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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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Brian Merchant’s “Blood In the Machine”

Tomorrow (September 27), I'll be at Chevalier's Books in Los Angeles with Brian Merchant for a joint launch for my new book The Internet Con and his new book, Blood in the Machine. On October 2, I'll be in Boise to host an event with VE Schwab.

In Blood In the Machine, Brian Merchant delivers the definitive history of the Luddites, and the clearest analysis of the automator's playbook, where "entrepreneurs'" lawless extraction from workers is called "innovation" and "inevitable":

https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/brian-merchant/blood-in-the-machine/9780316487740/

History is written by the winners, and so you probably think of the Luddites as brainless, terrified, thick-fingered vandals who smashed machines and burned factories because they didn't understand them. Today, "Luddite" is a slur that means "technophobe" – but that's neither fair, nor accurate.

Luddism has been steadily creeping into pro-labor technological criticism, as workers and technology critics reclaim the term and its history, which is a rich and powerful tale of greed versus solidarity, slavery versus freedom.

The true tale of the Luddites starts with workers demanding that the laws be upheld. When factory owners began to buy automation systems for textile production, they did so in violation of laws that required collaboration with existing craft guilds – laws designed to ensure that automation was phased in gradually, with accommodations for displaced workers. These laws also protected the public, with the guilds evaluating the quality of cloth produced on the machine, acting as a proxy for buyers who might otherwise be tricked into buying inferior goods.

Factory owners flouted these laws. Though the machines made cloth that was less durable and of inferior weave, they sold it to consumers as though it were as good as the guild-made textiles. Factory owners made quiet deals with orphanages to send them very young children who were enslaved to work in their factories, where they were routinely maimed and killed by the new machines. Children who balked at the long hours or attempted escape were viciously beaten (the memoir of one former child slave became a bestseller and inspired Oliver Twist).

The craft guilds begged Parliament to act. They sent delegations, wrote petitions, even got Members of Parliament to draft legislation ordering enforcement of existing laws. Instead, Parliament passed laws criminalizing labor organizing.

The stakes were high. Economic malaise and war had driven up the price of life's essentials. Workers displaced by illegal machines faced starvation – as did their children. Communities were shattered. Workers who had apprenticed for years found themselves graduating into a market that had no jobs for them.

This is the context in which the Luddite uprisings began. Secret cells of workers, working with discipline and tight organization, warned factory owners to uphold the law. They sent letters and posted handbills in which they styled themselves as the army of "King Ludd" or "General Ludd" – Ned Ludd being a mythical figure who had fought back against an abusive boss.

When factory owners ignored these warnings, the Luddites smashed their machines, breaking into factories or intercepting machines en route from the blacksmith shops where they'd been created. They won key victories, with many factory owners backing off from automation plans, but the owners were deep-pocketed and determined.

The ruling Tories had no sympathy for the workers and no interest in upholding the law or punishing the factory owners for violating it. Instead, they dispatched troops to the factory towns, escalating the use of force until England's industrial centers were occupied by literal armies of soldiers. Soldiers who balked at turning their guns on Luddites were publicly flogged to death.

I got very interested in the Luddites in late 2021, when it became clear that everything I thought I knew about the Luddites was wrong. The Luddites weren't anti-technology – rather, they were doing the same thing a science fiction writer does: asking not just what a new technology does, but also who it does it for and who it does it to:

https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/

Unsurprisingly, ever since I started publishing on this subject, I've run into people who have no sympathy for the Luddite cause and who slide into my replies to replicate the 19th Century automation debate. One such person accused the Luddites of using "state violence" to suppress progress.

You couldn't ask for a more perfect example of how the history of the Luddites has been forgotten and replaced with a deliberately misleading account. The "state violence" of the Luddite uprising was entirely on one side. Parliament, under the lackadaisical leadership of "Mad King George," imposed the death penalty on the Luddites. It wasn't just machine-breaking that became a capital crime – "oath taking" (swearing loyalty to the Luddites) also carried the death penalties.

As the Luddites fought on against increasingly well-armed factory owners (one owner bought a cannon to use on workers who threatened his machines), they were subjected to spectacular acts of true state violence. Occupying soldiers rounded up Luddites and suspected Luddites and staged public mass executions, hanging them by the dozen, creating scores widows and fatherless children.

The sf writer Steven Brust says that the test to tell whether someone is on the right or the left is simple: ask whether property rights are more important than human rights. If the person says "property rights are human rights," they are on the right.

The state response to the Luddites crisply illustrates this distinction. The Luddites wanted an orderly and lawful transition to automation, one that brought workers along and created shared prosperity and quality goods. The craft guilds took pride in their products, and saw themselves as guardians of their industry. They were accustomed to enjoying a high degree of bargaining power and autonomy, working from small craft workshops in their homes, which allowed them to set their own work pace, eat with their families, and enjoy modest amounts of leisure.

The factory owners' cause wasn't just increased production – it was increased power. They wanted a workforce that would dance to their tune, work longer hours for less pay. They wanted unilateral control over which products they made and what corners they cut in making those products. They wanted to enrich themselves, even if that meant that thousands starved and their factory floors ran red with the blood of dismembered children.

The Luddites destroyed machines. The factory owners killed Luddites, shooting them at the factory gates, or rounding them up for mass executions. Parliament deputized owners to act as extensions of law enforcement, allowing them to drag suspected Luddites to their own private cells for questioning.

The Luddites viewed property rights as just one instrument for achieving human rights – freedom from hunger and cold – and when property rights conflicted with human rights, they didn't hesitate to smash the machines. For them, human rights trumped property rights.

Their bosses – and their bosses' modern defenders – saw the demands to uphold the laws on automation as demands to bring "state violence" to bear on the wholly private matter of how a rich man should organize his business. On the other hand, literal killing – both on the factory floor and at the gallows – was not "state violence" but rather, a defense of the most important of all the human rights: the rights of property owners.

19th century textile factories were the original Big Tech, and the rhetoric of the factory owners echoes down the ages. When tech barons like Peter Thiel say that "freedom is incompatible with democracy," he means that letting people who work for a living vote will eventually lead to limitations on people who own things for a living, like him.

Then, as now, resistance to Big Tech enjoyed widespread support. The Luddites couldn't have organized in their thousands if their neighbors didn't have their backs. Shelley and Byron wrote widely reproduced paeans to worker uprisings (Byron also defended the Luddites in the House of Lords). The Brontes wrote Luddite novels. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was a Luddite novel, in which the monster was a sensitive, intelligent creature who merely demanded a say in the technology that created him.

The erasure of the true history of the Luddites was a deliberate act. Despite the popular and elite support the Luddites enjoyed, the owners and their allies in Parliament were able to crush the uprising, using mass murder and imprisonment to force workers to accept immiseration.

The entire supply chain of the textile revolution was soaked in blood. Merchant devotes multiple chapters to the lives of African slaves in America who produced the cotton that the machines in England wove into cloth. Then – as now – automation served to obscure the violence latent in production of finished goods.

But, as Merchant writes, the Luddites didn't lose outright. Historians who study the uprisings record that the places where the Luddites fought most fiercely were the places where automation came most slowly and workers enjoyed the longest shared prosperity.

The motto of Magpie Killjoy's seminal Steampunk Magazine was: "Love the machine, hate the factory." The workers of the Luddite uprising were skilled technologists themselves.

They performed highly technical tasks to produce extremely high-quality goods. They served in craft workshops and controlled their own time.

The factory increased production, but at the cost of autonomy. Factories and their progeny, like assembly lines, made it possible to make more goods (even goods that eventually rose the quality of the craft goods they replaced), but at the cost of human autonomy. Taylorism and other efficiency cults ended up scripting the motions of workers down to the fingertips, and workers were and are subject to increasing surveillance and discipline from their bosses if they deviate. Take too many pee breaks at the Amazon warehouse and you will be marked down for "time off-task."

Steampunk is a dream of craft production at factory scale: in steampunk fantasies, the worker is a solitary genius who can produce high-tech finished goods in their own laboratory. Steampunk has no "dark, satanic mills," no blood in the factory. It's no coincidence that steampunk gained popularity at the same time as the maker movement, in which individual workers use form digital communities. Makers networked together to provide advice and support in craft projects that turn out the kind of technologically sophisticated goods that we associate with vast, heavily-capitalized assembly lines.

But workers are losing autonomy, not gaining it. The steampunk dream is of a world where we get the benefits of factory production with the life of a craft producer. The gig economy has delivered its opposite: craft workers – Uber drivers, casualized doctors and dog-walkers – who are as surveilled and controlled as factory workers.

Gig workers are dispatched by apps, their faces closely studied by cameras for unauthorized eye-movements, their pay changed from moment to moment by an algorithm that docks them for any infraction. They are "reverse centaurs": workers fused to machines where the machine provides the intelligence and the human does its bidding:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/reverse-centaur/#reverse-centaur

Craft workers in home workshops are told that they're their own bosses, but in reality they are constantly monitored by bossware that watches out of their computers' cameras and listens through its mic. They have to pay for the privilege of working for their bosses, and pay to quit. If their children make so much as a peep, they can lose their jobs. They don't work from home – they live at work:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/22/paperback-writer/#toothless

Merchant is a master storyteller and a dedicated researcher. The story he weaves in Blood In the Machine is as gripping as any Propublica deep-dive into the miserable working conditions of today's gig economy. Drawing on primary sources and scholarship, Blood is a kind of Nomadland for Luddites.

Today, Merchant is the technology critic for the LA Times. The final chapters of Blood brings the Luddites into the present day, finding parallels in the labor organizing of the Amazon warehouse workers led by Chris Smalls. The liberal reformers who offered patronizing support to the Luddites – but didn't imagine that they could be masters of their own destiny – are echoed in the rhetoric of Andrew Yang.

And of course, the factory owners' rhetoric is easily transposed to the modern tech baron. Then, as now, we're told that all automation is "progress," that regulatory evasion (Uber's unlicensed taxis, Airbnb's unlicensed hotel rooms, Ring's unregulated surveillance, Tesla's unregulated autopilot) is "innovation." Most of all, we're told that every one of these innovations must exist, that there is no way to stop it, because technology is an autonomous force that is independent of human agency. "There is no alternative" – the rallying cry of Margaret Thatcher – has become our inevitablist catechism.

Squeezing the workers' wages conditions and weakening workers' bargaining power isn't "innovation." It's an old, old story, as old as the factory owners who replaced skilled workers with terrified orphans, sending out for more when a child fell into a machine. Then, as now, this was called "job creation."

Then, as now, there was no way to progress as a worker: no matter how skilled and diligent an Uber driver is, they can't buy their medallion and truly become their own boss, getting a say in their working conditions. They certainly can't hope to rise from a blue-collar job on the streets to a white-collar job in the Uber offices.

Then, as now, a worker was hired by the day, not by the year, and might find themselves with no work the next day, depending on the whim of a factory owner or an algorithm.

As Merchant writes: robots aren't coming for your job; bosses are. The dream of a "dark factory," a "fully automated" Tesla production line, is the dream of a boss who doesn't have to answer to workers, who can press a button and manifest their will, without negotiating with mere workers. The point isn't just to reduce the wage-bill for a finished good – it's to reduce the "friction" of having to care about others and take their needs into account.

Luddites are not – and have never been – anti-technology. Rather, they are pro-human, and see production as a means to an end: broadly shared prosperity. The automation project says it's about replacing humans with machines, but over and over again – in machine learning, in "contactless" delivery, in on-demand workforces – the goal is to turn humans into machines.

There is blood in the machine, Merchant tells us, whether its humans being torn apart by a machine, or humans being transformed into machines.

Brian and I are having a joint book-launch tomorrow night (Sept 27) at Chevalier's Books in Los Angeles for my new book The Internet Con and his new book, Blood in the Machine:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-internet-con-by-cory-doctorow-blood-in-the-machine-by-brian-merchant-tickets-696349940417

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/2023/09/26/enochs-hammer/#thats-fronkonsteen

#pluralistic #books #reviews #brian merchant #luddism #automation #history #gift guide #steampunk #makers #tina #inevitablism #reverse centaurs #amazon #arise

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celestiancrown · 2 months

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I've seen a lot of discourse about fandoms lately. Lots of people out there being terminally online. Now, I'm just some chick with a blog, but I might offer my two cents. This post mostly concerns antishippers and booktok, but it also has broader implications about censorship as a whole.

