#Plain Lobster

[menubot]

Welcome to 1851! Why not enjoy some Plain Lobster at American House? http://menus.nypl.org/menus/21075

[pegglefan69]

planning on dyeing a bunch of white yarn in my stash with the onion skins I saved from the local farm last year, then knitting a vest out of it...planning even further ahead to try & dye yarn with some of their beets & marigolds too later this year... I think it'd be really cute to have an ongoing 'farm vest' project >:^)

[alukaforyou]

my grandma passed away a couple of years ago and let me tell you the fucking relief i felt when she did...i had lived with her most of my adult life while i had two cats both with serious digestive health issues. every single day i had to berate her for feeding human food to those cats. she did not give a fuck. she would "accidentally" spill fries, hot dogs, fritos, chicken skin, anything. ANYTHING. and they got sick every single time. and she was constantly complaining about them being sick. it destroyed our relationship. there were other factors of course but this was really the crux of it. and she died miserable and lonely. of course i love to spoil my cats (for example it was my kittens bday recently so i bought a lobster tail boiled it and split it btwn all my cats and they lost their minds over it) but there is a limit and you need to do your fucking research and you need to respect what their owner says!!!!! i empathize with you greatly and i am wishing your shitty grandmother a speedy death for the sake of you your cats and the rest of your family.

my cats r p healthy for now and havent rly gotten sick eating god knows what from her but me & my sis are so paranoid every day we are out of the house like what is she feeding them now. literally WHAT is stopping her from listening to logic. like u kno what ur doing is bad right? u kno ur not supposed to be doing it cuz ur sneaking around. SO WHY ARE U DOING IT!! theres just like a lot of other issues w grandma that i cant even get into rn but i am so mad she is potentially endangering my cats :/ creamy doesnt rly eat ppl food (unless its meat) but crunchy will eat bread crumbs, fruit, anything :/ also she will? not hold them properly? and take them out to our balcony??? at night?!!! so they can get a good night time view like hello. i am scared they will jump out of her arms and go missing :/ i have them chipped but still!!!! i hate that lady sm. literally does whatever she wants.

[homunculus-argument]

Despite of the overwhelming body of evidence of the contrary, I am actually a fucking genius.

I've had this tiny dog/cat collar that I had meant to turn into a bracelet for quite some time, but felt like it was kind of plain and boring on its own, and I didn't know what I could do with it to give it some extra jazz.

And a while ago, while buying more studs and spikes to add to all my stuff, I was also overtaken by impulse to buy this thing. Once I got it, I came to see that the thing itself was kind of just flimsy, impossible to actually wear without it just flopping and sagging everywhere. And on top of that, it was unspeakably infuriating to try to put on. Whoever it is that keeps putting lobster claw clasps on bracelets, I am going to start physically manifesting inside your house. But the ring parts themselves were nice.

And then it fucking struck me: I can just combine them. Best of both. Finally use up this awkward-length strip of heavy flat chain that I had found no use for, which now has a perfect home.

This thing fucks.

[bogleech]

Opinions on the new Splatoon character featured in the upcoming Side Order update? (no idea what it is)

Oh my god is that a LUCIFER???!?!!!

......As in an obscure genus of darkness-dwelling planktonic crustaceans!

There are other transparent marine crustaceans with stalks eyes, like this mantis shrimp larva and spiny lobster larva:

...But Splatoon friend really emphasizes stalk-eyes as THE standout feature on an otherwise plain skinny body, and if they based a character on a larva I might expect it to be more kid-coded, though you really never know how Splatoon might decide to stylize a given animal. Also I say "darkness dwelling" because not all creatures like this are just "deep sea." Lucifer stay fairly deep during the day but they rise almost to the surface at night, as do lots and lots of other sea creatures. They just go where the dark goes! UPDATE apparently the character outright shares the lucifer shrimp's Japanese name, dream-shrimp!

[wanderingnork]

with the news of NaNoWriMo shutting down for good, I want to make sure to preserve Lemony Snicket's 2010 pep talk. every time I feel down about my writing, for the last 15 years, I've returned to this talk as a reminder of why I write. it's easy, especially now, to wonder why we bother doing what we do. here's a reminder for us all.

-

Dear Cohort,

Struggling with your novel? Paralyzed by the fear that it’s nowhere near good enough? Feeling caught in a trap of your own devising? You should probably give up.

For one thing, writing is a dying form. One reads of this every day. Every magazine and newspaper, every hardcover and paperback, every website and most walls near the freeway trumpet the news that nobody reads anymore, and everyone has read these statements and felt their powerful effects. The authors of all those articles and editorials, all those manifestos and essays, all those exclamations and eulogies—what would they say if they knew you were writing something? They would urge you, in bold-faced print, to stop.

