#I think it fits pretty good with them because. maybe for them

[ghouljams]

Ghoul i’m so sorry, this AU has taken over my brain and i can’t stop thinking about this you said:

Sitting in your slick for the rest of the night? If you're that excited for it he can leave a load in them.

like it’s stuck in my mind.

your dad has fucked the 141 over yet again, not only that, fucking asshole is there at the ceremony that takes place when the task force miraculously comes back from a death trap mission.

funny thing is, it’s not just dad there, you are too.

anyway, i’ll say it quick before i black out and write way too much: ghost pulls you to the bathroom, ruins both you and your underwear with his load just in time. as soon as you’re out you’re pulled along by your dad.

because now you have to go up to the stage to stand pretty beside your dad while he gives his speech.

and ghost has to hold back from having the cheshire cat grin because the whole time you feel his cum spill out of you and onto your already debased underwear.

- Morph

You're so fucking wet when he tugs your panties down, it makes him puff out his chest, victorious. You must be so used to being fucked every time you see him that your body responds easily now. Not that Ghost particularly cares, he's rough fitting his thick cock against your cunt and filling you quick. He wraps a hand over your lips to stifle the moan that threatens to burst free. He's got to be quick, your father (and the press) will wonder where you've gone, not to mention he's supposed to be on stage himself. Honestly this is going better than he expected it would. Humiliating you, and your father, is his favorite past time, and now he gets to do it in front of an audience.

Of course he'll leave you with come staining your panties, pasting them against your cunt like a terrible bandage as he pulls your skirt back over your ass. He gives you a neat slap on your backside when you leave the little bathroom he'd dragged you into. He can't wait to see you squirming on stage, maybe someone will ask you what's wrong and you'll have to lie. Oh it's too good a show to miss.

Except you're perfect the entire ceremony, smiling amicably and standing politely still with only the occasional shift in weight that anyone would blame on your high heels. It pisses him off. You should be as uncomfortable as he is in this bloody dress uniform, and you're simply not. You didn't even seem surprised to see him when he'd grabbed you.

It's only when Price comes back to the 141 during the post awards cocktail hour and clears his throat that Ghost feels some internal weight shift.

"So," Price says over the rim of his glass, "'O else is fucking the girl?" It's only too bad that the sergeants both stiffen at the same moment Ghost does.

[puckbunnyera]

Silver Spoons | Q. Hughes

• ──────────────♡────────────── •

pairing: quinn hughes x reader genre: angst, fluff word count: 2.1k warnings: none summary: insecurities rise to the surface when meeting quinn's family for the first time author's note: writing is a little (very) rusty after being away for so long but i came up with this idea while listening to a song i found through tiktok. the song is silver spoons (demo) by erin lecount. definitely suggest listening to the song before or while reading to really set the tone. it can be found on soundcloud and youtube. tried to link it but it wasn't working :(.

• ──────────────♡────────────── •

I stare at the house you were brought up in All the photographs and door frames are wooden I wish I'd known you when you were younger Before lovers

To say you were nervous would be the understatement of the century. Anxiety holds you tightly in her grasp and floods your mind with the dreadful thoughts that you had been trying so hard to keep away. What if they didn't like you? What if they didn't think you were good enough? What if they noticed how different you were from them? What if they thought you didn't fit into the perfect life they had created for themselves? Your thoughts were running wild and dragging your bruised heart around with them.

"You okay?" Quinn's voice soft and gentle as he slips his hand into yours.

"Yeah, of course." You give him a tight-lipped smile, hoping he won't be able to sense the internal chaos you are experiencing. He does, though. Even if he doesn't say it, you know he does because Quinn notices everything with you.

"Let's head in." He speaks, pressing a light kiss to your temple. "Can put our stuff away in the room then head out into the backyard. Everyone is already here."

"Okay." You nod, voice barely above a whisper.

As he leads you through the beautiful home he was raised in, you look around in awe at the memories held in pretty wooden picture frames hanging on the walls and sitting on tables. You can tell it was a house full of love and happiness. While it's always warmed your heart to know that the amazing man you had the luck of calling yours was the result of such a wonderful upbringing, you can't ignore the painful twinge you feel deep down.

Stepping into Quinn's childhood room, your eyes are immediately drawn to a picture, sitting on his dresser next to the door, of younger Quinn with his family sitting happily on the couch together next to a Christmas tree. The trio stand in the driveway, wearing rollerblades and holding hockey sticks, big smiles plastered on their faces. It brings a smile to your own face.

"How old were you here?" You ask Quinn as you feel him move to stand behind you after putting your bags down.

"Fourteen, maybe." He replies, wrapping his arms around your waist and resting his chin on your shoulder as you both examine the photo.

"You were so cute." You speak softly, a longing feeling pulling at your heartstrings. You wished you could've known younger Quinn. When things were simple and life wasn't so complicated.

"I was? Am I not cute now?" He asks in mock offense.

"You know what I mean." You roll your eyes playfully and nudge him softly with your elbow, drawing a laugh from him.

"Come on. Let's go meet everyone." He pulls away. You instantly mourn the loss of his warmth but settle with the feeling of his fingers intertwining with yours as he pulls you out of the room.

And I bet you grew up eating at the table Fed love from silver spoons, reasons to be grateful

You feel overwhelmed the moment you step out into the backyard. Quinn's parents and brothers are already seated at the dinner table that was set up, talking and laughing. You do your best to swallow down the panic that's trying to force its way up your throat as Quinn pulls you in their direction. You're only given about thirty seconds to calm yourself before you're standing in front of them.

"Quinn!" Ellen exclaims, standing up pulling her oldest son into a warm embrace. "I'm so glad you both made it safely."

"Hey," He returns her hug before stepping back and placing a comforting hand on the small of your back. "This is Y/N. Y/N, this is my mom, Ellen, my dad, Jim, and my brothers, Luke and Jack."

"Hi, it's nice to meet you." You wave shyly, giving them the best smile you could muster amidst your inner turmoil.

"It's so nice to finally met you, too." Ellen steps closer before pulling you into a hug. You hesitate briefly before returning the unexpected affection. When she steps back and returns to her seat, Quinn leads you to the two chairs left empty for you both to sit.

"Quinn has told us so much about you. All good things, of course. It's nice to finally put a name to the face." Jim speaks once you're settled at the table.

"You as well." You blush. "I won't lie and say that haven't been nervous about this trip, but I've been wanting to meet the people who raised him to be the amazing person that he is."

"Oh, please." Ellen laughs, shaking her head. "You're making me blush. And there is absolutely nothing to be nervous about. We are so happy that you are here."

"How did Quinn manage to bag you?" Jack scoffs, a playful spark in his eyes. "I mean, just look at him. You could've done so much better."

"Like who?" Quinn glares at his brother. "You?"

"You said it, not me." Jack raises his hands in mock defense.

"Excuse my meathead of a brother. We're not all like that." Luke jokes. "It's nice to meet you, Y/N."

"You, too."

Shortly after initial greeting, food starts being passed around as everyone starts asking you questions about yourself. What do you do for a living? How did you meet Quinn? How is life in Vancouver? Where did you grow up? The questions seem endless, but you answer them with kindness and grace, mentally patting yourself on the back for managing to keep composure under the pressure you were feeling. As the dinner goes on, the tension in you eases, and you're able to genuinely laugh and smile. It's clear in how comfortable everyone is that this is just another evening dinner for them. Something that they've obviously spent years doing.

I spilt the good wine, I panicked A disaster, a knee-jerk reaction Then everyone around us starts laughing Is that how it's supposed to happen?

"Hey, Y/N?" Luke calls from across the table. "Could you pass me the bread basket?"

"Of course." You smile, picking it up to simply hand it to him. If only life was that easy for you. You watch in horror as the wine bottle in the middle of the table topples over, spilling the dark red liquid onto the white tablecloth. "Oh my gosh! I'm so sorry!" You jump up from your seat, grabbing napkins and throwing them over the mess. Tears threaten to spill as embarrassment floods through you.

"Baby, it's okay." Quinn stands to help you.

"Let me go grab some more napkins." Ellen rises from her hand and heads into the house. Once the mess is cleaned everyone settles back in at the table.

"I'm really sorry." You apologize again.

"It's no big deal." Jim shrugs it off with a chuckle.

"Are you sure? I can pay you back. That looked really expensive."

"It's okay, Y/N. Really." Ellen shakes her head.

A warm hand slide across your thigh, squeezing gently and settling your bouncing leg that you hadn't even realized was moving in the throes of your anxiety. He leans over and presses a comforting peck against to the side of your head.

"Definitely not the worst thing to happen at the dinner table." Luke laughs. "One time, Jack and Quinn got into and spilt a whole pot of soup. It got everywhere."

"I completely forgot about that." Jack gasps, laughing at the memory that has resurfaced. And like that, the wine incident is forgotten and everyone moves on.

We're the product of love that we do not receive I'll corrupt every branch of this family tree --- Silver spoons and butter knives Living hand to mouth, I'm getting by Just feed me love and give it time Oh, maybe in another life

After dinner, you and Quinn make your way up to his room to turn in for the night. As you move through the motions of getting dressed into your sleepwear, a pair of sleep shorts and one of Quinn's shirts, your mind has taken you elsewhere. Everything has been going well, but you can't help but feel a sense of sadness. And a little bit of guilt. Sadness at the fact that you are clearly an outsider in the perfect family that Quinn belongs to. Happiness and love seem to come so easy for them, but your life has been so different, and it shows.

You grew up in a home where love was conditional. It wasn't given unless you gave something in return that benefited the other person. Your parents weren't the type to ask you how your day was. They didn't show up to support you at school events or hold you when you were feeling down. When you made little mistakes here and there, you were treated as if you committed the crime of the century. Yelling and cursing were a common occurrence. Show of emotions and shed tears were met with eye rolls and ridicule. You spent your life walking on eggshells around the people who were supposed to love you. You learned to only depend on yourself, trust no one, and expect absolutely nothing from everyone. Until Quinn, and that's where the guilt comes in. Guilt for wishing you'd had better parents than the ones you had. Guilt for wishing your life had been different. Guilt for being ungrateful when your life could have been worse. Guilt for being imperfect in the presence of those who seemed to have it all. It was eating away at you and you didn't know how to make it stop.

"Babe?" Quinn calls, voice quiet and cautious as he approaches you.

"Hmmm?"

"Where did you go?" He strokes your cheek softly and carefully with the back of his fingers.

"Sorry. It's nothing." You shake your head, crawling into your side of the bed and laying down.

"Talk to me." He lays down beside you, turning to face you. "Somethings wrong. You forget how good I've gotten at reading you."

"Nothing's wrong, but that's the problem." You sigh, caving in. Knowing that you can't hide anything from him.

"I'm confused."

"Tonight's been absolutely amazing. Your family is amazing and perfect. You are amazing and perfect."

"But?"

"But I feel like I don't belong here. I feel like we come from too different worlds. This life you live, and the relationship you have with your family is completely for to me." You release a shaky breath as the tears you held in all night slowly start to cascade down your cheeks. "And I'm scared that I'll just end up corrupting it somehow. You are the most amazing thing to ever happen to me, and I don't want to fuck this up, but it feels like it's inevitable. Bound to happen eventually."

"You could never fuck this up." He lifts a hand to softly brush away your tears. "You've told me that your home life was never the greatest, but don't do this. Don't compare yours to mine and make yourself feel like you've done something wrong. You haven't done anything wrong. What happened has clearly hurt you in ways that I could never understand, but don't let it define you. You might not see it, but to me, you are perfect just the way you are."

"I just want to be good enough for you."

"You are good enough for me. More than enough. I wish you could see that." He sighs, leaning forward and kissing you softly. "I making a promise to you that I will spend every day showing you that and proving it to you until you start to see it for yourself. I know it will take time, but that's fine with me. Because this. Us. Is end game. You are end game for me."

"You are too patient with me."

"And you aren't patient enough with yourself. It's okay though because I have enough patience for the both of us."

"I don't deserve you."

"It's the other way around, sweet girl." He pecks your nose. "I love you."

"I love you, too." You curl into him, pressing as close to him as you can.

"Now sleep." He wraps his arms tightly around you. "I'm pretty sure my mom has put together a whole itinerary of things for us to do tomorrow so you'll need the rest." He chuckles.

"Goodnight, Quinny." You murmur, sleep ready to whisk you away.

"Goodnight, my love."

[hoondolls]

PAINTER BABY. 박성훈

pairing: f!reader x park sunghoon

notices and warnings: non idol au, fluff, neck kisses established relationship, cursing, slightly suggestive ?, painter!reader , guitarist!sunghoon, someone for the love of god tell me a good word counter website 🙏🙏

Sunghoon’s guitar is fucked again. or maybe he’s the one who’s fucked, but it’s easier to blame the strings than admit he’s been playing too much.

he’s stretched out on y/n’s lap, fingers twisting at the tuning pegs, brows furrowed like this is some great dilemma. it’s not, but sunghoon likes to act like his entire livelihood depends on this. in reality, he just plays at underground gigs with his friends and makes enough for soju and convenience store ramen.

y/n hums, half-listening. her hands are busy mixing paint on an old plastic palette, the kind that still has dried specks of colour from last week. she’s not painting anything serious, just playing with shades, seeing what looks good together. this is what she does when she has the time—paint for no reason, just because it feels nice, there’s a comfortable silence, the kind that only exists when two people have known each other long enough to not fill it. sunghoon’s weight is warm against her thighs, his hair fanning over her hoodie. his guitar lets out a dull pluck as he tests the strings.

