pass (G)

HAPPY B-DAY GINNY POTTER: On Ginny's 39th birthday, she couldn't be happier to be alive. (G)

HARRY’S PENSIEVE: James S. travels through his father's saddest memories (T) (TRIGGERS FOR: DEPRESSION, DEATH, BLOOD, SELF-MUTILATION)

HARRY IT’S SUCH A GOOD FATHER: Harry can’t say no to his children, especially when they are bored (G)

MOM’S ADVICE: James has questions to ask, and who better than his mother to help him? (G) (cofcof my favorite by far cofcof)

BECAUSE IT’S THE GODFATHER’S JOB: Ron has a mission as a godfather, and he couldn't leave his godson helpless (T) PART II

I MUST NOT TELL LIES: Just a normal Potter day, when Lily Luna asked about Harry’s scar (G)

THE WORST / BEST BIRTHDAY: Some things have changed since he was 12 and lived with the Dursleys. Harry now has a family, and birthdays are not so lonely anymore (G) AO3

**INTIMATE PROBLEMS: ‘Harry.’ Teddy cried when Harry opened the door to their room, still wearing his pajamas and looking sleepy. If it weren’t for the look of panic, he would have thought the boy was sleeping on his feet. ‘My balls hurt.’ (T)

TEDDY IS DISCOVERED: Bill can be an understanding and calm guy ... but that doesn’t include when his daughter is with someone hiding in the room (ted x victorie) (T)

HARRY IS THE BEST FATHER: Moments in the life of James and Harry, where Harry proved to be the best father (T)

STILL INTO YOU: Some things just make sense, and even after all this time I'm into you... Baby not a day goes by that I'm not into you (M)

ADVICES: James Sirius makes an urgent call with his father; he needs loving advice. (G) AO3

**MISTLETOE: How could he find his best friend beautiful? How was he capable of that? (G) (James Sirius x OC)

**I’M SORRY: Mira was one of those fall that was worth it. (G) (James Sirius x OC)

**NO, I DON'T WANNA FALL IN LOVE: James Sirius faces his first broken heart (T) (James Sirius x OC)

**BAD NEWS: 'What happened?’ James asked.'The worst.’ Teddy said. ‘Vic is pregnant’ (T)

**KISSES: It felt so good to kiss him. Mira had already kissed other boys, and girls, but there was something about James that made him much better than everyone else (T) (James Sirius x OC)

JAMES IS DATING part 1 | 2: “James is dating.” Harry said, no longer holding on to the secret, remembering non-stop the scene of his son kissing the blonde warmly, in the back of their house. (T) AO3

I’M SORRY (Drastoria with a bit of Potters): Draco would do anything to see his son happy, even to apologize to ... someone. (G) (PART II)

GRADES: They are not at home when the bird arrives with James’ OWL grades.orJames Sirius is concerned about his future and the parents’ reaction to his idea (G) AO3

A PROTECTIVE FATHER: Harry is a concerned father, and when James decides to go to a party, he begins to doubt that that is the best option. (T)

ALBUS CAME OUT - PART I: Albus has something to say to James. Or, the one where Albus comes out gay to his brother and they have a conversation about it (T)

**BROTHERS: Albus and James' relationship over the years (T)

PLEEEASE?: Lily Luna just wants to be with his older brother and his 'cool' friends. Who could judge her? (G)

**INSECURITIES AND LONELINESS: Lily faces problems on her first year, problems that Ginny knows very well and knows that she will need to talk about - almost - everything about her own first year. Things are almost never easy in the beginning.(T) AO3

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HP AU

**JUST FRIENDS: 'Have you never been curious to know if you kiss well? Or if kissing a boy is different from kissing a girl?’ (T) (James x Sirius) AO3

EVEN AFTER THE END: They were alive. Right here, with Harry. Even after the end. (T)

IT’S CHRISTMAS!: It's Christmas and Harry can finally win the special gift that James kept so dearly (G)

**MUM: ‘Place your hand in mine,’ Lily said softly, ‘please hold my hand.’ (T) AO3

SIRIUS IS IN LOVE: "Do you always look at others like that?" (G)

NOBODY BUT YOU: For Sirius, at that moment, nothing the world exists but Hestia (M)

ALL ABOUT LOVE (SIRIUS X HESTIA): Sirius is this guy that everyone thinks kisses everyone, when in fact he is much more reserved and is afraid to connect with people. But then, when he starts going out with Hestia, he feels the happiest guy for the first time in ages (T)

DRUNK IN LOVE: ‘’I’m going to declare myself to her!’’ “You are drunk!” “Is there a better time than now?’’ (Jily + Sirius x Hestia) (T)

**ONLY ONE WHO KNOWS: 'I was the one who told him to be the secret keeper.’ Sirius sighed, his eyes watering, hugging her back and this time he hid his face in her chest. 'If they had died… Because of me.’ (Hestia x Sirius) (M)

BETTER THAN FIREWHISKY: What if Harry had realized that he loved Ginny in book five? (T)

FINALLY ALONE: ’You’re a big mama’s boy, aren’t you?“ She laughed. ‘’Lily taught you the rules well, thankfully you have me and I’m more than willing to distort you.’ (T)

TRICK OR TREAT, SWEETIE? : Halloween Special - Hinny faces a very unusual - and scary - situation on the night of the 31st (T)

WE WERE LISTENING TO THE WEEKND AND I HAD TO ASK YOU TO MARRY ME: There are things that need to be said at that moment (T)

**THE NUTCRACKER: All Harry wanted to do was take his daughter to watch The Nutcracker, but he didn't expect one of the dancers to mess with him so much. (T) AO3

**BOSS’S SON: Ginny is an auror in training, with few hours of fun in her schedule, but when one night she decides to go to a guy’s house and enjoy her youth, she is surprised by the discovery that she had sex with her boss’s son (T) AO3

**HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LILY!: Happy birthday to the woman who deserves all the happiness in the world. And for that, here’s an au where Jily lives, and Lily can celebrate her 61st birthday with her grandchildren and the whole family (G) (FLUUUUUF)

** HAPPY BIRTHDAY, PRONGS!: ‘Now who’s the old here?’ ‘It’s still you, Lils, you’re older than me… I’m like wine, every year better.’ Happy birthday my boy! (G)

REPUTATION: Harry and Ginny don't have the best reputations, which is exactly why the two get along so well. (M)

AO3 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7

YOU’RE THE RIGHT ONE: James discovers that some friendships can be something more. He just doesn't know how to handle it all. (next gen hp) (M) AO3 | 1 | 2 |

A LITTLE PARTY NEVER KILLED NOBODY: Harry would let her end her life without even complaining (T)

EASY: “Easy” by Camilla Cabelo (T) PART II (T)

THE ONE: Because when Harry realizes that Ginny is The One, he needs to do something about it. Even if it is risky, because his godfather always alerts him; “What is a life without a little risk?” (T) 1 | 2

THE DUKE: Some time ago a prophecy was made, one that said about two powerful and strong souls who would be able to defeat even the strongest of wizards, bringing peace that the Wizarding World has not seen for centuries. But for that to happen, they would have to be entwined through marriage. Everything was going well, the children were born healthy and were promised to each other, until one of them was kidnapped. (M) AO3 | FF.NET. | SIYE | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | **8

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JILYTOBER

JILYTOBER: Trapped in a broom closet (T)

JILYTOBER: Lily denying she fancies James (T)

JILYTOBER: Jily first kiss (T) (part two of the prompt where Lily denying she likes James)

JILYTOBER: At a Quidditch Match (G)

JILYTOBER: [text] [2AM] “I’m here. Come outside” (M for just a small detail that no longer has T)

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PROMPT

PROMPT JILY: With your fantastic ability to get into trouble, it doesn’t shock me to find you here (T)

PROMPT JILY: This is a shitty idea, do you want my help? (G)

PROMPT JILY: I want more than all of this, I want longer than forever with you. I just wanna love you. And take you on dates. And fuck you. And hug you (T)

PROMPT JILY: Simply Jily Muggle, and big declarations of love - and a runaway bride (G)

PROMPT JILY: Banana pancakes by jack johnson (G)

PROMPT JILY: Just… just talk to me. Please (T)

PROMPT ROMIONE: Sleep, I promise tomorrow will be better (G)

PROMPT SIRIUS x HESTIA: Hestia realizes there’s more to Sirius than just a bad boy image (T)

PROMPT SIRIUS X HESTIA: Sirius/ Hestia as a couple in hogwarts (T)

PROMPT SIRIUS x HESTIA: Sirius and Hestia during the years at Hogwarts (T)

**PROMPT SIRIUS X HESTA: Closing his eyes and hiding under the cover like a child, Sirius allowed himself to be miserable. It was horrible to like someone, he thought, he would rather die than have to feel it again. (T)

PROMPT HINNY: I actually wanted to get your number…(G)

PROMPT HINNY: Do you always stare at others like that? (T)

PROMPT HINNY: A new caffe has been opened near his house and Harry is besotted with the red headed barista (T)

PROMPT HINNY: Ginny thinks they’re doing a great job keeping their house plants alive but actually, Harry has secretly replaced them with identical-looking fake plants so Ginny can’t kill them (G)

PROMPT HINNY: Kissing in a vehicle for lust (T) (with mild mentions of sex)

PROMPT HINNY: This is definitely not my most attractive moment, but I promise I really am fit (M)

PROMPT HINNY: (plus Romione) Let me explain. I was bored and you left me alone. (G)

PROMPT HINNY: What Ginny would smell in her Amortentia. (G)

PROMPT HINNY: Ootp Sirius accidentally stumbles upon Harry and Ginny talking and accidentally thinking that it’s Lily and James (G)

PROMPT HINNY: Harry and Ginny come into the common room after quidditch practice and Ginny’s trying to make a bet with Harry that she can do a certain trick/trickshot in their next quidditch match (G)

PROMPT HINNY: Lily, James and Sirius react to hinny first kiss in the after life (G)

PROMPT HINNY/JILY: Hinny in an au where Jily and Sirius are alive (T)

PROMPT HINNY: Cho being jealous of Hinny in 6th year (G)

PROMPT HINNY: Ginny being jealous of Cho in 6th year (G)

PROMPT HINNY: How far did Harry and Ginny go in Half Blood prince? (M)

PROMPT HINNY: Harry and Ginny talk about their relationship after the Battle of Hogwarts (M)

PROMPT HINNY: Harry watching Ginny’s first league match (G)

PROMPT HINNY: Kissing in the rain after a declaration of love (G)

PROMPT HINNY: Jily were alive and James finding out that his daughter in law got a contract to be a professional quidditch player (T)

PROMPT HINNY: Please don’t die … If you die, I swear I will hunt you down in hell and bring you back (M) (For reasons of having description of blood and injuries)

PROMPT HINNY: Ginny was a woman who kept her cool, at least most of the time, but sometimes her Weasley blood boiled like a bubbling cauldron, and when that happened, she felt out of control and took the least rational attitude of all time. And that was how Petunia was attacked by a Bat-Bogey Hex as soon as she opened the door to the house. (G)

PROMPT HINNY: If you’ll excuse me, I’ll get my drink and leave you alone in your bad mood. I’m sure you’ll find someone better than me / you have 5 seconds to get off me (T)

PROMPT HINNY: Hinny kissing in a bar because they missing each other (T)

PROMPT HINNY: Harry winning Witch Weekly’s sexiest wizard alive (T)

PROMPT HINNY: The first time Harry is called dad (G) (fluffffffff)

PROMPT HINNY: Hinny taking 6 years old teddy to a Disneyland (G) (highly fluff)

PROMPT HINNY: Hinny and Teddy wearing matching costumes on Halloween (G)

PROMPT HINNY: Ginny's last days pregnant (G)

**PROMPT HINNY: Ron watches Harry and Ginny being new parents (G)

PROMPT HINNY: Harry and Ginny enroll their kids into a muggle Primary school the kids have a science fair, Harry helps them with it, Ginny and Arthur just being embarrassing muggle fanatics (G)

PROMPT HINNY: Have you ever died? I did a few times, it was actually quiet painful but you know what they say, no pain, no gain. (G)

**PROMPT HINNY: He and Harry had a fight last week... James said he didn’t like him anymore.’’ Ginny looked at her mother, looking a little sadder now. ‘’Harry cried.’ (G)

PROMPT HINNY: You’re safe now. I’m with you (T)

PROMPT HINNY: Hinny dropping off James Sirius for his first year at Hogwarts (G)

PROMPT HINNY: The boys and their dad vs Ginny and little Luna over having a sleepover with her guy friends (G)

PROMPT HINNY: Do you think the moon is jealous of how pretty you are? (T)

PROMPT HINNY: Dudley reviewing Harry - now, with his own family - for the first time in a few years (G) PART II

PROMPT HINNY: Blaise's son and Lily Luna start to date, and the Potter family doesn't handle the news very well (G)

PROMPT DRASTORIA: Death bed (coffee for your head) by Powfu for Drastoria (T)

#hinny #harry X ginny #my fic #hinnyheadcanon #jily #james x lily #draco x astoria #drastoria #jilytober #fluff #hp angst #smut #hp next gen #ROMIONE #james sirius x oc #sirius x hestia

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victorromeofox-blog · 3 years

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VRF Website and Community

VRF Website and Community - Soft Opening Coming Soon!