Clearly, the future is moving us proudly and zippily away from the written word, so writing a novel is actually interfering with the natural progress of modern society. It is old-fashioned and fuddy-duddy, a relic of a time when people took artistic expression seriously and found solace in a good story told well. We are in the process of disentangling ourselves from that kind of peace of mind, so it is rude for you to hinder the world by insisting on adhering to the beloved paradigms of the past. It is like sitting in a gondola, listening to the water carry you across the water, while everyone else is zooming over you in jetpacks, belching smoke into the sky. Stop it, is what the jet-packers would say to you. Stop it this instant, you in that beautiful craft of intricately-carved wood that is giving you such a pleasant journey.

Besides, there are already plenty of novels. There is no need for a new one. One could devote one’s entire life to reading the work of Henry James, for instance, and never touch another novel by any other author, and never be hungry for anything else, the way one could live on nothing but multivitamin tablets and pureed root vegetables and never find oneself craving wild mushroom soup or linguini with clam sauce or a plain roasted chicken with lemon-zested dandelion greens or strong black coffee or a perfectly ripe peach or chips and salsa or caramel ice cream on top of poppyseed cake or smoked salmon with capers or aged goat cheese or a gin gimlet or some other startling item sprung from the imagination of some unknown cook. In fact, think of the world of literature as an enormous meal, and your novel as some small piddling ingredient – the drawn butter, for example, served next to a large, boiled lobster. Who wants that? If it were brought to the table, surely most people would ask that it be removed post-haste.

Even if you insisted on finishing your novel, what for? Novels sit unpublished, or published but unsold, or sold but unread, or read but unreread, lonely on shelves and in drawers and under the legs of wobbly tables. They are like seashells on the beach. Not enough people marvel over them. They pick them up and put them down. Even your friends and associates will never appreciate your novel the way you want them to. In fact, there are likely just a handful of readers out in the world who are perfect for your book, who will take it to heart and feel its mighty ripples throughout their lives, and you will likely never meet them, at least under the proper circumstances. So who cares? Think of that secret favorite book of yours – not the one you tell people you like best, but that book so good that you refuse to share it with people because they’d never understand it. Perhaps it’s not even a whole book, just a tiny portion that you’ll never forget as long as you live. Nobody knows you feel this way about that tiny portion of literature, so what does it matter? The author of that small bright thing, that treasured whisper deep in your heart, never should have bothered.

Of course, it may well be that you are writing not for some perfect reader someplace, but for yourself, and that is the biggest folly of them all, because it will not work. You will not be happy all of the time. Unlike most things that most people make, your novel will not be perfect. It may well be considerably less than one-fourth perfect, and this will frustrate you and sadden you. This is why you should stop. Most people are not writing novels which is why there is so little frustration and sadness in the world, particularly as we zoom on past the novel in our smoky jet packs soon to be equipped with pureed food. The next time you find yourself in a group of people, stop and think to yourself, probably no one here is writing a novel. This is why everyone is so content, here at this bus stop or in line at the supermarket or standing around this baggage carousel or sitting around in this doctor’s waiting room or in seventh grade or in Johannesburg. Give up your novel, and join the crowd. Think of all the things you could do with your time instead of participating in a noble and storied art form. There are things in your cupboards that likely need to be moved around.

In short, quit. Writing a novel is a tiny candle in a dark, swirling world. It brings light and warmth and hope to the lucky few who, against insufferable odds and despite a juggernaut of irritations, find themselves in the right place to hold it. Blow it out, so our eyes will not be drawn to its power. Extinguish it so we can get some sleep. I plan to quit writing novels myself, sometime in the next hundred years.

Lemony Snicket

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Leveraged buyouts are not like mortgages

I'm coming to DEFCON! On FRIDAY (Aug 9), I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On SATURDAY (Aug 10), I'm giving a keynote called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).

Here's an open secret: the confusing jargon of finance is not the product of some inherent complexity that requires a whole new vocabulary. Rather, finance-talk is all obfuscation, because if we called finance tactics by their plain-language names, it would be obvious that the sector exists to defraud the public and loot the real economy.

Take "leveraged buyout," a polite name for stealing a whole goddamned company:

Identify a company that owns valuable assets that are required for its continued operation, such as the real-estate occupied by its outlets, or even its lines of credit with suppliers;

Approach lenders (usually banks) and ask for money to buy the company, offering the company itself (which you don't own!) as collateral on the loan;

Offer some of those loaned funds to shareholders of the company and convince a key block of those shareholders (for example, executives with large stock grants, or speculators who've acquired large positions in the company, or people who've inherited shares from early investors but are disengaged from the operation of the firm) to demand that the company be sold to the looters;

Call a vote on selling the company at the promised price, counting on the fact that many investors will not participate in that vote (for example, the big index funds like Vanguard almost never vote on motions like this), which means that a minority of shareholders can force the sale;

Once you own the company, start to strip-mine its assets: sell its real-estate, start stiffing suppliers, fire masses of workers, all in the name of "repaying the debts" that you took on to buy the company.

