#Trump 2024 Sneakers

[max11237]

Trump NEVER SURRENDER Gold Shoes Top Quality

Trump NEVER SURRENDER Gold Shoes Top Quality Big Size 47 48 Mens 2024 MAGA Golden Casual Streetwear Running Silvery Sneakers

[jackass-democrats]

Democrats are as childish as it gets. They're destroyed with TDS. They all secretly want a pair of Trump Sneakers 😂

[hale-nathan]

Trump Weird News - McBillionaire, McScrooge Or Both?

Showing Trump: "Your Bitch Called Again - He Needs More Money"

Reaction to "TRUMP-O-Nomics"

" If The Trump Sneaker Fits, BUY IT!"

[randyite]

[parttimereporter]

Image captured in the moment.. the former President hawking his $400 sneakers at Sneaker Con in Philadelphia..

It is intriguing that until this moment, very few of us knew that a Sneaker Con existed in Philadelphia..

[hang-on-lil-tomato]

um … 1 million Americans dead from terrible response to Covid, national debt out of control, enrichment of kusher and ivampa, likely sale of state secrets, creating a psychopathic group of MAGAt cult members, kid who crossed state lines with guns murders 2 people, attempted coup, January 6, etc.

yeah, he did a great job as FAKE POTUS!

[beardedmrbean]

Jimmy Kimmel has admitted his own role in “dividing” America in a 19-minute, last-ditch plea to Republican voters ahead of next week’s presidential election.

The comedian abandoned his “usual roast” of Donald Trump and, while he still cracked jokes about the Republican candidate, struck a more serious tone by making an appeal to GOP supporters on Tuesday night’s Jimmy Kimmel Live.

“We are very divided, and not just because of Donald Trump, because of people like – if I’m being honest – me,” Kimmel said.

“I do a lot of mocking and belittling, and it isn’t always productive.”

Kimmel urged viewers to share his monologue with people in their lives who are “either planning to vote for Trump or thinking about it” and urged them to watch the entire thing.

“I promise I won’t make you regret it because it’s not going to be our usual roast of Trump or some kind of liberal virtue signaling, none of that,” Kimmel said.

In his monologue, the late-night host asked Republican supporters to consider some of the statements Trump has made directly over the years, starting with healthcare.

Kimmel played a montage of clips of Trump promising to announce a healthcare plan, with the dates ranging from 2016 up until the 2024 debate with Kamala Harris on September 10, where he said he “had concepts” of a plan.

“Donald Trump was president for four years,” Kimmel said.

“You would think that at this point he would have some answers, some kind of plan, for simple questions about subjects like healthcare and childcare.”

He also slammed Trump for fearmongering with unfounded claims of forced sex change operations in schools. “I understand this is a tough subject, but this alarm he keeps sounding, about forced sex change operations, this is not happening. This is an imaginary problem,” Kimmel said.

In a lighter moment, Kimmel returned to more familiar ground when he joked that Trump is “the exact meeting point between Q-Anon and QVC.”

“You remember when Ronald Reagan was selling high tops in the 80s? No, you don’t because he wasn’t,” Kimmel said.

“Reagan didn’t sell sneakers, Clinton didn’t sell pork rinds, Bush didn’t sell baked beans, presidents don’t sell products – except for one who sells a lot of them.”

Towards the end of his monologue, the comedian turned to a wall full of photos of Republicans, including those from Trump’s first administration, who have backed Harris and abandoned their support for Trump this election.

“This has never happened before,” Kimmel said.

[magnetictapedatastorage]

full article under the cut

Big CITY

She Took a Picture of the Man Who Attacked Her. It Didn’t Matter.

In an age of widespread surveillance, why was a police lineup, a method known to be unreliable, treated as the gold standard?

The assumption that humans are the most dependable witnesses to traumatic events contradicts decades of social science research. Credit...Spencer Platt/Getty Images

By Ginia Bellafante

Ginia Bellafante writes the Big City column, a weekly commentary on the politics, culture and life of New York City.

Feb. 2, 2024

Last year, on a cool September afternoon around 2 o’clock, a friend who lives in my building was walking to the post office in Downtown Brooklyn when she was attacked by a stranger. She had been on the phone when she vaguely noticed someone in her periphery. Suddenly he was right in front of her, mimicking her movements as she tried to step away. Assuming the position of a linebacker, he tackled her to the ground, leaving her at the curb with various injuries.

