#but good thing is they are very few in numbers

[reidrum]

i think he knows

A/N: more doctor!reader!!!!!!! can you tell i love them. if you have requests for them please send them my way thank you <3

summary: in which spencer and reader try to find time for each other to have their first date

cw: doctor!reader, fluff, spencer being a flirt, medical talk

wc: 2.5k

A month passes before Spencer gets to see you again. A long, long month.

He stayed in the hospital for observation for another two days after meeting you, which were entirely medically necessary but don’t ask Spencer how his chest pain stopped the moment he signed the discharge papers because they just couldn’t keep him any longer. He knows it’s illogical, and a bit immoral, to fake symptoms for his personal gain. But who could blame him, had they seen you?

You didn’t make it any easier on him either, the times you’d check on him you’d leave him red for hours. Morgan had gotten suspicious seeing him be surprisingly high in spirits for someone who just got shot. You’d even talked to the nurses to get him extra jello, a love language in its own.

But his daydream was soon shattered upon his discharge, where he couldn’t just lay in a hospital bed and wait for you to come to him. He was to be sent to exile (home) to finish out the rest of his sentence (recovery), while he so agonizingly waits for the next chance to see you again.

The first day back home was already enough to send him into house fever, and he couldn’t even freely pace off the nervous energy because of his leg. You had given him your number, which meant he had to text you. It was a lot of pressure. He knew his assignment and yet couldn’t figure out what the right thing to start off this conversation with you should be.

Should he be formal and hit you with a simple Hello. Or give a bit of a flirty edge and add a heart emoji—one that Penelope taught him how to do, thank you very much. No, he should probably introduce himself since you don’t have his number. So you don’t think a random freak is trying to message you.

He types out a message and sends it before he can second guess himself anymore.

Spencer: Hey there, this is Spencer. Room 207?

Spencer flips his phone face down so he doesn’t manically check the notifications for your reply. You’re busy, you could be in surgery or doing rounds, or sleeping on a break or—Ding!

Or typing out a reply to him, perhaps.

You: Hi Spencer ☺️ how are you feeling? Spencer: Better now, how are you? You: Better now ;)

Oh, you’re everything to him.

Spencer: Are you on a break or am I bothering you? You: Lying down in an on call room bed! I love when you bother me please don’t stop

He actually giggles aloud, thank god he lives alone.

Spencer: Good, because I was running out of medical emergencies to fake just to get to see you again. You: Gasp, faking? Sweet talking works well on me, don’t get me wrong, but I might have to report you to the medical board. Spencer: I’m not that kind of doctor so I don’t think they’ll care, plus I think once they see you were my doctor they’ll side with me. You: Flattery will get you everywhere Spencer Reid be careful. Spencer: I’m sure hoping it does.

It goes on like that for a few weeks, to Spencer’s delight. Back and forth texting, the blatant flirting on both ends and his poor but endearing attempts to match it. He wants to get to know every part of you, and thankfully you’re just as curious as he is, so every waking minute either of you aren’t working ends up being spent by talking with each other.

Not just the casual things like where you grew up or where you went to school. No, he’s learned what your go to coffee shop order is, what latent hobbies you have hidden under your belt, what your favorite movie is and the specific line that makes it your favorite.

He’s told you about his favorite Doctor Who episodes—which you made him promise to show you someday, showed you pictures of his mom and his godson, his go to Indian food order for the place down from the office.

While Spencer loves talking to you, it’s simply not enough. He has to see you soon or he might combust spontaneously. He might do that anyway but it’s much more noble to have a good and valid reason to perish in such a way, like being in your presence.

Spencer: Hey, can I ask you something? You: Uh oh, I don’t like the sound of that. Spencer: Nothing bad, pinky promise. You: Ugh, the most sacred of promises <3 Okay, let’s hear it. Spencer: Are you free this Friday? You: AH I thought you’d never ask!! I am so free this friday night doctor, setting out my best dress just for you ;) Spencer: I’m sure everything you wear is beautiful, but I’m looking forward to seeing you again :) I’ll pick you up at 7? You: I’ll be waiting <333

He asks you out officially on Monday, and he spends the rest of the week praying to whatever unsub or case gods that are out there watching to calm down this week so they don’t get whisked away on a case. Tuesday through Wednesday only consisted of paperwork, and it gives him hope he might actually make it to Friday and finally get to see you. Even Morgan and Emily’s teasing of his suddenly happy mood can’t bring him down.

Thursday night comes around and he’s about ready to jump for joy as he finishes packing up his things. JJ walks by and he’s about to say goodbye to her when she waves a manila folder in the air, “Sorry Spence, conference room in 5.”

He deflates. So close.

Spencer lets his satchel slide off his shoulder and reluctantly pulls his phone out to open his message thread with you.

Spencer: Hi, I’m really sorry to do this but we just got called on a case. Do you think we could reschedule dinner? You: Hi handsome, don’t worry I understand. The world needs you crime fighters :) I’m free next friday?

He tries to ignore the way his heart stutters reading ‘handsome’ and types.

Spencer: I’ll make it up to you, I promise. Next Friday sounds great.  You: Be safe out there please Spencer: Always am. You: Need I remind you we met because you got shot on the job Spencer: That was one time, and I told the guy to shoot me. You: Yeah, that’s not making me feel better. Spencer: I’ll be safe, getting to see you next week will be my motivation to be extra careful. You: I’d hope you’re being careful regardless but whatever works for you, handsome <3 Spencer: Got a pretty girl waiting for me, I have to take extra precautions. You: Oooh that was good, you’re getting better at this Dr. Reid. Spencer: What can I say, you make it really easy. Spencer: Okay I have to go for the briefing, talk to you soon. You: Bye handsome 💞

The case comes and goes, an easy solve but it took a few more days than the team would like to admit for a case of this caliber. They return back only a week later and it’s another Thursday night where he’s hoping nothing steps in to prevent him from seeing you. He’s lucky in the sense that nothing is stepping in to prevent him from seeing you, FBI mandated break and all after a long case.

He’s not so lucky when you regretfully tell him you’re scheduled for surgery all day on Friday. You’re entirely too apologetic for his liking, for someone who flaked on you initially and had to alter your schedule to his. Especially for someone who, of all people, understands the busy lifestyles you both lead. He reassures you a thousand times over that it’s okay and that you can reschedule.

Spencer: Please stop apologizing, it’s okay I promise You: I just feel soooo bad. I was really looking forward to seeing you. Spencer: I know. But we’ll see each other soon. You: Promise? Spencer: Pinky. Did you eat anything? You: No I wasn’t hungry, too sad about not seeing your face. Spencer: A poor reason to starve yourself, I’m ordering food for you. Are you at the hospital? You: I’m at home but you don’t have to do that. Spencer: Okay but I want to, are you going to give me your address or will I have to find it myself? You: How are you going to do that? Spencer: I have my ways. You: It’s your tech analyst friend isn’t it Spencer: Maybe. You: So if I share your address it’s a HIPPA violation but when you do it no one bats an eye. Spencer: It’s for a worthy cause. Please let me do this. You: Fiiine. 1563 Rock Lakes blvd. What are you getting? Spencer: Thank you, honey. Pad thai with chicken satay. You: Ugh, you know me so well <3

To yours and Spencer’s dismay, this pattern continues on for another few weeks. Whenever your schedule finally clears, he gets dragged away on a case. When his schedule is clear you have back to back surgeries or consults. It’s like you just can’t get the timing right, no matter how hard you pine for each other.

The doubt travels and festers in both of your heads, the blatant evidence showing you that this may not work between you. Thing is, you both love your jobs too much to even try to accommodate the other. You’re both so busy you can’t even find time for one evening alone together.

Then George Foyet happened. The Haley Hotchner of it all, happened.

It hit the entire team hard, watching a colleague they viewed as family lose someone they loved so deeply and in such a torturous way. Spencer forced himself to take a step back and really evaluate what he was doing—was he willing to subject someone he cared about to the world he lives in? To the horrors they become exposed to? He still thinks about the heart attack he had when the Fisher King sent his mom a key after being in the same facility with her for some time. He’s not sure he can handle that kind of fear again.

Spencer knows he doesn’t have to do this, it’s so early in whatever this is between you both. You haven’t even had time to go on a date. Maybe your lives are just incompatible. Maybe he can save you before he ever even puts you in danger’s way—the ultimate act of valiant efforts in the form of preemptive measures. 

What you don’t know can’t hurt you, literally.

Ding!

But then you go and do something like this, where he gets to flip his phone over and blush red in the face at your name on the notification. That he gets to open his messages and be met with the beautiful sight of your face, smiling in a picture you took just for him showing off the coffee you got on your break and reading the book he recommended to you a few weeks ago.

And he’s just not sure if he can imagine a world where he doesn’t meet you and immediately fall in love with you.

Another week, another attempt at finally being able to take you on a date. Except this time fate has stepped in on both ends and sent Spencer on another case and you scheduled for surgery. Lovely.

The case goes fine again, save for the unsub with an overt penchant for clipping FBI agents aiming their guns at him. Enough damage to send him to the ER needing stitches on his forehead and a concussion evaluation.

The doctor seeing him was a good doctor, but he wasn’t you. It was a man who, no offense to him and his medical training, definitely did not have hands as soft as yours stitching him up. He sighs out loud in the ER as he waits for a nurse to come by and discharge him. God, he wishes it was you. 

“Seeing other doctors behind my back? I thought we had something special, Dr. Reid.”

He has half a mind to look up at the sky and mouth God?, as he feels his prayers have been answered in the most literal way.

“What are you doing here?” he asks incredulously, fully in disbelief at the sight of you in front of him.

You smile and step towards him, closing the curtain behind you, “I told you, I had surgery.”

“In Maryland?”

“In Maryland,” you nod, “They needed someone with my background to help out so I flew out.”

God, you’re so smart it physically hurts him how attractive it is.

“How’d you know I was here?”

“I didn’t, I was looking at the patient log to see if they needed help in the ER when I saw an S. Reid age 27 in bed 4 and thought to myself ‘This couldn’t be a coincidence.’”

He chuckles softly, “Well, you found me.”

“That I did,” you lean in to inspect his cuts, “I thought I told you to be careful, handsome.”

The blood rushes to his face, “I know, maybe I just knew I’d get to see you this way.”

You gently readjust the butterfly bandage on his forehead, securing it more tightly. “You could have called me if you missed me, Spence.” you whisper.

“You were busy.”

“So were you.”

Spencer pauses, “Are you busy now?”

You step back and look at his face, his borderline puppy eyes doing the most to convince you to say yes when you were about to ask him the same thing in about another minute if he hadn’t. 

You grin widely and check your watch, “I clock out in an hour. Wait for me?”

“Always.”

It makes all the missed connections and unaligned schedules entirely worth it when he gets to finally pick you up from your hotel room for your date turned into a weekend getaway. Spencer doesn’t even bat an eye when Morgan teases him about the mystery lady he’s staying back in Maryland for, or when Hotch gives him a multilayered nod of approval when he asks for a few personal days.

