#FAD Market

[hentired]

A lot of people are missing the point for that marketing post i think about Barbie / Oppenheimer / Grimace Shake challenges etc.

Its not about not posting about seeing a movie. You can see a movie and tell your friends about it, post about liking it or whatever. That's fine. The problem is that it's becoming a trend to go see these movies or participate in these challenges. People aren't doing it out of intrinsic motivation, but because they want to be part of the trend. This is what makes every corporate marketeer cum their pants.

Marketing is not to cater to people who would watch these movies nonetheless. Its to convince the people who normally wouldn't to do so anyway. Its about making people who don't participate feel left out so they'll go see it anyway and post their pink Barbie-watching outfits on Instagram so everyone else knows they're in on it. Its social manipulation to convince people to be part of something. Its very healthy to be conscious about it when you post about these trends and its also good to remind yourself that you shouldn't do anyone's marketing for them for free.

Again, there's nothing wrong with seeing a movie and posting about it. There is something wrong with making people feel left out for not seeing something and pressuring people to see something to belong in the in group.

[neon-moon-beam]

The irony of stores selling "stim toys" or "sensory toys" and then blasting pop music really loudly and having bright, fluorescent lights, or even flashing lights...Really seems they think "stim/sensory" means "'satisfying' to watch on the video app du jour" and not what it actually means.

[mars-ipan]

do you folks remember when food youtube was good

[sapphia]

people who think that ai can replace writers in fields like literature, tv, film etc are commenting on how dull and shallow they think modern consumers and their mediums are rather than how possible it is to actually is to do

[comicgeekscomicgeek]

The opposite of this is those little niche businesses like Pepper Palaces that you wonder how they’re possibly making ends meet.

i love commercial real estate that is essentially zoned exclusively for momentary fad businesses that will go bankrupt. hmm, ok, we are the 8th comic book store in this zip code, and, fuck, uhh, ok nobody is going to any comic book stores anywhere, hmm, ok, vape lounge, old robot style vapes, yep nope ok we don't really sell anything and we're bankrupt. now we're a Vape Store. ok we're the 8th one on this block. ok. they've changed the locks. hmm. what's next. Axe Throwing, Axe Throwing Will Be The Nex-oh, shit, fuck. ok. I got it. We sell fake weed.

[thatbanjobusiness]

The trend of modern, flimsy record storage needs to die in a hole. It only proves that vinyl is a fad, for display and clout rather than practicality.

Extra points for the stackable, collapsible, cloth boxes that are "for vinyl." Because that's not record damage waiting to happen.

And like. It's one thing if there are good alternatives easily available on the market. But 95% of what I see is an accident waiting to happen in some form or fashion. The remaining 5% is expensive as twice butt and stores a paltry sum.

I'm going to become a box maker out of spite. I am. Going to be. A box maker. The best box maker in the damn world. Out of S P I T E.

[reasonsforhope]

"A group of 200 UK businesses and charities have signed a pledge that company work weeks will be shortened to 4 days without a loss in pay

Including marketing and advertisement; tech, it, and software; and charity groups as well, the companies employ more than 5,000 people.

Organized by the 4 Day Week Foundation, it follows something less than a trend but more than a fad in which a mixture of employees and executives believe that a happier, more balanced workforce is key to driving productivity.

That balance, they would argue, can be achieved by far more people through the reduction of the 5-day work week to a 4-day one.

“[With] 50% more free time, a four-day week gives people the freedom to live happier, more fulfilling lives,” Joe Royle, the foundation’s campaign director, told the Guardian.

“As hundreds of British companies and one local council have already shown, a four-day week with no loss of pay can be a win-win for both workers and employers.”

This sentiment isn’t shared by all workplaces, but market competition should demonstrate over time whether or not firms that implement unorthodox work hours are in fact as productive or more so than traditional ones.

Economics says that with all else being equal, if enjoying more free time leads to greater employee retention and motivation, then these 4-day work week firms will begin to out-complete the old ones, which in turn will be forced to adapt or risk losing market share.

London firms have been the most enthusiastic, with 59% of the 200 workplaces being located in the capital. With so many firms for talented workers to choose from, it’s no wonder that some are looking to seek advantage in attracting this talent through more desirable working terms.

Last year, GNN reported extensively on a report that was released by a county government in Washington called San Juan, detailing their one-year experiment with a 32-hour, or 4-day work week. In the report, quitting and retiring decreased by 48%, while 55% of employees said their workflow wasn’t interrupted even though they lost an entire working day’s worth of time to complete it.

