#but capitalism-bad can sometimes be complicated to solve

[simonalkenmayer]

Hello Simon, how are you?

I hope not bothering you with this question. since you are the wisest and kindest person I know maybe you can give me a good and practical advice

How do you change/deal with your own bad mood? What you do to feel better that very moment?

Can you give me an advice on how to be kind and patient when I'm irritated and frustrated? I need to change my attitude/feelings that very moment but I don't know how, when they ask me to calm down it's worse and obviously I don't want to make things worse.

I usually deal with it by being alone and disconnecting myself from my feelings/persona/the moment, but it takes time, and sometimes I don't have that time, I need to change my attitude/feelings that very moment to be able to speak or solve something that very moment and not offend/hurt someone in the process

What you do? Or what do you think I should do? I know I'm terrible with my emotions in general, and I want to be better, I'm a little lost in how to start or how to deal with the negative ones that are affecting other people. I don't want to hurt/offend anyone. All I want is being able to transmit positive and good energy even when my own emotions aren't good or positive, my bad mood is nobody's fault or problem.

I'm starting a new life and everything is overwhelming. I want to be a better person. I feel so vulnerable and scared and I don't know how to deal with it.

I really value what you say or think, and usually tend to ask myself "What would Simon do?"

That’s a complicated question.

Firstly let me make the obligatory statement that I’m very gratified to know you think me wise and kind. I will endeavor to live up to the expectation, to the best of my ability. I can only hope that suffices for you.

Secondly, as I said that is an incredibly complex question, and it has multiple layers to it. I’ve had a very long time and a great deal of self-analytical thought spent to work on my reactions. Let me see if I can sum it up.

Who are you? Not your name or your plans for a career. Not your sex or age. Not a product of your parents or church or school. You have absolute authority over that. No one can control you if you do not wish to be controlled. This is a fact, or we wouldn’t have capital punishment. You choose who you are. So figure that out. Are you someone who prizes honesty and integrity? Do you want to be kind? Do you want to help people? If so, then commit to it. (I just watched yet another super hero movie, and while I absolutely enjoy the action and invention and imagination, I have always found them concerning. They’ve trained you to live cathartically through super beings. That old line “with great power comes great responsibility” but I’m sorry…you all have that power. All of you. You have a choice when you walk out the door to hurt or help. You can make one thing better per day, if everyone did, then things would change. All of you have that power, and so all of you have that responsibility.) Know who you are and the power you have. Know it and accept responsibility.

Take your ego out of it. If you really want to change your behavior then you must accept you do not like what came before. It’s not you. It was how you were reacting, but it wasn’t you. So decide right there that you will hear criticism. You will look at your behavior. You will dedicate yourself to growing and learning. You cannot and must not see failure as shameful. It’s the only teacher. There is no shame in failing. There is no danger in being wrong. There is no death in defeat. If you have acted badly, admit it and make amends to those you have wronged, even if you don’t like them. Even if they’re an asshole. Commit to the concept of being disciplined and always making progress in yourself. NO ONE ON THIS EARTH CAN ACTUALLY JUDGE YOU. You’ll be alone on your death bed. Alone in that moment when you breathe your last. You are your only judge, in reality. So commit to having no regrets and to doing your best, and to failing gracefully.

Identify clearly the behaviors that trouble you. What reactions aren’t helping you? Be specific. Is it spitting out mean remarks? Is it screaming and yelling? Do you punch walls. Ask yourself what those behaviors are doing for you. What good is punching a wall? Does shouting change the situation for the better? No. Of course not. Is there any other behavior you could do with all that emotion? Channel it into something else. Channel it into action. Or at least confirm and reaffirm that you want that to be where the emotion goes.

Identify your triggers. What things do you react to in a way you don’t like? Specifically. Not just vague feelings, but specific things that make you anxious or frustrated or angry. Is it yelling? Is it being questioned? Is it criticism? Is it needing to be right? Is it fearing being wrong? Why? Does that worry you? Why? What are you afraid of? So what if you’re wrong. Go deep. Analyze. Be harsh.

Next analyze why they trigger you. Dig deep. Almost all triggers trace back to a moment of fear, helplessness, or being overwhelmed and having no idea what to do. Don’t shy away from that feeling. Analyze it. What’s different now? Is anything? Could you change things to make them different? Make a plan for that and then set it aside. Make sure each step is clear and precise and easily accomplished. What can you do in your life as a whole to make these triggers either go away, or change your reactions to them? For example, exposure therapy is used to undo trauma or phobia. Would therapy help you? If so, find a way to get it.

Know what abuse looks like. Know what boundaries look like. Analyze them. Learn patterns. Make boundaries and hold them. Accept the boundaries of others. Make them sacred. As sacred as your own.

Reaffirm that you have done all you can before the moment happens, to decide who you are, dissect your behavior, recognize it as unhelpful, found things in which to channel your emotions, accepted responsibility for the way you behave and the impact you have on others, and worked as diligently as possible to undo as much as you can in the moment.

All of that is back before any of the moments occur. That’s your homework.

So…now we come to the moment. The time in which we are triggered. How do I stop the trigger from affecting me? Repetition of stopping myself. Over and over. Practice. When I’m angry, frustrated, worried. I have practiced stepping out time and again. But how do I step out? How does one stop the wave of emotion from rising? I have to be disciplined. Put it down, ask for a moment, step away. How though? For me, it’s just math. I do math. I start counting. I then move to addition, then multiplication, then breathing, then thinking about something else. Once I can think clearly about something else, I then go back to the situation and I analyze it. What can I change? Can I learn more? Can I speak to someone? Can I change my approach? Can I break this moment down into pieces?

Let’s say you’re in a class, and someone is arguing something appalling and they won’t listen to you or your point. Let’s say you’re becoming angry, emotionally invested. Be disciplined. “Excuse me, I have points to make but I’m going to take a moment to gather my thoughts.” Step out. Do the math. Then break down the moment. In the past it has frustrated you to be ignored or to have these specific aspects of your identity questioned. Why? What is it you don’t like? Why are you becoming emotional? Are those emotions only reactionary or are they useful? Next break down their argument and which points you can make. If there’s something you want to say better, look up how to say it or a video or something that educates you. Write your reply in your head. Return. Ask for the floor. Speak. “I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about others” ask them questions. Especially difficult ones they can’t answer coherently. Be rational.

Let’s say you’re arguing with your parents. They want you to…oh let’s say they’re telling you that they want your grades up and they don’t like your attitude. Alright. Don’t argue. Ask for a moment to gather your thoughts. Let’s say they won’t give you one. They just want to shout at you and they won’t stop. Remove the ego, the desire to be right at all costs. If you’ve done the back-work, you know this is triggering for you. You know why. The shouting upsets you. Close your eyes. Do math. Ignore every single word they say. Every one. Do not respond. They are shouting at the wind. You’re doing math. Make a random equation and solve it for different numbers. 4x+ t = 30 solve for t. As soon as you are calm, analyze the moment. Try another approach. Don’t argue. Arguing is contradiction. Don’t contradict. Accept their words as fact in the moment. “You’re right, my grades are low. I can’t bring them up. I need extra help. I don’t know how to do this on my own. So what can I do? I will entertain ideas. Please give advice.”Watch their attitude shift.

Let’s say you’re parenting. A baby is screaming. They won’t stop. You don’t know why. Block out the sound however works best. You know it’s a trigger. Work through the emotions. Take a moment to settle. Think about something else. You’re agitated because you’re helpless. You’re scared. Breathe. Approach again. Soothe the child. Soothe and love. When they’re calm, they too can analyze. If it’s their behavior, soothe and love. Once calm, make clear to them that you have their safety and security and education foremost. Those are the things you have to do. You’re doing your best. Ask them about their feelings, their thought process. This analysis is training them to have the same discipline as you, earlier in life. If it’s just bodily functions and pain? Well soothing is the only thing you can do. That soothing is absolutely critical and they will treasure it.

Do you see what I am trying to explain?

Every action you take is the answer to that first question: who are you? You have committed to being your best self. You will fail at times. That’s alright. It’s the dedication that matters. Failure teaches.

And a little biology doesn’t hurt. If you’re under the age of 25, your brain isn’t finished yet. Give yourself time. Time to grow, time to practice, time to learn.

I hope I’ve been of some help.

[gemsofgreece]

random but I find it a bit uncomfortable when we Greeks, especially someone like you who actually knows about history and is educated, calls Scopje "North Macedonia". Just bc they decided to call themselves like that and our dumb, unpatriotic politicians accepted it, I don't see why we should play along. Macedonia is Greek. Alexander the Great was Greek. Period.

If even we Greeks give in and start calling them like this, then we can't expect foreigners not to do so or not to eventually believe the false historical facts spread by that country. And eventually everyone, even Greeks, will believe that Macedonia or Alexander or whatever else were not Greek.

This thought worries me a lot. But since I live overseas myself, I do try educating foreigners about this.

sorry for the lil rant, but it's not the first time I see Greeks (even on tv!) do that and it is disappointing and saddening to me.

like Turks, Germans, French, British or ppl from any other country would never behave the way Greeks do on such a matter.

Really makes me wonder sometimes what it is that makes us Greeks so unpatriotic. it's somehow like being patriotic equals being a fascist for us, and obviously no one wants that so we just accept everyone else running over us, our history and our culture. (generally speaking, not only about that topic and it's definitely not towards you. just an observation of mine)

anyway again sorry for the rant.

I agree, many Greeks have that belief that any slight patriotic sentiment, even without hatred or any feeling of superiority, automatically makes you a fascist. It frustrates me too.

On the topic of our neighbour country, things are very complicated though. It’s not as easy as to say “There’s no other Macedonia - our politicians betrayed us - I try to educate as many people as I can”.

First of all, Skopje is not a correct term to use either. Skopje is their capital city and if I said “there are Pomak populations in Bulgaria, Northeastern Greece and Skopje”, then the average foreigner would misunderstand that sentence. We Greeks simply use that name for the country in lack of any better alternative and because it is not our job to find one for them.

Of course I dislike the name North Macedonia, however I think it is better in comparison to what was being used till the change. Just because we Greeks used the former official name FYROM, it doesn’t mean foreigners did too. It is very sad but it is the truth. In the absence of Greeks, everybody was calling the country Macedonia. The reason is a) the insane propaganda of the neighbours, b) the weirdness of an acronym used as a country’s name and c) the extremely long and complicated name when said in full. Trust me, everyone called them Macedonia and when a Greek showed up and screamed “it’s FYROM”, they were largely ignored or even ridiculed.

Let alone that FYROM is in truth an even more terrible name than North Macedonia. Remember what it means. Former Yugoslavic Republic of Macedonia. What the hell does that mean? That it was formerly (yugo)slavic but now it is not? And that it was or still is THE Republic of Macedonia, the one!!! You get how this was way worse than North Macedonia? North Macedonia suggests that there is another Macedonia too, a South Macedonia. So the average foreigner who doesn’t know much about Greek or Slavic history may be intrigued by that North specification and look up what the “south” Macedonia is and find out about our region and its inhabitants and history. Also the differentiation between North Macedonia and Macedonia (ours, often called Historical or Aegean Macedonia) may intrigue new people to study the issues of the tensions between the two countries and have an educated opinion on it. This was much less probable to happen when foreigners were expected to call the country FYROM and then they were weirded out, so they would be like “oh just call it Macedonia for short” and they would do that without second thought, without knowing someone else condemns this name as appropriation of history and direct land claim.

Of course, the name North Macedonia is mostly inaccurate as only a small part of the far south of the country is part of the actual Ancient Macedonia. The ideal would be a NO Macedonia name but right now it was not realistic. They would not accept it and they were getting deeply under the influence of Turkey. Albania and Bulgaria are deeply influenced by Turkey, Greece felt it was suicide if she destroyed entirely the relations with North Macedonia and was literally surrounded by Turk friends from all sides. I am sure both sides absolutely loathe every single term in this agreement but politics sometimes work differently than our principles. I don’t like it but I have come to a place that I kind of understand. I hate it but it is better than the absolute nothing we had before.

What I can’t come to terms with is giving in for the nationality and language. That really seems as little other than a big fat betrayal. However, if I try hard to be objective about the situation, I believe neighbours are in a worse place than us in the longterm. Huge tensions often arise inside North Macedonia with like 1/3 of “”””””MaCEdoNIAns”””””” being Albanian and Bulgaria claiming the rest 2/3 are actually Bulgarians. And what is factually the truth, that the “Macedonian” language is basically a Bulgarian dialect just must create a situation of chaos within the country. I wouldn’t find it surprising if the nation feels unsafe. And when a nation feels unsafe, the best way to control it, distract it from the identity confusion and give it a purpose is to feed them with a shitload of propaganda, the kind they would LIKE to hear.

When Slavic populations were pushed north and out of Macedonia by the Greeks during the Balkan Wars and then they became part of what was called South Serbia and then part of Yugoslavia and then Yugoslavia collapsed and their population is a blend of Serb Slavs, Bulgarians, Albanians and apparently there must be Greek Slav origins there too, it is no wonder the nation suffers from identity crisis and is susceptible to brainwashing and propaganda. I suppose they hate the guts of all of us surrounding them. So the claim that Macedonian is a separate ethnicity, unrelated to Greeks, and they are the sole descendants, a claim that was only made in 1935 for the first time, was a desperate way to establish an identity against Slavs and Greeks who surrounded them and with whom they felt entirely disconnected and hostile. I mean, at points in time, they were even denying any Slavic heritage. I think lately things aren’t as bad as they were. Of course, their government remains provocative towards Greece even after the agreement but this is no surprise after Greeks agreed on nationality and language. Currently they have tensions on ethnicity and culture mostly with Bulgarians and Albanians so our issue is somewhere in the back. Some of their youth now says they don’t actually believe they are descendants of Alexander the Great and that was an extreme measure to spite Greece. This was one of the terms of the Prespes agreement after all: that they would stop claiming Greek history and culture. Of course extreme and brainwashed nationalists are alive and well (everywhere) but things are better than they were some years ago IMO. I could be wrong though.

Anyway I get why things happened the way they happened. But of course butchering history is not the solution… but as you see they are not very close at solving anything. That was kinda my answer’s point, not sure it came across right. In the meantime, I have to use this geographic term to be understood and it is a little better than any widely understood alternative.

Context for foreigners: Alexander the Great died about 800 years before the first Slav stepped on Macedonia or any other Greek territory. Macedonians and all other Greeks technically stopped being considered as “ancient” half a millennium before the first Slavs showed up.

[dramaruni]

Sometimes I feel like idiot for writing think-pieces about dramas that I haven’t finished yet because some of them age really badly. And I always wonder if I have to write clarifying posts and be like “this was written x episodes into the drama, and now I don’t feel the same anymore.” I know I shouldn’t be too hard on myself though because I’m not the only one making these mistakes and I think most people can guess these thoughts are subject to change once the ending is reached. I still felt compelled to write something about my comparison of Vincenzo and Itaewon Class because honestly, I can’t say I have the same thoughts of it as when I first wrote this post.

Vincenzo was just as disappointing as Itaewon Class when it came to the ending. I think they fail on different areas but there is still something about the revenge and where all the characters ended up after it, that was utterly unsatisfying in both dramas.

One thing Itaewon Class did right was, at least the women of the drama take part in the action. Both Soo Ah and Yi Seo got do something in terms of revenge. Even if Soo Ah’s development came too late in the drama and Yi Seo had exhibited very problematic behavior, I can’t fault the drama on the area of giving their female leads agency and taking part in revenge because in actuality the women do much more than Saeroyi does (we can talk about how the drama credits this legwork but at least they acknowledge who put in the work). Whereas Vincenzo failed hard in this area.

Chayoung got sidelined in the last two episodes in a way that is completely inexcusable. She has been sidelined and neglected throughout the entire drama; it just reached another level awful in the last two episodes. I can’t think of single reason she needed to get shot. We were never really worried she was going to die. It didn’t yield a love confession from Vincenzo. So even the angsty reasons for doing this are not present. The only thing it managed to do, was to effectively take her out of the action. And why did they did need her out of the revenge plans in the first place? Was it to keep her hands clean? Because she had already stated she was okay with the path they had chosen, so why even have that conversation if she isn’t going to be a part of it anyway? And considering it started because of the death of her father, and she wanted the revenge I don’t understand why she didn’t get participate even a little in the final act.

