#also this is specifically red spy!

[exorcismist]

fuck canon, embrace headcanon

(long post, sorry!!!)

Besides her fear of commitment, Spy ran off when Scout was born because she had recently discovered that she was transgender. She didn't know if Scout's mom (im gonna use my hc name for her from here on out— Julie/Julianna) would be approving and didn't want to hurt Julie because she knew she probably wouldn't love her anymore (newsflash, she still would). Spy knew she deserved better, so she ran, but she never really went far. She simply moved to New York (Albany— or Salem, i like that better), where she could still keep an eye on them.

Of course, she traveled all the time for her assassination jobs, but every now and then she would visit Boston, walking down the street of their home in a different disguise each time. She did get to watch Scout grow up, but from afar. It hurt her every time she saw him alone. There were a couple of times she came by later at night (just to see if Julie had moved on to a new man), and saw her precious Jérémy sitting in the backyard all alone. In those moments, she wanted nothing more than to run up and embrace him, but she couldn't.

^^ (That could have been a reason she said, "You're stronger than you'll ever know, Jeremy," in the comics. She knew some of what he had been through by those check-ins.)

She was already working for Red a little before Scout was, and she begged Pauling to get him in discreetly. By the luck of whatever god was up there, it worked. It was her first time seeing her son face to face since he was just a baby, but she couldn't find it in her to tell him. She never could.

She did (eventually) reach back out to Julie, showing up at her doorstep one night and apologizing profusely. She had drunk a bit before she came, maybe a little more than she should have. Spy just had to dull the pain or she might die just looking into Julie's eyes. Julianna was rightfully upset, but she could see that Spy was genuinely distraught. She asked her to come inside and talk, as the boys weren't home then. Spy explained everything, leaving out the bits about who she really was, though she hinted at it here and there, but was too scared.

Julie saw right through that. She understood her immediately. Spy nearly exploded into tears when Julie told her that she would love her no matter who she was. She cried in Julianna's arms harder than she had ever cried before. Julie could also see that she was clearly a little drunk, and she didn't want to leave her alone in this kind of state, so she let her stay the night.

Even after that, Spy made Julie promise not to tell Jeremy. She had to be the one to tell him face to face, and she knew that. Spy held it off for years; she was terrified of how Scout would react. Would he be angry? God, she hoped not. Then they were fired, and she was so, so upset. It hurt her, God, why had she held off for so long? Now, what if she never got to tell him?

The comics took place (even though comic 7 doesn't exist, shhh), and once everything went back to "normal", she told him. Actually told him.

How Scout took it is up to interpretation. I have so many different ideas I couldn’t possibly explain them all (most of them are sooooo angsty btw. hurt no comfort type angst.)

[hacksawboy]

fuck it .heres my edgy sniper oc. this is tumblr im not gonna get shamed for this

ft my spy oc theyre so in hate 🩷

[fluffy-starlaxy]

Behold! The least complicated TF2 shipping chart,

Fluf edition.

These are the ones that I can remember liking off the top of my head, but I enjoy almost every other mercs ships (except scout and spy for obvious reasons..)

Blanks & og post (got the screenshot from another tumblr user)

[chaoticwriting]

Part 1

Fenton Crime Family 2

-Batcave-

The batmobile enters the cave with a resounding boom. When it stops, Nightwing, Batman, Robin and Red Robin jump out of the car with Batman going to the batcomputer to make a report. The rest go to change their suit when the elevator bell sounded. Out comes Alfred with a tray of tea and snacks.

Alfred: Returning early today, Master Bruce?

Bruce: *Grunts* Someone has already captured all the rogues before we reach them.

Red Robin: And Oracle can't find any footage of the person in question. All she got is blurry and fuzzy images and the next moment, the rogue has already been tied up. The only thing we know is that the rogues that got beaten up all are around The Bowery.

A revved of a motorcycle enters the Batcave and Red Hood enters with Black Bat and Spoiler following from behind. Red Hood gets off his bike and sits on one of the sofas while taking a plate of cookies from the tray.

Red Hood: I think I know the guy you are talking about.

Red Robin: You know?

Red Hood: Yeah. There is a new gang in The Bowery. They call themselves the Undead. Their MO is completely different from any other gang in Gotham.

Red Robin: So our guy is part of this gang?

Red Hood: Worse. The guy is possibly the leader of the gang.

Red Robin: What?

Red Hood: You say any video of the guy is corrupted in someway right?

Red Robin: Yeah. The image is blurry and the audio is unusable.

Red Hood: Yeah. That's the same thing that happens to all the spying devices I use on them. No recording devices can directly record the leader specifically but from what I know, the leader is supposed to be a child.

Batman: A child?

Red Hood: Yeah. And no. She will not get adopted by you. Apparently, she has a personal vendetta against rich people.

Nightwing: Welp. There goes my new sister.

Robin: I would appreciate it if father put more restraint on his adoption problem.

Batman: *Grunts*

Red Robin: What else do we know about the girl?

Red Hood: Not much actually. Most of the people around her are children around Damian's age so we can assume she is also around that age.

Red Robin: What about her gang?

Red Hood: Remember how I say their MO is completely different from anyone else? Yeah, that's because they don't seem to work like a gang.

Batman: Explain.

Red Hood: They don't partake in any illegal activity at all except for some sketchy gold selling that doesn't have any source. Even those golds are sold at a very high price because they are old gold. Apparently, the collectors are going crazy for them.

Red Robin: Then how do they obtain money?

Red Hood: Using their money as capital, they bought buildings and shops and made their gang members work there. Hell if not for the fact that I know it's a gang, I would have mistaken them as a company.

Red Robin: Anything else?

Red Hood: The leader also has a brother and an unknown sister. Both are older with only the brother ever showing up. White hair, green eyes and around Timmy's and Cass's height.

Black Bat: *Frown*

Spoiler: Wassup BB? Got any news?

Black Bat: I meet the brother.

Red Robin: What? Where?

Black Bat: On a rooftop. He says he is on the lookout for rogues.

Nightwing: You are not hurt right? He didn't attack you?

Black Bat: No. Not hostile.

Red Hood: I thought so. My underlings also say that The Undead is quite friendly. They wouldn't actively hunt other gangs unless provoked first.

Batman: Find out more about them. All of you go to bed. I will finish the report.

Red Hood: Well I guess that's my cue to go. See you never old man.

Red Hood then gets on his motorcycle and exits the cave. The others also move and return to the manor. The others realize that Cass is unusually absent minded the whole time they are going to bed. Cass is usually quiet but her eyes also show that she is not focusing on her surroundings.

She lays on her bed after showering thinking heavily on today's event. The guy that she meets on the rooftop seems so familiar to her. She just doesn't know who.

-The Bowery-

Ellie is not having a good day. First, Danny and Jazz are pressuring her to go to school at breakfast. She says she doesn't like school and their response is how can she not like it when she never experienced it herself. To that response, she has seen how Danny struggles with class and she is pretty sure he is not having fun.

Then there is that new gang that suddenly rises up. It's one thing to make a new gang. But then they have the audacity to send people to kidnap Danny. Sure, Danny is strong enough to raze Gotham to the ground if he wants to. But it's the principle that counts. She is going to punt their group to the ground for doing something like that.

And then there is this Arkham breakout. Why can't all these guys just stay in Arkham anyway? It's not like there is much for them to do outside. After she beats up Condiment King (Ellie swears she is going to kill this guy for covering her in mustard) and Professor Pyg, she gets the news that Danny has already beat up all the rogues near The Bowery.

On the bright side though, she met this cute guy named Damian. He has a little temper but not something she hasn't dealt with before. She is apparently some rich guy's son but she really can't see the similarities in their mannerism from what she sees in this Brucie Wayne guy. After talking for a bit they promised to go out on a date at a zoo. His dad sponsors it and apparently there is a new animal in the exhibition.

After all things are settled she goes back home to have dinner with her family. After teasing Danny a little bit about his date, she goes to bed excited for the date.

Part 3

[paepaerest]

doodle dump and human designs for a particular AU work in progress

These were made in our lord 2024 but only a few months ago, who knows if most of these designs have been revamped lol and here are some thoughts!

Dictatious - I wanted to edge-ify his design in the most simplest way and also make him look kinda endearing. I kept some of his troll form's features (ie: like his weirdly-shaped jawline, "stubble", hair,) and tried to replicate it in his human form in a way that would work, yet make him not look too trollish or too indistinguishable. Excessive piercings as a bonus and a frankenstein-hairdo, he's definitely a nosferatu freak and listens to type o negative/the cure.

Gunmar & Bular - Gunmar has two colored versions where he's in a yellow phase so he wears a yellow shirt and dyes his hair yellow, change his eye-contacts... Vice versa with blue, this change is very prominent and important to the plot but also, not going to lie Gunmar, it's a little gay. I couldn't imagine him with a lighter-skin tone or it would've looked a bit off (as well with the rest of his colours), so I managed to play around with his iconic troll colors while sticking true with how I wanted him to look like. Bular, oh my goodness I was reading The Secret History of Trollkind and there was a panel where Argh had done him some damage to his right upper lip, kinda badass. Had to add it onto his design, as it is very important to the storyline. If you've noticed, I tried to shape their hairstyles to look similar to their troll horns.

Ursuna - I'm a little bias towards her (you'll see a pattern with the others, lol) and she's not going down without feeling pretty. I wanted her beauty to balance with her charismatic 'leadership' and make her someone you'd least expect to be a villian, or already suspect she is one. Yes, she'll do drag. Yes, she is mother. No, I do not support her actions.

Angor Rot - His hair-do following the same inspiration from his troll form's horns, I imagine he'd style his own hairstyle and give himself braids. He's a true entrepreneur, and still is very magical! He carves voodoo stones etc etc, call him a false prophet or call out on his facade... nothing is going to happen, lol (Still, pack up & move out to a new country for good measure!) Someone put him in a retirement home, he is TIRED.

Gremlin - I spy with my little eye, the random french guy behind Gunmar & Bular. He is specifically the gremlin who draws a moustache onto his face while he trolls around with an alphabet kid's toy. (Yeah he has experienced death once)

NotEnrique/Rique - I don't know, I wanted to make him a normal guy. Who looks like a kid, but is actually almost in his 30's with a heavy boston-scottish accent ? he's a punk.

Draal - He has a new design now, but I thought it'd be nice to bring up his older design. Adidas pants, that says it all. Over-competitive and an over-achiever. He doesn't care about trends, just wears whatever is comfortable and it happens to be a brand clothing. I wanted to give him a fur-coat to resemble his troll form's spiky back, and keep his cool prosthetic arm. He's like the Costco guys with his dad but angrier

Kanjigar - A friend said he looked like he'd live in the suburbs. I see it. An arguably good father (that part seems to be controversial), I wanted to give him a Walter White vibe, while he is supposed to represent the Police.

Argh/Arthur - Big guy, build is a little wider and heavier, still has a muscular build, overall he's changed since. He used to have a slimmer, more muscular build when he was still working under Gunmar, call that an improvement. I got inspired by other people's human designs of Argh and HAD to design how I would see Argh. (I had an Argh/Blinky ao3 binge-reading phase, kiwibird being one of them aaah)

Vendel - A majestic wise old man, managed to keep his hair that long for over a decade. Gave him a skirt, he's kinda giving irish I think. In my defense, he had red-hair when he was younger. (Shown in The Secret History of Trollkind or The Felled !) Treatable hunchback and skin cancer, he and the hospital bill are opps. Does a lot of good for his community.

Speaking of fanfics, i plan to reread the one that heavily influenced me!!! and to know where I'm getting at please read below: the real thing

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Have any ideas on how a spy's job would work? I'm struggling to write about one

Writing Notes: Spy Characters

In the intelligence world, a spy is strictly defined as someone used to steal secrets for an intelligence organization.

Also: agent or asset; a spy is not a professional intelligence officer, and doesn’t usually receive formal training (though may be taught basic tradecraft). Instead, a spy either volunteers or is recruited to help steal information, motivated by ideology, patriotism, money, or by a host of other reasons, from blackmail to love.

From an intelligence perspective, their most important quality is having access to valuable information. For this reason, a government minister might make a great spy—but so might the janitor or a cafeteria worker in a government ministry.

Espionage - process of obtaining military, political, commercial, or other secret information by means of spies, secret agents, or illegal monitoring devices; sometimes distinguished from the broader category of intelligence gathering by its aggressive nature and its illegality.

Double Agent - someone who works for two sides.

