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cherrycola27 · 10 months

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false god

Series Warnings: Mythology!AU. Language, alcohol, drinking. Military inaccuracies. Mutual pining, unrequited love. Allusions to and eventual smut. Minors DNI. 18+. Individual chapter warnings will come as needed. Banner Credit @thedroneranger

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Chapter 5:Dagger 🗡

You would never come out and ask your brother, Zeus, for something, but all day Sunday, you wished that he would take the slightest bit of pity on you and make it rain the entire week.

But no, he's an ass like that, and on Monday morning, Apollo and his chariot were already crossing the sky as you dragged yourself out of bed and got ready for work.

You spent the entire weekend trying to formulate how you were going to interact with Bradley—no—not Bradley—Rooster, at work.

You decided the best method was to ice him out as much as possible. Sure, you'd still have to fly with him, but you didn't have to talk to him on the ground. You didn't have to be his friend.

It was better that way

After getting ready and giving Hyrda and Cerberus their goodbye pets, you headed out. You were waiting for the elevator when the ding of the bell let you know it had arrived.

The door opened, and the one person you didn't want to see was there—Rooster.

"Morning, Hades." He greeted you as he held the door open.

"You know what, I think I'll take the stairs." You deadpanned before turning on your heels and headed for them.

"Hades! Angel, c'mon, don't be like that." Rooster called for you, but you were already letting the heavy door slam behind you.

Anger filled your body with each step you took. How dare he still try to call you that ridiculous nickname, like he didn't just break your heart days ago.

You stomped out of the stairwell and towards your Range Rover. You noticed that Rooster was standing beside his Bronco a few spaces down from your car. You kept your eyes forward, focused on getting to your car without talking to him.

You heard him call out to you, but you ignored him, jumping in your SUV and driving off without giving him a second thought.

Shut him out, just like you always do

You cranked your music up loud, and your speakers were booming as you pulled into your reserved space on base. You quickly parked and collected your things and walked towards the building. You made it inside and were about to tuck yourself into your office for a few minutes of peace before heading out for training for the day.

You'd just sat down to look over some notes for today when a knock at your disturbed yoursilence.

"Hades?" Jake's voice came as he gentle opened your door.

"You can come in, Hangman." You said to him.

Jake came in and closed the door before taking a seat across from you.

"Can I help you with something?" You asked him.

"No, well—kind of. I wanted to apologize for Saturday." Jake said, almost bashfully.

You raised your eyebrow at him. You weren't expect that this morning.

"I was a real dick to you at my party. I shouldn't have thrown you in the pool. Really, I was just really trying to goof off, and I didn't mean to hurt you or give you a PTSD attack. You said you didn't want to get in, and I should have respected your boundaries. I hope you can forgive me." Jake says in earnest.

"I appreciate your apology, Jake. You're not a bad person. You just don't have the best listening skills or the best impulse control. Work on actually hearing what others are saying, and you'll be a better person and a better pilot." You tell him.

"I'll try to keep that in mind." He says as he shoots you his thousand watt smile. "Ready to get to training?" Jake asks you as he checks his watch.

"Not really, but I guess I have to be." You sigh as you stand up from your desk. Jake quickly hops up and opens the door to your office and gestures for you to go first. You nod your head before exiting your office and heading down the hall.

Jake makes small talk with you as the two of you walk together towards the briefing room. He says something funny before the two of you enter, and Rooster doesn't miss how chummy you are with Jake as you walk right by the empty seat next to him and take the seat next to Hangman.

A pang of jealous flashes through him as Jake pulls out your chair for you before taking his. Rooster wonders why you're being so friendly with him after what happened this weekend. But then again, Rooster realized he probably deserves the cold shoulder that you are giving him.

Phoenix elbows him in the ribs and points to you and Jake while giving Rooster a questioning glance. Rooster shrugs his shoulders and shakes his head.

Soon, Maverick comes in and gives assignments for the day. Rooster hopes that you'll cool down and the two of you will be able to fly together again.

Unfortunately, his hopes are dashed the moment the two of you are in the sky. You're out of sync. Questioning each other, making mistakes that the two of you never make.

You lash out at Rooster when Phoenix, Bob, and Coyote are able to get a missile lock on you because Rooster didn't listen to your directions.

You're fuming when you get out of your plane and make your way over to him. You jab your finger into his chest and glare up at him. "When I give an order, you need to listen to it. I told you to break left, so why in the hell did you break right!" You shout at him." Rooster looks at you with wide eyes. In the four months that you've been here, several members of the team have stupid things in the air, but you've never lashed out at them like this. He sees the fire burning in your eyes. Before he can defend himself, you start on him again.

"If you can't listen to me, I will ground you so fast that it will make your head spin!" You yell at him.

"Angel, I—" He begins, but you cut him off.

"Stop calling me that! It is Hades or Commander Kolasi. Have made myself clear, Lieutenant Commander Bradshaw?" You seethe.

Rooster's jaw ticks. He rolls his shoulders back as he looks straight ahead before defeatedly saying, "Yes, ma'am. My apologies, Commander Kolasi."

You swallow thickly and are about to say something else, but Maverick comes over to the two of you. "Hades, Rooster, is everything okay? Did something happen between the two of you? That wasn't your best flying today."

Rooster looks at Maverick before looking at you. He isn't sure what to say, so you speak. "No, sir, Captain Mitchell. Nothing happened. Nothing at all. Right Rooster?" You glare at him.

"Just having an off day, sir." Rooster responds. "Okay, well, hopefully, the two of you can get it straightened out before the new class of recruits come in in two weeks." Maverick says. You ask if you are dismissed before promptly walking away.

"What did you do, Bradley?" Maverick asks Rooster when you're out of earshot.

"What makes you think I did something?" Rooster tries to defend himself. Maverick gives Rooster a knowing "dad look" and shakes his head. "Because no woman goes off on a man like that if he didn't do something. I've been on the receiving end of that rage more times than a care to count, and it was always because of something I did." Mav says.

Rooster hangs his head because he knows Maverick is right. "I fucked up." Rooster says. Maverick shakes his head. "Whatever you did, fix it. You guys are the best team I have. Don't make me ground both of you." He pats Rooster on the back before heading to his office.

Rooster treads down the hallway to your office and knocks before you let him. He doesn't miss the way your face falls when you see that it'd him.

"If you came here looking for an apology, Lieutenant Commander, I'm afraid you're wasting your time." You tell him as gou type some things on your laptop.

"I didn't. I just came to say, that I don't understand why you're so upset with me, but for the sake of the team, can we please call a truce at work? Neither of us wants to get grounded. So you can hate me outside of base, but on base, can we be civil?" He says.

"I have no problem being civil, as long as you can communicate with me." You tell him with a stoic face.

"I can do that. And I'm sorry about earlier today." Rooster says you nod your head and turn back to your work as he sees himself out.

Tuesday was better. You and Bradley were able to successfully avoid getting shot down by Hangman and Fritz, but there was still a riff between the two of you.

Wednesday night, Cerberus and Hydra stared at the door all evening, waiting for Rooster to come through the door with pizza and treats for them.

"He's not coming." You told them as you sat on the couch

He's not coming ever again

As the weeks passed, you found yourself being less cold and bitter towards Rooster, but you still wouldn't call yourself his friend anymore. You could tolerate being around him, but that was about it.

Phoenix had dragged you out to the Hard Deck for the first time in over a month. You wanted to have fun, but without Rooster by your side, you felt like an outsider to your friend group.

You'd always been an outsider

You were content to sit and watch everyone as you drank your beer, but the senior wallflower of the group, one Bob Floyd, had other plans.

"Hey, Hades. Can we talk?" Bob asked you as he sat down next to you and offered you some peanuts from his cup.

"Sure, Bob. What's up?" You asked him.

"What happened between you and Rooster at Jake's party?" Bob asked. You choked on your drink, this is not where you expected this conversation to go.

"What do you mean, Bob?" You tried to play coy.

"I mean, after Jake threw you in the pool, Rooster was ready to rip his head off. You should have seen how furious he was. And then he went to go check on you, but after he came back out to get your things, something was different about him. He wasn't himself." Bob explains to you."I tried to talk to him, but he was just—I don't even know the word." Bob continued.

You didn't know what to say to him. What could you even say?

"Nothing happened, Bob. Rooster came to check on me and made sure I was okay and then asked me if I wanted to leave." You lied to him.

"Bullshit." Bob said flatly. Your eyes went wide. In the five months that you've been a Dagger, you'd never heard the mild-mannered WSO curse.

"That's bullshit, Hades, and we both know it. And another thing, you've started calling him 'Rooster' and not Bradley. And he's stopped calling you 'Angel.' Something happened between you two, and we all know it. So, spill." Bob stated.

You could feel his glasses covered eyes staring into your soul as you sat there. You looked around to make sure no one was listening and let out a heavy sigh.

"Fine, you're right. Something did happen. Rooster kissed me." You admit to Bob. "Oh." He said a tad surprised. "What happened after that?" Bob asked you.

"He pulled back and panicked and apologized and asked if we could pretend it never happened, that he didn't know what he was thinking when he did it." You say sadly.

"And from the tone of your voice, I can tell that's not the reaction you were hoping for. Was it?" Bob conclues.

"No, it's not. I have feelings for Rooster, and I thought maybe he had them for me, too, but I was wrong." You sigh.

"I really care about him, Bob. I haven't felt this way about anyone in a very long time." You say.

Three thousand years if you're being technical

"Rooster has feelings for you, too. You haven't been here to see how mopey he has been without you here. He hasn't played the piano in over a month. He's like a sad, lost puppy that's been kicked." Bob tells you.

"Well, he sure has a funny way of showing it if he does have feelings for me." You roll your eyes and take another drink.

"Rooster isn't the best at expressing himself. I think you two should talk." Bob tells you before Phoenix and Javy come and wrangle him away.

You take a moment to let Bob's words sink in. Maybe you should try to talk to Rooster. But you need some time to think about what you would say. You need to clear your head.