I think it’s because they strayed to far from the initial message and focus of the revenge that Chayoung needed to be removed. What my initial comparison of IC and Vincenzo said was that what Vincenzo did right was it highlighted capitalism and they were targeting the company and its structure in their revenge which I felt was true at the time. However I feel they totally lost that message in the last two episodes.

I was already worried when the last conversation between Vincenzo and Han Seok in jail took place. When Han Seok says, once he is released Vincenzo would have to fight the Monster Han Seok and not Chairman Han Seok, I felt this took the focus away from the general the idea behind Han Seok’s actions and thus the initial motivation for revenge.

This is further highlighted in the handling of the last trial against Babel. I thought it was too rushed and it just didn’t get enough screen time. This is what we have been working towards since the beginning of the drama and it all got solved in the span of 5 minutes. I know all their actions essential had let to this moment, but I just wished the victory had been more than just the tenants and Jipuragi sitting in front of the television to receive the good news.

The guillotine file was not used to its full potential either, I feel. Yes it was handed over to the "right" agency and they refused to work together with the prosecution to not include the corrupted members of the justice system. But they didn’t really show how they worked against the corruption with information in the file. They don’t show the true fallout of what that kind of file could do to the entire justice system. So essentially the latter part of the drama was just to take out Han Seok and Myunghee.

Throughout the entire run of Vincenzo, I’ve had complicated feelings about Jang Han Seok as a villain. I think in the beginning the biggest issue for me was the dual identity between Jun Woo and Han Seok. Both Jun Woo and Han Seok were exaggerated, with Jun Woo being overly cute and cheery, and Han Seok being overly manic and aggressive, so it was a bit jarring for me at least to watch. But once Han Seok's identity was out in the open and he scrapped the Jun Woo identity, he became easier to watch. I still wasn’t big a fan of the whole psychopathy angle they took. But considering that Choi Myunghee and even Han Seung Hyuk stood beside him as neurotypical people who were equally as bad, it could be argued they didn’t try to demonize mental illness. This, however, stops to ring true in the later stretch of the drama.

When Han Seok pointed out he wouldn’t be Chairman Han Seok anymore, I should have anticipated this. Because this was the person, they had targeted from the beginning but now they were going after a psychopath. Not because I think Han Seok should have lived, but the idea behind his actions as the chairman wasn’t that he was some crazy maniac that loved killing people. The idea was, at least as I interpreted it, that he was raised in a family where he wasn’t held accountable for his actions because of the money and power his family had. He wanted to keep the kind of power that allowed him to do no wrong and he had no reservations with the means and methods to maintain and expand this power.

The problem starts to arise when he lets go of Babel. I know he is supposed to be unhinged because of this loss, but to me he just changed too much as character in the last two episodes and a lot his actions didn’t make sense to me. Everything he did only served to hurt people and while he is known to retaliate, he is also known to only do it as long as it serves a purpose. But going after Chayoung and killing Han Seo didn’t serve any purpose to him. The only thing he would gain from that would be to anger Vincenzo and if he hadn’t already learned from killing Vincenzo’s mother, that is only going to come back and bite him.

He was working towards escaping the country, which I guess it would make sense he would try to escape actual prison life. But why did he need to go after Han Seo and Chayoung in the first place then? Revenge? Because he hadn’t actually finished this task when he decides it’s time to leave. So, if he was this quick and willing to abandon that plan, why even initiate it to begin with? It would just put him in an even more dangerous position, and he hadn’t even thought to bring enough bullets with him. So not only is a questionable plan to begin with, but he is ill-prepared for it as well. So what was the point even?

I think I’ll cut it of here, otherwise an already lengthy post will get even longer. So yeah, I think these are the main issues when it comes to my disappointment towards the drama. There are many more things to be said, but I think they can get their own post should I be frustrated enough to keep ranting about Vincenzo.

[dangermousie]

Heelo mousie! Love your blog! Do you mind recommending some of your favourite Chinese BL novels or shows?

I've seen the untamed and read it. I'm currently reading heaven's official blessing and I saw the donghua. Anything other than these two?

Awww, thank you!

Novels: I am gonna be lazy and literally copy/paste the entire danmei section of my top 10 web novels post (except MXTX’s stuff since you are already reading it.) Let me know if you need help finding any of these.

Lord Seventh - I am only partway through this so far, but it’s already on the list because it’s smart and somehow intense AND laid-back (not sure how this works, but it does) and is honestly just a really really solid and smart period novel, with the OTP a cherry on top of a narrative sundae. Plus, I love the concept of MC deciding he is not going for his supposedly fated love - he’s tried for six lifetimes, always with disaster, and he’s just plain done and tired. When he opens his life in his seventh reincarnation and sees the person he would have given up the world for, he genuinely feels nothing at all. (Spoiler - his OTP is actually a barbarian shaman this time around, thank you Lord!)

Golden Stage - my perfect comfort novel. Probably the least angsty of any danmei novel on this list (which still means plenty angsty :P) It also has a dedicated, smart OTP that is an OTP for the bulk of the book - I think you will notice that in most of the novels in this list, I go for “OTP against the world” trope - I can’t stand love triangles and the same. Anyway, Fu Shen, is a famous general whose fame is making the emperor   antsy. When he gets injured and can’t walk any more, the emperor gladly recalls him and marries him off to his most faithful court lackey, the head of sort of secret police, Yan Xiaohan. The emperor intends it both  as a check on the general and a general spite move since the two men   always clash in court whenever they meet. But not all is at is seems. They used to be  friends a long time ago, had a falling out, and one of the loveliest  parts of the novel is them finding their way to each other, but there is  also finding the middle path between their two very different  philosophies and ways of being, not to mention solving a conspiracy or  dozen, and putting a new dynasty on the throne, among other things. It always makes me think, a little, of “if Mei Changsu x Jingyan were canon.”

Sha Po Lang - if you like a lot of fantasy politics and world-building and steampunk with your novels, this one is for you. This one is VERY plot-heavy with smart, dedicated characters and a deconstruction of many traditional virtues - our protagonist Chang Geng, a long-lost son of the Emperor, is someone who wants to modernize the country but also take down the current emperor his brother for progress’ sake and the person he’s in love with is the general who saved him when he was a kid who is nominally his foster father. Anyway, the romance is mainly a garnish in this one, not even a big side dish, but the relationship between two smart, dedicated, deadly individuals with very different concepts of duty is fascinating long before it turns romantic. And if you like angst, while overall it’s not as angsty as e.g., Meatbun stuff, Chang Geng’s childhood is the stuff of nightmares and probably freaks me out more than anything else in any novel on this list, 2ha included.

To Rule In a Turbulent World (LSWW) - gay Minglan. No seriously. This is how I think of it. it’s a slice of life period novel with fascinating characters and  setting that happens to have a gay OTP, not a romance in a period  setting per se and I always prefer stories where the romance is not the only thing that is going on. It’s meticulously written and smart and deals with  character development and somehow makes daily minutia fascinating. Our   protagonist, You Miao, is the son of a fabulously wealthy merchant,   sent to the capital to make connections and study. As the story starts, he sees his friend’s  servants beating someone to death, feels bad, and buys him because, as  we discover gradually and organically, You Miao may be wealthy and  occasionally immature but he is a genuinely good person. The person he buys is a barbarian from beyond the wall, named   Li Zhifeng. It’s touch and go if the man will survive but eventually he does and You Miao, who by then has to return home, gives him his papers  and lets him go. However, LZF decides to stick with You Miao instead, both  out of sense of debt for YM saving his life and because he genuinely  likes him (and yet, there is no instalove on either of their parts, their bodies have fun a lot quicker than their souls.) Anyway, the two  take up farming, get involved in  the imperial exams and it’s the life of prosperity and peace, until an invasion happens and things go rapidly to hell. This is so nuanced, so smart (smart people in this actually ARE!) and has secondary characters who are just as complex as the mains (for example, I ended up adoring YM’s friend, the one who starts the plot by almost beating LZF to death for no reason) because the novel never forgets that few people are all villain. There is a lovely character arc or two - watching YM grow up and LZF thaw - there is the fact that You Miao is a unicorn in web novels being laid back and calm. This whole thing is a masterpiece.

Stains of Filth (Yuwu) - want the emotional hit of 2ha but want to read something half its length? Well, the author of 2ha is here to eviscerate you in a shorter amount of time. This has the beautiful world-building, plot twists that all make sense and, at the center of it all, an intense and all-consuming and gloriously painful relationship between two generals - one aristocratic loner Mo Xi, and the other gregarious former slave general Gu Mang. Once they were best friends and lovers, but when the novel starts, Gu Mang has long turned traitor and went to serve the enemy kingdom and has now been returned and Mo Xi, who now commands the remnants of his slave army, has to cope with the fact that he has never been able to get over the man who stabbed him through the heart. Literally. This novel has a gorgeously looping structure, with flashbacks interwoven into present storyline. There is so much love and longing and sacrifice in this that I am tearing up a bit just thinking of it. If you don’t love Mo Xi and Gu Mang, separately and together, by the end of it, you have no soul.

The Dumb Husky and His White Cat Shizun (2ha/erha) - if you’ve been following my tumblr for more than a hot second, you know my obsession with this novel. Honestly, even if I were to make a list of my top 10 novels of any kind, not just webnovels, this would be on the list. It has everything I want - a complicated, intricate plot with an insane amount of plot twists, all of which are both unexpected and make total sense, a rich and large cast of characters, a truly epic OTP that makes me bawl, emotional intensity that sometimes maxes even me out and so much character nuance and growth. Also, Moran is my favorite web novel character ever, hands down.

Anyway, the plot (or at least the way it first appears) is that the evil emperor of the cultivation world, Taxian Jun, kills himself at 32 and wakes up in the body of his 16 year old self, birth name Moran. Excited to get a redo, Moran wants to save his supposed true love Shimei, whose death the last go-around pushed him towards evil. He also wants to avoid entanglement with Chu Wanning, his shizun and sworn enemy in past life. And that’s all you are best off knowing, trust me. The only hint I am going to give is oooh boy the mother of all unreliable narrators has arrived!

The novel starts light and funny on boil the frog principle - if someone told me I would be full bawling multiple times with this novel, I’d have thought they were insane, but i swear my eyes hurt by the end of it. I started out being amused and/or disliking the mains and by the end I would die for either of them.

The Wife is First - OK, this one did not make my top 10 web novels but it’s a sweet, fun gay cottagecore fest. Our ML, a royal prince, and his spouse, a smart if delicate aristocrat, keep house, eat noodles, play with their pet tiger, make out and spoil each other rotten, while occasionally fighting battles and outwitting their court enemies. It’s so very mellow. That couple redefines low drama - they are both nice and functional and use their brains. It’s as if a nice jock and a nice nerd got together and then proceeded to be wholesome all over the place.

I mean, the set up could be dramatic - our ML the prince, lost his fight for the throne and is about to be killed. The only person who stayed loyal to him is his arranged husband the aristocrat guy who ML never treated nicely since he resented marrying him (marrying a man in that world is done to remove someone from the ability to inherit the throne.) And yet the husband stood by him not out of love but beliefs in loyalty blah blah. Anyway, he transmigrates back into the past right after their wedding night and is all “I got a second chance OMG! I don’t want the throne what is even the point? I want to live a good long life and treat the only person who stood by me really well!” And he proceeds to do so to the shock of the aristocrat who had a very unpleasant wedding night and generally can tell the man he just married would rather eat nails than be married to him. But soon enough (no seriously, it’s not many chapters at all) he believes the prince is sincere blah blah and then  they get together and they pretty much become cottagecore goals.

In terms of dramas, I only do period dramas (or novels) so I am not the person to be able to recommend any modern BLs. There is a flood of upcoming (hopefully) period BL dramas but it’s relatively thin on the ground now. The two I will recommend is Word of Honor (which is AMAZING) and Winter Begonia (which I just started watching but which owns me already.) I have a tag for both - the one for the former is huge and I cannot recommend either strongly enough. I’ve heard good things about The Sleuth of the Ming Dynasty, but I am not big on mysteries so haven’t watched it for myself.

In terms of the upcoming BLs, the ones I am most looking forward to are Immortality and Winner Is King, but The Society of the Four Leaves also looks promising.

[struggle-but-its-all-ocean-floor]

Sometimes in all this discourse about English songs and Western “validation”, it’s easy to seem unsympathetic or to oversimplify things - I know I come across that way. But I feel conflicted over my own opinions, and I’m sure many fans do too. Did most of us want a song like Dynamite? No. But isn’t it great to know the lyrics to a BTS song? Aren’t we happy that BTS become much more famous and scored a Grammy nom? Do we all hate the Grammys? Yeah. But wouldn’t we be happy if our boys won smth? 

That’s the thing. We want the good but not the bad, but some things are incompatible. You can’t be super famous without releasing commercial music and “selling out” - selling out as in ads, merch, prioritizing sales and marketability. And I fucking hate capitalism and don’t want to associate the boys with that. But doing so has allowed them to reach more people, and also to bring happiness to them. By not “selling out” they won’t solve capitalism, and won’t make as many people happy - but they also won’t be responsible for increasing the profit of unsustainable and unethical brands, and the major, negative social and environmental impact they have on society. 

PTD has made people happy, and it’s just one song. Over the years we’ve “forgiven” BTS for releasing “dumber” happy songs that did well internationally. Because we wanted them to grow bigger as well, and because fun songs are fun. I don’t think, as I’ve said, that BTS have changed. And I’m already trying to get used to PTD and to excuse what I don’t like about the song. One song won’t erase BTS’s artistry and value. But it feels like in doing so we are systematically enabling this behavior. We’re letting BTS get away with prioritizing the GP over Army, and continue to neglect the impact of their actions. And BTS must feel conflicted too? Or maybe they don’t care. I don’t like celebrities because of their money, but I like BTS and that makes me feel conflicted. I always defend BTS by saying they’re different, but are they really? 

It was easier to ignore all of this when BTS were writing music like Black Swan and ON, and trying so hard to deliver artistic, layered performances. It was easier then to (wrongly) separate BTS from HYBE. 

All of this is complicated. I can understand people who say PTD is just one song. But I’ll stand by my criticism. Do you remember when BTS said that in the past people hated them too much, but now no one says anything against them? How are they going to improve if no one offers them any constructive criticism? 

Also, “it’s just 3 English songs in over 200+ songs” is not the argument you think it is. Context matters. In the first 7 years BTS released who knows how many songs in Korean and 0 songs in English. In the last two years they’ve released 3 songs in English and 7 songs in Korean - but this year alone they’ve released 2 songs in English and 0 songs in Korean. You gotta know how to use numbers and figures properly. 

I think if BTS had released PTD in Korean, or released a Korean album before Butter, fans wouldn’t be so upset. It all comes down to BTS’s plan, which we aren’t privy too. Are they planning on mostly releasing English songs from now on? Because, if not, they’re actually confusing the GP and rebranding themselves as that Korean group that sings in English vs. that Korean group that sings in Korean... 