It’s entirely worth it and more when you and Spencer drive up to a lake house to spend the weekend together, and you joke about how your first date ended up being your first trip as a couple. Spencer doesn’t even stumble when you refer to yourselves as a couple, just tightening his arm around your shoulder and kissing the crook of your neck softly.

It’s the most worth it when, even after you said you were a couple, on the last night after staying up watching Doctor Who reruns post other activities, Spencer curls his arm around your body tugging you closer to his and whispers into your hair, “You will be my girlfriend, right?”

To which you simply beam up at him and whisper into his neck, “Of course, handsome.”

[dedalvs]

hey friend, i know you’ve been a pretty serious supporter and user of duolingo for a long time (so have i!), so i’m curious what your feeling is about the announcement that they’re going to be doubling down on using more and more AI for content creation, including using it to avoid having to hire actual humans?

personally, i’m really disappointed - i’ve disliked how much they’ve been using it so far, but the app is otherwise a great tool, and all of the other apps seem to use it, too, so it’s not easy to just jump ship to an app that isn’t using AI. i’ve seen a lot of responses that are like “hurr hurr just use a textbook idiot” which i find really unhelpful; learning from an app is easier and a lot more convenient in a lot of ways than having to use analog materials, especially if you study a high number of languages. still, i don’t ethically feel that i can keep giving them money if this is the direction they’re going.

what are your thoughts?

This is going to be a longer answer than you might have expected.

In 2001, fellow undergrad. Reiko Kataoka (now a professor at San Jose State) resurrected a club that had been dead for a few years at UC Berkeley linguistics: The Society of Linguistics Undergraduates (SLUG). One of its former undergraduate members, Alan Yu (now a professor at the University of Chicago), happened to be a graduate student at Berkeley at the time, so he helped her get it off the ground. The club was exactly what I was looking for at that time: a group for ling. undergrads. to get together and talk about language and linguistics, my new favorite thing. It was great! I even put together a couple phonology problems using my conlangs to distribute at a meeting. The following year I became the second president of the new SLUG and helped to create the SLUG Undergraduate Linguistics Symposium, where I gave my first talk on language creation. Being a part of this club was a major factor in shaping my undergraduate experience at Berkeley.

When I graduated I went to UC San Diego to pursue a graduate degree in linguistics. Part of the reason I chose UCSD was because it was an incredibly inviting atmosphere. Before we accepted they paid for prospective undergraduates down to San Diego and housed them with current grad. students who told them about the program and took them out for dinner, etc. It allowed prospective students to ask questions they wouldn't ask of professors (e.g. who's got beef with who). It was really cool, and so in our second year, we continued the tradition of housing prospective grad. students. Since we both went to Berkeley, my ex-wife (also a Berkeley ling. grad.) and I hosted Klinton Bicknell.

Klinton, it turns out, was the current president of SLUG. I didn't know him while I was at Cal, but we did overlap. It turns out he had renamed the club SLUGS, which I thought was weird. He said "It happened organically" and laughed in an off-putting way. He very much gave off the impression of someone who will smile at you and say whatever is necessary for you to go away. Klinton ended up going to UCSD the following year and I ended up leaving the following year.

Fast forward to 2016. HBO had put the kibosh on Living Language Valyrian, and so I turned to Duolingo. They had previously reached out about putting together a Dothraki course, but I declined, due to having a book out, Living Language Dothraki. With no hope for Valyrian, I asked if they'd be interested in me putting together a course on High Valyrian, which I did. I had some help at the beginning, but, truth be told, most of that course was built by me alone. I became very familiar with the Incubator, where Duolingo contributors built most of their courses. It was a bit clunky, but with enough elbow grease, you could put together something that was pretty darn good. It wasn't as shiny as their in house courses, because they couldn't do things like custom images, speaking challenges, etc., but it was still pretty good.

At the time I joined, everyone who was working in the Incubator was doing it for free. We were doing it because we wanted to put together a high quality course on our language of choice on Duolingo. When Duolingo went public, they realized this situation was untenable, so they began paying contributors. There were contracts, hourly wages, caps on billable hours, etc. It essentially became an as-you-will part time job, which wasn't too bad.

The Incubator faced a couple potentially insurmountable problems. When the courses were created by volunteers, Duolingo could say "This was made by volunteers; use at your own risk", essentially. Once they were paid, though, all courses became Duolingo products, which means they bear more responsibility for their quality. With so many courses (I mean, sooooooooo many courses) it's hard to ensure quality. Furthermore, "quality" doesn't just mean "are the exercises correct" and "are the sentences interesting". Quality means not being asked to translate sentences like "Women can't cook" or "The boy stabbed the puppy". With literally hundreds of courses each with thousands of sentences written by contractors, there was no way for Duolingo to ensure not just that they were staying on brand with these sentences, but that they weren't writing ugly things. There were reporting systems, there were admins that could resolve things behind the scenes, but with so much content, it became a situation where they would have had to hire a ton more people or scale back.

We saw what Duolingo did before with one aspect of their platform that had a similar issue. If you remember way back, Duolingo used to have a "forum", that was a real forum, but for most users, what it meant was on every single sentence in Duolingo users could make comments. These comments would explain grammar points, explain references, make jokes, etc. It was honestly really helpful. But, of course, with any system like that comes trolls, and so volunteers who had come to create language learning resources also found themselves being content reviewers, having to decide which comments to allow, which to delete, who to ban, etc. As Duolingo became more popular, the troll problem grew, and so eventually Duolingo's response was to kill the forum. This mean you were no longer able to see legitimate, helpful comments on sentences. They threw the baby out with the bathwater.

This is why it was no surprise to me when they shuttered the Incubator. The technology was out of date (from their standpoint, you understand. Their in house courses were way more sophisticated, but they couldn't update the Incubator without potentially breaking hundreds of courses they hadn't created themselves), quality assurance was nearly impossible, and they were also paying people to create and maintain these out-of-date courses they had no direct control over. Of course they closed it down. It would've taken a massive investment of time and resources (and capital) to take the Incubator as it was and turn it into something robust and future proof (think old Wordpress vs. Wordpress now), and Duolingo wanted to do other things, instead—like math and music. And so the Incubator died.

But that wasn't the only reason. This was something we heard internally and then heard later on publicly. There was rumbling that Duolingo was using AI to help flesh out their in house courses, which was troubling. This was before the big Gen AI boom, but after a particularly pernicious conlang-creation website I won't name had come to exist, so it caught my attention. I decided to do a little digging and see what this was all about, and I ended up with a familiar name.

Klinton Bicknell.

Indeed, the very same Klinton Bicknell was the head of all AI ventures at Duolingo. Whether enthusiastically or reluctantly or somewhere in between, he was absolutely a part of the decision to close the Incubator and remove all the contractors who had created all the courses that gave Duolingo its reputation. (Because, seriously, why did most of us go to Duolingo? Not for English, Spanish, French, and German.)

I know you sent this ask because of the recent news about Duolingo, but, to be honest, when I saw one of these articles float across my dash I had to check the date, because to me, the news was old. Duolingo isn't just now replacing contractors with AI: They already did. That was the Incubator; those were contractors. That is why there won't be more new language courses on Duolingo, and why the current courses are frozen. This isn't news. This is the continuation of a policy that had already firmly in place, and a direction that rests solidly on the shoulders of Klinton Bicknell.

But you don't have to take my word for it. He's talked about this plenty himself:

Podcast (Generative Now)

Article in Fast Company

Article in CNET

Google can help you find others.

At this point there's a sharp and baffling division in society with respect to generative AI. On the one hand, you have those of us who disapprove of generative AI on a truly fundamental level. Not only is the product something we don't want, the cost—both environmental and ethical—is utterly insupportable. Imagine someone asking you, "Hey, would you like a sandwich made out of shoelaces and shit?" And you say, "God, no, why would anyone ever want that?!" And their response is, "But wait! To make this sandwich out of shoelaces and shit we had to strangle 1,000 kittens and drain the power grid. Now do you want it?"

On the other side, there are people who are still—I mean today—saying things like, "Wow! Have you heard of this AI thing?! It's incredible! I want AI in everything! Can AI make my table better? Can I add AI to my arthritis? We should make everything AI as quickly as possible!"

And conversations between the two sides go roughly like this:

A: Good lord, now they're using AI art on phone ads? Something has to stop this… B: Yeah, it's so cool! Look, I can make a new emoji on my phone with AI! A: Uhhh…what? I was saying it's bad. B: Totally! I wonder if there's an AI shower yet? Like, it could control the temperature so you always have the perfect shower! A: Do you know how much power it takes to run these genAI apps? At a time when we're already struggling with income inequality, housing, inflation, and climate change? B: I know! We should get AI to fix that! A: But AI is the problem! B: Hey ChatGPT: Teach me how to surf!

It's frustrating, because the B group is very much the 💁 group. It's like, "Someone was using ChatGPT and it told them to kill themselves!" and they respond, "Ha, ha! Wow. That shouldn't have happened. What a learning opportunity! ☺️ Hey ChatGPT: How do you make gazpacho?" There's a complete disconnect.

In terms of what you do with your money, it's a difficult thing. For example, I've used Apple computers consistently since 1988. I'm fully immersed in the Apple ecosystem and I love what they do. They, like every other major company, are employing AI. If you go over to r/apple any time one of these articles comes out, it's all comments from people criticizing Apple for not putting together a better AI product and putting it out faster; none saying that they shouldn't be doing it. They're all ravenous for genAI for reasons that defy my understanding. And so what do I do? I've turned off the AI features on all my Apple devices, but beyond that, I'm locked in. From one direction, I look like a hypocrite for using devices created by a company that's investing in AI. From the other direction, though, I am using their devices to say what they're doing is fucking despicable, and they should stop—and I'll keep doing so so long as there's breath in my body.

Duolingo isn't necessary the way that, say, a computer or phone is nowadays. Duolingo is still usable for free, though, of course, they make it a frustrating experience to use its free service. (This is certainly nothing exclusive to Duolingo. That's the way of everything nowadays: streaming services, games, social media... Not "Well give you cool things if you pay!" but "We'll make your life miserable if you don't!") If you do use their Incubator courses, though, I can assure you that those are AI-free. lol They're too outdated to have anything like that. Some of those courses are bigger than others; some are better than others. But all of them were put together by human volunteers, so there's that, at least. At this point, I don't think Duolingo needs your money—nor will they miss it. They're on a kind of macro plane at the moment where the next ten years will either see the company get even bigger or completely disintegrate; there's no in between. They're likely going to take a big swing into education (perhaps something like Duolingo University [Duoversity?]) and it's either going to make a ton of money or bankrupt them. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

I've taken the Finnish course in its entirety and we're doing Hungarian now, and I've learned a lot—not enough, but a lot. I'm grateful for it. I like the platform, and I agree with the basic tenets of the language courses (daily shallow intake is better than occasional deep intake; implicit learning ahead of explicit instruction is better than the reverse). I'm grateful they exist, I'm grateful we can still use them (because they can always retire all of them, remember), and I think it's brought a lot of positivity to the world. I think Luis Van Ahn is a good guy and I hope he can steer this thing back on course, but I'm not putting my money on it.

