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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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Company that makes millions spying on students will get to sue a whistleblower

Yesterday, the Court of Appeal for British Columbia handed down a jaw-droppingly stupid and terrible decision, rejecting the whistleblower Ian Linkletter’s claim that he was engaged in legitimate criticism when he linked to freely available materials from the ed-tech surveillance company Proctorio:

https://www.bccourts.ca/jdb-txt/ca/23/01/2023BCCA0160.htm

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/20/links-arent-performances/#free-ian-linkletter

It’s been a minute since Linkletter’s case arose, so I’ll give you a little recap here. Proctorio is a massive, wildly profitable ed-tech company that sells a surveillance tool to monitor students while they take high-stakes tests from home. The tool monitors the student’s computer and the student’s face, especially their eye-movements. It also allows instructors and other personnel to watch the students and even take control of their computer. This is called “remote invigilation.”

This is ghastly in just about every way. For starters, Proctorio’s facial monitoring software embeds the usual racist problems with machine-learning stuff, and struggles to recognize Black and brown faces. Black children sitting exams under Proctorio’s gimlet eye have reported that the only way to satisfy Proctorio’s digital phrenology system is to work with multiple high-powered lights shining directly in their faces.

A Proctorio session typically begins with a student being forced to pan a webcam around their test-taking room. During lockdown, this meant that students who shared a room — for example, with a parent who worked night-shifts — would have to invade their family’s privacy, and might be disqualified because they couldn’t afford a place large enough to have private room in which to take their tests.

Proctorio’s tools also punish students for engaging in normal test-taking activity. Do you stare off into space when you’re trying through a problem? Bzzzt. Do you read questions aloud to yourself under your breath when you’re trying to understand their meanings? Bzzzt. Do you have IBS and need to go to the toilet? Bzzzt. The canon of remote invigilation horror stories is filled with accounts of students being forced to defecate themselves, or vomit down their shirts without turning their heads (because looking away is an automatically flagged offense).

The tragedy is that all of this is in service to the pedagogically bankrupt practice of high-stakes testing. Few pedagogists believe that the kind of exam that Proctorio seeks to recreate in students’ homes has real assessment merit. As the old saying goes, “Tests measure your ability to take tests.” But Proctorio doesn’t even measure your ability to take a test — it measures your ability to take a test with three bright lights shining directly on your face. Or while you are covered in your own feces and vomit. While you stare rigidly at a screen. While your tired mother who just worked 16 hours in a covid ward stands outside the door to your apartment.

The lockdown could have been an opportunity to improve educational assessment. There is a rich panoply of techniques that educators can adopt that deliver a far better picture of students’ learning, and work well for remote as well as in-person education. Instead, companies like Proctorio made vast fortunes, most of it from publicly funded institutions, by encouraging a worse-than-useless, discriminatory practice:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/24/proctor-ology/#miseducation

Proctorio clearly knows that its racket is brittle. Like any disaster profiteer, Proctorio will struggle to survive after the crisis passes and we awaken from our collective nightmare and ask ourselves why we were stampeded into using its terrible products. The company went to war against its critics.

In 2020, Proctorio CEO Mike Olsen doxed a child who complained about his company’s software in a Reddit forum:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/01/bossware/#moral-exemplar

In 2021, the reviews for Proctorio’s Chrome plugin all mysteriously vanished. Needless to say, these reviews — from students forced to use Proctorio’s spyware — were brutal:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/04/hypervigilance/#radical-transparency

Proctorio claims that it protects “educational integrity,” but its actions suggest a company far more concerned about the integrity of its own profits:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/16/unauthorized-paper/#cheating-anticheat

One of the critics that Proctorio attacked is Ian Linkletter. In 2020, Linkletter was a Learning Technology Specialist at UBC’s Faculty of Education. His job was to assess and support ed-tech tools, including Proctorio. In the course of that work, Linkletter reviewed Proctorio’s training material for educators, which are a bonanza of mask-off materials that are palpably contemptuous of students, who are presumed to be cheaters.

At the time, a debate over remote invigilation tools was raging through Canadian education circles, with students, teachers and parents fiercely arguing the merits and downsides of making surveillance the linchpin of assessment. Linkletter waded into this debate, tweeting a series of sharp criticisms of Proctorio. In these tweets, Linkletter linked to Proctorio’s unlisted, but publicly available, Youtube videos.

A note of explanation: Youtube videos can be flagged as “unlisted,” which means they don’t show up in searches. They can also be flagged as “private,” which means you have to be on a list of authorized users to see them. Proctorio made its training videos unlisted, but they weren’t private — they were visible to anyone who had a link to them.

Proctorio sued Linkletter for this. They argued that he had breached a duty of confidentiality, and that linking to these videos was a copyright violation:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/17/proctorio-v-linkletter/#proctorio

This is a classic SLAPP — a “strategic litigation against public participation.” That’s when a deep-pocketed, thin-skinned bully, like Proctorio, uses the threat of a long court battle to force their critics into silence. They know they can’t win their case, but that’s not the victory they’re seeking. They don’t want to win the case, they want to win the argument, by silencing a critic who would otherwise be bankrupted by legal fees.

Getting SLAPPed is no fun. I’ve been there. Just this year, a billionaire financier tried to force me into silence by threatening me with a lawsuit. Thankfully, Ken “Popehat” White was on the case, and he reminded this billionaire’s counsel that California has a strong anti-SLAPP law, and if Ken had to defend me in court, he could get a fortune in fees from the bully after he prevailed:

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1531684572479377409

British Columbia also has an anti-SLAPP law, but unlike California’s anti-SLAPP, the law is relatively new and untested. Still, Proctorio’s suit against Linkletter was such an obvious SLAPP that for many of us, it seemed likely that Linkletter would be able to defend himself from this American bully and its attempt to use Canada’s courts to silence a Canadian educator.

For Linkletter to use BC’s anti-SLAPP law, he would have to prove that he was weighing in on a matter of public interest, and that Proctorio’s copyright and confidentiality claims were nonsense, unlikely to prevail on their merits. If he could do that, he’d be able to get the case thrown out, without having to go through a lengthy, brutally expensive trial.

Incredibly, though, the lower court found against Linkletter. Naturally, Linkletter appealed. His “factotum” is a crystal clear document that sets out the serious errors of law and fact the lower court made:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aB1ztWDFr3MU6BsAMt6rWXOiXJ8sT3MY/view

But yesterday, the Court of Appeal upheld the lower court, repeating all of these gross errors and finding for Proctorio:

https://www.bccourts.ca/jdb-txt/ca/23/01/2023BCCA0160.htm

This judgment is grotesque. It makes a mockery of BC’s anti-SLAPP statute, to say nothing of Canadian copyright and confidentiality law. For starters, it finds that publishing a link can be a “performance” of a copyrighted work, which meant that when Linkletter linked to the world-viewable Youtube files that Proctorio had posted, he infringed on copyright.

This is a perverse, even surreal take on copyright. The court rejects Linkletter’s argument that even Youtube’s terms of service warned Proctorio that publishing world-viewable material on its site constituted permission for people to link to and watch that material.

But what about “fair dealing” (similar to fair use)? Linkletter argued that linking to a video that shows that Proctorio’s assurances to parents and students about its products’ benign nature were contradicted by the way it talked to educators was fair dealing. Fair dealing is a broad suite of limitations and exceptions to copyright for the purposes of commentary, criticism, study, satire, etc.

So even if linking is a copyright infringement (ugh, seriously?!), surely it’s fair dealing in this case. Proctorio was selling millions of dollars in software to public institutions, inflicting it on kids whose parents weren’t getting the whole story. Linkletter used Proctorio’s own words to rebut its assurances. What could be more fair dealing than that?

Not so fast, the appeals panel says: they say that Linkletter could have made his case just as well without linking to Proctorio’s materials. This is…bad. I mean, it’s also wrong, but it’s very bad, too. It’s wrong because an argument about what a company intends necessarily has to draw upon the company’s own statements. It’s absurd to say that Linkletter’s point would have been made equally well if he said “I disbelieve Proctorio’s public assurances because I’ve seen seekrit documents” as it was when he was able to link to those documents so that people could see them for themselves.

But it’s bad because it rips the heart out of the fair dealing exception for criticism. Publishing a link to a copyrighted work is the most minimal way to quote from it in a debate — Linkletter literally didn’t reproduce a single word, not a single letter, from Proctorio’s copyrighted works. If the court says, “Sure, you can quote from a work to criticize it, but only so much as you need to make your argument,” and then says, “But also, simply referencing a work without quoting it at all is taking too much,” then what reasonable person would ever try to rely on a fair dealing exemption for criticism?

Then there’s the confidentiality claim: in his submissions to the lower court and the appeals court, Linkletter pointed out that the “confidential” materials he’d linked to were available in many places online, and could be easily located with a Google search. Proctorio had uploaded these “confidential” materials to many sites — without flagging them as “unlisted” or “private.”