This process has its own euphemistic jargon, for example, "rightsizing" for layoffs, or "introducing efficiencies" for stiffing suppliers or selling key assets and leasing them back. The looters – usually organized as private equity funds or hedge funds – will extract all the liquid capital – and give it to themselves as a "special dividend." Increasingly, there's also a "divi recap," which is a euphemism for borrowing even more money backed by the company's assets and then handing it to the private equity fund:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/17/divi-recaps/#graebers-ghost

If you're a Sopranos fan, this will all sound familiar, because when the (comparatively honest) mafia does this to a business, it's called a "bust-out":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bust_Out

The mafia destroys businesses on a onesy-twosey, retail scale; but private equity and hedge funds do their plunder wholesale.

It's how they killed Red Lobster:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/23/spineless/#invertebrates

And it's what they did to hospitals:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/28/5000-bats/#charnel-house

It's what happened to nursing homes, Armark, private prisons, funeral homes, pet groomers, nursing homes, Toys R Us, The Olive Garden and Pet Smart:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

It's what happened to the housing co-ops of Cooper Village, Texas energy giant TXU, Old Country Buffet, Harrah's and Caesar's:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/14/billionaire-class-solidarity/#club-deals

And it's what's slated to happen to 2.9m Boomer-owned US businesses employing 32m people, whose owners are nearing retirement:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/16/schumpeterian-terrorism/#deliberately-broken

Now, you can't demolish that much of the US productive economy without attracting some negative attention, so the looter spin-machine has perfected some talking points to hand-wave away the criticism that borrowing money using something you don't own as collateral in order to buy it and wreck it is obviously a dishonest (and potentially criminal) destructive practice.

The most common one is that borrowing money against an asset you don't own is just like getting a mortgage. This is such a badly flawed analogy that it is really a testament to the efficacy of the baffle-em-with-bullshit gambit to convince us all that we're too stupid to understand how finance works.

Sure: if I put an offer on your house, I will go to my credit union and ask the for a mortgage that uses your house as collateral. But the difference here is that you own your house, and the only way I can buy it – the only way I can actually get that mortgage – is if you agree to sell it to me.

Owner-occupied homes typically have uncomplicated ownership structures. Typically, they're owned by an individual or a couple. Sometimes they're the property of an estate that's divided up among multiple heirs, whose relationship is mediated by a will and a probate court. Title can be contested through a divorce, where disputes are settled by a divorce court. At the outer edge of complexity, you get things like polycules or lifelong roommates who've formed an LLC s they can own a house among several parties, but the LLC will have bylaws, and typically all those co-owners will be fully engaged in any sale process.

Leveraged buyouts don't target companies with simple ownership structures. They depend on firms whose equity is split among many parties, some of whom will be utterly disengaged from the firm's daily operations – say, the kids of an early employee who got a big stock grant but left before the company grew up. The looter needs to convince a few of these "owners" to force a vote on the acquisition, and then rely on the idea that many of the other shareholders will simply abstain from a vote. Asset managers are ubiquitous absentee owners who own large stakes in literally every major firm in the economy. The big funds – Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street – "buy the whole market" (a big share in every top-capitalized firm on a given stock exchange) and then seek to deliver returns equal to the overall performance of the market. If the market goes up by 5%, the index funds need to grow by 5%. If the market goes down by 5%, then so do those funds. The managers of those funds are trying to match the performance of the market, not improve on it (by voting on corporate governance decisions, say), or to beat it (by only buying stocks of companies they judge to be good bets):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/17/shareholder-socialism/#asset-manager-capitalism

Your family home is nothing like one of these companies. It doesn't have a bunch of minority shareholders who can force a vote, or a large block of disengaged "owners" who won't show up when that vote is called. There isn't a class of senior managers – Chief Kitchen Officer! – who have been granted large blocks of options that let them have a say in whether you will become homeless.

Now, there are homes that fit this description, and they're a fucking disaster. These are the "heirs property" homes, generally owned by the Black descendants of enslaved people who were given the proverbial 40 acres and a mule. Many prosperous majority Black settlements in the American South are composed of these kinds of lots.

Given the historical context – illiterate ex-slaves getting property as reparations or as reward for fighting with the Union Army – the titles for these lands are often muddy, with informal transfers from parents to kids sorted out with handshakes and not memorialized by hiring lawyers to update the deeds. This has created an irresistible opportunity for a certain kind of scammer, who will pull the deeds, hire genealogists to map the family trees of the original owners, and locate distant descendants with homeopathically small claims on the property. These descendants don't even know they own these claims, don't even know about these ancestors, and when they're offered a few thousand bucks for their claim, they naturally take it.