You decide to call it an early night. You grab your things and go pay for your tab before driving home.

"Did you talk to her, Bob?" Rooster asked him as he caught the WSO by the arm. "Is she still here?" Rooster looks around for you hopefully.

"I did talk to her, but if you want to know what she's feeling, you need to put your big boy pants on and talk to Hades yourself. I'm not your middle man. And no, she isn't here. I think she left." Bob says as he shakes lose of Rooster's grasp.

Rooster sighs and heads to the bar to pay his tab. "You know that piano is starting to get dusty." Penny smirks as she takes his credit card from his hand.

"Penny—" Roostet begins but shr shakes her head. "I don't know what you did, Rooster, but if you care about that girl, I suggest you fix it." She tells him.

"Did Mav talk to you?" Rooster asks her. "More like he came home ranting about how you were flying." Penny smiles. "And you've been looking like shit every time you come in here." Rooster hangs his head. He definitely hasn't been at his best lately.

"Talk to her, Bradley. That's the only way you can fix it." Penny tells him. Rooster nods his head and turns to leave. They were all right.

Penny, Bob, Mav—he needed to talk to you. He just wasn't sure what to say.

.............

You spent the majority of Saturday pacing around your apartment. Cerberus and Hydra tracked you every move and listened to the one-sided imaginary conversation you had. Bob was right. Talking to Rooster would be the only way to move forward.

You missed him. You missed your Wednesday pizza sessions. You missed the easy conversation you could have with him. You missed the way he made you feel. You missed his friendship and his sense of humor and how he always made you smile.

You just didn't know how to tell him that. In theory, it should be easy, but in practice, it was extremely difficult. You didn't know if you could look at his perfect face and stare into his honey brown eyes and tell him that it was torture not being his friend these past few weeks. You were still angry with him, but you were more angry at yourself and how long you'd let this sad song go on.

You'd tried to find the right words, but they weren't there. You needed some space to think.

You quickly made your way down to your bedroom and opened your closet. Piles of clothes stared back at you. One advantage of being over three thousand years old was the fact that you had money. You invested in corporations and stocks as they were just taking off, and they paid dividens. You didn't outwardly flaunt your wealth, but you treated yourself to certain luxuries. You clothes and your vehicles being some of them.

You combed the space and settled in a black top and a pair of skinny jeans. You slipped some black over the knee boots on and grabbed a black leather jacket from the hanger.

You pulled your hair back before securing it in place with an Hermès scarf. You placed your favorite tortoise shell Gucci sunglasses in your well loved Tory Birch tote.

You then went to the small safe in your nightstand and punched in the code before taking out the keys to your most prized possession.

After packing a few snacks and a water bottle, you left your apartment and headed for the elevator. You took the lift to the very bottom floor of the covered parking. The spots were lined with luxury cars that screamed "new money" at you. There were shiny, new, and untouched.

You walked over to your corner spot and smiled as you set your eyes on your cloth covered beauty. You striped the canvas off and tucked it in the trunk before stepping back to admire your 1968 Shelby Cobra in midnight black. You'd bought it new all those years ago and taken care of it. Over the years, you had it repainted to include blue pinstripes, and you had the convertible top replaced, but most of it was still original.

You placed your things in the passenger seat and climbed in. You opened the glove box and grabbed your leather gloves, and slipped them on before wrapping your fingers around the steering wheel.

You turn the key, and the engine roars to life. You shift into gear and a pull out of the parking garage. You turn the dial on the old radio until some beach tunes come through on the speakers. You'd once thought about replacing the radio, but the pops and cracks and static that come through give it character.

The wind rushes past your face as you take in the smell of the salt air while you drive down the highway. You head north towards your favorite lookout. You'd stumbled upon it by accident the first week that you'd been in California.

It wasn't much, just a small parking lot that overlooked the ocean, but in the three hours that you spent there, not a single soul showed up. You were able to take in your first California sunset and really let yourself take a breath and think about how you were going to handle yourself at your new duty station.

You sighed as you followed the curve in the road. Fewer and fewer cars were around you until you were the only one.

Alone, like you were meant to be

You turned the radio down as you approached the turn-off for the overlook, and it appears to be empty. You're thankful for that, but the moment you turn in, you see it. An all too familiar blue Bronco parked at the far end of the lot.

"You've got to be kidding me." You mumble to yourself.

He really is like the neighborhood stray

You quickly pull into a space and realize you have two choices.

One, you could turn around and go home, and Rooster would be none the wiser.

Or, two, you could park beside him and actually talk to him.

You sigh, you were already planning on talking to Rooster, so what better time than the present?

You pull one spot over from him. He has the Bronco backed in and the tailgate down. He doesn't notice you at first.

"Hey, stranger." You say as you walk up to him. "Hades?" He looks at you and blinks a few times, as if he's not sure that it's really you standing there or a figment of his imagination that he's conjured up.

"Hi." You say shyly.

"Did you—" He shakes his head. "No, Rooster. I didn't follow you here. I found this place my first week in California. I come here to think, to escape the noise." You tell him. There's a long silence between the two of you. "Are you hungry? I brought a picnic with me because I was planning on spending a few hours here. You tell him.

He nods his head, and you smile. You turn your attention back to your car, and Rooster follows you with his eyes. "Holy shit! Is that yours?" He asks as he cranes his neck to see.

"Yeah, she's mine. A 1968 Shelby Cobra. She's almost all original. I had to replace the convertible top a few years ago, and I got her repainted. But other than that, she's original. It's my prize possession." You tell him. Rooster hops off his tailgate and steps over to admire the sleek black car.

"I guess that explains your attire." He chuckles. "A vintage car deserves and proper driving outfit." You say as you grab the basket of food from the passengers side.

You walk back over to his car and spread the blanket you brought over his tailgate. You take out the sandwiches, nuts, cheese, and water you brought with you and offer him some.

You spend a few minutes in the quiet of each other's company. With every passing moment, you realize just how much you've missed him.

"I'm sorry." Both of you blurt out at the same time.

"What?" You say again in unison. You both laugh. Rooster pauses before speaking again.

"I'm sorry about what happened at Jake's—well, I'm more sorry about how I reacted and treated you afterward. That was wrong of me. I wasn't trying to hurt you, Hades. I care about you a lot. You icing me out this past month has been torture for me." Rooster confesses to you.

"I miss our Wednesday nights together. I miss eating pizza and watching trashy reality TV on your couch. I miss sneaking bits of crust to Cerberus and Hydra when you aren't looking. I miss how you laugh when someone does something stupid on Big Brother. To someone on the outside, it may seem stupid to miss something so mundane, but to me, it's the highlight of my week. It gives me something to look forward to. But most of all, Angel, I miss you." He tells you in earnest. He looks at you with his big brown eyes, and you can't be mad at him anymore because you feel the same.

"I miss you too, Bradley." You admit.

He smiled and looked at you with starry eyes

Bradley, you had called him Bradley, and that made his heart swell. He had missed the way his name sounded coming from your lips.

"I miss our friendship, and Cerberus and Hydra miss you too." You tell him. "I'm sorry for how I've been treating you. I'm so used to people leaving me that I forgot what it was like to have a friend."

"I told you that you were stuck with me." Bradley laughs.

"Can we be friends again, Bradley?" You ask him. "Yeah, Angel, we can be friends again." Bradley smiles as you.

Friends

You wanted more, but this was better than nothing

You spend the rest of the evening talking with Bradley until the sun sets. Both of you head home shortly after that.

You pull into the parking garage and head down to the lower level. Bradley meets you there and helps you cover your car.

He then races to the other side of his Bronco to open the door for you. You shake your head and laugh at him over the gesture.

He drives both of you to your designated level of the parking deck and hops out. He jogs over to your side before you've even had a chance to unbuckle and opens the door again. He helps collect all of your things and walks you to your apartment door.

"Would you like to come in? I'm sure Cerby and Hydra would love to see you." You tell him.

"I would love to come in, Angel." Bradley smiles at you. Cerberus practically levels Bradley when he comes through the door, and Hydra curls back and forth between his legs as he stumbles towards your couch.

He stays with you until the late hours of the evening, and even though it's been a month since the two of you have really spoken, it feels like no time has passed.

Reluctantly, Bradley pulls himself away from you and Cerberus and Hydra and bids you all good night.

Later, when you are going through your apartment and checking all the lights and locks, you notice something.

There, sitting by itself on your kitchen island, is the shiny silver key to his apartment.

You smile as you place it back on your key ring. You don't plan to ever take it off again.

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rileys-basement · 2 months

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WATT Week 2024

Welcome everyone! We Are The Tigers Week is back! Very excited for this year's week-long celebration of teenagers who try their best despite the circumstances they've been presented with and or may or may not be dead!

WATT Week 2024 starts on July 28th and ends August 3rd!

You can do all of the prompts, or just one if you want! This is an open to all fanwork, so you can write fics, draw art, or anything else you can think of for WATT! Currently announcements are up on my Instagram and Tumblr (here!), and my friend's Twitter (thank you Penguin!), but the event is open to all social media platforms!

If you participate, tag #wattweek2024 + #wearethetigersweek2024 so others can see your creations! And you can tag me (@rileys-basement on Tumblr / @sparkieroses on Instagram) since sometimes things don't show up in the tags. Looking forward to another week; have fun everyone!

We Are The Tigers Week 2024 prompts:

Day 1 (July 28th) - Welcome everyone! Day 2 (July 29th) - Truth or dare Day 3 (July 30th) - That hopeless loser girl Day 4 (July 31st) - Bandage up the scars Day 5 (August 1st) - Friendship bracelets Day 6 (August 2nd) - Tigers fight and tigers win Day 7 (August 3rd) - Finding good things

#we are the tigers #we are the tigers musical #watt musical #watt week #we are the tigers week #we are the tigers week 2024 #watt week 2024

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huneyism · 8 months

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okay hear me out. married harvey and donna decide to move out west and start their own firm. harvey and donna have been having a lot of issues since they’ve been married. Donna is no longer just a secretary and therefore looking for someone to replace that.

it’s different than what harvey is used to. city isn’t near as big as new york but decent. still busy night or day but there’s a more relaxed pace here. maybe it’s the beach that’s only 5 minutes away but everyone works slower walks slower. harvey didn’t know that was something he needed.

they do interviews for a secretary - all of them are boring and just say whatever they think harvey wants to hear. here comes mike ross, skateboard tucked up his arm. worn leather satchel hanging across him. bright blue eyes and a thousand watt smile stuns harvey into silence. after his moment of silence he starts the interview and finds the boy is a genius and way too good for the position

“you should be a lawyer.”