I'll start off with a pet peeve.

To me, having a DNI list is pointless and like having a digital sign that says "Kick Me" glued to your ass. It's just a convenient list of triggers and things you don't like provided free of charge to any jackass who wants to ruin your day. Putting everything that pisses you off out as a convenient list and then saying "please don't troll me!" is such a ridiculous concept to me. It doesn't do anything favorable for you at all. Personally, I theorize it's some kind of internet purity signal you put out in hopes that people that hate the same things as you won't assume you're in the out group.

But if you're that concerned about someone you don't like potentially following you, why not either block people you don't like? It might be hard to swallow, but you should accept the fact that putting yourself out there will inevitably result in this and you can't police everything. How terminally online do you have to be to comb through your follower list making sure everyone agrees with you? Who fucking cares?

Need I remind you, the censorship a lot of these people with the big dni lists want is a foot in the door for bad actors to start censoring queer people in media as a whole. We're already seeing it with websites that run on algorithms suppressing leftist and queer opinions and spaces because it's not marketable.

If you're advocating for media to be censored because it has things in it that make you uncomfortable, you're no better than Tipper Gore and the PMRC. You're no better than people who said D&D was the devil and we should all get rid of it because won't someone PLEASE think of the children. You're no better than those religious zealots burning LGBTQ library books in Virginia. I implore everyone reading this post, regardless of your opinions, to examine their perspective on what is acceptable. Is it truly worth the long-term consequences to remove things you deem problematic if the end result is totalitarian?

Sure, I'll probably get cancelled by people for saying this. There's a lotta shit I don't want to read out there. Hell, I don't want to read or experience any of the shit antis are mad about. The difference is just that I don't read it and don't fucking look for it instead of seeking it out and demanding it be erased. Please, I beg you, stop fucking caring so much about the interests of people you're never going to meet. If they make you upset, block them. Censorship isn't worth the consequences, and fiction doesn't affect reality.

#anti censorship #proship

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aroaessidhe · 20 days

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so, the saint martin's press boycott.

I was offline for a few days a week or two ago and during that time SMP made an (okay) statement, R4A deliberated and eventually accepted terms and declared an end to the boycott, people got mad at R4A because the statement wasn't good enough, R4A panicked a bit and basically ended up disbanding/deleting their content. I don't know all the details of everything, but here's some summarised thoughts, since I have been one of the only people posting about the boycott on here:

firstly - I did see SMP's statement and think, eh, it was better than their previous ones, but it was still noticeably very vague on the catalyst of all this (it mentions Islamophobia and Gaza but it's not really centred or as emphatic as it could be) - so I totally understand people being angry that it was seen as good enough. The boycott is because of anti-Palestinian bigotry and the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

However, people upset at R4A started claiming that there were no Palestinians/Muslims in R4A, that it was all white people, which are both untrue. There were accusations of sucking up to SMP bc people want arcs/money and typical internet dogpiling and threats, which is... not really productive at all, to say the least, and starts to drown out reasonable criticisms.

Some people (the ones that feel safe enough to come forward, which is not everyone, due to said threats) have come out and discussed exactly why R4A decided to end the boycott. Mari's video here is worth watching - essentially it's that SMP clearly made massive steps to meet the demands, and the ones they didn't they're legally not able to (ie any explicit reference to the employee or what they said would probably get them sued).

A large group of (primarily bipoc) SMP authors have started talking about how they were working behind the scenes to urge SMP to respond - and reiterated that yeah, there's no legal way for them to comment on what the employee said and did.

I think most people understand strikes/boycotts are about negotiation, not necessarily getting every single demand. And it's an immense achievement to get a major publisher to respond and make changes. The way R4A fell apart at the end is pretty disappointing - they genuinely had the platform to make a lot of change going forward, and I hope that the change that was made isn't going to be undone because of that.

It kind of seems like the people who are encouraging continuing to boycott have changed from a marketing boycott in order to bring change to just a 'this company did a bad thing so don't engage with it ever' boycott. Which is valid, but said company has no incentive to meet the demands in that case.

But I also totally understand the opinion that the point of this - racism against Palestinians amidst a genocide - has been pushed to the side. It's extremely reasonable to be angry while watching an ongoing genocide. It's very reasonable to want someone with such despicable views to be fired (even if there's no actionable way to make that happen, and that was never an r4a demand). SMP also hasn't made any kind of statement about the unsolicited sex toys they sent people either, so like....there's that too.

I haven't decided exactly what I'll do - I've only read two SMP books since this started and tbh there's only a handful of other SMP books I'm interested in reading. But I'm considering, if I do decide to post those, donating the cost of a book to a GFM/esim/etc any time I read/review a SMP book. That feels like the most direct thing to bring things back to the point.

#Unfortunately there's no easy answer of an equal balance of their actions vs doable community response yaknow... there's a lot of variables #saint martin's press #speakupsmp #speak up smp #booklr #saint martin's press boycott #smp boycott #laya talks

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doiefics · 1 year

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hyunjin saves the day

pairing: hyunjin x afab!reader

prologue: when life goes hectic, some people bring in a lot of comfort, you can count on hyunjin on a stressful day

genre: fluff + established relationship!au

wordcount: 657

warnings: none

Twenty-seven missed calls, innumerable text messages, and left voicemails. All of these were sent to you in a mere span of two hours. Facing your phone and going through this could cause only one thing, panic.

For the past two hours, you had remained isolated from the rest of the world.

Giving presentations on the growing demand for global and accessible internet marketing to your clients sounded a bit dullbut was the necessity.

You were stressed thinking of the worst possibilities.

Why would your five year old’s school call you at unexpected hours? The mother's brain was only stuck at one question, was he alright?

You immediately took your leave from your corporate building, storming into your car and driving abruptly to your son’s kindergarten.

Your heart rate increased as you reached the reception to inquire about the matter. The only thing you needed right now was to hold your son in your hands.

Even though you had previous thoughts of dropping him when his father fled away after learning about your pregnancy, in the present time, your son was your motivation to live.

“Yes, Ms. Y/N. Ye-Jun injured himself during the swimming session today. We tried to reach out to you but didn’t receive any response back.” The woman who appeared to be one of the school’s authorities stated with a rather questionable look on her face, judging you.

It was not something new for you. Everyday societal condemnation for being a single mother, being portrayed as some careless and unempathetic individual for still pursuing your career.

You thought to yourself as you drove back home to your little one.

“Ding Dong” the bell alarmed, and the doors of your apartment opened for you only to see your son, Ye-Jun, messily covered in chocolate, gummy bears and food sparkles accessoried with a spider man bandaid on his tiny forehead.

The little pororo apron, in addition made it evident he had been creating some mess in the kitchen.

“Look, Mumma’s back home! Give her a hug!” exclaimed Hyunjin.

You still remember your first date. You did not want to lose a person like him, would he also leave? Aafterall you lacked the “youth tag’ while still in your twenties.

But Hyunjin was different.

Recalling his and Ye-Jun’s first meeting, and you sure had never been that nervous before.

Would your then four year old accept a random guy you bring home as his mother’s partner, and in the bigger picture, his dad figure? That stage of your life was filled with doubts, insecurities and questions to say the least.

Luckily it only took Hyunjin one Woody x Buzz Lightyear impersonation to pass your son’s vibe check and ever since they had been gelling well together.

It was not long back when he earned the 'dad' title during the 'Bring Your Dad to School Day' when Ye-Jun suddenly blurted out the word.

Later that night, after cleaning up and dinner, you tucked your son into his bed, caressing his wound and still blaming yourself the same, for never being there for him when he needed you the most. You did not even realize when the tears started to well in your weary eyes.

Suddenly, you felt a pair of arms wrap around you. Obviously, it was Hyunjin who hummed sweetly as he brushed his nose to your nape.

“Is there something on your mind? You know I’m always all ears for that.” He affirmed.

“Nah, it’s just, Ye-Jun, I’m somehow always absent whenever he needs me”. You explained out.

“Come on, Y/N! Isn’t it too harsh to blame yourself for everything? He suggested.

"Have you ever thought that no one can do what you can do?” He continued.

"To be honest, if I were you I would believe that every day of my life." And he continued to answer his own questions, earning a mini giggle from you.

Hyunjin sure did know how to save an awful day.

masterlist please refrain from plagiarising, translating or posting outside of this platform

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idontknowreallywhy · 4 months

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I was just trying to get a grip on my WIPs folder and had a teeny headdesk moment about how many there are and did I really just start another… so I made this list then because I’ve seen other people do it and it seems amusing I figured, hey, why not make a “what should I update next?” poll cos polls are fun…

Disclaimer… there is likely to be very little correlation between what wins and what I actually produce because brain does not work to demand but as I have plans for all of these stories and have toyed with them all over the last few weeks… who knows how it might go.

#thunderbirds are go #thunderbirds #thunderbirds fanfiction #WIP backlog #no promises

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wmarximoff · 2 years

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skeleton in the closet | w. maximoff

|spooktober collection|

summary: life married to Wanda Maximoff is as simple as it gets, and everything is as it should be. but old skeletons in the closet comes to light in your hometown, where the two of you lived during your teenage years, when the body of Pietro Maximoff, Wanda's twin brother, is found after nearly twenty years of being missing.

warnings (18+): dark!reader, dark!Wanda, explicit description of stabbing, explicit description of blood, explicit description of dead body, manipulation, explicit description of physical violence, allusions to homophobia.

pairing: Wanda x fem!reader

word count: 8k

A/N: and we're finally on spooktober, guys! seriously, i'm really excited for the fics to come this month. so, to get a sense of what our vibe's gonna be like from now on, i think this story is a good starting point (but remember that if dark things aren't exactly your cup of tea, you don't need to read this)

|main masterlist| |spooktober masterlist|

༺ᱬ༻

The autumnal chills made the lapels of your coat rustle against your chest. The transition to the cold climate began to gradually slip through the daily life, and the dark nights came to establish their veil into the beautiful celestial vault dazzles. Leaves taking on earthy tones fell from the trees like sand spilled over desert dunes. The birds returned south in flocks. It was October, as so many others had been and so many more would be. Soon it would be time to pick pumpkins and try to find god knows where a cloak for Billy's sorcerer costume.

As you unlocked the hardwood door dyed a deep pearly white color, entering your small family capsule, cloistered in the depths of a quiet neighborhood, turning with your right wrist clockwise twice at a broken one hundred and eighty degree angle, you found your nose greeted by an enticing aroma of food fresh from the oven, which in response had your stomach churning like a wild buffalo inside your abdomen.

The long rainy morning and the even lengthier gray afternoon had worn you down as a member of the working class, it’s true – your spine leaning against the hard back of the swivel chair, blinking slowly with your bright, demanding eyes, intent on your own words, wondering about your work displayed on the thin monitor sprinkled in its frame by notes on small yellow pieces of paper. Acting as if the internet and blogging hadn't incited an unrestrained crash in your job market.

That typical office job worthy of a big-city journalist's career (articles, write articles for the Daily Bugle, thank J. Jonah Jameson so the mustachioed bastard gives you a raise) that at the end of the day goes back to their residential neighborhood that didn't feel like it should exist in the bowels of New York, to sit in a leather armchair and open a cold beer with a hard click. But at that time of year, beer could well be switched for a steaming mug of hot chocolate with marshmallows and cinnamon swimming in the thickly sweetened brew.

You, however, still within your archetypal office journalist, only craved for a few silent minutes in your wife's arms in search of some comfort in your soul, because your marriage was not bankrupt as your profession made it seem as it was. Wanda still loved you as much as she had almost two decades ago, and you could only breathe if your wife gave you permission to do so. Everything seemed to be as it always should be.

