#Plumber Middle Park

[fatehbaz]

front page news for years now, "the homelessness crisis", newspaper printing letters to the editor from homeowners fretting about the "freeloaders" and how "dirty" homeless people are, the city progressively worsening their cracking down with ordinances. biggest issue in the city. apartments $675 in 2015 though unchanged go for $1500 in 2024. few months ago, significant new ordinance further criminalizing visible homelessness and banning people from parks and trails. multiple "community groups" now that hold events and pool money for advocacy, except they're not raising money to help poor people, they're raising money to pay for ads and banners and posters to say "keep them out of our neighborhood". imagine: in their free time, they go out of their way to attend potlucks, to get together, to talk about how much they don't like homeless people. it's that much of a priority in their lives. the place is reputed as by far "the most progressive city in the region". huge "enlightened (white) liberal" identity thing. many nonprofits.

this week, biking to work through middle class single-family neighborhood full of municipal employees. recoil and frown when i see the first yard sign: "no camping in parks! protect our children! protect our neighborhood!" but encounter more. many more. practically every other yard has the sign. these are administrators, plumbers, public school teachers, receptionists. people you interact with on a daily basis, who often have power over your well-being, who you hope would have your back, and these are the feelings and beliefs they are harboring.

very next morning. the big front page newspaper headline was the city announcing new contract, massive budget and payment to "private security force" to supervise several neighborhoods. giving them the power to issue warnings under city's new ordinances. (this is not the first year the city has paid mercenaries either. they've been doing it for about 5 years. they stand on street corners, tackle and remove "uncooperative" people from shelter vicinity, flaunting armor and weapons, glaring at passersby.) newspaper explains that someone on city council did try to add an amendment. they proposed that maybe the private security force (1) should not carry firearms, and (2) should at least wear body cameras if they were going to be a private company, interacting with the public, with the legal power to issue warnings. but nope. amendment rejected by 7 of the 9 councilors. the private contractors will carry guns and will not wear body cameras.

"most progressive city in the region" full of nonprofit careerists and liberal civil servant types cannot afford to put beds in shelters. cannot afford better social services. but they can apparently afford to pay massive sums to armed mercenaries. they will act with haste to introduce criminalizing ordinances. they will go out of their way even in their free time to rally and shout about keeping "dirty" people away from "our parks!"

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This is your brain on fraud apologetics

In 1998, two Stanford students published a paper in Computer Networks entitled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” in which they wrote, “Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.”

https://research.google/pubs/pub334/

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/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

The co-authors were Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin, and the “large-scale hypertextual web search-engine” they were describing was their new project, which they called “Google.” They were 100% correct — prescient, even!

On Wednesday night, a friend came over to watch some TV with us. We ordered out. We got scammed. We searched for a great local Thai place we like called Kiin and clicked a sponsored link for a Wix site called “Kiinthaila.com.” We should have clicked the third link down (kiinthaiburbank.com).

We got scammed. The Wix site was a lookalike for Kiin Thai, which marked up their prices by 15% and relayed the order to our local, mom-and-pop, one-branch restaurant. The restaurant knew it, too — they called us and told us they were canceling the order, and said we could still come get our food, but we’d have to call Amex to reverse the charge.

As it turned out, the scammers double-billed us for our order. I called Amex, who advised us to call back in a couple days when the charge posted to cancel it — in other words, they were treating it as a regular customer dispute, and not a systemic, widespread fraud (there’s no way this scammer is just doing this for one restaurant).

In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor hassle, but boy, it’s haunting to watch the quarter-century old prophecy of Brin and Page coming true. Search Google for carpenters, plumbers, gas-stations, locksmiths, concert tickets, entry visas, jobs at the US Post Office or (not making this up) tech support for Google products, and the top result will be a paid ad for a scam. Sometimes it’s several of the top ads.

This kind of “intermediation” business is actually revered in business-schools. As Douglas Rushkoff has written, the modern business wisdom reveres “going meta” — not doing anything useful, but rather, creating a chokepoint between people who do useful things and people who want to pay for those things, and squatting there, collecting rent:

https://rushkoff.medium.com/going-meta-d42c6a09225e

It’s the ultimate passive income/rise and grind side-hustle: It wouldn’t surprise me in the least to discover a whole festering nest of creeps on Tiktok talking about how they pay Mechanical Turks to produce these lookalike sites at scale.

This mindset is so pervasive that people running companies with billions in revenue and massive hoards of venture capital run exactly the same scam. During lockdown, companies like Doordash, Grubhub and Uber Eats stood up predatory lookalike websites for local restaurants, without their consent, and played monster-in-the-middle, tricking diners into ordering through them:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/19/we-are-beautiful/#man-in-the-middle

These delivery app companies were playing a classic enshittification game: first they directed surpluses to customers to lock them in (heavily discounting food), then they directed surplus to restaurants (preferential search results, free delivery, low commissions) — then, having locked in both consumers and producers, they harvested the surplus for themselves.

Today, delivery apps charge massive premiums to both eaters and restaurants, load up every order with junk fees, and clone the most successful restaurants out of ghost kitchens — shipping containers in parking lots crammed with low-waged workers cranking out orders for 15 different fake “virtual restaurants”:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/01/autophagic-buckeyes/#subsidized-autophagia

Delivery apps speedran the enshittification cycle, but Google took a slower path to get there. The company has locked in billions of users (e.g. by paying billions to be the default search on Safari and Firefox and using legal bullying to block third party Android device-makers from pre-installing browsers other than Chrome). For years, it’s been leveraging our lock-in to prey on small businesses, getting them to set up Google Business Profiles.

These profiles are supposed to help Google distinguish between real sellers and scammers. But Kiin Thai has a Google Business Profile, and searching for “kiin thai burbank” brings up a “Knowledge Panel” with the correct website address — on a page that is headed with a link to a scam website for the same business. Google, in other words, has everything it needs to flag lookalike sites and confirm them with their registered owners. It would cost Google money to do this — engineer-time to build and maintain the system, content moderator time to manually check flagged listings, and lost ad-revenue from scammers — but letting the scams flourish makes Google money, at the expense of Google users and Google business customers.

Now, Google has an answer for this: they tell merchants who are being impersonated by ad-buying scammers that all they need to do is outbid them for the top ad-spot. This is a common approach — Amazon has a $31b/year “ad business” that’s mostly its own platform sellers bidding against each other to show you fake results for your query. The first five screens of Amazon search results are 50% ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is “going meta,” so naturally, Meta is doing it too: Facebook and Instagram have announced a $12/month “verification” badge that will let you report impersonation and tweak the algorithm to make it more likely that the posts you make are shown to the people who explicitly asked to see them:

https://www.vox.com/recode/2023/2/21/23609375/meta-verified-twitter-blue-checkmark-badge-instagram-facebook

The corollary of this, of course, is that if you don’t pay, they won’t police your impersonators, and they won’t show your posts to the people who asked to see them. This is pure enshittification — the surplus from users and business customers is harvested for the benefit of the platform owners:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

The idea that merchants should master the platforms as a means of keeping us safe from their impersonators is a hollow joke. For one thing, the rules change all the time, as the platforms endlessly twiddle the knobs that determine what gets shown to whom:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

And they refuse to tell anyone what the rules are, because if they told you what the rules were, you’d be able to bypass them. Content moderation is the only infosec domain where “security through obscurity” doesn’t get laughed out of the room:

https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

Worse: the one thing the platforms do hunt down and exterminate with extreme prejudice is anything that users or business-customers use to twiddle back — add-ons and plugins and jailbreaks that override their poor choices with better ones:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/29/23378541/the-og-app-instagram-clone-pulled-from-app-store

As I was submitting complaints about the fake Kiin scam-site (and Amex’s handling of my fraud call) to the FTC, the California Attorney General, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau and Wix, I wrote a little Twitter thread about what a gross scam this is:

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1628948906657878016

The thread got more than two million reads and got picked up by Hacker News and other sites. While most of the responses evinced solidarity and frustration and recounted similar incidents in other domains, a significant plurality of the replies were scam apologetics — messages from people who wanted to explain why this wasn’t a problem after all.

The most common of these was victim-blaming: “you should have used an adblocker” or “never click the sponsored link.” Of course, I do use an ad-blocker — but this order was placed with a mobile browser, after an absentminded query into the Google search-box permanently placed on the home screen, which opens results in Chrome (where I don’t have an ad-blocker, so I can see material behind an ad-blocker-blocker), not Firefox (which does have an ad-blocker).