“i think my e string’s about to snap,” he mutters, adjusting the tuning peg. he stares at it for a second, like he’s mourning something. then, without warning, he shifts, sitting up and turning to face her properly. “paint something on it.”

y/n looks up, paintbrush still dragging through cerulean blue. “what?”

“my guitar,” he says, tapping the wooden body. “paint something on it. a flower. a little guy. anything.”

she raises a brow. “why?” Inspecting the clearly worn out guitar.

he shrugs, like he hasn’t just admitted to the most sentimental thing ever. “because it’s dying, and i don’t want to think about it.”

y/n blinks. sunghoon meets her gaze like it’s nothing, like he’s not asking her to imprint a piece of herself onto something he loves, something he spends most of his time with. something that’s carried every song he’s ever played.

she exhales, rolling her shoulders. “fine.”

his lips twitch into a smile. he shifts again, resting the guitar across his lap, fingers drumming against the wood. “what are you gonna paint?”

y/n tilts her head, scanning the scratched-up surface. “something sad, since you’re grieving.”

sunghoon groans, letting his head fall back. “you’re the worst.”

she smirks, dipping her brush into white. “you asked.”

he lets her do her thing, watching as she starts with the base—soft petals forming at the edge of the pickguard, curving slightly where the wood is most worn out. her hands are steady, moving with ease like she’s done this a hundred times before. sunghoon feels something tighten in his chest. maybe it’s the reality of his guitar’s last days, or maybe it’s just her, existing in a way that makes things feel less heavy.

he exhales, leaning back on his hands. “i like watching you paint.”

y/n scoffs, but there’s a hint of pink on her ears. “you always say that” she leans back, brush hovering in the air as she takes in her work. the bouquet blooms across the wood, soft pink petals overlapping in clusters, tiny green leaves curling around them. it looks delicate, almost too pretty for sunghoon’s beat-up guitar, but somehow, it fits.

“there, all done.” she smiles, satisfied, but as she shifts, she doesn’t notice the streak of pink smudging across her nose.

sunghoon does.

he tilts his head, grinning. “you’ve got paint all over your face, baby.”

y/n blinks, raising a hand to touch her cheek. “where?”

“everywhere.”

she frowns, trying to wipe it off blindly. it only makes it worse.

sunghoon watches, amused. then, as if it’s the most normal thing in the world, he says, “can i lick it off?”

y/n freezes before scowling, her hand drops, eyes snapping to his. “what.”

he blinks at her, all wide-eyed and innocent, like he hasn’t just said the most unhinged thing ever. “what? it’s non-toxic, right?”

she stares. “you’re insane and disgusting .”

he shrugs. “So can I ?.”

y/n groans, shoving at his shoulder. “don’t talk to me.”

sunghoon just laughs, leaning in anyway, eyes flicking to the smudge of paint she still hasn’t wiped off. “fine,” he murmurs, voice laced with amusement. “but you should clean it before i change my mind.”

He didn’t even wait for her to finish wiping the pain then he stared pressing slow kisses just below her jaw.

y/n tenses. “sunghoon—” but he doesn’t stop, trailing soft kisses down the side of her neck, his hands already moving to brace himself on either side of her. her breath catches as he pushes her back, his weight pressing her into the couch.

“You’ll get poisoned I have paint on me—” she starts, but her voice is already faltering, and sunghoon smirks against her skin.

“mm?” he hums, lips grazing her collarbone like he’s not doing anything at all.

y/n swallows hard. “you’re getting paint on yourself.”

sunghoon just laughs, low and warm against her throat. “It’s alright .”

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Petard, Part III

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/01/miskatonic-networks/#landlord-telco-industrial-complex

Last week, Trump's FCC chair Brendan Carr reversed a rule that banned your landlord from taking kickbacks in exchange for forcing you to use whatever ISP was willing to pay the biggest bribe for the right to screw you over:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/fcc-chair-nixes-plan-to-boost-broadband-competition-in-apartment-buildings/

Corporate fascists and their captured regulators are, of course, that most despicable of creatures: they are plagiarists. Like so many of our tech overlords, they have mistaken dystopian sf as a suggestion, rather than as a warning. I take this personally, because I actually wrote this as an sf story in 2013, and it was published in 2014 in MIT Tech Review's Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Bruce Sterling and published in 2014:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262535595/twelve-tomorrows-2014/

I adapted it for my podcast, in four installments:

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_278

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_292

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_293

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_294_-_Petard_04

And, given the new currency of this old story, I thought it was only fitting that I serialize it here, on my blog, also in four parts.

Here's part one:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/30/landlord-telco-industrial-complex/#part-one

Here's part two:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/31/the-blood-speech/#part-two

And now, onto part three:

One of the early Ftp code contributors was now CTO for an ISP, and they'd gotten their start as a dorm co-op at Brown that had metastasized across New England. Sanjay had been pretty important to the early days of Ftp, helping us get the virtualization right so that it could run on pretty much any cloud without a lot of jiggery and/or pokery. Within a day of emailing Sanjay, I was having coffee with the vice-president of business development for Miskatonic Networks, who was also Sanjay's boyfriend's girlfriend, because apparently ISPs in New England are hotbeds of Lovecraft-fandom polyamory. Her name was Kadijah and she had a southie accent so thick it was like an amateur theater production of Good Will Hunting.

"The Termite Mound?" She laughed. "Shit yeah, I know that place. It's still standing? I went to some super sketchy parties there when I was a kid, I mean sooooper sketchy, like sketch-a-roony. I can't believe no one's torched the place yet."

"Not yet," I said. "And seeing as all my stuff's there right now, I'm hoping that no one does for the time being."

"Yeah, I can see that." I could not get over her accent. It was the most Bostonian thing I'd encountered since I got off the train. "OK, so you want to know what we'd charge to provide service to someone at the Termite Mound?"

"Uh, no. I want to know what you'd charge per person if we could get you the whole Mound — every unit in the residence. All 250 of them."

"Oh." She paused a second. "This is an Ftp thing, right?"

"Yeah," I said. "That's how I know Sanjay. I, uh, I started Ftp." I don't like to brag, but sometimes it makes sense in the context of the conversation, right?

"That was you? Wicked! So you're seriously gonna get the whole dorm to sign up with us?"

"I will if you can get me a price that I can sell to them," I said.

"Oh," she said. Then "Oh! Right. Hmm. Leave it with me. You say you can get them all signed up?"

"I think so. If the price is right. And I think that if the Termite Mound goes with you that there'll be other dorms that'll follow. Maybe a lab or two," I said. I was talking out of my ass at this point, but seriously, net-censorship in the labs at MIT? It was disgusting. It could not stand.

"Damn," she said. "Sounds like you're majoring in Ftp. Don't you have classes or something?"

