#I don’t know if you’ll ever see this

[sapphosboy]

Was talking today with a friend about how monumental it was for me as a trans person and a lesbian who was uncomfortably presenting feminine, to meet my butch best friend in college, and how just being friends with them, and hearing about their experience as a butch really allowed me the space to feel comfortable exploring my own gender expression and identity, and how I feel like I’m a more complete person for having known them because they made me feel so incredibly safe in the journey and I now feel so much more comfortable presenting the way I want to and not the way I expect people to want me to, and the friend I was talking to said that I was that for them. So dress as faggy as you fucking want to and be as loud as you want to about it. It’s your god-given right to be DRIPPING with dykery and transgenderism because you never know if you’re going to be that lightbulb moment or safe queer space for someone!

[thakgayihunyaar]

thinking about aoi telling nagumo he could leave too. that he always has a place in their home. he had come over for dinner, and was helping clean up the dishes as sakamoto played with hana. she’s a perceptive woman, much smarter than people give her credit for. nagumo knows as much. he finds she always knows more than she lets on. that she can tell it’s eating him alive.

he wants to tell her that it’s not that easy. that he can’t leave. not yet. not until he’s done what he’s set out to do. but that’s a conversation he can’t burden her with. it’s not hers to bear. so all he does is joke about owing the JAA money, saying that he’ll call her to come to his rescue if needed. it’s enough that she got sakamoto out, he thinks.

that night nagumo wonders what it would be like to have a family of his own. he wonders if he’ll live to see the day.

[orionsnotcanon]

thinking about knockout with a detailer darling

theyre a new person in town and theyre not super into street racing, but new clients are new clients

maybe they’re handing out their card after a race, flirting and talking shop to get that bag

knockout overhears of course and maybe after Darlings been established as a reliable detailer in the Nevada circuit, he pops by their place of work/their house (if they do it out of their garage) maybe after a particularly annoying run in with the autobots or a dusty race

a full body spa every now and then doesn’t hurt anyone if they don’t know, and having someone who seems to get the importance of the finer details, well, that’s just a nice bonus.

[i-hear-a-sound]

A2 will be the character to cause the most on-screen and noticeable “divergences” in season 2, and I’ll even go on to say that if Accord shows up— like physically, at all— in this season, A2 will be why, in some way or another. A-1 dm’d me as such trust

[lonelypersonhere]

i wanna give a shout out to all the queer people and lgbtq people and anyone who as ever been outed.

it can feel really lonely, especially during pride month, but you aren’t alone. there are people out there who support you and are just like you.

you aren’t alone <2

[kastukj]

I hate micro transactions and permanently limited content I hate micro transactions and permanently limited content I HATE MICRO TRANSACTIONS AND PERMANENTLY LIMITED CONTENT

[fingertipsmp3]

Had a dream that this woman I vaguely know (I used to help her husband with spelling and reading and stuff before he turned to a life of crime) randomly had a vendetta against me and I told my mum and she was like “okay you need to either learn martial arts or leave the country”

[ctubbolvr]

@productofaritual this MIGHT be cs!tubbo

[reflectionsofgalaxies]

a friend body doubled for me today while i went through pretty much all my clothes and i ended up getting rid of a bunch of old clothes from highschool that i enjoyed objectively bc they’re pretty, but i felt SO uncomfortable in bc i was trying so hard to be someone else.

anyway that also led to us talking about gender and presentation and stuff bc he’s also a NB trans masc person. and i don’t think i’ve had a conversation that felt that good and honest in like. years.

i also came to the realization that for the first time in my life i feel Hot. and it has SO much to do with my hair being shorter. like, i’ve felt cute or pretty at times, but never hot.

but now? me with short hair in black jeans and a flat black sports bra with open flannels or muscle tees and shit? i feel SO good.

anyway thanks for listening to me talk about how hot i am and how great it feels to have other queer people in my life.

[huntingrays]

so, i love and vibe w bi leo, it’s so good

however

something just hits different with gay leo who’s been performing heterosexuality for years

[elysiuminfra]

HOW did they make that little blonde autistic guy from dungeon meshi HOTTER!!!!! HE WAS ALREADY HOT BUT THEY MADE HIM DO THAT AND……. WHAT ARE THEY PUTTINF IN THE FUCKING WATER

[metaphorical-goblin]

I don’t know if this is a universal experience but for me it’s like

Me @ someone who knows me, reading my smut: yeahhh what do you think? I really loved the illustrative tie-in with this previously established concept, I had it planned from the very beginning! Originally I was going to add in a bit more…

Me @ someone who only knows me through a friend, reading my smut: oh. Oh, lord. Can you tell them I said I’m sorry? I’m normally normal about things honestly, can you please— yeah thanks. Oh my gosh I’m so sorry

[spookysofi]

Ladies I would like to announce that this silly gal will be AT AN F1 RACE THIS YEAR EEEEEEEE!!!