Even in the famously hard-working nation of Japan, a 4-day workweek seems to strengthen productivity."

-via Good News Network, January 28, 2025

[slapstikcomedyentertainment]

A Guide to the Good the Bad and Just the Fad Diet Fads

I am here to tell you what diet is worth sacrificing a ten count of chicken McNuggets...

It seems like every week there is a new diet that goes viral. The marketing of these diets is so convincing that people go into them thinking they’re going to lose 20 pounds and look like Bella Hadid within a week’s time. While it’s true that many of these diets do show some results, it is never long-lasting. They are temporary fixes to a larger problem. As a young woman living in this social…

[iatrophilosophos]

Hey I'm hearing uh. More, and more, and more buzz about GLP-1 agonists like ozempic from random ppl and healthcare providers alike and there's like a terrifying lack of lucidity abt it so I just wanna say, if you've heard some stuff and are curious:

Ozempic is a chemically-aided crash diet. That's it.

Like metformin, an older diabetes medication used off-label for weight loss, it's functioning as an appetite suppressant in this use-case. It's not magic; it's not changing how your body makes or uses fat; it just makes it less miserable to eat less. It is contraindicated by histories of disordered eating and should absolutely not be prescribed without a full screening for above-adequate food intake and nutrition *and* ongoing screening for adequate nourishment/malnutrition: this is broadly not happening.

I've also seen no indication that ozempic/GLP-1 agonists are any less likely to lead to weight cycling (w/o constant use) than a straight crash diet, or do anything meaningful to limit the known, significant health risks of weight cycling.

Nothing has changed:

The main things we know from a western scientific perspective about weight and weight loss are that 1) almost all people who lose significant weight gain it back and 2) weight cycling causes cardiovascular and metabolic health complications. Yall we aint even have strong evidence to suggest that weight loss is beneficial to health conditions associated with higher weights. This *should* point to Dr's never ever reccomending weight loss (we do know it can hurt, don't know it can help) but yknow we live in uhhhh fucking world.

We are possibly ripe for an aggressive intensification of anti-fat medical rhetoric, especially in pediatrics

Among the projections for an RFK FDA that ive gotten from folks i know in these fields is a renewed focus on childhood obseity and general military-style fitness. As the ozempic fad has already been ramping up, I'm kinda! concerned! about this being a major point of focus for the oncoming administration--i figure we're ripe for another mass diet craze associated with a wide variety of deaths anyway and that existing cultural+market inertia added to it being literally on the agenda spells some not great things. I really seriously reccomend paying extra attention to this area.

Clinics love ozempic because it's extremely popular and extremely profitable--i even know someone who's job was threatened for refusing to prescribe it. We already know that we cant trust doctors to be informed around weight or for the system to sound public alarms.

Obviously, people have the right to do whatever they want--but the disclosure just isn't there and people are being sold this stuff based on the idea it'll make them *healthier* and prevent disease. It can't and it won't.

If the claims here about weight in general are new to you, start here: (Don't love the title of the article, second the exasperation)

If you want to understand more about glp-1 agonists specifically, like, start with the Wikipedia article and do some googling it lays out the pharmacology in relatively plain language. Sry i ain't doing a buncha work to find citations ppl won't click; there's not a lot of good critical stuff out there that's actually published but it doesn't actually take a lot of reading up on critical weight science to form a critical take on the sources singing ozempics praises.

Peace, good luck, do whatever you want forever, maybe tell ur mom that this isn't any different from the disastrous weight loss fads of the 90s.

[prokopetz]

You mentioned the baby Huey show when talking about the inexplicable "what was the audience for this?" cartoons of the 90's and why I don't disagree with that notion I do think there was some of that same energy in the 2000s as well, Baby Looney tunes and Loonatics unleashed anyone?

(With reference to this post here.)

I'm not sure I'd concur. Loonatics Unleashed was clearly a delayed reaction to the late 1990s fad for edgy reimaginings of classic media properties, and while the idea of doing that to the fucking Looney Tunes is misguided, there's no mystery about what target audience they were aiming for. As for Baby Looney Tunes, that's even more obvious – it was Warner Bros. trying to cash in on the then-lucrative cartoons-for-preschoolers market. It's hard to picture preschool entertainment being a big cash cow in 2024, but remember this was way back in 2002, before YouTube existed.

