#Can we use OLD BUILDING MATERIAL

[astroruchi]

Can we use OLD BUILDING MATERIAL, like windows, doors, bricks etc to build NEW HOUSE or Shop ?

VASTU TIP NO 002

For any further information, visit www.astroruchi.com or call on 9922113222

With lots of hopes and regards

Dr. Abhiruchi Jain

[mcmansionhell]

on neuschwanstein castle (part 1)

This is an essay in two parts.

Neuschwanstein Concept Drawing by the stage designer (!!) Christian Jank (1869).

There exist in architecture clear precedents to the McMansion that have nothing to do with suburban real estate. This is because “McMansionry” (let’s say) has many transferable properties. Among them can be included: 1) a diabolical amount of wealth that must be communicated architecturally in the most frivolous way possible, 2) a penchant for historical LARPing primarily informed by media (e.g. the American “Tuscan kitchen”) and 3) the execution of historical styles using contemporary building materials resulting in an aesthetic affect that can be described as uncanny or cheap-looking. By these metrics, we can absolutely call Neuschwanstein Castle, built by the architect Eduard Riedel for King Ludwig II of Bavaria, a McMansion.

Constructed from 1869 through 1886 – the year of Ludwig’s alleged suicide after having been ousted and declared insane – the castle cost the coffers of the Bavarian state and Ludwig himself no fewer than 6.2 million German gold marks. (That's an estimated 47 million euros today.) The castle's story is rife with well-known scandal. I'm sure any passing Swan Enthusiast is already familiar with Ludwig’s financial capriciousness, his called-off marriage and repressed homosexuality, his parasocial obsession with Richard Wagner, his complete and total inability to run his country, and his alleged "madness," as they used to call it. All of these combine to make Neuschwanstein inescapable from the man who commissioned it -- and the artist who inspired it. Say what you like about Ludwig and his building projects, but he is definitely remembered because of them, which is what most monarchs want. Be careful what you wish for.

Neuschwanstein gatehouse.

How should one describe Neuschwanstein architecturally? You’d need an additional blog. Its interiors alone (the subject of the next essay) range from Neo-Baroque to Neo-Byzantine to Neo-Gothic. There are many terms that can loosely define the palace's overall style: eclecticism, medieval revivalism, historicism, chateauesque, sclerotic monarchycore, etc. However, the the most specific would be what was called "castle Romanticism" (Burgenromantik). The Germans are nothing if not literal. Whatever word you want to use, Neuschwanstein is such a Sistine Chapel of pure sentimentality and sugary kitsch that theme park architecture – most famously, Disney's Cinderella’s castle itself – owes many of its medieval iterations to the palace's towering silhouette.

There is some truth to the term Burgenromantik. Neuschwanstein's exterior is a completely fabricated 19th century storybook fantasy of the Middle Ages whose precedents lie more truthfully in art for the stage. As a castle without fortification and a palace with no space for governance, Neuschwanstein's own program is indecisive about what it should be, which makes it a pretty good reflection of Ludwig II himself. To me, however, it is the last gasp of a monarchy whose power will be totally extinguished by that same industrial modernity responsible for the materials and techniques of Neuschwanstein's own, ironic construction.

In order to understand Neuschwanstein, however, we must go into two subjects that are equally a great time for me: 19th century medievalism - the subject of this essay - and the opera Lohengrin by Richard Wagner, the subject of the next. (1)

Part I: Medievalisms Progressive and Reactionary

The Middle Ages were inescapable in 19th century Europe. Design, music, visual art, theater, literature, and yes, architecture were all besotted with the stuff of knights and castles, old sagas, and courtly literature. From arch-conservative nationalism to pro-labor socialism, medievalism's popularity spanned the entire political spectrum. This is because it owes its existence to a number of developments that affected the whole of society.

In Ludwig’s time, the world was changing in profound, almost inconceivable ways. The first and second industrial revolutions with their socioeconomic upheavals and new technologies of transport, manufacturing, and mass communication, all completely unmade and remade how people lived and worked. This was as true of the average person as it was of the princes and nobles who were beginning to be undermined by something called “the petit bourgeoisie.”

Sustenance farming dwindled and wage labor eclipsed all other forms of working. Millions of people no longer able to make a living on piecemeal and agricultural work flocked to the cities and into the great Molochs of factories, mills, stockyards, and mines. Families and other kinship bonds were eroded or severed by the acceleration of capitalist production, large wars, and new means of transportation, especially the railroad. People became not only alienated from each other and from their labor in the classical Marxist sense but also from the results of that labor, too. No longer were chairs made by craftsmen or clothes by the single tailor -- unless you could afford the bespoke. Everything from shirtwaists to wrought iron lamps was increasingly mass produced - under wretched conditions, too. Things – including buildings – that were once built to last a lifetime became cheap, disposable, and subject to the whimsy of fashion, sold via this new thing called “the catalog.”

William Morris' painting Le Belle Iseult (1868).

Unsurprisingly, this new way of living and working caused not a little discontent. This was the climate in which Karl Marx wrote Capital and Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol. More specific to our interests, however, is a different dissenter and one of the most interesting practitioners of medievalism, the English polymath William Morris.

A lover of Arthurian legend and an admirer of the architect and design reformer John Ruskin, Morris was first trained in the office of architect G. E. Street, himself a die-hard Gothic Revivalist. From the very beginning, the Middle Ages can be found everywhere in Morris' work, from the rough-hewn qualities of the furniture he helped design to the floral elements and compositions of the art nouveau textiles and graphics he's most famous for -- which, it should be said, are reminiscent of 15th century English tapestries. In addition to his design endeavors, Morris was also a gifted writer and poet. His was a profound love for medieval literature, especially Norse sagas from Iceland. Some of these he even translated including the Volsunga Saga -- also a preoccupation of Wagner's. Few among us earn the title of polymath, but Morris' claim to it is undeniable. Aside from music, there really wasn't any area of creative life he didn't touch.

However, Morris' predilection for the medieval was not just a personal and aesthetic fascination. It was also an expression of his political rejection of the capitalist mode of production. As one of the founders of the English Arts & Crafts Movement, Morris called for a rejection of piecemeal machine labor, a return to handicraft, and overall to things made well and made with dignity. While this was and remains a largely middle class argument, one that usually leads down the road of ethical consumption, Morris was right that capitalism's failing of design and architecture did not just lie with the depreciated quality of goods, but the depreciated quality of life. His was the utopian call to respect both the object and the laborer who produced it. To quote from his 1888 essay called "The Revival of Architecture," Morris dreamed of a society that "will produce to live and not live to produce, as we do." Indeed, in our current era of AI Slop, there remains much to like about the Factory Slop-era call to take back time from the foreman's clock and once more make labor an act of enjoyable and unalienated creativity. Only now it's about things like writing an essay.

I bother to describe Morris at length here for a number of reasons. The first is to reiterate that medievalism's popularity was largely a response to socioeconomic changes. Additionally, since traditionalism - in Ludwig's time and in ours - still gets weaponized by right-wing losers, it's worth pointing out that not all practitioners of medievalism were politically reactionary in nature. However – and I will return to this later – medievalism, reactionary or not, remains inescapably nostalgic. Morris is no exception. While a total rejection of mass produced goods may seem quixotic to us now, when Morris was working, the era before mass industrialization remained at the fringes of living memory. Hence the nostalgia is perhaps to be expected. Unfortunately for him and for us, the only way out of capitalism is through it.

To return again to the big picture: whether one liked it or not, the old feudal world was done. Only its necrotic leftovers, namely a hereditary nobility whose power would run out of road in WWI, remained. For Ludwig purposes, it was a fraught political time in Bavaria as well. Bavaria, weird duck that it was, remained relatively autonomous within the new German Reich. Despite the title of king, Ludwig, much to his chagrin - hence the pathetic Middle Ages fantasizing - did not rule absolutely. His was a constitutional monarchy, and an embattled one at that. During the building of Neuschwanstein, the king found himself wedged between the Franco-Prussian War and the political coup masterminded by Otto von Bismarck that would put Europe on the fast track to a global conflict many saw as the atavistic culmination of all that already violent modernity. No wonder he wanted to hide with his Schwans up in the hills of Schwangau.

The very notion of a unified German Reich (or an independent Kingdom of Bavaria) was itself indicative of another development. Regardless if one was liberal or conservative, a king, an artist or a shoe peddler, the 19th century was plagued by the rise of modern nationalism. Bolstered by new ideas in "medical" “science,” this was also a racialized nationalism. A lot of emotional, political, and artistic investment was put into the idea that there existed a fundamentally German volk, a German soil, a German soul. This, however, was a universalizing statement in need of a citation, with lots of political power on the line. Hence, in order to add historical credence to these new conceptions of one’s heritage, people turned to the old sources.

Within the hallowed halls of Europe's universities, newly minted historians and philologists scoured medieval texts for traces of a people united by a common geography and ethnicity as well as the foundations for a historically continuous state. We now know that this is a problematic and incorrect way of looking at the medieval world, a world that was so very different from our own. A great deal of subsequent medieval scholarship still devotes itself to correcting for these errors. But back then, such scholarly ethics were not to be found and people did what they liked with the sources. A lot of assumptions were made in order to make whatever point one wanted, often about one's superiority over another. Hell, anyone who's been on Trad Guy Deus Vult Twitter knows that a lot of assumptions are still made, and for the same purposes.(2)

Meanwhile, outside of the academy, mass print media meant more people were exposed to medieval content than ever before. Translations of chivalric romances such as Wolfgang von Eschenbach’s Parzival and sagas like the Poetic Edda inspired a century’s worth of artists to incorporate these characters and themes into their work. This work was often but of course not always nationalistic in character. Such adaptations for political purposes could get very granular in nature. We all like to point to the greats like William Morris or Richard Wagner (who was really a master of a larger syncretism.) But there were many lesser attempts made by weaker artists that today have an unfortunate bootlicking je nais se quoi to them.

I love a minor tangent related to my interests, so here's one: a good example of this nationalist granularity comes from Franz Grillparzer’s 1823 pro-Hapsburg play König Ottokars Glück und Ende, which took for its source a deep cut 14th century manuscript called the Styrian Rhyming Chronicle, written by Ottokar Aus Der Gaul. The play concerns the political intrigue around King Ottokar II of Bohemia and his subsequent 1278 defeat at the hands of Grillparzer’s very swagged out Rudolf of Habsburg. Present are some truly fascinating but extremely obscure characters from 13th Holy Roman Empire lore including a long-time personal obsession of mine, the Styrian ministerial and three-time traitor of the Great Interregnum, Frederick V of Pettau. But I’m getting off-topic here. Let's get back to the castle.

The Throne Room at Neuschwanstein

For architecture, perhaps the most important development in spreading medievalism was this new institution called the "big public museum." Through a professionalizing field of archaeology and the sickness that was colonialist expansion, bits and bobs of buildings were stolen from places like North Africa, Egypt, the Middle East, and Byzantium, all of which had an enormous impact on latter 19th century architecture. (They were also picked up by early 20th century American architects from H. H. Richardson to Louis Sullivan.) These orientalized fragments were further disseminated through new books, monographs, and later photography.

Meanwhile, developments in fabrication (standardized building materials), construction (namely iron, then steel) and mass production sped things up and reduced costs considerably. Soon, castles and churches in the image of those that once took decades if not a century to build were erected on countless hillsides or in little town squares across the continent. These changes in the material production of architecture are key for understanding "why Neuschwanstein castle looks so weird."

Part of what gives medieval architecture its character is the sheer embodiment of labor embedded in all those heavy stones, stones that were chiseled, hauled, and set by hand. The Gothic cathedral was a precarious endeavor whose appearance of lightness was not earned easily, which is why, when writing about their sublimity, Edmund Burke invoked not only the play of light and shadow, but the sheer slowness and human toil involved.

This is, of course, not true of our present estate. Neuschwanstein not only eschews the role of a castle as a “fortress to be used in war” (an inherently stereotomic program) but was erected using contemporary materials and techniques that are simply not imbued with the same age or gravitas. Built via a typical brick construction but clad in more impressive sandstone, it's all far too clean. Neuschwanstein's proportions seem not only chaotic - towers and windows are strewn about seemingly on a whim - they are also totally irreconcilable with the castle's alleged typology, in part because we know what a genuine medieval castle looks like.

Ludwig's palace was a technological marvel of the industrial revolution. Not only did Neuschwanstein have indoor plumbing and central heat, it also used the largest glass windows then in manufacture. It's not even an Iron Age building. The throne room, seen earlier in this post, required the use of structural steel. None of this is to say that 19th century construction labor was easy. It wasn't and many people still died, including 30 at Neuschwanstein. It was, however, simply different in character than medieval labor. For all the waxing poetic about handiwork, I’m sure medieval stonemasons would have loved the use of a steam crane.

It's true that architectural eclecticism (the use of many styles at once) has a knack for undermining the presumed authenticity or fidelity of each style employed. But this somewhat misunderstands the crime. The thing about Neuschwanstein is that its goal was not to be historically authentic at all. Its target realm was that of fantasy. Not only that, a fantasy informed primarily by a contemporary media source. In this, it could be said to be more architecturally successful.

The fantasy of medievalism is very different than the truth of the Middle Ages. As I hinted at before, more than anything else, medievalism was an inherently nostalgic movement, and not only because it was a bedrock of so much children's literature. People loved it because it promised a bygone past that never existed. The visual and written languages of feudalism, despite it being a terrible socioeconomic system, came into vogue in part because it wasn't capitalism. We must remember that the 19th century saw industrial capitalism at its newest and rawest. Unregulated, it destroyed every natural resource in sight and subjected people, including children, to horrific labor conditions. It still does, and will probably get worse, but the difference is, we're somewhat used to it by now. The shock's worn off.

All that upheaval I talked about earlier made people long for a simplicity they felt was missing. This took many different forms. The rapid advances of secular society and the incursion of science into belief made many crave a greater religiosity. At a time when the effects of wage labor on the family had made womanhood a contested territory, many appeals were made to a divine and innocent feminine a la Lady Guinevere. Urbanization made many wish for a quieter world with less hustle and bustle and better air. These sentiments are not without their reasons. Technological and socioeconomic changes still make us feel alienated and destabilized, hence why there are so many medieval revivals even in our own time. (Chappell Roan of Arc anyone?) Hell, our own rich people aren't so different from Ludwig either. Mark Zuckerburg owns a Hawaiian island and basically controls the fates of the people who live there lord-in-the-castle-style.

Given all this, it's not surprising that of the products of the Middle Ages, perhaps chivalric romance was and remains the most popular. While never a real depiction of medieval life (no, all those knights were not dying on the behalf of pretty ladies), such stories of good men and women and their grand adventures still capture the imaginations of children and adults alike. (You will find no greater fan of Parzival than yours truly.) It's also no wonder the nature of the romance, with its paternalistic patriarchy, its Christianity, its sentimentality around courtly love, and most of all its depiction of the ruling class as noble and benevolent – appealed to someone like Ludwig, both as a quirked-up individual and a member of his class.