Now, I also have a PiHole on my home LAN, which blocks most ads even in a default browser — but earlier this day, I’d been on a public wifi network that was erroneously blocking a website (the always excellent superpunch.net) so I’d turned my wifi off, which meant the connection came over my phone’s 5G connection, bypassing the PiHole:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/28/shut-yer-pi-hole/

“Don’t click a sponsored link” — well, the irony here is that if you habitually use a browser with an ad-blocker, and you backstop it with a PiHole, you never see sponsored links, so it’s easy to miss the tiny “Sponsored” notification beside the search result. That goes double if you’re relaxing with a dinner guest on the sofa and ordering dinner while chatting.

There’s a name for this kind of security failure: the Swiss Cheese Model. We all have multiple defenses (in my case: foreknowledge of Google’s ad-scam problem, an ad-blocker in my browser, LAN-wide ad sinkholing). We also have multiple vulnerabilities (in my case: forgetting I was on 5G, being distracted by conversation, using a mobile device with a permanent insecure search bar on the homescreen, and being so accustomed to ad-blocked results that I got out of the habit of checking whether a result was an ad).

If you think you aren’t vulnerable to scams, you’re wrong — and your confidence in your invulnerability actually increases your risk. This isn’t the first time I’ve been scammed, and it won’t be the last — and every time, it’s been a Swiss Cheese failure, where all the holes in all my defenses lined up for a brief instant and left me vulnerable:

https://locusmag.com/2010/05/cory-doctorow-persistence-pays-parasites/

Other apologetics: “just call the restaurant rather than using its website.” Look, I know the people who say this don’t think I have a time-machine I can use to travel back to the 1980s and retrieve a Yellow Pages, but it’s hard not to snark at them, just the same. Scammers don’t just set up fake websites for your local businesses — they staff them with fake call-centers, too. The same search that takes you to a fake website will also take you to a fake phone number.

Finally, there’s “What do you expect Google to do? They can’t possibly detect this kind of scam.” But they can. Indeed, they are better situated to discover these scams than anyone else, because they have their business profiles, with verified contact information for the merchants being impersonated. When they get an ad that seems to be for the same business but to a different website, they could interrupt the ad process to confirm it with their verified contact info.

Instead, they choose to avoid the expense, and pocket the ad revenue. If a company promises to “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” I think we have the right to demand these kinds of basic countermeasures:

https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/our-approach/

The same goes for Amex: when a merchant is scamming customers, they shouldn’t treat complaints as “chargebacks” — they should treat them as reports of a crime in progress. Amex has the bird’s eye view of their transaction flow and when a customer reports a scam, they can backtrack it to see if the same scammer is doing this with other merchants — but the credit card companies make money by not chasing down fraud:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosalindadams/mastercard-visa-fraud

Wix also has platform-scale analytics that they could use to detect and interdict this kind of fraud — when a scammer creates a hundred lookalike websites for restaurants and uses Wix’s merchant services to process payments for them, that could trigger human review — but it didn’t.

Where do all of these apologetics come from? Why are people so eager to leap to the defense of scammers and their adtech and fintech enablers? Why is there such an impulse to victim-blame?

I think it’s fear: in their hearts, people — especially techies — know that they, too, are vulnerable to these ripoffs, but they don’t want to admit it. They want to convince themselves that the person who got scammed made an easily avoidable mistake, and that they themselves will never make a similar mistake.

This is doubly true for readerships on tech-heavy forums like Twitter or (especially) Hacker News. These readers know just how many vulnerabilities there are — how many holes are in their Swiss cheese — and they are also overexposed to rise-and-grind/passive income rhetoric.

This produces a powerful cognitive dissonance: “If all the ‘entrepreneurs’ I worship are just laying traps for the unwary, and if I am sometimes unwary, then I’m cheering on the authors of my future enduring misery.” The only way to resolve this dissonance — short of re-evaluating your view of platform capitalism or questioning your own immunity to scams — is to blame the victim.

The median Hacker News reader has to somehow resolve the tension between “just install an adblocker” and “Chrome’s extension sandbox is a dumpster fire and it’s basically impossible to know whether any add-on you install can steal every keystroke and all your other data”:

https://mattfrisbie.substack.com/p/spy-chrome-extension

In my Twitter thread, I called this “the worst of all possible timelines.” Everything we do is mediated by gigantic, surveillant monopolists that spy on us comprehensively from asshole to appetite — but none of them, not a 20th century payment giant nor a 21st century search giant — can bestir itself to use that data to keep us safe from scams.

Next Thu (Mar 2) I'll be in Brussels for Antitrust, Regulation and the Political Economy, along with a who's-who of European and US trustbusters. It's livestreamed, and both in-person and virtual attendance are free:

https://www.brusselsconference.com/registration

On Fri (Mar 3), I'll be in Graz for the Elevate Festival:

https://elevate.at/diskurs/programm/event/e23doctorow/

[Image ID: A modified version of Hieronymus Bosch's painting 'The Conjurer,' which depicts a scam artist playing a shell-game for a group of gawking rubes. The image has been modified so that the scam artist's table has a Google logo and the pea he is triumphantly holding aloft bears the 'Sponsored' wordmark that appears alongside Google search results.]

[oceandirtcountry]

the most fun part about shipping is making kids, both for me and for the characters *ba dum tss*

Aurelia Rose: After kidnapping Ruby and Ben’s Necrofridgian child, doctor Animo planned to torment Ben by turning the two into ungodly abominations. However, he didn’t factor in how absolutely batshit insane Ben can get when maternal instincts of all things kick in, and Ben accidentally fries the machinery, splicing the Necrofridgian child with Ruby’s DNA and making her an identical genetic clone.

Due to her Necrofridgian DNA, Aurelia lacks the ability to make most facial features. Hence, she seems cold and distant from everyone but her close ones. In reality, she’s very close to her mother in talking about her interests.

She sports an upgraded version of Ruby’s Semblance that she dubbed “Freeze Tag”, combining the abilities of super speed from Ruby, plus the cryokinesis and intangibility from Big Chill.

The oldest of Ben and Ruby’s kids, and the biggest handful considering she can disappear at will.

She took her mother’s name, because Ben didn’t think it was right to name her after himself.

Kenny Tennyson: Kenny was conceived naturally, four years after Aurelia. Ruby felt like another one couldn’t be so bad.

Kenny is a splitting image of his dad, but is far more reserved and introverted. He doesn’t like talking to people, and takes a really long time to warm up to somebody—to the point where he doesn’t smack talk his villains.

He received his very own Omnitrix at age 10. An Ectonurite actually took host in the Omnitrix Ben built for him, but Kenny bonded with the visitor and has Ghostfreak as one of his favourite aliens. The Ectonurite, named Kasper, tags along and takes over Kenny’s fighting when he’s too weak to fight.

Kenny feels that violence is never the answer and will attempt to be as peaceful as possible.

After unlocking his dormant Anodite abilities, he swaps to battling with energy-based weaponry. By then, Kasper was appointed as his Plumber partner, so he ends up passing the Omnitrix to Charlie, his little sister.

He took his dad’s name as Ruby wanted to have one kid taking Ben’s surname as well, just to be fair.

Charlie Tennyson-Rose: Charlie was the wildcard that nobody was expecting. Basically, somebody forgot to use protection.

Two years younger than Kenny, Charlie is the bundle of joy that takes after her dad. At family gatherings, she basically talks with everyone, and resembles her aunt Yang more than Ruby or Ben.

Charlie is the only one to have an irrational fear, being flamingoes. Her dad has vowed to never bring them to the bird park.

Having no special abilities, taking after her dad’s lack of Semblance, Charlie runs her mouth giving logistic help to her siblings and other Huntsmen from the backlines while still training her fighting skills. Eventually, after Kenny hands her the Omnitrix, she dons the title “Charlie 20”, twice as good as Ben.

Her favourite transformation is Jetray, and like her dad, subjects it to overuse.

She takes both surnames because Ben and Ruby were running out of reasons.

Summer Cunningham: Wanting to distance herself more from the Schnee family name and paying homage to the greatest Huntress to ever live, Weiss let Cunningham’s surname take the spotlight. Summer is unable to wield the Ninja mask, much to her dad’s disappointment. However, her Semblance of Schnee summoning and some Ninja Earth attack allows her to influence her summons with Dust.

However, Winter spoils her rotten, and she’s probably the next candidate for the Winter Maiden powers.

Summer acts close to her namesake, being bright, bubbly and positive, but is really airheaded. Randy and Weiss have made sure that she’s really nice, but she very much doesn’t understand what it’s like to be middle class, spending money for her friends like water.

She’s the same age as Kenny, and the two have some odd feelings in between them that remind Ben of his own.