"No," I said. "This is basically exactly what I figured college would be like. A cross between summer camp and an Stanford obedience experiment. If all I wanted to do was cram a bunch of knowledge into my head, I could have stayed home and mooced it. I came here because I wanted to level up and fight something tough and even dangerous. I want to spend four years getting into the right kind of trouble. Going to classes too, but seriously, classes? Whatever. Everyone knows the good conversations happen in the hallway between the formal presentations. Classes are just an excuse to have hallways."

She looked skeptical and ate banana bread.

"It's your deal," she said.

I could hear the but hanging in the air between us. She went and got more coffees and brought them back along with toasted banana bread dripping with butter for me. She wouldn't let me pay, and told me it was on Miskatonic. We were a potential big account. She didn't want to say "But" because she might offend me. I wanted to hear the "but."

"But?"

"But what?"

"It's my deal but…?"

"But, well, you know, you don't look after your grades, MIT'll put you out on your ass. That's how it works in college. I've seen it."

I chewed my banana bread.

"Hey," she said. "Hey. Are you OK, Lukasz?"

"I'm fine," I said.

She smiled at me. She was pretty. "But?"

I told her about my talk with AA, and about Juanca, and about how I felt like nobody was giving me my propers, and she looked very sympathetic, in a way that made me feel much younger. Like toddler younger.

"MIT is all about pranks, right? I think if I could come up with something really epic, they'd –" And as I said it, I realized how dumb it was. They laughed at me in Vienna, I'll show them! "You know what? Forget about it. I got more important things to do than screw around with those knob-ends. Work to do, right? Get the network opened up around here, you and me, Kadijah!"

"Don't let it get to you, you'll give yourself an aneurism. I'll get back to you soon, OK?"

#

I fished a bead out of my pocket and wedged it into my ear.

"Who is this?"

"Lukasz?" The voice was choked with tears.

"Who is this?" I said again.

"It's Bryan." I couldn't place the voice or the name.

"Bryan who?"

"From the Termite Mound's customer service desk." Then I recognized the voice. It was the elf, and he was having hysterics. Part of me wanted to say, Oh, diddums! and hang up. Because elves, AMR? But I'm not good at tough love.

"What's wrong?"

"They've fired me," he said. "I got called into my boss's office an hour ago and he told me to start drawing up a list of people to kick out of the dorm — he wanted the names of people who supported you. I was supposed to go through the EULAs for the dorm and find some violations for all of them –"

"What if they didn't have any violations?"

He made a sound between a sob and a laugh. "Are you kidding? You're always in violation! Have you read the EULA for the Mound? It's like sixty pages long."

"OK, gotcha. So you refused and you got fired?"

There was a pause. It drew out. "No," he said, his voice barely a whisper. "I gave them a bunch of names, and then they fired me."

Again, I was torn between the impulse to hang up on him and to hear more. Nosiness won (nosiness always wins; bets on nosiness are a sure thing). "Nicely done. Sounds like just deserts to me. What do you expect me to do about it?" But I knew. There were only two reasons to call me after something like this: to confess his sins or to get revenge. And no one would ever mistake me for a priest.

"I've got the names they pulled. Not just this time. Every time there's been any kind of trouble in the Termite Mound, MIT Residence has turfed out the troublemakers on some bogus EULA violation. They know that no one cares about student complaints, and there's always a waiting list for rooms at the Termite Mound, it's so central and all. I kept records."

"What kind of records?"

"Hardcopies of emails. They used disappearing ink for all the dirty stuff, but I just took pictures of my screen with my drop and saved it to personal storage. It's ugly. They went after pregnant girls, kids with disabilities. Any time there was a chance they'd have to do an air quality audit or fix a ramp, I'd have to find some reason to violate the tenant out of residence." He paused a moment. "They used some pretty bad language when they talked about these people, too."

The Termite Mound should've been called the Roach Motel: turn on the lights and you'd find a million scurrying bottom-feeders running for the baseboards.

I was going to turn on the lights.

"You've got all that, huh?

"Tons of it," he said. "Going back three years. I knew that if it ever got out that they'd try and blame it on me. I wanted records."

"OK," I said. "Meet me in Harvard Square, by the T entrance. How soon can you get there?"

"I'm at the Coop right now," he said. "Using a study-booth."

"Perfect," I said. "Five minutes then?"

"I'm on my way."

The Coop's study booths had big signs warning you that everything you did there was recorded — sound, video, infrared, data — and filtered for illicit behavior. The signs explained that there was no human being looking at the records unless you did something to trip the algorithm, like that made it better. If a tree falls in the forest, it sure as shit makes a sound; and if your conversation is bugged, it's bugged — whether or not a human being listens in right then or at some time in the infinite future of that data.

I beat him to the T entrance, and looked around for a place to talk. It wasn't good. From where I stood, I could see dozens of cameras, the little button-sized dots discretely placed all around the square, each with a little scannable code you could use to find out who got the footage and what it's policy was. No one ever, ever, ever bothered to do this. Ever. EULAs were not written for human consumption: a EULA's message could always be boiled down to seven words: "ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE." Or, more succinctly: "YOU LOSE."

I felt bad about Bryan's job. It was his own deal, of course. He'd stayed even after he knew how evil they were. And I hadn't held a gun to his head and made him put himself in the firing line. But of course, I had convinced him to. I had led him to. I felt bad.

Bryan turned up just as I was scouting a spot at an outdoor table by an ice-cream parlor. They had a bunch of big blowing heaters that'd do pretty good white-noise masking, a good light/dark contrast between the high-noon sun and the shade of the awning that would screw up cameras' white-balance, and the heaters would wreak havoc on the infra-red range of the CCTVs, or so I hoped. I grabbed Bryan, clamping down on his skinny arm through the rough weave of his forest-green cloak and dragged him into my chosen spot.

"You got it?" I said, once we were both seated and nursing hot chocolates. I got caffeinated marshmallows; he got Thai ghost pepper-flavored — though that was mostly marketing, no way those marshmallows were over a couple thousand Scovilles.

"I encrypted it with your public key," he said, handing me a folded up paper. I unfolded it and saw that it had been printed with a stegoed QR code, hidden in a Victorian woodcut. That kind of spycraft was pretty weaksauce — the two-dee-barcode-in-a-public-domain-image thing was a staple of shitty student clickbait thrillers — but if he'd really managed to get my public key and verify it and then encrypt the blob with it, I was impressed. That was about ten million times more secure than the average fumbledick ever managed. The fact that he'd handed me a hardcopy of the URL instead of emailing it to me, well, that was pretty sweet frosting. Bryan had potential.

I folded the paper away. "What should I be looking for?"

"It's all organized and tagged. You'll see." He looked nervous. "What are you going to do with it?"

"Well, for starters, I'm going to call them up and tell them I have it."

"What?" He looked like he was going to cry.

