#Wolf Racing

[chloesimaginationthings]

Hear me out, Michael would think Roxy is SICK AF

[fuji09]

Something I just realized, Deaton was the Hale emissary, he was around when Derek was younger, he had to have known about what happened with Paige. He had to have known why Derek's eyes glowed blue.

Something that irked me when watching and rewatching the show, Deaton had made a promise to Talia that if anything happened to her that he would help and look after Derek. But when Derek returns, and yes I know Derek had tied him up and punched him thinking he was the alpha, Deaton honestly didn't really help him.

When Derek was an alpha, Deaton constantly talked down to Derek and kept telling him how shitty of an alpha he was, instead of actually, ya know, helping the poor kid who had no idea how to be an alpha and was doing the best he could.

Then Deaton comes up with this plan and gets Scott to carry out how to kill Gerard, you can't tell me that wasn't the end goal, there is no way having mountain ash in your body and then getting the bite isn't supposed to kill you, and then he has Scott force Derek to bite Gerard. Deaton knows in the Hale family the bite is a gift. Deaton has to know the trauma Derek went through at only 15 years old with Paige, and yet Deaton still didn't even try to get Derek in on the plan! Which when it comes to the evil Argents, Derek would have done it willingly to defeat them. There was no need to take Derek's bodily autonomy away.

I know a lot of us hate that Scott forced Derek to bite Gerard, but after more rewatching and thinking, I realized that Deaton came up with this plan. Deaton chose to keep Derek in the dark about it. Deaton had Scott force Derek to bite Gerard. This is honestly more on Deaton, the adult, than it is Scott. Deaton was like a father figure to Scott and he trusted him completely and would do whatever was asked of him.

That's pretty fucked up for someone who promised the now dead alpha and mother of Derek, he would help and look after Derek. Deaton did Derek real dirty.

[matoitech]

blue but to the two hands mv bcuz i saw it and was like holy shit thats so blue.. he would do that he should have that. drawing him in his own racing gear consumed my mind. hes taking pics w some of his backup dancers afterwards

[m6rija]

⟡ ⠀rather unexpected⠀⠀⊹⠀⠀ guns n' roses & you

gn reader. poly relationship later on, reader is just messing around with them here, might be not fully canon-compliant. argenthill is established.

wandering through the intricate cosmos, the knight of beauty and the cowboy met by mere chance.

they had several encounters, and exchanged ideals, words and opinions in brief conversations.

boothill was attracted to the singularity of the man.

it was unusual for the cowboy that someone would not avoid him just because he was a wanted criminal, and that he would go out of his way to praise every aspect of him.

argenti had never seen a cyborg so… beautiful. he was completely captivated by his body, every part of it and the complexity of it— it was simply spectacular.

and just as the two of them met and began a curious and unexpected relationship through these encounters, they found you during their many travels.

over and over again; you were always there, on some distant planet or star.

they knew nothing about you, beyond your voice, unique appearance and… curious ability to be everywhere at once.

it was both an ethereal and ominous feeling

why didn't boothill's bullets reach you?

why were you oblivious to argenti's voice?

you seemed to disappear in icy frost every time they tried to get close to you.

you were unconscious of how peculiar you were to both of them, and you played along with the little cat-and-mouse chase you had meticulously orchestrated. the company of these two was not bothersome, after all.

however; every symphony comes to an end and although aha's ballad danced along with you, you were exhausted after what seemed like months of empty haunting.

you were unaware then that this would be the prelude to a everlasting, gentle orchestra.

“good evening, gentlemen”

your voice was as cold as winter itself, and the hands positioned on his shoulders felt like a sharp sickle blade.

soon you would feel a gun and a spear kissing your cheeks, and a faint smile would appear on your lips.

you closed your eyes, forming crescents as you felt the spear separate with an agonized sigh.

“forgive me, i had no idea it was about you. it has never been my intention to appear hostile.”

his voice genuinely sounded distraught

in comparison to the cowboy, who was still pointing at you with a determined frown on his face.

argenti tried to convince him to greet you differently, but his words seemed to be silent to the cyborg.

you watched the interaction with amusement, grin gradually widening

“how could i trust someone who has only been giving us trouble all this time?”

you felt boothill's finger bury itself in the trigger of his gun

in a split second the shot echoed out, bullet stuck in a far wall while behind both of their backs you laughed.

you feared for a few seconds that the cyborg's action would cause you harm, but you trusted blindly in your abilities to get you out of that predicament.

you wanted to have fun with them, to prolong the interactions as a dramatic finale to a lively score. it never crossed your mind to hurt them in any way— you were as attracted to them as they were to you.

you covered your mouth with one of your hands, the cowboy's hat resting on your head as if that was its place.

although in your opinion that's where it should stay

it's not as if you didn't know the implications of that action.

