#but it could save you from taking a big financial loss if someone fails to pay up during these tough times. At the end of the day

[artisticdivasworld]

Why Factoring can be a Lifeline for Truckers During Economic Downturns

A lot of truckers are familiar with factoring, but maybe you haven’t thought about how it could be a life saver during economy uncertainty. Everyone’s feeling the pinch with fewer loads, longer wait times, and the unpredictability of when payments are coming in. Right now, cash flow is more important than ever, and factoring could be the thing that keeps your business steady while you ride out…

[emberfrostlovesloki]

Criminal Minds October Prompt List - whump

Banner by @theshyshewolf

Good evening loves! We made it to October! This is a big deal for me because it marks me being back on Tumblr for a whole year writing for Criminal Minds. Also, very exciting because October means WHUMP, which is my favorite type of fic to write! This prompt list is inspired by the always amazing, @imagining-in-the-margins, who always make the best prompt lists. I won’t write for all of my prompts, but I might for a few. For obvious reasons the theme for this list is whump; however, I’m not a huge no-happy-ending type person, so if you want to take a prompt and give it a happy ending instead of a tragic one, you have my full approval. After all, this list is just to inspire a thought or idea. 

The rules for using these prompts are that there are no rules! You could use any Criminal Minds characters, OCs, reader inserts, etc. You could draw, write, make mood boards, or imagine anything else. I have included 30 prompts for each day of the month. I also added some character/episode-specific prompts too. If any of these prompts inspire you to create, I’d love to be tagged to see what you have made. This is all just for fun. I wish everyone a great start to the month. Please know I’m proud of you wherever you are right now - Love Levi ❤️

You can find all the prompts below the cut [also, please read the tags to avoid any triggering content in the prompts.] 

General Prompts

Character A tells character B they are no longer in love with them. 

Character A dies from their injuries on a case and makes a last confession to character B. 

Character A is forced to kill Character B due to the case/revenge etc. 

Character A wants to apologize to Character B, but they don’t get the chance. 

Character A suffers from an ED and gets hospitalized for it, risking their job. 

A case where one of the team gets psychologically tortured. 

A member of the team gets partially/fully paralyzed. 

Character A loses a pet they have had since childhood. 

Character A’s home/apartment gets targeted and is burned down. They end up losing everything important to them. 

Character A goes on a date and ends up humiliated (Character B comforts them after.) 

Character A who has claustrophobia ends up buried alive. 

Someone close to Character A becomes financially ruined, so Character A has to give up much of their savings putting them in a hard place. 

Character A has decided to adopt, but at the last minute, the birth mother decides to keep the child. 

Fic related to child/pregnancy loss. 

Character A falls into drug psychosis and relives the worst day of their life over and over again.  

Character A repeatedly dreams of Character B dying and one day it happens like they had dreamed. 

Character A is in the park when a dog comes up to them, Character B is running around looking for their lost dog when they find their dog with a pretty stranger. 

Character A who has hemophobia gets stabbed and has to deal with the wounds while waiting for help. 

Fic with a clown killer/fear of clowns. 

Character A realizes their patriotism was all misplaced and they’d been living a lie. 

A therapist unsub takes on a BAU member as a client and slowly starts tormenting them about their choices. 

Character A comes out to their friends/family and they face backlash (but they find their chosen family in the end.)  

Characters A realizes that they are starting to think more and more like an unsub. 

Character A has been working on a year-long project, but a rival ends up ruining it the day before it is due. 

Due to a misunderstanding, a child goes “no contact” with their parent, Character A. 

Character A has a nervous tick and is rudely told to stop doing it in the office/precinct/school.  

Character A has trichotillomania and worries about what people will think about their hair loss. 

Character A fails an important test, putting their degree/career/goals another year away. 

Somedays for Character A life just doesn’t feel worth continuing. 

Character A realizes their hero, Character B is a terrible person. 

Sad/scary Halloween fic. 

Character Specific Prompts

Hotch: S5 E9 100 - Aaron dies instead of Haley 

Spencer: S2 E15 Revelations - JJ gets captured by Tobias instead of Reid

Penelope: S3 E9 Penelope - Garcia ends up not making it to the hospital 

Emily S6 E 18 Lauren - After the trauma she’s been through Emily decides she can’t keep working at the BAU and has to tell Hotch. 

Derek: S2 E15 Revelations - Spencer ends up dying and Derek finds his body. 

Rossi: Describe a time that Rossi found out one of his ex-wives/wives have passed Away. 

List of Phobias for Inspo (some of these could be for CM kids). 

Acrophobia 

Astraphobia 

Nyctophobia 

Phasmaphobia 

Lockiophobia 

Erotophobia

CM whump Mood board below

Text Break Banner (above) @cafekitsune

Photo Credits

Top: Left (@anjukaji) Center (@kathrynmh) Right (@anjukaji)

Middle: Left (@rsier) Center (@leftoverenvy) Right (@d-iorpjm)

Bottom: Left (@anjukaji) Center (@reidgif) Right (@anjukaji)

[janisurstemostrespectedtrade]

Janis Urste  Simple Tips To Educate You About Forex In The Following Article

Janis Urste Qualified tips provider. Like most avenues you will take in life, you will need to become educated about the Foreign Exchange Market before you can actually master it. Nobody lucks into riches when playing the forex market, and people who try to treat the market as a gambling opportunity go broke in exponentially higher percentages than any casino. Follow the advice in this article and learn how to correctly approach forex.

Although you may aspire to big riches, you should never use Forex as a last resort. If you have to pawn your jewelry or take out a loan to get into Forex, you are getting in at the wrong time. Inevitably, people who use Forex in an attempt to make big money in a hurry ultimately fail. It takes patience and understanding to correctly use the system.

The best way to learn Forex is by practicing, so pick a broker that offers a "practice" account. These accounts allow you to play the markets without risking any of your own money, and can save you from major losses from beginner's errors when you start out. Practice accounts give you a chance to analyze your assumptions about Forex trading.

Before you carry out any trade, it is important to remember to figure out the risk/reward ratio. Try to estimate the amount that you will gain, and the amount that you could lose. By looking at the risk/reward ratio, it will give you a much clearer picture regarding wheteher that trade is the best for you.

Study your prior trades, both the good and the bad. The best way to learn what works is to study your successes and failures in the market. Look for patterns in your trades to see what strategies work best for you. Try keeping a diary of your trades and mark down what the results are.

On the Forex market, once you get an understanding of your trading, it will be tempting to plow your first profits back into additional trades. Resist this temptation! Remember that you are on the market to make money, after all. Take advantage of solid profits when they become available. Letting your money ride is a recipe for heartbreak.

Janis Urste Professional tips provider. When forex trading, you need to trust your instincts and ultimately, make your own decision. It's wise to get advice from critics and knowledgeable people, but ultimately the decision should be up to you. You don't want other people making major trading decisions with your money.

Beginning forex traders often wonder when it is wise to move from a demo account to a real account. A good rule of thumb is to move to a micro account after two or three months, and a regular account six months after that to give you plenty of time to learn without suffering large losses.

When one is using forex they should be aware of how stable or volatile the market they are investing in is expected to be. By having this knowledge one can more effectively time when they sell their investment. It will also reduce the chances of ones investment dropping unexpectedly something that nobody wants.

To become a successful trader, you should follow the main trends of the market. Even if your strategy commands you to go against the market, this will cause you stress and you are taking the chance of losing your investments. Choose a secure investment that is trusted by most traders.

A lot of business opportunities will require that you take on a partner to share the financial load, but forex is not one of these opportunities. You do not want to have a business partner in forex, unless we're speaking about someone who is strictly investing money. Two account users is a really terrible idea. You can lose your money in an instant.

Chinese Yen and Asian and African currencies are catching up with the Eurozone currencies and the USD. You will need to keep a close eye on all currencies these days to make the most out of the time you spend trading. Things are not like they used to be, the market is much wider now.

A fake out on the market can cause you to jump onto a trade that you think is going to be profitable and it ends up being just the opposite. These moves have cost many traders a good bit of money over the years, and once you get to recognize the signs you should be able to recognize them for what they are.

Janis Urste Top service provider. Make sure you have access to the internet at all times of the day and night so that you do not miss any opportunities. You can receive alerts on a laptop or a cell phone for instance: this way you will know when you have to buy or sell and react quickly.

Make sure that you know your goals when it comes to trading. Do you want to become wealthy or are you looking to just make some extra fun money? How much time can you spend figuring out the ins and outs of trading? Figure all this out ahead of time and you will most definitely, go a long way.

Choose a simple Forex system that meshes well with your personality and your thought processes. Some people do well with a scalping system. Others do well with a swing system. Study all the systems out there and choose the one that really resonates with you and seems as if you will be able to keep up with it without a lot of stress and confusion.

Avoid taking risks when you don't have to. Set a limit to your losses as well as a limit to your gains. Establish a specific number of trades per day as a goal and don't do more or less than that. For example, it's a good idea to set your loss limit at two-percent and to limit your number of trades to three daily. This will help you prevent great losses and errors caused by hasty judgment.

Janis Urste Best service provider. Never gamble with your money. Even though it does not take a lot of money to open a forex account, you still never want to lose your investment due to being misinformed. If you can follow the advice laid out there, you should be well on your way to making money in the forex marketplace.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Understanding the aftermath of r/wallstreetbets

A couple days back, I wrote up my best understanding of what happened with /r/wallstreetbets and meme stocks like Gamestop, trying to show how all the different, seemingly contradictory takes on the underlying financial stuff could all be true.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/28/payment-for-order-flow/#wallstreetbets

In the days since, a new series of contradictory takes has emerged, these ones disputing the meaning of this bizarre financial spectacle, and likewise what response, if any is warranted as it unfurls.

I think that all of these takes can also be true, and as with the trading itself, reconciling them requires that we widen the frame.

Let's start with Jimmy Carter.

In 1978, Carter's IRS created the 401(k), a tax-sheltered account for people who wanted to gamble on stocks to fund their retirement.

That was a fringe proposition at best.

The normal retirement system was a "defined benefits" pension where your employer guaranteed you a certain monthly percentage of your salary from retirement to death.

The vast majority of Americans wisely prefered a guaranteed payout to a tax-advantaged gambling account.

Obviously, right? On the one hand, you have the guarantee of a pension (maybe even inflation-indexed); on the other, you have a bunch of bets, that, if they go wrong, leave you literally homeless and starving.

When gamblers remortgage the family home and cash in the kids' college funds to play the tables, we consider them to have a mental illness, a pathological condition that harms them and the people around them.

Giving up a defined benefits pension in favor of a 401k is just the same kind of bet - staking all the money that will support you when you exit the workforce on the movement of stocks and bonds.

Who would do that voluntarily?

Pretty much no one. But the transition from defined benefits to 401k was not voluntary. Finance ghouls like Ethan Lipsig wrote memos to major employers like Hughes Aircraft showing them how they could ditch their pension obligations by moving workers to 401ks.

In the 80s, Reagan created a bunch of legal tools that allowed employers to coerce their workforces into giving up the security of a pension and force them into gambling their salaries on the prayer of a win in the markets.

This was insanely, amazingly great for the finance sector, in three ways:

1. It made companies more profitable. Guaranteeing that the workers whose labor made your company viable wouldn't spend their dotage starving and homeless is expensive.

Helping fund wagers on shares is much cheaper. The finance sector represented the major shareholders of the companies that transitioned to 401ks. The savings were transferred to these shareholders and the finance sector got commissions.

What's more, this temporary inflation of share prices disguised what was going on with the pension switcheroo: workers' defined benefits pensions were liquidated and turned into stocks, just as stocks were going up because their pensions had been liquidated!

Their legs had been amputated out from under them, but so subtly that they didn't yet feel the pain - and now their bosses cooked their legs and snuck them into their dinner, and everyone marveled at how full they felt after that hearty, meaty meal.

2. 401ks brought a lot of suckers to the table. The market was - and is - dominated by "sophisticated investors," AKA predators, who knew all the ways to fleece the rubes who had no idea how any of this worked.

The predatory nature of finance only increased over time. Hedge funds, for example, exist to find unethical practices that are legal (thanks to loopholes in the rules) and exploit them until they are illegal.

3. 401ks created a political force outside the finance sector that would lobby on its behalf. Transforming America into a nation of stockholders meant that workers had to choose between supporting rules that protected their jobs and rules that protected their retirement.

For your pension account to grow, you had to support policies that permitted finance ghouls to offshore your job, or misclassify you as a contractor, or eliminate the safety rules that prevented you from being maimed, or take away your right to sue for compensation.