“got knocked into a different life, here i am. be going for a chance to come back.”

it pulls at his heart but he’s not here for a sob story. he knows the kids too good for the position and deserves better but somethign about the kid says he doesn’t think he doesn’t.

he hires him. and within a week harvey realizes he’s already in too deep. the kid can match him quote for quote. can make him laugh at the silliest things and seems to be able to do everything in credibly fast and correct the first time.

a couple weeks donna gets suspicious about how close mike and harvey have gotten. harvey spends more nights at the office with mike than he does at him. she’s jealous and angry that harvey would rather talk to mike than try and fix their marriage. she goes in one evening after waiting for harvey to come home. she’s about to barge into his office when she sees through the window before they catch both of them smiling. harvey smiling in a way she hasn’t seen in a long time. his tie is gone his sleeves rolled and a button is undone. she’s never seen him so… relaxed and happy. it pulls at her heart seeing him like that with someone else but she gets it. donna and harvey might have been best friends but they were never meant to be lovers. but mike… mike pulls something out of harvey that donna couldn’t. that harvey needs. mike makes harvey human and oh so happy.

she’s only a little hurt that a year and a half after their divorce she receives an invitation to their wedding. the divorce hurt but somehow through it all their friendship stayed intact. it hurts knowing that she isn’t the love of his life but she would never take away mike. harvey’s happiness

#marvey #suits #mike ross #harvey specter #mike x harvey #should i write?#maybe someone else will write it better

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rwbyfan1999 · 7 months

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Justice league X RWBY pt 2 thoughts

I know I’m late to the party but I’ve finally got around to watching the second JL X RWBY movie and man did I love it, I loved it so much that after watching it I watched them both back to back and I’m not gonna do a review this time I’m just gonna give you my impressions on what part 2 brought to the table.

There will be spoilers so you’ve been warned in case you didn’t see it.

So time on remnant work’s differently then earth 3 days on earth equals 3 weeks on remnant so the time gap on remnant makes sense especially to get some V8 and V9 stuff thrown in

Great to see Black Canary thrown in I just wish Green Arrow would have appeared he’s mentioned but I would’ve loved seeing these married dorks together again

It was awesome to get a taste of Vacuo even if it’s super brief

Ruby is confident again which is awesome but she was also being insanely reckless while Yang’s protective instincts are not making her fully trusting of her leadership, given everything that happened in the ever after it makes sense for Yang’s character

Dc villains helping the league against a common enemy is pretty awesome

Man I feel sad for Weiss losing Atlas in this movie

Cute seeing Jessica ask about Jaune really wish JNR could’ve gone to earth

Man team RWBY’s super hero costumes look awesome, still weird seeing Blake without her cat ears but i quickly got used to it

Weiss not having powers is interesting and makes her little arc with Batman interesting sense now the roles are reversed

So Watts helped Kilg%re super surprised to see that

Blake gets 5 points for the reference to Dr Merlot and giving us some Grimm Eclipse representation (still love that game)

Love Ruby and Clark’s talk in the training room telling her that it’s ok to honor your family just don’t be in a rush to join them

Weiss and Bruce will alway’s be fun to watch and he helps Weiss realize where her true home was by the end, in his own way of course

Flash’s PTSD from being controlled by Kilg%re in part 1 plays a big part in this movie and Yang steps in to tell him her struggles, without directly talking about Adam or Raven, just to tell him to not let kilg%re consume his thoughts

The idea of the league using the digital world against Kilg%re and Watts was an interesting twist

Ruby and Yangs heart to heart moment is sweet, Ruby just telling Yang that she can’t protect her from everything and that she’s not gonna leave her

Having the end be at the Schnee manor felt full circle for both Weiss’s arc in the movie and the Atlas trilogy in general

Kilg%ore controlled Yang was crazy and Blake new like instantly, god she knows her girlfriend crazy well which is super cute

Trapping Kilg%re and Watts in the digital realm for good was an excellent way to cap the dualogy up

Another bee kiss need I say more?

All in all I’m very satisfied with this one and can see the development done for Ruby, Weiss, and Yang carry over into V10 especially Weiss

Stay awesome

#rwby #justice league x rwby #greenlight volume 10 #ruby rose #weiss schnee #blake bellodona #yang xiao long #bumbleby

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da-ambivertartist · 3 months

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Laura Shané Watts ⚡

"Well well well, you're the one that everyone's yappin' about. I guess the rumors are true, anyway, name's Laura! It's a pleasure! Since my girl Akari spoke so highly of you, a friend of hers is a lifelong partner of mine! Just text m-.. actually, just text Akari. I just realized I broke my phone last week so I might not respond.."

-Laura

Pronouns and Gender: She/Her and Cis Female

BDay: November 8th (Scorpio)

Ethnicity: Hawaiian/Black/Mexican

Weight and Height: 5"7 and 179 lbs

Age: 21

Laura is a clumsy, free-spirited young woman who struggles with taking a lot of things seriously. Her grip on her family/friends is a tight one, they'll forever be her top priority, even more than herself. However, another one of Laura's struggles is forgiveness; her temper could go off like a nuke so it's hard for her to control. Sometimes, it could lead her to unsavory places. When Laura's defenses are down, she can be a bit of a goofy and flirty towards the ones she cares about to make them feel better.

Laura's main passion in life is dancing and singing. At night, She and her 6 childhood best friends make up the other members. During the day, She works in a gas station run by her Uncle Keith, forunately, Keith hired her besties just to help with Laura's schedule and make it not as miserable. Laura promised her friends on the way to the top to not forget their roots and stay true to themselves all the way through. Laura is responsible for rapping in her group and singing soprano (higher notes).

Laura's other hobbies include:

⚡️Taking part in protests. She takes part in marching protests at least twice a month.

⚡️Exercising. Laura enjoys skateboarding, Baseball, and Parkour. Laura fractured her knee at one point, it's in the middle of healing but she enjoys being outside too much…

⚡️Playing video games. Laura loves playing games like GTA, Horizon Zero Dawn, Smash Bros., and Apex Legends.

⚡️Laura is still a beginner, but she loves Yo-yoing.

⚡️Laura loves a good long night of barhopping.

anyway

FUCK IT PONY LAURA >:3 *rolls and kicks around on the floor*

I HOPE YALL LOVE LAURA!!!! MORE OF MY PERSONAL OCS SOON

#oc #oc art #digital art #lgbtq #original character #mlp fim #autism moment #character intro #oc stuff #hue heroes

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cyarskaren52 · 5 months

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We always knew that abortion bans would lead to the criminalization of women and that Black women would be impacted disproportionately, per usual.

If you were disgusted and furious before, let me introduce you to Brittany Watts.

A Black Ohio woman who was 21 weeks and 5 days pregnant.

She had begun passing thick blood clots.

The doctor said that, while there was a fetal heartbeat, her water had broken prematurely, and the fetus was not going to survive.

She was told she would need her labor induced, so she could deliver the nonviable fetus. Otherwise, she would face a “significant risk” of death.

For the next three days, she made multiple trips to the hospital, the last day she waited eight hours, then left.

You see the hospital had been deliberating over the legalities of the procedure.

Brittany ended up miscarrying in the toilet, flushing and plunging.

Now she’s being charged with abuse of a corpse, a fifth-degree felony punishable by up to a year in prison and a $2,500 fine.

Abortion was legal in Ohio through 21 weeks, six days of pregnancy.

She miscarried at 22 weeks.

This woman had to go through the ordeal of carrying a non-viable fetus.

In and out of the hospital while hospital officials tried to interpret the law.

Went home and ended up miscarrying alone and afraid.

The Republican plan to punish women and girls is working flawlessly.

The women and girls in your lives will not be safe if we keep allowing Republicans to create policies that harm us.

Vote to protect your rights

#reproductive justice #kate cox #bodily autonomy #reproductive rights #abortion rights #abortion debate #abortion access #abortion bans #abortion is healthcare #Brittany Watts #abortion

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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Revenge of the Linkdumps

Next Saturday (May 20), I’ll be at the GAITHERSBURG Book Festival with my novel Red Team Blues; then on May 22, I’m keynoting Public Knowledge’s Emerging Tech conference in DC.

On May 23, I’ll be in TORONTO for a book launch that’s part of WEPFest, a benefit for the West End Phoenix, onstage with Dave Bidini (The Rheostatics), Ron Diebert (Citizen Lab) and the whistleblower Dr Nancy Olivieri.

If you’ve followed my work for a long time, you’ve watched me transition from a “linkblogger” who posts 5–15 short hits every day to an “essay-blogger” who posts 5–7 long articles/week. I’m loving the new mode of working, but returning to linkblogging is also intensely, unexpectedly gratifying:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/02/wunderkammer/#jubillee

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/2023/05/13/four-bar-linkage/#linkspittle

[Image ID XKCD #2775: Siphon. Man: ‘Wow, it’s true — the water doesn’t flow up the tube anymore.’ Woman: ‘Honestly, it’s weird that it ever did. Why did we ever think it was normal?’ Caption: ‘Physics news: the 2023 update to the universe finally fixed the ‘siphon’ bug.’]

My last foray into linkblogging was so great — and my backlog of links is already so large — that I’m doing another one.

Link the first: “Siphon,” XKCD’s delightful, whimsical “physics-how-the-fuck-does-it-work” one-shot (visit the link, the tooltip is great):

https://xkcd.com/2775/

[Image ID: A Dutch safety poster by Herman Heyenbrock, warning about the hazards of careless table-saw use, featuring a hand with two amputated fingers.]