"Come on," I said. "I'm not going to tell them where I got it. The way you tell it, I'm about to get evicted, right?"

"Technically, you are evicted. There's a process-server waiting at every entrance to the Termite Mound doing face-recognition on the whole list. Soon as you go home, bam. 48 hours to clear out."

"Right," I said. "I don't want to have to go look for a place to live while I'm also destroying these shitbirds and fixing everyone's Internet connection. Get serious. So I'm going to go and talk to Messrs Amoral, Nonmoral and Immoral and explain that I have a giant dump of compromising messages from them that I'm going public with, and it'll look really, really bad for them if they turf me out now."

It's time for a true confession. I am not nearly as brave as I front. All this spycraft stuff, all the bluster about beating these guys on their home turf, yeah, in part I'm into it — I like it better than riding through life like a foil chip-bag being swept down a polluted stream on a current of raw sewage during a climate-change-driven superstorm.

But the reality is that I can't really help myself. There's some kind of rot-fungus that infects the world. Things that are good when they're small and personal grow, and as they grow, their attack-surface grows with them, and they get more and more colonized by the fungus, making up stupid policies, doing awful stuff to the people who rely on them and the people who work for them, one particle of fungus at a time, each one just a tiny and totally defensible atomic-sized spoor of rot that piles up and gloms onto all the other bits of rot until you're a walking, suppurating lesion.

No one ever set out to create the kind of organization that needs to post a "MIT RESIDENCY LLC OPERATES A ZERO-TOLERANCE POLICY TOWARD EMPLOYEE ABUSE. YOU CAN BE FINED UP TO $2000 AND/OR IMPRISONED FOR SIX MONTHS FOR ASSAULTING A CAMPUS RESIDENCE WORKER" sign. You start out trying to do something good, then your realize you can get a little richer by making it a little worse. Your thermostat for shittiness gets reset to the new level, so it doesn't seem like much of a change to turn it a notch further towards the rock-bottom, irredeemably shitty end of the scale.

The truth is that you can get really rich and huge by playing host organism to the rot-fungus. The rot-fungus diffuses its harms and concentrates its rewards. That means that healthy organisms that haven't succumbed to the rot-fungus are liable to being devoured by giant, well-funded vectors for it — think of the great local business that gets devoured by an awful hedge-fund in a leveraged takeover, looted and left as a revolting husk to shamble on until it collapses under its own weight.

I am terrified of the rot-fungus, because it seems like I'm the only person who notices it most of the time. Think of all those places where the town council falls all over itself to lure some giant corporation to open a local factory. Don't they notice that everyone who works at places like that hates every single moment of every single day? Haven't they ever tried to converse with the customer-service bots run by one of those lumbering dinos?

I mean, sure, the bigs have giant budgets and they'll take politicians out for nice lunches and throw a lot of money at their campaigns, but don't these guardians of the public trust ever try to get their cars fixed under warranty? Don't they ever buy a train ticket? Don't they ever eat at a fast food joint? Can't they smell the rot-fungus? Am I the only one? I've figured out how to fight it in my own way. Everyone else who's fighting seems to be fighting against something else — injustice or inequality or whatever, without understanding that the fungus's rot is what causes all of those things.

I'm convinced that no normal human being ever woke up one morning and said, "Dammit, my life doesn't have enough petty bureaucratic rules, zero-tolerance policies, censorship and fear in it. How do I fix that?" Instead, they let this stuff pile up, one compromise at a time, building up huge sores suppurating with spore-loaded fluids that eventually burst free and beslime everything around them. It gets normal to them, one dribble at a time.

"Lukasz, you're don't know what you're doing. These guys, they're –"

"What?" I said. "Are they the mafia or something? Are they going to have me dropped off a bridge with cement overshoes?"

He shook his head, making the twigs and beads woven into the downy fluff of his hair clatter together. "No, but they're ruthless. I mean, totally ruthless. They're not normal."

The way he said it twinged something in my hindbrain, some little squiggle of fear, but I pushed it away. "Yeah, that's OK. I'm used to abnormal." I am the most abnormal person I know.

"Be careful, seriously," he said.

"Thanks, Bryan," I said. "Don't worry about me. You want me to try and get your room back, too?"

He chewed his lip. "Don't," he said. "They'll know it was me if you do that."

I resisted the urge to shout at him to grow a spine. These assholes had cost him his home and his job (OK, I'd helped) and he was going to couch-surf it until he could find the rarest of treasures: an affordable place to live in Cambridge, Mass? Even if he was being tortured by his conscience for all his deplorable selloutism, he was still being a total wuss. But that was his deal. I mean, he was an elf, for chrissakes. Who knew what he was thinking?

"Suit yourself," I said, and went and made some preparations.

#

Messers Amoral, Nonmoral and Immoral had an office over the river in Boston, in a shabby office-block that only had ten floors, but whose company directory listed over 800 businesses. I knew the kind of place, because they showed up whenever some hairy scam unravelled and they showed you the office-of-convenience used by the con-artists who'd destroyed something that lots of people cared about and loved in order to make a small number of bad people a little richer. A kind of breeding pit for rot-fungus, in other words.

At first I thought I was going to have to go and sleuth their real locations, but I saw that Amoral, Nonmoral and Immoral had the entire third floor registered to them, while everyone else had crazy-ass, heavily qualified suite numbers like 401c(1)K, indicating some kind of internal routing code for the use of the army of rot-fungus-infected spores who ensured that correspondence was handled in a way that preserved the illusion that each of the multifarious, blandly named shell companies (I swear to Cthulhu that there was one called "International Holdings (Holdings), Ltd") was a real going concern and not a transparent ruse intended to allow the rot-fungus to spread with maximal diffusion of culpability for the carriers who did its bidding.

I punched # # #300# # # on the ancient touchscreen intercom, its surface begrimed with a glossy coat of hardened DNA, Burger King residue and sifted-down dust of the ages. It blatted like an angry sheep, once, twice, three times, then disconnected. I punched again. Again. On the fourth try, an exasperated, wheezing voice emerged: "What?"

"I'm here to speak to someone from MIT Residences LLC."

"Send an email."

"I'm a tenant. My name is Lukasz Romero." I let that sink in. "I've got some documents I'd like to discuss with a responsible individual at MIT Residences LLC." I put a bit of heavy English on documents. "Please." I put even more English on "Please." I've seen the same tough-guy videos that you have, and I can do al-pacinoid overwound Dangerous Dude as well as anyone. "Please," I said again, meaning "Right. Now."

There was an elongated and ominous pause, punctuated by muffled rustling and grumbling, and what may have been typing on an old-fashioned, mechanical keyboard. "Come up," a different voice said. The elevator to my left ground as the car began to lower itself.