I've been a little less active here in the last little bit, but have been working behind the scenes to build up the VRF website and planning around community-building. I'm just about ready to start opening the site to semi-public access and start inviting trusted people to the Discord within the next week! There is some information below introducing some of the content and features of the site and Discord server. Please contact me (Ask or email preferred) if you would like access - I recommend reading the rest of this post before you do, but it is not required.

If you’re looking to better understand BDSM and kink, participate in a community of rational, respectful, and conscientious kink practitioners, and contribute to protecting, uplifting, and helping others - while still enjoying some fantasies - you are exactly the type of person who would be a great fit for this space.

If you’re “just here for the porn”, this website and community are not going to be what you’re looking for. They are specifically a pushback against that very mentality, and the rampant toxicity and problematic discourse in the online BDSM/kink space, especially CNC kink, and your needs will be better met elsewhere. Same goes for those who are just out to get nudes, roleplay online, organize hookups, or find a submissive - there are other spaces geared toward that.

In the meantime, I'd like to explain what this all means to me, where VRF is headed next, and what factors I'm taking into consideration as I continue. This is going to be a fairly reflective post - almost like a letter of intent - but I'm putting it out there primarily for transparency and also for those of you who want some insight into my thoughts and process.

VRF - A Quick Recap

When I started VRF in 2015, I didn't really have a goal. I was just looking to curate the kinds of porn I enjoyed the most on Tumblr and occasionally added some captions that came to mind as I did - and accidentally cultivated a sizeable following. As the blog grew and began to have more interactions with others on the network, I realized that I couldn't stay in-persona all the time - not without sending a potentially dangerous message - so I started answering asks and giving advice out of character, as myself. These "real" interactions, as well as the reality checks that kept rolling in, set the tone for what VRF would become - and made me feel much more comfortable with running a blog featuring questionable content.

I stepped away from the blog and went on hiatus in 2016; I saw a sharp rise in hateful, bigoted, and violent voices online and no longer felt comfortable that my posts would remain firmly in the realm of fantasy for the majority of readers. Although the original @violent-rape-fantasies was terminated in 2019, I made a fairly complete backup of the entire blog before it went down. I returned in late 2020 to start again from scratch, try to rebuild my following, and reconnect with the community - that effort was terminated by Tumblr in 2021, leading me to the two blogs I currently have (@VictorRomeoFox-blog / @violent-rape-fantasies-2) and to create a self-hosted website containing the original VRF archives with major quality-of-life improvements to the Tumblr experience.

This process made me consider what my goals are for VRF, how I want to achieve them, and what promises I make to the community as part of that journey.

VRF - Mission and Values

VRF's mission is to be a safe, inclusive, and collaborative space that promotes affirmative consent, healthy relationships, and conscientious kink, where consenting adults can explore their kinks, enjoy fictional fantasies, and uplift one another without overbearing guilt or shame.

Let me quickly break some of this down:

safe: I want people to feel comfortable consuming and interacting with me and my content - not only the kinks and acts depicted in the fantasies, but in the entirety of the space that VRF projects, including knowing that their personhood, privacy, anonymity, and emotional safety are important to me.

inclusive: although I focus primarily on male-on-female scenarios, people from all walks of life are welcome so long as they are good citizens of the community and conscientious kink practitioners. This also means rejecting hate, bigotry, and willful ignorance.

collaborative: VRF is discursive, both in-persona and out-of-character; the content and direction I take is often influenced by the conversations I have with followers, the asks and submissions I receive, and the state of the community as I see it. I want to always be in conversation with the community to understand its needs and goals so that I can better meet them.

affirmative consent: as discussed in a previous post, I highlight affirmative consent because it centers around positive action as opposed to consent, which can be a passive state. I believe this is critical for conscientious kink.

healthy relationships: the relationships we hold shape who we are, who we become, and how we interact with the world around us. I believe that healthy relationships build healthier, happier lives - this concerns all relationships, from friendships to families to romantic or sexual partnerships. I have seen less emphasis in this community on relationships, and interpersonal interactions in general, and think that this is a major oversight.

conscientious kink: kink can be dangerous or harmful when not practiced with care and consideration - not just for physical health, but for mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being. It requires reflection, introspection, and communication in order to form intentionality - the understanding behind what you do, how you do it, and why you do it.

reducing guilt: this is one of the concerns I get most often from followers - how to reconcile their guilt for enjoying consensual non-consent, and whether it is morally wrong or an indication that something is wrong with them. I believe that CNC, like most kinks, can be practiced in a conscientious way to reduce and mitigate the potential dangers, but that it requires consistent effort, education, and research.

Aside from these, I identified values which are important for me to maintain in order to meet the mission. Some of them are:

transparency: I try to be as transparent as I can, while maintaining my privacy and anonymity, so that people know that I have nothing to hide. I cannot build a safe space without building trust, and I can’t build trust without being honest and transparent.

leadership by example: if I am positioning myself as a resource and giving advice to others, I must embody the values I put forward and lead by example, not by words; otherwise, what I say is worthless and lacks substance.

data- and research-driven: I want to provide people with a deeper understanding of themselves and their kinks; while anecdotal information can at times be helpful, I want the things I posit to have weight and justification behind them. This means an intersection of data, research, and analysis around all of the factors involved, including moral philosophy, psychology, sociology, and biology.

care and patience: these kinks are difficult and hurtful to some people, and confusing or conflicting to others. I need to be caring, considerate, and patient in order for people to feel comfortable engaging with my content and interacting with me.

contextualized: these kinks and fantasies don’t exist in a vacuum and must be contextualized in order to remain conscientious of the relationship it maintains to the real world. This means that I don’t want fantasies misrepresented as reality or reality misconstrued as fantasy, and the onus is on me to ensure that followers are seeing both sides of the equation.

quality over quantity: I have a limited amount of time that I can dedicate to VRF work, and want to make the best possible use of that time. I want to focus on high-quality content, both in-persona fantasies and out-of-character advice, research, and resources, without worrying about how much or how frequently I’m posting. It also means that I care far less about the number of followers and viewers I have, and much more about whether I am cultivating the kind of followers that match my vision for VRF and its community.

There are other factors and values as well, but these are the biggest ones for me. They drive how I present myself, how I interact with the community, and what kinds of content I put forth.

VRF Website - Content and Features

What does the website allow me to do that I couldn’t on Tumblr?

No censorship, frustrating filters, or threat of termination - I can focus on my content without running into blockers at every turn, or worrying that I’m going to lose all my work without warning.

Better content controls, organization, and layout - I can group posts logically and have different ways for users to access and view them instead of being one monolithic stream of posts.

Tagging and search - I’ve tagged my archive with kinks, features, toys, actions, positions, locations, and more to make it easier to both find content that you want to see and avoid content that you don’t. The VRF site features granular search controls, including tag combinations, so you can engage with the site how you choose.

Random Post/Random Caption - sometimes, you’re in the mood to mix things up. Instead of seeing a temporally-sorted feed of posts, you can go to a random post or caption from the menu bar.

Clear disclaimers and view control - instead of my content being blended into a sea of posts, which creates difficulty in carving out that safe cognitive space for engaging with these kinks or necessitates rapid context-switching, all of my posts will be in one central repository with clear disclaimers where I have control over how things are viewed.

The VRF Archive - the content from the original @violent-rape-fantasies blog have been restored to the VRF website.

There are some downsides, of course - like the lack of network discovery, limited server space and resources, cost, maintenance, and effort. But the benefits greatly outweigh the additional overhead.

VRF Community

What’s the VRF Discord community all about?

This is a new idea I’m playing with - I’m not new to Discord or community management, but combining that with VRF is a new endeavor for me. Since I’m going to be shifting my focus from Tumblr to the VRF website, some of those network and community interactions from Tumblr will move to Discord instead, such as interacting with followers, taking requests, feedback, and suggestions, and delving deeper into kink philosophy, fantasy, and practice.

I’ve set up the Discord in a way that different sections can be partitioned - like general discussion, BDSM/kink discussion, CNC fantasies, member content (submissions), and so on. The different sections are accessible to different levels of membership and verification to maintain that safe, inclusive, and collaborative space. For example, agreeing to the rules and guidelines gives you access to the general discussion section; verifying your age gives you access to BDSM- and kink-related sections; and being an active and trusted member who contributes to the server over time gets you access to the private sections.

This will also be a much easier way to get in contact with me, and keep the majority of my interactions with the community in one place, instead of hunting across Tumblr messenger for both my accounts, Asks, Twitter, Discord DMs, Telegram, Kik, and email.

VRF - Next Steps and Future Work

In the next few weeks, the VRF website and Discord community will soft-open and move toward general opening. This is a new direction for me, but after assessing my priorities and goals, it is the solution best suited for what I want to achieve. I will continue to use Tumblr, but will likely be focusing the majority of my time on the website and Discord.

The mission and values I’ve identified leave quite a bit of room to explore various ways to express these kinks and share knowledge. I’m not hard-set on VRF being a blog with porn and captions, and could see changes or pivots in the future. I would love for this work to be able to generate some modest revenue in the future in order to cover basic operating costs, support survivors of abuse as well as kink education and safety, and commission custom content. As an aside, if you read all of this, please start your request for access with the word “potato” in all caps to let me know you got this far.

I also want to move toward a more ethical and sustainable model of captions and fantasies. My first step toward this is in creating gifs myself and fully crediting the source, which I started doing when I returned from hiatus. Concurrently, I am working with my partner, who is an artist, to develop illustrations and animations to accompany captions instead of commercial pornography - we’re still in the R&D phase for this, but hope to share some early content soon (including a fantasy and sketch that we’re working on to accompany a follower submission). Ideally, we would be able to collaborate with submitters and sex workers to create fully original, credited, and compensated content - but that’s a huge stretch goal for the future.

We are also considering other formats for fantasy and knowledge delivery, including a visual novel format or interactive media (i.e., games) if the art development turns out well and proves sustainable. We’re both fairly busy people in our personal and professional lives, and in situations where we have to maintain a fairly strict separation between kink involvement and our everyday lives, so carving out time for VRF work is challenging at times!

I look forward to seeing folks on the VRF website and Discord community soon!