Next is “Hoogspanning,” 50 Watts’s collection of vintage Dutch workplace safety posters, which exhibit that admirable Dutch frankness to a degree that one could mistake for parody, but they’re 100% real, and amazing:

https://50watts.com/Hoogspanning-More-Dutch-Safety-Posters

They’re ganked from Geheugenvannederland (“Memory of the Netherlands”):

https://geheugenvannederland.nl/

While some come from the 1970s, others date back to the 1920s and are likely public domain. I’ve salted several away in my stock art folder for use in future collages.

All right, now that the fun stuff is out of the way, let’s get down to some crunch tech-policy. To ease us in, I’ve got a game for you to play: “Moderator Mayhem,” the latest edu-game from Techdirt:

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/11/moderator-mayhem-a-mobile-game-to-see-how-well-you-can-handle-content-moderation/

Moderator Mayhem started life as a card-game that Mike Masnick used to teach policy wonks about the real-world issues with content moderation. You play a mod who has to evaluate content moderation flags from users while a timer ticks down. As you race to evaluate users’ posts for policy compliance, you’re continuously interrupted. Sometimes, it’s “helpful” suggestions from the company’s AI that wants you to look at the posts it flagged. Sometimes, it��s your boss who wants you to do a trendy “visioning” exercise or warning you about a “sensitivity.” Often, it’s angry ref-working from users who want you to re-consider your calls.

The card-game version is legendary but required a lot of organization to play, and the web version (which is better in a mobile browser, thanks to a swipe-left/right mechanic) is something you can pick up in seconds. This isn’t merely highly recommended; I think that one could legitimately refuse to discuss content moderation policies and critiques with anyone who hasn’t played it;

https://moderatormayhem.engine.is/

Or maybe that’s too harsh. After all, tech policy is a game that everyone can play — and more importantly, it’s a game everyone should play. The contours of tech regulation and implementation touch rub up against nearly every aspect of our lives, and part of the reason it’s such a mess is that the field has been gatekept to shit, turned into a three-way fight between technologists, policy wonks and economists.

Without other voices in the debate, we’re doomed to end up with solutions that satisfy the rarified needs and views of those three groups, a situation that is likely to dissatisfy everyone else.

However. However. The problem is that our technology is nowhere near advanced enough to be indistinguishable from magic (RIP, Sir Arthur). There’s plenty of things everyone wishes tech could do, but it can’t, and wanting it badly isnlt enough. Merely shouting “nerd harder!” at technologists won’t actually get you what you want. And while I’m rattling off cliches: a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Which brings me to Ashton Kutcher. Yes, that Ashton Kutcher. No, really. Kutcher has taken up the admirable, essential cause of fighting Child Sex Abuse Material (CSAM, which is better known as child pornography) online. This is a very, very important and noble cause, and it deserves all our support.

But there’s a problem, which is that Kutcher’s technical foundations are poor, and he has not improved them. Instead, he cites technologies that he has a demonstrably poor grasp upon to call for policies that turn out to be both ineffective at fighting exploitation and to inflict catastrophic collateral damage on vulnerable internet users.

Take sex trafficking. Kutcher and his organization, Thorn, were key to securing the passage of SESTA/FOSTA, a law that was supposed to fight online trafficking by making platforms jointly liable when they were used to facilitate trafficking:

https://www.engadget.com/2019-05-31-sex-lies-and-surveillance-fosta-privacy.html

At the time, Kutcher argued that deputizing platforms to understand and remove which user posts were part of a sex crime in progress would not inflict collateral damage. Somehow, if the platforms just nerded hard enough, they’d be able to remove sex trafficking posts without kicking off all consensual sex-workers.

Five years later, the verdict is in, and Kutcher was wrong. Sex workers have been deplatformed nearly everywhere, including from the places where workers traded “bad date” lists of abusive customers, which kept them safe from sexual violence, up to and including the risk of death. Street prostitution is way up, making the lives of sex workers far more dangerous, which has led to a resurgence of the odious institution of pimping, a “trade” that was on its way to vanishing altogether thanks to the power of the internet to let sex workers organize among themselves for protection:

https://aidsunited.org/fosta-sesta-and-its-impact-on-sex-workers/

On top of all that, SESTA/FOSTA has made it much harder for cops to hunt down and bust actual sex-traffickers, by forcing an activity that could once be found with a search-engine into underground forums that can’t be easily monitored:

https://www.techdirt.com/2018/07/09/more-police-admitting-that-fosta-sesta-has-made-it-much-more-difficult-to-catch-pimps-traffickers/

Wanting it badly isn’t enough. Technology is not indistinguishable from magic.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Kutcher, it seems, has learned nothing from SESTA/FOSTA. Now he’s campaigning to ban working cryptography, in the name of ending the spread of CSAM. In March, Kutcher addressed the EU over the “Chat Control” proposal, which, broadly speaking, is a ban on end-to-end encrypter messaging (E2EE):

https://www.brusselstimes.com/417985/ashton-kutcher-spotted-in-the-european-parliament-promoting-childrens-rights

Now, banning E2EE would be a catastrophe. Not only is E2EE necessary to protect people from griefers, stalkers, corporate snoops, mafiosi, etc, but E2EE is the only thing standing between the world’s dictators and total surveillance of every digital communication. Even tiny flaws in E2EE can have grave human rights concerns. For example, a subtle bug in Whatsapp was used by NSO Group to create a cyberweapon called Pegasus that the Saudi royals used to lure Jamal Khashoggi to his grisly murder:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/18/nso-spyware-used-to-target-family-of-jamal-khashoggi-leaked-data-shows-saudis-pegasus

Because the collateral damage from an E2EE ban would be so far-ranging (beyond harms to sex workers, whose safety is routinely disregarded by policy-makers), people like Kutcher can’t propose an outright ban on E2EE. Instead, they have to offer some explanation for how the privacy, safety and human rights benefits of E2EE can be respected even as encryption is broken to hunt for CSAM.

Kutcher’s answer is something called “fully homomorphic encryption” (FHE) which is a theoretical — and enormously cool — way to allow for computing work to be done on encrypted data without decrypting it. When and if FHE are ready for primetime, it will be a revolution in our ability to securely collaborate with one another.

But FHE is nowhere near the state where it could do what Kutcher claims. It just isn’t, and once again, wanting it badly is not enough. Writing on his blog, the eminent cryptographer Matt Green delivers a master-class in what FHE is, what it could do, and what it can’t do (yet):

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2023/05/11/on-ashton-kutcher-and-secure-multi-party-computation/

As it happens, Green also gave testimony to the EU, but he doesn’t confine his public advocacy work to august parliamentarians. Green wants all of us to understand cryptography (“I think cryptography is amazing and I want everyone talking about it all the time”). Rather than barking “stay in your lane” at the likes of Kutcher, Green has produced an outstanding, easily grasped explanation of FHE and the closely related concept of multi-party communication (MPC).

This is important work, and it exemplifies the difference between simplifying and being simplistic. Good science communicators do the former. Bad science communicators do the latter.

While Kutcher is presumably being simplistic because he lacks the technical depth to understand what he doesn’t understand, technically skilled people are perfectly capable of being simplistic, when it suits their economic, political or ideological goals.

One such person is Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called “father of AI,” who resigned from Google last week, citing the existential risks of “runaway AI” becoming superintelligent and turning on its human inventors. Hinton joins a group of powerful, wealthy people who have made a lot of noise about the existential risk of AI, while saying little or nothing about the ongoing risks of AI to people with disabilities, poor people, prisoners, workers, and other groups who are already being abused by automated decision-making and oversight systems.

Hinton’s nonsense is superbly stripped bare by Meredith Whittaker, the former Google worker organizer turned president of Signal, in a Fast Company interview with Wilfred Chan:

https://www.fastcompany.com/90892235/researcher-meredith-whittaker-says-ais-biggest-risk-isnt-consciousness-its-the-corporations-that-control-them

The whole thing is incredible, but there’s a few sections I want to call to your attention here, quoting Whittaker verbatim, because she expresses herself so beautifully (sci-comms done right is a joy to behold):

I think it’s stunning that someone would say that the harms [from AI] that are happening now — which are felt most acutely by people who have been historically minoritized: Black people, women, disabled people, precarious workers, et cetera — that those harms aren’t existential.

What I hear in that is, “Those aren’t existential to me. I have millions of dollars, I am invested in many, many AI startups, and none of this affects my existence. But what could affect my existence is if a sci-fi fantasy came to life and AI were actually super intelligent, and suddenly men like me would not be the most powerful entities in the world, and that would affect my business.”

I think we need to dig into what is happening here, which is that, when faced with a system that presents itself as a listening, eager interlocutor that’s hearing us and responding to us, that we seem to fall into a kind of trance in relation to these systems, and almost counterfactually engage in some kind of wish fulfillment: thinking that they’re human, and there’s someone there listening to us. It’s like when you’re a kid, and you’re telling ghost stories, something with a lot of emotional weight, and suddenly everybody is terrified and reacting to it. And it becomes hard to disbelieve.

Whittaker sets such a high bar for tech criticism. I had her clarity in mind in 2021, when I collaborated with EFF’s Bennett Cyphers on “Privacy Without Monopoly,” our white-paper addressing the claim that we need giant tech platforms to protect us from the privacy invasions of smaller “rogue” operators:

https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy

This is a claim that is most often raised in relation to Apple and its App Store model, which is claimed to be a bulwark against commercial surveillance. That claim has some validity: after all, when Apple added a one-click surveillance opt-out to Ios, its mobile OS. 96% of users clicked the “don’t spy on me” button. Those clicks cost Facebook $10b in just the following year. You love to see it.