I need you to understand that you're DMing me out of the blue about a post from 2015 with – at the time of this posting – a whole 75 notes, and if I wasn't the sort of genetic freak who can remember off the top of his head every social media post he's ever made, this would be an utterly incomprehensible thing to say.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Reading weird poetry and short stories and unapologetically strange novels really does teach you that a lot of stuff people teach you about writing is just not true. Almost anything someone tells you must happen when you’re writing has an exception and writing advice has trends and fads just like anything else.

I was struggling to find where I fit as a writer until I found writers like Daniel Olivias who wrote short stories in ways I’d never seen before. I owe a lot of my current inspiration in my writing to Latin American magical realism writers. Finding magical realism and surrealism really opened doors in my brain that had been shut before.

You can get weird with it. You can get weird in content, weird in form, weird in structure. You don’t need a plot. You can tell a story backwards, you can just sit in an idea, you can explain, overexplain, skip explanation, get political, start ideas, end ideas. No ifs ands or buts you can just throw traditional story structure out the window.

I know what kind of writer I am now. A weird one. You don’t have to be held to standards of predictability, genre fiction, markets, tropes. You can just do whatever. Truly. Honestly. Completely. For ten words or a hundred thousand.

[soft--dogs]

help they turned me into a marketable 90's fad and now they're fighting over who gets me in the divorce (disclaimer: sammy beanie babies sadly do not exist in the physical world)

[seat-safety-switch]

Based on the remarkable sales success of my powerful new business book, Sell Shit To Idiots, I've been swimming in marketing contracts. Thing is, I'm really expensive, mostly because I sell shit to rich idiots. That makes me feel guilty that I'm passing over a lot of poor idiots, who simply don't have the money for my time. Here's one for free: you can often sell more of something by making it bigger or smaller.

Cars have been getting bigger every year, and they're still selling. Theoretically, there should have been some point where we simply stopped buying them because they were the size of an elementary school gymnasium. Now they're high-school sized, and we're still going. How do you fight this trend? Tiny cars, which also sell pretty well to people who are a little weird and don't carry eight family members, sixteen dogs, and the contents of their house with them everywhere.

Bigger or smaller. This simple truism has been lost in our rush to business-school fads. Artificial "intelligence?" Who gives a shit? I dare you to find me a nerd-assed computer that is willing to say the plain truth: your product would sell better if it were much larger. Staple an "XL" on the end of the name, if you have to. Do you sell popcorn? Get a scientist to make you larger popcorn. I'm not talking a bigger bag, that's last-century talk. Bigger popcorn. Big enough that you get worried about herniating yourself when you grab a handful while watching Die Hard 2. Big enough that you could club a man with it. That shit will fly off the shelves, guaranteed. You probably want to buy it already.

Do you need additional evidence? Just take a look at cupcakes. In any major metropolitan area, there are several cupcake bakeries that exist entirely by making slightly smaller-than-normal cupcakes. What was their investment? Less. What do they charge? More. It's been awhile since I read an economics textbook, but I'm pretty sure that's how you get paid.

I can hear a lot of my haters in the back starting to get up, shuffling towards the door, unable to come up with a coherent counter-argument or even a reckless heckle in my direction. You run, you fucking cowards. And when you get home, you can write your apology letters to me with a comically large ball-point pen.

[nothoughtsjustfic]

Hunted - Y.JH

🩸Who: Yoon Jeonghan (Seventeen) x reader 🩸What: Vampire au. Vampire Jeonghan. Human Reader. 🩸Wordcount: 2.4k 🩸Warnings: Blood. Biting. Injury. Typical vampire stuff. 🩸Summary: "Jeonghan has always loved the Hunt, loves finding a tasty little human to prey on and sink his teeth into their neck. When he spots you one day and catches your irresistible scent, Jeonghan can’t help but make you the focus of his latest Hunt."

Masterlist

A/N- Thanks to @ddeonghwa-s for suggesting vampire Jeonghan on the hunt!

It’s an outdated tradition, sure. But Jeonghan loves it. Thrives on it. Something about it always sends a thrill up his spine.

Jeonghan has been alive for so long, he has seen so many things come and go; fads and crazes that light up his interest only to fizzle out. Yet after all these years this remains.

The Hunt.

Finding the perfect prey.

Stalking.

Luring.

Trapping. Sometimes he stays on this step longer just to watch the silly little humans panic. Sometimes he lets them go to give them a false sense of freedom, which always sweetens their scent, only to sweep in moments later and sink his teeth in. Drink down the joy fizzing in their blood before the fear can sour it again.

Though inevitably, the Hunt must end with his lips pressed against a racing pulse and warmth spilling over his tongue. Feeding.

Tonight is no different.