#vrf #blog #website #community #about

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elcorreodetorreon · 5 years

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“IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle”, Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Background : “IQ” is a stale test meant to measure mental capacity but in fact mostly measures extreme unintelligence (learning difficulties), as well as, to a lesser extent, a form of intelligence, stripped of 2nd order effects. It is via negativa not via positiva. Designed for learning disabilities, it ends up selecting exam-takers, paper shufflers, obedient IYIs (intellectuals yet idiots), ill adapted for “real life”. The concept is poorly thought out mathematically (a severe flaw in correlation under fat tails, fails to properly deal with dimensionality, treats the mind as an instrument not a complex system), and seemed to be promoted by

racists/eugenists, people bent on showing that some populations have inferior mental abilities based on IQ test=intelligence; those have been upset with me for suddenly robbing them of a “scientific” tool, as evidenced by the bitter reactions to the initial post on twitter/smear campaigns by such mountebanks as Charles Murray. (Something observed by the great Karl Popper, psychologists have a tendency to pathologize people who bust them by tagging them with some type of disorder, or personality flaw such as “childish” , “narcissist”, “egomaniac”, or something similar).

psychometrics peddlers looking for suckers (military, large corporations) buying the “this is the best measure in psychology” argument when it is not even technically a measure — it explains at best between 13% and 50% of the performance in some tasks (those tasks that are similar to the test itself), minus the data massaging and statistical cherrypicking by psychologists; it doesn’t satisfy the monotonicity and transitivity required to have a measure (at best it is a concave measure). No measure that fails 60–95% of the time should be part of “science” (nor should psychology — owing to its sinister track record — be part of science (rather scientism), but that’s another discussion).

Some argue that IQ measures intellectual capacity — real world results come from, in addition, “wisdom” or patience, or “conscientiousness”, or decision-making or something of the sort. No. It does not even measureintellectual capacity/mental powers.

If you want to detect how someone fares at a task, say loan sharking, tennis playing, or random matrix theory, make him/her do that task; we don’t need theoretical exams for a real world function by probability-challenged psychologists. Traders get it right away: hypothetical P/L from “simulated” paper strategies doesn’t count. Performance=actual. What goes in people’s head or reaction to a screen image doesn’t exist (except via negativa).

Fat Tails If IQ is Gaussian by construction and if real world performance were, net, fat tailed (it is), then either the covariance between IQ and performance doesn’t exist or it is uninformational. It will show a finite number in samplebut doesn’t exist statistically. Another problem: when they say “black people are x standard deviations away”. Different populations have different variances, even different skewness and these comparisons require richer models. These are severe, severe mathematical flaws (a billion papers in psychometrics wouldn’t count if you have such a flaw). See the formal treatment in my next book.

But the “intelligence” in IQ is determined by academic psychologists like the “paper trading” we mentioned above, via statistical constructs s.a. correlation that I show here (see Fig. 1) that they patently don’t understand. It does correlate to negative performance (as it was initially designed to detect learning special needs) but then any measure would work there. A measure that works in left tail not right tail (IQ decorrelates as it goes higher) is problematic. We have gotten similar results since the famous Terman longitudinal study, even with massaged data for later studies. To get the point, consider that if someone has mental needs, there will be 100% correlation between performance and IQ tests. But the performance doesn’t correlate as well at higher levels, though the psychologists will think it does.(The statistical spin, as a marketing argument, is that a person with an IQ of 70 cannot prove theorems, which is obvious for a measure of unintelligence — but they fail to reveal how many IQs of 150 are doing menial jobs).

It is a false comparison to claim that IQ “measures the hardware” rather than the software. It can measures some arbitrarily selected mental abilities (in a testing environment) believed to be useful. However, if you take a Popperian-Hayekian view on intelligence, you would realize that to measure it you would need to know the mental skills needed in a future ecology, which requires predictability of said future ecology. It also requires the skills to make it to the future (hence the need for mental biases for survival).

Real Life: In academia there is no difference between academia and the real world; in the real world there is. 1) When someone asks you a question in the real world, you focus first on “why is he/she asking me that?”, which shifts you to the environment (see Fat Tony vs Dr John in The Black Swan) and detracts you from the problem at hand. Only suckers don’t have that instinct. 2) Real life never never offers crisp questions with crisp answers (most questions don’t have answers; perhaps the worst problem with IQ is that it seem to selects for people who don’t like to say “there is no answer, don’t waste time, find something else”.) 3) It takes a certain type of person to waste intelligent concentration on classroom/academic problems. These are lifeless bureaucrats who can muster sterile motivation. Some people can only focus on problems that are real, not fictional textbook ones (see the note below where I explain that I can only concentrate with real not fictional problems). 4) IQ doesn’t detect convexity (by an argument similar to bias-variance you need to make a lot of small inconsequential mistake in order to avoid a large consequential one. See Antifragile and how any measure of “intelligence” w/o convexity is sterile edge.org/conversation/n…). To do well you must survive, survival requires some mental biases directing to some errors. 5) Fooled by Randomness: seeing shallow patterns in not a virtue — leads to naive interventionism. Some psychologist wrote back to me: “IQ selects for pattern recognition, essential for functioning in modern society”. No. Not seeing patterns except when they are significant is a virtue in real life. 6) To do well in life you need depth and ability to select your own problems and to think independently.

Functionary Quotient: If you renamed IQ , from “Intelligent Quotient” to FQ “Functionary Quotient” or SQ “Salaryperson Quotient”, then some of the stuff will be true. It measures best the ability to be a good slave. “IQ” is good for @davidgraeber’s “BS jobs”.

Metrification: If someone came up w/a numerical“Well Being Quotient” WBQ or “Sleep Quotient”, SQ, trying to mimic temperature or a physical quantity, you’d find it absurd. But put enough academics w/physics envy on it and it will become an official measure.

Notes And Technical Notes

“IQ” is most predictive of performance in military training, with correlation~.5, (which is circular since hiring isn’t random and training is another test).

There are contradictory stories about whether IQ ceases to work past a threshold, since Terman’s longitudinal study of “geniuses”. What these researchers don’t get is these contradictions come from the fact that the variance of the IQ measure increases with IQ. Not a good thing.

The argument that “some races are better at running” hence [some inference about the brain] is stale: mental capacity is much more dimensional and not defined in the same way running 100 m dash is.

I have here no psychological references for backup: simply, the field is bust. So far ~ 50% of the research does notreplicate, and papers that do have weaker effect. Not counting poor transfer to reality (psychological papers are ludic).

How P values often — rather almost always — fraudulent: my paper arxiv.org/pdf/1603.07532…

The Flynn effect should warn us not just that IQ is somewhat environment dependent, but that it is at least partly circular.

Verbalism: Psychologists have a skin-deep statistical education & can’t translate something as trivial as “correlation” or “explained variance” into meaning, esp. under nonlinearities (see paper at the end).

The “best measure” charlatans: IQ is reminiscent of risk charlatans insisting on selling “value at risk”, VaR, and RiskMetrics saying “it’s the best measure”. That “best” measure, being unreliable blew them up many many times. Note the class of suckers for whom a bad measure is better than no measure across domains.

You can’t do statistics without probability.

Much of the stuff about IQ of physicists is suspicious, from self-reporting biases/selection in tests.

If you looked at Northern Europe from Ancient Babylon/Ancient Med/Egypt, you would have written the inhabitants off... Then look at what happened after 1600. Be careful when you discuss populations.

The same people hold that IQ is heritable, that it determines success, that Asians have higher IQs than Caucasians, degrade Africans, then don’t realize that China for about a Century had one order of magnitude lower GDP than the West.

Mathematical Considerations

CURSE OF DIMENSIONALITY A flaw in the attempts to identify “intelligence” genes. You can get monogenic traits, not polygenic (note: additive monogenic used in animal breeding is NOT polygenic).

The Skin in the game issue

How social scientists have trouble translating a statistical construct into its practical meaning.

Psychology

Data Science

Black Swan

Racism

Alt Right

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John Gordon

Jan 2

I’m surprised no one has mentioned the book, “IQ: A Smart History of a Failed Idea,” by Stephan Murdoch. I read it recently and recommend it. Even without Taleb’s math prowess excoriating it, IQ’s legitimacy is unconvincing.

Taleb drives a stake through the IQ corpse and helps unveil the shame of 20th

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btshodown · 6 years

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STF - Tidal Wave

↳ “ Finally cashing in your vacation time and heading out to a little island off the coast becomes so much more than what you were expecting. A cute surfer by the name Taehyung decides he wants to show you what its like on his side of the waves.”

Pairing: Taehyung x Reader Genre/Warnings: Mainly comedy with sprinkles of fluff and sexual themes Word Count: 1,829 Tags: @hadskye

➭ Huehuehue...this all sprang from a message Admin RD sent to me about this gif and the surfer vibes Tae gave out. So tada~ This will be a mini drabble series of segments of the reader and Surfer Tae as they get to know one another.

The heat of the sun warms your skin pleasantly as your bare feet sink into the tepid sand; your eyes searching for the perfect spot to set your towel to begin sunbathing. The sudden increase in heat lately made for the optimal time to spend on the beach to try and find some coolness on your normally scorching days holed up in a temperate room testing synthetic skin. The company you worked in began a breakthrough in the newest technology and with a nice, hefty donation, finally had the financial means to carry on with numerous testing.

The pay was very, very, generous, but your time to yourself and friends became limited when you were one of the few to get promoted to begin the experimentation. Although, with finally having enough vacation hours accrued from the years working at the company, you couldn’t have fled fast enough for a month long time off.

So here you were in a small island off the coast and having arrived just an hour prior, you excitedly find a spot on the sand; about a yard away from any other people visiting the beach. With a satisfied huff, you plop onto your towel and pull off the knitted dress covering your bathing suit, slowly applying sunblock with a hum. As you did so, you let your eyes discretely glance around the people speckled across the beach behind your sunglasses. You idly wonder about what stresses each person was running away from when you spotted him.

It was like looking at the sun with how bright his blonde hair shined. His caramel skin glowed against the rippling water of the waves and you swore you had never seen someone so ethereal before. There was no denying that the man before you could very well be Poseidon; the waves seemed to naturally curve around his feet. That’s not even to mention your awe sparkling further when you see him dive into the water with a surfboard you hadn’t noticed, and began paddling his way out further into the clear waves. You really didn’t want to become a creeper just staring at the man, but it was incredibly difficult not to do so; especially when his skin tight, long sleeved shirt left your mouth to salivate wondering what was underneath.

With hurried motions, you begin setting the rest of your things into place to fully appreciate the view gifted to you and with a pillow resting against your tiny cooler, you finally settle in. Your body now propped into position, it was easier to gaze at the man’s impressive figure as his strong legs balanced on the surfboard and navigated him gracefully through the clear waves. Perhaps you were being a bit too much when you reach around to take out a chilled Smirnoff Ice bottle from your cooler and sip on it to watch the surfer, but you wouldn’t let yourself think about it too much.

This is was your time to finally relax and this gorgeous siren of a man was unwittingly giving you a beautiful scenic view to enjoy while you did so. And oh my, those wet shorts were working extra hard to cling onto his ass so as to not fall off with the powerful bashing of the ocean’s waves; you silently prayed to Neptune to let them slip off.

You were in the middle of appraising his rather large feet and wondering if those were proportionate to something, when those same bare feet were suddenly making their way to you and made your tongue feel like sandpaper. Your nerves were like a live wire as his figure is fast approaching, not letting your reassurances of him not coming to you specifically when his strides are utterly leading him to you. What could he possibly want to say to you? Surely he hadn’t been able to see how you were openly staring at him with your sunglasses on, had he? Oh god, what if he had and he was on his way to cuss you out for being a creep? Was it too late to pack up your things and quickly flee?

Finally he got to where you were while you panicked silently and stopped before the towel you were sat on; his looming shadow easily engulfing your figure. His mocha eyes bore into your own despite the cover of your sunglasses and you have to clench your fists to avoid popping your mouth open in awe. His tongue flicks out to wet his lips as he finally opens them to speak to you, and all you could do is hang by a thread to await his impactful words.