Intelligence - In the spying world, intelligence means information collected by a government or other entity that can help guide decisions and actions regarding national security. But intelligence can also mean the process by which that information is acquired

How are spies recruited? Spies are recruited via an approach or pitch by a case officer. This often seeks to persuade the individual through appealing to ideology, patriotism, religion, ego, greed, or love, or sometimes by using blackmail or some other form of coercion. 

How do spies go undercover? Intelligence officers often operate abroad under some form of official cover, perhaps as diplomats in an embassy. Others operate without the protection of their government and must create a convincing cover that explains their presence and activities in a country—a businessperson, perhaps, or a student. The Russians call these officers “illegals,” the Americans call them “NOCs” (for Non-Official Cover). If caught, they’re on their own, and face arrest, even execution.

How do spies communicate?. Face-to-face meetings can be impractical, even deadly—especially if spies are caught red-handed passing or receiving classified information or carrying spy equipment. That’s why sharing information relies on covert communication or COVCOM. Methods include secret writing (such as invisible ink or tiny microdots) or sending and receiving secure messages using special technology (often concealed or even disguised to look like everyday objects).

How much does a secret agent make? Professional intelligence officers receive salaries based on their level of experience, like all government employees. Few own vintage Aston Martin DB5s and order beluga caviar on a regular basis. Spies can earn a lot more money, though. In the 1980s, CIA officer Aldrich Ames received over $4 million from the Soviets for betraying US secrets, enough to buy himself a half-million-dollar home in cash and a flashy red Jaguar. But living beyond his salary aroused the suspicions of US intelligence, which ultimately led to his arrest.

The Intelligence Cycle

Refers to the process through which spy agencies acquire information. It consists of at least 5 stages:  

Planning: Decision-makers task an intelligence agency to acquire information on certain topics or specific issues of concern (“requirements”). 

Collection: This is where the spies, agents, case officers, tech ops, scientists, hackers, and others come in, acquiring information from different sources in a myriad of creative ways. 

Processing: Collected information needs to be narrowed down, prioritized, and put into some kind of digestible format. This might also involve having to decode information. 

Analysis: This is the stage where collected information becomes something useful that decision-makers can use: intelligence.

Dissemination: Intelligence agencies get the final product to the decision-maker or “customer.�� Of course, it’s quite possible that this might prompt more questions… and the intelligence cycle begins all over again. 

Tips on Writing About Spies

Some tips from different sources:

Being a real-life spy isn’t always James Bond-glamorous. Spies are typically brilliant when it comes to reading people—your spy character needs to be curious and patient. It may take seven years for a spy to get their footing.

Normal people make the best spies. In real life, handlers are looking for a Regular Joe or Plain Jane with access—they don’t want someone who sticks out in a crowd or whose life is in disarray. They also want someone who is honest and immediately willing to own up to any mistakes they might have made. (Elizabeth Bentley may have had problems with this.) So, having a character who is bland as vanilla (at least on the outside) may work well in your favor.

Your spy could be overheard at any moment. It’s a good idea to have your spy flip on the radio to cover important conversations, or meet in a loud restaurant. (Which also solves the problem of having a potentially bugged apartment.) Even better is to meet near a water feature—the sound of falling water is unique and difficult to filter out even in modern-day recordings.

Spy gadgets are really cool. Ticking off the KGB is not. If your spy character runs afoul of the KGB (or one of its many predecessors), be prepared for creative assassination attempts that may or may not make use of more lethal spy gadgets. (Just ask Bohdan Stashynsky, a KGB officer who used a cyanide spraying spray gun to assassinate two Ukrainian nationalist leaders.) In a pinch, the Russians might resort to a tactic like Leon Trotsky’s ice pick to the face, but either way, it’s not going to be much fun for their target.

You need a good reason to be a spy. Idealists often make the best spies, but there are other motivations that might get your character to join up with the CIA, KGB, or some other spy organization. Does your character need the money being offered? Are they looking for a sense of purpose or belonging? Do they have an axe to grind with the government? Also, remember that the CIA doesn’t coerce people into informing for them. The Russians, on the other hand… Well, they’re a different story. 

Don’t draw portraits of spies, but draw portraits of people who happen to work as spies. The choices they make in their lives emerge from who they are, and those choices might conflict with the requirements of their spy work. The spy’s job may be to suborn friends, lie to adversaries, betray a trust, but it is the spy’s nagging, perhaps inconvenient, humanity that makes them suffer their choices, and excites the reader’s empathy.

Writing Tips: Spy Thriller

A step-by-step guide to writing a spy story with international intrigue and non-stop action:

Think of a killer concept. There are a lot of spy novels out there, so you need to come up with a story that has a new and unique angle. If you’re a history buff and have a specific area of interest—like Russian operatives, Nazi Germany during WWII, or American soldiers in the Middle East—go with where your passion lies. Come up with a fresh idea that people won’t feel like they’ve read before. Do some research. Find inspiration in real-life spy stories to tell yours.

Get familiar with spy tools. From spy cameras to surveillance equipment, the cool tools and gadgets of espionage fiction are part of what makes the genre fun. Get to know spycraft and tradecraft—the technology and techniques real spies use to track the enemy. Read news stories to see how espionage works today or in the time period you’re writing about. While espionage can also be incorporated into another genre, like science fiction, for the most part, spy novels emerge from actual events. That doesn’t mean you need to just use real tools of the trade. Create your own spy tech for your story.

Create an incredible protagonist. From Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, a CIA agent first introduced in The Hunt for Red October, to Ian Fleming’s most famous secret agent, James Bond, the protagonists of spy stories have long been ingrained in popular culture. Create a main character who readers will root for and who will persevere no matter what obstacle you throw in their way.

Send your character on a world-saving mission. Think about James Bond. His heart-pounding missions crossed international boundaries, and they always involved more than just taking down a bad guy: He always had to stop a massive attack that would kill innocent people. You need to justify the intense action by making the consequences big. To do this, start by coming up with your antagonist. Who are they and where are they from? What is their goal in the story? Once you know that, you’ll have your protagonist’s quest that will propel your plot.

Write highly visual action scenes. Red Sparrow and The Bourne Identity are action-packed films based on bestselling espionage novels. Spy books make great movies because the action translates well to the screen. When you sit down to start your story, think in pictures. Readers are expecting action so you need to lead with a dramatic scene that shows your protagonist at work in a perilous situation. You’ll need a few of these big scenes throughout your story—not to mention the climax which has to be big, suspenseful and, yes, visual. Use descriptive words to get the reader into the middle of the pulse-racing scene.

Use page-turning literary devices. Plot twists, cliffhangers, dramatic irony, foreshadowing, red herrings: When you write a spy novel, you’ll get to employ literary devices you might not have used before. To write a real page-turning story of espionage, make sure you take advantage of the tools that literature has to offer for maximum suspense.

You can also read about real life spies to guide your writing. Some examples:

John Walker (American spy)

Donald Maclean (British diplomat and spy)

Mata Hari (Dutch dancer and spy)

Nancy Hart (Confederate spy)

Audrey Hepburn as a WWII resistance spy

Famous Women Who Were Secretly Spies

Some of history’s most notable spies

List of spies

Some Terminology: Espionage

Agent - A person unofficially employed by an intelligence service, often as a source of information.

Black Bag Job - Secret entry into a home or office to steal or copy materials.

Clean - Unknown to enemy intelligence.

Dangle - A person who is made accessible to a foreign intelligence agency with the intent of being recruited by that agency to then work as a double agent for the person’s own country.

Eyes-Only - A designation signifying who may read a specific, classified document.

False Flag - A deliberate misrepresentation of motives or identity; an operation designed to appear as if it were conducted by someone other than the person or group responsible for it.

Ghoul - Agent who searches obituaries and graveyards for names of the deceased for use by agents.

Honey Trap - Slang for use of men or women in sexual situations to intimidate or snare others.

Innocent Postcard - A postcard with an innocuous message sent to an address in a neutral country to verify the continued security of an undercover operative.

L-Pill - A poison pill used by operatives to commit suicide.

More spy-related terms: 1 2 3

Sources: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ⚜ More: References ⚜ Writing Resources PDFs

[loveisanimaginarydagger3000]

The Soldier Of Death (10)- Nightmares

Natasha Romanoff X Super Soldier Reader 18+

Summary: Soldat Smerti. The Soldier of Death. You were the perfect weapon: loyal, obedient, and merciless, or so Hydra thought. What happens when these traits are put to the test? Your captivity in the Avenger's tower and the presence of a redhead makes you realise you didn't have to be a monster. The question was though; Did Hydra make you the monster or were you always one?

This fic will contains dark themes. Please read these warnings before starting any of these chapters: graphic descriptions of murder, violence, gore and torture, heavy angst, mental issues.

Please consider these warnings before reading

Word Count: 3.7k

General Masterlist | The Soldier Of Death Masterlist

Specific Chapter Warning: Dark thoughts, flashbacks/nightmares of experiments and murder, graphic descriptions of violence and gore.

—

A knock at your door snapped you out of your thoughts, blinking your eyes as your gaze flickered across your new room, briefly remembering where you were as you had zoned out for a considerable amount of time, still adjusting to the enormous change.

"Y/n?" Natasha's voice called gently from the other side of the door, an odd weight taking over your chest as a small pang of guilt invaded you, the thoughts from earlier haunting you as a mocking chuckle seemed to linger at the back of your mind, the sight of her lifeless eyes staring back at you unable to be erased. Your eyes flickered down to your hands that trembled slightly, every time you blinked the image flickering between your normal hands and blood stained ones, the darkness incessant on tormenting you, determined to ensure you suffered.

Show her the real you, let's see if she still comes crawling back to check on us.

This was the real 'you', you argued back, still refusing to accept that the darkness was truly a part of you, desperate to believe it was something Hydra put into your head and not your own sick and twisted mind.

Stop lying to yourself. You crave to hurt others, to kill others. It's only a matter of time before she sees that too.

Another knock helps drown out the sinister words, your head snapping over to the door, noticing how it opens slightly, Natasha calling your name again.

"Y/n? Can I come in?" she asks, part of you screaming no, not wanting to put her in danger while the other part of you wants her to stay with you, to help numb your conflicted state and offer a peaceful escape for a little while.

"Sure," you answer with a hesitant voice, the spy immediately picking up on your discomfort as she enters the room, her enticing green scanning over the room to see how you'd changed a few things. She noticed how the mirror in the large room was covered with a sheet, your bathroom door shut and partly blocked by the bedside table, the sofa having moved closer to the window where you were currently sat curled up, your hands hugging your knees to your chest as you stared ahead at the view. Her brows furrowed at how small you seemed, her mouth opening and closing as she was unsure of what to say, not too sure as to what caused your sudden switch in demeanour.

"Is everything alright?" she murmurs, cautiously moving to sit on the other end of the sofa you were on, observing your reaction. Your fingers started to drum against your legs in an anxious manner, your gaze still fixated on the view outside but she could tell you were watching her in your peripheral vision.

From what you could see, you noticed how the gentle glow from the sun that streamed through the window caused her red hair to appear more vivid, her skin highlighted beautifully by the light which caused it to look impossibly soft and smooth, the green of her eyes also popping as the light caused them to look even more emerald if that were possible.

"Yeah," you sigh out, aware of how obvious the lie seemed, not too bothered at the moment as you didn't want to tell her the truth, to scare her away and show her that side of you. You would never want her to see that side of you.

"You know you can talk to me, right?" she almost whispers, her eyes trained on you rather than the spectacle that was outside, the sun starting to set which was why she was originally here.

"I know," you murmur back, risking a look towards her, noticing the tenderness behind her eyes, the gentle and soft smile that she was offering to you, nothing to indicate fear or hate present on her face. A warmth replaced the odd weight that had settled in your chest, getting lost in her enchanting green as she let the gaze linger, your eyes eventually flickering away as the darkness seeps back into your thoughts.

Let me talk to her, let's see what happens then

They snickered, your jaw clenching at their mocking tone, having a vague idea of what they would do if you lost control, the desire to protect her encouraging you to continue the tiresome battle of your mind.

When you remain quiet for a little longer, the room being enveloped in silence, Natasha speaks up again. She could sense there was something going on in your mind, just not sure as to what, the redhead longing to help you be able to be free of whatever Hydra did to you, just wanting you to be able to be the real you. Not their weapon.

"Do you still want to see the sunset from the roof?" she asks in a soft murmur, not wanting to push you and make you feel as though you had to come as, although she was eager to help distract you from whatever war was going on inside you, she knew that today would have been a lot, the earlier incident of the medical tests and training along with the adjustment to everything going to have taken its toll on you.