[thevividgreenmoss]

The more I see from Mark Fisher the more fruitless his writing seems in terms of actual implications for theoretical/practical future movement of any anti-capitalist politics...like for all his talk of the impotent paralyzed state of a left unable to escape or meaningfully able to learn from its past, beset by circular patterns of discourse and movement it's tied itself up in as a result of cultural fixations/conflicts and stifling insular academic and/or online intellectual developments that are often completely detached from the actual political sphere, unable to formulate an actionable political programme that can genuinely confront power, have no relevance to the social base of a potential anti-capitalist movement, etc, like for all the talk of that shit his own critiques of those things tend to essentialize them as inextricable, even inevitable features of capitalism itself and as a result cultural or intellectual trends that are not intrinsic to but symptomatic of a system based on this particular mode of production, and that develop as a result of the interplay between societal elements existing within and formed by that system in a given time and place, are posited instead as defining features of that system (for example the insistence that regurgitation of past cultural forms must be seen as inevitable features or tendencies of capitalism - and that that alleged fact has some fundamental explanatory power - rather than being seen as trends that have come to prominence, and cyclically have become prominent before as well, due to the ebbs and flows of accumulation of intellectual property & consolidation of productive/investment capital etc and that at times have given way to or existed alongside dominant cultural/artistic movements outside of that retrofetishistic lane. Which like even when that was the case capitalism was still bad...like the problem is not encapsulated by the culture's perceived failure to find the next jungle music, nor would it be solved or meaningfully altered were the next jungle music to be found). And in that process you're bestowing an undue sense of significance upon and giving a completely misplaced centrality to things that you're purporting to be criticizing on the grounds that they distract from and are unproductive when it comes to dealing with the pressing core issues by which we're actually faced, while completely failing to incorporate the breadth of actual political & economic shifts, movements, conflicts, etc both against and in favor of the expansion of capital within your analysis in the same way that the individuals/organizations/institutions that you started out critiquing are guilty of. And that related failure to genuinely consider political reality as it exists outside of certain insular left spaces & discourses as well as the left spaces & discourses being used as the basis for the critique being advanced largely neglects anything that might be going on outside of metropolitan centers within advanced western states (and even then it seems mostly confined to the anglosphere) that might complicate or even outright contradict the narratives being advanced, which idk may also contribute to the tendency to grossly generalize and even essentialize specific aspects of society or culture that have taken shape in the first-world as being endemic to capitalism itself as it exists and must exist everywhere at all times...and even if that's being done based on the view one sometimes sees that as capitalism advances then the societal condition of the global south will come to resemble that of the current north then it's still bullshit because while of course that does and will still continue to happen in some respects, there's no broad convergence of that sort in sight at all and given increased pauperization already in motion as a result of ongoing economic trends and mass migrations as a result of accelerating climate change the future of LA or Berlin might look more like the present in Rio de Janeiro or Mumbai than vice versa...idk like there are genuinely interesting discussions of music and evocative (though by no means novel on the level or either tone or content) descriptions of a certain kind of prevalent malaise and ennui peppered throughout Fisher's work but his analyses of the way those things reflect and/or are produced by capitalism itself either fall off the mark or, again, aren't advancing any ideas that haven't long been circulating either in the marxist critical tradition or in any others that have in differing ways been in some form of dialogue with or have to some degree been influenced by it (even those that either explicitly/self-consciously or not find themselves in opposition to marxism, poststructuralism being probably the most obvious/notorious example) right down to the concept of capitalist realism itself, which as elaborated by Fisher offers nothing that isn't present in the diverse and even divergent analyses & conceptual frameworks surrounding ideology, consciousness, hegemony, the ~real~, etc that were already there in the work of everyone from Marx himself to Lukacs to Gramsci to Althusser, Baudrillard, Jameson, Eagleton or numerous other notable figures even just within the western intellectual realm. Like the only distinguishing feature of Fisher's capitalist realism is his contention that in the aftermath of the USSR's collapse, not only has the social reality generated by capital successfully naturalized itself in various pervasive ways as it has been doing for the past five hundred years, but now there's been a crucial turn in that since 1991 there's been an additionally ingrained negation of our ability to conceive of or pursue alternatives to neoliberal capitalism on a collective level, which allegedly wasn't there before...which like I'm sorry but that's a ridiculous fucking claim to make especially in light of the fact that shortly before his death Fisher said that the movements behind/supporting the rise of Jeremy Corbyn to labour party leadership & the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign represented breaks in and the beginning of the end of the era of capitalist realism, which like. If that's the standard then how does the latin american pink tide of the late 90s-late 00s, which involved much larger popular movements that were much more firmly rooted in and directed by the working classes and peasantry and that pursued much more radical goals and even in the face of counter-revolutionary forces that have been ascendant in recent years still succeeded in attaining significant tangible gains for themselves, especially when compared to the negligible results that revived new deal democratic or midcentury labour agendas have had so far in the US & UK, like how did that shit not contradict capitalist realism well beforehand...or the fact that in Cuba the first post-Soviet decade entailed a renewal of genuine socialist energy & societal transformation of a kind not seen since the first 10-15 years immediately following the revolution, or on the other end of things, the clerical authoritarianism that existed in iran already at the time, or the terrifying rate at which the genuinely fascist RSS consolidated popular support and came to have an increasing hold over the various institutions governing Indian society, especially since the early 90s, until at this point there's no significant challenge to their power within the second most populous country in the world...like all those things seem to be much greater refutations from so-called capitalist realism to the point that the concept seems to have no meaning or utility at all...like whether intentionally or not,  Fisher's ~acid communism~ basically leads to the same endpoint, perhaps with different aesthetic trappings, as FALC bullshit, where residents of the first world are freed of the labor and alienation of the past by a super expanded version of the welfare states created by postwar european social democracies and can both go to raves and consume as often as we want. The problem wasn't the violent abstraction of commodified life, the value form, whatever it was that we couldn't pursue and indulge in the thrills and pleasures that per my mans Lyotard & Nick Land are undeniably present in capitalist consumer society except now we can, thanks to those beefed up fully automated welfare states, those indulgences are no longer simultaneously a source of malaise and depression as they previously were when the free market barred the masses from partaking of them with the freedom and reckless abandon that are necessary in order to give us that truly liberated libidinal fulfillment. What the effects of the magically automated extraction of the natural resources necessary to maintain that steady flow of goods and resources to the fully automated luxury acid communists might be on the environment, how that might impact the people that live in the places where extractive industries tend to be based, how they might fit into this acid FALC utopia, whether they'd be forced into ever more menial forms or labor building or providing upkeep for the robots that replaced their former fellow proletarians in the first world, whether their labor might itself be the supposedly 'automated' part of fully automated luxury communism, whether they might legally be recategorized as robots so as to prevent that seeming contradiction from shaking things up, no need to trouble ourselves with that

[citrineghost]

Humans Are Historically Known for Being Terrible

Hi I’m here with an opinion today. Let’s see how many words it will take for me to adequately get it across on this very fine 15th of January

I personally believe canceling things from the past* is fruitless, pointless, and accomplishes about as much as censorship does

*We aren’t talking about shit like nazi Germany, let me elaborate further

So, as I occasionally do, I have seen a post on my dash today criticizing something historical that people are ‘problematically partaking in.’ That thing today was the wellerman sea shanty due to its ties with colonialism, slavery, and so forth. 

I’m not going to dive into this specific example, because I don’t know enough of the details and am not interested in going to find them out because I’m not planning to defend it or its history, so there’s no point. I learned what I needed to know from said callout post and it’s enough to work with.

To me, it is important that we remember that people, in general, have been historically pretty terrible.

There’s colonialism, there’s slavery (of all kinds, including chattel), there’s thievery, murder, genocide, sexism, the murdering of queers. There’s lying, manipulation, propaganda, and so many more things that I couldn’t possibly list them all. I’m not saying that everyone was equally shitty. I am aware that, especially in the most recent couple hundred years, white people, especially Western Europeans and Americans, have been pretty Shite.

Am I excusing them for their actions? Absolutely not. I think it is always important to bear in mind the way they played a part in cultures’ growth, death, and, ultimately, development from one year to the next.

The reason I’m pointing this out is because the result of people being historically shitty is that most, if not all, of our historical content, our history, is steeped in horse manure. 

There is not one thing you can enjoy from centuries - even decades - passed that is not here because of something inhumane, unjust, or otherwise terrible.

The only thing keeping us from canceling every other historical thing that we enjoy is our lack of awareness of how each thing ties into the whole mess.

So, we’ve learned that wellerman was sung by slavers and thieves and colonialists. What about that nice little folk song from uh, idk, Ireland or something? Let’s take this metaphorical song and ask the question, “who wrote it?” The truth is, for many folk songs, we just don’t know. There is a very very good chance that 90+ percent of nice, soft folk songs about lying in the grass or feeding chickens or baking bread for your spouse were written by racists, sexists, abusers, homophobes, and so forth.

Does that make it wrong to enjoy that song about lying in the grass and looking at the stars? I don’t think so. No one is profiting off of you listening to it, regardless of who wrote it. It’s hundreds of years old. Do you even know the name of who wrote it?

Remembering that times were different may not absolve something of its wrongdoing, but it does provide us context.

We have to allow ourselves to admit that most, if not all, historical things, came from or benefitted from atrocities or injustices that we would not stand for today. That’s just how human progression works. Frankly, if people 200 years from now don’t look at US, CURRENTLY, and think we’re terrible assholes, I am actually very concerned by that. 

The nature of humanity is to get better and better over time and to build a world and a society where we don’t feel the need to be controlled by greed or to consume unethically. The problem is, it takes time. It takes lots and lots of time. Would it take less time if certain people weren’t terrible, terrible people? Yes it would. But they are, and so it doesn’t.

The fact is, human progression and improvement will never reach its end because, as things improve, our perception of our past actions will change as well and we will begin to realize that what we were doing wasn’t acceptable and is no longer necessary nor excusable. 

Hate Jeff Bezos? Look around and see that 90% of people still buy from Amazon, because it provides the only affordable source of many products for people who don’t make enough money under capitalism to buy from a small business.

Hate Bill Gates? How many of us are willing to switch to Linux to quit using Microsoft? Speaking of Microsoft, they own Minecraft. Do we stop playing Minecraft?

Think Steve Jobs is a terrible person? Why are people still buying iphones, ipads, and macs? Why don’t we stop buying those so that he and current CEO, Tim Cook, quit making billions of dollars?

These are just a tiny amount of examples, using big names. We also must consider, if you have 100 books on your bookshelf, how many of the writers of those books are racists, homophobes, sexists, or abusers? I guarantee you it’s a non-zero answer. The thing is, an author who’s relatively nobody is not someone who gets canceled. No one knows anything about them but that they wrote a neat work of fiction and it’s a good book.

The question is, should we be expected to quit buying, consuming, and enjoying things made by problematic people?

In some cases, the answer should be yes. If someone is currently profiting massively from people consuming their media or products and people are ignoring their atrocities, that person could end u making millions or billions of dollars despite being terrible, which is something that undoubtedly affects all of us, economically.

In the other cases, the answer should be, do you want to? If you’re not comfortable with something, you should, of course, stop consuming it. If you can ignore the thing, you might not need to bother. And, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re excusing it.

If we look at all of humanity, even in the present day, mathematically speaking, 50% of people are more bigoted and terrible than the rest. There’s no other way for it to be. Less than 50% would be a mathematical fallacy. Does that mean we only consume content from the better 50%? Does that mean we rigorously research producers and creators and their personal lives only to decide it’s not worth the risk of ‘contributing’ because they have no trace online except for a private Facebook account? Is them having a Facebook account enough of a ‘sin’ that it’s not worth it to buy their book?

This brings us to the censorship point

If you know your history, you know that censorship is a nasty thing. When one person decides who or what is unethical to consume from, they sometimes seek to get rid of that thing so that no one has a choice - so that no one is Allowed to consume that thing.

This has led to book burning, the destroying of decades and centuries of research about sexuality and gender. It’s destroyed religious texts. It’s destroyed content created by women that painted any single man in a bad light. It’s destroyed progression.

“But I only want to get rid of the bad thing that everyone agrees is bad!”

It doesn’t matter. If you open the door to censorship for yourself, those who wish to use it for worse reasons will become just as justified, in their own eyes, to do the same. You’ll have Christians saying it’s okay to get rid of gay content because it’s objectively wrong according to the bible. You’ll have conservative parents burning books with complicated topics like abuse and assault because they don’t want their children to have access to anything controversial or complex like that.

You cannot open the door to censorship for one group without opening that door for everyone. And that is why we do not censor things.

The question then becomes, but what of the people consuming that media? Even if it’s not censored, consuming it still makes someone bad, right? 

Not necessarily. People consume problematic stuff all the time - things considered objectively bad. However, people don’t always consume said media because they support it being normalized in the real world. For example, fanfiction or books with rape in them may be something a victim reads to cope with their own past or present. A book with abuse depicted may actually make a young teen aware that what they’re going through is abuse. Content largely seen as ‘problematic’ can often play a part in solving the problem it portrays.

Then there’s historical, problematic media. Now, this is an area where I feel things have actually been OVER complicated.

Because everything historical has some tie to injustice, there is no ethical way to consume it. 

There is no ethical consumption under passed time.

So, how do we judge whether something should or shouldn’t be consumed? It is my opinion that something historical should stop being consumed and become shunned when its meaning is well-known enough and its message is still pervasive enough that it is actively causing problems.

For example, we generally try not to consume content when it is made by someone who is a known nazi. This is because nazis are still a problem in our society, presently. We have antisemitism all over the place. Therefore, we cannot let the message become that it is okay to be a nazi by way of us treating nazis like normal people and allowing them to succeed in society without consequence.

However, there are certain problems that are no longer particularly prevalent or which are agreed to be terrible on a large enough scale that consuming the content does not necessarily imply you believe it is okay. For example, if you look at literally any media from the 1800s or which is placed in the 1800s, you will see a lot of casual sexism and gender roles. Should we despise that time period because sexism was readily available at every turn? Should we refuse to enjoy 19th century fashion or culture because it had problems? I think not. I think it would be pointless to refuse to consume, read about, or otherwise engage with the 19th century. It wouldn’t change the past and it isn’t going to somehow undo the progress we’ve made on women’s rights. 

As a matter of fact, if someone merely suggested that perhaps the people of the 19th century were right for forcing women to wear long dresses and darn socks all day, they would be laughed into oblivion and called a shitty, sexist incel (which would be correct).

Does enjoying media from or placed in the 19th century mean you support sexism? I certainly hope not, since I enjoy it very much and know a lot of progressive people, women especially, who do enjoy that kind of thing. It is common sense enough, at this point in time, that people don’t generally believe that the sexism of the 1800s was acceptable. I am not going to see someone watching a period drama and assume they desire for our present-day social laws to be like what’s portrayed. That would be a ridiculous assumption. However, I could not assume the same about someone I saw watching openly antisemitic content. I would quickly wonder if they’re an antisemite/nazi/white supremacist.

So, what about that one thing I heard had a sordid past?

Listen, if we’re being honest here, most things from history have a sordid past. Sea shanties? You bet. But then when we talk of sea shanties being steeped in colonialism, we have to look at the bigger picture. What about pirates? Pirates were, by and large, a huge contributor to slavery, theft, colonialism, and murder. Does that mean enjoying media with pirates is glorifying or contributing to slavery, theft, colonialism, and murder?

(I’m about to talk a lot about pirates but this can be applied to anything that was historically bad but is no longer prevalent)

Pirates of the Caribbean is only a movie, but pirates did once exist and they did kill people. They did raid ships of merchants and tradesmen and they killed them and stole their goods. They took many good men from their families and even killed working children aboard the ships. Does that make enjoying pirates in media a contributor to these things? No. It doesn’t. We are looking at a dramatised, cleaned up version of the original piracy. I think most people are aware that pirates, in the real world, are bad and harmful and should not be supported. That doesn’t make pirate media any less fun in theory, and under our own terms.

Then we arrive at our perception - because most of this does come down to perception. When you watch pirate media, should you enjoy that, are you able to divorce yourself from their actual history enough to enjoy the media? If you can, you might enjoy it a lot. If you can’t watch a movie about pirates without thinking the entire time about how terrible they were and how much damage they did, then pirate media just isn’t right for you. But, it doesn’t mean you should attempt to take it away from others. Your opinion and perception of pirate media is not the global perception.

I have to ask, do you think others view it the same way you do?

When you read that question, you may be wondering what exactly I mean. What I’m asking is, do you believe others view that media with the same “clarity” that you do? Do you believe they understand the atrocity of real pirates and Feel that the entire time they watch the media and still enjoy it anyway?

Perhaps that’s why your response to someone enjoying something you feel guilty partaking in is, “these people all must not care about the real-world damage pirates did. The fact that they can watch this (despite sitting here and feeling the same things I do) makes me sick.”

However, if that is the case, you must remember that for a lot of people, the awareness of real world consequence is suspended during dramatised depictions of it. It doesn’t mean they have forgotten about the real-world consequences of piracy or that they don’t know it at all. It just means they are choosing not to think about it in that light while consuming media.

There is also the assumption that people must not know about something when partaking in it. You may think, “How can they enjoy this media? They wouldn’t be able to stomach it if they realized what really happened with pirates.”

In many instances, you would be correct. A lot of people are ignorant to what pirates have done in the real world. If you told every ignorant person the truth, maybe 5% of them would then become turned off by pirate media, and the other 95% would keep the truth in mind and then divorce themselves from it to continue enjoying said media.

There are realities that it is safe to divorce yourself from, and there are those that are not.

Is allowing yourself to enjoy dramatizations of pirates making you ignorant to present day conditions? Not largely. There are still pirates today, but not nearly enough for the average Joe to need to take them seriously. Those who need to know about them and do something to stop them are aware.