#

I'd expected something sinister — a peeling dungeon of a room where old men with armpit-stains gnawed haunches of meat and barked obscenities at each other. Instead, I found myself in an airy, high-ceilinged place that was straight out of the publicity shots for MIT's best labs, the ones that had been set-dressed by experts who'd ensured that no actual students had come in to mess things up before the photographer could get a beautifully lit shot of the platonic perfection.

The room took up the whole floor, dotted with conversation pits with worn, comfortable sofas whose end-tables sported inconspicuous charge-plates for power-hungry gadgets. The rest of the space was made up of new-looking worksurfaces and sanded-down antique wooden desks that emitted the honeyed glow of a thousand coats of wax buffed by decades of continuous use. The light came from tall windows and full-spectrum spotlights that were reflected and diffused off the ceiling, which was bare concrete and mazed with cable-trays and conduit. I smelled good coffee and toasting bread and saw a perfectly kept little kitchenette to my left.

There were perhaps a dozen people working in the room, standing at the worksurfaces, mousing away at the antique desks, or chatting intensely in the conversation pits. It was a kind of perfect tableau of industrious tech-company life, something out of a recruiting video. The people were young and either beautiful, handsome or both. I had the intense, unexpected desire to work here, or a place like this. It had good vibes.

One of the young, handsome people stood up from his conversation nook and smoothed out the herringbone wool hoodie he was wearing, an artfully cut thing that managed to make him look like both a young professor and an undergraduate at the same time. It helped that he was so fresh-faced, with apple cheeks and a shock of curly brown hair.

"Lukasz, right?" He held out a hand. He was wearing a dumbwatch, a wind-up thing in a steel casing that was fogged with a century of scratches. I coveted it instantly, though I knew nothing about its particulars, I was nevertheless certain that it was expensive, beautifully engineered, and extremely rare.

The door closed behind me and the magnet audibly reengaged. The rest of the people in the room studiously ignored us.

"I'm Sergey. Can I get you a cup of coffee? Tea? Some water?"

The coffee smelled good. "No thank you," I said. "I don't think I'll be here for long."

"Of course. Come and sit."

The other participants in his meeting had already vacated the sofas and left us with a conversation pit all to ourselves. I sank into the sofa and smelled the spicy cologne of a thousand eager, well-washed people who'd sat on it before me, impregnating the upholstery with the spoor of their good perfumes.

He picked up a small red enamel teapot and poured a delicious-smelling stream of yellow-green steaming liquid into a chunky diner-style coffee-cup. He sipped it. My stomach growled. "You told the receptionist you wanted to talk about some documents?"

"Yeah," I said, pulling myself together. "I've got documentary evidence of this company illegally evicting tenants — students — who got pregnant, complained about substandard living conditions and maintenance issues, and, in my case, complained about the network filters at the Termite Mound."

He cocked his head for a moment like he was listening for something in the hum and murmur of the office around him. I found myself listening, too, but try as I might, I couldn't pick out a single individual voice from the buzz, not even a lone intelligble word. It was as though they were all going "murmurmurmurmur," though I could see their lips moving and shaping what must have been words.

"Ah," he said at last. "Well, that's very unfortunate. Can you give me a set and I'll escalate them up our chain to ensure that they're properly dealt with?"

"I can give you a set," I said. "But I'll also be giving a set to the MIT ombudsman and the The Tech and the local Wikileaks Party rep. Sergey, forgive me, but you don't seem to be taking this very seriously. The material in my possession is the sort of thing that could get you and your colleagues here sued into a smoking crater."

"Oh, I appreciate that there's a lot of potential liability in the situation you describe, but it wouldn't be rational for me to freak out now, would it? I haven't seen your documents, and if I had, I can neither authenticate them nor evaluate the risk they represent. So I'll take a set from you and ensure that the people within our organization who have the expertise to manage this sort of thing get to them quickly."

It's funny. I'd anticipated that he'd answer like a chatbot, vomiting up Markov-chained nothings from the lexicon of the rot-fungus: "we take this very seriously," "we cannot comment on ongoing investigations," "we are actioning this with a thorough inquiry and post-mortem" and other similar crapola. Instead, he was talking like a hacker on a mailing list defending the severity he'd assigned to a bug he owned.

"Sergey, that's not much of an answer."

He sipped that delicious tea some more. "Is there something in particular you wanted to hear from me? I mean, this isn't the sort of thing that you find out about then everything stops until you've figured out what to do next."

I was off-balance. "I wanted –" I waved my hands. "I wanted an explanation. How the hell did this systematic abuse come about?"

He shrugged. He really didn't seem very worried "Hard to say, really. Maybe it was something out of the labs."

"What do you mean, 'the labs'?"

He gestured vaguely at one cluster of particularly engrossed young men and women who were bent over screens and worksurfaces, arranged in pairs or threesomes, collaborating with fierce intensity, reaching over to touch each others' screens and keyboards in a way I found instantly and deeply unsettling. "We've got a little R&D lab that works on some of our holdings. We're really dedicated to disrupting the rental market. There's so much money in it, you know, but mostly it's run by these entitled jerks who think that they're geniuses for having the brilliant idea of buying a building and then sitting around and charging rent on it. A real old boys' club." For the first time since we started talking, he really seemed to be alive and present and paying attention.

"Oh, they did some bits and pieces that gave them the superficial appearance of having a brain, but there's a lot of difference between A/B splitting your acquisition strategy and really deep-diving into the stuff that matters."

At this stage, I experienced a weird dissonance. I mean, I was there because these people were doing something genuinely villainous, real rot-fungus stuff. On the other hand, well, this sounded cool. I can't lie. I found it interesting. I mean, catnip-interesting.

"I mean, chewy questions. Like, if the median fine for a second citation for substandard plumbing is $400, and month-on-month cost for plumbing maintenance in a given building is $2,000 a month, and the long-term costs of failure to maintain are $20,000 for full re-plumbing on a 8-10 year basis with a 75 percent probability of having to do the big job in year nine, what are the tenancy parameters that maximize your return over that period?"

"Tenancy parameters?"

He looked at me. I was being stupid. I don't like that look. I suck at it. It's an ego thing. I just find it super-hard to deal with other people thinking that I'm dumb. I would probably get more done in this world if I didn't mind it so much. But I do. It's an imperfect world, and I am imperfect.

"Tenancy parameters. What are the parameters of a given tenant that predict whether he or she will call the city inspectors given some variable setpoint of substandard plumbing, set on a scale that has been validated through a rigorous regression through the data that establishes quantifiable inflection points relating to differential and discrete maintenance issues, including leaks, plugs, pressure, hot water temperature and volume, and so on. It's basically just a solve-for-x question, but it's one with a lot of details in the model that are arrived at through processes with a lot of room for error, so the model needs a lot of refinement and continuous iteration.

"And of course, it's all highly sensitive to external conditions — there's a whole game-theoretical set of questions about what other large-scale renters do in response to our own actions, and there's a information-theory dimension to this that's, well, it's amazing. Like, which elements of our strategy are telegraphed when we take certain actions as opposed to others, and how can those be steganographed through other apparent strategies.