Randy has retired off the Ninja role post Salem’s death, but since he’s unable to pass it on to his kid, he decides to give it to Rex’s son.

Jake Xiao-Long: One of Yang and Blake’s twin son’s (which you shouldn’t ask me how they had him), Jake is about as stubborn as Yang. His Semblance is a bolster to this, leaving behind an explosive imprint of himself—he can leave clones, which he can detonate at will.

Yang starts to feel the real pinch of how her dad raised her, as Jake is as much of a crazy party animal, literally as a lion Faunus, and picks fights about every couple minutes. However, his heart (and hair) of gold means that he often does so to stand up for those he cares about.

He’s oddly closer with Blake, as she knows how to keep him in check as compared to Yang, who’s still working on keeping herself in check.

Ruby dotes on him because he chose a scythe that splits into twin sickles as his weapon of choice.

(it’s low hanging fruit. I have to name the kid Jake Long. He’s…it’s so…it fits…)

Sherri Xiao-Long: Sherri is a jackass. Coming off as quiet, shy and unassuming, she loves to play pranks on everyone, and nobody suspects her. Her twin brother finds her a little obnoxious, but they mostly end up being partners in crime as Sherri helps him sneak out of the house.

Her Semblance allows her to create a field of heat-induced hallucinations, the illusions seeming almost solid due to Blake’s cloning abilities being amped up.

A Panther Faunus, Sherri isn’t exactly lacking in the power department either, but would much rather not fight, and when she does, it’s with underhanded techniques and borderline cheating.

She longs to become the Ninja with all its fun gadgets and abilities, but she can’t.

Pietro (Junior) Salazar: Penny and Rex’s only son. Not wanting to burden their son with nanites, they made sure that he was nanite-free. It left him with Penny’s weapon-telekinesis abilities, which didn’t work as well until Randy offered him the Ninja mask “in secret”.

Now armed with an entire Ninja arsenal, Pietro whoops ass on the battlefield and keeps Bash, the heir to McFist’s company, from trying anything.

Pietro is calculative and tends to focus on the smaller things, and can seem hard on many people. However, he opens up to those he’s close with, which is extremely rare.

And yeah that’s it

[blizzardfluffykpop]

Scaredy-cats

Summary: Trying to branch out of your comfort zone, you try a haunted house installation in the middle of March.

Oneshot

Fluff, Meet-Cute, Non-idol au

Trigger Warnings: It is a haunted house, so it has light/minor horror themes.

Word Count: 2,056

Jacob X Reader

[A/n: As @jinkoh said; we watched Wings of Escape together and well, here’s another addition of that brainrot we experienced there. To check out jinkoh’s addition(s) to it you can find ‘em on kebbi’s blog 🥰]

------

This year, you were determined to try things outside of your comfort zone. So when they announced a haunted house installation in March at an old youth hostel near you, you were all for it because “It’s just a haunted house. How bad can it be?” You were confident that it definitely couldn’t be spooky because it was becoming spring, daffodils were starting to bloom, and the outside ambiance would make for a non-scary experience. But what you underestimated was that it still was a haunted house. It wasn’t the outside that mattered. It was the actors and ambiance inside that did. 

---Pov Switch---

Jacob had applied for countless jobs and finally heard back on a security job. He was getting desperate, and anything would do for rent money at this point. So when he walked in, he wasn’t sure what the position entirely entailed until the person said, "You're aware this is for a security position watching live CCTV footage at a haunted house?" He nearly threw up, but considering it was also his last option, and that he was running low on funds, he could do it, right? "Yeah, that's fine." He should have never agreed to this. Although, he’s met all the scarers and has been friends with them long before this installation began. He still refuses to enter the ‘scarer floor’ after they decorated it, or he’d feel his stomach tie in knots. 

Even driving to work made his stomach turn. His guts twist every time he puts his car in park. All he ever wants to do when he walks up to the building is turn ducktail and run to his car. But that’s money on the line he can’t risk. He goes down the basement steps, unlocks the door, and gets inside, quickly turning on the lights and locking it behind him. He sighed in relief before checking everything over, inspecting all the cameras to see if they were working correctly. Before turning his two-way radio on and going, “Good afternoon!” He hears ten friendly voices greet him back. And he asks, “Anyone on the floor? Or are you all getting ready?” Getting various answers of; “Getting ready.” “Waiting.” “Snacking.” He laughs, “Any good snacks?” “Gummies, you want some?” “Hell yeah.” A few minutes later, a knock rings through the door. He peeks through the peephole and sees Kevin, “You’re not in costume. That’s nice.” “Don’t need you sick.” He puts out his hand, “Gummies?” Kevin hands him the pack, and he asks, “Everyone’s doing the same routine as usual, right?” Kevin nods, “Yeah, as always. Hopefully, no dates go awry this time.” Jacob laughs, “It was cute to see Younghoon take them around, though. It was much more pleasant to watch than your gorey scenes~.” Kevin rolls his eyes, “All I do is chop jello.” Which makes Jacob shiver, “It doesn’t read the same on the CCTV. It really looks like guts.” Kevin shakes his head at him, “Later?” He nods, “Yeah, later.” 

He eats his gummies, looking over the main control panel as the ‘night’ starts at the hotel. “Overhead lights off in 3… 2… 1… Stage lights on!” There are little cheers before they get into character, and he refuses to look up, only listening to his two-way radio and hearing the random songs Haknyeon performs every time Haknyeon turns on his radio, “Spooky scary plumbers~” Which makes Jacob tune in and cackle over the radio. He looks at his designated camera and sees him singing his heart out into the plunger. Jacob shakes his head and carries on playing on his phone. He looks up occasionally, assuring no one is actually getting murdered there. And he laughs as he watches a couple cowering behind Younghoon as if that would help their case. Younghoon, as if on cue, turns around with a sinister grin, effectively spooking them. Which makes his nerves stand on end at the motion. He shakes it off and goes back to his phone. 

And that’s how he spends the majority of his shift until he hears a door slam over the two-way radio someone’s turned on. He looks up to see Juyeon and Younghoon staring at it curiously. When Juyeon goes over the two-way, “Jacob… Uh… Someone just ran right into the utility closet and locked the door. We can’t help them out. I think Younghoon terrified them too much.” Younghoon scoffs, “I did not!” Juyeon continues, “Sure. Anyways, you’re the only one who has keys…” Jacob couldn’t believe his ears. This was the first time the crew didn’t have the situation under control. And of course, because he refused to do a floor check when the decorations were finally up, a door was left unlocked. 

With haste, he looks at his keys and the panel before deciding to go and get you. And with nerves shooting through him, he goes over the two-way, “You all go to our assigned rooms and stay in there!” Eric calls back, “Where do you want me to go!?” “The other side of the building- I don’t care!” He throws the door open after flipping the overhead lights on and rushes into the building as he searches for the correct key. He refuses to look ahead, only down at the floor, “Fuck! Why are there so many fake mice!” He rushes to the room you’ve locked yourself in, and unlocks it. He tries to push it open as he calls out, “Hey!” Inside the closet he hears you yell back, “Leave me alone!” “I’m not a scare actor!” He hears your mumbles, but you still don’t budge from the door. He sighs, “Please come on... This building scares me so much. I want to be out of here just as much as you do.” You ask softly, “You promise me you’re not wearing scary clothes?” “Promise. I’m wearing a jean jacket with flowers on it if that helps.” You sigh, “Pinky swear?” “Pinky swear.” 

---Pov Switch---

You hesitantly lift your weight off the door, and he carefully pushes the door in. You cover your eyes with your hands and peek out of them to see his blue jean jacket with pretty painted flowers on it like he said. No blood in sight. And you whisper, “I don’t… I don’t think I can move.” He gulps, “You want to stay here for a minute with me?” You nod, and he walks in and leans against the door. He mutters, “I hate working here.” Thinking he meant because he had to save scaredy-cats like you, you apologize, “Oh, I’m sorry.” He shakes his head, “Oh, that’s not what I meant!” He looks at you and says, “It’s not your fault! I just get scared easily and like, uh… It’s just not good for a person who doesn’t stomach this well.” You giggle at him and go, “Really? Then why are you working here?” He sighs, “It was my last option left. No one else would hire me.” You shake your head, “Is it good money?” “Not in comparison to being scared shitless every day at work.” You look at him confused, “Why don’t you quit?” “Until I find something else, it makes due. Plus, I've known my coworkers since high school, so it makes it easier.” You shake your head, “Well if it makes due and they’re genuinely nice guys outside of work. I understand.” He nods before asking, “Are you okay to go back out there?” “You can get us through? No scares?” “Yeah, promise, they’re all away.” You hear his two-way radio scratch, “I’m getting bored!!” He rolls his eyes, “Eric, our gardener… He’s a little excitable when it comes to scares. So we better move before he decides to be a meanie.” You agree and he calls back, “We’ll be out in three, no funny business.” “That’s my job, though…” “Eric…” “Fine.” He laughs as he opens the door and looks down. 