The room once again was wrapped up in a silence as you thought over her request, the wait so long Natasha thought you may not have heard her. When her mouth opened to ask again, you responded,

"Perhaps... Another night," you whisper, looking at her with an apologetic glint in your eyes as you could tell she was just trying to help, that odd weight stomping out the warmth as disappointment took over. Earlier, you were excited to go with her but now you felt too on edge to truly enjoy it, your expression conveying your previous excitement.

Natasha doesn't take your words to heart, smiling a little as you tried to make your rejection sound as polite as possible, your words also giving her hope as you had suggested another time, your gaze flickering down to her lips as they tugged into a slightly wider smile as a small one grew on your face.

"Another night," she whispers back, her eyes holding an indecipherable glint in them as she slowly pushes herself off of the sofa to make her way back to the door, pausing and turning to look back at you. "Enjoy the rest of your night Y/n," she says with a soft smile, her tone gentle and soothing before she leaves the room, closing the door and leaving you on your own.

"You too, Natasha," you murmur back despite knowing she couldn't hear you, gaze lingering on the door before you lose yourself to your thoughts again, trying to unpick your fractured mind.

***

A sob escaped you as your veins practically glowed blue as the serum was pumped into you, fingers prying into the table you were on, denting the metal as pain coursed through you violently. A harsh whimper was ripped out of you as another needle followed the last, the restraints on your hands and feet stopping you from wriggling away from the metal needle as it slid into another vein, another wave of agony washing over your body as you could do nothing but cry out in pain. Your voice was hoarse from the last few rounds of serum, the screaming and incessant pain leaving you exhausted after each trial, this one feeling different from the last as a surge of energy seemed to consume you.

"Stay still Soldat," gritted out a scientist but you ignored their comment, your fist pulling against the restraint, snapping it with the amount of force you used. His eyes widened along with the other scientist in the room as your other hand effortlessly shattered the other handcuff, the second man running quickly to the door to escape when he found it locked, his hand wrapped around the metal handle and desperately pulling on it, knowing that he would need to leave now if he wanted to live.

You blocked out the desperate pleas from the other man as he called out to the other guards nearby, your gaze locked on the other scientist who stared at you in horror and awe, the knowledge that the serum worked again piquing your general's interest who watched behind the one way glass.

"Soldat," he trailed off while staggering back, the reality of the situation settling in his mind as you broke free of your last restraints, your eyes glossed over with darkness and malice. "Soldat-" he was interrupted by your body tackling his to the ground, the days, the weeks, the months, the years of torture and pain he inflicted on you fuelling your actions as you lost control, wanting to rip the man apart and break him.

The other scientist could only look back in pure terror as an animalistic scream was ripped out of his co-worker, your body pinning him to the ground while your hands roughly snapped the bones in his arms as he tried to pry you off of him.

"General!" The man at the door screamed, begging the man to let him be free as your hands went to the other's head, eyes holding nothing but darkness in them as your fingers pressed into his skull, killing him in the same way your general would order you to kill your victims. As usual, the bone started to strain under your thumbs, sobs leaving the man beneath you until they were silenced by a deafening crack. A sigh left you when his heart soon stopped beating, your ears zoning in on how it slowly stopped while you pulled your fingers out of what was left of his head, crimson oozing onto the concrete floor as you wiped what was left on your hands on his white lab coat, moving to stand and face the other man.

Nothing but pure rage and anger filled you as the man turned to look at you with fear in his eyes, his back pressed against the door as there was nowhere left for him to go.

They made you like this. He made you like this. It was only fair that he suffered like you did.

A gasp left you as you woke up from the vivid nightmare, your chest rising and falling as your eyes frantically searched around the room, trying to calm yourself down. You pulled the blanket up further on your body as you moved to sit on the sofa instead, not wanting to sleep in the bed as the mattress was far too soft, the feeling unnerving you as you were used to sleeping on something solid, your mind still reeling from the memory. You squeezed your eyes shut for a moment but all you could feel was the warmth that enveloped your arm as your fist went straight through the other man, fingers searching their way through flesh and blood until they reached his heart, ready to rip it out and watch as his body slumped to the ground.

They deserved it

The darkness said, their voice lacking the usual mocking tone as your hands covered your face, mind thinking for a split second that you could feel the blood from the man smearing on your face as your fingers moved to cover your eyes. You didn't bother to say or think anything back to them, simply trying your best to clear your mind, the attempt futile.

You knew you weren't getting back to sleep after the nightmare, your body itching for something other to do than drown in your thoughts, the only idea being to go back down to the training room. You were a little scared to leave your room in the middle of the night, not too sure if you'd be punished or not, so you made sure your movements were stealthy, footsteps light as you navigate your way around the compound until you reach the room, noticing how quiet and empty it was.

You didn't bother flicking on the lights as the small windows present illuminated the room softly, enough for you to see where things were to let your pent up frustrations out.

It was a cycle of cardio and weights, neither seeming to help tire you out as you either lifted the heavy bar over and over again or ran for an hour on end at a ridiculous pace, the enhanced stamina seeming to be endless as nothing seemed to tire you out, your mind wanting to sleep but body desperate to stay awake.

You didn't realise how long you were at the training room until Clint came over to you with a bottle of water, his face calm and containing a smile, hiding his concerns as he could tell you had been in here for most of the night.

"Thirsty?" he asked, to which you nodded a little nervously, not keeping his gaze as you finished the bottle in almost record speed, a pant leaving you as you realised how much strenuous exercise you had put your body through. "Everything alright?" he asked and you wished he wouldn't as you didn't want to have to talk about it.

"I just needed a distraction," you reply vaguely as you knew saying 'nothing' wouldn't have been a good enough answer, not wanting him to press for any more information.

The archer saw how you shifted from foot to foot, your head turning a little at all the sounds coming from the rest of the training room, your ears picking up all the noise as you weren't utterly consumed by your thoughts. An idea popped into his mind as he saw your eyes scan the room, his hands digging into his pockets in search of something.

"Try these," he says while handing you some earphones, your brows furrowing as you had never used them before. He chuckles a little at the confused expression written across your face, his hands motioning for you to put them in your ears before his hand pulls out his phone from his pocket. "Listening to music always helps distract me," he explains before he plays the song that was already loaded, the 80s hit causing your eyes to watch him puzzled at the strange noise, your mind noticing how it helped block out everything in the background without your thoughts taking over.

Clint watched with a small smug smile as you seemed to focus on the song, helping distract you from whatever was bothering you, as Nat came to him last night to talk about you, the archer giving her the 'best friend opinion' of the situation as she was unsure of how to help you and a little worried.

"Better?" He asked once the song had finished, a smile subtly creeping onto your lips as you actually rather enjoyed the song, nodding to him before moving to take the earphone out, the man stopping you, "Keep them, I'll play the rest of the songs for you now, but then later I'll sort you out a phone and make you a playlist." The words go straight over your head but you nod anyway, thanking him quietly before doing a few more rounds of running on the treadmill, hoping to tire your body out enough that you would sleep later without any issues.

***

The next few weeks seemed to be a constant cycle of waking up to a nightmare and sneaking off down to the training room, the ear phones a necessity to you now as you slowly but surely learnt how to use the music app on the phone, Clint's suggested playlist playing in the device as you worked out every day, still unable to get a good night's sleep. You felt guilty at how distant you had been to others, especially Natasha as you still hadn't gone to the rooftop with her yet, but you made a move to stop that as Wanda approached you in the kitchen.

Your teeth sank into the apple that you took from the fruit bowl, hoping no one would see you as the open space was empty until the young witch walked in, a mission on her mind.

"Hey Y/n," her tone casual as she walked up to you, moving to go into the fridge instead, your mind on guard as you were still not used to not having to ask permission for stuff.

"Hey," you reply back with a shy tone, still a little cautious of the witch after she invaded your thoughts, the brunette understanding of your nervousness. You took another bite of the red apple, the crunch seeming to fill the silence that brewed in the room, Wanda moving to lean against a countertop as she watched you sit awkwardly on one of the stools.

"I want to apologise to you," she says after a moment, her fingers playing with the ends of her long sleeve shirt, "I'm sorry that I went into your thoughts and made you relieve those... events."

You don't look at her as brief flashes of what you remembered filtered through your mind, your eyes fixated on the half eaten apple in your hands.

"Did...Did you see them too?" you asked, wanting to confirm your beliefs about her powers.

"I did," she quietly confesses, your eyes slowly moving over to look at her, noticing the genuine apologetic tone of her voice, "I'm sorry."

"I'm sorry you had to see them too," you murmur, taking her by surprise, her brows raising a little as she watches your form seem to slump in disappointment. "Thank you for apologising, I'm going to head back to my room now," you say, wanting to leave the conversation as swiftly as possible but her words stop you, your head turning back to look at the witch.

"Wait," she says to stop you leaving, "We're having a movie night tonight, the whole team. I was wondering if you wanted to join us?" Her eyes hold a hopeful glint in them, your mouth opening and closing just as quick, unsure of what to say.

"I don't know," you trail off, her smiling a little as it wasn't a straight up no.

"It will be fun, I promise you," she says, excitement seeping into her tone as she had gotten to choose the film for tonight, "I know it's hard to get used to but, we're a family here, and we want to get to know you better." The cheerful and optimistic look in her eyes wins you over, the idea of being with everyone a little daunting but the thought of familiar green eyes and red hair help calm you down.

"I'll join you," you say, earning a wide smile from the young woman, the sight inevitably causing one to grow on your face before you say goodbye, making your way back to your room.

Too busy thinking about the movie later, you bump into someone who rounds the corner, a recognisable shade of red entering your vision.

"Sorry," you both say at the same time, her voice a little breathless as she came straight from the training room after her workout.

You seemed to get lost in a trance as you take in her outfit, the simple sports bra and leggings occupying your thoughts while your eyes focus on a bead of sweat that drips down her neck in a tantalising slow motion, the sigh causing a different warm feeling to take over you, the sensation a lot lower than your chest.

"Y/n?" she asks, a hint of teasing to her tone as you snap out of it, red tinting your cheeks as you realise you were staring.

"Sorry," your tone shy as you mumble the apology. "I don't know what came over me," you say honestly, missing the subtle smirk that took over the redhead's lips, moving past her to go towards your room, confused as to when she followed you. You stood frozen by your door as she went to the room next to you, her hand opening the door before looking over to you, her brows furrowed as you stared at her once more.

"What?" She asked out in a chuckle, the smile never leaving her lips as she was glad to talk to you again, noticing how you distanced yourself recently.

"Have you always been in the room next to me?" you ask, unaware that anyone was near your room, the thought of her hearing you wake up after a nightmare entering your mind.

"Yes," she says, her smile dropping a little but still present as she could see your hesitation on whether to ask a question. She remained patient with you, moving to lean on the side of the door frame, her arms crossing over her chest in a relaxed manner.

"Have... Have you ever heard me during the night?" your voice was laced with nerves as you didn't want people to know, a sympathetic look taking over her face.

"Why, what have you been doing in the night, alone?" she teased, trying to lighten the mood but the innuendo goes straight over your head, your brows furrowing at her words. Her eyes soften as she looks at you, nodding to answer your question as you look down a little embarrassed.

"Sorry if I woke you up," you mutter, not meeting her gaze.

"You can come to me if you have a nightmare," she says with a gentle voice, reassuring you that she wouldn't mind, "We don't have to talk about it, I just...I don't want you to think you're alone. We're here for you. I'm here for you." You meet her eyes after her words, offering her a shy smile before opening your own door and looking back at her, unsure of how to feel at the care she was showing you.

"Thank you Natasha," your tone is filled with appreciation as you smile at her, a warmth enveloping the redhead's chest at your softening features before you enter the room, leaving her to stare at the spot you were just at, unable to stop thinking about your smile. 

[lu-is-not-ok]

Thoughts on the new Jia candidate? They seem to be at the very least related to Iori, considering their execution of that one guy and the red snake skin wrapped around himself and his companion(?). Makes me wonder if Iori or her disciples are going to make a physical appearance in the Canto.

Alright, let me put things under the cut for the spoiler warning for literally the last two cutscenes in this Intervallo.

When it comes to Jia Qiu, I don't have many thoughts on his place in the world or wider story as of yet.

It's clear that he's a figure that's meant to have quite a lot of renown, one that can be easily believed as being the one people sing about in the Backstreets. One that is so sure of his position in the world that he doesn't even bother finishing off Xichun or Hong Lu due to knowing they don't pose even the tiniest bit of a threat to him.

It's also interesting how he's described. There's a lot of similarities between him and Hong Lu in that way. He's shown to be always serene, almost intimidatingly so. The way he looks at the Sinners, "as though he was gazing upon the clouds or blades of grass", is a direct reflection of how Hong Lu is described earlier in the same Intervallo. In fact, that confident calmness of his is shown to be what makes him so intimidating.