“you…!” the cyborg looked dumbfounded, his companion equally surprised

“no need to resort to violence, 'hill. i've been merciful, greeting you properly, and now you want to scare me away?”

but you were a curious fool

even if they tried to get rid of you, you would continue to accompany them on their travels through the starry firmament.

argenti mentioned something about how charming it was the way you could evade them at will.

boothill seemed more annoyed by it than captivated.

and while you were listening to argenti's nice words, he kept aiming at you and making several attempts to remove the hat.

it wasn't until the knight of beauty approached his partner to give him a gentle kiss on his cheek that he stopped.

genuinely, he completely stopped

you burst out laughing at the sight of the puzzled face of the criminal, his eyes almost showing blue screens due to the suddenness of that action

you returned the hat to its owner as he remained frozen.

“if they had any intention of harming us, they would have done it by now, darling.”

argenti was right

you just wanted to get closer to them, that was all.

wasn't it?

inspo from jadestone2's roses 'n bullets for her.

part two

[rennebright]

RQ銀狼 by Qiandai以宇 [Twitter/X] ※Illustration shared with permission from the artist. If you like this artwork please support the artist by visiting the source.

[leclercskiesahead]

The grammar error sent me before I realised the wasp joke

[shanks]

Qiandai以宇

[wheelsgoroundincircles]

James Hunt, Wolf, Monaco 1979

[dailyjameshunt]

James in 1979, in Wolf Racing overalls, photographer unknown

[felassan]

I do not know if you have posted anything about this yet but can we talk about Harding turning darkspawn into stone like Bodan did in DA2???

hello! ◕‿◕ [Sandal DA2 frozen darkspawn scene] yess. 👁️ it's interesting that Bodan had a theory that maybe Sandal is lyrium-addled due to his exposure to lyrium (blood of Titans) in the Deep Roads, as the other thing that Harding's new powers bring to mind is Valta's new magical powers to shape stone at the end of Descent, after she was hit with raw lyrium during the battle with the Guardian in the Wellspring. I can't wait to find out more about the reason for Harding's new powers and what it might mean for the dwarves going forward, and/or in terms of Titan lore reveals etc.. (๑>ᴗ<๑)

[thomas-farrelly-2004]

out fowa a glamorous race with glamrock freddy and the gang

[jimbohusky]

stream comm for hotbeveragedog on twitter!

[vicky-sarah-arts]

Roxanne and Chica because they deserve more appreciation

[lights-at-night]

i might be shot but tbh i think fiction podcasts have an issue with racial representation

[m6rija]

⟡ ⠀through your eyes⠀⠀⊹⠀⠀ soshiro hoshina & you

gn, flower shop owner reader. soshiro realizes how much you mean to him, and how afraid he is to admit it. hurt/comfort. this is the part 2 of my scaredy cat series.

it had been a busy few months for both of you. hoshina had finally been accepted into the defense forces while you busied yourself moving into the heart of tokyo, setting up a modest little shop adorned with the seasonal flowers.

however, you made plans to say goodbye soon, as the man would be heading back south as he was assigned a base in the area. you had always remained close to each other since your childhoods and had formed daily habits that went around that, so it was a bit of a shock to hear the news.

but you would still support him from afar— even with empty words as you watched the tv hoping to see his smiling face on some news. you wished the best for the man even though you lacked the right words to express it in front of him.

you had watched him strive since he was a little boy; when he trained with his brother, when calluses began to grow on his fingers after carrying swords for long periods of time and how he explained his techniques to you with fervor.

you always felt that he deserved the best— the nicest compliments and the sweetest words, for he had worked so hard.

and somehow, you wanted to be the person who showered him with such praise. no matter how much your lips trembled as you tried to say something that would sound corny, or how much your hands clenched the fabric of your garments as you blushed in embarrassment, thinking of something nice to say to soshiro.

you hadn't changed a bit since you were a little kid, you knew that. and that was only highlighted by the way your eyes were fixed on a null point as you felt firm arms wrap around your waist with a certain warmth and utmost care.

you felt your cheeks burn, and silence greeted you as you shared that embrace that was beginning to linger longer than it should.

his head rested on your shoulder and you could feel his breathing vaguely bump against your ear.

you didn't know that his eyes, likewise, were looking at a blank spot behind you. you meant so much to him emotionally— even though he didn't mention it and you remained unaware of it.

you were the first person who welcomed him with open arms without judging what he did and how he did it. the first person who was interested in learning his techniques and who was genuinely intrigued by his extracurricular activities.

at that age he was used to hearing the opinions of only his clan, so seeing something different than that was special to him.

you were just a curious child from a family that happened to live not far from the hoshina settlement. during the summer vacations you liked to go visit him to hang out with him and watch him train until night fell and you would say goodbye with a broad smile.