You follow suit gulping as you exit the doorway with him to see the fake mice, snakes, and spiders on the ground, “Can um… Can you hold my hand?” He nods, waiting for you with his hand out. You quickly grab it and cling to his side. “Not that far, right?” “No, but look down. Mice and snakes are somehow easier to stomach compared to the rest.” You let out an, “Uh-huh.” But your curiosity gets the best of you. You look up and see the amber lights illuminating the spiders and spiderwebs above along with the netting with fake limbs entangled in it dangling down at you. You let out a small, “Yikes!” He laughs, “Told you not to look up.” And you quickly look down with him. Every time the building creaks, you shiver, and he does too. When you see the bottom of the curtain, he says, “Here’s our exit.” He moves the curtain, and the sunlight greets you as he opens the door. You nearly kiss the ground as you mutter countless thank yous. 

You don’t let go of his hand even though you’ve made it out. Feeling a sense of comfort with his hand in yours before you ask, “Um… is there any way I can stay with you for a bit until I get my nerve back up to drive?” He nods, “Yeah, that’s fine. I just need to go back to my security room.” “Is it okay if I go with you?” “Yeah.” He leads you along the side of the building and down the stairs. He unlocks the door and leads you in before calling on the two-way radio, “Back to business.” He flicks the overheads off, and you watch as everyone exits their rooms on the cameras. He gestures for you to sit in the spinny chair, “I’m gonna grab the chair from over there.” He points to the corner and lets go of your hand before getting it. He joins you, his knee touching yours under his desk. You watch the CCTV roll, seeing all of the scares live at once, making you feel sick to your stomach again. And he goes, “I wouldn’t watch that if I were you.” You gulp and nod before looking down at your shoes. 

He distracts you from it by asking, “So what scared you so bad you ran to the first open door?” “Uh… It sounds silly.” He laughs, “I’m just as much of a scaredy cat as you, so it’s not silly. I promise.” “So uh, the one with the doll face? Yeah… So he was stitching that Frankenstein or something together. And it freaked me out… And when the butler-dude turned away from me to show me to the next room. I made my break for it, thinking it was the exit…” He laughs, and you pout, “I thought you promised it wouldn’t sound silly….” He shakes his hand, trying to hold his laughter back, “No, it’s funny, 'cause I would have done the same thing.” You grin and end up laughing with him. You stay with him his whole shift as he tells you a little about each actor to ease your nerves. “And the doll guy?” “He's a good dancer. But he loves what the two of us would consider scary dolls.” “Oh.” “Yeah, and he calls them cute.” You laugh, “Of course he does. What about you: any weird hobbies?” He shrugs, “Well, it’s not weird, but I like to play guitar and sing.” You smile, “That sounds lovely.” He smiles, “Maybe I could play for you sometime?” You ask, “There’ll be a next time?” “I uh… well, I’d hope so. You seem fun.” You laugh, “You just watched me get trapped in a haunted utility closet.” He laughs, “Yeah, I did.” “But I’d like to hear you play sometime soon.” 

You exchange numbers before he turns the overhead lights on and the stage lights off as all the actors head to the basement to change back into their casual attire. You start to leave since you and Jacob already had plans to meet again sometime soon. You figured it was best to get going while the going was good. Until he asks, “Since we both had a scary experience, what do you say to getting some ice cream with me?” You grin, waiting for him to join you, “I’d love to.”

[pixeldistractions]

With Maria on the train and dashing back to her daughter, Jordan had a date to keep of his own. He told the boys he’d be a little late for their usual 4:00 chat. 

“Hey guys, I’m here now.” In the background of their image, the normally sterile counters were cluttered with pans and bowls. “Oh, hey, did your mom cook?”

“She tried to make mac and cheese,” Milo said. “But the water kept bubbling over and she almost burnt the kitchen down, so she got really mad and dumped it all down the sink. But then it clogged the drain, and now she has to call a plumber. You should have seen the veins in her head.”

“Oh, no. So what did you eat for dinner?”

“Pizza again,” Milo said. “It’s okay, we like pizza.”

“Ok. Well, sorry I was late. I had a visit from a friend. She just got on the train.”

“Was it Maria?”

“Wait, what? How did you know?”

“Because she’s your best friend. She said so, but she said it kind of funny. And you said she took a train, so it must have been kind of far.”

These boys were too smart.

“Right. She is my best friend.”

“Is she your girlfriend?” Felix asked.

Instant paralysis. “Where’s your mom?” Jordan scanned the background of the video for Colette. He suspected that she often listened in on these calls. And sure, these conversations would have to happen someday, but he wasn’t ready to deal with that now, especially when apparently her veins were already popping out of her head today.  

“She’s taking a bath. She said she needed self care.”

Relief.

“Okay,” Jordan said. “What do you boys know about girlfriends?”

“It’s like, kissing and holding hands and stuff,” Felix said.

“Felix wants Lily to be his girlfriend,” Milo tattled.

“Shut up, no I don’t, you idiot.”

“Felix, no name calling,” Jordan said.

“And Connor had a girlfriend last year. It was Bianca, except she said he wasn’t her boyfriend. But we saw them kissing during recess.”

“Kissing, in fourth grade?”

“Dad! They weren’t in fourth grade, they were in fifth. But now they went to middle school this year. They’re like eleven already.”

“Of course. Eleven.” Jordan felt so old. “But you don’t have to kiss someone just because everybody else is.” 

“Was mom the first girl you kissed?” Milo asked.

“Um, no, it was somebody else.”

“How old were you?” Felix asked.

“I was, uh, fifteen,” Jordan said.

Felix cackled. “Ha ha, that's so old. I better get to kiss someone before I’m fifteen.”

“It’s not a race.”   

“Were you a dork in middle school?”

“Ha. Maybe I was.”

“That’s why,” Felix said, nodding sagely. “Dorks don’t get kissed until high school.”

Jordan was hoping this side track into middle school romantic gossip might make them forget their question, but no, it didn’t. 

“So, is she? Your girlfriend?”

“This is the kind of thing I should probably tell your mom first,” Jordan said. “Does that make sense? It’s the right thing to do.”

“So, she is then?”

“You know your mom and I never got married, right?”

“Yeah, we know.”

“How do you feel about me having a girlfriend?”

“I don’t know,” Milo said. “It’s kind of weird. But I guess she’s nice.”

“She’s very nice. Felix, what do you think?” 

“I never really talked to her before,” Felix said. “I don’t know if she’s nice.”

“You can talk to her sometime if you want,” Jordan said. “Soon. We’ll all spend some time together soon.”

“I guess we could.”

“Your mom is still in the bath?”

They nodded. 

“Are you sure? Make sure.” 

Felix elbowed his brother in the ribs and Milo crept up the stairs and then back down. “Yeah,” he confirmed.

“Okay,” Jordan said. “Yes, Maria is my girlfriend.”

“Oh, okay,” they both said, sitting in that new truth for a moment. 

And then, thankfully, they had other things to talk about. Very exciting things. Like how Connor McCullough got suspended for pranking the school toilets, and how the new Voidcritter movies were kind of dumb, but they watched them all three times anyway, and did he know there was a skate park being built at the harbor? And when he comes back in December, could he take them there? Please please please?

“A thousand percent, yes,” Jordan promised. “No matter how cold, even if there’s snow.” 

They were smart and getting so big. They could walk themselves to the bus stop and pour their own cereal and didn’t need to be reminded to wash behind their ears most of the time. But they weren’t done with their dad. Jordan wasn’t even done with his own dad at twenty-two. And this was special, what they had, him and his boys. Colette had her role, and he wouldn’t call it an unimportant one, but he couldn’t imagine her holding space for them, being open for them, talking with them like he did. Maybe it was a boy thing. Which meant that his leaving left an immense void, and were these video chats good enough to fill that void?

Life was a seesaw—one thing goes up and another thing hits the ground. In one hand an answer and the other hand a quagmire. You might need it all, but you can’t have it all, and there’s the tragedy. Something precious will be lost, and what will it be?