What’s more, the videos that Linkletter linked to were in found a “Help Center” that didn’t even have a terms-of-service condition that required confidentiality. How on Earth can materials that are publicly available all over the web be “confidential?”

Here, the court takes yet another bizarre turn in logic. They find that because a member of the public would have to “gather” the videos from “many sources,” that the collection of links was confidential, even if none of the links in the collection were confidential. Again, this is both wrong and bad.

Every investigator, every journalist, every critic, starts by looking in different places for information that can be combined to paint a coherent picture of what’s going on. This is the heart of “open source intelligence,” combing different sources for data points that shed light on one another.

The idea that “gathering” public information can breach confidentiality strikes directly at all investigative activity. Every day, every newspaper and news broadcast in Canada engages in this conduct. The appeals court has put them all in jeopardy with this terrible finding.

Finally, there’s the question of Proctorio’s security. Proctorio argued that by publishing links to its educator materials, Linkletter weakened the security of its products. That is, they claim that if students know how the invigilation tool works, it stops working. This is the very definition of “security through obscurity,” and it’s a practice that every serious infosec professional rejects. If Proctorio is telling the truth when it says that describing how its products work makes them stop working, then they make bad products that no one should pay money for.

The court absolutely flubs this one, too, accepting the claim of security through obscurity at face value. That’s a finding that flies in the face of all security research.

So what happens now? Well, Linkletter has lost his SLAPP claim, so nominally the case can proceed. Linkletter could appeal his case to Canada’s Supreme Court (about 7% of Supreme Court appeals of BC appeals court judgments get heard). Or Proctorio could drop the case. Or it could go to a full trial, where these outlandish ideas about copyright, confidentiality and information security would get a thorough — and blisteringly expensive — examination.

In Linkletter’s statement, he remains defiant and unwilling to give in to bullying, but says he’ll have to “carefully consider” his next step. That’s fair enough: there’s a lot on the line here:

https://linkletter.opened.ca/stand-against-proctorios-slapp-update-30/

Linkletter answers his supporters’ questions about how they can help with some excellent advice: “What I ask is for you to do what you can to protect students. Academic surveillance technology companies would like nothing more but for us all to shut up. Don’t let them silence you. Don’t let anyone or anything take away your human right to freedom of expression.”

Today (Apr 21), I’m speaking in Chicago at the Stigler Center’s Antitrust and Competition Conference. This weekend (Apr 22/23), I’m at the LA Times Festival of Books.

[Image ID: A girl working on a laptop. Her mouth has been taped shut. Glaring out of the laptop screen is the hostile red eye of HAL9000 from '2001: A Space Odyssey.' Behind them is a tattered, filthy, burned Canadian flag.]

Image: Ingo Bernhardt https://www.flickr.com/photos/spree2010/4930763550/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Eleanor Vladinsky (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Canadian_flag_against_grey_sky.jpg

CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #security through obscurity #copyfight #education #cdnpoli #whistleblowers #pedagogy #canada #intimidation #corruption #slapp #ian linkletter #proctorio #censorship #remote invigilation

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am-i-the-asshole-official · 5 months

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AITA for scamming my ex out of an extremely valuable virtual pet?

🐓🥤to recognize. This might be a very long post with a lot of added context for a very niche hobby and a very small actual conflict.

I religiously play a virtual pet site called Chicken Smoothie. It's a pretty old site as far as virtual pet games go, starting back in 2008, so there is a pretty solid established site economy. Just for some context, Every pet on the site has a rarity, ranging from "OMG So Common" to "OMG So Rare", being the most common and most rare respectively. But there are rarities within those rarities, where some OMGSRs can be worth more than others based on species and demand. For example, an OMGSR dog from 2008 will be worth more than an OMGSR rat from 2008 despite being the same highest rarity and year, because people prefer the dogs over rats. These pets can get extremely valuable. You can't sell them for real money (according to site rules, but of course there's a black market), but the site has its own virtual currency you can buy (with real money) and trade for called Chicken Dollars, and you can also trade a valuable pet for other valuable pets. It gets very complicated, with the community coming up with its own set of value terms each pet can have. I'm not getting into specifics there, that's not important.

Every year, on December 18th, CS has gift boxes you can adopt from. These gift boxes can contain any rare pet from any previous year, including special "Unreleased pets" that you can only get from these Dec 18th boxes, with a very slim chance. These unreleased pets are some of the most valuable and rarest in the game.

Recently, I had seen my ex posting on the forums. I didn't know he had an account, he had made it within this year, long after I got the fuck away from him, and I only knew it was him because he uses the same username everywhere. This person had groomed me, physically abused me when we were together (we no longer live anywhere near each other, thankfully) and has always been emotionally manipulative. He does not know I play, and he wouldn't recognize my account as me. I took a note of his account and left it be for a while, until December 18th hit and I took a peek at what he had got. And what he got was one of the new Unreleased pets, which currently at the time of writing this only looks like a box of cereal. (Most pets on the site have growth stages.) And even better, all his groups were open for trade, so I took a chance and sent an extremely terrible trade. I told him that this pet would only be a recent rare, and I offered him a "Very Rare" rarity (but not very valuable) pet from 2018, telling him I was overpaying. (In the CS community, this is known as Ninjaing, and it's Not A Good Thing To Do). I didn't expect him to accept it, I at least thought he'd be smart enough to ask in the trade advice thread that is literally pinned on the home page for December 18th, but he didn't. He took my word for it and accepted the trade, and now I own an unreleased pet that will eventually end up as an OMGSR.

What I did was not a bannable offence. He will not get his unreleased pet back. The CS mods are laughable at worst, incompetent at best, and don't do anything to stop scamming. They have an "eh, sucks to be you, sorry, be smarter next time" mentality when people get scammed (Which is insane because there are literal single digit aged children allowed on this site!!!)

After taking a bit to think about it, I do feel a bit guilty because I really would not do this in any other circumstances. I hate scamming. I did what I did out of anger and contempt, and I do feel a bit guilty because in essence, I scammed a new player that didn't have much else and didn't know any better.

I'm still keeping that unreleased cereal box no matter what though

What are these acronyms?

#aita #am i the asshole #chicken smoothie

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etz-ashashiyot · 23 days

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For those of you out there who have rejected Christianity as a religion and want to fully break with it, you have to understand that it's not just a religion, no matter how much it tries to say it is - there's a whole culture to it, too. Or, perhaps another way of understanding it is this: religion and culture used to be entirely inseparable and "faith" or "religion" were not coherent identities by themselves. Christianity changed that on a widespread level by pushing the idea of universal religion and evangelism.

Essentially, Christianity styled itself as the one singular truth that must be known and adopted by all peoples everywhere. By doing so, it necessarily severed any ties to one specific people, culture, land, or language, so that it could be practiced by all groups. Not only did this make it easier to sell to people because they didn't have to give up their whole identity, culture, language, and even certain belief systems, but it served the practical purpose of making it portable to every land and adaptable to become palatable to [almost] any demographic. [Jews are a little unique in this particular situation, because since Christianity appropriates from us so heavily, we already know how much of it doesn't work within its original framework.]

The problem is that this separation is, even in the case of Christianity, untrue. Having been raised in a Christian culture (especially if you were raised religiously Christian, but even if your connection to the religious tenets was minimal or non-existent) it creates a whole world view and value system that must be addressed in addition to faith in the religious tenets recognized internally by Christians.

If you view faith in the religious tenets of your assigned religion as being the only or even primary aspect of divorcing yourself from a particular religious outlook, then you are still using a Christian framework that is very obvious to those of us outside of it. There are a lot of things that cultural Christians might call "religious" that we view as simply being "cultural," and vice versa, because the separation is neither as sharp nor particularly important to us in the same way.

If you are truly looking to leave Christianity behind, you need to stop telling us your truth about faith is the only truth and start looking at the broader ways in which Christianity has filtered into your world view in order to root it out, if that is truly your goal.

(And if it's not? That's fine! You can be a cultural Christian who doesn't believe in the faith elements even if you take your culture and values from a Christian-based culture. But don't deny that's what you're doing because at that point you may have stopped evangelizing religious Christianity but you are still actively proselytizing for cultural Christianity by doing so.)

#every hour is theology hour around here apparently

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obsessivevoidkitten · 2 years

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An Unwanted Promotion

Two Yandere Male Alphas X Male Reader Beta (CW: Noncon, over stimulation, face fucking, choking on cock, tongue fucking, ass eaten like it’s groceries, stalking, kidnapping, musk, scent marking, a/b/o dynamics, big alpha cocks with big alpha knots, threesome, male reader, aftercare, general yandere behavior, reader adopts a child) Word Count: 6k (This was a request from back when those were still open and I have been steadily working on it all week, this is my longest fic and I used it to practice longer/different smut scenes and also my dialogue so it turned out much longer than intended. I REALLY hope you all enjoy this.)