Jeonghan first spotted you days ago. He caught a whiff of your delectable scent as you passed him in the market, smelling more mouth watering than any of the sweet and savoury treats available for sale.

He knew right then that he had to have you.

For the past few days he’s been Hunting you; watching you to learn your routine and planning how to take advantage of that routine to lure you into a trap.

Which leads him to this point; standing in the shadows of the roof of your apartment building where you always step out in the middle of the night to look over the city. To admire the illuminated signs of life still in the city centre, a fair distance away from your residence where the light sources are fewer and further apart.

The perfect place to lay a trap.

Jeonghan feels smug satisfaction twist his lips into a smirk when you flinch at the sound of the roof door slamming shut. You spin around quickly, eyes darting to the door then around in search of who could’ve removed the brick propping the door open. Yet he knows humans can’t see him, not when his natural affinity for darkness as a vampire allows him to blend so seamlessly with the shadows.

“Who-who’s there?” You call out with a thick swallow.

He can just about catch the slight rise in your heartbeat from across the roof. It strikes him as a little odd that he can’t hear it jackrabbit with fear, as he is more accustomed to during his traps. But then he notices the way the wisps of your hair which are not tied back securely whip around in the wind and he realises that the wind is working against him.

There are few cons to not being sensitive to the weather and being able to withstand almost anything mother nature throws at him, and this is one of them. He hasn’t had to think once, let alone twice, about the weather, bar the sunshine, in centuries and tonight had been no different; he hadn’t added the wind to his plan.

Not that it really matters in the grand scheme of things. He doesn’t need to hear your heartbeat perfectly or easily catch your scent as if you’re right by his side, not now that you’re exactly where he wants you.

Of course, Jeonghan doesn’t respond to your question, he starts to prowl in the shadows without removing his gaze from your tense figure.

Slowly, you relax and let out a huff of laugh to yourself while softly reprimanding yourself for not putting the brick properly in place knowing how easy it would be for the strong wind to catch the door and blow it shut.

Instead of going to the door to try and open it, you turn to peer over the edge of the roof to your balcony a floor below and to your left a little. You’re too busy mumbling to yourself about the practicalities of getting from the roof onto your balcony, and wondering if you left the balcony door unlocked, that you don’t hear Jeonghan approaching.

Jeonghan watches as the fine hairs on your neck begin to prickle and stand on end the closer he gets; your instincts sensing something that your meagre human brain can’t comprehend. There is a predator behind you, and you are not safe.

He stands perfectly still and silent a few metres behind you, enjoying his own little game of hide and seek, even if the seeker is unaware there is someone to be on the look out for. It’s one of the parts of being a vampire that Jeonghan adores endlessly; the ability to stand so close, practically within arm’s length yet entirely out of a human’s senses. It makes his Hunts both easier and more entertaining for him.

As you lean a little further over the edge of the roof, your hands move along the brick ledge by your waist to balance better and something a little sharper than the rough surface of the bricks catches your finger. You flinch and lift your hand to eye it, yet the lighting is too low for you to notice the tiny pinprick of blood on your fingertip.

Jeonghan, however, can perfectly see the little bead of blood and although he can’t smell it with the wind carrying your scent away, his hunger burbles to the surface and his focus changes from playing the game to winning his prize.

He isn’t so quiet as he glides over to stand directly behind you. You hear the scrape of his shoes against the fine natural grit on the rooftop and tense a split second before his right hand lifts to clamp over your mouth.

Sometimes humans still try to scream but Jeonghan is glad that you don’t, he really hates it when they do that; it ruins the experience for him.

“That’s it, good little human, you keep that pretty mouth shut and I’ll be gentle on you,” he coos teasingly, lips brushing against the shell of your ear. “If you try to escape or call for help, I’ll rip your delicate little throat out and let you painfully bleed out right here. Understand?” You immediately nod shakily. “I’m going to remove my hand from your mouth, and remember; keep those lips together or I’ll really give you something to scream about, okay?” You only nod. “That’s a good little human.”

Although you’ve agreed and he can feel the scared tremble of your body against his front where he’s lightly pressed against your back, he doesn’t entirely trust a silly little human to stick to their word, so he moves his hand from your mouth ever so slowly, ready to move it back if need be. But you stay quiet as agreed, earning a hum of approval.

“I wish more humans are more like you,” he comments as his hand slides down your throat to gently grip and tilt your head aside so that he can eye your neck hungrily. You let out a short exhale of air, he assumes it’s some kind of strange human response and thinks nothing of it. He’s too focused on brushing his lips against your skin and inhaling that unique, mouthwatering scent clinging to you and begging to be let free from your veins.