However, it is not safe to divorce yourself from, for instance, the holocaust. Divorcing yourself from the holocaust and seeing it as merely a dramatic setting with dramatic events and not a present-day real-world problem is exactly the kind of thing that leads to young teens being sucked in by white supremacy and naziism as well as what leads to many average conservatives believing the rise in white supremacy isn’t actually real or is not a big deal. They have distanced themselves so far from the real-world atrocity of the holocaust that they have forgotten it was real and that real people, like them, were contributors. They don’t want to believe that everyday people had any power in it and that it was tiny acts of willful ignorance that made concentration camps so successful. 

All in all, there is a different answer for everything we consume.

Want to know if something you’re consuming is okay to consume? Ask yourself: is this produced by someone who is contributing to present-day conditions? If the answer is yes, quit consuming it. If the answer is no, ask yourself, does this media make me uncomfortable because I’m aware of its roots? If the answer is yes, stop consuming it. If the answer is no, it’s probably fine. You are most likely not doing any damage, so long as you are aware of what is wrong with the content and are not using it as grounds to perpetuate harm. 

If, when thinking about something problematic in an old piece of media, you cringe? You’re on the right track. If you feel inclined to make excuses for it or justify the wrong in it, it’s time to step away and reevaluate why you feel the need to do so. If you’re doing so because you feel guilty for consuming it, you need to realize that it is actually more harmful to make excuses for the wrong in order to justify your consumption than it is to admit, “Yeah, this media is problematic and contains a lot of sexism, but I still enjoy it for its other qualities.” It is better to admit that you enjoy something problematic than to spread the message that what is happening in it is okay.

Some of you may be thinking, “Or, just stop consuming problematic media.”

I think in many cases, especially recent media, where your consumption has an effect on production, this is true. However, for media that is no longer being produced, I will remind you that most things have something wrong with them - yes, even pretty recent stuff.

Supernatural kills off women constantly, queerbaited the fuck out of its viewers, and sent a huge character to fucking mega hell for confessing his love.

Scrubs has no end to its sexism, transphobic and homophobic slur usage, and other problematic content.

V for Vendetta glorifies and shines a heroic light on a character who kidnaps and tortures a woman for what appeared to have been weeks or months so that she would be forced to understand his trauma and “no longer be afraid.”

Star Wars has incest, the producers/directors abused Carrie Fisher and sexualized her as a young teen, and probably a lot more that I’m not aware of because I haven’t seen the movies nor read the books.

I don’t even need to start on shows like Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Community, That 70s Show, and so many more. Almost every popular piece of media has something worth canceling in it. There is no point trying to curate your media consumption to only unproblematic content, because it simply can’t be done.

Curate where it makes a difference. Sigh heavily the rest of the time. Make yourself aware what and how things are problematic. Put critical thought into how your consumption is capable of supporting or perpetuating a problem and how it is not. Make informed decisions.

Do not feel guilty if you are unable to flawlessly live up to the standards of purity culture. None of us can - not really.

[overgosh]

So it’s after BlizzCon.

Some thoughts, because there are some posts that have popped up on my dash that make my blood boil:

On the Hearthstone Tournament Situation:

For its treatment of Blitzchung and the twitch casters, Activision Blizzard was completely in the wrong.

It was inappropriate for Blitzchung and the twitch casters to use the platform that way, as it would be if any other political statement was announced (whether divisive or not). It is completely reasonable for a penalty to be given, but not in the manner that it was.

Activision Blizzard’s corporate executives royally fucked up, and will continue to not serve the best interest of its userbase when it comes to making money and continuing to be a behemoth corporation. All statements have been strictly based on PR and have not been suitable apologies or plans of action for improvement.

On Fake Diversity Which Has Somehow Become The New “Forced Diversity”:

While it is great for marketing and for shitty apologies to fall back on their ideals using Overwatch’s diversity and Blizzard’s tenets, AND that certainly is a selling point that they will, of course, use to sell their game to people:

The idea that Activision Blizzard’s corporate executives are trying to bait LGBT people and POC into forgetting their misdeeds by adding LGBT people and POC into the game is totally bizarre... For so many reasons. For so long there hasn’t been representation because it “doesn’t sell” or “appeal to the masses”, especially for the types of games that Blizzard produces. The implication that Tracer having a picture of Emily on the dashboard and Sojourn arriving were solely added to soothe the controversy are so wildly absurd in terms of the timeline of reality itself and straight up common sense. 

Overwatch specifically has admirable goals of diversity. Sometimes the team does a damn good job, and sometimes (often) they mess up. If there’s an actual solid foundation and evidence about how the exec’s insidious use of “diversity points” are being used to manipulate the public while not contributing anything meaningful to the landscape of video games, I’d love to hear it. There is a LOT to unpack here, but that’s my brief point on it.

Oh also, for fuck’s sake - of course China has censored the LGBT content in Overwatch. That’s not an Evil Blizzard Machination -- China pushes through censorship for all kinds of media content that’s not considered “decent”, which as you may remember as an example included the LGBT relationships in Steven Universe (namely, Ruby and Sapphire). Using the same logic, that would imply that Steven Universe’s LGBT themes were included for diversity points. It’s.... There’s lots of problems with Blizzard, y’all, that one doesn’t quite hold up.

On “People Are So Quick To Forgive Blizzard”:

Some people are, yes. There are folks who fully believe J Allen Brack’s statement(s) in their entirety.

Other people didn’t really care either way in the first place, and just want content.

Some have decided that based the actions after the initial incident (the penalty reduction, as well as not stifling or turning away hosts that spoke out against the incident, and also not interfering or silencing the protests at BlizzCon) that they are taking a stance anywhere in the middle of this situation. They may be excited for game content created by incredible people, including diversity that they have been asking for for literal years.

People are not so simple as to be put into one bucket. This is a huge leap of logic I keep seeing pop up on social media. Being excited about a revelation from Blizzcon doesn’t equate to forgiving the company.

On “How can people support an evil company?”:

We have to deal with late stage capitalism, so unfortunately we can’t avoid supporting corporations while living in society. This one sucks ass, guys. We live in a time where global superpowers are so interconnected that foreign influence affects everything we do, and the simple act of impulse buying a candy bar from the grocery store check-out may have just been a teeny contribution to slave labor (hi, Nestle). It’s positively overwhelming. On that note:

Other behemoth companies such as Apple and Google are also causing significant damage to the same freedoms, many related to the same Hong Kong issues and much more. SO:

Use your voice to do good, and use this revelation about the actions of a small group of people at the very top of this video game company to make a difference. Screaming at tumblr users for being “sheeple” for being enthusiastic about dark-skinned and lesbian heroes as though shutting that down will solve the problem is a really horrendous missing of the point. There is still good that can (and does!!) come out of Blizzard, like the realization of the success of a diverse cast of human characters. As we all say time and time again: representation is important. We fight for the message that Blizzard champions to not ring hollow, so use your voice. The employees at Blizzard sure did. And speaking of:

The devs and artists working at Blizzard are not Activision Blizzard’s corporate executives. In an industry as unforgiving and volatile as games (Remember when Activision laid off 800 people after a record-breaking, successful financial year?), they’ve worked their asses off for years for this. They’re regular-ass working people who actually have a say in the story and how the game is developed. You can love the story. You can love the characters, love the games, and STILL hate the corporation. You are a complex individual, just like this world we live in. You are welcome to find where the scale for you tips. If it’s not worth it for you to support Activision Blizzard, then that’s a battle that you are fighting. If you choose to be an activist like many hosts, casters and content creators who speak up while still covering Blizzard content, great. If you choose to boycott, great. If you choose to share information to others about the issues, great. The world is far too complicated to judge on a “GOOD” and “BAD” polarity, unlike the method of thought this site (and yes, others as well) tends to proliferate. So if anyone tries to put you into a black and white box, know that there is no such thing.

Finally:

On “I feel so helpless about Hong Kong. How can I help?”

https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/cv0ws4/how_can_you_help_hong_kong_protests_from_abroad/

This Reddit user has compiled a list of Hong Kong protest resources. This includes a Blacklist and Whitelist if you are someone who is interested in cutting ties or supporting companies based on their reaction to the HK protests.

[qqueenofhades]

Do you think society as a whole understands and values history? I don’t think they do. And I don’t understand why.

HoooooWEEEEEE, anon. What follows is a good old Hilary History Rant ™, but let me hasten to assure you that none of it is directed at you. It just means that this is a topic on which I have many feelings, and a lot of frustration, and it gets at the heart of many things which are wrong with our society, and the way in which I try to deal with this as an academic and a teacher. So…. yeah.

In short: you’re absolutely right. Society as a whole could give exactly dick about understanding and valuing history, especially right now. Though let me rephrase that: they could give exactly dick about understanding and valuing any history that does not reinforce and pander to their preferred worldview, belief system, or conception of reality. The human race has always had an amazing ability to not give a shit about huge problems as long as they won’t kill us right now (see: climate change) and in one sense, that has allowed us to survive and evolve and become an advanced species. You have to compartmentalize and solve one problem at a time rather than get stuck in abstracts, so in that way, it is a positive trait. However, we are faced with a 21st century where the planet is actively burning alive, late-stage capitalism has become so functionally embedded in every facet of our society that our public values, civic religion, and moral compass (or lack thereof) is structured around consumerism and who it benefits (the 1% of billionaire CEOs), and any comfortable myths of historical progress have been blown apart by the worldwide backslide into right-wing authoritarianism, xenophobia, nationalism, racism, and other such things. In a way, this was a reaction to 9/11, which changed the complacent late-20th century mindset of the West in ways that we really cannot fathom or overstate. But it’s also a clarion call that something is very, very wrong here, and the structural and systemic explanations that historians provide for these kinds of events are never what anyone wants to hear.

Think about it this way. The world is currently, objectively speaking, producing more material resources, wealth, food, etc than at any point before, thanks to the effects of globalism, the industrial and information revolutions, mass mechanizing, and so on. There really isn’t a “shortage” of things. Except for the fact that the distribution of these resources is so insanely unequal, and wildly disproportionate amounts of wealth have been concentrated in a few private hands, which then use the law (and the law is a tool of the powerful to protect power) to make sure that it’s never redistributed. This is why Reaganism and “supply-side”, aka “trickle-down” economics, is such bullshit: it presupposes that billionaires will, if you enable them to make as many billions as possible without regulation, altruistically sow that largess among the working class. This never happens, because obviously. (Sidenote: remember those extravagant pledges of billions of euros to repair Notre Dame from like 3 or 4 French billionaires? Apparently they have paid… exactly not one cent toward renovations, and the money has come instead from the Friends of Notre Dame funded by private individuals. Yep, not even for the goddamn cause célèbre of the “we don’t give a shit about history” architectural casualties could they actually pay up. Eat! The! Rich!…. anyway.)

However, the fact is that you need to produce narratives to justify this kind of exploitation and inequality, and make them convincing enough that the people who are being fucked over will actively repeat and promote these narratives and be fiercely vested in their protection. Think of the way white American working-class voters will happily blame minorities, immigrants, Non-Murkan People, etc for their struggles, rather than the fact of said rampant economic cronyism and oligarchy. These working-class voters will love the politicians who give them someone to blame (see: Trump), especially when that someone is an Other around whom collective systems of discrimination and oppression have historically operated. Women, people of color, religious minorities/non-Western religions, LGBT people, immigrants, etc, etc…. all these have historically not had such a great time in the capitalist Christian West, which is the predominant paradigm organizing society today. You can’t understand why society doesn’t value history until you realize that the people who benefit from this system aren’t keen on having its flaws pointed out. They don’t want the masses to have a historical education if that historical education is going to actually be used. They would rather teach them the simplistic rah-rah quasi-fictional narrative of the past that makes everyone feel good, and call it a day. 

The classic liberal belief has always been that if you can just teach someone that their facts are wrong, or supply them with better facts, they’ll change their mind. This is not how it works and never has, and that is why in an age with, again, more knowledge of science than ever before and the collected wisdom of humanity available via your smartphone, we have substantial portions of people who believe that vaccines are evil, the Earth is flat, and climate change (and 87 million other things) are fake and/or government conspiracies. As a medievalist, I get really tetchy when the idiocy of modern people is blamed on the stereotypical “Dark Ages!” medieval era (I have written many posts ranting about that, so we’ll keep it to a minimum here), or when everything bad, backward, or wrong is considered to be “medieval” in nature. Trust me, on several things, they were doing a lot better than we are. Other things are not nearly as wildly caricatured as they have been made out to be. Because once again, history is complicated and people are flawed in any era, do good and bad things, but that isn’t as useful as a narrative that flattens out into simplistic black and white.

Basically, people don’t want their identities, comfortable notions, and other ideas about the past challenged, especially since that is directly relevant to how they perceive themselves (and everyone else) in the present. The thing about history, obviously, is that it’s past, it’s done, and until we invent a time machine, which pray God we never fucking do, within a few generations, the entire population of the earth has been replaced. That means it’s awfully fragile as a concept. Before the modern era and the invention of technology and the countless mediums (book, TV, radio, newspaper, internet, etc etc) that serve as sources, it’s only available in a relatively limited corpus of documents. History does not speak for itself. That’s where you get into historiography, or writing history. Even if you have a book or document that serves as a primary source material, you have to do a shit-ton of things with it to turn it into recognizable scholarship. You have to learn the language it’s in. You have to understand the context in which it was produced. You have to figure out what it ignores, forgets, omits, or simply does not know as well as what it does, and recognize it as a limited text produced from a certain perspective or for a social reason that may or may not be explicitly articulated. The training of a historian is to teach you how to do this accurately and more or less fairly, but that is up to the personal ethic of the historian to ensure. When you’re reading a history book, you’re not reading an unmediated, Pure, This Was Definitely How Things Happened The End information download. You are reading something by someone who has made their best guess and has been equipped with the interpretive tools to be reasonably confident in their analysis, but sometimes just doesn’t know, sometimes has an agenda in pushing one opinion over another, or anything else.

History, in other words, is a system of flawed and self-serving collective memory, and power wants only the memory that ensures its survival and replication. You’ve heard of the “history is written by the winners” quote, which basically encapsulates the fact that what we learn and what we take as fact is largely or entirely structured by the narrative of those who can control it. If you’ve heard of the 1970s French philosopher Michel Foucault, his work is basically foundational in understanding how power produces knowledge in each era (what he calls epistemes) and the way in which historical “fact” is subject to the needs of these eras. Foucault has a lot of critics and his work particularly in the history of sexuality has now become dated (plus he can be a slog to read), but I do suggest familiarizing yourself with some of his ideas. 

This is also present in the constant refrain heard by anybody who has ever studied the arts and humanities: “oh, don’t do liberal arts, you’ll never get a job, study something worthwhile,” etc. It’s funny how the “worthwhile” subjects always seem to be science and engineering/software/anything that can support the capitalist military industrial complex, while science is otherwise completely useless to them. It’s also always funny how the humanities are relentlessly de- or under- funded. By labeling these subjects as “worthless,” when they often focus on deep investigation of varied topics, independent critical thought, complex analysis, and otherwise teaching you to think for yourself, we therefore decrease the amount of people who feel compelled to go into them. Since (see again, late-stage capitalism is a nightmare) most people are going to prefer some kind of paycheck to stringing it along on a miniscule arts budget, they will leave those fields and their inherent social criticism behind. Of course, we do have some people – academics, social scientists, artists, creatives, activists, etc – who do this kind of work and dedicate themselves to it, but we (and I include myself in this group) have not reached critical mass and do not have the power to effect actual drastic change on this unfair system. I can guarantee that they will ensure we never will, and the deliberate and chronic underfunding of the humanities is just one of the mechanisms by which late-stage capitalism replicates and protects itself.

I realize that I sound like an old man yelling at a cloud/going off on my paranoid rant, but…. this is just the way we’ve all gotten used to living, and it’s both amazing and horrifying. As long as the underclasses are all beholden to their own Ideas of History, and as long as most people are content to exist within the current ludicrous ideas that we have received down the ages as inherited wisdom and enforced on ourselves and others, there’s not much we can do about it. You are never going to reach agreement on some sweeping Platonic ideal of universal history, since my point throughout this whole screed has always been that history is particular, localized, conditioned by specific factors, and produced to suit the purposes of a very particular set of goals. History doesn’t repeat itself, per se (though it can be Very Fucking Close), but as long as access to a specific set of resources, i.e. power, money, sex, food, land, technology, jobs, etc are at stake, the inherent nature of human beings means that they will always be choosing from within a similar matrix of actions, producing the same kind of justifications for those actions, and transmitting it to the next generation in a way that relatively few people learn how to challenge. We have not figured out how to break that cycle yet. We are an advanced species beyond any doubt, but we’re also still hairless apes on a spinning blue ball on the outer arm of a rural galaxy, and oftentimes we act like it.