Eli and Ian had known each other since high school, not only were they natural competitors since they were both alphas but their family businesses were also in direct competition with one another, both selling supplies for alphas and omegas, which only served to fuel their bitter drive to best one another.

Everything was a competition to them. They competed in class, they competed in sports, they even competed in making the omegas, and the occasional beta or even alpha, fall for them.

When they finally graduated high school and later college they became the heads of their families' companies and the business competition became much fiercer. These were two young alphas in their prime who had been vying for dominance for most of their lives, so of course their tactics in the corporate realm would be cutthroat.

But at some point there was a retailer with a large custom order requiring both businesses to come together to fill it. They butted heads but all the tension, and begrudgingly held respect they had for one another, led to them slowly falling in love.

Eventually they married and merged their two companies into one to dominate the market.

You worked at this company, as a general assistant to all the employees in a division of sales that the two alphas directly oversaw. You mostly moved paperwork between other employees, fetched food and drink orders, tidied up here and there, and even occasionally took care of phone calls when Barb, the secretary, was unavailable.

It was more than a bit tiring, especially for someone of your short stature, flitting from one person to the next, completing any odd task that didn't suit anyone else, but you did it without complaint. You really needed this job since you were single and in the middle of the process of adopting a young child.

After only a few weeks of working there Eli and Ian started taking note of you. They first notice your willingness to serve in you execution of your tasks, so detail oriented and happy to please. And, of course being alphas, the other thing they noticed about you was your sweet delicious scent, like peaches and cream.

Since you were a beta your scent was not as pronounced as an alpha's or an omega's would be, but you still had a natural smell and it was one that just so happened to entice both Ian and Eli quite a lot, and they had been looking for a third and final partner, one that would be a good buffer and much more submissive.

Whenever you were in their presence to do tasks, which seemed more and more often as time went on, they always did little dominance displays to try and make you swoon.

The way they talked changed, they would stare at you intensely, almost hungrily, they might flex subtly, the scent of their musk would get stronger, even strong enough to be perceived by a beta, and they would try to carry stuff for you if you were carrying food trays or stacks of paper.

All of this would be obvious flirting had you been an omega or alpha who knew this kinda stuff instinctively, but alas, you were a beta. The intense stares of their red alpha eyes, the flexing of their tall muscular bodies, and their amplified scent only served to intimidate you. And when they took heavier things from your grasp and did your tasks for you it made you feel like they thought you were incapable of doing your job.

It all made you more servile and submissive in your job in an attempt to do better and escape the perceived ire of your bosses, but that only made the alpha husbands want you all the more. They stepped up their flirting to be much more clear.

They began putting musky, quite thoroughly scented, articles of clothing and other items in your work locker. First plushies, then worn shirts, and then they began resorting to underwear.

Had you been an omega you would have taken those items as prime nesting material and a clear sign that someone was interested in making you their little cumdump and knot warmer.

As it was, your nose was not perceptive enough to determine who was doing this and you assumed it to be some sort of weird prank or even a gross hazing ritual of some sort.

It never occurred to Ian or Eli that you were unaware of their intentions, they were romancing you like any alpha would romance a tiny cute mate. Like an omega. Neither of them had never really consciously attempted to get the attention of a beta before. So they kept courting you in the only way they knew how and assumed that you were just playing hard to get.

As they became more desperate to have you in every possible way they became jealous of the way you brought others in the department food, drinks, and did other tasks for them relevant to the nature of your job. They wanted you to just have all your attention on them.

As far as they were concerned you were far too tiny and sweet to just be ran ragged all day as your co-workers worked you to death, you were even smaller than most omegas, you should be stuck in their office with them all day to dote on you, sitting on their laps, livening up the place with your scent, and just keeping them company.

Of course that would be too distracting for a productive place of business, so they did the next best thing to at least get your attention off of doing tasks for the other employees, they promoted you to being their personal assistant.

It made you pretty anxious at first, but slowly you became acclimated to their seemingly bizarre behavior around you, though the intense stares were something you never really got used to. Mostly you were just confused, you had never gotten the sense that they were particularly fond of you. They must have been though, right? Why else would they have promoted you to a position that forced you to be near them for the vast majority of the day and came with a significant pay raise.

But you had more important things on your mind than the peculiar behavior of alphas. With your new pay raise you could finally make enough to scale back your hours and still have enough for the adoption to go through.

You had decided that you would be able to afford daycare during the first half of the day and then pick up your child and spend more time from home, maybe you could pick up a stay at home job too if you really needed to.

Ian and Eli were not happy with you cutting your hours, but they didn't show it. They did not want to have less time with you but they also did not want you quitting and being away from them completely. They considered you their perfect little mate, even if you hadn't realized it yet.

They were pretty terrified though, no adult scent clung to you like a mate's would, but what if you did have a mate and just cleaned really well before work. If you somehow were concealing a mate they would just have to prove how much better they were for you than whoever this mystery mate was.

And if you didn't have a mate then adopting a child just proved you had the parenting instincts of an omega and needed an alpha, or two, immediately. A sweet thing like you already worked too hard and you had no business working yourself sick to support a child all by yourself!!

It was absolutely unacceptable. No matter what the situation was YOU should be with THEM, preferably stowed away in their large home making a nice nest out of their clothing to keep you happy and comfy.

They began carefully having you followed, as well as carefully stalking you themselves when they could manage it. The alpha husbands learned the daycare you took your new son to, they learned he was 4 years old and named Desmond, they learned every little detail about him and you that they had not known previously.

Most importantly, they learned your schedule. and once they were absolutely sure of it they started planning.

You had never been aware of them or any of their agents following you. They were too professional and you were too occupied with all the new stresses that came with juggling work and being a single parent.

It wasn't easy, it was exhausting, but you had no regrets at all. You did not want to wait for some mythical man to sweep you off your feet to start being a parent. And if things went badly you didn't want to deal with a custody battle. Besides, Desmond was absolutely precious and giving him a better life than an orphanage ever could gave new purpose to your existence.