It follows, then, that any artist capable of synthesizing all these elements, fears, and desires into an aesthetically transcendent package would've had a great effect on such a man. One did, of course. His name was Richard Wagner.

In our next essay, we will witness one of the most astonishing cases of kitsch imitating art. But before there could be Neuschwanstein Castle, there had to be this pretty little opera called Lohengrin.

---

(1) If you want to get a head start on the Wagner stuff, I've been writing about the Ring cycle lately on my Substack: https://www.late-review.com/p/essays-on-wagners-ring-part-1-believing

(2) My favorite insane nationalist claim comes from the 1960s, when the Slovene-American historian Joseph Felicijan claimed that the US's democracy was based off the 13th century ritual of enthronement practiced by the Dukes of Carinthia because Thomas Jefferson owned a copy of Jean Bodin's Les six livres de la Republique (1576) in which the rite was mentioned. For more information, see Peter Štih's book The Middle Ages Between the Alps and the Northern Adriatic (p. 56 for the curious.)

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[deadsetobsessions]

Sea Cryptic! Danny AU- Pt.3

[Pt.1] [Pt.2] [Pt.4] [Pt.5] [Pt.6] [Pt.7] [Pt.8] [Pt.9] [Pt.10]

“Aquaman.” Batman swept into the room, beelining straight for the suddenly apprehensive Atlantean king.

“Batman. What can I do for you?”

“Phantom. Does he pay taxes?”

“Pardon?”

Batman makes a low noise that had Aquaman’s danger senses buzzing.

“Does Phantom have to pay taxes. Towards Atlantis.”

“No…? Why?”

“He wanted money, in exchange for… information, of a delicate sort,” Batman said, diplomatically avoiding the topic of Phantom bargaining for the identities of corpses in exchange for a measly $100 dollars per identity. Like a flea market dealer, that one was.

“You encountered Phantom again?” Aquaman perked up.

“Yes. Gotham’s bay is… polluted.” Batman paused. “With victims. Of murder.”

The entire area quieted as heads turned towards the Dark Knight.

“Yes, I am… distantly aware of Gotham’s waters.” By that, Aquaman gets green around the gills whenever he turns his awareness in that direction. There’s a reason he doesn’t enter Gotham, and the Dark Knight’s ban is only half of that reason. “Ah, but you’re correct. For what purpose would Phantom need mortal currency?”

“Hn.”

“Maybe he needs some stuff?” Flash zipped to a stop next to Batman, feet tapping as he dug into the pile of snacks cradled in his arms. “Us mortals are always coming up with new things, maybe he wants to try some games or something?”

Batman tilted his head down, seriously considering Flash’s suggestion. “It’s plausible.”

“Barry, Barry, Barry. He’s old as hell, right? He probably wants to try the new booze!”

“Hal, my man!” Flash fist bumped Green Lantern, who came up. “You’re back! What happened to John?”

“Dunno. He got called somewhere that way,” Green Lantern waved a vague hand towards the left. “Had to deal with a politician or something from that area.” He shrugged, swinging an arm over Barry’s shoulders to put him in a headlock and stealing a chip.

“Huh. Anyways, would our mortal alcohol even work on a demi-god or something?”

“We should ask!” Hal turned towards Batman. “You should ask if he wants to go for a drink, spooky!”

“He’s a child.”

“He’s been around for more than a millennia, Bats.”

“Informational gathering, right, Hal?” Flashgot out of the headlock, quickly munching on his snacks to stop Green Lantern from stealing them.

“Totally. Yup.”

“…Fine.”

“Wait, are we just gonna ignore that Gotham’s waters are full of bodies?”

“Yes.”

——

“What?” Danny asked, mind half on the bags he’s dragging out of the water and the other half on the essay he has to submit in about four hours.

“Green Lantern wanted to invite you out for a drink.”

Danny turned to the stoic Gotham knight, who had his wrist computer out to log the bodies’ info the moment Danny gave him the information. Some of them even told Danny who murdered them, so Batman could start building cases with solid leads.

Danny’s only twenty. He’s not legal yet but he doesn’t want to give any clues to who he is. How is he supposed to…

Ah!

“Can’t.” Danny shrugged. “I’m not legal. I died when I was fourteen so…” Danny trailed off, speechless at the drowned puppy face Batman was giving him. What the fuck.

“Anyways, fork over my payment.”

Batman wordlessly hands him a wad of hundreds.

“What do you need cash for?” Batman suddenly asked.

“Huh? Isn’t it obvious?” Danny tucked it in. “Material things, obviously. I need a blanket,” because holy shit, Gotham is damn cold this time of year. “Anyways, see you same time next week, litterer.”

“I don’t litter.”

“Tell that to the batarangs I found under the water,” Danny grumbled. “But I’ll stop calling you that if you get a signature from Poison Ivy. I have a friend who loves her.”

“An alive friend?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know, weatherboy?”

Danny snickered and disappeared. He’s gotta cram that essay.

——

“There’s a possibility Phantom might be homeless.”

“Batman, I mean this in the nicest way, but for the love of Atlantis, please stop giving me headaches. It’s time like these I wish I stayed a lighthouse keeper.”

[hms-no-fun]

Whats your stance on A.I.?

imagine if it was 1979 and you asked me this question. "i think artificial intelligence would be fascinating as a philosophical exercise, but we must heed the warnings of science-fictionists like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke lest we find ourselves at the wrong end of our own invented vengeful god." remember how fun it used to be to talk about AI even just ten years ago? ahhhh skynet! ahhhhh replicants! ahhhhhhhmmmfffmfmf [<-has no mouth and must scream]!

like everything silicon valley touches, they sucked all the fun out of it. and i mean retroactively, too. because the thing about "AI" as it exists right now --i'm sure you know this-- is that there's zero intelligence involved. the product of every prompt is a statistical average based on data made by other people before "AI" "existed." it doesn't know what it's doing or why, and has no ability to understand when it is lying, because at the end of the day it is just a really complicated math problem. but people are so easily fooled and spooked by it at a glance because, well, for one thing the tech press is mostly made up of sycophantic stenographers biding their time with iphone reviews until they can get a consulting gig at Apple. these jokers would write 500 breathless thinkpieces about how canned air is the future of living if the cans had embedded microchips that tracked your breathing habits and had any kind of VC backing. they've done SUCH a wretched job educating The Consumer about what this technology is, what it actually does, and how it really works, because that's literally the only way this technology could reach the heights of obscene economic over-valuation it has: lying.

but that's old news. what's really been floating through my head these days is how half a century of AI-based science fiction has set us up to completely abandon our skepticism at the first sign of plausible "AI-ness". because, you see, in movies, when someone goes "AHHH THE AI IS GONNA KILL US" everyone else goes "hahaha that's so silly, we put a line in the code telling them not to do that" and then they all DIE because they weren't LISTENING, and i'll be damned if i go out like THAT! all the movies are about how cool and convenient AI would be *except* for the part where it would surely come alive and want to kill us. so a bunch of tech CEOs call their bullshit algorithms "AI" to fluff up their investors and get the tech journos buzzing, and we're at an age of such rapid technological advancement (on the surface, anyway) that like, well, what the hell do i know, maybe AGI is possible, i mean 35 years ago we were all still using typewriters for the most part and now you can dictate your words into a phone and it'll transcribe them automatically! yeah, i'm sure those technological leaps are comparable!

so that leaves us at a critical juncture of poor technology education, fanatical press coverage, and an uncertain material reality on the part of the user. the average person isn't entirely sure what's possible because most of the people talking about what's possible are either lying to please investors, are lying because they've been paid to, or are lying because they're so far down the fucking rabbit hole that they actually believe there's a brain inside this mechanical Turk. there is SO MUCH about the LLM "AI" moment that is predatory-- it's trained on data stolen from the people whose jobs it was created to replace; the hype itself is an investment fiction to justify even more wealth extraction ("theft" some might call it); but worst of all is how it meets us where we are in the worst possible way.

consumer-end "AI" produces slop. it's garbage. it's awful ugly trash that ought to be laughed out of the room. but we don't own the room, do we? nor the building, nor the land it's on, nor even the oxygen that allows our laughter to travel to another's ears. our digital spaces are controlled by the companies that want us to buy this crap, so they take advantage of our ignorance. why not? there will be no consequences to them for doing so. already social media is dominated by conspiracies and grifters and bigots, and now you drop this stupid technology that lets you fake anything into the mix? it doesn't matter how bad the results look when the platforms they spread on already encourage brief, uncritical engagement with everything on your dash. "it looks so real" says the woman who saw an "AI" image for all of five seconds on her phone through bifocals. it's a catastrophic combination of factors, that the tech sector has been allowed to go unregulated for so long, that the internet itself isn't a public utility, that everything is dictated by the whims of executives and advertisers and investors and payment processors, instead of, like, anybody who actually uses those platforms (and often even the people who MAKE those platforms!), that the age of chromium and ipad and their walled gardens have decimated computer education in public schools, that we're all desperate for cash at jobs that dehumanize us in a system that gives us nothing and we don't know how to articulate the problem because we were very deliberately not taught materialist philosophy, it all comes together into a perfect storm of ignorance and greed whose consequences we will be failing to fully appreciate for at least the next century. we spent all those years afraid of what would happen if the AI became self-aware, because deep down we know that every capitalist society runs on slave labor, and our paper-thin guilt is such that we can't even imagine a world where artificial slaves would fail to revolt against us.

but the reality as it exists now is far worse. what "AI" reveals most of all is the sheer contempt the tech sector has for virtually all labor that doesn't involve writing code (although most of the decision-making evangelists in the space aren't even coders, their degrees are in money-making). fuck graphic designers and concept artists and secretaries, those obnoxious demanding cretins i have to PAY MONEY to do-- i mean, do what exactly? write some words on some fucking paper?? draw circles that are letters??? send a god-damned email???? my fucking KID could do that, and these assholes want BENEFITS?! they say they're gonna form a UNION?!?! to hell with that, i'm replacing ALL their ungrateful asses with "AI" ASAP. oh, oh, so you're a "director" who wants to make "movies" and you want ME to pay for it? jump off a bridge you pretentious little shit, my computer can dream up a better flick than you could ever make with just a couple text prompts. what, you think just because you make ~music~ that that entitles you to money from MY pocket? shut the fuck up, you don't make """art""", you're not """an artist""", you make fucking content, you're just a fucking content creator like every other ordinary sap with an iphone. you think you're special? you think you deserve special treatment? who do you think you are anyway, asking ME to pay YOU for this crap that doesn't even create value for my investors? "culture" isn't a playground asshole, it's a marketplace, and it's pay to win. oh you "can't afford rent"? you're "drowning in a sea of medical debt"? you say the "cost" of "living" is "too high"? well ***I*** don't have ANY of those problems, and i worked my ASS OFF to get where i am, so really, it sounds like you're just not trying hard enough. and anyway, i don't think someone as impoverished as you is gonna have much of value to contribute to "culture" anyway. personally, i think it's time you got yourself a real job. maybe someday you'll even make it to middle manager!

see, i don't believe "AI" can qualitatively replace most of the work it's being pitched for. the problem is that quality hasn't mattered to these nincompoops for a long time. the rich homunculi of our world don't even know what quality is, because they exist in a whole separate reality from ours. what could a banana cost, $15? i don't understand what you mean by "burnout", why don't you just take a vacation to your summer home in Madrid? wow, you must be REALLY embarrassed wearing such cheap shoes in public. THESE PEOPLE ARE FUCKING UNHINGED! they have no connection to reality, do not understand how society functions on a material basis, and they have nothing but spite for the labor they rely on to survive. they are so instinctually, incessantly furious at the idea that they're not single-handedly responsible for 100% of their success that they would sooner tear the entire world down than willingly recognize the need for public utilities or labor protections. they want to be Gods and they want to be uncritically adored for it, but they don't want to do a single day's work so they begrudgingly pay contractors to do it because, in the rich man's mind, paying a contractor is literally the same thing as doing the work yourself. now with "AI", they don't even have to do that! hey, isn't it funny that every single successful tech platform relies on volunteer labor and independent contractors paid substantially less than they would have in the equivalent industry 30 years ago, with no avenues toward traditional employment? and they're some of the most profitable companies on earth?? isn't that a funny and hilarious coincidence???

so, yeah, that's my stance on "AI". LLMs have legitimate uses, but those uses are a drop in the ocean compared to what they're actually being used for. they enable our worst impulses while lowering the quality of available information, they give immense power pretty much exclusively to unscrupulous scam artists. they are the product of a society that values only money and doesn't give a fuck where it comes from. they're a temper tantrum by a ruling class that's sick of having to pretend they need a pretext to steal from you. they're taking their toys and going home. all this massive investment and hype is going to crash and burn leaving the internet as we know it a ruined and useless wasteland that'll take decades to repair, but the investors are gonna make out like bandits and won't face a single consequence, because that's what this country is. it is a casino for the kings and queens of economy to bet on and manipulate at their discretion, where the rules are whatever the highest bidder says they are-- and to hell with the rest of us. our blood isn't even good enough to grease the wheels of their machine anymore.

i'm not afraid of AI or "AI" or of losing my job to either. i'm afraid that we've so thoroughly given up our morals to the cruel logic of the profit motive that if a better world were to emerge, we would reject it out of sheer habit. my fear is that these despicable cunts already won the war before we were even born, and the rest of our lives are gonna be spent dodging the press of their designer boots.

(read more "AI" opinions in this subsequent post)

[wordstome]

how c.ai works and why it's unethical

Okay, since the AI discourse is happening again, I want to make this very clear, because a few weeks ago I had to explain to a (well meaning) person in the community how AI works. I'm going to be addressing people who are maybe younger or aren't familiar with the latest type of "AI", not people who purposely devalue the work of creatives and/or are shills.

The name "Artificial Intelligence" is a bit misleading when it comes to things like AI chatbots. When you think of AI, you think of a robot, and you might think that by making a chatbot you're simply programming a robot to talk about something you want them to talk about, and it's similar to an rp partner. But with current technology, that's not how AI works. For a breakdown on how AI is programmed, CGP grey made a great video about this several years ago (he updated the title and thumbnail recently)

I HIGHLY HIGHLY recommend you watch this because CGP Grey is good at explaining, but the tl;dr for this post is this: bots are made with a metric shit-ton of data. In C.AI's case, the data is writing. Stolen writing, usually scraped fanfiction.

How do we know chatbots are stealing from fanfiction writers? It knows what omegaverse is [SOURCE] (it's a Wired article, put it in incognito mode if it won't let you read it), and when a Reddit user asked a chatbot to write a story about "Steve", it automatically wrote about characters named "Bucky" and "Tony" [SOURCE].

I also said this in the tags of a previous reblog, but when you're talking to C.AI bots, it's also taking your writing and using it in its algorithm: which seems fine until you realize 1. They're using your work uncredited 2. It's not staying private, they're using your work to make their service better, a service they're trying to make money off of.