As for the Iori connection... Well, first of all it's made kind of unclear who Actually kills Shi Yihua. Before the execution happens, Zigong comments on the presence of "a serpent", while Jia Qiu tells her to "leave it". After Yihua is killed, Qiu once again repeats to leave this serpent alone, this time directing the order to Zilu.

This, I think, implies that whoever killed Yihua is not actually affiliated with Jia Qiu at all. That 'serpent' who killed him was an outsider, a spy of some kind that Jia Qiu deemed unimportant enough to let live despite the sudden seemingly hostile action.

It's also important to note that the furry trio from the Prologue all have specifically Purple accessories. While Iori's connection with snakes and serpents is an important part of her identity, what's often more important and identifying is the color Purple due to it being a direct part of her Fixer title.

Thus, personally, I believe the serpent could have some connection to Iori, as it has both the purple and the snake imagery to tie it to her.

Jia Qiu and his posse on the other hand not only are implied to not be affiliated with that serpent, but also only have the snakeskin motive, not the color. It's kind of like the Rabbits of R corp and Hares of the Heishou Pack - they're based on similar animals, but are at their core extremely different and unaffiliated.

But. That's not really what I want to talk about.

No, what I want to talk about is what I think Jia Qiu's narrative role might be.

See, here's the thing about Jia Qiu and his posse. Neither him nor anyone following him are directly named after any DOTRC characters.

However, another source for specifically Zilu and Zigong has already been found - they're named after Confucius's disciples. The reason why that's important is that Confucianism plays a major role in DOTRC, with one of the ways it comes up being a notable part of the reason why Baoyu is abused by his father - as Jia Zheng is a Confucian scholar that tries to live by those values, while Baoyu is anything but.

Thus, there are now two camps I see when it comes to theories on who Jia Qiu is meant to be based on.

There is the camp that believes Jia Qiu might be PM's reinterpretation of Jia Zhu, Baoyu's older brother who dies before the events of DOTRC.

There is also the other camp that looks at the references to Confucius's disciples and believes that Jia Qiu is just straight up Confucius himself.

My take? I think he's both. I think he's a composite character of both Jia Zhu and Confucius. And I even have a sound reason for why PM would do that.

Remember how I mentioned that Confucian values are part of the reason why Baoyu is targeted and abused by his father so much? Well, Jia Zhu is the other part of the reason. Jia Zhu, when he was alive, was exactly the kind of son and heir that Jia Zheng wanted. So, when he died, all of those expectations fell onto Baoyu. There's even a point where Baoyu's mother has a moment where she laments that she wishes Baoyu was the one to die instead of Zhu, as Zhu wouldn't have angered his father nearly as much.

I believe that Jia Qiu is meant to represent everything that Hong Lu's family wishes he could be. Everything that Hong Lu can't truly be no matter how much he tries. A combination of the creator behind the values forced upon everyone in the family, and of the family son who was perfect for the role in his family. The ideal heir, the template Hong Lu was meant to fit but never could.

Something tells me he's not going to survive for long.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

My McLuhan lecture on enshittification

IT'S THE LAST DAY for the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

Last night, I gave the annual Marshall McLuhan lecture at the Transmediale festival in Berlin. The event was sold out and while there's a video that'll be posted soon, they couldn't get a streaming setup installed in the Canadian embassy, where the talk was held:

https://transmediale.de/en/2024/event/mcluhan-2024

The talk went of fabulously, and was followed by commentary from Frederike Kaltheuner (Human Rights Watch) and a discussion moderated by Helen Starr. While you'll have to wait a bit for the video, I thought that I'd post my talk notes from last night for the impatient among you.

I want to thank the festival and the embassy staff for their hard work on an excellent event. And now, on to the talk!

Last year, I coined the term 'enshittification,' to describe the way that platforms decay. That obscene little word did big numbers, it really hit the zeitgeist. I mean, the American Dialect Society made it their Word of the Year for 2023 (which, I suppose, means that now I'm definitely getting a poop emoji on my tombstone).

So what's enshittification and why did it catch fire? It's my theory explaining how the internet was colonized by platforms, and why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, and why it matters – and what we can do about it.

We're all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit.

It's frustrating. It's demoralizing. It's even terrifying.

I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the 'great forces of history,' and into the material world of specific decisions made by named people – decisions we can reverse and people whose addresses and pitchfork sizes we can learn.

Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It's not just a way to say 'things are getting worse' (though of course, it's fine with me if you want to use it that way. It's an English word. We don't have der Rat für Englisch Rechtschreibung. English is a free for all. Go nuts, meine Kerle).

But in case you want to use enshittification in a more precise, technical way, let's examine how enshittification works.

It's a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Let's do a case study. What could be better than Facebook?

Facebook is a company that was founded to nonconsensually rate the fuckability of Harvard undergrads, and it only got worse after that.

When Facebook started off, it was only open to US college and high-school kids with .edu and k-12.us addresses. But in 2006, it opened up to the general public. It told them: “Yes, I know you’re all using Myspace. But Myspace is owned by Rupert Murdoch, an evil, crapulent senescent Australian billionaire, who spies on you with every hour that God sends.

“Sign up with Facebook and we will never spy on you. Come and tell us who matters to you in this world, and we will compose a personal feed consisting solely of what those people post for consumption by those who choose to follow them.”

That was stage one. Facebook had a surplus — its investors’ cash — and it allocated that surplus to its end-users. Those end-users proceeded to lock themselves into FB. FB — like most tech businesses — has network effects on its side. A product or service enjoys network effects when it improves as more people sign up to use it. You joined FB because your friends were there, and then others signed up because you were there.

But FB didn’t just have high network effects, it had high switching costs. Switching costs are everything you have to give up when you leave a product or service. In Facebook’s case, it was all the friends there that you followed and who followed you. In theory, you could have all just left for somewhere else; in practice, you were hamstrung by the collective action problem.

It’s hard to get lots of people to do the same thing at the same time. You and your six friends here are going to struggle to agree on where to get drinks after tonight's lecture. How were you and your 200 Facebook friends ever gonna agree on when it was time to leave Facebook, and where to go?

So FB’s end-users engaged in a mutual hostage-taking that kept them glued to the platform. Then FB exploited that hostage situation, withdrawing the surplus from end-users and allocating it to two groups of business customers: advertisers, and publishers.

To the advertisers, FB said, 'Remember when we told those rubes we wouldn’t spy on them? We lied. We spy on them from asshole to appetite. We will sell you access to that surveillance data in the form of fine-grained ad-targeting, and we will devote substantial engineering resources to thwarting ad-fraud. Your ads are dirt cheap to serve, and we’ll spare no expense to make sure that when you pay for an ad, a real human sees it.'

To the publishers, FB said, 'Remember when we told those rubes we would only show them the things they asked to see? We lied!Upload short excerpts from your website, append a link, and we will nonconsensually cram it into the eyeballs of users who never asked to see it. We are offering you a free traffic funnel that will drive millions of users to your website to monetize as you please, and those users will become stuck to you when they subscribe to your feed.' And so advertisers and publishers became stuck to the platform, too, dependent on those users.

The users held each other hostage, and those hostages took the publishers and advertisers hostage, too, so that everyone was locked in.

Which meant it was time for the third stage of enshittification: withdrawing surplus from everyone and handing it to Facebook’s shareholders.

For the users, that meant dialing down the share of content from accounts you followed to a homeopathic dose, and filling the resulting void with ads and pay-to-boost content from publishers.

For advertisers, that meant jacking up prices and drawing down anti-fraud enforcement, so advertisers paid much more for ads that were far less likely to be seen by a person.

For publishers, this meant algorithmically suppressing the reach of their posts unless they included an ever-larger share of their articles in the excerpt, until anything less than fulltext was likely to be be disqualified from being sent to your subscribers, let alone included in algorithmic suggestion feeds.

And then FB started to punish publishers for including a link back to their own sites, so they were corralled into posting fulltext feeds with no links, meaning they became commodity suppliers to Facebook, entirely dependent on the company both for reach and for monetization, via the increasingly crooked advertising service.

When any of these groups squawked, FB just repeated the lesson that every tech executive learned in the Darth Vader MBA: 'I have altered the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.'

Facebook now enters the most dangerous phase of enshittification. It wants to withdraw all available surplus, and leave just enough residual value in the service to keep end users stuck to each other, and business customers stuck to end users, without leaving anything extra on the table, so that every extractable penny is drawn out and returned to its shareholders.

But that’s a very brittle equilibrium, because the difference between “I hate this service but I can’t bring myself to quit it,” and “Jesus Christ, why did I wait so long to quit? Get me the hell out of here!” is razor thin

All it takes is one Cambridge Analytica scandal, one whistleblower, one livestreamed mass-shooting, and users bolt for the exits, and then FB discovers that network effects are a double-edged sword.

If users can’t leave because everyone else is staying, when when everyone starts to leave, there’s no reason not to go, too.

That’s terminal enshittification, the phase when a platform becomes a pile of shit. This phase is usually accompanied by panic, which tech bros euphemistically call 'pivoting.'

Which is how we get pivots like, 'In the future, all internet users will be transformed into legless, sexless, low-polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon characters in a virtual world called "metaverse," that we ripped off from a 25-year-old satirical cyberpunk novel.'

That's the procession of enshittification. If enshittification were a disease, we'd call that enshittification's "natural history." But that doesn't tell you how the enshittification works, nor why everything is enshittifying right now, and without those details, we can't know what to do about it.

What led to the enshittocene? What is it about this moment that led to the Great Enshittening? Was it the end of the Zero Interest Rate Policy? Was it a change in leadership at the tech giants? Is Mercury in retrograde?

None of the above.

The period of free fed money certainly led to tech companies having a lot of surplus to toss around. But Facebook started enshittifying long before ZIRP ended, so did Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

Some of the tech giants got new leaders. But Google's enshittification got worse when the founders came back to oversee the company's AI panic (excuse me, 'AI pivot').

And it can't be Mercury in retrograde, because I'm a cancer, and as everyone knows, cancers don't believe in astrology.

When a whole bunch of independent entities all change in the same way at once, that's a sign that the environment has changed, and that's what happened to tech.

Tech companies, like all companies, have conflicting imperatives. On the one hand, they want to make money. On the other hand, making money involves hiring and motivating competent staff, and making products that customers want to buy. The more value a company permits its employees and customers to carve off, the less value it can give to its shareholders.

The equilibrium in which companies produce things we like in honorable ways at a fair price is one in which charging more, worsening quality, and harming workers costs more than the company would make by playing dirty.

There are four forces that discipline companies, serving as constraints on their enshittificatory impulses.

First: competition. Companies that fear you will take your business elsewhere are cautious about worsening quality or raising prices.

Second: regulation. Companies that fear a regulator will fine them more than they expect to make from cheating, will cheat less.

These two forces affect all industries, but the next two are far more tech-specific.

Third: self-help. Computers are extremely flexible, and so are the digital products and services we make from them. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing-complete Von Neumann machine, a computer that can run every valid program.

That means that users can always avail themselves of programs that undo the anti-features that shift value from them to a company's shareholders. Think of a board-room table where someone says, 'I've calculated that making our ads 20% more invasive will net us 2% more revenue per user.'

In a digital world, someone else might well say 'Yes, but if we do that, 20% of our users will install ad-blockers, and our revenue from those users will drop to zero, forever.'

This means that digital companies are constrained by the fear that some enshittificatory maneuver will prompt their users to google, 'How do I disenshittify this?'

Fourth and finally: workers. Tech workers have very low union density, but that doesn't mean that tech workers don't have labor power. The historical "talent shortage" of the tech sector meant that workers enjoyed a lot of leverage over their bosses. Workers who disagreed with their bosses could quit and walk across the street and get another job – a better job.

They knew it, and their bosses knew it. Ironically, this made tech workers highly exploitable. Tech workers overwhelmingly saw themselves as founders in waiting, entrepreneurs who were temporarily drawing a salary, heroic figures of the tech mission.

That's why mottoes like Google's 'don't be evil' and Facebook's 'make the world more open and connected' mattered: they instilled a sense of mission in workers. It's what Fobazi Ettarh calls 'vocational awe, 'or Elon Musk calls being 'extremely hardcore.'

Tech workers had lots of bargaining power, but they didn't flex it when their bosses demanded that they sacrifice their health, their families, their sleep to meet arbitrary deadlines.

So long as their bosses transformed their workplaces into whimsical 'campuses,' with gyms, gourmet cafeterias, laundry service, massages and egg-freezing, workers could tell themselves that they were being pampered – rather than being made to work like government mules.