[duskbornraven]

Not A Date

Dragging myself out of Animal Kingdom and Chicago PD to get this out in a reasonable time.

Pairing: Jack Abbot x f!Reader

Contents: Some implications around being widowed, a lot of awkward not date but totally a date energy, no use of y/n, no beta

Summary: After recovering from a surgery someone has a meet up with Jack. Just as a thank you, certainly not a date or anything. This is a direct sequel to this post.

Word Count: 3k

It had been weeks since your surgery. And recovery had been miserable, stuck on a second floor apartment for the first few weeks with the blessing of a very kind nextdoor neighbor who had come to check on you when he got home from work and his days off. Aside from him you had a few friends stop by here and there with news and life updates and bring you food. It had been mostly lonely stuck inside. 

The last week though had been a special kind of hell now that you were cleared to walk on your own and finally regained freedom. But it also meant following through on the invitation. You had opened your contacts to send a message to Jack more times than you cared to admit, even to yourself. He had texted you the night you gave him your number. And you hadn't been able to think of a single thing to text him about since. 

Sure you could have sent him an update on your foot, but admittedly you were sick of sending updates. All you seemed to do while you were stuck home was send updates after appointment  to family and work. You were sick of talking about recovery and retelling the story, especially since you were distinctly not telling anyone about Jack. You did not need everyone in your life demanding to know everything about him in addition to everything else. You hardly knew anything about the man to begin with. And, selfishly, you wanted to have a thing that was just yours while you were in recovery. Something to look forward to that was only between you two.  

You opened the message thread again, took a breath and sent him a text, nothing crazy, just asking if he was free that weekend for that drink. It was hopefully around the time he would be waking up anyway. Which meant you were sure he wouldn’t have time to answer and you could take a breath and remind your stupid brain that you were an adult and not a teenager with a crush on the star quarterback. Then your phone chimed and you all but threw it across the room, the soft ding feeling too loud in your small apartment.  

You took a breath and tapped the power button to see what the notification even was. And there in plain bold text was his name. Unlocking the phone displayed a simple Yes and the typing bubble beneath it. You watched it appear and disappear twice before another message came through. Commons around seven?

You sent back a yes without hesitation. A quick google did show it a good way from your place but not an impossible trek, especially with newly working legs. You had made sure you were cleared to go back to normal activity three times before you had left your last appointment. 

But this was it, in a few days you would see him again and hopefully not choke on your words now that you weren’t heavily drugged or in mind bending pain. Though based on how the thought of just texting him had been a struggle for weeks, you weren’t sure actually seeing him would go much better. 

The rest of the week passed painfully slowly, finishing another series on your to watch list and making sure you kept up with your therapy exercises, managing to ruin your progress was not an option this close to the finish line. Whe Friday hit you felt like your eyes were glued to your phone. And as you were scrolling mindlessly trying to kill time a text from Jack came through. 

Your heart sank for a tiny moment as you tapped the notification, expecting a cancellation, some reason why he actually decided this was the worst idea and he didn’t want to see you again. In reality, it was just a confirmation that you were still good to meet this evening. And of course you were, this was all that was keeping you sane for the last week. You didn’t tell him that, instead you fired off a simple yes. And decided that you needed to start getting ready for the night, getting stiffly to your feet and making your way to the shower. 

Just over an hour later you were hopping off The T at a downtown station, checking your maps app you headed off down the road in the slowly fading evening light. You had to remind yourself to breathe when the bar came into view. Forcing yourself to push through the door it takes you no time to spot him leaned against the bar back turned to you. 

Feeling your heartbeat in every step you walked over to him slowly. About half way across the room he turned enough to spot you over his shoulder. Raising a drink in greeting as you got closer. 

“Look who's up and walking around.” He smiled warmly at you. The dim lights overhead casting him slightly in shadow. 

“And very happy to be out of the house.” You joined him at the bar, squeezing into the space beside him with just enough room to avoid touching him. You were too aware of everything right now, a drink in you knew it would be better. 

“I can’t imagine.” He settled further back in the stool, turning slightly to face you, his knee brushing against your leg, neither of you pulled away right away. “I can hardly handle being home alone as it is. Stuck there? That would be some level of hell.” 

You ordered your go to, from the bartender. Something safe that you knew you would be able to handle. You had already almost died in front of him once, he didn’t need to see you struggle through a night a complete mess. 

“So, awkward small talk?” He asked and took another pull from the bottle. “You already know where I work.” 

“You make it sound like I knew you’d be there.” You nudged his knee with your own lightly. But did indulge him in the usual small talk, where you lived, what you did for a living, hobbies, and pretty much everything that you would normally go over with on a first date. Except this wasn’t a date, it was just drinks. With someone you couldn’t seem to take your eyes off of. 

“So medicine was really the only thing that made sense when I got out.” He finished, waving over the bartender for another drink. He pretended not to catch you watching him out of the corner of his eye. “But really I think it was always where I was going to wind up. At least I can’t imagine it any different.” 

Jack was not doing much better than you were being aware of how this looked, how it felt. He kept his drink in hand for as long as he could, just to keep his hands occupied. He was fighting the urge to lean an arm on the back of your seat while you talked. Or to help get the hair out of your face when you only managed to brush it mostly out of the way. 

“That’s still really admirable.” You were starting to feel the flush that always came with a buzz. Your hand landed on his knee, he didn’t pull away. 

“Glad someone else thinks so.” Another pull from the bottle, and another drink ordered. He slid in just a little closer, his free arm resting behind you, not quite touching, but close enough for you to be very much aware of it. 

You were painfully aware that you were both incredibly close, your hand still resting on his leg, the warmth of him radiating through the denim beneath your palm. This close it was hard to miss the details, his freckles, the hint of his cologne, the indentation from a ring of his finger. 

You pulled back from him slightly, leaning back, hands retreating back to your own lap. You looked away quickly, some gross feeling slowly forming. Something almost like shame that felt heavy in your chest. 

Jack wasn't unobservant, even drunk he watched you studying him, enjoying the proximity, the attention on that human level. But he also watched your eyes fixate on his hand still resting on the bar top. Probably see the void where a ring should be. Still should have been, if he was honest with himself. And felt a pang when you pulled away, color draining from your face as your eyes met his again, searching behind the fog of alcohol. 

He had agonized over whether he wanted to take it off all day, he had felt wrong without it, a reminder even more than when he was wearing it. He didn’t break your gaze, he did also lean away from you though, his arm falling back into his own lap. “Should have just mentioned it earlier.” He absently twisted his fingers around the spot where his ring should have been. “I just” He took a breath and another long drink from his beer “I haven’t been ready to take it off.” 

And for a minute you both sat there in this heavy silence, surrounded by the noise and the chaos of the bar. You moved first, breaking the still and the quiet between you like glass. Your hand took his, reassuring and soft. “Then you don’t have to.” 

He took your hand in his and the safe feeling you had first felt months ago washed back over you. You hardly knew him, were just meeting him for the second time really, but you trusted him. It was maybe a little difficult to imagine not trusting someone who, as far as you knew, saved your life. But it was deeper than that, there was just something about Jack that felt safe, safer than most people you knew. 

He pulled his hand away gently, reaching into the pocket of his jeans and retrieving the wedding band. “I couldn’t just leave it at home.” He glanced between you and the ring before slipping it back into his pocket. “But I got this far without it on, a little longer won’t kill me.” 

He paused, a half amused scoff coming from him. “Or maybe it will, you never know.” He caught the way your eyebrows knitted together. “Kidding.” He held up a hand placatingly, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. 

Whatever tension was left evaporated as the bartender came to check on the pair of you. One more round ordered and you decided to take the break in conversation to use the bathroom. And while you were gone Jack took the casual liberty of getting the bartender to add your drinks to his tab and close you both out for the night. 

You weren’t gone but he was able to get everything paid by the time you emerged around the corner and slipped back into your seat. Your drink sat waiting and Jack was scrolling something on his phone. A tired smile on his face as he typed out a reply and placed his phone back on the bar top next to him. 

“Welcome back.” He said, glancing down as his phone buzzed next to him. He flipped it over, examining the preview and scoffed before locking it again. 

“Everything alright?” You asked before taking a sip of your drink. 

“I take a night off and people lose their minds, but nothing they need me for.” Another buzz against the bar top, this one he ignored, drink in hand and focused solely back on you. 

“Something crazy happening at the hospital? Some crazy accident?” You turned in to face him. Your knees bumping lightly against his. 

“No, we’d hear about anything new and exciting at a review. This is just” He trailed off looking down at his phone again as it buzzed “Hospital drama.” 

You leaned a little closer, and almost whispered, a conspiratorial smile spreading across your face. “Anything worth sharing?” 

“I will tell you after it’s over.” He half laughed watching your face fall just a little. “I’ll have an update after work tomorrow, probably when I get in actually. I’ll text you an update if you really would like to know.” He checked his phone again and sent off another text smiling a little wider when he set it back down. 

It was embarrassing to admit but the idea of him texting you actually made you blush, just a little. Not that he really seemed to notice, his expression unchanged as he finished his drink, his foot now westing on the bottom rung of your seat, his leg resting against yours comfortably. 

A warm comfortable silence fell between you, just existing in each other’s company for a while. Jack tries his damn best not to stare at you while you finish your drink, occasionally checking his phone just as a distraction. Very aware of where your bodies touched and the warmth shared between them. It had been too damn long since he had felt this, felt connected. 

He was snapped out of his thoughts by you setting the drink down on the bar, the finality of glass on wood. “Ready?” He asked, leaning a little away, getting ready to stand. 

“Just have to get my tab settled and I am ready to leave if you are.” You leaned down the bar looking for someone to wave down. 

“No you don’t. I got you.” Jack stretched behind you, doing his best to keep a neutral tone. “Paid when you went to the bathroom.” 

‘But I was supposed to get you, that was sort of the deal.” You protested, trying to maintain a glare while he just smiled back at you completely unphased. 

“Well I guess you’ll just have to take me out again.” He pulled your seat back for you, giving you more room to slide back onto the floor. “And I promise I won’t pick up the check behind your back.” 

“It sounds like you’re asking me to see you again.” Your tone was accusatory but you were also doing a terrible job of fighting off a smile. You let him lead you through the crowd. 

“I am. Assuming you’re okay with that?” He said as the pair of you stepped out into the night air. 

“Yeah, I would like that.” You glanced up at him, it was harder to read him in the shadows of the streetlight but you were pretty sure you could see a self satisfied smirk on his face. “Let me know when you have another day off of work then? I think I have a more regular schedule than you.” 

“I’ll check when I’m in tomorrow, should have some time around the weekend coming up again soon.” He shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans, as he spoke, examining the decently busy street, watching the crowd. “Did you take The T?” He added after a beat of silence. 

“Yeah, I’ll have a few stops before I get home, but I’ll be good.” You turned absently to look back up the road towards the station. 

“I’ll walk you to the station at least.” he said, following your gaze down the road towards the distant lights of your stop. 

“You don’t have to.” It was a weak protest. A large part of you was more than happy for an excuse to spend a little more time with him. 