One night, after getting Desmond washed up and put into bed, you nestled into your own bed and quickly drifted off to sleep, unaware of the two sets of eyes watching you. When you woke up you had a massive migraine, you were dizzy, and you started to just nuzzle yourself right back into the luxuriously soft covers… until through the brain fog and headache you remembered that you did not own any covers this nice. This… wasn’t even your own bed… or your own HOUSE for that matter!!! Oh god, where was Desmond!? Despite your head pain and dizziness you bolted upright in panic but someone you had not even noticed before grabbed you by the arm and pulled you close to them. You recognized the voice instantly when they spoke. “Whoa there, (Y/N) you need to be a bit more careful. We used something special to sedate you, you don’t need to get up so fast darling~” The voice behind you came from Ian, he kissed your neck as he held you close. “What have you done with Desmond??” You squirmed as much as you could possibly manage in your still weakened state, but you were so small in comparison to the large alpha that your struggles did little to help you. “DESMOND!!?” Hearing the panic in the voice of one of the two people he considered to be a mate made his body instinctively release calming pheromones, of course even if you had been an omega those pheromones would have been all but useless when you were concerned with the well being of your child. “(Y/N), calm down sweet pea Desmond is fi-” You cut him off when you grunted in anger and threw your head back as hard as you could, making contact with Ian’s nose and causing him to recoil in pain and loosen his grip on you, you pressed your advantage and slipped away from him but you fell face first on the floor the second you took a step off the bed. You cried out in pain. God, your body just wouldn’t cooperate, your face and knees hurt from the impact and your ankle had twisted in the fall. Certainly sprained. But damn it, Desmond was in trouble, who knows what these psychopaths had done to him, so you pulled yourself towards the door, slowly inching your way towards escape. You probably would have realized it was hopeless, but in your panicked desperation you had to try! Suddenly two feet blocked your exit. “Really Ian? You cannot handle our little omega? Look, he already injured himself!” He bent down and scooped you up easily, despite your flailing arms. “I am not an omega, and if I was I certainly wouldn’t be yours! Where is my kid!? What have you done with Desmond you fucking assholes!?” “Well,” Ian started in an obviously perturbed voice, “As I was explaining before you headbutted me, Desmond is safe and sleeping in his room.” Eli seemed amused that you had given his husband so much trouble but scolded you nonetheless. “You shouldn’t be violent (Y/N), we are just taking care of you. A tiny little omega such as yourself should certainly not be taking on the trials of parenthood alone.” “I’m not an-, ugh, whatever, just let me see Desmond!” Eli laid you gently on the bed and Ian examined your leg and gently wiped your face and knees where you had scuffed them. “Okay, I will go get him, but you have to lay down, you can’t possibly walk on this leg.” You glared at him wordlessly. “Hey, it’s your own fault! You’re lucky I don’t punish you, but I know you’re super protective of our child like any good omega would be. Ian left and you just stared at him, dumbfounded, as he walked out of the room. What the hell did he mean “our” child!? Why did they keep calling you an omega? “Don’t worry (Y/N), once you get settled in and make a nice cozy little nest I am sure it will help your nerves calm down.” Eli sat beside you and pulled you into his lap, ignoring your squeak of protest. “I am not an omega, I don't even know why you have me here. Please just let me go now, I won’t even tell the cops if you let me go, I promise!” You started sobbing as your pleading grew more desperate. Eli pulled you close to him and nuzzled against your neck to get his scent on you before slowly licking and kissing up from your neck to your cheek in what were meant to be comforting gestures to soothe any sweet omega mate. But you WEREN’T an omega. “You’re just confused baby doll. Your scent may be a bit weaker and maybe you don’t have heats, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be our omega! Besides you are far too small and fragile to be anything else~” He gently wrapped his arms around you and practically purred with joy with how perfectly your small body fit so perfectly snug against his. You blushed from the humiliation of being helpless and insulted. A moment later Ian came back holding a sleeping bundle that was your son, thank god he was safe. You actually allowed yourself to relax a bit in Eli’s strong arms as Ian handed Desmond to you and you hugged him tightly but carefully so as not to wake him. “Oh, my sweet baby boy.” Desmond was unharmed and snoozing peacefully. Ian and Eli just watched you with content smiles on their faces. Even on the off chance that you really were not an omega this proved you might as well be treated like one, you clearly had a tender heart and great parenting instincts, you were small and fragile, you smelled so sweet, you were just too perfect. And their instincts were telling them to keep their omega mate and their pup safe and happy. The only problem was you were not yet scent marked properly, but they could fix that later when Desmond was back in his room. For now they were content with watching you hold Desmond and putting a blanket around you that smelled like them. Surely that would make any omega, or omega adjacent, feel safe and loved, right? Desmond woke up and looked at you sleepily before clinging tightly and snuggling close. He was back to sleep immediately, blissfully unaware the two of you had been kidnapped by a pair of alphas and added to their family. You kissed him on the forehead and just tried to push your anxiety away as you held him, if you could not escape (yet) then you had to be strong for him. During the two weeks that it took for your ankle to recover you fought them every step of the way, as long as Desmond was not in the room, you did not want him to pick up on your distress and desperation. He was young and being in another new house did not phase him. But when he was not in the room you tossed apart the nest they had made in the bed around you, you insisted you were not an omega, you begged for them to release you and you wiped off to the best of your ability the scent marks they kept reapplying all over you. It was so frustrating and you felt so helpless, they never even left you alone, when one absolutely had to be in at the office the other would always stay behind to dote on you while you healed. At the very least they were good with Desmond and they kept the both of you well fed. Though they did have a habit of literally sitting you in one of their laps and hand feeding you. They also had a habit of getting you sweets “because omegas love them.” Out of all of their behaviors the insistence that you were a fragile omega and that you had to be scent marked constantly where the two that most aggravated you, it made you want to scream, they made you wear their worn clothing and forced your face in their musky underarms. Sometimes they even competed between one another for who’s scent was on you more. Late one night when you were all bundled together in bed Ian made you reek of him so Eli added his scent on top of it, which prompted Ian to force some of his overly large clothing on you, which caused Eli to put his smelly blanket around you and after that they just growled softly and glared at each for a solid minute, not even blinking. Before you knew it they were wrestling for dominance right in front of you on the bed as you awkwardly scooted as far away from them as you could. They wrestled and scent marked one another to establish dominance before Eli narrowly came out on top as the winner. Sometime during their little altercation they had lost all their clothing but their underwear and sweat covered both of them, the musk was almost tangible. Eli held Ian down and moved his underwear out of the way to expose his hole before sliding his down to free his large cock. He did not hesitate as he leaned over his husband and plunged his dick in him in one swift motion and started well and truly pounding him right in front of you. Eli’s massive full nuts slapped ceaseless into Ian as if an auditory declaration of Eli’s dominance over the other alpha. You could not pull your eyes away as the spectacle continued to unfold with the blond knotting Ian as he growled softly and bit his earlobe before filling him with a hot load of cum. Well… you had at times wondered how alpha couples let out sexual frustrations and urges and how they resolved dominance conflicts. Apparently the answer was fighting for dominance and the winner passionately pumping the loser full of hot seed. The more you know. The one good thing about having two alphas seeing to you was that your ankle healed fairly easily with all of your needs so thoroughly attended to. You just had to bind your time and make your escape. It would not be the type of thing you could just do haphazardly. Ian and Eli had moved all of your and Desmond’s things into their large house and they had told your old landlord you were moving out so you had nowhere to go, except maybe to the police. It was the only thing you could think of. You decided that you would slowly pack a couple of bags up of clothes and your and Desmond’s most important possessions while gradually acting more cooperative with your captives to lull them into a false sense of security then once you had them fooled and your bags were packed you would disappear with Desmond in the dead quiet of night. You would not have too much time to bait them into complacency though, the longer you were here the harder it would be on Desmond, they already had him calling them his other daddies. The next day you began to slowly pack two bags of essentials that you couldn’t leave behind, you added to them daily and kept them hidden securely under Desmond’s bed. All the while you acted increasingly sweet to your captors. When one of them sat by you in bed, all musky and smelly after work, instead of shying away you would lean on them or put your hand on theirs. No matter how nauseating it was for you. When they kissed you you forced yourself to kiss them back, even if only on their cheeks. On a couple occasions you cooked a meal for them, you were not particularly gifted in the culinary arts, but you were not particularly terrible either. And eventually you even remade the nest on the bed with a lot of their freshly dirty laundry and all of the plushies and blankets they had scented for you. Every time you leaned on them their hearts melted all over again for you, whenever you graced their cheeks with a soft kiss they were totally reassured that you loved them, even if you were too shy to say it out loud, and when you made them a meal they savored every bite as they were sure it was made with love and they were so proud of their kind “omega” house husband. Oh, and when their little mate willingly made off with their dirty clothes and made a nest with their smell? That sent them over the moon. The pride and joy they had knowing their new boyfriend was getting comforted enough by their pheromones to sneakily steal their laundry was indescribable. Your plan was working perfectly. And when the day came where they had both planned on going to work later you knew you had finally received their trust and would have your chance to escape. When they had left you quickly grabbed your supplies and bundled up your son, you were finally going to escape from this hell. Desmond looked up at you cutely as you held him, “Where are we going?” “We are going on a little trip, okay?” You told him gently as you kissed his head gently. “I wanna go back to sleeeep” He whined, it was about time for his nap, Ian and