But for bosses, there's a downside to motivating your workers with appeals to a sense of mission, namely: your workers will feel a sense of mission. So when you ask them to enshittify the products they ruined their health to ship, workers will experience a sense of profound moral injury, respond with outrage, and threaten to quit.

Thus tech workers themselves were the final bulwark against enshittification,

The pre-enshittification era wasn't a time of better leadership. The executives weren't better. They were constrained. Their worst impulses were checked by competition, regulation, self-help and worker power.

So what happened?

One by one, each of these constraints was eroded until it dissolved, leaving the enshittificatory impulse unchecked, ushering in the enshittoscene.

It started with competition. From the Gilded Age until the Reagan years, the purpose of competition law was to promote competition. US antitrust law treated corporate power as dangerous and sought to blunt it. European antitrust laws were modeled on US ones, imported by the architects of the Marshall Plan.

But starting in the neoliberal era, competition authorities all over the world adopted a doctrine called 'consumer welfare,' which held that monopolies were evidence of quality. If everyone was shopping at the same store and buying the same product, that meant it was the best store, selling the best product – not that anyone was cheating.

And so all over the world, governments stopped enforcing their competition laws. They just ignored them as companies flouted them. Those companies merged with their major competitors, absorbed small companies before they could grow to be big threats. They held an orgy of consolidation that produced the most inbred industries imaginable, whole sectors grown so incestuous they developed Habsburg jaws, from eyeglasses to sea freight, glass bottles to payment processing, vitamin C to beer.

Most of our global economy is dominated by five or fewer global companies. If smaller companies refuse to sell themselves to these cartels, the giants have free rein to flout competition law further, with 'predatory pricing' that keeps an independent rival from gaining a foothold.

When Diapers.com refused Amazon's acquisition offer, Amazon lit $100m on fire, selling diapers way below cost for months, until diapers.com went bust, and Amazon bought them for pennies on the dollar, and shut them down.

Competition is a distant memory. As Tom Eastman says, the web has devolved into 'five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four,' so these giant companies no longer fear losing our business.

Lily Tomlin used to do a character on the TV show Laugh In, an AT&T telephone operator who'd do commercials for the Bell system. Each one would end with her saying 'We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.'

Today's giants are not constrained by competition.

They don't care. They don't have to. They're Google.

That's the first constraint gone, and as it slipped away, the second constraint – regulation – was also doomed.

When an industry consists of hundreds of small- and medium-sized enterprises, it is a mob, a rabble. Hundreds of companies can't agree on what to tell Parliament or Congress or the Commission. They can't even agree on how to cater a meeting where they'd discuss the matter.

But when a sector dwindles to a bare handful of dominant firms, it ceases to be a rabble and it becomes a cartel.

Five companies, or four, or three, or two, or just one company finds it easy to converge on a single message for their regulators, and without "wasteful competition" eroding their profits, they have plenty of cash to spread around.

Like Facebook, handing former UK deputy PM Nick Clegg millions every year to sleaze around Europe, telling his former colleagues that Facebook is the only thing standing between 'European Cyberspace' and the Chinese Communist Party.

Tech's regulatory capture allows it to flout the rules that constrain less concentrated sectors. They can pretend that violating labor, consumer and privacy laws is fine, because they violate them with an app.

This is why competition matters: it's not just because competition makes companies work harder and share value with customers and workers, it's because competition keeps companies from becoming too big to fail, and too big to jail.

Now, there's plenty of things we don't want improved through competition, like privacy invasions. After the EU passed its landmark privacy law, the GDPR, there was a mass-extinction event for small EU ad-tech companies. These companies disappeared en masse, and that's fine.

They were even more invasive and reckless than US-based Big Tech companies. After all, they had less to lose. We don't want competition in commercial surveillance. We don't want to produce increasing efficiency in violating our human rights.

But: Google and Facebook – who pretend they are called Alphabet and Meta – have been unscathed by European privacy law. That's not because they don't violate the GDPR (they do!). It's because they pretend they are headquartered in Ireland, one of the EU's most notorious corporate crime-havens.

And Ireland competes with the EU other crime havens – Malta, Luxembourg, Cyprus and sometimes the Netherlands – to see which country can offer the most hospitable environment for all sorts of crimes. Because the kind of company that can fly an Irish flag of convenience is mobile enough to change to a Maltese flag if the Irish start enforcing EU laws.

Which is how you get an Irish Data Protection Commission that processes fewer than 20 major cases per year, while Germany's data commissioner handles more than 500 major cases, even though Ireland is nominal home to the most privacy-invasive companies on the continent.

So Google and Facebook get to act as though they are immune to privacy law, because they violate the law with an app; just like Uber can violate labor law and claim it doesn't count because they do it with an app.

Uber's labor-pricing algorithm offers different drivers different payments for the same job, something Veena Dubal calls 'algorithmic wage discrimination.' If you're more selective about which jobs you'll take, Uber will pay you more for every ride.

But if you take those higher payouts and ditch whatever side-hustle let you cover your bills which being picky about your Uber drives, Uber will incrementally reduce the payment, toggling up and down as you grow more or less selective, playing you like a fish on a line until you eventually – inevitably – lose to the tireless pricing robot, and end up stuck with low wages and all your side-hustles gone.

Then there's Amazon, which violates consumer protection laws, but says it doesn't matter, because they do it with an app. Amazon makes $38b/year from its 'advertising' system. 'Advertising' in quotes because they're not selling ads, they're selling placements in search results.

The companies that spend the most on 'ads' go to the top, even if they're offering worse products at higher prices. If you click the first link in an Amazon search result, on average you will pay a 29% premium over the best price on the service. Click one of the first four items and you'll pay a 25% premium. On average you have to go seventeen items down to find the best deal on Amazon.

Any merchant that did this to you in a physical storefront would be fined into oblivion. But Amazon has captured its regulators, so it can violate your rights, and say, "it doesn't count, we did it with an app"

This is where that third constraint, self-help, would sure come in handy. If you don't want your privacy violated, you don't need to wait for the Irish privacy regulator to act, you can just install an ad-blocker.

More than half of all web users are blocking ads. But the web is an open platform, developed in the age when tech was hundreds of companies at each others' throats, unable to capture their regulators.

Today, the web is being devoured by apps, and apps are ripe for enshittification. Regulatory capture isn't just the ability to flout regulation, it's also the ability to co-opt regulation, to wield regulation against your adversaries.

Today's tech giants got big by exploiting self-help measures. When Facebook was telling Myspace users they needed to escape Rupert Murdoch’s evil crapulent Australian social media panopticon, it didn’t just say to those Myspacers, 'Screw your friends, come to Facebook and just hang out looking at the cool privacy policy until they get here'

It gave them a bot. You fed the bot your Myspace username and password, and it would login to Myspace and pretend to be you, and scrape everything waiting in your inbox, copying it to your FB inbox, and you could reply to it and it would autopilot your replies back to Myspace.

When Microsoft was choking off Apple's market oxygen by refusing to ship a functional version of Microsoft Office for the Mac – so that offices were throwing away their designers' Macs and giving them PCs with upgraded graphics cards and Windows versions of Photoshop and Illustrator – Steve Jobs didn't beg Bill Gates to update Mac Office.

He got his technologists to reverse-engineer Microsoft Office, and make a compatible suite, the iWork Suite, whose apps, Pages, Numbers and Keynote could perfectly read and write Microsoft's Word, Excel and Powerpoint files.

When Google entered the market, it sent its crawler to every web server on Earth, where it presented itself as a web-user: 'Hi! Hello! Do you have any web pages? Thanks! How about some more? How about more?'

But every pirate wants to be an admiral. When Facebook, Apple and Google were doing this adversarial interoperability, that was progress. If you try to do it to them, that's piracy.

Try to make an alternative client for Facebook and they'll say you violated US laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and EU laws like Article 6 of the EUCD.

Try to make an Android program that can run iPhone apps and play back the data from Apple's media stores and they'd bomb you until the rubble bounced.

Try to scrape all of Google and they'll nuke you until you glowed.

Tech's regulatory capture is mind-boggling. Take that law I mentioned earlier, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA. Bill Clinton signed it in 1998, and the EU imported it as Article 6 of the EUCD in 2001

It is a blanket prohibition on removing any kind of encryption that restricts access to a copyrighted work – things like ripping DVDs or jailbreaking a phone – with penalties of a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine for a first offense.

This law has been so broadened that it can be used to imprison creators for granting access to their own creations

Here's how that works: In 2008, Amazon bought Audible, an audiobook platform, in an anticompetitive acquisition. Today, Audible is a monopolist with more than 90% of the audiobook market. Audible requires that all creators on their platform sell with Amazon's "digital rights management," which locks it to Amazon's apps.

So say I write a book, then I read it into a mic, then I pay a director and an engineer thousands of dollars to turn that into an audiobook, and sell it to you on the monopoly platform, Audible, that controls more than 90% of the market.

If I later decide to leave Amazon and want to let you come with me to a rival platform, I am out of luck. If I supply you with a tool to remove Amazon's encryption from my audiobook, so you can play it in another app, I commit a felony, punishable by a 5-year sentence and a half-million-dollar fine, for a first offense.

That's a stiffer penalty than you would face if you simply pirated the audiobook from a torrent site. But it's also harsher than the punishment you'd get for shoplifting the audiobook on CD from a truck-stop. It's harsher than the sentence you'd get for hijacking the truck that delivered the CD.

So think of our ad-blockers again. 50% of web users are running ad-blockers. 0% of app users are running ad-blockers, because adding a blocker to an app requires that you first remove its encryption, and that's a felony (Jay Freeman calls this 'felony contempt of business-model').

So when someone in a board-room says, 'let's make our ads 20% more obnoxious and get a 2% revenue increase,' no one objects that this might prompt users to google, 'how do I block ads?' After all, the answer is, 'you can't.'

Indeed, it's more likely that someone in that board room will say, 'let's make our ads 100% more obnoxious and get a 10% revenue increase' (this is why every company wants you to install an app instead of using its website).

There's no reason that gig workers who are facing algorithmic wage discrimination couldn't install a counter-app that coordinated among all the Uber drivers to reject all jobs unless they reach a certain pay threshold.

No reason except felony contempt of business model, the threat that the toolsmiths who built that counter-app would go broke or land in prison, for violating DMCA 1201, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, trademark, copyright, patent, contract, trade secrecy, nondisclosure and noncompete, or in other words: 'IP law.'

'IP' is just a euphemism for 'a law that lets me reach beyond the walls of my company and control the conduct of my critics, competitors and customers.' And 'app' is just a euphemism for 'a web-page wrapped enough IP to make it a felony to mod it to protect the labor, consumer and privacy rights of its user.'

We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.

But what about that fourth constraint: workers?

For decades, tech workers' high degrees of bargaining power and vocational awe put a ceiling on enshittification. Even after the tech sector shrank to a handful of giants. Even after they captured their regulators so they could violate our consumer, privacy and labor rights. Even after they created 'felony contempt of business model' and extinguished self-help for tech users. Tech was still constrained by their workers' sense of moral injury in the face of the imperative to enshittify.

Remember when tech workers dreamed of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over?

Then that dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake startup, get acqui-hired by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion.

Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays.

And now, the dream is over. All that’s left is: work for a tech giant until they fire your ass, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired last year six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.

Workers are no longer a check on their bosses' worst impulses

Today, the response to 'I refuse to make this product worse' is, 'turn in your badge and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.'

I get that this is all a little depressing

OK, really depressing.

But hear me out! We've identified the disease. We've traced its natural history. We've identified its underlying mechanism. Now we can get to work on a cure.

There are four constraints that prevent enshittification: competition, regulation, self-help and labor.

To reverse enshittification and guard against its reemergence, we must restore and strengthen each of these.

On competition, it's actually looking pretty good. The EU, the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, Japan and China are all doing more on competition than they have in two generations. They're blocking mergers, unwinding existing ones, taking action on predatory pricing and other sleazy tactics.

Remember, in the US and Europe, we already have the laws to do this – we just stopped enforcing them in the Helmut Kohl era.

I've been fighting these fights with the Electronic Frontier Foundation for 22 years now, and I've never seen a more hopeful moment for sound, informed tech policy.

Now, the enshittifiers aren't taking this laying down. The business press can't stop talking about how stupid and old-fashioned all this stuff is. They call people like me 'hipster antitrust,' and they hate any regulator who actually does their job.