“Come on” And Jack took you by the arm, leading you up the street, letting you fall into line with him after a few steps.

He  lets you slip from his grip, returning his hand to his pocket as you walk. The streetlights overhead casting shadows of the pair of you walking in sync. Your shadow watching his slide silently along the pavement. He watches the people you pass, making sure he’s between you and the road. 

When you pass a group of people he draws closer to you, arms bushing against each other on occasion. At one point he took hold of your arm to steer you well out of the path of a larger group of college students. He watched them until they were well past you and didn’t let go until you were at the station. 

“Keep me updated.” He caught your eye again. “And text me as soon as you're home. Okay? I can wait for you to get picked up if you want.” 

I’ll be fine, text you as soon as I’m back.” Jack lingered, focused entirely on you in the lights overhead. And blame it on the drinks or the warmth in his eyes, you stepped into his space. When he didn’t back away you pressed a little further, leaning in to kiss him lightly on the cheek, your hand on his chest. “I promise.”

As you stepped back his hand caught your wrist. “The second you get home alright?” 

“The second I can see my front door I will let you know.” And he let you go, slowly started to make his way back up the road in the opposite direction. “Jack?” He turned back, just enough to face you, his face half cast in shadow “Thank you again. For everything. I’m glad we got to do this” 

And you saw a flash of a smile in the dark before he responded “You can pay me back by making it home safe this time.” You watched him as he started his walk back until your ride rolled into the station. 

And keeping your promise, the moment you saw your door come into sight you sent him a message letting him know you were home safe, getting another almost instant reply from him letting you know he made it home safe as well. 

And the next evening he kept his promise to you as well, sending you his next free nights for the rest of the month. And a promise that he would have an update on the whole work situation he hinted at when he saw you again, making it sound like there was more to it than he had initially thought. Which if you were being honest with yourself, could not come soon enough.

[trainsinanime]

The darkly ironic thing is that if you are worried about the recent news that someone scraped Ao3 for AI research, then you're probably vastly underestimating the scale of the problem. It's way worse than you think.

For the record, a couple of days ago, someone posted a "dataset for AI research" on reddit, which was simply all publicly accessible works on Ao3, downloaded and zipped. This is good, in a way, because that ZIP file is blatantly illegal, and the OTW managed to get it taken down (though it's since been reuploaded elsewhere).

However, the big AI companies, like OpenAI, xAI, Meta and so on, as well as many you've never heard of, all probably had no interest in this ZIP file to begin with. That was only ever of interest to small-scale researchers. These companies probably already have all that data, received by scraping it themselves.

A lot of internet traffic at the moment is just AI companies sucking up whatever they can get. Wikipedia reports that about a third of all visitors are probably AI bots (and they use enormous amounts of bandwidth). A number of sites hosting software source code estimate that more than 90% of all traffic to their sites may be AI bots. It's all a bit fuzzy since most AI crawlers don't identify themselves as such, and pretend to be normal users.

The OTW hasn't released any similar data as far as I am aware, but my guess would be that Ao3 is being continuously crawled by all sorts of AI companies at every moment of the day. If you have a fanfic on Ao3, and it isn't locked to logged-in users only, then it's already going to be part of several AI training data sets. Only unlike this reddit guy, we'll never know for sure, because these AI training data sets won't be released to the public. Only the resulting AI models, or the chat bots that use these models, and whether that's illegal is… I dunno. Nobody knows. The US Supreme Court will probably answer that in 5-10 years time. Fun.

The solution I've seen from a lot of people is to lock their fics. That will, at best, only work for new fics and updates, it's not going to remove anything that e.g. OpenAI already knows.

And, of course, it assumes that these bots can't be logged in. Are they? I have no way of knowing. But if I didn't have a soul and ran an AI company, I might consider ordering a few interns to make a couple dozen to hundreds of Ao3 accounts. It costs nothing but time due to the queue system, and gets me another couple of million words probably.

In other words: I cannot guarantee that locked works are safe. Maybe, maybe not.

Also, I don't think there's a sure way to know whether any given work is included in the dataset or not. I suppose if ChatGPT can give you an accurate summary when you ask, then it's very likely to be in, but that's by no means a guarantee either way.

What to do? Honestly, I don't know. We can hope for AI companies to go bankrupt and fail, and I'm sure a lot of them will over the next five years, but probably not all of them. The answer will likely have to be political and on an international stage, which is not an easy terrain to find solutions for, well, anything.

Ultimately it's a personal decision. For myself, I think the joy I get from writing and having others read what I've written outweighs the risks, so my stories remain unlocked (and my blog posts as well, this very text will make its way into various data sets before too long, count on it). I can totally understand if others make other choices, though. It's all a mess.

Sorry to start, middle and end this on a downer, but I think it's important to be realistic here. We can't demand useful solutions for this from our politicians if we don't understand the problems.

[mycroftrh]

People do always love to be like “oh Anakin was so stupid, keeping secrets for no reason, he should’ve just told the Jedi about Padme and everything would’ve been fine, doesn't he know Ki-Adi-Mundi was given an exception for survival of the species to have wives in Legends”

And when rewatching RotS I was forcibly reminded: he wanted to. He wasn’t actually the problem there. It was Padme.

Padme: Wait, not here. Anakin: Yes, here. I’m tired of all this deception. I don’t care if they know we’re married. Padme: Anakin, don’t say things like that.

A few scenes later, it’s Padme, again, not Anakin, who says:

Padme: If the Council discovers you’re the father, you’ll be expelled.

And Anakin who’s like “don’t freak out about that now, just enjoy that we’re about to have a baby”.

Back in Attack of the Clones, it was technically Anakin who offered the idea of a secret relationship first, but it was in response to Padme being insistent that he would be expelled from the Order:

Padme: You listen. We live in the real world. You come back to it. You’re a Jedi Knight…. Jedi aren’t allowed to marry. You swore an oath, remember? You’d be expelled from the Order. I will not let you give up your responsibilities, your future, for me. … Anakin: It wouldn’t have to be that way. We could keep it a secret. Padme: …Could you live like that? Anakin: No.

And then it was Padme who first introduced the idea of lying to Obi-Wan:

Padme: Ani, I told you I wouldn’t let you give up your future for me… Anakin: What about Master Obi-Wan? Padme: I guess we won’t tell him, will we?

And also Anakin, rather importantly, as you may have noted in the conversation a bit above, actually believed that a secret relationship was a bad idea in the first place, to the point that he stopped making advances on Padme because of it, until suddenly she started making advances on him:

Anakin: You love me?! I thought we decided not to fall in love. That we would be forced to live a lie.

And the thing is. Like. Anakin’s number one source of stress in Revenge of the Sith is that he does not want to be keeping secrets, and everyone around him is trying to force him to. From Obi-Wan to Palpatine to Mace and Yoda to, yes, very much Padme, as we saw in the very first quote above.

The Jedi are trying to make him keep secrets from Palpatine, which he very openly hates; Palpatine’s trying to make him keep secrets from the Jedi, which he also expresses extensive upset about and eventually refuses to do any longer; Padme’s making him keep their relationship secret when he explicitly doesn’t want to.

And he actually takes every possible opportunity to tell someone the truth about something, for the first three quarters of the movie!

He’s considering keeping the dreams secret from Padme for about three seconds before she’s like “Be honest with me” and he immediately tells her, honestly, without minimization or deflection. And then the very next scene, probably less than five minutes of screentime after the vision itself, is him telling Yoda, in as much detail as Padme’s rules will let him.

He doesn’t tell Palpatine about the Jedi Council’s plans because he’s trying so hard to be good and obedient towards everyone at the same time, but he’s so visibly upset about it that Palpatine deduces. (I firmly believe Palpatine had him put on the Council specifically so they would tell him to spy on Palpatine and thus break his trust in them, but that’s a side point.) Anakin dutifully ferries all information he’s given back to the Jedi Council without, as far as I can see, filtering it at all.

And the big one, of course - he learns Palpatine’s the Sith and immediately runs to tell Mace Windu.

(And Mace proceeds to only half-believe him, which, frankly, doesn’t make sense? He says “If what you told me is true, you will have gained my trust” but like. Mace’s primary concern about Anakin’s loyalties seems to be that he thinks Anakin’s loyal to Palpatine over the Jedi, in which case… what kind of next-level Machiavellian reverse-psychology triple-agent plan did he think Anakin had, that involved lying to Mace about Palpatine being MORE of a threat than they had believed and suggesting Mace go arrest and/or execute him, advising maximum force? It turns out Anakin is, in some ways, playing into Palpatine’s plans by doing this, but like… that’s because Anakin is telling the truth, and the truth is the problem here, and if he had been lying, things would’ve been fine for the Jedi. But that’s somewhat beside the point.)

Like. It’s been established since Phantom Menace that Mace and Yoda both tend to not be… friendly, let alone understanding, towards Anakin, and that continues to be the case in Revenge of the Sith, and yet still his first response is to run to them with any big truth he has, because they’re the Proper Authorities, and he hates secrecy, and he’s reaching out for any life-raft he can find.

Anakin is, in the end, the one who killed the younglings, yeah. But the secrecy? That was never his problem.

In conclusion - behold, Anakin’s synthesis:

[itallbecameablr]

I think y'all are both right, but in different situations.

Or maybe just different points in time, depending on bad things get.

If we're talking historians 200 years from now, or just history teachers in the classroom, then I expect that <i>some</i> part of Homestuck will still be around.

Not all of it, but depending on how exactly it's archived on the internet and how the technology of tomorrow interfaces with the technology of today, then at the very least a good portion of the still images could be dug up.

That does mean that a lot of it will still be lost at some point, the gifs and music, a growing number of corrupted and unrecoverable pages...

But let's say something catastrophic happens and forces the human race to basically start over, or for some other sapient race to evolve.

Not "America Remembered", but "America Rediscovered".

At best it would be like the discovery and excavation of Ancient Rome. With enough time and neglect, even the tallest towers fall and get covered by the sands of time.

Someday our only identity will be what we've managed to leave behind.

Anything that's solely electronic will be the first to go. Servers require upkeep. So do the buildings they're kept in.

But I looked it up and Homestuck has been printed out before, and no doubt will be at least a few more times before totally leaving the public consciousness.

Apparently some types of paper will theoretically last for a few centuries.

That's probably pretty expensive paper, not something a normal comic would be printed on. But it might be something one or possibly more wealthy and eccentric fans would have their favorite comic reprinted on for that exact reason.

But again we're talking thousands of years, so even those copies would have likely mostly rotted away.

Unfortunately unless someone has etched several copies of Homestuck in granite, and maybe even then, it will eventually be fully lost.

Well... Almost everything will be if left alone too long.

It's kind of interesting to think about what we'll leave behind when there's no one left to tend to it.

I'm not totally sure how historians will explain that America ruined its own economy for no good reason by electing the "let me ruin the economy" man

I hope to live long enough to find out.