“Su’ dude.”

So bewitched by the deep timbre of his molten chocolate voice, it took a few seconds for your brain to process his words and when it did, you swear your soul shriveled just a tad. All this anticipation and mystery, just for him to utter that? You’d be lying if you weren’t a little disappointed, and sure that made you a bit of a judgmental jerk, but you preferred your men to be a little intelligent. You wanted someone to stimulate you in invigorating conversations and keep up with your ever moving thoughts; so perhaps you could pretend as if you didn’t hear him.

“Um, so I kinda noticed you staring at me and honestly, you’re really pretty so I couldn’t help myself. I’d remember a face like yours, you new to the area or visiting?”

Well shit, he was more charming than what you thought as he easily squats by you and flashes you an endearing smile that looked a bit rectangular. Not only that, but he completely caught you red-handed and called you out on your ogling, making your cheeks brighten in embarrassment. Despite that though, there wasn’t anything arrogant about the way he just now spoke to you, only truthfully honest and sincere. Would it be such a bad thing to simply talk to him in spite of your previous judgements?

“V-Visting,” you clear your throat at your stutter and try to even out your nerves, “and please don’t misunderstand, I wasn’t staring at you. The ocean is just very…beautiful to look at.”

A dark brow rises at your statement and the simple action has your insides squirming, even more so when his lips slowly quirk to form a knowing smirk. Well crap, maybe you had judged much too harshly because it seemed as if the stranger before you was much more perceptive than what you had given him credit for.

“You sure bout’ that?” his voiced lowered just a bit as his eyes disarmingly caught yours in an intense stare. “Cause from where I was it seemed like you were looking at something other than the ocean’s beauty.”

Your eyes widen comically and while your sunglasses covered your surprise, your mouth opening did not, and if his smirk turning into a grin was anything to go by, he had noticed the effect his words had. “Yeah, w-well, things aren’t always what they seem,” you manage to choke out a bit indignantly.

A weird look crosses his handsome face as his eyes beseech yours, no doubt wanting to take off your shades and see your whole face, but instead his lips form into a small smile. “Yeah, guess they aren’t.”

You fidget under his intense scrutiny and silently finish off your drink, putting the glass bottle away in your cooler behind you as you try to ignore his eyes following you. “So, uh, you’re really good at surfing. I’m assuming you live here?”

“Thanks and you’d assume right. I would visit this little island a lot with family when I was younger and decided to just move here. So now I teach little kids how to surf as a job,” he blinks suddenly as if remembering something before smiling sheepishly, “I’m Taehyung by the way. What’s your name beautiful?”

Your own brow rises at this, both from the mini back story of how he came to live here and the mention of his name, but with his compliment you flush again and finally remove your sunglasses. His skin looked even more radiant without the color distortion from your shades and it made your breath hitch as his eyes almost greedily drink in your unobscured face. Now, your confidence was by no means lacking, even if you weren’t pretty to everyone, you knew your worth; but with someone as attractive as the man beside you, it made your confidence tremble.

“Y/N,” your voice comes out more self-assured than you felt on the inside and you hold onto that feeling, hoping to calm your nerves, “But…teaching kids how to surf is your job?” At his nod, your lips twitch and your head tilts to the side in false innocence. “So…you’re a beach bum then?”

Finally, his own confidence shakes as his mouth pops open at your slight insult and seeing it, it only made your own grin emerge. You were mainly teasing, but the small judgmental part of you prayed he wasn’t actually a beach bum. It’d be such a horrible mood spoiler if he was.

“What? No, no! I’ll have you know that my surfing class has a waiting list, mainly by single mom’s which is weird,” his vehemence slowly fades out into slight confusion in the end as he stays silent for half a second before focusing back on you with a small pout, “but I am not a beach bum. I even live in a really nice apartment on the ocean front!”

A small snort escapes you at your poor attempt to not laugh and his small frown lets you know it’s not appreciated, but it held no heat despite it. So far, you had to admit to your pride that you misjudged the man before you; he was so much more complex and enigmatic than you originally believed. Truly, the first day of your vacation was going better than you had ever hoped for.

“Right,” your tone was sarcastic and teasing.

His pout deepens as he leans in closer to you, catching you off guard as his childlike anger dissipates just as quickly as it came and instead the intensity from before returns. His deep, brown eyes pull you in like tidal wave and you’re powerless against it. “Let me prove it to you then. Come with me to my apartment so I can show you.”

Your teeth quickly catch your bottom lip as his words ignite a simmering fire in your veins, warming you from the inside as your lips twitch into a coy smile. “Okay, show me then.”

His devilish grin is enough to have you in a daze and euphoria to begin bubbling under your skin, the anticipation of your vacation heading in a different direction than what you had imagined nearly crippling you. After all, summer was all about throwing away inhibitions and taking every opportunity that came at you, right?

#Surfer!Tae au #Taehyung #Kim Taehyung #V #Tae fic #Bts #Tae fluff #Bts fic #I finished this is 5 hours :')#I still have that hybrid Guk wip #And Remember You part 4 too #And that Saxophonist Tae wip too....#I have so many wips holy fuck #Anyways yeah lemme know what ya think #:)#Btshodown #Admin LD

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bigbluebarns-blog · 6 years

Text

ABLEISM REDUX

Well… There are so many different dimensions of disability that people can be ableist toward those with different disabilities than their own. …And it’s only in the last couple of generations (within my lifetime, at least) that Disability Rights groups have banded together in a common cause (Rather than, say: Rights groups for the blind working only for the blind, Rights groups for Cerebral Palsy working only for Cerebral Palsy, etc.). Matter of fact, based on my own recollections, I think working together for universal access rights only really got any steam in the 1970s – when I was already a teenager.

Confession time: until relatively recently (like, the last 10 years, or so), as a physically disabled person, I was biased against those with intellectual disabilities, and would get quite insulted if anyone mistakenly thought I was “R

—–ed.”

@theborkplanet IDK HOW TO SEPARATE MY COMMENTS FROM YOURS AND COMMENTS FROM YOURS. HENCE THE CAPS.

I WAS ALSO BIASED AND PROBABLY STILL AM SOMEWHAT, TOWARD PPL WITH INTELLECTUAL DISABILITIES(ID). I TOO USED THE R WORD. GROWING UP MY EXP WITH PPL W/ ID WERE NEGATIVE OR GROSS, AND NO ONE EVER BOTHERED TO EXPLAIN SOMEONE’S ID TO ME, SO ALL I KNEW WAS NEGATIVE BEHAVIORS EG JO GRABS STUFF AND SCREAMS; NO ONE EVER EXPLAINED HER AUTISM. MOE HAS DOWNS SYNDROME, IS OBSESSED WITH SAYING “BOOBIES” LOVES THE EFFING BEACH BOYS AND FARTS A LOT AND NEVER SHUTS UP; HOW ANNOYING; NO ONE EVER TOLD ME ABOUT PERSEVERATING, OR THAT DS CAN CAUSE GI PROBS SOMETIMES. AL MUTTERS, HE STINKS, AND HE KNOCKED OUT HIS AIDE SO I’M AFRAID THAT AL WILL GET ANGRY WITH ME AND KNOCK ME OUT; NO ONE EVER EXPLAINS HIS CONDITION, SO I GLEAN MY INFO FROM EAVESDROPPING and RUMORS. THE ABLE-BODIED ADULTS DIDN’T BOTHER TO PROMOTE UNDERSTANDING EVEN THO WE WERE ALL TRAPPED ON THE SAME SPECIAL ED BUS, SO THE PASSENGERS WITHOUT ID TALK SMACK ABOUT THE ONES WITH ID. THE ONE TIME I ASK, “WHAT’S AL HAVE?” ABLEBODIED ADULT SHAMES ME FOR ASKING AND BLATHERS ABOUT CONFIDENTIALITY. NOT TRYING TO JUSTIFY MY PREJUDICE; JUST RELATING EXP. I’M ALSO WORKING THRU IT BUT U R RIGHT; NEVER 100% DONE.

I’m working through it, and like to think I’m getting better (and one huge part of that is learning just how deep and intertwined institutionalized ableism really is, in our societies). But as with being a White woman dealing with racism, I have to remember that it’s a case of continuing recovery, and not something I will ever be 100% over and done with.

Thanks for sharing, @aegipan-omnicorn. You’re lovely.

@bigbluebarns, I don’t personally know anything about suffering racism, being a white american myself. However, I do know a thing or two about suffering ableism, both at the hands of able-bodied people, and disabled people.

People are incredibly social animals and will band together in groups with other similar people. This is natural, and it is good. It can be healing and cathartic to hang out with people who “get it.” But this tendency can also have an extremely dark side, as we see with “isms.” This is going to get long, so I’m going to break it here in consideration of people’s dashboards. Again, I can only speak to ableism and sexism so please keep that in mind.

OMG, I LOVE THESE NAMES AND TRADEMARKS. DID U INVENT THEM?

Ableisms I have suffered at the hands of disabled people:

The Cripple Police™: These are the people who, in an overzealous bid for limited access available, arbitrarily decide who is disabled enough to use a mobility aid, bathroom stall, parking spot, and even sometimes the label of “disabled.” If you are not Crippled Enough, you can be subject to any form of social punishment they deem to be necessary.

I HATE THE CP AND I’M CONSTANTLY REMINDING PPL THAT U DO NOT HAVE TO APPEAR DISABLED IN ORDER TO USE HANDICAP PARKING. IT’S LIKE THEY WANT U TO WEAR A TAG STATING U R DISABLED SO THEN THEY CAN ASSESS IF U MEET THEIR RANDOM CRITERIA.

Example: I used to be able to walk longer distances with a service dog, but was still a high fall risk. My doctor (a licensed neurologist) prescribed me a parking placard so that none of us had to worry (as much) about me passing out in a parking lot where no one could see me, and getting run over. A lovely woman in a wheelchair, who just happened to park in the accessible spot next to me, proceeded to scream at me and my service dog all the way into the store. A manager rescued me by going along with my ruse of knowing him, and invited me into the back were I fucking hid away until they told me she had left the store. It. Was. Scary.

EGAD SOUNDS HORRIBLE. BUT YEAH THERE IS A DISABILITY HIERARCHY

The Born This Ways™ : The experience between people who were born disabled, and who acquired disability later in life, vary a great deal from one another. BTW ableist types actively minimize the experiences of other disabled people, simply because they hadn’t been baptized since birth by xyz. In other words, the suffering was not identical to their own, thus must be invalid.

Example: I became disabled after adulthood, and tried to find solace after being subjected to ableist responses from friends and family members who were unable to cope with the “broken me.” I found lots of great disabled people who helped me, but I also found people who routinely scoffed at my experiences, again informing me that I was not “disabled enough,” and suggested I was being deliberately weak, or histrionic. Sometimes it was almost eerily word for word what my ableist friends/family said. How strange…

I’VE SEEN THE ACQUIRED DISABILITY IS BETTER. TM ADIBS MIGHT IMPLY, “WELL I’M A QUAD, BUT AT LEAST I GOT TO EXP BEING ABLEBODIED; I’LL HAVE EXP U SADSACK LOSER BTWS WILL NEVER HAVE. I GOT TO BE NORMAL FOR A WHILE” MOST OFTEN I SAW IT COME FROM PARALYZED PPL WHO WISHED THEY COULD WALK AGAIN. I WAS BORN WITH CP AND AB PPL ACTUALLY ASKED ME “WOULD U RATHER BE BTW OR AD?” BEFORE I THOUGHT ABOUT IT, I SAID “BTW, CUZ THATS ALL I KNOW AND I’VE HAD IT FROM DAY1 FALSE EQUIVALENCY WHEREAS ADIBS HAVE TO ADJUST” NOW THO I KNOW THAT EVEN I AS BTW HAVE HAD TO ADJUST TO CHANGING SYMPTOMS. DO U WANT 2 BE A TREE OR A MOUSE...UHHH...FALSE EQUIVALENCY ALERT, CAN’T COMPAPARE APPLE N ORANGE.