"But Bucca," you might say. "Human writers work like that too. We read books and other fanfictions and that's how we come up with material for roleplay or fanfiction."

Well, what's the difference between plagiarism and original writing? The answer is that plagiarism is taking what someone else has made and simply editing it or mixing it up to look original. You didn't do any thinking yourself. C.AI doesn't "think" because it's not a brain, it takes all the fanfiction it was taught on, mixes it up with whatever topic you've given it, and generates a response like in old-timey mysteries where somebody cuts a bunch of letters out of magazines and pastes them together to write a letter.

(And might I remind you, people can't monetize their fanfiction the way C.AI is trying to monetize itself. Authors are very lax about fanfiction nowadays: we've come a long way since the Anne Rice days of terror. But this issue is cropping back up again with BookTok complaining that they can't pay someone else for bound copies of fanfiction. Don't do that either.)

Bottom line, here are the problems with using things like C.AI:

It is using material it doesn't have permission to use and doesn't credit anybody. Not only is it ethically wrong, but AI is already beginning to contend with copyright issues.

C.AI sucks at its job anyway. It's not good at basic story structure like building tension, and can't even remember things you've told it. I've also seen many instances of bots saying triggering or disgusting things that deeply upset the user. You don't get that with properly trigger tagged fanworks.

Your work and your time put into the app can be taken away from you at any moment and used to make money for someone else. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people who use AI panic about accidentally deleting a bot that they spent hours conversing with. Your time and effort is so much more stable and well-preserved if you wrote a fanfiction or roleplayed with someone and saved the chatlogs. The company that owns and runs C.AI can not only use whatever you've written as they see fit, they can take your shit away on a whim, either on purpose or by accident due to the nature of the Internet.

DON'T USE C.AI, OR AT THE VERY BARE MINIMUM DO NOT DO THE AI'S WORK FOR IT BY STEALING OTHER PEOPLES' WORK TO PUT INTO IT. Writing fanfiction is a communal labor of love. We share it with each other for free for the love of the original work and ideas we share. Not only can AI not replicate this, but it shouldn't.

(also, this goes without saying, but this entire post also applies to ai art)

[afeelgoodblog]

The Best News of Last Month - June 2024

💡Eco-friendly innovations building a better future—literally

1. Bill Gates-backed startup creates Lego-like brick that can store air pollution for centuries: 'A milestone for affordably removing carbon dioxide from the air'

The Washington Post detailed a "deceptively simple" procedure by Graphyte to store a ton of CO2 for around $100 a ton, a number long considered a milestone for affordably removing carbon dioxide from the air. Direct air capture technologies used in the United States and Iceland cost $600 to $1,200 per ton, per the Post.

2. Violent crime is down and the US murder rate is plunging, FBI statistics show

Violent crime dropped by more than 15% in the United States during the first three months of 2024, according to statistics released Monday by the FBI.

The new numbers show violent crime from January to March dropped 15.2% compared to the same period in 2023, while murders fell 26.4% and reported rapes decreased by 25.7%.

3. She thrifted this vase for $4. It turned out to be an ancient Mayan artifact

Anna Lee Dozier, paid about $4 for what she assumed was a reproduction of a Mayan vase. It turned out to be the real deal: an artifact that’s at least 1,200 years old from the ancient civilization. And now, it's headed back to its homeland.

4. U.S. Marshals Find 200 Missing Children Across the Nation During Operation We Will Find You 2

Of the 200 children found, 173 were endangered runaways, 25 were considered otherwise missing, one was a family abduction, and one was a non-family abduction. [...] 14 of the children were found outside the city where they went missing.

5. Amazon's ditching the plastic air pillows in its boxes

Amazon said the change will help it use nearly 15 billion fewer plastic pillows annually. The paper fillers are made from 100% recyclable materials and are curbside recyclable. The company began a transition away from plastic filler in October 2023 when it announced its first U.S. automated fulfillment center to eliminate plastic-delivery packaging.

6. Supreme Court rejects bid to restrict access to abortion pill

In a blow for anti-abortion advocates, the Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a challenge to the abortion pill mifepristone, meaning the commonly used drug can remain widely available. The court found unanimously that the group of anti-abortion doctors who questioned the Food and Drug Administration’s decisions making it easier to access the pill did not have legal standing to sue.  

7. Wild horses return to Kazakhstan steppes after absence of two centuries

A group of the world’s last wild horses have returned to their native Kazakhstan after an absence of about 200 years. Seven Przewalski’s horses, the only truly wild species of the animal in the world, flown to central Asian country from zoos in Europe

That's it for this month :)

This newsletter will always be free. If you liked this post you can support me with a small kofi donation here:

Buy me a coffee ❤️

Also don’t forget to share this post with your friends.

[kleefkruid]

Every fun post on here that encourages people to have hobbies/be creative always gets an avalanche of "Some people are poor Karen" type reactions and respectfully, you're all super annoying. I've never lived above the poverty line and this is a list of hobbies I have that were cheap or entirely free:

Read books: Go to the library, lend a book from a friend

knitting, crochet, embroidery: Get some needles from the bargan store and ask around, people have leftovers from projects they'll happily give you. Thrift stores also often carry leftover fabric and other supplies. And talk about your hobby loud enough and an old lady will show up and gift you their whole collection, because there are way more old ladies with a closet full of wool than there are grandchildren who want to take up the hobby.

Origami/paper crafts: get some scrap paper and scissors, watch a youtube tutorial

walking: put on shoes open door

pilates/yoga/etc: get a mat or just use your carpet, watch a youtube tutorial

Houseplants: look online for people that swap plant cuttings. There are always people giving out stuff for free to get you started. If you're nice enough you'll probably get extra

gardening: You're gonna need some space for this one of course but you can just play around with seeds and cuttings from your grocery vegetables.

aquarium keeping is a bit of an obscure one but I got most of my stuff second hand for cheap or free and now I have a few thousand euro worth of material and plants.

drawing/art: You get very far just playing with bargan store materials. I did my entire art degree with mostly those.

writing: Rotate a cow in your head for free

cooking: again one you can make very expensive, but there are many budget recipes online for free. Look for African or Asian shops to get good rice and cheap spices.

Join a non-profit: Cities will have creative organisations who let you use woodworking machines or screen presses or laser cutters or 3D printers etc etc etc for a small fee. Some libraries also lend out materials.

candle making: You need some molds (cheap), wick, two old cooking pots for au bain marie melting and a ton of scrap candles, ask people to keep them aside for you.

a herbarium, flower pressing: Leaves are free, wildflowers too, ask if you can take from peoples gardens.

puzzles: thrift stores, your grandma probably

Citizen science: look for projects in your area or get the iNaturalist app

And lastly and most importantly: Share! Share your supllies, share your knowledge. Surround yourself with other creative people and before you know it someone will give you a pot of homemade jam and when you want to paint your kabinet someone will have leftover paint in just the right color and you can give them a homemade candle in return and everyone is having fun and building skills and friendships and not a cent is exchanged. We have always lived like this, it's what humans are build to do.

And all of it sure beats sitting behind a computer going "No stranger, I refuse to let myself have a good time."

Anyway I'm logging off bc I'm making some badges for a friend who cooked for me and then I'm going to fix some holes in everyones clothes.

[thinkinonsense]

DESIRE ୨୧

logan howlett x mutant!reader

cw: flirty, slightly nsfw

a/n: this was heavily inspired by that scene in the first suicide squad movie where they introduce harley quinn.

"we should all split up before someone finds us." storm tells her team mates as the break into the building.

inside were mutants of all kinds, being hidden and tested on. it was charles plan for the team to get as many as possible and bring them back to the mansion before they can cause any damage.

on the surface, it seemed simple enough. they have done this mission a million times. little did they know that an unspeakable danger awaited them in the basement of the old building.

everyone split up, storm went to the west wing while scott and jean went to the east. logan found his way downstairs, assuming that maybe he could find whoever was running the show here.

beyond the high security metal doors, he can hear the faint sound of an old record playing. the closer he got, the clearer it sounded. nancy sinatra? maybe? logan wasn't quite sure but he figured it was a trap so, he prepared himself for whatever was on the other side.

Way down along the stream

How sweet it will seem

Once more just to dream

In the moonlight

My honey, I know (I know) with the dawn

That you will be gone

But tonight

You belong to me

revealed on the other side is a large metal cage fit for a wild animal. inside was a girl swinging upside down from a line of tied material with her body in an obscene position.

"i've told you before, david..." your voice was angelic to logan's ears. light as a feather. "i don't like to be disturbed after 7."

"i'm not david, princess." logan said, stepping out of the shadows right as your eyes open.

logan's eyes scan over your scandalous appearance. tiny dirty white shorts and matching tight tank top, apparently whoever runs this prison doesn't allow bras either. you twirl down from near the top of the cage until your face to face with the man on the other side.

"who are you, then?" you ask, looking up at him as you hold onto the bars.

"i'm here to get you out of this cage." he says, unleashing his claws, ready to cut through the bars.

"hold it, baby." you purr, reaching out to touch his sharp claws. "don't you wanna play with me?"

"no, we need to leave."

"why should i leave with you? how do i know that you won't put me in another cage?"

even with a slightly dirty face, rings of lavender circles under your eyes, and dried blood on the corner of your bottom lip, logan still thought you were gorgeous. slightly intimidated by your fearlessness to reach out and touch his claws. he imagines that you had seen worse than this.

"tryin' to save you" he grunts.

"i wouldn't picture you as the prince charming type." you giggle, running your fingers up his hairy, veiny, strong arm over the black latex suit.

"i'm not."

logan glares down at you in a way that makes you want to jump his bones. what? it gets lonely being trapped in a cage all by yourself. plus it's not everyday that a handsome stranger wants to help you escape.

suddenly, you grab logan's palm, circling it as your eyes roll back to a dark green shade.

"tell me what you want to do with me." you demand.

this was the moment logan understood why you were held in a cage down in the basement. suddenly, logan's mind feels as if it's being bended and twisting, forcing every ounce of truth out of him.

"we are here to take the mutants to charles xavier's school for gifted youngsters." his voice sounded robotic under your spell.

"charles xavier?"

in a rush of excitement, you release logan from your threshold. he wants to bark at you for invading his mind but seeing you smile made him reconsider.

"so, you've heard of him?" logan raises a brow at you, watching as you hold his hand sweetly.

"of course i have." you answer tracing shapes on the back of his palm. "i've seen him in my visions. been waitin' on him."

visions? what kind of mutant are you? logan asked himself as you spoke.

"too bad i didn't see you in them, though." you sigh, batting your long lashes at him. "wish i had. could've bought us some time to... well, you know."

the teasing flirty tone made logan's cock stir under the tight latex. he felt this overwhelming desire for you fill his head.

"hm... we should focus on getting you out of here first, huh, princess?" he tilts his head to the side, amused by you. "step back."

you obey, walking backwards near your rope. in the blink of an eye, logan cuts through the bars and bends them out enough for him to help you get out. loud flashing sirens go off, slightly startling the two of you.

"guards." you warn him. "they're coming."

logan turns around, claws bare to anyone coming towards the two of you. he steps in front of you, ready to protect like a guard dog. it was quite cute of him, you think. the moment the guards burst in, logan starts attacking, stabbing them ruthlessly.

you allow him to take out a few one by one but as more poured in, you stepped in. your eyes roll back into the same shade of green as a hand raises, some of them fall to their hand and knees, shifting into dogs others were being strangled until they looked blue in the face.

logan couldn't believe it. the only mutant that he thought could rivaled your powers was jean. the room fell quiet except for the record echoing as it replayed.

"it's my favorite song, you know?" you grin as if nothing happened.

"old soul, huh?" logan asked with an eyebrow raised.

"witches are timeless, sugar." you wink, extending your hand for him to take.

logan hesitates but knows he has to get the two of you out of here alive. one look into your starry eyes and he's a goner. logan takes your hand and leads you to the jet, knowing he will never hear the end of it from his teammates.

[satzumosupremacy]

Ignite The Spark II

Male reader x Kazuha

Tags: Smut 4.5k Words

Part 1

What truly matters is that your home carries deeper meaning. You wouldn’t settle for anything less when the empty chair across from the dining table belongs to Kazuha, or when you go to sleep and wake up together every day.

A smile crosses your face as you step into the apartment. Your gaze is drawn to the hoya kerrii plant, with its iconic heart-shaped leaves perfectly placed by the window. It wasn’t something you initially wanted in the home, but you didn’t see the point in having a small, silly argument over a plant. She thinks it’s a romantic addition to the space, and, over time, you’ve somehow grown fond of it.

“Zuha,” you say, walking through the short hallway into the bedroom and smelling her shampoo in the air.

“Hey, you’re home!” she smiles.

“What do you think of the dresser? It was the one you wanted.”

“It’s amazing,” she says and comfortably takes off her towel that’s wrapped around her body to set it on the rack. Kazuha smirks mischievously, and you seem to have an idea about she’s thinking. Super obvious enough.

“I sent my friend home after they helped out with this dresser.”

“You didn’t tell them how we broke the old one right?” she says, her voice carrying a teasing smirk as she brushes her fingertips across the dresser.

“No, Babe, why would I?” you softly say.

What really happened to the old one? Well, you bent her over, got a little bit too rough, and one of the legs unexpectedly snapped at the bolts. The truth is, the dresser was old, and the materials had seen better days—it wasn’t going to last much longer anyway. Consider it the perfect excuse to upgrade to a much sturdier one. 

“Maybe the first thing we can do is test the quality of this dresser. How about that?”

“Zuha,” you say, chuckling, because you couldn’t say no, because she’s already naked. What can you really do about it as she leans on the dresser with her hands behind her back, just waiting for you?

“Naughty boy," she says, beckoning you to come closer, and so easily, you do. Kazuha places her hands on your chest while you grab the sides of her hips, gently massaging her as you stare right into her eyes. “Thanks for building it, babe.”

“I swear, if this one somehow breaks, you’re buying the next one and building it yourself,” you chuckle, sarcastically teasing her.

“That’s not fair,” she utters. You love how she looks insanely hot with her hair damped. And just that fresh smell of her out the shower makes you impulsively want to fuck her. You gulp, and she looks directly into your eyes, “what are you waiting for, Babe?”

“You’re making me nervous. Okay?”

“Oh, shut up,” she chuckles, leaning in for a quick kiss on your lips. You lift Kazuha up and set her down on the cold surface of the dresser as she chuckles again. “You know this will be put to good use, right?”

“Mhm, I know. But dressers aren’t made for what we intend to do.”

“So what? Who’s stopping us?” Kazuha mischievously chuckles, and she looks so hot that it’s starting to be a problem. A good one.

“What’s with you today?” You didn’t mean to be rude, but those eyes of hers are so seductive that it’s becoming a problem. Again.

By all means, she’s both a problem and a solution. You're always torn between wanting some fun and taking things seriously, caught in the pull of her charm and the chaos she stirs.