Take Lina Khan, the brilliant head of the US Federal Trade Commission, who has done more in three years on antitrust than the combined efforts of all her predecessors over the past 40 years. Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal has run more than 80 editorials trashing Khan, insisting that she's an ineffectual ideologue who can't get anything done.

Sure, Rupert, that's why you ran 80 editorials about her.

Because she can't get anything done.

Even Canada is stepping up on competition. Canada! Land of the evil billionaire! From Ted Rogers, who owns the country's telecoms; to Galen Weston, who owns the country's grocery stores; to the Irvings, who basically own the entire province of New Brunswick.

Even Canada is doing something about this. Last autumn, Trudeau's government promised to update Canada's creaking competition law to finally ban 'abuse of dominance.'

I mean, wow. I guess when Galen Weston decided to engage in a criminal conspiracy to fix the price of bread – the most Les Miz-ass crime imaginable – it finally got someone's attention, eh?

Competition has a long way to go, but all over the world, competition law is seeing a massive revitalization. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher put antitrust law in a coma in the 80s – but it's awake, it's back, and it's pissed.

What about regulation? How will we get tech companies to stop doing that one weird trick of adding 'with an app' to their crimes and escaping enforcement?

Well, here in the EU, they're starting to figure it out. This year, the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act went into effect, and they let people who get screwed by tech companies go straight to the federal European courts, bypassing the toothless watchdogs in Europe's notorious corporate crime havens like Ireland.

In America, they might finally get a digital privacy law. You people have no idea how backwards US privacy law is. The last time the US Congress enacted a broadly applicable privacy law was in 1988.

The Video Privacy Protection Act makes it a crime for video-store clerks to leak your video-rental history. It was passed after a right-wing judge who was up for the Supreme Court had his rentals published in a DC newspaper. The rentals weren't even all that embarrassing!

Sure, that judge, Robert Bork, wasn't confirmed for the Supreme Court, but that was because he was a virulently racist loudmouth and a crook who served as Nixon's Solicitor General.

But Congress got the idea that their video records might be next, freaked out, and passed the VPPA.

That was the last time Americans got a big, national privacy law. Nineteen. Eighty. Eight.

It's been a minute.

And the thing is, there's a lot of people who are angry about stuff that has some nexus with America's piss-poor privacy landscape. Worried that Facebook turned Grampy into a Qanon? That Insta made your teen anorexic? That TikTok is brainwashing millennials into quoting Osama Bin Laden?

Or that cops are rolling up the identities of everyone at a Black Lives Matter protest or the Jan 6 riots by getting location data from Google?

Or that Red State Attorneys General are tracking teen girls to out-of-state abortion clinics?

Or that Black people are being discriminated against by online lending or hiring platforms?

Or that someone is making AI deepfake porn of you?

Having a federal privacy law with a private right of action – which means that individuals can sue companies that violate their privacy – would go a long way to rectifying all of these problems. There's a big coalition for that kind of privacy law.

What about self-help? That's a lot farther away, alas.

The EU's DMA will force tech companies to open up their walled gardens for interoperation. You'll be able to use Whatsapp to message people on iMessage, or quit Facebook and move to Mastodon, but still send messages to the people left behind.

But if you want to reverse-engineer one of those Big Tech products and mod it to work for you, not them, the EU's got nothing for you.

This is an area ripe for improvement, and I think the US might be the first ones to open this up.

It's certainly on-brand for the EU to be forcing tech companies to do things a certain way, while the US simply takes away tech companies' abilities to prevent others from changing how their stuff works.

My big hope here is that Stein's Law will take hold: 'Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop'

Letting companies decide how their customers must use their products is simply too tempting an invitation to mischief. HP has a whole building full of engineers thinking of new ways to lock your printer to its official ink cartridges, forcing you to spend $10,000/gallon on ink to print your boarding passes and shopping lists.

It's offensive. The only people who don't agree are the people running the monopolies in all the other industries, like the med-tech monopolists who are locking their insulin pumps to their glucose monitors, turning people with diabetes into walking inkjet printers.

Finally, there's labor. Here in Europe, there's much higher union density than in the US, which American tech barons are learning the hard way. There is nothing more satisfying in the daily news than the latest salvo by Nordic unions against that Tesla guy (Musk is the most Edison-ass Tesla guy imaginable).

But even in the USA, there's a massive surge in tech unions. Tech workers are realizing that they aren't founders in waiting. The days of free massages and facial piercings and getting to wear black tee shirts that say things your boss doesn't understand are coming to an end.

In Seattle, Amazon's tech workers walked out in sympathy with Amazon's warehouse workers, because they're all workers.

The only reason the tech workers aren't monitored by AI that notifies their managers if they visit the toilet during working hours is their rapidly dwindling bargaining power. The way things are going, Amazon programmers are going to be pissing in bottles next to their workstations (for a guy who built a penis-shaped rocket, Jeff Bezos really hates our kidneys).

We're seeing bold, muscular, global action on competition, regulation and labor, with self-help bringing up the rear. It's not a moment too soon, because the bad news is, enshittification is coming to every industry.

If it's got a networked computer in it, the people who made it can run the Darth Vader MBA playbook on it, changing the rules from moment to moment, violating your rights and then saying 'It's OK, we did it with an app.'

From Mercedes renting you your accelerator pedal by the month to Internet of Things dishwashers that lock you into proprietary dishsoap, enshittification is metastasizing into every corner of our lives.

Software doesn't eat the world, it enshittifies it

But there's a bright side to all this: if everyone is threatened by enshittification, then everyone has a stake in disenshittification.

Just as with privacy law in the US, the potential anti-enshittification coalition is massive, it's unstoppable.

The cynics among you might be skeptical that this will make a difference. After all, isn't "enshittification" the same as "capitalism"?

Well, no.

Look, I'm not going to cape for capitalism here. I'm hardly a true believer in markets as the most efficient allocators of resources and arbiters of policy – if there was ever any doubt, capitalism's total failure to grapple with the climate emergency surely erases it.

But the capitalism of 20 years ago made space for a wild and wooly internet, a space where people with disfavored views could find each other, offer mutual aid, and organize.

The capitalism of today has produced a global, digital ghost mall, filled with botshit, crapgadgets from companies with consonant-heavy brand-names, and cryptocurrency scams.

The internet isn't more important than the climate emergency, nor gender justice, racial justice, genocide, or inequality.

But the internet is the terrain we'll fight those fights on. Without a free, fair and open internet, the fight is lost before it's joined.

We can reverse the enshittification of the internet. We can halt the creeping enshittification of every digital device.

We can build a better, enshittification-resistant digital nervous system, one that is fit to coordinate the mass movements we will need to fight fascism, end genocide, and save our planet and our species.

Martin Luther King said 'It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.'

And it may be true that the law can't force corporate sociopaths to conceive of you as a human being entitled to dignity and fair treatment, and not just an ambulatory wallet, a supply of gut-bacteria for the immortal colony organism that is a limited liability corporation.

But it can make that exec fear you enough to treat you fairly and afford you dignity, even if he doesn't think you deserve it.

And I think that's pretty important.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel/a>

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

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[ozzyeelz]

Saw your Spy Hc post and me and my resident parent lost our shit over them!!

THEYRE SO HOT!!! WE LOVE THEM BOTH!!

Love seeing Hispanic/black/ (I didn’t read all the tags so I don’t know if you mentioned blue spy’s nationality) Spy’s!! Love love love your art of medic too!

Would cry tears of joy if you drew any more Medic/Spy 👉👈👀

Happy New Year from MD!!

EHEHE TYY I’m glad y’all like them!!! :DD

Also yes my Blu Spy is black (Specifically Haitian and mainland French for Blu, and mainland French and Spanish for Red)!!

And here’s some MediSpy for you!! :3 Im a bit late, but happy new year to you too!! :D

[axl-ion]

Some TF2 headcannons because like... Why not yk? These may change over time. This is specifically the RED team + Pauling and Zhanna.

Scout:

Has a lot of sport related skills, either just being able to play/participate in certain ones (baseball, swimming, basic gymnastics, football/soccer) or knows the rules (rugby, volleyball, ice skating, hockey, handball).

Would have gone to art school if he didn't fail English.

He's dyslexic, which comes from Spy.

Has driven a car/van illegally a couple times as a teen. One of his brothers taught him how to drive.

Got a couple art gigs after the end of the comic.

If he didn't make it into the Team Fortress, he would become a petty criminal or an artist, but still engaging in his mum's bizz.

Soldier:

Has the perfect pitch, unfortunately he's partially deaf from all the rockets he has blown up.

Believed himself to be a magician at one point (he was kinda just didn't notice Merasmus living in the place he decided to crash at).

Has named all the pets he ever had and will always recognise them even if no one else can.

Sweet tooth, but only if he's got something to go with it like coffee or tea.

Still didn't occur to him that some of his teammates are queer, even if they were to kiss in front of him (he's not homophobic, he just thinks all the flirting between Heavy and Medic is just your average platoon behaviour)

He genuinely loves kissing Zhanna on her lips and both her hands.

Pyro:

Any pronouns user.

Speaks a lot under the mask, is just that the mask huffles everything. But he speaks full coherent sentences, sometimes even singing to themselves.

Pyro-vision is result of asbestos and the respawn going haywire one time she went through it. They are actually pretty unbothered by it.

Likes to swim actually and will happily dive in! Will challenge other Mercs to swimming contests.

Their bed is more an AuDHD nest than a bed, plushies, trinkets, yarn and granny squares everywhere. He actually knitted all the granny squares himself!

Mercs usually go to him to tell their secrets, because she will never snitch on them.

Engineer:

Wakes up the earliest of the Mercs, only beaten by Soldier.

Misses sweet tea greatly, always gets a gallon of it when they get a time off from battling.

He's got a whole collection of gloves for his robotic hand for different occasions.

Does often check Scout's drawings, has even asked him to help him draw some of the machines.

Would have used Linux on his computer.

Dislikes phonecalls very much. Will do anything to avoid actually calling someone. Face to face, letters, he's happy to do it, just no phone calls!

Demoman:

He's worked in almost as many positions as Soldier, got even into a bet about who can work the most jobs in a month.

Not a cat person, because he fears a cat may scratch his good eye. However he may still pet a cat if it's held by its owner.

Actually likes rainy weather on a non-combat day.

Banned from driving due to his lack of depth perception, but that didn't discourage Scout from showing him through the hoops (no parking tho).

Aside from bombs, absolute nerd about booze and medieval history.

Makes the worst puns known to man.

Heavy:

Absolutely hates toasted bread, but will accept being offered some, even if they are essentially charcoal.

Reading a lot outside of combat, brings back memories from college.

Does share some of the stories of his youth with Medic, but that's it. He won't tell anyone else since he's still in the "words are very dangerous" mentality.

Usually the one who's vented to about issues, when the Mercs actually want some actual advice.

He enjoys the books that have English text next to Russian text as it helps him learn the language.

Trying to learn some German, so far can understand basic stuff, but mispronounces every 3rd word.

Medic:

He's also learning Russian for Heavy and also can just understand phrases, but can't talk for shit.

Certified pet dad, knows exactly how to care for his doves and won't let anyone else babysit them (except Heavy and Soldier).

One of the worst cooks amongst the Mercs, but excellent baker.

Has made his fair share of terrible puns, but the terribleness of his puns comes from not understanding how English puns work.

Tried to sleep with one eye open like a crocodile on several occasions.

Doesn't know how to drive. Nobody is risking teaching him that.

Sniper:

Has the best relationship with his parents out of all the Mercs.

Can sleep sitting up. Has even slept standing up once.

Knows about what's edible or not as he does engage in foraging.

He's learned a lot of little stuff to do to entertain himself like small entertaining stims.

This is the first time in years when he's stably living with other people and not sleeping somewhere in the outback in his van all alone.

He's goes to sleep the latest of everyone, including Pyro and Scout.

Spy:

Was a very good swimmer in his youth, just doesn't really do that anymore.

Flips his papers upside down to deal with dyslexia (that's how he taught himself how to do it).

Can't see himself as anything besides his profession or someone else's weapon.

Knows a lot of cool tricks with cards and stuff, but never does them in front of Soldier (learnt the hard way).

Polyglot, since I'm a sucker for that headcannon!

Is spooked out by wax figurines and mannequins, but since the fighting against the robots (Mann vs. Machine) he's also spooked by them. Usually the reaction is like "Huah! Disgusting!" or something like that but French and he moves on.

Miss Paulinng:

Zhanna was very much her sapphic awakening or made her appreciate butch women some more.

Absolutely dislikes moths because of associations with bad childhood memories.

Would do some accounting jobs before finally finding herself after all that happened.

She drinks an unhealthy amount of coffee.