The Faker Police™: I think anyone with an invisible illness has experience with this one. This is when people who “look disabled” refuse to believe someone who “does not look disabled,” and proceed to treat them as hysterical attention seekers instead of…well, anyone else. These people often practice double ableisms–I have noticed that many also tend to judge Disabled Enough based on mobility aids. Then, they try to chase the “fakers” out of the community, because everyone knows “fakers” are why we have additional burdens added (like further hurdles to access, government aid, etc).

ALSO IF U HAVE AN INVISIBLE DISABILITY LIKE YOURS AND ME ALSO, I SEE THE “WELL EVERYONE GETS DEPRESSED/SAD/TIRED.” I END UP FEELING LIKE I HAVE JUSTIFY THE DISABLING NATURE OF MY DEPRESSION/ANXIETY TO A WEG.

Example: Before my condition had progressed to me needing a mobility aid, I was already facing discrimination in the workplace. I requested an accommodation to have the crappy fluorescent lights removed from above my desk, as they provoke bad neurological symptoms. You’d think it was a little thing, but when I asked for advice on dealing with skeptical and belligerent management, I met the same reactions in some disabled people, followed immediately by “Fakers like you are why we see knee-jerk reactions like the word ‘no!’ Come complain when you’re actually disabled and need to have a ramp installed! Until then suck it up!”

The Totally Qualified Disability Judges™: This one seems to arise from the natural tendency of people to compare their situations to the situations of others. If they arbitrarily judge another person’s situation to be better or more favorable, then that person is not As Disabled, or Disabled Enough, or Disabled At All. Then, based on that judgment, they try to socially punish the condemned, or to excommunicate them.

Example: Some conditions are really straightforward and don’t vary widely. People with the condition all seem to have similar limitations. My condition is the exact opposite of that. I have the chronic form of migraine disease. Lots of people get migraines, but not all of them have more than 15 a month, and migraines can last anywhere from a few hours to three days. To some people, pain is the most disabling feature of a migraine, to others, the accompanying neurological weirdness is. (Migraines are often proceeded by cortical spreading depression, a phenomenon also exhibited in epilepsy. Just for an example).

So, when people hear what my condition is, they remember that one lady they used to know who had to lay in the dark for a couple days each month, and wonder why the hell I’m in a wheelchair. It doesn’t make sense to them (who cares that migraines don’t make sense to the most brilliant neurologists in the world), so they decide that I just must not be disabled. Or, if I am, it’s hypochondria.

I’VE SEEN: YEAH HAVE U TRIED XYZ CURE? IT REALLY HELPED THAT 1 LADY. IF U DON’T TRY XYZ WELL THEN UR LAZY N ALSO PROBABLY FAKING THE EXTENT OF UR DISABILITY?

Fun fact: Internalizing ableism from medical doctors, and from some close friends and family, and THEN the disabled people I came into contact with later, and from whom I seeked guidance, prompted so much self doubt that I had a licensed psychologist work me up for hypochondria and other related psychological conditions. It…turns out that I am not a hypochondriac. I could not find relief from all of these experiences until I encountered a neurologist familiar with my condition, and fellow disabled people who have been around the block, and who are not so embittered by their experiences that they deigned to expose others to the same.

For that reason, I will always be vocally critical of ableism within our community. I will not sugar coat it, nor will I flatter ableist disableds by giving them another name. That goes for my own ableism, too. Now that I have worked through a lot of my own, I can use my aids with confidence and obtain a freedom that is at least emotionally similar to the one I had when I first formed my adult identity (which was as an abled person).

AH YES, IN MY CASE, INTERNALIZED ABLEISM=ANXIETY N DEPRESSION. STILL NOT SURE IF DISABLED PPL CAN BE TECHNICALLY DISABLED BUT THAT’S JUST LINGUISTIC SEMANTICS.

CLEAERLY WE BOTH KNOW DISABLED PPL ARE CAPABLE OF ASSHOLERY.

CAN SOMEONE TELL ME HOW TO BOLD TEXT IN POSTS? #TUMBLR NOOB

For an example of sexism from women, see my post Never Underestimate Old Women, in which an old lady cashier schools us for self-righteous activism.

Thanks for the discussion!

#ableism #disability #disabled

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clodiuspulcher · 6 years

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I’m new to roman history, and I barley know the name Clodius; could you tell me more about him?

Publius Clodius Pulcher is a freak, a demon, a Pretty Boy, a man of Contradictions, a wild tribune of the plebs who sincerely believed the Laws did not Apply To Him, and my favorite Roman Politician bar none who epitomizes Roman Politics to the extent that I’d think he was a parody of a Roman senator, a fake person, the Discworld version, except he was REAL. Born to the Esteemed Patrician Claudius Pulcher Family, in 92-91 BC, Clodius Pulcher was the youngest of 3 sons (and had some older sisters too, most notably the notorious Clodia Metelli who aided and abetted his political career w/ considerable financial/other support) and deviated Wildly from the staunch conservatism of his oldest brother Appius Claudius Pulcher (PS: he’s a freak too and I need to do a whole post on ACP cos. 54 because WOW). They served in the third Mithridatic war under Lucullus together when Clodius was in his early 20s but Clodius didn’t get as high a position as his older brother and started a mutiny. Lucullus naturally removed him, Clodius then commanded a naval fleet and was almost immediately captured by pirates. They tried to ransom him to king Ptolemy because Clodius kept talking up how ~important he was (a Claudius Pulcher! A nobelman! A patrician from one of Rome’s richest and most famous families!) but Ptolemy didn’t care and Clodius had to wait until the threat of Pompey coerced the pirates to let him go. These early military incidents basically set the tone for Clodius’s entire life and political career, and I think they really Tell you what kind of person Clodius was. This is what we’re working with here.Clodius is best known for two things: radical populism and gang wars, and the bona dea scandal. The latter is what his arch Enemy Cicero tends to harp on because it’s absolutely insane: basically Clodius snuck into a women’s-only religious festival dressed as a woman, and was discovered because his voice was deep, and they kicked him out and had to re-do everything and he was tried for sacrilege etc. Plutarch/Cicero/Etc. claim this is because he wanted to sleep w/ Caesar’s wife but I Doubt that (and so does the author of the Clodius Bio: honestly I think this is ‘no one had ever told him no and he genuinely did not think the Law applied to him because status/wealth/etc). And Actually this is connected to the populism because when he was tried for sacrilege he positioned himself/his friends as ‘fighting against the senate’s overweening power / returning power to the hands of the people’ because the bill the senate promulgated to try him for sacrilege had the senate select the jury and that was the hill Clodius and his followers chose to die on. Then he dragged Cicero into it and Cicero had to defend himself and destroyed his alibi and Clodius only got off by bribing the jury and it was a mess and Clodius hated Cicero from then on even though he started it. wild. My Latin Professor described Clodius as a ‘dyed in the wool populist’ which is Not Untrue, since to be fair he’d had a Populist Streak since his army days (he was called ‘the soldiers’ friend’ because of the Lucullus mutiny debacle). it was PROBABLY a selfishly motivated populism, though, (and again: from the beginning Clodius’s populism was motivated by personal gain , he started the mutiny because he was mad at his own ‘slighted’ status) although I have to wonder if Clodius was Sincere to any degree…. but that’s my Thoughts. Continuing on the Shocking and Radical road, Clodius tried several different arcane laws to become a plebeian but eventually teamed up with the first triumvirate to be adopted by a plebeian family ~59. He didn’t change his name though, aside from the “Claudius->Clodius” thing that some people debate is even a significant difference (Cicero makes a distinction though when speaking of Clodius vs. his brother so). As tribune in 58, Clodius did some legitimate good: he passed laws restoring forbidden collegia and creating those that hadn’t ever existed, allowing the poorest some measure of involvement and status, and of course he passed a grain dole law which distributed free grain to the same class. He also helped the function of the senate actually- he passed a law wherein anyone who was removed from the senatorial lists by the censors had a chance to defend themselves, and formalized the process by which political actions could be hindered by bad omens (no more of Bibulus trying to stop politics from happening because of Auguries). However Clodius also used his political power and stalwart supporters to literally attack personal enemies (namely Cicero) whom he managed to get exiled based, again, on that purely personal vendetta stemming from the Bona Dea scandal. He passed a law that was like “Anyone (named Cicero) who executed Roman citizens without trial (during the Catilinarian conspiracy and is named Cicero) is exiled… bye.” Clodius’s Legitimate gangs of adherents helped with this and he intimidated politicians like Pompey as well when he needed to. This devolved into ah. gang wars between supporters of Clodius and T. Annius Milo’s (a political rival) gladiators/slaves whom he bought/trained to combat them, and in the midst of the chaos Cicero was recalled from exile when popular favor swung his way. Eventually Clodius was murdered in 52 BC by Milo’s slaves along the Appian way, the street his ancestor Appius Claudius built… Yet he remained a Stalwart (though selfish!) Populist to the end- Indeed, during his last campaign (for the praetorship) he vocally promoted supporting/improving the status of freedmen! Clodius! The loyalty his supporters felt for him speaks to the efficacy and importance of his tribuneship and political image to the dispossessed, disenchanted class of urban poor and his ability to recognize and respond to this crisis is impressive considering how many senators absolutely refused to do the former much less the latter. Any good that might have come out of his policies though is of course obscured in the historical record by the absolute wild and Violent shit Clodius got up to, and also by the fact that our main source, and our only contemporary source on Clodius is…. Cicero.This post is already getting Long and I haven’t touched on a lot of things like the Pro Caelio debacle, the importance of Clodia, the exact and detailed drama between Clodius/Caesar/Pompey/Cicero/Cato etc etc etc, the extent to which Clodius Bent Or Ignored laws and customs of adoption / other plebeian transfer methods, the importance of the tribuneship and Clodius’s relationship to the legacy of tribunes like Tiberius Gracchus or Saturninus BUT! I do want to say a few more things. First, Clodius also married ~62, when he came back from the East, Fulvia, whom is my favorite historical figure perhaps ever to live on earth. She was instrumental in rebuilding his image after the bona dea scandal, she was by his side so often than in the trial for his aforementioned violent murder, Cicero claimed that Clodius must have been planning something because Fulvia wasn’t there when he was killed, and she was ALWAYS with him otherwise. Fulvia dragged Clodius’s body through the streets of Rome and likely helped incite the riot of Clodian supporters that ended in the burning down of the senate-house. Thus she established herself as the heir of Clodius’s legacy, the inheritor of Clodian politics and political support, which she provided for her future marriage connections. She made sure Clodius didn’t die in vain by compelling her next two husbands, Gaius Scribonius Curio and one Mark Antony, who were associates of Clodius, to take more populist stances w/ their legislature and was especially heavily involved in Antony’s career. AND she got revenge on Cicero in the End according to Cassius Dio (She was also a much more effective military commander than Clodius ever was and I bet he was proud)To cut this off now, check out my Clodius Tag where I lose my whole mind about Clodius and his politics every week or so. I have a lot of Classics Opinions but my Clodius Opinions are the most well-formed and I’d hope the most informed as well. However please don’t ask me Super specific questions until the 28th because I’ve been in an Etruscan Art void for my archaeology class and I left my Clodius BIography at home and won’t be back til then. Also I Run @clodiussuggestion so you can ask Clodius Him Self.