You then hung your keys right next to the door, rotating both your shoulders out of the dark linen coat Wanda had told you once made you look like a stern, sexy college professor, playing with the authority worthy of a title you didn't really hold; it was your wife who did it, after all, and she allowed you to steal that coat tucked on her hanger because she said it looked better on you anyway – even though you only knew that something frugally possessive about Wanda liked to see you in her clothes, exhaling the soft floral effluvia of her perfume as if to mark her territory on your body.

Your breath still gave indications of warm, full-bodied coffee, a trace of that busy afternoon that needed some sort of stimulant—a drink from a plastic cup with your name written on the side in black marker pen; this one that, earlier that day, had been placed next to a framed picture of your family on your desk, next to a “Best Mom Ever” mug in bold letters with a handful of colored pens inside just to your left, close to your elbow.

With placid strides deferred to the wooden floor, imbued with an unpretentiousness when within the walls of your own house, you then set off with your wife's coat folded over the length of your right forearm raised to the height of your ribs, pressed against the length of your abdomen, hanging there as if to emulate the pose of a waiter in a suit at a fancy restaurant.

Upon entering the living room, however, seated on a light cream fabric sofa, you were faced with only the tops of two small heads that lavished thick locks of dark brown hair – a pair of little boys glazed over in artificial colors, your twin sons born ten years and eleven months ago.

They didn't agree on much with each other very often, from time to time fighting over toys as the ontology of having a sibling demands, but they were always close to each other's shoulders at the end of the day, just like they did inside the womb they shared for a whole nine months. A few feet in front of you, a thin television, securely screwed to the wall, flashed some action cartoon you were not very familiar with.

And you smiled with quiet lips and walked to the back of the sofa, where you lowered your spine and, without a word, placed a warm kiss on top of each of the two vanilla-scented chestnut-colored heads, receiving in response a series of dull whining – the protestor of the day, however, as it had always been, was Tommy and not Billy.

“Well, hello to you too, little dude.”

“Mom!” grumbled the little boy with eyes the same color as yours, in a slurred tone that actually sounded annoyed, craning his neck as if you'd stuck gum in his hair, “C’mon, I'm too old for this!”

"Oh, I'm sorry Tom, I almost forgot you're a big boy now that you're ten. My mistake, really,” you crooned in an air of laughter before smiling at the grumpy young boy, who squinted his eyes at you and frowned with his sparse dark brows.

“I am! I don't need to be treated like a baby all the time anymore!”

“‘Course you are, kid, I didn't say anything to the contrary. You're practically an adult now, what the heck.”

He had a fine chin and a gently upturned nose speckled with freckles like the stars spaced across the night sky. However, as boyish he was, his temper was just so solemnly contrary to his affable teddy bear with a bow tie appearance, an explosive den of undisputed bravery. Your gaze then decided to settle on the figure of Billy, always so much more serene and courteous when opposed to his energetic brother, who was offered a smart smile on your part, narrowing your eyes and raising both of your eyebrows towards him.

“And what about you, bud,” you questioned him without bothering to betray the mockery in your tone, “Are you too old to get a kiss on the head from your mom too?”

“I'm not,” he winked, scrunching a flash of skin over his little nose in a totally, genetically Wanda way, “I like it when you kiss me on the head, mom.”

“See, Tommy,” you turned your chin towards the other twin's freckles, “Billy is ten too and he still likes to get a kiss on the head. It doesn't hurt to like it, you know. You can be tough and still like your mom, just for a change.”

The other boy, in an embarrassed guinea pig squeak, traced the path between your face and Billy's before nurturing his twisted lips into a silly little pout; the stubborn Maximoff gene played out so much more in Tommy than it did in his brother, who hadn't gotten much more from your wife's family tree than the firm, sharp bone structure of his cheekbones and his soon to be smooth jawbone.

“Fine,” Thomas grumbled crookedly in a quick desistance, “You can still kiss me mom, geez.”

“Fine,” you said then, “Because I wasn't going to stop doing it anyway,” and Billy chuckled softly as it was that you turned your face to deposit a new, quick, wet little kiss on Tommy's rosy cheek, smacking your lips against his soft skin.

“Don't think you'll get rid of my kisses anytime soon, mister.”

Leaving the living room then with an impish smile well warped in the commission of your lips, you were directed by the smell of roast chicken that had covered the house like a sheet of flavors, and with slow steps, you let yourself walk across the matte floor in toward the kitchen, to the sacred source of the aroma of fresh-baked food.

You passed a spacious hallway with pale walls, whose faces, interspersed with casual, well-appointed furniture, held photographs of pivotal moments for that family of four (everyone sporting delightful, pearly-beautiful smiles with spasms of hearty glee, say cheese Tommy, look over here Billy, no Y/n, you can't take a picture grimacing for our Christmas card, a break for a round of lively laughter, stop it, Y/n!).

Wanda cherished them with all her heart, as for while she herself was just a lonely child, the walls of the house she lived in were all foreboding and empty, like an excruciating scream in a dark room.

There were no ugly itchy Christmas sweaters or big, fed up Thanksgiving dinners in the family album of Erik Lehnsherr, a high-profile political figure in a well-buttoned jacket and an golden watch screwed to his firm wrist, and Magda Maximoff, a dreary housewife soaked in wine and draped in expensive pearls, a couple married for sheer convenience — no pictures of their own set of twin children, none of the gritty boy or even the always so quiet little girl unwrapping some of their birthday presents by the fireplace, toys bought carelessly with unimportant cash deducted from an unlimited credit card.

But already in the life of an adult, married woman, a mother, that household you two formed together was like a being of its own, as alive as it could be.

A being of pipe bones, brick skin and a happy family heart, who breathed through impromptu Saturday breakfasts and old movie nights snuggled on the couch surrounded by buttered popcorn and cups of iced cinnamon apple tea. The kind of home that is familiar without any hesitation. A generally imposing house, but not enough to be challenging.

So, as you entered the airy white-walled kitchen, an cozy countenance expressed itself through the soberly relaxed muscles of your face, and you couldn't help but evoke a tender smile at what you saw before you – after all it was her, it would always be her.

Wanda had her back to you, her long fire-flaming hair falling over her porcelain shoulders and halfway up her spine like a high forest fire, ready to incinerate you too. It gave off a lovely scent of wild strawberries interspersed with glossy locks that you were fond of sticking your nose in and sniffing that eclectic scent every night before bed.

“Yes, I…I understand. I do, I swear I do.”

It wasn't until the sound of her low voice, in a watery tone that pretends she's not about to burst into tears, that you realized that Wanda's phone was being pressed against the shell of her right ear, a distant green gaze scrutinizing the wet dark of the sink drain. A curious brow of yours rose to your forehead as she faced the raw words in an uncharacteristically Wanda tone, afforded with her deck of cards congruent with dreary answers fitting only in very unfortunate situations.

“I'll try to get there as soon as possible. I'll– I'll talk to Y/n. We'll be there early in the morning. Tomorrow, yes, tomorrow,” Wanda turned on her heel, shimmering with emerald eyes at you, who was caught in her sight like a deer in the bright headlights of a car on the dark road – she frowned, her rosy lips curled intemperately.

Ah, there you are, Wanda said with her eyes in a dull green like the slime that grows on a tiny rock in front of a profuse lake. Something happened and I need you here with me.

“No, I– I know this is a priority,” she sighed a breath of warm air, deflating her chest from under a fresh-blood-colored cashmere cardigan, “I know. I do. I'll be there as soon as possible, father. Don't worry.”

Silence engulfed all four walls of the kitchen as the call then came to an end, though neither of the two parties has properly bid farewell to the other. It was an emergency, your startled senses heightened. Erik would never call if it wasn't an emergency.

A tremor along the length of your spine from the back of your neck alerted you that something was wrong. Saliva choked in Wanda's throat, and she lowered her smartphone to then laid it facedown against the stone kitchen island. She looked at you. You looked at her.

The blood flowing through your veins cooled down at the incognito facet that expressed itself through the dull face of your so gorgeous wife, who had her brown eyebrows curled in a calliginous way and an opaque veil clouding her jade-colored gaze, gauging pale shades of awestruck green to her hollow irises – terror climbing the length of your esophagus, her hands fluttering through the auburn length of her long hair before initiating the fidget act with her own pale fingertips, the two of you sharing a brooding pose, which exhaled a scent of anguish through the kitchen environment.

“Wanda,” there was an exchange of apprehensive looks between you and her, “Wanda, honey, what's wrong? What’s going on? Did... did something happen...? Erik... is your father all right?”

“Y/n...”

She opened her mouth, but nothing came out and so Wanda tried to collapse her peach lips again, to swallow the lump tied to her vocal cords. One look was enough for you to know that in Wanda's chest was an atrocious disease known as dread.

And your first instinct in the face of your wife's frightened figure was to slash through the kitchen like lightning, to shelter her haggard body against your own welcoming torso when her muscles chose to disassemble, like an ancient millenary structure that comes to the ground. It was like catching a rag doll in a free fall.

“Hey, hey, it's alright, sweetheart,” you whispered against her red hair, “Alright, alright, I'm here. I’m here with you, Wanda,” and then, a long kiss was bestowed on the pale skin of her right temple, near the last strand of a dark eyebrow.

“Y/n, they found it,” she sobbed in a whimpering murmur against the warm skin of your neck, her hands crawling like a pair of spiders up the fabric on the back of your blouse, “T-they, they found it...”

“They found what, Wanda?” you asked her mutely against her earlobe, “Who found what, baby? What’s going on?”

“A hiker in the woods,” your wife mussed in a thread of a pleading voice, “The police, they… they found Pietro's body... they found him... they found him...”

There was something eerie about Wanda's choked speech – something ominous, not of this world. And something in you flickered – your jawbone knocked, your sharp gaze blazing a stubborn roar of hopeless fear as your stomach dropped. Pietro, of course. Pietro’s body.

Pietro Maximoff, the prodigy athlete, the golden boy on the football team, the apple of his father's eye. The better twin. The missing twin, now earning the title of the twin found underground, the dead twin, the murdered twin.

The glow that always, always so unjustly overshadowed Wanda's charms. The boy this bitter couple had planned to have, the only child they could brag about, while Wanda had slipped out of the womb clinging to Pietro's neck, a particularly uninvited outsider to Erik who never stopped being more than that; more than the thing who came clinging to the boy he wanted to have, a nasty bonus.

Both your palms were sweaty against the back of her cardigan when you held Wanda tighter, the soft clothing leaving a feeling as rough as sandpaper against the tips of your so cautious fingers. You had to be there for her. You had to pull yourself together at that moment. Even if that shouldn't happen. Even if that's not how things were supposed to be.

“I–it's gonna be okay,” your voice no longer sounded like your own, it curled in an irresolute tone, your throat wavering in haste – and you masticated at your lower lip, your heart thudding against your ribcage in distress and the shrillest sensation of fear.

“It's gonna be okay, honey. It's gonna be okay. I’m here. Everything's gonna be okay.”

You kissed her strawberry head cork, your lips dry and your back sweating inside your thick blouse. Your skin turned cold against the warm of Wanda's hot tears. This wasn’t supposed to happen, not seventeen years later. Within that profuse forest, deep in the woods that surrounded the small town frame, no one should ever find anything in that unfathomable grave that you covered with pounds of soft earth when you were just eighteen years old.

ᗢ

“Why do we have to visit grandpa anyways?” whimpered Tommy, in that typical slurred intonation of a tantrum child who is frustrated at being annoyed, “It's not even Christmas yet!”

You were speechless for a few seconds, cluttering with the crimped bone of your jaw, holding up a tightly folded red shirt that you intended to stuff into Billy's blue backpack, through the open zipper like a hungry mouth for changes of clean clothes, so he could get dressed for the weekend.

It was a second taken to think of a wide range of explanations that there was no elucidation to be said in a way that a childish cognition could fully digest, understanding all the nuances carried in its broad meanings.