He walked away, but before long he turned around and came back. By this point my friend, Laura, a slight artist in her 50s (who asked that I not use her full name because she continues to feel vulnerable) was safely inside the closest building. From behind a glass door, she was able to take a picture of the man with her cellphone. And there was other visual evidence: A nearby security camera had recorded the attack, footage of which my friend eventually watched in the company of detectives at the 84th Precinct.

The incident struck me not only because it happened in the middle of the day, to someone I know and care about, in what is considered a very safe part of Brooklyn, but also because of what followed procedurally and what it revealed about the still dubious place of technology in modern law enforcement.

On Oct. 23, five weeks after the attack that left Laura with bruises to her lower back, a chipped tooth and scrapes on her elbow and forearm, she was called in to the precinct house to identify a suspect. There were no actual people in the lineup; instead, she faced a presentation of eight pictures of different men who, she said, looked unnervingly similar.

“The idea that I might wrongfully accuse someone weighed on me,” she told me later. Although she could quickly eliminate five of the eight, she found it hard to distinguish among the remaining three — each of whom had a point at the top of his cranium, she noticed, and eyes that were cast downward.

She made a selection. Then, detectives told her that her assailant was No. 5; she had chosen the wrong man. She hadn’t registered any details about her attacker’s appearance during the incident itself, but she had looked at the picture she had taken. He seemed to be in his 20s or early 30s, and was wearing patched jeans, white sneakers and a black parka. He had a vacant gaze, a small, distinctive bump over his right eyebrow and a tiny scar over his left. If you looked closely, you could see a cigarette clutched in his left hand.

Detectives told her that despite the photographic and video evidence, her mistake would prevent them from taking anyone into custody. When I asked sources at the New York Police Department to explain why victim identification, known to be so unreliable, would trump visual imaging — which, in this instance, included a high-resolution iPhone photo taken immediately after the attack — a spokesman responded with an email that said: Detectives “work closely with District Attorney’s Offices to build the best possible prosecution,” which includes “taking several investigative steps” to “effectuate an arrest.”

In other words, no matter the clarity of the imaging, the human determination remained the gold standard, and in the absence of an accurate one, the case was considered too weak to move toward conviction.

This implicit understanding of living creatures as the most dependable witnesses to traumatic events contradicts decades of social science research. According to a report by the Innocence Project, titled “Re-evaluating Lineups: Why Witnesses Make Mistakes and How to Reduce the Chance of Misidentification,” empirical and peer-reviewed research “reaffirms what DNA exonerations have proven to be true: Human memory is fallible.” For all the downsides of living amid ever-present 21st-century surveillance, one benefit would presumably be the capacity to correct for exactly these errors of human observation.

Memory formation exists in three phases: encoding, storage and retrieval. “When someone is in a moment of stress — when someone has attacked them — that stress impacts both the encoding and storage functions,” Alexis Hoag-Fordjour, a criminal-law professor at Brooklyn Law School, explained. There is a frustrating lag, she said, between developments in technology, pathology, social science and science in general and what happens in the law.

There is not a uniform approach to using pictures and security camera footage when making decisions in criminal cases. “The irony,” Alex Vitale, a sociologist who has studied policing for 30 years, said, is that if Laura had died, the police “would have been perfectly happy” to arrest the suspect “in the absence of a positive eyewitness ID.”

Some lawyers, like Julie Rendelman, formerly the deputy bureau chief of the homicide division at the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, maintain that mistaken identifications should not necessarily prevent prosecution from moving forward, or, as she explained, “that the level of crime should be relevant to bringing the case.”

What happened to Laura was psychologically disruptive above all. The release of her assailant is the sort of outcome bound to enrage those who see New York as an increasingly dangerous place where law and order have been subjugated to the ostensible virtues of progressive reform. But it would also gnaw at progressives who view inadequate attention to the psychological well-being of homeless and other marginalized people as the problem animating our sense of unrest.

Detectives asked if she wanted to press charges, and she did — so that the man who attacked her, she reasoned, could get help.

Lincoln Restler, the City Council member who represents the area where the attack took place, said that the decision to prosecute an assault like this one “should be made by the D.A.’s office every single time,” adding: “If that case is taken up, then the courts, a judge, could refer the alleged assailant to treatment services, even housing,” assuming that is what is needed.

