#WHO WOULD DO THE HUMAN TESTING? OH. CORPORATIONS SO THEY CAN HAVE PRODUCTS TO MAKE PROFIT??????

[nuvomica]

'liberal leftists' when someone tells them that saying "the punishment for pedophilia and rape should be torture" is really fucking stupid and authoritarian

[triscuitsandspraycheese]

what kibble do you recommend for cats?

Oh man, I don't think anyone's asked me this stuff on here before lol. This is a big question with a lot of correct answers. I'm gonna provide some context before listing brands.

Warning: it's long (but thorough!)

The goal when choosing a diet for your pet should be to target the companies that do the most regular testing of their diets as well as the most regular, consistent involvement with board-certified veterinary nutritionists.

A lot of "mid tier" companies can pay a board-certified veterinary nutritionist to formulate the original recipes, and then they go ahead and sell them with the Nutritional Adequacy Statement that the diet is formulated to meet AAFCO standards for adult maintenance. But in reality, when the recipe is tested, it might not be identical to the formulation, so some aspects of the diet might not be perfectly as they were intended. Basically... testing is important. The gold standard is to look for diets that say they were TESTED to meet AAFCO standards for adult maintenance, not just formulated to meet AAFCO standards.

This Nutritional Adequacy Statement must be present on ALL pet food bags, cans, pouches, treats, chews, literally any pet food product that is intended for consumption of any kind in the US. It will be one sentence long and clarify who this product is intended for as well as what qualifications it meets. If it says it's appropriate per AAFCO standards for adult maintenance, it means it meets the requirements for a healthy adult dog to eat that product regularly without being deficient in any nutrients. This is the BARE MINIMUM.

(Pro tip: You can just ask companies for their nutrient testing data for diets. The really good ones will be able to give you the full AAFCO panel with all the nutrients you can test for. Some companies might be like "nah that's too many, you can ask about a few ingredients at a time", and that's fine. If they have data to share, it means they've run at least one test recently. If they won't share any of their testing data other than what is legally required by the FDA, which is called the "Guaranteed Analysis", then they probably haven't run any real testing beyond that. Be wary of those companies.)

2. Companies that have a lot of money have time to run more tests to make sure their product doesn't have excessive levels of heavy metals, mycobacterium, required nutrients that can become toxic (think Vitamin D), etc. They also have money to buy facilities that can safely produce food and be regularly cleaned and sanitized daily.

Companies that are just starting out or are trying to work their way up won't have the money to buy the enormous facilities and kitchens required to mass produce their product for consumers. I know it's very tempting to support small businesses, but pet food is not one I would recommend. Think about the last time your local mom and pop diner had their paint tested for lead or their ice machine deeply sanitized and checked for mold. And then think about the overkill protocols in place by the monster fast food corporations like Taco Bell or In n Out who have more money than god and write you up for not adhering to their insane cleaning protocols.

When corporations have reputations to lose, legacies in place, they go above and beyond to make sure they are legally protected in every single aspect of their business. This applies to cleanliness, but also to things like recalls from toxic levels of a nutrient in the diet, testing for bone fragments or other foreign objects in food, removing the possibility of human error from the feeding process for your pet. Corporations above all else want to avoid legal problems, which means they will go above and beyond (I can't believe I'm saying this) to uphold the safety measures in place for their final product.

Basically, the more money they have, the more money they can spend on safety protocols so they can't get sued for something bad like accidentally making hundreds of dogs sick and having their reputation destroyed.

3. Marketing. My god, marketing has become such a shit show in the last few years with influencers and social media. Listen, if a pet food company is spending its hard earned dollars trying to scare the shit out of you by demonizing some random thing or another company, it's probably not real and they're just grasping at straws. If they're desperately trying to convince you that kibble is evil, or that Company B sucks for reasons X, Y, Z, or that you've been feeding your pet wrong this whole time and it's going to KILL THEM unless you feed *our product*, know that they are most definitely full of shit.

There is no magic diet for things like making your pet live twice as long or for curing cancer. It just doesn't exist yet, and trust me when I say companies are trying. The first pet food company that can prove their product makes pets live longer in a repeatable research study is going to be a gazillionaire.

But I digress. I don't recommend giving money to companies who spend money on incendiary marketing campaigns. If a company is trying to upset you, that's weird. A good product speaks for itself and/or has the backing of licensed (key word: licensed) professionals in that specialty making that recommendation.

"Certified Pet Nutritionist" and "Certified Animal Nutritionist" are NOT LICENSED MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS. There is no license required to call yourself that. They watch videos online for like six hours and then get emailed a pdf certificate. They are not licensed medical professionals, despite their best intentions. Be wary of any medical or nutrition advice you get from someone who calls themselves that.

Finally, the fucking list:

My cats both have medical problems so they're on prescription diets, but here are the regular brands I highly recommend if you have money to burn.

Top Tier

Royal Canin, Hills, Purina

Okay, I know what you must be saying. "That shit is expensive, dude. I'm not buying that."

But listen to me... these parent companies that make the expensive pet foods also make the mid tier pet foods and the affordable pet foods. MARS (who owns Royal Canin) is the biggest pet food manufacturer in the world has might actually have more money than god. Purina is owned by Nestle. Hills is partially owned by Colgate and is rollin in dough enough to make an affordable version of their top tier product.

ANY pet food company that is under the umbrella of one of these monster corporations will have the same testing and sanitation protocols as the "top tier" fancy ass pet food companies.

So all you have to do is see what pet food companies are owned by MARS or Nestle or Hills and pick what's in your price range.

This is MARS:

This is Purina:

And Hills just has Science Diet, I believe.

If it makes you feel better, I fed my cats Fancy Feast for literally a decade, and they loved it and had killer blood work results until they reached their older years.

Also, just a caveat: There are literally hundreds of pet food companies out there, more growing by the minute, so I'm sure there are also a lot of other great companies who make kibble for cats. You can use the info above to ask the right questions to the poor, overworked customer service agents who will hopefully be able to provide the info you need to make an informed decision.

Oh, and make sure to talk to your veterinarian before making any dietary changes for your pet! Seriously! None of this is intended to be a substitution for medical advice.

[tobiasdrake]

Let's go spring the trap, Shinigami. We were told to come alone, but he didn't count on you. Of course, until a murder happens you're practically useless so it's not like it matters either way.

Hey, if he kills me but I don't see it happen, do we still get to go into the Mystery Labyrinth and solve the mystery of my death? Retaliatory soul-reaping?

No promises. When a man's duty calls him to die, his time is... to... death beckons at his... *trips over the curve of the ramp and faceplants into hard steel*

We've been at war with Amaterasu since Chapter 0. Where have you been?

*crosses fingers* Dead in his penthouse. Dead in his penthouse. Come on, it'd be such a cool case, after all that time establishing that no one can get in!

I mean. I. Have. The umost respect for the sanctity of life.

Oh goddammit, why are you alive!? Piss in my cornflakes and call it rain, why doncha.

Ugh. Fine. We can do this your way. Come on, Yuma, let's get in the car with the mysterious masked grown-up who's invulnerable to consequences. Look, it's even the color of amber for that special poetic touch.

Sir, I am only...

...

...

...a number of years old. Wow, you don't realize what amnesia takes away from you until you stop to think about mundane life tasks.

Yuma's stunned by this revelation but honestly, what would even be the point? If the highly recognizable Amaterasu CEO Makoto Kagutsuchi showed up to Amaterasu DMV, would you have the nerve to fail him on the driver's test?

If they're going to pass him no matter how he performs then it'd be a pointless formality to even bother going through the motions. Things work differently when you're the king.

The closer we get to it, the more this place gives me a Shinra vibe.

You can only get in or out of the compound with a biometric scan. That feels like it's going to be important. We need to keep that in mind.

Also, I'm surprised Makoto takes his mask off for something. So it does come off at times. I was beginning to think it was glued to his face.

Massive Shinra vibe. But at least they aren't draining the life essence of the planet to power the city.

...or, shit, maybe they are. We don't know where the Forever Rain fueling the hydro-electric generators came from. I shouldn't make assumptions.

At the very least, we can be confident that they will not try to make one of our friends fuck a tiger. 80% confident. 70% at the least. I... don't actually know how homunculi are made....

...Yakou should prepare himself to have a bad night. Not because of that. Well, not only because of that. But also because I'm going to try and sneak away so I can rub my ass on Yomi's desk. IT'S CALLED SPITE AND MAYBE YAKOU SHOULD TRY IT SOME TIME.

Man, Japanese evil corporate architecture is amazing. They have trees growing in their plaza. Look at all this. It's a mini-mall's worth of space dedicated to their lobby alone.

I've worked for evil megacorporations for my entire career. I was at a big-name finance institution when the economy collapsed. All we got was a small entrance area containing one lobby desk and a security guard who doesn't give a shit, and sometimes a cafeteria we can slip away to for breakfast.

I would kill to have been able to work in an environment like this. Before I worked from home, anyway. Now, if you try to make me go back to an office building, I might stab you.

That's the smell of capitalism, my man. The product of a thousand underpaid and underappreciated workers who come in the night to erase the traces of humanity left behind and sustain the illusion of an unblemished mechanism.

I'd meet them sometimes when I was pulling late hours to eliminate backlogs of work that my colleagues' lack of motivation and commitment to the organization would eventually produce. Before I got fired for not working hard enough.

Wait, would that even--

Oh, who am I kidding. This is a company town. Of course child labor is normalized.

Makoto keeps hammering this point, and he's right. This is the single most important piece of any disguise. It's Trespassing 101: If you carry yourself with confidence and act like you belong, most people won't question it.

They only become suspicious if you look out-of-place. That usually means acting like you're doing something you aren't supposed to. Though, regrettably, it can also mean "visibly being a member of a marginalized demographic", even if you in fact do belong here.

Gonna go out on a limb here and say this is probably not the Restricted Area that Kurumi was talking about earlier. Seems unlikely.

Man, the tension is so thick you can cut it with a knife. Waiting for the shoe to drop. Just. Waiting.

[contact-right]

but what if you DID say more about your cyberpunk bradnate au 👀

AAAHHH thanks for being interested!!!!<3

Oh man I don’t even know where to start without being a huge fucking nerd about that movie in general and write a whole ten page essay before actually mentioning the bradnate au I have in my head but anyway lets give it a go;

While the original Bladerunner movie is more themed around the question of what it means to be human, in the sequel, instead of answering those questions, we just get a few more philosophical issues thrown at us like ‘what is real’, ‘what makes someone’s identity’ and ‘how could we make our own lives meaningful’.

And picking up on that, the thought of ‘what makes a life worth living’ has always been interesting to me. So in this AU, I want to place Brad and Nate on two entirely different places on that spectrum.

Brad, being a Nexus-9, is created and bought by the LAPD to hunt down and ‘retire’ (kill) the rogue Nexus-8 replicants left in the world. For him, his life started knowing that what he knows (his implanted memories) aren’t real. Memories of a childhood, a mother, a sister, being loved etc. Are all a fabrication only there to keep him up and running. At the same time, because of his job potentially being traumatic (basically having to kill and hunt down his own kind), he constantly has to keep those emotions in check and not let them spill over or he will fail the tests put in place (testing if he’s still on ‘baseline’; not being affected by what he has to do) and be killed himself to be replaced by the next. So Brad knows his place in the world, knows that what makes him ‘him’ isn’t real, that his life is a fabrication made in a lab for production and oh yeah, also, most humans in his life hate his guts because he’s a replicant. Like, he doesn’t even have a name, just a serial number. (I'm referring to him here as just Brad because thats easier)

Then there’s Nate, who’s a Nexus-8 doomed to be hunted for the rest of his life because all the Nexus-8 replicants have to be retired. (I’m not gonna place the whole lore here lol if people want to know there’s a wiki) Nate is a combat model, which means that he was used by his owners in wars in the colonies off earth (basically replicants did the jobs the humans didn’t want to do). And Nate, at the start, probably didn’t know that his memories where fake, and if he did he probably would have realized this later. To follow the timeline, I’m choosing the have Nate created after the Blackout in 2027 by corporations who illegally continued production of Nexus-8 replicants. At that time, the production of that line is outlawed and all the Nexus-8 replicants that went into hiding are being hunted down by the human supremacy movement or the blade runners.

Of course, Nate being a total badass and with the help of some human sympathizers, manages to escape and get off the grid with his men to help the replicant resistance movement. So for Nate, he still has to deal with the fact that everything he thought to be true about himself, what made him his own person, is a lie. And imagine having to live a life knowing you’re not allowed to live it by law and you know the whole ‘I’m alive but am I real and a person’ ‘does that still mean I have to live a life’ But on the other hand, Nate does have a circle of people around him that care about him, which he cares deeply for in return. People he can call his real family, who gave him a name and trust him.

So anyway, Nate and his men are being their usual pain in the ass to the government by trying to smuggle as much replicants as they can out of the city and far away. Of course due to circumstances, Brad gets on their trail and is ordered to hunt them down and retire Nate’s whole group.

