#Ed Steed

[dracothelizard]

I have just been informed about the worst and most hilarious season 2 review ever, which is obviously AI-generated in some way.

Spoilers and hilarity under the cut.

https://www.talktalknews.co.uk/our-flag-means-death-season-2-review-max-rhys-darby-taika-waititi

"A sad Blackbeard begins the series, sulking behind the steed."

"As we follow Ed and Steed on their separate journeys, we are constantly reminded of what happened between them."

"Con O’Neill remains the cast’s secret weapon as Easy Hands, who gets his own growth this season."

IF FANDOM DOES NOT USE EASY HANDS AS A NICKNAME FOR IZZY DURING KINKTOBER I WILL BE DISAPPOINT.

[pandaimitator]

Okay so I obviously finished it too quickly for my own good, but more importantly: can we talk about the soundtrack for this show?!

[sherlock-is-ace]

starting gomens s2 with the fam tomorrow... my mom is unpredictable when it comes to reacting to queer rep so i'm hoping for the best but ready for some shitty comments...

anyways if i come here to complain in a bad mood tomorrow you know why lol

[letangel]

ed 💕

[partlymadeofgold]

made a little display for our pirate party at the weekend. we got a new board game so we had a themed get together to play. but I love it so much I kinda want to leave it??

[xoxoemynn]

Where the Daylight Begins - Chapter Two

A modern AU featuring a pining Ed, a clueless Stede, found family, roughly a million animals, and a very magical house. I hope it makes you feel like you are being wrapped up in a big, gay hug. Written as a follow up to The Merry Strays of Lighthouse Sanctuary, but it's not strictly necessary to read that first. Read the most recent chapter here, or start from the beginning here.

Countless thanks to @margotandthefox, @monksofthescrew, and @blakbonnet for their feedback and encouragement. You are absolute gems. And also a BIG thank you to @haflacky for the incredible art.

~*~

"Yeah, I know it's probably not the best publicity that there's a podcast dedicated to alleging you murdered a police officer in cold blood," said Lucius. "But you have to realize a simple Google search would reveal as much." 

"Yes, I know," Stede snapped. "I'm not an idiot. But that doesn't mean I want the crew to suddenly know they have a murderer for a boss."

"Stede."

"Yes?"

"We all already know."

chapter one | chapter two

[buck1eys]

maybe it's been said but in light of stede and ed's new breakup... ed as the last surviving member of a 70s rock band, they lived like kings, smashed up cities, left a trail of unpaid bills and broken hearts in their wake but it all ended in tears. and then ed discovers stede, an older guy with a unique sound who's trying to make it in the industry and he helps him put out demos and get his first shows, but when stede blows up in la and starts living the rockstar life, ed can't take it. he doesn't know how to warn him but he doesn't want to ask him to give the fame up just to what - run a shitty diner whose only patrons are the other survivors of the seventies? and so they split and stede writes the most devastating breakup song that plays on every radio in every shitty bar ed frequents, and the whole world is wondering who broke stede bonnet's heart.

[timelord-of-the-moon]

Maybe seeing those two fictional middle aged men have sex will fix me

[personwholoveschocolate]

god his so stupid

i want to see him so so much i cant wait

[x]

[myjetpack]

I got a copy of FORCES OF NATURE by Ed Steed from @drawnandquarterly and it is as amazing as I expected. To quote myself from my blurb “Nobody is doing funny cartoons better than Edward Steed”. www.drawnandquarterly.com/books/forces-of-nature/

[mikacanica]

If you're taking ofmd requests, could you please do ed giving steed a rose and then they peck on the cheek or something. I just feel like that would be cute. Np If you're busy though 😊 (I love your stuff btw)

in love 🥰

I wish season 2 had more of the quiet tender moments. It wasn't a big deal to have so much missing since I thought season 3 would make up for it but then we got canceled *sob*

[follows-the-bees]

Reading Ed's body language in this scene really gives us a lot of insight into what he's feeling.

The little hop is just adorable. And shows that he is still feeling light-hearted even while being guarded with more of the crew around.

His hands are clasped firmly on his belt cause he's still not all the way at ease with the crew. Especially Jim who is arguably the most skilled. They look like a more relaxed position to the outside eye but his hands are still close enough to grab either of his weapons. (This is just like the scene when he introduces himself to the crew in 1x4. One hand is constantly on a weapon, but with Stede, he not only doesn't touch his weapons, but exchanges them with him. He is literally giving Stede his only defenses.)