[cupcakestreets]

My Friend Made An Emmet Virus

So this happened a few months ago or so, don’t know I’m time blind, but this starts a few years back, specifically after Pokémon Legends Arceus came out. My friend who is a computer wiz, game dev, and number #1 Emmet Lover was absolutely devastated when they see Ingo was separated from their brother. I was not very familiar with the Subway Masters at the time and they were twins who ran the battle subway, and you would basically have to beat a bunch of people in battle consecutively to see them, which absolutely sucked for me because honestly I do not care much for battling in Pokemon, honestly, I’m really there to collect little guys and take care of them, so no wonder I never heard about them in the modern day. But they got me obsessed with them and we were absolutely sharing headcanons and angst about Emmet obsessively looking for his brother like every Submas fan was at the time. My friend who I will now refer to as EV, got inspired by the glitch Emmet concept to create a “haunted” version of Pokémon Black and White where the Emmet AI would immediately go “turbo” if you delete the Ingo file in the game. I thought that was a really fun idea, and we went back and forth on the story and concepts for it, but I being a shrimple artist knew nothing about coding, or anything thing computer related so I left them to it. Honestly, I thought they would’ve dropped it after a bit but, no.

EV worked tirelessly on this thing guys. Like pulled all nights and neglected their health to create this thing. I was very concerned for them and I told them to seriously think about their well being. They did not text back for a bit and I did not speak to them for like a month or so due to school stuff and I was also just doing my own thing. Then one day, they send me a file on discord. It was Pokémon White and all they typed under it was “it’s finished.” I will not lie, I was super excited. We talked endlessly about this and I was curious to know what they did with it. So I boot up the game on my laptop and start playing! So at first it plays normally, in fact I think I was tricked into playing Pokémon White, which it’s a good game, I see why black and white are fan favorite games. I even tried to play the battle subway, and it played like how it does in the actual game. This when I thought “oh wait, it’s like doki doki literature club where I have to go into the files!” Which is what I did.

In the files I saw the Ingo.exe and Emmet.exe files. Which I’m like “aw yeah. I just gotta get rid of Ingo.” I’ll just put him in the recycling and put him back after I get the full crazy emmet experience, is what I thought. That turned out to be a mistake that I will pay drastically later on. I open up the game and immediately the change is apparent. Instead of the legendary appearing at the bottom screen I’m greeted by Emmet, standing in a black void with the game music turned down really low, and it played in the distance. I thought it was so freaky and cool, I immediately went to tell EV that it worked! EV replied back with the emmet sprite emoji. And I didn’t notice it till later but they deleted the game files from our chat history. I went back to playing the cursed game and it just slowly zoomed in on Emmet’s sprite. Which if you’ve seen how the Subway Master’s Sprites look in the the first game compared to the second you would honestly find them to be really creepy, especially when they stand in the void and just look directly at you. When I clicked into the game your character immediately is inside the Gear Station. The music is the battle subway them but occasionally it’ll just stop, or take these long unsettling pauses. Emmet approaches my MC, and goes “Put Ingo back.” And I got chills because I will admit I was playing this at night like a creepypasta/horror obsessed fool and they were talking directly to me. Like the sprite was centered to be looking directly at me. But I press forward wanting to see what will happen. He continues; “This is not funny. In fact, it’s not very nice. Put Ingo back.” And dialogue options appear and you can go “Okay” or “No”. The No button was greyed out so I couldn’t press it. So I pressed okay. The MC was able to move freely after that and I left the building. I decided to explore a bit, see what else I can do. I talked to the NPCs and they all say “Put Ingo back” or “Put him back” and I even ran into a glitched Colress near one of the houses and he said “put him back.” This happened with a few other major npcs of the game when ever I moved around the map, they would just pop up all glitchy and distorted, everyone you would talk to would just say a variation of “put Ingo back” or “where is he?”. Cilan and his Brothers kept glitching into each other near the gear station, and their faces would turn black square. The rival character was all red and emmets text box would appear over him, saying the lines you get when you meet him on the double battle line. What made it extra freaky is whenever I would try to leave Nimbasa City I would land right back inside the Gear station, Emmet standing there looking at me, same thing happened when I tried to enter buildings. I think occasionally there would be these times where his sprite would flash on the screen enlarged and his eyes would look side to side like he was looking for something. It scared me and I think I couldn’t do anything else so I decided to go into the recycling bin and get the Ingo file. To my horror, he was not there. I started to freak out because I know I did not clean out the bin and I made sure to keep it open just in case. I went to EV and ask them to please resend the files, and they sent the emmet sprite emoji, again, and then sent gibberish. I told them that it was not funny. All I got was spam of emmet sprites and under it asking “Did you find Ingo?” After that I closed discord. But I was getting pings on my phone, and I ran over to turn it off.

I go back to my files and I start seeing my stuff being renamed. “I am Emmet” “where is he” “what did you do to him” “put him back”. I closed out of it to see my wallpaper was changed to a picture of Emmet’s sprite enlarged and looking directly at me with hyper realistic eyes. The icons on my computer were all turned into sprites of emmet and under it said “put him back” more sprite icons filled my desktop and they started to invade my entire laptop. My phone got the same treatment, my files and icons turning into Emmet, along with renaming things to “Where is Ingo?” “I am Emmet” “Put Ingo back”.

Needless to say that laptop was locked away. It was absolutely unusable after that. No amount of restarts or shut downs could save it. Tried to see if I can hook it to another computer to do anything and they just spread to that computer. That old phone? Replaced. The emmets started taking over that one as well. I deleted that discord and made another one. I think they’re looking for Ingo still. Which they probably won’t find him considering EV has the only files with Ingo in them. I don’t think they made it to my contacts list as I did not get any messages wondering what was happening with their phones, at least not yet. So yeah my friend made an evil Emmet Virus. I think I’ve had enough Emmets in my life time.

[nomazee]

dan heng x gn reader — 1.6k — long overdue continuation of my dumb delinquent au (and the two remaining fans cheer in delight), high school au, probably very americanized, probably ooc, very super incredibly vague implications to sad things but it's so blink-and-you'll-miss-it, himeko is dan heng's adoptive guardian in this au, do u guys hate me for the hoops i'm jumping through to squeeze every character in this au, reluctant friends-to-crush-to-lovers fast/slow burn unbearable unspoken feelings trope

drabble no. 1 of this series/universe, u should probably read this first heh...

notes: hi guys, i'm back after taking yet another unplanned year-long hiatus, hope u missed me! (the crowd stays quiet) i bring u another delinquent au drabble because the worms got to me and i couldn't help it OK, OKAY?!?! enjoy! :3

—°+..｡*ﾟ｡*ﾟ+.*.｡.—

Dan Heng hasn’t seen much of you in the last week. 

It’s unusual, he defends his worries to himself, very unusual. Despite not having a single class with you, he sees you often. In the last few months since he’s known you, he’s seen you at least three times a week after school, sometimes bloody and other times free of any injury, but the point is, he sees you. Talks to you, lets you walk him home (and pointedly doesn’t let you take him to any antique stores or overpriced tea shops on the way there). 

Today is Friday, and the fifth day straight that he’s stood in the courtyard behind the school for thirty minutes after dismissal, waiting for you to show up, appearing in a breeze of glitter and dust like a poorly-practiced magician. It’s the fifth day straight that you haven’t shown up, and he’s starting to realize how paradoxical your friendship feels. 

Dan Heng is hesitant to even call it a friendship. It feels weird—it’s like he’s known you for years, like he’s grown up with you on the same block in the same neighborhood, except in truth he’s only known you for three months, and he just learned your birthday last week after (embarrassingly) prying it out of you. He doesn’t know where you live, which front door to knock on so that he can check up on you, he doesn’t even have your phone number. All he can do is circle the perimeter of school grounds, waiting for you to show up, or looking for a top hat somewhere so he can pull you up out of it like he’s the poorly-practiced magician and you’re the bunny that he’s unethically shoved into a top hat. 

Luckily for him, though, fifth time’s the charm, and on his (miserable, lonely) walk home, he bumps into you as he rounds the corner to his block. Like, really bumps into you.

He hears a semi-familiar shout of horror as he stumbles back, the sudden slam of pressure on his nose making his eyes water, and he clasps his hands over his nose (it doesn’t hurt that bad, he swears), and then your hands are grabbing his shoulder and giving him a firm shake before he can even process that it’s you he’s just stumbled into. 

“Oh!” You shout, and he registers the tilt of your head through his watery, cloudy vision, “It’s you! I was looking for you.”

Dan Heng feels like— laughing, dryly, or maybe grabbing your shoulders back and shaking you until you reflect on how ridiculous you sound—as if he wasn’t the one wandering school grounds for an hour each day for the last week in search of you, like a lost dog, and god he really hopes no one caught him doing that, but at the very least March 7th definitely saw him, which means it’s going to hit the rest of his social circle eventually and he’ll have to hang his head in shame and stay silent when all his friends ask him why he was moping for five days straight. 

“Looking for me?” he mumbles, repeating your words instead of coming up with a thought of his own because he’s still sort of reeling from the sudden sight of you and the buzzing ache in his nose. “Am I bleeding?” 

“Oh,” you say, yet again, and he feels your hands take his wrists and pull them away from his face so that you can get a good glimpse of him. “Nope, no blood. Thank god. I’d feel really bad if I had to return you to Himeko with your face mangled.” 

“Return me,” he echoes again, and in two seconds flat he sobers up and straightens his posture and finally gets a good look at your face. “What? Where have you been?” 

“Around,” you answer vaguely, like you always do, and Dan Heng is now half a step closer to actually shaking you by your shoulders and turning you upside down until the truth falls out of your pockets like cartoon coins. “I’m back now, though! I wasn’t going to get a perfect attendance award anyways, so it’s kind of whatever.” Your lips quirk up into a stupid smile, and your eyes are scanning his face and his potentially bruised nose bridge. “Did you miss me?” 

“Yeah,” he admits, like an idiot, and he unfortunately doesn’t miss the sudden stalling of your expression, the way your smile freezes for half a second and the twitch in your brow. “No,” he quickly rights, but it’s a moot point by now, “whatever. What do you mean, around? Have you been at school at all this week?” He finally looks down at your clothes, which are very much not any kind of school-uniform-adjacent garb, but rather a collared shirt with some kind of logo on the top left. 

“I’ve been working,” you say, and it’s maybe the most honest and straightforward answer that Dan Heng will ever get from you, so he relishes in it for a moment. “You know, a job. Have you heard of that before? Jobs? Employment?” 

“That’s allowed? Are we allowed to work?” 

“Well,” and you do it again, glance off to the side before coming back to him, “I hope so. I’m not looking to quit this job so soon. They hired me, so it’s all good. I just had to miss school this week so they could train me, but I’ll be back on Monday. You’ll get your daily dose of me again soon, don’t worry!” 

Working. Dan Heng doesn’t know much about your schedule, what you do after school besides annoy him and walk him home and get into fights with seemingly invisible and untraceable and unnameable people, but this feels like one more piece in a thousand-piece puzzle where half the pieces have been drenched in water and bent. He feels two steps away from knowing more about you at the same time that he feels miles away. 