As Mr. Vitale suggested, “It is not as though we don’t know who these people are who are responsible for these quality-of-life problems.” The challenge, as he put it, is that “we don’t know what to do about them.”

Ginia Bellafante has served as a reporter, critic and, since 2011, as the Big City columnist. She began her career at The Times as a fashion critic, and has also been a television critic. She previously worked at Time magazine. More about Ginia Bellafante

A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 4, 2024, Section MB, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: An Attack and a Tale of Law and Disorder. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Stephen A. Crockett Jr. at HuffPost:

I’ve always been stunned at former President Donald Trump’s physical prowess.

I mean, who can forget when his White House director of communications, Anthony Scaramucci, gushed about witnessing Trump throw a perfect spiral through a tire? Or his claim that he’s seen the confirmed thousand-aire at Madison Square Garden in a top coat at the foul line swishing free throws? And despite all of us knowing that the former president’s diet relies heavily on fast food, that didn’t stop his White House physician, now Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas), from praising his genetics. “Some people just have great genes,” Jackson told reporters in 2018. “I told the president if he had a healthier diet over the last 20 years, he might live to be 200.” So it has been quite the show watching the gymnast-like contortions of the former president to avoid getting to know, or actually court, Black people to support his campaign. Earlier this month, in his latest episode of “See? Black people like me!” the president stood during an obvious photo-op at an Atlanta Chick-fil-A while smiling Black workers appeared to pose while taking his order. Trump reportedly ordered 30 milkshakes and some chicken, dealing out fast food for free publicity before heading to a high-dollar fundraiser in a largely white neighborhood.

A Black woman in the restaurant said, in her best untrained actor voice, “I don’t care what the media tells you, Mr. Trump, we support you!” I later found out the Black woman was in fact Michaelah Montgomery, a conservative activist who had arranged the entire scene. To her credit, the bigger story was supposed to be a conversation between students from nearby HBCUs and the presidential candidate about conservatism and possible inroads with the Black community. The moment became a meme. As with most Trump moments. Because what Trump and those around him don’t understand or care to involve themselves with is that Black people, more specifically Black women (also known as the spine of the Democratic voting bloc), are three dimensional, alive, actual human beings.

In Trumpland, Black people are caricatures of all of the worst stereotypes that have ever been imagined. They are rapists, thieves and murderers who want to terrorize… wait, no, that’s immigrants. But the point remains: The idea of even possibly courting Black voters never moves past stereotypical ideology. Which is comical when you consider that in 2024, the year of our lord Dawn Staley, an actual presidential strategy for winning the Black vote was… wait for it… sneakers. In February, Trump unveiled his $399 “Never Surrender High-Tops” at SneakerCon in Philadelphia. Trump didn’t just premiere the gaudy gold high-top decorated with an American flag motif, the sort of faux patriotism that’s truly become Trump’s signature brand, he actually went to the event to help hawk the ridiculousness that was an attempt to capture not just youth culture but ... well, I’ll just let Fox News contributor Raymond Arroyo say the quiet part out loud. “This is ... connecting with Black America. Because they’re into sneakers. They love sneakers. This is a big deal. Certainly in the inner city.”

Arroyo got bashed for his take, as he should, but his take was a glimpse into how many Republicans, especially Trump, see Black people as sneaker-loving, inner-city dwelling and easily swayed by shiny, expensive things. It’s Republican typecasting in which a Black person remains the villain/magical negro who serves only to further the white protagonist’s storyline. And make no mistake about it, in the story of Trump, as told by the narcissistic narrator, the former president is always the hero.

Which brings us to Blacks 4 Trump (aka Black Voices for Trump), you know, that hodgepodge group of Blacks (mostly men) who have proclaimed their allegiance to Trump and who stump for him despite his lackluster attempts at any tangible metrics with the Black community. Don’t act like you don’t remember Michael Symonette, Maurice Woodside and Mikael Israel (these are not three people; it’s one man who has gone by three names), more commonly know as “Michael the Black Man” (his name for himself, not mine) who magically appeared behind Trump at a 2017 rally in Arizona. Always strategically placed in the camera’s view wearing a shirt that says “Trump & Republicans Are Not Racist” or “Blacks 4 Trump.” The funny thing is that the group Blacks 4 Trump didn’t ever seem to really do anything other than allow their Blackness to be co-opted for the then-president’s political gain. The group didn’t have an agenda or a political manifesto (at least it never presented one) that noted how Trump could actually earn the Black vote. They just showed up and allowed their images to be used to sell a product.