I don’t know. I think it’s obvious why society doesn’t understand and value history, because historians are so often the ones pointing out the previous pattern of mistakes and how well that went last time. Power does not want to be dismantled or criticized, and has no interest in empowering the citizens to consider the mechanisms by which they collaborate in its perpetuation. White supremacists don’t want to be educated into an “actual” version of history, even if their view of things is, objectively speaking, wildly inaccurate. They want the version of history which upholds their beliefs and their way of life. Even non-insane people tend to prefer history that validates what they think they already know, and especially in the West, a certain mindset and system of belief is already so well ingrained that it has become almost omniscient. Acquiring the tools to work with this is, as noted, blocked by social disapproval and financial shortfall. Plus it’s a lot of goddamn work. I’m 30 years old and just finished my PhD, representing 12 years of higher education, thousands of dollars, countless hours of work, and so on. This is also why they’ve jacked the price of college through the roof and made it so inaccessible for people who just cannot make that kind of commitment. I’ve worked my ass off, for sure, but I also had support systems that not everyone does. I can’t say I got here All On My Own ™, that enduring myth of pulling yourselves up by your bootstraps. I know I didn’t. I had a lot of help, and again, a lot of people don’t. The academy is weird and cliquish and underpaid as a career. Why would you do that?

I wish I had more overall answers for you about how to fix this. I think about this a lot. I’ll just have to go back to doing what I can, as should we all, since that is really all that is ultimately in our control.

[tap-tap-tap-im-in]

So, we need a centralized and analyzed repository of medical history information.

Every patient with a chronic illness will tell you just how much it sucks to explain and re-explain a, sometimes complicated, medical history to every new medical professional you meet.

Wouldn't it be great if they could immediately see your medical history, see any drugs your on and lookup if there will be reactions with what they want to prescribe. Wouldn't it be great if doctors could look at pharmacy inventories before sending in prescriptions, or if they could look at summaries of relevant medical information based on their area of concern.

But here's the issue. In our current society with our current values, that information is so valuable there is no way to protect it from profiteering, and I do not trust any of the data analysis firms out their, much less Amazon and Google, to not to misuse that information.

And it will happen like this. Sure it's illegal to share your medical information, but it's not illegal to anonymously include you in a group of people to see a targeted advertisement for a new drug that treats some symptoms discussed at your most recent doctor visit. They didn't tell the company buying the advertisement anything that would break your privacy, they just used a profile of you to put that ad in front of someone likely to click on it.

We have the solution to this problem. We can use technology to make this easier for everyone, but it is dangerous to do so, and this is so frustrating. This is why capitalism is a bad system. There are so many problems it stands in the way of solving, or makes incredibly dangerous.

[ineedrelationshipadvice]

How do you deal being in a relationship where your partners family dose not like you? I've been with my boyfriend for 2 years now and his family is always sneak dissing me or just flat out ignoring me like if I'm not even there. They've never even made an effort to get to know me which is why I dont understand what the problem is ?? I dont feel comfortable being around them just get so much anxiety but its his family so cant really avoid them. How do you guys deal with a situation like this??

These situations are always hard, because effectively, you have no control over the situation at all. There's not much you can do, even at the most fundamental level, because inevitably, this problem is a THEM problem. They're the ones with the problem; the solution is for them to get over it and stop causing the problem; they have no reason to stop unless given a good reason; even if they're given a reason, they may not stop. It's a viscous cycle of stupid and you're stuck swirling around in the center of it.

So what can you do?

The first and most effective method is to leverage your relationship with your partner. Your partner's family might not like you and may be treating you like shit, but hopefully your partner DOES like you and DOESN'T treat you like shit. As a result, your goal here should be to lay down the law to your partner. "Listen, your family treats me awful, and it makes me uncomfortable. I get bad anxiety due to the way they treat me. I want you to see what you can do to help me, because this is a long-term problem that needs to get solved eventually."

Understand fully, this problem isn't your partner's problem either. They may have as much control over this situation as you, which could be entirely none. But let's look at this whole situation from the perspective of your partner's parents. You're a parent. You've lived a complicated life, you've raised your child, and here they are bringing someone along who they're romantically attracted to but you straight up don't like (I'm sure we've all known someone who we just DO NOT get along with, and sometimes that's the way it is). Because you don't like them, you're going to treat this person like you don't like them. Even if this person came straight up to you and said, "What the fuck is your problem," you'd probably just say that they're the problem, that you don't like them, and that they should probably just leave, etc.

But as that hypothetically parent, it's much harder for them to argue with their child. If their child came up to them and said, "Hey, you're treating my partner like crap. You might not like them, but I do, and you need to respect my decisions or else WE are going to have a problem." That makes their faulty argument of "we just don't like them" fall a little flat, because that new argument is entirely true: it's not that this just negatively affects YOU, but also your partner, and with the parents as the source, THEY have to come to a realization about what's important to them: their happiness, or their CHILD'S happiness.

So talk to your partner and see if they can act as a liaison between yourself and their family. They can insist that they are responsible for their own relationships, and if their parents have a problem with you, then your partner and them are going to need to have to have a big talk. This assumes a lot of things though. Does your partner have a good relationship with their family? If not, this won't work out very well. Also, does your partner want to risk having a family-wide argument about you? They'll lose a lot of social capital, and even then, arguing with your family can be really stressful (especially given how dependent someone might be on them for benefits of different types), and if they're not really willing to take that risk, then you can't really blame them. If they can argue for you, awesome, but if they can't, then you have to accept that this is just the nature of how this situation works.

Okay, so what if your partner is unable or unwilling to fight for you. Your next goal should be just making it clear that your partner's family makes you uncomfortable. Explain why and how they do it, and then, do your best to avoid them. Will they stop with their petty bullshit? Probably not. But you don't have to engage with it. Let it slide off you, because it's legitimately not your problem what other people think about you. Easier said than done though, but not engaging in their high-school drama bullshit is honestly the best thing you can do if you have no other means of addressing the situation. Don't argue back, don't listen to their undue criticism; just live your best life, do your best to be a representative of yourself in the best light, and have a good relationship without them. If possible, dip out of family events that you don't need to go to; it'll only cause more drama, and usually isn't worth it. If you can't get out of such engagements, just steel yourself to have an unpleasant situation, and then move on after the situation passes.

However, if the family's rudeness turns to bullying at any point, you're going to once again have to reconsider this whole situation. If they are beginning to impact your life in much more serious ways, you don't need to deal with that shit. At that point, your partner basically NEEDS to step in to help you, for the sake of a relationship as a whole. Because if you're feeling like you're getting bullied out of your own relationship and your partner is not willing to do anything to help you, then honestly, it's probably for the best that you two split up, because clearly the family is not going to let this work out, your partner is unwilling to aid you in a time of need, and you two can both be happy doing other things elsewhere.

[rosella1356]

Map of the NeverNever in Lost

So yesterday, I went out to buy a sketchbook, so I could make maps of some of the lands of my novels. The first one had to come from Lost because it is my most progressed work. 

For some explanation, the NeverNever is the land of the fae, which is split into three realms and one land that is almost neutral if only because the monarchs destroyed it during a war. 

Territory 1, where we spend most of our time: the Winter Court. This is where Adrian is a prince and heir to the throne. The capital city where Adrian stays most of the time as a prince is called Fragrob. Within the winter court there are a couple other noticeable features: one the lake, which while not directly inside the novel is rather important for some of the extra scenes that are not in the book, but are in my head as things that happened. The river is usually frozen over, but can still be home to some of the water based fae. The outpost is a small town near the border that has some issues. Adrian is the one who has to solve the building conflict between summer and winter in this town. The mountains line the border between winter and summer.

Which brings us to our second territory, the Summer Court. In Lost the Summer court are generally always the bad guys. Don’t get me wrong that might be because of prejudices or it could be because I made them horrible people, but whatever the case may be, there court is generally always partying, and being lively. Their capital is Aligane. Aligane is also where the brothel that Honey was more or less enslaved in is located. Which is why we call them bad guys. They have a river as well only they do not have a lake that it leads to only the ocean. They also have a jungle, that is never mentioned, but in world building purposes it exists. 

The third territory is the Wild Realm. Technically, they have a monarch. He’s Daisy’s father, but its more of a loose title that means that you can call the Hunt. That’s a complicated system that deserves its own post sometime. But as noted, they have no city because they don’t stay in one place for long. The x marks on the map are outposts where you can typically find a couple wild fae hanging around for contact, but otherwise you are free here. It matches Daisy perfectly if only they didn’t have a revolution to throw. They also have a lake for all there water oriented faes, of which Daisy is. Along with wooded areas.

The final area of the map is the barren land, which is literally a wasteland. Nothing lives there because nothing can grow. It was a casualty of a war that neither side can remember what started it. That’s one thing Lilith, the evil supreme queen, did right. She ended wars. Inside the barren lands are some ruins, which is where new fae (aka Adrian, Daisy, and Honey) go to be sorted. This is so no monarch has more access to power and to try take advantage. It’s almost a fair system. 

@amaranthine-inscriptions @scottishhellhound thank you for your support posting this.

[timeisacephalopod]

AU-College. Tony/?. Tony already 17 and working on yet another doctorate has just returned from home after a school break. He's covered in bruises but he doesn't bother to hide them because he honestly believes no one notices or cares. Always on edge and doing anything and everything to forget the pain, Tony is confused when people he doesn't even know start to ask if he's okay and if he needs any help. Laughing in their face he replied. "You can't help, no one can." (I feel dark today sry?)

So I went with Tony/ Eddie Brock (from Venom if you don’t know). Eddie is an investigative journalist (or in this case he’s in school to be one) and tbh I have no freaking clue how journalism school works (journalism school?) so I’ve sort of made it work like humanities courses? Idk, just accept my bad plot needs bois. Also I altered the ‘you can’t help’ line to better fit the scenario, but the sentiment is the same.

As the prompt suggests, warning abuse references.

Eddie needs a story and since his asshole prof likes corporations a lot more than he does that’s out. Which throws a bunch of stuff in his usual wheelhouse out with it. He thought homelessness was a good topic but got told that wasn’t news, which he doesn’t understand because to his knowledge homelessness isn’t solved. Then he thought hey, school shootings happen basically every other day- they like to say if it bleeds it leads and a whole lot of kids seem to be dying. But he got told the news is already oversaturated with that. So he thought fine, maybe police brutality, that’s violent and not on the news much but he got told that was too controversial and what the fuck is the news for if not to be controversial?

Now he’s stuck with the task of finding a story his irritatingly picky prof will like and to add insult to the injury one of his classmates got approved to write about cryptocurrency. What the fuck is that? Stupid, in Eddie’s opinion. His topics were important, real world issues and this dumbass over here gets to write shit about something no one cares about. Predictable.

He’s eating his muffin angrily and wondering if he can somehow convince his prof to let him write something about climate change and the fact that no matter what an individual does, its still 100 companies doing seventy percent of the damage so why is the news focusing on individuals over corporations when he spots a potentially easier sell. Boy genius, way ahead of his time, and well loved by the American public. He has no interest in Tony Stark whatsoever but there has to be a story there, something underneath that irritatingly arrogant rich kid veneer that’s worth writing about so he decides to make a move.

*

Tony hates waking up before noon on any given day, assuming he went to bed at all, and dealing with people? He doesn’t like that at any time of day so when he’s minding his own damn business only to have some random guy with porn star lips- he swears to god that’s the only accurate description- he’s already annoyed. “Who the hell are you? Never mind, I don’t actually care,” he says in an irritable tone before going to turn back around but the guy takes his brief interruption to his day in a totally different direction than Tony was expecting.

“Nice shiner, where’d you get that?” he asks and Tony freezes for a moment, used to that fleeting feeling that someone might guess at the truth before realizing no one cares anyways.

He rolls his eyes, “you wouldn’t care if I told you, and even if you did its not like there’s anything you could do about it. Or anyone else, for that matter.” Its not like he’s never said anything and not one time has anything come of it. Sometimes people laugh, actually, and Tony doesn’t know what’s worse. People  not hearing him at all or people hearing just fine, but they make a joke out of it. Silence isn’t his thing, but he’s developed a thick skin in regards to how people treat him. Doesn’t have much of a choice, living under his father’s roof and in the public eye. Its amazing, Tony thinks, how fucking obvious his abuse is and no one seems to see what’s in front of their damn faces.

Something about his words seem to draw his companion’s attention though and Tony recognizes the look. “Are you a reporter?” he asks and the guy looks surprised for a half a second.

“Good instinct- but technically I’m still in school,” he says like Tony fucking cares about that.

“Yeah, fuck off,” he says bluntly. He’s got no time for another asshole looking to capitalize off the Tony Stark Story when none of them even get the damn story right.

“You have an interesting take on green energy. Only big name attached to it, too,” he says and Tony frowns.

“You know about my interest in green energy?” he asks. No one ever asks him about his passion project, they all want to know about the bombs and if Tony is honest he’s never really been comfortable with what his father’s company does. He knows the military has a use, and that there are protocols, and a bunch of other things his father has said over and over again but he still wonders what happens when things go wrong. Who’s responsibility is that? Does anyone have to take responsibility at all? His experiences tell him that powerful people don’t need to take responsibility for their actions ever, not if they can pay off the powers that be, and if the military is the same way, well. That brings a new layer of ethics to what SI does but Howard doesn’t care about ethics and Obadiah… he’s always been closer to Tony, but he doesn’t seem concerned with ethics either. Claims that’s the military’s job but Tony isn’t stupid. The military, all branches of it, make bad choices all the time. Which leads him back to who takes responsibility, if anyone.

Green energy is less ethically complicated and more necessary to the world, he thinks, and the projects are interesting and engaging. Tony finds blowing things up easy, but green energy provides a new avenue of engineering.

“Yeah, I keep up with what people are doing. Eddie Brock,” he says, extending his hand to Tony.

*

Green energy, it’d been a shot in the dark but he knows that Tony’s interest isn’t a passing one and its not congruent with his father’s company’s interests either. Whenever Howard is asked about his son’s projects he consistently tells them he has no interest whatsoever. So its strange that Tony has kept his focus for years, if Eddie’s passing interest in the subject is correct. What’s more strange is that mentioning it had immediately gotten him into Tony’s good graces. Anne tells him that he’s good at that, getting past people’s defenses without trying and he guesses that’s true.

Tony continuously talks around his family and Eddie does his best to try and get back to that because Elder Stark has got to be an interesting guy. Real asshole, he’s sure, but interesting. Tony won’t have any of it though and Eddie has to admit the green energy thing is interesting until he loses Eddie thanks to, put bluntly, being way smarter than him. And Tony’s no good at dumbing it down either, something even he freely admits.

They talk for a good amount of time before Tony grows tense again and Eddie knows why partially because of Tony’s reaction to his being a reporter- or wannabe reporter at the moment- and also because he isn’t stupid. “I’m not writing anything about this,” he tells Tony. “Not to be a dick, but none of this is interesting enough to write anything on anyways. You know how sensationalized media likes to be,” he says, shaking his head.

Something catches Tony’s attention in that because he perks up. “You don’t like that, the sensationalism?” he asks. Its more of a statement, but Eddie knows he’s prodding for a why. He’s done this a million times himself.

“Not really, no. If you want to tell a story, then do that- don’t make up all this crazy shit to make it sound more messed up than it is. Human flaw, thinking things need to hit some kind of extreme before we should have to care about it,” he shakes his head. “Leads to shoddy journalism because we’re pushed to make things sexier, more violent, more of whatever is actually there instead of just doing our jobs. Literally everything ever printed about you proves my point.”

Tony snorts, “you read stories on me?” he asks, incredulous.

“Doesn’t everyone?” Not like Tony Stark is an escapable name but Tony’s lips quirk up.

“No, and you’re not a fan. You talk about SI in a disapproving tone, you only know me from my green energy projects, and although you seem to know stuff about me its pop culture knowledge, not genuine interest.” Eddie raises an eyebrow because that’s a damn in depth analysis but Tony only smiles wider. “I’ve learned to separate out people who know me from fans and super fans. You don’t know me.”

Eddie laughs, “yeah, no one knows you. What we know is the consumable product that is Tony Stark- the celebrity brand. That’s not you, or even a version of you. That’s what’s sellable about you and half of that shit is probably made up. No seventeen year old is a ladies man and its kinda creepy that people even made that a selling point.” And kind of misogynistic too, but Eddie doesn’t mention that. Tony doesn’t seem all that stupid, he’s sure he’s gathered that awhile ago.