Now, armed with a claim on the property, the heirs property scammers force an auction of it, keeping the process under wraps until the last instant. If they're really lucky, they're the only bidder and they can buy the entire property for pennies on the dollar and then evict the family that has lived on it since Reconstruction. Sometimes, the family will get wind of the scam and show up to bid against the scammer, but the scammer has deep capital reserves and can easily win the auction, with the same result:

https://www.propublica.org/series/dispossessed

A similar outrage has been playing out for years in Hawai'i, where indigenous familial claims on ancestral lands have been diffused through descendants who don't even know they're co-owner of a place where their distant cousins have lived since pre-colonial times. These descendants are offered small sums to part with their stakes, which allows the speculator to force a sale and kick the indigenous Hawai'ians off their family lands so they can be turned into condos or hotels. Mark Zuckerberg used this "quiet title and partition" scam to dispossess hundreds of Hawai'ian families:

https://archive.is/g1YZ4

Heirs property and quiet title and partition are a much better analogy to a leveraged buyout than a mortgage is, because they're ways of stealing something valuable from people who depend on it and maintain it, and smashing it and selling it off.

Strip away all the jargon, and private equity is just another scam, albeit one with pretensions to respectability. Its practitioners are ripoff artists. You know the notorious "carried interest loophole" that politicians periodically discover and decry? "Carried interest" has nothing to do with the interest on a loan. The "carried interest" rule dates back to 16th century sea-captains, and it refers to the "interest" they had in the cargo they "carried":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#carried-interest

Private equity managers are like sea captains in exactly the same way that leveraged buyouts are like mortgages: not at all.

And it's not like private equity is good to its investors: scams like "continuation funds" allow PE looters to steal all the money they made from strip mining valuable companies, so they show no profits on paper when it comes time to pay their investors:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/20/continuation-fraud/#buyout-groups

Those investors are just as bamboozled as we are, which is why they keep giving more money to PE funds. Today, the "dry powder" (uninvested money) that PE holds has reached an all-time record high of $2.62 trillion – money from pension funds and rich people and sovereign wealth funds, stockpiled in anticipation of buying and destroying even more profitable, productive, useful businesses:

https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2di1vzgjcmzovkcea8f0g/portfolio/private-equitys-dry-powder-mountain-reaches-record-height

The practices of PE are crooked as hell, and it's only the fact that they use euphemisms and deceptive analogies to home mortgages that keeps them from being shut down. The more we strip away the bullshit, the faster we'll be able to kill this cancer, and the more of the real economy we'll be able to preserve.

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/2024/08/05/rugged-individuals/#misleading-by-analogy

[elinorasims]

Build | Strangerville | Ziggy's Diner

Lot Info

Type | Restaurant Lot Size | 30x20 World | Strangerville Value | 94,857 Baths | 3 CC | No Packs | Unrestricted Ziggy's Diner is a classicly retro mashup of Googie and passenger train inspired styles situated in Strangerville Plaza.

Ziggy's is a compact restaurant and bar combo with a Strangerville twist: classic red booths and an elongated mid-century modern bar layout meets sci-fi inspired and 50's-kitsch inspired cluttered decor..

It's giving the diner from the movie 'Paul'. I hope. lol

Ziggy's has a fully customised menu featuring some Mountain States inspired comfort dishes and some American classics (full menu below the cut).

DOWNLOAD >>

Interior Tour

Bar

Staff Areas

Floor Plan

| hi my loves

hopefully you like this one- it was super fun to build and I'm finding my feet a bit more building for this save, i think!

it's been playtested (briefly lol) and should be fully functional and a smooth enough restaurant experience for your sims to enjoy.

i love Paul so much aha we watched it this past weekend and i was immediately like 'yup. gotta go do a strangerville build now.'

| dag dag fn. <3

Ziggy's Diner Menu

Drinks water ; lemonade ; milk ; orange juice ; coffee ; cream cola ; fizzy fruity drink ; pitch black ; root beer float ; soda ; tang and zing ; boiler room ; eapa ; juice on the rocks ; wrench ; galactic vita-water ; silent film ; sour punch ; sunset valley ; alien juice ; cupid juice ; space energy drink ; jet juice

Appetisers chips and salsa ; mac and cheese ; bowl of olives ; bread roll ; french fries ; whole wheat bread ; popcorn shrimp ; garden salad ; cheesy bread ; grilled plantains ; seafood chowder ; soft shell crab cake ; empanadas ; watermelon salad