But Apple is a gamekeeper-turned-poacher. Even as it was blocking Facebook’s surveillance, it was conducting its own, nearly identical, horrifyingly intrusive surveillance of every Ios user, for the same purpose as Facebook (ad targeting) and lying about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Bennett and I couldn’t have asked for a better example of the point we make in “Privacy Without Monopoly”: the thing that stops companies from spying on you isn’t their moral character, it’s the threat of competition and/or regulation. If you can modify your device in ways that cost its manufacturer money (say, by installing an alternative app store), then the manufacturer has to earn your business every day.

That might actually make them better — and if it doesn’t, you can switch. The right way to make sure the stuff you install on your devices respects your privacy is by passing privacy laws — not by hoping that Tim Apple decides you deserve a private life.

Bennett and I followed up “Privacy Without Monopoly” with an appendix that focused on a territory where there is a privacy law: the EU, whose (patchily enforced) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the kind of privacy law that we call for in the original paper. In that appendix, we addressed the issues of GDPR enforcement:

https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy#gdpr

More importantly, we addressed the claim that the GDPR crushed competition, by making it harder for smaller (and even sleazier) ad-tech platforms to compete with Google and Facebook. It’s true, but that’s OK: we want competition to see who can respect technology users’ rights — not competition to see who can violate those rights most efficiently:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/06/gdpr-privacy-and-monopoly

Around the time Bennett and I published the EU appendix to our paper, I was contacted by the Indian Journal of Law and Technology to see whether I could write something on similar lines, focused on the situation in India. Well, it took two years, but we’ve finally published it: “Securing Privacy Without Monopoly In India: Juxtaposing Interoperability With Indian Data Protection”:

https://www.ijlt.in/post/securing-privacy-without-monopoly-in-india-juxtaposing-interoperability-with-indian-data-protection

The Indian case for interop incorporates the US and EU case, but with some fascinating wrinkles. First, there are the broad benefits of allowing technology adaptation by people who are often left out of the frame when tools and systems are designed. As the saying goes, “nothing about us without us” — the users of technology know more about their needs than any designer can hope to understand. That’s doubly true when designers are wealthy geeks in Silicon Valley and the users are poor people in the global south.

India, of course, has its own highly advanced domestic tech sector, who could be a source of extensive expertise in adapting technologies from US and other offshore tech giants for local needs. India also has a complex and highly contested privacy regime, which is in extreme flux between high court decisions, regulatory interventions, and legislation, both passed and pending.

Finally, there’s India’s long tradition of ingenious technological adaptations, locally called jugaad, roughly equivalent to the English “mend and make do.” While every culture has its own way of celebrating clever hacks, this kind of ingenuity is elevated to an art form in the global south: think of jua kali (Swahili), gambiarra (Brazilian Portuguese) and bricolage (France and its former colonies).

It took a long time to get this out, but I’m really happy with it, and I’m extremely grateful to my brilliant and hardworking research assistants from National Law School of India University: Dhruv Jain, Kshitij Goyal and Sarthak Wadhwa.

I don’t claim that any of the incarnations of the “Privacy Without Monopoly” paper rise to the clarity of the works of Green or Whittaker, but that’s okay, because I have another arrow in my quiver: fiction. For more than 20 years, I’ve written science fiction that tries to make legible and urgent the often dry and abstract concepts I address in my nonfiction.

One issue I’ve been grappling with for literally decades is the implications of “trusted computing,” a security model that uses a second, secure computer, embedded in your device, to observe and report on what your main computer is doing. There are lots of implications for this, both horrifying and amazing.

For example, having a second computer inside your device that watches it is a theoretically unbeatable way of catching malicious software, resolving the conundrum of malware: if you think your computer is infected and can’t be trusted, then how can you trust the antivirus software running on that computer.

Back in 2016, Andrew “bunnie” Huang and Edward Snowden released the “Introspection Engine,” a separate computer that you could install in an Iphone, which would tell you whether it was infected with spyware:

https://www.tjoe.org/pub/direct-radio-introspection/release/2

But while there are some really interesting positive applications for this kind of software, the negative ones — unbeatable DRM and tamper-proof bossware — are genuinely horrifying. My novella “Unauthorized Bread” digs into this, putting blood and sinew into an otherwise dry abstract and skeletal argument:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

Then there are applications that are somewhere in between, like “remote attestation” (when the secure computer signs a computer-readable description of what your computer is doing so that you can prove things about your computer and its operation to people who don’t trust you, but do trust that secure computer).

Remote attestation is the McGuffin of Red Team Blues, my latest novel, a crime-thriller about a cryptocurrency heist. The novel opens with the keys to a secure enclave — the gadget that signs the attestations in remote attestation — going missing.

When Matt Green reviewed Red Team Blues (his first book review!), he singled this out as a technically rigorous and significant plot point, because secure enclaves are designed so that they can’t be updated (if you can update an enclave, then you can update it with malicious software):

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2023/04/24/book-review-red-team-blues/

This means that bugs in secure enclaves can last forever. Worse, if the keys for a secure enclave ever leak, then there’s no way to update all the secure enclaves out there in the world — millions or billions of them — to fix it.

Well, it’s happened.

The keys for the secure enclaves in Micro-Star International (AKA MSI) computers, a massive manufacturer of work and gaming PCs — have leaked and shown up on the “extortion portal” of a notorious crime gang:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/05/leak-of-msi-uefi-signing-keys-stokes-concerns-of-doomsday-supply-chain-attack/

As a security expert quoted by Ars Technica explains, this is a “doomsday scenario.” That’s more or less how it plays in my novel. The big difference between the MSI leak and the hack in my book is that the MSI keys were just sitting on a server, connected to the internet, which wasn’t well-secured.

In Red Team Blues, I went to enormous lengths to imagine a fiendishly complex, incredibly secure scheme for hosting these keys, and then dreamt up a way that the bad guys could defeat it. I toyed with the idea of having the keys leak due to rank incompetence, but I decided that would be an “idiot plot” (“a plot that only works if the characters are idiots”). Turns out, idiot plots may make for bad fiction, but they’re happening around us all the time.

In my real life, I cross a lot of disciplinary boundaries — law, politics, economics, human rights, security, technology. I’m not the world’s leading expert in any of these domains, but I am well-enough informed about each that I’m able to find interesting ways that they fit together in a manner that is relatively rare, and is also (I think) useful.

I admit to sometimes feeling insecure about this — being “one inch deep and ten miles wide” has its virtues, but there’s no avoiding that, say, I know less about the law than a real lawyer, and less about computer science than a real computer scientist.

That insecurity is partly why I’m so honored when I get to talk to experts across multiple disciplines. 2023 was a very good year for this, thanks to University College London. Back in Feb, I was invited to speak as part of UCL Institute of Brand and Innovation Law’s annual series on technology law:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/laws/events/2023/feb/recording-chokepoint-capitalism-can-it-be-defeated

And next month, I’m giving UCL Computer Science’s annual Peter Kirstein lecture:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/peter-kirstein-lecture-2023-featuring-cory-doctorow-registration-539205788027

Getting to speak to both the law school and the computer science school within a space of months is hugely gratifying, a real vindication of my theory that the virtues of my breadth make up for the shortcomings in my depth.

I’m getting a similar thrill from the domain experts who’ve been reviewing Red Team Blues. This week, Maria Farrell posted her Crooked Timber review, “When crypto meant cryptography”:

https://crookedtimber.org/2023/05/11/when-crypto-meant-cryptography/

Farrell is a brilliant technology critic. Her work on “prodigal tech bros” is essential:

https://conversationalist.org/2020/03/05/the-prodigal-techbro/

So her review means a lot to me in general, but I was overwhelmed to read her describe how Red Team Blues taught her to “read again for joy” after long covid “completely scrambled [her] brain.”

That meant a lot personally, but her review is even more gratifying when it gets into craft questions, like when she praises the descriptions as “so interesting and sociologically textured.” I love her description of the book as “Dickensian”: “it shoots up and down the snakes and ladders of San Francisco’s gamified dystopia of income inequality, one moment whizzing up the ear-poppingly fast elevator to a billionaire’s hardened fortress, the next sleeping under a bridge in a homeless encampment.”

And then, this kicker: “it’s a gorgeous rejection of the idea that long-form fiction is about individual subjectivity and the interior life. It’s about people as pinballs. They don’t just reveal things about the other objects they hit; their constant action and reaction reveals the walls that hold them all in.”

Likewise, I was thrilled with Peter Watts’s review on his “No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons” blog::

https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=10578%22%3Ehttps://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=10578

Peter is a brilliant sf writer and worldbuilder, an accomplished scientist, and one of the world’s most accomplished ranters. He’s had more amazing ideas than I’ve had hot breakfasts:

https://locusmag.com/2018/05/cory-doctorow-the-engagement-maximization-presidency/

His review says some very nice and flattering things about me and my previous work, which is always great to read, especially for anyone with a chronic case of impostor syndrome. But what really mattered was the way he framed how I write villains: “The villains of Cory’s books aren’t really people; they’re systems. They wear punchable Human faces but those tend to be avatars, mere sock-puppets operated by the institutions that comprise the real baddies.”

One could read that as a critique, but coming from Peter, it’s praise — and it’s praise that gets to the heart of my worldview, which is that our biggest problems are systemic, not individual. The problem of corporate greed isn’t just that CEOs are monsters who don’t care who they hurt — it’s that our system is designed to let them get away with it. Worse, system design is such that the CEOs who aren’t monsters are generally clobbered by the ones who are.

So much of our outlook is grounded in the moral failings or virtues of individuals. Tim Apple will keep our data safe, so we should each individually decide to reward him by buying his phones. If Tim Apple betrays us, we should “vote with our wallets” by buying something else. If you care about the climate, you should just stop driving. If there’s no public transit, well, then maybe you should, uh, dig a subway?

[Image ID: Matt Bors’s classic Mr Gotcha panel, in which a medieval peasant says ‘We should improve society somewhat,’ and Mr Gotcha replies, ‘Yet you participate in society. Curious! I am very smart.’]