— from “boxes and squares #4.5: home is wherever you are, part 2” (5/10)

story notes: Jordan always tells his boys first

Next ->

[red-n-ded]

The World According to Kris (reverse!au) 1/4

K-008, Kritical or Kris to family and friends, suffers from Black Rust Disease, which is an infection that makes him rot from the inside.

Kris knows how much his family sacrificed for him and just wants to stop being a burden for once. He’s given that chance when he and his brother team up with humans to get their ticket back home. Maybe now, he can finally be the hero he always wanted.

Or

Reverse Roles AU and basically Kris takes Bee’s place in RotB, killed by Scourge trying to steal the transwarp key before being revived, followed by flashbacks on Noah’s and Kris’ life before the crash that sent hundreds of Cybertronians to Earth.

Ao3 Sneak Peek

Next

Kris has heard of the earthly saying, “your life flashing before your eyes.”

Oddly enough, when he felt his spark go out, the last thing he remembered wasn’t his life but the last conversation he had with his brother.

Kris remembers standing on a hill. The darkness of the night sky blocked the vision of any passing humans seeing metal aliens in the distance. The only thing illuminating is the shine of the stars against their plating.

Their human allies stand in a circle not too far from them. The blond teen Bumblebee stands next to his leader Optimus with the pink-haired motorcyclist Arcee standing on his other side. Mirage isn’t with them, busy grabbing the holotech promised to get Kris into the museum.

Kris is next to his brother and he spots the antennas on Noah’s helmet to flicker every few seconds. Clearly, the forest green Challenger wasn’t so fond of these squishy beings in the middle of their own mission to go home.

That doesn’t make sense. Humans are great! They made movies, video games𑁋although the one with the red plumber and the weird fire-breathing reptile is frustrating to finish𑁋and consume such colorful resources! The orange bot can’t help but envy the fact that he doesn’t have taste buds just thinking about it.

“What’s up with your face plate?”

Noah’s voice snaps Kris out of his thoughts, realizing the jealous scowl on his intake and immediately dropping his derma to a nervous smile.

“It’s nothing. Just thinking about how cool it would be to take a bite of those Earth cheeseburgers.” Kris assures his brother while trying to guess what a burger would taste like, “Do you think it’s like the Francium frankfurters back home or-”

“You know we can’t stay, right?”

Kris stops talking, looking up at the tall transformer. Noah’s voice was stern yet his expression looked delicate. It seemed he was afraid to offend the smaller bot while maintaining his usual serious older-brother persona.

The words regarding Earthly foods vanish from his glossa and the orange Viper just groans. “I know.”

A soft breeze leaves Noah’s cooling fans like an understanding but tired sigh, “You can’t get too attached to this planet. It will hurt even more when we have to leave.”

Kris grinds his denta. He knows that his older brother is just trying to protect him and he admires that. Everything that Noah has ever done was to protect him and his happiness, even at the sacrifice of his own. The memories of the bitter looks from everyone as Noah walked past them hurts just thinking about it and knowing those looks are because of him.

This involuntary visit to Earth would end eventually but that doesn’t soften the upcoming pain of having to leave this ruined yet beautiful planet.

Seven months ago when they crashed, the two brothers were separated. Noah was apparently all the way in Puerto Rico while the orange bot crashed near the border of New York all alone.

After a few Earth weeks, Kris had the bravery to venture into the city. With a teen holoform and a burnt orange pick-up truck alt, he drove into every part of New York. He ventured into Queens, Manhattan, and a bright red area they named Chinatown. He also visited Times Square where he copied the look of a beautiful Dodge Viper on display and had a newfound rage against human parking and traffic.

They were all flashy and beautiful but his favorite place was Brooklyn, mainly the small neighborhoods with kids that played on the streets, soft chatter from the sidewalks and the familiar feeling within the area.

Obviously, the place wasn’t completely safe—often startled and woken up by the sirens of the Decepticon police force almost every night—but something about this planet felt alive.

“You don’t understand.” Kris grumbles, trying to push down the frustration in his vocalizer, “Everything they make is so colorful! They don’t need movies, games or music to fight their bad leader. They just have it because they do!”

Kris looks away from his brother and onto the gathered humans with determination in their eyes as Mirage arrives. His silver Porsche pulls up and the driver begins to walk towards his team but first waving hello at the robots with the illusion disk at hand. Only Kris waves back in a similar manner.

“Their world is so messed up yet the Racers still have hope.” Kris crosses his arms and grins unapologetically, “So, sorry if I get attached. Human are just so fun!”

Noah’s brow plates furrow in confusion but now, his eyes gleam with a certain curiosity, “And how does fun help them survive?”

Surely in a world where humans are ruled under an iron fist, Mirage’s smile shouldn’t be as bright and wide at the sight of new friends and the hope in the Freedom Racers shouldn’t be so infectious.

“It doesn’t help them survive, it helps them live.”

Kris won’t ever know if Noah understood what he said or changed his mind about humans. He wouldn’t blame him after this.

A human controlling a Cybertronian’s corpse killed his little brother, who was trying to save humans.

The Viper isn't worried if Noah cares about humans. He worries how Noah will change.

Kris knew he died. He’s not stupid but not ready to leave his brother alone. Noah has always been protecting him and vice versa as much Kris tries.

With the younger one gone, who will protect his Sonic now.

[handeaux]

Why Did Cincinnati Abandon Cricket To Become America’s First Baseball Powerhouse?

You can blame the Civil War for Cincinnati becoming the home of professional baseball. Well into the 1860s, this was a cricket town with “town ball” and “base ball” taking a distant second place to bowlers and wickets.

The curious researcher can still find references to Cincinnati’s early cricketeers today, but most often as footnotes to the history of baseball. However, it is not too much of a stretch to say that baseball would not have prevailed in Cincinnati without the boost it received from the old-time cricket clubs.

Cincinnati’s cricket clubs were formidable opponents, hosting international matches with Canadian teams and participating in home-and-away rivalries with cricket clubs in Chicago, Cleveland and Pittsburgh. Cincinnati cricketeers were professionals long before the nascent Red Stockings decided to pay their players.

Cricket was most definitely an Englishman’s game and Cincinnati before the Civil War was largely a city of English origins. The Cincinnati Gazette [6 October 1853] summed up the popularity of the “manly old game”:

“Cricket matches are now quite in fashion. We see notice of them in numerous exchanges, East, North and West. Wherever Englishmen are found, there a Cricket Club is found with them.”

Although Cincinnati newspapers carried stories about out-of-town cricket matches as early as the 1820s, local cricketeers didn’t get organized until the 1840s. The Queen City Cricket Club convened in 1843 every Thursday at 2:00 p.m. at “Wade’s Woods” northwest of the intersection of Liberty Street and Central Avenue. By 1845, the Western Cricket Club offered some stiff competition to the Queen City club and the two teams battled it out on grounds located “at the foot of Eighth Street” in the Millcreek bottoms near the Whitewater Canal. It appears that the players were solidly middle-class – salesmen, plumbers, carpenters and shopkeepers – the sorts of folks who could spare a weekly afternoon to indulge in outdoor recreation.

By 1850 the Union Cricket Club, apparently a merger of the Queen City and Western clubs, was the dominant local team. Cricket grounds were hard to come by and the Union Club played variously at the Orphan Asylum lot where Music Hall now stands, on a wood-ringed field off Madison Road in East Walnut Hills, near the canal in Camp Washington and at the back of what later became known as Lincoln Park, location of Union Terminal today. From time to time, reports indicate that adherents of “town ball” or “base ball” also made use of the Union Cricket grounds, but only on days when the cricketeers were otherwise occupied.

Among the Cincinnati cricket stalwarts back in the day was Jonathan Hattersley, born in Sheffield, England, in 1835. Hattersley emigrated to the United States as a young man, arriving in New Orleans and working his way up the rivers to Cincinnati. After a failed start as manager of a weaving operation, he set himself up as the sales agent for a number of British steel refineries. He later joined the firm of Thomas Turner, manufacturer of cutting and slicing equipment. Hattersley married the owner’s daughter, bought out his father-in-law, and set up a saw manufactory with his son, Harry. Before the Cincinnati Fire Department went professional in 1853, Hattersley battled blazes with the Franklins, one of the amateur companies active in the city. He was among the founders of the Western Cricket Club and later became president of the mighty Union Cricket Club. His office in the saw blade factory on Third Street served essentially as the club’s headquarters.

The Union Cricket Club dominated Cincinnati cricket from the 1840s into the 1870s. Its bench was so deep that the club supported two teams – the stars and a farm team both under one roof. While the “first eleven” participated in matches from Chicago to the East Coast, the “second eleven” kept the hometown fans occupied by playing clubs from Northern Kentucky, Lawrenceburg and some smaller Ohio towns. The Union Club even challenged a championship English club then touring the states but couldn’t reconcile schedules. About half the Union Cricket Club players were paid professionals.