Ed looks down the whole time. He's already been vulnerable with Lucius, and while he isn't necessarily closed off, he isn't gonna show anyone else that side of him yet.

His jacket being back on is like shucking his armor back on around others — only Stede (and Lucius) get to see (t-shirt) Ed.

Ed also is whispering it because he doesn't want Stede to overhear. Ed just learned that his feelings are returned, and that Steed is doing this for him (how many times do you think that someone has done something for him, with no ulterior motive??) He wants Stede to continue having fun at the moment.

We see previously in this episode how open Ed became when he was with Stede. Even faking not finding something in his beard, so that Stede would touch him.

But once again, he becomes more hesitant, shucking that Blackbeard persona on a little more, while still being open. getting physically close to the crew so that Stede can continue being gleeful.

[batmanfruitloops]

would scarebeast be receptive to ed puttign a saddle on him and ridign him like a valiant riddle-steed if he got lots of boiled eggs in return

Scarebeast would be receptive to that, but Ed wouldn't do that. He wouldn't want to dehumanize Jo. A saddle wouldn't fit on Scarebeast anyway, his shoulders are too wide. He also has a mane full of quills so it wouldn't be very comfortable. So instead Scarebeast carries Ed around like this. No need for a boiled egg bribe, he just loves carrying his little gremlin around.

Ed could ride on his shoulders if he picked out all of Scarebeats' quills. It wouldn't hurt Jo, since like a porcupine the quills are loosely attached. It would just be tedious.

-Fluffy

[moontyger]

It was a tip that brought a dog to the main post office in downtown Jackson, Mississippi. An employee there had reported seeing someone in the lobby putting pills into hot pink envelopes.

Hours later, Ed Steed, a police officer from the small city of Richland, just south of Jackson, walked into a back room at the post office where one of the envelopes had been set aside. Steed, a K-9 handler, arrived with Rip, his narcotics sniffer dog. Rip strode around and, when he got to the pink envelope, sat down. According to records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, Steed said this meant the dog had smelled narcotics. That claim became evidence to get a warrant to open the envelope.

This, though, was no ordinary drug bust. As it turned out, there were pills inside the package, but they were not the kind that Rip or other police K-9s are trained to detect. The envelope contained five pills labeled “AntiPreg Kit.” They were made in India, and their medical purpose is to induce abortion. Dwayne Martin, at the time the head of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service in Jackson, told me this was exactly what the initial tipster had suspected.

...

What will happen to abortion-pills-by-mail and the people who use them if Donald Trump is elected in November? As the accounts of the regional USPIS head and FOIA documents show, a piecemeal crackdown is already underway during a Democratic administration. Under a Trump regime, things might go much further.

Whoever is in power, the incident in Jackson provides a potential window into the future — one in which freelancing local Postal Service employees and officials can call on local cops to halt women from accessing reproductive care and potentially charge and arrest those providing or using abortion medication.

My FOIA request asked for records from past years of investigations of people who’d used the mail to send pills. The documents I got back show how a willing administration might go after distributors. The feds could even lend support to police in states that have criminalized abortion care as they pursue cases under local laws. Pregnant people who order the medications could get caught in the dragnet.

The documents I received after my FOIA request were highly redacted but still reveal many details about a federal investigation that began less than two years ago in Mississippi. Dozens of envelopes with abortion pills were seized. The bust followed on the heels of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, and came after a group of anti-abortion doctors filed a federal lawsuit in Texas, arguing that abortion pills should be banned from the mail.

The Jackson investigation apparently also employed what’s called a mail cover: a little-known Postal Service method for collecting data about people suspected of committing crimes. Using an enormous database of images of the outside of envelopes and packages, postal inspectors can digitally compare names, addresses, and other information on one item to others. And the findings can be freely shared with almost any law enforcement agency that requests them. The return address for the hot pink envelope in Jackson included an unused post office box number, the sort of information postal inspectors can use to correlate parcels to each other.

Reproductive justice activist Laurie Bertram Roberts worries about an anti-abortion regime taking power. They direct the Jackson-based Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund, which assists fellow Mississippians with any reproductive decision they make, from having a baby, to leaving the state to go to an abortion clinic, to using pills at home.

In a state where abortion is strictly banned post-Roe, Bertram Roberts is also a doula. Along with other doulas, they have organized help for people at the end of their pregnancies, including those which do not come to term. Whether that end is due miscarriage or to abortion is immaterial. “We don’t ask,” they said.

The pink-envelope investigation came out of a sort of collaboration between the feds’ regional offices and a local official: U.S postal workers and a city K-9 cop. Though no one in Mississippi has yet been arrested for helping carry out an abortion, Bertram Roberts fears that synergy. They leaned forward and tensed their lips as I opened my computer and pulled up images I’d obtained from the FOIA request: photos the USPIS had taken, in a post office parking lot, of vehicles suspected of belonging to the person who mailed the pills. 

Bertram Roberts peered anxiously at the screen. “I don’t recognize them!” they said. Their face relaxed, but they shook their head. “The thing I worry about most is people getting criminalized.

...

Using local dogs creates risk for abortion-seekers. With the post office inviting local law enforcement to assist with federal investigations, local police could theoretically do their own investigations, by copying names and addresses from the mail. And they could pass that information to anti-abortion district attorneys. 

Police dogs, however, are trained to smell only the illegal drugs heroin, marijuana, ecstasy, fentanyl, and cocaine, not the ingredients in abortion pills, which currently remain legal. And the K-9s’ forensic reliability is suspect.

Why would a police dog alert on abortion pills in the first place, when they’re not narcotics?

Martel, the USPIS national spokesperson, speculated that the pills found in Jackson were contaminated in the manufacturing process by trace amounts of a drug such as marijuana, or perhaps someone was handling narcotics when they did the packing and left molecules behind that only canines’ super-sensitive noses can detect.

Theories along these lines are widespread among police, and they’re inherently impossible to disprove. Elisa Wells, a co-founder and co-director of Plan C, is skeptical. She said her group has conducted laboratory analyses of various brands of foreign-made abortion pills. They’ve all been pure, she said, and no one has ever complained about their containing narcotics.

There is another reason why a K-9 can zero in on a package that’s devoid of illicit drugs. Animal researchers call it “cueing.” Canines are exquisitely sensitive to the minutiae of a human’s posture, eye movements, and other subtle behaviors. Handlers wishing to develop probable cause to do intrusive searches for narcotics can coax their dogs into drug-alerting behavior. To get a reward, the dog will alert, even if nothing illegal is present. (Steed, the K-9 handler, declined to be interviewed for this story.)

Cueing can be deliberate, but it’s more often unconscious. In 2011, Lisa Lit, a researcher at the University of California, Davis, published a now-famous study in which she told the handlers of several police dogs that their K-9s would be searching for “target scents” hidden randomly in several containers. She put red tape on some containers and said it marked the targets. In reality, none of the containers had scents. Even so, most of the dogs alerted on containers, especially those with red tape.

[stoneagedevil]

Cherry Red, Denim Blue, and White Hot Rage | Billy Hargrove x Reader

TW/CW: Speeding, sexualization of reader, billy being a horndog, etc.

- 🏁-

The growl of the cherry red ‘75 Corvette warmed your heart, and sent adrenaline coursing through your veins every time you pressed your foot onto the accelerator. Pressing the clutch and moving your right hand to shift gears was second nature to you, and you almost found it easier to do this motion than to breathe sometimes.

However, right now the purr of your beloved steed was more comforting than anything, as today, you’d be attending a new school in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, Indiana. Hawkins High, to be more precise. Ever since your alarm had screamed at you to get up, you’d been chain smoking cigarettes like a maniac. A balanced breakfast.

Truly it didn’t matter what time you set the alarm for the day prior, as today, you were late. Your mind racing like your car on empty roads, you’d managed to forget multiple things at home multiple times. But this didn’t bother you.

The more time spent in your pristine baby was less time spent doing the “get to know you” routine at another new school.

Your father was a government agent: well off, absent, the usual. While he wasn’t able to tell you much about why he uprooted your lives to move to Indiana, one thing was for certain: this was a dangerous situation.

It wasn’t all bad, you supposed. He provided for you. Your dad and you had worked out a deal: get good grades, face no repercussions. You had free rein over your home and free time.

You were prepared to make this place your bitch too.

You pulled into the driveway of the school, looking for suitable parking places for your prized possession.

And that’s when you saw it. A fellow Chevy, a ‘79 Camaro, in as pristine condition as your Vette. Beside the admittedly stunning car was an open spot - on both sides, actually. You’d figured another passionate Chevy owner would do well to be mindful of their doors. If you had to deal with a door-ding in your fiberglass, you were prepared to break a couple of fingers.

Carefully and expertly, you sailed into one of the two open spots. The outside of the school was empty, signifying class was in session.

You grabbed your bag from your passenger side, slinging it over your shoulder and popping the trunk in order to bring the soft top over the car. Latching it into place, you bid your car farewell.

Time for second period. Your first period teacher would have to get over your absence. There was always tomorrow.

Walking into the room, you received many looks. Multiple eyes flitted up and down your form in order to get a read on you. Who are you? Where do you fit in? Do you even fit in at all? These were the questions you supposed were looping through their brains. The attention you received was annoying, but not unthought of; you couldn’t imagine anything super interesting happened here.

Your day consisted of weaving in and out of bodies in the hallways with whispers following behind you, entering and leaving classrooms, and finding a place to sit in the cafeteria, where you met a band of misfits, one of which was named Eddie who you had a very engaging conversation with on Black Sabbath’s discography. “The Writ” is unmatched in your eyes. He respected that.

Overall, the day was mundane, yet slightly enjoyable.

That was until you left the doors of the school, your eyes immediately catching an ass cladded in blue denim jeans resting on YOUR car, and a large crowd hovering over it. Attached to the ass was an ass himself. Denim head to toe, blonde curly mullet, cigarette trapped between his lips and an earring dangling on one side. The fucking nerve of this denim-ed dork sitting on your car like he owned it. He had another thing coming.

“Deep breaths.” You muttered. A hefty breath in and out followed your words. And then you started walking, shoving these strangers out of your way, not caring what they had to say in return. You had to defend your car’s honor.

When you were in his peripherals, he immediately took notice of you. Rather than trying to read you, he was checking you out. Sizing you up in a way that measured how much you’d play hard to get. He was in for a rude awakening.

“This pretty thing yours?” You asked him, nodding your head to your car behind him.

He laughed and ducked his head, pinching the cigarette between his fingers. “No, but my pretty thing is the Camaro. You could be too though.”

The crowd watched in anticipation: was the new girl set to be another Hargrove conquest? Not quite.

You pretended to laugh and twirled your hair between dark red manicured fingernails. “It’s beautiful. I like the color. But why sit on that car if yours is the Camaro?” You pouted.

He sat up at that, and you gleaned a sense of pride in your compliment by the way he puffed out his chest and smirked. “I’m gonna challenge this guy to a street race. I’d see you there, right? I think I’d remember your face if I’d seen you around here before.”

You laughed again. “I think you’ll have to.” You replied, stepping closer until your lips were inches away, reaching around him with your keys, you unlocked the door to your Vette.

His eyes widened in recognition, and his mouth fell open slightly.

Lifting one finger to his chin, you pressed upwards, closing his loud mouth. “I’ll race you, babe, but don’t get too sad when you lose, ‘kay? 2:00pm this Sunday on Elm sound good to you? Unless you’ve got church…a straight edged boy like you?” You smiled smugly.

He merely nodded, laughing slightly, though all confidence was lost.

You had that effect on men.

You opened your door on his ass, nudging him away, and unlatching the top of your convertible from the trunk, opening it, and unlatching and folding the entire thing back into the trunk again.

Getting in, you put on your sunglasses and blew him a kiss, squealing your tires as you floored it.

Billy Hargrove watched the new girl drive off, the sound of squealing tires quickly being replaced by the “ooh’s” and whistles of his peers at her challenging attitude to him. The feeling of surprise and awe was now overshadowed by the unmistakable feeling of his denim jeans being significantly tighter, and he made his way to his own vehicle.

This was going to be a long rest of the week.

-🏁-

I know I have other part 2s to make but part 2 to this fic will be out sooner than the others. I do what I want, where I want, when I want, how I want! It’s a curse, really.

Anyways, I hoped yall liked this. I totally dropped elements of me in this as I have a 75 Vette myself, and while it needs work done, I still love it with all of my heart.