Would write a fictional retelling of Team Fortress 2, but she's too shy to have it ever published.

Really started looking into subcultures in the late 1970s and early 80s.

Zhanna (the best girl for last):

She got all Soldier's pets vaccinated and made them all collars/ribbons with their names.

Became great friends with Engineer after he made her the hand.

Does say movie lines unironically. It's her way of connecting to the American culture.

She would enjoy Led Zeppelin.

Likes to literally butt heads with her husband.

Does frequently sing while doing mundane tasks and chores.

[wisteria-lodge]

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are not interchangeable.

(OR: Why Rosencrantz is the dumb one.)

Okay. First, their character introduction:

GERTRUDE. Your visitation shall receive such thanks  As fits a king’s remembrance. [she's paying them to spy on Hamlet.] ROSENCRANTZ. Both your Majesties  Might, by the sovereign power you have of us,  Put your dread pleasures more into command Than to entreaty. [Not a great opening move. What Rosencrantz is saying IS true, the King and Queen COULD just force them to do whatever. But why remind them of this, and risk upsetting them (and risk not getting paid??) ] GUILDENSTERN. But we both obey,  And here give up ourselves in the full bent  To lay our service freely at your feet,  To be commanded. [Guildenstern covers up Rosencrantz's faux pas, lays on the flattery, and is just much more politic with his 'thank you so much! We're so happy to be here! I am here to support your version of events 100%, whatever it ends up being!']

They later meet up with Hamlet, and at first there's an easy back and forth. Hamlet is friendly, happy to see then. But then Hamlet describes his situation as a "prison"... a red flag which Guildenstern immediately picks up on.

GUILDENSTERN. Prison, my lord? HAMLET.  Denmark’s a prison. ROSENCRANTZ. [doesn't get it] Then is the world one. HAMLET. A goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ th’ worst. ROSENCRANTZ. [STILL doesn't get it] We think not so, my lord. HAMLET. Why, then, ’tis none to you, for there is nothing  either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me, it is a prison. ROSENCRANTZ.  Why, then, your ambition makes it one. ’Tis too narrow for your mind. [COMPLETELY wrong, as Hamlet is about to tell him.] HAMLET. O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams. GUILDENSTERN. Which dreams, indeed, are ambition. [Guildenstern is again stepping in to cover for Rosencrantz, by saying... okay, that comment wasn't THAT stupid, since 'dream' and 'ambition' can mean the same thing]  For the very substance of the ambitious is merely  the shadow of a dream. [and I've got some additional thoughts: how can dreams and ambitions imprison you, if they're not real?] HAMLET. [Okay, I'll play, I'll bite.] A dream itself is but a shadow. [I'm talking about bad dreams specifically. A nightmare, like a shadow, isn't 'real' - but it can still affect you.] ROSENCRANTZ. Truly, and I hold ambition of so airy and light a quality that it is but a shadow’s shadow. [I'm not ambitious! I go with the flow! Wheeee!]

When Hamlet accuses them of spying, it's Guildenstern who asks "What should we say, my lord?" He's giving Hamlet a politic non-answer... what's your game, tell me what you want and maybe I'll do it. But then Rosencrantz starts asking Guildenstern what they're supposed to do... totally giving the game away... which is when Guildenstern makes the call for both of them, and confesses.

Which sets up one of my favorite jokes in the play, because it's just so dumb. Hamlet LOVES it when people are honest with him, so Guildenstern confessing seems to have... unlocked some extra emotional honestly, and Hamlet goes into the "What a piece of work is man" speech, just pouring his heart out, until:

HAMLET. ...what is this quintessence of dust? Man  delights not me, ⟨no,⟩ nor women neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so. ROSENCRANTZ. My lord, there was no such stuff in my  thoughts. HAMLET. Why did you laugh, then, when I said “man  delights not me”?

Hamlet is doing his Hamlet thing. Rosencrantz doesn't get it. He's zoning out. But it sounds like maybe Hamlet is wrapping up, and and then Rosencrantz comes back in right at the end, only to hear him say "Man delights not me."

And giggles.

Because "Man delights not me [anymore]" sounds... kinda gay.

So Hamlet has to roll his eyes and be like oh my god I've ALSO stopped being delighted by woman.

Like that's the joke right? If there is another way to interpret this joke I want to know.

Then, in the next scene, R & G check back in with Claudius to make their first report. Rosencrantz says "[Hamlet] does confess he feels himself distracted/but from what cause he will by no means speak." (He said he feels weird but didn't say why.) Guildenstern comes in with the actually useful thing: "But with a crafty madness keeps aloof/when we would bring him into some confession/of his true state." (Hamlet is 100% faking, because he doesn't want to deal with people.) Which is, y'know. Correct.

I want to skip ahead to after Hamlet's climatic play, where R & G show up with the message that Queen Gertrude is angry with Hamlet, and wants to talk to him. This is very much Guildenstern's scene. He's the one who delivers the message, he's the one who has the back-and-forth with Hamlet about the recorder, culminating in Hamlet's "Do you think I'm easier to be played on than a pipe?" It's such a modern insult I love it. "Do you think you can play me? You can't even play a pipe." But of course that's the insult Hamlet gives Guildenstern, who is at least trying to play the game.

The only part of the scene where Rosencrantz talks is this:

ROSENCRANTZ. Then thus she says: your behavior hath struck her into amazement and admiration. [Hamlet already has this information, Guildenstern already told him. Rosencrantz seems to actually think that the only reason Hamlet isn't coming is because he doesn't understand what to do.] HAMLET.  O wonderful son that can so ’stonish a mother! [*Deliberately* misunderstanding Rosencrantz. Making fun of... the way Rosencrantz tends to misunderstand things] But is there no sequel at the heels of this mother’s admiration? Impart. ROSENCRANTZ.  She desires to speak with you in her closet ere you go to bed. HAMLET.  We shall obey, were she ten times our mother. Have you any further trade with us? [This switch into the plural pronouns, and shift in register means that he is MASSIVELY pulling rank on Rosencrantz. It's an insult. Hamlet is saying "Why are you wasting my time?"] ROSENCRANTZ.  My lord, you once did love me. (... ) what is your cause of distemper? You do surely bar the door upon your own liberty if you deny your griefs to your friend. [I find this line heartbreaking, because it's honest. Rosencrantz really, authentically, does not get it. Hamlet was his friend, and now he's not. Something is bothering Hamlet, and he doesn't know what. And that's as far as he can go.]

The last bit I want to look at is the final solo interaction R & G have with Hamlet before he kills them (spoilers.)

HAMLET. (...) to be demanded of a sponge, what replication should be made by the son of a king? [Back to pulling rank] ROSENCRANTZ. Take you me for a sponge, my lord? [Doesn't get it] HAMLET. Ay, sir, that soaks up the King’s countenance, his rewards, his authorities. (...) When he needs what you have gleaned, it is but squeezing you, and, sponge, you shall be dry again. [When Hamlet insults Guildenstern it's - you're trying to play the game but you're bad at it. His insult to Rosencrantz is - you sponge. you don't have a single original thought or impulse in your head. Everything in there is something someone else put there, and the only reason the King keeps you around is to use you.] ROSENCRANTZ. I understand you not, my lord. [Doesn't get it.] HAMLET.  I am glad of it. A knavish speech sleeps in a foolish ear. [Directly calling Rosencrantz a fool.] ROSENCRANTZ. My lord, you must tell us where the body is and go with us to the King. [Doesn't know what to do, reverting back to just doing his job, therefore proving Hamlet's point.] HAMLET. The body is with the King, but the King is not with the body. The King is a thing— [Hamlet is doing a Hamlet, riffing on the idea that Claudius isn't really king, etc.] GUILDENSTERN. A “thing,” my lord? [Guildenstern hasn't actually said anything in a second. And this line... always feels cold to me. Cold, and a little angry. Because Hamlet is insulting the king by calling him a "thing," after he just insulted Rosencrantz by calling him an object. Rosencrantz didn't pick up on that... but GUILDENSTERN did. "Thing" is also slang for dick - Hamlet is calling the king a dick - and there might be an undercurrent of "is this really the time for dick jokes?"] HAMLET. Of nothing. [This does continue the dick joke. Nothing = no thing = vagina (in shakespearean slang) So, yeah, Claudius is not only a dick, he's a... pussy (sigh.) Claudius is also "nothing" as in worthless ect, but I actually think this is a three-way pun, because Hamlet was also JUST talking about Rosencrantz having no substance. Being "nothing" in the sense that he's an extension of Claudius, the "thing of nothing."

So yeah. It's Shakespeare. Ending the scene on a viciously insightful three-way pun... that is also a dick joke.

[hahahafangirl]

gotta put my thoughts down before i forget it but the thing that did it in for me is how spy x family is ultimately and uniquely a “children-focused” work, where the major stakes require that we pay attention to the lives and dynamics of young children so that — specifically — we have to genuinely engage with and invested in their inner lives, motivations, desires, thoughts, emotions, etc.

i think this is a very unique focus in the shounen sphere, where the audience and creators are centered about adolescent boys (the shounen genre, in its name) and thus have a very wide scope of focus that nonetheless has “aged” past “childhood”. usually media about children and childhood are sequestered in its own genre (children’s shows like doraemon, magical girl anime like precure series, etc.) aimed at a different target audience who are in the same demographic as the main characters in the shows. this is, obviously, not a bad thing. but i appreciate the “genre-breaking” focus that spy x family have because it inspires a sort of empathy to children, who are often not the most favorite group of people for the typical demographic of shounen readers, that is specifically vital in today’s climate. (can’t say much about japan itself, who historically has been dealing with declining birth rates, but oh i can speak for the american individualism— ironically where sxf is also very popular in) another thing about this is it’s drive home how intertwined the family life is, and should be. agent twilight and thorn princess’s plot-lines are clearly shounen-esque (a spy fighting for world peace, an assassin weeding out traitors) but they are nonetheless inextricable from the family- and anya-focused story, because by choice or circumstances they are anya’s parents. they’re a part of a larger societal fabric that embedded them in relationships to others — children being one of them. i think that’s pretty neat.

another thing, specially about the depiction of children in sxf: they are fictitious yet realistic enough to portray real children and inspire sympathy for them. a lot of asian home media in general have the problems of portraying young children as “problems”: annoying, loud, privileged, dumb, ungrateful, etc etc. these are such complaints about children that are unfortunately way too common and way too ungenerous and mean-spirited; none of these tropes are present, even in a media full of scions and heiress. complaints about them being brats (red circus bus hijacking arc) was rightfully framed as unsympathetic and unreasonable (they’re children! they can’t help where they were born into— it goes both ways.) i think the crux of this beautiful balance sxf struck in portraying nuanced, dynamics children is sympathy. they can be loud, they can be whiny, cry at the drop of a hat, has too much energy, gross, have bad grades, clingy, inconsistent, academically unmotivated, ran off randomly— and that’s fine, because we know why they do it, we are given space into their inner thoughts, something so rarely afforded to real life children at times. but they can be motivated, they want world peace, they want to have genuine friends, they want their friends to be happy, they have crushes, and most of all they love their parents and they love the people around them.

i think regardless of everything sxf is a work that understands that children are full of love and the majority of the things they do are out of love. i think that alone makes it incredible in the current socio-econo-political climate where sympathy is spared so little and humanity spreads so thin children barely gets what they deserve. i suppose that’s the sort of war we are entrenched in.

[kittenintheden]

Poker Face

the one-shot I've been teasing has dropped! thank you to every last one of you who supported me and contributed to this. you know who you are. and if you don't know, you will. enjoy!!!

Rating: E Paring: Astarion/GN!Tav Wordcount: 2.2k Content: established relationship, gender-neutral Tav (?), quickie, semi-public sex, party sex, blowjob, penetrative sex, use of lube, The Horrors (?)

You and Astarion are having a casual evening hanging out with some friends. When you spy him from across the room, he gives you a tell only you know.

He wants you. Here and now. And you're happy to oblige.

Astarion has a tell.

Several of them, if you’re being honest, but one in particular with a specific connotation. You catch him tonight as you look over your shoulder, laughing at something your friend just said. On the other side of the room, your love leans against the wall, also engaged in conversation with someone at this casual gathering in the loft above Dammon’s shop.

Astarion smiles blandly at his company before he meets your eye and it turns genuine. A subtle change in the lines of his face that you’ve come to know so well, eyes going rounder and the sharp points of his teeth glinting through his parted lips. That isn’t the tell.