[thekittyfox2999]

okay hold on this is kinda-

on one hand, past me was embarrassing. I was confused and lonely. I was so conversation and friend starved that it felt like I was pushing people away from me because I was too excited.

but on the other, I know that I was going through a rough period. I was finally getting diagnosed with depression and got the help I needed. I was gaining confidence in my self and started knowing my worth was not based on how “well” I did.

I found interests that have completely changed my life for the better. I was getting friendlier and I could communicate without feeling like an outcast.

Do I still feel lonely? Yes

Do I still feel like an outcast with no worth? It happens

But am I improving? In small baby steps.

I may never fully recover from this. But I am so proud of my past self for pushing through even when nothing was worth it.

I have made fond memories, great art, great friends and found media I truly love and can’t stop talking about.

I could never be more proud of myself.

I want to go back in time and promise my younger self that the future is brighter. Not completely. Nothing can be good forever. But I want to go back in time and give her a hug. She pushed through pain I wouldn’t wish on anyone. And she was brave for it.

GOD I’mTEARING UPPPPP

this ended up being more 12-16 but eh- still kinda in the “cringe era”

everyone is embarrassed of their fourteen year old self trust me if you’re fourteen right now you will regret whatever it is that you are doing at this moment

[yesornopolls]

The article is under the cut because paywalls suck

This is an edited transcript of an audio essay on “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the��NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you want to understand the first few weeks of the second Trump administration, you should listen to what Steve Bannon told PBS’s “Frontline” in 2019:

Steve Bannon: The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. … All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity. So it’s got to start, and it’s got to hammer, and it’s got to — Michael Kirk: What was the word? Bannon: Muzzle velocity.

Muzzle velocity. Bannon’s insight here is real. Focus is the fundamental substance of democracy. It is particularly the substance of opposition. People largely learn of what the government is doing through the media — be it mainstream media or social media. If you overwhelm the media — if you give it too many places it needs to look, all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next — no coherent opposition can emerge. It is hard to even think coherently.

Donald Trump’s first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannon’s strategy like a script. The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point. The message wasn’t in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trump’s country now. This is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. If Trump tells the state to stop spending money, the money stops. If he says that birthright citizenship is over, it’s over.

Or so he wants you to think. In Trump’s first term, we were told: Don’t normalize him. In his second, the task is different: Don’t believe him.

Trump knows the power of marketing. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true. Trump clawed his way back to great wealth by playing a fearsome billionaire on TV; he remade himself as a winner by refusing to admit he had ever lost. The American presidency is a limited office. But Trump has never wanted to be president, at least not as defined in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. He has always wanted to be king. His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.

Don’t believe him. Trump has real powers — but they are the powers of the presidency. The pardon power is vast and unrestricted, and so he could pardon the Jan. 6 rioters. Federal security protection is under the discretion of the executive branch, and so he could remove it from Anthony Fauci and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and Mark Milley and even Brian Hook, a largely unknown former State Department official under threat from Iran who donated time to Trump’s transition team. It was an act of astonishing cruelty and callousness from a man who nearly died by an assassin’s bullet — as much as anything ever has been, this, to me, was an X-ray of the smallness of Trump’s soul — but it was an act that was within his power.

But the president cannot rewrite the Constitution. Within days, the birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge — a Reagan appointee — who told Trump’s lawyers, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.” A judge froze the spending freeze before it was even scheduled to go into effect, and shortly thereafter, the Trump administration rescinded the order, in part to avoid the court case.

What Bannon wanted — what the Trump administration wants — is to keep everything moving fast. Muzzle velocity, remember. If you’re always consumed by the next outrage, you can’t look closely at the last one. The impression of Trump’s power remains; the fact that he keeps stepping on rakes is missed. The projection of strength obscures the reality of weakness. Don’t believe him.

You could see this a few ways: Is Trump playing a part, making a bet or triggering a crisis? Those are the options. I am not certain he knows the answer. Trump has always been an improviser. But if you take it as calculated, here is the calculation: Perhaps this Supreme Court, stocked with his appointees, gives him powers no peacetime president has ever possessed. Perhaps all of this becomes legal now that he has asserted its legality. It is not impossible to imagine that bet paying off.

But Trump’s odds are bad. So what if the bet fails and his arrogations of power are soundly rejected by the courts? Then comes the question of constitutional crisis: Does he ignore the court’s ruling? To do that would be to attempt a coup. I wonder if they have the stomach for it. The withdrawal of the Office of Management and Budget’s order to freeze spending suggests they don’t. Bravado aside, Trump’s political capital is thin. Both in his first and second terms, he has entered office with approval ratings below that of any president in the modern era. Gallup has Trump’s approval rating at 47 percent — about 10 points beneath Joe Biden’s in January 2021.

There is a reason Trump is doing all of this through executive orders rather than submitting these same directives as legislation to pass through Congress. A more powerful executive could persuade Congress to eliminate the spending he opposes or reform the civil service to give himself the powers of hiring and firing that he seeks. To write these changes into legislation would make them more durable and allow him to argue their merits in a more strategic way. Even if Trump’s aim is to bring the civil service to heel — to rid it of his opponents and turn it to his own ends — he would be better off arguing that he is simply trying to bring the high-performance management culture of Silicon Valley to the federal government. You never want a power grab to look like a power grab.

But Republicans have a three-seat edge in the House and a 53-seat majority in the Senate. Trump has done nothing to reach out to Democrats. If Trump tried to pass this agenda as legislation, it would most likely fail in the House, and it would certainly die before the filibuster in the Senate. And that would make Trump look weak. Trump does not want to look weak. He remembers John McCain humiliating him in his first term by casting the deciding vote against Obamacare repeal.

That is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.

The flurry of activity is meant to suggest the existence of a plan. The Trump team wants it known that they’re ready this time. They will control events rather than be controlled by them. The closer you look, the less true that seems. They are scrambling and flailing already. They are leaking against one another already. We’ve learned, already, that the O.M.B. directive was drafted, reportedly, without the input or oversight of key Trump officials — “it didn’t go through the proper approval process,” an administration official told The Washington Post. For this to be the process and product of a signature initiative in the second week of a president’s second term is embarrassing.

But it’s not just the O.M.B. directive. The Trump administration is waging an immediate war on the bureaucracy, trying to replace the “deep state” it believes hampered it in the first term. A big part of this project seems to have been outsourced to Elon Musk, who is bringing the tactics he used at Twitter to the federal government. He has longtime aides at the Office of Personnel Management, and the email sent to nearly all federal employees even reused the subject line of the email he sent to Twitter employees: “Fork in the Road.” Musk wants you to know it was him.

The email offers millions of civil servants a backdoor buyout: Agree to resign and in theory, at least, you can collect your paycheck and benefits until the end of September without doing any work. The Department of Government Efficiency account on X described it this way: “Take the vacation you always wanted, or just watch movies and chill, while receiving your full government pay and benefits.” The Washington Post reported that the email “blindsided” many in the Trump administration who would normally have consulted on a notice like that.

I suspect Musk thinks of the federal work force as a huge mass of woke ideologues. But most federal workers have very little to do with politics. About 16 percent of the federal work force is in health care. These are, for instance, nurses and doctors who work for the Veterans Affairs department. How many of them does Musk want to lose? What plans does the V.A. have for attracting and training their replacements? How quickly can he do it?

The Social Security Administration has more than 59,000 employees. Does Musk know which ones are essential to operations and unusually difficult to replace? One likely outcome of this scheme is that a lot of talented people who work in nonpolitical jobs and could make more elsewhere take the lengthy vacation and leave government services in tatters. Twitter worked poorly after Musk’s takeover, with more frequent outages and bugs, but its outages are not a national scandal. When V.A. health care degrades, it is. To have sprung this attack on the civil service so loudly and publicly and brazenly is to be assured of the blame if anything goes wrong.

What Trump wants you to see in all this activity is command. What is really in all this activity is chaos. They do not have some secret reservoir of focus and attention the rest of us do not. They have convinced themselves that speed and force is a strategy unto itself — that it is, in a sense, a replacement for a real strategy. Don’t believe them.

I had a conversation a couple months ago with someone who knows how the federal government works about as well as anyone alive. I asked him what would worry him most if he saw Trump doing it. What he told me is that he would worry most if Trump went slowly. If he began his term by doing things that made him more popular and made his opposition weaker and more confused. If he tried to build strength for the midterms while slowly expanding his powers and chipping away at the deep state where it was weakest.

But he didn’t. And so the opposition to Trump, which seemed so listless after the election, is beginning to rouse itself.

There is a subreddit for federal employees where one of the top posts reads: “This non ‘buyout’ really seems to have backfired. I’ll be honest, before that email went out, I was looking for any way to get out of this fresh hell. But now I am fired up to make these goons as frustrated as possible.” As I write this, it’s been upvoted more than 39,000 times and civil servant after civil servant is echoing the initial sentiment.

