#and figuring there was that one time with election interference

[iwouldliketoeatrandy]

Fun fact: did you know the US government has been awarding Automattic Inc. millions of dollars since 2021 which will run until December of 2024? Specifically, the presidential office has been funding tumblr.

Automattic Inc. bought tumblr in 2019.

Do you know who else funded Automattic Inc. in 2019 some $70,000? The US Department of Defense.

[qqueenofhades]

I just feel like even if we all vote and Biden wins, Trump won't accept the loss, and eventually they'll just put him in anyway. And then there won't be another real election. Even if Biden wins and somehow is actually confirmed (which again, I think is unlikely) we're going to have to do this for 30 more years because of the SC, and that isn't at all sustainable.

All this isn't to say I won't vote but I just think people are being way too optimistic about what happens if Biden wins. I don't think him winning will keep Trump out or the horrible fascist future at bay.

Look, I get the fear. I do, I do... but this is also one of the times when you have to ask if it's actually telling you something true, or if it's just preying on that generalized feeling of doom to make everything seem hopeless even if we win again. And that is... there is absolutely no actual mechanism for Trump to be installed as president if Biden wins the Electoral College (since as we have repeatedly seen, the popular vote is immaterial). SCOTUS is horrible and evil and are trying to interfere as much ahead of time for Trump as they can, but part of that is because they can't simply issue an order for Biden to be removed and Trump to become God King By Fiat. That is not how it works. If Biden wins in November, he will be president until his term ends, he steps down, Kamala takes over, or anything else.

Trump tried a coup with all the entire overwhelming might of the US government as the sitting president last time; fortunately, it failed. Reforms to the Electoral Count Act have been made to prevent another January 6. The Department of Defense and the military are still under (and would be on another January 6) Biden's command, not Trump's. That's not to say that Trump won't try some shit with his insane cult followers, but he is just a late 70s conman from Queens out on bail and under sentence for a criminal trial, who is already the biggest and most disgraced loser and asshole in American political history. He is so desperate to cheat his way back into power because in a real sense, this IS the last-chance saloon for him. He can't put off the legal proceedings, however long they take, for another four years. He's losing his marbles at a rapid rate. I'm just saying: we don't know what or when, but there will be (and already have been) real consequences for him. That is why he is scrabbling so hard.

"Even if we vote, nothing matters and Trump will win anyway" is another of those insidious lies that works to make you feel as if the battle is endless and pointless and none of its victories matter. Of course it will not all be magically fixed forever if Biden wins. We will still have to figure some godforsaken fucking way to expand SCOTUS or kick Alito and Thomas off it. But we will have bought ourselves, our democracy, our country, and the world time to do that, and put another nail in Trump's coffin. That matters. It matters a lot.

Fascism wants to present itself as overwhelming, irresistible, inevitable, and ready to happen no matter what you do, and that's what your brain wants you to buy in now. But that's not the case, Trump is not inevitable or some all-powerful monolith (in fact, another of the debate takeaways seemed to be that Biden looked bad but people still hate Trump too much for it to really shift anything). He is a loser, a fraud, a conman, a liar, and a crook, and he WANTS you to fear him like an almighty god. Don't give him or the MAGAGOP the satisfaction.

Frankly, having to endure another four months of this might kill us all, and I know that we are tired and scared (me too). But IT IS NOT INEVITABLE THAT WE ARE DOOMED. Not at all. Let's hang onto that and tell that anxiety doom voice to shove it.

Hugs.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jay Kuo at Think Big Picture:

For years, critics of Vladimir Putin have been warning that the Russians have taken over parts of the Republican Party. They raised the alarm as Republicans defended the Russian leader, parroted clear Kremlin talking points, and became mules for disinformation campaigns. In recent weeks, that criticism has shifted to include not just Republicans who have left the party, including former representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, but current GOP members. Recently, two powerful Republican chairs of the House Intelligence Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee warned openly about how Russian propaganda has seeped into their party and even made its way into speeches on the House floor. Other members are now even openly questioning whether some of their fellow officials have been compromised and are being extorted. Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) suggested in a recent interview that the Russian spies may possess compromising tapes of some of his colleagues. It’s unclear where he’s getting his information or how accurate it is.

And then there’s this: According to a report by Politico, a number of European politicians were recently paid by Moscow to interfere in the upcoming EU elections by Russians pretending to be a “media” outlet called “Voice of Europe.” The Kremlin-backed operation used money to influence officials to take pro-Russian stances. Authorities have conducted some money seizures and launched an investigation into which members of the European Parliament may have accepted cash bribes. This in turn raises an important question for our own politics: Are the Russians doing the same with U.S. politicians, directly or indirectly? This piece walks through the three types of compromise—disinformation, extortion, and bribery—to give a sense of what we know and what we don’t really know, and, importantly, where we should be on our guard. As this summary will show, from the 2016 election till now, there’s enough Russian smoke now to assume there is a fire, one that compromises not only the integrity of our own system of elections, but the safety and security of the free world. Duped.

Over the past year, we have witnessed two distinct kinds of Russian propaganda in action. Both use our own elected officials and intelligence processes to amplify and even weaponize disinformation. The first kind originates online through Russian-backed internet channels. Information operatives begin spreading false rumors, for example about Ukraine, that then get repeated within right-wing silos before reaching willing purveyors of it within the halls of Congress. A chief culprit in Congress is Georgia’s Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Among the Russian-originated false narratives she has uplifted is the patently false claim that Ukraine is waging a war against Christianity while Russia is protecting it. On Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, Greene even claimed, without evidence, that Ukraine is “executing priests.”

Where would Greene have gotten this wild, concocted notion? We don’t have to look far. Russian talking points have included this gaslighting narrative for some time. The twist, of course, is that, according to the International Religious Freedom or Belief Alliance, it is the Russian army that has been torturing and executing priests and other religious figures, including 30 Ukrainian clergy killed and 26 held captive by Russian forces. The Russians have also targeted Baptists, whom they see as U.S. propagandists, according to an in-depth Time magazine piece on the violence and death directed toward evangelicals. The Congressional propaganda mouthpieces for Russia aren’t limited to the U.S. House. Over in the Senate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance was also recently accused of spreading Kremlin-backed disinformation about Ukraine, this time over spurious allegations that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy siphoned U.S. aid to purchase himself two luxury yachts.

[...]

The accusation that Russians are presently extorting and blackmailing U.S. politicians into supporting Russia’s agenda has some broad appeal. It would help explain some mysteries, including why people like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) suddenly is no longer as supportive of Ukraine as before and constantly kisses the ring of Donald Trump these days—after presciently saying in 2016 that the GOP would destroy itself if it nominated him. 

The problem has been that these accusations aren’t supported by much evidence. That means that political extortion by the Russians is either not a very prevalent practice, or it’s so effective that no one dares expose it. Either way, we’re left without much to go on. The Russian word kompromat came into common parlance around the time that Buzzfeed published a salacious story about another intelligence report back in early 2017. In that instance, the author, a former British intelligence officer named Christopher Steele, was concerned Russia had compromising data on the soon-to-be president, Donald Trump.

That report never wound up being substantiated, and its sources and funding came into question as well. But intelligence agencies are in general agreement that obtaining kompromat is standard practice by Russia, and someone like Trump could have been an easy mark considering the company that he kept (e.g. Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell) and the projects he was involved with (e.g. the Miss Universe contest). Lately, the notion of kompromat emerged once again, this time not from Democratic-paid outfits but from within the GOP itself. Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) is one of the more “colorful” characters within the GOP, primarily known lately for being one of the eight members who voted to oust former Speaker Kevin McCarthy and even for getting into public jostling and shouting matches with McCarthy.

The Republican Party (or at least its pro-MAGA faction) is compromised by Russian kompromat.

[calaisreno]

An Arrangement

1200 words / Prompt: Hobby

Summary: Mycroft finds an ally

Mycroft Holmes regards the police officer who is sitting on the other side of the desk. Dark eyes, prematurely greying hair. Good at his job, recent promotion. A sense of humour (laugh lines), and an uncompromising commitment to honour. Maybe that’s not quite what it is. Honourable, yes, but it’s an inner sense of rightness, a gut feeling about people. Not impressed by power.

He wonders what DI Lestrade is thinking about the man he’s come to see without an appointment. 

“You’re here about my brother,” he says, sparing him the explanation. 

Lestrade nods. “I’ve seen him around, talked with him a few times. Last night—”

“Thank you.” Mycroft isn’t good at thanking people, not when thanks seem so inadequate. “I am truly grateful that you found him before… well, before more serious harm was done.”

Lestrade looks at him directly, openly, and Mycroft imagines this is the face he uses when interrogating a suspect. “You don’t know what to do with him.”

Surprised at the deduction, he responds. “I have taken some measures. It seems what I’ve attempted has not been successful, but I have the means to try other things.”

“What about your parents?”

“Our parents are not able to fully grasp the problem. Sherlock has always been… difficult. They have never understood him, and blame themselves for his problems. The matter elicits a great deal of emotion, and I have elected to be my brother’s keeper, so to speak, in order to spare them that ordeal.”

“Mr Holmes, I can’t claim to know Sherlock as well as you do, but I know a thing or two about addiction. The measures you’ve taken… well, nothing’s going to work until he’s ready to work on himself.”

Mycroft smiles grimly. “Mr Lestrade, I’m sure you’ve met many junkies in your line of work, but I’m equally sure you’ve never met anyone like Sherlock.”

“True enough. First time I met him he was high, stumbled on a crime scene I was investigating. It was like he had x-ray vision or something. Described exactly what had happened, pointed out where the murder weapon was, even suggested that the murderer was left-handed and had a limp. I didn’t dismiss him as a nut job because I could see it all— he was right.”

Mycroft’s smile is more genuine now. “My brother is several levels above any junkie you’ve met, Mr Lestrade. His problem is one he could solve, if he turned his mind to it. He resents my interference, however, and resists the measures I’ve taken. I will not give up on him, however long it takes. You need not feel responsible for Sherlock.” 

Lestrade stares down at his hands, which he holds clenched in his lap. When he speaks, his voice has lost something of the policeman. 

“Forgive me for speaking so freely. I know what it’s like to talk to someone on the phone, to say see you later, knowing that it might be the last thing you say to them. Guarding your words so you won’t sound bitter, won’t drive him away, when all you want to do is shake some sense into him, scream at him, lock him up until you can make him right.”

“Ah.” Mycroft leans back. “Your own brother.”