“I’m at the movie theatre,” you tell him, “so you should come visit with your friends some day. Four to ten P.M. on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. You can introduce me to your friends properly, you know,” and you have that nearly-tense, nearly-dishonest quirk of your lips, and you’re looking right at him like you’re trying to tell him something without saying it, “unless you’re too embarrassed to let them meet me.” 

This is not the first time you’ve said things like this, not by a long shot. Dan Heng thinks back, and is sure that you say something along the lines of aren’t you embarrassed at least once for every two times that he talks to you. Scared you’ll get caught with me? you asked him just last week, like being with you was a surefire way to get cursed or shunned or ostracized. Dan Heng doesn't get it, and it doesn't sound like you want him to. 

“No,” he says, steadfast, realizing belatedly that your hands are still around his wrists from when you’d tugged them down off his face, and his skin beneath your fingers is heating up rapidly, but so are the tips of his ears. “That’s not it,” and he really doesn’t have the strength to say anything deeper than that, so he dodges, “what were you doing on my street? Did you go to my house?” 

You’ve been caught. Sheepishly, you let go of his wrists, one hand going up to scratch the back of your neck instead, looking at his neighbor’s dead half-dead rose bush next to the sidewalk. “I kind of figured maybe I’d check in on you, or something. Ask to hang out. But when I came at three, you weren’t home yet, so I just kind of hung out with your mom. I was leaving just now. Figured you were busy, or something?” 

It’s an open-ended question, one that Dan Heng is very unwilling to honestly answer—if he did, he’d have to admit that the task that was oh-so-arduously occupying his time after school was sitting in the courtyard like a grieving wife waiting for her spouse to come home from war. He shakes his head instead of explaining anything—that should be enough of an answer. 

“She gave me cookies,” you continue in lieu of a real response from Dan Heng. “Seriously, am I the only one that eats them, or am I, like, stealing your only source of food every time I come over?” 

“The first one. I hate those things. They’re dry. I don’t understand how you eat them like that.” 

“Woah! Rude! Whatever, more for me. Hey, you’ll help me with all that schoolwork I missed, right?” You punch him in the shoulder playfully, which might’ve knocked the wind out of him had it been aimed any closer at his sternum. “I think we have almost all the same teachers. And I'm a quick learner, so it won't be so bad for you."

“Fine,” he says with a faux reluctance that would really only be convincing to a child, “I can walk you home.” 

“Haha,” and you punch his shoulder again, soothing it this time with a pat before you trail your hand up to the side of his neck, clasping the side of it with your warm palm, like you’re holding his pulse in your hand, and Dan Heng holds his breath so you won’t easily feel the rapid thump of blood underneath his skin, “maybe next time, champ.” 

You’re smiling again, laughing when you look at the paling expression on his face, like you know something he doesn’t, and he barely has time to feel disappointed at your easy rejection before you laugh, breathy, one more time, and say goodbye. 

(Himeko, to Dan Heng’s utter misery, hounds him for “details, the whole story, what did they say, Heng?!” the second he steps into the threshold of his house, keys still dangling from his hand. Terrible, awful, miserable. He does in fact, tell her everything.)

[seventhconsumedsigil]

The following is a record of the infamous Speech of Defiance by the heretic wizard known as Ao, formerly proscribed by the Tower under penalty of immediate execution, indisputably the pivotal point between the Age of Hierarchy and the Age of Madness. This copy is kindly produced by now-Archmage Vath, who was in attendance at the time as the scribe and only other direct witness, and so could make this copy after that proscription became dead law.

Archmage Telluric - We meet here today to discuss the "alleged" heresies of Mage Ao, who stands before us. Under my powers as Archmage, I shall sit in judgement over this case, and serve as executioner when it concludes. Apprentice Vath holds position as Scribe and will ensure the transmission is clear and properly archived. The courtroom is sealed against any trickery your fetid allies might pull, so don't-

Mage Ao - Oh do shut up, you withered old windbag. We all know why we're here, and we all know what's going to happen. Stuff the formality.

Telluric - [A lot of spluttering that I don't see the point in writing down. Heretic, lich, blasphemer, none of it really coherently strung together into a sentence. He did heat the air a by 20 degrees through the whole chamber while doing it though, which was an impressive display of unchanneled power if not for how uncomfortable it made my seat. This isn't helped by the subsequent effort of will Ao made. It would take us months to work out what he had done, but at the time it felt like being suffocated by very soft pillows. An uncomfortable combination, let me tell you]

Ao - Sweet silence. Ah, that's better. What, surprised that I can do that without you opposing it? Because I'm not effecting you, Archmage. The air around you, that's another matter.

[This was patently ridiculous, as effecting non-discrete objects like that should have required a ritual circle to manage the definition by common understanding. I know this sounds horribly archaic now, but magic was a lot rougher back then. For example, the wards sealing the courtroom were on a hard-set timer of 1/23rd of a solar cycle and would not budge unless blasted down before that time. Appreciate how we can do things in non-prime numbers nowadays.]

Ao- Now, I don't much care for defending myself to the likes of you all, but let me get a few things straight, since if I'm going to be condemned I want it to be accurate. Lichdom, the act of binding one's dead and dormant soul back into the body, has a few important differences. It loses the ability to naturally grow, leaving consumption the only viable path for increased magical potential, but more importantly it deforms the soul through shear forces. It tears at it, opening holes that cannot be healed without more raw material, leading to the legendary soul-thirst. What I have done is much simpler and far, far stupider, despite the fact it works! I just filled in my skull with raw magic and let my soul press against that to induce cognition instead, at least where the scraps that used to be my brain were. That causes stress, yes, but compressive stress. My soul is a mass of calluses and grows so slowly I'll probably reach Archmage level potential... approximately never, or at least an order of magnitude late, but there are upsides. You would not believe how badly optimised that sack of fat in your skull is. We've spent over ten thousand years killing anything that strays from the nice safe bounds of known magic, and arguably for good reason in some cases, but the rest... no, you've all been sat on your thrones for too long, got too comfortable with being right in the ways we teach even the dumbest apprentice not to be, before the immortality abrades their common sense away. And here I am rambling almost as bad as you are, in front of such an audience. Terrible habit, spent too long lecturing and not enough fighting. Well, I suppose a little class demonstration to end it off is due then. Watch closely, oh Archmage, and consider this. If I can run on a substrate of magic, why should I remain constrained to one piece of meat?

[At this point, Ao proceeded to fall over stone dead, in what was shockingly actually his plan. The autopsy revealed that was in fact his body, but the first sighting of one of his crystal spiders a week afterwards confirmed that he was in fact perfectly alive and had figured out body-transference a whole month before, and it was almost safe when he used it. The Hivemind of Ao would go on to become, as Ao liked to style himself, A Big Damn Problem. They still called him a lich for the next sixteen years though, and I have it on the best of authority it drove him demented that entire time.]

When a mage is badly injured, magic sometimes "fills in the gaps"—growing an arcane hand or leg. You suffered brain damage that would have killed most. Magic filled in your mind.

[anadrym]

Extended Author's Notes for Left Behind Ch17.

Spoilers!

Chapter title is from "Cascade" by Satron Paint Samuel. Very pretty song. :)

At 5590 words, this is the longest chapter so far! It will be dethroned by the next one, which is pushing 7k.

I feel like I keep making Cait touch Vi's tattoo, but like. Of course she does. It's her name, the name they tried to turn into a number but couldn't. And names have kinda become a thing in this fic. Caitlyn and Ghost, Vi and Number 6 / "the girl", [REDACTED] and [REDACTED], etc.

And, of course, one of the first things Caitlyn tells Petra is Vi's name. :')

Okay, so the whole part with Caitlyn panicking about the serum and whether it's keeping Vi alive? That was all added later. I'll admit, I originally forgot to address it until y'all brought it up in the comments a few chapters back. I couldn't find a place to fit it sooner, which ended up working out. Cait was too preoccupied with getting them out to consider it, so she didn't think about it until she was safe enough.

So, I don't know if this is a big reveal or anything, but... The Baroness completely misled Caitlyn (and you guys). The serum they've been using in Maintenance is entirely to keep Vi under control. It has absolutely nothing to do with Vi's revival after being shot. That was achieved via a different serum, which has not been necessary since.

Also, I love Petra just cutting off that downward spiral by calling bullshit. It's a conclusion Caitlyn would have come to on her own if it wasn't her partner's life that she was fretting over.

During her realization, Caitlyn goes absolutely still - no blinking, barely breathing, staring blankly into the distance - which is why Petra looks so unnerved.

Vi's head injury (from the bullet) is completely healed. It is not affecting her ability to understand speech or anything. That's entirely the control serum (an unintended side effect that the Baroness happily took advantage of). So, as soon as they can get the serum out of her system, she'll be able to start verbally communicating again.

They will end up doing a series of blood transfusions. We're not going to see them (I'm tired of Vi being unconscious, so we'll be back with her next chapter), but they happen and they help.

I don't like writing hospitals. I don't know how they work and I'm honestly not quite interested enough to find out. So I will avoid them as much as possible in my writing. That's why Caitlyn refuses. Luckily, Petra knows someone who knows someone.

Petra sees how pale Caitlyn is, sees that her hands are shaking, and realizes that Caitlyn needs to eat and drink. She doesn't say anything until after all of Vi's wounds are bandaged because she knows Cait won't even listen until then.

The bruising from the restraints is on Vi's wrists and ankles; since the injuries are on the insides of her elbows and thighs, Petra isn't too worried about bandages there triggering something. She has to ask about Vi's neck because she doesn't want to risk it.

(I want to write a fic where Vi is collared. The guard dog imagery is just too good to pass up.)

Oh, I am never going to get enough of side characters calling Vi and Caitlyn each other's "girl." There's just something about "your girl." The recognition of their complete and utter devotion to each other, to the point of possession and codependence? Maybe?

I think it's really good that Petra calls Caitlyn out here. 'Do you trust me or not? If you came here for help, then let me help you.' She knows Caitlyn is still in survival mode, where she can't trust anyone, and she's telling her that she made it. She doesn't have to just keep surviving. She's safe now, and she can let herself feel all the things she's been surpressing. She can let someone else take over for a bit. She can focus on healing.

I was having so much trouble keeping track of who was on which side of the bed. I'll have to sketch it later.

Caitlyn keeps touching Vi lightly, afraid of waking her or triggering her or hurting her. And Vi keeps pressing into the touches. Cait is focused (for now) on the physical wounds. By Vi is used to hurting; she just wants the comfort of a touch without the intent to harm.

Cait is still in survival mode. Everything is a potential threat. Which is why she reaches for her gun when Petra comes back into the room. Petra can tell that Cait still needs time to let go of that defensiveness, so she doesn't hold it against her.

I originally had Petra give Caitlyn a glass of water, but when I was editing, I was like, "Oh, wait, she has low blood sugar! She needs some juice!"

Hooray! She's eaten one (1) whole sandwich! She's had water and juice! Yay!

Yes, Petra is actively trying to give Caitlyn even the smallest sense of normalcy that she can.

Petra giving them clothes makes me think of Captain Shakespeare in Stardust. :)

A new problem comes to light. If Vi hasn't eaten in years, then her digestive system absolutely has to be eased back into functioning. Which means that they'll have to keep administering nutrients and fluids intravenously. I'm sure that won't freak Vi out at all.