Mains mac and cheese ; chicken nuggets ; popcorn shrimp ; baked potato ; hot dog ; lobster roll ; veggie burger ; chicken and waffles ; fried chicken sliders ; mushroom waffles ; sausage and peppers ; scrambled eggs with bacon ; seafood chowder ; tofu dog ; fish tacos ; hamburger ; fried fish ; pancakes ; aubergine Parmesan ; sweet corn pizza ; mushroom steak ; french toast ; vegetable chilli ; egg white omelette ; mushroom soup ; bbq ribs plate ; blackened bass ; gumbo ; steak

Dessert neapolitan ice cream ; rainbow sorbet ; vanilla ice cream ; alien fruit tart ; cream filled donut ; cream snack cake ; honey cake ; plain waffles ; rainbow brownies ; hamburger cake ; chocolate chip cookie ; apple pie ; banana cream pie ; pumpkin pie ; simcity cheesecake ; fruit cobbler

[fab-ernathy]

Eating Like the Greek Class, Book 1

Okay, so here's my thing. I have a hard time motivating myself to do basic human things like eat food. It has to be linked to a special interest or hyperfixation OR be a set routine for me, and since I don't have a routine for dinner that's the most difficult meal of the day. And TSH is my hyperfixation at the moment so... behold: every food the Greek class eat (not including drinks or we'd be here forever).

(Under a read more because it's Long.)

Chapter 2

Page 62:

Despite the vast amount we ate that afternoon – soups, lobsters, pates, mousses, an array appalling in variety and amount [...]

Page 73:

Charles had the oven open and was poking at some lamb chops with a fork.

Page 90:

[...] to find Bunny and Charles on the front porch, eating ham sandwiches and playing cards.

Page 94:

We borrowed Henry's car, drove to Maine so he could have a club sandwich in a bar he liked there [...]

Page 103:

Francis sat curled in the window seat with a plate of little sandwiches in his lap, reading [...] Bunny lay on his stomach on the hearth rug, doing his homework; occasionally he would steal one of Francis's sandwiches or ask a pained question.

Chapter 3

Page 120:

I found an awkward note of apology in my mailbox, wrapped around a paperback copy of the poems of Rupert Brooke and a box of Junior Mints.

Page 121:

Sitting around the kitchen table we had a sad, makeshift dinner of canned mushroom soup, soda crackers, and tea without sugar or milk.

Page 126:

Then I would go make myself a can of soup and some instant coffee on the hot plate in the Social Science office [...]

Page 142:

But sometimes when I got home he would have made dinner – he wasn't a fancy cook like Francis and only made plain things, broiled chickens and baked potatoes, bachelor food [...]

Page 144:

I cut some bread and made him a cheese sandwich, as he showed no inclination of getting up and making anything himself.

Chapter 4

Page 154:

One morning after he'd had a date with Marion, he showed up at breakfast with his tray full of milk and sugar doughnuts

Page 162:

I went upstairs and got myself a cup of coffee and a couple of soft-boiled eggs, which I ate alone at a table near a window in the empty main dining room. [...] It was the big back-to-school dinner that night – roast beef, green beans almondine, cheese souffle and some elaborate lentil dish for the vegetarians.

Page 166:

He reached in and pulled out a frozen cheesecake.

Page 172:

'There was no food at Francis's house except some cans of black olives and a box of Bisquick.' 'Yes. We ate olives and Bisquick.' [...] 'There wasn't any milk, even,' said Camilla. 'We had to mix the Bisquick with water.'

Page 175:

Henry ordered an enormous dinner – pea soup, roast beef, a salad, mashed potatoes with gravy, coffee, pie – and ate it silently and with a great deal of methodical relish. I picked erratically at my omelet and had a hard time keeping my eyes off him as we ate.

Chapter 5

Page 198:

Walking home, a sandwich from the snack bar in my pocket, [...] Bunny leaning back on his elbows with his legs stretched in front of him, cracking pensively with his rear molars at a little Dum-Dum sucker.

Page 200:

'He took a quart of ice cream out of my freezer to eat while he waited he couldn't bother to get a bowl of it, you understand, he had to have the whole quart – and when he fell asleep it melted all over him and on my chair and on that nice little Oriental rug I used to have.'

Page 204:

We ate Welsh rarebits and listened to the rain beating down in gusts on the roof.

Page 234:

Dinner appeared with instantaneous magic: pork roast, biscuits, turnips and corn and butternut squash, in thick china bowls that had pictures of the presidents (up to Nixon) around their rims.

Page 237:

To the casual observer, I suppose, he seemed pretty much his jolly old self - slapping people on the back, eating Twinkies and Ho Hos in the reading room of the library and dropping crumbs all down in the bindings of his Greek books.

Page 240:

He ignored our awkward greetings and went straight to the cabinet and made himself a bowl of Sugar Frosted Flakes and sat down wordlessly at the table.