There truly is something endlessly enticing about your scent, which only grows stronger the longer he’s so close to your skin. His gums ache as his fangs force him to let them free ready to feed.

Jeonghan lifts his left arm up to wrap around your waist knowing that humans always flail for the first few seconds.

He can’t blame them though, the pain is excruciating the very first time being bitten, but it flows away as the venom numbs the pain and makes the human compliant. Many humans even enjoy it and become willing blood bags for a vampire. Jeonghan doesn’t like that, he thinks it’s despicable for a vampire to tie themselves to a human; to swear loyalty and take their feed so easily.

It’s lazy. An insult to the very nature of a vampire.

Vampires are predators, hunters. There is nothing more gratifying than a successful Hunt.

Jeonghan can’t wait any longer, he drags his sharp fangs over your neck, only harsh enough to leave faint lines; his favourite trick to add a little tang of utter terror to the blood before he bites down.

Immediately, Jeonghan knows something isn’t right.

You don’t flail. You don’t make a noise past a soft grunt as his teeth pierce your skin and that’s not right. He is never particularly gentle when he feeds, he doesn’t care for the comfort of his food to even attempt to be careful except to allow the little human to live and block the memory for them to not bring attention to his hunting grounds.

Yet you’re quiet, far too quiet for the amount of pain you should be in.

Perhaps it’s not the first time you’ve been unknowingly hunted and fed on, it wouldn’t surprise him at all; vampires all over would love to get their teeth in you and your blood on their tongues.

Jeonghan ignores the niggling in his mind that something is wrong as he reasons with himself about why you’re so still and quiet, and he starts to drink.

As soon as your warm blood pools on his tongue and starts to slide down his tongue, Jeonghan realises that he should’ve listened to his instincts.

It burns. He pulls away from you as quickly as he can to try and spit out the mouthful of blood already blistering his tongue and throat.

With blood trickling from your neck, you turn to look at Jeonghan with a grin, but he doesn’t even notice, he’s too busy on his hands and knees in excruciating pain.

You know that his vampiric abilities will start to heal him soon, so you don’t have long to bask in the sight of the old, powerful vampire suffering on his knees at your feet. Though you do take another few seconds to admire the scene and take a mental picture before you step over and take the thin silver chain from your inner jacket pocket.

Jeonghan yelps and tries to move away as soon as you wind a section of it around his throat from behind and loop it a few times, but every movement makes the silver singe his skin painfully. He tries to pull it away with his hands, but it burns his fingers, and you simply take the chance of him being on his knees with his hands by his throat to wind the ends of the chains around his wrists and yank them behind his back while he wails in pain.

“Now, now, Sir Yoon, you really shouldn’t make such a fuss, it’s just a little silver and holy water rich blood. Surely such an old, powerful vampire as yourself can handle that, right?” You tease, connecting the ends of the chains together at his lower back with the padlock you pull from your pocket.

“Y-you’re a Hunter,” he realises, voice raw and rough from the burns of the holy water within his throat. It sounds like it’s painful to speak and you mentally applaud him for pushing through just to sneer at you with pure hatred.

“Makes two of us, huh?” You retort and circle around to stand in front of him. He’s glaring up at you yet makes no attempt to get up from his knees.

Either he’s smart enough to know that an experienced Hunter, like you clearly are, has more than just these two tricks up your sleeve, or he’s dumb enough to not realise that he could break the chains apart if he’s willing to grit his teeth through the pain of his flesh searing from the silver.

Regardless, it makes your job easier, and you take your phone out to send the confirmation text to your team to let them know that you have Yoon Jeonghan chained and ready for pick up as planned.

Jeonghan is still staring at you icily when you look back at him while slipping your phone back away. “How does it feel to be the one Hunted for a change, Sir Yoon?”

“Stop calling me that, I renounced that title long before your conception, human,” he hisses. You just scoff a laugh. “I should’ve ripped your throat out the second I felt mine burn.”

“Hindsight is 20/20 and all that.”

As expected, you’re not given much longer to gloat as your team rush onto the roof from the door one of them has the sense to prop open again, with all the necessary equipment to properly bind the vampire and incapacitate him. They dose him up with a powerful sedative and once he’s an unconscious lump, he’s carried off by most of the team while the rest get busy cleaning up the roof of your shared blood.