Petra absolutely has done this before. Caitlyn will find out more about it during the very brief timeskip between this chapter and the next. You guys will learn about it when Vi does.

Petra remembered Caitlyn's name! She's gonna keep calling her 'Ghost' though, until Cait says otherwise. She only uses 'Caitlyn' now because she's desperate for Cait to let someone to help her, even if it's just for ten minutes.

Mmm, and the recognition that the separation anxiety is two-sided. A well-warranted, though frankly unhealthy, amount of codependence. (They'll work on it.)

Caitlyn's reflection kinda makes the 'Ghost' moniker a little too fitting.

Cait leaves her dirty clothes in the bathroom. Petra will run them through the laundry and will find Tobias' ring. Just for everyone keeping track of where it is. ;)

Hell yeah! Emotional breakdown in the shower! Write what you fucking know!

Leave Caitlyn alone and unsupervised and she will go through your cabinets and steal your unused toothbrushes.

Survival mode again. Caitlyn trusts Petra, but still almost panics when the woman is between her and Vi (bear behavior), and when she can't see what she's doing. Logic vs. Fear.

Vi will get her earrings back, don't worry. One of you pointed out that they're all she has left from before the Purge and it almost made me cry.

Cait: I have to protect Vi, I can't let anyone touch her, she's hurt and I can't risk anyone else getting close. Also Caitlyn: Yeah, sure, I'll take these drugs without even knowing what they are.

So, apparently, you're not supposed to lie down if you have broken ribs??? I didn't know this. That's the main reason I made Caitlyn's injury less severe; she needs to be able to cuddle.

Petra, knowing how stubborn Caitlyn is and seeing the results of Vi's will to survive: "...I honestly can't imagine a world in which she doesn't recover."

I wanted them to cuddle! I'm so mad at myself! I damaged Caitlyn's ribs and inadvertantly sabotaged myself! Fuck! >:(

Gonna fucking make them hold hands instead. Damn it. I wanted them to cuddle. :(

Kissing your partner's hands, my beloved. (Especially when those hands have been forced to do terrible things.)

Teaser for next (next) week:

Her hair is messy, falling out of her loose, lopsided ponytail. Her clothes are rumpled. There are lines on the side of her face where the folds of the blanket have left their impressions in her skin. It's so beautiful and imperfect and Caitlyn.

Vi's heart cracks open inside her chest, something molten bleeding out of it. There is so much she wants to say, but all of it gets caught in the dry desert of her throat.

You came back. You found me. I missed you. I love you.

[in-collection]

Le facteur « Loki » by @hito76

Stargate SG-1 (1997-2007) | Sam Carter/Jack O'Neill | 27,950 words | 256 pages

You can see the full typeset HERE.

You can also print it if you want a copy for yourself, I provide printable files below. The book is 11x18cm AKA 4,3"x7,1" & is bound with a coptic stitch. Mine's printed on 80gsm grey recycled paper & 210gsm grey paper for the cover.

DOWNLOAD THE FILES / PRINTING & BINDING GUIDE

This typeset breaks quite a few rules. First, it's a fic in French, and second it's not hosted on AO3, so I had to adapt the cover a little bit as best as I could. I don't intend to make this a habit, but this fic is quite special to me. Without getting too much into because it's very personal, it is one of the fics that introduced me to the world of fandoms, and I just had to typeset it.

What I tried to make is something less based on the text and more based on my memories of my first read-through. Those memories are fairly old and, I'm sure, very skewed by time and by my own feelings about the fic. They evoke mostly nostalgia and wonder at the fic and absurdity and annoyance at how inconvenient it was to read it. I invite you to click to link at the top to take a look at what it still looks like. That's a look people who where on Internet at the time (2007-8) will be quite familiar with: rough, clunky and blocky, full of awkward compositions and bright colors.

I tried to have all of that in the typeset. Surreal beauty, because this fic was nothing short of a miracle for me, mixed with weird clunkiness and inconvenient things, like the absence of folio (page number) which is really annoying but that was very much the way things were. The only clue you had as to where you were in the fic was how deep you were in the webpage. Good luck closing the tab and then finding where you left off lol.

Another example, I quite liked how at the time scene breaks were sometimes written with the pairing's initials - meaning JSJSJSJS. So 2010s.

Of course, there is also the text laid out on the full spread. Inconvenient? Hard to get printed? In bad taste? All of those, but that's kind of the point too. Stupid and beautiful. I hope I captured some of that.

This is also my biggest typeset so far. Nearly 2cm thick! It sure makes for such a satisfying book to hold!

One final note. I am not sure about the word count, actually. I usually take the count provided by AO3, but this time AO3 is not in the equation, and Word is giving me a number different than InDesign's. I went with InDesign's as it seemed more accurate but. Who's to say.

[thefrogman]

Alright, let's address this point by point.

@khorneschosen said:

if I have to choose one or the other kind of existence I'm picking the one in which I'm fat unhealthy but I ain't starving.

I would choose that too, but that is a false choice. Our country has plenty of food. No one has to starve.

But the cheap, calorie-dense, high-fat, soft, and easy-to-prepare foods are killing us. Heart disease is the number one cause of death. And commercial food industries are trying to engineer this unhealthy food to be as addictive and easy as possible. We have these ancient food-motivated drives telling us to eat as much as possible so we don't starve. And for many, it is difficult to ignore that instinct. And we shame folks for succumbing to that survival adaptation.

People get hung up on the "processing" of it all. They think industrial process is tainting the food in some way to make us all sick. But it is so much simpler than that.

It's full of fat and calories and it's soft.

Don't sleep on the softness. It is easy to eat quickly before we feel full. And many working class people gravitate towards these foods because they are so tired from the grind of capitalism, they never have the energy to prepare their own food with individual ingredients.

If you're happy our society solved the problem of not starving and want to call the issue resolved, that is up to you. But man-made food processes have long stopped caring about feeding people and moved on to overfeeding people for profit.

@siryouarebeingmocked said:

If the choice is between fake sugar that tastes bad and real sugar that tastes good, and both are just as bad for you, why is it wrong to say "I'd rather have the good tasting stuff? Which should also be cheaper?

High fructose corn syrup is not fake sugar. It is just very concentrated sugar. But chemically they are pretty much the same. In fact, when the body breaks it down, it is functionally identical to cane sugar. Our body sees it all as fructose and glucose.

As far as it "tasting better," that is a myth. People are biased toward the "organic" version always being better, but blind tests do not show a huge difference in taste and it usually comes down to a preference of how sweet you like your drink. The American brands often pump up the sweetness in soda and candy—probably to make it more addictive.

When people do a blind taste test, they often pick the American version as "better" most likely because they prefer it a little sweeter.

He got it wrong.

And so did he.

Both preferred the US version.

This video busts the myth of cane sugar being superior due to its "natural" chemistry.

And this video is full of comparisons and experiments on this issue. In the end he eliminated all variables and tasted sugar against HFCS and found no difference between them.

As far as cane sugar being cheaper, that is just not true either. It is cheaper in Mexico for Mexicans. It is more expensive in the US. Switching to cane sugar would increase the prices of soda for US consumers.

I think lobbying for lower sugar versions might be better.

Or we could stop demonizing aspartame. Because, guess what, it's fine.

All forms of sugar are the bad thing people are over-consuming. There is no distinction in their overall badness.

Spending our tax dollars on resources to legislate a pointless switch from sugar to sugar is wasteful.

It is... inefficient.

>Eliminating food deserts

How, exactly?

A food desert isn't 'people are starving', it's 'lack of access to healthy food'.

Do you want the government to force supermarket companies to open branches in unfriendly neighbourhoods? Subsidize those stores with taxpayer money?

Or just to give out free food?

There are plenty of experts with great ideas for how to reduce food deserts. Here is a handy list I smooshed together from a few different sources.

Subsidize Grocery Stores Offer tax incentives and grants to attract full-service grocery stores to underserved areas.

Mobile Markets & Food Trucks Fund pop-up farmers markets and food trucks that bring fresh produce and healthy foods directly into low-access neighborhoods. Ya know, like the ice cream truck, but with tomatoes and shit.

Urban Agriculture Support community gardens, rooftop farms, and local food co-ops to increase local access to fresh produce. Vertical farming and hydroponic technology offer a way to grow fresh vegetables at scale in an urban setting.

Improve Public Transportation Enhance routes and reliability so residents can easily reach grocery stores outside their immediate area. Trains and buses and subways, let's go!

Cooking and Nutrition Education Teach people how to cook nutritious food. Focus on low cost meals with accessible ingredients that can be prepared with minimal effort.

Free Food Yes, free food. We should expand SNAP and make school lunches free. There are 14 million kids living in food-insecure homes. Kids should have access to nutritious meals.

@beardedmrbean said:

Never thought I'd see the day when people on the left started to defend HFCS, guess all it took was the right person suggesting reducing it.

No one is defending it. It's bad. But it is not *worse*. Our understanding has evolved. We realize that replacing sugar with sugar is not going to solve our sugar problem. Eliminating HFCS and replacing it with an identical amount of cane sugar will not have any noticeable health improvements.

@robert-the-foul said:

Another big thing to end food desserts is for fucking junkies and assholes to stop stealing. Then, stores won't close due to a huge money loss.

Poverty is a huge causal factor creating drug addicts and desperate people who have to steal to eat. Right now this country is trying to treat its addiction issue by sending kids and grandmas and pesky protestors to another country.

That's the strategy for the opioid crisis.

Deporting migrants is going to solve everything... because reasons.

*whispers* Most drug smugglers are American citizens.

People are always going to have access to drugs. If you want less addicts, we need to treat them. We need to keep them out of severe poverty and desperation. They need Narcan to stay alive and healthcare to get better. We've tried rounding these people up and putting them in jail and it doesn't work. It's time to take a different approach.

As for the stealing, Universal Basic Income could really help with that. When people aren't desperate, they don't feel compelled to do desperate things to survive and stay fed.

@libertarianbean-plz-dont-step-sh said:

A year ago they were the ones bitching (quite rightly, in my opinion, they were just annoying in the way they did it) that the US didn't have enough restrictions for harmful ingredients in the food industry.

They would also bring up how much different it is in Europe (it is) a lot of studies keep being made every year (they are) and all the chemicals that are discovered to be dangerous are banned (tis true). These people would point out (whine about) how in the US, soooo many of these chemicals are allowed without any sort of restrictions, and said (cried) that the US should be more like Europe.

Everything is chemicals. Chemophobia is an unhelpful approach to food safety. There are plenty of chemicals that are great and plenty of natural ingredients that will kill us.

Europe and the US both have their own food safety systems. And both are pretty good when they are well run. The US does some things better. Europe does some things better. But this idea that Europe is banning more harmful ingredients while the US allows them is mostly wrong. It's complicated and nuanced.

The gist of it is that Europe regulates more with an "abundance of caution" approach. If there is a small chance that something might be harmful and people won't miss it much, they will try to ban or limit it. Sometimes they will ban something just because of public demand despite little evidence to back it up. Which is what happened with food dyes—as there isn't much evidence to support that they are actually harmful.