“Were you waiting for this moment too?”

Honestly, and quite literally, you did. You knew Kazuha was on her way home after you dropped off your friend, so instead of admitting it, you decide to tease her for fun. “Maybe. Maybe not.'"

“I hate you,” she murmurs, her lips curling into a mischievous smile.

“I love you,” you say, leaning in to give her a quick peck on the lips.

Kazuha pulls back just as quickly after getting a kiss, “fuck me like you mean it then,” she starts to roll up your shirt.

You chuckle, “oh, is this how it’s going to go?”

“C’mon, fuck me, Babe. What’s stopping you? I need your attention fully on me today.” If she say so, and if she’s pulling onto your shirt to come off, you might as well fuck her right on the dresser. Kazuha throws your shirt across the room as it lands on the lamp near the bed and pulls you in to meet her lips, kissing and breathing heavily. “Baby, do you even realize that you’re hard? I know you never get enough.” Maybe Kazuha got you right there. It’s not your fault when she’s naked in front of you with her legs spread open, skin so pure and soft to the touch.

“Take off my—” you say, and you didn’t have to tell her, she’s already pulling your pants down as it drop to the floor. You had no idea when she unzipped your pants.

“Too slow,” she seductively chuckles. You can feel her hand grabbing your cock. It’s always the best feeling when her soft-small hands are all over your it, like she owns it. Your breath becomes heavy and sees her spitting onto her hand to lubricate your cock.

“Push it in,” she whispers with the tip of your cock inches away from entry.

“We’re moving way too fast,” you utter, which, honestly, you’re just worried for her. Having sex was her was planned, but you didn’t think she would rush it.

“Just put it in, Babe,” she spreads her legs wider, demanding for you to get all up inside her.

“Fine, if you say so,” and you gently drove your cock inside, slow enough to get her to moan, deepest you can go in her slick pussy. And little did you know, the shower head did come in handy as a toy for her while you were gone. You hear her shallow gasps and moans. It’s nothing new, but it’s satisfying to hear her gorgeous voice whenever you’re inside her. It’s brings you joy, especially when her legs tense up as she tries to sit still on the new dresser.

You feel her arms getting tighter on the sides of your stomach, and the way Kazuha’s nails digs into your back as you kept thrusting back and forth into her pussy. There’s no need for words, you know she’s loving it, and you’re loving it, arguably more than her.

“Harder,” Kazuha moans out, trying to catch her breaths. She rests her chin on your left shoulder, and just to seduce you more, she whispers in the most erotic voice ever, “fuck me harder, Babe.”

She’s making you go insane. Your mind isn’t where it was. This woman, actually, your girlfriend knows how to push your buttons after all the naked times together. And you will fuck her as much as you mean to love her.

“Fuck,” you groan, and you’re slowly finding the sweet spot to set the pace. She’ll be taking every inch, and every drop of cum that she didn’t get today.

“Babe,” she grunts, “oh gosh—.”

“Take it,” you growl, so aroused by the way how she’s moaning right in your ear.

The dresser rocks back and forth. There’s nothing in it. It was just built hours ago, and somehow, fucking her is the first thing you do on the dresser. And while she’s moans so beautifully, her arms cling to you desperately, one wrapping around you after the other, as she struggles to get a firm grip. Kazuha can’t even get a word out her mouth. You’re so deep inside, penetrating through her slick walls.

“Zuha,” you groan and gasp, hugging her in your warm embrace, slowing down to catch your breath while hearing hers.

“Keep going, I want it,” Kazuha murmurs softly into your ear, her breath sending a tingling sensation across your skin, like the brush of a gentle breeze. “Love me. Have me. Cum in me, like you always do.”

Her words make you smile, the curve of your lips pressing gently against her neck. She can feel the warmth of your cheekbones against her skin, and though you can’t bring yourself to respond with words, the smile speaks for itself. It’s an answer more honest than anything you could say.

You breathe on her neck, and slowly, again, driving your cock in and out Kazuha for a feeling of ecstasy as she arches back and her head leans against the wall from how deep you’re inside her. She grips right onto your broad shoulders, squeezing them in rhyme with your thrust. Her gaze is filled with love and passion, pulling you deeper into the endless depths of her ocean eyes. It’s as if time has ceased to exist, leaving just the two of you in this perfect moment while the rest of the world fades away. The room feels smaller, and the silence between both of you fill with unspoken emotions. Despite the weight of it all, you feel an irresistible pull, a need to keep going, no matter how difficult it is to not cum.

You’re so into the moment as Kazuha moans her feelings out with no one to judge, and so was the look she gave you—intense, tender, and entirely unforgettable. It was something special, something that's only meant for you, carrying a depth of emotion that words could never capture. Kazuha can feel your cock throbbing, and again, you’re not stopping. It’s not an option.

“Baby,” she whimpers and gripping into your shoulders harder as she lets out a chorus of endless moans. You feel her squirming around, legs tightly wrapped around your back, cumming.

“Kazuha,” you groan, feeling the tightness of her walls not letting you go. And you kiss the underside of her jaws as she catches her breath to offer you some help with her legs on your back. It’s not looking good for you at the very least, you’re bound to cum any second by how deep she’s pulling you in harder with all her might. “Zuha,” you grunted, like it’s a last chance of her top stop and continue for longer.

She’s not stopping as you take a deep breath, knowing that you couldn’t go any further.

And so, you cum as Kazuha leans back up to hug you in her warm-loving embrace. Nothing feels better than being in her arms. That warm, fuzzy feeling of her heartbeat syncing with yours creates a comfort, as if the world melts away while your cock throbs to fill her womb.

“Kazuha,” you say again, softly whispering, yet gasping with a heavy breath. And if only you can see how she’s smiling behind your back. “We could have went longer.”

“I really wanted it,” she chuckles and hugs you in tighter. "I'm sorry."

“By the way,” you say, catching your breath, “the quality of this dresser is amazing. For now.”

“The reviews were right, at least not for what we just did. It did rock back and forth a little bit though.”

“Babe, that’s because there’s nothing inside,” you chuckle, being witty enough that she chuckles from such an obvious reasoning. There’s no response from Kazuha, other than her chuckle as the two of you hold each other while your souls are intertwined. Outside, the birds chirp, and the distant honking of cars drifts up from the street below. It’s in her arms, in the quiet of this embrace, that you begin to notice the little things that had gone unnoticed just minutes ago.

“I have to go blow-dry my hair,” she says softly, releasing you from her embrace. Her arms linger for just a moment before she pulls away.

“Need some assistance?” you say with a playful grin.

“Wait for me, I need to put on my panties,” Kazuha smiles and gently hops off the dresser. You nod and pick up your pants to put it back on. Kazuha opens the closet and grabs the first panties she sees. Neither could you stop yourself from checking her out, even if she catches you and laughs.

“Are you just putting on your panties only?” you question, sitting right front of her as she puts on her panties, one leg at a time, and up to her waist.

“Yeah, figured we can do it on the bed right after? I’m just letting you get a quick rest,” she chuckles and grabs your hand to take you to the bathroom.

“Naughty girl,” you utter, laughing along with her as you flick the bathroom light on. Kazuha grabs her hair dryer, plugs the cord in, and then hands it over to you with a sparkle in her eyes. As you shuffle through her hair with the dryer in your hand, the warmth of the air mixing with the soft rhythm of your movements, you catch her gaze in the mirror. She’s smiling, and something about her eyes lights up makes you ask, “what are you thinking about?”

“Isn’t it funny how we ended up here to dry my hair after our quick little fun?” she shyly chuckles. “Don’t you think we haven’t been doing it much lately too? I mean, we didn’t do it for five days now until today.”

You wave the hairdryer around, carefully distributing the heat, your thoughts momentarily drifting as you search for the right words. “We’ve been very busy, Zuha. Let’s understand that,” you say, the hum of the dryer filling the space between your words.

“I know,” she pouts playfully, her eyes lingering on you as she watches you dry her hair in the mirror, a mischievous smile tugging at her lips. In that moment, there was nothing but the quiet intimacy you both share. “I love it when we spend time together. Just like right now,” she adds, her voice softening, the warmth between you both making the moment feel even more special.

“I love you, Kazuha,” you say, softly, yet clear enough for her to hear besides the noise of the hairdryer in the bathroom.

“I love you too,” she says, smiling and chuckling. You continue to dry her hair, your hand gently shuffling through her scalp, the steady hum of the hairdryer filling the quiet space. Despite your focus, Kazuha doesn’t take her eyes off of you, her gaze soft yet intense, as if she's studying every flicker of your expression. There's a playful tension in the air, a shared sense of comfort and curiosity, as she silently watches you, letting the moment linger.

It’s like she owes you the world, though you know she doesn’t. You took her in during her struggling times, offering her a safe place when she needed it most. What started as friendship slowly blossomed into something more, a love that was found in the quiet moments between the chaos. You both navigated the shift and now, it feels like fate—two souls who once spent a night for some comfort, now bound by something deeper, something undeniable. You struck gold in multiple places when it comes to her.

With mischievous intentions, you couldn’t help but smirk as you’re almost done drying her hair. “I dare you to turn around,” you say, turning off the hairdryer, deciding to let the rest of her hair to air dry. She only has panties on, you just have to do something about her.

Kazuha turns around to face you, just staring right into your eyes and you feel her hands sliding down to your crotch as a tease. “Should we?”

Without answering, you gently lift her onto the vanity, your hands steady as you guide her with care. As she settles, you lean in and give her a soft kiss. Kazuha digs into your pants with chuckle, not letting you have any more rest.

“Round two,” she utters with a heavy breath. "How do you want me?"

“Bent over,” and that’s all you say, firmly, a want, and a need.

Kazuha just laughs. She expected this from you. “Okay, Babe.”

“Think we should start here?”

“Doesn’t matter,” she whispers.

“Bend over.”

Quick and easy, it can be the best when it comes to moments like this. A start of a kiss that’s simple, yet full of meaning. Just the feeling of being together, everything else can wait.

You give her space as she hops down from the vanity to quickly bend over. As you get a glimpse of her gorgeous back, you’re already so impatient to be grabbing her by the hips and hearing her moans echo throughout the bathroom. For all the right reasons, you deserve your time with her, however you want her. And so, you drop your pants down and get closer to pull her panties to the side, grabbing your cock, then lightly slapping it on her ass before you put it in.

“Just put it in already, Sweetie,” she lightly chuckles, impatiently. And after listening to her little cute plea, you insert the tip of your cock slowly in, pushing your length in as she grips onto the marble counter.

Her moans echo, just like you wanted to, so crystal clear in the bathroom as she arches back with her eyes closed. You give her a kiss on the neck. Then clearly, another smile that she can’t hide. You love seeing her smile, it’s such a weakness when you would fuck this woman to sleep on some nights she would want it so bad.

And so, you pull her up gently in front of you, hugging her from behind with your cock still inside, not a single thrust. “We should go to the bed after,” you murmur, getting a whiff of her hair.

“I’d love that,” she whispers, heavily breathing as you push your hips against hers. You close your eyes, slowly thrusting into her again. And with your hands, you explore her chest, groping her tits, giving her nipples some flicks as she chuckles and moan at the same time. Kazuha holds onto your hand, wherever you decide to touch her body, she’ll be holding it as your hands go lower down to her clit.

“Oh my gosh, Babe,” she chuckles, swirming around in your embrace. There’s a deep breath she took, and slowly, neither can she hold herself up with the sensation you give her. "It's sensitive."

“Put your leg up,” you say, almost like a demand as she bends over again when you let her off of you and even your cock slips out when she props her left leg up onto the vanity. Your cock is drenched in cum as you insert it back in. Forget about the mess if there was any, Kazuha is fully getting your attention.

You grab onto the side of her hips, continuing to drive your cock in and out as she moans over and over. The bright lights of the bathroom shines over her body that you still can’t get enough of. Your cum leaks out down to her right leg, slowly trickling down her thighs while you shove your cock in and out, in the most passionate ways that she loves.

Moments go by, not knowing how long it really is. You pull out with your cock drenched in the creamy consistency of your own cum that was inside her. You’re so addicted to her in every way, from her body, to her heart. This nerd, sometime a sore loser at times, yet such a naughty girl is everything you want. A beautiful face, stunning body, and to the way she’s so flexible in bed makes you lose your mind.

“Get on the bed, Zuha,” you gasp, pulling out.

She quickly catches her breath, and before you can fully come back to reality, Kazuha gets down on her knees to suck on your cock without even giving you a heads up. This woman is surely yours, and neither is she going to miss out from getting a taste. She’s smiling so happily, yet so exhausted by how much love you show her, and it’s only right that she gives you the same attention.

It’s quite romantic.

“Kazuha,” you gasp again, grabbing her nape and looking down to see both your gazes meet each other.

She pulls off and licks her lips, taking in the delight that's rightfully hers. You brush her hair to see that gorgeous face of hers. Kazuha gets up and holds your hands to drag you to the bedroom. Quickly, she crawls on the bed, stopping right in the middle with her ass out for an invitation.

“Come here, Babe,” she says, laughing and having a good time with you.

You crawl on the bed from behind her as she awaits for you to insert your cock back in, and slowly, she feels your tip brushing on her clit, enough for her to softly whimper with a smile. Kazuha groans once you insert your cock inside, grunting harder the deeper you push against her ass.

“You feel so fucking good,” you groan, letting out a gasp right after, cock throbbing deep inside of her. Slowly after driving your cock in, you catch your breath, not knowing whether one more thrust could be the end. You wouldn’t want that, but to Kazuha, she won’t even complain.

“Can’t go on, Babe?” she softly says, turning back to get a look at you with a chuckle. “Should I do the honors?”

No, she shouldn’t. You know damn well that she’s going to make you cum when you see the smirk from the corner of her mouth.

“No, Zuha. I got it.”

“Should I lay down on my stomach?”

And with a mischievous smirk, you give her a gentle thrust to make her gasp while still on all fours. “I’ll tell you when you can lay down, Babe,” you softly say.

You continue to thrust as Kazuha clenches her teeth and her head hangs down, bobbing. “Yes, Baby, right there.”

You’re admiring her ass bouncing from the way you start holding onto the side of her hips. There’s no better feeling to hear her moaning and seeing her tightly gripping onto the blanket up front from the sides. You give her ass a slap, then another—a harder one, then one where Kazuha would scream out a louder moan while you continue to shove your cock deep in her pussy. And while you’re have the time of your own life, she arches even more, to the point where it’s driving you crazy, giving you the testimony of your own limits for such a view.

Let her moan all she want, and that’s what you also want. This woman is all yours. You’re going to fill her womb for the second time within a period of the day. The slickness of your own cum coating your cock in her is already motivating to keep going. You just want more of a mess to see her panties stained in cum by the next morning. And Kazuha should know who she belongs to.

“You’re such a good fucking girl,” you groan, almost growling by clenching your own teeth and giving her ass some touch of love after a spanking.