“Another successful Hunt, you’re going to get that promotion any day now,” your right hand man and favourite medic, comments as he approaches you with his medical bag on his shoulder and doesn’t wait for your permission before turning your head to look at the harsh bite mark on your neck.

“Head Hunter has a nice, punny ring to it, don’t you think?” You muse.

“That reminds me, the boss wants to see you about the present you left him last week.”

“He said he wanted Countess Cho’s head on a silver platter, I just gave him what he wanted.”

Soonyoung tries to give you a flat, unimpressed look, but it lasts for all of two seconds before you both start to giggle.

“I stole Yoon’s wallet, drinks on him?” He says a few moments later when he’s looking at your neck again as he cleans it up and covers it properly.

“Hell yeah, he drinks from me, I drink on him.”

“It’s only fair.”

The two of you share another look and giggle before heading off together ready to spend every penny present in the wallet of Sir Yoon Jeonghan, ancient vampire, and prolific human hunter, now nothing more than just another trophy for the Hunter’s Association.

It’s funny, really, that after all his years evading the even older association, all it takes to get Yoon Jeonghan on his knees and bound is turning his own game back on him, making the Hunter the Hunted.

Don’t forget to reblog if you liked to help spread the story and let others read it too! And don't be shy to leave comments or send an ask so I can see your thoughts 🥺 💖

Permanent taglist: @okiedokrie, @tusswrites, @svtiddiess

[devildomwriter]

Jolly Old St Nick | Solomon x Reader

1.2K Word Count | GN! Reader | Fluff, Humor | CW: none? Magic shenanigans

You’d never been so relaxed while in such a crowded place. You held Solomon’s hand tightly as he slowly walked from booth to booth at the Christmas market.

When Solomon called you away on business, he’d done so specifically to stop the brothers from following you on what was actually a surprise date.

You like Solomon so you didn’t mind the surprise date but you were shocked at how good of a job he’d done choosing locations.

A world-famous Christmas market hadn’t been your first idea for a holiday-timed date but he was fully prepared to buy you anything that caught your attention so you weren’t complaining about the crowds.

“Look, ___, they’re making candy canes,” he pointed out the booth next to you and you stood on your tip-toes to sneak a look as the sugar was poured into the molds.

“Are they all made like that?” You asked aloud and he proceeded to give you a more in-depth explanation than you were expecting. Even the booth owner looked shocked by his expertise and appeared to quickly be taking notes on his phone.

You pulled Solomon away from the candy canes after he bought a few to a booth with glass blowers who were making custom Christmas ornaments.

“Blowing glass art, it’s been such a long time since I’ve seen anyone do it. It’s still as incredible as it was thousands of years ago,” he sighed nostalgically and got a few curious looks.

You gave him a cautious look and he laughed and patted your back. “Ah, there’s no need to worry now. No one would believe me anyway.” He made a valid point so you decided to have fun with it instead.

“Did you ever meet Saint Nick?” You asked him as you clutched the paper bag with your glass ornaments.

Solomon laughed and stopped walking, “would you believe me if I told you I am him.”

You ran into somebody in Sienese and dropped your delicate bag. “Oh!”

Solomon quickly caught it before it hit the icy stone path. You breathed a sigh of relief and he chose to hold onto it instead. A wise decision from the wise king himself.

“There’s no way. You just snuck into people’s houses and gave them stuff?”

“Well, sort of. I’m certainly not the only one who did something like that but when I came into my power more I experimented with it a little and tried teleporting small things. Every so often if I overheard a family wasn’t doing well, their child especially, I’d place something small and fun in their drying clothes.”

You shook your head in disbelief. “So…you’re a king of ancient times, a sorcerer, and Santa Clause? All in one, huh?”

Solomon laughed it off and shrugged. “I wouldn’t say ancient…”

“That’s the part you disagree with?”

You laughed at Solomon and you both continued through the Christmas market. You found a few cute items for everyone. A hand-stitched angel ornament that reminded you of Luke, a hand-carved wooden cow from a nativity scene (Belphegor didn’t need to know that part), an antique metallic Christmas tree from a fad decades past, and a fancy leather belt you thought would be perfect for Thirteen.

Solomon found a booth with kettle corn and immediately purchased some while you found a free bench. As soon as you sat down a distraught woman sat next to you on the phone while the kid held onto her leg looking like they’d cried for a long time.

You knew it wasn’t your business but as soon as she hung up the phone you had to pry. Just to see if you could help them.

“I’m sorry for intruding but…is something wrong?” You asked.