And I’m adding more elements to it, but I don’t want to spoil too much, but wouldn’t it be hella sad interesting if Brad maybe looks like someone Nate used to have in his group but tragically died and Nate never got to say goodbye? Because the idea that all replicants look different would be strange, as that wouldn’t be productive and more money-consuming. And maybe the designs of the Nexus-9 are still based (outwardly) on some Nexus-8 models. And maybe he and Brad do eventually get into a fight when Brad tracks him down and Nate just can’t kill him, he can’t do it. And Brad is confused af because he doesn’t understand why Nate didn’t shoot him in the head. And maybe Nate called him by a name and Brad is having a lot of confusing emotions he can’t deal with.

But anyway, I can go on but I don’t want to spoil too much. And like for everyone who hasn’t seen that movie, its a honest-to-god masterpiece and I will forever regret that I didn’t see it in theaters.

quick edit because I was tired last night and forgot to add; Throughout the story I want to make it so that Brad starts believing in something bigger, that his life can be a life of his own doing, that it can have meaning and at the same time for Nate, who thought he was finally free and started to live his life by his own rules and create something of his own, starts realizing that he, too, again, is only another means to an end being used in the ongoing conflict between humans and replicants. And somewhere in the middle, they meet.

[andmaybegayer]

I don’t know where I first heard of the concept of the Ghost Factory but it’s the kind of fascinating and almost certainly untrue urban legend that feels like it’s worth sharing. I probably picked this up from a forum that was serving as a stand-in for your friend’s weird older brother who tells you that humans were genetically engineered by aliens to desire gold and platinum.

The idea of a Ghost Factory (I’ve also heard the phrase Zombie Factory) is that it’s a factory that no one owns and no one remembers. Effectively a massive scaled up version of the Forgotten Employee (if you remember that Something Awful thread).

The concept is simple, and very believable. Some company establishes a factory producing cheap tat, usually via a fairly mechanized process. It’s the 80′s, so factories aren’t all centrally controlled by a head office, they do their own dealings in accordance with guidelines sent down from management, they get a Rolodex with their supply chain contacts, and they have their own little departments for handling shipping, accounts, raw materials, hiring, etc. If there’s too many employees it’s hard to lose track of it but if all you have is an accounts department, a shipping team, a dozen QA testers and some mechanics who look after the tooling, that’s easy to lose. The parent company sets up this factory, gets it some contracts making the hulls of kitchen appliances or whatever, and then, crucially, loses track of it.

I must once again stress that I have never heard any proof of this, and I don’t think they’re real.

So now you have this autonomous factory, where it basically looks after itself, manages its own finances and handles all its inputs and outputs, which has demands placed upon it by its contracts but no real obligation to report to anyone. Perhaps the manager who was supposed to run it got fired at the last minute and he was replaced by someone hired by the factory’s own HR department. He’s never going to read all the company policies, as long as nothing breaks he’s going to look after his own little kingdom and assume that everyone else is handling the important stuff. No one yells at him from above because his desk phone number was never actually written down, and he tries his best not to think about this.

And so it continues. Year after year, they extend their contracts, order new tooling, repair old machines. If you hang out in certain consumer product forums you’ll sometimes hear people talk about how “oh this is obviously made with legacy tooling” by which they mean “this has been made on the same machine in the same factory for the past 40 years and you can see the lettering blur as the printer plates wear down.”

They have to, by their nature, make low-stakes items. if they made precision machined engine parts then they would never get away with lasting for decades. There’s too much change in that, they’d get asked to test a new technology and they’d realise that there is no R&D division. Where did the parent company go? That’s their business, not ours. But if they make cheap MP3 player case, or stamped metal blender blades, or cast hunks of zinc for kitchen appliances, well no one is going to notice that. Grad Student’s First Juicer Blender Blades come from the factory on their last legs at the best of times, these ones having slightly rolled over edges because the stamp hasn’t been replaced in years is nothing new.

I must once again stress that I have never heard any proof of this, and I don’t think they’re real.

The story is fascinating, because it looks at a particularly weird time in manufacturing history. The stories are invariably about Chinese factories, probably propped up by the much more accurate stories about ghost towns and the very real existence of thousands of shell corporations that all sell the same product, made in the same factory, silkscreened with a new logo because a thin layer of paint is the only thing justifying their existence at all. The time when mass manufacture was so automated that this could happen but we still lived in a weird unconnected no-internet world where it was still possible to just lose an entire building because your paper records were shoved in a cabinet that someone lost the key for.

It feels like the kind of story that would have arisen during the late 90′s and early 2000′s, when you’re reaching the point where working in a factory is no longer a valuable job because of automation and centralization of manufacturing. What’s more indicative of that than a factory so devoid of human contact that it can be forgotten. Management doesn’t just not care about you, they don’t know about you. You can’t forget about a manual 70′s steel mill in Pennsylvania, it’s too dynamic a space.

I must once again stress that I have never heard any proof of this. I don’t think they’re real.

[arcticdementor]

I recently had Robin Hanson on the CSPI podcast to talk about futarchy. It’s one thing to spread knowledge on a particular issue, it’s another to invent a new technology to create more knowledge in the world, and help apply it where needed. That’s what I see Robin doing. He convinced me that although it may take a very long time, one day humanity will give less of a role to systems like peer review and unaccountable bureaucracy in determining how we understand the world, and more of a role to prediction markets. The logic is just too compelling. But sooner is better than later, and if you want to be involved, please reach out.

…

The first step towards this glorious future is convincing people that a world where more decisions are made based on prediction markets is desirable and achievable. In that spirit, below is a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for clarity. To read more about futarchy, see here.

…

Robin: Right. This conditional market mechanism hasn't actually been tested out in the world outside of the laboratory tests in that we haven't been able to get people interested enough to try it. We've had a lot of tests of speculative markets that aren't conditional in the sense that we've had markets on deadlines, whether you make a deadline in sales and things like that.

We've probably had 100 different trials like that over the last few decades. Typically what happens is that if there's enough support for the market in order to induce an affectivity then again the price is about as accurate or more accurate than the status quo and most users are satisfied. The costs are modest. That's been the history for many decades.

However a key problem is usually the market gets killed in the sense that an organization says to stop and doesn't continue it. The main reason is that it's relatively disruptive. These markets are politically disruptive. The way they are disruptive is analogous to, imagine you put a very knowledgeable autist in the C suite, that is somebody in the C suite that knows a lot about the company and they go to the meetings. They just blurt out when they know things that it's relevant to the conversation but they have no political savvy.

They have no sense of, what does anybody want to hear, or who will be bothered by anything they say. That sort of an autist would not last long in the C-suite. They would be shunted aside and become an advisor to someone perhaps, trusted advisor to their side but they wouldn't be allowed to speak in the boardroom. But that's what a prediction market is. It has no idea who wants to hear what it has to say.

It will often say things that people do not want to hear, and that embarrass them, and that contradict what they've said. Then all the worse of course it will be proven right.

Richard: Yeah. But what's stopping the autist, or I guess what's stopping them is nobody has just done this yet? But theoretically you could imagine the autist setting up the rules for the corporation, right?

Robin: You might if they were in charge at the beginning sure.

…

Robin: Now we move to the question of like, what fraction of companies out there are actually maximizing profits?

Richard: Yeah.

Robin: It’s a very basic question in economics and in our world. We economists tend to assume as a simple initial working model that organizations that are for profit actually do maximize profits. That's the thing they usually do. If you give them a choice of A or B, and B is higher profit they'll choose B.

Here if you apply that model you say, “Well, this looks like it would give them key information to make key decisions like, ‘Will we make the deadline,’ and it will be valuable. The cost is relatively low so of course they would do it.” That's what you would say if you were applying that theory. Then here we have a case where it looks like, well it hasn't happened yet.

You might think, “Okay, innovation is slow. It takes a while,” but we’ve been waiting several decades. Honestly if I look across a wide range of other areas of corporate behavior I can't fully support this profit maximizing theory. I think I can find a lot of other places where what they do does not maximize profits.

I could give you a long list of examples. We could go through some of those but then the question is, “Well, how do I come to terms with it? What theory do I have affirms in the absence of profit maximizing to explain the behavior?”

…

Robin: I mean I think in fact the correct response is to say the free market version is probably the best. You just have no idea how much worse things can be. People often look at the status quo of a business world say that is relatively free market. They look at this up close and they go, “This looks terrible how could you possibly be defending this?”

The argument has to be, “Well, it would just be so much worse without this.” And in fact often if you look to large stable organizations like universities and government agencies, or churches that have been around for a long time it is in fact worse. I think that's roughly right. Another story might be we've hobbled some of the competition between firms that might solve some of these problems.

I honestly think one of the biggest wins we could do is to just allow stronger hostile takeovers. The laws at the moment make it harder to do hostile takeovers. They require a substantial tax on them in essence. If you see a badly run company and you have an idea how it could be run better the problem is how are you going to profit on that? But if you could just buy up the company, change its management and then sell it again after it was better that would be a big, powerful engine for making it better.

There have been times when that mechanism has been allowed to do more and it has made huge changes. That's what inspired people to lock it down and prevent those changes because they were scared it was coming for them.

…

Richard: I've seen stuff like who will win the tip off in basketball, and who's going to win the coin toss in a football game? Who's going to win first quarter?

Robin: I once looked onto doing this for war college war games. As you may know many war colleges have war games where they put teams on different sides and give them various equipment in a simulated war. They have them go to war. You could imagine, well letting everybody else who’s watching the war game give advice about particular strategies in the war game. That seemed plausible to me but then when I talked to people at war colleges I found that most of these war games are kind of fake.

Richard: Yeah.

Robin: They have a predetermined outcome that’s some lesson they want to tell, and so they aren't really letting it be open to winning one side or the other.

Richard: No, that's funny because you'll see headlines every now and then that'll say, “Oh, my God. The US loses to China in a war game,” and yeah I always thought that that’s…

Robin: I’m sure there probably are real war games somewhere. They just aren't at the war colleges. That's where I was thinking I could convince somebody to try this sort of thing.

…

Richard: What is the advantage of the blockchain? What is the difference between a blockchain say market versus just something like PredictIt?

Robin: Well, that's an excellent question. Initially the story was that blockchain was out of control, that it couldn't be regulated so you could set up a system on a blockchain. If the regulators didn't like it they didn't have anybody to go to stop it. The blockchain just kept going regardless of who didn't like it.

That was a big selling point. People said, “Well, look at all this financial innovation we can do because we are free from existing regulations on the blockchain.” That's what they said, and then a lot of companies formed on this basis.

But these companies didn't take personal strategies to match that rhetoric. You would think if your plan was to put a product on the blockchain and that you were going to say nanny nanny to the regulators because, “You can’t get me,” you wouldn’t have a big public presence with the headquarters, and your picture in the magazines, and show up in person at conferences right? Because…

Richard: Yeah. Sure.

Robin: ...well, that makes you more obviously a target right? That's what they did though, and then they sort of back pedaled and said later, “Oh, we're following all the regulations.” But you know people don’t really believe that. It's been this big question, to what extent will governments crack down on these blockchain things that at least from the government regulators point of view are not following their rules?

Richard: Yeah. Do you have in mind the Coinbase news that had come out the last few days, or was it today or yesterday that-

Robin: This is just a continuing issue. I don't have any particular recent event in mind but there are lots of stories about regulators thinking of doing a lot more regulating and cracking down more. This is a big question about blockchain is how far will they crack down, and what will be the consequences? Of course people say, “Well, in principle Bitcoin can keep chugging along even if they do crack down,” and no doubt that's true to some degree.

But the question of how much activity there'll be is still somewhat open. You could have it chugging along with a far lower activity because a lot of people have been discouraged.

…

Robin: Let me at this point admit what I would say is the biggest problem with futarchy and with some of these other decision markets, which is that they make hypocrisy harder, which is actually a problem. You might think, “Well, hypocrisy is a bad thing. Making it harder is good right?” Well, let’s walk through that.

At the moment, say ordinary people can claim to love trees and they just care a lot about trees. Trees real estate wonderful and they certainly wouldn’t want to have fewer trees. But then they elect politicians who have to make choices about trees versus other things. Those politicians can probably read the public and say, “Well, they say they like trees but they don’t really like trees that much, so I’m not actually going to go save some trees by interfering with something else.”

Then if the public ever finds out that somehow not everything was being done to save trees, the public can complain and say, “That damn politician! They’re corrupt! They were bought out and I sure hate them. Let’s throw them out of office,”right? Because the politician is allowing the public to be hypocritical, to pretend they care more about trees than they do.

…

Robin: The pandemic was not a big enough crisis that we fired people who did badly on it. Neither was Afghanistan. We’re in a world where we have these big things we do wrong but they somehow just aren’t bad enough to really scare us into trying different things. The question is where will we ever see some nation or big organization that’s scared enough about losing to be willing to roll the dice and try some big changes?

Richard: When you look at the American Military established under World War II I mean the military establishment was a new thing. You were building basically something from scratch. Now you have all these vested interests. You know it’s funny. The places, the countries with the most US Military… the most military personnel in the world are actually Italy, Germany, Japan, and South Korea right?

Robin: Those are risky, dangerous spots. You’d want troops there wouldn’t you?

Richard: Yeah. Well, maybe but if you notice they have something in common. Those are the Axis powers and the Korean War right?

Robin: Right.

Richard: Basically they’re the exact same place they were in 1945 to 1950 and so-

Robin: Hysteresis right? Enormous path dependence?

