#blame Taiwan

[thistransient]

I took the train around the southern tip of Taiwan today and the difference in air + water was very striking from the west, above, to the east, below (no filter/edit)

[evil-jennifer-hamilton-wb]

Okay so can we all agree that the ABB have a stupid name?

In my Capes in the Dark campaign, I’m gonna re-flavor it to be similar to the original with lung targeting an ethnic group except make him only target the Japanese resident's, because the pan-Asian gang idea is so stupid (like I live in Taiwan, depending on what you believe in, both Chinese and Japanese people could be seen as hostile entity) Anyways the point of this post, does anyone have ideas for a new name for the ABB

[sevenleaguesunderthesea]

man you know shit is bad when your non-usamerican ex is asking you if you're doing alright

[thecruellestmonth]

Appreciate when the peeps following my blog just politely ignore my failposts and my out-of-left-field posts. Somtimes my posts are pretty solid, sometimes they come out misshapen like a collapsed creme brulee. I feel like two different authors in one, it's weird.

[sayruq]

Biden's visit has concluded. Israel has spent his entire visit trying to muddy the waters of what happened to Al Ahli Hospital and despite their cartoonish efforts, it hasn't worked

The Global South and especially West Asia know who is responsible for the bombing and no amount of AI voice recordings of 'Hamas operatives' can change that.

Israel war crimes continues to backfire on them even in America

Biden backing Israel has had an impact on America's image. Here's a Wall Street Journal article warning that America's continued support is turning countries towards Russia and China which is code for turning countries against America

An EU official said that the EU will pay a heavy price in the Global South for its continued, unabashed support for Israel

There's also speculation that the Biden administration knew about the bombing before it happened.

Countries that were/are allied with Israel continue to distance themselves from Israel like Russia. The reason I keep highlighting Russia is because the West has been running out of ammunition due to the Russia-Ukraine war and that includes Israel which is rumoured to have sent 80-90% of its ammunition to Ukraine. If this conflict lasts a long time, Israel will need to buy weapons and ammunition and Russia would be one of the countries they would turn to (same with China)

So, where are we in terms of the conflict? After days of waffling over a ground operation in Gaza, Israel postponed it until some time after Biden's visit and now we're back here again

Now I'm no military expert but constantly going back and forth on whether or not you'll invade Gaza is bound to do damage to your troops' morale. No wonder they're dealing with mass desertions while their citizens demonstrate on the streets. The Israeli leadership has no plan besides bombing Gaza.

I've seen people on twitter say that the hospital bombing was done deliberately to normalise IDF soldiers to mass civilian deaths in places like hospitals, schools, places of worship, etc. I don't know if I believe that - I think they wanted to push Iran and Hezbollah's buttons before hiding behind Biden. I don't think these people are thinking strategically.

As far as the possibility of regional war is concerned, all indicators show that the West preparing for the war to escalate

Seems to me the Israel has seen what Ukraine has received in just a year and a half of war. They're done receiving a paltry 3.8 billion every year and now prepared to drag out the conflict and I can't say I blame with Biden proposing a 100 billion package for both Ukraine and Israel. This will stretch America too thin as far as funding in concerned. Cracks are already showing

There are parts of the US government that is unhappy that the Ukraine war is losing attention. During the Ukraine war, you had parts of the government that wanted focus to shift from Russia to China. Because of that, the US government has spent the past year alternating between hostility to Russia and threatening to go to war with China over Taiwan. When Niger expelled France from within its borders, America was preparing to join that conflict until Mali and Burkina Faso declared they would fight with Niger. Now they're entering a third front in West Asia. In short, the mighty empire is expending a lot of resources right now and it is not the threat it was when it invaded Iraq and Afghanistan in the early 2000s.

At any rate, the ground invasion of Gaza won't go the way Israel and America hopes it will

The coalition of Palestinian resistance fighters are still patiently waiting for the IDF to come meet them. Their allies aren't backing down either

The reason I keep making these posts is to remind people that, while the genocide of the people of Gaza is horrifying, the war for the liberation of Palestine has not yet been lost.

Do not lose hope. From the river to sea, Palestine WILL be free

[absolutebl]

This Week in BL - The Summer Games BLgin.

Organized, in each category, with ones I'm enjoying most at the top. Those Greeks did have that reputation for naked dudes rolling around together so I'm declaring it...

BL OLYMPICS!

I'll be passing out metals in various sporting events, as part of the weekly updates through mid August, just for funzies.

July 2024 Week 4

Ongoing Series - Thai

The Rebound (Weds Gaga) eps 9-10 of 12 - I guess mass murder is nothing next to having to raise funds for your basketball club. There were a lot of water sports in these eps (no not that kind). I’m not complaining. The street BB playoffs were fun. Frank is GOOD. I didn’t know he played. They aren’t using doubles for this. Meanwhile, it’s a bummer this one can’t be a poly romance. 

Winner!

Gold in Handball

for that shower scene in ep 9 (also... ya know, DUNK TANKS)

Balls in hands of all types.

Briefly must chat about that intro/outro music. It's like Thai autotuned Stray Kids. Which means I kinda adore it.

Century of Love (Weds Gaga) eps 5-6 of 10 - I guess he’s had a long time to learn how to fight really really well. This is a fun show. It does occasionally feel like a bunch of gay boys playing dress up. I LIKE P’Third a lot. I hope he doesn’t turn out to be an actual baddie. I’m finding the music a little intrusive in these episodes. I love the deconstructed suits look, and the velvet blazer. Very 90s. The confessions scene was very cute. It’s a good thing Vee is so easy-going, because the last few months of his life have been truly insane. And now he’s queen of the castle? Still working his convenience store job?

I honestly thought we'd just get kisses halfway through not a full on sex scene. But it was very sweet and tender. Appreciated, boys, thanks. However it’s never a good sign when the sex scene is it at the halfway point, it just means there’s gonna be a lot of trauma to come.

(I gotta say every time Daou smiles he actually looks his age.) 

This Love Doesn't Have Long Beans (Fri iQIYI) ep 4 of 8 - I like them now. I mean as a pair of characters. I wasn’t really sold on the main couple until this episode, and now I’m interested (yes I am shallow). The boy with the glasses is definitely sus. I’m quite drunk, thus I have to say Sailub is the hottest thing on my screen right now. Metas's taste in interior design sucks. OK, that physical therapy session was sexy. I wasn’t sold at first, but now I love this side couple too.

Argh. SailubPon kiss so well. Also COUNTER LIFT!!!! 

Silver in Weightlifting

Sunset X Vibes (Sat iQIYI) ep 7 of 12 - I’m the one who always says this stuff, but this pair might be the best at relationship heat. Let me try to explain. They are good at putting on screen the kind of NRE, want to bone, just really into each other physically and also connected and loving. It’s the way their bodies always arch towards each other. They’re very comfortable in each other’s space in a way that’s really rare to see out of Any BL country but Taiwan. I think they might be my favorite couple currently active. I don’t know how to put it except that

it looks like they want each other,

it looks like they like each other,

it looks like they’re into each other,

and it looks like they GET each other.

It’s nice to see on screen. The plots/stories/narratives that they're given aren’t doing them any favors, but man they’re a good pair. Meanwhile, was I screaming the whole time don’t rip the sample of the custom piece? Yes I was. But it was still sexy.

Sam getting discovered was fun! Yo is gonna burn his arse good.

My Love Mix-Up Th (Fri YT) ep 8 of 12 - Okay! Officially boyfriends. I almost like the friendship btw Atom and Mudmee better than the romances. But they all so cute. 

The Trainee (Sun YouTube) ep 4 of 12 - I hate the gf intern so much. I think she is past redemption now - time for death. What is it they say about ADs? they do all the work, for none of the credit but all of the blame.

Knock Knock Boys (Thurs Gaga) ep 10 of 12 - I guess Peak’s dad really is that awful. Jane is the beard? Got it. The show got suddenly quite sweet and complex. Where did that come from? Meanwhile ,Almond + Latte + sex education is awesome. Great trope we rarely get in BL. 

Love Sea (Sun iQIYI) ep 7 of 10 - Look, what’s really annoying me is that I am neither upset nor pleased with the show. I like to be driven one way or the other by Meme. Trash watch here. (delayed this week, I can't face it)

I Saw You in My Dream (Weds Gaga) ep 1-2 of 12 - Out the gate I don’t like it. I don’t really like the teasing thing and the acting is poor. That said, neck kisses in the very first episode do make me happy. So I’m gonna keep watching. As for ep 2, I like the sides, and we have gay brothers trope activated. I also like the paranormal element, it adds some much-needed tension, but it is still a little slow (typical of a pulp).