#publius clodius pulcher #how is he a real Fucking human who lived on this earth. seems fake #anyway im much more sympathetic to Clodius than most people and I have some uh. sentimental headcanons that yall might see #if i ever write clodius x fulvia fic #but heres smth controversial and brave as well clodius got woke to class consciousness when fulvia dommed him #joke tag

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messofcurls-creative · 6 years

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Hey. I love your wax of wane series so much. your writing is amazing and Ive found myself somewhat attached to Josh and Chris's relationship. Ive been reading through maybe a chapter a night and your writing is so good and im kinda addicted. So I was looking through all the chapters in the series and i accidentally read a tag that I wish i didn't later on in the series about their breakup? Im a couple chapters away, but im terrified I wont be able to take the angst. is there a happy ending? plz

Thanks so much for getting in touch. I’m glad that you’re enjoying the series, and it’s nice to know that people are still into it even though I haven’t updated in a while ^^;So… the dreaded tags. It’s always a bit of a dilemma deciding whether to include them, but I generally err on the side of caution so readers can make up their minds about what content they want to consume. Unfortunately, as you’ve discovered, this sometimes leads to spoilers.In this case, I can’t promise you won’t feel the angst, if I’ve done my job correctly. From what is currently part 17 onward (I say currently because this will probably change), you’re in for a bit of a rough time. The latest part - The Mountains Are Calling - is still a work in progress, which I’ll update when I get the chance to, but again, let’s just say it’s not the most upbeat of fics.

In better news, I have at least two more multi-chapter fics plotted out that continue the series beyond part 20, and two other multi-chapter fics set before chapter 17 - both smutty and in one case almost sickeningly fluffy - so hopefully that will soften the blow a little bit. In the meantime, if you’ll excuse the blatant self-promotion, I have some angst-free alternatives that might tide you over. I’ve posted a few other fics on ao3 besides the ones listed, but they’re either from other fandoms or perhaps a little too dark:

Planet Terror:A longass smut odyssey I co-wrote with the amazingly talented @flowerkingofangmar . Josh and Chris go to the drive-in. It’s filth. I’ll leave it at that.

35mm:This is where I keep my Tumblr drabbles (all smutty), which are, so far, very much inspired by the artwork of the unabashedly awesome @desperado-raspado . She posts a lot of great Until Dawn content (primarily NSFW), so her blog is worth checking out regardless.

Guts and Sparks:This isn’t fluffy by any means, but it isn’t exactly angsty either (?) It’s another ongoing fic that I’ll hopefully finish someday. I won’t go into too much detail in summary for fear of spoilers, but the tags should give you a rough idea of what’s in store. Lots of gore, so if that’s not your deal, give it a miss!

I’m currently working on another multi-chapter Climbing Class fic set in a decidedly happier AU, so there’s that, too. Fingers crossed I’ll be in a position to post it soon.So, back to your original question. I’m loath to give away the ending of W+W, but can confirm that I do have an ending in mind that will, I hope, give some resolution. I’m sorry I can’t elaborate, but I hope you’ll keep checking back. Again, thanks a lot for the ask, it means a lot. Apologies for the huge fuckin’ essay! xx

#brendondoeslife #asks #until dawn #fanfiction #long post #seriously sorry for the essay!#fic spoilers #?#is that a thing I should tag? I don't know...#asks4me

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cerealmonster15 · 7 years

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yo fam i read ur grifnut/rvbnut tags,,like just make a post, i want to reblog this

OOH u mean my tags on this post yea? i’ll just make it THIS POST 8))) i was just gonna screencap all them juicy tags but since rvbnut [best term ever thank u for that] is otp, i will retype for better readability + i thought of some extra things to throw in, so here we go:

as mentioned already, there’s donut’s super secret diary where donut describes"gazing silently into each other’s visors” and feeling a connection, as well has having sat in grif’s lap”. i very much believe donut had a crush on grif at some point

there’s some PSA or something that for the life of me I can’t remember the name of, and it might just be a dvd extra cause I found it on youtube not through the rvb channel, where the reds are getting on motorcycles to go somewhere and grif has to share w/donut, and hes Very Hesitant and i dont remember what exactly donut was saying but it was Very Suggestive how he was telling grif to get behind him and hold on tight or w/e, and when grif didnt wanna get on it with him he was like “whats wrong ;(?? dont be shy~”

ive pulled out my book now and donut describes the play they put on for tucker as being about “the band of handsome male survivors braving the elements together” so, donut thinks he + the other BGC members are handsome

“The first thing the doctor did when we got him back over to our base was pin Sarge against the wall with the Warthog. I always thought if anyone was going to ram Sarge up to the wall, it would be me, seeing as how I’ve been angling for a promotion lately” -another entry in donut’s diary. i honest to god have no idea how this could be taken as an innuendo, bc it straight up sounds like donut wants to fuck his way to the top

also in the book, simmons’ self insert fanfiction “Hero In Maroon” has… a special scene with “Donut the Enchanter,” who is “spreading his temptation magic through scandalous dancing.” This is SIMMONS writing this, and simmons has himself say “Tell me what you know about Sarge, else I will have to run you through with my long sword” and, sure, he has donut speak in innuendos and reply to that line with “I like where this is gong. Maybe I’ll keep you here… FOREVER!” but like, simmons literally wrote himself throwing an innuendo to donut. then you have the next few lines “DONUT USES OFFICER HOT PANTS HANDCUFF ATTACK” “”Oh no!” Simmons exclaims. A bed appears behind him. His hands are cuffed to it.” And while the next line is just donut laughing and saying “Now you must watch my rendition of the musical CATS” so while donut wasnt gonna do anything creepy, this really sounds like simmons writing a self insert fic that includes a provocative donut flirting with him while talking about musicals…. simmons dont repress ur crush on donut

^not to mention the officer hot pants comes from donut having dressed up and jumped out of a cake for sarge’s birthday……..

at the finale scene of s13, donut says “I love you, too, Lopez”

Donut lived offscreen with Doc in valhalla, and then was dropped back off there to continue living in valhalla with doc (and lopez’s head) (i could talk for 60 years about them but anyone who’s followed me long enough has heard it all before and i’m tryin to keep the points b r i e f lol)

church has said “I like donut. He’s pretty harmless, man. I-I don’t think he’d hurt a fly.” and upon finding out donut got crushed by a spaceship, he paused his snarking to say “Oh, wait, the pink guy? Oh, I actually liked him!” to which grif replies “Seriously, what’s with all these feelings for donut?”

tucker, thinking donut was a girl bc pink armor, asked donut if he “wanted to date one of us” and then called donut a “tease” when he said he wasn’t a girl

donut polished tucker’s codpiece 3 times when he and caboose were helping tucker get the black gunk off his armor, saying something along the lines of “a 3-coat waxing is just my way of saying I Care :)”

epsilon!tucker, while not canon to actual tucker, is implied to have jacked off to donut bc he thought he was a girl

seems to be implied that tucker and donut were both assigned to the same desert location when everyone got split up, and donut passed out from thirst/exhaustion trying to get tucker’s distress call to the others

in The Best Red vs Blue DVD Ever of All Time, there’s a scene where tucker and donut are introducing “best couple.” Donut goes on about romance, while tucker says couple doesn’t necessarily mean romance, and that “you[donut] think everything is romance! last week you called it romance when i accidentally took a bite of your sandwich” “was it really an accident tucker? was it?” “YES!” “time will tell” “ugh, whatever-” dudes, donut totally had a crush on tucker at least once

i dont have a good source but i remember seeing in a post a while back that there was a scrapped plotline that was gonna be a love triangle between donut, a “confused caboose”, and an unknown third party

i’m willing to bet the confused caboose bit is because caboose seems to have thought (and maybe still does? who knows) that donut was a girl, likely because of the armor. in caboose’s mind, donut’s a girl who says things like “I love caboose, and yet, I’m still afraid of him, he’s so scary :)” [cause he seems to think of himself as intimidating to the red team lol], and then in Head Canon, caboose!donut says something like “i like [something] almost as i like to paint my nails and not talk to boys. i would never talk to boys, especially not caboose for some reason!” which… is hard to make sense of tbh lol, but since everyone in caboose’s mind is how caboose perceives them, it maybe seems like caboose doesnt get as much of donut’s attention as he’d like?? lmfao, it sounds like “not caboose for some reason” means caboose doesn’t really understand either.

donut tearily said to caboose way back in KITBFF: “ Mister Caboose, I just want you to know that even though we are on different teams, and we may never see each other again, whatever happens out there today, I’ll always remember the moments we shared together. You are now, and forever will be… my friend.” very emotional if i do say so myself

there’s this reconstruction deleted scene where i guess donut had gotten transferred to doing special agent stuff w/wash’s division or something (wash calls him Special Agent Donut so, i guess lol). Wash speaks in donut innuendos the whole time he’s talkin about donut [”He’s a back door expert” “if there’s an unsecured rear entrance, he’s your man” “legend has it he can get through even the tightest cracks-” lmfao and they address each other by name, so i like to think they’ve worked together and donut’s… mannerisms… have been Rubbing Off on wash ;p

^also in that deleted scene caboose goes “DONUT! :D” when donut appears and talks, so he’s clearly excited to see him!!!!!!!!!

ahem. point being: the bgc needs to embrace the donut love and i firmly believe that if someone didnt have a crush on donut, donut had a crush on one of them at some point in time

#katanacupcake #look what u've done... you have... Enabled Me...#i'll never turn down a chance to yell about my Fave Red #franklin delano donut #rvb #im taggin him but not everyone else bc that's a Lot #hashtag all donut ships are canon lol #asks #lmfao i love simmons and grif just giving up 'hey donut...............' in that last thing #my faves... i love the reds #WHY CANT THEY ADMIT THEY LOVE DONUT TOO #bless church and caboose for not hiding their fondness for donut #ive talked longer and in depth for some others like church tucker and doc /donut #in other posts #i could find them but dsflkfsj this was more like #specific stuff #the other posts had more speculation of 'this is a hypothetical similarity' and stuff

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junker-town · 4 years

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What a 1936 movie reveals about women coaching football

Bessie Winters (Patsy Kelly) drawing up a play in Pigskin Parade. | Pigskin Parade/20th Century Fox

The almost century-old film is more progressive than many contemporary movies.

One ad has been nearly inescapable over the past few months, even more so if The Algorithm knows you watch sports. Niners coach Katie Sowers, the first woman to coach at any level in a Super Bowl, talks about her journey to the NFL while not-so-subtly promoting the league’s iPad-like device of choice, the Microsoft Surface. “I always wanted to be a coach,” she says in the voiceover for a clip of her directing some players in practice. “I never saw an opportunity in football because I’d never seen a female coach before.”

Sowers might have found a little inspiration on the big screen if she’d been up for digging through some Hollywood vaults. Pigskin Parade, the 1936 musical best known as Judy Garland’s film debut, features a story as unlikely now as it appears to have been unremarkable then: A bumbling football coach gets recruited from Flushing, Queens, to then-fictional Texas State University, where his wife pushes that team of underdogs to victory in an accidentally-scheduled game against Yale. Yes, at that point beating Yale was considered hard.

Bessie Winters (played by the so-called “Queen of Wisecracks” Patsy Kelly) isn’t named as the team’s coach, and she is generally relegated to the sidelines with everyone else. But from the film’s opening scene, she’s established as both smarter and more fluent in football than her husband Slug. When he accidentally pushes her over during their train ride to the school, her droll response is, “Don’t pull any of those offside plays on me.” Their playfully combative dynamic wasn’t unusual for screwball comedies of the period but its relative one-sidedness is surprising, especially to those viewing it today.

Pigskin Parade/20th Century Fox

Winters telling her husband (and the team’s coach) Slug how to win in Pigskin Parade.

Bessie’s impact on the rag-tag team begins almost immediately. When she learns there are four players who also compete on the school’s much stronger basketball team, she calls her husband over to the sideline and tells him he needs to get his team to play “basketball football” — sort of inverting the idea of converting basketball players to tight ends.

“Look, you’ve got four great basketball players — make them your backfield,” she suggests. “They’re used to heaving a basketball to each other, let them do the same thing with a football.”

“Say, there might be something to what you’re saying,” he replies.

“There’s everything to it!” she says, indignant. “Don’t write a lot of screwy passing plays, let them toss the ball around and run wild.”