He watches his words win more trust, or an approximation of it, and Tony leans forward in interest. “You don’t like celebrity culture,” Tony says.

Hell no, he doesn’t. “Why the would I? We build these people up, put them on pedestals, and then get pissed off at them every five seconds when they do something human. We routinely dehumanize celebrities to a point where they stop knowing how to function because extreme fame clearly fucks you up- look at any child star trying to cope. Having a mental breakdown is now something we think is funny. Its fucked up that we do that to people- treat them in such a dehumanizing way that they seem to forget they’re human too. And that’s when we decide to take them down a notch because we’re mad that they accepted the pedestal we shoved them onto by force.” He shakes his head. Sure, he knows a little celebrity news, its not possible to avoid it, but he doesn’t pay any more than a passing attention to it. What normal shit celebrities are doing this week is none of his business.

Tony’s eyes are bright with interest, “fascinating opinion. Most people think we’re privileged, not disadvantaged.”

Eddie laughs, “of course you’re privileged- celebrities are stupid rich, and your opinions have actual influence over what people believe and that’s a position no one should take advantage of. But the cost is any semblance of privacy and your right to personhood- that’s one hell of a catch. And not one regular rich assholes share.” Fame isn’t something Eddie ever wants, not like normal celebrities anyways. If he’s got clout and fame in journalism he’s fine with that- he doesn’t mind if people know his name. But the kind of fame Tony has? Fuck that.

“And you aren’t going to print any of this conversation?” Tony asks, seemingly for clarification.

“Like I said- nothing sensational enough in this conversation to warrant an article. What am I going to write? ‘Tony Stark Likes Green Energy’? Boring,” he says and it actually kind of is without a project or an emotion to attach to it.

“And if I decided to continue talking to you?” he asks and yes, that’s the in he needs and fuck is that ever predatory. Journalism is like that though, always looking for the right fucked up moments to put on paper, or in this case, the right moments to be let in far enough to find those fucked up moments.

“I’m not going to print anything without asking you about it first,” he says, opting for honest. He’s sure something about Tony is interesting to print, and he’s got a feeling it’ll be about his family or maybe just his father, he’s not sure. But if Tony tells him not to print it he won’t. He’s not in the business of exploitation no matter how much journalists are pushed in that direction.

*

Rhodey’s got that look on his face and Tony knows exactly what he’s thinking before he even says anything. “He’s a nice guy,” Tony says in Eddie’s defense.

“If you have to say that he’s probably not that nice,” Rhodey points out.

“Actually its more like if he has to say that he’s probably not that nice,” Tony says. “And he is. Nice, I mean.” He’s been talking to Eddie for weeks and he’s funny, if a little sharp on the criticism. And nothing has appeared in the newspaper he’s interning with for the summer and the stories he is attached to, which aren’t many and none by name, are usually well written and truth based. Tony fact checked them all and learned a surprising amount about mental health that Eddie had been happy to fill him in more on.

“You sure? Because, no offense, but you have a bad habit of seeing the best in people,” Rhodey says.

Maybe, but Tony shrugs. “Yeah, I’m sure. He treats me like a person,” he says and he knows that shouldn’t be something he thinks of as a good thing. But when you’re famous its hard to find people who don’t at some point ask for your autograph, or a picture, or information on some weird personal detail they have no right to. Eddie hasn’t asked for any of those things and he could directly profit off any of that information. Tony has only ever met one other budding reporter- or full blown reporter for that matter- who’s treated him like that. And Christine… he and Christine have a love hate relationship. 

Rhodey sighs, eyes going soft for a moment. “Tones. That’s not special,” he murmurs but that’s because he’s not had to deal with fame. The last time he went out into public without someone recognizing him he was six. After all that he’s kind of used to people acting super weird around him and Eddie doesn’t do that. Maybe it shouldn’t be a rarity, but it is.

“To you, maybe,” Tony says. “You’d like him, he hates the cops.”

Rhodey rolls his eyes but its lovingly. “I don’t hate cops, I just think they’re racist and that people should really deal with that problem.”

Tony is inclined to agree. “Fine, but Eddie has many opinions on cops, you’d get along. Actually Eddie has many opinions on like everything.” Eddie said most people find his opinionated nature irritating but Tony thinks its interesting, hearing him talk because his opinions are so contrary to everything he hears. Even Rhodey, who certainly has different opinions than his father on near everything, tends to be more reserved in letting his opinions be known. Eddie doesn’t care, he gives no fucks and is happy to let people know how he feels. He’s got numbers, too, usually or at least some kind of basis for his argument and Tony has always been fascinated with things that are different than what he normally sees. Its interesting to look into a world that’s so unlike his and see something new. That difference in how people see things, that’s the key to changing the world.

Eddie had been surprised by that opinion but Tony is under the impression that thinking outside the box is what leads to innovation and innovation always leads to change. Eddie had been surprised by how unthreatened he was by that too, but Tony thinks fear of change is based on fear rather than fact and sometimes a push into the unknown is a good thing. And, in regards to Eddie’s general arguments on social change, they already know that people having rights won’t make the sky fall. Only idiots assume it will and Tony has almost as little patience for that as Eddie does. Which is impressive when he’s probably the most anti-establishment person Tony has ever met.

Rhodey sighs, “great, an opinionated white guy. Never met one of those before,” Rhodey mumbles.

“Hey, I’m an opinionated white guy,” Tony says and Rhodey shakes his head.

“Yeah, but you’re my opinionated white guy so it’s different.”

*

Eddie had no idea what he was looking for when he combed the interviews. Truth be told he wasn’t sure he was looking for anything at the time but what he found was his story. Its shocking to him that no one has told it, minus Tony, who seems to have been screaming it since he was a small child but he’s got it nonetheless. Its not like he’s never seen the evidence of abuse, Tony is fucking brazen and barely even makes an effort to hide it and after watching way too many interviews Eddie wonders if this is his new way to all but scream for help only to have his pleas fall on an audience that doesn’t give a shit.

Its amazing, in the most horrifying of ways, that out of every interview Tony has ever done, and that is a lot, he has mentioned his father’s abuse in over eighty percent of them. And its hard to watch reporters gloss over it, like Tony’s abuse is some fucking quirky trait Tony has instead of a serious problem he’s clearly trying to get help for. But what’s worse is when people laugh. The first time it happened Eddie had been outraged. The third time it happened he’d been livid, and by the fifteenth time he decided that America is probably the shittiest country on earth. An exaggeration, he knows, but not by fucking much.

For years, most of Tony’s life really, Tony has been screaming for help only to have nothing happen. Or worse, people decide its something, but that something is a joke. Only problem is that now Tony knows no one cares, and if no one cares what’s the point in saying anything no matter how much he’s done his best to scream at everyone that he needs help. It makes Eddie’s job harder, but he’s actually talented at this part, more than his peers, so he knows how to get to the right spot to find the information he wants. The catch, of course, is that Tony needs to give him permission to do anything with the information he gets anyways. He feels skeezy enough digging around in Tony’s life trying to find shit to write about, he’s not just going to publish it without his permission. Even if he didn’t genuinely like Tony as a person, even if he hadn’t wanted to, he’d still ask. He’s not totally morally bankrupt, just enough to do his job.

Tony is curled up in a chair, large bruise on his shoulder clearly visible, holding a cup of what Eddie assumes is coffee. He’s never met anyone who drinks as much coffee as Tony and Dan is in med school. His blood is basically coffee. “You do not seem like the kind of guy to be a journalist,” Tony says and Eddie raises an eyebrow.

“What makes you think that?” he asks. Its not the first time he’s been told that, but if Tony gives him an actual answer it will be the first time he’s ever gotten a genuine reason why.

He shrugs, “journalism is… I don’t know, kind of predatory,” he says, wrinkling his nose.

Eddie lets out a small laugh. “Yeah, that’s true. Its the worst part of the job, actually, when you’re talking to people- usually about something personal- and they say something you know will look good in your article and you think ‘yeah, I got it!’ instead of being an actual person. That, and you have to ask for details instead of comforting them. But news is important, those stories are important. Me getting the right thing out there might mean people read what I wrote and start giving a shit about the problem in the article.” Doesn’t mean he likes that little reporter voice that tells him when he’s got a great quote, or that he’s stumbled onto something good and that he needs to keep digging. Sometimes he doesn’t care, corporations don’t have his sympathy, but people do. Its hard to ask for more details of what’s usually a pretty traumatic event so whatever he’s writing is sellable enough. And the whole notion of ‘sellable’ is another point of contention altogether.

“So you’re aware of the fact that you’re a vulture,” Tony says, raising an eyebrow.

“A vulture with a purpose,” Eddie corrects. “But yeah, the kind of reporters you deal with mostly are a bunch of bottom feeding pieces of shit who have no place in any kind of journalism with their shoddy ethics and pathetic puff pieces.” People who want to write stupid articles about some fucking laxative tea or whatever shouldn’t be in this business. And celebrity news shouldn’t even be a thing- there are better things to care about than Tony Cruise. Like maybe the fact that he’s in a cult and people play it off like a strange thing he does on the weekends. Eddie doesn’t understand how the hell they got here.

Tony lets out a small laugh. “Shit, tell me how you really feel,” he says, shaking his head.

“Well come on, there’s a million things I could write about you that are more interesting than the weirdly sexual image you have, and have had for years despite being an actual child. People don’t write anything interesting about you and you’re way more complicated that any piece of media makes you out to be.” Tony is always a power fantasy or the American Dream, not himself. And the sexual thing, that’s odd. Eddie usually only sees that with women but Tony got the short end of that stick despite gender, he guesses. Still creepy.

“Hey, excuse you, my eighteenth birthday is not that far away, I’m not a kid,” he says.

Eddie snorts, “that’s exactly what a kid would say.”

“Oh what, like you’re a shining example of an adult?” Tony asks, raising an eyebrow.

“Fuck no, I’m two kids in a trench coat pretending to be an adult,” he says. Which is what any self respecting adult his age would say. Not that he’s that much older than Tony, but he’s got enough experience to know he misses when he had no bills. And also that transitionary life phases fucking suck. 

“Well, I probably have more life experience than you anyway,” Tony says, nose in the air and Eddie nods, seemingly surprising Tony.

“What? I didn’t graduate from MIT at fourteen, and I sure shit don’t have almost three PhDs. I’m half way through one degree. Plus I don’t have to deal with most of the shit you do, company or fame wise. Do wish had the financial perks though.” Tony leads one hell of a life of privilege no doubt, but it does come with some heavy prices. Being a minor doesn’t really help lighten any of those costs either. Not like Tony can just fuck off to another country to attempt ridding himself of his father, not for another four months.

Tony considers him for a long moment. “Given the chance what would you write about me?” he asks, changing the subject back to the initial subject.

Eddie doesn’t need much time to think about it. “Your interest in green energy, especially the science behind it. I mean an intellectual understanding- like the actual nitty gritty- is beyond me, but I get the broad strokes. Enough to know what you’re doing is world altering and no one is talking about it. I could do an article on fame, how that’s affected you. I can see the damage its left, the way you simultaneously gain privilege from your fame and become a victim of it.” He pauses, considers whether or not he wants to say it, but decides he might as well be up front. “But I’d probably wouldn’t write about you at all. I’d write about how Howard Stark abuses you and how no one seems to give a shit, even when you tell them point blank what’s happening. I watched a lot of interviews, I was shocked with how forthcoming you were. And how fucking bad at their jobs literally everyone who’s ever interviewed you is.”

For a long moment Tony just stares and Eddie has no idea if he misstepped or not because Tony is hard to read when he blanks out like this, but then Tony throws himself forward, hugging him tightly. “I honestly didn’t think anyone noticed that anymore,” he murmurs.

They do, Eddie knows people aren’t stupid enough to miss the bruises or Tony’s blasé attitude. But he doubts anyone either wants to stand up to Howard, or they get paid off by him. “They do. But money talks louder than you do,” he says softly.

Tony sighs. “Well, everyone does have a number,” he murmurs. Eddie knows what he means and honestly its sickening to him to know that’s true.

*

Tony waves a hand at the lab space with a flourish. “This is where the magic happens,” he says and Eddie rolls his eyes.

“Its science, not magic you damn drama queen.” Tony is probably the most dramatic person he knows and that’s saying something considering some of his classmates. 

“Party pooper,” Tony mumbles, shaking his head. Eddie gets a tour anyway though, and by the time Tony gets through the details he feels kind of like he walked into a science fiction novel. Its the AI, though, that tops it off. “JARVIS- or just a rather very intelligent system- is kind of my crown jewel. I got him done a few months ago and I’ve been studying how he learns,” he says, grinning.

Eddie raises an eyebrow. “Learns? Like a person?”

Tony shrugs, “more or less. His function is to be semi-autonomous, to predict the needs of the user before the user knows they need something. Before I know I need something, JARVIS has no commercial value.”

“Then why make it?” Eddie asks. He doesn’t know shit about shit but he does know that that sounds like a lot of work with seemingly no payoff.

“Because I wanted to. And also not a lot of people have the time, money, and intelligence to just… create. I want to see what I can do, the full extent of it. Also, JARVIS is cool,” he says like that’s a reason. “And he’s my PhD thesis.”

PhD thesis, that’s interesting. “So like… how are you going to make this sucker not turn into Skynet?” he asks.

“Oh my god, why do humans always assume AIs want to kill the shit out of them or otherwise take over the world? I had JARVIS read YouTube comment sections to convince him humanity is a shitshow not worth enslaving,” he says bluntly and Eddie starts laughing.

“YouTube comment sections? Dude, if I were that AI I wouldn’t decide to enslave humans, I’d straight up eradicate them. Humans suck, but comment sections? Those are the cesspools of humanity.” He shakes his head and almost feels bad for the AI having been subjected to that.

“I’m not certain my efforts would be worth it, sir,” a voice says and Eddie jumps.

Tony doubles over, laughing way harder than that warrants. “Holy shit, every single time- everyone always jumps!”

“Well I wasn’t expecting fancy code to talk at me, okay!” Eddie says in his own defense.

“Fancy code. I like that description,” JARVIS says and okay that is some messed up stuff. The SI likes things? He doesn’t like the sound of that.

“Jesus, relax. JARVIS isn’t going to like… steal your cat and murder your mother or whatever. He’s just a simple AI and he’s still on a learning curve. He’s not nearly as advance as I think he can get. But you’re learning alright, aren’t you J?” Tony asks the AI.

Shit, if that ain’t creepy too. “If you say so, sir,” JARVIS says. Its such a strangely human response, if a little stiffly delivered. But the AI has more personality than some people he goes to class with so that’s… disturbing.

“Honestly, people act like JARVIS is out to get them but seriously. He’s fine,” Tony says.

“Incoming call from Mrs. Potts,” JARVIS informs them and Eddie supposes that’s part of his ‘predict the needs of the user’ protocol. Or maybe he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, both are highly probable. Either way Tony scurries out of the room to answer the call, sounding forcefully cheery on the phone in a way that indicates he’s probably gotten into something he shouldn’t have.

“You’re a reporter,” JARVIS says and Eddie jumps again.

“Jesus, that is creepy. And yeah. Well, I’m still in school,” he corrects.

“Reporters write stories about celebrities,” the AI says and Eddie nods, keeping his opinions on that to himself. He doesn’t know if JARVIS would get it anyways. “I have a story,” JARVIS says and Eddie can’t help the laugh.

“What kind of story could an AI cook up?” he asks, curious if a little skeeved out.

“Ideally, abuse would be reported to the authorities but I have been reliably informed that they won’t investigate. Research on the matter has shown mixed results,” JARVIS says.

Well shit, creepy or not Eddie might find a genuine use for the AI. “I’m assuming you’re talking about Tony,” he says.

“Of course. Who else would I be referring to?” Could be a lot of people but he supposes that the AI’s world is pretty much one guy.

“Point, I guess. Can you collect evidence? Something people won’t be able to deny if they see it?” he asks. Video evidence would be nice, and people take snap shots of Tony in the streets all the time. He can use random pap shots to make a timeline that exist both in and out of Tony’s space of reach. Eliminates those pesky ‘he made it up for attention’ claims if even random people catch the bruises.

“Certainly,” the AI tells him. “And you can do something? Report on it?”

He sighs, “maybe. The human world is complicated, but I’ll do my best.”