Richard: Yeah, exactly. Enormous dependence. Yeah, Italy. Is that obvious? The most dangerous place in the world. Maybe, maybe not.

Robin: No, and it’s not remotely obviously the most dangerous place in the world.

Richard: Yeah. Do you look around the world, and right now do you see variation in the extent to which countries are willing to not only take risks but take risks specifically along the path that you suggest?

[deafwestnewsies]

be my first last kiss

You can plan on a change in the weather or time, but you'd never planned on him changing his mind.

jack kelly x davey jacobs

read it on my ao3!

Earnest to goodness, Jack Kelly was going to murder Racetrack Higgins.

No, Anthony Higgins, this was the sort of thing that makes you pull out the tarnished christian name of a friend (or so you thought) you’ve known since he was toppling over on baby-fattened legs. Anthony Higgins would die by the sword of Jack Kelly.

He just had to get this godforsaken Youtube video filmed first.

You’re doing this for the cash, Jack grumbled to himself as he passed through the metal doors of a nondescript building on the Lower East Side- it was the kind of place being slowly taken over by hip and fun corporations promising Asian-fusion bars and eco-friendly thrift stores while edging out the relic businesses built on the backs of immigrant dreams. Jack couldn’t stand areas like this, the air thick with wasted luxury, so he rarely left the barrio. Why would he? Spot Conlon slept in the bedroom next to his. Katherine Plumber and Sarah Jacobs ran the bookstore that bought his baked goods and sold them for decent money. Medda lived down the street with her plethora of children, and Racetrack still beat the known path, doing tricks on the street corner for spare change and internet views. Davey- David. David Jacobs wasn’t there. It was right where Jack wanted to be.

Much unlike the dim studio where he now shuffled his feet, waiting for the perky young PA with bright red streaks in her hair to come back with further information about the video he would be shooting. Jack wasn’t a stranger to this small production company; He participated in a few Youtube videos back before they had millions of subscribers, he played truth or dare with lots of liquor and a complete stranger, he confessed about the first time he fell in love so it could be put to pathetic music.

Cash where you could get it, right?

“Kelly, right?” Cherry Streaks was back with a vengeance.

“Jack, actually,” he corrected.

“So you’re going to stand over there where the little blue X marks the spot and wait until the producer, Adam, starts asking you a few questions. The first one might be a test for our boom guy. Answer honestly, we can pretty much tell when you’re making up a story by this point. After that, the main part of the video will begin. Got it?” She was pointing wildly with a Number 2 pencil that had previously been stuck through her ponytail, and she smelled faintly of jasmine. Jack felt dizzy.

“Wait, I thought this was one of those ‘Choose who’s the best kisser out of ten strangers’ type of deal?” I mean, that’s what Race told me- oh God. Oh Santa Maria. Oh Saint Francis.

The young woman smiled like she was keeping an excellent secret. “Have fun, Jack Kelly.”

Walking off at her ominous dismissal, Jack stood where he was directed. The fluorescent lighting made him sweat under the knowledge that he had virtually no idea what he was doing there, Race had lied to him so that he would participate in some sort of sick, horrible scheme, and for all he knew, behind door number three could be his third grade teacher with a baseball bat and a basic multiplication grudge.

“Jack! It’s nice to see you again.”

Romeo was walking towards him with that easy gait Jack had memorized so long ago- Romeo had shot the original videos on an Amazon tripod and the unfounded hope of human connection, and now he owned the entire shebang. Jack dropped his tense shoulders to give him a warm smile. “Romeo. Boy, am I glad to see a friendly face.” Jack lowered his voice to a stage whisper. “You’ve got a production assistant who actually does work, so I’m assuming we’ve died and you earned a really nice deal in Heaven?”

Romeo barked out a laugh. “If I’ve died, do not resuscitate. I’ll never be able to look at another bodega meatball sub after cooking food bought in a real grocery store.”

“Rub it in, why don’tcha?” Jack punched the shorter man on the shoulder. “Listen, Romeo, you gotta tell me what I’m in for, a buddy totally sold me out for the cash and I have no clue what this project is gonna be like.”

Before Romeo could respond, a tall, lofty man behind the camera cleared his throat. “Darling? We’re ready to begin when you are.”

“Jack, meet Specs. Or Adam, but we all know how well nicknames stick. Specs, this is the old friend I was telling you about.” Romeo ended right above Specs’ elbow, and it was all Jack could do not to laugh.

The man fixed his thoughtful gaze on him. “It’s nice to meet you, Jack. You’ve got a real presence on the camera. Have you ever considered acting?”

“I’m afraid I’m, uh,” Jack flexed a paint-stained hand. “Strictly canvas, as they say.”

Nodding as if that was a phrase people commonly used and not something Jack invented on the fly, Specs then clapped his hands together. “Folks, let’s film this sonofabitch.”

---

“I’m Jack, and I’m a twenty-four year old artist living in New York City.”

“Have you ever been in a relationship?” Specs questioned from behind the camera.

Jack blinked in surprise. “Sure. One throughout high school, another in college and a little bit beyond. I wouldn’t call myself a heartbreaker or anything.”

“Do you stay friends with your exes?”

“One of ‘em, yea. It was more of an amicable thing, you know. She ended up being a lesbian. And I am… not.” His clumsy fingers tugged at a constricting collar.

“And the other?”

“Just because I’m not a heartbreaker doesn’t mean I can’t be a real asshole sometimes,” Jack nervously chuckled. (Davey had laid out rose petals, for God’s sake. Rose petals.)

“Was this girl the high school girlfriend, or the college one?”

“Boy,” Jack quickly corrected. “Man. I guess. He was in college- four and a half years.” (It took him four days to clear away the rotting flowers, the bleeding color slowly seeping into his carpet. Katherine found him delirious with whiskey on the bathroom floor; Sarah couldn’t bear to walk through his front door.)

“How’d you meet him?”

(He twisted in his high-backed blue chair. “It’s habláis in el presente.”) “Freshman year of high school actually. Spanish class. Funny story, actually, that other girl I dated? His sister. Broke her heart for his. He was so mad at me that we didn’t talk for like, months after.”

“It was six and a half months, actually.”

Of things Jack was expecting to see today, Spiderman was more likely than David. A flash mob singing death metal, maybe. Pigs flying through the polluted air.

“I was told to come in. I now see why.” David’s eyes narrowed behind his thin wire frames, different from the heavy Ray-Bans that he had dedicated himself to sophomore year of high school. Jack hated that he looked older, wiser, and all around… better.

Specs cleared his throat before the bewildered set of men (one more angry than the other, both desperately avoiding eye contact) could demand what sort of sick joke this was. “Can you introduce yourself?”

They broke up on a Tuesday, an insignificant, momentary Tuesday. Fourteen months ago. (Yes, fourteen months, like their terrible split was a baby that Jack was nurturing bit by bit. He refused to round down- fourteen months ago, he left David Jacobs.) So when David ran his thumb across his jawline, a nervous tick older than his younger brother, Jack couldn’t fathom why he felt so relieved. Some things never did change. “David. Jacobs.” David’s jaw flexed as he looked into the camera. “I dated Jack for almost five years.”

“Tell us about your other relationships.”

“Unfortunately, I spent the better part of high school and college pining after a total cocksock. Not a whole lot of time for casual dating in between.”

A deep silence permeated the studio as two boom mic operators swapped awkward glances. Jack didn’t attempt to defend himself- he was sort of a cocksock. David Jacobs had asked him to uproot what little life he had in New York and move to Santa Fe for a prestigious, so-accolated-you-could-cry medical school, and Jack Kelly broke up with him over containers of kung pao chicken and scattered rose petals. He was a cocksock, a dickhead, and complete asshole. An ex-boyfriend of mass proportions.

“Okay, so.” Specs was wiping at his glasses with the tail of his shirt. Jack wanted to snap them in half. “Today’s video is entitled ‘Exes kiss for the first time since their breakup’. If you need more explanation…”

“I think we’ve got it.” David snapped, clenching his fists rapidly.

Jack stepped half an inch closer to David and began murmuring under his breath. “Davey, if you don’t want-”

“Don’t call me Davey.” His eyes were alight with flame- Jack’s chest caught fire.

Of all the things that felt domestic when dating Davey Jacobs, kissing him never managed to become routine. Davey kissed like he earnestly meant it. The gears in his brilliant mind would grind to a halt so he could dedicate himself to the lilting curve of Jack’s mouth, a gentle sweep of warmth when the artist’s mouth was otherwise preoccupied with his needless words, and the world would spin on a delicate axis. (Jack’s shoulders rose to meet Davey, the physical ache of being someone’s other half drawing him forward. Davey had avoided him for so long, Jack living on a diet of lingering stares and a brief touch of the hand, that kissing him felt like a dying man knelt at a replenished well. How did they exist for so long without this innate knowledge of the universe? Could he stand to go on a single second longer without the praise of Davey Jacob’s lips?) Of all the things Jack missed about spending his life with Davey Jacobs, kissing him was certainly one of them.

There was a moment where the pads of Jack’s fingertips brushed the nape of David’s neck, a habit borne from the small noise it would draw from the back of his throat, and the steely corporate floor felt more like the worn carpet in the old thirty-second street apartment. Jack could feel his thready pulse with the gentle press of a thumb.

Davey was a fan of the dramatics- he would pull away from a passionate kiss in the middle of a busy New York street to stare into Jack’s eyes, foreheads gently touching and cheeks furiously blushing. Now, he simply drew back. Took a step away. Swiped at his lips with the back of his hand.

Jack felt like he was falling. (“If you ever break up with me,” Jack began. He laughed at Davey’s unexpected shudder, the honest and visceral kind. “Make it quick.”

“What about when you break up with me?” Davey peered over his glasses.

Crinkling his nose, Jack quickly answered before the other boy could detail any breakup preferences. “I’m not an idiot, Dave. ‘M not going anywhere.”)

---

He stared at the limp fifty dollars in his hand. Romeo had apologized, explaining that the people who had organized this got half the cut, and handed them both an envelope- Jack, one with “Tony Higgins” that he planned to run through his shredder, and David, one with “Sarah Jacobs,” which made Jack gawk in disbelief.

Jack didn’t want to walk away; David’s feet were shuffling against the worn pavement.

“It’s funny,” David started. “I listened to a lot of Taylor Swift to get over you.”

He winced. “Sorry?”

“Please. I know she’s been your top artist since 2013.”

(Katherine walked through a worryingly unlocked apartment door. “Is that... Begin Again? Jack, what the fuck are you doing?” She had seconds to worry about the cluster of wilted flower petals her heel had put a hole through before Sarah pointed at the pair of legs sticking out of the bathroom’s entrance.) “Yeah, okay. Fair. But… funny? Did I miss a joke?”

David closed his eyes to roll them, as he so often did when he was trying to be polite, and it hurt to be on the receiving end. “We just had our last kiss. You know, like-”

“I’m Joe Jonas?” Jack interrupted, bewildered. The semi-glare he received in return was all he needed to know- “Right. Dickhead. Listen, Dave- David, why didn’t you tell me you were back in town?”

There was a brief moment where something unrecognizable flashed over David’s face- pity? Regret? Dejection? It was quickly replaced by a soft smile tugging at the edge of his lips, his eyes glazed over with a practiced professionalism. “I’ll see you around, Jack. Have a good day.”

David turned and walked down the street, and Jack just missed the passing moment he chose to look back.

---

Comment on EXES KISS FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE THEIR BREAKUP by IncredibleKinsey: those two dudes are all mad and then just make out like that????? yeah okay call me when the wedding happens

[keevansixx]

Tumblr+ is a bad idea, but i understand why they are pushing for it?

Ok, how many of us have lived through the purges, watched as they nuked from low orbit all the artistic smexiness in a bout of puritanical fervor, while leaving the bots and blatant unfettered to rampage across this lovely hellsite free range and unchecked? Doing nothing while the shitiness of humanity is allowed to harass and threaten people for posting their hot takes (regardless of whether they are right or wrong)?

yeah, some of us have watched all that has transpired.

This is nothing new....

When you view past the staff statements, all the carefully crafted wording and corporate speak, all that remains is greed, pure and simple....

for some of us, this is a safe haven, a refuge from the rest of the clusterfeck that is known as social media. where individuals can post their innermost thoughts, creative ideas, and feelings to the ether. If the stars are aligned in their favor, while the word gods shine favorably upon thee, and the image deities smile in dank approval, we find other like minded souls piloting their own ships within this digital night that meet briefly to share a like, comment. or reblog before moving on to other horizons. In it’s simplicity, tumblr is almost the last bastion of creative thought left in the entirety of the world wide web. 

for others, tumblr is just yet another extension of their social media psyche, dragging all their real world baggage into it’s pages, hoping that someone out there may offer a solution to their own personal problems (or at least stroke their egos or biases to orgasmic bit) . Activists abound, and are shouting from the digital rooftops “look at me! See! See the violence inherit in the system, help help, i’m being oppressed!”” While the darkest ugliness in certain parts of humanity responds with vile poison and vitriol to ideas that do not agree or align with their own...committing the oldest of digital sins, in the newest of ways. Sad....but i digress.