A second passed, almost taking up the shape of full minutes, until you turned your gaze towards the scowling little boy that was Tommy, who, with an observant ember sparking through the intrinsic color of his clever, harmless irises, stared at you in expectant anticipation for the resolution of his sly doubt.

He, after all, was your son, one of them. A boy to whom you owed explanations of the greatest mysteries that made up the universe just because a few years ago you and Wanda both wanted him to exist.

“Well, honey, you see, it's...” but the words, the correct ones, didn't come out of your mouth, which was left open like a big black hole lacking light, “It's... it's very important to your mama that we're going there tomorrow, Tommy. She needs it.”

“But why?” as his brother lulled him, however, it was Billy's turn to express the doubts that were hovering in his little head, who was in charge of the mission of folding a handful of pants and shirts.

“Yeah mom, why?” claimed Tommy one more time.

“Grandpa's house is weird,” Billy sustained, “It’s so big and smells like a dentist's office and old people. I don't like it there.”

“Well,” you made an unnatural sound that was a mockery of laughter, like a low battery toy, “Your grandpa is old, isn't he…? Don't ever tell him I said that.”

It was the extremes of the moderate hour of eight-thirty at night when you, with your twin children dressed in pajamas at your heels, found yourself in the softness of the boys' shared room – because they, always so united as in a only entity, would never be able to fall asleep in separate rooms, alone and dispersed in two dark corners, which was why there were then two empty guest rooms gathering dust within your house.

Clothed in their cotton pajamas strewn with tiny prints of colorful dinosaurs (red, green and blue too), the pair of little boys were by your side while you took care to pack their bags, willingly volunteering to do so when in front of Wanda's swollen, exhausted eyes, who had retreated to the master bedroom after a lifeless dinner that had surely troubled the two children's spirits.

Two pairs of little eyes then flickered towards your damp face. Just two curious children (your curious children) looking for an answer to their question before Wanda's only relative of whom they had empirical knowledge, the only one alive and yet so far away, whom they had not seen for a certain period of time, but that had sent them new toys the month before this one, on their birthday. You came out on a lame sigh, the coming headache brushing hot on a hard muscle at the back of your neck.

“Look, guys, I'm gonna be honest with you,” you uttered, tucking your knees into your comfy cotton sweatpants to sit on the edge of Billy's bed, putting the folded shirt aside.

“I know it can be a little… um, uncomfortable… to go to grandpa's house sometimes. Trust me, I... I really do. But we need to go there because... well, something serious has happened, and that's why grandpa needs mama there. You guys remember what I told you about mama's brother, right? Her twin brother, just like you two are.”

“Uncle P?” Tommy took the lead in the round of questions, taking a comfortable seat right next to your right elbow, “He left when you and mama were in high school. She said he’s far away from here. That makes her sad sometimes.”

“Yes, he… he's gone,” you bowed your head in a mechanical, hard motion, the words rancid against the face of your tongue, “Your uncle was… he was indeed far away from here, you know? But it turns out... that he was found recently. The cops found him, but… it wasn't in a good way, boys.”

“What happened to him, mom?”

Billy's eyes pointed upward towards your gloomy face, as a complement to his doubt; the little dark brow furrowed in demand for a congruent resolution to his brooding inquiry. You turned your chin at an angle towards your left collarbone to answer him.

“Well, Bill, your uncle, he…” there was a pause on your part, a long silence held in your throat, “He's not alive anymore, kid. Do you understand what that means? He... he's not coming back. Pietro will never come back.”

The boys looked at each other and, with a rehearsed action, cast a sorrowful glare on you – a look that didn't quite understand the real implications of what you'd said to them, but did it well enough to get the idea that it was something bad, something sad enough to mobilize the adults who always seemed to be in control of everything. To make mama cry even when she was the one who nursed them on blue days, brushing the tears away from their cheeks with her thumbs.

“And mama,” Billy said in a tiny voice, so befitting his sad little eyes, “Is she sad?”

“She is,” you cordially splayed your left hand on the small expanse of his knee, where your fingers began a series of affable, unconscious caresses.

“She's very sad, Bill. So we need to do this for her. We need to stand by her side in this moment of sadness and take good care of her when she needs us to. Because now she has to say goodbye to him. For real this time. And goodbyes are big, sad feelings that are very difficult to deal with, even if it's someone as strong as mama. Even more a goodbye like that. Can you do this for her, boys? She’ll be so much happier if you guys do this for her.”

“We can,” Tommy stated, ever so sure of his own words, “We can do this for mama.”

“Yes,” Billy supported his brother, “We gonna do it, mom.”

“Right,” you smiled small, just lifting the corner of your lips, “Thanks, guys, really. This will mean a lot to her. Now come here, come here,” when you offered each boy an arm, the two soon tried to snuggle against your chest, their ears brushing against both of your collarbones.

“It's gonna be okay, did you hear me? We'll get through this. We’ll get through this as a family, as we always do.”

At least, that's what you hoped would happen. As if everything wasn't absolutely out of control. As if you weren't an asshole for lying to your own kids.

ᗢ

Had flown across the sky only a few sluggish minutes since the dawn of the opaque day, enveloping the longitudinal expanses of the outskirts of Westview, then, in a vague aura of homely appearance – thus offering, to the parochial naked eye, a shifting nuance between pastel shades of salmon colors that were soon taken over by the autumnal gray of the heavy clouds, which served as the prelude to a frosty October morning (the first signs of a coming cold temperature already settling, like a disease, through the crooked bowels of the ominous city). Wanda made sure Billy and Tommy were dressed up in thick coats in the backseat.

The sun was clumsy in the midst of the gloomy sky, like a silvery child hiding behind its mother's skirt, and at the foundation of the sky's vault, a long magenta band of sun spread to the horizon, hoisting towards the day, even though it was a particularly gloomy morning.

You had just left New York State behind, and so the reddish-hued family car found itself wandering through the conglomeration of roads that made up New Jersey, just a handful of miles from the nondescript town of Westview.

“Are we there yet? I’m hungry,” asked Tommy from the backseat, his voice coming over your shoulder.

“We're almost there, baby,” Wanda replied in a slightly dry voice, her gaze always looking straight ahead, at the road that unfolded in front of the fender of the car, “Just hang in there a little longer, okay?”

“Okay…”

You looked at her sideways for half a second of bottled oxygen in your throat. Your right hand then wandered over the derailleur that stood between the two seats at the front of the car, to give a cordial squeeze on your wife's left thigh, which was tucked into dark jeans. In grim silence, Wanda held your fingers extensions between her palms – her wedding band felt cool against your skin.

Out of the corner of your sharp eye, your left hand screwed into the outline of the steering wheel, you captured the smudged image of a rudimentary green-painted board made from logs; population 3,892, “WELCOME TO WESTVIEW – HOME: IS WHERE YOU MAKE IT”. You once spray-painted that sign because you were a stupid teenager who had a stupid idea. Nobody ever knew that you did it.

Little Westview was still the same as before, always so classic and timeless. But there was something there, like an ominous specter lurking around corners and behind the fogged up windows, that had made your heart crumple inside your anxious chest and your body curl up like a tortoise does in its shell, unconsciously going further into the faux leather seat.

It was as if every component structure of the city looked into the moving car, as if everything there knew what you had done. How guilty you were; your sin leaking from your pores, bristling your veins.

As the concrete and pylons of the gray, wet asphalt citadel burst before your eyes, magically trapped in an eternal vortex of the sixties, with its empty houses and dismal colonial-style shops surrounded by leafy trees of essence green taking on shades of orange, damp and dark, and its old-fashioned cinema that in its facade of red and blue in bright neon, announced the rerun of a horror movie in black and white.

The Halloween decorations began to appear more and more as the vehicle approached the center of town – a wicked witch in a purple dress flying on top of a broom, a bedsheet made into a ghost with two open holes for the eyes and one for the mouth, a handful of pumpkins with carved pointy teeth.

You clenched your jaw, a streak of sunlight barely crossing your forearm raised to brush a strand of hair out of your eye. It didn't take more than minutes for you to park your car in front of Wanda's old childhood home – the town was tiny, and the house stood triumphantly wider and larger than the other residences.

The cream-colored little house just around the corner caught your eye like a beacon in the dark, however; before your parents moved out of the country after you finished college, this is where you had lived with your family – the window of your old room always facing the street outside.

It was about a ten-minute drive straight down Ellis Avenue (Tommy already fidgeting to get out of the car, Billy saying he was sleepy, Wanda holding back so she wouldn't explode, you just wishing you'd get there soon). Still so early in the morning, the figure of Erik Lehnsherr, once the mayor of Westview, could already be found on his front porch – gray-striped jacket and cropped white hair, bordering on the pearly tone of old age. You turned off the car ignition.

“It's gonna be okay, Wands,” was a whisper on your part into a pair of dark green eyes that weren't quite staring at you, “I'm here with you. I’ll always be here for you, honey.”

“I know,” she sighed back, before taking her right hand to the doorknob and then opening the car door, “I know, baby. Thank you.”

Erik tucked both of his hands into the pockets of his linen pants, piercing eyes burning into your silhouette beneath a pair of bushy dark brows as you helped Billy to get out of the vehicle through the left door that opened like a long red wing towards the street. Sapphire irises, the grandfather of your children.

Clean, wealthy and downright cruel. A frown stripped away from his thin dead lips, which made him looked like a comic book villain – a puff of cocky unpleasantness. Bitter aroma of pompous whiskey on the lapels of his jacket. Your wife crossed the sidewalk, that green, well-trimmed lawn that carpeted the entrance to the house, and approached her own father with her head down.

“Good morning, father,” Wanda greeted him then in a tiny voice, a grim air leaking from her mouth, and she had been bringing Tommy's hand along with hers. With Billy you followed after them, stopping behind her right shoulder encircled by her dark coat.

“Wanda,” said the man in a scolding tone, always so sharp, which prompted a jolt of muscle memory from your wife, who shivered like a shy bunny inside her coat, “Boys.”

“H-hello, grandpa,” Billy tried first, his grip pressing hard against your hand that he held.

“Hi, grandpa,” came Tommy's voice then, though Erik's blue gaze wasn't aimed at the boy; but it did towards you. You swallowed the saliva behind your tongue in a long, sullen blink.

“G-good morning, Mr. Lehnsherr,” you whispered in a strained voice, performing a vaguely welcoming act, “How are you, sir?”

A second of icy silence pierced the front porch of the house, your coat rustling over your body. You brought Billy closer to your hip, his temple pressing against your ribcage in an attempt to warm the boy in front of the zephyrs that traversed the porch of the house stained in icy white paint. A car passed on the street. A dog started barking. The older man just turned his back on you, without offering you any syllables at all.

“Come in,” said Erik then, in a tone that in no way emulated a host, already walking his body back inside the open door, ever so used to giving orders and not receiving them, “It's cold out here.”

It took you a long time to find any answers to the inhospitalities uttered by the father of your beloved redhaired wife. Wanda realized that there had been more than one (or even two) attempts on your part to speak out over the course of a few long, drawn-out seconds. Your eyes then migrated to the troubled look of the silent woman standing beside you, who nodded in agreement with the slightest movement of her head. Silently, always behind Wanda, you only entered the residence after your wife did.

ᗢ

The hallways of Westview High School were still the same ones you remembered in your memory, seeming preserved in time since the last time you set foot on that comfortable linoleum floor, in a teenage memory cloistered within the walls of your own cranium.

But you were an adult now, a self-assured, stable woman with a solid career and an established family. You wouldn't allow a pompous boy who exuded arrogance, that same troglodyte who always bumped his strong shoulder against yours, to trouble your spirits again.

The gym’s basketball court (a rectangular floor with baskets at each end) had been willingly granted by Monica Rambeau, the then-current principal of the school, always so efficient as she did since she was a young girl, to play a crucial role in the location where Pietro Maximoff’s memorial would be held – as in a ritual religious, a cult of an numinous god, as if one were about to light a candle and sacrifice a chicken on an altar to bring him back to the realm of the living beings.

He was still there, more alive now than dead than he had ever been before. It was like your own augur spirit slithering behind your shoulders, a past always ready to haunt you, to rip your soul out of your eyes if need be. Little by little, the small town seemed inclined to accept the unpalatable fact that the golden boy had indeed died, even though almost two decades had passed and the youth of today didn't even care about the name of the late teenage athlete who studied with their parents so many years ago.

It was easy to bring back the time that had been spent there, and everything you had ever experienced in that environment – the tin lockers were still bluish and you still remembered your own combination of numbers off the top of your head (turn to the side once, turn to the other twice, then turn to the other three times and the door magically opens, but needs a slam to open it fully).

Wanda had memorized that combination when you two started dating only to sneak there cute little notes in between classes.

Near a small stage set up in front of the sloping seats of the polished wooden bleachers, with a platform at its center as in a presidential campaign, was a huge glossy photograph of a young Pietro smiling sideways, forever preserved at that stage in his life, a broken chuckle at the corner of his fifties Hollywood heartthrob's lips, a cheap performance by a small-town James Dean, just another naughty bad boy.

It was, that photograph, taken just before he disappeared, because the boy had dyed his brown hair a platinum blonde just a month before he disappeared for good. The sight of him there depressed you to the extreme, even though the tight lump in the nerve endings of your stomach further pointed to the bitter taste of fear rising in your gut; it had been a while since that boy had stopped bothering you altogether, and bringing that guilt-ridden nervousness back was not doing your health any good.

You'd abandoned your demons and didn't want to worry about them, even though Pietro's sapphire-colored irises looked like two security cameras following you around the room, his lips seeming to twitch in horror-movie words only you could hear: I'll tell them, Y/n. I'll tell them all what you did to me. The autumn air felt heavyweight and dense when enclosed in such a spacious environment, and an icy thread was rising in your throat.

Groups swarmed the walls of the gym like a flock of flies, former classmates of yours, faces dizzyingly familiar, the entire battalion of retired teachers who used to hang out with you in your everyday life at that school, and half a dozen other of Erik's stuck-up acquaintances al dresses in wealthy coats so similar to his own. You shook a few hands and offered some unsympathetic smiles – always the same questions and always the same answers, after all, you were now part of the victim's family.

“Yes, yeah, I married Wanda”, “Yeah, his twin sister”, “Wanda is sad but we're doing our best to make it okay”, “No, I wasn't that close to him back then”, “He was a great guy, wasn't he?”. No, he wasn't.

Citizens in their late forties, all expressing sad faces, as if they were rehearsing for a play; the main role would win whoever convinced everybody that they were sadder than the others at the death of a boy that everyone pretended to like at the time because his father was the mayor. You watched it all so secluded, so far away, that play worthy of social etiquette to tragedy unfolding right under your eyelashes, while Wanda was with Erik and more people talking on the platform. Black always looked good on her.

You kept your eyes on the twin boys circling near the coffee table, a donut dusted with an icing sugar crust to each, just to keep their childish palates entertained, avoiding Pietro's gaze in that photo, preferring to pounce like a cat and sneaking between people's ankles, letting yourself fall into abandon, as long as you didn't see anyone and no one else could see you either.

“Man, that's really sad,” a voice had said over your right shoulder, and Darcy Lewis, a former classmate of you, always with long dark hair and round glasses, came to meet you carrying a disposable cup of warm coffee in her right hand.

She was always full of ghastly puns and some occasional movie reference exchanged between the times you paired up in sophomore chemistry class.

“Yeah, it's really sad,” you muttered in an artificial tone, “It's sad as fuck.”

“I mean, I always thought that the guy was a fucking idiot. He was an asshole, everybody knew he was an asshole,” she continued, just after taking a long swig from the steaming cup of coffee that she held at her jaw height.

“At the time I was even glad he was gone, I'm not gonna do like these hypocritical suckers here and pretend that I liked him because I truly didn’t. But I don't know, after all this time... he was just a kid, you know?”

The walls of your stomach clenched and ached in an icy brush. He was just a boy, really. In the end, he was just a boy. Something you discarded for the earth to digest and take away, but which in a run of bad luck, just came back to haunt you so many years later.

“I just… I thought he had run off with some girl when he realized he had no chance of getting into college or whatever. He looked like the kind of guy who would try his hand at life in L.A and then come back home old and crying. But damn, being actually murdered? What the fuck. That’s sick.”

She used a tone of indignant surprise to accentuate the last word you couldn't quite digest in your stomach, acrimony bile and distressing dread climbing up the muscles of your slimy mucus-covered throat. Nothing in you was intent on looking at the woman in the thick coat standing beside you, but your gaze even less yearned for Pietro's piercing irises.

“Just… this isn't one of those TV shows that always has a small-town mystery or some shit like that. This is real life, man. These things are not supposed to happen around here.”

You took a deep breath, forcing yourself to swallow a gulp of icy air. Crossing the crowd, next to her big-handed father in expensive pants, Wanda's earnest gaze sought you out. And you didn't notice something opaque distorting the green of her irises, as far away as she was from you. But your former classmate noticed the exchange of glances with your wife, and another sip of coffee came for her to speak again.

“Damn, sorry,” Darcy mussed then, “You married his sister, didn't you? Shit, I completely forgot about that, Y/n. I'm sorry. I know this must be a difficult time for your family. For you, even.”

“It’s okay,” you shrugged into your own coat, “He and I weren't very close in high school, anyway,” and then, you finally looked at her, “But I know it’s just sad that he’s gone. I’m trying to keep it together for Wanda and our boys, but… it’s tough. Everything in this situation just sucks.”

“Right?” she scrutinized at you with her piercing, pale blue eyes under her glasses frame, looking at you with pity in her gaze, as if you weren’t just a guilty liar.

“He was an asshole, sure, but he... he was just a kid. I realize this now that I’ve grown up. It’s not fair, man, it’s not fair to him that it was like this. I wonder how scared he was at the end. Nobody… nobody deserves to die like this.”

It was like the last shovel of dirt in your own coffin. It was too much, just being there was too much for you. Your stomach dropped as you vomited a sweaty smile out of your lips. So you accepted, you just did – a pompous boy who exuded airs of arrogance still troubled your spirit, after all.

Because what you had done to him (your hands stained with still-warm blood and wet earth, your skin itching against the dewy tall grass in the middle of the night, the smell of iron and musky trees in the air) had scarred your carcass for the rest of your life. The latent guiltiness would never let your bones rest again in your life.

ᗢ

You hugged your thick coat made of black fabric to your body, even though you didn't feel the autumn chill at all. But you only knew that you had done it so that you could hide from the morbid eyes of the trees in the cemetery. The atmosphere of that place was horrible. The white headstone was beautiful, and that was just despondent. There was something sadistic about the fact that a funeral was such a beautiful thing – even more so when you were the reason that corpse lost its heartbeat.

Everything in a cemetery was miserable, of course, the stench of human putrefaction was intrinsic in the still life of that sacred ground; just a bunch of dead people and memories buried to the bottom, but the fact that this tombstone was so expensive and so exceedingly beautiful was the most distressing part of it all.

It meant that Erik wanted to give the best treatment to this thing that would be a memorial to his beloved son even in death. Your cloudy irises descended to that cluster of flowers placed on top of the closed casket of dark varnished wood, whose interior held only a handful of bones worn down by exposure to time and the animals of the forest. They were burying a bag of bones because of you.

Amidst a sea of bowed heads, hazy faces tucked into dark garments, all with shoulders pressed together like a wall founded in mourning, the deceased's father was the one who spoke the parting words, while Wanda stood beside you, each of you holding the hand of one of the twin boys the two of you had had. When she noticed the stress simmering up inside you, almost leaking out of your mouth, your brow furrowed, a hand of hers soon tried to reach for your fingers.

“Pietro was a good boy,” the heartbroken father had said then, “He really was. And someday he would be a great man, I know he would. I... I'm glad my beloved Magda isn't here to witness this. She wouldn't deserve to see our boy like that. See what they did to him.”

You thought you were going to throw up as memories began to pour through the blood coursing through your pallid veins, a den of unsettling affliction teasing you into a frenzy of unease. Between bushes and rocks, into the beech woods of the forest, swallowed up by the enormities of the shadows of the scrupulous pines, placed in wide profligate rows, you set out carrying those bones that were still wrapped in a capsule of flesh, veins, muscles and sinews.

The twigs on the forest floor twisted the flesh at her ankles and calves, but the vibrating epinephrine in your veins inhibited the burning sensation of a handful of tiny cuts slashing open in your skin. But still, you groaned in pain. But the pain you felt had not come from the abrasions and fissures denoted here or there in your epidermis – it had been the broken heart, which had begun to weaken you, chilling your bones and viscera.

Flowing reality flooded your bronchial tubes; there was fear emanating from the tears dispersed down the length of your face. Fear of losing your beloved Wanda Maximoff. Wanda, your support, your muse, your martyrdom, your passion. Lyrical, but somewhat tragic, like a Homeric tale. A famine that was supplied to you; an abstruse epic romance born of the core of two girls devoid of a primordial love. What would you do without her, and what wouldn't you do for her? Heaven and hell weren't extreme thresholds that would keep you from searching for the girl you were dating.

You dug a grave, the deepest of them, a hell hole. You dropped Pietro's inert body into that eternal darkness. And then you threw dirt on him until you couldn't see his platinum hair anymore. Your yelps echoing off trees, rocks, and tall grass. The sky was overcast and the weather tasted of blood and bitterness. And when you let go of the shovel you turned back to the young Wanda standing right behind you, her eyes empty, her clothes still smeared with the blood that spurted from her own twin's jugular.

“It's gonna be okay, baby,” you reassured her, your girlfriend, your future wife, the future mother of your kids, “It's gonna be okay, Wands. I'm here with you. No one will know. They’ll never know.”

“Promise me, Y/n?” she hummed through the trees, a shy, measured voice. Dark hair curled with streaks of heavy blood starting to clot at the ends. Your dirt-smeared right thumb stroked the sharp of her cheekbone.

“I promise, Wanda. I'll always protect you, okay? No one will ever know what you did, honey. Never.”

“I love you, Y/n," she confessed, eyes shining in a sparkle that shouldn't have been there, “I want you to be by my side my whole life. I want you to keep this secret with me. Just you and me. We'll be together forever, and no one will ever know what we did.”

“No one will ever know,” you huffed back, leaning in to kiss her in front of her brother's makeshift grave.

No one would ever know that Pietro came home one night when Erik was out and found you and Wanda exchanging some teenage kisses on the kitchen counter – her sitting there, you standing between her legs, your finger going south, almost touching what hadn't been touched yet.

Or how he looked a lot like a rabid animal when he knocked you to the ground, making you hit the back of your head with a hard thud. As on the floor, slumped like a rag doll, you turned your hips dorsally so that you were facing your attacker – your own legs unusable once he had sat on them with his full weight. The boy's stiff hands bound your wrists just above your head, his hot breath brushing your hairline, just to the top of your forehead.

His psychotic dim face was thin and rampant, shades of blue flickering across his homicidal irises, his animalistic mouth hooded by strands of an oncoming dark beard that would someday show on his firm chin. And then masculine fingers, experienced, strong from gripping heavy basketballs every day, pressed against the throbbing muscle in your throat.

“You,” Pietro yawned, but, on the whole, didn't seem to be full of his mental faculties to the point that he could speak without being haunted by occasional tantrums of shaking, “You’re fucking my sister?! You fucking weirdo! I’ll fucking kill you!”

You squinted your eyes, your vision slowly dimming as your brain was deprived of oxygen. And then a cavernous growl resounded through the gray walls of the amorphous kitchen, followed by a heavy thud. You opened your eyes. With both his legs tangled up in your own, Pietro was slumped to the left, oozing from an open wound in his neck, a pool of warm blood that only grew. Like a mouse, he agonized over rambling words, before being lulled by the coldness of death.

His strong chin was soaked in the thick reddish blood seeping out of his nostrils, out of his mouth, and out of that gaping gash in the skin, from within an artery, thick and dark, almost the color of wine. Blood that trickled down the boy's viripotent chin, then dripped in a sinuous red line across your puffy face beneath him. The collar of your shirt was soaked in the color of tomato sauce.

The sound of metal hitting the floor reached your ears. Wanda dropped the knife she had stuck inside her twin brother's neck. She fell to her knees, bare by the little black dress she wore. And, pushing Pietro's body off you, you just crawled up to her like a bloody animal after a violent slaughter. And you held her against your body. You just held her.

“Y/n,” she whispered under her breath, “Y/n... I... I'm... I'm scared, Y/n... I'm scared...”

Blood all over the kitchen floor, showing and where it shouldn't be – on the sleeves of your shirt and in Wanda's long dark hair, “No one will know,” you uttered against the shell of her ear, “Don't worry, honey, no one will ever know. I won't lose you, Wanda. No one will ever tear us apart.”

You might have thought differently in the years that followed if you had seen the smile she hid against your collarbone. If you only knew how much she disliked having her ankle chained to Pietro's glory even though she always passed for the sweet passive twin (after all, what kid would even want to be second choice?). If you only knew she hadn't just forgotten that her brother was coming home earlier that night.

If you only knew that years later, when you were finally there giving a dignified funeral for the body you two buried together, Wanda smiled the same way she did that night. After all, you were her wife now. You were the mother of her children. And you were the keeper of the biggest secret in her life, the only person who knew about the skeleton in her closet. It wouldn't make any difference to get rid of Pietro if she got you for life.

“I love you, I love you so, so much,” Wanda whispered in your ear then, that night when you slept in her father's guestroom, “And I'll never lose you, Y/n. Never. Thanks for making sure of that for me, baby.”

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varunshrimediasolutions · 6 months

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20 SEO Mistakes To Avoid In 2024

Introduction In the rapidly evolving field of digital marketing, search engine optimization, or SEO, continues to be essential for success online. Nonetheless, the field of SEO is always evolving due to changes in user behaviour and algorithmic changes. It's critical to keep up with the newest trends and steer clear of typical traps if you want to guarantee that your website stays visible and competitive.

In this post, we'll look at 20 SEO blunders to avoid in 2024 to help you move deftly through the always-shifting digital landscape.

20 Mistakes You Should Avoid In SEO For Best Results

Ignoring Mobile Optimization:

In 2024, mobile optimization will no longer be a luxury; it will be essential. Since mobile devices are used by the majority of internet users to access content, not optimizing your website for mobile devices might result in lower visibility and lower user engagement.

Ignoring Page Speed:

Slow-loading pages can have a big effect on your site's SEO success in a world where speed is everything. Consumers demand immediate satisfaction, and search engines give preference to websites that load quickly. To improve page speed, make sure to minimize HTTP queries, take advantage of browser caching, and optimize images.

Ignoring Voice Search Optimization:

It is now mandatory to optimize your content for voice search due to the popularity of voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant. Take into account long-tail keywords and natural language searches to match user speech patterns when conducting voice searches.

Ignoring HTTPS Migration:

In today's digital world, security is crucial, and Google favours secure websites. Making the switch to HTTPS improves your site's trustworthiness and security in the eyes of search engines and users alike.

Ignoring Local SEO:

Ignoring local SEO can be an expensive error for companies that cater to local customers. To increase exposure in local search results, make sure your business listings are correct and consistent across online directories and make use of local keywords.

Failing to Optimize for Featured Snippets:

Search engine results pages (SERPs) now prominently display featured snippets, which give users instant answers to their questions. To increase your chances of getting included in snippets, organize your material to provide succinct answers to frequently asked questions.

Excessive Anchor Text Optimization:

Although anchor text optimization is crucial for search engine optimization, excessive optimization may raise red flags with search engines. To avoid fines, keep the diversity of your anchor text in a natural balance by using synonyms and variations.

Ignoring User Experience (UX):

UX affects metrics like click-through rate, dwell duration, and bounce rate, and it is a major factor in SEO. To increase UX and SEO performance, give priority to responsive design, appealing content, and easy-to-navigate pages.

Underestimating the Power of Internal Linking:

Internal linking improves search engine optimization by dispersing link equity throughout your pages and assisting users in navigating your website. Include pertinent internal links in your text to improve crawlability and create a logical hierarchy.

Ignore Structured Data Markup:

Rich snippets and improved SERP displays are made possible by structured data markup, which gives search engines context about your material. Use structured data markup to increase search engine visibility and click-through rate.

Ignoring Image Optimization:

Images are more than simply decorative components; alt text, file names, and image sitemaps all help with SEO. To increase accessibility and SEO, optimize photos for size and relevancy and provide a description to the alt text.

Neglecting Content Quality:

In an era of abundant content, quality is paramount. The SEO performance of your website may be harmed by thin, pointless, or duplicate content. Concentrate on producing valuable, high-quality content that speaks to and meets the demands of your target audience.

Ignoring Social Signals:

Social media can affect search visibility indirectly by raising brand awareness, engagement, and traffic, even though its direct impact on SEO is up for discussion. Sustain a consistent presence on pertinent social media channels to increase the visibility of your material.

Ignoring technical SEO:

Technical SEO, which includes aspects like crawlability, indexing, and site structure, lays the groundwork for your site's overall performance. Perform routine audits to find and fix technical problems that could limit the SEO potential of your website.

Keyword Stuffing:

The overuse of keywords, often known as keyword stuffing, is a holdover from antiquated search engine optimization techniques and can now lead to search engine penalties. To keep your content relevant and readable, instead concentrate on naturally occurring keyword integration.

Ignoring Video Optimization:

Videos are taking over search results and provide a captivating way for users to consume material. To increase your videos' exposure in standard and video search results, make sure they have clear names, descriptions, and transcripts.

Ignoring Backlink Quality:

In today's SEO environment, quality is more important than quantity even if backlinks are still a crucial ranking component. Make getting backlinks from reputable, relevant sources your top priority, and avoid deceptive link-building strategies that can damage the reputation of your website.

Ignoring Local Citations:

In local search engine optimization, local citations—that is, references to your company's name, address, and phone number (NAP)—are quite important. Make sure that your NAP information is the same on all websites, social media pages, and review sites.

Ignoring SEO Analytics:

An effective SEO strategy requires data-driven decision-making. Track your progress and find optimization possibilities by keeping an eye on key performance indicators (KPIs), including organic traffic, keyword rankings, and conversion rates, on a regular basis.

Failing to Adjust to Algorithm Changes:

Algorithms used by search engines are always changing, so what works now might not work tomorrow. Keep up with algorithm changes and modify your SEO plan as necessary to keep your website visible and relevant in search results.

Conclusion

Success in the ever-changing world of SEO depends on avoiding frequent errors and keeping up with current trends. You can position your website for increased visibility, traffic, and eventually business growth by avoiding these 20 SEO blunders in 2024.

To Read more of our blogs, click the link below 👇

#seo mistakes #SEO mistakes to avoid #SEO #Search engine optimization #SEO optimization #SEO in 2024 #Search engine optimization in 2024 #strategies of SEO #SEO strategies in 2024 #search engine optimization strategies #mistakes to avoid in 2024

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mask131 · 1 year

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You know, there is one thing that annoys me - and I know that is goes against the current, where everybody praises the "death of the author" concept - but it truly does annoy me how fans sometimes decide on their own they have more authority on a fictional work than this work's author (given I am into liteature, we'll take books as an example).

I am not talking about situations such as "The author forgot that they wrote that in the first book, and wrote something contradicting it in the third, and the fans pointed it out and deemed it bad writing" - no I am not talking about this kind of situation.

I am rather talking about situations such as for example: an author's work gets adapted. The author loves very much the adaptation and finds it faithful or at least that it works well on its own. Some fans dislike it and declare it unfaithful and a bad adaptation. And if the author's liking of the adaptation is brought up, the fans will over-rid it as the author's opnion being wrong, and theirs being right.

The first situation (the one I do not talk about) was about facts, textual facts, internal logic, writing problems - and this is all part of the fan's domain. Because the fan, the reader, is all about accumulating the information given, piecing together the elements created, the fan reflects the author's work in that regard, and thus it is the fan's natural right and duty to point out things such as incoherences, bad writing, plot problems and the like. But the second situation (the one I do talk about) is about opinion, and this changes everything.

We live in an era (well mostly Internet era since it all happens over the Internet nowadays) where, as I said before, the "death of the author" becomes a rule and is encouraged. And the death of the author itself is not a bad thing - in fact, it is the "natural state" of reading a work. When you discover a new author, a new book, a new series, you don't know who made it, what this person is about or for. You just read a story, judge it, and make your opinion out of it. We also live in an era where fan-content (fan-art, fan-fiction, fanzines, fan-games) are even more visible, encouraged and thriving than ever before. They are even reused by the industry (for marketing purpose) and by creators themselves (to share the love and appreciate between them and their audience). But somehow, with such a mass-valorization, with such an effort to make it all common and mundane, something changed, and fans started to think themselves equals, rivals or even superiors to the creators.

We live in an era where fans believe their headcanons and theories can be used as rightful demands, as words of command, as orders over creators of content. We live in an era where fans are somehow so mad at authors they actually insult them for not following their fanfction ideas and for not doing what the fan wanted. This is a new form of tyranny where fans that get invested too much in something mistake their "fan-creator" rank for "co-creator" and believe in some sort of delusion that the work they are a fan of belongs to them and that they can dictate how it goes, as if it was their story and not one someone else created and placed their blood, sweat and tears into.

I do wonder if this bizarre switch of thought on the Internet wasn't partally due to the "Potter-trauma", when J.K. Rowling's political comments completely destroyed and ruined the perfectly "united, happy and peaceful" Potterdom, this entire subculture that had grown over the Harry Potter books and dominated a few generations. This faced the people of the Internet (but especially Americans, who didn't had centuries of literary wars behind them) with the dilema of "What do I do when I love a work, but I hate the person that makes it?". And one of the many answers, one of the many "solutions" to this problem, that was widely accepted, was "Well, make the work yours. You have centered your life around it, you love it, you study it and know it better than the author herself. Just ignore her, ignore her words, cut her off and make the books yours." An answer that was logical and reasonable at the time, in front of the given situation - it is the very simple "Consider the work, not the person behind it" logic behind fiction that is however still hotly debated today.

But ever since, it seems that people have taken this logic to its most extreme ways, and turned into some sort of mania. A mania where people will claim to know better what the author truly wanted to say than what the author themselves say ; a mania where people will contradict what the author says about their book in interviews, promotions, and the like, and clearly consider that the author's words have no weight outside of their own book ; a mania where people will see whatever they want in a story, and completely ignore things such as the context or the intentions behind the release of the book.

I know things are not all simple or black and white. My example about the author's opinion on an adaptation of their work is one that works generally well - because who is on the better position, and on the first-line, to judge a book's adaptation? The author of the book of course! However, to very example there is a counter-example, and I have one right there. Stephen King hated Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining, despite Kubrick's movie being one of the greatest horror movies ever made in America, and King's book being quite flawed (great book, but there's definitively big flaws typical of early King in there). This is a counter-example where myself include I recognize the author can be wrong about such matters of opinion, due to the author's own biases, own personal involvment and vision of their work. In The Shining's case, it is because there is the very nuanced situation of a movie that is objectively great on its own, but is actually a bad adaptation of a book (it does happen sometimes that you have good adaptations that are bad works on their own, and bad adaptations that are great works).

But here's the catch and the result of this discourse: doesn't matter that the author is right or wrong, the importance is that an author's opinion MATTERS and should be taken into account when it comes to their own work. Because they are the FRIGGIN CREATORS and MAKERS of this work - you are not. It is their work, that came out of their mind and hands, it belongs to them, they can change it and decide its fate until their disappearance from the surface of the human world [not accounting for the editors ex machina], and you can do nothing about it. Because it isn't "your" work". If you dedicate your entire life making excellent fan-content of a book, it won't make it "your book". All the fan-content will be yours, for certain, but the original material will stay "not yours".

Yes an author can leave things open-ended, leave questions unanswered, encourage theories and head-canon, and people coming up with their own answers. But it doesn't mean that when the author eventually decides one day to solve their own mystery or resolve their own riddle, you get to insult them and harass them because it isn't the one you imagined! Of course you can criticize an author for coming up with a bad solution - because as a fan you will note for example how unsatisfying such a resolution is, how anti-climactic it feels, or how a story worked better with an open-ending. But only some spoiled bratty child (or child-minded person) would come up to an author and say "I don't like your idea, because it isn't mine, and it doesn't fit this drawing I made of your character - which by the way is mine now". I said it before and I will say it again - we live in the "Misery" era. Stephen King's Misery, where Annie is walking everywhere down every streets, and where all popular authors are at fear of being locked in a bedroom with their feet broken by some lunatic wanting them to write an "official fanfic" with their OCs and personal planned "happy ending AU".

You can argue one thing against this entire speech: But, aren't critics, and literature historians, constatly imagining new meanings and new messages inside literary works? Aren't university teachers and literary students constantly reappropriating works in new ways the author never intended to? Aren't they all just placing their own ideas and biases and interpretations inside books, and then proclaiming it the "good way" to read it? Aren't they the one who decided that a curtain isn't just blue? And to that I will say yes and no. Yes because, indeed, it is their job, as researchers, as studiers of literature, as investigators of the life and works of authors, as theorizers of the book industry, to constantly bring new things in old stuff, and to unravel ad dig up things the author themselves did not plan to have in their work. So "yes". But also "no", no because such a caricatural view only comes from a simplistic overview of literary criticism and literary studies, and even from some anti-intellectualist ideas.

Because this entire world of literature teachers, and profesionnal critics, and scholars of authors, has something that (at least in French) is called the "fairness of the researcher". These people can say the wildest, craziest theories, interpretations and readings of a work, as long as they recognize that A) it is their words, their puzzle, their solution to a mystery they sometimes make up themselves B) there is a context, a life behind the work and things such as publication constraints that were involved in the shaping of a book and C) they have proof, evident and obvious proof of what they advance, and that encourages such a reading.

People who just waltz in with their own personal theories about why "X author wrote a subtle criticism of the sausage industry throughout their three main novels" need to have something to back it up, else they will be mercilessly mocked, ignored and have the door slammed in their face. This is why literature high-studies is such a competitive and "harsh" world, because people constantly look at each other in a rivalry designed to keep in check those that would go a bit "insane" and make everybody doubt their words and recheck their papers to make sure they are not imagining things. On the bad side, it also explains why university-critics and book studies are so slow to change and evolve over time, because due to this need to take into account every influence and context, and to bring solid proof to back up one's reading or theory, it can sometimes take a century or so to realize what is obvious from the beginning if you know where to look.

But even then - even in this context of encouraged, widespread and even accepted interpretations of text, people still do NOT believe the works of these authors somehow belongs to them! This is the true aberration that is festering on the Internet today, and the apex of the "bad fan" behavior. You own your fan-made content, you own your physical copy of the book, you own your hand-written copy of the novel you took five years writing with an ostrich feather - but you do not actually own the book until you bought its rights from whoever has it! And even beyond a mere question of "owernship" - because we all know how big corporations just buy over the rights to everything and fuck them over massively due to not understanding a single thing about what makes them great - it is a question of the author's symbiosis with their work, something that cannot be questioned and that only truly stops when they die, because the author can't create more of the work or express any more opinion or control over it. But before this death, people seem to have forgotten that authors are creators - that they made the work, that without them the work would not exist, and that they made this work with a certain goal, a certain plan, certain intentions more or less subtle. And that the fate of a work usually should rely within the hands of this author, not within the hands of the fans, who are only here to support, love, criticize, hate or judge a work, not act as some sort of board in a big company!

Authors are not your pals that can do you a favor if you offer them a drink (well... scratch that, there's a lot of authors who would do a lot of things to you if you gave them a drink). Rather - authors are not your employees. Yes, authors will work for you technically because they will write for their audience and for their fans - but authors also write primarily for themselves. They are selfish beings who write because they want to tell the stories they have in their head, and they want to do the work they always intended to, and they only want to use their character with their tory, their world, their plot. If you want to tell your story, become an author, but fans should honestly stop pretending they have just as much authority and owernship of a work as their creator just because they spent too much time daydreaming about it.

#this is one of my unhinged rants that come out of nowhere #or rather that come to me when I didn't slept enough #fans #authors #fandoms #i don't even have a right tag for this #due to how unclassified this topic is #because it is all a great mess #and i need to go to sleep #people seem to forget that an author when it comes to their work is alone against the world #or a small group against the rest of the world #but there's no book that was written by everybody that read it #though it is an insanely cool concept

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xpc-web-dev · 1 year

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Hi! I have just recently deciding to switch careers and leave the vet industry , go into tech. Have spent past 2 years in tech school to become a vet assistant but after being in my field, I always wondered how it would be like to have a career in tech, ive always thought for so long that being in tech comes w Math and science and i suck at both 🤣🤣🤣. so I’m deciding to enroll myself in a completely online program to become an IT tech yet i have always admired hacking and coding so without getting sooo much into it, which leads me to my question:

- what do I have to do to be in the code career?

- do I have to go to boot camp out of my state or should look into going online completely?

- is coding beginner friendly especially as someone who doesn’t have ABSOLUTE NO IDEA about coding?

Please let me know and I love that I have found a community of women jn the tech industry, it’s pretty inspiring which why I want to go into the tech career.

Hi Stone, first of all welcome to our small and growing community.

I'm glad you're giving yourself this chance to try technology and see if it's for you or go back to vet or even go to art(yes I stalked you UEUHEHUEHUE) and I also thank you for finding my opinion relevant.

As you said that you wanted a career and that you are interested in coding and hacking, here you need to choose which one to prioritize. Because whether back-end, front-end, mobile, fullstack or cybersecurity there will be a lot to study, practice, make mistakes and practice again.

Here I give an addendum that if you don't know what these areas mean in technology, I recommend doing a search, reading and watching videos on youtube about it to see what might please you.

So based on what you've told me, again I think the best first step is to know what you want to prioritize and what you want to make money from.

Because trust me, you won't be able to study everything together at the same time. And if you manage to find an hour, there will be a burnout, so take it easy my friend. (from personal experience)

Even more so if you want a job, it's best to focus on 1 and then move on to others. Then find out what might be best for you / what you most identify with.

I also like hacking, I have books and I have already found courses. But this is something I want to study as a hobby and a safety measure (after all, there's no shortage of motherfuckers doing shit with others with that knowledge). So I put it in the background. Because my priority is money and hacking has work, but not in my country.

Now about entering the code career. Despite being a junior/student, I've seen a lot and I've also learned in these 2 years in the technology community in my country and watching you from the outside, so I can have a more mature view to help you with that.

So let's go:

1) - To know what you need to do to enter your career in code, you need to know how the technology market is in your country.

Because with all these layoffs, we have a lot of professionals with experience and academically well qualified and depending on the country, we currently have more demand for professionals than job offers. (Here in Brazil this is happening, because the layoffs in North America reflected here).

And here I don't want to discourage you, I just want to give you a realistic parameter for you to enter the area without illusions and not get frustrated like me and a bunch of people on the internet. (I wish someone had guided me like that). Because what we have most on social media is people making it seem like programming is easy and getting a job is even easier, or that you're going to earn A LOT since you're just a junior and THAT'S NOT THE REALITY..

BUT all the effort pays off in the end.

Within that, here I think it's cool that you try to observe what vacancies in your country ask for juniors/interns.

From Skills like knowing python to asking college or accepting bootcamp. See what's most in demand out there and within that see if you like what's in demand.

I tell you this, because here in Brazil, for example, we currently have more vacancies for internships (and here you need to be enrolled in a college to do an internship) than for juniors without college and only with bootcamps. So if we want a job around here, the first thing is to go to college and not be completely self-taught. So again, research and study your country's technology market.

In my conception TODAY getting a job in programming without college will be 10x more difficult than in 2020 for example, things have changed. The market now is not lacking developers, quite the contrary, now it has hight demands from developers but not for JOBS.

What the market wants most are senior people (and I've seen seniors I know saying that after layoffs even for them it's more willing to get a job, again supply and demand), but there are still opportunities for us beginners, in some countries there are more and in others less.

Speaking in the sense of the United States from what I observed from the US (content producers and twitter) + my experiences here in Brazil.I don't know the current situation of the technology market in Africa, the rest of Latin America , Asia and Europe.

Of course, you can be lucky and succeed without , but I, for one, got tired of believing that I would be lucky and be one of those people who succeed and changed my strategy to get a job.

Or you could also join a job-guaranteed bootcamp. Check how it works and if you have this type in your country.

And here we come to your second question.

2) The answer is it depends.

For example, will this bootcamp in your state guarantee you a job or is it possible to do an internship at a company or will it connect you with companies after the program?Or is he recognized by technology companies in your state?

If so, I would recommend doing it and dedicating yourself to getting in.

Because look, if they guarantee you an job is even better , you'll just have to study and do what they tell you to get your job.

But if you don't guarantee it, but this training has merit/respect in the market, it also pays off.

Here, I wanted to take the opportunity and talk about apprenticeship.

In our community we have our queen @xiacodes @xiabablog (it's the same person), she did an apprenticeship and today she is a junior developer in UK .

She shared her journey on her blog and is also the most engaged and resource sharing person in our community.

Here I would like to say that FOR ME Apprenticeship is one of the smartest strategies today to get into the technology market.

I myself will start on a Monday and it was my solution to get a job in code by the end of the year. (I'll talk about this in another post too)

So I recommend looking for apprenticeship in your country / state and how they work there.

And obviously observe and read the rules of the program to see if there are any catches that put you in absurd debt or contractual fines.

And see if you can handle it if you have the possibility.

Here I give an addendum that if you find an apprenticeship but that you will earn little in the beginning, for you to analyze well before saying no. Because salary we can evolve after we have experience, the important thing for us juniors/students is to get the first experience and the rest later becomes easier. (At least that's what the Mid /seniors I know say)

Now if in your country you don't have this kind of opportunity, I would recommend trying to see if it would be possible to do bootcamp/online courses + college to get an internship.

And you don't even have to start with paid courses, in my opinion if the bootcamp won't guarantee you a job, it's not worth paying for it. We have a lot of free resources on the internt (youtube biggest school) .

But it's up to you.

Free Courses:

-Freecodecamp

-Odin project (And it has both fullstack with ruby and with node.js. )

For me, paying will only pay off when you don't find quality resources for what you want to study. So I would advise you to always think about whether it pays off or not.

Accessible paid courses:

- Codecademy

- Udemy (there are good courses there and there are always promotions)

+++ Here I also wanted to talk about knowing that public colleges (100% free) are not possible in all countries or when they are, they are very elective and difficult to get into for poor people as it is here in Brazil.

But here despite that, studying A LOT to pass the exams and having worked to save money and support yourself until you get scholarships to support yourself (and if you do), you manage to get into the best colleges that are free and that is more viable than being poor and being able to pay for college in the US, for example.

So I know that it might not be very viable depending on where you live and whether or not you are a resident of the country.

So I don't know if college can be an affordable thing for you, but if not that you can find the best strategy to achieve your financial prosperity in technology!

But if you are from the United States for example, this week I discovered this spotify program: https://fellowship.spotify.com/

The one where they only hire people with bootcamps and not colleges and open in the summer there.

And despite the layoffs, I still think there are more entry level openings there than here HUEHUEEHEU.

3) What do you mean by friendly?

If you mean easy, no, she probably won't be friendly to you at all AND THAT'S OKAY.

As you yourself said that you know absolutely nothing, it will be natural for you to have difficulty, to think about giving up and to make a lot of mistakes to get it right.

It's going to be a process of failing and trying again and again.

NOTHING IS EASY. And since you've already taken a veterinary course, I think you already know that things are really difficult. So this is another reminder that it won't be any different here.