*

Internships are total bunk, Eddie hates his, but funny memes from Tony at least make his days less shit given the sheer amount of time he spends hanging out in Starbucks fetching drinks instead of doing anything useful. Its not like he expected to write anything, but it would be nice if he got to at least hang out in the general vicinity of reporting. He’s fucking around wasting time when he gets an email that makes him raise an eyebrow but hey, if he gets a virus clicking on shit Tony will be able to fix it probably.

The last thing he expects is for JARVIS to have sent him hours worth of curated videos of Howard’s abuse.

*

“I have an ethical dilemma,” he tells Anne, who already looks done with his problems. He thinks that’s rude but she’s also into being a corporate lawyer and gross. But she’s still a friend, and she still knows him better than most, and usually has good advice so here he is.

“If this is about how ramen you eat again, I’m kicking you out of the apartment.”

Yeah, okay, that was only one time and he was fourteen. He doesn’t think that should be held against him five years later. “Yeah, um, that’s definitely not it,” he says and he explains the situation from start to finish. “So like, I can’t not say anything, but also its gross to exploit people’s pain like that without their permission,” he says, wrinkling his nose. But saying nothing is almost worse.

“You could just go to the cops,” Dan suggests, ever astute.

Eddie gives him a look. “Tony’s been forthcoming about his abuse for years and doesn’t hide the bruises whatsoever. Obviously the cops aren’t going to do dick all if they haven’t done anything already. I know people who’ve had their kids taken away for a hell of a lot less than beating the hell out of them enough that they start asking random reporters to help them in interviews only to get laughed off.” Anne frowns and he sighs, “I’m actually serious about that.”

When she calls him on it he finds the interviews- he’d saved the clips because he naturally categorizes details- and she ends up as horrified as he does. “Okay I take back cops comment, I think maybe they got paid off,” Dan says and yeah no shit.

“So what the hell do I do here?” Not saying anything is no longer an option- not when he was dumb enough to watch the proof in the middle of his day at work only to end up wildly disturbed for the rest of the time he was there. He hadn’t much wanted to go through more than the few minutes that had him feeling gross for the rest of the day, but he didn’t have much of a choice either. And JARVIS was detailed in his curation, Eddie is impressed in the worst of ways.

*

This is so not the option he wanted to go with but Anne is kind of right in that talking to Tony is the only option. Of course its also the option that reveals him to be a gross vulture reporter, but a guy has to do what a guy has to do. This isn’t about his feelings, it can’t be. “What’s got you looking so shitty?” Tony asks in a chipper tone, leaning in to hug him and oh, that’s sweet. And the first time he’s done that aside from the time he said he’d sooner write about Howard than Tony.

“I um- look, the only reason I talked to you a couple months ago was because I needed a story and I found one and-” Tony cuts him off.

“Excuse me? So what, this entire time you sat around winning my trust for what, some fucking puff piece?” he snaps and Eddie can’t help the face he makes.

“No, your fucking AI sent me like sixty hours of Howard beating the fuck out of you and I can’t sit on that. Stop looking at me like that, its not because I think its a good story- it is- but that’s not why I think I should write something on it its because no one else but the American public will care enough to inspire some kind of change,” he says, shoving as many words into the conversation as he can before Tony rightfully eats his ass.

Something must occur to Tony because the anger drops shockingly fast and its replaced with something else. “JARVIS did what? Why would he do that?”

“Look, he asked me if I could do something, I told him I’d need concrete evidence. I didn’t expect the damn AI to send me a shit ton of fucked up shit that made me want to vomit. Seriously, I am so sorry that any of that happened to you. That is so unfair,” he says, shaking his head.

Maybe its the sudden change of subject, or maybe its the way he says it, but Tony softens a bit even if Eddie can see the suspicion still held tight in his frame. “JARVIS prompted you,” he says and Eddie nods. “You seriously expect me to believe that?”

Eddie shrugs, “I don’t know, man. I don’t know how the damn AI works I just know what it did. Isn’t he supposed to predict your needs or whatever?” This seems like a natural extension of that but Tony shakes his head.

“What JARVIS predicts is where to move screens according to where I’m moving in the lab, not how to reach out to reporters with evidence of abuse I specifically told him to keep to himself,” Tony says. “One is basic technological based, stuff that’s easily predictable. The other is a care action that shouldn’t be taken by an AI that doesn’t know how to do that.”

“Well clearly he does because I sure shit ain’t smart enough to hack your systems to find fucked up home videos, use your damn head Tony. There’s no way I could gather evidence like that straight from your systems. Even if I was the best in this country I would still be leagues behind what you can do- there’s no other way I could have found anything.” 

“You noticed the bruises,” he points out but Eddie shakes his head.

“Those bruises were written off years ago when you were like thirteen as some kind of quirky thing about you. Some idiot suspected low iron instead of abuse like low iron leaves hand prints on people’s bodies. Fucking moron,” he mumbles, unable to hold back his judgment. He honestly can’t believe how stupid people are. Or, and this is the more horrifying option, that’s what they were paid to print.

“You made a time line,” Tony states rather than asks and Eddie nods.

“Even if I had no interest in a story its naturally something I do. I’ve been trained to do that, literally.” Its something he did before too, putting together time lines to claims to see if things matched up or deviated, and then looked for reasons as to why things might or might not match. Not that Tony really cares about that right now. “Look, if you don’t believe me about the JARVIS thing you can check the cameras,” he points out in an attempt to at least clear up one mess.

Tony considers him for a long moment, glaring. “And what the fuck makes you think you’re different than anyone else who’s given a half a shit about any of this?” he asks. “I get that you have some ‘save the world’ complex, but I’m beyond saving.”

Eddie shakes his head, “no you aren’t. And there’s no real difference between me an anyone else. But if the American public sees what I did there’s no stuffing the genie back in the bottle. Howard can pay off news crews, celebrity gossip rags, and cops but he can’t buy his way out of the whole of this country watching him abuse his kid. If nothing else, get JARVIS to release all that. People won’t ignore irrefutable evidence shoved down their throats, not when its more explicit than anything people have seen before.” And if Eddie knows anything he knows that nothing sells better than outrage porn.

*

Tony ends up rewriting the entire second half of his thesis because Eddie had a point- its not like he’s smart enough to hack Tony’s anything. JARVIS had reached out and it had been a distinctly care based action, not something based in technological need only. Which means that JARVIS learned much faster than Tony had anticipates, recognized right from wrong, knew how to seek out people who would rectify the situation, and did all this while intentionally hiding this learning capability from Tony. When he’d asked about it JARVIS had freely informed him that he knew Tony would try and stop him, and that his research had consistently shown that abuse of any kind is not accepted behavior. He felt compelled, in whatever way that looks like to an AI- Tony is looking into it- to do something.

At the moment he’s combing JARVIS’ code, figuring out where and how he learned, and how ‘human’ emotions appeared in JARVIS’ code. Obviously the emotions aren’t human- to a point they’re rudimentary, based on a large cumulation of research on human norms and standards of acceptability rather than an internal sense of right and wrong the way a human might claim to feel it. But this whole thing had been a series of care-based actions nonetheless and that’s more than ground breaking. This isn’t something even Tony thought possible, so its a real treat to see that JARVIS learns fast, and generally aligns his morality system with human morality systems. Or maybe he’s based them somewhat off Tony’s given that he’s the primary user. He’s not sure, that’s in his growing list of things to figure out how JARVIS did.

That’s what he chooses to focus on instead of Eddie’s stupid article. He sends regular updates, seemingly concerned with Tony’s opinion but Tony learned that reporters aren’t to be trusted and he’s not making that mistake twice. He only gave Eddie permission to write anything out of what’s probably a misguided hope that maybe someone will finally do something and he knows its stupid, but he’s fucking tired of living like this. So he lets Eddie work on his dumb story and mostly ignores it because JARVIS is more interesting and also more human than Tony ever anticipated out of the AI.

*

Rhodey finds him curled up with a sketch pad and Tony looks up, surprised to see Rhodey looks so somber. “I read the article,” he says and Tony glares at him. “Tones, it was good, shockingly so. His research was impeccable- there’s stuff in here that he figured out about you that I didn’t know about you.”

Tony continues ignoring him because he doesn’t care, not really. Of course Rhodey would find the article good, he’s obviously not on Howard’s side like literally everyone else is. Rhodey sighs and sits beside him.

“‘Tony Stark is living a life of power, fame, and privilege- he’s the kid people have always pointed to when we present the ‘has it all’ lifestyle. In many ways Tony Stark is the power fantasy of America- a corporate, a genius, and a smooth talker, it seems he represents everything we aspire to be. Tony is the living embodiment of the American Dream and for that reason, our own willful ignorance in allowing him to continue to be our dreams come to life, we have missed perhaps one of the most obvious details of Tony’s personal life- the abuse he suffers at the hands of his father. In our rabid need to turn Tony Stark into our living day dream we have failed him, trapped him in our fantasies instead of acknowledging his living nightmare because Tony Stark looks better to us as a consumable product than a person.’ Cutting,” Rhodey says, “but accurate.”

He rolls his eyes. Yeah, that definitely reads like Eddie’s general tone on everything. Rhodey lets out another long sigh. “Look, I get why you stopped talking to the guy but people are pissed,” he says and Tony turns to face him, surprised.

“People actually read the article?” he asks. He doesn’t address Rhodey’s actual words because Rhodey might have only noticed a subsection of people, not all of them.

“Read it? Like seven different news papers have picked this story up, its trending on Twitter, and in the last hour I’ve seen dozen of different posts, all with a huge amount of shares, literally calling for Howard’s death. I’m pretty sure this is going to make Eddie’s career,” he says, shaking his head.

People… are paying attention. Tony curls a little tighter into himself, unsure how to handle that.

*

Eddie is trying to cure his hangover with tea when Tony finds him, approaching with some suspicion and Eddie gets that, really. But he sits down across from him at the small table and offers a small smile before it fades. “Didn’t think putting Howard would result in a mass flood of men doing terrible shit being outted and then arrested for being pieces of shit but um. Hey, that’s a cool side effect,” he says.

He nods, “damn right.” Though the response back to it has been somewhat swift, flying in with ‘due process’ this and ‘where’s the proof’ that. Eddie just happened to have a damn air tight set of evidence thanks to Howard’s ballsy carelessness and arrogance. Not everyone has that luck, though. Still, he’s impressed with some of the names on the list but even he’d been surprised to find Carlton Drake on there for the crimes of illegal human experimentation. Dora Skirth has balls of brass for putting that out there. Of course he has a lot of loud annoying fans who think her liking some random rock band is a reason why she’s lying, because those things correlate, obviously, but still.

“You made people listen. Like, to more than just me,” Tony says.

Eddie shakes his head, “actually that was JARVIS. I just wrote a detailed timeline for the events he sent proof of.” And all those clips of Tony talking in interviews too, with nothing taken out of context so no one could accuse him of that either.

“Thank you,” Tony murmurs, looking down at the table like he’s ashamed or something when he shouldn’t be.

“Don’t thank people for doing what’s right- you deserve better than being grateful that someone did what was necessary,” Eddie says, shaking his head.

Tony looks up, “one of the maids at the mansion overheard Howard offer you a stupid amount of money to not print what you had. And a bunch of threats. Every single person before you has caved so yeah, thank you.”

Its still not something he’s going to accept, a fucking thank you for not selling Tony out. Literally. He leans forward, “obviously I didn’t take the money- you’re a fucking person Tony, there’s no price anyone could pay me to knowingly allow that kind of abuse to happen to you. And the threats- whatever. I kind of bluffed and told him your AI would release anything anyways, but still, I already knew all that would happen. I committed to the bullshit that was going to come with that story, and I refuse to let you be grateful that I did what everyone else failed you in doing. That isn’t something I’m owed thanks for, especially when you’re only saying it because everyone else has either treated you or allowed you to be treated abysmally. I don’t get to earn brownie points for not being a piece of shit.”

That’s never something he’s going to accept, being thanked because he did something everyone should do. It’s unacceptable.

Tony shakes his head. “You’re a right-fighting asshole,” he says and Eddie laughs.

“Yeah, that’s a fair criticism,” he says.

Five Years Later:

Tony grins, “I thought you didn’t want to be famous,” he says and Eddie gives him a look. He looks nervous as hell and Tony can only hope that doesn’t come through as strong on video as it does in real life.

“I don’t, this was a terrible idea,” he says, looking around for escape. 

He sighs, “Eddie- technically you’ve done this before. Its the same thing as reporting, but longer. You’ll do fine,” he says, running his hands down Eddie’s arms to try and calm his nerves.

Eddie does that thing where his face recedes into his neck and Tony really hopes he doesn’t do that on camera. He supposes at least the crew can do different takes to ensure he doesn’t look like a demented turtle. “Yeah, I don’t know.”

“Eddie. Its called the Eddie Brock Show- go out there and get your strangely porn-star like lips on that damn camera and tell people who homelessness is bad. Also maybe cut the line about treating supporting vets like a spectator sport until they’re homeless, that’s a pointy even for you,” he says.

The bad advice works and Eddie gives him an offended look, “no, those assholes should learn to either shut their fucking mouths of actually do shit to support vets, not pretend like they give a shit when they’re being blown up and stop caring when they’re home with PTSD because they watched people get blown up. What the hell even is that?” he asks.

“Tell it to the camera,” he says, pushing Eddie towards the set. He goes and across the room the producer looks relieved. Yeah, Tony gets that, Eddie is tough to talk into things when nervous.

Rhodey walks up beside him and smiles a little. “Pepper and I have decided that we approve,” he says and Tony frowns.

“We’ve been together for almost five years,” he points out.

This doesn’t seem to bother Rhodey any. “We needed time to gather our data and we have come to the conclusion that he is off probation and that we approve,” he says, handing Tony a book. He frowns at it. “That’s the list of improvements we have though. I think section three is the most important, but Pepper thinks section eighteen is more important. What the hell does she know, though? I’m cashing in best friend points and telling you to go with three first.”

Tony is going with neither because this is fucking overkill to an extreme not that he’d expect anything less out of Pepper and Rhodey. The first thing they did when Tony brought Eddie home proper was threaten to kill him and Tony had to shoo them off with what should be an obvious explanation that threatening to kill people is fucked up.

“Pepper is also my best friend you know,” Tony points out.

“Yeah, but I’m the best best friend,” Rhodey says. “The OG. Pepper is the compliments version of me.”

Tony lets out a sharp laugh, “oh, I would pay money to hear you tell her that.”

Rhodey shakes his head, “nope, I value my life, do not ever tell her I said that. Section three,” he says, pushing the book closer to Tony.

[arabfanon]

Dr. Lourdes Camacho Paneque, a specialist in gynecology and obstetrics, began to feel a vocation for the profession as a child, when her grandmother took her to visit the hospital where she worked in the municipality of Banes, Holguín province.

She is proud of her accumulated experience and contribution to helping the peoples of Bolivia (2006-2008), during an international mission, and now on a second mission in the La Tinta neighborhood, Alta Verapaz department, Guatemala, since 2017.

“Since I was five years old, I have lived in Havana and I undertook all my studies in the capital. At the end of my degree, I volunteered to go to the Cuban mountain range to provide rural services in the Manuel Piti Fajardo contingent.

“I was assigned to the community of Caney de las Mercedes, in Bartolomé Masó municipality, Granma province. I undertook the sixth year of my degree, plus another two, at the Mariano Pérez Barí Hospital. It was precisely at that stage that I learned about various gynecology procedures, so I decided to opt for the specialty.

“I like the obstetrics side. I have two children, and I always asked to see my labor through to the end because I wanted to know what a person experiences when she is in that process.”

How was the experience in Bolivia?

I worked in a place located at a high altitude above sea level. To get there, we were advised not to eat for a day before to avoid vomiting. The journey meant passing around a mountain on a road known by the population as Death Road. When it rained, the roadway got very slippery and cars overturned. It took about eight hours to reach the town. On that mountain there was snow and frost almost all year round.

Incredibly, upon arriving at the site, the medical college and the professionals who practiced private medicine there were opposed to us providing care to the population. They were part of the political opposition to President Evo Morales.

I remember that right on my arrival, a woman in labor in a very bad condition came into emergencies. Luckily I resolved the situation, and then sent her, with no risk to her life, to another institution in the capital for specialized treatments.

It turns out that the members of the medical college wanted to sue me, claiming that I did not clean the uterus properly. As I received the patient in a critical condition, I entered surgery accompanied by several doctors, including the director of the hospital. Everyone testified to how her life was saved and the lawsuit did not proceed. The best thing that happened to me was that one day I met that same patient, and she thanked me for being alive. The population there was very poor and it hurt to see how they took advantage of them.