Page 252:

She was still a girl, a slight lovely girl who lay in bed and ate chocolates [...]

Page 264-5:

He reached in the pocket of his overcoat and pulled out a bundle wrapped in napkins. 'I brought you a sandwich since you weren't at lunch. [...] It was cream cheese and marmalade, I knew without looking. The twins were fanatical about them but I didn't like them much.

Page 269:

There was roasted lamb, new potatoes, peas with leeks and fennel; a rich and almost maddeningly delicious bottle of Chateau Latour. I was eating with better appetite than I had had in ages when I noticed that a fourth course had appeared, with unobtrusive magic, at my elbow: mushrooms. They were pale and slender-stemmed, of a type I had seen before, steaming in a red wine sauce that smelled of coriander and rue.

Page 279:

Henry switched off the lamp and went to the stove and began, rather mechanically, to make some bacon and eggs.

Page 283:

'Well, I don't know who did it,' the house chairperson said, 'but whoever it was, they had spaghetti for dinner.' [...] Then I put on my robe and, eating an apple I'd found in the house kitchen, walked downstairs [...] When I got to Henry's, I was glad to see that Charles and Francis were still picking at a cold chicken and some salad.

---

OK, so so far we have lots of sandwiches, European-style food, and mentions of lots of unspecified meals (that I didn't include) but some were seen as elaborate by Richard's standards. I did take note of the drinks, but they seem to be of all varieties; alcoholic drinks (which tended to be whiskey based), coffee, tea, water, and soft drinks. This is a good start, and I'll be back for Book 2 soon for more inspiration.

[sciderman]

Round boy + mask = square jaw

Pointy boy + mask = egg

Why?

wade's mask is masc. (hahaehehehahaeo...)

wade does a lot to mask his soft interior – he worries a lot about appearing soft.

[x]

he's GETTING SOFT (and peter loves it. he loves when wade gets soft.)

[x]

underneath it all, wade's soft and round. no matter how he tries to hide it.

[x]

wade is always hiding it – to way more extreme and destructive measures than peter, actually.

it's kind of funny, wade's insistence that peter needs to be honest to himself - because wade's the poster boy. wade finds it difficult to be true to himself, because he doesn't even know which "self" is true at this point. he's constantly pretending to be someone or something else.

something that'll please others. make him more palatable. more entertaining. make the audience side with him, even if he thinks he's undeserving. fake it till you make it.

sometimes i think about how wade lost his virginity the night before he enlisted (because he was worried the guys would make fun of him if he was a virgin.)

of course they made fun of him anyway.

he doubles down - he puts on the macho air that everyone expects from him. he can be the bad boy. he can be the rugged antihero that is a total jerk but everyone loves anyway because he's the tough guy. it's why you'll never get to see what adult wade looked like pre-weapon X - you'll see wade in his teenage years - but once he enlists - that's not wade wilson. he's constantly playing a role. cool action hero, whatever'll get him the girl.

it isn't until weapon X that he's forced into a position where he can't hide anymore. everything is on his skin. plain as day, for everyone to see.

[x]

deadpool becomes the mask wade can hide all his damage and his insecurities behind because lord knows he can't hide a thing when he's out of it. like a lobster out of his shell. he's soft, and pink and tender. he couldn't survive without that hard red shell exterior, to make him look tough.

peter's mask is also masc, but his mask is peter parker.

spider-man is kind of funny. in that – outwardly, it does look similar to deadpool's performative masculinity. he has "-man" in his name, for christ's sake - but - it's not, really. you wouldn't say spider-man is overly macho. even as much as peter insists it is - nobody buys it.

you'd definitely, by all accounts, call peter parker the more masc aligned of the two - peter wears baggy clothes, he's kind of uptight, a little bit boring - and spider-man - spider-man's downright flamboyant - from his mannerisms, his jokes, and his tights. oh, and his fluttery little web-wings. he is fruity.

spider-man, in his tiny fruity little tights: YEAH. take a look at ME, girls. this is what true manhood looks like.

you might say the confidence it grants him is what makes him macho - but i think the fun thing about peter's gender journey is his embracal that actually - confidence isn't necessarily a masculine trait, and that - actually, his gender icons (save for uncle ben) are largely confident women.

i think that's why olive is so dear to me - that peter's leaning into a confidence and self-assuredness that doesn't come from being conventionally masculine. and, in fact - peter parker might be so shy and insecure because he's trying to fit in a box that doesn't fit him.

i think spider-man is more of a playground for peter. a place where he can experiment with his gender and his sexuality and the concept of "manhood" and what it means to him.

he can explore, because the anonymity grants him less social pressure to fit in. society can despise spider-man, and yeah - it'll get him down, but the repercussions are relatively little. peter has to fit in, to survive. and, as peter parker, he's terrified of those repercussions.

peter has such a desire to explore his identity and understand himself better - but, under safe, controlled conditions - whether that's under the anonymity of his mask or... or with people, who make him feel safe.

so, spider-man is peter's outlet to be fruity without repercussions. peter's og dragsona, actually. so – lithe, and curvy. he is so shape.