Every time there's a particularly ghastly bankruptcy driven by PE or hedge funds - Toys R Us, Sears, etc - it emerges that at least some of that money is coming out of a union pension fund.

That's marketization - turning the once obscure, boring business of market-based capital allocation into a matter of import to everyday people.

Marketization begat financialization.

While marketization is primarily about capital allocation (who gets what money), financialization is about bets. Sometimes those bets are about things - businesses, houses, coal and timber - but things are limited. Mostly the financial market consists of bets on other bets.

Bets are infinite. Every time you make a bet, you create inventory for a market in a bet on the outcome of your bet. And that's inventory for a new market: bets on the outcomes of bets on the outcomes of bets.

It's called Wall Street Bets for a reason.

Bets need referees, someone who decides who the winner is. In sports, it's a major scandal if a referee is caught wagering on one of the teams in a match. In the financial markets, it's the norm - referees that lay wagers on the outcome of the contest they're overseeing.

Let's take stock:

Workers are forced to play the casino, and if their bets fail, they spend their old ages homeless and starving;

The vast majority of casino games are wholly abstract - bets on bets on bets - and require layers of refs;

the refs are all crooked.

Every couple of years, we have a massive, systemic financial crisis, and every time that happens, the finance sector lobbies for a no-strings-attached bailout, abetted by suckers who hate the finance sector but fear starving in their old age.

We're about to be engulfed in the second-largest crisis of our lifetime - the reckoning from trillions in capital market gains propped up by the Trump administration's policy of buying all corporate debt as a covid stimulus.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/28/cyberwar-tactics/#aligned-incentives

(the largest crisis of our lifetimes is a few years off, as the climate emergency piles losses on losses, stranding tens of trillions in assets, from fossil fuels to obsolete gas-stations to literally underwater coastal real-estate to whole towns incinerated by wildfires)

That's where we're at: a crooked casino that we've trusted our futures too, a crisis on the horizon, and a bunch meme-stock "players" who have thrown the normal weirdness of the market into stark relief through a spectacular stunt.

A lot of people are angry at Robinhood, the stock-trading platform at the center of all this. Robinhood froze trading on meme stocks, and has only allowed it to come back in a useless, performative trickle that is seemingly calculated to prevent more meme-stock gamesmanship.

Is Robinhood just another crooked ref? Yes…and no. The meme stock run upset the stable cheaters' equilibrium whereby cheating never escalated to the point where the game just collapsed.

For example, the total short position on Gamestop exceeds its total stock issuance.

Translation: there were more Gamestop shares promised between bettors than exist. When the game stops, all those promises come due, and they literally can't be paid off because there aren't enough tokens in circulation to settle all the debts.

Robinhood halted trading in part because the big fish upstream of Robinhood also halted trading, because they have even more at risk than Robinhood does if the game collapses - they the refs for MANY players, all the same size as Robinhood or larger.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-29/reddit-traders-on-robinhood-are-on-both-sides-of-gamestop

But remember, the refs are cheating. And they are both downstream and upstream from other games in which the refs are also cheating.

And the games, as a whole, encompass our economy, including the solvency of the "real economy" (the people who make masks, deliver groceries and drive ambulances), and whether you spend your old age homeless and starving.

So the people who say, "Don't blame Robinhood, they didn't halt trading to help billionaires, they halted trading to prevent the game from collapsing are right."

But they're not the only ones who are right.

Also, there's the people who say that meme stocks aren't making money for little guys at the expense of the big guys. They're right too.

First, because these stocks will all need to be converted to cash, and that means selling them.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/the-gamestop-bubble-is-going-to-hurt-a-lot-of-ordinary-investors/

When the selloff starts, the price will plunge, because even if the stock was undervalued before, it's certainly overvalued now. Every bubble produces wealth for its early bettors who sell out to later players who lose everything when they can't find a sucker later on.

From Beanie Babies to subprime, bubbles burst and leave suckers holding the bag. If you just heard about meme stocks last week, you're too late to make money off of them.

There's another version of the "this isn't little guys, it's big whales" that's *also* true: the main beneficiary of the meme stock runs is giant funds who magnified and the bets from r/wallstreetbets and got out smart and fast.

https://twitter.com/zatapatique/status/1354904995901136896

So given all this, what can we make of calls (from parties as varied as AOC and Ted Cruz) to investigate Robinhood and other retail brokerages to see whether they're honest refs, or in the tank for billionaires?

At Naked Capitalism, Yves Smith calls this a "fatuous uproar," saying that the Senate has more important things to do during the racing-out-of-control pandemic than to investigate a literal penny-ante grift.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/01/the-fatuous-uproar-about-robinhood-and-gamestop.html

Do we really care who the winner is in "a beauty contest between Cinderella’s ugly sisters" ("clueless new gen day traders versus clumsy shorts")?

Smith is right too.

A speculator-v-speculator contest that falls apart when the crooked ref halts play to prevent collapse - who cares who "wins?"

But here's how they can all be right - the "who cares" and the "goliath v goliath" and the "bubble" and the "Robinhood is a plutes' honeypot."

*If* there's hearings, and *if* those hearings expose the absurdity and corruption of the system, *then* there is a chance to build the political will to make real, systemic changes when the crisis comes.

And there's a real crisis coming: two, in fact. The covid junk bond financial crisis, which is due very soon, and the climate crisis stranded asset emergencies, which will unroll with increased tempo and intensity for decades to come.

The half-century cycle of "addressing" finance crises by increasing financialization MUST stop.

If the meme stock spectacle gets us to pay attention to hearings that reveal the irredeemable rot of the system, then it's a unique chance to spread *real* "financial literacy."

And that literacy is the necessary (but insufficient) precursor to taking action when the time comes - and the time is certainly coming soon.

[collecting-stories]

Invisible Strings - John B Routledge

Request: Hi welcome back!!! I hope you are doing well ❤️ I am literally so obsessed with Folklore I would die for anything John B/Folklore. Maybe invisible string or peace?❤️

A/N: Okay so I had this finished and then re-wrote it this afternoon so hopefully it’s good...god I actually haven’t written Outer Banks in like a month. 

The TS Anthology Series | Outer Banks Masterlist

✰...one single thread of gold tied me to you✰

_ . ◦ ⭐︎:*.☾.*:⭐︎◦∙._

“I always forget that this is still here.” You mused, running your fingers over the carved part of the baseboard. 

John B looked over from the box he was packing, old dishware that had been given to his mom and dad when they were first married, stashed away in the house for a time that never came. It would go to the thrift shop tomorrow morning along with other, now useless items that littered the small house. On Monday you would call the realty office on the island and inquire about putting the place up for sale. John B had seen an apartment for rent, beach side, closer to Figure Eight, nicer than the Chateau and he’d suggested it as a starter apartment, something small that you both could afford.  

“Where was it going to go?” He teased, walking over to you. He pressed his legs against your back and you leaned your head to look up at him.  

“You could’ve painted over it.”

❖

The year that you turned ten your mom got re-married and your step-father decided to relocate the family to Tennessee where his new job would be. You cried for days over the prospect of leaving the Outer Banks but it wasn’t your decision, all you could do in the end was pack your belongings and move. In what little defiance you were awarded as a ten-year-old you climbed underneath the bed and carved your name into the baseboard. You thought about including some ominous request, perhaps a clumsily drawn ‘help me’ but decided against it at the last moment. Your mom was much more excited to be moving into what she claimed was a nice, big, house in Tennessee with your soon to be ‘new dad’. A step-up from the shoebox shack that you’d been getting by in. 

The house was sold almost immediately to a man and his young son, downsizing after his wife left them with next to nothing. Two bedrooms was all he needed and the view of the marsh was better than he expected to get in his financial state. His son was unbothered either way, sure they were moving but that only meant they were in a new house. He would still go to the same school and see the same people. Though he rode his bike passed his old house often that first year, wishing he could walk up the front steps and go through the door and everything would be the same.  

The carving remained unseen until he was thirteen. His best friend JJ was trying to flip off the bed when he fell against it, pushing it away from the wall. His head landed next to the baseboard. While most kids might’ve cried from the possible concussion JJ just rolled onto his stomach to get a better look at the wall and the writing engraved in it.

“Look.” He reached up to smack John B’s arm and pointed at the name carved into the wood, “you got a ghost.”

“It’s not a ghost you moron,” John B laughed once he’d seen the carving for himself, “probably the girl who used to live here.” He’d lived with pink walls, stenciled with butterflies for a year and a half before Big John finally caved and spent some of his money on paint instead of alcohol.  

After that John B found an odd sense of comfort in the carving. Sometimes he did his homework laying on the ground with your name staring back at him. A sort of imaginary friend he was too old to have. And when Big John disappeared at sea John B pulled the blankets off the bed and laid with his head at the baseboard, crying alone in his room while his uncle watched TV, oblivious to his nephew’s heartache.  

That same year, while they were still combing the shoreline for any sign of Big John’s boat, you and your mom arrived back in North Carolina. You were 16 and she was heartbroken, disillusioned with love and taking every opportunity to caution you against it too. You ignored most of her bitterness, concerned only with the new house and the new life that you were expected to settle into. The cottage style home was so close to the Outer Banks that you could see the island in the distance on the other side of the bay. Your mom talked about fresh starts and got a job working for the Department of Child Services. 

It was the year you heard John B Routledge’s name for the first time. She’d come in from work every day that summer and curse about the delinquent teen. It was her greatest source of reassurance that you didn’t hang around wayward teenagers who, though still grieving the loss of their father, unsure of their place in the world now that they were alone, were expected to move on from that. 

“Placing him with a family is going to be hell. No one is going to want to put out the effort for two years...I’m sure he’ll skip town the second he turns 18.” She would bitch over a bottle of white wine. 

“He could stay here?” It was a pointless suggestion. Your mother would likely strangle him in his sleep if he lived with you. 

“Absolutely not! I’m not a charity.” She had taken up social work only so her psychology degree wouldn’t be wasted but you thought maybe some people did belong behind a desk, in a cubicle, somewhere. Certainly not caring for children.  

Either way you weren’t too bothered to listen to those stories. You liked the thought of John B Routledge. He was like some character in a book, too good to be true. His story sounded sad but he didn’t. His life wasn’t a boring repetition of school and work and friends you didn’t particularly like. He was above all that. Like a Jesse Tuck, young forever, stuck on some magical island that you could see but never be a part of again.  

After graduation that all changed, just as life was starting to change. You got a job working in a beach front surf shop on the island. It was your first big strike out into the unknown and your mom was less than thrilled that you would be living in the Outer Banks until college started in the fall. But you’d saved enough to rent space and someone had listed a room available online. The ad boasted lots of outdoor area and featured a picture of a hammock and a VW bus behind it.  

“How do you know that it’s not some ploy to traffic young women and take them overseas or down to Mexico?” Your mom had pestered you as you dragged your suitcase out of the house to meet the Uber that would take you to the ferry. Away from boring hopefully. At least for a summer.  

“I‘ll let you know if I end up overseas.”  

“This isn’t funny!”  

“You’re being ridiculous mom, I already texted with the kid who owns the house, he’s like my age.” You replied. Someone named John had texted you after you emailed about the room. He seemed nice, he was funny, no red flags had gone up in your mind. The name hadn’t even occurred to you. It’d been a few months since you’d heard any mention of your mother’s tormentor.  

It was JJ’s idea to lease the room. The two needed extra money and working the docks or waiting tables or mowing lawns hadn’t cut it. JJ had two jobs to support his half of the rent and John B was working all kinds of hours when JJ suggested that they split it three ways.  

“Get a renter in here, it’s perfect.”  

“Yeah okay,” John B agreed because he wanted to keep his dad’s house and that seemed like the most logical way to go about it.  

You weren’t what he was expecting when you arrived. Having never rented before he’d spent more time making sure you could afford payments than he had finding out any details about you at all. But you stepped out of the car regardless and the immediate sense of nostalgia hit you like a wave. You didn’t mention that you used to live here and John B was too focused on getting through the tour of the shack that he didn’t even register the name you gave him.  

“This’ll be your room.”  

And just like that you were in each other’s space. Like two timelines fusing together, one of you had swerved and tangled your lives into a mess of summer and shameless flirting and parties on the beach. You realized early on that this John was your infamous John B Routledge, teenage outlaw, sadder in real life than you ever gave him the range for. You liked talking to him late at night when JJ was already passed out or lingering close to him at parties. Everyone, his friends and your new, adopted friends, knew that there was something there but none of them realized how deep it ran. Even you didn’t.  