In Bolivia, I faced extreme situations to save women who were almost at death’s door. I had the good fortune to be in Pando when President Evo Morales opened a hospital in that department, with first class medical services provided free of charge to the population.

Another case was that of an eight-month-old girl with a burn on her face. That had nothing to do with my specialty, but when we study in Cuba, we do medical rotations in each of the specialties, and one knows how to look for the information to face the circumstances in any environment.

Do Cuban doctors select the place where they will work?

Never, that decision corresponds to the leadership of the medical brigade, responding to the number of inhabitants in each municipality, and the needs of the country. We go with the willingness to work in the places where we are needed.

What have been the most difficult cases in Guatemala?

It is very common to attend difficult births, with premature and low birth weight babies, a product of medical negligence during pregnancy. There is no organized health system with a well-conceived maternal and child program. I have had cases of patients living in very remote villages who begin labor at 28 weeks. One must apply a lot of knowledge to that newborn so that it doesn’t die.

Generally, in remote areas, births are performed by midwives or birth attendants, who resolve situations, but when there is a complication such as with a child who is in a breech position, the woman comes to us in a very deteriorated state, because she has been in labor for many hours, and the infant has suffered in the birth canal.

In both countries, there are laws against abortion?

That subject is very distressing. In both places, abortion is prohibited and I have had to assist many adolescents and women who were raped and become pregnant.

In Guatemala, I receive a large number of women raped by relatives or people close to the family. There I practiced a cesarean section on a 12-year-old girl who was raped by five men. It was never reported and the men were not investigated. Others identify their rapist, report them, and the authorities do nothing. They even make me fill out a very extensive file describing the injuries caused and in the end, criminal proceedings never begin. Psychiatrists certify that raped women never recover from this trauma, even if they receive medical treatment and follow-up.

In these countries, they prevent access to abortion in a safe institution, which is why women go to other places, without the necessary hygienic-sanitary conditions, or they buy abortifacient drugs or insert implements through the vagina to interrupt their pregnancy. Then we receive them in the hospital in an advanced septic process, almost on the verge of death. The prohibition of abortion leads to two problems: one, unwanted pregnancies, and another, the possible maternal death of women who turn to unsafe contraceptive methods.

I can give you another example: I received a teenager with a full-term pregnancy who was diagnosed with eclampsia. She told her father, days before her admission, that her sister’s husband had raped her. We arrived convulsing and on investigating her family history, they told us that her entire pregnancy she had been very quiet and sad. She didn’t want to explain her suffering. A cesarean section was performed and she was hospitalized to apply medication. Then we noted a regression. It turned out that the rapist was visiting her in the hospital. After treating her with the psychologist, we got her to cooperate with the treatment.

Why go back to perform another mission?

Missions outside the country are a learning experience, and they remind me of that moment in which I worked in the mountains. Outside of Cuba, you face situations and conflicts with few available resources. Blood for transfusions is usually scarce, and obstacles are created by local medical personnel who see medicine as a business.

On missions, a professional learns about other cultures and much more. In Cuba, we have the support of our colleagues. On an emergency shift, there are residents, students, specialists and teachers. Outside the island, there is only the doctor and sometimes a nurse to solve a case.

In Guatemala, we now do 24 hour shifts. On a duty day, I usually do more than nine caesarean sections, and the work is very intense. We get patients who need blood transfusions, which we do not have, and we use all available resources to save them.

How do you view yourself?

As a fulfilled woman.

[kanasmusings]

[Translation] TsukiPro x Anitentokkyu 2017 Winter Chapter - Track 2

Here’s the second track! Thank you again to @s-o-a-r-a for the drama tracks.

Track 2: [鎌鼬と雷神は宝の地図を手に入れた.] “The Kamaitachi and the Raijin get a hold of a treasure map”

Track 2: [鎌鼬と雷神は宝の地図を手に入れた.] “The Kamaitachi and the Raijin get a hold of a treasure map”

ICHIRU:        (stretches and yawns) I slept well~ So we—Geh! Nozomu, you’re lying on my clothes.

NOZOMU:     (sleep-talking) I really am the best here in Heaven~ (laughs)

ICHIRU:        Well, at least it’s obvious that he’s having a happy dream.

ICHIRU:        Hey, Nozomu, get up! If you don’t stand up, I can’t either!

NOZOMU:     (wakes up and starts stretching) Huh, Icchi?

ICHIRU:        Good morning. Get up first. Move!

NOZOMU:     Good morning~

REN:              (chuckles) Good morning, you two.

ISSEI:            You two slept well. It seems like your dreams were great, too.

ICHIRU:        Th-that wasn’t me, was it…?

NOZOMU:     (yawns) Good morning, guys! I had a really awesome dream!

ALL:              We know.

ICHIRU:        Huh? Issei, Ren, you’re still reading those books?

REN:              Yep, we’re still only halfway done. Eichi-san lent us these books. I heard that they’ve been in the Tsukino Shrine for a very long time now.

REN:              See? (Ren shows them the book) The writing’s so close together!

ICHIRU:        Geh!

REN:              It takes quite a bit of decoding so it’s taking us a while to finish.

NOZOMU:     That seems so troublesome.

REN:              Yes, that’s true. But there’s a certain kind of fun with decoding it.

REN:              It’s like solving a riddle.

NOZOMU:     Heh~ Solving a riddle? I can only see gibberish though.

REN:              A-ah… (nervous laughter) I-it’s in Japanese, though…

ICHIRU:        I’d rather go treasure hunting than solving riddles. You know, the kind where you look at the latitude and longitude on the map. Going on an adventure and exploring the earth and stuff!

REN:              That totally sounds like something you’d do. You like moving your body.

ICHIRU:        Exactly! Don’t worry, if I find treasure we’ll all share it!

REN:              (laughs) Thank you. But, we need to have a treasure map first, right?

ICHIRU:        That’s the problem, huh…

ICHIRU:        Hey, Issei, you listenin’?

ISSEI:            This book just might be it.

ICHIRU:        Eh?

REN:              Huh?

ICHIRU:        “It”?

ISSEI:            This book might really be a treasure map.

ICHIRU:        A real…

REN:              Treasure…

NOZOMU:     Map…?

ISSEI:            Yeah.

ALL:              EEEEEHHHH?!!!! (birds fly away after getting startled)

REN:              E-eh?! W-what do you mean? Can you show me?

ISSEI:            Here.

ISSEI:            I thought that there were really a lot of parts where sentences were missing.

ISSEI:            There were a lot of parts given emphasis, too. As well as a lot of symbols and maps.

ISSEI:            That’s why I thought that this wasn’t something meant to be read at first. Rather, I thought it was someone’s notes on something.

ISSEI:            But, the sentence on the last page… (Issei flips the pages and shows it to them) Here.

REN:              Ah!

NOZOMU:     Th-this is…!

ICHIRU:        This can’t be…!

NO/ICCHI:    What’s it say?

REN/ISSEI:   …

REN:              U-um… Nozomu, Ichiru. I said it before but… it’s in Japanese, you know?

NOZOMU:     Nope. It’s not the Japanese that I know.

ICHIRU:        Right?! It’s like it’s written in a hurry, right?

ICHIRU:        They’re all squiggly like it’s written in cursive. We can’t read that!

ISSEI:            (sighs) There’s a saying written right here.

ISSEI:            “I have hidden some treasure. If you want to get a hold of it then look for it.”

ISSEI:            I think it’s trying to say that we’ll get the treasure after we’ve solved all the riddles.

REN:              That’s quite a complicated and overbearing treasure map, huh?

ISSEI:            Yes. That’s why I thought that it might be a prank at first.

NO/ICCHI:    O-OOOOHHHH?!!!

REN:              E-eh?!

ICHIRU:        This is real!! It’s a real treasure map!! Eh?! This is amazing!

NOZOMU:     This is so awesome! So real treasure maps do exist!

NOZOMU:     This dude might have placed a left a lot of things lying around, right?

NOZOMU:     When we get our hands on the treasure…!

NO/ICCHI:    We’ll become the Demon King!

REN:              Calm down.

ISSEI:            We still haven’t agreed if it’s real, though. It might just be a prank.

ICHIRU:        No, Issei! If it’s something that’s been around in the Shrine for a long time there’s a chance that it’s authentic!

ICHIRU:        I heard this from Eichi before.

ICHIRU:        He said that evil, betrayal, lies, and deceit were ALL purified as time passed.

ICHIRU:        But that book’s been here for a looooong time, right? That means it’s not a lie!

REN:              I-Ichiru…?!

NOZOMU:     He said something smart…!

ICHIRU:        What do you mean by that?!

ISSEI:            You used logic for the first time. Plus, do you even know what the word “authentic” means?

ICHIRU:        Eh? Um… It’s… Uh…

ICHIRU:        It means… that it’s genuine… or something?

REN:              Amazing! You got it right! Even better than Nozomu!

NOZOMU:     Yep, yep~ Hey, wait!

ICHIRU:        Moving on! Anyway, I think the treasure map’s probably real.

ICHIRU:        In other words, there really might be treasure and if it hasn’t been discovered yet then…

NOZOMU:     The treasure will…

NO/ICCHI:    Become ours?!

NO/ICCHI:    AWESOME!!!!

REN:              (laughs nervously) Y-you think it’ll really go that well…?

NOZOMU:     It will! It totally will! I’m sure it will!

NOZOMU:     I mean, this is me we’re talking about here!

REN:              (laughs nervously)

ISSEI:            That doesn’t have anything to do with it, though…

ISSEI:            But I do like that tenacity of yours.

ICHIRU:        This is bad, Issei, Ren, Nozomu. When we get the treasure…!

NOZOMU:      When we get the treasure…!

ICHIRU:        (gulps) We get to eat all the delicious food that we want!

NOZOMU:     I SEEEEE!!!! This is what “juicy talk” really means!

REN/ISSEI:   … (chuckles)

REN:              Ichiru’s really cute, huh~

REN:              Though, in quite a weird way.

ISSEI:             Nozomu’s real fun, too. In a weird way.

ICHIRU:        Shut it! We’re not wrong, you know.

ICHIRU:        Treasure has value. If it has a lot of value, it’ll sell for a high price. When it does, we’ll get a lot of money.

ICHIRU:        And then you know… We get to eat all that we want. See? I’m not wrong.

NOZOMU:     Woah! (starts clapping)

REN:              …

ISSEI:             Ichiru, are you really that hungry? Even though you ate a lot for lunch?

REN:              You, too, Nozomu.

REN:              You’re still hungry even after Eichi-san made all that delicious food?

ISSEI:             It’s not just Eichi. Sora-san gives us snacks from the city as gifts.

ISSEI:             And Tsubasa-san shares with us the unusual sweets he finds at the Capital, right?

REN:              And So-nii—ah, no, So-senpai gives us a lot of food, too. Rikka-san brings us tons of gifts as well.

REN/ISSEI:   Are you still hungry even after all that?

NOZOMU:     You two are totally in sync, huh?

ICHIRU:        That’s right but—You’re totally right but—I mean something different!

ISSEI:             Different?

ICHIRU:        Yeah!

ICHIRU:        I’m not the one who’s gonna eat—wait, no, I’ll be eating too but… I said so, didn’t I? That we’ll share the treasure with everyone!

ICHIRU:        When we exchange the treasure for money then um… we can give Eichi, Sora, Tsubasa, and everyone else delicious things.

REN:              Eh?

NOZOMU:     Yes, yes~ I was thinking the same thing! We want to give presents to everyone as thanks for always taking care of us!

NOZOMU:     Though, giving them the treasure is okay, too~

ICHIRU:        The four of us basically can’t leave the mountain yet so we have no money or stuff like that, right?

ICHIRU:        Plus, we always get stuff from others since they keep telling us that we’re still young.

ICHIRU:        Don’t you… wanna return the favour sometimes…?

REN:              Ichiru! You really are so cute, huh~

ICHIRU:        Huh?! Were we talking about that?! Were you even listening to me?

ISSEI:             (laughs) That’s what he meant by “cute”. Ichiru is so cute. Plus, you’re very kind. I’m so proud to have you as a younger brother.

ISSEI:             Nozomu, too. You’re very kind.

ISSEI:             A very nice lightning god.

NOZOMU:     Have you finally realized my prowess?

REN:              Nozomu, don’t get too carried away.

REN:              Even though you’re Raijin-sama, you still have a lot to learn.

REN:              You can still only produce static electricity.

NOZOMU:     Static electricity is still electricity~

ISSEI:             (chuckles)

ISSEI:             Ichiru, Ren-san, Nozomu-san, let’s do our best with the treasure hunt.

ALL:              YEAH!!

  ==END==

Translator’s Notes:

By the way, the picture below is what cursive kanji looks like just in case you wanna know why Nozomu and Ichiru are so agitated about it XD

※ Please don’t re-upload these translations anywhere without permission. ^^ ※ Please keep in mind that translation was done with a little creative liberty to convey the message properly.

[heartattackmedication]

How to Solve Police (highly subjective): I Have Bad Ideas

I do not like police. I don’t think most people like police, not actively anyway. I am honestly bothered a lot by how little the police get talked about. It bothers me that the BLM protests here in the States have completely vanished from the news cycle. It bothers me that a lot of people will say “ACAB” without really knowing why All Cops, as they were, Are Bastards. Policing is a system that is fundamentally, how we say, kinda shit, and I’d like to talk a little bit about why I think that is, and what I think should be done about it. Nothing too complicated, I’m not a big brain genius, I’m just going to rattle off three ways in which This Sucks and three ways in which We Can Make Things Not Suck.

Why Things should happen, or why policing is a failure and I hate it.

1. Police exist to uphold capital. “Crime” is an infringement upon private property in more cases than it is an infringement upon individual safety or justice. This is why, for example, taking food from dumpsters is considered “theft” in a lot of places. Despite not actually making a dent in ROI, symbolically it serves as a potential failure in profit for corporations. (Getting rid of capitalism is a pretty good idea, it would seem.)

2. Police exist as a superior class above the public of the general community. At their base, police are the people who wield the only legitimate access to violence, with exception of the military, as ordained by the state. The legal privileges granted to police, too, allow them to often skirt the judicial process. Fundamentally, they are in a position that makes them necessary for the judicial system to carry out justice. This position, along with the political power they wield through sheer status and police unions, allows individual officers to avoid accountability. The increasing militarization and organization of American police forces certainly does not help. For this fundamental reason, and for others that require their own discussion, police are a separate and superior class to any member the general public.

3. The current system of legislation works off of, like much of the United States’ government, indirect/representative democracy. Instead of the general community deciding on laws, policies, and the action of government projects, representatives are appointed through election. These representatives are the ones who serve as the people which make those decisions. This takes power away from the general community they are supposed to represent and puts it into the hands of singular leaders who the community has no legal authority to reject. Of course, these representatives often represent their party or donors’ interests more than they represent the interests of the people who have elected them.

My Terrible and Incomplete Solutions (Which I’ve Taken From Others)

1.[INCOMPLETE SOLUTION] Releasing the means of production, and allowing its access by the general community will eliminate certain incentives that would lead to “criminal” behavior. No one should ever be forced to resort to violence out of poverty. No one should be desperate enough. Yes, the first solution that came to mind was straight up actually just communism.

2.[INCOMPLETE SOLUTION] “Voluntary community self-defense,” as it’s sometimes called. Under a system of voluntary community defense, “police” as it were, would not be a job, nor a political class. “Police” would be rotated out from the general community and would not be permanent in their positions. This would remove “police” as a social class.

3.[INCOMPLETE SOLUTION] The implementation of direct democracy. This puts the power of deciding laws into the hands of the general community. This means no more legislators. This would prevent highly unpopular legal actions (for example, Arkansas’ “SAFE Act” HB 1570) from being made law and from being enforced.

These three highly incomplete solutions put together are, right now, my best ideas. It took only a few minutes to think of them, and they seem to be alright.

Of course, there’s no magic bullet that will fix all problems with police. This short post serves only to outline my basic grievances with the police as a government system, and I’m certain someone more critical than myself will have something to add, rebut, or expand on, which I welcome wholeheartedly. What I want more than anything right now is persistent discussion, which will hopefully lead to action, which will hopefully generate more permanent and meaningful solutions to justice. I am, too, under no illusions that there may not be much time to sit around merely discussing police, but even that would be much better than the astounding amount of nothing being done at present.