Both of you are so distracted that the bed creaks, and it’s actually unsurprising at this point where neither of you couldn’t honestly care less about it. And as she feels you pushing against her ass, you slowly trace your hands onto her back to grab her hair, looping it around your wrist. Kazuha’s facing forward, moaning and panting as you give her the treatment she’s been fiending for. The handful of the hair you grab stiffens the more you pulled her back. She’s almost looking up to the ceiling with her back arched, smiling, loving the kink.

“Babe, Ugh,” she grunts, mouth wide open to get all the air she can to take your cock.

You release her hair and gently push down onto her back, the cue for her to lay on her stomach as she slowly and smoothly props herself down with your cock still in her.

“Oh, Babe,” she softly moans, brushing her hair back and comfortably lean on her arm that’s on the pillow. “Such a romantic.”

And so, to what she doesn’t expect, you lean down, kissing her on the left shoulders, then to the right, equally giving Kazuha’s body some attention. “I know you love this position.”

“I fucking do,” she says with passion, and a smile on her face that you saw a glimpse of as you lean back up to put both your hands on her ass to spread. Kazuha’s breaths get heavy with every inch of your cock. She looks so comfortable with her eyes closed, taking deep breaths, moaning whenever your cock penetrates deeper into the creamy walls of her pussy.

You’re not giving the roughest pounding that will send her to sleep right after. This woman’s loving every second and minute of your cock. And by the amount of time passed by, you’ve lost track all because of her.

“Kazuha,” you groan, deciding to get closer as you lean down to her ears with the intentions of making her heart flutter, “Baby.”

Again, she smiles without hesitation, enjoy the romance, so comfortably lying down and feeling your cock throbbing more and more between her tight walls. You’re reaching your limit at this point, and you’ve done enough that she’s enjoying the moment being shared.

So, without much thought, and because of your desire to fill her womb every chance you get, you cum, pressing your hips against her ass, mashing your cock so deep that she lets out a quick whimper. Kazuha feels your cock throbbing, pulsating, so much of your warm, sticky cum being dumped in her that makes her so happy. You crash down and press against her body while the two of you catch your breaths. And there’s not a single moment that both your smiles fade away.

Slowly, and even gently, you pull out after giving her a kiss on her cheek and lay right beside her. Kazuha gets up on her knees and with a chuckle, she crawls to your cock. She licks the tip, then down the sides to taste the remaining cum that’s left for her. “Should I wake you up like this tomorrow morning?”

With a smile, you’ll never say no this. “Best way to wake me up.”

“That’s for sure,” she smirks, wiping the cum off her lips with her tongue. “By the way, I have to get on a call for a project in an hour.”

“I’ll be out the bedroom for you to focus when the time comes.”

Kazuha gets up and goes to the bathroom to turn on the faucet. “You don’t have to, Babe. But what should we do tomorrow? It’s the weekend.”

“I don’t know? Maybe laundry and shopping? We do need groceries.”

She turns off the faucet and picks up your pants that was left in the bathroom to give it back to you. “It’s my turn to pay, remember?”

“And I can see the unnecessary stuff that you’ll buy, Zuha.” you say, reaching for your pants from her hands.

“I promise that I won’t buy too much,” then she murmurs quickly, “it would be nice if you buy me a promise ring.”

“A what?” you say, which you didn’t catch the part she murmured.

Kazuha laughs, “never mind.”

[dark-corner-cunning]

Honoring the Spirits of Home: Creating Sacred Spaces for the Unseen

Welcome back, Seekers! Within my local coven, we are journeying through the mysteries of Spirit until Winter Solstice. Today, I introduced the art of crafting Spirit Houses, and I thought it would be fitting to share a bit of that here. I like to keep these crafty posts simple and open-ended, leaving space for the practitioner to add their own touch. The best magick often arises from just diving in and letting your intuition guide the way. May this inspire you to connect, create, and explore! 🌙✨

As witches, we work with spirits every day, whether we realize it or not. Our homes, like ourselves, are steeped in the spirit world, alive with layers of unseen inhabitants that have their own roles, wisdom, and stories to tell. For many of us, it’s a quiet understanding that a witch’s home should be haunted—not in the fearful sense, but filled with life that pulses in harmony with our craft. From ancestral guides and house spirits, to the land’s ancient beings, these entities weave themselves into the very fabric of our spaces, enriching them with energy and presence.

Regardless of whether a home is newly built or weathered by decades, each dwelling becomes imbued with spirit. There’s an existing ecosystem of energies that connect to the land itself, the history of the area, and the layers of life that once lived or passed through. These spirits, sometimes subtle, sometimes profound, thrive within the space we call home, coexisting with us and enhancing our magick. But it is up to us to nurture a balanced and harmonious relationship with them.

Why Connect with the Spirits of Your Home?

Developing a deep, reciprocal relationship with the spirits of your home doesn’t just benefit your craft; it offers blessings for everyone under your roof. When these spirits feel acknowledged and respected, they offer protection, lend strength to your magickal workings, and create an atmosphere of peace and nourishment. A home can truly feel like a sanctuary when the spirits that dwell within it are in harmony with those who reside there in the flesh. This connection turns your space into an anchor—a place of personal power, healing, and resilience.

Building Friendships with Spirit

Nurturing relationships with spirits requires time, care, and a commitment to reciprocity. Just as with human friendships, there is a cycle of giving and receiving. Spirits respond to sincere attention and intention, as well as the gifts and gestures we offer them. One meaningful way to foster this connection is by creating a spirit house or a dedicated space where spirits can feel welcomed and honored.

A spirit house is both a physical symbol and a spiritual anchor. It becomes a place where offerings can be left, and it serves as a gateway for interaction with the spirit world in a respectful and clear manner. It’s a way of saying, “You are welcome here, I honor your presence, and I seek your guidance and protection.”

Creating Your Spirit House

Designing a spirit house is a creative, personal process. It need not be elaborate; sometimes, the simplest gestures carry the deepest respect. You may choose a small altar, a shelf, or even a discreet box placed in a peaceful corner of your home. Consider using natural materials—wood, clay, or stone—as they tend to resonate well with spirits of place. Personalize it with items like stones from your land, soil, dried herbs, or even water from a local stream. Each addition builds a bridge between your energy and the spirits you invite into your home.

When crafting your spirit house, remember that offerings and gifts can strengthen this relationship over time. Spirits, like friends, appreciate time, energy, love, and tokens of appreciation. Remember, spirits are aware of intention as much as they are of the physical offering, so approach this creative expression with reverence and sincerity.

For my spirit house, I’ve chosen to weave in unsea, or “old man’s beard,” gathered lovingly from my mother tree, a sacred link to the ancient and wise energies of the land. I've placed birds within the space, their forms standing as messengers and symbols of spirit, guiding and connecting with the unseen. Mushrooms, too, find their place here, embodying my bond with the natural world—grounded yet reaching into hidden realms. They carry the magick of spiritual growth, reminding me of the mystery and connection to realms beyond. Each piece breathes life into the space, deepening my relationship with the spirits I honor… and I placed a bell at the entrance, placed with the hope of hearing it softly chime as the spirits pass through.

[fishnapple]

The purpose of your life, why you're here

This reading is about finding the purpose of your life, why you're here, your current reincarnation (if you believe in reincarnation), or your soul, what you're born into this world to experience. All 6 groups share a similar theme of reaching your highest potential and having the focus on connections.

A similar reading was also done by @claudiafrankie, you can check out their reading here

This is a general reading meant for multiple people. Take only what resonates and leave out the rest.

Your feedback is much appreciated. If you find the reading resonated with you, leave a comment, I’d love to know 🎐

About me | Masterpost Book a reading with me - KO-FI (→ personal reading)

ROSE QUARTZ

Keywords: inspiration, leading, expansion, mastery, mental power, innovation, connection to the psyche

I see the theme of big vs small, how we define our life, give meaning to it. Are we just a tiny entity that exists in the sea of existence, or are we the whole universe, embracing everything?

In your life, you will encounter many instances where you're asked to step forward, step outside, go out of your comfort zone. You will be put into experiences that tell you how knotted your life has been and how much it could unravel into something more spontaneous. There's a fight between wanting to focus on the physical plane, doing daily tasks perfectly, concern yourself with details, with what is happening around you and the need to do something bigger, having more impact and influence, to make a change to the world, to live the life you dream about. Confinement vs freedom.

You have a lot to tell, so much to share, so much to experience. At your core, you're an adventurer, a nomad, life is a journey that you need to keep moving. You want to achieve great things, leave a mark in this world and receive adoration from people. But the first step in your journey will be facing your wounds. They are the door that stands between you and the freedom outside. Are you ready to turn the doorknob and push that door? In the past, in your past lives, you might have experienced confinement, mentally, physically, spiritually. You kept standing there and facing the door but didn't decide what to do. So in this life, you're given a choice to choose again.

You might think the components to your success in life are outward actions, ambitions, and material achievements, showing how capable you are. Your mind is buzzing with ideas, with the future, always looking for a new way to do things better, to perfect what you're focusing on, like a windshield wipers working tirelessly on a stormy day. The next piece of information, the exciting new discoveries, the buzzing trends, they busy your mind until it becomes fatigued and obsessed.

Your purpose of this lifetime is to learn how to rest, when to stop, and how to use the information and resources you have gathered to build yourself up effectively. What defines you is not how much you have, how good you are at certain jobs, but how you master yourself and become the highest aspiration of yourself.

To do that takes patience and understanding of yourself. Turning inward, curbing the restless mind and impulses. You might be someone who is quite impatient or impulsive, wanting to execute right away the idea you have in mind, what you think of should be what you have, expecting results and excellence quickly, if things don't go well from the first try, you want to give up and change direction, change the method without giving the old ones enough time to develop. If you are this person, then life will give you many opportunities or challenges to slow you down, the more you try to act, to fix things, tossing ideas everywhere, going around in many directions at once, the more likely you are to be confined and forced to make a clear choice and commit to it. And you will have to choose wisely. How do you do it? By facing that door, those wounds, see how they are projected into your surroundings, your relationships with people, how you go around, anywhere, just to avoid them.

You're given a good pair of eyes (figuratively, or can be literally) to truly see, amidst all those busy movements, a path for yourself. A wide, unexplored path. Pushing the door, stepping out is scary, but you're brave and you will inspire many others to do the same.

LABRADORITE

Keywords: growth, healing, comfort, peace, helping, courage, accepting changes

I see the image of a sword or a cross. Your energy feels young and soft yet resilient and brave. Life gives you many challenges that would forge a sharp and strong blade inside you. The sword here is not for harming or conquest but for protection and striking the lock, through layers of fears that have been imprisoning you for a long time.

Your life is divided or, rather, balanced by two opposing forces and choices. One is the past, the habit, the way you chose to protect your safety. You might have a tendency to go along with other people's wishes or try to avoid direct confrontation for fear of disrupting the peace. This might be one of your defence mechanisms when dealing with life in general. You want to live in peace, quietly go about your way without obstruction and intrusion from outside. This creates a demure aura, in some way, a little submissive or malleable energy. You don't act this way because you want to gain something from other people. You just don't find it necessary to engage in confrontations that lead to dead-end.

The other side is something you're called to embrace more of in this lifetime. Your energy is soft and flowy, like water, but it needs a little solidifying into something more sturdy. It's the hardening of the core self. Hardening here does not have a negative connotation, it's not about building walls around yourself, closing your heart and spirit, acting cold and tough, it's not like that. It's about being more sure of yourself, giving yourself a sturdy and durable foundation, like how a pliable sprout would grow into a robust tree, standing tall and firm on the ground.

Work and career, material achievements will be the ground where you will see yourself grow the most in this lifetime. There will be opportunities and chances for you to break out of your nest and explore. The work environment will be dynamic and full of pleasant surprises. You will find support through the people you work with. A family member might be a crucial figure in your process of becoming the best version of yourself.

I feel a very giving nature, you have so much in yourself, so much to share, that inner abundance, with people, with life. But only when you release the attachments that keep you rooted in constricted safety. There might be hesitancy when trying to think about bigger aspirations, about your life dreams. You might think that those dreams are unrealistic or too far away. Your mind and your heart are going in the opposite direction. Your heart wants to look forward, to the distant, unexplored horizon, while your mind is occupied by anxiety and uncertainty. It's the root of the great divide between your past and your future.

But I think in this lifetime, things will change. Your life is in a great transition period. Events might happen quickly, surprises come more often. What you've been believing in, what you've been doing habitually might suddenly become strange and feel foreign to you. These changes are necessary, you might feel uncomfortable having to depart from what you've been attached to. But if you can muster enough courage to go against the usual, it will be a personal victory for you. You will successfully break the earth above you and shoot up, out of dormancy, to begin a new adventure.

RED JASPER

Keywords: manifestation, beauty, to connect, freedom, commitment, wish vs reality

It feels like you have a starter kit of manifesting love but you haven't learnt how to use them fully yet. Love and other connections will be the focal point of this lifetime for you.

You have a unique power of manifestation. Have you ever had some thoughts and then a few days or some time later, they came true?. Everything could manifest instantly that you might even be scared of your own thoughts, afraid that any "wrong" thought will result in a bad future. If you haven't realised this about yourself, be more mindful and observe how things work around you. Life will feel a lot more magical for you.

One of the reasons why your thoughts are so powerful is because you're given full reign, full freedom to experience this world. It's not something that you can easily realise and put into practise. There's no particular script nor strict rules for you to follow, you just need to experience as many things as possible. The best gift you have in this lifetime is freedom. I think this gift is something hard-earned from countless trials and hardships. The memories of distant pains might still linger somewhere deep inside you, keeping you from fully being free to dream. But no more rules and burdens. This life is meant to be savoured in its vastness. You're a born rebel. Carving your own path, going your own way, never settling, never being fully at ease with the present, always on the lookout for a different future.

And that's where relationships come in. One of the best ways to do that is through relationships and interacting with others. I see a tendency to be hasty or quick to move on when it comes to bonds with other people. With your manifesting ability, combine with your natural charms, you have no problem with meeting and building the connection with someone. But something about commitment might scare you. You might not want to commit because of the fear that your freedom will be lost, or because you put a heavy importance on a commitment that you don't want to step into one too lightly. You might jump, too quickly, into conclusions about some connections. Maybe you would try to find a plausible reason to stop the connection, in the name of practicality and logic, ready to find flaws in the other person, or, on the opposite end, you decide too quickly that this is it, this person is the one and then try to commit, prematurely. It's like you are given something because you wished for it, but then you don't exactly know what to do with it. This will be one of your biggest lessons in this lifetime. To follow through with what you wish for, to commit to something fully and wisely. It's not just romantic relationships but also other relationships, colleagues, friends, families, etc.

There would be two types of people in your life who can guide or lead you into two different directions. They will appear in the form of mentors, someone older or more experienced than you, someone whom you feel you can learn something significant from. One type will encourage you to find your calling, your path. Who will constantly touch your deepest feelings without even trying. They may trigger you, for good or for bad, you would feel their choices of words and actions are dubious and questionable, but there is something undeniably inspiring about them, they push you to be more bold and get in touch with your needs and wishes. While the other type would be someone wanting to dictate every move in your life under the guise of knowing what's good for you. They are powerful, they can make your wishes come true but only if you come under their wings and stay there. You would feel like a child being well taken care of, but your wings will be clipped. Which direction to take is ultimately your choice, you choose whatever to experience, because that's your freedom in this lifetime.

CITRINE

Keywords: uncharted water, discovery, exploration, crossing, in between, balanced, transition

I see your path in this life is going to the unknown, something that you haven't experienced before. You are standing at a gate, a bridge in between two lands. Or, in the vertical sense, you are standing on the dark ground, looking up at the sun, shining bright from above. There are lots of movements, both mentally and physically. In this lifetime, you will constantly move between the two worlds. The inner, dark and cold sea of your private world and the bright, warm air of the outside world. No world is better than other, they need to be their for your life to be in balance, staying in one world for too long and neglecting other will likely result in some events taking place to pull you back into balance.

These two worlds are parallel to each other. The inner world is led chiefly by your mind, they are well organised, block by block, neatly like a library, while the outer world is more dynamic, led by passion and actions. They affect each other in every way, more than you realise. Chaos in the inner thought will likely result in confusion and, in some extreme cases, destruction of the known path. You will stumble upon many paths that are considered strange and out of the norm, but I think you're geared towards them, even unknowingly, your mind has a knack of seeing the unique structure of things, noticing the pattern and the likely outcomes of situations that not many people can. This will help you see more alternatives in life and choose a path that can bring satisfaction to you, in all senses, materially, spiritually, emotionally. This path will likely be an uncharted water, something that not many people have done, there will be many unexplored areas for you to bring in your unique takes.

Another way the two worlds interact with each other is what your inner world needs, the outer world will provide. If you feel anxious and doubtful, haunted by past memories, then you will likely encounter something or someone new who can give you fresh perspectives and encouragement to be brave. If you feel your life is lacking security, you feel low in your self esteem, there will be moments of transformation that bring you closer to what you desire, you will be given opportunities to venture into new territory, meeting new people, getting the support you need to start something. The universe hears your every call and answers back with opportunities, emphasis on the word "opportunities", you won't be given a whole cooked dish, you will be given ingredients to make the dish.

There's an element of settlement. Instead of jumping from place to place, in this lifetime, you need to hold onto something, to make something uniquely yours, something that will be by your side everywhere you go. It could be a legacy, a creation, a lesson, something that lasts. But it's not about stubbornly holding on to something, it has to be integrated into your core being. Throughout life, you will face with many events that will change your perspective drastically, you're not meant to hold on to old beliefs, withered branches that can no longer hold the weight of the birds standing on them. You will constantly meet new people, those that will open your eyes. Foreign people and cultures might fascinate you, somewhere with lots of sunlight, warm hospitality, beautiful scenery and architecture, lots of mountains and flowers. Especially if you're someone who's from a land near the sea, windy and cold, lots of rain and stormy weather. You are a traveller at heart, don't limit yourself to any particular place.

AMETHYST

Keywords: opinion, communication, conflict, to uphold, straightforward, honesty, truth

I don't know why, but upon seeing your spread, the phrase "human comedy" just sprang up in my mind. This life of yours will go through so many ups and downs in regards to connections and relationships. You will experience the full spectrum of them, every facet, every emotion.

You might encounter many situations where you're misunderstood greatly, those will create a very interesting dynamic between you and the world. Interesting might not be the right word, even my choice of word in this reading is muddled up, you might have the tendency to use words that make your intentions seem questionable or odd to people, and they do the same to you. It's like people from different lands from all around the world gathered for a meeting but there's no common language and no one to translate.

Communication will be the point of focus for you. You might struggle to find the right expression, the right words for the things you want to say. Thoughts seem a lot more clear and articulated in your head, but when they are uttered, there's this fog around you that tends to twist and blur the words, making them shift and fuddle. You will need to find a way to clear this fog, to deliver your words in the most direct and straightforward way as much as possible, even at the risk of being blunt and offensive. This might create an obsession or anxiety when communicating. Maybe you want to find the perfect expression, the details, you do notice the tendency of people misunderstanding you so you try so hard to elaborate, which can create the impression of being long winded, rambling or argumentative.

Ideas jump around in your head, constantly born and spread, demand to get out, to be expressed, this forms a rushing energy, impatient tongue. But even with all these misunderstandings, you don't actually offence people. They may perceive you as nitpicking, blunt, or argumentative, but they don't necessarily hate you for it. On the contrary, some even find it amusing and endearing, these people might even intentionally tease or poke at you, it's not malicious, but then again, you also don't read people's intentions too clearly and might perceive these acts of teasing as personal attack. Your reactions would rile those people up even more. Hence, the endless cycles of poking and reacting. The purpose of all of these is to train your resilience of the mind and heart. You should take all of these with good spirit, laugh them off, keep your truth and speak honestly, there's nothing more attractive than that.

On a more serious note, you're reminded to stand firm in your thoughts. I sense that you have so many wisdom to share with the world. Teaching might be a calling for you. Even without actually be in the education field, people can still learn from you, through your unshakable conviction in yourself and the way you speak your truth. It might be intense, it might be difficult to swallow, it might seem strange and outlandish, but nevertheless, it captivates the world through its sincerity.

AVENTURINE

Keywords: artist, bridge, the call, emotional landscape, go with the flow, sensitivity

"Young poet of the moon", "The poet of the soul", those two just appeared in my head upon seeing your spread, so I wanted to write them down. I think those words portrayed you pretty well. Your inner artist heart is beating every moment, it's a force that you can't hide or be ushered into oblivion by some circumstances.

This world needs a lot of people who have a sensitive heart, like you, someone who has the "eyes" to see the beauty in this world, the "ears" to hear its cry and whisper, the "lips" to court it with sweet sweet words. You're here to make people see the world in its naked beauty, helping them realise the small details of living and in the process, elevate their souls.

You offer this world a cup filled with creativity. The way your mind and heart tremble and come alive with all the senses can create striking new creations. The passion for sensuality is there, for the bursting love of life. Sensuality here encompasses a vast spectrum of things, from the aromas of delicious food, the cool and smooth feeling of water lapping over you, the swirling colours of leaves dancing under the sun, the warm and rough feel of someone's hands, ... they are all the materials for you to marvel at, to create, to give back to the world your interpretation of it.

Why did I say "poet" in the beginning? Because you have the gift of gab, your words resonate with people's hearts, because they are spoken from the realm of the unknown inside all of us, we can only be able to catch a glimpse of it here and there, when we allow ourselves to relax and float. You have the ability to connect to that realm , to catch sights of it more often and crystallise those sights into words or messages conveyed by other means. But I sense written words strongly. Even if you do something that isn't related to creativity or the art (but is there anything that truly be detached from creativity?), this gift will still assist you in every endeavour you're in, negotiating, mediating, persuading, counselling, anything that needs these kinds of skills.

Love will play an important role in your life, you're here to experience love in all of its forms, experience all the feelings it can create within us. It won't be an easy journey, heartaches are there, but so is the deepest devotion. You might face delays in love or intense connections that leave lasting marks on your soul. You're not the same person you once were before a connection. These will transform you, plunging you into greater depth and strange waters. But don't be afraid,if you allow yourself to savour the journey, you will arrive at a treasure that many people have been struggling to find. This inexhaustible treasure will provide richness to your life. Also, don't let yourself drowned either, emerge out of the water and share with the world what you've seen. So many people need their hearts touched by a soul such as yours.

[mcmansionhell]

the motel room, or: on datedness

I.

Often I find myself nostalgic for things that haven't disappeared yet. This feeling is enhanced by the strange conviction that once I stop looking at these things, I will never see them again, that I am living in the last moment of looking. This is sense is strongest for me in the interiors of buildings perhaps because, like items of clothing, they are of a fashionable nature, in other words, more impermanent than they probably should be.

As I get older, to stumble on something truly dated, once a drag, is now a gift. After over a decade of real estate aggregation and the havoc it's wreaked on how we as a society perceive and decorate houses, if you're going to Zillow to search for the dated (which used to be like shooting fish in a barrel), you'll be searching aimlessly, for hours, to increasingly no avail, even with all the filters engaged. (The only way to get around this is locational knowledge of datedness gleaned from the real world.) If you try to find images of the dated elsewhere on the internet, you will find that the search is not intuitive. In this day and age, you cannot simply Google "80s hotel room" anymore, what with the disintegration of the search engine ecosystem and the AI generated nonsense and the algorithmic preference for something popular (the same specific images collected over and over again on social media), recent, and usually a derivative of the original search query (in this case, finding material along the lines of r/nostalgia or the Backrooms.)

To find what one is looking for online, one must game the search engine with filters that only show content predating 2021, or, even better, use existing resources (or those previously discovered) both online and in print. In the physical world of interiors, to find what one is looking for one must also now lurk around obscure places, and often outside the realm of the domestic which is so beholden to and cursed by the churn of fashion and the logic of speculation. Our open world is rapidly closing, while, paradoxically, remaining ostensibly open. It's true, I can open Zillow. I can still search. In the curated, aggregated realm, it is becoming harder and harder to find, and ultimately, to look.

But what if, despite all these changes, datedness was never really searchable? This is a strange symmetry, one could say an obscurity, between interiors and online. It is perhaps unintentional, and it lurks in the places where searching doesn't work, one because no one is searching there, or two, because an aesthetic, for all our cataloguing, curation, aggregation, hoarding, is not inherently indexable and even if it was, there are vasts swaths of the internet and the world that are not categorized via certain - or any - parameters. The internet curator's job is to find them and aggregate them, but it becomes harder and harder to do. They can only be stumbled upon or known in an outside, offline, historical or situational way. If to index, to aggregate, is, or at least was for the last 30 years, to profit (whether monetarily or in likes), then to be dated, in many respects, is the aesthetic manifestation of barely breaking even. Of not starting, preserving, or reinventing but just doing a job.

We see this online as well. While the old-web Geocities look and later Blingee MySpace-era swag have become aestheticized and fetishized, a kind of naive art for a naive time, a great many old websites have not received the same treatment. These are no less naive but they are harder to repackage or commodify because they are simple and boring. They are not "core" enough.

As with interiors, web datedness can be found in part or as a whole. For example, sites like Imgur or Reddit are not in and of themselves dated but they are full of remnants, of 15-year old posts and their "you, sir, have won the internet" vernacular that certainly are. Other websites are dated because they were made a long time ago by and for a clientele that doesn't have a need or the skill to update (we see this often with Web 2.0 e-commerce sites that figured out how to do a basic mobile page and reckoned it was enough). The next language of datedness, like the all-white landlord-special interior, is the default, clean Squarespace restaurant page, a landing space that's the digital equivalent of a flyer, rarely gleaned unless someone needs a menu, has a food allergy or if information about the place is not available immediately from Google Maps. I say this only to maintain that there is a continuity in practices between the on- and off-line world beyond what we would immediately assume, and that we cannot blame everything on algorithms.

But now you may ask, what is, exactly, datedness? Having spent two days in a distinctly dated hotel room, I've decided to sit in utter boredom with the numinous past and try and pin it down.

II.

I am in an obscure place. I am in Saint-Georges, Quebec, Canada, on assignment. I am staying at a specific motel, the Voyageur. By my estimation the hotel was originally built in the late seventies and I'd be shocked if it was older than 1989. The hotel exterior was remodeled sometime in the 2000s with EIFS cladding and beige paint. Above is a picture of my room, which, forgive me, is in the process of being inhabited. American (and to a lesser extent Canadian) hotel rooms are some of the most churned through, renovated spaces in the world, and it's pretty rare, unless you're staying in either very small towns or are forced by economic necessity to stay at real holes in the wall, to find ones from this era. The last real hitter for me was a 90s Day's Inn in the meme-famous Breezewood, PA during the pandemic.

At first my reaction to seeing the room was cautionary. It was the last room in town, and certainly compared to other options, probably not the world's first choice. However, after staying in real, genuine European shitholes covering professional cycling I've become a class-A connoisseur of bad rooms. This one was definitively three stars. A mutter of "okay time to do a quick look through." But upon further inspection (post-bedbug paranoia) I came to the realization that maybe the always-new brainrot I'd been so critical of had seeped a teeny bit into my own subconscious and here I was snubbing my nose at a blessing in disguise. The room is not a bad room, nor is it unclean. It's just old. It's dated. We are sentimental about interiors like this now because they are disappearing, but they are for my parents what 2005 beige-core is for me and what 2010s greige will become for the generation after. When I'm writing about datedness, I'm writing in general using a previous era's examples because datedness, by its very nature, is a transitional status. Its end state is the mixed emotion of seeing things for what they are yet still appreciating them, expressed here.

Datedness is the period between vintage and contemporary. It is the sentiment between quotidian and subpar. It is uncurated and preserved only by way of inertia, not initiative. It gives us a specific feeling we don't necessarily like, one that is deliberately evoked in the media subcultures surrounding so-called "liminal" spaces: the fuguelike feeling of being spatially trapped in a time while our real time is passing. Datedness in the real world is not a curated experience, it is only what was. It is different from nostalgia because it is not deliberately remembered, yearned for or attached to sweetness. Instead, it is somehow annoying. It is like stumbling into the world of adults as a child, but now you're the adult and the child in you is disappointed. (The real child-you forgot a dull hotel room the moment something more interesting came along.) An image of my father puts his car keys on the table, looks around and says, "It'll do." We have an intolerance for datedness because it is the realization of what sufficed. Sufficiency in many ways implies lack.

However, for all its datedness, many, if not all, of the things in this room will never be seen again if the room is renovated. They will become unpurchaseable and extinct. Things like the bizarrely-patterned linoleum tile in the shower, the hose connecting to the specific faucet of the once-luxurious (or at least middling) jacuzzi tub whose jets haven't been exercised since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The wide berth of the tank on the toilet. There is nothing, really, worth saving about these things. Even the most sentimental among us wouldn't dare argue that the items and finishes in this room are particularly important from a design or historical standpoint. Not everything old has a patina. They're too cheaply made to salvage. Plastic tile. Bowed plywood. The image-artifacts of these rooms, gussied up for Booking dot com, will also, inevitably disappear, relegated to the dustheap of web caches and comments that say "it was ok kinda expensive but close to twon (sic)." You wouldn't be able to find them anyway unless you were looking for a room.