Eli had left in the afternoon today. “You can in a bit ok-” You dropped your sentence, the word forgotten as you opened the door and saw Ian and Eli standing there, Eli’s hand outreached as he had been about to open the door. They had actually forgotten it was a holiday and there was no work today or tomorrow. Unfortunately, you had forgotten too. “Uh, (Y/N), sweetie... where are you going with Desmond and all that stuff?” Eli looked and sounded genuinely heartbroken, his red eyes even threatening to cry. Desmond’s little voice piped up, “Don’t cry daddy! We are going on a trip!” “Come here little man, it’s your nap time”, Ian took Desmond from you and put him back in his bed for his nap time before returning to the living room. You just looked down, guiltily avoiding their eyes, unable to summon any words in your defense. It was Eli who broke the silence. “Well, aren’t you going to say something (Y/N)!? Why were you trying to leave? We thought you loved us.” He crossed his arms and looked at you sternly. Something in his words made you snap. “You kidnapped me and my son, you keep me locked in here and miserable, I hate you, I hate both of you so much!” Eli took a step closer to you before responding in utter denial, incapable of believing such claims after you had clearly started to warm up to them. “No! You love us! You were so nice all week..” Eli’s eyes could not hold back anymore and a tear made its way down his cheek. “Because I was trying to get your trust to escape, asshole!!” “Hey, don’t talk to Eli like that! You’re really being grouchy today (Y/N)… do we need to take better care of you?” Ian got close and rubbed your arm. “OH! I know what it is, you need breeding!! You’re acting up because we neglected you and didn’t slide in our knots, of course that is it, you’re just a cute bratty omega too shy to ask for what you needed so you lashed out for attention~~” At this obvious explanation for your actions Eli perked up immediately. “Yeah, that must be it, (Y/N) just really needs to mate and was too shy to say anything when his alphas should have been able to anticipate his needs! Well don’t worry sweet pea, turns out today is a holiday, so we can relax and take care of you as much as you need us too~” “W-wait no! It’s not like that! I really h-” Your words were cut off by an excited Ian. “Babe, in the future if you need one of our knots just hop on okay, you don’t need to be all shy about it~” And with that Eli took you by the arm and practically dragged you into the bedroom. You probably would have struggled, but you were too stunned and flustered by the way things had unfolded to do anything. Eli placed you a bit roughly on the bed, a bit too excited to feel you around his knot to treat you as gently as he typically preferred. Eli took up position on his knees behind your head, his crotch hovering above your face ominously as he began to peel away your shirt. Ian got in a similar position behind your ass and easily removed your pants and underwear despite your squirming. Your protests only elicited smirks and chuckles. Even now, as you kicked, writhed, and pleaded, they were sure you were just too shy to admit that you desperately needed a forceful deep breeding. Eli disrobed and his cock bounced free above your face, smearing a bit of precum on your forehead. He pinned your arms down as he began smothering your face with his musky nuts. Scenting you in this lewd manner made him hard faster than anything else ever had. Meanwhile Ian was between your legs, licking and nuzzling against your own nuts, moaning softly as he inhaled your heavenly scent before moving his attention to your tight asshole. He began kissing and licking it tenderly, a string of drool connecting the two of you as he pulled back before diving back between your cheeks for more. You redoubled your struggles as you felt him give attention to your hole, but you were no match for an alpha, let alone two of them. Eli began prodding your lips with his cock, desperately wanting to feel the hot wet insides of your mouth on his dick, but you held your mouth closed and moved your head as much as you could to deny him entry, at the same time you were also clenching your ass closed as tightly as humanly possible to avoid letting in Ian’s overly eager tongue get a taste of you. Ian slid his long tongue into you anyway, gradually wiggling against you and slipping in, this caused you to gasp in surprise and Eli wasted no time in shoving his massive cock right past your lips and slowly grinding it into your face. “Shit, your mouth is so amazing, (Y/N), definitely made for this weren’t you?” It was by no means small and you gagged horribly as his constantly dripping precum was forced down your throat, tears began to fill your eyes as a rod invaded you from one end and Ian continued passionately making out with your ass from the other end. “Don’t feel bad about not making any slick baby doll, I lubed you up with my spit~” Ian knew you still were not quite ready for him though so he slowly inserted a finger into your well kissed entrance, lovingly feeling around your warm folds before finding your special spot. He knew he hit it when you let out a gagged and muffled moan and bucked your hips involuntarily as he continued rubbing you there, adding another finger to his delicate ministrations. As you began to see the first hint of stars from Ian fingering you you were gagging and crying more as Eli’s cock began knotting your face as he began grinding himself deeper into your face, his dick imprint now visible in your throat. And while you were busy worrying about whether or not you would die choking on a knotted cock Ian decided that it was almost time to slide his length into the warm waiting embrace of your insides. He aligned the tip with your hole, adding more natural lube by smearing his precum all over it, just to make absolutely sure that it would enter easily before he eased himself into you. He was being abundantly careful with you, something that Eli was not. | Eli was roughly fucking your face, stopping only briefly when it seemed necessary to make sure that you did not lose consciousness, though at this point that may have almost been the more merciful of the two options. At this point two twin rivers of tears were streaming down your face. The violation, the helplessness, the gagging, the unwilling pleasure building inside you with each thrust made by Ian. Now that you had acclimated nicely to being slowly explored by his cock Ian had picked up the pace considerably and was now focused a bit more on seeking his release than on your comfort. They set up a rhythm for fucking themselves into you, as one thrust forward the other pulled back, using you as a double sided cum dump while you cried uselessly for it to end. With each powerful stroke came the lewd smack of their balls, one set slapping your ass the other slamming into your face, the sound was so loud and clear throughout your ordeal it was as if it was mocking you further about your situation. As Ian continued battering your prostate you could not help cumming harder than you ever had in your life, and after you had Ian continued working towards his own orgasm and started fondling your sore nuts and sensitive cock as he did so. “Fuck, babe, you fit so well over my cock (Y/N), so tight and warm for me~” You were forced to cum twice more, painfully, before the two alphas finally had a synchronous climax, warm heady cum filling you from both ends, forcefully filling you up. You wanted to throw up but you had no choice but to allow it down your throat. Eli finally removed himself from your mouth with a wet plop as his knot exited your soft, sore lips. You were crying and shaking from the overstimulation and sheer domination that you had been victim of. Eli sat with your head moved into his lap and wiped away your tears and stroked your hair tenderly but you flinched and squealed as he kissed from your cheek to your collarbone and bit down hard, leaving his mark on you. He licked and kissed it tenderly like it was the most beautiful testament to love that he had ever seen, like he was worshipping it. But Ian was not done yet, his knot was thoroughly buried deep within your hot ass and he intended to fuck you full of at least one more load before stopping. The taste of cum was still on your lips as Eli leaned down and kissed you gently, probing every inch of your mouth with his tongue, tasting himself on your lips, savoring the mingled flavors of your spit and his cum, an addictive concoction created by the shared intimacy between you two. You were still crying a bit from the continued attention Ian’s cock was so dedicated to providing your ass, but Eli was kissing you and playing with your hair, and trying to comfort you as much as possible. You whimpered into Eli’s comforting lips and clung to his arm as Ian’s efforts made you cum yet again. Ian increased his pace again, going faster and harder as his pleasure mounted once more. He knew he was about ready to unload in your beautiful body again. The sight of you being kissed by Eli as you were blissed out with half lidded eyes, your mind temporarily broken as you were swept up in the tumultuous world that existed between the blurred border of pleasure and pain, twitching, whimpering, and moaning oh so deliciously sent him over the edge and his cock throbbed hard inside you, stuffing you to the brim with even more of his love as he shouted, “Oh god, (Y/N), I love you so much!”, Before biting you hard and leaving a big mark opposite of Eli’s, causing you to wince. Ian’s knot kept him firmly inside you so he pulled you into his lap and held you close to his chest. It was finally over and you clung to him, hiding your face in his neck as you cried. Eli was behind you rubbing your back and kissing your neck comfortingly. “You did so good for us baby doll.” “Yeah, our good little omega took our knots so well~” Ian cooed softly into your ear. Both of them were on cloud nine, they had successfully gotten you to live with them and they had actually bred you full of their seed, and now they had you all vulnerable and needy in their arms. You clung to Ian until you were released from his knot, you had stopped crying but you still felt like any vulnerable needy omega would after such intense breeding, despite being a beta. Your alpha “boyfriends” were going to make sure to give you the best treatment for being a good little mate and taking them both despite your much smaller stature. They made you a bubble bath and cleaned you off tenderly before bundling you in the softest pajamas that money could buy, they took turns cuddling you in their laps, and they kept kissing and licking your sore neck. When Desmond woke up later in the day you were in no state to be able to take care of him so Ian did while Eli snuggled and pampered and doted on you non-stop. You just lay by him in bed nuzzled into his hairy underarm, your subconscious had slowly begun to associate the scent of the two alphas with comfort and it was a good place to hide your face in for as long as you wanted to. He was more than happy to let you get as much of his smell as you needed. Later that night, when you had recovered more, they fed you all of your favorite sweets and hot chocolate. They wanted to make sure you were filled with all the things that made an omega a happy little mate, not just their thick seed. You were too tired to refuse, so when one of them pulled you into his lap you willingly nibbled at everything he gave you as you leaned back against his warm chest, they were thrilled with how placated mating had seemed to make you, though they agreed among themselves they had overdone it and that they would be gentler in the future. You were such a good little mate now, they knew all you had needed was a nice knotting to make you happy. In a twisted way they were not wrong, as they held and babied you you realized you had started to bond with them, it was good that you were, because you certainly would never be living apart from them.