"Now, most of these questions we can answer through pretty straightforward business processes, stuff that Amazon figured out twenty years ago. But there's a real risk of getting stuck in local maxima, just you know, overoptimizing inside of one particular paradigm with some easy returns. That's just reinventing the problem, though, making us into tomorrow's dinosaurs.

"If we're going to operate a culture of continuous improvement, we need to be internally disrupted to at least the same extent that we're disrupting those fat, stupid incumbents. That's why we have the labs. They're our chaos monkeys. They do all kinds of stuff that keeps our own models sharp. For example, they might incorporate a separate business and use our proprietary IP to try to compete with us — without telling us about it. Or give a set of autonomous agents privileges to communicate eviction notices in a way that causes a certain number of lawsuits to be filed, just to validate our assumptions about the pain-point at which an action or inaction on our side will trigger a suit from a tenant, especially for certain profiles of tenants.

"So there's not really any way that I can explain specifically what happened to the people mentioned in your correspondence. It's possible no one will ever be able to say with total certainty. I don't really know why anyone would expect it to be otherwise. We're not a deterministic state-machine, after all. If all we did was respond in set routines to set inputs, it'd be trivial to innovate around us and put us out of business. Our objective is to be strategically nonlinear and anti-deterministic within a range of continuously validated actions that map and remap a chaotic terrain of profitable activities in relation to property and rental. We're not rentiers, you understand. We don't own assets for a living. We do things with them. We're doing commercial science that advances the state of the art. We're discovering deep truths lurking in potentia in the shape of markets and harnessing them — putting them to work."

His eyes glittered. "Lukasz, you come in here with your handful of memos and you ask me to explain how they came about, as though this whole enterprise was a state-machine that we control. We do not control the enterprise. An enterprise is an artificial life-form built up from people and systems in order to minimize transaction costs so that it can be nimble and responsive, so that it can move into niches, dominate them, fully explore them. The human species has spent millennia recombining its institutions to uncover the deep, profound mathematics of power and efficiency.

"It's a terrain with a lot of cul-de-sacs and blind alleys. There are local maxima: maybe a three-move lookahead shows a good outcome from evicting someone who's pregnant and behind on the rent, but the six-move picture is different, because someone like you comes along and makes us look like total assholes. That's fine. All that means is that we have to prune that branch of the tree, try a new direction. Hell, ideally, you'd be in there so early, and give us such a thoroughgoing kicking, that we'd be able to discover and abort the misfire before the payload had fully deployed. You'd be saving us opportunity cost. You'd be part of our chaos-monkey.

"Lukasz, you come in here with your whistleblower memos. But I'm not participating in a short-term exercise. Our mission here is to quantize, systematize, harness and perfect interactions.

"You come in here and you want me to explain, right now, what we're going to do about your piece of information. Here's your answer, Lukasz: we will integrate it. We will create models that incorporate disprovable hypotheses about it, we will test those models, and we will refine them. We will make your documents part of our inventory of clues about the underlying nature of deep reality. Does that answer satisfy you, Lukasz?"

I stood up. Through the whole monologue, Sergey's eyes had not moved from mine, nor had his body-language shifted, nor had he demonstrated one glimmer of excitement or passion. Instead, he'd been matter-of-fact, like he'd been explaining the best way to make an omelet or the optimal public transit route to a distant suburb. I was used to people geeking out about the stuff they did. I'd never experienced this before, though: it was the opposite of geeking out, or maybe a geeking out that went so deep that it went through passion and came out the other side.

It scared me. I'd encountered many different versions of hidebound authoritarianism, fought the rot-fungus in many guises, but this was not like anything I'd ever seen. It had a purity that was almost… seductive.

But beautiful was not the opposite of terrible. The two could easily co-exist.

"I hear that I'm going to get evicted when I get back to the Termite Mound — you've got a process-server waiting for me. That's what I hear."

Sergey shrugged. "And?"

"And? And what use is your deep truth to me if I'm out on the street?"

"What's your point?"

He was as mild and calm as a recorded airport safety announcement. There was something inhuman — transhuman? — in that dispassionate mein.

"Don't kick me out of my place."

"Ah. Excuse me a second."

He finished his tea, set the cup down and headed over to the lab. He chatted with them, touched their screens. The murmur drowned out any words. I didn't try to disguise the fact that I was watching them. There was a long period during which they said nothing, did not touch anything, just stared at the screens with their heads so close together they were almost touching. It was a kind of pantomime of psychic communications.

He came back. "Done," he said. "Is there anything else? We're pretty busy around here."

"Thank you," I said. "No, that's about it."

"All right then," he said. "Are you going to leave me your documents?"

"Yes," I said, and passed him a stack of hardcopies. He looked at the paper for a moment, folded the stack carefully at the middle and put it in one of the wide side-pockets of his beautifully tailored cardigan.

I found my way back down to the ground floor and was amazed to see that the sun was still up. It had felt like hours had passed while Sergey had talked to me, and I could have sworn that the light had faded in those tall windows. But, checking my drop, I saw that it was only three o'clock. I had to be getting home.

There was a process-server waiting ostentatiously in the walkway when I got home, but he looked at me and then down at his screen and then let me pass.

It was only once I was in my room that I realized I hadn't done anything about Bryan's eviction.

[laurents-laces]

Only 20 days left until TGR! Here's all my rambling that I couldn't fit on a bingo:

Jean just found out about Elodie's death, Jeremy lost his relationship with his sister, and Lucas is about to lose his brother. I think sibling relationships are gonna be really important in this book. I also hope we get to meet Cat's sister Vivi when she drops off the motorcycle for Jean

So excited for exy with the Trojans! I hope they actually take some of Jean's advice because he's really good at seeing people's strengths and weaknesses. And I hope they interact with other teams more than the Foxes do. It would help Jean see that the Trojans are actually pretty normal and the Ravens are the weird ones. He still thinks it's the other way around

Jean thinks of Kevin as Riko's Queen or the Court's Queen a few times in TSC. Does he see that title as a symbol of independence like Kevin does, or does he see it as Kevin still having a place in Riko's perfect court?

I'm obsessed with the way Jeremy narrates events without telling us a single one of his emotions. Does he miss having his little sister in the audience when he plays a big game? Did he have feelings for any of those boys who were "exactly the kind of guy [he] was prone to trip himself up over"? Why hasn't he dated anyone before? He loves USC because it feels private and safe, so does he not feel that way at home?