every day he waited for you, even if he didn't say it out loud. he always took time off for you, to greet you and chat a bit while he rested from his practices— his older brother teased him by saying that he was in love, and he deeply denied it.

but perhaps soichiro's words weren't too far from the truth.

soshiro began to integrate you into his daily life and unconsciously dedicated part of his busy schedule to you just for the whim of seeing you; to see your smile, to hear your voice while you explained something to him, or simply to watch you while spending time together.

he appreciated you a lot more than he did any other acquaintance and that only reinforced the theory that he liked you

as much as he was afraid to admit it

as much as he knew that it was a huge liability because of his line of work

for he didn't want to put your life at risk, or involve you in the intricacies of his work that might escalate to something bigger

for he knew that your life was volatile, fragile in the sight of a kaiju

he would never forgive himself if he was seriously wounded one day and saw you looking at his bandaged body in distress. he would never forgive himself if he lost his life in combat while you waited for him at home, patient and innocent.

so he turned away from you before his body betrayed him, before he felt the need to cling to you and ignore his duties as part of the defense forces. because you meant so much to him and soshiro wasn't yet ready to say goodbye.

so he would force it.

"soshiro?"

your voice, trembling with obvious hesitation, left your lips in an almost silent trickle. you dared to observe the scowl that adorned his face, how his lips were pressed into a thin line and how those crimson orbs were somehow avoiding looking directly at you

a knot was born in both of your throats, as you clung to each other because of the weight you assigned to the other's presence in your lives. you were like puzzle pieces— made to be together, hands intertwined, close.

so this sudden event would cause certain repercussions in your lives. consequences that both would evade and hide when facing the uncertainty, not knowing how the other would react when declaring something as heavy as love.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Naomi Klein's "Doppelganger"

Tomorrow (September 6) at 7pm, I'll be hosting Naomi Klein at the LA Public Library for the launch of Doppelganger.

On September 12 at 7pm, I'll be at Toronto's Another Story Bookshop with my new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

If the Naomi be Klein you’re doing just fine If the Naomi be Wolf Oh, buddy. Ooooof.

I learned this rhyme in Doppelganger, Naomi Klein's indescribable semi-memoir that is (more or less) about the way that people confuse her with Naomi Wolf, and how that fact has taken on a new urgency as Wolf descended into conspiratorial politics, becoming a far-right darling and frequent Steve Bannon guest:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374610326/doppelganger

This is a very odd book. It is also a very, very good book. The premise – exploring the two Naomis' divergence – is a surprisingly sturdy scaffold for an ambitious, wide-ranging exploration of this very frightening moment of polycrisis and systemic failure:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCjcwVhFhTA

Wolf once had a cluster of superficial political and personal similarities to Klein: a feminist author of real literary ability, a Jewish woman, and, of course, a Naomi. Klein grew accustomed to being mistaken for Wolf, but never fully comfortable. Wolf's politics were always more Sheryl Sandberg than bell hooks (or Emma Goldman). While Klein talked about capitalism and class and solidarity, Wolf wanted to "empower" individual women to thrive in a market system that would always produce millions of losers for every winner.

Fundamentally: Klein is a leftist, Wolf was a liberal. The classic leftist distinction goes: leftists want to abolish a system where 150 white men run the world; liberals want to replace half of those 150 with women, queers and people of color.

The past forty years have seen the rise and rise of a right wing politics that started out extreme (think of Reagan and Thatcher's support for Pinochet's death-squads) and only got worse. Liberals and leftists forged an uneasy alliance, with liberals in the lead (literally, in Canada, where today, Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party governs in partnership with the nominally left NDP).

But whenever real leftist transformation was possible, liberals threw in with conservatives: think of the smearing and defenestration of Corbyn by Labour's right, or of the LibDems coalition with David Cameron's Tories, or of the Democrats' dirty tricks to keep Bernie from appearing on the national ballot.

Lacking any kind of transformational agenda, the liberal answer to capitalism's problems always comes down to minor tweaks ("making sure half of our rulers are women, queers and people of color") rather than meaningful, structural shifts. This leaves liberals in the increasingly absurd position of defending the indefensible: insisting that the FDA shouldn't be questioned despite its ghastly failures during the opioid epidemic; claiming that the voting machine companies whose defective products have been the source of increasingly urgent technical criticism are without flaw; embracing the "intelligence community" as the guardians of the best version of America; cheerleading for deindustrialization while telling the workers it harmed with "learn to code"; demanding more intervention in speech by our monopolistic tech companies; and so on.