#yandere a/b/o #yandere alpha x beta reader #male reader #male yandere x male reader #yandere alpha #yandere boyfriends #MY OCs #My OC Ian #My OC Eli #a/b/o #a/b/o dynamics #omegaverse #yandere omegaverse

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weirdly-specific-but-ok · 5 months

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hi it's the good omens mascot here's some shit about me that might be relevant

I appear to have accidentally caused chaos so I figured you might as well know about me since I'm responsible for it. And also so that you know who you broke, thanks ineffable fandom.

I have been called the prophet by some of you all. This is not entirely untrue, but I would like to add as I did in one post, that Apollo also gave me the curses of art, (very emotional) music, (sometimes good mostly dreadful) poetry, (same parentheses apply, except that the dreadful is on purpose) writing and (used to be good now dreadful) medical knowledge, and so yes, you did accidently adopt a messenger of an ancient Greek god.

Yes, this entire entry into your cult happened from start to now happened in 48 hours.

This will seem less bizarre when I give you context about me and fandoms. I changed career paths (after three years of intense study that cost me my sanity) from science to the arts because I was inspired by drarry fanfiction of them leaving their ministry jobs and following their dreams. Yes I tossed three years and my loss of sanity away in one week of decisions. I'm now a designer. Thanks Draco.

I read so much drarry fanfiction that my mum had to take me to the hospital for injured wrists. I wore wrist and elbow supports and was in constant pain for a few months. I was only later introduced to autoscroll. Yes, I am a fool. Yes, I am unaware of how to human.

I'm broke and cheap enough that I feel guilty buying bottled water, but for Christmas I spent the equivalent of around 150 bottles of water getting a Bakewell tart custom made (they don't sell them where I live). Why? Because in one single fanfiction, it is Draco's favourite food. I would never spend that kind of money on a dessert for any real human being.

That is to say, you all are not ready for when I REALLY fall for Crowley. I don't saunter vaguely downwards for people. I bypass earth and crash into hell, leaving a smoking pit in its infernal ground.

I swear I'm not as dumb as I seem, I just have ZERO general knowledge, and am terrible with faces. I can tell you what the graffiti on the walls of Pompeii from before 70 AD said but I don't know who my previous president was, and personally I think that's very classy of me.

Some of you seem concerned about my sleep schedule. Worry not, I sleep in four installments, night, morning nap, afternoon nap, evening nap. I sleep more than you all, that I can promise. I sleep more than my doggy sister.

About the streams and the timezones, I have no idea how to make it so people can watch, because I frequently mix up east and west and last morning I mixed up the Pacific and Atlantic ocean. I don't know at what point the Eastern hemisphere becomes the Western or how any of it works. I also thought Wakanda was a real place.

But hey fun fact, in 2020 diclofenac sales were dropping in Iceland. I know this because I wanted to make sure to use the correct painkiller in one sentence of a story I was writing. It was completely irrelevant. But hey any of you writers here probably feel my pain. I don't write fanfiction, but I am an author and I write original stories. And honestly what is more useful, Icelandic diclofenac sales from three years ago or timezones?

A career test once told me to be a standup comedian.

Yes that's me Asmi, just your regular dumbass lad who is slightly unhinged, serving himbo twink energy, hello hi nice to meet you all. PS: the poll results are out and Doctor Who won, so tremble, DW fandom.

#good omens fandom #good omens mascot #asmi #weirdly-specific-but-ok #this is me y'all #good omens brainrot #thanks for breaking me i figured you should know about me #crowley #just crowley i'm going to shatter soon #drarry #draco malfoy #fandom culture #fandom things #doctor who #dw fandom #more inaccurate summaries coming up #good omens #fanfiction #and how it ruined and saved me

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lackadaisycats · 11 months

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Hi, I'm going to a convention this weekend and was planning on commissioning some art involving Lackadaisy characters from various artists at the artist alley, but it occurs to me that it might not be okay on your end? I know custom one-off "merch" is okay (as opposed to mass production) but does that include drawn artwork? I figure it's worth checking just in case, as I want to respect your wishes on this sort of thing. Additionally, it would be worth knowing if it's okay if the commission(s) are of nsfw nature (not likely in my case but I'm curious) or include OCs with the canon characters (or are otherwise "out of character"). Thank you so much for your time and I am a big fan of what I've seen so far! I'm relatively new to the fandom (found it through the pilot and then read the comic so far) but I love these cats so much omg- even the murdery ones

Hey, apologies if I'm late answering this! It's been a hell of a month and I'm quite behind on answering messages here (sorry to anyone who's submitted a question). Anyway, to answer you - yes, commissioning artists for Lackadaisy art for your own personal use is fine. And yes, canon characters + OCs, and adult themes are fine too.

If you post adult themed work online, I'd appreciate it if you tag it with 'crackadaisy' instead of 'lackadaisy', just as a courtesy to people who search the tag but don't want to see the adult stuff. (I didn't just make this rule up - the community sort of adopted this method on their own, so I'm rolling with it.) ------- The gist of my policy is just this: Please don't mass produce and sell Lackadaisy stuff as retail items without a license to do so. That's all.

#lackadaisy #lackadaisycats #q&a #commissions

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justarandompersononthehellsite · 1 month

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So... @muffinlance wrote a really awesome story. I read a post from a point in time, though I truly do not remember when since it seems like I've been working on this project forever, saying that she gives blanket permission for people to print and bind the story into a book (I think there was an also addendum saying that they do not give permission to be sold, since selling fic is illegal). This fic has had total control over my whole brain since it was sent to me (@creatorofthemind I believe it was you, so thank you forever for tuning me into it) back during the days of like chapter six or seven.

So here I am now, sharing this amazing journey of my first ever bookbinding adventure. Further reading below.

So to give you an idea of what's going on, this is a fanfiction about Zuko (Avatar the Last Airbender) (animated show version, the LA show did not exist yet and we do not speak of the movie) being adopted by Hakoda, Father of Katara and Zuko. (This might have also been what kicked off the Give Zuko A Parent craze, but don't fact check me.)

Overall, the characters from the show stick very well to the cannon versions, but where MuffinLance really shines is in the rich backstories and fleshed out feeling of all the non cannon elements. Especially the background characters. I would argue that the writing in this peice of fanwork could easily rival the cannon show at many points of comparison.

Now that you have context, we can get into the actual process.

To start, I used this guide to figure out where to even begin, and fount the included resource list to also be quite helpful. I cannot for the LIFE OF ME figure out where I found the template I used for the front matter and such, but it must be somewhere and I will link to it when I inevitably come across it again.

Then I began to typeset. This step took... a long time. I worked in chunks from about September of 2022 to late March of 2024. I would get a big section done, sometimes even the entire thing, but then find I hated the way I had done it and give up for months at a time. Such is the life of ADHD and flitting interest in projects I suppose.

And then finally, step one was done, and I was left with pages on a word document that look like this. (And do please let me know if you want the link to the document. It was so much work, and I would love to not be the only one to use it.)

Next step was printing out this beast. Ended up being about eight pages of front matter, and about 630 pages of body text.

That I printed wrong.

Twice.

Before finally getting it right. And then not getting a picture of it, because I finished at 4 am and had work at 7, and am also an idiot.

Then I simply stitched along, putting everything together into a beautiful text block.

And came up with a design for the cover.

Yes the glue did end up lumpy. Ignore it.

Yes I did have to sketch out the design onto a scraped page several times before I figured out what I was doing. Ignore that too.

The cover design does wrap around the entire cover. No I did not get a picture before I glued the thing down. See again: I'm an idiot. And just... massively impatient.

Finally, we get to the stage of gluing. Behold, my bookpress.

Of course, topped with Madam MuffinLances own actual professional-people book, Fox's Tounge and Kirin's Bone. It is Excelent. Here is the LINK so you can go and support this amazing author with the real-monies as well as the internet-kudos.

Then, once everything is glued together, one must give the book its "gilt" edges.

#atla #salvage #bookbinding #fanbinding #muffinlance #I'm a really big fan of this story and the characters ok?#They're really fun and I love them.

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shima-draws · 7 months

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POKEMON FUSION GIJINKA ADOPTS 2 ELECTRIC BOOGALOO!!

Just like last time this is an auction! So please read the rules below so you know how to bid <3

Also these are on DeviantART as well! Might be easier to go over there and bid under the comment chain.

Everything is under the cut ;)

RULES

◆ Please make sure you have money before placing a bid! You can’t back out once you’ve bid so please be aware of that. Bid responsibly <3

◆ Going off of that, if you win the auction, payment must be sent within 24 hours. Otherwise, I will release the adopt to the next person in line.

◆ Payment is through PayPal only. If you don’t have a PayPal account and want to buy one of these adopts, I suggest you get one!

◆ The auction will run for 48 hours from the time an adopt is first bid on. In the case of an AB, the auction will end for the specific adopt immediately.

◆ I do not do holds. This is a first come first serve auction.

◆ You will receive the full-sized image without the watermark once payment is confirmed.

◆ I will not give refunds! Once it’s bought, it’s yours!

◆ These adopts are for personal use only. Since they’re based off of Pokemon, I cannot sell them for commercial use.

◆ The design is yours to change/do whatever you’d like with once you purchase it! However, please DO NOT STEAL OR RESELL it. If you didn’t buy the design it’s not yours!

◆ If you buy one and would like to repost the art elsewhere, that’s fine. Just please, if you can, credit me! (This blog specifically if you’re not sure what to credit.)

◆ Using my artwork to train AI is NOT permitted.

SB (Starting bid): $35

MI (Minimum increase): $5

AB (Automatic buy): $100

Shiinotic + Polteageist (SP): OPEN

Roselia + Drampa (RD): OPEN

Togekiss + Xurkitree (TX): OPEN

Cobalion + Volcarona (CV): CLOSED

Ralts + Bewear (RB): CLOSED

Please reply on this post to bid! (I'll also be replying with updates on the bids.)

i.e. RD SB, CV $45, SP AB, etc.