Ongoing Series - Not Thai

I Hear the Sunspot AKA Hidamari ga Kikoeru (Japan Weds Gaga) ep 6 of 10 - I like our poor lost puppy slowly figuring out what’s going on. It’s so elegantly done. Also, the the boy begs his quiet seme to SAY something, you know he’s gonna DO something instead. 

I could have done wihtout the pan around the head kiss. We over that, 8 years ago.

Takara's Treasure AKA Takara No Vidro (Japan Mon Gaga) ep 4 of 10 - Why don’t I like this show? I had to think about it quite a bit. It’s the power differential. I never enjoy it when the character with less power is the one doing the pursuing, it comes off as too desperate or something. In this case he is: from the country, poor, and younger, It just makes Takara’s dismissive attitude and snobbery unpleasant to watch. Also, you know me, =/= obsessive stalker behavior. 

It's airing but...

Bad Guy (Korea YT) - yeah, erm, no thank you.

4 Minutes (Thai Netflix/Grey) ep... - Great, a rich boy studying business at uni, suddenly gains the supernatural power to see four minutes into the future. I try to catch up next week.

I have a source, but I simply didn’t have time to watch it. So sorry. Too much traveling too much BL to keep up with. A perfect conflation of conflicting priorities.

Meet You at the Blossom (China) - it's your funeral (or, more likely, one of the main characters'). You can argue but... statistics. You know my feelings on this matter. MY BLOG, remember?

64.media.tumblr.com

In case you missed it

The Time of Fever AKA Unintentional Love Story 2 (Korea movie) trailer IS COMING IN SEPTEMBER!!!!

Next Week Looks Like This:

Upcoming BLs for 2024 are listed here. This list is not kept updated, so please leave a comment if you know something new or RP with additions.

Coming Up Next!

7/29 Battle of the Writers (Thai ????) - trailer here, TutorYim return, and while I adore them, I really hope this is better than Middleman's Love. Won't be hard. However: the premise? Ugh. Something something authors fighting - save me. Why don't writers understand that nothing is more boring than writers?

8/4 Sugar Dog Life (Japan Sun ????) 10 eps - OMG a uni student who looks too young and a... COP. GAH. The subversion and kink of it all. Please Gaga pick this one up? They made it for US.

8/7 Cosmetic Playlover (Japan Weds ????) 8 eps - office romance around the makeup counter featuring a younger seme and sex by blackmail. I am intrigued. DFTUJ (don't fuck this up, Japan).

8/8 Monster Next Door (Thai Thurs WeTV ) 12 eps - I am so DAMN excited to see Big finally lead a BL. I can't even with this, one of my most anticipated of this year. He's a great kisser ya'll, he's kissed a lot of boys as second lead. I can't WAIT.

8/12 First Note Of Love (Taiwan Mon Gaga) 12 eps - About a singer with stage fright and his timid fan stars Charles (H4 the puppy one) and Michael Chang (the youngster in My Tooth Your Love), plus side couple featuring a Thai actor Jame (Koh in Gen Y) and Liu Min Ting (of Guardian fame). What a damn tean. I can't wait. With thier powers combined!

8/16 The Last Time (Thai Fri YT) ? eps - Convoluted story of loss and possible reincarnation or something.

8/22 The Paradise of Thorns (Thai movie) theater release - Jeff Satur is back but this does not look like a BL (the gay lover's death is the inciting event). More in Goodbye Mother vein. Looks dark and dramatic. He opposite and extremely well known actor Toey Pongsakorn who has never done gay before.

Addicted Heroin (Thailand adaptation) is also supposed to release this month. GIVE IT TOO MEEEEEE. I don't care about anything else but August back on my screen. It's been almost a decade since he did BL.

THIS WEEK’S BEST MOMENTS

This week's adventures in caption "out of" and "off" are not the same thing. This is an uncomfortable thought.

I'm so tired I'm seeing double. This is all you get.

(Last week)

Streaming services are listed by how I (usually) watch, which is with a USA based IP, and often offset by a day because time zones are a pain.

The tag BLigade: @doorajar @solitaryandwandering @my-rose-tinted-glasses @babymbbatinygirl @babymbbatinygirl @isisanna-blog @mmastertheone @pickletrip @aliceisathome @urikawa-miyuki @tokillamonger @sunflower-positiiivity @rocketturtle4 @blglplus @anythinggoesintheshire @everlightly @renafire @mestizashinrin @bl-bam-beyond @small-dark-and-delicious @saezurumurmurs

Sigh, Tumblr in it's infinite wisdom doesn't like too many tags.

Sports in Play (the jokes write themselves) )

Boxing

Breaking

(That's Not) Cricket

Diving (yes, for that)

Fencing (yes, with those)

Handball (exactly what it says, no, read the word.. again)

Rhythmic Gymnastics (obvs)

Squash (snicker)

Surfing

Swimming

Trampoline

Weightlifting

Wrestling

[theidiotwhowritesthings]

TAKE CARE OF YOU [6]

Sugar Daddy!Joel Miller x Female!Reader

Overall Warnings: slow burn, angst/comfort, power imbalance, age gap, possessive tendencies, eventual smut, #daddyissues, independent reader learns to let go and relax, emotionally constipated Joel Miller learns to be vulnerable; (more specific warnings to be added to individual chapters if necessary)

Chapter Word Count: 3,484

Summary: You spent your entire adult life supporting yourself and barely getting by. It’s why a life of ease offered to you by a mysterious stranger sounded so foreign and unbelievable. Joel Miller, dressed in flannels that had seen better days, didn’t look like the kind who could promise you the world on a plate, but he seemed desperate to help out. All he asks is that you let him take care of you. That wouldn’t be so hard. Would it?

[A/N: I'm having too much fun with this. Also, I may do away with tag lists here soon. i know they're helpful for y'all but the amount of time it takes up for some God forsaken reason is killing me lol]

06: HERE'S YOUR PUNISHMENT

"always be careful of what you hear about a woman. rumors either come from a man who can't have her, or a woman who can't compete with her."

A week and a half had passed and you had been on three other dinner dates with Joel. They hadn’t been as elaborate as your putt putt date, but it was still time with him that you enjoyed. The nights you didn’t go out you spent on the phone with him. A day hadn’t gone by where you didn’t speak to Joel in some manner or way. 

“What is this??” Nima cried from your kitchen. She wandered out of the space in her pajamas, a korean face mask in place, and held up the expensive bottle of wine Joel had sent you. “Bitch, I went to look for your box wine and found this.”

You beamed at her from your spot on the couch. A thick, cozy blanket draped over your shoulders. “Joel got it for me. Crack it open!”

“Pfft, you don’t have to tell me twice.”

A few moments later, Nima entered your view again. She hurried to jump onto the couch beside you. Two wine glasses held precariously in one hand and the wine bottle in the other. The corkscrew was held under her arm and when she was settled she began to open it up.

“How is that sugar baby stuff going?” Nima asked.

“Good.” You responded. “We’ve been on a few⏤ outings.” You didn’t refer to them as dates like you did with Joel. It just felt odd. “We went putt putt golfing on our first outing. We walked through a park another time.” Nima narrowed her eyes at you while pouring wine in the glasses. “What?”

Nima scoffed and handed you the wine. “Putt putt? A walk? He’s a millionaire.” She took a sip of the wine and groaned in pleasure at the taste. She then motioned to you to make her point. “He should be flying you to Paris for escargot or Taiwan for noodles.”

You rolled your eyes. “That’s literally absurd.” Nima shrugged her shoulders in an exaggerated manner. You shifted in your seat comfortably and you could feel a slow smile spread across your lips at the thought of Joel. “I like our outings, thank you.”

“Oh no.” Nima blurted and you furrowed your brow in confusion at her sudden concern. “I recognize that look.”

“What look?”

“That look.”

“I’m not wearing a look!”

Nima leaned forward and shook her head. “You like your sugar daddy.”

You scoffed in response. “I think that’s kind of the point.”

“No, no.” Nima waggled her finger at you. “The point is to pretend like you like your sugar daddy. That’s how you keep all the power.” You rolled your eyes then took a sip of the delicious and expensive wine. Nima sighed. “I’m serious.”

“You’re ridiculous is what you are.”

Nima stretched out to rest her legs in your lap and shot you a serious look that you could only half take seriously due to the face mask she wore. “You haven’t liked a guy since your ex. You can’t blame me for being worried. I just don’t want you to get hurt again, babe.”