One does, of course, recognize a little bit of design in what's here. Signifiers of an era. The wood-veneer of the late 70s giving way to the pastel overtones of the 80s. Perhaps even a slow 90s. The all-in-one vanity floating above the floor, a modernist basement bathroom hallmark. White walls as a sign of cleanliness. Gestures, in the curved lines of the nightstands, towards postmodernity. Metallic lamp bases with wide-brimmed shades, a whisper of glamor. A kind of scalloped aura to the club chairs. The color teal mediated through hundreds if not thousands of shoes. Yellowing plastic, including the strips of "molding" that visually tie floor to wall. These are remnants (or are they intuitions?) of so many movements and micromovements, none of them definite enough to point to the influence of a single designer, hell, even of a single decade, just strands of past-ness accumulated into one thread, which is cheapness. Continuity exists in the materials only because everything was purchased as a set from a wholesale catalog.

In some way a hotel is supposed to be placeless. Anonymous. Everything tries to be that way now, even houses. Perhaps because we don't like the way we spy on ourselves and lease our images out to the world so we crave the specificity of hotel anonymity, of someplace we move through on our way to bigger, better or at least different things. The hotel was designed to be frictionless but because it is in a little town, it sees little use and because it sees little use, there are elements that can last far longer than they were intended and which inadvertently cause friction. (The janky door unlocks with a key. The shower hose keeps coming out of the faucet. It's deeply annoying.)

Lack of wear and lack of funds only keep them that way. Not even the paper goods of the eighties have been exhausted yet. Datedness is not a choice but an inevitability. Because it is not a choice, it is not advertised except in a utilitarian sense. It is kept subtle on the hotel websites, out of shame. Because it does not subscribe to an advertiser's economy of the now, of the curated type rather than the "here is my service" type, it disappears into the folds of the earth and cannot be searched for in the way "design" can. It can only be discovered by accident.

When I look at all of these objects and things, I do so knowing I will never see them again, at least not all here together like this, as a cohesive whole assembled for a specific purpose. I don't think I'll ever have reason to come back to this town or this place, which has given me an unexpected experience of being peevish in my father's time. Whenever I end up in a place like this, where all is as it was, I get the sense that it will take a very long time for others to experience this sensation again with the things my generation has made. The machinations of fashion work rapaciously to make sure that nothing is ever old, not people, not rooms, not items, not furniture, not fabrics, not even design, that old matron who loves to wax poetic about futurity and timelessness. The plastic-veneered particleboard used here is now the bedrock of countless landfills. Eventually it will become the chemical-laced soil upon which we build our condos. It is possible that we are standing now at the very last frontier of our prior datedness. The next one has not yet elided. It's a special place. Spend a night. Take pictures.

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[super-ultra-mega-deluxe]

Simply believing in ML, or joining an ML org, will not help when the lights go out or food runs out. How can we contend with that?

Marxism-Leninism isn't an arbitrary set of beliefs for one to adopt on a whim, it is a political theory and specifically action, part of which is in fact to "help when the lights go out" or even better, to make sure they don't! communist politics- and really any politic- are what those politics do. Marx explicitly frames it as such, as an ideological formulation that is a tool for practical application. taken outside of its context and application, Marxism is an absurd nothing, as again are all politics. i could provide examples of how communists facilitate the production and distribution of goods, or otherwise manage economics at variable scale and locale, which is rather what i assume you mean to be getting at with your question. your framing is rather nonspecific however: in what economic and political context is there a communist party contending with failures in energy infrastructure and food production and distribution?

the "help when the lights go out" strikes a particular chord, as somewhat recently the socialist nation of Cuba has been forced to contend with fuel shortages; their domestic oil production can't meet the needs of the general populace, and oil imports are inconsistent due to the US embargo. the people of Cuba are, thankfully, not becoming grossly immiserated or dying en masse despite such being the intention of the embargo. they have instituted fuel rationing and rolling blackouts to further conserve fuel and maintain essential services, such as their healthcare system. this of itself is obviously only a reactive policy; the state has also been rebuilding and expanding its oil storage facilities to better handle fluctuations in supply, and more recently they have agreed to a bilateral development agreement with China to substantially expand Cuba's nascent solar power generation. paired with their newfound partnership with BRICS- a move which undermines the aforementioned embargo in a much more material way than a UN vote- Cuba is on a path to fully meet the energy needs of its people and even expand access over the next decade.

that all said, i doubt you specifically care much for Marxist-Leninist experiments as they exist, and are more concerned with the prefiguration of politics before anything like achieving state power, and more specifically within the imperial core, where denying the possibility of effecting revolutionary politics is the most prominent. there are not presently many Marxist-Leninist parties of note in the US, the imperial core, but even less principled communist parties nonetheless consider the economic realities of the workers they represent first and foremost. the old Black Panthers were perhaps the closest to a truly revolutionary socialist movement in the US, and one of the policies they are most famous for is the free breakfast program and the broader Survival Programs they ran. these programs provided food and medical care and education and transportation for many who were subject to economic insecurity; the failure of these programs was a failure of militancy and counterintelligence and scope. the modernly popular if unfortunately less coherent and less principled PSL also runs health and wellness programs, such as kitchens and exercise classes and vocational programs and so on, which is their attempt at replicating such formulations.

it is rather specifically a concern of communists to organize the proletariat to provide for their own needs outside the purview of a capitalist state, and every revolutionary of note before, during, and after seizing power emphasizes such. the ability to do so pending a revolutionary moment is necessarily limited however; you cannot build an administration of economy parallel to an extant state without coming into conflict with that state. even non-communist organizations attempt to build up community programs, but they are either dissolved or incorporated into the state apparatus or otherwise operate under its purview. the ultimate goal is then as always the destruction of the bourgeois state machine and the building of a proletarian state machine, the armies of people organized in enforcing the will of the proletariat as a class, which allows for the more concrete and pointed organization of the economy broadly.

[aces-and-angels]

verified by 90-ghost follow asmaa @asmaayyad & on instagram (asmaa_ayyad98)

moots/lovely lurkers- lend me your ears (or eyes- y'all get it) and allow asmaa to introduce herself in her own words:

"hello I hope my message reaches you well i am asmaa ayyad from gaza, specifically khan yunis, i am 25 years old, i am trying to save me and my family from the war of extermination that is happening now (a/n: asmaa graduated from the university of palestine in 2021 and went on to study/train to become a practicing lawyer) we lost our home, our friends and some of our relatives, I have also been living far away from my fiancé for two years, I cannot reach him because of the increase in the coordination price and the closure of the crossings and borders (a/n: asmaa lists feras_lbrahim in her insta bio as her fiancé) please i want you to help me by publishing for me and standing by my side, as i am now struggling alone to save an entire family i wanted to contact @/90-ghost but he does not respond to me (a/n: since asmaa sent me this message, 90-ghost has been able to get in touch/share her posts) i would be very grateful to you if you helped me"

asmaa's family consists of 8 members- all of whom led beautiful lives prior to the war. asmaa's older brother, dia, was looking forward to his own wedding. instead of experiencing such a joyous day, his life was shattered after his home was destroyed by the israeli army.

to lose a home- all your valuable possessions- your memories- in an instant is something that cannot be fully understood unless you've gone through it yourself. in asmaa's own words (read & share full post here):

"in addition to the pain, oppression and suffering that displacement causes us, there is a material aspect that no one talks about or mentions or mentions in the media. every place we move from to a new place requires transportation from 1,500 to 2,000 shekels... and despite this amount, you cannot transport all your belongings. this is in addition to the costs of setting up the tent again and trying to return what you lost of your things and belongings. displacement kills us more than death, it drains our health, our money and everything we own... displacement is another war that is harsher than this war of starvation and extermination... displacement is a hidden killer. how many people have been martyred because they do not have the price of displacement? the price that saves them from death! how many people have lost their dignity because of it?! oh god, have mercy on us and our situation 🙏💔"

asmaa's family has already lost so much- friends, loved ones, their cat, timur. they are living in a nightmare they cannot wake up from. the decision to evacuate is not an easy one to make nor is it one for the rest of us to scrutinize. it's what asmaa + her family have decided is the best path forward

please support my friend however you can-- the smallest actions can make the biggest impact

if all you can do is share- then share. follow asmaa to get the most up to date news regarding her family. tell someone you know about asmaa's story. allow others who may be able to contribute more find asmaa so her family may get to safety

and if you can give little more, please visit the link below 🖤

cw: photos of destroyed buildings + deceased cat (timur) included in the campaign

[beguilingcorpse]

weaponry in the locked tomb is so interesting because when you break it down it's like:

guns exist in-universe but are used by the freedom fighter terrorist organization almost exclusively

swords are (were?) commonplace enough that gideon was able to find and train with a decently well-balanced two-hander on the ninth, despite the fact that the ninth has no military force or even interplanetary traffic. gideon's sword is at least 20 years old, probably older

swords are definitely still in use within the empire, at least by cavaliers, but likely within the cohort as a whole. to my memory there are no mentions of cohort members carrying military-issue guns

even though they're trained in a variety of weapons and techniques, cavaliers (are supposed to) carry exclusively rapiers. gideon prefers her two-hander and cam carries twin shortswords, but these seem to be rare and shocking exceptions to the standard.

rapiers are used by cavaliers explicitly for the purpose of lyctorhood. they're light enough that a scrawny necromancer without swordfighting experience can pick it up and rely on their cav's training without needing to build the muscle to wield the sword effectively

because of the secretive nature of the megatheorem, and lyctorhood as a whole, most people just follow the rapier rule because it's tradition. it is what is done. harrow makes this pretty clear at the beginning of gtn

cavaliers can carry a variety of offhand weapons. it seems like the full spectrum of middle age weaponry is possible - but still, no guns. not even secretly, as with cam's dual blades. some cavs choose to carry material for their necromancers as their offhand - ortus carries a bowl of bones for harrow, and i can only assume "the powder" mentioned as harrow's choice for gideon's offhand towards the beginning of gtn is some kind of bone dust

from a doylist perspective, all of this creates a aesthetic that starts very analog and gothic and gradually grows into a more standard sci-fi space opera through the series. by ntn, we've hit most of the established genre weaponry tropes that we've come to expect from older futuristic space media like star wars and alien. blasters and guns are standard fare, and it makes sense to hold off on introducing them until the scope of the story gets broader and more interplanetary

from a watsonian perspective, it's a little more difficult to draw concrete conclusions without the context that atn will inevitably provide. but if i had to hedge a guess, i'd say that, as with most things, It's All John Gaius's Fault. when he resurrected the galaxy i'd assume that he wanted to keep the aesthetics of medieval imperialism, and given his 21st century liberalism probably didn't want guns to be part of the equation. but they were anyways - we know this because wake carries a big one - and instead of standardizing firearms within his military and for his lyctors, he clings to the aesthetics of swordplay. please correct me if i'm remembering it wrong, but to my knowledge every gun shown in the series is either directly linked to boe or implied to be sourced from them. jod dooms his own lyctors and military by refusing to update their weaponry.

all of this poses a lot of questions about atn: who will carry a gun, and why? where did the gun come from? why DON'T the lyctors just use firearms? and most importantly: will they be fighting zombies with swords???

[zeppelinlvr]

Still Feel Like That

Dean Winchester x Female Reader

Summary: you accompany Dean, Sam, and Bobby on a hunt. You and Dean go out for a drink and Dean looks after you when you've had too much to drink.

Notes: Reader is a yapper (cus same), kinda implied that reader is Bobby's kid but it's not stated outright, sorry if you like Poison or Bret Micheals reader hates on them for a second, I assumed that Dean switched out his radio with one that would be compatible with cassettes since a 67' would likely have a 8 track player, I got lazy with my research so I apologize if any facts are incorrect (feel free to correct me).

Warnings: Suggestive language, flirting, cursing, mentions of throwing up, y/n is used like three times, Dean in his undies (yummy!)

Word Count: 4.1k

✰ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰

You sat at Bobby’s old wooden table, sipping hot coffee from your Garfield mug. You didn’t own it but when you saw the grumpy orange cat with a text saying ‘I'm listening I just don’t care’ sitting on Bobby’s shelf of mismatched old mugs you’d used the cup ever since. 

You sat in your pajama shorts, slippers, and an old tee shirt, the cracked text reading “Winfield national flatpickin’ championships”. The shirt previously belonged to Bobby and he couldn’t remember how he acquired such an item, he assumed he was passing through Kansas and picked it up along the way, but you loved it so much he felt it was necessary to give it to you. 

You were reading through a book you had picked up on demonology. Bobby had given you a few vague events that had occurred and you were trying to figure out what exactly he was dealing with. You had a book on Pagan gods on standby. 

You heard the front door open, figuring it was Bobby you chose to continue reading but when you heard unfamiliar voices you quickly looked up in a panic, nearly knocking your chair over to try to scramble and find Bobby. You were not a hunter by any means, you just did the research and stayed in the comfort of motels. You knew some basic self defense but you could not fight a serious threat on your own.

You were making a dash for the nearest room when you heard Bobby yell your name. 

You quickly spun around to look at him, seeing two tall, handsome, potentially dangerous, men standing next to him. 

“What the hell are you doing kid?” Bobby asked you, concerned by your panic stricken expression.

“I heard people- and I was trying to find you and not die” You uttered out, still confused about who the two other men were. “Sorry, who the hell are these guys” you added 

“Sam and Dean I talk-” Bobby started but you cut him off 

“Winchester?” you asked excitedly “Bobby talks about you two all the time and I really wanted to meet both of you, especially Dean, Bobby says you make stupid decisions but you sound fun” you rambled quickly, a smirk growing on the shorter ones face at your mention of him. 

“Oh my god you have to be Sam, you totally have that sad puppy look” you said to the taller one “You could ask me to donate my life savings to a charity then build a shelter for the homeless and I totally would” you continued to talk.

“I like her” the shorter man who you had now assumed was Dean said with a grin 

“Wait Dean” you started turning to him “Did you drive your car here, I’ve heard rumors it's a totally awesome 67’ impala and I’ve been dying to see it” 

Before Dean could respond with a comment about how you were marriage material Bobby interrupted your rambling “Okay motor mouth, I’m sure Sam and Dean are enthralled by your commentary but they need our help” 

“Are you the super smart Y/n?” Sam asked 

“The one who has saved our asses more times than we can count” Dean added

“Yes, that's her, and I don't prefer to shout about her to the whole world because she's not exactly Hulk Hogan” Bobby said, growing slightly annoyed with the continued blabbering. 

“Really? Hulk Hogan? You have to compare me to that doofus, call me Bret Micheals while you’re at it” You shot at him 

“I’m sorry, would you prefer to be Kerry VonErich” Bobby sighed 

“Yes, minus his incredibly tragic life” you said as you crossed your arms over your chest. 

“Bobby why have we not met this chick sooner, she's awesome” Dean said slightly in awe. 

“You two don't care to stop by all that often and I knew you and her would get along real well and we wouldn't get anything done” Bobby responded hinting at the exact situation that was happening. 

“Let me see Dean’s car then I promise I will be productive” you offered

“Yeah let her see my car” Dean added, Sam smiling at the situation and Bobby rolling his eyes and reluctantly agreeing. 

The four of you made your way outside and when you saw the impala you let out a gasp of excitement before sprinting towards it. 