If you have any questions feel free to DM me <3

#Pokemon #Adopts #Adoptables #Auction #Shima arts #OC #Original character #Character art #Gijinka #Pokemon fusion #Pokemon gijinka #shima-draws

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olderthannetfic · 2 months

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I love Ao3 donation season because it truly brings out the most unhinged people.

Suddenly, these people whose blogs revolved only around fandom and memes turn into the most vocal activists, the most involved protesters. There's not a single cause they don't root for, there's not a GoFundMe they don't advertise.

Oh, you think you can donate 10 dollars to a site that provides you with hours of free entertainment and doesn't ask you to sell your soul through data mining? Well, then you should kill yourself and go to hell, because look at these *insert request of money from someone you've never heard of before, isn't part of your online social group, and you share nothing with* causes need it more!!!

I'm far more likely to donate to my mutuals/people I follow/causes I care about than random people (especially when the request comes from Tumblr users, the same breed that gave us people pretending to have AIDS and of being attacked in a mall bathroom for shipping the wrong ship).

But how dare we enjoy life when JonBenet Ramsey's killer is still on the loose, am I right?

Yuuup.

And half the time, the gofundmes they link to are dodgy as fuck. I don't reblog e-begging almost ever. I barely post about organizations fundraising, aside from OTW and maybe the Internet Archive once in a blue moon. Very occasionally, I'll find someone's "I'm a disabled, trans POC" post compelling enough that I'll donate myself, but I'm still not posting it here.

Mostly, I don't post such things because if I did, I'd never stop getting pestered to post more. But a lot of it is that many, many, many of them smell of bad money management of the "Oopsie, I spent all my money going to a con and buying merch! Now rent is due!" or "I adopted 57 disabled pets I don't have the means to care for!" (Yes, I have known many fans of both types. And all of them needed to beg again a month later.) I don't doubt that something is wrong in their life, but I just don't think it's money well spent. I'd rather donate to an organization or, on rare occasions, somebody I'm pretty sure is telling the truth about being from a poor-ass country where my few bucks might actually make an impact. That's not the majority of posts that I see.

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gothhabiba · 6 months

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loving your falafel research saga and just wanted to ask - something I remember hearing about falafel is that while Israeli culture definitely appropriated it, the concept of serving it in pita bread with salads, tahini etc. is a specifically Israeli twist on the dish. I wonder if you found/know anything about that?

The short answer is: it's not impossible, but I don't think there's any way to tell for sure. The long answer is:

The most prominent claim I've heard of this nature is specifically that Yemeni Jews (who had immigrated to Israel under 'right of return' laws and were Israeli citizens) invented the concept of serving falafel in "pita" bread in the 1930s—perhaps after they (in addition to Jews from Morocco or Syria) had brought falafel over and introduced it to Palestinians in the first place.

"Mizrahim brought falafel to Palestine"

This latter claim, which is purely nonsense (again... no such thing as Moroccan falafel!)—and which Joel Denker (linked above) repeats with no source or evidence—was able to arise because it was often Mizrahim who introduced Israelis to Palestinian food. Mizrahi falafel sellers in the early 20th century might run licensed falafel stands, or carry tins full of hot falafel on their backs and go from door to door selling them (see Shaul Stampfer on a Yemeni man doing this, "Bagel and Falafel: Two Iconic Jewish Foods and One Modern Jewish Identity," in Jews and their Foodways, p. 183; this Arabic source mentions a 1985 Arabic novel in which a falafel seller uses such a tin; Yael Raviv writes that "Running falafel stands had been popular with Yemenite immigrants to Palestine as early as the 1920s and ’30s," "Falafel: A National Icon," Gastronomica 3.3 (2003), p. 22).

On Mizrahi preparation of Palestinian food, Dafna Hirsch writes:

As Sami Zubaida notes, Middle Eastern foodways, while far from homogeneous, are nevertheless describable in a vocabulary and set of idioms that are “often comprehensible, if not familiar, to the socially diverse parties” [...]. Thus, for the Jews who arrived in Palestine from the Middle East, Palestinian Arab foods and foodways were “comprehensible, if not familiar,” even if some of the dishes were previously unknown to most of them. [...] They found nothing extraordinary or exotic in the consumption, preparation, and selling of foods from the Palestinian Arab kitchen. Therefore, it was often Mizrahi Jews who mediated local foods to Ashkenazi consumers, as street food vendors and restaurant owners. ("Urban Food Venues as Contact Zones between Arabs and Jews during the British Mandate Period," in Making Levantine Cuisine: Modern Foodways of the Eastern Mediterranean, p. 101).

Raviv concurs and furnishes a possible mechanism for this borrowing:

Other Mizrahi Jewish vendors sold falafel, which by the late 1930s had become quite prevalent and popular on the streets of Tel Aviv. [...] Tel Aviv had eight licensed Mizrahi falafel vendors by 1941 and others who sold falafel without a license. [FN: The Tel Aviv municipality granted vending license to people who could not make their living in any other way as a form of welfare.] Many of the vendors were of Yemenite origins, although falafel was unknown in Yemen. [FN: Many of the immigrants from Yemen arrived in Palestine via Egypt, so it is possible that they learned to prepare it there and then adjusted the recipe to the Palestinian version, which was made from chickpeas and not from fava beans (ṭaʿmiya). Shmuel Yefet, an Israeli falafel maker, tells about his father, Yosef Ben Aharon Yefet, who arrived in Palestine from Aden [Yemen] in the early 1920s and then traveled to Port Said in 1939. There he became acquainted with ṭaʿmiya, learned to prepare it, and then went back to Palestine and opened a falafel shop in Tel Aviv [youtube video].]*

But why claim that Yemeni Jews invented falafel (or at least that they had introduced it from Yemen), even though its adoption from Palestinian Arabs in the early days of the second Aliya, aka the 1920s (before Mizrahim had begun to immigrate in larger numbers; see Raviv, p. 20) was within living memory at this point (i.e. the 1950s)? Raviv notes that an increasing (I mean, actually she says new, which... lol) negative attitude towards Arabs in the wake of the Nakba (I mean... she says "War of Independence") created a new sense of urgency around de-Arabizing "Israeli" culture (p. 22). Its association with Mizrahi sellers allowed falafel to "be linked to Jewish immigrants who had come from the Middle East and Africa" and thus to "shed its Arab association in favor of an overarching Israeli identification" (p. 21).

Stampfer again:

On the one hand (with regard to immigrants from Eastern Europe), [falafel] underscored the break between immediate past East European Jewish foods and the new “Oriental” world of Eretz Israel.** At the same time, this food could be seen as a link with an (idealized) past. Among the Jewish public in Eretz Israel, Yemenite falafel was regarded as the most original and tastiest version. This is a bit odd, as falafel—whether in or out of a pita—was not a traditional Yemenite food, neither among Muslims nor among Jews. To understand the ascription of falafel to Yemenite Jews, it is necessary to consider their image. Yemenite Jews were widely regarded in the mid-20th century as the most faithful transmitters of a form of Jewish life that was closest to the biblical world—and if not the biblical world, at least the world of the Second Temple, which marked the last period of autonomous Jewish life in Eretz Israel. In this sense, eating “Yemenite” could be regarded as an act of bodily identification with the Zionist claim to the land of Israel. (p. 189)

So, when it's undeniable that a food is "Arab" or "Oriental" in origin, Zionists will often attribute it to Yemen, Syria, Morocco, Turkey, &c.—and especially to Jewish communities within these regions—because it cannot be permitted that Palestinians have a specific culture that differentiates them in any way from other "Arabs." A culinary culture based in the foodstuffs cultivated from this particular area of land would mean a tie and a claim to the land, which Zionist logic cannot allow Palestinians to possess. This is why you'll hear Zionists correct people who say "Palestinians" to say "Arab" instead, or suggest that Palestinians should just scooch over into other "Arab" countries because it would make no difference to them. Raviv's conclusion that the attribution of falafel to Yemeni immigrants is an effort to detach it from its "Arab" origins isn't quite right—it is an attempt to detach it, and thus Palestinians themselves, from Palestinian roots.

"Yemeni Jews first put falafel in 'pita'"

As for this claim, it's often attributed to Gil Marks: "Jews didn’t invent falafel. They didn’t invent hummus. They didn’t invent pita. But what they did invent was the sandwich. Putting it all together.” (Hilariously, the author of the interview follows this up with "With each story, I wanted to ask, but how do you know that?")

Another author (signed "Philologos") speculates (after, by the way, falsely claiming that "falafel" is the plural of the Arabic "filfil" "pepper," and that falafel is always brown, not green, inside?!):

Yet while falafel balls are undoubtedly Arab in origin, too, it may well be that the idea of serving them as a street-corner food in pita bread, to which all kinds of extras can be added, ranging from sour pickles to whole salads, initially was a product of Jewish entrepreneurship.