Lestrade smiles. “Five years younger than me, baby of the family. Our parents worked hard, and we did all right. All of us but Andy. I don’t know why. He was bright enough to do anything, be anything. We loved him, but something made him feel unloveable. It was never enough.”

“I’m sorry.” There really isn’t anything else to say when someone admits something so personal. This conversation is far more personal than he wants it to be. 

“I always take an interest in the addicts because of Andy. Maybe I can figure it out, save someone when I couldn’t do anything for him. Last time Sherlock and I spoke, I made him an offer, said I’d be willing to talk to him about homicide cases I’m working on, if he stays clean. He seemed to like that idea, said he might be a ‘consulting detective,’ the one I come to when I’m in over my head.”

Mycroft shakes his head slightly. “Sherlock is meant for something greater than police work, Mr Lestrade. I’m afraid you’ll find he quickly loses interest.”

“I don’t know, Mr Holmes. What police do matters. I’m not suggesting that Sherlock would make a good policeman. I saw a spark in him, though, one I hadn’t seen the other times we talked. Even if solving a crime is just an intellectual exercise to him, it might be the thing that keeps him from needing his next dose. That’s how you solve addiction, I think, one dose at a time.”

“That’s very simplistic.” Mycroft frowns now. “Believe me, I understand what rehab entails. And I know the success rates of most programmes.”

“True, there are a lot of failures. I don’t mean to suggest that I can cure him. You can’t cure an addict. But you can give them something else, something that absorbs them, even for a while. And maybe over time they’ll learn that there is something they want more than drugs.”

“You’re asking my permission,” Mycroft says. “I give it to you with conditions. First, you must not let him in simply to let him down. If you invite him to solve things, you will need to keep giving him things to solve. I’m not sure that’s feasible, but it is my condition. Do not treat him like a hobby.”

“I wouldn’t.” Lestrade looks at him solemnly. “I’m doing this because I think I can help him, and it would go against everything in me not to try.”

“I have another condition. You must check in with me and let me know if you see him slipping. Sherlock doesn’t see me often, doesn’t answer my calls. As I’ve said, he resents my efforts to help. You will recognise the signs. If he’s doing poorly, I want to know. I don’t care about confidences and trust between you and my brother. I must know if he is in danger.”

“I’m willing to do that.”

“Even if it involves lying to him?”

This gives the detective pause. “I want him to trust me, and lying to him would break that. I don’t want him to think I’m working for you. At the same time, I won’t pass along anything you say to me; our conversations will remain confidential.”

“In addition.” He sighs. “I am appalled that I must say this, but I would be remiss not to mention it. Do not use my brother. People have used him before, taken advantage of him. I’m not suggesting that you are the type of person who would do that. I don’t know you, Detective Inspector Lestrade. But if I ever learn that you have done such a thing—” He breaks off, giving him the humourless smile that explains more than words. “It would be very unfortunate.”

“Of course.” Lestrade looks sad. “I would never.”

“Very well, then.” 

He extends his hand. Lestrade takes it, gives it one shake, and nods. “You’ll be hearing from me.”

---

Shoutouts to everyone who is writing these! I'm so impressed 💕 Please keep writing your mini-epics, fluffy/angsty one-shots, hilarious AUs, limericks, and whatever else your brain comes up with. Please do tag people, and if you're posting on AO3 as well, consider adding to my MayPrompts2024 Collection. Much love to you all 💕

[mixelation]

i wrote more reborn au. it is the situation described previously when tori has a non-team 4 mission go awry

i might change the timeline a little, but for now: tori is 16, and she has an official position in R&D so she takes fewer out of village missions. i might change it later but she gives her rank as tokubetsu jounin, because my interpretation of this rank is that you have some sort of high-value jounin-level skill (like fuinjutsu) but your OVERALL skills aren't really jounin level. so she got promoted hella fast after making chunin, but she gets stuck at this rank a while whereas itachi and deidara get to full jounin like immediately lmao. also she and itachi have been fake-dating a few months, but that's not relevant to the following

uuh also this has some stuff that i feel like doesn't punch as hard as it should without context to foreshadow it, so apologizes if some details seem to come out of nowhere???

--

The mission started off uncomfortable and it didn’t get much better. 

The premise was this: a research team had tracked some rare scrolls all the way into the boonies of a tiny jungle territory between Fire Country and Water Country, which had historically been traded back and forth between both countries but was currently maintaining its status as an independent state after the fallout of the Third Shinobi War. It had no native ninja clans, but enough powers had occupied it that both Kiri and Konoha occasionally sent in probes to figure out if there were any leftover ninja-related valuables. 

The idea was that a ninja village had the rights to ninja materials, even if they’d both technically agreed not to interfere with the tiny nation. Tori understood everyone in her life just accepted this as a morally neutral fact of the world and elected not to analyze it further for her own sanity. It wasn’t like she wasn’t ready and willing to forego her own ethical framework when it was convenient. 

So the research team had followed some local leads to unearth an ancient and abandoned shinobi stronghold of unknown origin, but had been blocked from accessing it because the fuuinjutsu protecting it was so old no one on the team could figure out how to break it. This was how Tori was chosen for the back-up team Minato was sending in: if you wanted someone to disentangle an unknown and strange set of seals quickly and without damaging the surrounding structure, Tori was your girl. There simply wasn’t anyone else as good except Kushina herself, and Kushina had way more in-village responsibilities.  

The risk of spending a long time at this location was that Kiri would inevitably notice and send their own team in, and then even if they avoided an outright conflict, Konoha risked Kiri running off with the scrolls or whatever other treasures happened to be in the stronghold, if any. This was how the rest of the Tori’s team was picked: combat ninja for back-up. 

“Oh, this is the most fun part about being a fuinjutsu specialist, you know,” Kushina had told her, when she’d gone over to pick up fuinjutsu supplies from her office. “You get sent on all sorts of weird missions to all sorts of places, and work with all sorts of people!”

Kushina was… maybe more social and likable than Tori. Kushina could make friends with a rock. Tori, in contrast, somehow started a feud with half the people she met. 

It started with some weird comments. Tori pulled a bottle of insect repellant out of a storage seal during one of their breaks on the first day, and her teammate made a snide remark about Tori living a life of luxury. 

“...do you want some?” Tori offered. 

She was literally just using a store-bought spray in a standard-design storage scroll. Kushina had told her off more than once for over-relying on storage scrolls which could be easily stolen or destroyed or lost, but she’d seen other shinobi do this. She’d seen their captain do this, earlier. This was normal behavior. 

The weird comments continued from the same teammate, who was a rank-and-file jounin with no additional titles. Mostly they were jabs at her main designation being R&D: surprise she could clean fish, condescendingly assuring her she wouldn’t have to fight and risk chipping a nail. The comments got an occasional snicker from other ninja, but they weren’t overtly hostile and definitely not as mean as whatever the fuck Itachi might say just in friendly conversation. She gritted her teeth and beared it. 

The guy was only like nineteen or twenty. Tori wasn’t sure what his problem with her was, since he was pretty young for a jounin and couldn’t be so untalented that it would make sense for him to have a chip on his shoulder, but also he was young enough that maybe he just hadn’t matured very much yet. Or maybe it was just that she was even younger and already a tokubetsu jounin and– gasp!– a woman. People generally highly praised Deidara and Itachi for making jounin so young, but their talents were generally more obvious, and also they were men. Shinobi were less sexist than the surrounding civilian attitudes toward women, but the misogyny still crept into their culture. Sometimes some men just got upset when women were smarter or stronger or higher ranked than them. Even Kushina occasionally got pushback. 

(Not that no one ever acted jealous or insane to Itachi or Deidara– it was just that they got it less often, and people rarely acted like that twice, because both boys were nightmare people.)

So she ignored her teammate and didn’t think much of it. Sometimes people were just assholes. In Oto or in Akatsuki, this might have led to him doing something unspeakably horrible to her, but this was Konoha. Konoha ninja could be petty and mean and jaded, but they didn’t do that. 

Tori hadn’t gotten to go into the jungles of this world often, and her mood did brighten even as the weather got hotter and more humid and they had to slow down as the foliage got denser. She liked seeing the shift in trees from Hashirama trees to broad-leafed jungle trees, seeing strangler figs and hearing tree frogs and finding the prints of a large cat. She even found delight in the presence of native giant leeches they also imported to their Forest of Death.

“The anticoagulants they excrete actually have a lot of medical applications,” she said cheerfully, poking one gently with a stick. They could also kill you if you let one attach for too long. 

“Uh, okay,” said their captain. “Keep on task.”

“When you let a researcher out of the lab,” another teammate joked to the one who kept ragging on her. Tori rolled her eyes. 

It took almost an entire week to get to the stronghold. During this time, the teammate that was ragging on her got both the other ninja with them to also start on the same sort of stupid jokes. Tori pulled a branch off a squat little tree and offered it to the teammate who’d started it all. 

“Here, it’s an insect repellent,” she said, smiling as sweetly as she could. “Since you forgot to bring yours.”

For some reason, this just made the teammate meaner. By the time they researched the stronghold, she was getting accusations that she was only here due to favoritism from the fucking Hokage. 

“On task,” the captain sighed, having also laughed at a couple of the jokes. 

Whatever, Tori thought. 

The lead of the research team, at least, didn’t even blink when he saw her. He was technically part of R&D. She had a reputation there. 

The stronghold was a small, stone building overgrown with strangler figs. The research team had already removed the foliage from the entrance and revealed the seal protecting it, which probably saved at least half a day’s work. Still, the fuinjutsu on it was a mess, and it took Tori a couple hours to disentangle what was even going on. 

The research leader bounced his knee in anticipation the entire time. Apparently they’d found evidence the night before of other shinobi in the area, and they were afraid Kiri could show up at any moment. 

“Can’t you do that faster?” Tori’s captain asked as she made notes on her own scroll. 

“Not unless you want me to risk blowing it up,” Tori replied. 

“Well, try harder,” he said.

She wondered, vaguely, if he would have this attitude towards her if he hadn’t spent a whole week listening to someone make demeaning comments about her. Maybe she should have tried to nip that in the bud sooner? Usually she’d prefer an opponent underestimating her, but these were people she needed to trust her skills… she’d promised herself to stop thinking of everyone she met as an enemy until proven otherwise. 

Well, whatever. The nice thing about her boss being a fuinjutsu master was that if this captain tried to report on her being too slow, Minato would put him straight immediately. 

She got the seal off in record time. Instead of opening into the little building, the door led to a staircase that went straight down into the earth. Tori held back a comment about Oto also being arranged like this. She didn’t need to remind her asshole teammate that she was a foreigner on top of whatever he didn’t like about her. 