“I’m not gonna⏤ You’re way off base here.” You shook your head and took a sip of your wine. “That’s not something you need to worry about.” Nima tilted her head and gave you a firm look. “Seriously!”

“Right.” She dragged the word out. “And you haven’t checked your phone a dozen times since I got here hoping for a text from him.”

Your eyes widened as she called you out. Nima wasn’t wrong. Despite, just having spoken to him this afternoon you still hoped to hear from him. The back of your neck warmed in mild embarrassment and you took a sip of your wine before speaking. “No. No, I’m just… I’m keeping an eye out because if he does text me I need to reply. Obviously. He’s, uh, he’s paying me.”

“Uh huh.” Nima deadpanned. You rolled your eyes and sunk into the couch. “How much do you know about this guy? Like, for real?”

“I know what I need to know.”

“What if he has a secret family??” Nima cried.

“He has a not secret family that he talks about quite warmly.” You replied with a small smile. Only days ago the two of you had gotten onto the topic of families. “He has a brother, and two daughters.”

Nima waved her hand toward you. “I bet all those relationships are all fucked up.”

“Actually, Joel says they’re incredibly close.”

“Of course, he would say that.” Nima argued. “Have you met them?”

“What child, regardless of age, would ever want to meet their father’s sugar baby?”

“True.” She conceded.

You hid behind your wine glass, taking another long sip, in thought. The topic of Joel’s daughters had you torn. On one hand, listening to Joel talk about his daughters was literally the cutest thing in the world. He was so proud of them both. His eldest was about to be a senior at Baylor University back in Texas with plans to go to pharmacy school when she eventually graduated and his youngest had just been accepted into UCLA. It was obvious how much he adored them and the few stories he told made it clear that they cared about him equally so. The only part of it that felt odd to you was the thought that if they knew about you they’d hate you.

You were the weird woman their father was paying to hang out with. If the roles were reversed you’d be worried that some psycho woman was taking advantage of your father. 

“Well, I wanna meet him.” Nima demanded.

You scoffed with a laugh. “Not yet, Nima.”

“Why not?? Is he hiding from me?”

“No,” You grinned at her, “I’m hiding him from you. Joel’s not ready to be exposed to your insanity quite yet I don’t think.”

Nima hummed and held up the wine glass for you to clink yours again. “That’s fair, babe. That’s fair.”

The rest of the night was filled with cheesy rom coms, Nima’s nonsense, and an additional wine bottle after you and her killed the first one. Every month the two of you had a dedicated ‘girls’ night’ where you both hung out and got fully caught up with one another lives. Around midnight, when Nima had risen to use the bathroom you felt your phone buzz and reached out for it: ‘Didn’t wanna interrupt girls’ night, but hope you’re having a good night. Talk to you tomorrow, sugar.’

You held the phone to your chest as a stupidly pleased smile flickered to your features. Nima hadn’t been wrong. You liked your sugar daddy. You really liked him, actually. Still, you could keep you emotions separate from this deal. It would be fine. You wouldn’t get hurt. 

A few days after girls’ night, you found yourself at work leaning against the counter while reading a book. Henry had stepped out to buy lunch. The last customer to come through had been a little over an hour ago and you had gotten pretty absorbed in your book. However, the sound of the door chime made you glance up in excitement. Joel had said he’d swing by to visit you around this time. It was not your sugar daddy who came waltzing through the door though. 

“Rosalind?” You asked in surprise. She looked as regal as she did when you met her prior to agreeing to a deal with Joel. She wore a flowy, long dark green gown with braided brown straps. It made her look like some kind of forest goddess which you mildly obnoxious. How could a person look airbrushed in person? “Uh, hi.”

“Hi, girly.” Rosalind pushed her sunglasses away from her eyes and into her hair. “So good to see you again!”

“Yeah.” You stuck a bookmark in your book before tucking it under the counter. “What can I do for you?”

“Oh, I’m not here for baked goods.” Rosalind laughed. “I haven’t had a carb in seven years.”

“That sounds… miserable.” You mumbled the last bit, but she acted as if she did not hear you.

“How have things been with your daddy?”

You blinked in shock at her statement. Rosalind had come in here just to ask you how things were going with Joel? You had a strong suspicion it wasn’t for your sake. She waited patiently for you to respond. Finally, you gave her a small nod. “Good. It’s going really good.”

“Aw, there’s no need to lie.” Rosalind cooed and you simply raised an eyebrow in confusion. You couldn’t even begin to feel bullied by this woman mainly because there was too many questions swirling in your mind to be intimidated. “I hear he dropped you.”

You blinked once and tilted your head at her, “Huh?”

“I mean, why else would you still be working in this decrypt and sad little bakery?”

“I have a responsibility?” You replied. Granted, you knew Joel didn’t want you working here anymore. He wasn’t nagging you or twisting your arm to put in a two week’s notice, but his opinion was still made clear. Joel respected that fact that you wanted to right by Henry which you were thankful for. Not thankful enough to bite the bullet and just do it, but you were working up to that. Slowly. “I can’t just leave.”

Rosalind let loose a mocking laugh. “What idiot would still work a full schedule despite their sugar daddy offering them a life of ease?”

You rubbed the back of your neck with a mildly amused wince. “I think the word ‘idiot’ is a little harsh.” She seemed to ignore your comment entirely. “Did you really come all the way here to mock me about a rumor you heard? An incorrect one, at that? Because I think that means you need to get a hobby.” You shrugged. “Or maybe better sources.”

“No, girly, I came to offer condolences.” Rosalind replied.

“It doesn’t feel like that…”

She ignored your mumbles again. “I know this was your first time branching into the extravagant world I’ve made my home in, and I don’t want you to get discouraged.” Rosalind reached over the counter to grasp your hand in hers. “In fact, I want to help you find a new daddy. Maybe one more…” She eyed you up and down. “In your league.” You furrowed your brow at the backhanded insult. “All you have to do is help me set a meeting with Joel Miller.”

“Why?” You asked. Though, you were fairly certain you knew why.

“I’m in the market for a new daddy.” She winked at you as if the two of you were friends gossiping and she hadn’t been tossing insults your way since walking through the door. Rosalind was either the most confident woman on the planet or she was completely and totally delusional. Maybe both. 

Though she was lucky though because after another five minutes of rambling to you about her newest plans to secure a daddy and the kinds she could find for you, the door chime rang. You found any annoyance you felt toward Rosalind vanished the second Joel walked through the door. He was dressed in a work flannel today which meant he was either coming from or going to a construction site.

“Hi, daddy.” You grinned and his eyes widened at your public greeting. Joel’s eyes weren’t nearly as wide as Rosalind’s though as she gawked between you and him. You pointed to the woman in front of you. “This is Rosalind Turkey⏤”

“Turby.” She corrected through the gritted teeth of her smile.

“⏤and she hasn’t eaten a carb in seven years.”

Joel nodded slowly. It was clear he didn’t fully understand the circumstances, but his lips still curled up in amusement. He nodded at Rosalind once. “Congratulations?” 

“Rosalind, this is Joel Miller.” You finished. “You said you wanted to meet him? Ask him something about a meeting?”

Rosalind faked a laugh before waving her hand at you. “Don’t be silly, my love.” It was fun to see the smile she wore as it did not match the rage in her eyes. “I’ll leave you two be.” She paused only to set a hand on Joel’s shoulder. “It was very nice to meet you.”

“Yeah, okay.” Joel grunted.

“Ta-ta!” Rosalind waved at you once more and you gave her a cheerful wave back as she glared at you once before storming out the door.

You laughed at her reaction, and Joel shook his head. “Mind tellin’ me what the hell that was about?”

“Remember I told you that I met with a sugar baby before agreeing to our deal?” You asked. Joel nodded. “That was her.”

“Why was she here?”

“Apparently there’s a rumor that you dumped me as your sugar baby.” You grinned teasingly at him. “So, if that’s what you’ve come to do, may I just warn you that women like her will be kicking down your door looking for a little loving the second you do.”

Joel laughed. “Guess that means I just gotta keep you forever, hm?” You felt your entire face warm as your lips twisted into a smile you tried to hide. His goal must have been to make you squirm since his own amusement increased at the sight of you. “Rosie tell you why she thought that?”

You were positive that she would hate that nickname and reminded yourself to use it if you ever had to deal with her again. You shrugged. “To be honest, I’m not sure. I don’t know how she found me or anything, but I think she thought it was because I was still working here.”

“Not for my lack of tryin’.” Joel snorted.

“I’m gonna talk to Henry soon, I promise.” You replied.

Joel shook his head and held a hand up, “I ain’t here to bother you about that. I came to bother you about somethin’ else.”

“And that is?”

“You still got that three day weekend?” He asked, and you nodded. This week you had Friday, Saturday, and Sunday off which was almost unheard of, but Henry was going out of town to visit family and figured it’d be best just to close up those days. Joel knew that though. The two of you had just talked about it so you weren’t sure why he was asking again. “Good. I got this conference to go to. Was hopin’ you’d, uh, you’d come along.”

It dawned on you then that Joel seemed a bit nervous to ask and after all the time you spent together you found that curious. You tried to reassure him, “I’d love to go, Joel.”

“Well,” He leaned on the counter in front of you, “It’s not a normal conference. Just don’t feel obligated to say yes because of our deal. As much as I’d like you to be there, I never told you this," He motioned between the two of you, "would involve any sort of travelin'.”

Your eyes widened. “Traveling?”

“The conference is in Vegas.” Joel replied. “We’d leave Friday mornin' and I’d have you back late Sunday night.” You felt a wave of excitement roll through you which Joel seemed to take as anxiety. “No pressure. It’s just last year this conference wasn’t any kind of fun, and I was hopin’ you’d change that.”

You smirked, and leaned on the counter as well to bounce your eyebrows in a suggestive manner, “Change it how? What kind of fun are you expecting from me?”

Joel’s face flushed and he cleared his throat. “Not⏤ I wasn’t⏤ I just thought you'd, uh we'd…” He finally seemed to notice you were simply teasing him, and he scoffed⏤ lips curling into a smile. Joel reached forward to set his hand on your face and he squished your cheeks with one hand so your lips were slightly pursed. He leaned in, “You’re bein’ a brat, sugar.”

“I thought you liked that.” You replied, but all your words came out slightly muffled by the way he held your face. Joel raised an eyebrow at you in response, and it made your heart flutter in your chest. You chuckled, cheeks still squished, “Sorry, daddy.”

“That’s what I thought you said.” Joel chuckled. He loosened his grip so he wasn’t playfully squishing your cheeks together, but he let his fingers linger on your cheeks for a moment before pulling his hand back. You found you missed his touch more than you should. “So?”

You nodded. “I’ll come. I’ve never been to Vegas before.”

“Good.” Joel nodded, excitement in his brown eyes making you even happier to say yes. “You know what this means?” You tilted your head curiously then slightly shook your head. “Means we get to go shoppin’, sugar. You need a brand new wardrobe for Vegas.”

You chuckled, “You look for any excuse to buy things.”

“Only for the special people in my life.” Joel shrugged, and he made the comment so nonchalantly that you felt heat creep up the back of your neck and into your cheeks. Joel reached back to his back pocket and pulled out a square box that he set in front of you. “Speakin’ of…”

You stared at it for a moment before snapping your gaze back to him, “What is this?”

“You lost at mini golf. Here’s your punishment.”

“You were serious??”

Joel winked at you, “Always, sugar.”

He nodded once for you to open it and you hesitantly picked up the velvet box to pop it open. Joel had promised you exorbitant and gaudy jewelry. You weren’t sure what to expect when the lid hinged open, but you gasped at the sunflower that stared up at you⏤ just like the first flowers he sent you.

The necklace was made of a silver chain and the sunflower charm hanging from it was about the size of a dime. It’s center was made up of a collection of very small, glittering smokey gems and yellow petals fanned out from it in a radial pattern. Some petals were a solid yellow stone and others made of some kind of yellow gem. Your eyes snapped up to Joel to see he had been staring at you intently the entire time. The corner of his lips curled ever so slightly and a softness in his eyes that only added to the gift itself.

“Oh my God, Joel.” You breathed.

“You like it?” He asked, genuinely nervous about your reaction. You pressed your lips together and nodded frantically⏤ unable to find the words. Joel breathed out a breath of relief. The necklace was gorgeous, but you really loved the memory tied to it. As long as you wore it, every sight of it would remind you of that first bouquet, that first date. 

You picked the necklace up from the box then grinned at Joel. “Can you…?” Joel understood what you were asking and you spun in place so he could reach across the counter and latch the necklace’s clasp. The feel of his warm fingers brushing against the skin at the back of your neck sent a chill down your spine that you couldn’t help but shiver at. If Joel noticed, he made no comment. You were thankful for the counter separating the two of you. Having his breath fanning down on your neck alongside his fingers would probably send you spiraling over the edge.

When he finished, his hands pulled away and you turned around to admire the way the gift looked around your neck. “Thank you so much. I love it.”

“Not gaudy?” 

You shook your head. “Not at all. Where’d you get it?”

“I had it made.” Joel replied. “That’s what took me so long to get it to you, sugar.”

“So, this is original?” Your eyes widened again. “There’s no other piece just like this?”

Joel smirked. “It’s one of a kind. Just like you.”

“That’s so cheesy.” You beamed at him, hands lifting to rest on your cheeks. After telling Joel how much you liked cheesy shows of affection he had showered you in that kind of behavior. The sound of the door’s bell going off made you glance over to see two strangers walking in. “Alright, I need to get back to work.”

Joel shook his head, “If you weren’t working we wouldn’t be interrupted like this, sugar.”

“Shouldn’t you be at work?” You teased back. He nodded in surrender and you leaned in to leave him with one last comment before the two strangers got any closer. “Thanks for the gift, daddy.”

Joel held your gaze for another beat before he shot you a discreet final wink before leaving. The two strangers, still caught up in their own conversation, finally drifted over and it took actual effort to tear your eyes away from Joel’s broad frame. Your hand lifted to touch the sunflower charm hanging round your neck. Maybe Nima was completely right. You were in trouble.

taglist (closed):

@weddingfairy @bfences @fairntonorth @jasminedragon @biwitchy @huffle-punk @shelbyteller @anoverwhelmingdin @aheadfullofsteverogers @stagerightlauren @basicoccult @rinnfey @boofy1998 @farintonorth @thepascalofus @amatis-gray @casa-boiardi @northernbluess @jettia @sapphicsoie @spidey-3 @camiali25 @hrtsforpascal @gingersince97 @sentients17 @bigboiseason123 @lunxramour @ktheunready @heyheyheygaypay @keepingupwiththeskywalkers @adoringanakin @come-hell-or-eldren-fire @cherriebat @whitewolfstar01 @alyssa121611 @asreadbyaj @painfullyandprettypoetic @cantobightcafe @hellooseulgi @str84pedro

[previous][next]

✨J.M. Masterlist✨

[mariacallous]

A long trip on an American highway in the summer of 2024 leaves the impression that two kinds of billboards now have near-monopoly rule over our roads. On one side, the billboards, gravely black-and-white and soberly reassuring, advertise cancer centers. (“We treat every type of cancer, including the most important one: yours”; “Beat 3 Brain Tumors. At 57, I gave birth, again.”) On the other side, brightly colored and deliberately clownish billboards advertise malpractice and personal-injury lawyers, with phone numbers emblazoned in giant type and the lawyers wearing superhero costumes or intimidating glares, staring down at the highway as they promise to do to juries.

A new Tocqueville considering the landscape would be certain that all Americans do is get sick and sue each other. We ask doctors to cure us of incurable illnesses, and we ask lawyers to take on the doctors who haven’t. We are frightened and we are angry; we look to expert intervention for the fears, and to comic but effective-seeming figures for retaliation against the experts who disappoint us.

Much of this is distinctly American—the idea that cancer-treatment centers would be in competitive relationships with one another, and so need to advertise, would be as unimaginable in any other industrialized country as the idea that the best way to adjudicate responsibility for a car accident is through aggressive lawsuits. Both reflect national beliefs: in competition, however unreal, and in the assignment of blame, however misplaced. We want to think that, if we haven’t fully enjoyed our birthright of plenty and prosperity, a nameable villain is at fault.

To grasp what is at stake in this strangest of political seasons, it helps to define the space in which the contest is taking place. We may be standing on the edge of an abyss, and yet nothing is wrong, in the expected way of countries on the brink of apocalypse. The country is not convulsed with riots, hyperinflation, or mass immiseration. What we have is a sort of phony war—a drôle de guerre, a sitzkrieg—with the vehemence of conflict mainly confined to what we might call the cultural space.

These days, everybody talks about spaces: the “gastronomic space,” the “podcast space,” even, on N.F.L. podcasts, the “analytic space.” Derived from some combination of sociology and interior design, the word has elbowed aside terms like “field” or “conversation,” perhaps because it’s even more expansive. The “space” of a national election is, for that reason, never self-evident; we’ve always searched for clues.

And so William Dean Howells began his 1860 campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln by mocking the search for a Revolutionary pedigree for Presidential candidates and situating Lincoln in the antislavery West, in contrast to the resigned and too-knowing East. North vs. South may have defined the frame of the approaching war, but Howells was prescient in identifying East vs. West as another critical electoral space. This opposition would prove crucial—first, to the war, with the triumph of the Westerner Ulysses S. Grant over the well-bred Eastern generals, and then to the rejuvenation of the Democratic Party, drawing on free-silver populism and an appeal to the values of the resource-extracting, expansionist West above those of the industrialized, centralized East.

A century later, the press thought that the big issues in the race between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy were Quemoy and Matsu (two tiny Taiwan Strait islands, claimed by both China and Taiwan), the downed U-2, the missile gap, and other much debated Cold War obsessions. But Norman Mailer, in what may be the best thing he ever wrote, saw the space as marked by the rise of movie-star politics—the image-based contests that, from J.F.K. to Ronald Reagan, would dominate American life. In “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” published in Esquire, Mailer revealed that a campaign that looked at first glance like the usual black-and-white wire-service photography of the first half of the twentieth century was really the beginning of our Day-Glo-colored Pop-art turn.

And our own electoral space? We hear about the overlooked vs. the élite, the rural vs. the urban, the coastal vs. the flyover, the aged vs. the young—about the dispossessed vs. the beneficiaries of global neoliberalism. Upon closer examination, however, these binaries blur. Support for populist nativism doesn’t track neatly with economic disadvantage. Some of Donald Trump’s keenest supporters have boats as well as cars and are typically the wealthier citizens of poorer rural areas. His stock among billionaires remains high, and his surprising support among Gen Z males is something his campaign exploits with visits to podcasts that no non-Zoomer has ever heard of.

But polarized nations don’t actually polarize around fixed poles. Civil confrontations invariably cross classes and castes, bringing together people from radically different social cohorts while separating seemingly natural allies. The English Revolution of the seventeenth century, like the French one of the eighteenth, did not array worn-out aristocrats against an ascendant bourgeoisie or fierce-eyed sansculottes. There were, one might say, good people on both sides. Or, rather, there were individual aristocrats, merchants, and laborers choosing different sides in these prerevolutionary moments. No civil war takes place between classes; coalitions of many kinds square off against one another.

In part, that’s because there’s no straightforward way of defining our “interests.” It’s in the interest of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to have big tax cuts; in the longer term, it’s also in their interest to have honest rule-of-law government that isn’t in thrall to guilds or patrons—to be able to float new ideas without paying baksheesh to politicians or having to worry about falling out of sixth-floor windows. “Interests” fail as an explanatory principle.

Does talk of values and ideas get us closer? A central story of American public life during the past three or four decades is (as this writer has noted) that liberals have wanted political victories while reliably securing only cultural victories, even as conservatives, wanting cultural victories, get only political ones. Right-wing Presidents and legislatures are elected, even as one barrier after another has fallen on the traditionalist front of manners and mores. Consider the widespread acceptance of same-sex marriage. A social transformation once so seemingly untenable that even Barack Obama said he was against it, in his first campaign for President, became an uncontroversial rite within scarcely more than a decade.

Right-wing political power has, over the past half century, turned out to have almost no ability to stave off progressive social change: Nixon took the White House in a landslide while Norman Lear took the airwaves in a ratings sweep. And so a kind of permanent paralysis has set in. The right has kept electing politicians who’ve said, “Enough! No more ��Anything goes’!”—and anything has kept going. No matter how many right-wing politicians came to power, no matter how many right-wing judges were appointed, conservatives decided that the entire culture was rigged against them.

On the left, the failure of cultural power to produce political change tends to lead to a doubling down on the cultural side, so that wholesome college campuses can seem the last redoubt of Red Guard attitudes, though not, to be sure, of Red Guard authority. On the right, the failure of political power to produce cultural change tends to lead to a doubling down on the political side in a way that turns politics into cultural theatre. Having lost the actual stages, conservatives yearn to enact a show in which their adversaries are rendered humiliated and powerless, just as they have felt humiliated and powerless. When an intolerable contradiction is allowed to exist for long enough, it produces a Trump.

As much as television was the essential medium of a dozen bygone Presidential campaigns (not to mention the medium that made Trump a star), the podcast has become the essential medium of this one. For people under forty, the form—typically long-winded and shapeless—is as tangibly present as Walter Cronkite’s tightly scripted half-hour news show was fifty years ago, though the D.I.Y. nature of most podcasts, and the premium on host-read advertisements, makes for abrupt tonal changes as startling as those of the highway billboards.

On the enormously popular, liberal-minded “Pod Save America,” for instance, the hosts make no secret of their belief that the election is a test, as severe as any since the Civil War, of whether a government so conceived can long endure. Then they switch cheerfully to reading ads for Tommy John underwear (“with the supportive pouch”), for herbal hangover remedies, and for an app that promises to cancel all your excess streaming subscriptions, a peculiarly niche obsession (“I accidentally paid for Showtime twice!” “That’s bad!”). George Conway, the former Republican (and White House husband) turned leading anti-Trumper, states bleakly on his podcast for the Bulwark, the news-and-opinion site, that Trump’s whole purpose is to avoid imprisonment, a motivation that would disgrace the leader of any Third World country. Then he immediately leaps into offering—like an old-fashioned a.m.-radio host pushing Chock Full o’Nuts—testimonials for HexClad cookware, with charming self-deprecation about his own kitchen skills. How serious can the crisis be if cookware and boxers cohabit so cozily with the apocalypse?

And then there’s the galvanic space of social media. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, we were told, by everyone from Jean Baudrillard to Daniel Boorstin, that television had reduced us to numbed observers of events no longer within our control. We had become spectators instead of citizens. In contrast, the arena of social media is that of action and engagement—and not merely engagement but enragement, with algorithms acting out addictively on tiny tablets. The aura of the Internet age is energized, passionate, and, above all, angry. The algorithms dictate regular mortar rounds of text messages that seem to come not from an eager politician but from an infuriated lover, in the manner of Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction”: “Are you ignoring us?” “We’ve reached out to you PERSONALLY!” “This is the sixth time we’ve asked you!” At one level, we know they’re entirely impersonal, while, at another, we know that politicians wouldn’t do this unless it worked, and it works because, at still another level, we are incapable of knowing what we know; it doesn’t feel entirely impersonal. You can doomscroll your way to your doom. The democratic theorists of old longed for an activated citizenry; somehow they failed to recognize how easily citizens could be activated to oppose deliberative democracy.

If the cultural advantages of liberalism have given it a more pointed politics in places where politics lacks worldly consequences, its real-world politics can seem curiously blunted. Kamala Harris, like Joe Biden before her, is an utterly normal workaday politician of the kind we used to find in any functioning democracy—bending right, bending left, placating here and postponing confrontation there, glaring here and, yes, laughing there. Demographics aside, there is nothing exceptional about Harris, which is her virtue. Yet we live in exceptional times, and liberal proceduralists and institutionalists are so committed to procedures and institutions—to laws and their reasonable interpretation, to norms and their continuation—that they can be slow to grasp that the world around them has changed.

One can only imagine the fulminations that would have ensued in 2020 had the anti-democratic injustice of the Electoral College—which effectively amplifies the political power of rural areas at the expense of the country’s richest and most productive areas—tilted in the other direction. Indeed, before the 2000 election, when it appeared as if it might, Karl Rove and the George W. Bush campaign had a plan in place to challenge the results with a “grassroots” movement designed to short-circuit the Electoral College and make the popular-vote winner prevail. No Democrat even suggests such a thing now.

It’s almost as painful to see the impunity with which Supreme Court Justices have torched their institution’s legitimacy. One Justice has the upside-down flag of the insurrectionists flying on his property; another, married to a professional election denialist, enjoys undeclared largesse from a plutocrat. There is, apparently, little to be done, nor even any familiar language of protest to draw on. Prepared by experience to believe in institutions, mainstream liberals believe in their belief even as the institutions are degraded in front of their eyes.

In one respect, the space of politics in 2024 is transoceanic. The forms of Trumpism are mirrored in other countries. In the U.K., a similar wave engendered the catastrophe of Brexit; in France, it has brought an equally extreme right-wing party to the brink, though not to the seat, of power; in Italy, it elevated Matteo Salvini to national prominence and made Giorgia Meloni Prime Minister. In Sweden, an extreme-right group is claiming voters in numbers no one would ever have thought possible, while Canadian conservatives have taken a sharp turn toward the far right.

What all these currents have in common is an obsessive fear of immigration. Fear of the other still seems to be the primary mover of collective emotion. Even when it is utterly self-destructive—as in Britain, where the xenophobia of Brexit cut the U.K. off from traditional allies while increasing immigration from the Global South—the apprehension that “we” are being flooded by frightening foreigners works its malign magic.

It’s an old but persistent delusion that far-right nationalism is not rooted in the emotional needs of far-right nationalists but arises, instead, from the injustices of neoliberalism. And so many on the left insist that all those Trump voters are really Bernie Sanders voters who just haven’t had their consciousness raised yet. In fact, a similar constellation of populist figures has emerged, sharing platforms, plans, and ideologies, in countries where neoliberalism made little impact, and where a strong system of social welfare remains in place. If a broadened welfare state—national health insurance, stronger unions, higher minimum wages, and the rest—would cure the plague in the U.S., one would expect that countries with resilient welfare states would be immune from it. They are not.

Though Trump can be situated in a transoceanic space of populism, he isn’t a mere symptom of global trends: he is a singularly dangerous character, and the product of a specific cultural milieu. To be sure, much of New York has always been hostile to him, and eager to disown him; in a 1984 profile of him in GQ, Graydon Carter made the point that Trump was the only New Yorker who ever referred to Sixth Avenue as the “Avenue of the Americas.” Yet we’re part of Trump’s identity, as was made clear by his recent rally on Long Island—pointless as a matter of swing-state campaigning, but central to his self-definition. His belligerence could come directly from the two New York tabloid heroes of his formative years in the city: John Gotti, the gangster who led the Gambino crime family, and George Steinbrenner, the owner of the Yankees. When Trump came of age, Gotti was all over the front page of the tabloids, as “the Teflon Don,” and Steinbrenner was all over the back sports pages, as “the Boss.”

Steinbrenner was legendary for his middle-of-the-night phone calls, for his temper and combativeness. Like Trump, who theatricalized the activity, he had a reputation for ruthlessly firing people. (Gotti had his own way of doing that.) Steinbrenner was famous for having no loyalty to anyone. He mocked the very players he had acquired and created an atmosphere of absolute chaos. It used to be said that Steinbrenner reduced the once proud Yankees baseball culture to that of professional wrestling, and that arena is another Trumpian space. Pro wrestling is all about having contests that aren’t really contested—that are known to be “rigged,” to use a Trumpian word—and yet evoke genuine emotion in their audience.

At the same time, Trump has mastered the gangster’s technique of accusing others of crimes he has committed. The agents listening to the Gotti wiretap were mystified when he claimed innocence of the just-committed murder of Big Paul Castellano, conjecturing, in apparent seclusion with his soldiers, about who else might have done it: “Whoever killed this cocksucker, probably the cops killed this Paul.” Denying having someone whacked even in the presence of those who were with you when you whacked him was a capo’s signature move.

Marrying the American paranoid style to the more recent cult of the image, Trump can draw on the manner of the tabloid star and show that his is a game, a show, not to be taken quite seriously while still being serious in actually inciting violent insurrections and planning to expel millions of helpless immigrants. Self-defined as a showman, he can say anything and simultaneously drain it of content, just as Gotti, knowing that he had killed Castellano, thought it credible to deny it—not within his conscience, which did not exist, but within an imaginary courtroom. Trump evidently learned that, in the realm of national politics, you could push the boundaries of publicity and tabloid invective far further than they had ever been pushed.

Trump’s ability to be both joking and severe at the same time is what gives him his power and his immunity. This power extends even to something as unprecedented as the assault on the U.S. Capitol. Trump demanded violence (“If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore”) but stuck in three words, “peacefully and patriotically,” that, however hollow, were meant to immunize him, Gotti-style. They were, so to speak, meant for the cops on the wiretap. Trump’s resilience is not, as we would like to tell our children about resilience, a function of his character. It’s a function of his not having one.

Just as Trump’s support cuts across the usual divisions, so, too, does a divide among his opponents—between the maximizers, who think that Trump is a unique threat to liberal democracy, and the minimizers, who think that he is merely the kind of clown a democracy is bound to throw up from time to time. The minimizers (who can be found among both Marxist Jacobin contributors and Never Trump National Review conservatives) will say that Trump has crossed the wires of culture and politics in a way that opportunistically responds to the previous paralysis, but that this merely places him in an American tradition. Democracy depends on the idea that the socially unacceptable might become acceptable. Andrew Jackson campaigned on similar themes with a similar manner—and was every bit as ignorant and every bit as unaware as Trump. (And his campaigns of slaughter against Indigenous people really were genocidal.) Trump’s politics may be ugly, foolish, and vain, but ours is often an ugly, undereducated, and vain country. Democracy is meant to be a mirror; it shows what it shows.

Indeed, America’s recent history has shown that politics is a trailing indicator of cultural change, and that one generation’s most vulgar entertainment becomes the next generation’s accepted style of political argument. David S. Reynolds, in his biography of Lincoln, reflects on how the new urban love of weird spectacle in the mid-nineteenth century was something Lincoln welcomed. P. T. Barnum’s genius lay in taking circus grotesques and making them exemplary Americans: the tiny General Tom Thumb was a hero, not a freak. Lincoln saw that it cost him nothing to be an American spectacle in a climate of sensation; he even hosted a reception at the White House for Tom Thumb and his wife—as much a violation of the decorum of the Founding Fathers as Trump’s investment in Hulk Hogan at the Republican Convention. Lincoln understood the Barnum side of American life, just as Trump understands its W.W.E. side.

And so, the minimizers say, taking Trump seriously as a threat to democracy in America is like taking Roman Reigns seriously as a threat to fair play in sports. Trump is an entertainer. The only thing he really wants are ratings. When opposing abortion was necessary to his electoral coalition, he opposed it—but then, when that was creating ratings trouble in other households, he sent signals that he wasn’t exactly opposed to it. When Project 2025, which he vaguely set in motion and claims never to have read, threatened his ratings, he repudiated it. The one continuity is his thirst for popularity, which is, in a sense, our own. He rows furiously away from any threatening waterfall back to the center of the river—including on Obamacare. And, the minimizers say, in the end, he did leave the White House peacefully, if gracelessly.

In any case, the panic is hardly unique to Trump. Reagan, too, was vilified and feared in his day, seen as the reductio ad absurdum of the culture of the image, an automaton projecting his controllers’ authoritarian impulses. Nixon was the subject of a savage satire by Philip Roth that ended with him running against the Devil for the Presidency of Hell. The minimizers tell us that liberals overreact in real time, write revisionist history when it’s over, and never see the difference between their stories.

The maximizers regard the minimizers’ case as wishful thinking buoyed up by surreptitious resentments, a refusal to concede anything to those we hate even if it means accepting someone we despise. Maximizers who call Trump a fascist are dismissed by the minimizers as either engaging in name-calling or forcing a facile parallel. Yet the parallel isn’t meant to be historically absolute; it is meant to be, as it were, oncologically acute. A freckle is not the same as a melanoma; nor is a Stage I melanoma the same as the Stage IV kind. But a skilled reader of lesions can sense which is which and predict the potential course if untreated. Trumpism is a cancerous phenomenon. Treated with surgery once, it now threatens to come back in a more aggressive form, subject neither to the radiation of “guardrails” nor to the chemo of “constraints.” It may well rage out of control and kill its host.

And so the maximalist case is made up not of alarmist fantasies, then, but of dulled diagnostic fact, duly registered. Think hard about the probable consequences of a second Trump Administration—about the things he has promised to do and can do, the things that the hard-core group of rancidly discontented figures (as usual with authoritarians, more committed than he is to an ideology) who surround him wants him to do and can do. Having lost the popular vote, as he surely will, he will not speak up to reconcile “all Americans.” He will insist that he won the popular vote, and by a landslide. He will pardon and then celebrate the January 6th insurrectionists, and thereby guarantee the existence of a paramilitary organization that’s capable of committing violence on his behalf without fear of consequences. He will, with an obedient Attorney General, begin prosecuting his political opponents; he was largely unsuccessful in his previous attempt only because the heads of two U.S. Attorneys’ offices, who are no longer there, refused to coöperate. When he begins to pressure CNN and ABC, and they, with all the vulnerabilities of large corporations, bend to his will, telling themselves that his is now the will of the people, what will we do to fend off the slow degradation of open debate?

Trump will certainly abandon Ukraine to Vladimir Putin and realign this country with dictatorships and against NATO and the democratic alliance of Europe. Above all, the spirit of vengeful reprisal is the totality of his beliefs—very much like the fascists of the twentieth century in being a man and a movement without any positive doctrine except revenge against his imagined enemies. And against this: What? Who? The spirit of resistance may prove too frail, and too exhausted, to rise again to the contest. Who can have confidence that a democracy could endure such a figure in absolute control and survive? An oncologist who, in the face of this much evidence, shrugged and proposed watchful waiting as the best therapy would not be an optimist. He would be guilty of gross malpractice. One of those personal-injury lawyers on the billboards would sue him, and win.

What any plausible explanation must confront is the fact that Trump is a distinctively vile human being and a spectacularly malignant political actor. In fables and fiction, in every Disney cartoon and Batman movie, we have no trouble recognizing and understanding the villains. They are embittered, canny, ludicrous in some ways and shrewd in others, their lives governed by envy and resentment, often rooted in the acts of people who’ve slighted them. (“They’ll never laugh at me again!”) They nonetheless have considerable charm and the ability to attract a cult following. This is Ursula, Hades, Scar—to go no further than the Disney canon. Extend it, if that seems too childlike, to the realms of Edmund in “King Lear” and Richard III: smart people, all, almost lovable in their self-recognition of their deviousness, but not people we ever want to see in power, for in power their imaginations become unimaginably deadly. Villains in fables are rarely grounded in any cause larger than their own grievances—they hate Snow White for being beautiful, resent Hercules for being strong and virtuous. Bane is blowing up Gotham because he feels misused, not because he truly has a better city in mind.

Trump is a villain. He would be a cartoon villain, if only this were a cartoon. Every time you try to give him a break—to grasp his charisma, historicize his ascent, sympathize with his admirers—the sinister truth asserts itself and can’t be squashed down. He will tell another lie so preposterous, or malign another shared decency so absolutely, or threaten violence so plausibly, or just engage in behavior so unhinged and hate-filled that you’ll recoil and rebound to your original terror at his return to power. One outrage succeeds another until we become exhausted and have to work hard even to remember the outrages of a few weeks past: the helicopter ride that never happened (but whose storytelling purpose was to demean Kamala Harris as a woman), or the cemetery visit that ended in a grotesque thumbs-up by a graveside (and whose symbolic purpose was to cynically enlist grieving parents on behalf of his contempt). No matter how deranged his behavior is, though, it does not seem to alter his good fortune.

Villainy inheres in individuals. There is certainly a far-right political space alive in the developed world, but none of its inhabitants—not Marine Le Pen or Giorgia Meloni or even Viktor Orbán—are remotely as reckless or as crazy as Trump. Our self-soothing habit of imagining that what has not yet happened cannot happen is the space in which Trump lives, just as comically deranged as he seems and still more dangerous than we know.

Nothing is ever entirely new, and the space between actual events and their disassociated representation is part of modernity. We live in that disassociated space. Generations of cultural critics have warned that we are lost in a labyrinth and cannot tell real things from illusion. Yet the familiar passage from peril to parody now happens almost simultaneously. Events remain piercingly actual and threatening in their effects on real people, while also being duplicated in a fictive system that shows and spoofs them at the same time. One side of the highway is all cancer; the other side all crazy. Their confoundment is our confusion.

It is telling that the most successful entertainments of our age are the dark comic-book movies—the Batman films and the X-Men and the Avengers and the rest of those cinematic universes. This cultural leviathan was launched by the discovery that these ridiculous comic-book figures, generations old, could now land only if treated seriously, with sombre backstories and true stakes. Our heroes tend to dullness; our villains, garishly painted monsters from the id, are the ones who fuel the franchise.

During the debate last month in Philadelphia, as Trump’s madness rose to a peak of raging lunacy—“They’re eating the dogs”; “He hates her!”—ABC, in its commercial breaks, cut to ads for “Joker: Folie à Deux,” the new Joaquin Phoenix movie, in which the crazed villain swirls and grins. It is a Gotham gone mad, and a Gotham, against all the settled rules of fable-making, without a Batman to come to the rescue. Shuttling between the comic-book villain and the grimacing, red-faced, and unhinged man who may be reëlected President in a few weeks, one struggled to distinguish our culture’s most extravagant imagination of derangement from the real thing. The space is that strange, and the stakes that high. ♦

[ketrindoll]

Biden could now use that Supreme Court's Trumpist immunity for decisions in office to safeguard American democracy.

To secure institutions against Trump.

To establish unbreakable ties with democratic allies.

To secure Taiwan.

To arm Ukraine to the brim, untie their hands, and give them free reign to use those weapons how they see fit to win.

But he won't do that. We already know he won't do that. Because while liberals ponder and stall, right-wingers yell and act.

Democrats are just as much to blame for Trump winning so massively as are republicans. And it's specifically Democrat lack of decisiveness that will lead to the worst damage that Trump could potentially do.

And Ukraine will be fucked not because Trump will do what he always promised to do, but because Biden can do something, but won't.

[sanguine-pigeon]

You don't get to fucking stab us all in the back and then whine and piss about being called on the blood drenching your hands.

You put it there.

"Erm aksually both sides are bad" is a crazy take to have when there’s people being genocided. Typical American moral highground attempt when there’s none to have. Do you also think both Russia and Ukraine are bad too?

--

Yes, I do think Russia is bad, you tankie dipshit.

Y'all can't be trusted, so asks are going back off until you grow the fuck up.

[mybookof-you]

2024.11.06

I awoke earlier than usual this morning after a restless night of sleep.  Coffee was brewing as I heard the news piping into the kitchen that America, my country, was destined for an eminent Trump presidency.  I reacted at first with disbelief, but as further information was delivered the reality became clear.  My heart is broken.  I sat with my warm mug alongside my husband taking in this reality.  I have been crying for about an hour or two.  So much inexpressible grief and concern for those who will be most ill-effected.  So much worry for the direction of the future of our planet and our global human connection. 

The news I watched pointed to the fact that Trump represented a change in economies that spoke to middle America.  I cannot blame people for wanting to preserve their pockets, homes, and families or values they feel are eroding.  I do not believe Trump’s answers will fully realize those hopes for positive change, but it looks like we are going to find out.  I believe he is the wrong answer to those concerns.

I fear that Trump’s presidency will deliver authoritarian rule in a way we will not be able to overcome for generations.  Again, it looks like we are going to find out just what a second Trump presidency will bring.  Most of all, I fear that people who will be devastated by the coming administration will not be heard, and their muffled cries will go silently into the darkness, forgotten like so many who have historically been marginalized, dealt with, and eliminated. 

I fear for Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, and Taiwan.  I fear for under-represented groups like the LGBTQ community, communities of color, and the poor who suffer beneath a structure which keeps them from rising above their situation.  The elderly.  The expendable. 

I fear for our planet, and the future of all creatures which depend upon it.  The answer may come from the science that has already explained the climate change we are experiencing.  That devastation will predictably continue exponentially if we do not act responsibly.  The future may be on Mars.  The future may be aided by genetically modified plants and new methods of growing food.  I believe science will help us in our uncertain future.  

Though, I would rather not go there.  The state of health of planet Earth is the only area I wish to move backward and promote a more sustainable lifestyle, economy, and direction based on interdependence of people from across small, local communities to the global community.  We all matter, and more than us, the Earth itself is a precious gift we, the top of the food chain, were trusted to steward and preserve.  Our very lives depend on the stability of the ecosystem we selfishly trash in order to serve our immediate needs.  We can attempt to synthesize what we need to survive the destruction we bear responsibility for, but if the Earth’s design and system of functioning has worked why fix it?  Why not listen to what She is saying and change to follow Her lead.  She will outlive all of us, whether we are lucky enough to be here or not.  She does not need us.  We need Her.

We need one another.  I do not want to move backward toward dehumanizing those who are not like us.  The human self-centered thing to do in crisis is to square-off and draw lines between ourselves and those who do not share our perspectives, our cultures, and our skin color.  It is easy to fall into that false sense of security, when, in truth, our future is safer and more sound when we consider the whole of creation, all people, all creatures, and all elements of our world.   

Purging and sanitizing the world of anything we do not accept as our personal own is not a solution.  It is self-deprecating.  It is a plan to eliminate and silence perceived enemies and create new ones.  It is an unending path toward bloodshed.  It is genocide.  It is an endless cycle of victimization from which no one is guaranteed protection. 