In Iowa this week, Democrats flipped a State Senate seat in a district that Trump won easily in 2024. The attempted spending freeze gave Democrats their voice back, as they zeroed in on the popular programs Trump had imperiled. Trump isn’t building support; he’s losing it. Trump isn’t fracturing his opposition; he’s uniting it.

This is the weakness of the strategy that Bannon proposed and Trump is following. It is a strategy that forces you into overreach. To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting, keep moving, keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear. You overwhelm yourself. And there’s only so much you can do through executive orders. Soon enough, you have to go beyond what you can actually do. And when you do that, you either trigger a constitutional crisis or you reveal your own weakness.

Trump may not see his own fork in the road coming. He may believe he has the power he is claiming. That would be a mistake on his part — a self-deception that could doom his presidency. But the real threat is if he persuades the rest of us to believe he has power he does not have.

The first two weeks of Trump’s presidency have not shown his strength. He is trying to overwhelm you. He is trying to keep you off-balance. He is trying to persuade you of something that isn’t true. Don’t believe him.

You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.

[readwritealldayallnight]

Simon ‘Ghost’ Riley, who from the moment he laid eyes on you, has only ever referred to you as his wife

You, this sweet little thing, running through the halls on base one day when you turn a corner and nearly run headfirst into the Lieutenant, who’s walking alongside Soap

“Oh! Sorry about that, sir.” You told him, never slowing down in your hurried pace as you snuck around his large frame and continued down towards whatever you were evidently late for

The only reason his gaze had followed your retreating form, was that unlike everyone else, you had met his eyes when you spoke, even smiled warmly up at him

That one smile and he was done for

“Who was tha’?” The sergeant had questioned, seeing Ghost’s attention still fixated on you.

“Think that was my wife.”

“Yer what?!”

Simon ‘Ghost’ Riley, who makes it a point to let everyone know that you are in fact his wife

Well, everyone apart from you apparently

He would certainly never abuse his position as a Lieutenant, but some new recruit had the audacity to whistle at you as you walked by? Well 100 laps around the base don’t exactly run themselves

Another soldier saved you a seat next to him in a briefing? He can enjoy scrubbing toilet seats for the next week in that case

Someone actually had the bollocks to ask you for your phone number? Perfect, he needed a volunteer for demonstrating hand to hand combat to the recruits, medics on standby of course

By the time he properly introduces himself to you for the first time, it’s understood by everyone else around that you are, for all intents and purposes, Mrs Riley

Simon ‘Ghost’ Riley, who listens to you tell him your name in a voice that resembles music to his ears, hardly bothering to remember your last name, seeing as it’ll be changing soon enough anyway

“You can call me anythin’ you want, love.” His deep, gravelly voice had sent shivers down your spine, cheeky smirk widening beneath his mask. “So long as you call me, that is.”

By the end of your first date, (you were sitting alone in the dining hall and he wordlessly joined you what do you mean this isn’t a date) he’s wondering if you’ll insist on a ceremony or if he can sweep you away to the nearest courthouse and make this official, slipping a ring onto you finger and himself into you

You had laughed when he put his number into your phone and named himself ‘Husband’, certain that the man was only messing with you, some kind of hazing that you apparently weren’t aware Lieutenants played on the new communications hire, but it was only fair seeing as he’d saved your contact under ‘Wife’

Simon ‘Ghost’ Riley, who is over the moon every time you play along, even if he knows you believe you’re only playing

“Ach, thanks Lt. Just what I needed.” Soap said, seeing Ghost’s approaching form enter the common room, holding a steaming cup of tea in each hand

“S’for my wife. Get your own.” The older man gruffly replied, sliding the mug onto the side table next to where you’re curled up on the couch, reading a book

“Aw, thank you honey.” You giggled, smiling up as him with an expression he thinks would taste even sweeter than honey if he were to run his tongue across your upturned lips

“Happy wife, happy life, sergeant.” Ghost shrugged, ignoring the other man’s pout, landing next to you and reaching an arm behind you across the back of the couch

“God, maybe I really should keep you.” You’d laughed, reaching a leg out to dig your socked toes into his muscled thigh, teasing him

Grasping your foot into his large, strong hands, he began massaging it, uncaring that you were only two of the many people in the common room, not when you looked at him like that, smiling together as though you truly were nothing more than a married couple

Simon ‘Ghost’ Riley, who surprised you one day, insisting he needed your help with something crucial off base, and drove you to a local shopping outlet to look at none other than dresses

“Is there some sort of party happening?” You’d questioned, confused out of your mind

“Suppose you could consider it a party.” He’d answered, leading you through the many racks of dresses, you noticed were all, very conveniently, white

“Now while you’re lookin’ through dress sizes,” he’d added, taking your left hand in both of his. “You know your ring size? Got my own shoppin’ to do ‘round here.”

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