Because, never forget, Trump is always in the Trump business. Which leads to arguably the most disturbing attempt by Trump’s campaign to court Black voters, which Trump’s camp openly admits they need to win over in the upcoming election: Insisting that because Black people have been the victims of an unjust criminal system, they relate to Trump more because he, too, is a victim of the Man.

[...] Trump acknowledges that there is discrimination and, more important, that Black people have been discriminated against. This means nothing to him, of course, as that only serves to get him to his second point, which is that he can relate, which therefore makes him more relatable to the discriminated class. He doesn’t want to fix the problem, he only wants to leech off of the sympathies related to it. It is in this brushstroke that Trump ― who has been charged by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, a Black woman; Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Black man; and New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Black woman ― that he, too, is a victim of systemic racism.

“When I did the mug shot in Atlanta, that mug shot is number one,” Trump said. He added that the Black population “embraced it more than anyone else.” He also said: “I’m being indicted for you, the Black population.” First, the obvious. I’ll just let President Joe Biden’s campaign spokesperson Jasmine Harris explain it. “The audacity of Donald Trump to speak to a room full of Black voters during Black History Month as if he isn’t the proud poster boy for modern racism. This is the same man who falsely accused the Central Park 5, questioned George Floyd’s humanity, compared his own impeachment trial to being lynched and ensured the unemployment gap for Black workers spiked during his presidency,” Harris told The Washington Post.

“Donald Trump has been showing Black Americans his true colors for years: an incompetent, anti-Black tyrant who holds us to such low regard that he publicly dined with white nationalists a week after declaring his 2024 candidacy.”

Stephen Crockett Jr. wrote in HuffPost that Donald Trump's attempt to court Black voters is based on stereotypical traits of Blacks from a conservative POV, including by claiming to relate to being victims of an unjust criminal system that Black folk face.

[mariacallous]

It’s Everyday, Bro feat. Donald J. Trump

In between court appearances, former president Donald Trump has been campaigning in a handful of odd places. In February he hawked his golden shoes at Sneaker Con, and now his team might be sending him to Jake Paul’s next boxing match.

Over the weekend, Paul, the influencer and professional boxer, was interviewed by Jesse Watters on Fox News. The pair discussed his upcoming fight with Mike Tyson and whether Joe Biden or Trump would come out on top in a hypothetical match. At the end of the conversation, however, Paul offered Trump a seat outside the ring.

“Trump, if you’re watching this, this is an invite. I know you used to promote Tyson, so I’d love to have you at the fight,” Paul said. “Donny, pull up, we’ve got tickets for you.”

On Monday I asked the Trump campaign whether they’d take Paul up on his offer, and a top Trump adviser told me that the campaign is “seriously considering” attending the fight. When Paul announced his match with Tyson a few weeks ago, the video received more than 4 million views on YouTube, making it his most popular video so far this year. And while the match itself will likely bring in a massive audience, Paul’s more than 60 million followers across platforms would be the real trophy for the Trump campaign.

2024 is already the year of the election influencer. I wrote about Biden’s gaggle of influencers a few weeks ago, and it’s true—influencers are catching the attention of politicians and campaigns like never before. Paul is a great example: Last fall, the boxer met with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and said that he was teaching him to use TikTok. Later that year, Vivek Ramaswamy was in the crowd at one of Paul’s fights. Paul stopped short of endorsing Ramaswamy, but offered to join him on the campaign trail ahead of the Iowa caucus (though bad weather got in the way).

“When we talk about political influencers, we tend to really focus on influencers who are inherently political. However, politicians don't just benefit from those kinds of influencers,” Jo Lukito, an assistant professor focused on political communications at University of Texas at Austin, told me. “The ideal is actually to get influencers who are not super political, right? Because you're able to get an audience that you normally wouldn't have access to.”

Team Trump might also struggle to reach its usual base this year, meaning they’ll need to rely on alternatives. Earlier this week, The Atlantic reported that traffic belonging to the top 10 conservative and right-wing news sites has gone down 40 percent since the last presidential election, in 2020. It was these outlets, like Breitbart, that leveraged the internet to elect Trump in 2016. Now that machine is breaking down.