Shaul Stampfer cites both of these articles as further reading on the "novelty of the combination of pita, falafel balls, and salad" (FN 76, p. 198)—but neither of them cites any evidence! They're both just some guy saying something!

Marks had, however, elaborated a little bit in his 2010 Encyclopedia of Jewish Food:

Falafel was enjoyed in salads as part of a mezze (appetizer assortment) or as a snack by itself. An early Middle Eastern fast food, falafel was commonly sold wrapped in paper, but not served in the familiar pita sandwich until Yemenites in Israel introduced the concept. [...] Yemenite immigrants in Israel, who had made a chickpea version in Yemen, took up falafel making as a business and transformed this ancient treat into the Israeli iconic national food. Most importantly, Israelis wanted a portable fast food and began eating the falafel tucked into a pita topped with the ubiquitous Israeli salad (cucumber-and-tomato salad).

He references one of the pieces that Lillian Cornfeld (columnist for the English-language, Jerusalem-based newspaper Palestine Post) wrote about "filafel":

An article from October 19, 1939 concluded with a description of the common preparation style of the most popular street food, 'There is first half a pita (Arab loaf), slit open and filled with five filafels, a few fried chips and sometimes even a little salad,' the first written record of serving falafel in pita. [Marks doesn't tell you the title or page—it's "Seaside Temptations: Juveniles' Fare at Tel Aviv," p. 4.]

You will first of all notice that Marks gives us the "falafel from Yemen" story. I also notice that he calls Salat al-bundura "Israeli salad" (in its entry he does not claim that European Jewish immigrants invented it, but neither does he attribute it to Palestinian influence: the dish was originally "Turkish coban salatsi"). His encyclopedia also elsewhere contains Zionist claims such as "wild za'atar was declared a protected plant in Israel" "[d]ue to overexploitation" because of how much of the plant "Arab families consume[d]," and that Israeli cultivation of the crop yielded "superior" plants (entry for "Za'atar")—a narrative of "Arab" mismanagement, and Israeli improvement, of land used to justify settler-colonialism. He writes that Palestinians who accuse "the Jews" of theft in claiming falafel are "creat[ing] a controversy" and that "food and culture cannot be stolen," with no reflection on the context of settler-colonialism and literal, physical theft that lies behind said "controversy." This isn't relevant except that it makes me sceptical of Marks's motivations in general.

More pertinent is the fact that this quote doesn't actually suggest that this falafel vendor was Yemeni (or otherwise) Jewish, nor does it suggest that he was the first one to prepare falafel in pitas with "fried chips," "sometimes even a little salad," and "Tehina, a local mayonnaise made with sesame oil" (Cornfeld, p. 4). I think it likely that this food had been sold for a while before it was described in published writing. The idea that this preparation is "Israeli" in origin must be false, since this was before the state of "Israel" existed—that it was first created by Yemeni Jewish falafel vendors is possible, but again, I've never seen any direct evidence for it, or anyone giving a clear reason for why they believe it to be the case, and the political reasons that people have for believing this narrative make me wary of it. There were Palestinian Arab falafel vendors at this time as well.

"Chickpea falafel is a Jewish invention"

There is also a claim that falafel originated in Egypt, where it was made with fava beans; spread to the Levant, including Palestine, where it was made with a combination of fava beans and chickpeas; but that Jewish immigration to Israel caused the origin of the chickpea-only falafal currently eaten in Palestine, because a lot of Jewish people have G6PD deficiencies or favism (inherited enzymatic deficiencies making fava beans anywhere from unpleasant to dangerous to eat)—or that Jewish populations in Yemen had already been making chickpea-only falafel, and this was the falafel which they brought with them to Palestine.

As far as I can tell, this claim comes from Joan Nathan's 2001 The Foods of Israel:

Zadok explained that at the time of the establishment of the state, falafel—the name of which probably comes from the word pilpel (pepper)—was made in two ways: either as it is in Egypt today, from crushed, soaked fava beans or fava beans combined with chickpeas, spices, and bulgur; or, as Yemenite Jews and the Arabs of Jerusalem did, from chickpeas alone. But favism, an inherited enzymatic deficiency occurring among some Jews—mainly those of Kurdish and Iraqi ancestry, many of whom came to Israel during the mid 1900s—proved potentially lethal, so all falafel makers in Israel ultimately stopped using fava beans, and chickpea falafel became an Israeli dish.

Gil Marks's 2010 Encyclopedia of Jewish Food echoes (but does not cite):

Middle Eastern Jews have been eating falafel for centuries, the pareve fritter being ideal in a kosher diet. However, many Jews inherited G6PD deficiency or its more severe form, favism; these hereditary enzymatic deficiencies are triggered by items like fava beans and can prove fatal. Accordingly, Middle Eastern Jews overwhelmingly favored chickpeas solo in their falafel. (Entry for "Falafel")

The "centuries" thing is consistent with the fact that Marks believes falafel to be of Medieval origin, a claim which most scholars I've read on the subject don't believe (no documentary evidence, + oil was expensive so it seems unlikely that people were deep frying anything). And, again, this claim is speculation with no documentary evidence to support it.

As for the specific modern toppings including the Yemeni hot sauce سَحاوِق / סְחוּג (saHawiq / "zhug"), Baghdadi mango pickle عنبة / עמבה ('anba), and Moroccan هريسة / חריסה ("harissa"), it seems likely that these were introduced by Mizrahim given their place of origin.

*You might be interested to know that, despite their Jewishness mediating this borrowing, Mizrahim were during the Mandate years largely ethnically segregated from Eastern European Zionists, who were pushing to create a "new" European-Israeli Judaism separate from what they viewed as the indolence and ignorance of "Oriental" Jewishness (Hirsch p. 101).

This was evidenced in part by Europeans' attitudes towards the "Oriental" diet. Ari Ariel, summarizing Yael Raviv's Falafel Nation, writes:

Although all immigrants were thought to require culinary education as an aspect of their absorption into the new national culture, Middle Eastern Jews, who began to immigrate in increasing numbers after 1948, provoked greater anxiety on the part of the state than did their Ashkenazi co-religionists. Israeli politicians and ideologues spoke of the dangers of Levantization and stereotyped Jews from the Middle East and North Africa as primitive, lazy, and ignorant. In keeping with this Orientalism, the state pressured Middle Easterners to change their foodways and organized cooking demonstrations in transit camps and new housing developments. (Book review, Israel Studies Review 31.2 (2016), p. 169.)

See also Esther Meir-Glitzenstein, "Longing for the Aromas of Baghdad: Food, Emigration, and Transformation in the Lives of Iraqi Jews in Israel in the 1950s," in Jews and their Foodways:

[...] [T]he Israeli establishment was set on “educating” the new immigrants not only in matters of health and hygiene, [77] but also in the realm of nutrition. A concerted propaganda effort was launched by well-baby clinics, kindergartens, schools, health clinics, and various organizations such as the Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO) and the Organization of Working Mothers in order to promote the consumption of milk and dairy products, in particular. [78] (These had a marginal place in Iraqi cuisine, consumed mainly by children.) Arab and North African cuisines were criticized for being not sufficiently nutritious, whereas the Israeli diet was touted as ideal, as it was western and modern. […] [T]he assault on traditional Middle Eastern cuisines reflected cultural arrogance yet another attempt to transform immigrants into “new Jews” in accordance with the Zionist ethos. Thus, European table manners were presented as the norm. Eating with the hands was equated with primitive behavior, and use of a fork and knife became the hallmark of modernity and progress. (pp. 100-101)

[77. On health matters, see Davidovich and Shvarts, “Health and Hegemony,” 150–179; Sahlav Stoller-Liss, “ ‘Mothers Birth the Nation’: The Social Construction of Zionist Motherhood in Wartime in Israeli Parents’ Manuals,” Nashim 6 (Fall 2003), 104–118.]

[78. On propaganda for drinking milk and eating dairy products, see Mor Dvorkin, “Mif’alei hahazanah haḥinukhit bishnot ha’aliyah hagedolah: mekorot umeafyenim” (seminar paper, Ben-Gurion University, 2010).]

**On the desire to shed "old, European" "Jewish" identity and take on a "new, Oriental" "Hebrew" one, and the contradictory impulses to use Palestinian Arabs as models in this endeavour and to claim that they needed to be "corrected," see:

Itamar Even-Zohar, "The Emergence of a Native Hebrew Culture in Palestine, 1882—1948"

Dafna Hirsch, "We Are Here to Bring the West, Not Only to Ourselves": Zionist Occidentalism and the Discourse of Hygiene in Mandate Palestine"

Ofra Tene, "'The New Immigrant Must Not Only Learn, He Must Also Forget': The Making of Eretz Israeli Ashkenazi Cuisine."

#sorry for this but you should've known better than to ask me about falafel at this stage in my life #falafel research saga

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