Food scientist Ann Reardon breaks it down well.

Oh woe is the poor innocent multi billion dollar company! Why would anyone force them to use something that won't cause kids to develop diabetes at an early age!!!

Switching to cane sugar will not prevent diabetes in kids.

Less sugar will.

@siryouarebeingmocked said:

"you only know what the right wingers want"

Not even that. They regularly hallucinate sinister motives for right-wing people.

There are plenty of sinister motives on the Right. I don't have to hallucinate extras.

In this case, RKF Jr. is a conspiracy-brained nut job. He thinks scientific consensus cannot be trusted and will only entertain dubious evidence that goes against that consensus. For him, the truth must always be hidden or hard to find. He needs to be the hero who uncovers it and saves the day. He spits in the face of millions of working-class researchers who have spent their lives building up preponderances of evidence and data to help create the best medicines and treatments in human history.

He wants to burn it all down and have his every conspiracy theory entertained as if it is valid and worthy of consideration. He is cutting the funding of vital research and prioritizing solutions that are either pointless or will make such a small difference that the beneficial health outcomes will be imperceptible.

Spending time, money, and resources switching seed oils to beef tallow is stupid.

If you are deep frying French fries and chicken wings changing to beef tallow isn't going to make them any healthier. You are far more at risk from the fat and calories than what oil is used.

Spending time, money, and resources changing sugar to sugar is stupid.

Spending time, money, and resources banning food dye is also stupid.

Spending time, money, and resources removing fluoride from the water is *very* stupid.

But it gets worse than RFK Jr. wasting time with his pointless crusades.

Many of his crusades are very dangerous. He has already laid off thousands of people in important healthcare roles. He has cut funding for important research.

And he is handling the measles outbreaks about as well as you might expect. He is recommending people take Vitamin A as a treatment.

Whoops!

This isn't the first time his advice has harmed people.

And now he is talking about scouring the private health data of autistic patients to come up with some magical cause for autism in September.

@lordascapelion said:

But holy shit is OP retarded?

“I think we should do X.”

“UH WHY ARE YOU DOING X? YOU SHOULD DO A, B, C AND D YOU FUCKING MORON DO YOU EVEN CARE ABOUT THE AMERICAN PEOPLE?”

But honestly at this point political propaganda blogs are fueled by retard logic

No, I am not retarded.

Though I am very tired of people trying to force that word to have a comeback. I know you think it signifies you are rebelling against the woke crusade to censor language. But in reality you just immediately let everyone know you are a cringe-lord dipshit.

I think my logic is sound. The government has finite resources. They only have so many employees. They only have so much time to accomplish important work. They only have enough budget to address a handful of major issues.

A good leader of a government department will triage. They will figure out which problems are urgent, which are easy, which are near impossible and then adjust the department's goals and priorities to efficiently address what needs to be done.

Spending time, money, and labor on pointless endeavors robs resources from the more important causes. He's fixing hangnails while the country is bleeding out.

I want him to fix things that are actually broken. I want him to take action that will improve health outcomes on a population scale. We need more research, not less. We need the 5 million kids without health insurance to get care. We need drug costs under control. We need more nurses in hospitals. We need a pandemic response team.

The list of needs is sooooo long and he wants to waste time adjusting the hue/saturation of Froot Loops.

RKF Jr. is picking easy performative actions that will do nothing except satisfy those who believe in conspiracy over actual evidence. Many people are convinced that all of our health issues are due to these inconsequential factors. So when he addresses them and these fools give him a big "attaboy," he will increase his political capital and feel emboldened to tackle bigger conspiracies...

His white whale.

Vaccines.

Actually his white whale was an actual whale that he beheaded.

Okay, vaccines are his OTHER white whale.

He wants to disrupt the most successful medical treatment in history.

Did you know we used to have constant dead babies? Before 1900 people just assumed a few of their kids were gonna die. People think the average lifespan used to be 40 and no one ever made it to old age. Nope... there were just so many dead babies it skewed the statistic. If a person survived childhood, they had a very good chance of living until they were old and gray.

"Vaccines have saved an estimated 154 million lives over the past 50 years. This includes 146 million lives among children under 5, with 101 million being infants under 1 year. Increased access to crucial vaccines means that infant mortality rates are 40% lower than they would be in a world without vaccines."

So... am I hallucinating?

I can think of a hundred things we could do to improve our collective health a hundred fold more than replacing sugar with a slightly different sugar that breaks down to be the same sugar in our bodies.

Free cancer screenings.

Eliminating food deserts.

Free vaccines.

Free birth control.

Drug treatment.

Naloxone to anyone who wants it.

Okay, I am too tired to do one hundred. But I'm sure I could.

[eri-pl]

@edennill I was thinking more about what you said about Valarin grammar, and of course you were very right!

Of course it would be very irregular, because complexity of meaning.

The relationship between "see" and "have seen" is maybe same enough as "hear" and "have heard", but very different from, say, "forge" and "have forged". They'd have a lot of tenses, some existing only for one or a few verbs. The elven scholars would group them into larger groups like "past simple", "past perfect" etc just with irregular forms, but the Ainur would say "No! No! those are different!"

And for other verb grammar it's even stranger: there would be no clear table of [person x number x maybe gender x honorific? x tense x...]

Sure, for some there would be. The categories that incarnates have would mostly have the table structure (person x genders x number x tense), but surely there are future tenses that Elves can do and Men can't (...let's not even begin on all the more transcendental tenses, but Men also have a tense of "finished for good" that's likely never used for Elves, but maybe Feanor...).

But most of the language is less regular-ish:

There is a number/gender for a married couple as a whole in particular.

Each Vala has their separate honorific, because each has such a different relationship with their Maiar. Of course you can't have those forms in plural, or, for example, Aulë's honorific verb forms in feminine grammatical gender.

Inclusive "we", exclusive "we", "I'd love you to be included if you want"-"we",… A ton of them. And the uncertain/wishful forms are obviously only for future tenses, because in the past it's either inclusive, exclusive, or probably "You too, but in a different way" and some others… [the XKCD geologists post came to my mind]

And many, many other things like this. And don't even get me started on the stranger parts.

And I still (even more than before) hold to the HC that Mairon wanted to make it regular at some point.

But now it's clear to me that it was late, it was when he was already falling. Because when you have a language that's irregular and complex to match the complexities of it all, and someone wants to force it into tables, and that's bad... Oh, it fits so well! It fits with Tolkien's attitude of "who pulls a thing apart in order to understand it, is dumb".

He would try to do hyper-regular grammar in Black Speech.

And I agree, Fefe learned to use the more normal parts well.

Fingolfin just spoke Quenya, not willing to do another thing in which he was inferior to his (half!) brother. Finarfin learned to use the normal parts not as well as Feanor, but still well, and then ignored it for most of the time anyway, and just said things in whichever way felt right, resulting in a (rock-opera-style) wild mix of brilliant ideas (that reinforced the Valar's belief that the Elves know things well and need no explanations) and absolute trash (mostly politely ignored).

BTW you'd think, maybe, that it was like: Manwë made the words for air-related things, Ulmo for water etc, but no. Everyone else made words for various kinds of wind and Manwë was like "But those two are very different, you can't out them in the same category!" and similarly for the other Valar.

The more someone knows a thing, the more difficult it is to put it into categories— no, that's not fully true, either. Categories and words do have merit, because they allow for narratives and parables and literary devices and many things like that.

But also, language is a simplification of the world, not the world itself, so the closer someone is to comprehending a part of the word, the less language-based it would be, or at least the more nuanced and bigger the language, I think.

Somehow, those both are true.

…still, I do think that Manwë complained about doubted the words for winds, and Ulmo for various water phenomenons.

[getawayheaven]

.

[pagesofkenna]

this chapter made me so emo about Keiichi. I still don't really get what his deal is but for him to start out as a bully and a petty rival, and then this??

boy loves his hometown so much that he literally has no greater ambition than to live and die in it. meanwhile his brother has his sights on the NHL; Rou is aiming for the Olympics. is it heartwarming that Keiichi treasures his home so much that he can't see anything beyond it, or sad that he has hundreds of photos of the same factory smokestack that he's already planning to die staring at??

I don't know. but Noda could have easily made Keiichi the hotshot rival who thinks he deserves the best in the world, but instead he made Keiichi a big fish dreaming only of his small pond.

(from Dogsred ch. 28)

[squishyputty]

You know what? This sounds fun, as simple of a question as it is. I'm going to go with comedy for my genre, though there are probably multiple others that I could do just as well.

For a comedy, the answer to this question is quite straight forward, though it's most easily answered by another question. What system is the funniest? In my opinion, there are a few things that are nescessary for a skill system to be funny. It has to be unpredictable (random, multiple degrees of success), extreme (you'll rarely get a result of 'nothing...' unless nothing happening is, itself, an extreme result), and flexible (able to be used for a wide variety of actions, without needing additional rules). By examining each of these criteria, which you're welcome to disagree with, of course, I think we can begin to determine the best type of system for a comedy game.

Firstly, let's look at unpredictable. Some systems are much easier to guess what may happen then others. This is common in systems where you have large bonuses, or where the exact odds can be easily calculated. d100 roll under is a system that gives a clear percent chance. Card systems have chances that can be predicted based on what's previously been drawn. Systems where modifiers can get extremely high can result in near zero chance of failure. But systems with dice pools, small bonuses, or varied dice size are all still options.

Next, we have extreme. Right away, this rules out most card systems, and all pass/fail systems. To be truly extreme, we need no simple results as possibilities, and at least "failure but" and "success but" results, in addition to normal success and failure. If you want to push things even farther, I suggest having no "failure" and "success" result. Instead, it should be a system that ranges from "no and" to "yes and," as well as including "no but" and "yes but." In otherwords, you should never just succeed or just fail. There should always be more to it than that, for good or for ill. Since this requires a large range of results, and the less predictable the better, we can remove any system that gives a small range, such as d10 and d6 systems. However, this still leaves several options, so let's examine the last trait, flexible.

When I say that the system should be flexible, what I mean is that it should accomodate as many situations as possible with as few rules as possible. This rules out most heavily complex systems, tiered skills, sub skills, and so on. Instead, the skills should either be completely abstract, completely custom, or very vague. The simplest solution is to use only stats, not stats and skills. This more or less rules out d20 systems, since they have too little varience without more in depth skill systems.

With all that said, what do I suggest? Exploding dice/dice pool system. No matter how good you are, you could roll all ones. Even if you suck at something, you could roll max, letting you roll higher dice as well. In addition, the potential range of results is huge, and you can apply extra effects on certain individual dice results, as well as based on the totals. For example, something bad could happen for every 1 you roll on any die, and something good for any result that's high enough. And then you need to roll at or above a target number to succeed. As a result, you can never predict how things are going to go down, giving lots of potential for funny and unexpected consequences for even simple actions.

Full Nuance Saturday: Explain what system of checks (something like d20 roll over, Xd6 keep highest, d100 roll under) would fit best for a genre of your choice

Your answer should be 500-1000 words long