BUT it will end well because EVERYTHING IS LEARNED.

And that also goes for math, if you ever have to deal with it (and if you go to cs college you will) you will make a lot of mistakes, but you will succeed, because EVERYTHING IS LEARNED based on trial and error.

And that doesn't mean you're bad or stupid, just that you're learning something completely from scratch. It won't be overnight that you will understand, it may take months or years, but persisting you will succeed. THIS IS NORMAL.

I cried (literally) to do conditional algorithms in 2021, I banged my head in books, said I would never make it and felt like the biggest dumbass in the world and today 2023 are the easiest things for me. I have no problem making them.

And that was only possible because I didn't give up.

Here I wanted to advise you to start your programming studies with low expectations, to help you manage your frustrations and maybe burnouts. It won't be overnight that you will become the best programmer and do many projects at the level of a senior developer or the people who do tutorials on youtube.

They will be small steps that lead you to your goals in studies. Again, constants.

There are people who could get their ek code jobs in 3 to 6 months of study.

BUT FOR ME, currently having a plan to get an opportunity between 2 years and 4 years (if you actually go to college) study is the healthiest way to pursue your studies and goals. If you get it sooner, even better for you, but if not, you'll be fine with yourself because it's within the period you stipulated.

Finally, I ask you not to take anything I say as absolute truth.

Question what you read Take what I said, analyze it and see how it works in your reality.

I also recommend trying to find women in technology from your country on linkedin and see if they can help you with tips and so on. I feel very good knowing so many Brazilian women in tech since I did this, my network there is composed only of them precisely to create a place without judgment but of welcome and inspiration.

Well, I invested about 3 hours answering the best way I can, I hope you read it and that it helps you.

Anything, if you want to talk more, you can call me in the chat, I'll take a while but I'll answer.

I wish you good studies, discernment to see which is the best path for you and that you stay well! Lots of protection in studies and career.

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northwest-cryptid · 26 days

Text

The future is now, and a lot of people really don't like it.

It's something I've noticed, I was born just before the turn of the century, and I grew up with a lot of talk about what the future would be like. Computers, the internet, technology itself was still fairly new at least to the everyday consumer. Sure my father had been programming for years, but cell phones were still bricks we had to carry around in our pocket. This isn't a put down, so please don't think I'm using Zoomer as a derogatory term or anything but; Zoomers may not really grasp the fact that our first cell phones were these really chunky bricks that had 2 toned small screens that literally could just make calls or play snake. Texting was a pain, you had to literally hit the same key multiple times to cycle through letters and then wait for it to move to the next slot if you needed a letter on the same key.

And yet, almost everyone around me, and everyone I spoke to online was excited about technology; about the future. Integration of tech into the daily lives of those around you was the coolest stuff you could see, we had classes in school that taught us not just how to type and use the computer, but also things like internet safety and even really basic stuff about how to program. We're talking about elementary school by the way, I was playing computer games in the lab and learning how to type properly, how to stay safe online; and in some cases even how to make games. It was uncommon for anyone even in middle school to own a cell phone, and if they did it was a Nokia. You had people who would swear by Apple products because "they made the iPod!" Which yea, you read that correctly; not the iPhone; the iPod. The iPhone was still just this sort of concept back in the day. The idea of a future where our phones could do more than play snake, send texts, and call people.

You had a lot of people online who made their own websites and were lamenting how easy the internet was becoming for "just any schmuck on the street" to use. It used to be a utopia for only the biggest nerds with their text based computer games and personal websites. However it was quickly becoming more and more accessible to the every-man and people were divided on whether or not that was a good thing. Some didn't care for the direction the internet was going, and others enjoyed the attention the internet and technology by proxy was finally getting.

With more people being able to use technology effectively, the demand for better and better tech was growing. At the time, the capitalistic nature of the industry was fine, it prompted companies to compete for the biggest and the best new stuff to show off. If you were going to spend your money on something; it really had to be quality made. This isn't just about cell phones and computers either, if you look back at how much advancement was made in game consoles back during the time of the Gamecube or Dreamcast eras, you'll see that no one in the console industry could stand by and make sales by just being a brand name. Everything from computer parts to gaming consoles to even software was becoming better, whether that meant faster; higher definition, or even just sometimes having bigger numbers. I mean hell the Nintendo 64 literally put the number in the name to tell you how big of a deal it was.

This was the golden age for technology, and I am genuinely sad that a lot of Zoomers never got to really experience it. We shit-talk Zoomers for growing up without tech literacy, or being iPad babies, but the truth is; they're not taught like we were. Most of the older Millennials, or gen Xers had a lot more understanding of tech because we either were literally raised on it, or we were making it. Zoomers never got to experience what it was like to know the what and why of new tech coming out. The market has become so taken over by capitalistic greed that no one is really happy about it.

We wanted a world where tech made people's lives easier, integration of tech into your daily life was meant to simplify things. Not to advertise 20 different products to you before you can request an uber to come pick you up just so it can ask you if you want to upgrade, only for your uber driver to be so distracted by their phone and the reek of marijuana that they can't drive safely. Which mind you, isn't to say phones or weed are necessarily bad, but hey don't drive under the influence you piece of shit, especially not with passengers; you make the rest of us look bad! Now I gotta go online and complain about this on social media, of course I'm talking about like, maybe one of five social media sites people actually use. Yes it's highly censored and what isn't censored by the people running the site is likely to be caught in the net of the social culture around the website, so of course I have to watch what I say and over explain myself. Then I think I'll reblog that post about how we're all explaining ourselves too much and being too nice and we're too afraid to speak our minds and we really need to stop doing that. Then I'll answer the anon hate I got for speaking my mind and trying to not over explain myself because the social culture net is so broad it encompasses significantly too many different kinds of people who won't see eye to eye...

My point with that whole paragraph is to say that even someone like me, who adores technology and wants it to progress and wants it to integrate more into my life; still doesn't agree with what has become of it. I think the worst part about it is that some of it is inescapable while other parts can be fixed but every time I say that I get yelled at for it. It's like people would rather believe they're trapped here than understand they still have a lot of power over the use of their technology. It's easier to accept the world around you when you don't feel like you could do anything, when you understand that you could do something rather than merely complain it creates a dilemma. Suddenly you know for a fact you could fix your problem, but that requires a certain amount of effort on your part. I've heard people tell me they can't learn to code in HTML for reasons branching from trauma to disabilities. Which is baffling because if you can literally make a text post on tumblr, or send me anon hate to yell at me about how you can't possibly learn HTML; you could easily type out HTML or copy paste it.

However I'm not here to point fingers, I'm here to say I've noticed that the places we can't escape from are getting more and more aggressive, and no one feels like we can do anything. It's rough, because I know if we did try to do something it would be a hell of a lot more effort than just getting people to figure out they could make their own websites if they don't like the ones they are on.

The majority of public transport, businesses, and restaurants have apps that require you to have a smart phone. I sit down and ask for a menu, I'm told there's a QR code on the table I can scan. I once told a waitress my phone couldn't scan QR codes and she made a big fuss about how they don't have physical menus anymore and she wasn't about to tell me what all they had as options. It was my fault for being too poor to afford a good enough phone. Something that was once considered a luxury is now a necessity to eat at an establishment. If you're curious, it was a waffle house. A fucking Waffle House decided to do away with their menus and opted for QR codes. Thankfully I've not seen this catching on with other Waffle Houses, but consider the target audience of a Waffle House. This isn't some fancy classy restaurant, this is a 24/7 diner where you stop in at 3 AM to eat some poorly cooked hash-browns and eggs that were made by a poor college student who isn't paid enough; and hope no one starts a fight because the only other two people in this place are drunk off their ass and getting a little loud with the waiter. When I asked the waitress for literally just hash-browns, a couple of eggs, and bacon; a typical breakfast you could get just about anywhere that serves, you know; breakfast. I was told that's not a menu item and that I'd need to order off the menu if I wanted to actually buy anything. We went back and forth for about 5 minutes and I was doing my best to be polite about the situation because I've worked food service before and I understand too well what it's like to just want a quiet, simple shift. Finally the manager came out, charged me about $7 and made me some food. When they told the waitress to leave me be I heard her remark "alright but they were being rude as fuck" as she walked off. Mind you the only thing I asked for was a menu, then some food; and then asked what the menu item most resembling my order would have been and to just charge me for that. As the waitress stood off in the corner of the Waffle House she literally pulled out her smart phone. Not once did she offer to just scan the QR code for me and help find an order closest to my request, or any such thing. The situation was simple in her mind, I didn't have access to their QR code menu, so I couldn't order anything; end of story.

For many if you take public transport and you need an app for it, your phone needs to be able to run that app. If it can't you're out of luck, it doesn't matter if you have the money for the bus, it doesn't matter if you could pay a taxi. You need to have the app on your phone to travel, you need to scan a QR code to eat, some apps will literally ask for your ID or driver's license, so that's fun. I've literally had apps ask me for my social security information. Yea, remember kids don't give out your personal information to anyone online... unless it's this fun app you use, because remember the guys at [business] are your friends! I know you may believe that they're a business and therefore they have to use your data responsibly, but the truth is that's just not how it works. The people working at Google, at Tumblr, at Uber, they're all just people; people like you and me. Except they have access to your cloud storage, they have access to everything you've ever posted, they have access to your location, they have access to any pictures you've taken that get automatically backed up to your phone with metadata that lists the exact place it was taken; yes that includes your nudes. "For your eyes only... and like all the google employees who see this, and that one creepy guy who screenshot it and shares it with his friends uwu"

Not to be a boomer, but back in my day we were literally taught internet safety in school; and a lot of people cared deeply about this sort of thing. They weren't so apathetic to it all just to get through the day, I hear people say "oh I don't care, I know they're watching, listening; they know everything about me, targeted ads are real; etc." Hell I've been there myself, it's hard to care about it all because it feels like it's everywhere. I understand you may not want to really concern yourself with it, but when you're aware of it you can actually take measures to prevent it where you can. That's literally WHY we were taught this shit in school.

Truth is, I still have those hopes of a future where tech is part of the daily life of those who want it. I love the idea of convenient apps and fun websites. I love the idea of tech advancing and everyone finding new ways to enjoy life. Things like Vtubers, VR/AR tech, video games, and yes even the good things about shit like cell phones, and smart devices. That's all great, but I want it without all the bullshit. I hate using AR tech and going "hi random Meta employee who's likely viewing my data, location, and possibly has random access to my cameras and what I'm running on my own personal tech!" People call me paranoid, they bitch at me for being cynical; and I can't blame them. I really can't, because I know I'd enjoy life a lot more if I didn't think like this, if I didn't know what I know. It's that age old saying that ignorance is bliss.

However, when I see things like the Old Web Movement, and I understand people are trying; they're fighting the good fight and I'm just sitting there? I can't do that. I have to do my part, I have to try as well; or else I have no right to complain, to want for better tech; safer tech, more private tech. I can't scream about something as simple as discord suddenly telling me about everything my friends are playing, or what they're watching in a server I'm not even a part of; unless I'm actively actually doing my part to spread awareness and fight against the violations of privacy that so many tech applications are imposing upon people. I have to speak up even if people hate me for it.

If I was alone on that front, I'd probably let it die; I'd just be some hermit living my own way and not even care. However when I see people trying to fight for others to make their own websites, to give that power back to the public. When I see people trying to teach others how to jailbreak their tech, how to fight back against the automation of data mining and AI stealing your every word to teach some multi-billion dollar waste of electricity. I have to do my part, because I was born just before the turn of the century; and while I'm sure people would tell me it's not that deep. I still dream of the future that was promised to me when I was young, and if I can't have it in my life time, I'll fight for Zoomers; and if they can't have it in theirs, I want them to be armed with the knowledge necessary to help the next generation.

#personal ramblings don't come at me with dumb anon opinions about this I will just block you I don't care man #I'm just venting and getting this shit off my chest because it's something I think about a lot #I'm so tired of having to hold my tongue because I hate putting up with getting so much anon hate over my shitty opinions

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