“The mainstream media is dead. They’re dead. They just haven’t realized it yet,” a former Ramaswamy staffer told me at his caucus night party in January. “If you look at the types of voters that make up the America First movement, they get their news from alternative media. Fox News is just a very small sliver.” Paul, and other creators like him, could fill this void.

Trump’s team is realizing this. Before, right-wing media and Trump’s online fanatics together generated enough buzz that he didn’t need to build these relationships himself. But as the media landscape has changed, so must the campaign. Already last year, the former president appeared on the Nelk Boys’ Full Send podcast, where he was quizzed, of all things, on Ice Spice. He also hosted a dinner for conservative influencers. The fact that the campaign is considering joining forces with Paul marks the next step in their strategy.

It’s not just presidential candidates either. On Tuesday, NBC News reported that House Speaker Mike Johnson, who’s trying not to get fired by his own party, briefed popular conservative influencers and activists on his election integrity bill. Popular social media figures including LibsofTikTok, DC Draino, and End Wokeness were all briefed and, in turn, put out messages in support of the bill.

While Johnson’s briefing was an attempt to create his own viral moment, Trump attending Paul’s fight would be him seizing an opportunity that makes sense for his brand. Trump’s involvement in the bravado of men’s fighting sports has lasted decades. More than a decade ago, he famously participated in a Wrestlemania match with Vince McMahon. Recently, Trump’s been attending more UFC fights and chumming it up with Dana White.

Not only will Paul be hyping up this summer’s fight across his social media accounts, but Netflix will also be livestreaming the match, allowing it to reach the streaming platform’s more than 260 million users. Many digital consultants say political advertising on streaming apps like Netflix will be huge this year. Unlike with a New York Times article or an Instagram post, users are often glued to a movie or show, and some services can force their audiences to watch ads, depending on their subscription tier.

“If I were a political candidate, this would be the time where I'm recognizing Jake Paul has a uniquely large audience and would want to leverage that to benefit me in some way,” Lukito told me.

This is all to say that we live in a world where Jake Paul’s endorsement carries weight in politics. Social platforms are no longer prioritizing news content—they’re fixed on the creator economy. Influencers dominate these feeds, where a majority of US voters read the news, and we should expect more YouTube-style collabs like these, at least through November. Get ready. It’s going to be every day, bro.

[jackass-democrats]

Trump's sneakers made kamala jealous 😂

[goblissofficial]

Show your support for President Trump and his future reelection in 2024 with the bold design and statement slogan.

[goblisslive]

Show your support for President Trump and his future reelection in 2024 with the bold design and statement slogan.

[azspot]

The Trump Organization was founded as a real estate firm. In many ways, that’s still what it is, although the company no longer builds, but mostly manages their own and other people’s properties. And what do we know about real estate? It’s one of the main vehicles for laundering stolen and illicitly earned money, which is why on February 7, 2024, the U.S. Treasury rolled out a new set of regulations requiring all-cash purchases of real estate to reveal their owners. Between 2016 and 2021, a minimum $2.6 billion was laundered through real estate deals in the United States alone, with New York and Miami as the epicenters. By 2019, trillions of pounds worth of London real estate were also “washing dirty money clean,” as an old friend of mine (now deceased) who worked as an agent for Russian oligarchs told me.

Donald Trump and the Golden Sneakers

[stephenjaymorrisblog]

One Man’s Opinion on Retirement

Stephen Jay Morris

5/12/2024

©Scientific Morality

            Once again, I must remind you that every human being is different. However, one gender has trouble with retirement: male. Why? The male ego. Thanks to the constant haranguing by advocates of masculinity, some men think that retirement is a death sentence to their identities. It’s part of the male castration complex. Upon retirement, you lose the respect of people who now view you as a useless, babbling nobody. You are regarded as a child again. Some dudes must be forced into retirement because they refuse to go there. In a capitalist society, you are either a master or a slave. Capitalists (masters) never have to retire because they have enough money to allow them 10 lifetimes. Now, as a worker (slave) who retires, you can no longer make any capitalist rich. However, your body ultimately breaks down from arthritis and heart disease, and you can no longer function without physical discomfort.