It wasn’t until August of that summer, when John B was out and you were left in the Chateau by yourself, that you had wandered into his bedroom and pushed the bed away from the wall. There on the baseboard was the first of a million signs, the first place in your parallel timelines where your stories overlapped. The bed had knicked the wall enough times that the writing almost blended in with the other scratches but you could see your name clearly when you knelt down.

“What’re you doing in my room?” John B’s voice caught you by surprise and you turned too quickly, falling over, killing whatever tension might’ve arose from finding you supposedly snooping in his space. He cracked a smile and went to offer you a hand up.  

“Sorry, I-” you let him pull you to your feet, his skin warm against yours, “I wanted to see if it was still here.”

“What?” He looked rightfully confused.  

“I...carved that.”

“That was you?”

And somehow it was just a question of who had vandalized his bedroom but who had been there when he was fourteen and got so angry at his dad that he had slammed the door and jammed the lock. When he was sixteen, crying for days because his dad was missing and no one could tell him anything. When he was eighteen and all his friends were graduating from high school but he had failed out so terribly that his only options were repeat or get a GED. When you pulled up outside for the first time that summer and something in him just seemed to make sense, like all those loose puzzle pieces had figured out their pattern.  

❖

“What’s the matter?” John B asked, fitting the last box of donations into the Twinkie. You had followed him outside but you were just standing on the steps, staring out toward the jetty.  

It’d been four years of moving you in and out of dorm rooms, returning each time to this house. Four years of navigating dating when you already lived together, kicking JJ out when he interrupted nights you were supposed to have alone, avoiding every visit your mom ever made after she realized that the boy you were living with was the same one who’d caused her so much trouble years earlier. It was every argument, every holiday, every movie marathon, every stupid party, every lazy sunday...You’d spent ten years in that house without a friend in the world and John B had spent another eight trying to keep his head above water only to realize that what you had both needed all along was each other.

“Let’s not sell.”

“You wanna live here?” John B asked, sounding a little more surprised than he should’ve been. The apartment was everything he knew he was supposed to want but really he just wanted to stay in the Chateau with you.  

“We already live here.”

“Yeah but...Heyward said there are a lot of repairs that need to be done. Electrical stuff, plumbing, new water heater, new windows, the floor needs to be-”

“John B.” You stopped him short, walking the rest of the way down the steps to meet him in the yard.

“What?”

“Live in our house with me? Forever?” You asked, watching the smile that blossomed at your words.

“Okay.”

-

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[misssophiachase]

Prompt: Caroline and klaus as rival lawyers

Thanks anon, this is inspired! Hope you like it : )

Bad Reputation

California Superior Court, Beverly Hills CA - Tuesday, 11 July

“Objection, Your Honor! Opposing Counsel is badgering the witness.”

“Since when did asking a perfectly normal question constitute badgering?” She could feel his blue eyes boring into her, almost like he was trying to remember her naked.

Ass.

“Overruled, Ms Forbes,” the judge replied, not before casting an unimpressed glance in the defense attorney’s direction. “But if I was you, I’d stop talking back, Mr Mikaelson.”

“Apologies, Your Honor,” he said, sending her his signature smirk. “It won’t happen again.”

Ass.

Caroline Forbes thrived on competition which was why she was known as one of the best defamation lawyers in California. Celebrities far and wide flocked to Caroline for her services and winning track record.

Unfortunately, she could see her unblemished run slipping away and it was all thanks to him.

LA Times Offices, El Segundo, CA - Friday 9 April (3 months earlier)

Caroline consulted her appearance in the reflection of the elevator, straightening her black, suit jacket as the floor numbers ascended.  

The opposing counsel in her current case had requested a pre-trial meeting. As much as she loved the adversarial thrill of the courtroom, she wasn’t going to complain if the Los Angeles Times decided to write a big, fat cheque to her client.

Skylar Lopez was a well known Hollywood actress who’d suffered significant financial loss after the Los Angeles Times ran an article asserting she was unprofessional and difficult on set. Caroline had her fair share of questionable clients but she knew Skylar had been unfairly treated.

Caroline had dealt with the Times on a number of occasions and was confident she’d walk out of the meeting triumphant.

Until the tables were turned.    

Walking towards the boardroom, Caroline was already imagining what would transpire. They’d offer a settlement that was too low but would ultimately meet her client’s demand. 

She was just that good. However, upon entering the room, everything changed when she saw him.

His back was turned but, after all these years, she couldn’t mistake those broad shoulders even housed in a grey, suit jacket. Those dark, blonde curls were still slightly unruly like she remembered and she could still recall just how good it felt combing her fingers through them.

Caroline liked to be in control and suddenly she felt like she was in freefall. He turned to face her, almost like he could sense her anxiety.

Between the slight stubble and crimson lips, Caroline knew she was in trouble. The guy could also wear a suit and it should have been illegal given how well it moulded to his toned physique.

“Hello, love.” It was a greeting she knew all too well and immediately transported her back in time to college.

“What are you doing here?” Caroline hoped it didn’t sound as shaky as it felt.

“Is this how you greet all your opposing counsels?” With his left eyebrow cocked, Caroline was trying to pretend it didn’t look sexy.  

“You are not my opposing counsel.”

“Well, that’s where you’re wrong,” he replied, sliding a manila folder towards her. “I’m acting for the defense.”

“But how? I thought you were in DC acting for all those questionable politicians.” It came out before she could stop it.

Yes, maybe she’d followed him over the years since law school graduation but this wasn’t the way she saw their reunion going.

“Sounds like someone has been stalking me.”

“You wish,” she growled, placing her briefcase on the table and consulting the folder he’d provided. “And, as a lawyer, I’m well aware of the fact that stalking is an illegal offence in all fifty states.” She couldn’t miss the way his left dimple made an unwelcome appearance at that point.

“Fine. I guess you could say I felt like a change and, between you and me, those DC winters are a real killer without someone to keep you warm.”

Ass. 

“Why don’t I believe you, Mikaelson?”

“I suppose that’s your problem, not mine, Forbes.” Their gazes lingered, Caroline attempting to look away but failing miserably.

Ass.

“My client is willing to offer a generous settlement,” he said, breaking their trance and handing her another piece of paper, his hand grazing hers teasingly in the process.

“I’ll bet,” she shot back, finally regaining her composure. She looked at the page and was immediately insulted by the supposedly ‘generous’ offer. “This is a joke, right?”

“Do I look like I’m laughing?”

“This is insulting and you can pass that onto your client,” she offered. “Unless you’d like to meet my client’s demands here and now and save us all some time and money.”

“That’s the final offer, take it or leave it,” he uttered, his jaw clenched. Caroline knew enough of Klaus to realise he meant it.  

“Right, so, if we’re finished here, I suppose I’ll see you at trial?”  

“Yes you will,” he promised. “You know during all those mock trials at Harvard, I always hoped that we’d meet up again and settle this for good.”

Caroline stilled, knowing just how those mock trials ended after dark. In her dorm room between the sheets, all the pent up energy leading to one hell of a crescendo.

“Unlike those mock trials when I was young and naive, I’m not going to sleep with you.”

“That’s a real shame, love.”

Ass.

“See you in court.” She left, albeit on shaky legs, before the creeping blush threatened to reveal itself and her true feelings.

She loved the idiot but she didn’t want him to know that. Ever.

Honor Bar, Beverly Hills CA - Monday 27 July (2 weeks later)

Turns out Caroline’s fears were premature and unfounded.

She won the case, like many before it, and Skylar received full damages from the Los Angeles Times for defamation.  

Instead of gloating over her unexpected win, she was currently drowning her sorrows in vodka. Or maybe it was her coping mechanism to block out the fun they could be having in a bed further uptown.

“I was a little upset you didn’t invite me to the party.” She turned, knowing that familiar voice all too well.

“Do you have a tracking device on me or something?”

“Your personal assistant thought I should know your whereabouts to provide the final paperwork,” he said, gesturing to the barwoman for a drink. Caroline couldn’t miss the flutter of her eyelashes knowing the effect he had on women.

She hated that she felt it too.

“Of course she did,” she growled, knowing he’d sweet talked Lexi too. “You’re such an ass.” Caroline was proud of the fact she finally verbalised it after all these months of control.

“Says the defamation warrior,” he whistled, taking a sip of his drink. He’d shed his suit since their last meeting and she couldn’t miss just how good he looked in that navy henley and jeans. It was almost like they’d gone back in time to Boston.

“It’s true and, quite frankly, you deserved it.”

“Last time I checked you left me, sweetheart.”  

“We were both heading in different directions after graduation and excuse me if your reputation didn’t fill me with much confidence.”

“Wow,” he murmured, his gaze downcast. “I’ve followed your career too and what you’ve done is nothing short of phenomenal, not that I was expecting any less given your intelligence, dogged determination and ambition. But it seems as if you’ve not learned the biggest lesson.”

“And what exactly is that?”

“Not to judge a book by its cover,” he responded sincerely, his eyes now aligned with hers. “I love you, always have, but it seemed like what we had didn’t mean enough for you to try.”

“Well then, you’re mistaken,” Caroline replied gruffly, turning to face him. “I haven’t stopped thinking about you since college.”

“You better hope I don’t report you to the police for all of that stalking, love.”

“Just shut up and kiss me, Mikaelson,” she insisted, grabbing handfuls of his shirt and pulling him closer. 

His lips felt familiar, like nothing had changed and Caroline didn’t mind that one bit. He promised to beat her in court next time and she relished in the impending challenge.

It was what they did after all. 

[theliterateape]

I Like to Watch | Zack Snyder’s Justice League

by Don Hall

Mythology is fun.

As a kid I loved reading Edith Hamilton’s book on the Greek gods and the myths. Hercules, Perseus, Apollo, and Hera—this fell completely in line with my love for superhero comics. The strangely petty human traits of envy, greed, and lust combined with the power to level cities make for some great storytelling.

Zeus was basically Harvey Weinstein in the retroactive revision we’re mired in today. If Harvey could’ve changed into a golden animal and boned unsuspecting ladies looking for careers in Hollywood I’m pretty certain he would. The gods and demi-gods of the Greeks dealt with daddy issues, mommy issues, bad relationships, and fighting. Lots of fighting. Sometimes for the good of humanity but more often for the glory of winning.

Zach Snyder is in the business of tackling myths and reframing them with a style all his own. His career has become its own myth.

From Dawn of the Dead (not so much a reboot of Romero's zombie mythology but a philosophical reimagining of the genre that arguably jumpstarted The Hollywood fascination with it), 300 (a borderline homoerotic take on the myth of the Greek underdog), and Watchmen (a ridiculously ambitious attempt to put one of the most iconic takedowns on the potential fascism of the superhero legend machine ever written) to his nearly single-handed hack at answering the Marvel juggernaut with Man of Steel and Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice, Snyder is in the artistic business of subverting and re-envisioning the mythologies we embrace without even seeing them as such.

Snyder's style is operatic. It is on a grand scale even in the most mundane moments. The guy loves slow motion like Scorcese loves mobsters and Italian food. When you're tackling big themes with larger than life stories, the epic nature of his vision makes sense and has alienated a good number of audience members. With such excess, there are bound to be missteps but I'd argue that his massive take on these characters he molds from common understanding and popular nomenclature elevates them to god-like stature.

Fans of Moore's Watchmen have much to complain about Snyder's adaptation. The titular graphic novel is almost impossible to put in any other form than the one Moore intended and yet, Snyder jumped in feet-first and created a living, breathing representation of most, if not all, of the source material's intent. Whether you dig on it or not, it's hard to avoid acknowledging that the first five minutes of Watchmen is a mini-masterpiece of style, storytelling, and epic tragedy wrapped up in a music video.

Despite a host of critical backlash for his one fully original take, Sucker Punch is an amazing thing to see. More a commentary on video game enthusiasm with its lust for hot animated chicks and over-the-top violence that a celebration of cleavage and guns, the film is crazily entertaining. For those who hated the ending, he told you in the title what his plan was all along.

The first movie I saw in the theaters that tried to take a superhero mythology and treat it seriously (for the most part) was Richard Donner's Superman: The Movie. Never as big a fan of the DC characters as I have been of Marvel, it was still extraordinary to see a character I had only really known in pages to be so fully realized. Then came Burton's Batman movies. The superhero film was still an anomaly but steam was gaining. Things changed with Bryan Singer's X-Men in 2000, then Raimi's Spiderman, and those of us who grew up with our pulpy versions of Athena, Hermes, and Hades were rewarded with Nolan's Batman Begins. A far cry from the tongue-in-cheek camp of the 1966 TV Batman, Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne was a serious character and his tale over three films is a tragic commentary filled with the kind of death and betrayal and triumph befitting the grand narrative he deserved.

I loved Singer's Superman Returns in 2006 because it was such a love letter to the 1978 film (down to the opening credits) but by then, the MCU was taking over the world.

Snyder's first of what turns out to be an epic storyline involving perhaps seven or eight movies was Man of Steel. It was fun and, while I had my issues with the broodiness of Kal El, the odd take on Jonathan Kent, and a redheaded Lois Lane, I had no issue with Superman snapping Zod's neck. Darker and more tragic than any other version of the Kryptonian, it was still super entertaining.

Then came Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. By 2016, Marvel had codified their formula of serious characters wrestling with serious issues of power and responsibility peppered with lots of good humor and bright colors. Snyder's desaturated pallete and angst-filled demi-gods was not the obvious road to financial competition.

I'll confess, I hated it. BvS felt half-rendered. Lex Luthor was kind of superficial and played as a kind of Joker. The whole Bruce Wayne wants to kill Superman thing felt undeveloped and the "Martha" moment was just stupid.

When Joss Whedon's version of Snyder's Justice League came out in 2017, I was primed for it to be a turd and I wasn't surprised. So much of it didn't work on any level. I dismissed it as DC trying and failing miserably and was comforted by the coming of Thanos.

Following Thanos and the time heist was COVID. Suddenly, we were internationally sidelined and the movie theater industry caved in. Streaming services started popping up like knock-off smartphones and Hollywood was reeling, doing anything and everything to find a way back. Since Whedon's disastrous helming of Snyder's third act, fans online had been demanding to #ReleasetheSnyderCut but no one was ever really taking them seriously until all movie production was shut down for a year.

The stage was set to remedy a mistake (or at least make some bucks on a do-over of a huge box office failure). Snyder had left the production in part because of the suicide of his daughter and in part due to the constant artistic fights over executives looking for the quippy fun of the MCU but he still had all the original footage. Add to that the broiling accusations that Joss Whedon was "abusive" during the reshoots, the path seemed destined. For an additional $70 million and complete control, Snyder delivered a four hour mega-movie streamed on HBOMax.

Of course, I was going to watch the thing as soon as I could.

The Whedon version opens with an homage to the now dead Superman (including the much maligned digitally erased mustache on Henry Cavill). The SynderCut opens with the death of Superman and the agony of his death scream as it travels across the planet. It's a simple change but exemplifies the very different visions of how this thing is gonna play out.

Snyder doesn't want us to be OK with the power of these beings unleashed. He wants us to feel the damage and pain of death. He wants the results of violence to be as real as he can. When Marvel's Steve Rogers kicks a thug across the room and the thug hits a wall, he crumples and it is effectively over. When Batman does the same thing, we see the broken bones (often in slow motion) and the blood smear on the wall as the thug slides to the ground.

The longer SnyderCut is bloated in some places (like the extended Celtic choir singing Aquaman off to sea or the extended narrations by Wonder Woman which sound slightly like someone trying to explain the plot to Siri). On the other hand, the scene with Barry Allen saving Iris West is both endearing and extraordinary, giving insight to the power of the Flash as well as some essential character-building in contrast to Whedon's comic foil version.

One thing I noticed in this variant is that Zach wants the audience to experience the sequence of every moment as the characters do. An example comes when Diana Prince goes to the crypt to see the very plot she belabors over later. The sequence is simple. She gets a torch and goes down. Most directors which jump cut to the torch. Snyder gives us five beats as she grabs the timber, wraps cloth around the end, soaks it with kerosene, pulls out a box of matches, and lights the torch. Then she goes down the dark passageway.

The gigantic, lush diversity of Snyder’s vision of the DC superhero universe—from the long shots of the sea life in the world of Atlantis to the ancient structures and equipment of Themyscira— is almost painterly. Snyder isn't taking our time; he's taking his time. We are rewarded our patience with a far better backstory for the villain, a beautifully rendered historic battle thwarting Darkseid's initial invasion (including a fucking Green Lantern), and answers to a score of questions set up in both previous films.

Whedon's Bruce Wayne was more Ben Affleck; Snyder's is full-on Frank Miller Batman, the smartest, most brutal fucker in the room. Cyborg, instead of Whedon's sidelined non-character, is now a Frankenstein's monster, grappling with the trade-off between acceptance and enormous power. Wonder Woman is now more in line with the Patty Jenkins version and instead of being told about the loss of Superman, we are forced to live with the anguish of both his mother and Lois Lane in quiet moments of incredible grief.

To be fair to Whedon (something few are willing to do as he is now being castigated not for racism or sexism but for being mean to people) having him come in to throw in some levity and Marvel-esque color to Snyder's Wagnerian pomposity is like hiring Huey Lewis to lighten up Pink Floyd's The Wall or getting Douglas Adams to rewrite Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

I loved Snyder's self-indulgent, mythologic DC universe.

So much so that I then re-watched Man of Steel and then watched the director's version of BvS (which Snyder added approximately 32 minutes). The second film is far better at three hours and Eisenberg's Lex Luthor now makes sense. Then I watched Zach Snyder's Justice League a second time.

After nineteen hours of Snyder's re-imagining of these DC heroes and villains, I saw details that, upon first viewing, are ignored or dismissed, but after seeing them in order and complete, are suddenly consistent and relevant. Like Nolan or Fincher, Snyder defies anyone to eliminate even one piece of his narrative no matter how long. With all the pieces, this is an epic story and the pieces left at the extended epilogue play into a grander narrative we will never see.

Or maybe we will. Who knows these days?

[theadrogna]

This comes under the heading of better late than never, and many apologies to @singledarkshade​ for the lateness of this response to the Dream Movie Challenge. So, we were given six actors from our favourite TV shows/movies, a wildcard actor, and a random item. We had use these actors and the object to create our own movie.

I give you a supernatural romantic comedy, starring Matt Ryan, Elizabeth Henstridge, April Bowlby, Taika Waititi, Ellen Page, and Woody Harrelson. With a special appearance by Merryl Streep.

Synopsis:

Max Webster is working as an investment banker in London, making huge amounts of money that support a lifestyle of clubs, bars and one night stands, until his boss and mentor commits fraud on a huge scale. Max is implicated, despite knowing nothing. He loses his job and not a single other bank in the city will touch him, meaning his career is effectively over and he’s rapidly going broke. Just when he thinks things can’t get worse, he is told that his sole relative, his estranged paternal grandmother has died and left him property in Brighton.

With nothing better to do and hopes that the property is worth something, Max heads to Brighton to tie up his grandmother’s affairs, dreading his time outside the capital and increasingly depressed about life. Upon arrival he meets Poppy Fletcher, his grandmother’s lawyer who was the one who contacted him about his grandmother’s death. 

Max discovers that his grandmother was the proud owner of the “Worst Wax Museum in Britain”: The House of Wax. Only a handful of the wax statues look like who they’re supposed to be and the rest are like someone sculpted celebrities that they’d never seen. The museum is barely making enough to keep it afloat. He begins to make plans to sell the museum and at least make enough to pay off his Grandmother’s debts. Enter Cooper Farnsworth, rich American businessman, on the run from the Mafia after a dodgy deal went wrong. He desperately needs to make money fast.

But Max finds out that his inheritance is rather unusual in a number of ways...

For starters, there aren’t many wax museums where Meryl Streep hands out advice and enjoys watching the footy on the night watchman’s TV when the punters have gone home for the night. But it isn’t just Meryl, all of the waxworks come to life thanks to an old book of magic that is powered by the signatures of the guests and the messages they leave. The less visitors there are, the less magic there is to keep the waxworks alive and things have been getting desperate lately until only a handful of the waxworks have the necessary magic to come to life.

The waxworks tell Max about how his grandmother desperately tried to bring in more people, but her failing health meant that everything fell apart. Max discovers how his grandmother loved the museum and also loved him, despite her outwardly cool demeanour. He had thought that she didn’t care that he left Brighton, but Amelia unearths the letters that his grandmother wanted to send but didn’t have an address to send them to.

Max realises that he can’t sell the wax museum after all, and he enlists Poppy’s help in finding a way to keep it going. In the process she also discovers the secret of the museum, and Max and Poppy discover that they’re falling for each other. Meanwhile Cooper is plotting to get Max out because the listed building is worth more than Max is aware, especially with some of the period features.

The finale has Cooper breaking into the museum to destroy the waxworks, but Steve, the night watchman sounds the alarm. Cooper accidentally starts a fire and there is a desperate fight to save everyone from melting. Max and Poppy rally everyone to deal with the fire, and Cooper is arrested for arson.

The publicity from the fire actually brings in more customers, Max updates the museum with new exhibits, deciding to focus more on local history and tell the stories of the people who live in Brighton. He’s cleared of any wrong doing at the bank and Poppy helps him sue for wrongful dismissal. He uses the payout to finance repairs to the museum and more and more waxworks come alive every night as the visitors pour in.

And Max never thinks about leaving again, because now he has a family, albeit one that includes Meryl Streep, Amelia Earhart and Margaret Thatcher but he doesn’t mind.

Max Webster (Matt Ryan): Max lost his parents when he was young and was raised by his paternal grandmother. The two did not get on and he left home as soon as he could for university and then the big city. He always had a love of risk taking and wanted to be rich, so he studied finance and got a job in banking. He spends his time closing deals in a highly stressful job during the day and then out on the town in the evening. He has very few friends, all of whom are from work, and he very rarely sleeps with the same woman twice. He has a very shallow outlook on life and everything is about money.

His life is changed by inheriting the House of Wax and discovering that his memories of his grandmother are flawed and desperately inaccurate. He deals with the unusual House of Wax that his grandmother created and his grief at her passing. He comes to realise that not everything in life is about the next deal or how much money can be made.

Poppy Fletcher (Elizabeth Henstridge): Poppy is a lawyer and is responsible for executing Max’s grandmother’s will. She’s the one who hand Max the keys to the House of Wax and sees the look of disappointment on his face. She is very efficient and competent, loves the town she lives in and knows everyone on her street. She mourns the loss of Max’s grandmother, and has no idea that she was anything but the eccentric, elderly owner of the House of Wax. She doesn’t like Max at first because of his attitude to his grandmother and his version of her doesn’t seem to be the same as the woman she knew.

She ends up spending a lot of time with Max as the property sale becomes more difficult and after a while, she realises that he’s not at all the image that he projects. She starts helping him to get back on his feet and renovate the museum. Then she discovers about the magic book and she realises that she can’t let Max deal with the situation on his own.

Florence Nightingale (April Bowlby): Florence doesn’t look like the picture that hangs next to her in the slightest. Even her period dress is somewhat suspect. She prefers to wear much more recent clothes and is doing online first aid courses at night. She’s slightly haughty and thinks she knows best.

She can see that Max is depressed and grieving when he arrives. She’s one of the driving forces behind getting Max to take better care of himself and to talk about how he feels. Once the museum is safe, she works at becoming qualified as a therapist and sees patients online, writing an agony aunt column for the local paper.

Amelia Earhart (Ellen Page): She likes to pretend that she’s actually the pilot that she was sculpted to be. She’s very much her own person though, feisty and fun loving. She has no idea how to fly a plane, but has a flight simulator that Max’s grandmother gave her and is a computer game ace. She has the high score and no one can beat her.

She is the first waxwork that Max discovers is alive and persuades him that he isn’t hallucinating. She takes him to see the others when she realises that he’s the grandson of the previous owner.

She ends the film playing games in esports tournaments and winning, much to the amusement and delight of her fellow waxworks.

Steve (Taika Waititi): The night watchman of the House of Wax. He’s always known as Steve and no one knows his full name. He never really seems to go home, he’s just there. Max is very confused by him at first, but eventually realises that he’s another waxwork. He was one of the first created and no one is ever sure who he was supposed to be, at the end of the film it’s discovered that he’s supposed to be Genghis Khan, but like most of the other waxworks he bears no resemblance to his original. He is quite protective of the museum though.

Cooper Farnsworth (Woody Harrelson): An American property developer who is interested in buying the House of Wax and turning it into flats. He moved to the UK, to get away from some people who didn’t like him much (actually he double crossed the Mafia). He gets increasingly desperate to buy the House of Wax when some of his former business partners catch up with him, threatening Max and Poppy if they don’t sell up, but he never finds out the real secret of the museum. He thinks he’s hallucinating when he sees the waxworks move and fight back during the finale. He’s dragged away shouting about moving statues and charged with arson.

Meryl Streep (herself): She is modelled after the three time Oscar winning actress and is the only waxwork who looks like she is supposed to. She’s something of a leader of the group, checking in with everyone to make sure that they’re doing okay. She’s concerned about the fading magic and trying to keep everyone’s spirits up. She offers very good advice to Max about how to run the museum, most of which Max ignores to begin with because he thinks he knows better. Later we see her taking on the museum accounts and running the financial side of the museum with Max listening carefully to her. He may have been a banker but those skills are very little use when it comes to book keeping.

Additional actors:

Arthur Darvill as David Bowie - Can actually sing, sounds nothing like David Bowie. Wants to be Major Tom and follows NASA on Twitter. Tom Ellis as Paul McCartney - Can also sing and taught himself to play the piano. Duets with Bowie to entertain the rest of the group. John Boyega as Frank Bruno - Hates punching people, is a total softy. Ryan Reynolds as Salvador Dali - He once tried painting and decided never to do so again. He prefers reading and writes poetry. Eccentric. Celia Imrie as Queen Victoria - Knows everything that there is about Queen Victoria. She misses Albert who hasn’t woken up for a while now due to lack of magic.

[yavannah]

Part 3, Terri and Cale

After returning to Manaus, Terri was the first to arrange for Cale to be treated at the local hospital for a time when she and Danny would take care of their affairs.

Although Cale's well-being had improved considerably on the way back, Terri still wanted to make sure. When the wound was not stitched in any way during the trip, but they had been forced to use the only wound care supplies, which they had been involved in the first-aid box. In addition, she had concerns about possible infection, because the riverboat was anything but hygienic.

Their belongings were more or less preserved, so they would be able to travel as soon as she could get the tickets. Admittedly, she also took Denise, Gary, and Westridge’s travel papers, IDs, and other important items with him, as she knew she needed them. Especially when she will be dealing with the authorities. A couple of days later, Terri got the tickets purchased and they finally got to leave for Los Angeles. There, Terri took care of things further, investigating the company that had commissioned them to make that fatal film, as well as the police, who, of course, opened a criminal investigation into the matter because of the deaths involved.

She gave the information and papers of her deceased comrades to the police, as they would need them anyway. She also told everything that had happened along the trip, although the police investigating the matter refused to believe the existence of a giant anaconda.

Fortunately, Terri had also managed to save most of what they had time to film during the trip before everything had gone to hell. It was also hard for the police to believe Serone existed, but in the end they had to believe it because Terri had footage of the man. In particular, that short film clip from Westridge’s narrative, which Serone had interrupted very bluntly.

As the investigations continued, the trio learned that Serone didn’t really have good intentions at all, but the man had been doing a little more that couldn’t stand much daylight. In addition, a number of persons with whom he had been concluded, had disappeared under mysterious circumstances. The authorities were already suspected for some of those persons whu has disappeared had met their end at Seronen’s hands, one way or another.

The investigations seemed to take forever, but eventually they were completed. Terri, Cale, and Danny had no problem with the matter, as the evidence made it very clear that they were not involved in the deaths of their comrades and Mateo, who served as captain of the riverboat.

So the trio finally got to go on with their lives, although of course it wasn’t easy. Their popularity had waned, and most financiers did not want to have anything to do with them. Admittedly, they didn't want to go back to that damn river anymore. There were so many bad memories left of it.

Luckily, Cale got a job at a small museum, and Terri got to work with Danny in a small production company that, though, did documentaries only on local issues and sometimes small stories in the lightening sections of local news channels.

Life was smooth, and nothing exciting happened, except for some big news that revolutionized the world. During those years, Terri and Cale got closer and eventually got married. Their families also grew. Time passed a couple of decades.

One day, the curator of a small museum asked Cale to speak. The man was a little freaky, for usually it didn’t know anything good. He wondered if the budget had been further reduced and were about to fire someone and therefore chatter on us, he thought as he stepped into the curator’s room. He politely knocked on the door, which was heard from the other side, “Come in”.

Good, the curator didn't sound like he was in a bad mood, maybe this is still to be figured out, Cale thought, opened the door and stepped into the room.

The curator sat in his chair and glanced at Cale, who was still standing at the doorway. He referred Cale to sit in a free chair, which Cale did.

“Dr Cale”, the curator began, while looking for a comfortable but influential position in his chair, “you must be wondering why I invited you to my office”, he continued.

“Yes”, Cale admitted.

“The thing is, we were given a very lucrative offer that would know good for the museum,” the curator began, “but, it would require me to have a very competent team and you would be what I am looking for from a group leader”, he continued.

“What are you aiming for?”, Cale asked, already guessing he wouldn’t like the answer.

"One person asked me to assemble a team, the purpose of which would go to make Amazon expedition", the curator replied, “I am already aware that your previous trip failed terrible way, but I would still like you to consider this”, he asked.

"I'm sorry, but I have answered in the negative, and as you have already mentioned, so I have my reasons for not wanting without there ever again", Cale replied coolly.

“Let’s just say I’d rather send someone other than you there, but the funder of the trip definitely wanted you”, the curator said.

“Why does he want me? He probably already knows what happened then and why I am not willing to leave”, Cale replied.

“I assume he wants you, because of your knowledge and because you really have experience with it”, the curator stated.

“My answer is still no”, Cale said firmly.

“I suspected that, so I have to point out that if you still refuse, I have to fire you from office. I wouldn’t want to do that, but the funder threatened that our museum wouldn’t get a substantial amount of money if you refused, ”the curator said in a harsh tone that Cale heard the man didn’t tolerate stubbornness.

“Okay, but could I get even some time to think, because I’d like to talk about it with my wife”, Cale asked.

“You will get, but only until tomorrow, the matter is in a hurry, as our sponsor would like the team to pile up and leave as soon as possible”, the curator admitted.

“All right”, Cale growled, guessing that he is forced to agree, because the job loss right now didn’t really fit the patterns. Bills were not be paid with an  empty bank account.

He looked coldly at the curator, got up and disappeared into his own office, from where he called his wife. He tentatively told what was going on and said he wanted to discuss the matter in more detail when he got home.

The day seemed to be going very slowly, but in the end he could leave work. Slightly grumpy, he then traveled through the traffic jam to his home. Terry hadn’t come yet, as apparently she had gone a little longer with the current project.

Huge thanks to all TS4 cc-makers. @zeussim 

[crimsonsheadache]

who is that walking on the quad? that’s roxanne hartman, of course. she may look like anya taylor-joy but the twenty-four year old is actually a part-time student studying fashion. on game days, they’re maternal and alluring ; during finals week, they’re theatrical and frivolous. if you catch them at a party, they’re probably dancing to the fear by lily allen.

— THE BASICS

full name: roxanne marie hartman ( legal name: elizabeth grace connelly ) name meaning: dawn date of birth: november 22th age: twenty-four star sign: sagittarius  year: first year part-time student  department: fashion alignment: chaotic good mbti: esfp spoken languages: english ( native speaker ) mother’s name: lindsay connelly ( estranged ) father’s name: nathaniel connelly  ( estranged ) siblings, if any: alexander connelly, older brother  ( estranged ) height: 5′4″ hair colour: blonde ( natural color: brown ) eye colour: brown

— BACKSTORY

elizabeth was born the parents who never wanted to be parents -- a marriage forced together by her brother’s arrival and only felt like a tightening noose with her own arrival. the children forced them to remain together despite all desires to be elsewhere.

still, little lizzie tried to love them all. she clung to any scrap of attention and affection that she could get which was. . . barely any at all. her parents’ coldness and neglect were a completely terrible fit for a little girl who cried at the thought of a classmate eating alone. in a normal world, elizabeth’s soft kindness would have been protected but around her family, it was needlessly mocked. 

she ran away to novels and the glossy pages of magazines, admiring the wily protagonists and beautiful models who seemed to live the life she so desired. elizabeth vowed that one day, she would be one of them.

while her home life was a mess, she thrived everywhere else. she had such a beautifully appealing soul that made it easy for her to make friends. her teachers adored her. as she got older, elizabeth held on to that attention as if that could be a salve for what her family lacked.

at sixteen, she fell in love. . . just like the story was meant to go. his name was mason and he was older, rich, and beautiful. he walked off the page of the romantic novels that elizabeth used to escape to. but the truth was that his charming front was simply a facade for what lied underneath. mason was impossibly cruel, possessive as hell, and very easily began to ween her off of everyone that wasn’t him.

still, she loved him. he provided a sense of protection and stability ( no matter how sick ) that she craved for her entire life. elizabeth started spending less time at school and more time with mason. since she was still a minor, her parents were notified of her dwindling grades and attendance. they gave her an ultimatum: get her act together or risk going down this path alone. elizabeth, so blinded with love, of course chose mason. her parents kicked her out shortly before her high school graduation.

the next step was always meant to be college but over the years, mason had convinced elizabeth to instead stay in town with him. the cruelty escalated to physical violence and she began to fear for her life. but she didn’t feel like she had anyone to call. after all, mason had convinced her that she didn’t need anyone but him. no family, no friends, no alliances. it was just her and the man she was beginning to realize was more of a monster.

one particularly brutal altercation with mason led a sobbing and bloodied elizabeth to her parents’ doorstep, begging for a safe haven. her heart completely shattered that day when her parents numbly told her that they did not have a daughter and refused to let her inside.

she knew she had to run away, but each failed attempt she made only forced mason to tighten the reins. he began to hinder her communication to the outside world and had a tight grasp on her finances. for months, elizabeth crafted a plan to slip away one night when mason was asleep. it involved lightly drugging him, avoiding all the cameras in his house, stealing money, and finding a means of transportation to get as far away from town as possible. it was only when she was about three hours out of town on a raggedy bus that she began to breathe easily again.

thus at twenty, elizabeth’s life began anew. she headed to the closest us embassy and used the last bit of mason’s stolen cash to legally form her new identity: roxanne hartman. with her new identification burning in her pockets, she headed to the local corner store to shoplift some blonde hair dye to complete the new facade. it was almost as if elizabeth connelly had never existed.

of course, the money didn’t last her for long. roxy was fully aware that she would need to find some source of income to maintain a semi-normal lifestyle and a cold bed in the local motel. she worked low-paying oddball jobs until one day, she noticed the most glamorous woman waltzing through town. roxy eyed her designer bag and her easy confidence and decided to follow her all the way to the local strip club. businessmen and wealthy clients alike showered the mysterious woman with attention from the moment she walked in and the young girl knew that this was it: this was her way to be the protagonist.

she auditioned to be a dancer at the club and was welcomed to this new community with open arms. but it didn’t take long for her to realize that any semblance of luxury and adoration wasn’t just handed to anyone. it had to be earned. so, roxy worked diligently to try to climb the ranks. she obsessed over youtube tutorials. she watched the older women in the dressing room, imitating how they talked and walked. she snuck into dance and exercise classes at the local recreation center to keep up her rhythm and stamina. and most importantly, roxy had an eye for style. she began to design costume ideas to provide to the designer in hopes of having them seen on stage. her boss began to take notice and started giving her more solo time on the center stage.

things were finally starting to look up. and then of course, mason found her. panicked, roxy packed her necessities and her savings and skipped town, tearfully mourning the loss of community on the train ride away from her new home. she didn’t have much of a pan other than to gain as much space between her and her past. at the train station, she simply closed her eyes and picked a city to head off to -- athens.

thankfully, the kind of occupation that roxy found herself in meant that she could always find a job. granted, she had to start over yet again at a new club but her level of charisma and dedication appealed to all who knew her. it wasn’t long before she was in the top ranks, the highest she had ever been, offering herself as a sort of protector for the other girls in the club despite her relatively young age.

it was there that she eventually met cora, someone that roxy grew to adore quite quickly. how could she not when the young redhead was like the sun herself ? immediately, roxy accepted a role as a big sister and though she refuses to claim favoritism with the younger girls, it’s very clear that cora is at the top of the list. it is also thanks to cora that roxy heard more about riverbank university. 

going to college had always been something that interested her, but of course wasn’t much of an option. diligently, she began to work away on the application. unfortunately, despite having a high school degree, her last-minute dwindling grades and the distance between her graduation and now admission to college worked against roxy’s favor. she was rejected as a full time student but managed to be accepted as a part-time one with little to no financial aid. she began taking on extra shifts and batting her eyes at her regulars to help supplement the rest.

roxy’s incredibly theatrical and adoring facade covers up an unbelievable sadness and fear that things will not always end well. though she seems like she has laid down roots here in athens, she’s constantly looking over her shoulder as if waiting for the other shoe to drop and wondering if she is resigned to live no meaningful life at all due to the choices she made in the past.

[almostnoisydonut]

𝓢𝓱𝓸𝓾𝓵𝓭 𝓖𝓸𝓿𝓮𝓻𝓷𝓶𝓮𝓷𝓽 𝓑𝓪𝓲𝓵𝓸𝓾𝓽 𝓑𝓪𝓷𝓴𝓼?

It is widely debated that the policy actions taken to alleviate from the crisis would complicate future policies by encouraging risky investments; this has been one of the important reasons for opposing bailout as this behavior leads to a problem known as “Moral Hazard”. Moral Hazards creates a presumption that the government would again rescue a failing firm, which signals a firm to be less careful then they would have been otherwise while taking risk. It is important to note that, when the government decides to absorb losses, bailouts unavoidably increases inappropriate risk taking behavior, which increases the likelihood of losses in the future. It acts as a disincentive to smart investment strategy or a risk-averse behavior.

If a business should not be rewarded with funding from a government stand point from failing in society. If a business fails it is because it had not complete its purpose in society. On that note, government officials should not allow business to be bailed out for failing in society and people should stand against this to ensure economic stability.

Bailing out banks desecrates the capitalist principles of our country. Banks are like any business and should not be saved if they fail. They do not deserve special treatment because they are "too big to fail." In fact, bailing them out only makes them bigger. Sure, the economic fallout may be bad at first, but sometimes you have to endure chemotherapy to cure cancer.

It is important as an investor to know any money in a bank will be returned to you, hopefully with interest. It is also great as a home buyer to know banks are willing to take risks on giving a mortgage to someone with bad credit. However, bailing out banks rewards them for behaviors which put investors at greater risks. Bankers benefit, because they get bonuses from the bailout. The people who had bad credit, but qualified for loans get punished, because banks let them borrow more than they could afford to pay back. The investors suffer, because the interest rates go down, though at least they didn't lose everything. Sometimes even the banks suffer, because they have to sell houses which has now depreciated in value.

Banks were bailed out by the federal government in 2008, that doesn't make what happened the correct thing to do. Bankrupt banks would have sent shockwaves through the United States and Europe, likely leading to a second Great Depression. However, in a free market economy, those institutions should have been allowed to fail and other banks would have risen to the top of the financial heap.

Business go under because of flawed business practices, mismanagement, or just a lack of demand for whatever it is they're offering. They can either adapt or die. If the government bails out ANY business, big or small, that business will simply continue to do whatever it was that got them in trouble in the first place.

Bailing out banks has moral hazards as well. In the theory of economics, moral hazard means taking undue risks, because the party taking the risks does not have to bear the cost. It refers to a situation where in the way one party behaves may prove harmful to the other party after the completion of a transaction. One party may decide that how much has to be taken while the other party will have to bear the costs if things do not turn up as expected. Moral hazards pop up when one party is not ready to take responsibility for the way it performs, acts or behaves. It fails to perform well and acts carelessly, or not as carefully as it otherwise would have. It leaves the other party to take responsibility for its actions and bear the consequences as well. To under the phrase better, we must know where the phrase first came from. It was first used by the Insurance Industry because the industry believed that if they would protect the people or their clients from hazards like accidents or fire, it would only make the people or the clients behave in a riskier manner and they would cease to be careful and be more careless. Hence the term was coined. Moral hazards may occur.

Thus, moral hazards are a direct result of the bailout of banks and the discipline of the market is lost as these bailouts create more scope for financial crisis and also because the expectations of future bailouts are increased. This in turn, ruins the entire discipline of the market. Insurance expectation is also increased due to bank bailouts, which decreases the ability of the market participants to adjust to the risks which a bank may have to face. This creates a negative effect on the market, and weakens it. It also affects the efforts of the financial sector. These bailouts affect the risk taking ability of the banks to a very large extent. The bailed out banks end up taking more risk. Therefore the government should let them fail and as a result the bondholders and stockholders will not have money to invest in such institutions and eventually, such weak functioning institutions will no longer exist in the market.

[dearyallfrommatt]

 My late father loved Krystal burgers. Even after his diabetes blossomed into something his battered old body could barely control, if he came near a town that had a Krystal, he’d make Momma drive him by it. When my brother got married in Athens, GA, and a mix-up of Daddy’s meds put him in a serious fog, he had enough presence of mind to have us make a run to the one on Prince Avenue.

 Long story short, the Krystal burger chain is filing for bankruptcy. Founded in 1932 and famous for those little hamburgers like you’d get at White Castle up North, the company has a hearing in the North District Court of Georgia Wednesday, citing debts up to $100 million dollars. Regardless how things turn out, some of the 320 restaurants in nine different states will remain open thanks to franchising, but that still makes life a little worrisome for the 5,000-plus people who work for the company now, mostly at part-time wages, of course.

 The last time Krystal went bankrupt was 1997 and that was due to millions of dollars of unpaid overtime owed to employees. The company was bought by a private equity firm, Port Royal Holdings, for $145 million dollars. As an aside, the original Port Royale was a famous pirate haven back during what’s called The Golden Age of Piracy, roughly 1620-1720, before becoming a center for “legitimate” shipping and trade in the Caribbean, but I’m sure that’s a coincidence.

 Since 1997, Krystal has bounced from private equity firm to private equity firm and has had eight different CEO’s. The last one, Paul Macaluso, left after the company eliminated franchises and management positions, not to mention slashing basic staff, in an effort to not actually turn a buck but the stave off their mounting creditors. The company declared bankruptcy the day their last loan deal with a creditor ran out. At the same time, the company’s dealing with an investigation into their payment practices and a “security breach”.

 I doubt this will mean we’ll see the end of Krystal, but maybe. What’s most likely is that yet another private equity firm full of people who care nothing about anything beyond making more and more profit and damn the torpedoes, will swing in to rescue it, finding new and better ways to screw over workers. Because they can never make enough money.

 I don’t understand rich people, I really don’t. People who can’t just enjoy their wealth and good fortune, I mean, the ones that have to have more and more lucre. Wrestling legend Jim Cornette - stay with me here - once said the main thing he could not understand about former boss and WWE CEO Vince McMahaon is why he couldn’t just enjoy his billions. He had to have more and, not only that, fuck over other people as much as possible while doing it.

 For your edification, after the end of the Monday Night Wars in 1999, the only professional wrestling company that made money was the WWF. McMahaon - who bought the company from his father Vince Sr. in the late ‘70s for one dollar - was literally worth billions. On top of that, it didn’t look like the they’d ever stop making money bringing the rabid fan base the best in sweaty men in small pants pretending to fight.

 And then Vince got greedy. First they tried to bring the world two billion-dollar flops in the XFL and a restaurant in Manhattan. I really don’t know from the restaurant except that it crashed and burned, but being a fan of football, I watched the XFL saga with fascinated horror. Going against the NFL is a rum’s game - ask the USFL and President Trump - but the XFL was set up to actually take down - or pretend to, keeping with the wrestling theme - the pro football juggernaut.

 The lads from at Old School Wrestling can sum it up better and more entertaining than I could. After all was said and done, the league lost $138 million dollars with their deal with NBC, it cost Vince himself $69 million, and by the time the thing washed out, Vince was no longer a billionaire. In short order, the wrestling boom ate itself and money that could’ve been spent to give their employees some sort of health insurance security went to creditors. Even in the football league, the highest paid athlete made five grand a week and, of course, no health insurance for players.

 Now, I’m not ragging on the WWE or even professional wrestling. I firmly believe that one of America’s greatest contribution to world culture is professional wrestling - no, seriously - and a full understanding of the United States’ development and evolution, at least in the 20th century. But this is a fine example of how greed destroys whatever it touches. Call it capitalism’s inevitable outcome or whatever you want to call it, but this is now seen as How Things Are Supposed to Be.

 The last decade saw a plethora of long-running businesses go flat broke and have to shutter their doors. Financial experts blamed the death of Toys ‘R’ Us on Millennials not having kids and the spread of Amazon, for example, but the fact is the private equity companies - including Mitt Romney’s Ban Capital - cut and sliced everything they could in the run for more profits and less overhead. ‘Cause that’s all that matters.

 I used to do an internet streaming radio show with a libertarian who once tried to enlighten to me the evil of taxation in maybe the dumbest way possible. A friend of his, he said, worked at a private equity firm, putting in 80 hours a week, and because of taxation, she was only able to bring home $180 thousand out of the $200 thousand she “earned” each year. Needless to say, that didn’t cut it.

 But again, this is how the world is Supposed To Work. Providing a good consumers either need or really enjoy and in some way makes their lives a little better, that doesn’t even pretend to matter anymore. Taking care of your employees, paying them enough to live on and keep themselves hale-&-hearty because workers that aren’t living in terror of getting sick or a raise in rent are better workers, that’s not profitable.

 Well, it is profitable and a smaller, self-contained businesses can totally do that, but the American Way is to gobble up as much as possible for some reason. Instead of enjoying your wealth and the sense of stability never having to worry about which bill you’re going to have to skip this month or if your landlord is going to increase your went for whatever the hell reason, our society encourages the very richest to accumulate and horde as much wealth as possible. If you can step on someone’s face in the process, even better.

 And if you fail, no big worry. In 2008, Delta Airlines fired their CEO, Richard Anderson, after four months because the company lost over $70 million. Anderson nevertheless walked away with a severance package that included  over $11 million dollars plus a corner office on Peachtree Street in Atlanta. More recently, due to on-going scandals involving their 737′s, Boeing booted their CEO Dennis Muilenberg after ballooning losses and deadly crashes of two of their planes. They did punish him by denying his full severance package, though. Luckily, he still walks away with $60 million in stock options and pension benefits.

 So, what is the answer, I hear you say. Hell, I don’t know. These practices are an ongoing problem, but the acceptance of such behavior by the hoi palloi is even worse. We see this as natural and good, the American way. We elected a president who was born rich and was a big mover-&-shaker in a field his father already plowed, and companies under his control went bankrupt at least six times. Had he spent the last 50 years funding art galleries and weaving baskets, just letting the interest do it’s work, he’d arguably be richer than he is now.

 Is socialism the answer? Can capitalism be saved? Do we need to look for an entirely different paradigm when it comes to economic survival? Again, I don’t pretend to have any answers. Indeed, my whole approach to anarchistic theory isn’t searching for a specific end result way to “make things work” so much as using the tools I can live with to get by as best I can while maybe making the world a better place along the way. But since no one is ever really punished or suffers from such actions that have proven to be, at best, a crap game, we’ll see more of this.

 More profit, that’s all that matters.

[babes-and-baddies]

I just read @codenamesazanka’s post (+some responses) about the issues with a ‘#1 hero’ ranking, and it ties into a lot of stuff I was already planning on writing about with how exactly this mindset self-generates and offshoots into everything else so I figured I’d write it here! I don’t know if Hori himself considered this view (it would be amazing if he did!), but the explanation that would make best sense in-universe? Is that this “#1 Hero” system seems like a bad idea because it is bad- and was designed to be.

I feel like this whole issue has to do with economics and how heroes are paid, mixed in with the value of public image and discrimination towards weak/lacking/dangerous quirks, the social emphasis on individual strength and image, as well as how that image perpetuates trust beyond the heroes means and stifles civilians inclination to help eachother. It all sorta jumbles together into one huge, complicated, interconnected, and unhealthy mess, just like real life does!

Disclaimer: this is gonna get long, and it’s very pessimistic about how things are and I’m probably going to be called a villain sympathizer which, y’know, isn’t wrong, but this is just really interesting and fun to look into. 

So to get this started: money.

It’s unclear how exactly heroes are evaluated for pay -though it seems competitive if Mt. Lady’s intro is anything to go by- but most likely it’s based on fulfilling specific pre-agreed upon tasks efficiently. There’s the normal heroes, rescue heroes, etc- and i’m willing to bet that they each have their own rigid set of expectations. 

It’s not about doing what’s the most good; it’s about doing what fits their job as a specific kind of hero. And as we saw with when Stain fought Midoriya, Iida, and Todoroki, ‘what’s necessary’ doesn't always line up with ‘what’s allowed’. Doing what’s right is not only sometimes separate from hero work, but also discouraged in some cases with heavy penalty, potentially even the loss of their hero license. It’s a system that says, ‘Be strong, be flashy, play by the rules, and you’ll rank high. Rank high, and you’ll have more security and freedom.’  Following that mindset is a requirement of being a hero, even though it doesn’t help the public or even the heroes themselves. 

Likewise All Might mentions that heroes don’t participate in public service anymore (like cleaning trashed-up beaches), and I have to wonder how many don’t because they don’t have the time to. 

After all, if only Top Ranking Heroes get paid a lot for hero work, most heroes need to turn to other sources of a living- such as modelling, advertising, endorsing, etc. It’s been alluded to several times, such as with Uwabami towards Yaomomo and Kendo, that, at least for the girls, these extra media jobs are central to doing herowork! Even male heroes such a Present Mic have side-jobs, and I wonder as well for whether they’re because he wants to, or because they’re financially necessary. This all also leads to fierce competition. While heroes can in cases work well together, it’s shown as early as ep. 1 that there is also infighting and lack of communication, such as when Mt. Lady created unnecessary property damage in order to do nothing more than steal Kamui Wood’s thunder (and in extension, money). 

While at UA there are times where they students are forced to work together, overall it seems like communication and cooperativeness is something optional and never taught. And if Endeavour is any indication, it’s something they’re never expected to learn.

All of this creates a situation where heroes are limited in what they’re able to do. Helping others is most practical to do while working as a term and providing everyone with support, but things are set up with a Strong Lone Hero type ideal. 

They have to constantly look out for their image since it’s their source of income, they have to allocate their time carefully between hero-ing and jobs for money, etc. None of that leaves much opportunity to focus on other central aspects of helping others, such as helping local communities or volunteer work.

So how does this matter outside of the fact that it limits the amount of good that can be done? For starters, it can work as one of the main tools to maintain the hero industry: creating an environment which allows for villains to be created. Not to get too political, but this can lead to a strong parallel between the BNHA universe and our own, or at least many prominent societies irl.

There are countless types of people who turn to villainy, and while some are genuinely evil people who would do wrong in any situation, it’s most likely that the majority of villains are small-fry who did minor or non-violent crimes, just like in real life. And what leads to so many of today’s crimes? Economic disparity, lack of other options, and discrimination.

To start with disparity: public service is already undervalued irl, and I can assume it is over in the BNHA universe as well. Since villains are needed to maintain the hero vs villain rate to keep heroism acting as an industry, there needs to be enough villains. So for those who are controlling and benefiting from the system there would be active interest in maintaining conditions where villains would be created.

An easy way to do this would be by making it harder for heroes to help with community outreach, so that those in need have less practical avenues to get any while at the same time maintaining a cultural idea that heroes are able to save everyone, even in non-villain scenarios, and therefore civilians don’t need to get involved. 

I know that, luckily, lots of people wouldn't fall for it and would still try to take care of their own without heroes involvement, but having a sociocultural and political system invested in maintaining its power would certainly make it harder for the smaller communities where more villains come from to find enough resources.

At the same time, what is one clear example of discrimination shown time and time again in BNHA, something routinely shown in both extreme positive and negative light? Quirks. There’s probably a reason why there are no quirkless heroes, or why Shinsou had such a hard time to get his foot in the door at UA; their society and culture idolizes powerful quirks and overlooks/fears those who have quirk statuses that are deemed not good enough. 

Those with flashy quirks become ‘good’ and those with dangerous quirks become ‘bad’, despite everyone having no control over what quirk they eventually manifest. These people are underrepresented in groups of power, and looked down upon in different contexts. While this won’t in and of itself lead to villainy, it does a first step of ostracising someone from society.

At the same time, there’s a parallel idolization of heroes which aims to create trust in them, for both big and small things- they can save you from a villain, but they can also let you in on a secret of the best shampoo for every hair type for super luscious locks. They can clear debris, but they can also be a hero in every moment of the days, helping others. This is the image that sells, and it’s the image that maintains trust. 

It’s also the image that makes people see an injured and afraid child crying for help and happily think ‘a hero will save him’; it doesn’t matter that it’s improbable, because it’s what the media and hero industry has continually led them to believe. Even the most kind and well-meaning people can be susceptible to incorrect beliefs shared by those they trust.

Villains on the other hand are universally shown as irredeemable, where all of them are viewed as scum of the earth regardless of the severity of their crimes. This helps maintain the image that the hero industry needs to continue to sell itself. Heroes are always good and always win, villains are always bad and always lose. We can trust heroes, so we can trust the system, and we can trust what heroes are paid to tell us. Strong flashy quirks are good because heroes have them and heroes are good. We don’t need to get involved. Everything’s simple and we’re all in the right since we support heroes and we don’t need to worry, yay! The belief system is simple, it makes people feel good, and I understand how it could be appealing. 

Even when Midoriya looked past the idea that heroes would always win, and he went to save Katsuki from the sludge villain, he was admonished for it. While that’s fair because he’s a child and shouldn’t put himself into danger like that, it’s not hard to see how that reflects a wider mindset- not only do civilians not need to help others when there are heroes to do so instead, but it’s bad if civilians do heroes’ jobs for them. 

That would be relatively fine if heroes could always help; it’s shown both here and in canon that that often isn’t the case regardless of how much most heroes genuinely want to help people as best they can.

And of course there are people realizing things feel wrong. But even when there’s criticism of hero society, such as Stain’s ideology and it’s popular reception, it keeps failing to recognize the underlying causes of what’s going on. Heroes aren’t universally shallow and greedy any more than quirkless people are weak victims or people with dangerous quirks are evil. 

As long as the criticisms are like Stain’s in nature, which place the responsibility solely on the shoulders of individual heroes rather than the society as a whole and the people who benefit from how things are set up -the media, corporations which profit off of trust in the Hero Image, politicians which understand how things are set up and use it to improve their image- the system is never going to change. But this is a whole other topic deserving of its’ own analysis, so I’ll stop there for now.

As an example of where this ties all together, take the hero/villain fight in ep 1. It was a huge fight over a purse snatching- people potentially getting injured, major street damage, etc, all over one purse. And what do the civilians have to say about it? They’re impressed by the villains quirk, wondering why such a good quirk is wasted on someone like him; the villain literally gets called the ‘incarnate of evil’ by Kamui Woods- while purse snatching is bad there are much worse things to do, such as, I don’t know, murder; most importantly, the civilians watch it as entertainment.

Wow, cool, a fight! It doesn’t matter that it’s dangerous, because there are heroes there and therefore everyone’s protected. And if people get hurt, that’s sad, but it’s an exception, bad luck, or the injured person did something wrong like not listening to the heroes! The hero vs villain conflicts have become so normalized, sensationalized even, that people feel separate from the situation, as if they are passive bystanders to everything where everything works out as long as they cheer the heroes on. 

And when there are pro heroes, why would anyone need to think about what makes actual ‘heroes’ in the broader sense? They trust the pros, so they trust the system- even though it’s the system which controls the pros.

So as far as I can see- there shouldn’t be a number one hero! The very concept could play into a self-serving system which priorities public image over actually doing good, and in fact would be part of what allows the hero/villain conflict to be so rampant in BNHA’s society! And considering all the potential implications of that, maybe the LOV have a point, even if it’s not as simple as they make it out to be.

At least there’s still hope in the form of 1-A and the other up-and-coming future heroes, and maybe one day they’ll be able to work together and change things into a better, healthier, more cooperative hero system.

[kkintle]

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics by Richard H. Thaler; Quotes

One day on a phone call I asked him how he was feeling. He said, “You know, it’s funny. When you have the flu you feel like you are going to die, but when you are dying, most of the time you feel just fine.”

Let a six-year-old girl with brown hair need thousands of dollars for an operation that will prolong her life until Christmas, and the post office will be swamped with nickels and dimes to save her. But let it be reported that without sales tax the hospital facilities of Massachusetts will deteriorate and cause a barely perceptible increase in preventable deaths—not many will drop a tear or reach for their checkbooks.

“willingness to pay” or “willingness to accept.”

Opportunity costs are vague and abstract when compared to handing over actual cash.

The Weber-Fechner Law holds that the just-noticeable difference in any variable is proportional to the magnitude of that variable. If I gain one ounce, I don’t notice it, but if I am buying fresh herbs, the difference between 2 ounces and 3 ounces is obvious. Psychologists refer to a just noticeable difference as a JND.

So, we experience life in terms of changes, we feel diminishing sensitivity to both gains and losses, and losses sting more than equivalently-sized gains feel good.

Big ideas are fine, but I needed to publish papers to stay employed. Looking back, I had what science writer Steven Johnson calls a “slow hunch.” A slow hunch is not one of those “aha” insights when everything becomes clear. Instead, it is more of a vague impression that there is something interesting going on, and an intuition that there could be something important lurking not far away. The problem with a slow hunch is you have no way to know whether it will lead to a dead end. I felt like I had arrived on the shores of a new world with no map, no idea where I should be looking, and no idea whether I would find anything of value.

Economists don’t care whether you like a firm mattress better than a soft one or vice versa, but they cannot tolerate you saying that you like a firm mattress better than a soft one and a soft one better than a firm one.

Psychologists tell us that in order to learn from experience, two ingredients are necessary: frequent practice and immediate feedback.

Many people have made money selling magic potions and Ponzi schemes, but few have gotten rich selling the advice, “Don’t buy that stuff.”

acquisition utility and transaction utility.

Expressions such as “don’t cry over spilt milk” and “let bygones be bygones” are another way of putting economists’ advice to ignore sunk costs.

Many mentioned the advice, often attributed to William Faulkner, but apparently said by many, that writers have to learn to “kill their darlings.” The advice has been given so often, I suspect, because it is hard for any writer to do.

The bigger lesson is that once you understand a behavioral problem, you can sometimes invent a behavioral solution to it. Mental accounting is not always a fool’s game.

A good rule to remember is that people who are threatened with big losses and have a chance to break even will be unusually willing to take risks, even if they are normally quite risk averse.

Although it is never stated explicitly as an assumption in an economics textbook, in practice economic theory presumes that self-control problems do not exist.

Some early economists viewed any discounting of future consumption as a mistake—a failure of some type. It could be a failure of willpower, or, as Arthur Pigou famously wrote in 1921, it could be a failure of imagination: “Our telescopic faculty is defective and . . . we, therefore, see future pleasures, as it were, on a diminished scale.”

The economics training the students receive provides enormous insights into the behavior of Econs, but at the expense of losing common-sense intuition about human nature and social interactions. Graduates no longer realize that they live in a world populated by Humans.

I once gave a talk about self-control to a group of economists at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. At one point I used the word “temptation,” and one of the audience members asked me to define it. Someone else in the audience jumped in to say, “It’s in the Bible.” But it was not in the economists’ dictionary.

Ainslie’s paper also provides a long discussion of various strategies for dealing with self-control problems. One course of action is commitment: removing the cashews or tying yourself to the mast. Another is to raise the cost of submitting to temptation. For example, if you want to quit smoking, you could write a large check to someone you see often with permission to cash the check if you are seen smoking. Or you can make that bet with yourself, what Ainslie calls a “private side bet.” You could say to yourself, “I won’t watch the game on television tonight until I finish [some task you are tempted to postpone].”

We all have occasions on which we change our minds, but usually we do not go to extraordinary steps to prevent ourselves from deviating from the original plan. The only circumstances in which you would want to commit yourself to your planned course of action is when you have good reason to believe that if you change your preferences later, this change of preferences will be a mistake.

At some point in pondering these questions, I came across a quote from social scientist Donald McIntosh that profoundly influenced my thinking: “The idea of self-control is paradoxical unless it is assumed that the psyche contains more than one energy system, and that these energy systems have some degree of independence from each other.” The passage is from an obscure book, The Foundations of Human Society. I do not know how I came by the quote, but it seemed to me to be obviously true. Self-control is, centrally, about conflict. And, like tango, it takes (at least) two to have a conflict.

One principle that emerged from our research is that perceptions of fairness are related to the endowment effect.

“If you gouge them at Christmas they won’t come back in March.” That remains good advice for any business that is interested in building a loyal clientele.

Although it is true that in the Ultimatum Game the most common offer is often 50%, one cannot conclude that Proposers are trying to be fair. Instead, they may be quite rationally worried about being rejected.

Further research by Ernst Fehr and his colleagues has shown that, consistent with Andreoni’s finding, a large proportion of people can be categorized as conditional cooperators, meaning that they are willing to cooperate if enough others do. People start out these games willing to give their fellow players the benefit of the doubt, but if cooperation rates are low, these conditional cooperators turn into free riders. However, cooperation can be maintained even in repeated games if players are given the opportunity to punish those who do not cooperate. As illustrated by the Punishment Game, described earlier, people are willing to spend some of their own money to teach a lesson to those who behave unfairly, and this willingness to punish disciplines potential free riders and keeps robust cooperation rates stable.

Not everyone will free ride all the time, but some people are ready to pick your pocket if you are not careful.