“This is the greatest idea you’ve had since you asked me to marry you,” he concludes — a gag that draws out how Bessie’s interest in the game is hardly the only way she defies traditional gender roles.

Though Bessie is none too pleased at the mention of her proposal, her unorthodox offense works immediately and the team starts blowing out all its opponents. (The offense is basically just a lot of laterals, mimicking the way you might pass a basketball down the court.) When reporters ask Slug where he came up with the idea he (naturally) takes credit despite the fact Bessie is standing right next to him, folding her arms and looking chagrined.

The team faces a new challenge, though, when Bessie accidentally breaks the star player’s leg while trying to teach him to improve his tackling (!) at a dance (!!).

“You played a great game Saturday, but I’m sorry, old boy — you still don’t know how to take a man out,” she tells Biff (yes, his name is Biff), seemingly inspired in part by the gin she’s consumed. There’s cringey subtext around her desire to tackle him that was likely intended to titillate audiences, but isn’t played too dramatically in the movie itself. Biff doesn’t have time to be surprised, as she immediately gets into a three-point stance and pushes him straight into a wall of dumbbells (hence the leg breaking).

Pigskin Parade/20th Century Fox

Winters starting a tackling drill with Biff in Pigskin Parade.

The film reiterates Bessie’s masculinity, evidenced by her interest in the game, her lack of deference to her husband, and in Biff’s case, her brute strength, over and over. But somehow it’s never a source of serious alarm to her peers on-screen — instead, more of a winking gag. It might actually be more surprising to modern viewers that she’s the one who recruits Biff’s replacement, the massively talented quarterback Amos Dodd, literally from a field of melons (funnily enough, she also suggests paying another top player, prompting a brief aside about the ethics of amateurism). When a visitor drops by her and Slug’s apartment unexpectedly, she’s drawing up a play on a chalkboard while he does the dishes in a frilly apron.

Showing a woman as successful in football didn’t raise many red flags probably because the movie itself was presented as mildly absurdist, an “elegant spoofing of the conventional football film” as Hollywood Reporter described it at the time. The whole film was so patently unrealistic (although Variety noted the “somewhat domineering wife”) that no one was too concerned about Kelly’s “characteristically amusing performance as the coach’s coach” (also from the Reporter).

Pigskin Parade/20th Century Fox

Winters convincing Amos Dodd that he can play quarterback in Pigskin Parade.

But what the reviewers may not have realized is the character of Bessie Winters mirrors the role of some real coaches’ wives from the period. Alice Graham Sumner, wife of the “father of American football” Walter Camp, was known for attending Yale practices when he couldn’t be there (Camp still had to work a day job) and taking detailed notes on the proceedings. They would rehash practice over dinner, often alongside players or other coaches. During the 1888 season — when Yale outscored opponents, 698-0 — Alice herself was billed as an assistant coach. Both of Camp’s most prominent biographers, Harford Powell and Julie Des Jardins, agree that Alice was indispensable to Camp’s success at Yale.

Amos Alonzo Stagg, another legendary college football coach and player, played at Yale under the Camps and eventually developed a similar relationship with his wife Stella Robertson while he was coaching at the University of Chicago. She would help scout and work out plays — and according to Erin McCarthy, an associate professor of history at Columbia College Chicago, her presence at all the games was regularly noted by Chicago papers.

Pigskin Parade/20th Century Fox

Winters drawing up the gamewinning play in Pigskin Parade.

Stella and Alice probably never called the game-winning play after their husbands hit their heads and passed out on the sideline, as Bessie does at the conclusion of Pigskin Parade. But there’s a chance they might have known the thrill of being part of the game, the same way Bessie does throughout the movie. There’s nothing farcical about the unbridled glee she shows when she’s finally able to work unhindered: “Now we’ve got a chance!” she yells after her husband faints, before whispering one final play to her top recruit. Sure, the movie is a comedy and her Hail Mary is to have the very country QB take off his shoes and run to the endzone. But that single moment of total self-assurance — a feeling women are afforded all too rarely in movies and in life — is a serious, and deserved, triumph.

Pigskin Parade/20th Century Fox

Winters celebrating a W while her husband (the coach) is passed out on the bench in Pigskin Parade.

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avanneman · 6 years

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John McCain, Paul Ryan, and the Myth of the Virtuous Republican

John McCain is one of those guys who, when he dies, people say “he was the last of a dying breed.”

No one will ever say that about Paul Ryan.

John McCain was a genuine war hero, a man who preferred to face hardship, torture, and even death rather than abandon his comrades. Paul Ryan has the suit, haircut, and soul of a TV personality. Yet both ended their careers kissing Donald Trump’s ass. Strange! More than strange!

It could justly be said—and often was—that John McCain approached politics with the mindset of the fighter pilot he used to be, an adrenaline junkie who wanted to see every issue as a struggle of good against evil, or at least us against them, which, in his mind, constituted the same thing. He was always wanting to go to war, wars in which, he was sure, the good guys always won and everyone’s problems were settled once and for all. My most vivid memory of McCain is video showing him striding around Baghdad in an armored vest, surrounded by heavily armed troops, with assault helicopters circling overhead, and proclaiming “Mission Accomplished”.

McCain made himself a national figure in the 2000 Republican primaries by wowing the national press corps with his war stories, young men and women stunned to be in the presence of a man who’d seen and endured things they, with their pampered backgrounds, could not even begin to imagine. This was a man!

And so he was, but as a senator he wasn’t so much. McCain was furious—well beyond furious—at George Bush because he believed, with some reason, that he’d been done out of the Republican nomination by some seriously subterranean backstabbing during the South Carolina primary, which may well be true, but one can also wonder how deliberate noncombatant Georgie W. beat a war hero in what is often regarded as the most militaristic state in the union.

McCain continued to cultivate the press in defeat, playing the beloved role of “maverick”, charging like a bull at a variety of issues, but never really succeeding at anything. For McCain, the passionate display of “passion” was its own purpose and end. His was not to reason why, and he never did.

Yet however harshly one wishes to criticize McCain, his ultimate obsequiousness to Trump remains baffling. Trump publicly ridiculed McCain’s heroism. Why wasn’t McCain at the Democratic Convention, standing beside Hillary Clinton, whose foreign policy views were almost identical to his own, and proclaiming her “America’s Choice”? What kept the proud maverick in such humiliating harness?

Well, as I say, I’m baffled. Perhaps he was intimidated by the Republican base, which had shifted so heavily against the “free trade, open borders” orthodoxy to which he had always subscribed.

But, in fact, there was always a bit of smoke and mirrors when it came to McCain’s “bipartisanship”. He had a knack for choosing issues, like campaign reform and immigration reform, that never, or rarely, managed to make it into law.1 On tax and spending issues, he almost always voted the straight party line, never giving an inch to either Clinton or Obama, though he did draw back a little from the “burn the house down” efforts of the newly elected Tea Party Republicans to drive the federal government into default—though probably more because he was worried about the possible impact on defense spending, which was the only fiscal issue he really cared about.2

But as for “leadership”, McCain was almost always absent. He voted in favor of removing President Clinton from office and, most infamously, brought Sarah Palin and her brand of “Americanism” into the national spotlight for the first time. And when the country really needed some bipartisan leadership, during the first onslaught of the Great Recession when Obama took office, McCain said, and did, nothing.

What’s remarkable about Paul Ryan is that, for a long time, he received press almost the equal of McCain’s, with far less substance. While McCain’s warrior ego was always front and center, deciphering Paulie’s slippery humility has always been a chore. He eagerly promoted—and the press eagerly bought—his Wisconsin Boy Scout demeanor. His incessantly repeated claim to be a “wonk” was, I think, deliberately designed to insulate him from the continuing bro-ha-ha3 over “social issues”—abortion, homosexuality, the “war against Christmas”, etc.—that so obsessed most ambitious Republicans. Paulie always looked east, towards Wall Street, but I’ve never been sure of his motivation. Was he gunning for the presidency? Then why stay in the House?

For many years, Ryan was sort of a hero—or perhaps fig-leaf—to many Republicans. In fact, to “recovering Republicans” like (former) conservative broadcaster Charles Sykes (author of How the Right Lost Its Mind), WashPost columnist and long-time Literature R Us whipping boy George F. Will, and former Republican strategist Rick Wilson (author of Everything Trump Touches Dies), who, unlike the first two, is deeply disappointed in the “new Paulie,” Ryan is (or was) a true hero. Nonpartisan centrists like Josh Barro are also deeply disappointed in the Ryan reinvention, which I will demonstrate—at length–is not new at all.

Sykes, in his book, gives us a taste of the true Paulie believer:

Whatever you might think of his policies, Paul Ryan is inarguably the most formidable intellectual leader the Republican Party has had for decades. For years, he was known for his dogged advocacy of budget and entitlement reform in opposition from his party’s establishment. His rise from conservative backbencher to Speaker could have been seen as one of the great success stories of the conservative movement. “I spent more time, I’d say, in the backbench than the leadership,” Ryan told me during a conversation on my last radio show. “The party really tried to isolate me a number of years ago and tried to explain to our members, ‘do not touch what Ryan is talking about, don’t deal with these fiscal issues, these entitlements, it’s political suicide.” And I just decided instead of trying to win the argument internally, I tried to win it externally, and that took hold,” he explained. “What happened, really, was the 2010 election, I think. The 2010 election brought all these, sort of Tea Party conservative Republicans into office.”

I suppose it’s possible to pack more self-serving nonsense into one paragraph than Paulie (and Sykes) just did there, but it isn’t easy. Ryan was always an eager self-promoter, though, as I say, it’s a bit of a mystery—again with the mystery! Republicans are mysterious!—exactly who Ryan was trying to sell himself to. Ryan has spent nearly all his adult life working in politics, either as a legislative aide or a congressman, and has claimed that all he wanted was to be chair of the House Budget Committee, but I don’t quite believe that. He has always appeared to me to have national aspirations, but for what? If you want to be president, you have to get out of the House, and, as far as I know, Ryan never showed interest in running either for governor or senator. If he wanted money, sure, a Budget Committee chair can retire after five or six years and make $2 or $3 million a year as a big-time lobbyist, but why bust your ass in your fifties for $2 or $3 million a year when you could have been making $20 or $30 million a year on Wall Street in your twenties?

So is Ryan telling the truth when he claims that he’s just a wonk, just wants to make the world a better place via free-market capitalism? No, he isn’t. To coin a phrase, he’s a big fat liar. Ryan lists the late Rep. Jack Kemp as his mentor and role model. Kemp was perhaps the most passionate advocate of the holy gospel of supply-side economics this side of George Gilder. Both men believed that the absolutely unfettered free market would solve all of mankind’s ills. Ryan was/is also a disciple of the legendary Ayn Rand, the Queen of Mean, saying that he frequently reread Ayn’s exercise in übermenschlichkeit, Atlas Shrugged, but, grudgingly aware that Ayn’s atheism and frequently expressed hostility to the Catholic Church (Ryan was raised a Catholic) didn’t sit well with the evangelical set, pulled in his horns just a bit, so to speak, and more recently pronounced himself a big fan of supposed big thinker Yuval Levin, who celebrated the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in 2010, so hailed by Ryan as essentially his work (“I just decided instead of trying to win the argument internally, I tried to win it externally, and that took hold”), with a piece for the National Interest entitled “Beyond the Welfare State”.

According to Ryan, Levin “does a very good job of articulating why these are good ideas and the right way to go and how they’re philosophically connected with one another and consistent.” Indeed, Levin has made a career out of pretending to be a student of Edmund Burke, but back in 2011 he sounded a lot more like Herbert Hoover, making a multi-pronged assault on the welfare state: “The reason is partly institutional: The administrative state is dismally inefficient and unresponsive, and therefore ill-suited to our age of endless choice and variety. The reason is also partly cultural and moral: The attempt to rescue the citizen from the burdens of responsibility has undermined the family, self-reliance, and self-government. But, in practice, it is above all fiscal: The welfare state has turned out to be unaffordable, dependent as it is upon dubious economics and the demographic model of a bygone era.”

Despite his “the bottom line is the bottom line” pitch, Levin was not at all shy about making Randy/Hooverian generalizations about the welfare state as the source of modern-day moral collapse:

This is the second major failing of this vision of society [the first is that it is grossly inefficient] — a kind of spiritual failing. Under the rules of the modern welfare state, we give up a portion of the capacity to provide for ourselves and in return are freed from a portion of the obligation to discipline ourselves. Increasing economic collectivism enables increasing moral individualism, both of which leave us with less responsibility, and therefore with less grounded and meaningful lives.

Moreover, because all citizens — not only the poor — become recipients of benefits, people in the middle class come to approach their government as claimants, not as self-governing citizens, and to approach the social safety net not as a great majority of givers eager to make sure that a small minority of recipients are spared from devastating poverty but as a mass of dependents demanding what they are owed. It is hard to imagine an ethic better suited to undermining the moral basis of a free society.4

In other words, it is not only means-tested welfare programs that are morally corrupting—and it is these that the general public thinks of (and often resents) as “welfare”—but Social Security and Medicare as well. In fact, they’re the really bad ones!

Unsurprisingly (but predictably) Levin doesn’t have the courage to follow his own argument and simply eliminate Social Security and Medicare. Instead, he’d make them means-tested. Most people would still get some retirement assistance (but why wouldn’t this still be “bad”?), but most people—the middle class in particular—wouldn’t get as much. And everyone would have to buy their own health insurance, with some assistance from the federal government to cushion the blow: “This approach would seek to let people be active consumers, rather than passive recipients of benefits — which would be good both for the federal budget (since consumer pressure in a free market keeps costs down far better than price controls) and for the character of our nation.” Naturally, the less expensive social programs, such as Head Start, would be trimmed and, ultimately, one could hope, be eliminated, since they simply waste money and make us more dependent.

It’s “interesting” to look both backwards and forwards with regard to Levin’s manifesto, looking backwards first to Ryan’s own conduct in office when, as he pictured it, he was more or less howling in the wilderness, rejected by the Republican establishment and forced, basically, to take it to the streets. Because what did Ryan do? He voted for every budget-busting Bush proposal, starting with the massive, and massively unnecessary and counter-productive, Bush tax cuts, which turned a $172 billion surplus in 2001 into a $210 billion deficit in 2002 (using 2014 dollars), and continuing through all the “unnecessary” (not to mention morally corrupting) social programs like No Child Left Behind, which added billions in education spending, through the ultimate budget-buster, the disastrous invasion of Iraq (the bold Mr. Levin makes no mention of defense spending at all in his manifesto) plus the ultimate outrage, a new entitlement program, adding billions to the Medicare tab yearly to cover prescription drugs, with no provision for funding whatsoever! Mr. Ryan, one has to say, believes that words speak louder than actions.

Supposedly, the 2010 election brought “Paul Ryan” Republicans into Congress. This is nonsense. As Ryan and Levin surely noticed, the Republicans’ ace in the hole in the 2010 election was Barack Obama’s decision, via the Affordable Care Act, not to talk about cutting Medicare, but to actually cut it—something that, of course, neither Ryan nor Levin ever talked about. Over and over again, Republicans promised never to cut “a dime of Grandma’s Medicare”, and of course they never did. Ryan and Levin “proposed” to cut Medicare 10 years down the line, which is rather like promising to go on a diet in 10 years,5 but as for the present, hey, nothing’s too good for Grandma! And Social Security, presumably the most corrupting program of all, at least in Levin’s philosophy, would never have lost a dime under Ryan’s proposals.

The one entitlement Ryan was always willing to cut was, of course, Medicaid, cutting spending for the poor, not to balance the budget but rather to hand out tax cuts to the rich, which was always the first priority of all.6 Ryan produced a variety of budget plans that were supposed to produce a balanced budget in X number of years, but they were always phony, with the popular provisions, like reduced tax rates, spelled out, while the unpopular ones, like “base broadening” (elimination of tax exemptions and other “loopholes”) left for further discussion. Medicaid would be cut immediately (it was somehow “fair” to cut benefits for the poor immediately, but not to do the same to the middle class, i.e., “Grandma”), and further spending cuts would be made in “domestic discretionary spending”, which had expanded enormously under Bush from 2001 through 2008, under legislation for which Ryan had repeatedly voted. But these cuts, like the “base broadening”, were left unspecified, to be worked out in further negotiation. In other words, Ryan would spell out the popular provisions, which would, in fact, expand the deficit dramatically, and the leave it to the Democrats to repair all the damage he had created. It would be the Democrats who would have the responsibility for balancing the budget, not Paul Ryan.

It was all a shell game, as Paul Krugman and others repeatedly pointed out, a mere partisan hustle, but it made moderate Republicans like Sykes and Will and Wilson proud. We’re serious! We’re fiscally responsible! We’re still the party of ideas! We’re not like those crazy Democrats, who are turning us into Greece!

Well, that was then. When the era of Trump dawned, Ryan was clearly in a quandary. His Wall Street buddies, whose willing servant he had always been, had no use for Trump’s bad ass, xenophobic, race-baiting populism. But Trump had the votes, so Ryan caved. And once he started, the caving never stopped.

To be fair, Ryan caved to everybody, everybody with power. He finally got his chance to cut Medicaid in the course of overturning the Affordable Care Act, but in his eagerness to both help the rich, by eliminating one of those opprobrious Obamacare abominations that actually increased taxes on innocent millionaires/billionaires, and stick it to the poor by denying health insurance to millions, he overreached himself. “It’s curious,” Republican health care maven Avik Roy opined, “that extending tax cuts [to the rich] was a higher priority for the House than addressing the fact that the bill will make insurance unaffordable for millions of Americans.” Actually, it isn’t, but fortunately the naked hypocrisy of it all caused three Republican senators, including John McCain, greatly to his credit, to gag and Obamacare was granted another day.

Yes, Paulie was denied on that occasion, but he was not denied on his tax bill, where the hypocrisy was even greater, but with so much money on the table, well, what’s a little nudity among friends? I mean, this is the way God made us!

As originally crafted, Ryan’s tax bill was revenue neutral, thanks to a “controversial” provision, a “border tax adjustment” that would have brought in $1.5 trillion over 10 years, that was furiously opposed by most corporate outfits, including Koch Inc. Ryan could have said to them, “okay, guys, you don’t like my proposal. So how are we going to make this thing revenue neutral?” But he didn’t say that. Both Ryan and the Koch folks, who had been shouting, shouting, shouting “It’s the deficit, stupid!” for eight long years, turned around and added a cool $1.5 trillion to the deficit at a minimum7 and celebrated! And then followed that up with a budget-busting spending package with both massive and entirely unnecessary increases in defense spending and equally large increases for “domestic discretionary spending”, which Republicans supposedly hate!

Charles Wilson (remember him?) at least had the honesty to be openly ashamed. Writing in his book Everything Trump Touches Dies, Wilson wrote

The bill does nothing to reduce the complexity, expense, opacity, and general brain-frying shittiness of the tax code for ordinary Americans. So much for our “Do your taxes on a postcard!” rhetoric. The tax code, baroque and ludicrously convoluted before, is even more baffling unless you can afford a fleet of corporate tax attorneys and consultants.

A prominent tax lobbyist I know wrote, “This is almost too easy. Even I feel dirty.” This person literally sat in the majority leader’s office crafting parts of the tax bill, laughing all the way to the bank. The members of the House and Senate who voted for this 479-page bill had only a few hours to consider it. I asked this lobbyist at the time what the job-creation effect would be from the corporate tax cut, and he replied, “How the fuck do I know? Something? Maybe?”

This is the legislation Paul Ryan “crafted”, or at least put his name to, and this is the legislation that John McCain voted for, a massive change to the U.S. tax code to which the U.S. Senate, the world’s greatest deliberative body, had zero input. The bill was written for them by Paul Ryan and a gaggle of lobbyists, and they contributed nothing. Decades of lying and deceit came to their full fruition. This was Paul Ryan’s achievement, and John McCain’s submission made it possible.

For whatever reason, the election of Bill Clinton to the presidency in 1992 essentially drove the Republican Party mad. Both the elite and the base were seized by a compulsive need to destroy Clintonism by any means necessary. The base seethed with paranoid rage against blacks, Hispanics, feminists, homosexuals–“the other”–while the elite sought to manage the monster and perpetuate itself first with tax cuts and “culture war” then with the intoxicating self-righteousness of a real war in the Middle East.8 But the elite discredited itself with disasters both home and abroad, and the triumph of the Tea Party signaled the collapse of elite power. For eight long years during the Obama Administration Paul Ryan served as the mask of Republican corruption. But now we see–as if it were hidden before–that the mask is as corrupt as that which it concealed.

McCain first became an advocate of campaign reform perhaps as an ass-covering measure, when he was identified as one of the “Keating Five”—five senators who aggressively promoted the interests of savings and loan hustler Charles Keating. Later, after his defeat by George W. Bush in the 2000 Republican presidential primaries, McCain was widely, and accurately, suspected of wanting to “get” evangelical groups who helped Bush defeat him. On immigration reform, McCain, like both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (and, pretty much, myself), was a strong advocate of the “open borders” approach favored by Wall Street. The same could be said of Paul Ryan as well, but Ryan did not dare cross the rabid Republican base—much stronger in the House than the Senate—on this one. ↩︎

In what was very likely a fit of pique rather than common sense, McCain voted against George Bush’s 2001 tax cuts. It was rare for McCain to care about deficits, unless a Democrat was in office. ↩︎

Word accepts this spelling, because it accepts “bro” as a word (as well as “ha”). I find it hard to believe that I typed “bro-ha-ha” but apparently I did, if only because Word will correct “brohaha” to “brouhaha” rather than “bro-ha-ha”. I guess I was really drunk. ↩︎

Levin, who is Jewish (he was born in Israel), titles his discussion of the shortcomings of the welfare state “The Passing of an Illusion”. In 1927, Sigmund Freud published a withering critique of Christianity under the title The Future of an Illusion. You don’t have to be a Freudian (cause I sure ain’t one) to suspect that Levin unconsciously—but not consciously—echoed Freud’s title. ↩︎

Back in the eighties, when Ronald Reagan introduced Americans to “modern deficits” (Reagan doubled the size of the entire national debt in eight years, in constant dollars, although an expanding economy meant that as a percentage of GNP the increase was only 43%), Congress enacted several elaborate deficit reduction packages. All of them employed the same strategy: cosmetic cuts to get Congress through the next election, followed by “real” cuts afterwards. Inevitably, after the next election, the new Congress would “discover” that the “real” cuts were in fact “crazy” ones, and rewrite the legislation to push the new “real” cuts to after the next election. The notion that the Congress elected in 2010 could “force” the Congress elected in 2020 to make massive, and massively unpopular, cuts in Medicare is ludicrous. ↩︎

Levin, in his paper, briefly explains that he wants a simplified federal tax policy, with low rates. Despite his supposed obsession with soaring deficits, he doesn’t even discuss the possibility of raising taxes to reduce them, probably because he knows that would work, as it did under Clinton, and he doesn’t want to balance the budget on the backs of the rich. ↩︎

The bill made tax cuts for the rich permanent but set the tax cuts for the middle class to expire in 10 years. Now Republicans are “proposing” to make them permanent. This is probably an election-year gambit, but if it works, what are they going to do? Say they were lying? ↩︎

For many evangelicals, the events in the contemporary Middle East are a direct continuation of the events of the Bible–God’s Will in action. ↩︎

#John McCain #Paul Ryan #Republican Party #Lyin' Paulie Ryan

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