It's not like leftists ever stopped talking about the importance of transformation and not just reform. But as the junior partners in the progressive coalition, leftists have been drowned out by liberal reformers. In most of the world, if you are worried about falling wages, corporate capture of government, and scientific failures due to weak regulators, the "progressive" answer was to tell you it was all in your head, that you were an unhinged conspiratorialist:

https://doctorow.medium.com/the-swivel-eyed-loons-have-a-point-3434d7cbfae2

For Klein, it's this failure that the faux-populist right has exploited, redirecting legitimate anger and fear into racist, xenophobic, homophobic, sexist and transphobic rage. The deep-pocketed backers of the conservative movement didn't just find a method to get turkeys to vote for Christmas – progressives created the conditions that made that method possible.

If progressives answer pregnant peoples' concerns about vaccine risks – concerns rooted in the absolute failure of prenatal care – with dismissals, while conservatives accept those concerns and funnel them into conspiratorialism, then progressives' message becomes, "We are the movement of keeping things as they are," while conservatives become the movement of "things have to change." Think here of the 2016 liberal slogan, "America was already great," as an answer to the faux-populist rallying cry, "Make America great again."

When liberals get to define what it means to be "progressive," the fundamental, systemic critique is swept away. Conservatives – conservatives! – get to claim the revolutionary mantle, to insist that they alone are interested in root-and-branch transformation of society.

Like the two Naomis, conservatives and progressives become warped mirrors of one another. The progressive campaign for bodily autonomy is co-opted to be the foundation of the anti-vax movement. This is the mirror world, where concerns about real children – in border detention, or living in poverty in America – are reflected back as warped fever-swamp hallucinations about kids in imaginary pizza restaurant basements and Hollywood blood sacrifice rituals. The mirror world replaces RBG with Amy Coney-Barrett and calls it a victory for women. The mirror world defends workers by stoking xenophobic fears about immigrants.

But progressives let it happen. Progressives cede anti-surveillance to conservatives, defending reverse warrants when they're used to enumerate Jan 6 insurrectionists (nevermind that these warrants are mostly used to round up BLM demonstrators). Progressives cede suspicion of large corporations to conservatives, defending giant, exploitative, monopolistic corporations so long as they arouse conservative ire with some performative DEI key-jingling. Progressives defend the CIA and FBI when they're wrongfooting Trump, and voting machine vendors when they're turned into props for the Big Lie.

These issues are transformed in the mirror world: from grave concerns about real things, into unhinged conspiracies about imaginary things. Urgent environmental concerns are turned into a pretense to ban offshore wind turbines ("to protect the birds"). Worry about gender equality is transformed into seminars about women's representation in US drone-killing squads.

For Klein, the transformation of Wolf from liberal icon – Democratic Party consultant and Lean-In-type feminist icon – to rifle-toting Trumpling with a regular spot on the Steve Bannon Power Hour is an entrypoint to understanding the mirror world. How did so many hippie-granola yoga types turn into vicious eugenicists whose answer to "wear a mask to protect the immunocompromised" is "they should die"?

The PastelQ phenomenon – the holistic medicine and "clean eating" to QAnon pipeline – recalls the Nazi obsession with physical fitness, outdoor activities and "natural" living. The neoliberal transformation of health from a collective endeavor – dependent on environmental regulation, sanitation, and public medicine – into a private one, built entirely on "personal choices," leads inexorably to eugenics.

Once you start looking for the mirror world, you see it everywhere. AI chatbots are mirrors of experts, only instead of giving you informed opinions, they plagiarize sentence-fragments into statistically plausible paragraphs. Brands are the mirror-world version of quality, a symbol that isn't a mark of reliability, but a mark of a mark, a sign pointing at nothing. Your own brand – something we're increasingly expected to have – is the mirror world image of you.

The mirror world's overwhelming motif is "I know you are, but what am I?" As in, "Oh, you're a socialist? Well, you know that 'Nazi' stands for 'National Socialist, right?" (and inevitably, this comes from someone who obsesses over the 'Great Replacement' and considers themself a 'race realist').

This isn't serious politics, but it is seriously important. "Antisemitism is the socialism of fools," its obsession with "international bankers" the mirror-world version of the real and present danger from big finance and private equity wreckers. And, as Klein discusses with great nuance and power, the antisemitism discussion is eroded from both sides: both by antisemites, and by doctrinaire Zionists who insist that any criticism of Israel is always and ever antisemetic.

As a Jew in solidarity with Palestinians, I found this section of the book especially good – thoughtful and vigorous, pulling no punches and still capturing the discomfort aroused by this deliberately poisoned debate.

This thoughtful, vigorous prose and argumentation deserves its own special callout here: Klein has produced a first-rate literary work just as much as this is a superb philosophical and political tome. In this moment where the mirror world is exploding and the real world is contracting, this is an essential read.

I'll be Klein's interlocutor tomorrow night (Sept 6) at the LA launch for Doppelganger. We'll be appearing at 7PM at the @LAPublicLibrary:

https://lafl.org/ALOUD

Livestreaming at:

https://youtube.com/live/jIoAh-jxb2k

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine