#anonymous reporting

[cosycryptid]

Modern AU where the party have a famous paranormal investigation and unsolved mysteries youtube channel. Steve is in the background of their first ghost hunting video because he wasn't going to let them go and stay overnight in an abandoned building without supervision. Their audience finds Steve's sarcastic comments and parental attitude towards the kids really compelling and most of the comments on that video are begging for him to become a regular in their on location videos. Before long, Steve is a reoccurring presence in their videos playing the skeptic/concerned parent role.

For example:

Dustin: I’ve connected the dots guys. This must be the work of a demon.

Steve: You didn’t connect shit. It's just an old creaky building.

Dustin: I’ve connected them.

—————————————

In an abandoned hospital.

Max: Hey this giant metal door has some kind of engraving on it.

Lucas: Oh cool, it looks like old graffiti.

Steve: Yeah that’s great, do you know what else it looks like? Rusty as shit. Now get back here and don’t touch anything because your parents are gonna be so pissed if they find out you had to get tetanus shots at 2am on a Saturday because I let you wander around an abandoned hospital with a bunch of shady ass camera men. No offense.

Camera man: None taken.

Mike (from the doorway): Guys! Will, El and Dustin found an operating theatre and there are a bunch of old scalpels and needles and stuff in there.

Max: Awesome, let’s go.

Steve: No! No! Let’s not go! Let’s stay as far away as possible from the room full of potential infections. Where are Dustin, El and Will? They didn’t go inside the room, did they?

Mike: See, I could answer that, but I don’t think you’re gonna like it.

—————————————

While exploring a ‘haunted’ hotel:

Mike: Hey look, all of Steve’s bitches are in this room.

El: There is nobody in there.

Mike: Exactly.

He turns to look directly into the camera with a sly grin and the others start laughing.

Steve: Yeah, yeah. You’ll be laughing when I drive home without you.

—————————————

At the same hotel.

Steve: Dustin. Your little light box thing is broken, it’s been flashing on and off for the past five minutes.

Dustin: Oh my God, Steve! That means it can sense a spirit. Why didn’t you say anything?! Did you not listen to my long and detailed explanation of how the equipment works?

Steve: I’m gonna be so honest with you. No, I didn’t.

—————————————

On their Mothman episode trip to point pleasant.

Steve, staring at the statue (we all know which one): Ok, but why is he kinda…

Lucas: Please stop talking.

Dustin: No sexualising the cryptids please, Steve.

Steve: If they didn’t want anyone to sexualise Mothman, then why would they give his statue such a defined ass and abs?

Max: I mean, he’s not wrong.

—————————————

Eventually, Steve gets peer pressured by the comments into starting his own channel. And since he still has no idea what he wants to do with his life, he decides to go ahead and do it.

At first his audience are super confused because his content is a hard pivot from the supernatural and unsolved mysteries content people are used to seeing him in. He mainly reacts to DIY haircare videos and gives tips on how to do what the people in the videos were trying to do properly without risking ending up bald.

He also makes wholesome baking videos, and has a side podcast with Robin, where they talk shit for 3 hours about anything they want - usually celebrities and assholes on the internet - as well as having a segment where Robin makes Steve watch a movie he's never seen and they review it. People who came from the paranormal channel still love his content because he’s funny and sassy and his videos are surprisingly helpful at times. He’s soon catching up to his friends in subscriber numbers.

Eddie and his band have a channel where they upload music videos, live performances and backstage/tour vlogs. They also make the occassional song covers where they take requests in the comments for metal versions of pop songs. Eddie also has a side channel where he runs D&D campaigns with other influencers (he hates that word).

One day he’s doing a Q&A and when someone asks which influencers he’d like to invite for his next campaign, he mentions Steve and says he’s been secretly watching his videos for a while and they’re kind of a guilty pleasure. He’s even tried some of Steve’s hair care tips because his hair was looking a bit frazzled under the heat of the lights on stage and it was getting in his way during performances. Now he swears by them because his hair has never looked or felt better.

Steve’s never seen any of Eddie’s videos but he starts watching them after that, he particularly likes the metal versions of pop songs because it makes the genre more accessible to him. Sometimes he makes joke song suggestions in the comments. Every single time, the song he suggested gets covered.

The boys are all insanely jealous of this new development because they’ve been fans of Eddie’s channels for years and have been bringing up references to some of his campaigns in their videos to try and get him to consider them for the next one, but so far have had no luck. Meanwhile, Steve, who doesn’t even know the first thing about D&D has his full attention. Steve was going to ask Eddie to consider asking them out of the kindness of his heart, but after they’ve given him a little too much attitude over it, he decides he’s gonna join the campaign instead just to spite them.

Cue Steve going from completely clueless to kind of a decent player and the two of them going from fascinated with each other to constantly flirting and appearing in each other’s videos.

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

I think the call needs to come from inside the house, so to speak. You’re spot on that public outcry can make organizations resistant to feedback, and that’s what it feels like is happening here.

A big part of it is that a dedicated reporting option requires paying for the staff time to assess, triage, and follow up on complaints. Most accrediting groups run on pretty bare-bones budgets (regardless of how extravagant their meetings may feel at times) and so that expense is inhibitory. Dealing with anonymous reports also means sorting through a lot genuinely mistaken concerns and purposefully accusatory claims in order to identify the real issues, and I just get the sense the industry doesn’t want to deal with that. (Decades of anti-industry antagonism where they just make shit up definitely has something to do with that.)

There’s also the issue of like… accrediting orgs exist to encourage their network (not just members, always) to maintain a certain quality, but they don’t want to culturally have to be the police. All of the big accrediting groups - sanctuary, aquarium, zoo - they’re communities. The people at member facilities frequently have known each other for decades, seen each other progress through different jobs and animal births and deaths, often watched their kids grow up alongside animals that came from one another’s facilities. There’s a lot of conflict of interest and cognitive dissonance involved when it comes to actually having to enforce strict rules with real business consequences on your peers. I don’t know what the solution for that is. It sucks but… ensuring that compliance is ostensibly the main purpose of the accreditation. If that’s not real anymore, there’s a much bigger conversation that has to happen.

I think at some point these organizations are going to recognize that the increased public/governmental attention to their accreditation programs will be necessary in order to continue operating credibly (and also a pre-req to be considered for things they want, like legislative exemptions). The brand of ensuring a certain standard throughout a multi-year cycle will not survive much scrutiny if it becomes clear there’s little to no continued oversight of facilities after the initial inspection. Not having any way for concerns to be safely reported to the accrediting body is a pretty clear sign that the organization isn’t invested in finding out about issues during that interim. Accrediting organizations are going to have to choose if they want to get ahead of that curve and take the positive media from it, or if they’re going to be dragged kicking and screaming into a new era by inevitable awkward publicity.

So while I wish it was as easy as utilizing mass public feedback, I think the history of anti-zoo pressure campaigns is a big part of why so many groups are so resistant to it at the moment. I don’t think there’s anything nefarious going on, and that’s important to say. But the zoo industry is frequently behind the zeitgeist in a lot of ways, and slow to catch up. I think it will really come down to accrediting groups recognizing the landscape they operate within is changing and that even their most dedicated supporters want more accountability - and either choosing, or being forced, to create reporting options accordingly.

Y'all regularly send in questions wanting to know how to report concerns you've observed at zoos you've visited. I've been able to point people at the USDA (regulatory) option, but with regard to accrediting groups I haven't had a good answer. I spent the last six months or so really digging into why there hasn't been a good answer. What I've found is that the majority of zoological accrediting groups in the United States don't provide any way for the public to report issues they've observed at accredited facilities, and none of said organizations have a mechanism for truly supporting / protecting staff who might choose to report issues at their own facilities. Which is. not great.

I wrote a whole Substack post about it a few days ago, arguing that in order to remain credible institutions accrediting groups must facilitate public reporting, anonymous reporting, and commit to enforcing penalties for any retaliation against staff who choose to utilize the option. I'm linking it below for anyone who is interested in all the details. CW at the beginning for animal abuse mentions - I started the piece by discussing a truly egregious welfare situation that occurred last year at a Miami facility, which might have been prevented or at least caught earlier if the two groups that accredit the facility had had a reporting mechanism in place.

What I want to talk about here, though, is specifically why accrediting orgs need to not only have an anonymous reporting option for staff, but why they must ban retaliation and penalize any facility that does it anyway. Whenever something terrible happens at a zoo or sanctuary, people always ask "why didn't the staff say something?" And the answer is, basically, because taking that risk can get you not just fired, but blacklisted from the field. People literally end up having to choose between their careers and making noise about issues that aren't being resolved, and that's absolutely not freaking okay. But I want to explain for you the extent of the issue.

If you're not industry, something you might be surprised to learn is that most zoo staff don't have any special reporting options above and beyond what the public does. Most zookeepers and other low-level staff never interact with people from accrediting groups except during an actual inspection - so if there's a problem, it's not like they know someone they can back-channel a concern to if they don't feel safe reporting it publicly. And for the most part, reporting things your facility is doing to an accrediting group will always be considered inappropriate and probably get a keeper in trouble (even if it's a really valid issue).

The zoological industry runs on a strongly hierarchical system. Staff are expected to “stay within their lanes” and work within the established bureaucracy to resolve issues. Deviating from this, if staff feel like management are suppressing issues or something needs to be addressed urgently, is very heavily frowned upon. Basically, going around management to bring something to an accrediting group (or USDA, or the media) is seen as indicating that your facility has failed to address a problem, or that the individual making the report feels they know more than their superiors. At most places, no matter how extreme an issue may become, there's never a point at which it would be acceptable for a staff member to reveal a facility’s internal issues to their accrediting body. 

The thing is, attempting to resolve issues through the proper internal channels at a facility doesn't always work! It can result in an issue being covered up (especially if the company is kinda shady) or suppressed rather than addressed. If staff decide to push the issue, it can really backfire and jeopardize their job, because it's expected that if management says something is fine, staff need to acquiesce and go along with it.

There have been a couple high-profile examples of this in the last decade: the incident I mention in my Substack where new management at the Miami Seaquarium decided to starve dolphins to coerce them into participating in guest programs, and an issue at the Austin Zoo five-ish years ago where the director was perpetuating serious welfare issues and ignoring staff feedback. In both cases, there's always the questions of where the accrediting group was. We don't know anything about what happened with the Seaquarium (it's been over six months since the USDA report documenting the diet cuts was released and AMMPA and American Humane haven't said a thing), but I remember hearing that ZAA had no idea what was happening at Austin because nobody had reached out to them about it.

This is why I'm arguing that all zoological accrediting groups need to make visible reporting options and make sure staff feel safe enough to use them! If you've got a facility perpetuating or not dealing with major issues, it's pretty probable that they're going to be unhappy if their staff reports those issues to any oversight body. That's not a situation where it's currently safe to speak up right now - and four out of five zoological accrediting groups in the US don't have standards prohibiting retaliation against staff for bringing up issues like that! (Surprisingly, it's not AZA. It's the sanctuary accrediting group, GFAS). Without any option for internal reporting, issues may not get addressed - which hurts animal welfare - or people risk losing their job, possibly their entire career in the field (which is a huge part of people's identities!), and their financial stability to advocate for their animals.

Currently, the two accrediting groups that do have reporting options (AZA and GFAS) stay they'll attempt to keep reports anonymous, but acknowledge it may not be possible to do so. (Which tracks, because zoo jobs are highly specialized and only a few people may be exposed to an issue). However, only GFAS prohibits facilities from retaliating against people who make reports. On top of that, there's absolutely no transparency about what happens next: GFAS, ZAA, AMMPA and AH have no information about how the process transpires and if someone making a report will get any information back about what happened. AZA straight up says that all accreditation stuff is proprietary (read: confidential) so you just have to trust that they dealt with it appropriately. Just yeet your report into the void and hope the groups doing oversight handle it correctly when there's no accountability? That's... not a great look for animal welfare concerns.

I hope the industry chooses to fix this problem. I hope it chooses to invest in transparency and increased credibility. I don't know what I expect, but I'd like to see these accrediting groups do the right thing.

My full write-up on how accrediting groups in the US handle reporting and concerns (or don't) is linked below.

[ddarker-dreams]

any sunday crumbs for us? 😽

He's doing it again.

If you were conscious during a brain surgery, this is what it'd feel like, you think. The general anesthesia would render you immobile and deny your body the ability to process what it's being subjected to. But on some level, you would know. The metal implements poking and prodding and pulverizing defenses never intended to be breached.

Get out, get out, get out!

Squeezing your eyes shut, you fixate on memories that tie your intestines into knots. Your first love's puzzlement over who you were. The looming threat that the same fate could befall others you care for. How not even your mind is a haven in this padlocked 'paradise.'

The pressure in your head recedes.

"... You're upset," his voice is as soft and smooth as velvet. "It's understandable. Still... you should be able to tell. There's no malice behind my tuning — only consideration for your wellbeing."

You rub your temples, still throbbing from his abrupt departure. Even a perfectionist like Sunday wavers when confronted with the sheer depth of your loathing.

"A lie is a lie, no matter how pretty you spin in," you reply. "I think... I'm supposed to be mad at you. I am mad at you, I just can't remember why."

You turn to face him and smile wryly. "That's clever. Pulling the problem up from the roots instead of trimming it down. You learned from last time, huh?"

"Easing your resentment isn't solely for my sake," Sunday deflects your accusation. His countenance is solemn, like he's bearing a burden you couldn't begin to understand. "You're torturing yourself to make a point. If you'd just let me—"

"—Oh no, you don't get to sound fed up," you march up to where he stands and jut your pointer finger against his chest. "Acting all— righteous and like... like some kind of a martyr! I'm so sorry I'm not tripping over myself to thank you for fucking around with my head!"

You're trembling with fury, every vein in your body boiling. His countenance is neutral, if not a touch stern, but he allows you your cathartic outburst. Eventually, you pull your hand back, slumping over from exhaustion.

It's then that you throw in an additional jab for good measure.

"No matter what you do, or how many times you do it... I'll always find a new reason to hate you."

Sunday's eyes gleam as he replies:

"And I'll be here all the same."

[canisalbus]

I can't quite remember if you did this with the suggestive posts that got taken down but, perhaps you should try not to tag those as canines, dogs, animals, sighthound etc? This can only be happening because people are purposefully reporting these things when they find them. You could try adding as little tags as possible. Personally I tag as cw suggestive and my art, as well as ship names, and that's it really. This makes it so that your own audience can find it in your blog, but really no one who isn't a follower of yours or knows about you can find it. Genuinely I hope this helps because I adore your art so much and it hurts to see such tame things get taken down. Otherwise I'd just post in another website, highly recommend Bsky

Ah dang, I think you might have a point there. My online circles are so pro-furry or at least benignly indifferent towards anthro art, I had kind of forgotten that some people consider it so deeply off-putting and offensive. Even very tepid, mildly suggestive pieces, even completely sfw art.

I've had the habit of tagging my posts systemically and carefully since the beginning, mostly for personal organization purposes, it makes it slightly easier to dig up specific things from the the extensive archive of my blog. It didn't even cross my mind that it could potentially lead to this sort of result. I'll use fewer tags from now on and see if it improves anything.

[incognitopolls]

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Palantir’s NHS-stealing Big Lie

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then SAN FRANCISCO (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!

Capitalism's Big Lie in four words: "There is no alternative." Looters use this lie for cover, insisting that they're hard-nosed grownups living in the reality of human nature, incentives, and facts (which don't care about your feelings).

The point of "there is no alternative" is to extinguish the innovative imagination. "There is no alternative" is really "stop trying to think of alternatives, dammit." But there are always alternatives, and the only reason to demand that they be excluded from consideration is that these alternatives are manifestly superior to the looter's supposed inevitability.

Right now, there's an attempt underway to loot the NHS, the UK's single most beloved institution. The NHS has been under sustained assault for decades – budget cuts, overt and stealth privatisation, etc. But one of its crown jewels has been stubbournly resistant to being auctioned off: patient data. Not that HMG hasn't repeatedly tried to flog patient data – it's just that the public won't stand for it:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/nov/21/nhs-data-platform-may-be-undermined-by-lack-of-public-trust-warn-campaigners

Patients – quite reasonably – do not trust the private sector to handle their sensitive medical records.

Now, this presents a real conundrum, because NHS patient data, taken as a whole, holds untold medical insights. The UK is a large and diverse country and those records in aggregate can help researchers understand the efficacy of various medicines and other interventions. Leaving that data inert and unanalysed will cost lives: in the UK, and all over the world.

For years, the stock answer to "how do we do science on NHS records without violating patient privacy?" has been "just anonymise the data." The claim is that if you replace patient names with random numbers, you can release the data to research partners without compromising patient privacy, because no one will be able to turn those numbers back into names.

It would be great if this were true, but it isn't. In theory and in practice, it is surprisingly easy to "re-identify" individuals in anonymous data-sets. To take an obvious example: we know which two dates former PM Tony Blair was given a specific treatment for a cardiac emergency, because this happened while he was in office. We also know Blair's date of birth. Check any trove of NHS data that records a person who matches those three facts and you've found Tony Blair – and all the private data contained alongside those public facts is now in the public domain, forever.

Not everyone has Tony Blair's reidentification hooks, but everyone has data in some kind of database, and those databases are continually being breached, leaked or intentionally released. A breach from a taxi service like Addison-Lee or Uber, or from Transport for London, will reveal the journeys that immediately preceded each prescription at each clinic or hospital in an "anonymous" NHS dataset, which can then be cross-referenced to databases of home addresses and workplaces. In an eyeblink, millions of Britons' records of receiving treatment for STIs or cancer can be connected with named individuals – again, forever.

Re-identification attacks are now considered inevitable; security researchers have made a sport out of seeing how little additional information they need to re-identify individuals in anonymised data-sets. A surprising number of people in any large data-set can be re-identified based on a single characteristic in the data-set.

Given all this, anonymous NHS data releases should have been ruled out years ago. Instead, NHS records are to be handed over to the US military surveillance company Palantir, a notorious human-rights abuser and supplier to the world's most disgusting authoritarian regimes. Palantir – founded by the far-right Trump bagman Peter Thiel – takes its name from the evil wizard Sauron's all-seeing orb in Lord of the Rings ("Sauron, are we the baddies?"):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/01/the-palantir-will-see-you-now/#public-private-partnership

The argument for turning over Britons' most sensitive personal data to an offshore war-crimes company is "there is no alternative." The UK needs the medical insights in those NHS records, and this is the only way to get at them.

As with every instance of "there is no alternative," this turns out to be a lie. What's more, the alternative is vastly superior to this chumocratic sell-out, was Made in Britain, and is the envy of medical researchers the world 'round. That alternative is "trusted research environments." In a new article for the Good Law Project, I describe these nigh-miraculous tools for privacy-preserving, best-of-breed medical research:

https://goodlawproject.org/cory-doctorow-health-data-it-isnt-just-palantir-or-bust/

At the outset of the covid pandemic Oxford's Ben Goldacre and his colleagues set out to perform realtime analysis of the data flooding into NHS trusts up and down the country, in order to learn more about this new disease. To do so, they created Opensafely, an open-source database that was tied into each NHS trust's own patient record systems:

https://timharford.com/2022/07/how-to-save-more-lives-and-avoid-a-privacy-apocalypse/

Opensafely has its own database query language, built on SQL, but tailored to medical research. Researchers write programs in this language to extract aggregate data from each NHS trust's servers, posing medical questions of the data without ever directly touching it. These programs are published in advance on a git server, and are preflighted on synthetic NHS data on a test server. Once the program is approved, it is sent to the main Opensafely server, which then farms out parts of the query to each NHS trust, packages up the results, and publishes them to a public repository.

This is better than "the best of both worlds." This public scientific process, with peer review and disclosure built in, allows for frequent, complex analysis of NHS data without giving a single third party access to a a single patient record, ever. Opensafely was wildly successful: in just months, Opensafely collaborators published sixty blockbuster papers in Nature – science that shaped the world's response to the pandemic.

Opensafely was so successful that the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care commissioned a review of the programme with an eye to expanding it to serve as the nation's default way of conducting research on medical data:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/better-broader-safer-using-health-data-for-research-and-analysis/better-broader-safer-using-health-data-for-research-and-analysis

This approach is cheaper, safer, and more effective than handing hundreds of millions of pounds to Palantir and hoping they will manage the impossible: anonymising data well enough that it is never re-identified. Trusted Research Environments have been endorsed by national associations of doctors and researchers as the superior alternative to giving the NHS's data to Peter Thiel or any other sharp operator seeking a public contract.

As a lifelong privacy campaigner, I find this approach nothing short of inspiring. I would love for there to be a way for publishers and researchers to glean privacy-preserving insights from public library checkouts (such a system would prove an important counter to Amazon's proprietary god's-eye view of reading habits); or BBC podcasts or streaming video viewership.

You see, there is an alternative. We don't have to choose between science and privacy, or the public interest and private gain. There's always an alternative – if there wasn't, the other side wouldn't have to continuously repeat the lie that no alternative is possible.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/08/the-fire-of-orodruin/#are-we-the-baddies

Image: Gage Skidmore (modified) https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Peter_Thiel_(51876933345).jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

[zvahlne]

??? GARROTH LMAO YOU'RE RESPONDING TO A NOISE COMPLAINT NOT GOING ON A DATE. IT'S LIKE A THREE MINUTE WALK TOPS

goofiest thing to get flustered over i love him

[humming-fly]

sometimes i think the shop names in fma are really lazy and uncreative, then i drive past a building that just has a giant LAUNDRY sign above it and nothing else. maybe arakawa is right.

Fma is truly timeless in this way 😤

[ipostmysimpingstuffanonymously]

ever lovely, wonderful, and most talented miss/mr anonymous what are ur thoughts on drawing satoshoko in this way 👀? (if u graciously decide to take this request on pls pls pls choose the 1st one 😭)

I had a sketch started a while ago that I never finished. It's not exactly what you asked for but I hope you still like it. I'm glad i picked it up again, I'm a sucker for clingy!Satoru and I think if anybody would let Gojo relax like that without finding him annoying or obnoxious it would be Shoko

[hijinxinprogress]

12 year old tim realizing robin’s not coming back to gotham and deciding that it’s Batman’s fault so he has to ruin the little bit of sanity and peace of mind Bruce has managed (read: struggled) to keep in his grasp:

[soonhoonsol]

there’s this trend on twitter/X where fans post photos of their cleavage with kpop idol photocards (typically male idols) sticking out of their bras/shirts and idk if i’m too woke or something but this seems to me like harassment toward the idols.

please remember that some of these idols are minors, and even for those who are of age, i don’t think any of those idols would appreciate this kind of content targeted towards them. you’d think they wouldn’t see it but c’mon, so many idols are chronically online now. you really think they won’t see it? especially when you tag the official group accounts and their names??

the replies under each post are typically very sexual in nature too, either toward the op, idol or both. some fans even go so far as to put the photocards in the hem of their pants/underwear. again, gross.

it’s frankly quite sickening watching kpop stans do something demeaning towards idols just for the “trend” or “a hit tweet”. it’s even more sickening that it’s so widespread that it’s become normalized and people, especially the younger crowd, don’t see any issue with what they’re doing anymore because “everyone else is doing it”.

[tatatale]

Is there a pairing in your universe? If yes, which one is your favorite and least favorite?

Them.

Because Alive and Soul are too stupid to be something official.

[ddarker-dreams]

Lock!! does ur big wrinkly brain have any neuvillette thoughts

yan neuvillette... it'd really be something.

he isn't cruel, deceptive, or forcefully restrictive. you'll walk away from interactions feeling like something's off, without being able to identify what. the quiet intensity of his gaze, perhaps? he looks at you like you hold the key to all the universe's mysteries. there's this expectation that neither you nor him fully understand.

he's just as perplexed by his behavior as you are, if not more so. from the onset, he rightfully predicts that nothing good will come from this. he values fairness and recognizes the immense gap in your positions. there's so much he could do, so much he could get away with, and his fascination with the infinite possibilities initially disturbs him. this mild revulsion never fully disappears, serving as a minor checks and balance for himself.

neuvillette isn't delusional. when he realizes there's no staunching this interest, he decides to take a practical approach by drafting his own code of conduct. he reasons that these 'rules', while dubious, provide a framework that's preferable to the draconic urge to possess you in your entirety.

the reoccurring tenet centers around doing you no 'unnecessary harm.' naturally, this is subject to his interpretation. your definition and his don't often overlap. he isn't deaf to your objections, though, in fact, he encourages them. he'd much prefer you spell out your thinking than leave him in the dark. if you make a compelling enough case, he'll relent. these minor victories mostly consist of you absolving innocent friends from his judgment.

you'll come to find out why your occasional run-ins left a lasting impression on you. it's because each second, behind that composed façade, he was weighing your fate on a scale that favored his interests over yours.

[toontown-rewitten-cconfessions]

I think Rainmaker's story is a lot more complicated than what we are told. I honestly don't think she's either lying and is just some sort of manipulative mastermind or an uwu wittle baby who did nothing wrong.

Yeah she's not being intentionally manipulative and she's not in the right all the time. I ♡ complex and nuanced situations!!

[allastoredeer]

Do you have any headcanons about Alastor's participation in WW1? The Selective Service Act of 1917 made it mandatory for men aged 21-30 to register for military service and was later expanded to include men as young as 18, so if the stream saying that Alastor was late thirties to early forties when he died is still canon he'd have lived through that

So, I hadn't gotten to this part in my development of Alastor's backstory, but it got me thinking because, huh, how DID Alastor manage to get out of that?

Unless he just served in WW1. Which...I find oddly funny. I don't know why, but the the image of Alastor in the trenches...

But anyway, you got me curious so I looked into it. You're 100% right about the Selective Service Act of 1917 making it mandatory for men aged 21-30 to register for military service, and they even came up with different "classes" of the men who qualified, and if they exhausted one class, they'd go down to the next.

However, even with the Selective Service Act, there was still a lot of draft evasion going on. In fact, a significant amount of draft evasion happened in the South, which, as I'm sure you know, Louisiana is part of (some of it was in part of Southerners not having documentation, and thus, unable to even legally draft, which would probably give them a whole other slew of problems).

So, I was looking into how people evaded the draft. A lot of it is split up into different groups, like draft avoidance and draft resistance, with their only little list of things, but that's a lot and I don't wanna get into all of that. But my bet is on Alastor doing draft avoidance.

And there were actually quite a few interesting ones, like:

Claiming to have a mental or psychological problem (if you could find a doctor willing to certify that for you)

Student deferment, when someone is primarily in school to learn and study (or obtaining one in an effort to avoid the draft)

Deliberately failing the military intelligence tests

Professing sincere or religious ethical beliefs (join a church, avoid the draft!)

Bribery

and my personal favorite:

Being homosexual.

Because, as you know, the government can't allow the gay in the military!

And look, I'm a silly goober, so of course I immediately went to Alastor claiming to be homosexual. But the thing is, I kind of do think that is something Alastor would do for a majority of reasons.

In the 1920's, social values were evolving, and a lot of postwar "youths" began questioning traditional concepts of family, sexuality, and gender. There were "little Bohemia's" around the US, including in Manhattan and San Francisco, with communities and groups like this, and they weren't exactly unknown.

Back to Alastor, he lived in the French Quarter in New Orleans (or, at least, that's where I think he lived as a majority of mixed-raced Creole people lived there, which we know Alastor canonically is). And it just so happens, that it became the birth place of New Orleans gay community in the 1920's. There were entire gay neighborhoods, there were clubs where people dressed in the clothing of the opposite gender, they had parties and bars, and while it wasn't "the norm" to live this "lifestyle," and there was still a lot of harassment, it was still fairly normal to see. (Of course, then came what we can call the "gay panic" where government started cracking down on it, and claiming the gay community were all predators and pedophiles, and - well, you know. You know.)

But that was after/close to Alastor's death, so...

Anyway, I 100% believe that Alastor did take part and lived in communities like those. Names and labels for those things didn't exist at the time, so it's not like he knows what they're called, but homosexuals, cross-dressing, drag queens, they were normal to him. He's lived with them, partied with them, maybe even tried a few things out himself(so many headcanons, guys. So many).

This is to say, I think Alastor would 100% be comfortable claiming to be homosexual to avoid getting drafted. You've seen getting married for tax benefits, now consider becoming gay for draft evasion! I actually had a pretty fun talk about it with a friend in Discord, which only cemented it in my mind LMAO.

I have SO many headcanons around Alastor and him living in the French Quarter, in gay communities, where they challenged social norms (and we all know how he feels about challenging status quo's 😏)

But if not that, my runner up is that he totally bribed his way out of it. I don't know how he got the money, maybe he killed someone and stole their wallet, IDK, but bribery is a yes from me.

And if not THAT one, then he joined and church and claimed to have sincere religious and ethical beliefs 😇 🙏 (Yes, this is inspired by Nun Alastor, and no, I do not take constructive criticism. That's what happened guys, I was there). Besides, New Orleans was pretty Catholic, I'm sure he could find a church somewhere.

That's my take on it XD I think the one closest to Alastor's canon character would be bribery, but this is fandom, and if I say he claimed to be gay to get out of going to war, then goddammit he claimed to be gay to get out of going to war.

[chiliger]

Arrrggh Peck looks so sweet in that picture!!! How does she pull it off? She's a hecking ARC trooper who can decapitate droids with her bare hands, she should not be able to look so soft and cute 🥺🥺🥺 (in case you didn't notice, I adore her. That picture of her and Bella on that couch looks so damn soft and fluffy it straight up gave me three cavities minimum and also looks like it should hang in a museum somewhere)

Ahhhh thank you!! 💚 Haha, the duality of a woman 🤭

See, the thing about Peck being all soft and cute is because of Bella. She has so much love for her little sister that Peck will indulge her in just about anything. Bella is really the first being Peck truly clicked with. She had no attachment to her batchmates on Kamino, so when she got assigned as Bella’s second (and personal guard), Peck’s devotion to the young Jedi Padawan kinda skyrocketed and never came down.

Anyone outside their close friends and family circle usually gets a suspicious glare. It’s very guard dog behavior heheh

I’m so glad Peck has an admirer out there~ 💚