            A lot of retirees do not have any savings or investment income, so they are dependent upon pensions and/or Social Security. As such, they are on fixed incomes. Plastic conservatives point their boney fingers at them and declare it was their fault: “You didn’t handle your money right! You spent it on capricious stuff like a sports car or a 500-dollar pair of sneakers. You should have invested your money or saved more!” So, like a good little flunkey, you feel guilty for having burdened rich, White guys to pay taxes to fund your Medicare or Social-Security benefits. Even when you lost your job during your working years and were eligible for unemployment benefits, you didn’t sign up because of feeling embarrassed over your plight.

            Some men go through the extremes of depression and then suicide. Others become hermits and withdraw from society. Why is this? Because we live in society that celebrates wealth and downplays the proletariat. Plus, old people are viewed as annoying and useless, like children.

I am glad I have a different attitude towards retirement.

I am a subject of Gerontology. I state my case here. After an anfractuous life and being yelled at by alarm clocks, I am here to state: I love retirement! The money sucks, but the freedom is priceless. Many seniors go to Las Vegas and sit in front of those one-armed bandits all day, hoping for a big payoff. As for me? I was never good at making money. Plus, I never cared for it. To me, money was something you needed to buy art supplies and chilidogs. I had a passion for the arts and other things, like musical instruments. You needed money to buy birthday presents or other gifts to show your friends that you valued their friendship. Well, not me. A lot of people I knew thought I was a cheap asshole. Maybe I was.

            Retirement to me is living in freedom. I sleep as long as I want. I don’t have anything scheduled. I can literally stop and smell the roses. The only notable difference in my activities is that I see medical doctors more. But nobody points at me and tells me to be a man! I couldn’t even if wanted to. It takes me two minutes to get up from my couch. I don’t have to prove anything to anybody. I can walk away from anything and not care. I am happily married and in love.

In this country (USA), nobody has respect for elders. We are just a nuisance. President Biden is one those men who refuses to quit, just like Donald Trump. The selfishness of these two men is astounding! Should one of them die of natural causes during their term in office, it would put the entire nation in political crises. But, do they care? Hell no! They’re dead!

As for me, I am still alive, and I can take a long lunch if I want to!  Retirement: plan for it and have fun year-round!

[nattousan]

ok but imagine being the fursuit artist that he contracts to make his costume tho

He contacts you via an anonymous email and is very exacting and precise in his request. Money is no object, which isn't uncommon in your line of business, you're a professional and more than a few customers have been in the 1% range.

So you ask if he's local so you can meet and take measurements and he says no but he will meet you at (conveniently close local craft store) tomorrow after work (you did not mention where you live)

You're a little shaken but you meet him anyways because daddy needs to pay rent, and he's probably not a serial killer, right?

Right?

You had no idea what kind of person to expect, but a 6'2 bald white guy built like a fucken shit-brickhouse with a "FurCon2023" shirt wrapped around his brolic frame was rather on the shorter end of your list. His cargo shorts and pure white sneakers looked like they'd just been picked up off of the shelf and his glasses looked too small for his massive head.

You jump because you don't even notice him until he's tapping you on the shoulder and introducing himself. How did he know it was you?? Alarm bells are going off everywhere but there's cameras all over, he wouldn't try something in public right?? You take his measurements and look at fabrics together.

You ask about his fursona and he very seriously produces a laminated folder with several crudely drawn pictures of a polar bear suit. Well, you guess you shouldn't be mean, they were clearly drawn from references but you could tell this was someone who did not draw often. It didn't even have any accessories, it was just a normal polar bear... But the notes surrounding them were so neat they looked printed! And so in depth! There was one page solely dedicated to the visibility needs, with advanced notes on the camera and display system he wanted in the head. You'd only seen this sort of thing at the national cons, just who the hell was this guy??

You haltingly ask him if he was sure. You tell him this is really advanced stuff and he was looking at at LEAST 10k with all the specific modifications on it. When you first started making suits you would have never been this firm on pricing, lowballing and trying to make up the difference so as not to upset the customer with a hefty price, but you'd learned eventually that undervaluing your work was a waste of your time and effort so even though you couldn't gauge his reaction, you figured being upfront about the price would at least be a test to see how serious the guy was.

He nodded silently and reached into the fanny pack around his waist to produce the cleanest stack of hundreds you'd ever seen in your life, like straight printed from the treasury mint. He places it in your palm and you almost drop it out of shock.