This is the mindset Matt Bors skewers so expertly with his iconic Mr Gotcha character: “Yet you participate in society. Curious! I am very smart”:

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

(Which reminds me, I am halfway through Bors’s unbelievably, fantastically, screamingly awesome graphic novel “Justice Warriors,” which turns the neoliberal caveat-emptor/personal-responsibility brain-worm into the basis for possibly the greatest superhero comic of all time:)

https://www.mattbors.com/books

Watts finishes his review with:

I’ve never fully come to terms with the general decency of Cory’s characters. Doctorow the activist lives in the trenches, fighting those who make their billions trading the details of our private lives, telling us that they own what we’ve bought, surveilling us for the greater good and even greater profits. He’s spent more time facing off against the world’s powerful assholes than I ever will. He knows how ruthless they are. He knows, first-hand, how much of the world is clenched in their fists. By rights, his stories should make mine look like Broadway musicals.

And yet, Doctorow the Author is — hopeful. The little guys win against overwhelming odds. Dystopias are held at bay. Even the bad guys, in defeat, are less likely to scorch the earth than simply resign with a show of grudging respect for a worthy opponent.

I often get asked by readers — especially readers of Pluralistic, which is heavy on awful scandals and corruption — how I keep going. Watts has the answer:

Maybe it’s a fundamental difference in outlook. I’ve always regarded humans as self-glorified mammals, fighting endless and ineffective rearguard against their own brain stems; Cory seems to see us as more influenced by the angels of our better natures. Or maybe — maybe it’s not just his plots that are meant to be instructional. Maybe he’s deliberately showing us how we could behave as a species, in the same way he shows us how to fuck with DRM or foil face-recognition tech. Maybe it’s not that he subscribes to some Pollyanna vision of what we are; maybe he’s showing us what we could be.

Got it in one, Peter.

And…

It’s also about what happens if we don’t get better.

Writing on his “Economics From the Top Down” blog, Blair Fix — a heterodox economist and sharp critic of oligarchy — publishes a Red Team Blues review that nails the “or else” in my books, and does it with graphs:

https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2023/05/13/red-team-blues-cory-doctorows-anti-finance-thriller/

Fix surfaces the latent point in my work that inequality is destabilizing — that spectacular violence is downstream of making a society that has nothing to offer for the majority of us. As Marty Hench, the 67 year old forensic accountant protagonist of Red Team Blues says,

Finance crime is a necessary component of violent crime. Even the most devoted sadist needs a business model, or he will have to get a real job.

[Image ID: A chart labeled, ‘With more plutocracy comes more murder. As countries become more unequal (horizontal axis), their murder rates go up (vertical axis).’]

Fix agrees, and shows us that murders go up with inequality.

https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2023/05/13/red-team-blues-cory-doctorows-anti-finance-thriller/#sources-and-methods

Which is why, while the average private eye is a kind of “cop who gets to bend the rules of policing”; Hench is “a kind of uber IRS agent who gets to work in ‘sneaky ways that aren’t available to the taxman.’”

[Image ID: A chart labeled, ‘Was the US prison state the inspiration for cyberpunk? The term ‘cyberpunk’ (which describes a genre of dystopian science fiction) became popular in tandem with mass incarceration in the US. It’s probably not a coincidence.’]

This observation segues into a fascinating, data-informed look at the way that science fiction reflects our fears and aspirations about wider social phenomenon — for example, the popularity of the word “cyberpunk” closely tracks rising incarceration rates.

https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2023/05/13/red-team-blues-cory-doctorows-anti-finance-thriller/#sources-and-methods

(It’s not a coincidence that the next Marty Hench book, “The Bezzle,” is about prisons and prison-tech; it’s out in Feb 2024:)

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

I’m out on tour with Red Team Blues right now, with upcoming stops in the DC area, Toronto, the UK, and then Berlin:

https://craphound.com/novels/redteamblues/2023/04/26/the-red-team-blues-tour-burbank-sf-pdx-berkeley-yvr-edmonton-gaithersburg-dc-toronto-hay-oxford-nottingham-manchester-london-edinburgh-london-berlin/

I’ve just added another Berlin stop, on June 8, at Otherland, Berlin’s amazing sf/f bookstore:

https://twitter.com/otherlandberlin/status/1657082021011701761

I hope you’ll come along! I’ve been meeting a lot of people on this tour who confess that while they’ve read my blogs and essays for years, they’ve never picked up one of my books. If you’re one of those readers, let me assure you, it is not too late!

As you’ve read above, my fiction is very much a continuation of my nonfiction by other means — but it’s also the place where I bring my hope as well as my dismay and anger. I’m told it makes for a very good combination.

If you’re still wavering, maybe this will sway you: the blogging and essays are either free or very low-paid, and they’re heavily subsidized by my fiction. If you enjoy my nonfiction, buying my novels is the best way to say thank you and to ensure a continuing supply of both.

But novels are by no means a dreary duty — fiction is a delight, and after a couple decades at it, I’ve come to grudgingly concede — impostor syndrome notwithstanding — that I’m pretty good at it.

I hope you’ll agree.

Image: Robert Miller (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/12463666@N03/52721565937

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

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Toronto, DC, Gaithersburg, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!

[Image ID: A kitchen junk-drawer, full of junk.]

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thefringespod · 11 months

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Happy #AudioDramaSunday! This week was devoted to @TellNoTalesPod because once I started in earnest I couldn't stop. Multiple episodes made me cry at work. And I had to stop episode 10 this morning so I wouldn't cry in front of my family. Its *such* a good show!!!! Tell No Tales also has 2 more days of crowdfunding! They're just over 50%, help them get even closer to their goal before the campaign ends!

We had more logs from the Demeter on @re-dracula this week! Even with how short these entries are, Alasdair Stuart is still finding ways to absolutely wreck me with his delivery

@doyoucopypod episode 3. Yeah. YEAH. I too would flirt with my co-watchtower person but I also wouldn't assume that they were trying to prank me when things start getting scary

@karenonepercent episode 5 fucked me up a little bit and I *do* mean that as a compliment. I am still very worried for Simon. And worried *by* Simon

And of course we had new @ethicstownpod which *also* fucked me up (compliment) I'm going to make a red string board. A digital one. Because this show keeps going to places that make my theory brain buzz

Not a new episode but new exciting news from @chainofbeing ! They're currently dropping the season 2 cast and it looks PHENOMENAL Crowdfunding starts August 13 and it is already in my calendar

@camlannpod was just announced this week coming from the incredible mind of Ella Watts with the incredible talent of @tincanaudio I'm incredibly excited to see what comes from this show and encourage yall to give it a follow!!

In terms of still funding shows, we've got 3 days left for Shelterwood

33 days left for @levianpod

And 18 days left for @innbetween

Next week is promising more Tell No Tales and a return to the Hallowoods once I finish TNT season 1

There are so many amazing shows out there

Physically I can't listen to them all

But you *know* I'm gonna try anyway

#pines notes #recommendation post #audio drama sunday

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dearabby1990 · 2 months

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Chapter 7: Fears and Flashbacks

You lay alone in your bed thinking of how wonderful it felt to be with Eddie but like a storm cloud your insecurities start to form and hover above you. Thinking back to that night that Timothy Giberson ruined not just your senior year but your innocence. Him & his teammates had made a bet in the boys locker room that Timothy couldn’t get you to goto prom with him let alone put out. A bet of $20 & a half ounce of pot in exchange for your feelings & being embarrassed in front of the entire senior class Timothy had got what he wanted that night & as you both headed back to the gym for the announcement of king & queen is when your “perfect” night came crashing down you both won you couldn’t believe it thinking it was Tim’s social status that even got you the crown to begin with but accepting with a smile. As Timothy takes the mic is when your world fell apart “Hey Joey where’s my $20 I told you that you could slap lipstick on a pig” he turned to you & laughed going up to Sarah Watts & putting his arm around her “come on babe let’s get outta here” he faded into the crowd as everyone else laughed at you in shock frozen on stage before you ran behind the curtains to take the fire exit so nobody see you crying. You’ve never been intimate with anyone since let alone let anyone in or close to you. Your mom was your only friend you talked to her about everything she’d know just what to say to bring you off of the cloud of thinking you’re a horrid creature. You always stare at the women in all the magazines in your bedroom wishing & praying you’d one day look just as good as them. Eddie deserves someone beautiful like these women. He’s too gorgeous to be seen in public with you the Greek god & the lard ass he’s toting around. Tears fall one after the other. It’s been 2 weeks since you’ve seen or talked to Eddie the phone only rang 5 times today. Yesterday you lost count he tried coming by but you had every light off in the house hiding in your bed you made sure to park in Robin’s garage just so nobody would think you’re home. Robin has been trying to get you to talk to him but you just can’t at least not right now. You roll over in the dark of your room it’s been 4 days since you’ve eaten anything all you’ve been doing is drinking water, sleeping, smoking up your stash repeat. Little did you know Eddie & Robin we’re linking up with the gang in hopes of trying to get to you someway somehow.

#eddie munson fanfic #eddie munson x reader #eddie munson x you #joseph quinn #joseph quinn x reader #Str #Robin b

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claudiajcregg · 2 months

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20 Questions for Fic Writers

Tagged by both @mihrsuri and @unseenacademic 💜💜💜 Thank you so much! I actually wrote up most of the answers the day I was tagged, and then forgot to post them. For over 10 days, probably. Me bad.

1. How many works do you have on Ao3? 23! (One of them is a 'collection' of short ficlets, and has 6 chapters. So 28 stories in 23 works so far. Probably about to be more stories in still 23 works.)