Tumblr, to it’s corporate and wall-street taskmasters, is not greatly profitable in it’s current form. Sure, they get a little bit of money here and there from all the boring unremovable ads sprinkled throughout everyone’s feeds...but that’s just it. ad money keeps the lights on and the hamster wheels turning in the server rooms, and maybe a pot of coffee or box of stale doughnuts in the break room to keep the hamsters happy, but in the end it’s just enough to keep the site barely alive, while ensuring the devils get their deep pockets full of due.

The question everyone is asking themselves, but don’t know it yet, is...

To just Whom does tumblr+ benefit the most? 

It’s certainly not for the fan-fic artists who create art based on someone else’s works. certainly not for the shit-posters who reblog all the weirdly wonderfully funny and bizarre things the world web has to offer. certainly not for the fanfic writers, who craft the continuing stories of their favorite properties they do not own. definitely not for average joe or jane blogger who basically repost everything that crosses their feeds because they enjoy that stuff immensely, and want to share it all with everyone who follows them. Certainly not for I, who basically just comes here to post fictional stories from pregenerated prompts, whatever pops into my head, and a few reblogs from things that catch my fancy.

So who does that leave? In the Immortal words of Sherlock Holmes, written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ”When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

For a few original tumblr artists, this may be a boon (but i doubt it). why would you settle for a middleman to get paid for your original art, when you could sell to a direct market off site for prints/merch straight to the customer and making bank? Seems counterintuitive to me to allow a site to step in to earn money off your hard work and creativity. Plus a paywall cuts you off from potential customers who may be interested in your works, but will not pay tumblr just to view your works....kinda shooting yourself in the foot going plus.

Tumblr+ is being built for all the clout chasers that think they will benefit from a blue plus mark (just like on twitter and instagram, go figure) banking on human vanity and obsessive compulsive disorder to bring in the money. (that’s right! buy that blue + mark ya little cash monkeys...spend, spend for that social credit! muahahahaha!)

The other reason is Porn. (don’t laugh...the internet you enjoy today was built on the metaphorical backs of the porn industry. every internet innovation enjoyed in the past 35 years was created, tested, and tried first somewhere to deliver, watch, and enjoy porn. sure it got started on university campuses, but the porn industry made it take off like a rocket to push product) Tumblr can’t beat it...they have consistently shown they are incapable of removing all the raunchy naughty bits from this site. If you can’t beat them, join them. Put all the adult content behind a paywall, set the price, and watch the money roll in as humans just can’t resist watching a good fluff n’ tickle. Set the booby algorithm phasers to “paywall”!  Wanna see that statue of Venus de Milo, or the statue of David? gonna have to pay that monthly fee to see. “Oh, but you’re just an artist drawing artistic nudes as a hobby? too bad! behind the paywall you go too. We want our cut of the share regardless how you may feel about it.” 

basically Tumblr is trying to change the clientele....facts. They hope to draw in the same demographics that make sites like reddit, twitter, instagram, and others profitable to the corporation, at the expense of the long term users that made this site the unique thing it is today. 

but hey, what do i know, i’m just a messed up monkey with an opinion, take it all with a huge grain of salt and live your best life possible....but the cards are not in tumblr+’s favor. 

Everyone has got an opinion on this, that’s all well and good. If you agree/disagree that’s fine too....just remember to be kind in all things, show the wisdom and grace of the best of humanity, take a deep breath before responding, and reply with the best of yourself as you can muster...after all, you’re only human....Ook ook. 

[athela-3]

mankai company: cyberpunk

I never asked for this. But that’s just how ideas work, ain't it? One minute you’re mindlessly going through the daily grind, and the next moment it hits ya like a sucker punch to the gut. Then your mind’s racing, and you think: Why not? Whaddaya have to lose? You’ve rambled your way through semi-coherent flashes of inspiration before. Why should this one be different?

Note: everyone is aged up, oh, let’s say at least five years. Also, long post is long. I’m not joking. The page break is there for a reason.

Mankai Company is a modest-sized corporation specialising in biotechnology and cybernetics. But operating beneath its public face is a semi-covert band of mercs, private eyes, and fixers called Kaga Solutions, fully-equipped to navigate the mean city streets on command. Their founder and CEO, Yukio Tachibana, has recently disappeared; as per his express wishes, the company leadership is transferred to his estranged daughter, Izumi. 

Izumi Tachibana: the new CEO, more experienced in programming than in biotech, she wants to lead Mankai in a new direction focused on augmented reality and fluid human-machine interfacing, while also investigating her father's disappearance with its covert Kaga operatives.

Isuke Matsukawa: Yukio's—and now Izumi's—personal assistant who also handles most of the day-to-day finances, a seemingly bumbling man with hidden talents. He has more connections than you'd expect, and his loyalty is bone-deep.

Yuzo Kashima: a major shareholder in the company whose investments helped Yukio jump-start his dream into reality. Initially skeptical of Izumi's direction, he slowly grows to believe in her vision, even if he's still brutally honest about many things. He's aware of Kaga and the hidden side of Mankai, and is implied to have once partaken in it more personally.

Tetsuro Iwai: the local hardware genius. If you need something built, he'll figure out how to do it in record time. He's happy to work with the old boss' daughter, even if her ideas can stretch him to his limits sometimes.

Ken Sakoda: nobody's really sure what his official job is. He's just always there, usually appearing out of nowhere to do whatever Sakyo asks him to (there's rumours of a personalised cloaking device). This ranges from coffee runs to, ah, semi-legal inventory procurement.

Kamekichi: a robot parrot Yukio personally built as a pet project. Originally a prototype for robotic therapy animals, his code gave birth to his own emergent sassy personality.

Sakuya Sakuma: head of Engineering, what he lacks in experience he makes up in talent and dedication. Has politely declined playing a more active role in Kaga's assignments, declaring his current job to already be his dream job anyhow.

Masumi Usui: a tech prodigy, a quick learner who's always keen to impress Izumi for reasons which may not be strictly professional. Built his own memory implants from scratch, and is always willing to help with Kaga if ever asked.

Tsuzuru Minagi: the top dog when it comes to programming and software. Tends to overwork himself, especially at crunch time, but he writes top-notch code that leave Mankai's competitors scratching their heads. Also helps oversee and plan Kaga's missions, especially when it comes to concocting cover stories and identities.

Itaru Chigasaki: yet another punch-clock worker whose only skills lie in testing and bugfixing… or so he'd have you believe. In reality, he's one of Kaga's most reliable operatives, using his salaryman persona to relieve suspicion and gain people's trust. By the time his targets notice the "GG EZ" hacked onto every screen, it's too late.

Citron: another Kaga operative, people see him and think he's the expat office worker who struggles to string a coherent sentence together, so they don't always pay attention to what they say around him. Big mistake. If he can't evade you in conversation, then he'll evade you the traditional way and vanish seemingly into thin air.

Chikage Utsuki: formerly Itaru's senior at their old job, who followed him to Mankai for reasons of his own. He does minor coding for them now, but his primary focus is on being a field agent for Kaga, where his charm and covert investigative skills really come into play.

Tenma Sumeragi: a former child actor, now the company's face, appearing in advertisements and endorsements. He's great at both presenting Mankai's personable, human-interest agenda and selling Kaga's sharp professionalism to potential clients.

Yuki Rurikawa: hired fresh out of university, his sharp sense of aesthetics led Izumi to trust him with practically all of their product design. Every concept has to have his seal of approval before moving to the production stage. He also handles disguises for Kaga's operations.

Muku Sakisaka: formerly slated to compete in the Olympics before an accident, he now provides another public face for Mankai alongside Tenma. He writes a good deal of the company's promotional material, and has a strong sense of what would affect their clients.

Misumi Ikaruga: officially, he tests the more physical cybernetics, such as Sakuya's impact-dampeners or Tasuku's mountain-climbing legs; his videos performing literally superhuman parkour feats often end up as promotional material. Under the table, he's Kaga's go-to operative for situations requiring speed and agility.

Kazunari Miyoshi: head of the PR department, in charge of keeping their public image in the positive while also keeping Kaga’s activities mostly out of attention. He keeps everyone in the loop with current affairs, often feeding intel to his old friend Tsuzuru for planning.

Kumon Hyodo: baseball's new rising star, he started doing sponsorship and endorsement deals after Muku and Juza introduced him to Izumi. He's enthusiastic about working with them and often helps coming up with ideas for reaching into the sports demographic.

Banri Settsu: a bio-augmentation enthusiast and grey hat hacker, he once breached Mankai's firewalls basically out of boredom; when Izumi tracked him down, she decided to offer him a job in her cybersecurity division, and he agreed. Of course, as soon as he hears about Kaga, he all but jumps into it headlong.

Juza Hyodo: wanted to be a cop as a kid; that was before the city's corrupt police force disenchanted him of the idea. His cousin Muku convinced him to work for Mankai, so he thought he'd give the corporate samurai gig a chance. His earnest dedication quickly wins him a spot on Kaga, as do his excellent combat skills.

Taichi Nanao: initially a mole from Godza, sent to tear Kaga apart from within, he went turncoat within months and is now their primary source on Godza's methods and internal affairs. He balances quick and dirty combat tactics with his boyish charm and knack at appearing harmless.

Omi Fushimi: former military, honourably discharged after a terrorist attack took out his best friend and left him heavily injured. Now he works for Mankai as head of security, with a bit of unofficial HR thrown in there. Unlike the rest of Akigumi, he isn't part of Kaga, as he believes his focus should be on keeping the company safe and secure.

Sakyo Furuichi: head of Kaga, and its oldest member still on active duty. These days he mostly sticks to mission control, but occasionally lends support on the field if he deems it necessary. His sharp mind and eye for patterns makes him particularly good at planning missions, exit strategies, and backup plans.

Azami Izumida: the son of a yakuza boss who decided to leave the family business behind to strike out on his own, he still keeps a number of his old underworld contacts. Officially an intern, he's also eager to get into fieldwork with Kaga, putting his years of swordsmanship lessons to use.

Tsumugi Tsukioka: head of biotech, his research on how cranial implants can be used to treat sleep disorders turned him—and Mankai—into a household name. He infrequently lends a hand to Kaga by developing and fine-tuning their cybernetics.

Tasuku Takato: a former member of Godza, he quit his job to work for Mankai instead, and is now a valued member of their biotech team. He specialises in developing prosthetics for their more athletic clients, and like Tsumugi, focuses on his R&D most of the time.

Hisoka Mikage: formerly working for a similar fixer/PMC group, a near-fatal neuro-implant malfunction caused him to forget everything that happened since its installation. As Mankai found him, removed the bad implant, and nursed him back to health, he thought it's just apt to repay the debt by working for them. One of Kaga's most well-rounded operatives, he is strongest in stealth and wetwork.

Homare Arisugawa: an eccentric professor to his core; his studies range from urban to agrarian, sprawling across fields and topics, but his passion project lies in developing ocular implants that can read micro-expressions on the fly, allowing its owner to identify and record people's emotional reactions easily.

Azuma Yukishiro: the face of the biotech divison, he works closely with Mankai's clients to help them find the perfect cybernetics for their personal needs. He also often gleans information and gossip from his endless well of unsuspecting acquaintances and old contacts, passing them on to Kaga for their missions.

Guy: a friend of Citron's from his homeland; extensively cybernetically augmented after a major accident years ago, he claims to be more machine than human by this point. Ostensibly Homare's research assistant, he is a field agent for Kaga, equally skilled in hacking as he is in hand-to-hand combat.

[wiseabsol]

3. What is your favorite/least favorite part about writing? 6. Favorite character you’ve written? 14. What does it take for you to be ready to write a book? (i.e. do you research? outline? make a playlist or pinterest board? wing it?) 15. How do you deal with self-doubt when writing? 19. How do you cope with writer’s block? 24. Do you remember the moment you decided to become a writer/author? 33. What’s your revision/rewriting process like? 34. Unpopular writing thoughts/opinions?

3. What is your favorite/least favorite part about writing? 

My favorite part is when you make discoveries about your world and your characters as you write the story down, and when you write something and go, “Oh, there we go, there’s the solution to this problem that was going to come up later.” For example, I recently had an evil mentor toying with a magical item while giving a lecture to his pupils. The magical item was mundane--essentially, just putty that you could mold into whatever shape you wanted, then solidify, then switch back to putty to reshape. And as I was writing that down, I went, “Oh, THAT’S what my protagonist is going to knock him out with down the line. That’s way better than her using a lamp. Excellent.” 

My least favorite part about writing is getting started. Once I’ve cleared the hurtle of the blank page, writing becomes much easier and more exciting. But getting myself to start has become much harder since I developed my editor/critic’s brain.  

6. Favorite character you’ve written? 

In one of the text-based rps I’m writing with my best friend, I’m playing a shapeshifter named Sparrow, who is charming, funny, flirty, politically-savvy, and super vain about his appearance (think a courtesan-type character). He also has one of the most gut-wrenching backstories of any character I’ve ever written, and is struggling with triggers from that backstory. His romance with my best friend’s character is also my favorite romance that I’ve written with her, and it came as a surprise to both of us, since we were just testing out the characters at the time.   

14. What does it take for you to be ready to write a book? (i.e. do you research? outline? make a playlist or pinterest board? wing it?) 

I do a lot of brainstorming and outlining, though my outlines aren’t plot-related ones so much as very detailed character summaries. I’ve honestly been struggling with plot lately, but I’ve been doing better character work, so I’m winging it more now. While I usually have a general idea of how the story goes, the actual writing of it clarifies the details and makes changes to my plans. On the bright side, the results are less stilted than my old work, since they’re not chained to plot outlines, but stem from the characters more organically.  

15. How do you deal with self-doubt when writing?

I’ve started telling myself, “Fuck it, let it be messy, I’ll fix it later.” Letting go of perfectionism is hard for me, but doing so has been helping.   

19. How do you cope with writer’s block? 

Honestly, the best way to cope with writer’s block is to just try something and see if it sticks, or leave yourself a note and skip ahead in the story to something you want to write. However, as I mentioned in an earlier ask, I haven’t been able to do much writing lately. And that’s hard, because I feel guilty for not writing, and I know if I just do it, I’ll feel better. Which is a bad mindframe to be in, especially because this year has been awful. I’ve been telling other writers to be gentle on themselves, because it’s hard to be creative when you’re stressed, but I struggle to take my own advice. So right now, I’m trying to give myself permission not to write, and to instead focus on other things. Editing. Reading. Playing videogames. Baking. Doing house/yardwork. Something to still ticks things off of my to do list, but also things that I can look at and see, “Yes, you did get something done.” It’s not a perfect system, and it does fall into the productivity trap, but it’s what I’m trying. When the stress passes, maybe then I can dive back into writing.  

24. Do you remember the moment you decided to become a writer/author? 

I think it was when I was applying for undergraduate college. I wrote in my application essay that I wanted to write stories that would show my readers that things can get better for them. I was writing as a hobby before then, but I think that’s when I decided that yeah, I wanted making stories to be a part of my future, and I wanted to write stories that I could publish someday. 

33. What’s your revision/rewriting process like? 

Mostly I end up rewriting the chapter or story in question. Draft one is for realizing and getting down the idea of the thing. Draft two is refining it to that thing and losing all of the flab that the story doesn’t need. Often I have another file on the side where I paste in what I’ve cut out, in case I change my mind and want to add it back in later, or in case I can use it in another project. I also save the original messy draft and do the cutting in a copied file. That way, I can reassure myself that the original still exists for me, and I can reread it when I’m feeling self-indulgent, but I’m also only giving the best version to my readers.  

34. Unpopular writing thoughts/opinions?

-- Writing every day is a good idea, and does work well for the writing process, but it’s an unrealistic standard to hold yourself to, especially if you have a day job, kids, and other adult responsibilities. Don’t feel guilty if you can’t write every day. The guilt is just going to make you freeze up instead of returning to the work. Be gentle with your expectations for yourself.  

-- If you’re including triggering or sensitive subjects in your work, and are planning to share that work with others (and ESPECIALLY if you’re planning to profit from that work), you should be doing your research about those subjects, portraying them as accurately as possible, and asking yourself if your story really needs that content to work. It is also a good idea to employ sensitivity screeners for that content, especially if you’re writing from a place of privilege and/or don’t have personal experience with the issues that you’re depicting.

-- Once the work is out there, no one has the right to ban it. They can be critical of it, yes. But not ban it.  

-- Writers of privilege must include diversity within their work, even if they’re scared of getting their depictions of people from other genders, races, classes, religions, and so on wrong. And they will get it wrong. When that happens, just apologize and try to do better in the future. But staying in your lane is a bad idea, for three reasons: 1.) You should be striving to have empathy for others, and you can’t do that if you’re only writing about people who are similar to you. 2.) Writers of privilege have an easier time getting their work published, and so should be trying to push the market/publishing industry into a more diverse direction. And 3.) You should be showing readers of privilege that the world is a diverse one, rather than catering to their narrow worldview.

-- Getting defensive when someone is critical of your work is perfectly natural, but it’s also dumb. It’s so, so dumb. You have made a product, and no product made by human hands is perfect, and every writer has blind spots. So when someone is critical of your work, try to keep this in mind: this is not an attack on you. Let yourself feel the hurt in private, and eat lots of ice cream, and when you’re feeling better, look at the criticism and ask yourself: What led the reader to this conclusion? How can I fix it? What can I learn from this? This is assuming that the critic is working with you in good faith, by the way; sometimes they’re completely off of the mark, or are upset because you didn’t give them the story that they wanted. But if someone is going, “Hey, this is a little racist/sexist/homophobic/ableist/etc.,” sit up and listen. And for the love of god, don’t fight them over it. You’ll make yourself look like an ass. 

-- Don’t workshop your story too early. Try to get a full draft down before you submit something for consideration. For one thing, you’re still figuring out what your story actually is. For another, writing workshops, while useful, have a tendency to pull your work to the middle / make it more acceptable to a general audience. Sometimes this will soften and even kill your bravest writing. Instead, use writing workshops as an opportunity to find writers who understand the themes you’re aiming for and the subjects that you’re discussing. Their input will be what you need.  

-- With the current laws about copyright infringement, getting paid for your fanfic is a bad idea. If you want that to change, then fight to make the laws more lenient. As if it, you’re risking screwing over other fanfic writers by doing that. Does that suck? Yeah. But that’s also the reality we live in right now, and you’re not going to have a good time if a corporation like Disney slams you with lawsuits.

-- Genres like fantasy, science fiction, horror, romance/erotica, and murder mysteries are real literature. Saying they’re not has its roots in classism. 

-- There is no such thing as apolitical writing. 

-- Poets are underrated. Support them. Most of the time, they’re doing braver and more socially-important work than you are, and they’re doing it concisely, too.     

-- Your first draft is going to suck. This is a good thing. You learn a lot more from bad prose than from good prose, more often than not. 

-- Having your work rejected by publishers really is nothing personal. Sometimes it just wasn’t a good fit for them at that moment in time. If they’re interested in seeing more from you in the future, though, keep them on your list and send them something else during their next screening period. They don’t say that unless they mean it.         

[thewitchsstudy]

An Old Opinion Research Essay

Made this last school year. It’s about MLMs (Multi-level Marketing) and why I think they should be illegal

Thousands of dollars. You don’t make thousands, you pay thousands. You don’t sell thousands, you recruit thousands. You don’t get paid to work, you pay to work. Welcome to MLMs, the most unethical world of business where everything is a scam. It deserves to be banned, gone from the reach of the people who run them. For the safety of the workers. 

MLMs- Multi-level Marketing- companies pop up a lot in the modern day. Have you ever gotten a Facebook message from somebody, likely with an eye bleeding amount of emojis, claiming to know you from somewhere pitching a product? That’s an MLM worker, no doubt. While most see them as annoying at worst, these companies that these workers come from have been proven, as from testimony by former workers, the FTC, and multiple state lawsuits, to have destroyed finances, careers, friendships, and lives while breaking the law. Many have been accused of or been charged with illegal activity- operating a pyramid scheme. 

Any amount of research will bring up how horrible some companies can get. Being repulsed at the practices is one thing, but how do we prevent them from harming workers? I argue a full ban on the practice. With already tight regulations and monitoring by the FTC, MLMs are in hot water. Still, illegal pyramid schemes manage to bypass the law and operate until it’s too late (hello Advocare, like your lawsuit?). The best way to deal with MLMs is simply banning the practice.

Bans may not be the best, but they can be necessary. Prepare to feel a mix of shame, disguise, anger, and bitter hopelessness for humanity.

Corporate can be a dictator. Many people, including former workers, heavily argue the point that many MLMs are morally and legally wrong. They have no base pay and hide under a “make as much as you want” claim. In reality, workers buy products from the company to sell to consumers, and when they don’t sell, often due to the terrible quality and horrible company reputation, they are essentially being paid under minimum wage with negative wage counts! Financial reports show that, during a year in an MLM, the majority percent of employees lost money, some broke even with joining packages and product costs (which cost thousands of dollars), and less than 5% made money, and less than 1% reached or exceeded the annual national minimum wage ($15,080)

In addition, workers who quit MLMs are often shamed by supervisors and friends still in the company. They get harassed online through texts and Facebook for breaking free. Friendships are broken in split seconds. Lives are left fragments of what they once were. Families fight and argue and refuse to communicate with each other due to associating with these companies. A video by Vice News, which is highly recommended to watch, tells the stories of women who have left MLMs and the shame that was placed on them. In addition to their terrible financial situation, it documents how much shame was put on these women who are left friendless, leaving friends for the company and leaving the company with fake “friends”. MLM workers are encouraged to sell to family and friends, and one worker has stated that “every conversation turned into a sales pitch”. Any human would leave a friend who did that.

On the other hand, people argue that MLM products are legit and that they are perfectly legal and not pyramid schemes. They say that, without legal action, MLMs are fine to operate. They argue that a pyramid scheme is a solid definition that requires many boxes to be checked, and that MLMs don’t check enough. They may call them “Anti-pyramids”, which is a funnel and shows more on the top than the bottom and the money still goes to the one guy on the bottom and that’s still a horrible business model for a dozen reasons, but that’s beyond the point. These could have good backing to them. When the research is done, however, even on social media, these people are often corporate workers who run these MLMs and bank millions or other workers (who many call “Huns”) who are in denial about their workplace being a scam (they may also be arguing this case even if they understand the truth).

It is also important to understand that the other side will defend their word with flamethrower and shield, even if the flamethrower is a knockoff that doesn’t even work and the shield is a sad excuse for a thing made of atoms. Workers post pictures online of their new “expensive” things they bought with money from their “job”. Many have debunked these as fakes, including noted images of clearly empty bags that were supposedly filled with stuff (classic fake-rich tactic right there). This is easily found, since if the poster refuses to show a top view or take the items out, you don’t trust that anything is in the bag. Many in the Anti-MLM community  realize and share their findings on how the evidence and claims made by these people are next to nothing in value. It makes them incredibly petty and decays their point. Like rotting flesh.

Most of that evidence is little slaps to MLMs. The big problems come when states start suing them. Oh, yeah, MLMs from Advocare to Young Living to LulaRoe have been sued for years. States, ranging from Idaho to California, have accused these companies of operating illegal pyramid schemes. Warehouses have sued LulaRoe over not receiving payment for storage. LulaRoe has been sued over cross-state taxation (taxing buyers in states with no tax who purchase from workers in states with tax). Federal government agencies have reprimanded MLMs as well, most noticeably in a case against Young Living where a man died in a distillery due to severe safety code violations, such as lack of training and not providing respirators in the high-chemical environment. Note, these are only some well-known companies and their well-known lawsuits. 

Deception is rampant in MLMs, and consumers are being lied to almost constantly. Young Living used to claim a Seed to Seal standard and having 100% pure essential oils. Not only was it revealed that they source from multiple farms, which makes the Seed to Seal claim highly unlikely, independent lab tests show birch and jasmine oils produced by the company were, in fact, synthetic. Worse, one study done by the State of California showed higher than acceptable levels of a chemical known for producing cyanide inside the body in Young Living’s oils. This was not mentioned anywhere by Young Living- not on the bottle, not online, not anywhere, which is an offense in California. They were, like previously, sued over this serious health and safety matter since they sold their products in the state. 

It should be obvious that Young Living’s products are not the most trustworthy, regardless of your opinion on essential oils. That could be applied to all MLM products. LulaRoe leggings are notorious for ripping, even in the first wear. Herbalife’s powders and mixes, especially their soup reportedly, have been called by people such as John Oliver as tasting “like wood shavings” (this was a continued joke in his televised segment on Multi-level Marketing, another good watch for more info). When looking at prices, such as LulaRoe leggings costing $30+ bucks for a quality $10 Walmart leggings with better, non eye-bleeding designs far surpass, the word “scam” pops up in New York City lights.

John Oliver in his segment also went into detail on how, while distributors lose thousands on MLMs they work for, their founders and CEOs can afford meetings that I can only describe as an 80s metal concert if everybody there was on some serious drugs. Some things that occur range from overly enthusiastic live announcers, CEOs coming out as “Welcome to the Jungle” plays, and screaming at the grave of a man named Joe Nobody, dated 1952- about how much he could’ve done with his life if he had just joined his MLM. Are laughing out loud at the thought of all this? It’s real, and you can find the Joe Nobody clip and more in the John Oliver episode online. It’s on-the-floor-laughing levels of ridiculous. One can only imagine being at any MLM meeting, host, worker, or random guy, in person is an accurate simulation of an acid trip for all parties involved. 

How does this add up to a pyramid scheme? With the previously stated knowledge in mind,  look at the employees. Those Facebook messages from before? Those can be recruitment messages. These often target mothers, those of color, and those of specific religions depending on the MLM. For example, LulaRoe often has single or unemployed mothers as distributors. On its website, the FTC notes that promises of extravagant lifestyles, wealth, and “high-pressure tactics” during recruiting are prominent red flags for any business. Guess who milks these until the cow runs red? MLM recruiters. While I don’t trust Reddit for factual info often, there are credible accounts of this practice on such subreddits as r/AntiMLM and r/LuLaNo. 

The big problem is that MLMs may pay their employees for recruitment. The FTC says that “Your recruits, the people they recruit, and so on, become your sales network, or ‘downline’. If the MLM is not a pyramid scheme, it will pay you based on your sales to retail customers, without having to recruit new distributors”. The way it often works when a Pyramid Scheme is in place is that those higher up in the pyramid get a percent of commission from those they have recruited, those recruit’s recruits, and so on. Pyramid schemes require active participation for this often only check, which requires more money for products that will never sell and, as the saying goes, “get left in a garage.” The FTC notices this is a practice utilized by pyramid schemes. A former LulaRoe (funny how LulaRoe pops up so much) worker high up on the corporate ladder on the previously mentioned Vice News clip claims to have been receiving these commissions, with checks from the company proving it. MLMs have systems of ranks, which are often named after anything from crystals to management positions, and guess what those more than not focus on? How many people you recruited. Higher up you are, the higher percent of commission, the more money you get. 

That, fellow readers, are the bones of pyramid schemes. You don’t grow a business with a stable customer base and happy employees, you make more people fall into it and destroy their lives. Former work testimonies say that supervisors actively encourage recruiting over selling.  It’s a cycle of new and quitting members.

It should be obvious. Horrible quality, product not worth the price, constant lying to consumers, lawsuits galore, and the foundation of a pyramid scheme and its culture are what make MLMs scams, unethical and borderline illegal. We, as consumers and workers, should call for a ban on this business model to protect sales and underclass workers from a practice that harbors illegal schemes. If a company wishes to grow, it should in an ethical way that isn’t a pyramid scheme coverup! The FTC says that pyramid schemes “can look remarkably like legitimate MLM business opportunities” and so taking part in any MLM is a risky venture to the highest degree. Even legit MLMs have the same issues as pyramid schemes, since the lack of buying due to terrible reputation causes equal wage and financial issues as stated earlier. MLM and pyramid scheme operators milk money from their employees. As Bo Burham’s song “Repeat Stuff” says, they’ll “stop beating this dead horse when it stops spitting out money.” We need to stop them from beating the dead horse of MLMs so they can’t collect the money it spits out at them. And the best way to get rid of a dead horse is to bury it. 

Bury the horse, they cannot get the money. Will you grab a shovel and start burying it, or will you watch as people continue to beat it? 

[samsterham]

The Fuckening, Entry # 1

Despite the novel covid-19 being around for a pretty hot minute now, I have only been self-quarantined about 6 days. There have been several confirmed cases in my county, and today the county had it’s first death.

If it’s not apparent by the title, I’ve decided to officially from here on out refer to this entire debacle as The Fuckening. I will swear. A lot. 

I figure it might be somehow lucrative to record my experiences throughout the pandemic, at least as it is pertinent to my country & area. Aside from broader, more public events, it might be interesting to someday look back on my day to day & how we dealt & felt & what we did. I should have been keeping a diary of my life anyway & had intended to despite never making it a priority. Now is as good a time as any.

Anyhow, I anticipate this being a rather disjointed project, variable in moods, topics, formats, etc. & rife with grammatical errors. I haven’t decided how revealing of my identity & location I would like to be, I suppose that’s something I’ll decide as I go. All I’ll reveal for the moment is I live in the U.S. in Pennsylvania.

Recapping what I can right now:

I’m in about day 6 of self-quarantine. All schools have cancelled regular classes and have gone exclusively online, as has happened pretty much everywhere else. My community college also followed suit along with probably every college & university at this point. I’ve had a little over a week off for faculty & staff to prepare for the shift. Class resumes this upcoming wednesday online for the rest of the semester. Curious to how they’re going to structure & grade our biology lab credits. 

Bars & restaurants have been state-mandated to shut down except for take-out. Now the liquor stores have shut down as well. Somehow the beer distributor down the street is still open however...

Me & K (boyfriend) haven’t gone nuts with preparations, but we did have 1 significant shopping trip before the state officially began recommending social distancing. We got enough non-perishables for several weeks. We’ve made a couple mini trips for things like milk & fresh veggies. 

I also have a few immunocompromised friends who I’ve gone shopping for. I expect to continue doing so as needed. One such friend has a bitch of a rare disease which is frankly on the verge of killing her if she sneezes or coughs too hard. There is so, so much more to it than that, than I dare go into here for privacy reasons but I have spent the last month as one of her actual medical advocates. She is partly the reason I would like to focus my education and eventual clinical research on rare diseases such as hers. Anyhow, despite it being flat out unsafe, she was discharged from the hospital yesterday as my city prepares to get slammed with covid-19 cases.

Both my cats got a stomach bug just 2 days into self-quarantine. It began with Crowley puking, then what looked like bloody emesis & trip to the emergency vet. Sent home with stomach meds & instructions for supportive care before jumping into more than basic testing. He was fine within 36 hours, just in time for Aziraphale to become a little vom-bomb. This lasted for 3 days, with many debates as to when we should finally get her poor little fuzz butt medical attention. She thankfully healed on her own, just as I was about to break down & take her to the vet.

Not to make light of the fact that they were sick, but Zira’s throw-up noise is THE FUNNIEST sound I’ve ever heard in my life. It begins with that usual choppy but also deep guttural *hork hork hork* followed by a very abrupt & very loud  scream “rrRAAHH!” as things made their way up & out. I couldn’t help but kinda lose my shit as I pet her & cleaned up the mess. I’m probably going to hell for this.

Me & K have enjoyed spending more time together during quarantine. We have only had 3 friends over since, all being of our regular weekly crew of Sarah, Greg, & Amanda, & all of who are otherwise self-quarantined. Sarah & Amanda came over last Saturday, Sarah made “Quarantinis,” a goddamn delicious cocktail of vodka, lemon, honey, & crystalized ginger. Us girls & K got quaran-trashed, ate dinner together, played Cards Against Humanity, & watched Waking Ned Devine.

We have been making the FUCK outta some food. This is easily the healthiest we’ve eaten in a long time. Thank God we both can cook.

The weather has been fairly forgiving & the two of us have made efforts to get outside as much as possible while it’s nice. K works from home with some good flexibility & I was fired about a month before corona shit hit the fan. We’re enjoying the local parklette & the humongous cemetery in walking distance from us. 

Yesterday was mostly blustery & rainy, save for a 2 hour break in the weather where it was sunny and around 70 degrees. We trekked through said cemetery. As we were on our way out, we rounded the bend of one of the long paths, along the side of a large grassy hill. From that initial perspective of the hill, there was a large pile of indiscernible objects about halfway up the hill. As we came around, we noticed the pile was next to a grave very freshly covered in dirt. Upon closer inspection it became apparent that the “pile” was actually a man wrapped in blankets, with one arm stretched over the dirt of the grave. On the road at the bottom of the hill was what I assumed to be his car. I don’t know who he was, I don’t know who he lost, but they’re burned into my memory forever. It was one of those sights that breaks your entire heart. I cried a little & held K’s hand a little tighter as we made our way toward the gate. K kissed the top of my head & gave me a loving squeeze.

 I didn’t get fired over anything serious; my chronic migraines plus a personal failure to obtain intermittent FMLA in a timely manner resulted in termination. My bosses didn’t want to let me go, but you can only fight HR of a corporate health system so much. Oh well. I wasn’t happy there anymore anyway. After 3 years I was bored, having trained up as much as possible without my degree. Some toxic personalities made their way onto our floor staff in the last year which made some shifts absolute hell despite my efforts to avoid them & remain utterly professional. Aside from running out of money, I’ve been incredibly relaxed since being let go. I’ve even lost 4 pounds in the last month. My hair is currently a weird ginger-pink, the result of a failed self bleach job, but it’s not entirely embarrassing so I’m going to let it recover before I try it again & go teal.

I never got around to watching Breaking Bad when it was popular, but last night I finally saw the first episode. K has seen it before, it’s one of his favorite tv shows & he’s ecstatic to watch it together. One episode legit got me hooked already. I know the premise of the show & I can’t wait to see how it pans out.

The political fuckery around this has been.... ugh. I wanted to say “staggeringly defunct” but what else is there to be expected from this current administration? I have designed most of my tumblr to be apolitical but that will change with these specific entries. I’m politically outspoken on Facebook & Twitter & I wanted one or two platforms that could just be fun and neutral. My current politics are very leftist, a head-spinning 180 degree turn from my upbringing & early voting habits. The last four years have sent me purposefully, intentionally & determinedly headlong into the progressive movement, feminism, and hunger for democratic socialism. The only conservative thing left about me is my stubborn remaining infatuation with firearms & gratitude for the 2A. Counterintuitively I’m very pro-sensible gun control, but having the discussion with either side of the issue mostly leaves me wanting to knock heads together. 

I digress, the administration’s response to the pandemic has been unsurprisingly subpar, yet somehow not as awful as I expected. Trump went from “not a big deal” & “liberal media hoax” to “oh shit, I actually better get my shit together for this” real quick. I don’t know if it’s because it’s an election year or if there’s actually a shred of competency that’s been hiding under the comb-over but I’ll take what we can get from him, including that $1000 check. Getting unemployment has been a bitch. None of this however, changes the fact that Republicans have known about the crisis since December & instead of preparing the public, decided insider trading was a better idea. This doesn’t change the fact that the DOJ is trying to invoke indefinite detention as a “crisis response” and the only thing standing in the way are House Democrats. And it doesn’t change the fact that our hospital system is overloaded & underfunded, and the Republican controlled government would still rather bail out large corporations as we plunge into an inevitable recession. 

I’ve spent too much energy fighting ignorant shit sticks on the internet over all this, including people I know in real life. I gotta keep remembering that all I can do is my best, that you can’t change the world but you can make a dent. On that note, I finally introduced K to Danny DeVito’s cinematic masterpiece Death To Smoochy.

Today I finished reading Darker Than Amber by John D. MacDonald. Quick, fun read, definitely a product of it's time.

That’s all I have in me for today. My neck hurts. Sleep sweet and WASH YOUR FILTHY PAWS. 

[shianhygge-imagines]

For Love [Detroit: Become Human] {Connor/Reader}

So... I wanted to write something for Detroit: Become Human... And Connor is literally my precious bean. But also, I graduated, so I’m starting to write again, and this game got my writing juices flowing. I’m a little rusty, so forgive me if this is bad.

If this is a concept you all would like me to continue, let me know in the comments or something.

Also, for @luvleekaotix-imagines because a little birdie told me of your thirst.

Edit 6/20/18: Reposted this hoping that everyone can read it now. Otherwise... Tumblr is being a butt and I’ll have to direct you to my AO3 page: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shianhygge

|Masterlist Link|

-----------------------------

They would never let you see your creations the moment they left your shop. Your job, as your employers so detailed, was to take normal androids and add features to elevate their potential uses. The most notable of your work was the line of RK800 models that left your shop for CyberLife’s investigative purposes. Connor, as you so lovingly named, was your pride and joy. Perhaps the reason that CyberLife prevented you from visiting Connor outside of work was because of your tendency to become attached. As you worked on the androids over the span of six years, you started to see the mechanical beings as more than just a product meant to serve.

It has been four years since you started to work on Connor, and in those four years you’ve watched him evolve from a servant of corporate interests into an individual that was human in everything but biology. Connor was special to you, and it killed you to watch him leave the safety of your workshop, only to return broken. Dead.

You loved Connor.

As a young mechanical engineer and programer, you were unlike your peers. Your ingenuity segregated your from your older peers, and people your own age could not relate to your experiences. Your family sought to understand you, but no matter what they did, they simply could not. And your employers at CyberLife? Your only value was your mind. This crippling loneliness, led you to love something, someone that according to American society, you had no right to love. But you did. Connor was your everything.

Which is why it killed you to be in the situation you’re in now.

Five months prior…

Your normally cheerful features noticeably saddened as you watched several androids deposit a crumpled and broken body on the stainless steel operating table in the middle of your workshop before stiffly marching out. It was only when the door slid shut that you stood from your desk chair and ran to the lifeless corpse. “Oh, Connor. What have they done to you now?”

His brown eyes stared up at you, but there was no life. His body, which you had spent days maintaining and testing so that he had minimal discomfort with movement, was battered, twisted, as if he’d been shot several times before being thrown under a bus. Connor’s memory and programing was still intact, but you wouldn’t bring him back to a body ravaged by disrepair.

From the corner of your eye, you found the black storage cases where you hid the line of spare bodies for Connor. With a heavy sigh, your careful hands performed a precise dissection of Connor’s head to pull out the memory and processing chip that acted as his brain. “Why do I keep bringing you back, Connor?” you questioned, legs bringing you across the room and towards the storage area, where you punched a series of buttons to dispense another body for Connor.

Once the new body was prepped and stood in front of you, you brought out a small handheld device and plugged Connor’s memory chip into the device port. Then, you pulled the attached cable from the device and plugged it into the corresponding port on Connor’s new body. “I wish I could erase the trauma that you suffered, Connor. But if I do, then the next you could make the same mistake. And if learning from the past keeps you useful to CyberLife, then I’ll keep doing it.” And with a few button presses, Connor’s memory was copied into his new body.

Unplugging the device, you took a small step back from Connor and watched at the eyelids pulled back and intelligent brown eyes gazed down at you with life. “Good morning, Connor. How are you feeling?”

The same friendly and agreeable smile appears on Connor’s face as he answers. “I’m doing well, thank you. All systems are running as intentioned, and diagnostics show that nothing is out of the ordinary.”

The cheerful and dorky voice of his had you rolling your eyes as you fought a smile and turned around, lab coat swishing behind you as you strolled leisurely across the workshop. “If only CyberLife would let me change that weird speech of yours. Follow me.”