"Will this be enough to get you started? I included some extra to compensate for lost wages as I do need this suit fairly quickly" he says, tone unreadable.

You stammer and try to look professional thumbing through the crisply banded notes and would you look at that, you think this will do just fine!

He nods again, shakes your hand and leaves without another word.

You exit the store, just trying to comprehend what in the hell you'd just gotten yourself into, zoning out so hard that you didn't even realize someone was yelling at you until the word "-fuckin furry faggot" pierced through your thoughts. You were looking at your phone so you didn't notice the band of truck bros creeping up behind you in their suped up pickup truck. There were three or four in the bed of the truck, dangling out over the side in between giant "TRUMP 2024" and "Lets Go Brandon" flags. They have their phones out, recording you and shouting slurs.

You raise double birds at them and turn to walk quickly in the opposite way, hoping you wouldn't see them as you walked home. You'd heard of a couple beatings happening locally and you didn't want to be around if that's what they had in mind.

So when you hear tires screeching and and engine roaring behind you, you break out into a run, hoping to make it to the bus terminal across the parking lot.

But they catch up to you before you'd made it halfway. They all get out and one grabs your phone that you held out to record with. He smashes it on the ground and shoves you into the pavement. Hard.

They all stand over you, jeering and laughing and you try to escape but your limbs won't listen to you. You always figured if something like this happened you'd stand your ground, maybe get in a couple of hits yourself, but in reality you could barely breathe and your chest felt like it was collapsing in on itself, so your attempts to scream for help end up coming out as breathy wheezes. One of them levels a crowbar at you and thats when the screaming starts.

You curl up into a ball to protect your face but the pain never comes. You hear screaming and sneakers skidding across asphalt and oh god, wet crunchy impacts followed by something warm and wet being splattered across your arms and legs.

Its suddenly silent except for the drone of the truck engine but eventually you crack open an eye to get a look around, and for the second time that day you almost lose your lunch.

Its straight up something out of a video game, just absolute carnage surrounds you. All of the tall frat bros are out cold in varying stages of fucked up. You do actually start to hurl a little when you see one with his nose completely sideways like a gory Picasso.

And in the center of the carnage is -no fucking way- your fucking fursuit client, calmly wiping his hands of the blood with some baby wipes from his fannypack.

He looks over at you when he sees you're up and for a second there you see something, a slip in the mask, something angry, something violent. You flinch as you realize it, but oh fuck, this guys like.. killed people before. like, for fucken sure.

He walks towards you and you suddenly feel like a very small animal being stalked by a tiger. You try to stumble away but the mask is back on and he just looks down at you and offers you a babywipe.

"You alright?" He asks plainly.

Turns out the guy is "ex-military" and he hurt himself so he's back in the states and bored out of his mind. His daughter is a furry and wanted him to go with her to FurCon and insisted he get a suit as well. You keep on glancing at all the deep scars running up and down his arms and wondering how the hell you didn't see it before.

He's saying something to you but you only snap out of it when a phone is being placed into your hands. You look up and suddenly you're standing outside your apartment building (did you tell him where you lived???)

"This is a secure line, if anything happens to you or you have questions, I'll answer immediately." He says, pale blue eyes drilling into your skull with their intensity.

The tears start bubbling up in your eyes before you can stop them and you just lean forward, bumping your head into his chest and choking out a thank you as you clutch the phone to your chest like an amulet.

As you figured, his body is make out of steel and he stiffens at the contact, unsure of what to do.

He just lets you cry it out for a bit before eventually placing a heavy hand on your shoulder, pulling you off but he keeps the hand gentle.

He's not looking at you this time but he clears his throat and murmurs a quick "Take care" before turning around and disappearing into the night. You unlock your door and collapse into bed.

"What the fuck" you murmur to yourself as you pull out your tablet, and you start to sketch...

They’ll never do a Hitman level set in a Furry Convention because gamers would absolutely ruin it but imagine. like the target isn’t a furry he just owns a hotel that happens to have one every year but you can disguise yourself in a fursuit and some guy will ask you “what species is your sona” and 47 would be like “a wolf. i always felt a connection with…hunters.” and then diana would be like “let’s see if you can sniff out some information, furrty-seven” and then he comes to my house and kills me for writing this