It was Jonathan Hattersley who recruited George and Harry Wright to Cincinnati from New York’s stellar St. George Cricket Club. Although the Wright brothers carried the original Cincinnati Red Stockings to baseball glory, they arrived in the Queen City as professional cricket players. Harry Wright was also from Sheffield, born the same year as Jonathan Hattersley. One may assume they had met in childhood. In an interview with the Enquirer [20 August 1875], Harry, by then manager of the Boston Red Stockings, recounted his arrival in Cincinnati:

“I was under contract, and was offered very fine inducements to leave New York. When I arrived in Cincinnati cricket was all the rage, but it finally subsided, and from the club I managed the old Red Stockings of that city was organized. I would like to say in this connection that the uniform I used as the cricketer was adopted by the Base-Ball Club.”

Wright glosses over what specific factors caused the “rage” for cricket to “subside,” but baseball scholars generally point to the Civil War, which brought young men from all over the United States together and gave them a great deal of free time when they weren’t busy shooting each other. Simon Worrall, writing in Smithsonian Magazine [October 2006] describes the wartime conditions that promoted baseball over cricket:

“A year before the Civil War broke out, “Beadle's Dime Base-Ball Player,” published in New York City, sold 50,000 copies in the United States. Soldiers from both sides of the conflict carried it, and both North and South embraced the new game. It was faster than cricket, easier to learn and required little in the way of equipment: just a bat (simpler to make than a cricket bat, which requires sophisticated joinery), a ball and four gunnysacks thrown on a patch of ground, and you're ready to play.”

By the time the war ended, Cincinnati seethed with baseball fever. Even Jonathan Hatterley’s son, Harry, took up baseball, catching for the junior-league Pickwicks in Cincinnati. A group of young executives – many of them Civil War veterans – organized the Cincinnati Base Ball Club on 23 July 1866 and quickly allied with the Union Cricket Club, who already had very nice facilities ready for play. According to Harry Ellard’s 1907 “Baseball in Cincinnati”:

“In 1867 the club moved to the grounds of the Union Cricket Club, with which was made a quasi alliance. These grounds were situated at the foot of Richmond Street. They were used in the summer for cricket and baseball and in winter were flooded and used for skating purposes, where great enthusiasm was manifested in this winter sport, with a series of interesting carnivals.”

Harry Wright and his brother George were convinced to give up cricket to lead America’s first professional baseball team. The rest, as they say, is history. Still, Harry, George and the rest of their team did not totally abandon cricket. It is not often reported that the Cincinnati Red Stockings, during their undefeated inaugural season, actually played a cricket match. In San Francisco, on 28 September 1869, the Cincinnati baseball team engaged the “All California Eleven.” According to Ellard:

“For the sake of variety and amusement they played a game of cricket with the California eleven, in which they showed that they could play cricket as well as baseball.”

The former cricketeers now known as the Cincinnati Red Stockings prevailed 118 to 79.

[makwandis]

normal jobs I can see gil as a human doing in no particular order that arent just military jobs:

mechanic (cars, motorcycles, airplane)

engineer

physical education teacher in a high school or middle school

mason

carpenter

fireman

cop (😭😭)

professional fighter

soccer coach

pro wrestler (he reminds me of vince mcmahon at times)

university/college wrestling coach

janitor

talent scout for pro athletes

roofer

plumber

logger

farmer/cowboy/ranch hand

park ranger

oil rig worker

hunting guide

fisherman

[cantsayidont]

Some movies, considered chronologically:

THE FLAMINGO KID (1984): Nostalgia-burdened period piece, set in 1963, about working-class kid Jeffrey (Matt Dillon), who gets a summer job parking cars at an exclusive beach club called El Flamingo, starts dating a rich girl (Carole R. Davis), and becomes fascinated by her father (Richard Crenna), a self-made sports car dealer and local card sharp who thinks college is sucker's game. This alienates Jeffrey's own father (Hector Elizondo), a stalwart plumber who doesn't want to see Jeffrey squander his chances of bettering himself. The story is thus a sort of YA prototype of Oliver Stone's later WALL STREET — a Reagan-era morality play about a young man caught between two father figures, one representing the Lure of Easy Money and the other a paragon of Honest Hard Work — badly undermined by its absurdly idealized longing for the alleged innocence of the Kennedy era (underlined by an obnoxious oldies soundtrack). It offers a meaty role for Crenna, but as a drama, it has less substance than FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF. Davis's character is such a nonentity that you keep forgetting she's there, and the way she ends up functioning as a proxy for Jeffrey's obsession with her dad is awkward. CONTAINS LESBIANS? Nope. VERDICT: A simple-minded story blinded by its rose-colored glasses.

THE JOY LUCK CLUB (1993): Sudsy but affecting episodic adaptation of Amy Tan's novel about four middle-aged Chinese women and their strained relationships with their Chinese-American daughters, starring Ming-Na Wen and nearly every other Chinese actress working in the U.S. at the time. The way the script segues between the characters' respective stories is clunky, and it often teeters on the brink of schmaltz, but there are moments of real dramatic power amongst the more superficial tearjerker moments, and you'd have to have a stonier heart than I to not sob at the bittersweet ending. Strong acting helps, with Tsai Chin particularly good as Auntie Lindo. CONTAINS LESBIANS? It seems like it should, but alas. VERDICT: Heavy-handed at times, but undeniably moving.

COLD COMFORT FARM (1996): Before she became an action star, Kate Beckinsale starred in this hilarious adaptation of Stella Gibbons' 1932 satiric novel about glib orphan Flora Poste, who makes it her project to fix all the problems of the titular farm and its eccentric denizens — distant cousins who feel obligated to Flora (whom they will only address as "Robert Poste's child") because of some unspecified wrong they once did her late father. Among the inmates of Cold Comfort are Cousin Judith (Eileen Atkins), a hysterically morose creature straight out of a gothic novel; Cousin Amos (Ian McKellen), a fire-and-brimstone preacher who warns his brethren, "There'll be no butter in Hell!"; Amos and Judith's oversexed son Seth (Rufus Sewell), a local stud who dreams of being in the talkies; and of course Aunt Ada Doom (Sheila Burrell), who rules the family with an iron fist and won't let anyone forget that she once saw something nasty in the woodshed. A delightfully silly spoof of a particular category of once-popular English literature, as the farm's assorted grim melodramas prove no match for the implacable (if somewhat snobbish) modern sensibilities of its plucky heroine. CONTAINS LESBIANS? Nope. VERDICT: Great fun throughout, although Stephen Fry irritates as a boorish "Laurentian person" who keeps hitting on Flora despite her obvious disinterest.

BREAKDOWN (1997): Competent but underwhelming Jonathan Mostow thriller starring Kurt Russell and Kathleen Quinlan as Jeff and Amy Taylor, a couple of Yuppies whose fancy Jeep breaks down on the highway on a trip from Massachusetts to California. A passing trucker (J.T. Walsh) gives Amy a ride into the nearest town to find them a tow truck, but when Jeff gets their Jeep running again and follows her into town, he finds that Amy has disappeared, and no one, including the trucker, will admit to having seen her. It has a great premise, and Russell is credible enough in the lead, but it's pretty ordinary, and, once you know what's going on (which is revealed a little over a half-hour in), pretty superficial — there's no psychological depth, and I kept waiting for some other story twist that never came. CONTAINS LESBIANS? It barely contains women (Amy is absent for 80 percent of the running time). VERDICT: Not bad, but nothing special, and you'll forget it 10 minutes after it ends.

MY TWO HUSBANDS (2024): Okay Lifetime thriller about a young woman named Eliza (Isabelle Almoyan), still reeling from the recent murder of her mother (Joanie Geiger), who becomes deeply suspicious of her father's young new wife, a flight attendant named Brooke (Kabby Borders) who's no older than Eliza — and, as the title alludes, is secretly married to another man (Britton Webb, who looks like a lesser Baldwin brother) and up to no good. Despite the cheesy title (which is really also a spoiler) and awkward marketing (which misleadingly suggests a comedy-drama with Brooke rather than Eliza as the main character), it has a surprisingly decent, reasonably credible script, hamstrung by very weak performances. The story is still interesting enough to make it a not-bad little thriller, although it would have been better with a stronger cast and less somnabulistic direction. CONTAINS LESBIANS: It sometimes seems like Eliza's friend Star (Kristen Grace Gonzalez) might be her girlfriend, but the script is noncommittal on this point. VERDICT: A B+ script burdened with D+ acting and C- direction.

[simiansmoke]

Reverse w/ Mario from @allnostalgic? >o>

feelin' possessive

Having pestered the plumber up til 4 in the filthy am to PLEASE JUST TAKE HIM TO GET MUNCHIES- the two were stuck at the Subway nearest to Mario's place under blinking fluorescent lights.

DK barely noticed the cashier, considering he's busy drooling over all the grub guarded behind a plastic shield that was not a stranger to his face pressed up against it and blowing heated waves of condensation over the surface.

Usually it was up to Mario to order since DK just looked like some kinda escaped circus animal in the human kingdom. "DON'T FORGET THE MAYO!" He hollers over to Mario after the other had moved over to pay for the ridiculously stuffed sandwich order. Though what DK sees gives him pause and a flaring of fur.

"Hehe, yeah - we only get some real stoners out here this late. Why don't you take a cookie for a road? My treat~"

He can't help notice the way Mario laughs awkwardly, shifting from foot to foot as the cashier wraps up the finished sandwiches...how dare he get any attention! Good attention that is...

"...heY MARIO, IT LOOKS LIKE YOUR VAN'S GOT A FLAT-" DK loudly interrupts, waiting for the stunned short-stuff to look out confused at the parking lot before he turns to head out and get a better look, but not before dropping the meal compensation on the counter in form of a handful of bills.

"Here you go ~" The cashier is in the middle of handing over sandwiches in a baggie when DK takes it upon himself to...first - snatch the sandwiches, then secondly -lean down to blow a puff of hot air into the Subway worker's face.

"...I'll have you know, I'm a fuckin' service animal. So ~ enjoy your court summons for very illegally interrupting my work!" He leaves the poor store clerk wide eyed and shaky, but not without first devouring that free cookie himself before Mario could even get a WHIFF of it. Delicious.

[hag-lad]

Tagged by my all time fave, @alienfuckeronmain ! Thanks, pal!

I’ll tag @intergalacticwhales @dark-emissary @leolaroot @spacedyevest @wanderingtheythem @perditious @rabidvulcan​ and anyone else who feels like playing along!

were you named after anybody?

First name no, middle name is after my grandmother, Ethel. Lowkey wish that was my first name, lmao

when was the last time you cried?

At work last week, because I was listening to Celestial Elixir by Haken and that song is simply TOO MUCH (in the best way). So devastating and beautiful.

do you have kids?

No... I keep thinking I might want kids in the future though. The world needs more lesbian parents. 

do you use sarcasm a lot?

No, I kind of hate sarcasm. I almost never understand when others are being sarcastic, so it does not come naturally for me to use it. 

what sports did you play/have you played?

Chess 😎

what’s the first thing you notice in somebody? 

Probably the way they talk? Voice, turn of phrase, accent, vocabulary, etc. 

eye color?

Green

scary movies or happy endings?

Happy endings, generally. Scary movies don’t scare me anymore so they’re just kind of a bummer :(

any special talents?

I’m extremely good at untying tangled cords and strings. I’m also a damn good explorer, like, I’m the person who “knows a spot” except I know like 700 spots, and they’re all very cool and unseen. Hit me up for abandoned building recommendations. 

where were you born?

Houston, Texas

what are your hobbies?

Photography, digital collage, Photoshop, sewing, hiking, cycling, fan fiction (reading and writing), exploring internet rabbit holes, making playlists, making mood boards (with my own photography or with pinterest; i’m vers), gardening, home improvement (recently taught myself how to replace all the guts in a toilet tank! yay!), tarot & oracle reading, divination, and of course, READING BOOKS. 

do you have pets?

3 beautiful cats

how tall are you?

5′3ish

favorite subject in high school?

English

dream job?

I don’t know, man. On the one hand, capitalism is an oppressive hellscape of exploitation and control, and I’m way too punk rock to work for The Man. But on the other hand, there are so many things that Need To Get Done, and it feels wrong to even fantasize about shirking my responsibility to contribute. Not to mention the financial necessity of working, forever. Like, I will literally never be able to retire or anything like that. I’ve changed my mind hundreds of times about how I can fit myself into the job market without going insane. And I’ve determined that it’s less about my title and more about what fills my day. If I can be useful, make people’s lives easier, take plenty of breaks, and do no harm to people or the environment, I’ll do anything. Right now, I’m a social worker, and that ticks most of the boxes, so I’m alright. But it would be really cool to be, like, an electrician or plumber, or to foster kids, or to become a doula or a school counselor, or anything in National Parks/ forest services. I just want to avoid bullshit busy work, because that’s the shit that kills me. 

[invitainvidia]

12/26/22

8 a.m.

i wake up. still half baked of last night. took over a restaurant in the countryside in november.strugglin*

get coffee. roll spliff.read sth.push away the visions of various, unfortunately very probable futures in which this species self destructs and stumble to the bath w][room>

fucked up skin..i had a slight cold just only fading..drugs..sorrow ..no sleep..too bruised and shattered to put a blade to it.

bathing, wanking, drinking coffee. planning that day .

we stopped celebrating christmas when covid started.

my son is 19 and he is beyond white lies.

[thinking of our son always lifts me up]

10 a.m.

must drive to my office to prepare an airbnb check in. restaurant open at 12. i light another spliff to tone me down.

last time checking the mirror if at least the red bruises have vanished after application of loads of moisturizer. i look frail. i dont give a fuck but i realize to be on the brink of a third burnout

11 a.m.

my in law always grants us his old cars. never get stopped by cops with these. perfectly unspectacular. non descript.

the warm leatherette.

this must stop.

11.44

Putting keys into keysafe . change code. print registrastion. write on airbnb. waiter calls. will be late. guy i hired 2 days ago calls. a lady wants a glass of whitewhine.

12.23

hurry to the car. construction work on the tram rails demands your patience like the 1 hour drive i will have to endure now.

we have loads of tourists,roadwork, pop up bicycle lanes and 4 millions idiots using 5 million cars. driving through berlin you cross oceans of time

13.16

to land in the next x_mess adventure.

water flows out of the sink of the kitchen floor- if i get a professional company we all will have worked all christmas just to pay that plumber. it is a small sea inbetween the cold houses.

my waiter works like a machine. a ruddy service soldier in a perfect trance of a hangover to come.

my new crew member is just 20. i already taught his mother how to work a bar. so. love that dynamic.

15.30

Gettin a big steak. i devour entierely and fight with the waiter about him having to wait. he won*t have to fix the music for our backroom x_mess reservation of 17.

16.00

we rent out some rooms there as well. 1 check in.

they complain. i give them another room. the they tell me the heating is off. i check. heating off in the whole house. i panic . i phone a plumber in Bulgaria.I apologize to the old and polite couple with health issues. I start sending pictures to Bulgaria and ask questions.

Finally. Fixed.

18.50

i order calameretti. i will cease to be a fake italian restaurant on new years eve.

I visit my friend markus in room no 9 .works for his rent.

19.45

last table. do the bar.waiter gets message his smallest son has high fever. middle son just had been severly sick. i tell him he may leave as soon as poss. without cleaning up.

find air bnb message that we missed to provide enough bedcloth..1 is missing. promise to supply them around midnight.

22.00

waiter runs off to take his son to the hospital. wont be able to work tomorrow. i will. i start cleaning.

and we check out the new.amp. m. has built. the inmost light.

23.33

Before i drive.i have to change one of the light.bulps of the cars headlights. i left on the parkings lots* flood lights. close down the place. leave it only half cleaned.

00.40

Drive to the air bnb . they sent another message demanding toiletpaper and shampoo.

01.56

home.spliff. tumblr. finished writing this 03.35.

[lovethesagefan]

CALLING!!!

Usually when a person say they have a "calling" or they received "the call", they are probably talking about the ministry. Sometimes, I wonder if I had received that call. If so, it probably was a wrong number. LOL! Nevertheless, I once received the calling to teach. I started out at Georgia State University as a business major. This is despite spending many an hour marking up my Mama's wall with stolen chalk from my teachers at Park Street Elementary. What interrupted my call was my father. He didn't think I should be a teacher. My mother was a teacher. He had two sisters who became teachers. Why he didn't think I should be a teacher, I can't say. So being dutiful (he was paying), I chose business, though I didn't know what I could do with a degree in business.

Math isn't my strong suite. In fact it's the Joker in my deck. I had Ms. Kohler in my Senior year. She was a good teacher, but the type who had a reputation to be feared. When she got mad, she would use the term, "Tinker's Dam". Now we gasped at the term thinking profanity, but it's a plumber's thing. Go figure. So any field requiring math would not be for me. Accounting 101 took a couple of tries and then Accounting 201 made me realized I might need to hang up the "call."