The mom looked slightly annoyed to be asked as she’d been through enough but the child quickly fessed up. “My doggy,” he trembled and his mother quickly picked him up and sat him in her lap to coddle him.

“Did your doggy go missing?” You asked as Solomon approached you from behind.

“Oh dear, did he?” Solomon asked with a frown.

The mother shook her head. “It’s his stuffed animal. I told him not to bring it,” she began but the indication it was his fault brought a wave of tears from the young child so she stopped herself.

You thought about it for a moment and looked at Solomon who nodded with a similar idea. “Do you have a picture?”

The mother shook her head, “It’s okay. Really,” she dismissed but you shook your head.

“I happen to be a private investigator, mam. I’m pretty good at finding things. If you hand a picture, I promise you’ll have that dog back in the hour.”

She looked horrified you’d made such a promise with her son in earshot but Solomon nodded confirming the same thing.

Reluctantly she took out her phone and found a picture. The dog appeared to be handmade and well-loved.

You nodded and took off into the crowd with Solomon to keep an eye on the woman.

After searching for a while using a tracking spell you had no luck so you texted Solomon for help. He sent you a laughing emoji which frustrated you and then sent you a spell you hadn’t tried before and asked you to recite it out of sight.

You slipped away into a dark alley behind some booths and recited the spell with the stuffed animal in mind and it materialized in front of you. You gasped and caught it before it hit the ground.

It was identical to the photo. You weren’t sure if you summoned it or made it but either way, you knew a little boy was about to be very happy.

You quickly rushed back to the bench and the mother’s eyes widened when she saw you.

The little boy sprang free from her arms and ran to you to quickly hug his beloved stuffed dog.

“You actually found it!” The mother gasped and looked teary-eyed. “I can’t thank you enough. What do I owe you?”

You shook your head, “I’m Santa’s helper, Mam, I find kids their toys for free, it’s part of my job.”

Suddenly you heard a laugh from Solomon and gave him a puzzled look.

“Time to go,” he said quickly and you walked his way as a man called out to the mother and son.

“Honey I found the dog, it was by the vending machine still—huh?”

The family looked at the dog in the dad’s hands to the one in the boys and to you and Solomon smiling like nothing weird just happened.

“How did you…this dog was hand-made by my mother…she died last year…” The woman was too shocked to say more and her husband stood there silently bewildered.

“Umm…merry Christmas from Saint Nick!” you said and grabbed Solomon’s hand running away as quickly as you could as he laughed loudly.

“Shut up Solomon! Didn’t that break some kind of rule!?” You exclaimed and he shook his head.

“Who cares? You magically created the exact toy a child wanted. I think that makes you a st nick just like me,” he chucked and you rolled your eyes.

“Give me the scarf. I want to look around more but now I need to hide my face.”

Solomon continued to laugh at you the rest of your date at the Christmas market.

Sure enough, the story of the two stuffed dogs made it to the local news as a Christmas miracle from one of Santa’s mysterious helpers.

[feministdragon]

Transcript:

"Many people still believe that the spread of transgender ideology represents a harmless fad, or a phase, or a problem of youth culture or social media, I've chosen to talk about the wider context and conditions that have allowed this ideology to take hold.

Transgenderism is a predatory, an authoritarian, neoliberal ideology, and one that couldn't take hold outside of the context of the rape culture that Steff described. I want to make this as clear as I can in ten minutes. My slideshow is just a series of books, my sources, and if you want to record them, go ahead.

So the first point to make about neoliberalism is that it's basically synonymous with globalization and with corporatization. It is not just a flawed economic policy, it is a corporate backlash against the political left and a tool of colonization. The 19th and 20th centuries saw the rise of a strong political left, indigenous Renaissance movements, workers unions, successful independent struggles that ousted colonizers, anti-war protests, and women's rights movements.

By the 1990's the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund had a response. They adopted policies that would reverse the progress these movements made. They began to hand out financial loans to governments only on the condition that they undergo what is euphemistically called ‘structural adjustment’, a term to ponder in relation to this issue, for the benefit of multinational corporations.

This structural adjustment has three basic components. Firstly, governments have had to make natural resources, lands, and public infrastructure, available for purchase by foreign corporations. Secondly they are compelled to drastically cut back public spending on health, education, welfare, and social services. Lastly, regulations and legal protections that restrict corporate profiteering, like laws that protect workers from exploitation need to be removed.

This is neoliberalism: the commodification of nature and the removal and defunding of social services and protections, ramped up for the age of multinational corporations. Neoliberalism and its so-called structural adjustments are packaged with rhetoric about freedom. The story is that our so-called free market—in which private sector employers face minimal barriers to profiteering—fosters job and opportunity creation and a trickle-down effect that gradually enables the empowerment of the self-made individual or employee and choice for consumers.