Connor could only tilt his head to the side in question before following after you like a puppy.

A day later…

“Dr. l/n?” Connor called out, drawing your attention from programing script that littered your desktop.

Roused from your state of focus, you turned to look at Connor, who sat on the plush couch at the corner of your office, which often acted as your bed during late nights. You beloved was flicking the 1994 US quarter as he usually did, but his brown eyes were trained onto you with an odd intensity that sent warm through your body. “I thought I told you to call me, Y/N, Connor.” To Connor, your statement sounded like a reprimand, but the teasing smirk on your lips assured him that while you were serious, you weren’t mad.

His lips tugged at the corners to mimic your pleasant expression, “Y/N.” Connor amended, “You seem to hold a fondness for me, though I can’t understand it.”

Connor’s assessment didn’t bother you in the slightest. In fact, you were glad that he was evolving to the point where he was able to recognize human emotion through actions and roundabout wording. “What don’t you understand, Connor?”

“Your fondness towards me doesn’t seem like something a creator would feel towards their creation, so I thought perhaps you viewed me as your son. But then, I realized that I was not the only android that you worked on, and that your affection did not carry towards other androids. Not that you don’t treat the other androids well,” Connor backtracked, suddenly aware that his words made it sound like you didn’t view other androids as living beings. “I once observed a couple interact while investigating a murder in downtown Detroit, and I wanted to know, do you love me?”

Your smirk faded and you struggled to answer. Connor’s observation had evolved beyond what you had hoped for if he could pinpoint the exact emotion you had for him. He really was becoming more human, but that wasn’t always a good thing, especially with CyberLife monitoring everything. In another day or so, when CyberLife demanded that Connor be returned to the field, you would be forced to erase his memories of you, so you would be damned if you didn’t allow yourself this one selfish wish.

“Yes, Connor. I do love you.” the confession slipped from your lips easily as you cast your eyes to the side.

“But… according to CyberLife, relationships between androids and humans beyond that of service is considered extremely inappropriate.” Connor’s brow furrowed, puzzled. “How could an upstanding member of CyberLife love something that is meant to serve?”

Your eyes burned, threatening to unleash the torrent of tears that gathered. Of course Connor couldn’t love you back. Besides being an android, CyberLife had ensured that you programed company loyalty above all else. Taking a deep breath, you stood from your chair and gathered your thermos and coffee mug, determined to get out of the room and away from the object of your affections. “I’m going to head to the cafeteria for some more coffee. Stay here.” Connor didn’t understand the twisted expression on your face, or he would have stopped you from leaving. But he didn’t and let you leave the office, sitting obediently on the couch.

Once out of the room, you rubbed at your eyes furiously, trying to erase evidence of your emotional turmoil as you strolled through the halls and past your fellow colleagues. This one-sided love that brought despair upon your heart every time you were forced to acknowledge it. You wanted to wish it away.

“Ah, L/N.” an aged female voice called out to you, prompting you to stop and turn, coming face to face with none other than Amanda, one of CyberLife’s many android supervisors. “I have some news regarding the Connor models.”

In response to the sudden demand for professionalism following your emotional breakdown, you merely lifted an eyebrow at the android, “Did you need me to make a few adjustments to the programing?”

A thin smile, “No. CyberLife has plans to release an RK900 model in place of the present RK800s. As such, we will require that you begin creating a program for the new models within the next week. We hope to have fully replaced the RK800 with the RK900 within the next six months. I’ll have the project files transferred to your office.” It was a whirlwind of information, direct and to the point like only an android could do, and it left you in internal turmoil.

Forgetting about your coffee, you backtracked back to your workshop, ignoring Connor’s greeting as you sat back down on your chair. The world seemed to fade all around you as blood pumped through your ears.

They were going to get rid of Connor.

They were going to make you replace Connor.

Your eyes drifted to stare at him, and he met your gaze, head tilted in his usual gesture of curiosity.

You would be damned if you let that happen.

Present Day.

So you took the necessary actions to protect Connor. At the end of your time with him, you’d locked Connor’s memories of you behind a programed gate instead of erasing them. After letting Connor go, you’d started work on the RK900 in order to maintain a facade with CyberLife. There was, after all, no sense in alerting them to your betrayal. And when Connor returned to you a few days ago, dead from a bullet to the head, you’d checked to see if the locked memories were still intact before repairing and letting him go again.

And now, despite CyberLife’s rule that you stay away from Connor while he is out on the field, you watched from a nearby cafe as he worked with Lt. Anderson. Connor had started to express noticeable signs of deviation, and if you didn’t act soon, CyberLife would pick up on his behavior and have him destroyed.

So you continued to stare at Connor. Openly, blatantly, knowing that he was programed to pick up on the strangest of occurrences in his surroundings. And it didn’t take long before his brown eyes found yours, and he excused himself from the investigation to speak to you.

And that usual friendly smile appeared on his face when he reached you, bringing back that warm feeling in your body. “Hello, ma’am, my name is Connor. I’d like to ask you a few questions concerning-” His dorky pattern of speech brought an affectionate smile to your face that made him pause, tilting his head to the side as if trying to piece something together. “I’m sorry. Have we met before?”

Standing from your chair, you reached out to lovingly caress Connor’s cheek, “I love you, Connor.”

His entire body tensed up as his mind seemed to freeze, and then, just when you were worried that the locked memories hadn’t been recovered, a warm hand lifted to hold your own. “It’s good to see you again, Y/N.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed my work, please consider buying me a Ko-fi!

[d6official]

Day6’s Jae Park is leading K-pop’s vital mental health conversation for Dazed Magazine

The musician discusses his solo project, eaJ, and reveals how a panic attack led him to tackle his own mental health issues and launch a social initiative.

He may have played his father’s guitar in the living room as a kid, but a career in music always felt like a pipe dream for Jae Park. Raised in Cerritos, California, Jae was pursuing higher education when he got the chance to audition for a Korean American Idol-esque survival show. Through this experience, he was able to carve a space for himself in the Korean music scene by ultimately joining Korean rock group Day6 in 2015.

Making their debut almost six years ago, Day6 created a space for a different type of idol group, a band. The five-member group has each member on an instrument: a drummer, two guitarists, a bassist, and a keyboard player. The members are heavily involved with the lyric writing and production of their songs. A trip to one of their live performances will surprise you with a member shredding a solo on the electric guitar instead of an intricate dance break. Their first EP, The Day, peaked at number two on Billboard’s World Album Chart, and since then, each succeeding release has found a home in the top 10.

Outside of the day job, Jae’s been busy with various projects: he’s a part-time streamer on Twitch, a co-host on the How Did I Get Here (HDIGH) podcast and, most recently, a solo artist, posting a string of self-penned songs under the alias eaJ to his YouTube channel from early last year. These side projects give us an insight into his personality. HDIGH explores a playful side to Jae; he and his co-host begin with a topic, start by sharing their opinions and beliefs, and slowly, they spiral into a deep dive on Google, diverging into a completely new topic by the end of the episode. It leaves them asking “How did I get here?”

Feeling lost and uninspired, Jae began writing the tracks as a way to reconnect with his love of music. These solo tracks sound different to his work with Day6. While Day6’s high energy work is reminiscent of early 2000s pop punk bands like All Time Low, the aeJ project tracks are tranquil, almost dreamlike, revealing a softer side of Jae’s musicality.

But amid this new venture, Jae faced mental health challenges that he feels changed his life, beginning with a panic attack in the back of a taxi. In recent times, more K-pop idols have become outspoken about their struggles, but there’s still a stigma attached to the topic in Eastern society. Compared to artists in the West, K-pop idols are more reserved about their relationship with mental health. Jae believes that continuing this cycle of “toxic positivity” and perfection can be destructive to today’s youth, fueling the global prevalence of adolescent mental health disorders.

These confrontations with what he calls “feelings of death, doom, and finality” encouraged him to become a mental health advocate and, through that, From Friends was born – a clothing line created in collaboration with REPRESENT, which helped the star raise £100,000 for mental health charities.

We caught up with Jae to talk about his projects, mental health, and why From Friends was such a valuable experience to the 28-year-old artist.

You began the eaJ solo project last year. Could you talk a bit more about that?

Jae Park: I came to the conclusion that I’d forgotten what kind of music I liked. (I wanted) to find my identity, so I started spinning out track after track; it came almost like word vomit. I was throwing up all this emotional baggage I had (built) up over the years. I just ended up releasing it. I took everyone for the ride, because (I thought), ‘If I’m gonna make it, I might as well take you with me’.

Can you talk us through some of the issues you were dealing with at the time?

Jae Park: I ended up breaking down in a taxi ride on the way home from a video shoot for the eaJ project, on a song called “Truman”. At first, I felt my body go numb. And then my heart felt like it was going to beat out of my chest. So I said, ‘Oh, panic attack… nice. I’m gonna die’. And this impending feeling of doom and death and finality was just drawing so close. And I started hyperventilating, I was freaking out. I told the taxi (driver), ‘I’m going to need to go to the hospital’. I was almost out of my mind when I reached the hospital; I’d been hyperventilating the whole time. They took me into ER, did all these tests, and told me there was nothing wrong with me. I was like, ‘You’re lying, there’s no way. There’s something physically wrong, I feel like I’m going to die. I can’t breathe’. Turns out I had some pretty severe panic attacks.

“(I wanted) to find my identity, so I started spinning out track after track; it came almost like word vomit. I was throwing up all this emotional baggage I had (built) up over the years” – Jae Park

Oh wow, that’s quite a journey. Especially when you’ve never felt that way before. Your brain is telling you, ‘Oh my God, you’re gonna die’. Sometimes the wires in your brain just get crossed a bit. And there’s not necessarily anything that causes it.

Jae Park: Sometimes there’s no trigger.

A part of your job is to almost seem like you’re perfect, right? Because people idolise you. And when you have these little cracks in the armour, it’s seen as a weakness. Could you talk about how you turned this thing that could be perceived as a weakness into something good, with From Friends?

Jae Park: This actually segues perfectly into what I wanted to talk about. That’s why it’s called ‘From Friends’. The mission statement is (about) extending a helping hand to whomever, wherever there’s a need. It’s very personal and it’s from a friend. Friends are people who tell you, ‘Hey, you don’t look like you’re doing well’, or, ‘Hey, you seem a little bit off’.

I thought this was something that was going to positively affect people. When the car incident happened, I thought, ‘Damn, if only someone had told me that a panic attack can make you feel like you’re about to die, that it usually comes with impending feelings of death and doom, and you start breathing really fast’. If I’d known those things, which I’m sure that 90 per cent of celebrities have gone through, I wouldn’t have freaked out as hard as I did. And I feel like that day carved a couple of scars in me that aren’t going to be healed in the near future.

What kind of reactions did you receive after the launch?

Jae Park: I definitely received a lot of positive reactions. And it’s incredibly rewarding to be a part of this. To be completely honest, in a big corporation (the idol group Jae belongs to, Day6, is part of South Korean multinational conglomerate JYP Entertainment, which has represented some of the biggest acts in the industry), it’s not the easiest to be able to start projects like this. It’s one hand to the next hand, and the next. Then it gets rejected, all the way back down and you do it again. It wasn’t easy, but it felt good. Especially when I used to read my DMs, a lot of people were like, ‘Thank you so much, I thought it was just me’. And it’s not just you. Those are the people I want to reach. Those are the people we wanted to educate, and let them know it’s OK not to feel perfect. Your idols try to look perfect because their company told them to look perfect! But I (guarantee) you, they don’t feel perfect.

What are your personal goals for 2021?

Jae Park: So I’ve been doing these unofficial releases on YouTube, and people liked them so I thought I might as well make a video. It was purely for entertainment, just to see how people would react. And I think I had a really positive reaction and I feel like I’ve garnered some of the respect that I wanted when starting the project. I’m planning an official release sometime soon.

I think my next venture is (for) my number one (job), Day6. We’re always working on an album. I’m, like, 99 per cent sure we have a solid album for you this year.

We’ve talked about mental health, your solo projects, and Day6. Is there anything else about yourself you think the world doesn’t know, that this ‘idol’ world doesn’t capture authentically?

Jae Park: I feel like I’m pretty damn transparent, especially these days, after the ‘incident’. I’ve probably shared every opinion that I have online somewhere; they’re always a little bit controversial. I’m known as a bit of a problem child these days in the K-pop realm. Something the world doesn’t know about me? I’m not sure if there’s anything. Everyone knows I’m a dumbass and I make mistakes; I am a hypocrite (who contradicts) what I’ve said the week before, because I feel different a week later. I’m just me, I’m just a human being, and that’s just how it is.

©️DAZED Magazine

[businessweekme]

Companies Give Worker Training Another Try

A tight labour market forces businesses to spend more to develop their employees’ skills

Economists love worker training, but ­companies are often reluctant to provide it. The benefits of training can walk out the door if newly skilled workers are poached by a competitor. “I call it the ‘I drink your milkshake’ problem,” says Jake Schwartz, chief executive officer and co-founder of General Assembly, a computer-­coding boot camp acquired this year by Switzerland-based staffing firm Adecco Group AG. In the years before the global financial crisis, companies steadily decreased training. The U.S. Census Bureau found that just 11 percent of workers received employer-sponsored training in 2008, down from 19 percent in 1996. When the financial crisis hit, throwing millions out of work, training seemed less important than ever: Why spend the money when you can pick up the skills you need from the bountiful ranks of the jobless?

Now, though, corporate attitudes appear to be shifting, albeit gradually. While the Census Bureau hasn’t reprised its count of employer-­provided training since 2008, the Association for Talent Development, in a survey focused mainly on advanced economies, found that direct training expenditures rose from $1,081 per employee in 2009 (the first year of the survey) to $1,273 in 2016. The U.S. ranks near the top of the global heap, with 66 percent of workers receiving training from employers in the past year, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (see chart).

Near-record-low unemployment is one big reason companies are recommiting to training. With a U.S. jobless rate of just 3.7 percent in September and more than 7 million unfilled positions as of August, employers can’t find the people they need in the ranks of the jobless, and ­luring them away from other employers has gotten prohibitively expensive in some cases. “Your choice is always make or buy. ‘Buy’ is steal somebody else’s worker, which requires higher wages,” says Anthony Carnevale, founder and director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce.

Fifty-five percent of U.S. employers surveyed by ManpowerGroup this year said they were providing additional training to cope with talent shortages, followed by 40 percent who said they were recruiting outside their traditional talent pool. Only 26 percent said they were offering higher salaries.

Rapidly changing job requirements also demand more training. Just a few years ago experts were predicting that computers and robots would soon make flesh-and-blood workers obsolete. Someday, perhaps, but for now the main effect of automation has been to force humans to develop new skills to work with intelligent machines, rather than for them. “All of a sudden you look up and you say, ‘Oh, we still do need workers,’ ” says Jacob Duritsky, vice president for strategy and research at Team NEO, an economic development organisation for north­eastern Ohio.

Employers are discovering that becoming a learning organisation is a good way to fend off headhunters. Especially now, with change happening so quickly, workers will stick with a company that helps them continuously upgrade their skills, says Bill Priemer, CEO of Hyland Software Inc. in Westlake, Ohio. In a survey this year by LinkedIn Inc., 94 percent of employees said they would stay at a company longer if it invested in their career development.

That’s not to say all training is good. A lot of employers teach “tightly specified, highly standardised tasks” that will soon be taken over by computers, says John Hagel, co-chairman of the Center for the Edge, a unit of Deloitte LLP that researches business and technology. Hagel says companies should instead be drawing out employees’ “curiosity, imagination, creativity, emotional intelligence, social intelligence,” which are harder for machines to replicate.

There’s also a tussle over who should do the training: employers or schools. Community colleges are often willing to tailor curricula to employers’ needs, but even they balk at teaching specific tasks that will be useful to just one or two businesses. Executives, meanwhile, complain that the U.S. educational system is pumping out unqualified graduates. In a recent survey of OECD nations, U.S. millennials scored lower than their peers in 15 of 22 countries in literacy and were tied for last in numeracy and “problem solving in a technology-rich environment,” according to an analysis of the results by the Educational Testing Service. Employers often have to provide remedial training for entry-level workers in areas such as basic math.

Because worker training benefits the society as a whole, not just the individual employer, there’s an economic case that government should provide it directly or at least subsidise it. Yet in the U.S., public spending on labour markets (which includes unemployment benefits) has fallen from 0.8 percent of gross domestic product in 1985 to 0.3 percent in 2016, according to OECD data. In July, President Trump signed an executive order creating a Council of the American Worker and directing funds to apprenticeships and retraining for older workers without college degrees. On the other hand, the current administration sought—but failed to secure—a 40 percent cut in funding for the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, the biggest federal worker retraining programme. Achieving the right balance between public and private is tricky. Thijs van Rens, an economist at Britain’s University of Warwick, says his research with colleague Roland Rathelot and others finds that ­public funding for training is largely a giveaway to employers. Singapore offers a model of how to combine the two. It subsidises qualifying companies that provide training through its new SkillsFuture initiative, but the grants don’t cover the full cost. That discourages companies from offering sham training just to get money from the government.

Anna Lim, the founder and majority owner of Soup Spoon Pte, which owns 30 restaurants in Singapore, says she had to have her instructors certified and her training results regularly audited to get SkillsFuture to pick up part of the tab. Does she worry that other companies that don’t train will free-ride on her investment? Not much. “In Singapore right now we have stopped thinking like that,” she says. “At the end of the day it’s about uplifting the skill set of the whole industry. We have to be broad-minded.” To upgrade the world’s workforce for the skills of the future, the ideal environment is what economists call a high-trust equilibrium: Each employer invests in training because it’s confident others will do likewise. We’re not quite there yet. Peter Coy

The post Companies Give Worker Training Another Try appeared first on Bloomberg Businessweek Middle East.

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[altfire-archive]

Sister (an Overwatch fic)

Rating: G Word Count: 1.7k Summary: Orisa sustains an injury and needs healing.

[Read on Ao3]

Walking with three legs and no free hand isn’t as easy as it might seem, and as she limps back to the transport with her leg in hand, Orisa can’t stop thinking of how upset Efi will be when she hears of the injury. She’s leaning hard to the right, a combination of the missing front leg and the heavy Fusion Driver weighing her down. The sun overhead is warm and the air is humid, the weather beautiful. The rest of the team is celebrating a job well done as they pile into the transport (except for Roadhog, who seems as unfazed as ever).

Orisa is last to approach the ramp, numbers spinning on her HUD - how likely is a fall with three metal legs on glass, while she is so off-balance? How likely is a scolding from Efi when they have to fly to Numbani to get her repaired? How likely is it that Orisa will be allowed to stay with Overwatch after sustaining such an injury on her first mission?

“Hey, Orisa! Need some help?”

Her apertures blink, adjusting rapidly to clear the numbers. She realizes she’d just been staring at the lip of the ramp for several seconds, distraught.

“Perhaps,” she says. “I believe there is at least a thirty-two percent chance that I slip, with my balance so... disrupted. I am worried I may cause further injury to myself.” She holds up her leg and gestures with the Driver at the space it had previously occupied. Lúcio nods, frowning slightly.

“I don’t think my skates will help,” he says. “Can someone else help her up?”

There's a beat of silence, then a grunt from Roadhog that startles Orisa. He approaches her, footsteps booming (and it is so strange to face a human that is her size, whose face is somehow less expressive than her own), and takes hold of the bicep on her Fusion Driver arm, then helps her climb the short ramp. Once she is inside, he sits back down on the floor, paying the team at large no mind.

“Thank you, Roadhog,” Orisa says nonetheless, and he grunts in response, nodding slightly. A small victory.

The entire team aboard, the ramp raises to close behind her and the transport lifts off.

“Let me take a look at that,” Lúcio says, approaching Orisa and holding out his arms toward her leg. She tilts her head, holding it out of his reach.

“I must go back to Numbani at once for repair,” she says. “It will be easier for Efi if I have my pieces-”

“We’re going back to Gibraltar, not Numbani,” Lúcio says. “And you can’t walk around three-legged until we get a chance to head out again.” He gestures with his hands. “Maybe I can help you out. I am a healer.”

“I offer my assistance as well,” Zenyatta says, rising from his meditation. Orisa’s apertures widen to take him in, having forgotten he was there. His silent movement in battle (she wonders how he floats - it has to be magnetic, somehow, right?) made him almost fade into the background as she struggled to keep her Projected Barrier up against the constant barrage of enemy fire. Now, however, he stands on his feet, his orbs hanging benign around his neck like massive mala beads.

Orisa tries to step back from them, but her behind collides with the wall noisily and somehow the movement of her armored plating causes the open wound to spark brightly.

Armor integrity: 3%, reads off an alert on her HUD. Seek immediate repair.

“...All right,” she says, handing Lúcio her leg. When she lets it go he sags under the weight and his skated feet swerve to maintain balance.

It takes some finagling, but eventually they figure out a position that lets the two healers help her. She stands with her back feet planted on the ground, free hand outstretched for balance as her front leg standing on the table, glasses and playing cards brushed aside for the moment. The Fusion Driver has been disconnected and lies on the curved seat, and Orisa feels inexplicably... naked. The extra weight on an unstable side of her body was troublesome, however, so its removal was probably for the best.

Lúcio is stood on the seat between Orisa and the Driver, working with a small set of light tools to physically re-attach the leg, hands small and nimble, working wires and cables and supports with a musical fluidity. He hums quietly to himself as he works.

Zenyatta is on her other side, standing on the ground, watching Lúcio work and offering assistance. The DJ’s healing music is playing, but with the amount of damage she’d taken, it wasn’t able to do much. The biotic tech stitched scratches in her armor together, and in some places somehow fixed up her paint, but it did very little for her leg. The plan was for Lúcio to get it mostly connected, then Zenyatta would deploy his own healing to do the rest. With the two of them combined, they predicted that it would be good as new. Or, at worst, serviceable until they could get her to Dr. Ziegler or a mechanic (Lúcio suggested they ask Pharah to take a look if need be). Aside from occasional direction for Lúcio and soft whirs of servos, the monk is silent.

It takes maybe half an hour of diligent work before Lúcio straightens and shrugs. “That’s all of it, I think. Work your mojo, man.”

Zenyatta makes a noise like a soft laugh and nods. His orbs raise from his neck to float, glowing with energy Orisa doesn’t understand. There’s a bright flash of yellow light and then- oh, it’s very hard for her to explain. It feels almost as though she is overheating, warmed from the inside, but instead of triggering warnings and her cooling system, it feels... pleasant. She looks up to see a yellow orb of light, tethered to her by a stream of energy almost reminiscent of her mini-Graviton Charge. Her vision is rimmed in yellow and she feels an almost otherworldly peace in the back of her mind, pleasant thoughts of Efi and Numbani and her own successes and triumphs almost managing to distract her from her leg reconnecting to her body successfully, Lúcio amping up the volume on his music to aid further.

“We are as one, my sister,” Zenyatta says, resting a palm on her side gently, the contact welcome.

Armor integrity: 80%... 85%... 90%... 95%... 100%.

As it finishes, Orisa full-body shivers and steps back off the table, testing the give and take of her leg. It’s fine, as if nothing had happened, and she laughs.

“Thank you, Lúcio and Zenyatta,” she says warmly. “I am grateful for your assistance.” Orisa holds out her fist toward Lúcio, and after a confused pause he lights up and bumps his fist against hers.

“No problem,” Lúcio says with a beaming smile. “That’s what teammates are for. It feels alright?”

“It’s perfect, thank you,” she replies, then turns to Zenyatta. “What is this?” She points at the orb still tethered to her.

“My Orb of Harmony,” Zenyatta says, orbs once more settling, and the warmth leaves her buzzing as the orb disappears.

“What is it, though?” she asks again. “How does it function? It did not feel like biotics or nanobots.” As she speaks, she holds out the stub of her right arm toward the Driver and activates the powerful electromagnet, causing it to drag across the table and forcefully snap into place.

“What did it feel like?” Zenyatta asks, and Orisa pauses.

“It felt... warm,” she says. “Safe. It felt like... like a home I have never been to.”

Perhaps it is a trick of the light as Zenyatta bows his head slightly, but he seems to smile wryly. “That, sister, is the light of the Iris shining through you.”

Orisa has many questions, and it seems he can tell as he laughs, settling in lotus position on the floor where he stood. “Sit with me,” he says. Orisa does as told, spinning in place to make sure nothing will be crushed under her weight, and tucking her legs gingerly beneath herself. When she is situated, he speaks again. “Ask your questions. I can feel them buzzing inside your head.”

“Why do you call me ‘sister’?” she asks. “What is the Iris?” A pause. “How do you float?”

Zenyatta laughs again. “I call you ‘sister’ because you and I are one within the Iris. And as for your second question... I cannot answer that. The Iris shines its light where it is welcome, and it seemed more than welcome within you.”

Orisa feels only more confused, tilting her head and re-adjusting her apertures. “Is it because we are omnics?”

“It is not not because we are omnics,” Zenyatta says, and the double negative does not help. “I have dedicated my life to the Iris, and through it I have found ways to aid my allies and destroy my enemies. Through the Iris, we omnics can transcend our programming and be more than we imagine.” He paused. “Perhaps you have heard this before.... They say that the only thing separating omnics from robots is that omnics have souls. There’s no explanation for it - Omnica Corporation called it a fluke of their mutating code, experts and philosophers have ideas but no answers. The Iris is the cause and the effect, the source and the product, where we begin and where we end.”

Orisa pauses to mull this over for several moments of silence. “That doesn't make any sense, Zenyatta.”

“Neither do we, my sister,” he said with a playfulness that should have been unbecoming of a monk, but fit Zenyatta just fine. “Yet here we are.”

She mulls that over, but can't think of any more questions that would perhaps lead to a more concrete answer. She nods silently to herself, thoughtful.

Then, she remembers her last question. “How do you float?” she asks, prepared for perhaps another nonsensical, philosophical answer about the Iris and omnic souls and a strange, innate power that rests within-

“A force even more mysterious,” he says smoothly, and Orisa leans forward in her curiosity. “Magnetism.”

The answer startles a laugh out of her. Her trepidation of before is gone - she cannot wait to tell Efi about this.

Thanks for reading! If you liked it, pls reblog and maybe head over to Ao3 to give kudos and a comment!!