Without telling anyone, I changed my major to History. I told myself, if I was going to flunk out of GSU, do it doing something I loved. I was like Br'er Rabbit landing in the briar patch after being freed from the tar baby by Br'er Fox. I had finally answered my call.

When you are called to do something, it is easier to fulfill the mission. Yes, the pay isn't great. I wish I could hit a ball, but I didn't get that call. You are blame for everything that is wrong with society, yet not given the credit for improving society.

For 28 years, I was on that teacher telephone call. Well, the last couple of years I muted the conversation. I was burnt out and basically had enough. Fast forward five years later. The phone to which I thought was disconnected...rang. You hardly hear a story of a retired teacher returning to BACK to the field of battle. Even yet as a substitute teacher. That is the definition of someone who enjoys being inflicted with pain. Then on top of that...MIDDLE SCHOOL!!

I thought I must be crazy. I mulled over the decision over and over. The call got louder and louder. Teaching is the only thing I can do with any alacrity. I did work for the IRS before teaching and probably could still do something with the government, however, I took the teaching call first.

So for the second time in my life I find myself in a classroom. Not the main teacher, but a teacher still. I sometimes forget I am a sub...or supposed to be. As noted, I am being accepted as being cool. Today in Social Studies, after running an errand, Dr. W had the class sing the "Bell Ringer" song. You know music makes me move. So I swayed, moved, and started waving my hands in the air just like I didn't care. Cause I didn't! But the kids loved it.

I do not know how long this conversation will last. I do not know how much this call will cost me. I have a lot to learn. Education can change and yet be unchanged. I have students who call me "Friend" when they see me. I taught Smiley how to do the Vulcan greeting. I am sure he was sad when I wasn't in his class today. I wants to be in ALL of my class now. Getting the call this late in life I hope turns out to be the right move and not a crank call. I took the call and I there every day to answer.

[fajcit]

A white two door tacoma is the most incognito car you can buy. The tacoma can belong anywhere and is never out of place. You can park it crooked near a lightpole in a parking lot and suddenly you’re an electrician fixing the light, back of a shopping center where the deliveries are made and you’re a plumber or technician. It’s so Unlike other larger trucks like fords that middle class toxic dads and general contractors drive. The tacoma is the staple car of underpaid workers /laborers, and the only downside is racist soccer moms in expensive suvs won’t let you merge because they think you’re not in a rush since you’re an undocumented worker from the home depot… who just so happens to be working,underpaid by her husband, the scammer half redneck general contractor driving a f150.

[smartworlddeveloper]

Modern Properties By Smart World Gurgaon

In the modern day, we all need modern properties to live in Gurgaon. How to find the best modern property developer is not easy. Not every property will be able to suit your requirements. All properties have their qualities and specifications. Some developers are providing the same things in all their properties.

The best and most modern property property is available by Smart World Gurgaon. The group is providing the best properties that are unique. Also, there are lots of premium projects where residents are living the best lives. These property rates are increasing day by day. Moreover, all the premium materials are used in all their projects in every city. The Group specializes in building high-end properties that are a perfect match for your dream property.

We are also known as the dream property developer because most of our clients find their dream property in our projects. The Smart World Gurgaon is the best place for all needs of properties like commercial and residential. We have received many awards for beautiful development. At the same time, all our project location is superb. The best things in our properties are road connectivity and facilities. That is only offered by Smart World Gurgaon.

We are going to launch some premium properties and most of them are having a huge demand in the market. We vision to honesty and perfection. Soon we will become the iconic builder in the entire industry. All the previous achievements are done because of all Smart World Gurgaon premium projects. You will not get any ordinary property on our list. All the properties can stand in the finest property list of Gurgaon.

Premium Property by Smart World Developers Gurgaon

One DXP: It is one of the premium properties that is located in Sector 113 Gurgaon. Also, the property offers premium 2 to 4 bhk apartment options in the middle of the city. The project is spreading over an 18-acre land area in Gurgaon middle. It is the best location to invest in Gurgaon properties nowadays. Because this sector contains many other commercial properties along with residential. 1200 premium units are available in the One DXP. The Smart World Gurgaon is offering world-class specifications in the property. Sector 113 is one of the best locations because all the basic and premium facilities are available nearby. Moreover, the sector is breaking all the records of development. Most of the competitor companies are launching their property in Sector 113.

Facilities in Smart World One DXP 

The residents will get security in Smart World Gurgaon One DXP

Also, CCTV surveillance

Car parking facility for residents and guests

In-house plumber and electrician facility

Swimming pools and Club House

Conclusion

The M3M Smart World Gurgaon is one of the capable developers that is operating in Gurgaon City. The presence of the leading group property makes the city more premium from a real estate view. In Short, Gurgaon real estate is achieving milestones because of this leading group presence in the city.

[belsitoplumbing]

When to call emergency plumbers in Phoenix?

Plumbing emergencies can strike at any time of the day, and it’s no different when it comes to waterworks. On a hot summer’s day in Phoenix, you may find yourself in the middle of a waterworks nightmare. But don’t worry, emergency plumbers are here to save the day.

In this blog post, we’ll explore when it’s time to call the unsung heroes of the plumbing industry.

Burst pipes

A burst pipe is one of the most common plumbing emergencies. It can start as a small issue, such as a slow drainage or a gurgling sound, but if you ignore it for too long, it can turn into a full blown waterworks nightmare. It’s easy to see why burst pipes are so common, especially when extreme temperatures or corroded pipes cause them to burst.

Clogged drains

When your home turns into a water park and your bathroom floor turns into an impromptu swimming pool, you’ll want to call the experts ASAP.

Sewer Backups

You may have heard the term “sewer backup” before, and it’s true. Sewer backups are messy, and they’re dangerous. When sewage backs up into your sink, toilet, or shower, it’s not just a plumbing issue; it’s a health hazard. That’s where emergency plumbers come in.

Water Heater Woes

Phoenix residents know how important hot water is, especially during the summer months. When your water heater goes on strike and you’re left shivering in your shower, that’s a plumbing emergency. Emergency plumbers in Phoenix can help you get your hot water back and your sanity back.

Leaky Roofs

If you’re lucky enough to live in Phoenix, you’ll never have to worry about a leak in your roof. But if your roof suddenly springs a leak and water dries into your living room, you’re in for a world of trouble. Emergency plumbers can help you identify and fix the problem so you don’t suffer further damage.

Gas leaks

Gas leaks are a silent but deadly hazard. If you smell gas or think there might be a gas leak in your home, don't hesitate to evacuate your home, shut off your gas supply and call an emergency plumber in Phoenix. A gas leak is a dangerous hazard and should be dealt with as soon as possible.

Broken fixtures

You expect water to come out of your faucet, but when you turn on your tap, you don’t get a trickle of water. Poor water pressure can mean a variety of things, from pipe blockages to a malfunctioning well pump. An emergency plumber can quickly identify the problem and get your water flowing again.

A Broken Toilet

If you’re hearing clanking, banging, or hisses coming from your plumbing system, it’s time to call emergency plumbers. These loud noises can be a sign that something’s amiss, and if you don’t take care of it, it could turn into a bigger problem. Emergency plumbers will figure out where the noise is coming from and fix it as soon as possible.

Frozen Pipes

Phoenix’s winter weather isn’t always cold, but it can be. Frozen pipes can cause cracks and bursts, which can cause water damage when the pipes thaw. If you’re experiencing frozen pipes in Phoenix, emergency plumbers can help thaw them and prevent more damage.

Flooding

Flooding can happen at any time, but it’s especially bad in Phoenix. If your home starts to look like a swimming pool because of flash floods, don’t wait any longer. Call an emergency plumber to assess and minimize the damage.

 Strange odors

If you smell strange odors coming out of your drains or pipes, it could be the result of a hidden problem. It could be that your sewer gas is leaking, your vent is clogged, or your mold is growing. Emergency plumbers will investigate and fix the problem, bringing fresh air back into your home.

Conclusion

In conclusion, a plumbing emergency can ruin your life and cause serious damage to your home. It is important to know when to call emergency plumbers in Phoenix for quick and effective solutions. When you encounter any of these situations, don’t hesitate to contact an emergency plumber. They have the experience, tools, and knowledge to handle even the most difficult plumbing emergencies, keeping your home safe and comfortable. The next time a plumbing emergency strikes, remember that your emergency plumbers are right around the corner, ready to save you from waterworks chaos.