In her book the Shock Doctrine, Noemi Klein points out that people—especially people who have been fighting for centuries for true liberation—don't actually take these sorts of reforms lying down, so alongside propaganda, disaster conditions have been crucial for imposing neoliberalism worldwide. That's why Klein calls neoliberalism disaster capitalism.

Structural adjustment often follows a state of emergency, a natural disaster, or a military invasion or coup. Multinationals and profiteers and agribusiness and tourism move in and benefit. And because women are made especially vulnerable when land is sold off and degraded, subsistence lifestyles are destroyed, wages drop and welfare and health care are harder to access.

One of the industries that has profited most from neoliberalisation is prostitution. The global sex trade lobby is extremely strong at the moment, and of course in a neoliberal climate, it sells us the idea that prostitution is a legitimate business and that pimps are just job creators, in an industry we are now supposed to call sex work, and perceive to be empowering for women as individuals, disregarding the factors of poverty, land theft, sexism, and rape.

Combine this with tourism and the internet and you have huge industries, and sex tourism, trafficking, and pornography—one in ten websites are porn sites. The industry is worth more than the combined revenue of the top ten web technology companies. To encourage porn consumption, porn is also normalized through mainstream media. All of this fuels a climate, described by Steve earlier, a climate of male sexual entitlement, rape and violation, objectification, body hatred, dissociation, dysphoria, and anorexia.

These are the disaster conditions that transgender ideology exploits and that enable whole populations to buy into the idea that not only can women be bought and sold like products, but womanhood itself is a commodity to which men should be entitled. Transgenderism is a neoliberal ideology that treats the natural fact of biological sex itself as something to be plowed over and substituted with the cash crop of gender identity.

It is "empowering" for the individual to reject biological sex, and substitute it for a customized gender that expresses one's own essential tastes. Just like your clothes and shoes are meant to do, and even your car and your cell phone screen protector and your toothbrush.

The mindless mantra, “trans women are women”, encapsulates both the ideology and attitudes of transgenderism and the neoliberal zeitgeist in three words. It implies the destruction of nature, of biology, of our own bodies, including through the radical mastectomies increasingly conducted on adolescent girls, mainly lesbians. It is based on the commodification of women and it leads to the removal of legal protections and social supports designated for women and based on sex. And using this mantra, ‘trans women are women” like a threat, because if you don't accept it you're a ‘bigot’, men are colonizing woman's hard-won spaces, organizations, movements, and safe houses, as well as lesbian culture.

This mantra is also having the effect of consolidating the domestication of the whole political left—peace groups, unions, socialist organizations like Anna described—and assimilating them with the establishment as they ingest and then commit to and prioritize transgender mythology, purge feminists and independent critical thinkers from their ranks, and build stronger ties to the liberal political parties and big money, also promoting gender identity and funding the pride parades.

In this way the lie that trans women are women is the neoliberal answer to the myth of the resurrection within the Catholic Church. It is the one mad thing that you need to accept these days to demonstrate that, despite whatever else you believe in or work toward, you are ultimately willing to surrender your critical faculties and submit to power and to groupthink.

People would never buy the idea that men can get pregnant or that a lesbian can have a penis outside of the disaster conditions we feminists call ‘rape culture’. The conditions of male sexual entitlement—a woman being raped somewhere in the world every single second of the day, normalized porn objectification, dysphoria and body hatred.

In a culture that honored women, cared for children, and was grounded in the natural world, the spread of transgender ideology would not occur. Voltaire’s famous warning that 'those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities' is also pertinent.

Despite all these large-scale pop-up social movements taking place throughout the West at the moment, it is actually a dangerous and threatening climate. We live in a climate in which the absurdities of transgenderism are promoted so widely, while they cause such serious irreversible harm, and it's so taboo to question. Women who speak out now face ostracism, and losing their livelihoods at the hands of the very same people who are currently joining mass movements that claim to fight for the planet and for social justice.

But as Audrey Lorde famously said, “Your silence will not protect you.” So to women out there holding their tongues to stay safe I say, “We're living in an era of rising authoritarianism, and this ideology is a key vehicle for it. You need to find your sisters. Now is the time to speak the truth where you can—in spite of those who will turn on you, who'll refuse to offer you solidarity—and find your sisters. We're here, we're healing, and finding our voices together, and we want you among us."