The tell is when he raises his hand to his mouth and rubs the pad of his thumb over his lower lip, letting it pull from the tension ever so slightly as his eyes look you up and down. He doesn’t even realize he’s doing it, and you’re not about to tell him, but you know exactly what it means even as he turns back to his conversation.

He wants you. Here and now. There’s no doubt in your mind that there’s a dull ache starting between his legs, just as it’s starting between yours.

You take a sip from your goblet, letting the wine swirl on your tongue as you pay your companions a placating smile, only half-listening to the subject of their discussion. After a few minutes, you graciously excuse yourself and move toward Astarion’s group. You notice his head turn slightly at your approach.

“Sorry to interrupt,” you say to the others as you run your fingers over his shirt sleeve before looking into his face. “I could use some air. Would you walk with me?”

“Of course, my sweet,” he says, voice the very essence of chivalry. He takes your goblet and sets it on the side table, offering his arm. You accept it and allow him to lead you outside the flat and down the stairs. When you hit the ground floor, you gently guide him with you out of sight.

“What’s this?” he teases.

In answer, you put one hand on his waist and slide the other hand around the back of his neck to draw him into a deep soul kiss. When he immediately opens to you without a hint of resistance, you know you were right. Before you pull away, you gently suck his lower lip and listen to him whine when you give it a light nibble.

“You looked like you needed a walk,” you whisper against his mouth. “Partner’s intuition. Was I wrong?”

Astarion tucks his chin and looks up at you, pupils overtaking the heated red irises of his eyes. “No.” He reaches around to twist the cloth at the base of your spine in his fist and pull you flush against him, where you can feel something rigid against your hip. “You weren’t.”

You know what that ridge is.

You open the door to Dammon’s storage shed and pull Astarion along behind you. You fumble with the nearest lantern until the flame lights, casting the space in a flickering orange glow before you pull the door shut. With a laugh, you herd him into the closest open expanse, careful where you step.

Astarion’s back hits the wall. He growls and takes you by the wrist, dragging your fingers down the fabric of his shirt until you’re pressed tight to the firm length of his quivering member through his trousers. You meet his eyes, inches from your own, and note the way he pants out his breath between the points of his teeth.

“Do you feel what you do to me?” he whispers, tilting his chin toward you. “The way my magic male love stick is pulled to you like you’re the Sailor’s Star? The way I want to put my peepee in your peepee?”

Your eyelids go heavy and hooded. You tilt your head and catch his mouth in a kiss and feel the vibration of his approving hum through his lips. At the same time, you give his heckin long chonk a slow stroke through the fabric and his body leans into yours, knees gone weak. He licks along your lip with a quiet groan.

Oh, how you love him like this. Hornt up and ready to ride, tender and eager. He’s frothin’ for you instead of thinking of his next move, and the one after that, and the one after that. Split open like a hot dog bun, 100% all beef frank and condiments spilling from him in a cascade.

Such a show of trust, of love, to let you see exactly how badly he wants to take the skin boat to tuna town. To put that knowledge and that power in your hands.

You’ll show him his trust is well-placed.

Reluctantly, you break from his mouth and he tries to follow you, tries to maintain the connection with a breathy whine. You swallow hard and run your fingers over his jawline. “Where do you want this, dearest? What would you like?”

“Your gibbering gob,” he gasps, still fighting you for another kiss. “I want you to put your piehole on me.”

“On you where?” you whisper, brushing your lips barely against his.

“On my piehole.” His voice contains the hint of a growl, now. “My neck. My chest, my stomach, my schlong.” He tests your will to hold him at bay. “Especially my big pulsating pocket rocket.”

You grin and wrinkle your nose, running your fingers up either side of his head to thread into his hair as you roll your body into his, capturing his lips with an agreeable purr. As requested, you release him and instead reach for his linen shirt, pulling it free of his trousers where he’s tucked it. He doesn’t release you from the kiss until the shirt has to go over his head. You drop it on the floor and put your hot mouth against the side of his neck, following the column of his throat with tooth and tongue. His back arches up off the wall and you use your weight to keep him in place.

Kisses travel across the expanse of his chest and over his undulating abdomen, incapable of staying still in his current state of total horned upitude. With gentle fingers, you pull at the fastenings at the front of his trousers, working them open enough to kiss and lick to the hem of his underoos. You spend a teasing amount of time running the tip of your tongue just under the band before he huffs his impatience at you.

When you sit back to look up at him, you find his eyes lidded and teeming with glossy lust, curls hanging down around his head. “I need you to slobber my knobber, my love,” he says softly.

“You do?” you ask him sweetly, even as you continue working his banana hammock to free his dingdingdong. He sighs his relief when he feels it in your hand, your fingers dancing lightly over that velvet salami.

“I love your mouth muscle on me.” He gasps sharply when you reward him with a light lick under the bulbous mushroom. “Love your sloppy toppies, your…” Another gasp as you swirl your tongue round him. “Gods, I need you to blow my job right now, I can’t think-”

His groan is low and wanting as you take him fully, letting the length of his one-eyed snake slide over the curl of your oral slug as far as you can go without gagging. You hollow your cheeks slightly, giving him the suction he seeks, and begin to move, working his love popsicle slowly.

“Yes,” he breathes, leaning heavily back into the wall even as he gently cants his hips in time with your mouth. You feel the light touch of his fingertips against your temple, moving back to play with your hair. When he looks down again to observe, he adds, “Such a sweet orifice, so perfect for my tallywacker. You are so beautiful like this. Could watch you… forever.”

Forever is a very long time, which you remind him by increasing your efforts, head moving quicker now, your tongue dragging along the underside of his organic dildo. He shudders forward, curling over you, humming.

“Ah, good to me, so good, gods, gods, that-” His words are cut through with an aching moan and you feel his steel rod swell (somehow) and go harder (than steel) against the softness of your mouth.

Then he has his arms underneath your arms and he pulls you bodily off him, up and away, and then you’re on your feet and he’s spinning you both around until your back is the one against the wall.

“What-” you start, but then he’s face humping you with his mouth, tongue desperately tasting.

You feel his hand digging into your side pouch and for one incredulous moment you think he’s trying to bloody pickpocket you mid-doink, but then you hear the near-indistinguishable pop of a cork and realize he’s found the vial of oily sex sauce you keep on hand. He moves to your neck, suckling and kissing, and you glance down to see him pumping his piston dick with his greasy hand.

He raises glazed, ruddy eyes to look deep into you, the rosemary and citrus scent of him resiny and bright. With the same hand he used on himself, he runs his palm straight down the front of your pants and crotch sling to slip in between your legs. Immediately, you lift a knee and he grabs hold of it with his free hand, hoisting it up and wide to get all up in there.

With a winded laugh, he says, “Didn’t know how ready you’d be, and I don’t want to wait.”

“So don’t,” you gasp, your eyes rolling back into your head as his slicked hand slides against your meat curtains in a dizzying way. He works the tips of his fingers inside your love pocket, testing as much as needed, and when he’s satisfied, he pulls his hand free.

You’re fairly certain you pull out a seam in your leggings in the rush to get them off, but neither of you care. True to his word, Astarion hikes your leg back up high and plunges his fuck stem into your bajingo without further pretense, the pair of you choking back your cries as you start doing the horizontal tango, except it’s vertical because you’re up against the wall. With his hand splayed over your hip and booty-butt to keep you in place, his fingers press into your skin on that delightful edge between pressure and pain.

“I a-ache,” Astairon stammers, swallowing hard as he helps you bounce on his fat hog. “Every moment you’re near, I… I ache for you.”

With his free hand, he goes under the hem of your draping shirt and runs his cool fingers up over your torso to your chest, massaging you in slow circles and giving those pink nubs a good once-over. He churns you like butter with his wand of penetration like he can’t wait, like this is the first time, like this is the last time, like this is every time in between.

You whine out your horniness and drop your head back, exposing the length of your throat to him as your jollies climb higher, coil tighter. He clings to you as though you’re life itself, using the wall for leverage as he angles you until he hits that good shit that makes you hiccup.

“Give me this, gorgeous,” he gasps, his humpy-humps firm and rhythmic. “I want to feel your b/p/ussy clench, come on. Let me feel you, let… spurt for… gimme cummies…”

You do. Your body shivers from your toes to the top of your head, radiating in waves from the core of you. Astarion gives a strangled cry almost like a sob as the strength of your whambam hits him, rippling along the length of his tickle stick where it’s bottomed out inside you. The place where you meet goes sticky-wet with your lubricating ointment.

He hoists you higher onto the wall, your legs tight around his waist, until you’re looking down into his face, your arms wrapped around his shoulders.

“You are so beautiful like this,” you say, whispering his own words back to him.

It isn’t a lie. Never has been, never will be. He’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen, gazing up at you with eyes the color of lifeblood and hair the color of moonlight as he bumps your ugly, as close as he can possibly get. Just like always, he tries to keep it together, to be the picture of confidence and seductive heat, and just like always, he can’t quite manage it as he closes in on the final moment of your bonedogging, his flesh chandelier slapping a final time.

His eyes fall closed, his brow tenses, and his lips part as quiet ah ah ahs fall from them. He grabs your hips with both hands and pulls you firmly to him, rolling once more before he releases his brogurt with a shaky exhale, spine arching and head falling back. Tension rolls off his body like rainwater, pooling beneath the pair of you as your cardinal sinning slows and stops.

Without a word, Astarion tilts his head forward again, eyes shut, and finds your mouth with his, lips soft and sweet as sugarcane. His head lolls to the side to lay on your shoulder and you feel his smile stretch against the skin of your neck.

“April Fool’s,” he whispers. “Sucker.”

so, this was a joke. obviously, I hope. APRIL FOOL'S LOL.

there is, however, a real actually sexy version and you can find that one right here. sorry. no I'm not. mwah love you all.

[capn-twitchery]

ok. in ssea they talk about breeding specific lamplighter bees to collect specific memories from people. if we can modify bees for red honey collection how much more unethical can we get with red honey business

can you gain skills via red honey?? steal all of someone's artist memories & get yourself real good at art. become a pro in 30 minutes for 500 echoes!

kidnapping surfacers to take memories of sunlight & the surface to sell to neath people

paying people for voluntarily giving up their memories,,, paying people to go out and do specific things so you can get the memory of it later. entire business built around selling specific ""experiences""

paying people to voluntarily give up the memories they DON'T want! sorry your wife cheated on you. do you want to forget it forever for 500 echoes. we can't guarantee we won't sell it on btw

criminals using people as spies & collecting what they've seen via bees. also if someone won't be a spy willingly you can just take the info anyway i guess

has anyone tried to revive a dying loved one/extend a loved one's lifespan by taking all of their memories & transplanting them in an empty honey hive body. maybe you can make an argument for transplanting a consciousness

you could make the world's least ethical dvd by just eating memories of someone who watched a movie. wait is that copyright infringement. can you get sued for selling that

sorry i forgot what i was thinking about i'm laughing at the idea of disnwy demanding royalties for mickey being in a honey memory. help

[trypo-p]

uhh im bored and it's late so. mercs if they were from Canada:

- Spy is most definitely Quebecois. That, or he's Acadian. Probably the prior of the two knowing Quebec as well... Quebec.

- Demoman is Nova Scotian, more specifically he is from Pictou. I literally have nothing else to add to this as I am also from NS and he would fit in with us perfectly.

- Soldier is most definitely from Windsor ON, and used to work for the RCMP. He is still very much patriotic. We stand for the flag (maple leaf) and kneel to the cross (....red cross??? I guess?)

- Firm believer Scout is probably from New Brunswick. Something something it's kinda french and also the bad drivers (all new brunswick drivers) there remind me of Scout's reckless personality. Not only that but NB is pretty tightly knit, he's got a big family so the family name would be pretty well known.

- Sniper lives in British Columbia. It's known for its scenery in nature and it fits him. Also the stereotypes for B.C. are that the people there are laid-back environmentalist stoners. Valve would still make them stereotypical if they were Canadian, let's be honest here. However... If we're making it similar to the comics, Sniper is originally from Washington.

- Pyro exists... Somewhere— in Canada. They could be from anywhere and it would probably work out right fine.

- It really depends with Medic. Him being from either Saskatchewan or Nova Scotia fits. Saskatchewan is definitely the most "German" place in Canada, however the most Canadians with German origins are found in Nova Scotia (I myself am a prime example, I'm like 70% Scottish 20% Irish and 10% German or something like that roughly)

- Engineer is probably from someplace in rural Ontario. I don't exactly know "too much" about Ontario m'self, however. When anyone thinks of Canada I feel like the first place they think of is Ontario. That's like me with America and Texas.

- Heavy is probably somewhere in the prairie provinces (for all you Americans that's Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba) or Nunavut.