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lovelybarnes · 4 years ago

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god- l. laufeyson (part 2)

pairings: loki laufeyson x reader, platonic!tony stark x reader, mentions of nick fury warnings: language and minor angst about: part 2 to god a/n: i apologize for taking so long to post it, i was having trouble coming up with the little details and honestly just writing overall but it’s up!! and another bucky fic will be up tomorrow or saturday!!

loki is suspicious after you leave. in the- admittedly short- time he’s been shoved away and locked in a cage to rot, he had seen you all of two times, and he was enthralled. flabbergasted, too, surprised that a simple mortal managed to stay hidden in the deep parts of his brain and refuse to leave. you were… interesting, just as you had described him: not as a villain, or evil, or horrendous, but captivating; unbelieving that he would do anything for no good reason.

whether that was true or not was still up for debate, so he had yet to decide if you were incredibly intelligent or the simple, stupid mortal he thought you all to be. nevertheless, he found himself slightly disappointed when you left, waving goodbye to him and tucking your book under your arm. while he tried to dissolve the sensation, tony stark came bounding in, standing as close as he could to the glass barrier. stark barked words that loki didn’t care much for, ignoring the man. he could see you wince from inside the elevator, a sliver of your face still available from the closing doors.

“hey, hey!” stark barked, snapping his fingers at loki. the god tilted his head at him, “yes?” he asks, voice dripped in more annoyance than usual. “that girl who just came out of here?” stark started, while loki took a minute to examine his words, “girl,” was she not an accomplished avenger? he thought tony of all people would show the respect that loki thought none of them deserved. “if you even think about doing anything to her, i will bring in the big guy to slam you around some more. you remember him? or do you need a refresher?”

loki nearly scowls at the mention of hulk, body reminding the strange ache that was left after the oaf slammed him into the floor. he only chuckles lowly, though, “how much do you distrust a fellow avenger to believe they cannot handle themselves?” loki muses. tony scoffs, shaking his head, “i really don’t think you’re in a position to question me.”

“i’m a god. i am always in the position i wish to be in,” loki reminds, making tony roll his eyes, “you’ll never see her again if i can help it. and i can,” he says. “oh, but i like her!” loki rebuts, riling tony up, “so sweet, don’t you think?” tony freezes, abruptly turning around and slamming a hand against the glass, “you will not lay a hand on her. i’ll make sure of it.”

“i seem to remember midgardians can usually do as they please,” loki replies smoothly. “and you really think she��ll want to spend time with a monster?” tony questions. loki smirks, “i suppose i simply have a feeling.”

tony is seething when he comes to your lab, having switched with steve to come talk to you. you’re humming along to a song he doesn’t bother to recognize. “you’re in a good mood,” tony observes. at the sound of his voice, you turn, taking your earbuds out and grinning at him. you press what he assumes is the pause button on your phone, “tony! i’ve actually been meaning to ask you something,” you begin. tony raises an eyebrow to tell you to continue. “it’s about loki,” you continue, anxious about his reaction. the man pauses, exhaling softly, “oh. i know what you want to- i’m so sorry for doing that to you, y/n. i promised that i wouldn’t put you with him and we should’ve been more prepared. it won’t happen again.”

the confusion is clear on your face, vocally affirming it with a “huh?”

“that’s what you wanted to talk about, right? babysitting loki?”

“well, yes, but no, it actually wasn’t bad, i wanted to bring up the idea of maybe allowing him books? or maybe music or something, i can’t imagine going from having any book at your fingertips to none at all. also, he’s not getting enough food and i wanted to talk to you abou-” tony stops you with a raised hand, “what?” you recognize the conversation won’t end too well, so you try to phrase your words in a way that tony won’t get too angry at. “i just- when i was watching him, i thought we could be a little less… cruel.”

“with the guy who tried to take over earth?” tony retorts, you sigh softly, already beginning to feel resigned. “he still deserves to eat,” you defend weakly, “come on, tony, please? i’ll watch over him myself when he’s listening to music or reading or eating and i’ll take it back when i have to leave.” tony shakes his head, “someone will always be watching, and it won’t be you.” you frown, “why? don’t you trust me? i’m an avenger, tony. i’m not weak or useless, it’s just watching over someone who is literally in a cage. he can’t even escape.” tony’s about to say no again, so you press, “how come nick fury- man who doesn’t trust- trusts me enough to do that but you don’t?”

tony’s fingers squeeze the space between his eyebrows, eyes closed. he contemplates the effects if he refuses, no doubt ending in the thinning-by-the-minute thread that is your trust in him completely snapping.

“fine,” he finally agrees, and your frustrated frown melts back into a relieved small smile, “but everything you give him has to go through someone else first. i don’t care if it’s fury or hill or romanoff or me, but it has to be approved.” you nod quickly, “yes, of course.” tony raises a finger, “and, you will watch him the whole time. you got yourself into this, kid. i trust you can protect yourself from him if you ever need to.” you agree, “absolutely, and, uh-” you reach into your bag, pulling out the book finnegan’s wake, and your old ipod, equipped with a single downloaded song and earbuds plugged in. “i actually have already chosen a book and a song that i think he would appreciate during the time he tells me himself what he would like and while it gets approved, and um,” you push the objects toward tony, a surprised look lining his features, “since you have time now… the ipod has only that one song and i doubt he can do anything with either of the items, although i’ll be here if he does.”

“you picked these out for him?” tony questions, and you nod again, “i don’t really know him, i doubt anybody does, but i thought james joyce was a good guess considering.” tony looks from the objects in your hand back to you, before sighing and grabbing them. “i want to break free?” he asks, holding up the ipod. you feel your cheeks heat, “music is hard, i went for the obvious.”

tony exhales, looking down at the book, “fine, both are approved.”

“what, you’re not gonna check to see if i carved out a hole into the book and put the tesseract in there so he could escape?” you ask sarcastically, taking back the items while he rolls his eyes. “no, i trust you.” you grin, “you better. there’s no reason for you to not,” tony agrees with you softly, genuinely feeling bad while he kisses your cheek in goodbye. “steve was just called on a mission and needs a replacement, so you better get down there. bowser isn’t in a good mood today.”

you huff out a light laugh at the nickname, cradling your dear books and tangling your fingers in the cords of the earbuds while you walk to the elevator. you catch your bottom lip between your teeth while you watch the numbers blink above the elevator doors, nerves from your choices finally making a home in the pit of your stomach and making your grip tighten on the items. you really don’t know him, and one of the few things that you do know about him is that he isn’t the nicest- although you think it probable that it was warranted- which begins the inkling of regret of your carefully-picked choice to form. you try your best to push past it though, attempting to reassure yourself through the fact that loki’s reading options are limited, and as evil as everyone (including him) claims he is, you suspect (hope) that there is something in him that can’t simply disregard kind gestures. you suppose that theory is from what thor has told you about frigga. you hope it’s correct.

the elevator dings, knocking your thoughts off their destructive railroad and your attention to the shield guard wearily eyeing you and what you carry. “hey, wally,” you greet, shooting him a smile as you walk over to him, pulling your id card from your pocket. “what’cha got there?” he asks, sitting up straighter in his chair to look closer at you. “a- already approved by tony stark- book and song for loki. you know how much he had access to in asgard?” you question. he shakes his head, and you sigh, “me neither. but i imagine it’s a lot, and i don’t think he’s been introduced to our books yet.”

wally stares at you for a few seconds, before pursing his lips, “already approved by stark?” he checks, “already approved by tony,” you repeat. “just no ear things. don’t want him to choke somebody,” he instructs, holding out his hand. you oh quietly, hurriedly pulling off the headphones and putting them in his hand. wally only nods then, trusting you enough to not ask for any more reassurance, and pressing a button next to him to allow you into another elevator. the ride is much shorter, and you bounce on your heels, fidgeting with the edge of the book.

you barely recognize when the doors part, the slick-haired god already examining you. “in asgard, it is strongly discouraged to damage books like you are doing,” loki states. you stop your picking, dropping your hand and walking inside. “hello to you too, loki.” the god ignores you, instead focused on what is in your arms. “i thought any pleasantries for you weren’t allowed down here,” he says, eyes focused on your ipod. “ah, not if you ask nicely,” you reply, standing next to the chair, “and, these aren’t for me.”

you set your own book down on the floor- a very cliche wuthering heights, but it was either that or romeo and juliet, and you’d prefer not get caught reading about a forbidden romance while watching a villain- and hold up the one for him, grinning. “so i don’t know much about asgard or its books because thor hasn’t budged yet on taking me, but from what i can gather, you have little to no media from here, right?” loki ducks his chin suspiciously in response. “so i can imagine you haven’t read shakespeare, or james joyce, which reminds me a lot of you, so…”

you offer no more explanation, putting the book on your chair and showing him the ipod, walking closer to the glass. “this is an ipod. it’s used to play songs offline, and i picked one out for you. i don’t know if you’ll like it because i don’t really know what type of music you like or if you like it at all-” you pause, finally recognizing how long it had been since he’d talked. “but, uh, i hope you do.”

you look up at him then, unsurprised to find him already staring back at you. “you did this for me… why?” he queries skeptically. “i told you before; i imagine it’s difficult to go from everything to nothing in a day. and i think it must be boring to be trapped in there all day with nothing to do.”

loki still looks distrustful, but you grab the book, pulling out the key card to open his food slot. “i can’t leave these in here after i leave, but i’ll stay until you finish both,” you assure, pushing the book through the small gap. your ipod is still in your hands as you walk back near him. he looks at you for a few moments longer before his eyes flick to the book. “and there are no… explosives? poison of some kind in that?”

you shake your head, “no, of course not.”

loki narrows his eyes at the paperback anyways, walking towards it apprehensively. “when you want me to, i can teach you how the ipod works and you can listen to the song. it’s by a rock band called queen,” you babble, watching as he slowly observes the book before picking it up at an even more leisurely pace.

“i’m going to go sit over there now. just let me know if you need something,” you can’t seem to stop talking, so you focus instead on your legs moving you back to your seat, picking up your novel before sitting. you’re about to ramble on about something else again, until you notice the publication in loki’s hands, slightly panicking at the immediate rush of satisfaction and happiness it gives you when he opens the first page.

you try to avoid the sound of turning pages when you stay stuck on the same sentence, too concerned about why your neck decided to warm when the god accepted your favor.

“you can play it,” loki voices suddenly, almost as if reading the loud thoughts about your decision on the song. he looks up at you, “reading is usually accompanied by light music, but i suppose i could listen to rock.”

you nod, pressing a button on the small device that makes the beginning notes bounce off the walls of the room. your fingers gently tap along to the beat on the edge of your page without your noticing, too used to the melody to not react. you try not to look too hard at loki to watch for his reaction, too interested if he’ll like it or not.

after the first minute passes by and he doesn’t object to the sound, you count this as a win, allowing yourself to relax into your chair and actually read the words lined on the page, discovering them to make a lovely combination. you only notice when the song ends when loki speaks up, “it is okay,” he compliments, “i enjoyed it. i think i’d enjoy your so called queen.” you chuckle softly, “i thought you would. do you have any favorites here so i can add them for next time?”

“no,” loki responds, not taking his eyes off the page. “i’ll find some for you, then,” you promise, then press play on the ipod again, not missing the tiny quirk of loki’s lips, making you way too giddy than you should be.

after it has been over six hours and loki has barely finished finnegans wake, you’re completely sure he took extra time to read it; whether it be to absorb it better or simply have more time with it in his hands, you don’t care, pride swelling up in your chest because you did something right for him. he hadn’t complained about the repeated song, and you can’t blame him. the sounds are a lot more entertaining than the cold silence that usually occupies the space where he resides.

you ask loki more about what he thought, attempting to coerce him into telling you his preferences, until tony is calling you up.

you’re about to leave, both books and ipod in hand when you pause.

“y/n,” loki starts, and you realize it is the first time you’d hear your name out of his mouth. you decide you like how it sounds in his voice, not disregarding how you shouldn’t. “yes?” you answer instead, meeting his eyes. “thank you.”

you swallow, surprised at the genuinity in his voice while you nod, “it was no problem.”

loki finds it disturbing how much he dislikes seeing you walk away.

#loki laufeyson #loki friggason #mcu loki #reader x loki #loki x reader #loki x you #loki x y/n #mcu loki x reader #mcu loki x you #loki laufeyson imagine #loki layfeyson x reader #loki layfeyson imagine #loki laufeyson x you #tony stark #avengers x reader #avengers #avenger!reader

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yamithediaperdork · 3 years ago

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My Little Brothers revenge Part 1

My little brothers revenge

The Hickman's were for the most part a average middle class family. both the parents worked and they had two children.

A 12 year old named Justin who had natural blond hair in a brush cut though he currently had it dyed indigo blue to go with his icy blue eyes. He had a jock's build (well as much as one could have at that age) and wasn't scared to use his physical power to his advantage.

his little brother Alex was short for his age and was always being mistaken for a 6 year old or worse when he was 9 and a half. He had red hair that went down to his shoulders and he kept in a pony tail and his checks were sprinkled with freckles.His slim body meant he was last to be picked for any sports though unlike his brother he was a strait A student and actually sometimes had to help his older brother with his homework, a fact that neither of them enjoyed.

It was their mother Anne (who Alex took after in appearance) who insisted that he help his big brother and it always ended with Justin pissed off and Alex hanging from a bed post by his sponge bob underoo's.

Their father who Justin took after in appearance refused to believe his little all star could be such a bully and so it was usually left to Alex to figure out a way to hold his own or go and whine to their mother, getting him labeled a mama's boy.

Still all brothers fight, it was just a fact of life and it might of all just gone this way with them being a semi happy family till the day the bully of a big brother took things a step too far and Alex decided that Justin had to be put in his place once and for all.

Alex had been hanging out with his friends Saturday afternoon, playing video games in the living room and having semi pissed off Justin who had wanted to watch a movie with HIS friends.

But mom and dad made sure that the TV time was shared and that both boys got a block of time and with their parents just down the block, Justin knew better then to try and strong arm them out.

Said friends were Kyle and Lyle, twins from down the block who had a semi creepy habit of finishing each others sentences and had light caramel skin and black hair in matching mushroom cuts. it was easy enough to tell them apart as by a semi quick of fate Lyle had brown eyes while Kyle had green.

Missing in action because he'd gone fishing with his dad was Max, anther shrimp who had dirty blond hair in a short Mohawk (his attempt to look cool which had backfired) and was so white he looked pale most of the time.

being shrimps themselves they had hit it off well with Alex and had formed a semi losers club of sorts, though Alex wasn't found of the name the twins who loved anything Steven king had insisted and he was out voted 2 to 1 since Max had joined the group after.

the boys were doing a retro gaming session of sorts, playing downloaded old games on a new machine and the game of choice for the moment was Ninja turtles two.

"Man, this game is so bad.." Lyle spoke up, playing as Leonardo.

"That it's almost good!" Kyle finished and was playing as Ralph.

"heh, that the fun part of these old games..you know they were giving it their all but just were limited." Alex said.

all three of them were seated on the hard wood floor of the living room though they had spread out a blanket since despite the chill of the October air his parents had refused to turn on the heat yet.

the twins nodded and Alex went to say something else when he hear the booming footsteps of his brother then a familiar stink hit his nose.

'No way, he wouldn't!' Alex thought.

"Hey Little Alexandra, Didn't mom tell you to toss out your pissy wet diapie when you got changed this morning? It's bad enough your a bed wetter, do you have to leave your soggy huggies around?" Justin asked.

and indeed Justin was holding out a totally soaked Spider-man print diaper in front of him, holding it with just a finger and his thumb and holding his nose.

Behind him were his friend Adam (Nicknamed grizz or grizzly because of his girth and wildly unkempt brown hair) and Rayne, actually a year younger then the other two but a head taller and so very, very much stupider. Rayne kept his head shaved because he thought it made him look more like the pro wrestlers that he so so loved.

"is that-" Lyle asked, pausing the game and turning to look.

"-A diaper?" Kyle finished, raising a eyebrow.

"JUSTIN! Mom told you not show people those! and I DID toss it out!" Alex huffed and whined, his cheeks going crimson then adding. "And DON'T call me Alexandra!"

"Whatever you say pamper pisser. Look, I went to go into our room to get something and was assaulted by the stink of your bed wetter pants." Justin said and then tossed the soggy thing at Alex, hitting him in the face and knocking him over.

the truth was Alex KNEW he'd tossed the diaper out this morning, he wasn't allowed to toss his very much needed bed time diapers out in the house trash because Dad and Justin would raise a fuss about it stinking up the house and he'd had to wait five minutes because the paper boy had stopped to talk to Mr. Johnson next door.

"JUSTIN GROSS!" Alex whined and sat up, whining and now smelling like stale pee.

"Whatever dork, go and toss your diaper out then take a shower..me and the guys are gonna start our movie early. Wonder twins, I'm sure you don't wanna stick around and hang out with a pamper packer like my little brother right?" Justin said.

"Hey! Leave him alone!" Lyle huffed and went to put a supportive hand on Alex's shoulder, but then pulled it back.

he was with his friend but that didn't mean he wanted to get any of the ick on him.

"What he said! Everyone matures differently! Heck, Lyle only just stopped needing a night light this year!" Kyle said, then pout his hands over his mouth as his brother glared at him.

"...Pfffftt BWHAHAHAHAHA!" all three big bullies broke into gut busting laughter.

"I'm not the one who has to suck on a pacifier during thunder storms!" Lyle shot back and blew a raspberry at his twin who huffed and glared.

the bullies naturally were loving it as the twins only dug themselves in deeper and Alex just face palmed.

"Guys, you're NOT helping yourselves." He pointed out.

"Oh my god, it's a group of BABIES! No wonder they all get along!" Grizz laughed, slapping his leg.

"I bet their next sleep over is gonna have them in a crib." Rayne added.

"Alright pamper packers, out of the living room, this movie is PG 13 and I don't want you all blorting your pants when something scary happens. Wonder twins, get your asses home. Alexandra, go take a shower AFTER you toss out your pissy diaper." Justin said, unable to believe just how well all of this had worked out.

"Whatever jerk.." Alex huffed and got up.

he saw his friends off though the twins were still semi huffing and fighting, shoving each other as the walked away and Alex got his wet diaper tossed out without anyone seeing him.

as he went upstairs and got his shower ready one thing was on his mind.

'This means war. I'm gonna make him feel EXACTLY how embarrassing being seen in diapers around your fiends is.' Alex vowed to himself.

Ok, he had no idea HOW he was going to do so, but while Justin may of won the first battle, it was going to be Alex who won the war and prove his Brain's out did his brother brawn.

The movie was going about as well as could be expected since they had to keep pausing it to have anther laugh at just how dorky Alex and his friends were.

Of course Rayne and Grizz had known for awhile (even if Justin technically wasn't suppose to of told them) about Alex being a diaper filler. (and he might of exaggerated what all Alex used his diapers for)

Maybe a SMALL part of Justin had felt sorry for Alex being humiliated like that in front of his friends, but Grizz had actually come up with the idea and he didn't wanna look like a pussy in front of the guys.

Besides with it coming out that the twins were just as big of dorks as his little brother any real guilt had vanished and he toyed with the idea of dragging out Alex's old play pen out of the basement for the next time he had all his dorky friends over.

'heh, get some pacifiers to shut'em up..put them all in Alex's diapers and take lots of pictures. boom, homework and chore bitches till I graduate.' Justin thought with a smirk and chuckled.

"what's so funny? Oooo and I know that look. Someone's had a evil thought." Grizz asked.

"Heh.. How would you guys feel about making some diapered nerds do our homework for us?" Justin asked.

"well, could be funny, but where are we gonna find some?" Rayne asked.

"..." Grizz roiled his eyes

"...Rayne buddy just smile and listen." Justin said semi sweat dropping.

"I can do that!" Rayne said with a big toothy grin.

Shaking his head Justin started to explain his evil plan, and his friends laughed and chuckled, and were MORE then on board.

Getting out of the shower and drying off, Alex got dressed in a pair of black jogging pants and a t-shirt then sat on his bed with his laptop.

He tried different google searches trying to figure out just how to get his brother back in diapers but for the most part it ended up giving him story link's that he bookmarked to look over later and see if there was anything usable.

He did find a forum called little brothers revenge and it had some really wicked ideas for the most part, but only two threads popped up when he searched for diaper.

the first one was clearly bull with it talking about how this kid had pooped in a diaper and hide it in his big brothers room and gotten the big brother in trouble (and even if it wasn't, Alex would hold off crapping himself as a weapon of last resort.)

the other thread was old, and had been posted just before Christmas of last year and had a little brother talk about how he had set his brother up to look like he wanted diapers for Christmas and his dad had fallen for it, and so had the rest of the family.

Of course there was a lot of disbelief in the read over that and one guy commented 'pics or your full of shit!'

As Alex scrolled down, he pretty much thought the same but then his jaw dropped as there was a picture of a sleeping boy, in a t-shirt and thick diapers and sucking on a paci and a younger boy was in frame too, it was a semi selfie and was smirking and giving the peace sign. the caption under the picture read 'Believe me now bitches?'

"Hoooly shitttttt." Alex said, this guy was his hero!

he didn't seem to be activate on the forum anymore though, there were a bout a dozen replies and a few more comments from the guy but then he vanished.

his user profile did have a e-mail attached to it and so Alex snagged it and went to write the guy a e-mail.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: DUDE YOUR MY HERO!

Hey just wanted to say, I saw your post on Little brothers revenge and wanted to say how awesome that was and also I was wondering if you had any advice or tips on getting a big brother in padding. mine's being a total butt hole lately and just ugggghhh @_@

I had one idea about maybe like peeing on his bed after he gets up to frame him for bed wetting, what do you think? hope to hear from you soon!

E-mail written Alex clicked send and then went to kill some time play a few games online, never once suspecting that while he was trying to plot his big brother diaper doom, he was likewise plotting out Alex's downstairs.

It was a hour latter when Alex heard the ding that told him he'd gotten a reply and he switched tabs to go and take a look.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Re:DUDE YOUR MY HERO

Heh, thanks for the high praise though I gotta warn you, first of all this is something you've gotta be reallllly careful with. Diaper humiliation is a double edged sword, trust me. Had a friend named Ken who tried this and now he's in diapers.

Anyways just taking a leak on your big bro's bed is dumb, you'll get busted for sure! what I'd recommend is making use of laxatives and pee pills in increasing doses till he's wetting his pants all the time and blorting them too. It's a longer game but better results.

what made you wanna get his butt back in diapers anyways, and FYI i expect 'baby pictures' when your plan works.

Alex thought about that for a second and couldn't help but wonder if maybe this 'ken' was really Ben, but pushed that thought out of his head as he started to write his reply.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Re:Re:DUDE YOUR MY HERO!

Oh well, I'm a bed wetter and the butt hole went and fished one of my soggy diapers out of the trash and threw it at me while I was hanging out with my friends, trying to say i never tossed it out. so trust me, he totes has this coming.

I really got nothing to lose if I get busted since I'm in huggies every night so I'll try out your plan. it works out because he likes to make me get him drinks and snacks.

as for the picture of him once he's back in huggies heh, sure. thanks for the advice and I'll let you know when the plan starts to work.

E-mail sent Alex closed his e-mail and his game tab then went searching online for the best med's to get to reduce his brother to a helpless pants wetting stinker, only to pause after a few minutes recalling that Max had gotten in trouble awhile back for causing a series of messy accidents around school.

'nggggh..no way he'll be back yet though. I'll go and talk to him tomorrow.' Alex thought and set his laptop aside and laid back on his bed, thinking about just how much fun he was gonna have and ended up conking out.

which was unfortunate as he hadn't put on one of his spider-man diapers and with in ten minutes a wet patch was starting to grow on the front of his jogging pants, which while the dark color would hide it, the tan covered blanket he was laying on wouldn't.

"So when do you think we can do this?" Grizz asked.

the movie was basically forgotten but had been kept on to cover up their voices on the off chance Alex came downstairs (Small chance of that) or if their parents came back early.

"Welll that's the tricky part. I have to have all four of the dweebs here AND have my parents gone. they're going on a weekend trip in about 2 weeks though so I'll try and convince the dweeb to get the loser's club all over here." Justin said.

Rayne, who had just shut his mouth like he'd been told to raised his hand like he was in class.

"heh, Yes Rayne?" Justin asked.

"Aren't they into that dice game, Dragons and prison or whatever?" he asked.

"..Dungeons and dragons, yeah." Justin chuckled.

"Same difference. anyways, say you've been reading up on it and wanna try your hand at hosting a game, but just want them over before you embarrasses yourself in front of us.Most nerds I know love to play and will jump at the chance." Rayne said and smiled.

"Sweet fucking cthulhu. Rayne had a good idea." Grizz chuckled and to patted the bigger boys head. "good boy!"

Rayne beamed and was clearly proud of himself and Justin chuckled.

"Ok, I'll just have to learn enough about this nerd stuff to fake it and get them over. you guys will have to be ready to help though, I don't wanna risk one of the losers getting away." Justin said nodding.

"Hey, as long as I don't have to change any shitty asses I'm in." Grizz said.

"Wait, your gonna make them USE the diapers?" Rayne said and then laughed lots. "Gross!"

"Heh, well the best blackmail is a sobbing little brat in a stinky diaper blackmail. no way the dweeb will risk him in all his smelly glory ending up ALL over town."

"Man, I am glad your not MY big brother." Rayne said, never mind the fact Justin was pretty sure if he tried anything on the semi giant he'd be the one in huggies.

"Eh, No worries. you'd be a awesome little bro. Now all we need to do is go and pick the perfect pampers for them."

"Oh, I got it! There's this discount store my mom drags me to because they have her cream of wheat and other junk she likes cheap, but they got in a shipment of over night diapers for big kids, boys and girls. the boys has rockets and stars on them and are blue." Grizz said, setting up the best part.

"Oh, this is gonna be good." Justin smirked.

"the girls has unicorns and rainbows and are pink!" Grizz finished and cackled.

Plans set for his brother's diapered humiliation, the boys finally turned they're attention back to the movie.

After the movie it was getting late and so Justin sent the guys home as technically speaking they weren't suppose to be over, only him or Alex could have friends over for the most part if mom and dad weren't home. (Weekend vacations were the exception, though their folks made it clear the house had been be clean when they got back)

Whoever had their friends over was also suppose to clean up after them and after a chip fight in the living room Justin smirked, knowing he could get Alex to clean the mess up, since it would be Alex and his friend getting blamed for the mess.

Of course Justin usually made Alex clean up after him and his friends anyways but that always took a little bit more effort in the form of using the dorks undies to bounce him like a yo yo if he didn't listen.

He toyed with leaving Alex sulking in their room where he been since the shower and just letting the dweeb get in trouble but since it was Justin's turn to start dinner so it'd be ready and he didn't feel like cooking, he had to get Alex downstairs anyways to be a good little chore bitch.

"This will be SO much easier once I have the blackmail on him." Justin sighed to himself as he made his way up the stairs to the boys shared bedroom.

Opening the door he went to go and say something but was hit by the stench of piss and a quick look confirmed the little bed soaker had gone night night without a pamper on.

"Hey dork face! wake up! you pissed the bed!" Justin said in a loud voice.

"Ngggh a gigi boo..Five more minutes mommy.." the still mostly asleep dweeb said, trying to shoo Justin away.

"heh, baby talk? really? Wow, just when I think you can't lower the bar any more Little bro.. ALEXANDRA! WAKE UP!" Justin said then cupped a hand to his mouth and yelled.

Alex jumped sort in bed then sat up, eyes wide and panting, looking around.

"WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU!?" He growled once he locked eyes on Justin."ARE YOU TRYING TO GIVE ME A HEART ATTACK?!"

"No, but you had a wetting attack dork." Justin said and pointed.

Alex went to say something then looked down and went from pissed off to blushing and tried to cover himself up.

"Ah crap crap crap crap!" Alex whined and got up off the bed.

this was NOT good. not good at ALL! Dad was already riding him on the bed wetting and if he found out Alex had soaked the bed from a little nap he would NOT hear the end of it, or worse, dad would make him wear ALL day tomorrow!

"Ah..ah..Justin big brother who I love ever so much.." Alex started, swallowing and trying to put on his best 'I'm so cute help me' faces.

"Save it dweeb. I'll keep my mouth shut about your little..well BIG accident as long as you go and be a good little chore bitch and get the living room cleaned up and start supper." Justin said and leaned on the door frame, a evil smirk on his face.

Considering his options Alex just hung is head and then did a small nod.

"Butttt to show you I'm not totally heartless..I got some clothes that need to be washed so you can do them and wash your sheet at the same time as a cover up. I know, my kindness knows no bounds. just be thankful mom got you that rubber sheet or you'd be going to sleep in a soggy bed tonight." Justin said and laughed.

'gee he's all heart. letting me do his landry and clean up AND cook.. ' Alex thought but it WAS better then trying to explain the sheet alone.

"Yeah ok.." He said finally and went to strip stripping the bed.

"ah ah ah, what do you say to your kind and wonderful brother for helping you out?" Justin said, milking this for all it was worth.

'He has to be..ok no, I know him better then that.. just keep digging your grave jerk.' Alex thought then took a deep calming breath.

"Thank you for letting me do your landry big brother." he said, clenching a fist.

"Anytime dork. not get to it, you don't have a whole lotta time. my clothes are in the hamper in the bathroom." Justin said and started to walk away, then poked his head back in. "Oh and dweeb? next time don't forget to put on your diapies when your going for your afternoon nap."

and with that he walked off laughing.

"...I'm SO going to enjoy getting him in diapers." Alex huffed.

Changing into a pair of clean spider-man shorts and a captain America t-shirt, Alex got the load of landry started and then went to work cleaning up the living room while keeping a eye on the time.

the chips were everywhere and every time he though he was done he'd spot some more and wondered how much the three bullies had actually managed to get in their stupid fat mouths.

Between the cleaning and getting landry switched over he didn't have time to make anything too special so he went with the old stand by of making macaroni and cheese with hot dogs as it was quick and simple and his parents never really expected Justin to go all out when he was cooking anyways.

Dinner was ready and the landry was finished by the time their parents got home, Alex just had to go and get it out of the dryer but he figured he'd have time to do it stealthy after eating.

"So, what did you boys do for fun today?" Dad asked as they were sitting at the dinner table, a small grimace on his face at the prospect of eating the old stand by.

"Oh well-" Alex started by Justin cut him off.

"It was pretty much same old same old for me, went out and played some football with the guys and had fun. Came back though and I think The twins brought over some super sugar loaded snacks or something because Alex and them where have a chip fight and trashed the living room. it was cute though." Justin said and smirked, winking at Alex who's jaw hung open.

"Alex, you didn't!" Mom signed and shook her head. "After supper you'll be cleaning up the living room!"

"Oh don't worry about it mom, I know little guys like him just need to get it out of their systems. after the twins went home he was super pooped though, think it was a sugar crash so let him go and take a nap and I cleaned up the living room." Justin lied.

"Well that was was nice of you Justin, but in the future leave the cleaning for Alex to do." Dad said and shook his head at Alex. "Alex, we've talked about this."

Alex for his part was stuttering now, trying to think of a way to prove his innocence without getting scolded but first shots had been fired by Justin and there was nothing he could do now.

"Alex did you say thank you to Justin for cleaning up after you?" Mom asked and her tone made it clear if he hadn't she expected him to now, but again Justin spoke up.

"Oh, he's already thanked me for something else. see somebody was just SO sleepy when he went for his nap that he forgot to get his bed wetter pants on and well, Let's just say it's a good thing I had to do a load of landry anyways." Justin said as Alex,'s jaw dropped.

"Y-You said..you.." Alex stammered.

"Alex! what have I told you about not going to sleep without one of your diapers on?" Dad asked in a sharp tone.

"N-Not to do it again or..or.." Alex whined, looking down and feeling ready to cry.

this wasn't fair! he'd done everything Justin had asked him too and he was still gonna get punished!

"Or you'll be spending the next day in your diapers all day. Now I was hoping NOT to have to use that punishment but clearly you've left me no choice. you can still use the potty of course, in fact I encourage it, but you WILL be in diapers all day tomorrow." Dad said.

His tone left no room for argument and feeling hot tears start to slid down his cheeks Alex looked down at his bowl of food and sniffled.

"Yes sir."

After supper Justin offered to do the dishes if Alex would go and get the landry out of the dryer, but mom said since Justin had already cleaned up after Alex, made supper and did the landry for the most part he could go and relax and watch TV with their dad while Alex got the landry out and folded it.

Justin smiled and kissed his mom's cheek and asked if she was sure, but she insisted and so he went and plopped down on the couch, ready to watch some hockey with his dad and giving Alex a shit eating grin as the huffy and tear stained cheek dork started to stomp his way up the steps till dad called for him to knock it off unless he wanted to go to bed early.

'Oh my god. this worked out even better then I could of hoped! Mom and Dad are just too easy!' Justin thought, having to bite his tongue every so often to keep from laughing.

the dweeb had done all the work and yet here he was sipping on pop and munching on chips with their dad while the dork was off folding his undies and was gonna be a crinkle butt the next day.

'It'll be a nice little preview of whats to come.' Justin thought and let out a little chuckle despite himself.

"what's so funny?" Dad asked.

"Oh, just thinking of how silly Alex and his friends looked this after noon. they were like sugar crazed toddlers." Justin lied.

"heh, Next time you should try and get a video of it, I bet it looked cute." Dad chuckled.

Upstairs Alex was mentally cursing up a storm, pissed off and fuming like crazy as he folded pair after pair of his brothers skid marked undies.

'Son of a bitch! son of a bisket eating bitch! I'm not just gonna get him in diapers, I'm gonna make him the biggest dumbest big baby loser of all time! I'm gonna have him in the halls of his school in nothing but huggies and a bib and bonnet!'

of course a small part of Alex knew that going that far likely wasn't gonna be possible, it was a warm thought that helped him keep from just having a melt down fit that would of gotten his bun's blistered and him put to bed before it was even 8 pm.

He should of know better then to think that Justin was gonna hold up his end of the deal, or he should of spoken up about getting the landry done but nope. He'd trusted his big brother and was paying the price for it now in spades.

'And now I have to wear a diaper all day tomorrow..Maybe I'll wait till Monday to go and talk with Max.' Alex thought.

it would mean putting his plans on hold for a bit but he really didn't wanna waddle the block and a half over to Max's with pampers on under his pants.

Finishing up the folding and putting the clothes away Alex checked to make sure that his rubber sheet was dry and tugged in his blanket he'd hung out the window to dry (as it would of taken up too much room in the machines to do Justin's landry too) and with it dry he started to make his bed.

'God, what did I ever do to deserve a asshole like him for a big brother.' Alex whined mentally and finished making his bed, looking it over and then jumping and letting out a girlish shriek as a hand came on his shoulder.

"heh, Relax sweetie, it's mommy." Came his mother voice, sounding a little amused.

"That's ok, I didn't need that heart." Alex huffed, blushing and turning around to face his smirking mother. "what's up mom?"

"Well I wanted to come up and check on how the folding was going and to help you get ready for bed." She said with a smile.

"...Mom it's not even 8 yet, and it's a Saturday night.." Alex said, not liking where this was going.

"Oh You can stay up and everything till 11 like normal, but I just wanna make sure you don't conk out with your 'special armor' on." she said, using finger quotes.

"Mom I think I'm quite capable of putting my own diaper on." Alex huffed, feeling a hot blush cover his face.

"And yet you soaked your bed earlier." She cheerfully pointed out.

"T-That was different, I was just all tired and didn't realize I'd be conking out!" Alex whined, sounding more like a fussy toddler the the big kid he was trying to be.

"I know sweetie, but it kinda goes with my point. what if you just conk out again tonight? do you really wanna have to go to school on Monday in a diaper?" She asked, and the ruffled his hair.

The mental image of it stopped Alex's whining in it's tracks, picturing himself in a bib and spider-man diaper and sucking on a paci in the halls.

"No way! I'd Dieeeee!" Alex whined and shook his head no A LOT.

"well then let mommy help you out. And also if your gonna keep being so tired maybe we'll lower your bedtime for awhile." She added, then smirked and winced at the glare Alex gave her. "Now now, no using your super pouty powers on family."

"Moooom!" Alex huffed but resigned himself to his fate, when she got like this there was no getting her to back down.

He reached under his bed and pulled out his pack of spider-man diapers and noted that he was running low, and started to tug down his shorts when mom spoke up.

"Oh Alex, before we get your in your bed time diaper, do you have to use the potty?"

"mom, I know I wet the bed but I THINK I would know if had to take a leak or a dump you kn-" Alex started and then there was a loud 10 second poot out of his bottom and his tummy was gurgling.

"You were saying?" Mom asked, holding her nose but smirking."

"I-I'll be back.." Alex said in a small voice, blushing SO bad as he went past her he was shocked his hair hadn't caught on fire.

As she watched him go and had to fight the urge laugh, the little guy's undies had a fresh skid mark appearing on the back.

'Maybe I should look into getting him some of those washable training pants.' She mused.

One trip to the potty later and with Alex realizing what's he'd almost done in his undies, and the fight was all out of the little guy at least for the moment.

Zero fight was put up as he let his mom take his shorts and briefs and then proceed to diaper him, numbly just going along with her requests of butt up and the like.

"Are you sure your feeling alright? Maybe I should of checked your temperature before getting the diaper on." Mom asked, putting a hand to Alex's forehead.

"N-No I'm fine..just I dunno, Tired." Alex said, wincing.

he had to be the only boy his age to still get his temperature checked via the back door and it's wasn't that fun of a experience.

"Hmmm I think somebody better lay off of the sweets for awhile if it leaves you JUST drained after." Mom said and then started to tug Alex's blanket up on him.

"M-Mom what are you doing?" Alex whined, looking at the clock, it was 7:51 PM!

"I think you've had a big day, and your just not feeling that good. it would explain all the huffing and whining too. if you be a good boy and go night night for me now I'll see what I can do to get your father to back off with the all day diaper punishment tomorrow. I have to take you shopping for more diapers anyways with you almost being out and you get embarrassed enough as is when your in your undies."

Alex whined and whimpered a little but after a few seconds just signed and nodded.

"Good boy." She said and leaned down, kissing his forehead and then went and got one of his stuffie style Avengers from their display shelf and handed him Thor.

Lacking the energy to fight back Alex just took the offered stuffie and snuggled into it as his mom turned off the lights in the room and paused at the doorway.

"Night night little guy. Mommy will leave the door open a crack for you so you don't get scared. Love you and see you in the morning." She coo'ed/

"..Love you too mommy." Alex said, blushing.

He hadn't been scared of the door in like ages but somehow mom had the impression he still was and the only reason he wouldn't accept a night light was Justin would complain.

She left the little guy to go to sleep and Alex listened to her footsteps.

'This is bull shit. I'm not some little baby! I bet I don't even fall asleep till 11 anyways.' He huffed, crinkling and squirming in his bed.

Five minutes later he was snoring softly around his thumb as he sucked it in his sleep.

"So did Alex give you much of a fight?" Justin asked as Mom came downstairs.

"Just a token one, he's already gone to bed. I don't think he's feeling well and I think that should excuse him for needing his punishment tomorrow." Anne said, though the last part was more directed at her husband.

"Look, rules are rules, and if we start g-" Jackson started but was cut off.

"Excuse me, but who's idea was the rule that a D or worse meant no TV or computer time, and yet Justin who got a D on his last English test is watching the game with you?" She asked sweetly.

Justin gulped now and turned to his dad.

"Uh..you know..I think mom's right, we can't punish Alex if he had his accident because he's sick!" Justin chimed in.

"Heh, Nice try buddy but your mother is right in a way. I can't really punish your brother and not punish you. "Jackson said

"Soooo Alex isn't wearing a diaper tomorrow?" Justin asked hopefully.

"try again buddy, but do it in anther room so I can finish watching the game." Jackson chuckled and ruffled his sons hair as the 12 year old pouted.

"Finnne, I'll just go to my room an-." he started to huff and went to get up.

"ahhh nope. First of all I know you well enough you'll just go on your laptop." Anne said. "and second of all your brother is sleeping. Don't worry though, we have LOTS of board games you can play with me."

"Geee, spending Saturday night playing board games with my mom. aren't I lucky." Justin groaned

One mind numbing night of games later and Justin went to bed, taking note of the fact that Alex had semi drenched his pillow in drool and was still sucking his thumb.

'Heh, He's kinda cute...Still gonna make him a big dumb diaper nerd chore boy..but he's cute.' Justin thought before going and climbing into his bed.

as he went to go to sleep he had the most wonderful evil idea that could at the same time be played off as just being a nice big brother and help get 'revenge' on Alex for making him miss the end of the game.

'Hehehehe damn I'm so smart!' Justin chuckled and dropped off to sleep.

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alexseanchai · 4 years ago

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Fanfic 2020 in Review

I got tagged by @kasienda @noirshitsuji and @marvelousmsmol and I am tagging whoever wants to play!

1) List of fics completed this year in the order they were finished:

*filters own works to complete and updated in 2020*

1 - 20 of 57 Works by AlexSeanchai

nope. *adds filter to include only works of at least 1000 words*

unless otherwise indicated, these are all Miraculous Ladybug:

“don’t bake it lying down”, post-reveal Marichat vs Felix Graham de Vanily

“veracity”, canon divergence from “Ladybug” featuring Mister Bug and Verity Queen (so also Marichat, I guess)

“(no request is too extreme, if) your heart is in your dream”, in which Hawkmoth wins, for the thirty seconds or so before Emilie saves Ladybug and Chat Noir’s lives

“tell me you love me and make me believe it”, in which trans girl Chatonne Noire ropes Ladybug into helping plan her civilian self’s escape slash social transition

“kingmaker, oathbreaker”, in which Hawkmoth wins and Emilie watches her son remove himself from the family

“stay and let me watch you break it down” (Twelve Dancing Princesses), a modern setting

“set a course for winds of fortune”, in which trans girl Chatonne Noire has already escaped and Gabriel and Nathalie are trying to bring Gabriel’s son home

“we ground love in a hopeless place”, in which post-reveal Marinette’s attempt to remain resolutely not in love with her partner dissolves like sugar in coffee when they start a pun war

“ring the bells that still can ring”, in which Alya is deeply confused about why Adrien and Marinette are planning a wedding when last night both were single

“burning wishes at both ends (the cold wind and long loud wail remix)”, in which Gabriel made a monkey’s paw wish and Emilie makes another

“words cannot espresso”, in which Marinette’s OC roommate is justifiably worried for Marinette’s safety, and meanwhile Adrien takes care of Marinette

“the compromise of truth” (the chronologically second-earliest part posted to date of nine lives, snake’s eyes), in which Adrien tells his friends how he won some freedom and respect from his father

“At The Present Time”, the Ladrien/Ladynoir marriage proposal follow-up to @art-deco-shrimp‘s “Your Presents Required”

“j'ai rêvé (so I don't have to dream alone)”, in which the events of canon must just have been a series of dream sequences, Marinette and Adrien both think, until they both arrive at Chloe’s Halloween masquerade dressed as themselves from the dreams

2) Number of words written:

ahahaha no. I am not counting all my scattered fic drafts and trying to figure out what I did and didn’t write in 2020. I refuse.

AO3 says I posted 162K in 2020. it is counting all of keeps you guessing (like any real love), which (a) I started posting in 2019 (b) is co-written by @galahadwilder; it is counting all of my meta snippets collection, much of which was written in 2019; it is counting the Vimeo passwords for my vids. but I probably cleared 150K by a safe margin.

3) Your most popular fic:

“veracity” has a four-digit kudos count, wow, when’d that happen? this is also the 2020 work with the most hits and the most bookmarks, but “tell me you love me” has four-thirds as many comments as its nearest competitor.

4) Your personal fav:

“cannot break us, not with a thousand swords”, no question about it. this is the one in which Ladybug proposes marriage to Chat Noir via Princess Bride meme on Tumblr. (if you intend to download the work or otherwise to consume it with creator style off, you want the accessible version instead of the primary version.)

5) Your fav scene:

aaaaaaaaa

—okay so this is cheating and I know it, since Uncertain Humors (the one where Marinette/Adrien is both Orpheus/Eurydice and Theseus/Ariadne) is nowhere near finished, never mind posted (maybe I'll get “Sanguine” done to post on my birthday?)

but it is still my favorite of the year. as you might guess from that description of the story, this scene has content notes for character death:

Hell is a maze. Marinette walks.

This acrid passage has little to see but damp stone, seeming blood-stained in the dim carmine light. At about the height of her heart, the faintly glowing thread cuts through the not-clammy air; it ought to be pulsing at the same rate as the heart it's bound to. She might be able to see her own reflection if she looked down at the open sewage pipe, or at one of the puddles that now and again she splashes through, dampening the canvas of her shoes. She might see reflected what's behind her.

She remembers Mme. Mendeleiev lecturing on human physiology. In healthy humans old enough to have learned how, urination is a voluntary action: one may not know which muscles one tenses and relaxes in order to do so, and probably isn't paying attention to those details when one is doing, but one has conscious control over whether one does. Usually. Stress and anxiety mean some people are unable to relax the relevant sphincter muscle and others are unable to stop themselves. It's voluntary for cats, too: it's one way they mark their territories. Cat-boys have other ways.

There is a moment in every human life when all one's muscles relax at once. Some Parisians have had several such moments.

The thread is braided with itself around her left fourth finger, rows of tiny red half-hitch knots, and falls loosely over the back of her hand to loop twice around her wrist. She holds it wrapped between the fingers of her right hand to keep it at a constant tension, as though knitting with this insubstantial thread, so fragile for something two (two dozen, two million) lives hang from—too thin to sew with, no thicker than one strand of his hair. As she walks, she winds it around and around and around her wrist.

Between her ring finger and her right hand, it loops twice.

Marinette's shoe lands in a puddle she didn't see. The rainwater splashes soundlessly onto her bare ankle and on the stone.

(With cat-like tread, upon our prey we steal— It's a very loud song.)

She walks on.

6) A fic or scene that challenged you:

where the firelight fades, no contest. this is the second story I’ve ever been able to stick with more than a couple hundred words past the 20K mark, but it’s easily the twentieth novel-length I’ve begun. (though also, you know that kedreeva post? well, 90K later, I’m less than 15K from completing this 10K fic! I think.) and I have been learning so much about long-form fiction.

there has also been a lot of weeping and tearing my hair. case in point: I just trashed the chapter 15 draft because I figured out the reason it wasn’t going anywhere! I can probably keep the first few hundred words of that draft without any editing, and another few hundred with some revision...

7) A line of writing you’re proud of:

from “j'ai rêvé (so I don't have to dream alone)”:

Everything about their partnership is fragments of sentences in the dream diary Adrien writes in ultraviolet pen. Disjointed flickers of thought even when examined under the black light he hides in the snack cabinet under packets of Super Yoyo sandwich cookies and bags of cheesy Monster Munch potato chips and boxes of petit écolier butter cookies (chocolat noir)—none of which explains the gym-socks smell. All fleeting incoherent flashes, invisible between the mundane lines of La Modification shelved at his bedside between Leroux and Dumas. None of it is solid. Adrien has more proof his room's haunted.

okay let me break this down for you!

* Adrien started a dream diary to make sense of the memories

* in invisible ink, in a book that (according to Wikipedia) is thematically appropriate and won’t (if Gabriel sees it) look like anything other than Adrien developing an interest in French literature

* shelved between Phantom of the Opera and The Three Musketeers

* look I didn’t come up with the name “black light”

* or “chocolat noir” for what English speakers call “dark chocolate”, or “petit écolier” (that is, “little schoolboy”) for that sort of butter cookie

* also not my fault that “chocolat noir” sounds remarkably like “Chat Noir”, which, attentive readers may have noticed, is not a name that appears in the story after the header and before Miraculous Cure

* I found the website of a store in Boston, Massachusetts that caters to French expats, and the yo-yo cookies and the monster chips were right there in the photos, y’all

* the snack stash and the black light live in the cabinet where, in canon, the Camembert lives; yes, that cheese smells in the real world like gym socks

* this story’s akuma was not able to affect anything but squishy human memory: nobody affected remembers anything about Ladybug or Chat Noir or Hawkmoth, not in any solid way, not even when they read news articles about the subject, and this includes Marinette and Adrien not being able to see or hear or remember their own kwamis—but you know what Adrien’s Insta post about his poltergeist and Adrien’s Insta post with the floating sock don’t show and don’t explicitly refer to?

* I love this paragraph so much (my housemates may have been lovingly mocking me over it)

8) A comment that touched you:

there are people (y’all know who you are) who said y’all are studying my style. I ded of blush.

9) Something that inspired your writing:

by volume of fic drafts that can be blamed on any particular person, the winner is probably @norakwami

10) Your proudest accomplishment (that one scene; finally finishing that one fic; posting your first fic; etc):

so that longest-story-ever-written record I set in 2007 with the 89.5K story that, till where the firelight fades, was the only story I’d gotten much past 20K?

I broke that fucking record!

and then I deleted the draft of firelight chapter 15 😭

11) Do you have any writing goals for the next year?

I’m starting work on a fantasy novel, a Sleeping Beauty retelling in which I explore (among other things) the economic consequences of the king’s ordering all the spinning wheels burned, and I want to make significant progress on that. and I want to not make my hands any worse; I kind of need those!

(breaking news alert: bodies fucking suck. so does giving yourself repetitive stress injuries in doing one and a half to two people’s worth of work for an organization that was never ever going to pay you more than one person’s worth of pay.)

#by alexseanchai #miraculous ladybug #tag game

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bi-dazai · 5 years ago

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a summary of the whole contrapoints thing from someone who has been spending most of her time on twitter and seen it first-hand throughout

(im using screenshots, some ive downloaded from trusted twitter mutuals and some ive made myself. since i have the shinigami eyes extension and many of my twitter mutuals dont, some scs will be inconsistent. i have checked each downloaded sced tweet to make sure theyre real.)

please dont try to start an argument on this post, im just summarising whats happened. ive already argued myself out over on my twitter and whatever point youre trying to make has literally already been said 20 times before.

Basically in late august/september natalie said some inflammatory shit about pronouns and nbs and “binary transes” which she’d said stuff along the lines of in the past. both nb and binary trans folks have criticised her lightly for this kind of attitude in the past as well. she has a pattern of behaviour (including being very...lenient towards terfs) but the stuff she was saying and the bad takes were tolerable, if incorrect and a little ignorant. what she said this time was basically “asking for pronouns in trans spaces is good i guess but it hurts passing/semi-passing transes like me” which is a take that makes no goddamn sense and is extremely ignorant towards both nb folks and trans folks who do not have the luxury of even trying to pass. she exaggerates the actual effect it has on her as well. basically the entire tweet reads really badly (the discussion was about asking for pronouns in trans spaces):

peter coffin made some batshit crazy takes (as usual) including inventing the term “enby cultural capital” which he refused to actually evaluate on past asking people to read a book (if you cant clarify your point on your own then you have an issue). he started tweeting like a madman and making it painfully clear how hard he will go to bats for natalie despite him being nb himself (many people joked/suspected that its because he wants to fuck her, same with philosophytube, and honestly looking at how they see her that isnt hard to believe).

natalie went off twitter for a while, eventually leaving an apology that was actually alright and made me and several others believe she would return a little more understanding of trans intra-community issues, especially in terms of class because she has always had an issue with ignorance from that angle. she said she had a friend called gwen taking over (nobody knows who this is nor had they ever heard of this friend, leaving some people suspicious that she may have made her up. im not going to confirm or deny this because i have no clue.)

idk what peter coffin was up to because at this point i and most ppl had officially stopped listening to him but i believe he was angrily tweeting about cancel culture. a lot of people were as well, even though the bulk of the criticisms of natalie had been written and expressed in a mature, appropriate way. some of my twitter mutuals who had been involved in discussing natalie’s past trends with these issues as well as her lack of class consciousness and (probably) accidental antisemitism began to get messages from what was very clearly alt-right trolls trying to doxx natalie. it was real information, which is extremely concerning, but no person published it and her criticisers that got those dms were vocal about not bullying or doxxing natalie. natalie wasn’t pushed away because of “cancel culture”, and “cancel culture” really isnt a real thing and many contra fans believed this too until she came under criticism, which highlights a pretty weird mentality but whatever.

anyway, she came back this week with a new video titled “opulence” which i dont care for watching so i just read about it from my twitter mutuals who did. since i didnt watch it ill only summarise its criticisms very basically.

to put it simply the main criticisms of the video were that she conflated trans aesthetic with literal opulence and class again, which people weren’t a fan of. she talked about her experience over the last few weeks, spinning it her way because how else would she spin it, thats to be expected. it was mostly just the usual contra, flawed takes and a bit of class ignorance...except for one blaring massive issue which is absolutely undeniable proof for where she’s heading with her politics and her content.

on that video, natalie invited infamous transmed, the guy who outed lana wachowski for money, buck angel, to collab with her. this guy is infamous in the trans community for being a cis bootlicking bigot. he makes kalvin garrah look like a lovely guy. he’s been around for a very long time and he’s very famous for being a massive asshole. heres just a taste of the kind of attitude he carries:

contra has previously spoken up about why you shouldn’t platform bigots. so her platforming a bigot has some very very obvious implications.

needless to say, people were and are pretty mad and very disappointed. a large majority of her fans have been against this.

when oliver (philosophytube) promoted the video on his twitter many replies to his quote tweet were his fans begging him to be even mildly critical of contra.

on contra’s subreddit (for clarification, natalie isnt a mod there and im not sure about how involved she is on the sub) there was even a thread created in which MANY of her fans on there expressed criticism of contra’s views. the mods then locked the post, deleted comments, and banned the use of the word “truscum” because it was offensive i guess? it was a move very close to “terf is a slur” territory

furthermore, some pretty infamous transphobes have been in support of her and buck angel in the past, including ian miles cheong which is...wow. some of these are scs from a twitter mutual, but the ones with red names are from me - i have the shinigami eyes extension, so basically any person with a red name is a known transphobe (im surprised buck isnt marked yet lol).

finally, ill put some threads here that give a pretty good analysis and view of the situation imo

#long post #contrapoints

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cabiba · 4 years ago

Link

THREAD - Face Covering Regulations: How the UK government instructed supermarkets and major retailers to respond to exemptions.

Last year the heads of supermarkets and *major* retailers received a ‘secret’ Cabinet Office document about face covering exemptions

An important point to make here is that small independent businesses were NOT given the same details. And neither has the government ever shared it with the public. In fact, they REALLY do not want you to see it.

Although I’ve known of this document since September, I previously decided not share it for fear that it would make life even more difficult for people with genuine medical exemptions and disabilities

Yet, this week, the government has mounted a fear campaign that has caused widespread confusion and despair for people who are not able to wear a mask. Notably, those with hidden disabilities. It must now be made public

As you will see in the document, the Cabinet Office specifically states that some people are not ‘expected’ to wear face coverings for some ‘health’, ‘age’ and ‘equality’ reasons. We knew this already, but now you will know what the Cabinet Office told big retail about this

I told a little white lie when I said it was not a 'public' document, it is. It's just you have to look very, very, very hard for it. There is ONE copy on the internet and it seems to have been uploaded by mistake.

I am going to post a link to a PDF of it now and I want EVERYONE to download it *right now* before the government makes it disappear. When you download it please drop a message underneath and share with everyone you can

https://www.businesswest.co.uk/sites/default/files/guidance_for_face_covering_exemptions.pdf

As you can see, it is a step-by-step guide - written by the Cabinet Office - designed for heads of major retail to brief their staff on how to deal with anyone who walks into a shop without a face covering

The first point backs up what's already said on the http://gov.uk website: "It is not mandatory for an individual to wear a visual cue to outline they are exempt" - which has to make us wonder what the hell the @GOVUK & @Morrisons and @asda are playing at today

The second point advises what staff should do if you're not wearing a lanyard. They may offer you a mask or ask you to wear one. I believe this is what @morrisons and @asda are now going to be doing if you do not 'clearly' look exempt

A few people are commenting 'is that is?', my reason for sharing this document is to REASSURE people who are genuinely exempt but are now *terrified* following the government's new fear campaign But the BIG news about this document concerns points 3 and 4

For the first time we have it on paper - STRAIGHT FROM THE CABINET OFFICE - examples of what shop staff should say to people without masks and how people without masks are expected (or not expected) to reply

If shop staff see a person without a face covering AND no lanyard or visual clue, the government suggests that retailers ask "Please can you wear a face covering if you are able to?"

The most important points: "Once an individual has said they are not able to/exempt, you MUST take their word and allow them to continue. A verbal confirmation alone is enough."

"You must NOT ask for proof of their medical exemption and it is not essential they show any form of exemption card at any point"

A few people are saying they've seen this. I've been tweeting about masks daily on Twitter for six months and I've *NEVER* seen this document posted, you ungrateful swines. What did you want? Outdoor masks?

This document sets out the record - in writing- of how mask exemption for medical reasons is claimed. You should *only* be refused at these new @morrisons and @asda 'check points' if you say something like "I don't want to". Print the document and carry it around with you

The existence of this document cancels out any threats that the government or supermarkets have made this week because they simply CANNOT lawfully refuse you - under the Regs, the Equality Act 2010 and Data Protection Act 2018 - if you make clear you are medically exempt

The main problem is that it hasn't been disseminated to individuals or small businesses - so the government has protected large retailers (by giving specific instruction) but left small businesses at risk of action under the Equality Act

Anyone doubting that this document was only shared with select organisations....please read the part that says "Please note charity organisations working with the government have been made aware of this too"

(Those sharing the Business West page, yes! That's the page I shared, if you read back my thread). The fact of the matter is that I know - through other sources - the government did NOT want this document in the public domain. This is the important part

My mission of sharing it was to dilute some of the government's current fear-mongering and give frightened exempt people another doc as ammunition. If you were expecting something else, well, it says more about you and you're not one of the people suffering who I want to help

It's also a reminder the supermarkets are not acting totally of their own accord. They're briefed by the Cabinet Office who simply cannot give out written advice that contravenes the Equality Act or the Data Protection Act without first changing those laws. Remember that.

There is a HUGE amount of confusion about the face covering regs and exemptions. My hope is that sharing this step-by-step guide helps clear up some confusion and helps people to go about their lives a bit more confidently. It spells out what *should* happen with exemptions

PDF:https://businesswest.co.uk/sites/default/files/guidance_for_face_covering_exemptions.pdf… ARCHIVE VERSION: https://web.archive.org/web/20201109123213/https://www.businesswest.co.uk/sites/default/files/guidance_for_face_covering_exemptions.pdf…

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doom-modding-discord-3x · 2 years ago

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Top Doom Eternal Discord Servers | Discord Server List

💾 ►►► DOWNLOAD FILE 🔥🔥🔥 Return to Rules and Forum Announcements. Official ZDoom Discord Server We sure do have a lot of rules and guidelines threads - find them all here, and please make sure you've read them! Also, community-wide announcements that aren't major ZDoom News go here as well. Yes, it is necessary. The rest of the rules are in the respective channel. They are visible without the need for approval. When you first join the server, you will be in the Welcome Room. Before you are allowed to talk in the other channels, you will need to say something in welcome-room that proves you're not a spam bot - simply saying "I am not a bot" does not satisfy this requirement. It doesn't have to be a long introduction one sentence is fine but it has to be more than "hello". Please be aware that this process is completely manual, and depends on there being a moderator present and active. If you join during off peak hours, it might be a while before you can get access, so patience is recommended. We ask that you take the welcome room process seriously; this is your chance to make a first impression. If it's a bad one, it could lead not only to denial for access to the rest of the server, but actual removal. Forum ban appeals are permitted in welcome-room, but make sure you have actually changed for the better. Administrators reserve the right to ignore your appeal and leave you banned. Note: If you need assistance getting past a login lockout where you cannot login even if you enter a correct password on your account , you may contact Rachael directly whether you have been approved or not. Be ready to answer many questions to prove you are who you say you are. Please use the ModMail bot to do so. Last edited by Rachael on Wed Apr 13, am, edited 20 times in total. Reason: edits, edits, edits, more edits! We've already had one failed "offical" discord and I refuse to join unless it's officially official. And hang on while I sticky this. Re-read the rules for more information. Re: Official ZDoom Discord Server by NeuralStunner » Sat Jan 14, pm It's too bad the Discord client did everything possible to give me a bad experience, up to and including crashing my sound device. Web client's a no-go either. Newcomers now enter a lobby where only they, admins and mods can write. When you have been approved, access to the channels will be given. I don't care which side says it - there will be hour bans for it the moment it begins. Should be about enough with the server jokes now. We've all had our fair share of lols. Time to get serious. Why do I have to get approved? Is that really necessary? Why was that rule added? So everyone else except forum. What about people who want to learn more about ZDoom and are not registered here? With so many people on there, there must be some kind of countermeasure against idiots who have nothing better to do. And as for people outside ZDoom, well, if anyone can vouch for them or they turn out to be legit users, they're more than welcome. All are welcome, but it's beyond the scope of the server to accept just anyone right off the bat. Think twice before trying to redeem yourselves. You have only one chance, so make sure it's worth our while and the community's as a whole. You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post. Board index All times are UTC.

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powermakesussick · 4 years ago

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Q&A with Power Makes Us Sick

A condensed version of this piece appears in the Spring 2021 issue of Slingshot.

A few years ago, when I was living in Europe, I heard about a feminist healthcare collective called Power Makes us Sick (PMS). They were organizing and holding workshops, writing, printing and distributing zines, beautiful posters, and free resources, in different countries in the EU, in South America, as well as in the US. Being very curious and excited to hear about this project, I read and saw more of what they were sharing with folks, and putting out into the world, all rooted in an anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist perspective, politics, and practice. And in the process, the PMS collective was creating and connecting broad networks of projects, communities, and individuals involved in various forms of healthcare, as well as various forms and fabrics of political struggle. I felt inspired to try to meet with some of them in order to learn more, and hopefully spread the word about PMS, who they are, what they're about, and what they do.

What follows in this article is an interview with some of the members of the collective. Hope readers out there find this useful, and that we all deepen and solidify our networks and relationships of care in our own lives and communities. Stay safe out there, and take good care of yourselves and each other.

"Self-care can't cure social diseases"

In solidarity, Sarafina Witch Militia Northeast

Who is PMS? We are called Power Makes Us Sick, which kind of speaks for itself in a way. We're an anti-national group that researches autonomous health practices and shares the good news about all the ways we can and do care for one another outside of and in opposition to the state and capitalism.

How does PMS relate to issues of health? Where do you fit in? “We're all a bit sick. In some ways we are healing. We're all healers in some way. We're all growing stronger or learning how to better act in the world through this collective and others. There's a lot of little things that we've just accidentally found out along the way that we all have in common, they didn't start off as rallying points.”

“Take what you need and compost the rest” is a slogan and an approach that inspires us.

Our work is centered around sharing skills, resources, and tools. A mutual aid with emphasis on the “mutual”. We offer our support to social movements and others fighting back against oppression. We make new friends along the way, we share strategies and lessons from their experiences and ours. They help us refine our tools, and then we bring all of that back to the group and are able to share new skills farther and wider.

What is autonomy? What is health? What are practices of autonomous health? Autonomy, in our context, really doesn't mean “solo” or on the level of the “individual”. It's something that only begins to make sense in a collective context, and against repression, control, and institutional power. We see it wherever people are finding each other and coming together to directly bring about the kind of world they wish to see.

In terms of “health” it's the kind of health we want to see in the world, not necessarily in the ways it is conceived of by those in power. If “health” is related in a certain context to work and productivity, we might refuse to be healthy. Alternatively, we might choose to say this or that aspect of the dominant society is profoundly “unhealthy”, sickening, sick...

Our working model of health encompasses the mental, physical, and social aspects and we want to incorporate an understanding of each part. We are inspired by an example given to us by our friends at the “group for an other medicine” (rough translation) in Thessaloniki, who say that if there is mold in a building and you're only looking at the physical health of the individuals, you might treat the affected lungs, but if you understand health in a social context, you might come together to pressure the owner of the building to remove the mold. This is just an example of how the shift to the social can help address the issue at its core.

We too often feel that the dominant practices of healthcare ignore the health of the social body. By shifting the discourse to encompass the social, we can get a better picture of the things that are ailing us as a society, whether that be the way that capitalism makes us all very anxious, the way that industrial civilization itself encourages us to work ourselves to death, the way that patriarchy can make us feel very small (or gets us killed), the way that racism means we ignore the pain of certain people (or gets us killed), among a myriad of other social ailments.

While those in power may work to incorporate that in diagnosis and policy, there is a point beyond which their analysis and actions won't go. Anxiety, depression or dependency might be portrayed as “mental health epidemics” with social causes and outcomes, but they will never be portrayed as a symptom of capitalism and various forms of exploitation, exclusion, and extraction. Giving ourselves the freedom to make that analysis can open up new spaces to work in. This consciousness doesn't mean we can write and analyse our way to better health, but it can give us an edge, an organising basis, a direction to go in.

This is where practices of autonomous health comes in. Methods and means can be pirated and communalised, or found in already existing popular and folk contexts. In our zines, we share examples of what autonomous health care looks like in practice through articles, reportbacks, and interviews. The mental, physical, and social aspects are not necessarily distinct from one another, but we cover them all in each zine. In Issue #2 (2017) you can see physical health being addressed in a reportback from a DIY abortion workshop, as well as a comprehensive article about gut flora, probiotics, and microbiome health and resilience. In that same issue, emotional wellbeing is addressed in an article about how to perform a hex, and a guide to some acupressure exercises for stress and anxiety. The health of the social body is addressed via reportbacks from sex worker organizing), a report on an anti-surveillance makeup workshop PMS organized in Berlin, and more. You can download (and print for free, although we appreciate donations) that zine and others on our website.

What are the inspirations or prior struggles that PMS is building on? We put together a very incomplete and eclectic list of instances that came to our minds. We have a lot to say about each of these inspirations and struggles, so if you want to hear more, perhaps you can read some of our report backs or otherwise get in touch:

Greek solidarity clinics (particularly in Thessaloniki and Athens) post-2008

Icarus Project (New York, et al.) [now Fireweed Collective]

Health organizing from our past and in our own communities that we have left behind (personal failures within the Woodbine autonomous health track, the failures of so many accountability processes, the blockades, the occupations, the herbal mutual aid efforts that have come and gone, etc.)

Out of Action (Germany) and Activist Trauma Support (UK)

Black Mesa Indigenous support (Stone Cabin Collective)

All of the sex work and sex worker organizing that so many of us have been involved with over the years

Standing Rock med tent

No More Deaths (so-called US/Mexico border)

Lincoln Hospital occupations (South Bronx, 1969, 1970); Lincoln Detox (1970-78); Dr. Mutulu Shakur

Socialist Patients' Collective (Heidelberg, West Germany 1970- present)

Radical Herbalism Gatherings (UK, 2014-present)

The Gynepunks in Catalonia

The Solidarity Apothecary / Nicole Rose / The Prisoner's Herbal

Pirate Care (Croatia / Europe / worldwide)

Many people working in the 'undercommons' of the NGO-industrial complex

How do you all work together as a group, especially given that you're all far apart? Since we don't get the chance to meet in person very often, a lot of our organizing is done online. We'd already been meeting over an encrypted video chat site for years, so once the pandemic started, we had a communication strategy ready to go and could continue meeting as usual (almost).

Sometimes we come together in person to work on projects or respond to specific calls for support. Actually, that's how most of us who are with the project now have met each other, in doing the work along the way. We've been exploring new modes of emotional support for some time now, and most of the instances where we've been asked to support social movements have centered around bolstering different existing communities' infrastructure for support in, and after, potentially traumatic events, such as actions and occupations that involve direct conflict with the state. Along the way, we met others interested in working on this topic and have expanded our networks and our collective through those relationships that have been made “on the ground”.

One key aspect informing our organizing is a prioritization of one another's wellbeing over the productivity of the group as a whole. In practice, this means making time and space to check in before and after our meetings and following up with one another to offer support outside of meetings. We talk about emotional support, herbal remedies, or just brainstorm solutions to health-related issues that come up for us as people. This also means that a lot of what we do tends to move slowly as we give ourselves the time we need to work at whatever pace our own health needs require. We create spaces where we can be honest with one another about where we're at and what our capacities are, so that we can do the work that we want to do together with intention.

What are some of the shared beliefs that have brought the group together? “Action dries your tears! Self care can't cure social diseases! Most of us are not doctors!”

We don't have these set in stone, but there are definitely some common threads that come from our experiences and that we've encountered. There's a few points that stand out as some kind of “tenets towards an autonomous healthcare”. These areas are consent, accountability, self-defense, and illegalism. They might be more open questions than core beliefs, but we certainly see them as crucial, and sometimes underdeveloped, in movements and initiatives we've been involved with.

How does the matter of consent come up in your work, and how do you navigate that? Our approach to consent in care goes something like this: take measures to ensure that you are getting consent from folks before providing care whenever possible. Be conscious and respectful of the tools and practices that the individual (or community) in question might already be using. Honor and strengthen those practices and offer information about additional sources of support if it makes sense or it is requested of you. Always ask folks what help they need first and what they are already doing: they probably have a good idea of what support they need or want anyway. We look to harm reduction principles, which affirm that each of us is capable of determining what our own health, healing, and well-being could look like, and that these understandings are a valuable basis upon which care and support can be provided. Caring is a process; consent needs to be obtained and maintained throughout that process.

Beyond offering care, consent extends into the way we relate to one another in the group as well. We make decisions on the basis of consensus, which for us is about people in the group consenting to doing work that they feel called to, that coheres around their values, or simply that they feel good about. Consensus is not about unanimity, but unity, which is generated through shared commitment. It is about slowing down in order to take the time to consider and address everyone's concerns, as well as their cool ideas. When we practice with consent and consensus in these little ways, like decision making, we learn what it feels like and can spread that farther and wider into the everyday.

Self-defense and health aren't necessarily topics you would expect to see together. How do you see them relating? For any movement to substantively or even marginally challenge capital, self-defense must be considered. The line between self-defense and care is quite blurred. How can movements survive without defending themselves from the many systems of exploitation, dominance, coercion, and oppression that we experience in our daily lives? And further, how can we defend ourselves without cultivating our own infrastructures of care to patch the literal and emotional wounds, both current and ancestral? In our zine on autonomous trans healthcare, we wrote of the Stonewall riots in 1969: “If you are so accustomed to fighting to exist on a regular basis, and fighting to keep your friends and loved ones alive, you are already so enmeshed in, and so concerned with a community self-defense that letting the brick fall on someone who is attacking you is simply not so far of a stretch.” We think this is how it starts; survival and self-defense are just so intertwined for so many.

Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P Johnson, who were involved with the riots, were founders of STAR: Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, a group focused on direct action as well as harm reduction and providing housing and food for other trans/gender-nonconforming people. It's clear to us that these aspects of the movement are so much a part of one another that no distinction is clear. When self defense becomes care, when care becomes a riot, when these become interchangeable - that's when it becomes revolutionary, when substantial change begins to happen.

How do you approach the question of illegalism? What does that mean to you? In short, we are against the law.

It is an essential aspect of state formation to criminalize solidarity. In most contexts, like wherever there is a state, it is illegal to meaningfully take care of one another's health without supervision. Acts of care are criminalized; such as sharing food with houseless people, providing shelter to those without the documentation the state demands, and distributing medication without a license. We are guided by our theoretical approach and stay grounded in the history of past projects of autonomous and illegalist care, but often it is most effective to learn by doing, bringing us into direct conflict with the state.

Solidarity means taking care of one another. When we learn to take risks for one another's wellbeing, we learn to render the walls of division obsolete. Sometimes people are baffled by the idea that these seemingly trivial acts would be illegal, but of course they are. Taking action through seizure, distribution, or provision of what is necessary for survival in the face of oppression interrupts and challenges the state's ability to maintain power. State power depends on the ability to decide who is a citizen and who is not, who deserves “rights” and who doesn't, and ultimately who lives and who dies. That is whack, obviously, and so we aspire to shift the responsibility of care into the hands of the community.

This is why we don't just passively skirt the law, but we support practicing in a way that essentially renders “the law” totally irrelevant. Remember, “you didn't see shit.” We're doing the work in a manner that DIRECTLY creates the world that we want to see. That means us being able to take care of one another's bodies entirely on our own terms, with consent, with abundance, with nurturance.

Is that why you're an anonymous collective? It seems this is directly connected to how you relate to legality. Yes, anonymity is practical: we may allegedly do things that are not considered entirely lawful, or that the state considers a threat. Sometimes this looks like direct action; often these are simply things we do to survive. When we don't connect our names and faces to our work, we can speak more openly in hopes of sharing our tools and strategies with others living lives that are similarly outside of the law. Some of us have faced doxxing by fascists or harassment by abusive people in our own scenes. You may see some of us at events or workshops, or out doing things in our communities, because some degree of identification is sometimes what's needed to build connections of trust with others, but maintaining good security practices is essential for us.

Anonymity can be a tool for accountability: it may feel counterintuitive when we're used to an emphasis on visibility, but speaking and moving as a nebulous collective means that no one can use our work to build themself a platform or gather social capital, or actual capital/money, for that matter. We have agreed to refuse to do so ourselves.

We recognise that being denied visibility can be part of the harm and repression inflicted on us by power. It can be degrading and demoralising when we don't get recognition for our actions: either because care and healing are less visible and less valued than other forms of activity - or because we consciously chose (alleged) criminality and anonymity over taking credit.

Also, speaking from a position of anonymity doesn't mean you speak for everyone. It might be necessary to be very clear about the standpoint you're talking from. At least, it's important not to speak for those whose experiences you don't share.

These problems open up a strategic question about what kinds of visibility are useful as a means, but for us it's never simply an end.

“Accountability” can be understood in a lot of different ways. Usually, in radical communities it is understood in a very specific context around harm. It sounds like you all might be intending for it to be understood differently. Can you elaborate on what this concept means to you?

Accountability is an elusive principle that we constantly aspire to develop and understand within ourselves, with each other, and in our communities. Why is it so hard? We could start by looking at two different ways accountability gets used. First is the view that seems common in activist, anarchist, queer, feminist communities. There, accountability is often seen as a response to harm, something that’s primarily invoked when one person harms another, often in the form of abuse and sexual violence. The second way accountability can be understood is as an ongoing practice of care, or as harm-reduction, a continual basis for healing and reparation(s), which may open up some new possibilities and directions.

What is the accountability model and what were some of the inspirations behind it? Here we understand accountability as a kind of shared responsibility, specifically in relation to a person's health. Being able to 'account' for each other. We have been developing a tool for groups to use to move towards collective engagement in the health of many individuals, in an overlapping web of smaller groups. We were inspired by some models that people were already using to reinvent how they thought about healthcare for themselves, including the clinic at Vio.me in Thessaloniki, the Icarus Project, and others. In Thessaloniki in the wake of “the crisis”, some newly-unemployed medical professionals were able to reinvent health care from the ground up by creating an experimental clinic in a factory squatted by workers. Later, some of those involved developed the “group for an other medicine” whose project was a system starting with an expansive initial interview that would take about three hours or “as long as was needed” with (1) someone from their community, (2) a 'doctor', and (3) a 'psychologist'. They would use an exhaustive questionnaire to inform a comprehensive discussion about the person's wellbeing, some next steps, and how to achieve them together. It also served as a kind of health record for many of the migrants who otherwise did not have papers of this type that they were in control of and could take with them. Drawing heavily from how inspired we were by what we saw of their process, we wanted to adapt this for folks who might not have access to a a physical clinic, whose networks might be more spread out, or for groups of friends and comrades in community with one another.

Our accountability model is a guide with suggestions for how people might form such a group themselves. It covers the types of commitments and boundaries participants might choose to make with one another, a series of questions for the long interview itself, and ideas about how to move forward and continue working on core issues once they've been identified. Right now, it also contains some practical suggestions around security and group process that would aid in keeping everyone safe and secure. The idea is to redistribute accountability for each other throughout the ties that exist between people who already share community with one another, and shift responsibility (and therefore power) into the hands of the community while mapping out and making visible the pre-existing relationships of care so that they can more heavily be relied upon. This means building ties based on accountability and support for the wellbeing of each individual in a pre-emptive way - building stronger relationships of care before people break under the burdens of capitalism and other oppressions, and the community is left to pick up the pieces.

What are you working on right now? Our most recent zine came out last May and was a collection of preliminary ideas and resources in response to the Covid-19 pandemic - much of this is still relevant and reflects what we are doing right now.

As for our current public-facing work, we're forming a new publication tentatively titled “An Abolitionist's Guide to Autonomous Emotional Support”, which will focus on concrete models and tools to support the emotional wellbeing of our communities on our own terms. The general contexts we see are immediate and longer-term survival, combatting and deserting repression, isolation, “pathology”, and associated distress, harm, and capture. We are in an environment where psychological warfare is a primary mode of attack from the state and its allies (fascists, police, the border, the psych ward, the prison). These kinds of attacks aim to divide us and leave the most vulnerable among us to deal with the consequences. Combatting this means taking the responsibility for our collective wellbeing into our own hands through care with longterm treatment plans, navigating existing resources together, and community self-defense. If we really want to get rid of the logic of the prison, we have to take on the work of caring for one another, and it isn't easy. The zine will include some ways to relate to our herbal allies, notes on how to navigate 'big psych', reflections on supports that have served us well (DBT, somatic exercises, on-the-ground emotional first aid, etc.), a toolkit for a "spa day" you can take anywhere, de-escalation and self-defense basics, an 'ask me anything' from an anarchist therapist, among other little treats.

If you are working on a project that coheres around these themes, we'd love to hear from you. We invite you to share tools and strategies that you have found useful in supporting the emotional health of your friends or community, or that have allowed you to find support in times of crisis.

How can people hear more, or how can people work with you or become involved in the collective?

On our website, there's a “Want to get involved?” section listing ways folks can connect with us and support our work.

All our zines and a bunch of shareable resources can be downloaded here [look in the “resources” tab]. Our zines are made to be shared! Feel free to print them out give them to your friends, put them in your local infoshop, add them to your zine table, leave them strategically placed around your city etc.. We have a small social media presence, but we mostly rely on people spreading the word about what we do, sharing our zines, and reaching out to us personally. If you don't have access to the internet, you can write to us and we are happy to correspond, and/or send physical copies of our zines to anyone who needs them.

PMS can be reached via e-mail at [email protected] or [email protected].

All physical mail can be sent here: PO box 234 Plainfield, VT 05667

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cindylouwho-2 · 4 years ago

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RECENT NEWS, RESOURCES & STUDIES, April 6, 2021

Welcome to my latest summary of recent ecommerce news, resources & studies including search, analytics, content marketing, social media & Etsy! This covers articles, podcasts, videos and infographics I came across since the early March report, although some may be older than that.

I am hoping to launch a new ecommerce resource page on my website in May, although that is looking a bit ambitious with everything else I have on the go. (I've released the latest version of my Etsy search ebook, and am working on updating the keyword research ebook this week as well as still drafting a few new blog posts on Etsy search.)

If you have any questions, please drop me a line here on Tumblr, reply to this post, email me, or contact me on Twitter.

TOP NEWS & ARTICLES

Etsy Ads have been turning themselves on without sellers taking any action. There are threads here, here, here, and here. There is a video here with more people reporting the issue in the comments. A few cases seem to be related to using vacation mode, and at least one person reports a much higher budget than they would have chosen. So go check to make sure they ae still off (unless you want them running).

eBay, Etsy and some other marketplaces have formed a coalition to lobby against proposed laws they say could harm small sellers and microbusinesses. The Coalition to Protect American’s Small Sellers (PASS Coalition) is currently fighting the INFORM Consumers Act, which “would require online marketplaces to disclose third-party seller information to consumers, including name, address, email and telephone, or face civil penalties.” An Etsy rep said that this would be problematic because it would affect the privacy of sellers, and could potentially move communications off-site meaning Etsy would have less “ability to ensure seller integrity and consumer protections.”

PayPal is now allowing Americans to pay using cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin; this is rolling out over the next few months.

ETSY NEWS

Remember when Etsy Ads got way more expensive and stopped working for some people? Here’s the technical explanation of what they changed. [It is very technical in some parts, so most people will struggle with a lot of it] Note they explain that the Etsy Ads algorithm “ranks listings based on their bid price, multiplied by their predicted click-through rate”, and that they added contextual factors such as the time, the day of the week, and the buyer’s platform to tailor the bidding, and the expected order value is supposed to be part of the final bid calculation. They also mention that the current system is using the “30-day listing purchase rate” as a factor. The results of testing: “[t]he buyers saw more relevant results from ads (+6.19% CTR), the buyers made more purchases from ads (+3.08% PCCVR) and the sellers received more sales for every dollar they spent on Etsy Ads (+7.02% ROAS).” It’s clear that Etsy Ads are designed for the really big spenders, not small shops.

April’s attribute updates include candles and desks.

In their latest sustainability initiative, Etsy will now offset carbon emissions from packaging.

Etsy’s “disaster relief fund” has launched, but it is only available to US sellers, which is something not stated until you click to the application form. The FAQs actually state it is available to “all sellers”. Because everyone on Etsy is American, right?

Etsy donated $500,000 to two groups working against Asian hate. Ironically, they also got called out for having an algorithm that was surfacing “erotic” photos of Asian women as recommendations on listings that were completely unrelated items with only “Asian” as a common keyword. The issue was also noted in searches for “Asian photo”. Etsy’s response was to remove 3 listings and to promise to “continue to work on improving our algorithm to avoid surfacing recommendations where not relevant or appropriate.”

The Spring and Summer Trend Report is out, with the usual detail on trending items and keywords used. Some of the search trends:

“143% YoY increase in searches on Etsy for checkered prints”

Things like mushrooms, and “waves and squiggles” are hot

Outdoors, plants and gardening, staycations & decor related to travel are all expected to continue to be popular

“286% YoY increase in searches on Etsy for vintage colored glassware”

“42% YoY increase in searches on Etsy for pendant necklaces”

“86% YoY increase in searches on Etsy for clothing patterns”

SEO: GOOGLE & OTHER SEARCH ENGINES

If you are fairly new to SEO for search engines such as Google, you may find that it seems way too complex, and you might worry that you are missing something. Here is a great basic checklist for websites. Most of these items will not apply on marketplaces such as Etsy; e.g., Etsy rewrites the file name, and doesn’t allow you to create an URL separate from the listing title, or a meta description different from the listing description.

One of the most common questions I get is “how do I get backlinks”? Fortunately, Moz just came out with the Beginner's Guide to Link Building.

You know that links are very important for Google ranking, but do you know how Google decides that? Read this, and you will. [text with lots of graphics]

If you really want to know everything about SEO, Search Engine Journal compiled a fabulous list of resources. Some get very technical, so this list is definitely not for everyone.

A new study says that ⅔ of Google searches do not result in a click; people are getting the information they seek from various Google features on the search page. The study does not separate out simple searches such as the temperature outside, or a spelling check, in which users wouldn’t benefit from clicking. But while the click rate is dropping, users are still growing, so the total number of clicks continues to increase. Here’s a bit of commentary on the study.

Although Google says it likely won’t change ranking much, here’s a good overview of the upcoming Core Web Vitals algorithm update.

Good news! Bots don’t hurt your Google ranking.

SEO for videos on Google, appropriately in the form of a video. [links and highlights in the video’s description]

Former Google employees are involved in Neema, a subscription-based search engine which will protect users’ privacy. The site is currently in beta and there is a waitlist.

(CONTENT) MARKETING & SOCIAL MEDIA (includes blogging & emails)

Trends in the best headline/caption/title for sharing have changed. BuzzSumo’s review of 100 million posts shows that emotional phrases are no longer as big as they were in 2017, and the most shared headlines are now shorter: only 11 words/65 characters. There is a lot of analysis of Twitter and Facebook as well as general info here.

Ideal image size is different on every social media platform; this infographic gives you all the sizes for the major sites.

Reminder: don’t buy Instagram followers. A lot of the services sell bots and inactive accounts, which means you won’t get any engagement. The article ends with a few tips on how to get authentic followers that will actually help you.

Coming to Instagram: the ability to save drafts of Stories.

Reddit has opened a Canadian office, a logical decision since Canuck Redditors are the third-largest country base, and are increasing by 40% a year.

Which app was downloaded the most in the first quarter of 2021? You will be unsurprised to hear it is TikTok.

ONLINE ADVERTISING (SEARCH ENGINES, SOCIAL MEDIA, & OTHERS)

You can’t know how successful your ads are, or how they could be improved, if you aren’t paying attention to several different metrics. Here is what to watch on Facebook.

Here is an overview of what we know about how Google is doing away with advertisers’ third party cookies; the new set up is called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC).

Ad design can be tricky; here are 11 tips for creating Facebook ads that will work.

TikTok is forcing users to see ads related to their TikTok history; as of April 15, you will not be able to opt out of ad personalization. You can still refuse to let them use your activity on other sites, though.

STATS, DATA, OTHER TRACKING

Here’s an overview of how the new version of Google Analytics works.

Facebook Analytics will be retired June 30, 2021, and some people do not feel there are adequate alternatives.

ECOMMERCE NEWS, IDEAS, TRENDS

Poshmark now has listing videos. Any videos added also show up on a seller’s Posh Stories. eBay is also rolling out videos on listing pages and storefronts.

Walmart’s Marketplace now allows sellers from outside the United States; the first new group is from China.

Hudson’s Bay Company is the latest to invite third-party merchants to sell on its site, the Hudson’s Bay Marketplace. There isn’t much there yet, though.

BUSINESS & CONSUMER STUDIES, STATS & REPORTS; SOCIOLOGY & PSYCHOLOGY, CUSTOMER SERVICE

Half of Americans hate seeing the same ads all of the time. 40% were interested in learning about deals through ads, while almost as many want ads that are “entertaining”.

Make sure you are using the correct words to get buyers to convert. This infographic lists some of the most useful psychological trigger words, depending on your goals.

Increasing the average order value is a smart way to increase your income without adding more new customers. Here are 4 pricing strategies to get you there.

Ecommerce spending is projected to continue increasing, and installment plans have been popular early in 2021.

How fast a website loads is directly related to sales and conversions. “If a page’s load time slowed from one second to three seconds, the chances of a bounce increased by almost a third (32%). And going from one to five seconds increased bounce rate by a whopping 90%!”

#etsysellernews #Etsynews #search engine optimization #content marketing #microbusiness #ecommerce

0 notes

ben-j-man · 6 years ago

Text

Secret War: Upon Blood Sands- Chapter 1

A sequel to my 40k fanfiction Secret War.

Link to chapter 1- http://ben-j-man.tumblr.com/post/180097372453/secret-war-chapter-1

After his organization is hired to hunt down an influential ganger on the Hive world, Omnartus. Attelus Kaltos is embroiled deeper into the complex world of the Assassin. This is the job which will change him, for better or for worse, forever more.

‘I am not a partier; I am an assassin who kills people for a living. And being the dangerous job it is and that I would quite like to live past my twenties, I spend every waking hour for training. Making sure I have the necessary skills to live to see the next day.’ -Attelus Kaltos Bursting from the seams with action, intrigue, suspense and full of twists and turns. With a character driven narrative which delves deep into the mind torn asunder by war as he tries to find purpose in the grim-dark universe of 40k where there is only war.

A Sanction for Sanity: Chapter 1 link a prequel

http://ben-j-man.tumblr.com/post/181441697383/secret-war-a-sanction-for-sanity-chapter-1

"This is accurate?" asked Attelus Kaltos as he looked up from the data slate, his hazel eyes wide with surprise.

"As much as it can be," said Interrogator Arlathan Karkin who reclined back in his seat, smiling.

They sat in Arlathan's office on the Audacious Edge, the room was large, a good fifteen by thirty metres. The walls made of shining adamantium and Arlathan's desk was inbuilt with an advanced cogitator. A very long Nalwood cabinet sat against the right side wall, keeping Arlathan's liqour bottles.

ge collection of Amasec and other alcohols. Behind the Interrogator was a window taking up the entire width of the office, allowing a good view of Scintilla, the sector's capital world below. The smog covered hive world reminded Attelus unnervingly of Omnartus.

Shit, it'd been three years, three frigging years since the destruction of Omnartus. So much had happened since then and yet so little, Arlathan's promotion as Inquisitor Enandra's Interrogator, the death of the Space Marine chapter responsible, The Destruction Inculpators and Attelus' ascension to master assassin by Glaitis' old cult.

It'd taken Vex six months to decipher the data downloaded from Taryst's cogitator, and Attelus had travelled far and wide, investigating into the leads it gave. Adelana working with him as his apprentice. But all of it had been for nothing, no true clue of Etuarq's whereabouts.

Until now, perhaps.

"And it'd been seven months since it'd occurred?" Attelus asked, trying to keep the anger from his tone.

Arlathan shrugged, looking at Attelus with weary eyes. Much had changed, Arlathan now sported an impressively thick, neatly kept beard and his once pitch black hair now speckled with bits of grey. His pale skin, marked with scars, two crossed on his right cheek and, one ran from his brow onto his left cheek. Scars said given to him by the traitor Inquisitor, Devan Torathe on the bridge of the Imperial Crusher, so long ago.

What had gone on there, Attelus still didn't know. Arlathan and Inquisitor Enandra seemed determined to never talk about it. Something which he didn't like, but had to respect.

At the thought of scars, Attelus absently touched the huge, ugly black scar just under his left eye. The scar he still refused to have covered by false flesh unless the job needed it, instead electing to hide it underneath a thick fringe of brown hair.

"You know more than anyone how slow information in the Imperium of Mankind can move," said Arlathan. "This occurred in the Gothic Sector, way to the galactic south-east, we're bloody lucky we received it this soon."

"Of course we were," Attelus sighed, placing a palm over his face.

"Let me have a look," said Karmen Kons as she got up from one of the couches and approached.

Attelus smiled and handed it to her. Karmen's attractive features didn't smile back. She wore a black bodyglove, her shoulder-length blond hair dead straight and parted in the middle. She was truly attractive, beautiful, perhaps. Her face heart shaped and high cheek boned. Without a word, she took the data slate and began scrolling through it.

"Taryst's records indicated a tenuous at best connection," said Attelus.

Arlathan raised an eyebrow, "to general Tathe? Yes, I know you're unwilling to pursue this thread. They are from your homeworld, they were your heroes as a child, Estella's too."

He furrowed his brow and looked pointedly at Karmen, she ignored him continuing to read the data slate.

"You've been avoiding it," said Arlathan. "But now you can't afford to any longer. A world was put to the sword at general Tathe's behest, Attelus."

"The information is lacking," stated Karmen. "Doesn't even say the world's name, nor even where it is."

Arlathan sighed, "that was beyond our accessibility, that information is classified. Vermillion level."

"But it did happen?" said Attelus.

"Do not know, the information was taken from the Gothic sector's Inquisitorial data banks by one of our long-range operatives, but it still seems worth investigating," said Arlathan. "The Elbyran contingent is taking part in a campaign subduing worlds still held by the archenemy in the Orar subsector since Abaddon the Despoiler's 12th Black Crusade. With the sector highly weakened by Abaddon's forces, they've been importing Imperial Guard regiments from other sectors to help."

"Where are they now?" Attelus asked.

"The last we heard, the Munitorum had sent them to retake the mining world of Carkeath, in the Savath system," said Arlathan. "That was a month ago, but there were problems."

"And what are they?" asked Karmen, looking up from her dataslate.

"A day after they were scheduled to arrive, the system was cut off by a freak warpstorm," said Arlathan. "We know that the Orar astropaths received a message from the invasion force just before the system went dark..."

"And let me guess," Interrupted Attelus. "The contents of that message too was Vermillion level."

Arlathan nodded.

"Isn't that a little strange," said Karmen. "Only bits and pieces of that information being classified."

"All of it is classified," said Arlathan. "Our agent isn't high enough on the totem pole to be able to access just the Vermillion level encoded information."

"And fair enough too," agreed Attelus with a shrug. "But Karmen's right. It is strange. Why not all of it being Vermillion?"

Arlathan smiled, "does this stink as much to you as it does me?" he said.

Attelus smiled and raised his eyebrows, which said, 'of course I frigging do.'

"How does it feel?" said Attelus.

"How does what feel?" asked Arlathan, his eyes narrowing.

"Since being made Interrogator you've become quite the uhh, exposition teller," he said.

"Exposition...teller?" said Arlathan, with a bemused furrowed brow.

"Never mind," said Attelus quickly, shaking his head. "What does the Inquisitor want us to do?"

Arlathan tapped his desk with the tip of his fingernail as a guilty expression crossed his face, "she wants you to travel to Sarkeath to investigate the Velrosian 1st and general Tathe. Find out the why and how the Exterminatus happened and if it's connected to Etuarq. Also to find out the fate of the Elbyran contingent."

He took out another two data slates from under his desk.

"We've got a team lined up for you and, a ship readied to take you to the Gothic Sector," said Arlathan.

"Yeah, that's all well and good and all," said Attelus leaning back in his seat, folding his arms across his chest. "But that's going to be hard, because, y'know it's cut off due to a warp storm and, it's also so frigging far away."

"Yeah," sighed Arlathan. "But she also said that isn't her problem. That if you have to wait on Orar for the warp storm to clear, then you'll wait on Orar for the warp storm to clear."

"What!" both Karmen and Attelus exclaimed at once.

"That could take frigging centuries!" cried Karmen, the showing the most amount of emotion Attelus had heard from her in a long time.

"The Inquisitor also said that's what rejuvenant treatments are for," said Arlathan. "She also said during that time you could set up a better spy network for our organisation in the Gothic Sector."

Attelus frowned and looked at his data slate, scrolling through the list of agents, he really liked what he saw but...

"Yeah and how can we do that with a squad of ten people?" said Karmen sullenly, verbalising the question Attelus wanted to ask too. "Including us."

Arlathan shrugged, "she said you'll also be well funded. You can hire your own agents once there."

"Of course she did," Attelus said as he shook his head with a smile. "What else did mamzel Enandra say?"

"She also said that Attelus would say 'of course she did,' a few times and would be quite happy with at least one member of the squad," said Arlathan, then he looked at Karmen. "She also said that Karmen wouldn't be..."

Karmen's narrowing eyes made Arlathan quickly shut up.

Arlathan cleared his throat and straightened, "all the rest of the information you need is in your data slates. She also said that it's up to you to brief your squad members."

"Of course...," Attelus started to say, but smiled and stopped himself. "We're done?"

Arlathan nodded, "the mamzel wishes for you to be gone in as soon as two days. She'd also like you to give us a call over the vox when you're ready to leave. So we can see you off."

Attelus got off his seat with a sigh and, they turned and started toward the door.

"Attelus," said Arlathan causing Attelus to stop in his tracks. "About Adelana..."

"You've already said enough on her," Attelus snapped. "I don't want to hear anymore! Okay?"

Arlathan expression creased with sadness before he nodded and lowered his gaze to the cogitator in his desk.

The door slid closed behind Attelus as he stepped into the corridor. Karmen stood, her arms folded over her ample chest, her full lips pouting in annoyance. There was no sign of the horrid, self-inflicted scars on her face anymore, the false flesh that covered them was grafted perfectly by Inquisitor Enandra's best surgeons.

Attelus met her gaze for a few seconds before he turned right and continued down the corridor, studying the data slate, his feet silent as they walked over the steel grating.

Karmen fell in step with him, her footfalls clanging in contrast to Attelus' complete silence.

"What do you think?" she said.

Attelus sighed, stopped and lowered his data slate, turning to Karmen.

"That this assignment is a right royal pain in the arse," he sighed, before continuing on again.

He'd only made a few metres more, before Karmen's voice said in his mind, +can your other benefactor help us in this?+

Attelus shrugged, I'll ask her, see what she has to say. It wouldn't be the first time Farseer Faleaseen had provided them with a literal shortcut in their endeavours. Only Adelana and Karmen knew of his connection to the Eldar, but it seemed that was going to change.

Temporarily, perhaps.

Karmen nodded, "we have better get the others together," she said, reaching for her vox bead, but she stopped as Attelus raised his hand.

"No," he said, "Inquisitor Enandra seems to know everything about everyone. Let's see if we do. We'll try to find them."

"Sounds like a complete waste of time to me," said Karmen, folding her arms again.

Attelus grinned, "come on Karmen, just humour me here, please."

She rolled her eyes, but was smiling as she groaned and said, "fine! Have it your way! I swear you're like a child sometimes. If we're delayed because of it, it's on you, alright?"

"Don't you worry, we won't," he said.

"Where to first?" she asked.

Attelus smiled, "the training area, of course."

Attelus had lied, of course. Along the way, he just had to stop at the kitchen to get himself a cup of caffeine.

They walked side by side, Attelus with one hand in the pocket of his black flak jacket, while sipping from his cup with the other.

Karmen couldn't help but smile. She remembered the little, stick thin but deadly teenager she'd found in the ruins of Varander ten years ago. Now Attelus was an exceptionally handsome and accomplished young man. He was thin but svelte. His skin pale white and lips deep red. His sharp-featured, elfin face was quite feminine made even more so by his shoulder-length brown hair. Karmen always felt he'd look even better if he had his hair cut short, she'd suggested it once or twice, but was promptly ignored. Attelus was far older than he looked, being twenty-seven, but looking perhaps, eighteen, nineteen. How he managed to look so youthful after everything was quite beyond her. Karmen knew more of Attelus Kaltos than she'd cared to admit, she knew how hard a life he'd had and couldn't help marvel at how well he'd pulled through it all.

He'd had help, Karmen supposed, Inquisitor Enandra and the little bitch had given him much in the way of moral support over the last three years.

Attelus quickly noticed Karmen looking at him, his five senses were always as sharp as Karmen's sixth and gave her a smile.

Karmen forced away her own smile and looked away, she hadn't forgiven him, she would never forgive him.

He frowned sadly and fixed his attention forwards, he'd seemed to have got the idea of their relationship a long time ago. There was to be no friendship, they were acquaintances, professionals and that was that.

It was his own damned fault, as he would say, in all honesty.

They turned and walked through the doorway leading into the training facility

All around dozens upon dozens of elite soldiers under Enandra's command were practising hand to hand drills, bayonet techniques and disarming and wrestling style fighting on blue soft mats

Almost everyone was a large bastard, as muscular as Attelus was thin. Their every technique was brilliant and practised almost to perfection. She tried not to stare, many men were stripped to the waste, their sweat-slicked torsos corded with muscle. Some were women, but only a few.

In the corner of her eye, Karmen saw Attelus looking on with a small measure of an amused, half smile, his brow furrowed arrogantly.

None of them could even come close to taking him and, he knew it. Attelus was one of the most dangerous individuals Karmen had ever met and, that was saying a lot. His arrogance was almost justified, almost. He must never forget, that there was always someone, somewhere better.

Karmen looked over the Stormtroopers training but saw no sign of anyone on their list.

"Try the sparring cages," Attelus said, scratching the back of his head before slipping his hand back into its pocket and taking another sip of caffeine.

They moved through the thoroughfare, many a soldier noticed them and stopped to salute or make the sign of the Aquila.

Attelus and Karmen nodded or saluted back politely.

They eventually came to the five large sparring cages set at the end of the huge hall. In the first one figure was a complete blur of speed and skill, fighting off five close combat servitors with blunted blades at once, so much so Karmen couldn't even make out who it was.

"Hey, Darrance!" Attelus yelled quickly as they stopped to watch. "A frig head says what?"

It was Darrance, how the hell Attelus was capable of telling that was anyone's guess

Darrance didn't deign to reply he just continued his battle.

"Hmm, was worth a try," said Attelus with a smile and a shrug, looking sidelong at Karmen

Karmen was about to reply when abruptly there was a loud buzz and, a servitor's flat toned voice said, "horizontal slash to sternum a fatal blow, end of session."

Darrance let out a frustrated growl as he spun away flourishing his long, two-handed sword to whip off the imaginary blood and stalked toward them. Darrance was very pretty as well, but his features were grimmer, much more gaunt and haughty. His white hair was once long but now he wore it close-cropped and short. He was also thin and long-limbed but was much taller than Attelus being just under two metres. Darrance was obviously highborn, Karmen had been a lord's daughter back on Velrosia, she had to have many dealings with the upper class as a child so she knew his type well.

Spoilt and totally up himself but he wasn't without his merits, he was a swordsman of equal skill to Attelus but was also an extensively talented pilot and held much in the way wisdom and intellect, he was usually more correct than not in his statements and assumptions. He and Attelus were once mercenaries working under the same assassin sect, they still did but were permanently outsourced under Enandra's command.

But, Karmen was sure both of them were truly loyal to Enandra.

"I hope you are aware..." Darrance gasped but stopped himself and frowned; he was obviously going to call Attelus 'apprentice' but, that title didn't fit him any more. "Attelus, you made me frig up then."

Attelus grinned as if it was the greatest achievement of his entire existence; it proved infectious and, Karmen couldn't help smile along with him. After Omnartus' destruction, it'd taken a long time for Attelus to be able to smile again, a very long time. He had a nice smile and, she'd missed it greatly.

Darrance smirked, shook his head, turned away and barked, "training simulation! Level ten, start!"

Attelus took another sip of caffeine and, they walked on, idly gazing into the sparring cages. In the next were two more assassins from the cult, Delathasi and Kerlia were sparring. Delathasi was wielding dual short blades while Kerlia, she fought with a two-handed axe.

Both were a blur, but not quite as quick or skilled as Darrance. They were young, seventeen so inexperienced. Delathasi was apprenticed to Darrance and Kerlia was under Hayden Tresch. Although Hayden was nowhere to be seen. Kerlia was like Hayden more of a sniper, but she still seemed intent on practising with close combat weaponry.

Attelus and Karmen stopped, watching them. Karmen, a long time ago, before she had focused on her gift, was quite the swordswoman and she could see Delathasi was holding back.

"Hmm, pretty good," said Attelus, his words tinged with melancholy and Karmen knew why they both reminded him of Elandria.

It was in the third they found two of the people they were looking for, Adelana and Helma were locked in combat. They wielded blunted practise long swords and Karmen couldn't help but be impressed by their skill. Both had only started to learn the blade three years ago and both had learned under Attelus.

Attelus smiled like a proud father and drunk back the rest of his caffeine in one long gulp.

"Still got a long way to go, though," said Attelus absently. "To catch up with Delathasi and Kerlia."

"And those two will just keep on improving as well," said Karmen. "I don't think they'll ever catch up, Delathasi and Kerlia have been training since they were really young."

Attelus grimaced and shrugged, quickly seeing her point.

Karmen felt a very familiar presence, a very familiar feeling, this despite her trying to suppress her gift and she turned to see two women in black singlets and combat pants walking toward their way. Karmen recognised them as trainees on the mats and quickly remembered their names, troopers Salantha and Olianthis. Both were drenched in sweat and looking at Attelus as they walked past. The emotion which radiated from them like a blindingly powerful lamp pack was attraction, but Karmen didn't need to be a telepath to tell that. It was a regular occurrence and Karmen fought back her annoyance, women were just as bad as men at objectification, if not even worse. With her gift no longer so suppressed she started to sense at least twenty of the men around in the room were attracted to her, looking at her. Their thoughts ranged from disgusting to moderately respectful, some were even somewhat nice.

Hissing through clenched teeth, she pushed away the thoughts whirling through her mind, then gave the two woman a withering glare which caused them to look away and continue quickly onward.

Karmen looked back into the cage, and she glanced sidelong at Attelus. He was so entrenched in watching he hadn't even noticed them checking him out, which was uncharacteristic. Karmen knew why, he was really looking at Adelana, who was also only in a sweat-slicked singlet and combat pants. Adelana was a pretty thing, beautiful in fact, her face diamond-shaped, with a long nose and full, lusciously red lips. Her skin was very pale and covered in freckles, she tied back hair red with brilliant blonde streaks.

As Attelus has said, Adelana was truly beautiful, but in an understated way, like many of the bird species back on Velrosia. They were coloured with dark greens and blues unlike the birds of the Elbyran continent of Aluthisa where they were bright, overly ostentatious. Velrosian birds were no less pretty but in a different way. As Attelus was popular with the women, she was just as popular with the men and, there were many competing for her affection in the organisation.

Karmen frowned and folded her arms, they didn't have time for this.

+Helma! Adelana!+ she sent, with a bit more force than necessary, causing them to stop and flinch in pain. +Get out here, we've got a mission!+

Both Helma and Adelana, glared at her but quickly Helma opened the door and they stepped out.

"A mission?" growled Helma, she was a short, plain-faced woman with ruddy brown skin and a large, ugly scar on her left cheek. Her blonde hair was close-cropped short and her build more muscular than many men. She was a soldier, hard-edged and unsentimental, a leader. She'd been a captain in the 51st Fenksworld regiment and so was a captain in Taryst's mercenary forces which was modelled on the Imperial guard. Over the past three years she'd proven a masterful military tactician, and a dependent, ruthlessly effective long-range fighter, but lacked a true talent for undercover work.

"Yes," said Karmen and looked to Adelana, she was the exact opposite to Helma. While she too was an excellent shot and only average close combatant. Adelana seemed to have a natural affinity for undercover and stealth work. Only after three years of training, she was already one of their best. Karmen had to admit her and Attelus made for an excellent team, both having skill sets that complemented and contrasted each other well.

"It's a pretty big one too," said Attelus.

"We finally have a lead on Etuarq?" asked Adelana sounding excited and looking at Attelus intently.

He shrugged and met her gaze. Adelana was one of the very few native Omnartisians left and, so was one of the most eager to bring the rogue Inquisitor to justice.

"Perhaps," he breathed, Karmen knew out of all of Adelana's features, Attelus appreciated her large sea-blue eyes the most. "But there's no guarantee."

Adelana pursed her lips and nodded in disappointment, but continued to look at Attelus.

"Anyone knows if anyone else on the list is here?" said Karmen and she read from the dataslate the list of squad members assigned to the mission.

"No," said Helma bluntly and she furrowed her brow. "Why do you ask? Why not call them over the comms?"

Karmen smiled and waved a thumb at Attelus, "Mr weirdo here wishes to waste time tracking all of you down. I thought I'd humour him."

"I'm right here, you know," said Attelus, but still grinned.

"Says it's a test," said Karmen. "See how well we know the people who are to work with us."

"And I was right," said Attelus proudly. "I knew they would be here."

Karmen raised an eyebrow, "it hardly takes a genius to think that someone might be at the training room, Attelus."

Attelus raised his hands, the empty cup hanging from his index finger, "alright! Alright! Is it annual take the piss out of Attelus day, is it?"

"Everyday is take the piss out of Attelus day," Adelana laughed.

"Story of my life," said Attelus with a good-humoured sigh.

"We may as well come with you," said Helma, "try to speed up this farce a bit."

Attelus pursed his lips and tore his attention away from Adelana to Helma, trying to see if the ex-guardswoman was joking or not and frowned as he quickly saw she wasn't.

He sighed, slipped his free hand into its pocket, turned on the balls of his feet and started back.

"Alright, alright," he said. "Can't waste any more time, we've better head on then."

"Where to first?" said Adelana as they started after him.

"I'm taking a wild guess," said Karmen. " And saying...the shooting range."

Attelus, with his back to them, muttered something indignantly.

"Yeah," said Karmen, smiling. "We're going to the shooting range."

Much to no one's surprise, the shooting range was indeed, their next destination.

Attelus was the first through the door and, they approached the desk of the range's custodian, a grumpy middle-aged and going to seed ex-guardsman named Gorres. Gorres sat back casually in his worn leather chair, reading a data slate. Karmen knew how much of a sleaze the old bastard was and had no wish to know what he was looking at.

"Yo," said Attelus as they approached and he held up his cup. "Mind if I give you this?"

Gorres sat up and glared Attelus up and down as though he'd just asked if he could lay with his daughter. (Calestia Gorres was a pretty little trainee just starting in the Stormtrooper corps)

"Please," said Attelus, grinning and shaking the cup.

"Ahh give here!" growled Gorres and snatched it from Attelus with impressive speed. "You may be a big mighty Throne Agent now, but I've been workin' in this organisation before you were even in ya daddy's sack! I ain't ya bloody servitor, got it?"

"Fair enough," said Attelus, raising his hands in diplomatic supplication. "Never would've even considered you were, not for a second. Thank you by the way."

"Yeah," growled Gorres. "If ya gonna go into the range, don't forget to wear your damn ear protectors."

"Of course," said Attelus as he approached the wall the ear protectors hung off and, he began to take them down and started to hand them to the others.

They walked through the thick glass steel doors and into the range and even with the ear protectors on, the discharge of weapons fire was horrid. Causing Karmen to involuntarily wince.

The firing range was huge, easily as large as the practise area, but despite this, it wasn't large enough, as they passed by a long line of soldiers waiting to take their turn at the range. Most of them gazing appreciatively at Adelana and Karmen while they walked.

They were halfway through when they found another assigned to their team and Karmen wasn't surprised at all to find him here. Trooper Jelket, stood, las gun braced as he took shot after shot at the target. He wore his Stormtrooper carapace but went without a helmet. Jelket was an average looking man of average height and average build. His skin was tanned and his black hair curly, scruffy. He'd lost his right arm from an Astartes bolter round back on Omnartus, now it was replaced by an advanced augmetic. That seemed almost normal at first glance. But at a closer look, one could see the joints in the fingers.

Karmen liked Jelket, he was an intelligent, forward thinking, observant character, but also strangely dumb in other circumstances. He was awkward but always pleasant, kind but more than a little bit paranoid. A real conspiracy theorist, in fact, he was one of the first people who'd figured out about Taryst's secret before anyone else.

Most of his other theories were a bit beyond reality, even for Attelus' taste who too was paranoid beyond belief.

Jelket paused in his shots and turned to them as they approached, grinning widely.

"Hey! What are you guys doing here?" he said.

"You caught up to Hayden yet?" asked Attelus.

Jelket shook his head, he was one of the best shots in the organisation, but Hayden Tresch was the best and, the two had a friendly rivalry. Karmen had never felt any bitterness from Jelket for being second best (in fact he held that position with at least three others, depending, as it would change constantly, but Jelket was always at least fifth, there was fierce competition for second place)

"You guys here to support me?" asked Jelket, sounding legitimately hopeful. "Cheer me on?"

"No," stated Helma, folding her arms across her chest, her tone implied she thought such a thing would be the biggest waste of time in the galaxy.

Jelket pursed his lips and grimaced, looking highly disappointed.

"We're here because we need you for another mission," said Karmen, trying to abate the young ex-guardsman's frown.

"Oh? Really?" he said. "Something about that shit-head Etuarq?"

"Perhaps," said Attelus. "Can't guarantee anything yet."

"You know I suggested we look into Marius Hax, right?" said Jelket. "He must be involved being the lord..."

Attelus raised a hand, causing Jelket to cut his sentence short, "yes," he sighed. "You've said that on numerous occasions now, but there is no true evidence that he's involved, there was no mention at all of him in Taryst's records. Anyway, Omnartus was a hub world, its production of minerals was huge and served the sub-sector and even the entire Calixis sector well. It'd even supplied some excellent Imperial Guard regiments, many still in service now, I really doubt, even if he is a traitor he was involved at all."

"But that's what he wants you to think!" insisted Jelket.

Attelus sighed and rolled his eyes, then checked his wrist chron, "and how do you propose we find that out? Burst into his office, put a laspistol to his head and get him to spill his secrets? We maybe Inquisition now but we haven't the right without sufficient evidence and even if we did every Amalathian from here to Thracian Primaris would be on our arses faster than you can say, 'you idiot.'"

Attelus sighed, "just please meet us at briefing quarters 56a at 1600, got that?"

"Yes sir!" said Jelket with a salute.

They pushed past Jelket who continued on with his practice.

"You and I are both aware that we have, as we speak, spies investigating into Marius Hax and his underlings on Scintilla," Karmen whispered in his ear.

"Of course," said Attelus with a small smile. "But I wouldn't admit that to him, would you?"

Karmen smiled, seeing his point.

"Besides," said Attelus, while stretching his long arms over his head and intertwining his fingers together. Karmen was sure that he didn't even know he was doing it, the instinct so entrenched in his psyche. "It's just a necessity, we're doing it with pretty much all the rulers across the sector, or at least trying to. You know, just in case."

They only had to walk a few metres more to find another member of their squad. Torris was waiting in the line, shotgun slung over his shoulder his arms folded over his chest.

Torris was a large, muscular man with very dark brown skin. He was once one of Taryst's most capable employees and before that a member of the Adeptus Arbites on Malfi. With his background of law enforcement he was incredible at reading people, so much so Karmen couldn't help suspect he might have some latent psychic ability. He had after the Omnartus incident, in respect to his murdered friend, Jeurat Garrakson taken up training for heavy weapons and due to his size and strength proved a natural.

He'd once been a charismatic, cheery caring person, but after Omnartus he turned grim and ruthless. Torris still blamed Attelus for the death of their friend and would never forgive him for it, which Karmen couldn't help feel was a true tragedy. If Adelana could forgive Attelus for his role in the death of her homeworld, why couldn't Torris forgive him for what Garrakson did? What also made it sadder was Karmen was sure it wasn't really Attelus' fault. They'd been good friends, and Attelus had needed that friendship over the last three years. Karmen had attempted to talk with Torris in private once or twice about it but the ex-arbitrator wouldn't hear of it.

Despite this, Torris was pragmatic enough to put aside this for the mission. He still respected Attelus somewhat for his skill as a spy and an assassin, but that was that.

"Marcel," said Karmen as they approached.

Torris sniffed and looked them over, "we got a mission?" he asked.

Karmen nodded.

"Good, about frigging time," he growled and looked at Attelus from under a hooded brow. "And you're the leader, I assume?"

Attelus frowned and said, "I am."

Torris nodded but showed no emotion.

Adelana stepped past Karmen, her hands balled into fists.

"We're to meet at briefing room 56a at 1600," she growled through gritted teeth. "Alright?"

Karmen pursed her lips, it was generally well known that Adelana really disliked Torris. For obvious reasons.

Torris grimaced slightly, looking down at Adelana and folding his thick arms across his wide chest.

Karmen didn't have to be a telepath to tell it meant; what right do you have to order me around, little girl?

Karmen cleared her throat, causing Torris to look her way.

"We're looking for Verenth, Hayden, Vark and Halsin," she said, ignoring Attelus' glare and pouty look. "You know where any of them are?"

Torris shrugged, "where Hayden is, is anyone's guess, could be with the Tech-Priests, could be in the armoury, could be at the frigging library. Verenth's probably in his quarters, he isn't here so he's most likely there. Vark's probably in the Ecclesiarch. Halsin, well he's most definitely..."

"Here," a voice interrupted him, and Torris turned to reveal Halsin who approached them. A laspistol held confidentially in his left hand.

With his bulging thyroid eyes, beneath his thick-framed glasses, he always looked like he was in a constant state of surprise.

Halsin was once a tall, scrawny, awkward junior medicae under Taryst's employ but over the past three years, he'd grown. Volunteering as a front line medicae he had served on many assignments since they were taken under Inquisitor Enandra's wing. This, as well as countless hours of training with the Stormtrooper Corps, had hardened him, giving him some confidence. He wasn't as good as any of the elite soldiers, but could still hold his own in a fight. Unless it was close combat, he was still gangly but only a little less now. But his supreme skill with a scalpel, bandaging and ability to keep calm under pressure more than made up for that.

"Halsin!" said Attelus. "Good to see you."

Halsin was one for few words, he simply grimly nodded in reply.

"Been practising at the range?" Attelus said. "What's your percentile now?"

Halsin grimaced in distaste and answered hesitantly, "seventy-nine."

Attelus shrugged, "still better than me."

"Well, even a cross-eyed Grox could shoot better than you!" said Adelana, but with a playful grin causing both Torris and Helma to chuckle with amusement. Karmen couldn't help roll her eyes. She hated their flirty, playful banter.

Attelus furrowed his brow and pursed his lips before a wide smile crossed his face, "I do get seventy to seventy-three, I doubt a cross-eyed Grox could do quite that well. We all can't be good at everything unless you're a freak called Hayden Tresch."

"The only freak around here is you," said Helma making mostly everyone, even Karmen chuckle.

"I am presuming we have an assignment," said Halsin, as humourless as ever.

"You presume correctly," said Torris. "You seen Verenth, Tresch or Vark?"

"Verenth and Hayden I wouldn't have a clue," he said. "But I saw Verenth not long ago when I was leaving the medicae. As I understand it, he's getting a tattoo."

"What? Yet another tattoo?" exclaimed Adelana.

"Yes, another tattoo," said Halsin, sharing none of Adelana's astonishment.

"Well!" said Attelus. "Next stop, the medicae."

"Or you could, you know, call them," said Helma. "Because that's what Vox links are for."

Attelus shrugged and sighed, "alright, we'll go get Verenth, then call the other two."

"That's not what I meant," muttered Helma, although Helma had been a captain and older than Attelus, she'd never begrudged his more senior status, but she had little patience for his eccentricities.

"You guys wanna come with?" said Attelus, ignoring her.

Halsin and Torris exchanged a look.

Torris shrugged, "yeah I'll come, don't want Attelus having his own bloody harem, do we?"

"What? You jealous, Torris?" said Attelus with a wide grin.

"Correction," said Torris. "Don't want him thinking he's got his own harem."

"I think, therefore I am," said Attelus.

Torris pursed his lips and shrugged, conceding defeat, "you make that up now, or get it from somewhere?"

Attelus shrugged back, not rising to the bait.

"I guess I will come too," said Halsin. "Will need to retrieve some equipment from there anyway."

"Alrighty," said Attelus. "Let's get going, then."

It didn't take long for them to find Verenth in the large medicae, they just had to follow the loud buzzing sound to its source. Verenth sat stripped to the waist as surgeon Solvik applied the ink to his bicep.

If Adelana could describe her fellow Omnatisian in one word it would be, 'snake.' She'd never actually seen a snake, not first hand, but she'd read about them and seen illustrations. Verenth was a tall, very thin and long-limbed young man, but that wasn't what was most snake-like about him. That was his eyes. Stark, pitiless and coloured a strange, light green. His plain, gaunt almost chinless face was hard, perpetually frowning. His head shaven, allowing everyone to see the numerous tattoos covering his skull.

Adelana was never sure how to act around the passionate, intense ex-hammer, he too was one of the few remaining survivors of Omnartus, that made any and all interaction out of assignments very awkward. Not just that but he scared her, constantly it felt he was going to explode into a rage in any second, especially when around Attelus. Adelana had once thought it was because of the part Attelus had played in the destruction of their homeworld. But she'd learned from Attelus that it wasn't just that, but the assassin had also killed Verenth's brother, Verenth had even witnessed it first hand. Unlike Torris, he had a very good reason to hate Attelus but despite this, the ex-hammer still worked under the ex-mercenary. Like Torris, he was pragmatic and saw the big picture enough to know there was more at stake.

"Hey Verenth," said Attelus with a small wave as they approached, causing the ex-hammer's attention to snap at him, his perpetually frowning face somehow frowned even more.

"What is it?" he growled, eyeing them from under his hooded brow.

"We've been assigned a mission," said Attelus, still sounding cheery despite Verenth's demeanour. Verenth never seemed to intimidate Attelus or Attelus never showed the intimidation he felt. Out of everyone in their group, besides, maybe, Tresch. Verenth had the highest chance of killing the superhuman. He was a gunslinger, his hands faster on the draw with his autopistol and Stubbrevolver than thought, inhumanly fast in fact. He was also one of the five top contestants for the second best shot in the organisation. If he could somehow catch Attelus off guard...

Adelana glanced at Karmen who stood next to her, the psyker's expression was unreadable her arms folded across her ample chest. No, Adelana corrected herself, if anyone here could kill Attelus it was Karmen Kons. Adelana knew she didn't like her, hated her in fact and she knew why. This despite Adelana never intending to ever have any kind of relationship with him, in spite of...

Adelana should've been utterly terrified by the psyker's enmity, knowing what Karmen Kons was capable of, but she wasn't. The Psyker was not petty, in fact, she was one of the most reliable people on the team, she'd saved Adelana's life on countless occasions over the past three years. In fact, if it wasn't for her Adelana would've died with Omnartus.

"If you haven't guessed yet," said Attelus knocking Adelana from her train of thought.

Verenth sighed, shook his head and rolled his eyes, "yeah, I guessed, boss. I was just hoping it wasn't, that somehow not saying it would make it untrue."

Attelus smiled, apparently ignoring Verenth's sarcasm when he said 'boss.'

"Fair enough," said Attelus, he never seemed to begrudge Verenth of his immense dislike toward him. He understood it and was genuinely regretful for the injustice he'd perpetrated. "And as much as I respect anyone who fights fate, the frigging bastard. I'm sorry to say it's won this day."

Verenth groaned, "alright, just let Solvik finish my tattoo."

"Can he do it in..." Attelus checked his wrist chron. "Fifteen minutes? We've got briefing room 56a booked at 1600."

Verenth scowled and looked pointedly at the tattoo on his left bicep. Adelana was no expert, but it seemed far from finished. From what was done it looked like the starting of a winged, green-robed, faceless figure holding a sword to its chest, tip downward.

"Hmm," said Attelus, stroking his thin chin. "Dark Angels, right?"

Verenth stiffened visibly.

"They saved my homeworld from invasion," said Attelus. "They've interested me ever since."

"Funny," growled Verenth. "Space Marines saved your world but destroyed mine."

Attelus frowned, "that's why I find it ironic that you would..."

"Last time I checked," interrupted Verenth. "It wasn't the Dark Angels who did it, it was the Destruction Inculpators or The Desolation Inculpators, whatever, they're gone now, faced justice. Just because they did it doesn't mean all Space Marine chapters are the same."

"Besides," said Verenth. "I think it just looks frigging cool."

Attelus nodded, "sorry to interrupt your tattoo but if it's any consolation this mission may or may not involve our enemy."

Verenth's snake-like eyes widened briefly, "you mean the enemy?"

Attelus shook his head, and he turned to walk away, "perhaps an emphasis on perhaps," he said with another brief wave. "See you soon."

"I'll be there," said Verenth as Attelus lead them away. "I'll frigging be there."

Adelana could see Attelus was smiling slightly and Torris, glaring at him in disapproval. That was another reason why Torris didn't like him, he could be so very manipulative.

If anyone scared Adelana, truly scared her it was Attelus Xanthis Kaltos. She knew he'd been through hell, and couldn't help admire that he didn't come out of it worse off, but she knew he was constantly teetering on a precipice between sanity and insanity. That in any second he could fall permanently into the metaphorical darkness, into his murderous, manipulative mentality. It was only sheer force of will that prevented it. That was one the many reasons she didn't want more, to be more than just colleagues, she knew he dearly wanted that but...

"I'll get Hayden and Vark over the vox," said Helma interrupting Adelana's thought process and she reached for her microbead.

"Yes," said Attelus. "You do that."

After Halsin collected his equipment, they left the medicae.

It took them about five minutes to walk through the thin, gunmetal grey corridors and Adelana's mind wandered. She'd been through much in the past three years, fought alongside Space Marines on two separate occasions, the first time was with the Space Wolves, second the Death Watch when she and Attelus had allied with the Ordo Xenos Inquisitor, Lorris to stop a Genestealer cult on Sinophia. She'd even travelled all the way to Segmentum Ultima via Attelus' 'connections,' and back. She'd faced down mutants, heretics and even daemons. But most of all she'd killed, she'd killed a lot of people, more than she could've imagined. The first time it'd been traumatic, on the flagship the of traitor Inquisitor, Torathe. During the initial boarding action, she'd taken the top off a Stormtrooper's skull with one well-placed shot. She hadn't felt anything at the time due to the adrenaline but after the fight, when recovering from her injuries, she'd wept.

Attelus had helped her through it, he was unusually open with his emotions and told her he'd felt the same the first time he'd killed too. A chaos cultist invader during the invasion on his homeworld when he was fifteen.

Despite never enjoying the killing, she felt right, she had a purpose and a truly worthy one at that. A far greater one than if she'd wound up working in the Magistratum as she'd initially intended. She just wished that it didn't need to start with the death of her homeworld.

She'd never get over that, not truly. Not even after they hunt down that bastard Etuarq and bring him to justice

Adelana eyed Attelus as he walked ahead of her, in his usual pose, hands in the pockets of his black flak jacket. She'd forgiven him for the part he unwittingly played in Omnartus' fate, it'd been frigging hard, though and taken her awhile. He'd saved her mostly due to selfish reasons, all just because she'd been nice to her.

It was pretty damn pathetic, pitiful, almost. In fact, it'd taken her longer to forgive him of that, than the role he'd played in Omnartus.

She'd learned a lot from the now master assassin over the past three years, and despite some initial hiccups he'd proven a pretty damn good teacher. Eventually.

Adelana had often wondered why the Inquisitor had promoted Arlathan to Interrogator over Attelus or Karmen Kons or the many other more senior candidates. But so far Inquisitor Enandra had led them exceedingly well, she'd made very few mistakes. She'd helped Adelana through the depression after the death of Omnartus, Enandra must know what she was doing.

She'd worked exclusively with Attelus for so long she'd never actually seen Arlathan (who worked exclusively with the Inquisitor), So she didn't exactly have the best knowledge of his abilities, but surely they paled in comparison to the superhuman Attelus or the extraordinary psychic abilities of Karmen Kons?

Adelana had never approached Karmen on the matter, but she had once asked Attelus. He'd just shrugged and said.

"Arlathan knows his shit, he used to be a selfish arsehole but has changed for the better. I respect him, and I really don't envy him the responsibility. Besides, I think it's also more uhh personal if you catch my drift."

Adelana did 'catch his drift' (a saying she'd never heard before, must be native to his homeworld) Arlathan was a very handsome man, even with the beard and it was well known that Arlathan and Sergeant Kollath, the leader of Enandra's personal bodyguard, were in constant competition for the attractive Inquisitor's affections but Adelana had hoped it was more than that. Attelus seemed to believe it, so maybe it was, but it wouldn't be the first time he was wrong and it definitely wouldn't be the last.

In silence, they turned the corner headed toward 56a, their footfalls clanging on the metal grating. Everyone's beside Attelus' and Adelana's.

Three men stood waiting at the entrance Jelket, Vark and Hayden Tresch.

Vark was dressed in his Stormtrooper carapace and took up most of the corridor's width with his bulk. Vark had been long ago designated as Karmen Kons' bodyguard, accompanying her on missions to watch over Karmen when she'd leave her body in her incorporeal form. An effective soldier of all-round ability, he'd once served in Taryst's elite Stormtrooper corp. A deeply religious man (a rarity amongst mercenaries, even before he became a former mercenary) Adelana, who'd never been terribly religious and recognised the more secular nature of the organisation found it disconcerting. He could proselytise often and it got on her nerves. He and Karmen were both quite religious and that, Adelana guessed, was one of the reasons why they worked together. Vark's was plain of face, his skin a ruddy brown and his small beady eyes light blue. His closed cropped hair blond. Vark's most unique feature was his large cleft chin, it was hard for Adelana to keep her attention away from it when in conversation with him.

Tresch, unlike Vark, didn't need to wear Stormtrooper carapace to dominate the corridor. Broad shouldered, long-limbed. The large, two-metre tall sniper wore a grey bodyglove and leaned against the wall, arms folded across his wide chest. He was perhaps one of the most talented individuals she'd ever met. As Attelus had once said Hayden was, 'a jack of all trades and a master of quite a few too.' (Attelus was always fond of his rhymes) Tresch was an amazingly good sniper, an explosives expert, a hacker they were only a few among many skills under his name. A former Adeptus Arbite, he was a grim man, one of few words. Many of the women in the organisation described Tresch as a 'grey fox or 'tall dark and handsome' due to his once brown hair mostly overtaken by grey. Adelana didn't understand this sentiment, she'd never found him particularly attractive, she preferred her men younger.

She could help look briefly at Attelus, and well, more pretty.

Tresch was at least in his late forties. His square-jawed face lined and weathered. Attelus had once said both his eyes were augmetics, but they looked so normal she'd never have guessed it. She'd always thought it was a bit of a cheat, surely they'd aide him in his inhuman accuracy?

"Hayden, Vark, Jelket," said Karmen. "Good to see you are here already."

Vark shrugged, "mamzel Helma said this may involve that bastard Etuarq so I got here as quick as I could. We may finally end him, God-Emperor willing."

"Emperor willing," echoed Karmen, making the sign of the Aquila. "We just have to wait for Verenth then we'll start the briefing."

"Let's head in, shall we?" said Torris.

In silence they started to file through the door, Attelus in the lead, but he stopped and straightened briefly, seeing two more in the briefing room.

"You," said Attelus sternly and stepped aside, allowing Adelana a clear view.

It was Darrance and his apprentice, Delathasi.

"What are you doing here?" said Karmen, perplexed. "We have this room booked."

Darrance grimaced and exchanged a look with Delathasi, "when I saw you walking through the training facility. I thought something was up, so I gave Arlathan a vox and guess what? There was, he said that it might involve that shit stain Etuarq, so there's no way in hell Delathasi and I are not taking part."

"You are aware that I'm going to be in charge, right?" said Attelus.

"I am," said Darrance. "But I'm willing to swallow my pride and follow your lead, this time."

Adelana could've sworn she heard Helma mutter something along the lines of, "I bet that's not the only thing you'll swallow."

Darrance obviously overheard her as he treated Helma a dark look.

"I'll be your new designated pilot," said Darrance smoothly. "Delathasi can help you on the ground. I am sure you don't want to be the only close quarters specialist, do you, Attelus?"

"Who was going to be our pilot?" said Vark. "Originally."

"Ulysses," said Darrance, "but Interrogator Arlathan superseded it."

"He must've owed you one hell of a favour," said Torris. "For him to do that, what did you do? Give him a blow job? Must've been good, I'm sure you've had a hell of a lot of practice."

Everyone, even Delathasi laughed, Darrance's face darkened, but it didn't last long before he just shrugged.

Adelana realised that Delathasi was looking appreciatively, almost gapingly at Attelus. This caused Adelana to smile and shake her head in amusement.

Delathasi would've been pretty if it wasn't for the very present acne on her tanned skin and boxer's nose. She was shy and kept to herself constantly, but when in battle she was a force to be reckoned with her dual monomolecular blades. Tall and lanky she had plenty of power in her limbs.

The door behind them abruptly slid open, and Adelana turned to see Verenth step into the room. His piercing gaze silently travelled over them, before finally sitting himself down on the nearest desk.

"Well!" said Attelus rubbing his hands together excitedly. "Now everyone's present and accounted for, let's get this party started."

0 notes

destiny-smasher · 8 years ago

Text

So I did the “get to know me” meme on Twitter but because of how Twitter functions now it’s a hard to follow mess of a thread. Decided to post it all here -- and hey, if any of ya’ll are curious, feel free to read.

1) When I was 10 my abusive stepdad threw a spray at me. I ducked -- it scraped my head. Sent to school bleeding b/c he was too stoned to realize it'd get noticed and I'd get pulled out of that environment immediately. This moment changed my life, left a scar on head.

If I hadn't ducked, would've hit my stomach. No cut. Whole childhood would've been different. My first Butterfly Effect Moment.

2) I started writing fiction about Pokémon. First-person, from the Mons perspective. Rotating point of view each scene.

3) I moved on to crazy crossover fanfic where I constructed an entire war, personal and political motivations, so many ideas I still like?

4) Part of this involved detailed drawings of Mario-themed Keyblades I wish I still had.

5) Paper Mario 1&2 are some of my most influential inspirations. expanded such a simple world so much so fluidly. (Harder than it looks)

6) When I was a kid my sister would wake me st like 6am to watch dubbed Sailor Moon. Bothered me they all sounded like same person.

7) I can recognize voices very well and even specific sounds and songs. Couple years back my roommate ran a test - playlist of 100 NES tracks, he'd play the first NOTE, singular, and I could recognize exactly where it was from if I'd played the game.

8) My first computer was a PC I bought w/$ saved up during an entire summer of custodial work in HS. Had no Internet.

So I'd use the public library's very slow connection to download things to floppy disk and copy them over.

Eventually, I was able to graduate to a USB. Obtaining music was hellish so I treasured each song I could download -- most from OC Remix.

9) We had this tiny rabbit ears TV that could get WB and Fox sometimes if it was set up in a specific corner of my sister's room

And so I would desperately use it to try and stay up to date on Pokémon and Digimon, it was so bad

10) Teen Titans was arguably the most influential piece of media for my teenage mind. It formed the base of so much I care about re:stories

Fleshed out, varied protags who grew together and each had their times to step up and step down. Action w/character dev context.

Fantastic themes important for growing humans; awesome moments "between the panels" instead of all comic book melodrama and action.

Then everything changed when TT GO attacked and pissed on everything smart and thoughtful because MONEYYYYY

11) Cowboy Bebop was the first "good" anime I ever saw and blew my mind open about what animated stories could do -- i.e. Not just kid stuff

I don't like "anime" in general because most of its common tropes but the shit out of me even worse than most western toon tropes

And yet like 50-75% of my most favorite shows ARE anime because thoughtful animated storytelling has so much potential.

11) I predicted months before Last of Us came out that you'd play as Ellie but when it happened I had to stop, cry happy tears.

I predicted the second I saw the Left Behind trailer what was going on w/those two and again, still had to stop and cry happy tears.

(I seem to have pretty good gaydar now but I also don't like, ship everyone together all the time)

It just hits me so hard when actual canon queerness happens in mass media and is done well, but we're still so bad at following through.

12) Favorite m/m ship: Troy and Abed in the Morning. Favorite w/w ship: Max and Chloe BFF Pirates 2008.

ATLA ships: Tokka the most, also Katang, also Smellershot. ATLA makes me more open to shipping than any other series?

Like, Zutara makes me feel kinda gross and some of the crack ships like Sokka/Azula scare me but otherwise I'm pretty chill w/ATLA ships?

13) When I was a kid, and we'd role play, I always wanted to play the girl characters. I was surrounded by boys so they always were weirded.

It was weird to me, too, honestly.

Now it makes perfect goddamn sense.

14) Apparently I was kidnapped as a baby by some mobster or something but it's hard to tell with my mom what's real or not.

15) Smash Bros. Melee was the first game I ever got genuinely hype over before launch. I still remember being startled to discover it --

-- existed via E3 trailer on GameTrailers back on my goddamn dialup connection in 2001. I had to wait all fuckin' day for that thing to load

And when it did, it was GLORIOUS (and had FZero music, which at the time I did not recognize) and I was FLOORED.

The screenshots made the game look too good to be real, and I was instantly sold on the GameCube, the first time I NEEDED new hardware Day 1

I got SSBM as an Xmas gift before my grandpa's GCN present arrived, so for a week or two all I could do was stare at the box/manual/disc

That game kind of changed my life -- SSB64 was the first time I'd gotten so invested in a multiplayer game, and SSBM crushed it.

A fire was born in me -- competition, something I'd never been much interested in w/games before, not against actual humans.

Those months between E3 2001 and finally getting to play SSBM felt like forever. And thus did I post online fiction for the first time.

That's actually how I met @SDiDuro , my first 'Internet friend' and what I'd consider to be my first proper 'reader.'

16) After college, I ended up working at a call center because it was the only job I could find and I needed to support my disabled wife.

DURING college, I gave up on writing fiction and had focused on gaming editorial through a site where I'd engaged with an online community

But that empty space between phone calls eventually got filled in by writing fiction on a notepad, with a pen, inspired by Street Fighter 4.

Eventually, this evolved and radically changed into what is now (still in dev) DownRight Fierce.

Back then, I had no idea I'd be motivated to DO this, though -- write original fiction -- but the fire had been re-lit.

I wanted to write.

I was sickened by my "naive" adolescence crossover fics and wiped them from my http://FF.net profile and started anew.

Having just come off of ATLA 1st time, I knew I wanted to explore that world/characters more, so I wrote a story about Toph & puberty.

That serving as "practice," I then went on to write SRU, and...well, that...changed EVERYTHING.

17) My biological dad (who I have never met) has OCD, to the point where he apparently washed his skin raw trying to avoid germs?

So as soon as I showed enthusiasm in gaming, my parents FREAKED and worried I was exhibiting OCD and they brought the hammer down.

They made me feel BAD for writing about video games when I wasn't playing them, but they never READ anything I fucking wrote.

Even now, my mom tries to comment on what a good writer I supposedly am, yet when I ask for her thoughts, I ask what she's read?

Silence.

I wasn't writing fiction based on games because I was THAT addicted to games.

I did it because a storyteller was awakening within me --

-- and I told stories through the worlds and characters I was familiar with.

(And my first genuinely "serious" fic was Teen Titans, anyway)

But even now, it really hurts that my parents will sometimes try to guilt me over not calling or whatever the fuck, when they never READ

never supported, and actively DISCOURAGED my writing, my storytelling, refused to understanding why I loved games.

18) I never watched Avatar until after college (years after it had finished), and I watched it because of the live action movie.

I watched halfway through the season 1 of the cartoon to get "read up" on it. Then the movie. Which was horrible. Then the rest of season 1.

At that point, the movie utterly baffled me. My wife and I proceeded to marathon the rest of the series. And it became my fav story ever.

But I ironically owe it to that terrible live action movie. ^_^;;

19) My taste in music is really weird. I couldn't tell you what my favorite genres are, and even fav musicians is hard.

Like, every year my top three fav musicians "change" because I just add more to the pile and spend the year focused on their music.

But music inspires my storytelling more than any other medium, I'd say -- in terms of me actually planning and growing ideas.

I didn't just give Nishiko and Seiko last names of my two fav game composers as tongue-in-cheek. In fact, that's not why I did it at all.

I gave them those names because I wanted some element of their very design to express how Japanese composers inspired me in my teen years.

#get to know me #personal

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hoseahargrove0-blog · 6 years ago

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getaether · 6 years ago

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Aether News & Updates - July / August 2018

Hey folks - this is the Aether monthly. This one is pretty exciting with screenshots, and it is probably going to be the last pre-launch update, because it's about around one week to some semblance of code complete. The app is running fine on my machine now, with all features built for the backend and frontend, and most for the client (user interface) side. There's a few screenshots of the current state below. None of those are design mocks, it's the real thing, pulling data from real other nodes. (The data within them is auto-generated for load testing, so there are no users on the system right now.)

Recap: I'm new. What's this thing?

Hey there - welcome in! There was a write-up on that last month, do check it out here.

July updates

Javascript

July, it was mostly about going deep into the Javascript rabbit hole to build the client user interface. (Quick recap: Aether has three parts, client, frontend and backend. Client is UI, frontend is the graph compiler, and the backend is responsible for distribution of underlying entities and communicating with other nodes.)

The tl;dr is that designing and building user interfaces is fun —to me, at least— but doing it in a world where everybody wants you to use Webpack in their own way with slightly different and subtly incompatible configuration is not.

Packing, unpacking and compilers

There is one general rule that is useful in building most things: to do the simplest, dumbest thing that works. I heard it called the Linus' rule, though it is not entirely clear if Torvalds has ever said it. (Nevertheless, the Linux kernel and its success could be considered a manifestation of this idea.)

Go works well for this mindset, and that's why the frontend compiler and the backend is written in it. It's a place where you can actually control the layout of your structs bit by bit in the memory, and it does a great job of getting out of your way, in that the abstraction of Go is fairly thin: you are working with a CPU and a memory that you can put bits into, and there is a small, helpful, and fast garbage collector provided if you want to use it. That means, in Go, you can have as few third party dependencies as possible, and for the things that do not exist in the standard library, you can efficiently build what you want. It also helps that the core language is very small, and there is usually one way to do things. This is very useful when you actually want to read code on Github on how libraries implement a specific functionality. Everybody has to write it mostly the same, so library authors aren't writing what is effectively a completely different language. coughC++cough

With this in mind, I opted for Vue as the base for building the client. This was largely motivated by my desire to avoid Webpack, and this whole seemingly-always-half-broken part of Javascript ecosystem that frequently picks a favourite son every 6 months and kills it with fire shortly afterwards. Considering past experience of projects that had to be maintained that were still on Grunt (remember that?), others still on Gulp, going into this again with Webpack did not sound enticing to the least bit, especially considering that the main selling point of it (single Javascript file) is not very useful in a local Electron environment. To that end, Vue offers an ability to use it through the old-school way, which is to include it as a `````` file. Very simple! Since my use case did not need Webpack, this made Vue a first and only choice. Much later on, and long beyond the point of no return, however, it became obvious that this was a siren song.

The issue was this — Vue considers the ability to split your code into multiple Javascript files (single-page components) an advanced feature. And the moment you hit this, which is early enough that your project is not yet functional, but late enough that you can't really back out, Vue tells you that you have to use Webpack.

This was a huge disappointment, since the majority of the reason for using Vue was to avoid Webpack. It's not that one cannot get it to work, it's just that it does not make sense to integrate with yet another build system, especially in this specific case, one that offers exactly zero benefits. Ostensibly it makes things easier for library developers (since they can offload a decent chunk of 'getting things to work' part of library-building to Webpack, which, promptly, unloads it onto you), but it would have been very nice if Vue had provided a way to use single-file components in a way that does not require a build step, especially considering even Angular-1 in 2014 had a way to do so, in the form of ng-include directive.

(I know that it is not the fastest, since fragments have to be all loaded before the page needs to render, but in this case, the files are already available on the local filesystem, thus it does not matter.)

Nevertheless, it was a good few days spent on getting Vue, Webpack and Typescript working. To be fair, Vue is awesome, Typescript genuinely fixes legitimate problems with Javascript, and Webpack can help under right conditions. It is a good thing that all three exists. It's just that it is a little sad that the Javascript environment is such a high-churn, high-thrash place, and coming from 4-5 months of writing Go code where the language is sound, the libraries, the very few you need, are of excellent quality, and there is only one specification of the language, one gets to realise why the concept of Javascript Fatigue exists.

I do not want to belabour the point. The one last thing that is quite interesting is that the main three Javascript libraries that is used (Vue, Typescript and Webpack) don't even agree on what is syntactically valid Javascript. There are multiple specs of Javascript floating around, and there is Babel, which is a library that compiles new, not-yet-ratified (often, not-yet-finished) Javascript language changes into old, mostly-valid Javascript that you can run. It is a fun tool to test new syntaxes. Unfortunately, it appears that everyone is so sick of old, standard Javascript that it is a dependency on almost anything, so that library authors can write new, shiny Javascript.

Considering the fact that it implements changes that are drafts, and drafts sometimes do change, the tendency to use the newest, cutting edge, unstable Javascript features ends up in a place where the documentation on the Internet is written in Javascript that you don't understand (because it was created literally a week ago), that does not work, that does not compile (because the spec changed two days ago), and most importantly for most intents and purposes, of negative actual value.

If you are a library author, or if you are writing documentation of any form, please consider writing your documentation in good, old, standard Javascript that actually executes without requiring a compiler set up exactly the same way you have on your local machine.

Regardless, it should be obvious where this is going at this point. Fast forward a month of writing Javascript, and there is more than one million lines of Javascript in the node_modules directory, totalling 2+gb of code that there is no actual dependency on, but is there nevertheless due to how node ecosystem and Webpack in general works. Thankfully, the final end result is only a few megabytes of front-end code, since that is the actual code that is needed. The rest is code that Webpack refuses to compile without, but far as one can see, none of it does go into the final end result.

The fundamental goal was to achieve was a client that was simple to write, simple to understand, and simple to maintain. Unfortunately, it appears that this is close to, in the Javascript world, a yet-unsolved problem. There will be some maintenance to do when Webpack goes the way of Grunt and Gulp. Regardless, I'm happy with the client code given the constraints, and it is as simple and maintainable as technically possible. The hope is that it will only improve.

WebAssembly is something to watch, because it does allow one to completely replace Javascript and its dependencies with another language of your choice (which you can do right now), and have it be able to interact with the DOM (which you cannot, and won't be able to for the next few years). Since what matters is the DOM access, whenever that comes, it will be some welcome competition to Javascript and its environment.

August updates

Current status

As of today, the app is about a week to code complete, there are a few pages that need to be designed and implemented (notifications, status, home/popular views), and a few components that need to be finished (post and thread ranking logic based on signals). I'm also getting an Apple Developer Key, so that in OS X, the app will open without scary warnings, and I will be able to push auto-updates in a way similar to Firefox does. (Download update in the background, install on next start, with an ability to disable it).

I will also be putting out a Discourse forum for user support coincidentally, so that there will be community support available.

Integration testing

The expected code complete is the end of this week, but given the prima facie impossibility of giving accurate estimates in building anything of nontrivial complexity (estimating the task takes full knowledge of the task, and in building tech products, the task itself is 90% getting the full knowledge of the task at hand, and only 10% building it), some skepticism is probably warranted.

Regardless, the goal is to have a pre-release executable for OS X (only because I develop in OS X. The goal is to provide Windows, OS X and Linux versions in general availability, same as Aether 1) as a test to see network function and find bottlenecks, if any. It will be followed by a beta release that is generally available, and from that point on, the auto-update system will keep your app up to date.

In short, by the end of August, the network should be transmitting data in some form.

Feature freeze

A feature freeze is a set date where a product stops adding new features before a launch date. This is an useful cutoff, because trying to cram as many features as possible into a launch can mean biting more than you can chew. There are some features that did not make it to the feature freeze deadline of August 1: the feature set that allows for ongoing moderator ballots in communities. These features are code complete for backend and frontend, but they will ship disabled in the first version until the client (UI and product integration) is complete. After the product stabilises and the network is operating correctly under real load, this is what comes next. The expectation is that they will make it into the first non-beta release.

Code freeze

A code freeze is when one stops writing any code and focus on bug fixes, finishing existing features, stability, and QA. The pre-release version will be the public QA test, and if everything goes right, the external QA test will replicate the results of the internal one that I've been running on my own local network. The rough code freeze date is August 15.

Pre-release

After the code freeze, the tasks that remain are those of packaging the app into an executable, updating the website, and setting up a bootstrap node so that newly downloaded nodes will have a point to bootstrap from.

Beta launch

This will happen when the pre-release gives enough confidence that the app is stable, and can handle nontrivial amount of users. Here, the major thing to keep an eye on is not that the app would not work (it does now, and it likely will continue to do so), but it is that the network is slow to deliver every post into every participating node. Since this requires fiddling with network variables (such as how often a node checks for updates in a minute) and is untestable in a synthetic environment, the only real way to know this is to actually have real people using it, and getting the real-world data on dispersion speeds.

From this point on, it gets a little hard to say, because it depends on the reception of the app, and the real world usage. If this app becomes a place that we all can enjoy spending our evenings in, I personally would consider it as success, even if it does not succeed in financially supporting me working full time on it. That said, the ideal path that I have in mind is that this would support me and a small core team (which does not yet exist, it's just me, for now) financially enough that we can devote our full focus to offer a mass communication platform that is free of the catches of what's available today. After all, Aether offers what they won't sell you at any price: your privacy.

Screenshots

Not mocks, actual app! 🙂 (It goes without saying that these are all works-in-progress.)

Addendum: Who's funding you / this work?

I'm currently working on this project full time, and I have been doing it for the past six months. I'm funding it through my own savings. My initial plan is that I want to release the full app, and then consider getting a job, because, well, my savings aren't infinite. That lines up nicely with the end of the majority of the development effort for the release, so for the initial release, I don't foresee any problems. After that, it all depends on how many people actually end up using it. If a lot of you guys do, then we'll find a way to make it work.

My motivation is not that there's money to be made out of this. If you're interested in that, ICOs might be a better bet, but I'd still recommend index funds over anything crypto-related, Vanguard is a good provider for that. I find most ICOs to be fairly distasteful (with some very rare exceptions), because I'd rather have my work speak than empty promises, as opposed to what ICOs typically do, hence my starting to speak about my work just now, when 80%+ of the total work is already done and implemented in cold, hard code.

If you are happy with any of the existing solutions solving similar problems out there, you should consider donating to them. There are a lot of open source creations for different kind of needs. They do often suffer from poor user experience and poor usability though, most of the time, which unfortunately renders them unable to gain adoption. If your project requires the user to compile it before running it, it's fair to say that your audience is not the general public. That is in itself not a bad thing, and if any of those projects actually satisfy your needs, consider donating to them. I'm focusing on better experience for the mass public, to provide all of us with more accountability, more transparency, more privacy, and hopefully some real discussion that we all sorely need — as a human society, we've gotten far too good at stifling each others' voices.

The reason I think I can make a difference is that I'm an ex-Google, ex-Facebok product designer with a lot of experience in the field, and while I have some ideas on what can be improved, I've learned through the long and hard way that the best ideas come from people who use the actual thing. I've also learned a second, almost as crucial other thing: people doing something that they genuinely, honestly care about tend to achieve much better results than a team of highly experienced specialists that are just meh about it, even if the first team is relatively inexperienced. I do have experience, and I do feel this problem every day, to the point that I was willing to quit my job and start working full time on it using my life savings. I'm lucky to be able to do that, but more than luck, I also care enough about this that I wanted to do that.

In summary, I think there's a need for it, and it should exist, in some form of another. Nobody else seems to be doing it, so I'm doing it. This won't make you rich, this definitely won't make me rich, but this has, if done right, has the chance to create an open, simple, free, decentralised, and private way of mass-communicating for the next half century — a public online gathering place that also happens to belong to the public, with no catches, and no kings.

If you think this is worth supporting, you can fund me via Bitcoin at: 1K12GwzAtPWa6W864fkm48pc4VNqzHXG4H, and via Ethereum at: 0x3A4eC55535B41A808080680fa68640122c689B45. Your funding will extend the amount of time I can stay working full time on it. I don't need the funding to finish it (I made sure that I can actually finish it with my own savings), and if you are a student, new graduate, or on a budget, you should not — keep your money, use it for yourself and use your money for good whenever you can. But if you consider yourself relatively well-off and thinking about how your money can do the most good in the world, and you're interested enough that you've read this far, I'd offer this as a pretty good bet.

I'll open a Patreon page, eventually, but I'm focusing on actually writing the code and releasing the app right now. The Patreon benefits I have in mind are mostly cosmetic, such as getting a 'benefactor' username class with some visual distinction, and priority in picking from available unique usernames. If you fund me through Bitcoin or Ethereum, you'll get the same benefits as Patreon supporters.

Lastly, if you're in San Francisco, and you're excited about this, have questions, hit me up, always happy to go for a coffee. Might take a while to schedule considering that I work 14-16 hour days, but we'll probably find a time.

As per usual, feel free to reach out to me with any questions at [email protected].

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mindthump · 6 years ago

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My deep dive into one of the largest dark web hacking forums | Dylan Curran https://ift.tt/2A3u7BT

The darknet (or dark web) is one of the most fascinating vestiges of humanity we’ve ever seen. It’s an aggregated swamp of all the darkest aspects of Internet activity - child porn, drug markets, gun shops, gore smut, stolen merchandise, anarchist guides, terrorist chats, identity theft, hacking services …

I’m going to focus on the most potent of these tiers – hacking services.

Browsing porn in incognito mode isn't nearly as private as you think | Dylan Curran

I spent three weeks studying and translating FreeHacks, one of the largest hacking forums on the internet. It’s a Russian community which aims to collectively gather its resources in order to maximize efficiency and knowledge dispersement.

It works the same as any typical forum, you open up TOR (a specialized browser for browsing the dark web), paste in the URL, and land on a home page with various sub-forums split into different categories. The categories are varied and well-divided:

Hacker world news.

Humor.

Hacking and security.

Carding (stealing credit cards and trying to cash them out on the Internet).

Botnet (a network of bots used to steal data and send spam, or perform DDOS attacks).

Electronics and phreaking (phreaking is trying to break someone’s security network).

Brutus (software used to crack passwords).

DDOS (overwhelming a server with requests to shut it down).

SEO-optimization.

Programming.

Web development.

Malware and exploits.

Private software.

Clothing market (people who use stolen credit cards to buy clothes and resell them).

Financial operations.

Documentation (passports, driving licenses, citizenships).

Blacklist (a community judicial system).

As you can see, this forum covers a dizzying amount of illegal activity. The entire forum is in Russian – and has around 5,000 active members. This is just the tip of the iceberg, too; every sub-forum is split even further into dozens of other sub-forums. To document everything here would take me at least six months and encompass a full book.

When you attempt to register on the site, you’re met with a mission statement of sorts – a weird justification method for their own illegal activities. It seems pathological and ironic; these hackers who essentially get paid to make life more difficult for people try to justify it with a beguiling proclamation.

The word ‘hacker’ is incorrectly used in the meaning of ‘computer burglar’ by some journalists. We, hackers, refuse to accept such an interpretation of it and continue to imply the meaning of ‘someone who likes to program and enjoy it’

After reading the above categories, do you think these people just enjoy some casual software development?

Once you go through the rigorous registration process where you have to declare why you want to join the forum, and what software development skills you have and want to learn, you are granted access to this treasure trove of illicit information.

For this article, I’m going to focus primarily on the hacking and security sub-forum.

The very first post I clicked onto is: “How to get someone’s physical address.” Not the most comforting topic to start off with, but here we are.

A video is posted detailing a step-by-step process to reverse query addresses, and cross-reference them against other websites. The method uses various sites such as whois.com and some credit check websites. (That’s as much information I can give without giving the tutorial myself.) Multiple users have a back-and-forth with one another, discussing the pros and cons of this method, as well as how to make it more efficient.

One user leaves a thorough dissection expanding on the current method. It allows the perpetrator to use a phishing website to grab the person’s location via the wifi access points around them. I can’t verify if this method works, but the Russian users certainly seem to think it does.

The next thread I ventured into is “The Grandfather’s Way of Hacking”, an eccentric title if I’ve ever seen one. Perhaps my Russian-English translating software is acting out, but I’ll take what it gives me.

The user describes how people have a distorted view of hackers, how they hack remote computers in basements by simply smashing their keyboard. They goes on to describe the easiest method of penetration occurs through knowing the IP address of the target computer. Using Shared Resources, you can easily penetrate the fortified walls of a PC. The easiest method, however, is social engineering.

It’s fascinating to see how this community works together to take down 'western' systems and divulge chaos and profit from it

Social engineering, in terms of hacking, is when you use some clever psychology to make a member of a company trust you and bypass security protocol where they otherwise would have. A common one is to ring the customer support of a company, and mask your number to mimic that of an internal phone number. You then play the fool and say you can’t access a website where you normally could have, and that it’s important to access it for an angry client.

You then give the customer support agent a link to the website. The catch, is that you have made a fake website which has a Trojan ready to be deposited onto the agent’s computer. The hacker then has access to the company’s internal network.

This thread gives great detail in how to carry this out, going into a tutorial of how to mask your phone number, using IP range scanners, which Trojan viruses to use, what can be gained once you access the computer and how to get in, download everything and get out as quickly as possible.

It’s incredibly comprehensive, and the other Russian users thank him kindly and comment about how concise and informative this chaos-wreaking method is.

In 2016, a Turkish citizen hacked the Turkish government’s ID system and downloaded the national ID, name, address, date of birth and mother and father’s name of 49.6 million citizens. It was one of the biggest hard leaks we have ever seen.

A member of this forum took credit for it, and posted links to the download of the Turkish citizen’s information. I have no doubt it’s true, judging from the user’s post history.

Are your phone camera and microphone spying on you? | Dylan Curran

It’s fascinating to see how this community works together to take down “western” systems and divulge chaos and profit from it. Typically, hackers in first-world countries are terrified to work together due to the multiplicative risk of a group being caught. In Russia, however, the authorities don’t seem to care that these hackers are wreaking havoc on the west. They are left to their own devices, and most users on this forum have been regular members for over six years.

A lot of the information on this forum is incredibly worrying, even if a lot of it is harmless 15-year-olds trying to be edgy and hack their friend’s phones. In any case, it’s important to know these communities exist. The dark underbelly of the internet isn’t going anywhere.

#IFTTT #Feedly #future #hmmm #tech #good to know

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connecticut-seo-adwords · 7 years ago

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The Complete Guide to Blog SEO

Rating:

Ryan Stewart is a web marketing expert with over 10 years of experience working with clients like Best Buy, Accenture and the Department of Defense. Ryan holds a number of web certifications as well as a Master's in Business Administration (MBA). Follow Ryan on social media: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Instagram

Over the last 8 months I’ve driven over 10,000,000 organic visits to my client’s blogs and my own. I decided to put together a no bullshit SEO guide to show you exactly how I’m doing it. Before I do, I’m going to show you some screenshots from my Google Analytics account: I’m not showing you these screenshots to beat my chest.

I’m showing you to prove what I’m going to tell you works.

In this guide, you’ll learn:

How to come up with the right blog strategy

How to do keyword research to find high volume, low competition searches

How to craft amazing blog content optimized for Google

The best WordPress plugins to help optimize your blog

How (and where) to build links to your posts (you don’t want to miss this…)

This is long post (5,000+ words). Use the navigational links below to jump to each chapter: [mailmunch-form id=”35465″]

Chapter One: Blog Strategy

1. Define Your Audience

I hate writing cliche tips that you’ve already read a million times, but it’s the truth. You need to define your target audience. I’ll use Webris as an example (we sell Internet marketing and design services). I target 2 segments with my content:

Business owners / marketing managers (potential customers)

Other marketers

You might think speaking to customers is more important –it’s not. Other marketers provide more value:

Social media amplifiers– they’re more likely to share content

Link sources– the content they create is related to yours. This greatly increases the changes of gaining quality and relevant backlinks (key for your blog’s SEO)

Influencers– Your clients don’t make you an influencer though –your peers do. If you’re viewed as an influencer in your vertical, you can sell water to the ocean

Make sure your content speaks to more than just potential customers!

2. Create Epic Posts

I really can’t stress this enough. In fact, this is the most important piece of advice I can give you.

You will never have success with blog SEO if you’re not creating amazing content.

I know, I know – I sound like Matt Butts (ahem, sorry, Cutts). As much as I hate that stupid fucking buzzword “content is king”, it’s true. You have to create content that people want to read, share and come back to. Otherwise, blogging is a complete waste of your time. Every time I create something, I ask myself a number of questions:

Does this solve a problem my audience has?

Does this teach my audience a new skill?

Would I share this with my peers?

If it doesn’t meet all of those requirements, I refuse to post it. If you own a business, you’re an expert at something. Share this expertise –don’t hold anything close to chest. This type of content sets the building blocks needed for blog optimization.

3. Stop Selling, Start Giving

When I log into my Facebook account I’m overwhelmed by shitty marketers selling even shittier products. Stop! Please. Just stop. I’ve been down that road. It’s a waste of time and money. I created [what I thought] was a great offer, funnel and upsell. I set up some remarketing ads on Facebook and was ready to watch the cash roll in. That never happened. Here’s what did:

I spent a ton of time tweaking ad copy, targeting, messaging, landing pages, etc

I spent a ton of money advertising my offer

The leads that converted turned out to be duds

In November I launched this site on a new domain (webris.org). I wanted to start new. I began posting the content to the blog that I was previously charging for. Here’s what happened: This site is now driving 1,000 times the weekly leads and they’re 100% FREE. I no longer have to convince people to opt in –they choose to.

4. Update Consistently

I’m not going to lie to you – maintaining a blog is a bitch. It takes a lot of patience and discipline to continue to create content when you’re seeing no results. I like to try and write for at least an hour each day. At that rate I crank out a solid update once or twice a week.

Remember, the more content you create the more traffic you’ll drive.

Create a schedule and stick to it.

5. Find Your Voice

The chances are you’re writing about something that’s been written thousands of times so it’s extremely important to show yourself in your writing. I write like I speak. I use jargon, humor and I curse. Even though I’m writing about professional topics, I don’t care. This is who I am – this is who I am and my readers respect me for it.

Chapter Two: Keyword Research

If you want your content to perform well in search engines you need to understand the search demand and competition of each post you write. That’s why keyword research is so crucial. Here are the tools you’ll need:

Necessary: Google Keyword Planner– FREE

Necessary: – FREE

Optional: Long Tail Pro– $97

KW Research Step 1: Finding Keywords

Lets’ go back to my target segments:

Business owners / marketing managers (potential customers)

Internet marketers

We want to create problem actionable content that solves their problems –how do we know what those problems are? I use forums and social media groups – specifically, Facebook Groups. Good, active Facebook Groups are hard to find – but they’re gold.

Log into your Facebook account and use the search bar – I use “SEO” and “analytics”

Click on the Groups with the most members

Join as many as you can – once accepted, look for active groups with NON SPAM threads

Browse the group and look for questions – I use [command + f + ?] to find questions quickly

Here’s a thread that I found generating a lot of responses: I also saw related threads in other groups. Using these threads, I can generate a list of preliminary keywords that has a built in audience. The ones I came up with were:

Website silos

Link silos

SEO silos

How to create website silos

Silos link juice

Facebook Groups are great, but I also use other sources. Here are some of my favorites:

Quora

Google+ Communities

Niche forums (Blackhatworld.com, Yahoo questions)

LinkedIn Groups

Twitter #’s

Blog ideas and keywords are all around you – pay attention!

KW Research Step 2: Flushing out Keywords

If you’re on a budget, use Google’s Keyword Tool – it’s free. If you’ve got some extra funds, I strongly recommend Long Tail Pro. For the purpose of this post, I’ll be using Google’s tool.

In the first box, type in some sample keyword searches. I chose:

Website silos

Link silos

SEO silos

Silos SEO

How to create website silos

Silos link juice

Click “Get Ideas”

On the next screen click “Keyword Ideas” tab

The top box will show you the data for the keywords you put into the search field. What we’re looking for here is “Avg. Monthly Searches” (don’t pay attention to the other data because it’s referring to Google AdWords campaigns, not SEO).

Download the entire list as an Excel spreadsheet. Open it and sort the keywords by volume

Take keywords with a high volume, copy + paste them back into the Keyword Tool, and click Get Ideas

Download the new list an Excel spreadsheet. Open it, Copy + Paste the data into the other Excel spreadsheet

Sort the keywords by name and delete duplicates

Repeat this process 3 more times

The goal is to find as many high volume keywords as possible. Try to flush out at least 50 keywords that get 30 or more monthly searches. Don’t be afraid to focus on finding groupings of long tail keywords. If done correctly, long tail keywords will drive more traffic than your main keywords. Save the spreadsheet and keep it handy. We’ll be using it shortly.

KW Research Step 3: Analyzing The Competition

Before creating the post you need to analyze the competition.

The goal is to find keywords with high search volumes and low competition.

Start by downloading and setting up the Moz toolbar:

Chrome version | Firefox version

Click the Settings icon and select Display SERP Overlay

Type your website name into Google: You’re looking at 2 factors:

PA (Page Authority)– The ranking power of that individual page (i.e. rankingsite.com/ranking-page)

DA (Domain Authority)– The ranking power of the overall website (i.e. rankingsite.com)

For your website, find the DA and write it down – this is a gauge of the power of your root domain (NOTE: NOT exact science, but still accurate). You will be comparing your DA to the competition’s. Next:

Re-open your Excel file with list of keywords

Copy the keyword with the most search volume and Paste it into Google

Analyze the DA and PA of the top 4 results returned

The higher the PA and DA of the ranking websites, the harder it will be for you to rank for that specific keyword.

We’re looking for results in the top 4 spots with PA less than 20 and DA similar to yours OR less than 50.

Below is a matrix to help explain:

For each keyword you analyze, record the result in your Excel file

If the keyword you Pasted into Google returns websites with high DA / PA, highlight that keyword row in red

If Google returns sites low DA / PA, highlight that keyword row in green

Repeat this until you’ve Googled every keyword in your Excel file (below is the Excel file for my post I wrote on SEO silos).

Chapter Three: Optimizing Your Content

6 years ago all you had to do was jam a bunch of keywords into a page and you were golden. Through the use of semantic search, Google’s gotten a lot smarter. The algorithm combs your entire page and looks at overall context, synonym keywords and semantic markups. It’s important to keep this in mind when creating your content.

Filter Your Keywords

Filter your Excel list so the keywords with the highest search volume and lowest competition are on top (these rows should be green). The keyword at the top will be your main keyword – the others we will use as long tails and synonyms throughout your post. To better illustrate, here were my top 5 keywords for this post:

blog seo – 2,900 searches

seo for blogs – 260 searches

increase blog traffic – 1,170 searches

optimize blog for google – 50 searches

blog post search engine optimization- 40 searches

NOTE: my keyword list contained 40 keywords in total. For the purpose of brevity, I’m only showing you 5.

Using Your Keywords

There are a couple of places you need to inject your keywords:

Title

Creating a title is tricky because it needs to accomplish a few things:

Contain your main keywords

Convince users to click on it

Be under 55 characters (Google’s display limit)

If possible, stick your main keywords at the front of the title. Then, work in secondary keywords. For this post, I was able to work in my main keyword up front and a secondary keyword behind it:

Blog SEO: How to Optimize Your Blog for Google

The main thing is to include your top keyword and make it legible for users – the rest is a bonus!

URL

Your website should be set up to support permalink structure. If it does, your URL will be auto optimized based on the title of your post. For example:

http://webris.org/blog-seo-guide-to-optimizing-your-blog-for-google/

If your blog is running on WordPress, click Settings -> Permalinks to set it up.

Content

The most important thing is to write a great post that is clear to users. Don’t try and stuff your entire list of keywords in where they don’t read well. Here’s what I like to do:

Use main keyword in the first 100 words of the post

Use main keyword 2 – 3 times throughout the whole post (no more!)

After I’ve written the post, I go back and look for places I’ve repeated low volume keywords (Control + F)

I then replace them with higher volume, long tail or synonym keywords

Again, Google is getting really good at picking up relevancy. The most important thing is to write a focused article that is clear to users – Google will handle the rest.

Semantic HTML Markups

AKA the use of HTML markup to reinforce the semantics (meaning) of the information in your post. Most refer to these as

and

tags. These tags are used as headings and can increase a search engine’s ability to pick up content relevancy. Here’s what you need to know:

Your

tag is your title and auto added to your post

DO NOT add additional