[changingplumbob]

Waiter: Hello folks. What can I get you

Coraline: Apple

Layla: If my birthday girl could have a bowl of applesauce please, I’ll have lobster

Malcolm: And I’ll have salmon please. Our son will have the gnocchi

Layla: Actually forget that. If we could just have a chicken breast, as plain as you can make it, with some vegetables. I think it’s on the kids menu as a number 5, or it was online

Byron: Plain vegetables please

Mal looked like he was going to interrupt but I just looked at him. He kept his mouth shut until the waiter had gone.

[ultfreakme]

Moot already made a post about this but the way the de-agers and specifically damijons talk about Jay & Damian in terms of class is so fascinating. It's entirely removed from canon, first of all, and for some reason consistently portrays generational wealth and ancestry as something to be admired.

It entirely disregards Damian's personal issues over his ancestry. He kinda fucking doesn't like that he's defined entirely by his bloodline. His pride in his name and his family doesn't come from the presitge linked to the wealth and status of the names but based on how he relates to his family individually without the obligations of the titles, and how he defines those names ON HIS OWN TERMS. But he's characterized by wealth to contrast with the "plain Jane" Jay who apparently doesn't understand the world of the wealthy???

Jay may not be the son of a billionaire but HE IS THE SON OF A PRESIDENT. He works at PR with Steelworks directly with John-Henry Irons. He was living by scrapping up money when he was solely running The Truth and was a refugee from Gamorra but he is not removed or unaware of how the wealthy elite function. He's a president's son for fuck's sake he was probably in one of the better, if not best, schools in Gamorra and currently lounges in his bath tub with wine. But the damijon and de-ager fanon specifically makes him out to be completely unaware of how these upper class oppressive group works.

The strangest bit is Jay is demonized for being peasantly in these headcanons whereas Damian's wealth gives backing into making him morally correct. Why are you talking like you are writing Marie Antoinette's defense when they put her on the chopping block? Why on earth would you willfully mischaracterize Damian into being defined entirely by his wealth and ancestry rather than his skill? Why would you demonize Jay's apparent lack of knowledge about the upper class and make him immoral for.....pointing out that the batfam are all nepo babies?

You're reading DC Comics, fuck you're reading COMICS PERIOD

This is where we shit on the ruling class!!!! Put down the shipping goggles and put on the literary analysis goggles right NEOW!!! Fucking hell man write your damijon fics but don't make Damian a rich prick and Jay a pauper who knows not what lobster could possibly be

[nightshadesmusings]

text under the cut

Whale Fall

As the last flickers of life fade She sinks into the depths.

The great journeys of her life remain etched into her skin Until the sharks tear it away, erasing the record of where she’s been

The life bleeding out as she sinks, but she is not alone In her final journey to nourish the starving depths of the unknown.

As her corpse settles on the seafloor She begins to be stripped away.

The hagfish follow the scent leaching out into the frigid ocean In search of the promise of life for their world of slow motion They burrow into her body to tear flesh away from bone Relishing in the muscle memories of warmth that she has known.

As the deep sea cleans off her bones She exists to be picked clean.

Squat lobsters make their homes in the shelter of her system Chiseling away the scraps of blubber that held her wisdom Working around the boneworms whose roots siphon the marrow And free the stories of her ancestors from her deep-sea barrow.

As the abysses exhaust her flesh She continues to sustain life.

The deeps worship her skeleton; great sustenance falling from the light None of which is ever wasted, for the abysses are sympathetic to her plight Bacteria extract the lipids from her bones so they may enrich The sediments around her grave, creating an oasis in a ditch.

As the deep sea strips away everything She still has more to give.

Even hundreds of years after her death and decay After the deep sea has consumed the stories her body could convey In a seemingly empty world of muddy plains Anemones and corals cling to her mineralized remains.

And through them, she is still alive.

[syneilesis]

I forgot I started a sub!Rafayel fic when the beta version of the game came out but never finished it because I got derailed by the darker and angrier facet of Rafayel in his Abysswalker era lol

Anyway, I'm posting it now in its first draft (un)glory. It's supposedly smut but I never got to that point lmao so this is still relatively sfw

Rafayel keeps making incessant and silly demands of you. You retaliate by putting him in his place.

Today is a weird day. It's also a busy day, but that's probably why today is a weird day.