I need to know what Jeremy's family did to him. He calls his mother the devil and dislikes his last name and gets angry just at the mention of his step grandfather. It's such an extreme reaction from a guy who barely says anything negative about anyone

I feel like Jeremy's family issues are gonna be too weird for anyone to predict. But I think his part of the story is going to be less about redeeming himself from past mistakes and more about letting his friends support him instead of acting like he's fine all the time

I think Jean might really struggle with holding back when they play against more violent teams. Would suck if it costs him a spot on the starting lineup, but maybe it would be good for him to see that there aren't any consequences for failing to be the best

I think Neil and Andrew might be too busy with Aaron's trial to go with Kevin to California but Jean thinks of them too often for them to not be relevant at some point, whether now or in book 3

I think Jean saying he learned the hard way not to look at another man too long has something to do with Kevin and the incident his freshman year. It's really weird that Riko only told Kevin half of the truth of what happened

"You cannot save me from what came before, and you help neither of us by trying to dig up those graves. Leave Evermore to me and Dobson... Help me survive what comes next.” I hope his friends listen to him about this. And I hope he starts actually talking to Betsy. He seems like he wants to, he's just worried it won't actually help

The way Jean describes the people he loves is so intense. We got some really lovely thoughts about Kevin and Renee from him in TSC, and I can't wait to see how he'll be when he gets to know Jeremy better. I don't think they'll be able to beat "you are a pipe dream" but I'd be thrilled to be proven wrong

[baphometsss]

I'm so confused about where people are getting the idea that Solas loves talking to kids from . I think, maybe, the projection here is making people push the envelope on his characterisation a bit

Like what part of this man being annoyed at the noise they make when he whinges at Blackwall for loudly training them outside his room has people thinking that this guy would love kids ?

Let's be real. He'd tolerate them at most. Even his own (especially his own good gord that man has enough self-hate to fill a reservoir). He's even annoyed by Cole following him around and nagging him about the talisman. He makes a typically bitchy remark about it. Can you imagine him with a toddler bugging the shit out of him while he's trying to work? Or screaming when he meditates? Getting filth all over his precious books and artefacts?

I mean I'm very open about my own child-adverse projections but I do genuinely think he would not be particularly child-friendly. Solas screams someone who's internally thinking 'get that thing away from me' every time a child is invading his space too much. It's odd to me that there are so many people who have the white picket fence fantasy with the egg of all people. Cullen is right there for that. Hell, even Bull would fit the brief pretty well.

Like YES he would love teaching them and helping them learn but otherwise he would be the most hands-off father in existence and TRUST ME when I say hands-off fathers are a nightmare. I've seen more than enough women come close to tearing their hair out because their partners/co-parents only help with the bits they're interested in. (I.e. playtime, not cleaning or nappy changing or dealing with tantrums or behavioural issues etc ETC!!) I would not want Solas as a co-parent. I really wouldn't, and if you were even a little bit realistic about what it would entail I don't think you'd want it for your Lavellan either lol

(Yes I'm being a little OTT but that's what Tumblr's for lmao)

Idk man outside of Tumblr just being for funsies and not taking it too seriously it does kinda worry me bc so many people just do not think about what constant ballache parenthood is. Once the novelty of picking a name and seeing what your kid looks like wears off you're left with a crushing responsibility that does not go away for 18+ years. Sure, those responsibilities shift a bit as time goes on as they mature and become more independent. But you do have to make a lot of sacrifices. You don't have any time to just be a person anymore. You have to have your eye on them pretty much constantly for the first few years. You have to change everything. You have to become a different person.

Maybe I'm just thinking about this a lot bc I'm at an age where people around me have started popping kids out and I can see what a nightmare it is. (That and my mother has been pressuring me to breed since I was like 12 and has only recently accepted that that is Not Happening.) Idk I just wish more people would think about what parenthood is gonna be like before they make a decision that doesn't have an undo button. I don't think many people in fandom have kids or have thought about what it really entails and it shows in fanworks lol

[two-bees-poetry]

titles for my wip (a fun poll)

So, I haven't talked about my fiction at all on here! Fiction is what I started writing when I was maybe 10, and I fell in love with the early-20th-century mystery novel when I was 11 or 12. Fun fact about yours truly: I have more Agatha Christie novels than will fit on a single bookshelf.

I'm currently working on a mystery novel- with lesbians! Crucially. Because it's me. Here's the premise:

The year is 1948. Judith Mitchell (Jude) has made a modest life for herself in Boston. She's an artist, specializing in portraiture, and things are pretty good. She counts herself lucky when she's hired by the wealthy Armistead and Catharine Lord, who want portraits painted of themselves and their children, so she drives down to their estate in South Carolina, where she has been invited to stay. She's surprised, however, at the amount of hatred that many of the family members seem to feel for one another, and she's surprised when Armistead, one morning, turns up dead.

The prime suspect is 20-year-old Maggie Lord, Catharine's illegitimate daughter, whom Armistead despised. Jude is certain that Maggie could not have done it- Maggie seems to want to melt into the floor of every room she stands in, and Jude can't believe she'd have the guts. However, she's the town pariah, and with some of her own siblings leading the crusade against her, it seems like there's only one thing she and Jude can do to prove her innocence; find the real killer.

There we are! We've got post-war, Southern gothic lesbians (spoilers: they fall in love) recovering from family trauma while solving a mystery that was loosely inspired by Antigone (again, because it's me).

These are my ideas for a working title. They're all lifted from Antigone, but I can't remember for the life of me which translation I took them from.

Tell me what you think! Do you want to hear more about Jude and Maggie? I love them very much and I would love to introduce them to you (I also have drawings of them).

[beeholyshit]

2 of my neurons just made synapses

Thinking about Glitchy and M3ga mmmm

[sysig]

Dr. “Has to get a good grade in therapy” Doran (Patreon)

[zuzu-romeave]

man if we get canon alloromantic brad im gona. lose my mind

[v1rtualtrash]

Gijinka so good it got a sequel

[alternautxyz]

uuhhh in other new that lmk s5 trailer dropped and people are very

mixed

for context the new season is being partly animated by wildbrain i think. flying bark is still working on the show but probably due to all the other projects they've been working on like the atla movie the animation is off.

its understandable that people are upset. lmk has some of the most consistently dynamic and lively animation ive ever seen, and going from that to ok animation kinda sucks. as a culmination of a lot of what the series has been building up to people were inevitably going to be disappointed

at the same time people shouldnt harass animators. like ever. no amount of trying to petition or anything will change the s5, people are just trying to do their job and theres no probably no major changing to the finished product by now. and theres still a lot of that lmk charm in there, and we haven't even seen the whole season yet to judge it. flying bark is still working on it, and even if the animation never reaches the peak of the old seasons it still has the same writers so at least the writing has the chance to live up old standards. idk though we'll just have to wait and see

[jils-things]

2024 is probably not my best year now that i think about it

[vegley]

hi guys ^_^

[longagoitwastuesday]

Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie as Heathcliff and Cathy seems like out of The Onion

[itsseriouslyridiculous]

I really hate how my physical body looks so so so much. unfortunately there isn't much I can do about it.