2. What's your total Ao3 word count? 156,597 words. For now.

3. What fandoms do you write for? Currently? Just TWW. Who knows in the future!

4. What are your top five fics by kudos?

They have about 35% of my total kudos, but the first two are ~21% alone. (The first one is the only fic that has over 100 kudos. Then again, any of them getting above 30 is a miracle.)

maybe everything's just turning out how it should be (Big Block of Cheese 2008; CJ & Josh. Posted Feb 2021) [121]

say it's here where our pieces fall in place (Vignettes, 1998-2008. Posted Jan 2022.) [66]

just your smile lit a sixty-watt bulb in my house that was darkened for days (Thanksgiving 2006. Posted Dec 2022.) [55]

nobody knows how to get back home (Missing scene from ITSOTG. Posted April 2023) (wait what. top 4?!) [50]

we could be the way forward and I know I'll pay for it (B4A Campaign Fic, spring 1998. Posted May 2021) [47]

5. Do you respond to comments?

YES. I don't take them for granted, and I like interacting with my readers. Sharing is nerve-wracking and makes me feel so exposed, so any comment makes it worth it. I like to thank peeps for their time! As of late, it's taking me weeks to get back to comments for Brain/spoons reasons (and because I try to do so in order, though not always). I sometimes feel bad I have fallen behind on leaving my own comments, so replying to what I get makes me feel bad. I love getting the rare, long, thoughtful comments, because I love seeing what people pick up on (had to restrain myself from commenting on everything), so if that one's up next… It'll delay everything. I have a harder time letting go of those.

I know replying or not is a hot topic, and I fall on the side of 'whatever the author does is fine' (I see them as being voluntary gifts to the author, kinda, but I understand why some authors can't or won't reply! Especially those who get dozens.). It does feel weird(ly demoralizing) when you see that yours is one of a couple of comments they haven't replied to, though. (Selfishly, as someone who tries to write medium-long comments, lack of anything can sting. It's irrational, it's not what I'm after, but it'd be nice to know whether that hour plus of my time was worth it. It's not transactional and I hate that c4c idea or whatever. Just. weird feelings.)

6. What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

As we've established in previous similar memes (lol, I think I've answered these questions before), my fics don't really have angsty endings! For the most part. I think I said don't want you to go but I'll be okay then, and I can still buy that/definitely popped into my brain. I think some of my late S7 fics have an ominous feel to them, with some references/buildup to the angsty parts of IM, but I wouldn't call them angsty endings.

7. What's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

Um. The opposite is true! still you never took your hand from mine was my first thought, but I feel like oh, and I will be with you to feel the California sun is pretty darn happy. I could have picked almost any of them and I could make a case for them!

8. Do you get hate on fics?

I luckily do not. I have gotten a couple of comments that have messed with my brain, and made me second-guess things, but they were not hate.

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

Yes, but not regularly and not that well. It's usually short, mild scenes at most, but I did challenge myself to write a more explicit one last summer, especially after I got those 'one bed' tropes in the Wheel but didn't go there in the 500-word limit. Streets say it's hot. IDK. I also wrote a smutty continuation to the exchange fic. Best if we forget parts of that one happened. I also started writing one that would be in my S5 pregnancy universe but 🤐

10. Do you write crossovers? What's the craziest one you've written?

I don't. But this question confirms to me I have answered this before because I know I've joked about how TV has already done that for me, lmao. See: Bones/Sleepy Hollow.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen? (I had to track down this question because it wasn't anywhere.) I don't think so!

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

Nope! I'm having déjà vu here. I know I have answered this before: I could do it myself! But I have a feeling it wouldn't be as easy as one might think, but I'd be honored.

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

I don't think so…? If I have, it was years ago, in my forum/LJ days. I've been trying to make it happen for a while now, but who knows if it'll ever happen. WE HAVE IDEAS. We want to make it happen. (Wink wink, nudge nudge. You know who.)

14. What’s your all-time favorite ship?

Spaceships are so cool. Atlantis was the first space shuttle I saw in person (and also the one I've seen the most) and it and its exhibit are awesome. I'm only missing Discovery out of the four space shuttles, because I didn't go to the second National Air and Space Museum location in Virginia back in 2015. And once the new exhibit center is completed, I'd love to see Endeavour again.

(In all seriousness, I don't have one. Booth and Brennan will forever and always hold a special place in my heart, but I love CJ and Danny so much, writing for them, their journey. Pls don't make me pick.)

15. What’s a WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will?

I am a big 'never say never' person, because I end up picking stuff up (and maybe rewriting it to fit my current style/ability) if I remember an idea… But I'm guessing many of them won't get finished. Probably some of those that are deep in my notes app or on the drive.

16. What are your writing strengths? I (try to) dig into the emotion of a scene as best as I can.

17. What are your writing weaknesses? Everything else? I know it sounds like an excuse (at least to my ears), but writing in your second language is hard. I know my writing sounds limited because of it – my descriptions will never be as evocative as I wish they were, my dialogue won't be there. I am not the most imaginative person, either.

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fic?

If it makes sense, and won't take the reader out of the story, go for it! (A few words, or a line or two, might work if there's appropriate context.)

But also, as a non-native speaker, I'll always recommend using pals who might be fluent in that language and checking with them! I know that, throughout my many years in fandom, I've read quick things in Spanish within English fics that weren't entirely correct in the context they were being used (i.e. character's fluency, smaller details), and they took me out for a second. (I know, I know – pot, meet kettle. If anyone has read an unedited story of mine, they've found me making up English phrases.)

19. First fandom you wrote for? Bones. In Spanish. (I also think I wrote some ficlets in English that are probably hidden in some random LJ comm I created for my writing. They're probably 14-15 years old.)

20. Favorite fic you’ve written?

I honestly cannot pick! And maybe it's yet to come. But basically, if I've gone through the embarrassment of having someone edit/beta a fic and catch all the avoidable mistakes, it's because it genuinely has something I like about it and that I think others will like, too. (Perceived quality aside.)

Off the top of my head, and out of the posted fics (obvious recency bias, sorry). I have a story for all 23… Also, let's consider I've mostly not read them since they were posted so I might be off. (Would love to hear what everyone's favorite is, if you've read any and are reading this!) Obviously, that top 5 by kudos has great ones. There's a reason

don't want you to go but I'll be okay: I just remember finishing it and knowing it was something special. Felt like many things coming together. I wanted to write angstier, a break from the endgame of the IM AU I've yet to post, and I think it works. I had had that quote as inspo for a while, and I think the trip to Berlin put it back on my mind. (The first haunted by the notion draft is from around this time, too!)

your love is a secret I'm hoping, dreaming, dying to keep: the structure is likely a tad repetitive, maybe (but also, the point of 3+1s, sort of?) but I love writing in that s7 period, and there should be more fic with the press corps. I think the stuff I wrote while editing (which included an overhaul of the +1) is even better than what was there.

oh, and I will be with you to feel the California sun: recency bias, yes. I love a good early Cali story, and even if this was nowhere the story I sat down to write originally, I love how it turned out. It's silly but fun, and so sunny.

still you never took your hand from mine: I will always have all the soft spots for my memoir stories, even if two of them have yet to be posted. This one doubled its size a year and a half after “finishing” it because I realized what it was missing. It's sappy, probably unrealistic re: the publishing industry, but damn it if it's not one of those that have made me cry while editing them.

we could be the way forward and I know I'll pay for it: I had to include an oldie but goodie from my first year, and this one is so special to me. (Along with BBC 2008, which I also absolutely adore. That was the fic I always wanted to post. Hilarious it was third. But it's also my most popular fic by a huge margin.) Seeing it recommended on Tumblr? God. I love campaign stories and all their potential. I love that I took a random line from some unposted story and it evolved into this fic.

nobody knows how to get back home: I almost added the most recent one because of how fun it was to write (or, as I mentioned above, Big Block of Cheese) but I like how bittersweet this missing scene one is. I find CJ's internal struggle so interesting to explore, and this is one of her most vulnerable moments. I also wanted to see a hug so badly.

#20 questions for fic writers #ask games #god this is so late #hopefully I make up for it with my rambling #tagging whoever wants to do it - everyone I know was tagged in one of the rounds with me #in between writing most of this and posting it I hit 900 kudos woo

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rileys-basement · 1 year

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Hello WATT fandom! I would like to introduce you to an event I just made up because other fandoms have their week, and We Are The Tigers deserves one too! WATT Week 2023!

WATT Week 2023 starts on July 25th and ends July 31st, the day of the WATT reunion concert! (Hence the final day’s prompt) You can do all of the prompts, or just one if you want! This is an open to all fanwork, so you can write fics or draw art or anything else you can think of for WATT! Currently announcements are up on my Instagram and Tumblr (here!), but this event is open to all social media platforms. (I just don’t have any others so it’s harder for me to announce this and view things elsewhere.) If you participate in this event, make sure to use the tag #wattweek2023 + #wearethetigersweek2023 so others can see your creations! It’d also be cool if you could tag me since sometimes things in tags don’t show up and I want to make sure others can see others’ works! This community is small, but is very talented and dedicated to the murder mystery cheerleaders!

We Are The Tigers Week 2023 prompts:

Day 1 (July 25th) - The basement Day 2 (July 26th) - Captain of the team Day 3 (July 27th) - And the freshman’s in prison! Day 4 (July 28th) - Pom poms up Day 5 (July 29th) - Mistletoe Day 6 (July 30th) - Pizza delivery Day 7 (July 31st) - Reunion

#we are the tigers #we are the tigers musical #watt musical #we are the tigers week 2023 #watt week 2023 #wearethetigersweek2023 #wattweek2023

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randomprojectsbeforeidie · 5 months

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Heyoo, I'm back!

So, before I go on explaining my other goals for the year, let's see what I did about the first goal I explained yesterday:

Goal number 1: study like Wade Watts

The app I use for my reviews is Anki, for Android. It's an authomatized flashcard app, and it's really good to memorize stuff (which I need for my tests to be a public server), if a bit time consuming.

Today I studied: 30 min. This is what I've been trying to do this week, so I can up the time next week. Success!

In my progress to study on at least half of the days of the year, I'm at: 5/184, which amounts to 2.73% of my goal!

Cool!

Now, to the second goal, to fight like a Bene Gesserit. As I said before, I'm obese to the point it's affecting my mobility. I gotta gradually get out of this obese zone so I can safely fight. So, here's my plan: I consulted my nutritionist (dietician? I don't think there's a difference in Portuguese, but I know there's one in English) and he said that, to lose weight in a sustainable way, I should be losing 2kg for month. It's slow, but it's susteinable.