I would advocate the preservation of all life.  Communication.  Understanding.  Respectful disagreement.  Compromise.  Solutions reached to promote all peoples and all of life.  There are most certainly no easy solutions.  My hope is that viable solutions which value all of us are attained.  That is what I will attempt to work toward within the tiny space I occupy and continue to find hope.  Tomorrow is another day, and I claim it for me and for you, for all of us and for everything.

[monsamborabutterfly]

Throwback to these two cause there hasn't been a single bl (Thai, Taiwan or any other and trust me I'm fucking trying) that I liked since love sea aired and I blame it on them.... Also I miss them terribly!🥺

[runningpsychic]

Why Venba resonated with me so much

First of all, I want to preface this article with who I am. I am not Indian nor Tamil, but I am an Taiwanese immigrant living in the Netherlands, and I also spent some of my childhood in the US.

Using food as the through line for the story is genius. Food really represents so much about a culture. By moving abroad, I feel I am broken from that lineage. My grandmother worked as a chef, and my mother learned from her too. But now that I am abroad, I don't have access to the same ingredients, and often it is just easier to cook the same way as the locals do. There's a very limited number of dishes I remember how to cook, and it's hard to even get inspiration. I only wish I could've learned more from my mom, or have a cookbook passed down from my grandmother. Seeing Venba and Kavin try to remember their home dishes reminds me of trying to recreate a flavor I had in my childhood, with nothing but a blurry memory, and my general knowledge of Chinese cooking principles.

When I was born, my parents felt that Taiwan didn't offer enough chances, and they want me to be a global citizen, so they taught me English, by only showing me English TV shows, and later on, we got to live in the US for a couple years. But when I returned, I no longer fit in. Even though I spent most of my childhood in my own country, I felt like a foreigner. I related to internet culture more than my home culture. 

I cried a lot when Kavin said he felt like a fraud, because he tried not to be Tamil when it was inconvenient. I also wished that I was born in western europe. I thought it would make things much easier. I'd already know the culture, the language, the way of life, and have citizenship. I do not blame Kavin for wanting to distance himself from that culture. If anything, the fault lies in the locals not being accepting of foreign cultures.

This game reminded me that there is something unique in having a foot in both doors. I have a unique perspective on cultures that most people don't have. And that is why it's so important to tell these stories in games. Like Rosa's trans immigrant story from Goodbye Volcano High, it helps others understand my experience, and it helps me understand and accept myself.

[absolutebl]

This Week in BL - Bit Slow Round These Parts

Organized, in each category, by ones I'm enjoying most at the top.

Dec 2023 Wk 4

Ongoing Series - Thai

Last Twilight (Fri YT) ep 8 of 12 - Mhok is about the most indulgent boyfriend on the planet. Why they dressed as 1930s gangsters for the wedding? I have no idea idea, but it’s adorable. IFYLITA mark 2? And they’re even dancing together using bits of the same steps that were used that show too. Cute nod.

The Sign (Sat YT) ep 6 of 10 - Everything but the kitchen sink includes lesbians apparently. Excellent. Carry on. Also a lot of filler about the sides. (Boring, stop that.) I wish the doctor were a little bit more of a multifaceted character (and less evil snakey), and that we had some of his backstory + Tharn. If we saw them as kids, having a longer true friendship, it would make Tharn’s attitude a little bit more sympathetic and forgiving.

For Him (Thurs iQIYI) ep 5 of 10 - I like this show, but it’s awfully one-sided in the romance arena. I mean shouldn’t they be trying to support and make each other happy? Why does it always have to come from Him? Also, I’m constantly worried about the fact that Nail doesn’t eat any vegetables. His digestive track must be in serious distress. And if the boy is a bottom?! Look I have concerns is all I'm saying, I hope he's getting his fiber along with the dk. Meanwhile... Mom confrontation! Always fun.  

Twins the series (Fri GaGa) ep 9 of 10 - Now I’m having a hard time keeping the twins straight. Who’s getting beat up for whom, what’s going on? No matter who, First caught himself a live one. I like those bits.

Pit Babe (Fri iQIYI) ep 7 of 14 - I got little crumbs of my sides but not enough, and then they dropped the mpreg bomb. Kinda like blowing the BL diaper. Trash watch happening here.

Cooking Crush (Sun YT) ep 5 of 12 - They are so cute. And mostly such good communicators. Except evil dad is evil! I didn’t have OffGun tango on my bingo card, but I'm happy to check it off. After making everyone sing, GMMTV is now making everyone dance. I much prefer it. Kiss came a bit out of nowhere. But it was sweet. 

A few minutes later...

Bake Me Please (Mon Gaga) ep 6fin - I don’t know, I feel like this just wasn’t good enough for the class of talent involved. Which means it’s mostly the story and script's fault. In the end I kinda just wanted Guy to get the guy.

In cluclusion:

A lack-luster story about a group of bakers coping with (mostly) a shoddy script that could not be saved by either the beauty nor the talent of the actors involved. It suffered for lack of narrative backbone and so did I. 6/10

Middleman’s Love (Fri YT & iQIYI ep 8fin - Mai is an adorable clingy boyfriend, and that bit was kind of cute.

Summation:

Office clown, Jade, a manic pixie dream dork, is courted by the new intern, Mai. This show is right in my wheelhouse but it fell flat for me. I wish it had lived up to the concept behind the title (if nothing else). If we had done more of Jade‘s family and the reasons behind his self-worth struggles and self-acceptance issues, they might have been easier to bare. Without backstory, the show had no through line. In the end, Jade was a largely intolerable character, and Mai felt flat and lacking in personality. I was disappointed with this show, and I hope they don't blame the pair for the poor ratings. 6/10

My Universe (Sun iQIYI) 1626 ep 19 of 24 - Meh. So dull. 

Ongoing Series - Not Thai

VIP Only (Taiwan Fri Gaga) ep 7 of 10 - I’m not really interested in the late addition love triangle concept.

Sahara-sensei to Toki-kun (Japan Fri Gaga) ep 4 of 8 - a bit too frenetic and manic for me, this one. Glasses boy is best boy. But I’m kind of confused as to was actually going on with this show. Including whether I like it or not.

I Became the Main Role of a BL (Japan Sun Gaga) ep 1-3 - AKA BL Drama no Shuen ni Narimashita: Crank Up Hen - it should finish airing at the very beginning of the year, so I decided to wait and watch all 3 back-to-back. 

It's Airing But...

Playboyy (Thurs Gaga) 14 eps - Dear Playboyy, it's not you, it’s me… I hate you. You’re about as deep (and as palatable) as a shot glass of cum. While I'm sure you’re someone’s kink, you're my weakest link. Goodbye. I DNFed this at ep 5. Frankly I'm impressed with myself for getting that far.

Night Dream (Sat YT) 6 eps - It’s a pain to track down and I really didn’t like the first episode so… DNF  

The Whisperer (Sun ????) 10 eps - Thai horror BL that ALSO involves cheating (what joy is mine). I don't think even the perfect single dimple can motivate me to watch. Word is... it's terrible.

7 Days Before Valentine (Weds WeTV) 10 eps - Giving me Luminous Solution vibes. I'm waiting to binge if safe.

Dead Friend Forever (Thai Sat iQIYI) - horror, meh, tell me if it's worth my time?

It's done and I didn't, or we can't

Beyond The Star (Weds iQIYI) 8 eps - House of Stars meets Boyband. I was NOT impressed with ep 1. Been told I shouldn't bother. So I won't.

Behind the Shadows (Korea movie) - This is a historical I was interested in, but I've been told they kill the gay so I'm OUT.

[INTERNATIONAL] Cherry Magic (Sat YouTube) ep 3 of 12 - yeah Japan put the smack down on our boys. Sadness. You can use a VPN if you like. Read all about it here.

What Did You Eat Yesterday Season 2 AKA Kinou Nani Tabeta? Season 2 (Japan Gaga) 10 eps - will binge when I have a spare day.

Crazy work load right now so no idea when that will be. (End of year is a bear for me.)

Honestly I'm gonna have an epic number of dnf's this year for me.

Next Week Looks Like This

Original 2023 forthcoming BL master post (see comments, some are inaccurate, NOT KEPT UPDATED). With the end of the year upon us I'll do an "announced for 2023 but never happened list" soon.

Also my best ofs are coming.

Don't think I'll do a stats round up this year, everything progressing as before.

THIS WEEK’S BEST MOMENTS

(Last week) - sorry, forgot to link it.

It's 2024 people! Round ups are coming!!!! Leave a comment or an ask, if you have something specific you want addressed.