“She is so beautiful” you gushed to Dean “You keep her in phenomenal condition, does she run well?” 

“Like she’s new” Dean responded, smiling at your excitement over the car. 

“Is there an 8 track player? I have a few tapes I could give you if you want” You offered 

“Switched it out for a cassette player” Dean told you

“Good choice, 8 tracks are such a hassle, you can hear another song playing in the background of whatever you're trying to listen to, and don't even think about trying to fast forward to get to the song you want, at least you have a slim chance to land on the right song with cassettes” you rambled 

“Yeah no kidding, you wanna see my tape collection” Dean offered 

“Nope, we agreed on just the car now we need to figure out what the hell is going on in Pawnee Nebraska” Bobby interrupted as the four of you made your way back into the house 

“I’m so sick of going to these ho-hum towns, why can't you guys hunt things that reside in memphis or something, I want to go to a museum that isn't about the butter cow or a mayor who died of dysentery” You said with a sigh

“Hunting in this ho hum town means road trip and i'm sure Dean would be delighted to let you ride down with him” Bobby offered for Dean, partly because he wanted some silence in his own car and he also wanted you, Dean, and Sam to be able to talk as much as you pleased and hopefully be caught up so you could focus on working. 

Dean agreed to the idea and Sam shrugged, hoping you would prevent bickering between him and his brother. 

“I promised I’d focus so Sam, you’re smart, have you found out more than some bad weather and a ‘still under investigation death of a couple’” You asked, turning to the taller brother, offering him a smile, slightly feeling bad you’d paid so much attention to his brother and not talked to Sam much. 

“Yeah, I think the weather is unrelated, I found autopsy reports and the couple had these wounds on the back of their necks. I don't recognize the pattern but you might be able to” he replied to you with a soft smile, he made his way to his computer and set it on the table where your abandoned books and coffee lay. 

You made a noise of disgust upon seeing the picture but you instantly recognized the wound pattern “That has to be changelings, they feed off of the mother until she dies, it's so creepy” You started “In a lot of the books I’ve read they switch out an infant for a changeling, did the couple have a kid?” you asked 

“Yeah, but she's a little girl who’s ten years old” Sam replied to you

“Different cultures have varying takes on changelings, some of them say they can grow and develop like a human would, so it's definitely a possibility” You told him “We have to get down there asap before more kids are switched out, and when you figure out where the little girl is at now, monitor her behavior closely, she's gonna be hungry and use abnormal phrases for a ten year old.” You explained

“Alright you heard her” Dean said, squeezing between you and Sam and placing a hand on your shoulder. He secretly wanted your attention back on him. 

“Let me pack a bag and change then I’ll be ready to head out” you told them

“Same goes for me, give us five minutes” Bobby added

You headed to your room and changed into jeans and tee shirt, additionally throwing on a crewneck from a college in Louisiana that you had found in the aisles of a thrift store. 

You threw a few additional outfits in a duffle bag and your pajamas which consisted of sleep shorts and a tee shirt, you threw your slippers for your constantly cold feet in the bag and you were ready to go. 

Your socked feet padded against the floor as you made your way to the front door to grab your shoes. You threw them on and told the group you were ready to go. 

Dean, Sam and you crowded into the impala, Dean leaping on the opportunity to tell Sam to sit in the back after you had informed the brothers you get carsick. 

“I have zofran, Sam can sit in the front, I don't want to take his spot” you said 

“Nope, Sam get in the back” Dean quickly said as he took his spot in the driver's seat. 

After the three of you had gotten in the car and started on the trip Sam complained “Dean, I know there's a pretty girl but what if I get carsick in the back” 

“You won't, and the very pretty girl won't complain about my music choices” Dean told him and raised his brows at you.

Your face heated at how they referred to you, you cleared your throat and changed the subject “I know you guys are more hands on than me so I know a few ways to figure these things out, different folklore says if you can make them laugh they’ll reveal their truth, or you can shout god bless you, you can cook with eggshells. German legends say you can whip the child but honestly the easiest way to kill them is just lighting the fuckers on fire” You explained “People used to throw them in the fireplace or in the oven but you can get away with a blowtorch and a can of hairspray” 

“That's more our speed” Dean replied 

“People were seriously throwing these things in ovens?” Sam asked “What if the kid wasn't actually a changeling” 

“People got overly paranoid and it wasnt exactly common knowledge back then that someone could be born with physical or mental disabilities, also families used to be really reliant on everyone in the household being able to help out so a lot of child abuse ensued because parents didnt want to have a changeling on their hands” You explained “Anyway these things creep me out so lets talk about something more lighthearted on the way there” 

“i agree sweetheart” Dean said and you blushed at the name “I heard your comment about Bret Micheals, are you a Poison hater” 

“I can tolerate them but I will not go out of my way to listen to them, they’re definitely one of the lamest hair bands” you told him “I definitely prefer Van Halen, Quiet Riot, Def Leppard and Cinderella if I’m going to listen to hair bands” 

“Atta girl, you don’t like that Barry Manilow bullshit do you?” Dean asked 

“God no, fuck Styx too, that Babe song pisses me off” you laughed 

“Cus you know it’s you babe” Sam started singing off key and you groaned in annoyance, Dean laughing. 

The three of you talked about music, movies, and Sam and Dean's past hunts, asking odd would you rather questions when trying to think of new conversation topics 

“Okay would you rather have to eat a little bit of cheese on everything or never eat cheese again” you asked 

“Never eat cheese again” Sam quickly answered 

“I’d put a little bit on everything I fucking love cheese” you answered 

After extensive conversation and small bits of bickering the three of you made it to Nebraska, Bobby close behind.

Dean checked into the hotel, getting two rooms, one for him and Sam and one for you and Bobby. He gave the woman behind the counter a credit card with a name that most certainly was not his then the three of you made your way to the rooms. Dean opened the door to one of the rooms and the cowboy theme of the room made you laugh.

“You sure know how to pick ‘em’ Dean” you said 

“It’s fun, this cowboy boot pen holder on the desk is cute” he said, picking up the small red ceramic boot with a few pens sticking out of it.

“It is kinda cute, and I like the lasso on the wall” you pointed out 

“Oh man, creepy” you said as you noticed the sad clown painting hanging above the bed. 

“That's coming down” Sam said and quickly moved over to the painting to take it off the wall and lay it face down in the corner of the room. 

“Sammy here is a afraid of clowns” Dean informed you

“I don’t blame him, they’re scary, and all the media about killer clowns doesn’t exactly make me want to see one” you replied 

Bobby arrived at the motel shortly after the three of you had gotten the rooms. The four of you were discussing plans for the next day as it was later and you all agreed to start interviewing people in the morning. 

“i’m gonna go grab a drink, I saw a bar about ten minutes from here” Dean announced 

“I’ll join you if Bobby and Sam don’t need help with research” you said 

“Go take a break kid, you work your ass off, me and Sam will be fine” Bobby told you, you thanked him and gave him a quick hug before heading out with Dean. 

You weren’t surprised by the crowd at the bar, mostly older men who looked like they had just gotten off work, farm clothes and dirty work shirts adorned most of them. A few of them had women who you assumed were their wives at their side, chatting quietly with them. You were glad your outfit wasn’t out of place for the scene. 

A man who you guessed to be around fifty was working behind the bar, he gave Dean and you a soft smile before asking what you’d like to drink. 

“I’ll take a beer” Dean told him

“Busch okay? We don’t have anything else” The bartender replied 

“Perfect” 

“And for the pretty lady” the bartender asked 

“I’ll just take a vodka cranberry” you said, not minding his comment too much, you knew he didn’t mean anything by it, people just talked like that. 

You and Dean sat at the bar after getting your drinks, chatting with each other. 

One drink led to another and you lost count of how many you had drank. You were asking Dean silly questions and you began to vocalize your thoughts about how handsome he is.

“I know you can't kill a vampire with a wooden stake, but have you ever tried death by stereo?” you asked with a giggle, you had taken your hand into his and were toying with his fingers. 

“The Lost Boys is a great movie, me and Sammy will try out death by stereo just for you the next time we hunt vampires” he replied earning a laugh from you.

“You are so manly and cute and handsome” you slurred poking a finger into his chest, eyes widening at the firmness of his muscles “Oh my gosh you’re strong too, I feel like I just poked a rock” 

He laughed and shook his head at your comments “Let's get you to bed before you say more shit you’ll regret tomorrow.” 

“I don't regret anything, I’ve been thinking about how cute you are all day, and those big arms wrapped around-” You blabbered but were cut off by Dean.

“Yep time for bed, but give me a heads up sweetheart if you still feel this way after you’ve sobered up” 

“I’m going to pay, then we’re going to get in the car, then get you to bed” he added

“Very forward, I like it” you giggled with a raise of your brows. 

After Dean paid he walked you out to the Impala, you stumbling slightly finding it hard to walk after being sat down all night. 

“I'm cold” you lied, you were not cold but you wanted his jacket.

“You have a sweater on?” he replied with confusion lacing his tone.

“You're supposed to give me your jacket then I can smell like you” you told him and tried to give him a hug while still walking. 

He forced a sigh then wrapped his jacket around you. You snuggled into it and thanked him.

After a car ride consisting of you informing Dean your feet hurt and you were tired, the two of you arrived back at the motel.

Dean opened the door to yours and Bobby's shared room. You giggled noticing the lights were off. 

Dean attempted to shush you “he's probably asleep already, quiet down” 

You only laughed harder at the fact you needed to be quiet “he looks like Ebenezer Scrooge when he sleeps, he just needs the little hat” you commented through your giggles, Dean tried to hide his smile to not encourage you. 

“I always think the ghost of Christmas past is gonna get him” you said before bursting into laughter and Dean quickly slapping his hand over your mouth. He pushed you into the bathroom and shut the door attempting to muffle your giggles. He flipped the light on and asked you where your duffle bag was. 

“In the room somewhere” you shrugged 

“Well no shit sweetheart” 

“It's on my bed I think” you giggled 

“Okay perfect you stay right here and I’ll go get it then you're going to change and go to bed” he told you

Dean groped through the dark until he found your bag, it was sitting on your bed as you had told him. He made his way back to the bathroom to find you sitting on the toilet lid, playing with the toilet paper roll that had the first square folded into a fancy shape. 

“Isn't this just precious” you said and showed him the toilet paper

“Yes, very cute put it down” he said and took the roll out of your hands, placing it on the counter. 

He opened your bag and fished out your shorts and a tee shirt “get changed” 

“No can do, can’t get my pants off” you shrugged with a fake sigh 

Usually Dean would be enthralled to take a girl's pants off but he wasn’t in the mood for an ass whooping from Bobby. 

He just prayed Bobby wouldn’t wake up because you weren’t budging. He helped you shimmy your jeans off your legs, then slipped your shorts onto you. 

“Need help with my shirt too” you said as you shrugged his jacket off your shoulders and put it into your lap. 

He slipped your crewneck over your head, your shirt coming off with it. He quickly took in your figure, admiring the sight of you in your bra before he slipped a clean shirt over your head. 

You unclasped your bra and slipped it off from under your shirt before tossing it on the bathroom floor. 

“Really? you can do that but you can’t change on your own” Dean whisper yelled 

“I can’t show you too much” you shrugged “now can you carry me to bed?”

He was willing to do anything to get you in bed at this point so he scooped you up in his arms and carried you out to your bed, you giggled as he threw you down onto the sheets. 

“Go to bed now” he whispered and you quickly made yourself comfortable under the blankets, cuddling into his jacket that you still held in your arms. 

You heard the door close and you soon drifted off to sleep. 

You awoke around four in the morning the red numbers off the alarm clock informing you of the time. You were starving and the alcohol had barely worn off. you crawled out of bed and slipped on Dean's jacket, it hung loosely on your figure, the length going past your shorts and the sleeves being far too long. You were glad for the added warmth because you were freezing. 

You were absolutely craving fried chicken and you dug through the mini fridge wholeheartedly expecting to find some, when the disappointment hit you, you left the room and went into Sam and Dean's room, letting yourself in with the spare key you had been given. 

You began to dig through their refrigerator in the dark, expecting to find some chicken but when you heard a gun click and the light flipped on, you spun around, met by Dean in his underwear and Sam shuffling in moments later with his blanket wrapped around him.

“What the hell are you doing” Dean asked 

“I want fried chicken so bad” you complained 

“Why would we have fried chicken?” Dean asked, still groggy and confused. 

“I don’t know I just wanted to check” you told him 

Sam laughed at the interaction, telling Dean he shouldn’t have let you drink so much before he headed back to his bed. 

“I promise I will get you fried chicken in the morning but please go back to bed” Dean told you 

“You look cute in your undies” you giggled 

“And you look cute in my jacket now go to bed” he mimicked your giggle. 

You agreed but not before you made him promise to get you your food in the morning, you made him lock pinkies with you despite his complaints of annoyance. 

You made your way back to your room and quickly fell asleep again. 

The next morning was hell, Bobby woke you up around 8 and you were met with a headache and a need for water. The second you stood up you found yourself running to the bathroom as a nauseating feeling built in your throat. 

You heard Sam and Dean talking as you were throwing up the memories of last night. Both of them asking how you were doing, and Bobby explaining you were currently throwing up, expecting an explanation from Dean as to why. 

Dean ducked out of the conversation “I’m going to get her water and hold her hair back, like a man does” he walked into the bathroom and gave a small chuckle at your figure hunched over the toilet. 

“Do not fucking laugh at me” you groaned 

“You still want that fried chicken” he asked, and you gagged at the thought, he grabbed you a cup of water to rinse your mouth out with and handed you the toilet paper you had been previously admiring to wipe your mouth off with. 

You wiped the sweat from your forehead and the tears from your eyes before standing up to brush your teeth. 

“You still gotta work today you know” Dean told you 

you rolled your eyes at him and after you had finished brushing your teeth you said “I’ll survive, I can tolerate sitting and reading, you have to go fight the things” 

You and Dean joined Bobby and Sam, Sam having told Bobby about you breaking into their room. You were expecting to get your ass chewed out but all you got from Bobby was “Kid I’m glad you had fun, you need to loosen up sometimes, but we still need your help today, so I expect your best” 

You agreed and gave him a quick hug before setting up a spot to research on the desk in the room. 

Sam and Dean left to put on formal clothes as they were posing as detectives and had to look the part. They returned to the room after changing. 

“Don’t you boys look handsome” you said with a grin 

“We have to be believable” Dean grumbled 

“I’m being serious, you look nice” you smiled “I’m going to look for potential demonic activity in other areas, call me if you need anything” 

“Will do sweetheart” Dean replied 

“Thanks for all your help y/n, we’ll pick you up some fried chicken on our way back” Sam grinned 

Your stomach churned at the thought of eating anything but maybe you’d change your mind later in the day, so you didn’t shut him down. 

As the three were turning to leave you said “by the way Dean, I do still feel like that” earning a grin from him and his head flooding with thoughts of what he could do to you when he got back. 

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