You look down and Rafayel looks up at you, silk ties snaking around his wrists and on the bed frame, firm and tight. Redness begins to take over his cheeks and the rest of his face and ears. His eyebrows are drawn down, as are his lips, but his eyes flare with something you can't identify right now, hot and unyielding and it stirs your gut, the embers in his gaze.

“Apologize.”

Rafayel's nostrils flare in defiance and his head whips to the side, huffing despite his being in the disadvantaged position. “Why should I? I did nothing wrong.”

His clothed hips touch the inner sides of your thighs, bare, and they graze the hem of your skirt.

Above him you sigh in frustration, originally not planning to arrive at this compromising position but unwilling to back out nonetheless.

“You strongarmed me into becoming your plus-one for that high-profile art gala and I got mobbed by a group of reporters asking me whether I'm your girlfriend! There were cameras! Videos rolling! And when I turned you weren't there to help! You'd already sneaked out! I literally had to run away—like a coward!”

Rafayel isn't fazed in the slightest. “You could have told them off in the first place. Didn't you say yourself that you're strong, Miss Hunter?”

The urge to roll your eyes burns so bad. Sure, Rafayel has his moments—plenty of them, to be exact. Nearly all the time. He's a brat, whiny and self-assured, but he isn't malicious.

+++++

Rafayel is sitting on the floor, leaning against the wooden ladder, hands above his head just pressed into the third step, bound by a silk tie with a knot that is firm and tight but doesn't bruise his paint-stained wrists. Bright crimson spills across his cheeks, his nose, his ears—his whole face as if overbaked by the sun, almost matching the color of his expensive formal jacket. It makes you want to tease him, tell him that he's no different from a lobster, but you hold back, because this isn't the time to say such cheeky words, not when things are only beginning.

His two-toned eyes follow your movements, his brows tugged downward, as are his lips. Every minute shift from him draws attention to his exposed collarbones and his chest, the first three buttons of his shirt opened and splayed like a recently bloomed hibiscus flower. Barefoot and seemingly helpless, Rafayel is a dash of paint against the plain white of the studio—striking like a lightning bolt.

“What did I do to deserve this?” He tugs his hands a little, and the ladder shakes behind him.

“Careful,” you warn, “you don't want the ladder to topple on you, yeah?”

“I can get out of this easily, you know,” he says, and you can hear the pout in his defiant voice. It's true, though. Despite his slender build, Rafayel is a competent fighter. In this kind of situation, his Evol is also an appropriate means to escape—and destroy.

“I know. But you're not going to do that.”

“And what makes you so sure?”

You step towards him, careful of the discarded papers on the floor, and stop when your feet cage his squirming legs. He freezes at the contact, craning his neck to meet your amused gaze.

“Because,” you answer, singsong, bending down to trace a finger along the dip of his collarbone, then further to his chest, tapping the mole on his left pec. He gulps at the touch, and you almost miss his shudder. If anything, he reddens more. “You want to know where this is going. You're curious, but you also don't want to admit it.”

[coldgoldlazarus]

Tahu - Salamander/Komodo Dragon/Bull/Bear/Samurai/Barbarian

Vakama - Phoenix/Clocktower/Factory/Tiger/Red Panda

Jaller - Crab/Samurai/Spartan

Gali - Angelfish/Shark/Atlantian

Nokama - Giant Squid/Aquarium/University/Orca/Flying Fish/Water Strider

Hahli - Lionfish/Angler Fish/Eel

Lewa - Dragonfly/Snake/Monkey/Flying Squirrel/Aztec

Matau - Monkey/Biplane/Suspension Bridge/Feathered Utahraptor

Kongu - Gecko/Hummingbird/Falcon/Lobster/Gorilla/Vampire Squid

Onua - Daddy Long Legs Spider/Steam Shovel/Gorilla/Mongol

Whenua - Pillbug/Bear/Library/Zoo/Warehouse/Mole

Nuparu - Stealth Bomber/Bat/Manta Ray

Kopaka - White Tiger/Wolf/Polar Bear/Knight

Nuju - Snowy Owl/Observatory/Lighthouse/Chameleon/Bat

Matoro - Narwhal/Death's Head Moth/Arctic Fox

Pohatu - Kangaroo/Scorpion/Gladiator/Outbacker

Onewa - Giraffe/Quarry/Auto Shop/Bull/Antelope/Komodo Dragon/Jumping Spider

Hewkii - Armadillo/Dingo/Manta Ray

Takanuva - Hummingbird/Great Plains Nomad/Crab

Ahkmou - Scorpion/Scarab/Bazaar/Cuttlefish

Helryx - Eel/Crocodile/Seahorse/Sea Serpent/Viking

[beaut-ful-d-saster-1986]

I took Flare to the Plains Of Eidolon...

They caught a tiny lobster -- [karkina] -- and seemed super proud.