“Great,” the research lead sighed. 

The next several days were spent exploring the tunnels that turned out to be underneath the building. They were carved out by an underground river, which still flowed through the main passages. The remains of wooden walkways over it were still apparent, but the structure had largely rotted away and they were forced to walk on the walls or the river itself. There were more fuinjutsu-covered doors leading to narrow rooms and more fucking stairways down, in a confusing labyrinth of passages that mostly held nothing of value. 

The combat team was roped into searching the tunnels in order to cover more area quickly, since there was the ongoing anxiety that Kiri could show up any minute. They all seemed bored by the slow progress of Tori opening up new passageways only for no one to find anything but rotting wood furniture and, once, some old and useless cookware. Tori was having fun, at least. Whoever had set up the security seals must have been high when they did it. 

Then everything went to shit all at once. 

Tori was taking her lunch break, squatting in the corner of an empty room and eating a protein bar, when her asshole teammate showed up to report he’d found another fuinjutsu-covered door. Many of the rooms had puddles from the river leaking through cracks, and the jounin rushed in so quickly he didn’t even bother water-walking over them. 

The door he’d found was different from the rest, with an ornately carved stone door frame. It also wasn’t wood like the rest had been, held together against time by fuinjutsu. This door was a solid block of rock, a giant disc on the side of the door frame. 

“I bet Hokage-sama will give us a bonus if we’re the ones who find the scrolls,” he said, his excitement obvious as Tori poked at the door. “They do that for object recovery, right?”

“I think that’s only if you find something that wasn’t a part of the mission parameters,” Tori replied, taking a step back to squint at the full seal. There wasn’t a universal pattern to them, but she was getting pretty quick about identifying and then dismantling the relevant parts. 

“Pft, what do you know,” her teammate replied, kicking at a puddle. 

“No offense,” Tori started, pulling out her brush and a jar of ink, “but what is your problem with me?”

Her teammate didn’t answer, watching her paint very carefully over the seal. The stone wheel that made up the door groaned and slowly rolled aside. 

The room inside was definitely different from the rest. The back wall was nothing but running water, held in place by more fuinjutsu that formed a gently glowing web of chakra over it. There was also actual decoration on the exposed stone walls, carved and then painted in. In the center of the room was a stone pedestal with an obvious scroll box. 

Tori’s teammate was obnoxious, but he was still a jounin and not an idiot. He waited for Tori to flick chakra-infused ink into the room and then perform a jutsu to check for traps. 

The room itself was safe. The problem was that the pedestal was obviously boobytrapped. 

“Can you undo it?” her teammate asked, peering at the box. It matched the description the research team had. 

It was hard to reveal the seals on the pedestal and take a look. They were, in fact, more insane than what was on all the doors. Unlike the doors, these were meant to be somewhat permanent, not meant for anyone but the sealmaster who made them to take off. 

“It’s… going to take some time,” Tori said cautiously. “But, shit, this array itself is probably valuable.”

She pointed to how it scattered down the pedestal to the river wall and then up and across the ceiling in a nonstandard shape. If it were disrupted, the seal holding the water back would break, immediately flooding the room. At the same time, the bit on the ceiling would collapse… something. Either the ceiling itself or wall with the exit. 

There was a mechanism also holding the box in place and locked shut, so no random person would be able to move it or open it and then accidentally set off the trap. Breaking that part of the seal wouldn’t be any more difficult than the doors, but Tori would need some time to figure out how to disentangle this mechanism from the deathtrap so they didn’t set it off and could remove the scrolls safely. 

“Alright,” the jounin said at length. “But you have to make it clear I’m the one who found it.”

Tori really, really didn’t think this mattered, but before they could decide what exactly to do, two strangers walked into the room. They were both wearing Kiri headbands. 

“Are you kidding me?” the jounin said, stepping between Tori and the Kiri-nin and drawing a kunai. 

She hadn’t noticed it over the rush of the river in front of them, but now that Tori was concentrating, she could hear the shouts of a fight outside. 

“Oh nice, you found it for us,” one of the Kiri said. Both had swords drawn. Tori drew her own kunai and shifted into a fight-ready stance. 

“Surely there’s a diplomatic solution to this,” she tried. 

“Oops, too late,” the other Kiri-nin answered, flashing teeth at her. 

Tori’s jounin teammate took a step back and whispered out of the corner of his mouth: “I’ll engage them. Get the box off.”

“But–” Tori started.

Behind his back, he signed that they’d flash step out. Tori nodded slowly. It was risky, and she wasn’t sure she could flash step quickly enough to not get caught in the trap, but a really good jounin could. 

This was the best part of Konoha, she thought. Even assholes had your back. 

One of the Kiri-nin chucked a handful of kunai at them, and Tori fully turned to back to face the seal on the pedestal. She heard the clink of her teammate batting the blades out of the air with his sword. Yes, even this guy had her back, no questions asked. 

She barely watched the fight as she concentrated on her own work. Her teammate was a good fighter, and he managed to counter both ninja while also keeping any attacks from hitting her. It only took a few minutes for him to kill one of the Kiri-nin, after which the second backed off and tried more mid-range attacks. 

“Got it,” Tori finally announced. Her teammate pounced on the Kiri-nin, plunging the sword into her. 

“Do it,” he told Tori, turning to her with the wild eyes of man high on his own bloodlust. 

“As soon as I release it, the seal–” Tori started to warn.

The Kiri-nin he’d left crumpled in the corner groaned and rolled onto her feet unsteadily, still alive. 

“It’s okay, I got you,” her teammate said, wrapping an arm around her waist. “The faster we move, the faster we can back-up our teammates.”

“Right,” Tori agreed, poising her paintbrush. “On the count of three.”

What happened next was such a slimy move that it completely blindsided Tori, even if it shouldn’t have. Training herself to no longer assume that people were just going to screw her over for no reason had been a bad idea, it turned out. 

She called one as she made the last of her brush strokes. Her mouth started on the syllable, and the jounin adjusted his grip on her so his hand was around the supply pack at the small of her back. He leaned over and put his hand over the box, his grip adjusted wide enough to wrap the last joints of his fingers over the top. This would be a weird as fuck hold for a joint flash step, but Tori didn’t give it a second thought. He just moved to put his hand on the box. That was their mission. 

And then he flash stepped through the rubble suddenly raining down on them, taking the box and Tori’s pack with him, leaving Tori behind to be knocked over by the sudden wave of water. 

The first few moments of the room flooding were chaos. Part of the ceiling and the entire wall collapsed, and debris hit her shoulder and legs as the water battered her around. 

It calmed eventually, with the water only waist deep. Tori spat out water and fumbled for one of the glow sticks in her weapons pack. 

“Are you fucking kidding me?” the wounded Kiri-nin asked when Tori lit up the room. “Holy shit, did he leave you on purpose?”

Tori bit her lip. Yes, he totally had. What the fuck. Konoha ninja weren’t supposed to be like this. 

When Tori didn’t respond, the Kiri-nin wrote her off and started yelling at the collapsed wall for help. There was no evidence anyone heard her at all. 

The good news was that the river wasn’t rushing in. Its source must have also partially collapsed, leaving the river at a small trickle. 

“The water had a way out,” Tori announced, wading toward the back wall. “Maybe we can…”

She tried diving. When she found nothing, the Kiri-nin also tried. The exit the water had been taking before was completely sealed off. 

“Oooh, we’re fucked,” the Kiri-nin sighed. “What the fuck was your friend’s plan?”

“I don’t…” Tori started. He should have taken her with him. It was well within his abilities. He’d told her. 

He’d also taken her travel pack with all her fuinjutsu supplies. She still had some kunai and shuriken and a flare and a couple glow sticks in her weapons pack, but those would hardly help. She had a few scrolls still on her, but none of those were going to get her out. 

The water was getting higher. Tori found she was shaking. Konoha ninja weren’t supposed to do this. 

Old Tori had been physically weaker, but she hadn’t been this gullible, this stupid. She hadn’t been able to afford it. 

“I-I can stop the water,” Tori told the Kiri-nin, embarrassed that her voice sounded like she was on the brink of tears. 

The Kiri-nin eyed her with something that was either pity or disgust or both. 

“Is this your first life or death mission, little girl?” she asked. 

Tori let out a hysterical laugh. No, actually, she should have anticipated this happening from the first weird comment. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

“I’m sixteen,” Tori said. “They’ve sent me into worse.”

She said this more to remind herself. She’d survived worse. She’d just been an idiot, thinking she’d finally been in a position to trust people. 

The Kiri-nin snorted. 

“Whatever, Konoha. Don’t stop the water yet. That might be the only way out.”

The Kiri-nin performed a series of water jutsu, meant to scope out the walls and floor and ceiling and find any gaps they could take advantage of, either to drain the water or send a message for help or get out. It would make sense if the person who set up the trap also left a way to get out, rather, let themselves back in to retrieve their scrolls. 

Tori wondered if the Kiri-nin would actually help her if she identified a way out, or if she’d also spitefully leave her for dead. How sad would it be, if she was betrayed by her own comrade and saved by a random Kiri-nin?

Tori didn’t get to find out the answer to the question, because the Kiri-nin didn’t find anything. If there was a way back in, it wasn’t accessible from the inside. The Kiri-nin leaned back against a wall, panting with exertion and holding her side where Tori’s teammate had stabbed her. 

“I’m a medic,” Tori offered. Her medical supplies were off with her treasonous teammate, but she could still do some chakra-based stuff.

“Shut up,” the Kiri-nin groaned. “Okay, I’m going to dive again and try to get out through the river’s entrance.”

“You sure you don’t want me to at least stop the bleeding–”

“Shut up.”

The Kiri-nin dived. When she didn’t come back for a very long time, Tori waded over to the river’s entrance and attempted diving herself. 

There wasn’t an opening big enough to fit her body through. Instead, she found the Kiri-nin’s body with her arm wedged into a crevice that must have collapsed further when she stuck her arm in. Tori couldn’t dislodge it to try and drag the woman back to the surface. She was dead, anyway.

Tori pulled one of her remaining scrolls from her vest and set up a barrier to block the influx of water. It was now up to her chest. 

Then she pulled herself up to sit on top of the water and very quietly freaked out. 

It wasn’t being trapped in a sealed room with two dead Kiri-nin that freaked her out, exactly. It wasn’t even that she had no idea if any of her teammates outside were alive or aware she needed help. It wasn’t even necessarily that her teammate had seemingly turned on her for stupid reasons. 

It was that she had gone out of her way to assume an asshole was just an asshole, that Konoha ninja were the exception to the rule she’d learned through both her shitty lives, like an idiot. It stung, worse than she would have thought it would. 

Her barrier eventually ran out of chakra, and as she watched it flicker and die, a horrible thought struck Tori. 

No one was going to come help her, because her teammate was not going to report her as alive but trapped. He was going to report her as definitively dead, because there was no way he’d let her be seen alive to tell her side of the story. 

Maybe, once they got back to Konoha and formally reported her KIA, Minato would send someone for her body. They usually only did that for people with stealable bloodline limits, but Kushina would probably push for it. Or maybe, if the rest of the team was all killed by Kiri or otherwise too injured to go back themselves, Minato would eventually send someone to check up on them. Neither scenario was a timeline where Tori would still be alive if she stayed in here. 

In the best case scenario, her team beat off the Kiri-nin, and then someone came looking for her. The asshole teammate would protest, would insist she was dead in a collapsed and inaccessible room, but maybe someone would insist on retrieving her body. 

It seemed unlikely. She’d already been too charitable with her assessment of this team. None of them were coming for her. 

She had two more scrolls with barriers to hold back the water slowly seeping in. Neither of them had enough chakra to last more than a couple hours, but she could recharge them a few times with her own chakra, although without food, chakra would become a finite resource. She had maybe a day before she drowned using just these tools. 

She could make a seal, of course. Her teammate had taken her supplies, and the ink and brush she’d had out before we lost in the flood, but she still had a body full of blood and plenty of surfaces to draw on. It wouldn’t be easy or neat, since blood required different calculations and wet, uneven rocks would be hard to draw on, but she could do it. 

 Her first idea was to tap into one of her storage dimensions. She had some food squirreled away in one, and some fuinjutsu supplies in another. The one she’d stuck a bunch of spare camping supplies in probably even had a better light source. 

Okay, Tori decided, standing on the water, here I go. 

xXx

Two days passed, and no one came for her. With food and fuinjutsu supplies, she’d been able to wrap a double barrier around the main source of water, but it must have been slowly seeping in from somewhere else too because the water level was still slowly rising. She could no longer stand fully on the water surface, and she’d had no good way to sleep. 

She tried a controlled explosion on the wall she knew led to an open passage, but instead she’d just collapsed more of the room. There must not have been anything above her but more earth. 

The explosion had also shaken the Kiri-nin’s body loose, and Tori didn’t really have anywhere to put it, so she was just… floating. 

Tori’s new plan was to get a message to Konoha. Maybe a regular team wouldn’t get to her in time, but Minato could. She wasn’t sure he would, but… 

She struggled to cling to this hope, even though it turned out trust was a lie and Konoha-nin were the types to just fuck you over for no reason. 

Tori didn’t really have a good way to send a message herself. Between Itachi’s crows and Deidara’s animated clay, they’d always taken care of it when she’d been on a regular team. She’d never had a need to invent her own way. She stuck some messages into storage dimensions she knew Kushina also had the key to, but she wasn’t sure why Kushina would check them unless she knew Tori was in danger. 

Which she wouldn’t know, because Tori’s teammate was an asshole. 

She did know a couple time-space jutsu, but those were notoriously difficult, and she didn’t know any that wouldn’t require another person. She wasn’t even sure any solo ones existed, besides the Hiraishin, because usually you at least needed a receiver. 

Tori ran option after option through her brain. She didn’t know shit about summoning jutsu, which would be super useful in this situation if not just for the ability to reverse summon. Could she logic her way through how they must work and then reverse engineer it…?

No, she’d have better luck reverse engineering the Hiraishin. At least she knew some of the theory behind that one. 

Sitting on the water, the top of her head brushed the ceiling. Or maybe she should focus on making a full-wall seal to keep the water out. That she was at least positive she could do. But that would take so much time… 

Tori stuck her head between her knees and willed herself not to cry. She still felt so fucking stupid, and the lack of sleep and floating corpse weren’t helping. Of course she shouldn't have trusted the guy who was making fun of her the whole time. Of course, of course, stupid, stupid, stupid.

She mentally flipped through everything she knew about time-space jutsu, feeling hysterical. She’d tried the Hiraishin before, and nothing had even happened because only two people in the world had ever managed it. Even with entire villages trying to beat it during the war, no one had even come close. It would be deeply stupid and arrogant of her to push forward assuming she could accomplish what entire teams of more experienced shinobi had failed to do. 

She was developing a crick in her neck from being bent forward as she approached the ceiling, so she laid down on her back. All her clothes were already wet regardless. 

Except, she had spent a lot of time thinking deep thoughts about the Hiraishin, because, well, it didn’t make sense no one had been able to copy it. Minato had left seals all over the place. No one had even been able to figure out how to undo them without removing the entire object the seal was on; it was why Iwa had been so terrified of them sneaking even one in. 

The markers are only a guide for the actual jutsu, Minato had said when she’d asked, and then when she’d asked again and again, Only I can use them, because only I have my chakra. 

But why couldn’t someone else use his chakra? She just couldn’t shove this explanation into her understanding of how space-time jutsu worked. Most of them worked using another user as a receiver on the other end, or else by using multiple people to throw something to a receiving array, and none of them worried about chakra incompatibilities. Tori had been considering using a fucking tree as a receiver, if she’d had the foresight to set up a tree-powered seal to be her receiver. And why the fuck hadn’t she done that, if she’d thought about it so much? How had she never anticipated being trapped with no hope of back-up? Old Tori would have never. Stupid, stupid, stupid–

Actually, Tori thought, sitting up on her elbows. Hiraishin wasn’t receiver-less, was it? Minato just did both jutsu on one end but somehow the marker anchored the receiving jutsu, somehow slingshotting him through space. Or at least that was the only way Tori could conceptualize it possibly working. You could, in theory, use an already active seal as an unmanned receiver; it was just that you needed to be really, insanely good to make a seal that complex that could stay active for long periods of time. That was why Tori’s idea had used a tree’s chakra to power the receiving end. But if you just had, like, some sort of tiny, self-sustaining guide for your receiver jutsu….? That was probably why it had to be Minato’s own chakra. 

Tori had no idea how to simultaneously do two jutsu and also do them so lightning fast it was basically instantaneous from having the thought to teleporting, the way Minato did. But why couldn’t she include both in a seal, with one of his markers as the anchor? At the end of the day, Tori had taught herself to use fuinjutsu almost entirely with other people’s chakra. Her original concept she’d been working on (but never tested, like an idiot) had been based around a goddamn tree. She’d done extensive testing on how chakra from different sources varied and how to optimize jutsu to it. She could totally hijack one of Minato’s seals. 

She was worryingly close to the ceiling now, even flat on her back. She drew a copy of a Hiraishin marker and then got to work painting a combination send-and-receive transport seal around it. 

xXx

Tori found herself on a dark forest floor, gasping for breath. She had no idea where she was, but at least she was no longer under fucking water. Pine needles poked into her back as she collapsed, staring up into the canopy. The trees had spindly arms and the full moon peeked through. 

The forest was still and quiet. Tori was working very hard on not hyperventilating. 

I’m alive, she promised herself. I’m breathing. 

Her body was shaking from adrenaline. She’d gotten a working seal painted in time, even if she’d had a hell of a time activating it. She was fine. She was alive. 

She got about three seconds of time to lay there and breathe before Minato was suddenly on top of her, a rasengan waving in her face. Tori shrieked. 

“It’s me, it’s me!” she screeched. The rasengan, being made mostly of chakra, gave off its own weak light, and Minato’s face was dead-serious as he commanded that she give various identifying codes to confirm her identity. Tori’s brain was already scattered and panicked from barely escaping drowning, and her answers came out garbled. Finally she yammered, “Who else would be hijacking your seals?”

Minato was quiet for a few moments, and then he released the rasengan. Rather than reabsorb the chakra, he let it spiral out in a gust of wind that made Tori shiver. 

Minato stood. He was in his pajamas, and one knee was damp from where he’d been kneeling on her stomach. He offered her a hand. In the moonlight, his face looked weary. 

“What the fuck are you doing?” he asked, sounding exhausted. “Report.”

The phrasing of the command meant that even if he was in his pajamas, he was talking to her as Hokage right now. Tori did her best to straighten up and explain herself like she would for a mission or a lab experiment gone wrong, but her story quickly turned into an upset ramble. 

She didn’t know if her team was alive. She wasn’t even sure how much time had passed. Her teammate had been an asshole to her and she’d ignored it but she shouldn’t have because that was her clue she shouldn’t have trusted him with shit– 

“How did you get here?” MInato cut her off. His voice was barely restrained emotion, stress and anger. Tori felt almost taken aback. She’d thought he’d care more than she nearly died. 

She felt stupid that she was this upset over a bunch of nobodies leaving her for dead, about being this incoherent over almost dying. Wasn’t she tougher than this? Why did Minato being mad at her make her want to cry?

She walked him through the logic of her escape efforts. If Minato had any personal thoughts on her initial attempts or her aside that the Kiri-nin’s body had just been hanging out, he didn’t show them. His eyebrows did raise higher and higher as she described her eventual solution to her predicament. 

“You just came up with that?” he asked. She couldn’t tell if he was dumbfounded or furious. 

Maybe this will be when they decide I’m too dangerous and kill me, Tori thought. She’d thought she’d been safe from this inevitability, but maybe not. 

“Well,” Tori replied slowly. The fact that no one could hijack his seals had been bugging her for years. He knew this, because his and Kushina’s own dismissive attitudes were why she’d been stuck on it. He knew this about her. She shouldn’t have to lie and back off. “I’ve been mulling it over, and I thrive under stress.”

Minato sighed loudly. He still seemed tense, but he wasn’t exactly angry, she didn’t think. 

“We need to destroy it, even if you think the passage is inaccessible,” Minato told her. “Tori, I cannot stress how dangerous it is to leave evidence–” He cut himself off, frowning. “Shit, I can access it.”

And then he was gone. Tori shifted awkwardly, peering around her. She definitely wasn’t anywhere near Konoha. The amount of pine meant she’d probably ended up way further north, although she didn’t have enough light to be identifying exact species to narrow it down much further than that. How the hell did Minato aim this thing?

Tori was soaked, and the forest was colder than a Fire Country night. She shivered and peeled off her outer layer, wringing it out. A few minutes later, Minato returned, now also wet. 

“Good news is, I destroyed it for you,” he told her. He still sounded stressed, but there was a hint of relief in there. “So that problem, at the very least, has been resolved.”

Minato was not mad at her for breaking his jutsu, per se, but everything about his body language was deeply tense. He banned her from ever drawing it up again without his direct supervision, or even mentioning the idea of it to anyone. Now that Tori wasn’t afraid of dying alone in a cave, it occurred to her that Minato had hundreds of his seals in Konoha. Tens of them were in his house alone. One was in the Kyuubi’s seal. If an enemy could do what Tori just did, they were all fucked. 

Tori was very certain no one else on the planet could do what she did in this very specific regard, including Minato himself. But perhaps a motivated person could copy her, or an informed person could follow her line of research to figure it out themselves. 

“Okay,” Minato finished his very long list of commands on things she was never even to think about doing again. He took a deep breath. “Now we can move on to the other problem. Your teammate did what?”

She walked him through the story again, and was relieved that she seemed too tired to cry. That asshole wasn’t worth her tears, although she still felt deeply stupid and almost embarrassed as she described what happened to Minato. She felt like a whiny kid recalling the passive aggressive comments, and then like a moron when she described trusting his plan. 

When she was done, Minato said very slowly, “I want you to understand that I believe you, Tori. However, as Hokage, I will have to do an investigation before making any decisions.”

Tori frowned. “So no one sent a message?”

Minato raised an eyebrow. “Tori, you beat any message they could get to me.”

That seemed wrong, as Tori had also had this whole upsetting detour where she’d nearly drowned in an underground room. 

“Okay,” Tori replied dully. “What do you want me to do?”

If he made her go back to her mission, she was going to throw a fit. Instead, he put a comforting hand on her shoulder. 

“You successfully completed your assigned part of the mission,” he said. “And, as much as you scared me, I’m really glad you didn’t die. I think you should get some rest.”

He brought her to his home. Tori had not seen full light in days, and even the kitchen overhead light made her squint and blink rapidly when he switched it on. 

“I want to hear what they report before they know you made it back alive,” he told her in a hushed tone. “So lay low and hang out here a few days.”

Tori squinted at him. “That’s pretty mean,” she assessed. “I like it.”

She wasn’t sure how he would treat this situation if it happened to another shinobi. Certainly he wouldn’t let most people stay in his home; they didn’t exactly have a revolving door of house guests. It made her feel better, she thought as she showered off in the guest bathroom, to be reminded someone did value her as more than a tool or an obstacle. 

Even if he commented about the mission first, her brain reminded her traitorously. 

When she stepped out of the bathroom, a set of women’s pajamas had appeared neatly-folded on the guest bed. They were almost definitely Kushina’s, and given Kushina was significantly taller than her, fit comfortably loose. Tori stepped out of the guest bedroom to find Kushina angrily chopping vegetables in the kitchen. 

“It’s 2 AM,” Tori told her. “What are you doing?”

Kushina paused, sticking her bottom lip out at Tori. She was wearing a baggy shirt that came down to mid-thigh and her hair was braided back and wrapped for sleep. Tori barely had time to react before she was in a hug. 

“I’m working out my feelings in a productive way,” Kushina said, releasing her. “Besides, you need to eat.”

Tori did not want to admit she wanted a longer hug. Instead, she persuaded Kushina to let her eat cup ramen instead of the full course meal Kushina appeared to be preparing to make. Kushina did insist she felt better chopping things up and she was only saving herself time doing it later for dinner, so Tori sat at the table and listened to the rhythmic sound of Kushina taking out her anger on some carrots. 

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Kushina insisted more than once. Minato might have told her the basics to explain Tori’s presence, but surely Kushina didn’t know all the details of Tori’s mission. She was in no place to know if Tori had actually done anything wrong or not. Still, sometimes Kushina’s blind faith was reassuring. 

“Thanks for the PJs,” Tori told her before escaping to bed. 

She’d never stayed overnight in the Uzumaki-Namikaze house. She’d only ever seen the guest bedroom to dump her coat off before a party. But the bed was comfortable and had a thick comforter, and she found herself bone-tired. She fell asleep immediately.

[emp-t-man]

okay here’s the thing— i don’t think hilbert actually killed fourier and rhea, and here’s why:

yes. he did kill lambert and hui. we know that it’s because command insisted that he continue the human decima trials after fisher’s death, and since neither lambert nor hui had received the physical and immune system training that he had gone through, their bodies weren’t able to fight it off. but fourier… she didn’t die from the virus. she disappeared. the day after she was able to figure out how to wire the vx3 into lovelace’s escape shuttle. they never found a body. and rhea? she was deactivated only three hours before running the final calculations. and lovelace was right, these were definitely not coincidences. someone didn’t want them to leave the hephaestus. but why would hilbert want them to stay? there was no reason he needed lovelace alive. the door didn’t exist during that mission, and so hilbert had no reason to believe that command wouldn’t simply provide him with more subjects after this one was met with failure. hilbert himself wanted to get off the station and go home! he says so in episode thirty-one, where he admitted to contacting command fifty days before she left and suggesting that they terminate the mission! there was no logical reason for hilbert to resort to murdering in cold blood in order to keep lovelace on that station.

but.

there is someone else that would resort to such an extreme just to keep the hephaestus crew from returning to earth. someone who, several years later, was able to bend the laws of time and space to their will by creating a loop of an entire day just to ensure something would keep them in the same place.

“doug, are you seriously suggesting that the aliens were miraculously able to remove two entire people from existence without a trace?” you bet your ass i am.

here’s the thing: these guys are able to do pretty much anything they want. they’ve created human duplicates, they’ve created time loops, they use a god damn wormhole to transport humans to a seemingly entirely different plane of existence. if someone were to figure out a way to do something they didn’t like, they could very easily just,, make them disappear! just like lovelace assumed it was for hilbert, it was a last resort for them, and last resorts make people get sloppy!

another thing that makes me think hilbert wasn’t behind this in particular? lovelace stated in her logs that command stopped responding to their calls months before the day she died. just like cutter seemingly stopped responding to minkowski’s call for help four months before he arrived on the station. he was only able to actually make it to the hephaestus after eiffel and bob have their little heart to whatever-the-hell-bob-has. that also does not sound like a coincidence to me.

the aliens causing fourier and rhea to disappear also makes sense from a learning standpoint. after they made them go away, lovelace still managed to make it off the station, even if she died shortly after. having a little run-in with the indomitable human spirit like that would make sense as to why they would elect to simply have time repeat itself until someone did something stupid rather than only dwindling their recourses and letting them continue.

as we learned from kepler, this was far from the first time the aliens had done something to interfere with a hephaestus mission in order to attempt to start their process. why would they try so hard during zhang’s (and possibly several others’) mission and leave the crew entirely alone during lovelace’s, just to try and stir the pot again during minkowski’s run?

i dunno, it’s just a theory (a space theory), but i think it would make a lot more sense as to why lovelace’s mission went the way it did rather than simply “hilbert went crazy and pulled a wadsworth on everyone”

[starlightbooklove]

Omg You guys tysssm for the support to My last post, it means the world to me.

Hello again, I started writing this post last night, I'm going to try to keep the timeline of how the events happened so that everything makes sense Because I couldn't finish writing it at the time, because of how everything ended. I have 2 and a half hours of sleep, it has been a complete emotional roller coaster of the worst kind for us as a country.

So, yesterday, July 28, 2024...

This day has been fucking Legendary in our story, By midday there were already 9 million votes in the voting centers with a majority in the polls in "La Unidad" (the opposition party)

Voting is still happening and it is currently 7:54 pm

People were in lines since last night, at 6 AM the centers were supposed to open. There was a part of these that did not open their doors at the scheduled time due to people from the Chavista party, acting as if they had some power to deny them the exercise of their right to vote, which led to the hilarious uprising of several voters in several states, coming to fucking knock down Gates to enter schools (the usual voting centers)

It also happened that they did not let the voters in but they did activate the machines and began to insert an unreal amount of identity cards to collect false votes for the government, WHEN THE CENTERS DIDN'T EVEN OPEN, CÑLM Which resulted in cases of violence in several states of the country, people went to exercise their right and did not allow themselves to be intimidated by anyone, to the point that CEBIM officials (a military body of the country) had to interfere with the anti-riot squads to remove the government sympathizers who started the problem by not opening and now they were getting their asses kicked by the voters who didn't sit still. The people were so firm that they didn't care that a military official was trying to protect the troublemakers at the voting centers, yet they insulted them and tried to beat them, Wich, ngl was heckin hilarous.

This was only at one of the voting centers

At seven, as i mentioned people were still voting, But many voting centers had already closed tables and were already counting votes, so theoretically the elections would close no later than 9 p.m. The broadcast of the national electoral council (CNE) had already started, never a broadcast was so damn long (the last time we had an opposition candidate this close, The results came out at 1:30 AM..., so that in the end they took away his victory with fraud, so you see, it's a pattern).

They told the story of ALL the presidents who have governed the country, since the country was literally unified and even when they reached the end they said that the results would be known shortly

Outside, in the voting centers, the results were being recorded by the same citizens, they all had the majority of votes for Edmundo González by A LOT, and in almost all the states.

Here things only went from bad to worse. When voting, there is a tradition called taking care of the boxes. The boxes are those that have all the votes from the voting center to which they belong, the votes are counted in the centers in front of witnesses from the people, the results are stated and then those results are sent in minutes to the national electoral council. María Corina urged people to take care of their votes, to stay in the centers so that they could see clearly what they were doing with the boxes once the voting closed. Around 8, 9 pm the vast majority of the states had reported Edmundo as the winner, several went out to celebrate in the streets and the voters continued to wait patiently and calmly outside the voting centers.

One of the biggest political figures in our country and the biggest spoiled son of a bitch here started talking on TV From where his people were celebrating, as in all votes, their Victory without even finishing giving out the results.

And I think I knew what hate is that corrupts, burns and boils in the blood, because while that man was speaking, in one of the states where they were celebrating, the "collectives" arrived. The collectives are another military branch which is at the same time independent of the country's own militia, and that is known to be led by said political figure, they are known for committing crimes And not suffer the consequences, so when they get to a place, it doesn't mean anything good.

They killed a man, and began to attack the people who were there, and this began to happen in several states, they took the militia out into the streets, they began to fight with the people, armed soldiers against young and old women, against people who were just celebrating damn it, while the fucking son of a bitch said on television that it was a night to celebrate in peace the absolute victory of the political party

[theculturedmarxist]

Being labeled a Russian propagandist all day every day for criticizing US foreign policy is really weird, but one advantage it comes with is a useful perspective on what people have really been talking about all these years when they warn of the dangers of “Russian propaganda”.

I know I’m not a Russian propagandist. I’m not paid by Russia, I have no connections to Russia, and until I started this political commentary gig in 2016 I thought very little about Russia. My opinions about the western empire sometimes turn up on Russian media because I let anyone use my work who wants to, but that was always something they did on their own without my submitting it to them and without any payment or solicitation of any kind. I’m literally just some random westerner sharing political opinions on the internet; those opinions just happen to disagree with the US empire and its stories about itself and its behavior.

Yet for years I’ve watched people pointing at me as an example of what “Russian propaganda” looks like. This has helped inform my understanding of all the panic about “Russian influence” that’s been circulating these last six years, and given me some insight into how seriously it should be taken.

That’s one reason why I wasn’t surprised by Matt Taibbi’s reporting on the Twitter Files revelations about Hamilton 68, an information op run by DC swamp monsters and backed by imperialist think tanks which generated hundreds if not thousands of completely bogus mainstream news reports about online Russian influence over the years.

Hamilton 68 purported to track Russian attempts to influence western thought on social media, but Twitter eventually figured out that the “Russians” the operation has been tracking were actually mostly real, mostly American accounts who just happened to say things that didn’t perfectly align with the official Beltway consensus. These accounts were often right-leaning, but also included people like Consortium News editor Joe Lauria, who’s about as far from a rightist as you can get.

They played a massive role in fanning the flames of public hysteria about online Russian influence, but while they did this by pretending to track the behavior of Russian influence ops, in reality they were tracking dissent.

One of the craziest things happening in the world today is the way westerners are being brainwashed by western propaganda into panicking about Russian propaganda, something that has no meaningful existence in the west. Before RT was shut down it was drawing a whopping 0.04 percent of the UK’s total TV audience. The much-touted Russian election interference campaign on Facebook was mostly unrelated to the election and affected “approximately 1 out of 23,000 pieces of content” according o Facebook. Research by New York University into Russian trolling behavior on Twitter in the lead-up to the 2016 election has found “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.” A study by the University of Adelaide found that despite all the warnings of Russian bots and trolls following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the overwhelming majority of inauthentic behavior on Twitter during that time was anti-Russian in nature.

Russia exerts essentially zero influence over what westerners think, yet we’re all meant to freak out about “Russian propaganda” while western oligarchs and government agencies continually hammer our minds with propaganda designed to manufacture our consent for the status quo which benefits them.

All this and we’re still seeing calls for more narrative management from the western empire, like the recent American Purpose article “The Long War of Ideas” being promoted by people like Bill Kristol which calls for a resurrection of CIA culture war tactics like those used during the last cold war. Every day there’s some new liberal politician sermonizing about the need to do more to fight Russian influence and protect American minds from “disinformation”, even as we are shown over and over again that what they really want is to shut down dissident voices.

That’s what we’re seeing in the continual efforts to increase online censorship, in the bogus new “fact-checking” industry, in calls to increase the output of formal US government propaganda operations like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia, in the way all dissent about Russia has been forcefully purged from the western media in recent years, in the way empire-amplified trolling operations have been shouting down and drowning out critics of US foreign policy online, in the way censorship via algorithm has emerged as one of the major methods of restricting dissident speech.

They claim there needs to be a massive escalation in propaganda, censorship and online psyops in order to fight “Russian influence”, while the only influence operations we’re being subjected to in any meaningful way are only ever of the western variety. They just want to do more of that.

Our rulers aren’t actually worried about “Russian influence”, they’re worried about dissent. They’re worried the public won’t consent to the “great power competition” they plan to subject us to for the foreseeable future unless they can exert massive influence over our minds, because they know that otherwise we will recognize that our interests are directly harmed by the economic warfare, exploding military spending and nuclear brinkmanship which necessarily accompanies that campaign to reign in Russia and stop the rise of China.

They’re propagandizing us about the threat of foreign propaganda in order to justify propagandizing us more. We’re being manipulated into consenting to agendas that no healthy person would ever consent to without copious amounts of manipulation.

[xiphiaarts]

Still solidifying the relationship between Starscream and Megatron for my au

I don't know the fine details of it yet, But I know I don't want to go the 'Starscream gets pimpslapped for every small mistake' route

I rather go for like the corrupt military official route, who may very well be sabotaging his own affiliation in order to have it's people turn against their leader, and elect him, the one who supposedly knew Megatron didn't have to steel for leadership all along, as new ruler (Also known as Starscream talking sweet in Megatron's face and talking shit about him when he isn't around.)

Soundwave and his cassettes are spared Starscream backstabbing musings, his loyalty to Megatron and the decepticon cause poses a threat to Starscreams plans

I also like to think Starscream wants to lead based off of the idea of being loved/feared by all, being seen as a revolutionary like Megatron, untouchable like him too, though he usually lacks the compassion to be the kind of leader Megatron started out as, the compassion Megatron has slowly but surely lost.

I also like to think another part of it is the idea of 'if I can just get x thing I'll be good enough' or 'if I can just get x thing I'll be happy', he's tunnel visioned onto ruling the decepticons as his object of happiness, he assumes the role comes with power, respect, and safety, but never considers factors like maximizing your troops survival or an end goal *if* the decepticons ever manage to truly trump the autobots.

He wants the power, but he has no righteous goal he wishes to see through, he has no guilt for those weaker than him because he was never fighting for them, only for the chance of being the one on the throne and calling the shots, to be the one wearing the crown

I can't imagine if they (the cons) win Starscream will be satisfied, there will always be a bigger fish, such leadership won't make him happy so there will always be another 'x thing' for him to pursue, it will never end unless he changes his goals entirely.

He isn't in the cons to make a difference, he's there to highjack what power and notoriety Megatron has achieved with his own two hands by soaring straight to the top with little effort besides his manipulation. He works hard but he works hard for his own interests and nothing more, he figures he's done being used and he has the right to use everyone else, like some twisted sense of vengeance

I like to think only after Starscream manages to kill off most of the decepticon ranks does Megatron's trust in him waver, even if he doesn't say anything to Starscreams face, he knows of the whisperings Starscream spreads about him (he's been told many a time to ensure the loyalty of his second in command by other cons, hes not nearly as sneaky as he thinks he is) But Megatron keeps him close to keep an eye on him, to keep him sharp in the face of fake friends, and to utilize what resourcefulness Starscream does posses.

This is why plans may be made or revised in the absence of Starscream, his second in command left out of the loop to make it more difficult for him to orchestrate decepticon failures. He knows of plan A, But not plan B Through Q, the backups Incase something interferes, autobot or traitor.

Though Megatron does bestow him with 'decepticon hospitality', the base layer of hostility all decepticons treat eachother with, he doesn't particularly aim his frustration at him, he more sees his disloyalty as a challenge, a way to keep his processor on its toes and to expect every bad thing.

His punishment may come in the forms of suicide missions, but the wonder that is Starscream always returns from them, bruised, beaten, maybe missing a few operatives assigned to him, maybe even dead. But he always returns

That's all for now, I'm still thinking about it, thanku for coming to my Ted talk

[vaguely-functional-directions]

I am fixing the 4th descendants movie backstory:

Instead of a school that all the kids go to, they're attending a festival in the week before cinderella's ball takes place. They do not all come from the same kingdom, but each fairy tale is from it's own land

The 'villain kids' group meet there and are never referred to as villains because they have not done their crimes yet.

Bridget is from cinderella's kingdom and is still friends with cinderella, and the same thing with the cupcakes happens to all the not-yet-villains and they still decide they need to get revenge on her so they team up

The whole thing leads up to the ball, where cinderella attends after her fairy godmother (who she has never met before) gets her all dressed up

Red and Chloe still learn about the prank and figure that bridget is turned into a monster/troll or whatever and that is the experience that makes her evil

They act as guards for bridget, keeping her safe from the not-yet-villains. But they made a mistake in what the plan was.

At the ball, there is some potion that gets put into the drinks that turns everyone else into monsters, and because bridget was not turned into one due to red and Chloe stopping her from drinking anything without first checking for spells, she gets blamed for it

(Merlin had arrived and magicked everyone back to normal)

She is arrested and banished into the world of wonderland forever; out of sight, out of mind. Then in a montage it is shown how being cast out in exile alone hardened her and she had to fight for survival, eventually rising to become the evil queen of hearts.

Cinderella at the ball is distraught about what happened to her friend, and the prince notices and comforts her. Cinderella's own story takes place from there and they fall for each other

Chloe and red realize that their own actions actually helped the not-yet-villains plans come true, so they use the time travel clock thing to go back in time again and that time, actually do stop the whole thing from happening.

As they travel back to the present, there is another montage showing the new version of events that happens since their interference in the past, and the present. Bridget is selected as a group from the kingdom to go on a mission into wonderland to bring the world's closer together. She moves there permanently and is eventually becomes an elected official, and still gains the title of the queen of hearts

The end

Also, uliana's name is morgana. As is should be.

[hervoiceinthedark]

"Ma'am," the synthetic voice sounded from behind her, "this one requires maintenance."

She sighed, and swiveled her chair around. "What is it this time," she asked dryly, "another fridge magnet stuck to your chassis? Another spider in your wires, somehow?"

The drone before her had the sensibility to appear chagrined. "apologies, Miss, nothing like that this time." It held up its lower left arm, or what remained of it. The entire length was crushed and twisted like it was tinfoil, fluids dribbling from fractures in the metal.

She made an angry noise, an instinctual reaction to seeing her work destroyed.

"What happened," she growled, already selecting tools from the various cases around her workstation.

"minor malfunction in the processing chamber," the drone answered neutrally.

Her scowl tore into the drone. "And why wasn't I informed of this?" she hissed.

"this one elected to tell you personally as it was already on route, and the issue was minor," the drone said apologetically. "it's already been resolved, with this one being the only actual damage."

the mechanic huffed, holding something thin between her teeth as she removed her light jacket. "C'mere," she grunted around the tool in her mouth.

The drone obliged, maneuvering into position on its back on her workstation, its left side facing her.

She took the tool out of her mouth and plugged it into something, her other hands still moving nonstop as she prepared to work.

She paused with her thumb on a switch. "You know this is gonna hurt?" she asked, looking down at the drone's faceplate.

"yes, this o—"

The drone didn't finish before she flipped the switch and a white-hot light at the tip of the tool severed its shoulder joint like it wasn't there.

The drone screamed with a broken, synthetic noise, a sawtooth wave rubbed the wrong way against a square.

She grinned at the sound. "You drones think you're so invincible, until you have to come crawling back to me," she said, picking at something internal with a sharp tool.

The drone's scream was fluctuating. With no need to breathe, there was no panting, no breaks in the sound.

"But like you say, the job is its own reward, you know," she continued, barely audible over the noises she was extracting from the drone. Her hands switched tools again, this one eliciting a high-pitched whine from her patient.

"This is gonna take a while, you know. Another couple hours."

The drone, barely capable of staying still on the table, turned its head to the mechanic. "can—can—can—" it stuttered, attempting to speak despite the continuing work.

She smirked, still not stopping, and put her face an inch away from the drone's.

"Can what? Hmmm?" she teased.

She jabbed something into the drone's side that made it hiss with white noise, akin to a gasp, then leaned back in her chair, stopping for a moment.

"Something to say?" she asked, still smirking.

The drone tried to speak, processors still too scrambled for complete sentences.

"can—c—this one? please? please?" the drone managed, every word garbled with interference.

"Hmm? Your advanced drone functionality has finally managed to figure out I'm a little pent up, huh?" she said, almost growling.

The drone's arm flailed on the table, and its head twitched in a way that could be construed as a nod.

"You want to please me? Take off your visor," she demanded, her smirk becoming a sadistic leer.

The drone complied, removing its visor with a twitching arm.

The mechanic stepped from the chair to the table in one movement. She unbuckled her belt and let her pants drop, the many pouches and tools clacking against the surface.

Before the drone could stare, she dropped her hips.

"Get pleasing," she growled, and switched on another tool.

The drone didn't hesitate, though the only visible sign was the mechanic's scowl fading slightly. She didn't tremble or pause as she got right back to her repair work, the drone's screams muffled between her legs.

[qqueenofhades]

Hi just wanted to say thank you for taking the time to thoughtfully respond to these anon messages. I work in dc w a fairly wonky set and i cant overstate how haunted the DC Professional Thought Havers are by the spectre of the "low propensity voter." I think these ppl (myself included LOL) thought we had everything figured out ahead of the 2016 elections and then never recovered from the way it ended up going......i feel like in all the years that followed.....the liberal bubbles.....the coastal elites.......the hillbilly elegies......the real america....the ohio diners....the pennsylvania diners.......the polls......the 2020 horserace....while part of an earnest attempt to understand What Happened, were primarily self-indulgent, self-flagellation for being "out of touch" bc of a self-diagnosed "elite" status that then turned into ANOTHER myopic view of the world, just opposite, where the "libs" are hapless and everyone else remotely to the left are primarily victims to the unstoppable supernatural forces of the Right. Then in 2020 the narrative flipped AGAIN and once again, instead of taking the opportunity to expand a worldview and having the bravery to confront their own shortcomings, the opinion havers and wonks and beltway pressers have decided to groupthink their way into writing off democracy altogether. Its BEYOND frustrating to see! Like damn volunteer at a soup kitchen or smthn instead of being obsessed w the fact that i vote lol

Yes, and there are several reasons for that. First, despite all the factors that contributed to Trump's shock win in 2016 (anti-Clintonism, white backlash to Obama, general low voter enthusiasm, Russian disinformation, etc) we should never forget that until James Comey decided to announce 10 days before the election that he was reopening the EEEEEEEMAILS case, even though we all knew there was nothing there, she was leading fairly comfortably in the polls. And while we will never know how the 2016 election would have gone without that, which imho was one of the most unforgivable acts of blatant sabotage by a public official in American history, it's also true that we saw her poll averages start sliding almost in real time, as people who hadn't really been keen on voting for her anyway decided firmly not to and Trump was able to scrape out 16,000 votes across PA, MI, and WI to take the Electoral College. Which... we all remember how we felt that night, right? (Or in my case, early morning, since I was overseas?) We don't, we really, really don't want to feel that way again. Just saying.

As such, the media (which had already beat up Clinton nonstop during the BUT HER EEEEEMAILS saga) drastically overcorrected and as you say, began writing endless angsty handwringing pieces about Trump Voters in Rural Ohio Diners and giving endless sympathetic airtime to how "economically left behind" they felt, regardless of the fact that open racism, especially Obama backlash, was and remains the principal animating feature of Republican politics (since their only economic platform is that which makes very rich people even richer and Democratic economic policies are the only ones actually targeted at helping ordinary people). The hangover was so strong that even when Democrats had a massive 2018 midterm result and flipped the House blue for the first time since the post-ACA backlash lost it in 2010, the Conventional Wisdom was now beyond any doubt that Democrats were doomed for a generation or something, and not that Trump had squeaked out a fluky win (while losing the popular vote) due to endless Russian/Comey/third party-etc interference and wasn't actually that powerful. Even in 2020 when Biden was leading fairly steadily and things were going to hell with Covid, etc. etc. TRUMP IS UNSTOPPABLE, TRUMP IS GOING TO WIN.

(And now. Like. I know Trump thinks Trump won in 2020, as do a large majority of his cultists, but that doesn't mean he did.)

Even after that, when Roe went down in 2022, that made no difference to the RED WAVE COMING!!! narrative, and the amount of smug white male pundits insisting that abortion just wasn't very important and people weren't going to base their entire vote on it reached truly disgusting levels. We're now seeing the same thing with the constant "people won't vote for democracy and/or abortion rights" blast, when as you say, this narrative has just been completely made the fuck up by a lot of groupthinking DC media who are determined that this time, Trump really is going to win and then they get to be principled chroniclers in opposition or something. Not to mention, the basic principle of "democracy and abortion rights are good" do in fact win by thumping margins every time they're on the ballot, including in deep red states. But there is literally not a single piece of empirical evidence despite the massive amounts of it supporting the truth (i.e. that Democrats are doing historically well in competitive elections since 2018 and there's not really a major reason to think this will change in 2024) that will get the media to change the "Democrats in disarray and Biden Iz Doomed" horserace BS they so love. They don't like Biden because he's boring and competent and just does the job without being insane, because it's totally a great idea to treat American government like a reality show! (Recall the infamous comment by the CBS CEO who literally said that Trump was bad for America but great for CBS, because he pulled in high ratings and therefore lots of money and visibility for CBS. We live in the worst timeline.)

As such, the mainstream media has a vendetta against Biden, is determined that this time Trump is super definitely going to win and everyone will see how genius they are, and not-so-secretly wants Trump back because a) he's good for money and ratings, and b) because the media conglomerations are owned by oligarchs who have a vested interest in making sure that Democrats and their policies never get too popular. Notice how the once self-proclaimed centrist independent Elon Musk has turned into a rabidly alt-right fanboy ever since the Democrats really got serious about taxing billionaires as a key part of their platform. Likewise, insisting that Biden Iz Doomed makes Democrats nervous (and thus more likely to tune in) and Republicans gleeful (and thus more likely to tune in), so there's literally no incentive for the media to even try to report things accurately. You could create a very different narrative of the 2024 election if you just remotely bothered to write about things that have actually happened as they have actually taken place, rather than bending over backward to insist that Biden being four years older than Trump is a worse crime than 91 felony indictments, 2 impeachments, 1 insurrection, 450 million dollars and counting in punitive jury verdicts, more major criminal trials coming down the pipe, and just demonstrably being the worst human being alive in so many ways. I mean. Wow.

The good news, as I said in my other post, is that when people actually vote, these utter bullshit narratives get routinely blown out of the water, and that's a good thing. Because it turns out that unlike Super Smart Beltway Pundits' Super Smart Predictions, the average American does actually like democracy and freedom for women to make their own personal healthcare decisions, and they vote accordingly. So while yes, it's being made harrowingly much harder than it needs to be because of how much the media simply refuses to report that basic fact, and there is no amount of evidence that will convince them otherwise, at least we're trending in the right direction and, if we all pull our weight, can do it one more time. I realized the other day that I hadn't heard a fucking peep about Ron DeSantis in the last two months, and oh, how glorious it was. I yearn beyond words for the day (God willing, soon) when the same is true of Trump as well.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Dean Obeidallah at The Dean's Report:

Imagine if Vice President Harris publicly called on a foreign nation that has a history of interfering in our elections to help her defeat Donald Trump. The response would’ve been wall to wall media coverage and members of the GOP would’ve been calling for a DOJ Investigation. But when Donald Trump did that exact thing on Thursday, it barely received any coverage from the corporate media.  Yet there was Trump at an event organized by Trump’s close ally Miriam Adelson—the widow of billionaire Sheldon Adelson and a supporter of far-right policies in Israel—calling on Israel to defeat Harris. I don’t mean Trump inferred he wanted the help of Israel to win, he stated it point blank.

That is when Trump declared: “More than any other people on Earth. More than any other people on Earth, Israel, I believe, has to defeat her. You know that?” He then repeated that Israel—not Jewish Americans—need to help him defeat Harris, stating, “And I’ve never said this before. And I’m thinking, Miriam, more than any people on Earth, Israel has to defeat her. I really believe that.” There is no wiggle room here. Trump twice asked Israeli leaders to help him defeat Harris in a room filled with people like Adelson who has very close ties to Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu. Where is the outrage that Trump wants a foreign nation to interfere in our election?!! What could Netanyahu do to help Trump? Well one example is the online interference type campaign they were engaged in 2016 that I detail below.  Or far worse and what is what we are seeing over the past few days and that is spark a deadly war with Lebanon.

[...] To that end, in the last few days we’ve seen an unparalleled escalation of attacks by Netanyahu on not just Hezbollah—but the nation of Lebanon. It began with the pager bombings that may have been targeting Hezbollah militants but ended up killing and wounding innocent people including children. In the days that followed, Netanyahu’s military bombed targets in the suburbs of Beirut that killed 45 people, including three children and seven women. Two Hezbollah leaders were killed as well but we as we’ve seen in Gaza, there is no limits to the civilians Netanyahu will kill. And then there is the more traditional type of online election interference. For those unaware, the Israeli government under Netanyahu has a documented history –even noted in Israeli media outlets like Haaretz--of interfering in other nation’s elections, including the United States, to elect people supportive of his right wing views. That was the very point made by The Nation in a detailed deep dive article in 2023 titled, “The Trump Campaign’s Collusion With Israel.” As The Nation explained, “In the spring of 2016, no issue was more important to Benjamin Netanyahu than Donald Trump winning the White House.”  The reason was simple: “The GOP presidential candidate was key to everything he was after, from ending the Iran nuclear agreement, to recognizing Jerusalem—rather than Tel Aviv—as Israel’s capital, to continuing the occupation of” the West Bank.

To that end, Netanyahu personally directed a “covert operation” that “aimed to use secret intelligence to clandestinely intervene at the highest levels in the presidential election on behalf of Trump.” The Times of Israel in 2020 even addressed this plot noting Trump close ally Roger Stone was the point person for key Israeli figures, writing, “the Trump campaign, was in contact with one or more apparently well-connected Israelis at the height of the 2016 US presidential campaign, one of whom warned Stone that Trump was “going to be defeated unless we intervene” and promised “we have critical intell[sic].”

[...] Trump publicly asking Israel to help defeat Harris, of course, conjures up Trump’s infamous comment during the 2016 campaign when he declared about Hillary Clinton’s missing emails, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” And as the Mueller report detailed, “the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome.” Adding importantly about Trump: “the campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts."

Israel Apartheid State PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s escalation of war with Lebanon serves one purpose: put Donald Trump back in office as “President” in the USA.

[originalleftist]

I really wish more people understood Depp v Heard, and the obscene media circus generated around it, as a Right-wing campaign to destroy a queer feminist activist, rather than as "entertainment news" about a celebrity scandal.

What do a base this conclusion on? (apologies for some of the links refusing to format properly, no matter how many times I check them.)

Here's Amber Heard campaigning for legislation to combat non-consensual pornography (which she was a target of):

This legislation, the SHIELD Act, was introduced by then Senator Kamala Harris in 2019 and has still never been passed, nor has any Federal law criminalizing non-consensual pornography.

I would also advise people to read Heard's fantastic OpEd on the subject in the New York Times, which is without exaggeration one of the most powerful pieces of advocacy that I have ever read: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/opinion/amber-heard-revenge-porn.html

During the Virginia trial Depp unsuccessfully to have Heard's nudes introduced as evidence in a live-streamed trial, as revealed in unsealed court documents: https://www.businessinsider.com/heard-lawyers-say-depp-tried-submit-nudes-evidence-report-2022-8

And then there's the OpEd for which she was sued. It never names Depp, and only briefly alludes to him, but is actually an article, written in conjunction with the ACLU, advocating for Congress to "reauthorize and strength the Violence Against Women Act" and for greater protection for sexual abuse survivors on college campuses: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ive-seen-how-institutions-protect-men-accused-of-abuse-heres-what-we-can-do/2018/12/18/71fd876a-02ed-11e9-b5df-5d3874f1ac36_story.html

As for the attacks on Heard, and their sources:

Here is an article detailing the connections between Depp's lawyer/fixer Adam Waldman and the Kremlin, including Oleg Deripaska (a Russian oligarch sanctioned for the invasion of Ukraine), Russian Foreign Minister Sergie Lavrov, and 2016 election interference operativeJulian Assange:

More on Waldman's ties to Russia, including his efforts to obstruct the investigation into Trump/Russia, and to blackmail the US government on behalf of Julian Assange:

The Hollywood Reporter also noted Waldman as "The chief architect behind Depp's sue-'em-all strategy", and the fact that Depp was introduced to Waldman by the Saudi minister of energy, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, in 2016.

And that brings us to the Saudis.

It turns out a lot of the online hatred and harassment toward Heard can be traced back to Saudi government bots.

Why would the Saudi government give a shit about a celebrity defamation trial in the US? Well, maybe because Prince Mohamed Bin Salman (of bone-saw fame) and Depp are good friends. And perhaps because Saudi Arabia has pushed aggressively to use the film industry to improve its international reputation. As the article above notes, the Saudi government helped to finance two recent films produced by Depp to the tune of millions of dollars, and as of February 2024 "the actor's team is in talks with the Saudi government to secure "an annual seven-figure deal for him to attend events and shoot films in the country."'

In effect, then, Depp is a paid PR agent of the Saudi government.

Of course, the support was not limited to foreign actors- as noted in the article below, both Donald Trump Jr. and MAGA Congressman/alleged child sex trafficker Matt Gaetz were vocal Depp supporters, despite Depp having once joked about killing Donald Trump. And the Republicans of the House Judiciary Committee celebrated the trial verdict against Heard with a Jack Sparrow gif.

(Donald Sr. was actually surprisingly reticent about the trial considering his general inability to resist spouting bullshit on any topic- perhaps because he is above all else a petty and vindictive motherfucker, even when it would be to his political advantage not to be.)

The trial also benefited up-and-coming far Right/fascist influencers by giving them something to talk about with mass appeal outside of their usual base. I do not think for one second that its coincidence that Andrew Tate became a household name at almost the exact same time as the hight of the trial.

The following excerpt from a far Right commentator (sadly I do not recall which one, but I've kept the screenshot) elaborates on how they believed that the trial could be used, and really sums up everything that I've been trying to say here:

Depp V Heard was many things. But perhaps most significantly, in a larger cultural and political sense, it was a highly-successful fascist influence op.

[dirtbag-linecook-kyloren]

The Great War is kylux coded already in my mind but I want your thoughts

(for the send me a taylor swift song and I'll make a kylux au thing I created on a whim)

OKAY SO I WAS THINKING ABOUT THIS ALL DURING MY SHIFT TODAY

(also the other ones, I'm typing them all out now in reverse order bc that's how they are in my ask box)

I'm adopting this as an eternal game and maybe with all songs but i have an eclectic but picky musical taste so who knows??

the great war could be the soundtrack for every fucking amazingly well-written canon exploration fic so I had to get a little creative, which brings us to my brain.

I started with war, then went to battle ground, then to battle ground STATES, and that's how you get presidential election au

Leia Organa, long time senator, finally pulls the trigger on running for president. She's got strong polling, she knows she's an incredible candidate for the democrats. She's a little old, but she's moderate enough that some republicans will vote from her, given her practical stance on military matters.

The republican party has a plan, though, and it's Armitage Hux, 36, four-time representative of a normally democratic congressional district, and they love him, and the democratic party CANNOT FIGURE OUT WHY. (It's because his district is mainly rich white people, a language he is fluent in. He's in favor of mild gun control because he read the ENTIRE second amendment and knows that free guns doesn't meet the definition of a well-organized militia and still goes to church every Sunday, although republicans wish he wasn't catholic.)

This is a problem for the Organa campaign, because they're terrified of Hux's youth. He's a gifted public speaker, he's hired good staff, some of whom were poached directly from the D triple C bc they would like politicians to be less OLD, and he's a moderate enough republican they can stomach working for him.

The biggest issue? Armitage Hux is gay, has been secretly seeing Organa's son for several months after literally running into him in the halls of congress, and knows that the time for him to tell the public about this and not torpedo his campaign was several months ago.

Kylo can play interference all he wants, tell Leia the guy he's seeing isn't serious, lie and say he's busy, explain away why he's spending so much time in DC when he never has before, but he's caught going into Hux's apartment a few days before the first debate, pressing a kiss Hux's cheek as seen by telephoto lens, and nothing he says will make Hux feel like it wasn't all a set up, that Organa's son didn't seduce him with the full intent to ruin his political career so Leia could take the white house.

GOD DAMMIT ANOTHER AU okay fine i'll add it to the list I think I'm at FIFTY now

[madaramee]

@rangikuxmatsumoto:

The morning had been uneventful, quiet – with only a few reports and forms needing her signature and no meetings to speak of – so her venturing away from her desk wouldn’t set off any alarm bells, nor hinder any plans. Her walking wasn’t aimless however, the streets were calm as the few souls she passed walked along at a leisurely pace. Arriving at her destination, she found his dojo in a state of peaceful serenity – if he wasn’t training recruits, or practicing himself, it meant he was taking part in only one other action – meditation. The door slid silently open as she discarded her scandals at the threshold. Socked feet barely made a sound as she crossed the matted floor before sinking down behind him, arms encircling his waist as her chin came to rest gently upon his shoulder. She sensed her presence had been noted by the slight tensing of his body at her touch, followed immediately by a relaxing ease. “—Morning…” Her voice was tender, barely above that of a whisper, not intending to disturb him more than she already had – initially.

Breathe in... Then out. No noises around, the dojo as still as could be. It was still early morning (relatively anyway) and with the majority of the squad still unavailable (each in their own reasoning), he had some time to himself. Despite the working day having already started, Ikkaku was well aware that his Captain would very much forgive him if he neglected to do his paperwork, granted it was for the sake of fun and fighting. Now, meditation isn't exactly what you'd call fun. But it was most definitely preparation for battle. A warrior's greatest strength is their mental fortitude - as is their greatest weakness. While he was a Lucky man, one graced with the simplicity in battle, he also had to keep a clear head if he was to engage with a foe that would ultimately, prove too powerful for him to face. That, he learned firsthand on an unfortunate critical moment.

The only sounds passing by his ears were of his breaths, in and out; fully immersing in the feeling of his chest expanding, then shrinking again with his lungs' movement. Simply being there, present, still. At ease. That is all that is required. While usually he would immerse himself in combat, or reliving some battle of the past; today, he had elected to remain unmoving and undeterred instead. Birds chirping heard through the gaps in the dojo window... The faint footsteps of those treading by the dojo wooden floor with their socks, skidding faintly over the polished floor. Those were the occasional interferences he'd took note of, only to resume his stance calmly.

What he'd figured would happen sooner or later, came to pass: he was snapped out of his personal moment. While it is arguable whether or not he truly considered this serene personal time to be his own if he anticipated someone coming to get him out of it, he was nonetheless genuine in his reaction. Knowing it will happen, just not when. The draping of those slender arms around his front, his breathing's rhythm was moved as a jolt ran in his body.

Fully taking in every motion she'd grant; the touch through his trapezius, sliding down. It was her forearms at first, though the wrist would join soon as her embrace reached his upper chest; feeling the light shift in weight from behind as his back was softly grazed as well. Further down, her hands interlocking over the lower joining of his chest -- hovering above his sternum, her pinky nail making light touch as her weight came to further lean on him, her face resting atop his shoulder.

A smile rising over his features. A long sigh accompanying as he took his sweet time before starting to open his eyes again. Being at ease, used to her touch and the frame by now but cherishing it ever, even now. "Morning." He replied, the tint of joy evident in his lowered tone despite the prickliness of being interrupted.

Ikkaku had honestly assumed whoever would snap him back would be either Yumichika, or one of the squad members who'd come early to take an early strike at him. He was struck, yes, though not very conventionally.

Opening his eyes, easing his posture almost completely as he gave in; reaching for her farther cheek with a hand to caress the side, by the ear. "Don't really see you out of bed these hours."