So I set the goal to get to 69kg by the end of this year. Considering I was weighting 85,5kg by the beggining of the year, this is quite possible! It would require me to lose 16kg to get there. It's even lower than 2kg per month!

So I decided to use the method I read about on r/xxfitness (yeah, I use Reddit), which consists in calculatind your TDEE (using Nerd Fitness Calculator) and then subtracting 10% of it to get to your conservative deficit. And then you gotta count calories, which I've being doing using the app "MyFitnessPal".

I also watched a video by ATHLEAN-X in which he made a plan for losing weight gradually. I measured myself (weight, neck, waist, hips) and got my aproximate body fat percentage according to the US Navy Calculator. And then I started my plan.

Right now, I weight 85,5kg, have a neck circunference of 35 cm, a hio circunference of 94 cm and a waist circunference of 118 cm. This amounts to 49,10% of body fat, according to the US Navy Calculator. Cool.

So here are the actions I'll take by this level, which I call Level 1: from 50-45% body fat level:

1. I will not try to modify WHAT I'm eating right now, just HOW MUCH I'm eating. Doing the calculations above, I should eat 1.636 calories for the day. As long as I stay below that, I'll not worry about much at this point.

2. I'll reduce my alcohol and limit myself to drinking at most 2 days a week, and at most 5 drinks per week.

3. I'll take 3 walks per week, for 30 minutes each. This is the funnest part for me. I love walking and hiking, and I just found out about rucking! Which sounds like the perfect training for hikes! Basically, you walk with a weighted backpack on your back. I started with a bit more than 5% of my body weight, or 5 kg of weight.

To expand on this part, I'm a bit of a nerd. So, along with tracking my walks with an app called "MapMyWalk", I've been using another app called "The Walk". It's basically a game/audiobook in which you are a spy (I think?) carrying an important parcel across the UK while running from a terrorist groups. As you walk, you get to check points where you listen to new parts of the story. It's been nice!

(Also, I daydream a lot, and sometimes I've been running my own story in my head where I'm a human in a post-apocalyptic alien world carrying with me a parcel I got from a dying alien who told me that would be the only thing to save his race from extinction, and I promised to get it safely to the others of his species, but it is a long walk, and I gotta keep it safe. Anyways. I do have an overactive imagination sometimes)

I also have been trying stretching. Got the routine from r/Flexibility. Maybe this will stop me from injurying myself.

Oh, and I also made a deal with myself to only weight and measure myself on the first day of each month. I've never had an eating disorder, but I'm terrified of getting them, and I'm hoping this will help me track my progress without getting obsessed with my weight.

Anyways! For the tracking:

Number 2: to fight like a Bene Gesserit:

Yesterday I consumed: 1.535/1.636 calories.

Today I rucked: with 5kg on my back for 30 minutes, walking a total of 1,98km.

Today I stretched: my upper limbs.

So that's it for today! See you guys tomorrow!

#daily log #habits #studying #studyblr #fitness #diet #weight loss #calorie counting #exercising #rucking #stretching #fitblr #daydreaming #goals

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carnivorousyandeere · 1 year

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Welcome to the Cliffside Inn P.3; Isla and Airna Short Intros

CW: gambling mentions, alcohol implications

Spending some more time with Kurtis, and meeting the enigmatic performers of the hotel’s casino.

The next installment will probably be a more in-depth look at Isla and Airna, rather than an intro to the Siren Eris, since this one ended up being so Kurtis-centric. Hope you all don’t mind 💜

Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5

After Cecilia leaves, you do your best to shake off your nerves and tidy your belongings in the hotel room; your trip is a week and a half long, after all— may as well unpack a little.

You’re almost done when a knock comes at the door. You brace yourself for yet another enigmatic or larger-than-life person to be waiting on the other side of the door, but to your relief and confusion, nobody is there. The confusion of who knocked and why is quickly replaced with a new question— who’d left such fancy clothes outside your room?

And why— as you pick them up to examine them, a letter falls out— do they look like they’d fit you perfectly?

The letter was on extremely nice paper, and sealed with a… a Lisa Frank sticker, of all things, and was written in magenta ink. You supposed it was pretty obvious who’d left the letter after all. The letter invited you to a casino on the property, and even included a little photograph of the building.

Kurtis didn’t sign his name, instead signing with a little bitty heart at the corner of the page. The ink is ever so slightly smeared, in contrast with the neatness of the rest of the page.

Kurtis seems… a little strange, but you can’t deny the attention feels kind of nice. Part of you screams at you to be careful, but the rest says, “fuck it! We’re on vacation!” You idly wonder if you’re going to end up on some kind of Netflix true-crime special thinking that way, but bring the clothes into your room and try them on anyway.

As you suspected, they fit perfectly— and you look good.

The letter didn’t specify a time, and as you look in the mirror, doubt begins to swirl once more. But again you say, “fuck it!” And decide to go anyway.

It’s been a long, and stressful day. Maybe a night of dancing and partying, or people-watching from the corner, will actually be just what you need. Even if Kurtis is there to talk your ear off the whole time.

The evening air is dark and heavy with humidity, clouds masking the sunset and making it look much later at night than it was. You shiver a little in the salty winds buffeting you among sparse plants and sand-crusted walkways.

The gaudy lights of the casino reach you over a sand dune, drawing you inside. The place is lavish, maybe even more so than the main hotel— but if anything, it looks like a place from the 80’s, something straight out of Twin Peaks or Blue Velvet, rather than out of the 20’s.

The lights are soft, and the atmosphere strangely calm for how many people were gambling and drinking. Maybe when you had as much money as these people, gambling felt less… dangerous, you supposed. Tempers just didn’t run as high then.

You meet Kurtis’ eyes from where he stands behind the bar, decked out in a slim tuxedo. Although it isn’t what you would’ve expected from him; it’s plain black-and-white, the only hint of his favorite pinkish shade a pocket square.

He squeezes in between the bartenders, careful not to disturb their mixing, and makes his way to you. Kurtis’ smile is a million watts as he places his hands on your shoulders and thanks you for coming.

“I wasn’t sure you’d show up,” he admits. “We did just meet after all. Didn’t know if you liked this kind of thing. If not, we could always walk on the beach? It’s so peaceful at night, I love walking out there.”

You let Kurtis ramble on for a bit, but assure him you’re fine to stay here for now.

He grins again in response. “Great! There’s actually a really cool show tonight. Not me doing card tricks, although that’s pretty cool too. Tonight we’ve got our best singers and musicians playing a set.”

As if on cue, the lights in the casino dim, some changing to moody colorful lighting, and a hush falls over the crowd. You and Kurtis sit next to one another at the bar, facing the stage opposite.

Musicians begin to play, one-by-one, weaving together a rich tune.

Spotlights flicker on over one, then two, singers. Their voices are soft and dreamy, mixing with one another in a strangely tense harmony. Everybody is entranced by their voices, the words flowing over you and dragging you under… or at least you think they are, until a third spotlight shines on the last singer.

Her voice is strong, tightly controlled, her mastery over pitch unquestionable. Her tone is rich and dark, a slight vocal fry scratching an itch in your brain you hadn’t known was there. This is what it means to be entranced, you find yourself thinking, leaning forward more and more, even forgetting to blink, until Kurtis’ hand around your waist anchors you back to reality.

You look up at him. His expression is more serious than you’ve ever seen before, gaze fixed on the lead singer. Something about it sends a shiver down your spine.

He seems to feel your gaze on him, and turns, leaning to your ear; “She and her voice are beautiful— but only from a distance. You really should stay away from her.”

You blink at the sudden change in his mood, and try to lighten things up with a risky joke, shakily whispering back “Why? You got a history with her?”

Kurtis smiles down at you, expression brightening like the sun peeking through dispersing storm clouds, and he bumps your shoulder lightly with his. “Nah, thank goodness! She’s just a real man eater. And woman eater. And… well, everyone eater.”

You cover your mouth, trying not to laugh too much at his awkward phrasing— especially since the musicians and singers are still hard at work onstage.

You and Kurtis bring your attention back to them, though they don’t manage to ensnare you in the music as deeply this time. They go through one song, then two, then three, before the lights come up and the hushed awe of the crowd splinters into polite-rich-people-applause and admiring whispers.

All of the singers and musicians bow before leaving the stage, save the lead singer, who walks right off. She looks across the room, meeting your eye by chance— there’s something so cold, so electrifying, about her gaze, but then she’s looking away and being hidden by a throng of admirers. The curiosity is eating you alive— you’ll have to ask for her name later.

Kurtis leans down, as if to whisper something in your ear again, but is interrupted by his phone ringing. He smiles apologetically, and excuses himself to take the call. You see a glimpse of that serious side of him again as he walks out, spine straight and brow furrowed.

How strange.

You don’t have much time to ponder this before you’re accosted by two new acquaintances. One of them bounds up and grabs your hand excitedly, and the other approaches more calmly. They look beautiful in the dim light, the sparkles in their makeup and dresses scintillating.

“Hello~!” The first barks out, startling you with her volume. You blink, surprised that the harmony singers who’d put on such a gorgeous show seem so excited to talk with you of all the people in here.

“Haven’t seen you around here before! You new? We might be a resort but we do get a lot of regulars coming around too. You’re really pretty, too-“

“Airna!” The other singer interjects with a laugh, “I think you’re coming on a little strong. Give them a chance to answer your questions, cariño.”

Airna flushes, smiling guiltily at her, then you. “Hehe, sorry. I’ve been overexcitable like that since I was little.”

You introduce yourself, and they introduce themselves.

Airna and Isla, two peas in a pod. Even just meeting them, you can tell they have a way of completing the other. It makes your heart ache just a little, wishing you had someone like that. But you don’t say so, and the conversation stays light. They’re fun to talk to, and the time slips by before you know it.

#cliffside inn #beachside resort #oc Isla #oc Airna #oc kurtis #my thoughts #yandere #yandere oc #yandere imagines #yandere scenarios #yandere x darling #yandere x reader #yandere x you #yandere cw

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