Shefrin and Statman’s answer relied on a combination of self-control and mental accounting. The notion was that some shareholders—retirees, for instance—like the idea of getting inflows that are mentally categorized as “income” so that they don’t feel bad spending that money to live on. In a rational world, this makes no sense. A retired Econ could buy shares in companies that do not pay dividends, sell off a portion of his stock holdings periodically, and live off of those proceeds while paying less in taxes.

“Discovery commences with the awareness of anomaly, i.e., with the recognition that nature has somehow violated the paradigm-induced expectations that govern normal science.” —Thomas Kuhn

the Journal of Economic Perspectives is available free online to anyone at www.aeaweb.org/jep, including all the back issues. It is a great place to learn about economics. 

If the outside view is fleshed out carefully and informed with appropriate baseline data, it will be far more reliable than the inside view. The problem is that the inside view is so natural and accessible that it can influence the judgments even of people who understand the concept—indeed, even of the person who coined the term.

Flip a coin, heads you win $200, tails you lose $100. As Samuelson had anticipated, Brown declined this bet, saying: “I won’t bet because I would feel the $100 loss more than the $200 gain.” In other words, Brown was saying: “I am loss averse.” But then Brown said something that surprised Samuelson. He said that he did not like one bet, but would be happy to take 100 such bets.

“If it does not pay to do an act once, it will not pay to do it twice, thrice, . . . or at all.”

“myopic loss aversion.” The only way you can ever take 100 attractive bets is by first taking the first one, and it is only thinking about the bet in isolation that fools you into turning it down.

One reason is that it is risky to be a contrarian. “Worldly wisdom teaches that is it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.”

Remember another of Keynes’s famous lines. “In the long run, we are all dead.”

In a rational world there would not be very much trading—in fact, hardly any. Economists sometimes call this the Groucho Marx theorem. Groucho famously said that he would never want to belong to any club that would have him as a member. The economist’s version of this joke—predictably, not as funny—is that no rational agent will want to buy a stock that some other rational agent is willing to sell. Imagine two financial analysts, Tom and Jerry, are playing a round of golf. Tom mentions that he is thinking of buying 100 shares of Apple. Jerry says, that’s convenient, I was thinking of selling 100 shares. I could sell my shares to you and avoid the commission to my broker. Before they can agree on a deal, both think better of it. Tom realizes that Jerry is a smart guy, so asks himself, why is he selling? Jerry is thinking the same about Tom, so they call off the trade. Similarly, if everyone believed that every stock was correctly priced already—and always would be correctly priced—there would not be very much point in trading, at least not with the intent of beating the market. No one takes the extreme version of this “no trade theorem” literally, but most financial economists agree, at least when pressed, that trading volume is surprisingly high. There is room for differences of opinion on price in a rational model, but it is hard to explain why shares would turn over at a rate of about 5% per month in a world of Econs. However, if you assume that some investors are overconfident, high trading volume emerges naturally.

The key lesson is that prices can get out of whack, and smart money cannot always set things right.

“the three bounds”: bounded rationality, bounded willpower, and bounded self-interest.

When people are given what they consider to be unfair offers, they can get angry enough to punish the other party, even at some cost to themselves.

The winner’s curse. When many bidders compete for the same object, the winner of the auction is often the bidder who most overvalues the object being sold. The same will be true for players, especially the highly touted players picked early in the first round. The winner’s curse says that those players will be good, but not as good as the teams picking them think.

The false consensus effect. Put basically, people tend to think that other people share their preferences.

A competitive labor market does do a pretty good job of channeling people into jobs that suit them. But ironically, this logic may become less compelling as we move up the managerial ladder. All economists are at least pretty good at economics, but many who are chosen to be department chair fail miserably at that job. This is the famous Peter Principle: people keep getting promoted until they reach their level of incompetence.

“I am not the sort of person who would steal, and I hope you are not one of those evil types either.” This is an example of what game theorists call “cheap talk.” In the absence of a penalty for lying, everyone promises to be nice. However, there turns out to be one reliable signal in all this noise. If someone makes an explicit promise to split, she is 30 percentage points more likely to do so. (An example of such a statement: “I promise you I am going to split it, 120%.”) This reflects a general tendency. People are more willing to lie by omission than commission.

(...) he said he was planning to steal right up until the last minute. The hosts reminded him that he had given an impassioned speech about his father telling him that a man is only as good as his word. “What about that?” the hosts asked, somewhat aghast at this revelation. “Oh, that,” Ibrahim said. “Actually, I never met my father. I just thought it would be an effective story.” People are interesting.

Someone turning sixty who finds herself flush with surplus savings has numerous remedies, from taking an early retirement, to going on lavish vacations, to spoiling the grandchildren. But someone who learns at sixty that she has not saved enough has very little time to make up lost ground, and may find that retirement must be postponed indefinitely.

When dealing with Humans, words matter.

standard recommendation from the Cialdini bible: if you want people to comply with some norm or rule, it is a good strategy to inform them (if true) that most other people comply.

Ethical nudges must be both transparent and true.

If you want to encourage someone to do something, make it easy.

“big peanuts” fallacy

Those looking for behavioral interventions that have a high probability of working should seek out other environments in which a one-time action can accomplish the job. If no one-time solution yet exists, invent one!

As Gene Fama often says when he is asked about our competing views: we agree about the facts, we just disagree about the interpretation.

Mark Twain once said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

[kain-moriquendi]

What’s Worse, Death or Dissappointment?

I loathe happy people.

Oblivious, stupid little lemmings.

They walk by and don’t see the signs.

They don’t see the brooding isolative lone statue in the back corner cubicle watching their silly little social dance of pleasantries over by the water cooler.

They don’t see me.

They don’t see that they put me here, alone to audit the monthly finances for the company. We are at the utter brink and all they can do is chime on around the cooler like immature school children.

To think I was once their friend.

It is a malady of the highest order, when a friend becomes a fiend only by the whim of sheer ignorance, stupidity, and repetitive offenses by the side of the socially giddy worms wallowing in the fodder of their congregational conversing.

They don’t recognize that they all at one time needed help, or advice, or even a friend to console them.

And I obliged.

I gave them something of myself, whether it be words of encouragement, a joke to liven their days, a hug to remind them they’re not alone, or even a project to occupy their headspace.

The best remedy for any malady is activity, everybody knows that. Yet they prefer to lounge around like flies on a dung heap and it confounds me.

Oh, the effort I put to befriend many of them over the years, only to receive passing glances along the halls (within meters distance of course as is the custom around me) and the occasional request for my numbers so they can, “replicate my formulae,” as they would say. Petty theft aside, I still tried to envoke the effort to break out of the proverbial shell to acquaint and befriend these people.

And time. Time being one of God’s most precious gifts bestowed to man, as one could not truly measure the gratuity until he is gone to his grave.

Time I could have been utilizing towards myself and my endeavors I put into the office and its inhabitants. Time unpaid, off the clock, off the books, working with them on personal matters whether big or small.

Their lack of skill, their inhibitions, their addictions, their depression, all these human things I would spend my time, my effort, and albeit my soul into addressing.

And all I wanted is that it would not be in vain.

I know this all too well. You give something and you lose something.

A gift is something that stirs elation within the soul for both parties involved. A loss is when one takes and the other feels worse for wear.

I am that latter.

When a trinket is on a perpetual liar, is it still a gift?

When an invite to friendly discourse is ignored repeatedly, are these good terms?

When a project is abandoned due to not lack of content but lack of investment from the other parties, are these good partners?

The number of times I saved someone from their demons has become a bit of a laugh for me. I’d say there is a strong correlation of rescues as there are cuts along my heart.

Alas, I do get sickly sentimental over these things.

Those days of being of useful (or used, whichever you may choose) are long gone. Swept away by the sands of time.

I wish time would swipe them away already. They are a painful reminder of why one must never deviate from the task at hand. I am an employee of a company, on good standing, and I must conduct myself as such. I am no one’s friend or ally.

I applied to the manager position this afternoon.

I am good with numbers and must do what is possible to be in control of them. It is something that does not fail me. I have been able to predict quarterlies since I’ve started. I just know because I keep track of every finite detail. Time is not wasted in my world.

When one wastes my time it is a grave sin.

How many times did I find a coworker at wits end, or in some drunken stupor, and for some inexplicable human reason I helped them? How much time was lost in life by their lies when they continued to commit the same atrocities?

Sometimes I wonder if they would have died, would I feel as terrible as I feel now , alone in utter disappointment knowing that I helped these wretched souls keep their livelihoods and I am still the loner?

I look at all them, remembering all their sullen faces when they came to me. The attention they craved, the drama they fabricated. The stories they wove to lure me in.

I lost time and friends from all that, dealing with other people’s issues. Appeasing to the needs of these once social outcasts. Now look, they’re self proclaimed rehabilitated and happy little lambs.

And I’m still here. Outside looking in. (Or inside looking out?)

I pray they make me manager. There are six positions no longer deemed necessary that we can slash and rescue the company from financial ruin.

I look forward to giving my presentation...

[onisiondrama]

Luxymoo’s Stream 1/11/19 (2 of 4)

After the tweets, Greg messaged her and said sorry she was upset, he and Lainey were upset too.

She says she told him she felt like an asshole because she made it seem like it was all because of him, but it was the three way relationship.

Greg asks her to meet them in person before coming to a conclusion.

She says it doesn’t make sense to have doubt and to go there, form a bond with them and their family, then say no again. She says it would have hurt everyone a lot worse and she thanks god she didn’t do it, especially after hearing Maya, Billie, and Madison’s stories.

She takes a break from reading the messages to read comments. She says Greg hasn’t contacted her since. He sent her a message request, but never said anything.

She said there were warning signs that she willfully ignored. He asked her if she worked paycheck to paycheck, which struck her as off. She believes they look for people that aren’t financially stable on their own. She misunderstood the question and told him yes (she thought he was asking if she worked and made a paycheck). They were talking about if she was going to buy Fallout. She realized and told him no she saved her money.

She goes back to the story and said the messages after that were just talking in circles.

Greg replies three way relationships and awesome and make you feel like you’re part of something bigger. They make you feel stronger and multiplayer games are always better. He says they assume she doesn’t want to be a part of a three way because of her religion. He says that’s a bad reason to avoid potential happiness on an awesome level. (She explains she told Lainey she was a Christian.)

She defends her decision and says she wants a family and happy marriage like Lainey and Greg. Being a Christian didn’t play a factor in her decision, just her feelings.

He asks what’s wrong with a family with one father and two moms. (She explains he was hinting she could have kids, they’d be his kids.)

He asks if Lainey isn’t worth it. (She says this is when Lainey tweeted something like “I guess I’m not worth it”)

She defends herself again and says she has to think about herself too.

He goes hard on the “if Lainey is worth it you’d try” manipulation.

She notes this is because she changed her mind and she’s 100% allowed to change her mind if she’s not comfortable. It’s fucked up he demonized her after and made a video about her because someone tricked her with fake screen shots.

Greg: "Ok well let’s be clear. Lainey isn’t worth it to you otherwise you would have moved forward and that’s what worth it means so let’s stop pretending.”

She explains this is where the manipulation comes in. He’s trying to manipulate her into feeling like shit because she didn’t want to have sex with both of them.

Greg says something along the lines of she missed out. Tells her goodbye.

She told him he’s right, but she did have feelings for Lainey. She had to be selfish because this lifestyle isn’t for everyone, which is why when she came to that conclusion the night before she wanted to tell them immediately. She says she hopes they don’t hate her and she still supports them. She apologized and thanks Greg for his time. (She explains she was still supportive at this time and was open to friendship because she still idolized Lainey.)

She reads a comment “Using his own spouse as a means for manipulation, disgusting”, she agrees and says that’s exactly what it is.

He tells her they don’t hate her, just bummed out she chose a “generic cookie cutter nuclear life” over the “awesome” person Lainey is and the “handsome” person she described him to be. He says it doesn’t make sense to turn away two people she really likes for normality and the potential to hook up with guy for a marriage that’s statistically has more chance to fail than succeed. If this is your gut then do what you want. (She explains he’s telling her to do what she wants, but he continues to keep going. She explains she was also very scared while talking to him because at this point she realizes Greg goes after people in videos and anything she says he could use against her. She’s trying to stay calm and kind.)

She thanks him for understanding and hopes the best for them.

He questions why her gut told her to pursue the relationship, but is now telling her not to. He supports people doing what feels best as long as their not hurting anyone and she’s only hurting feelings to a small degree. He says he supports her feelings, wishes her good luck in her life. (She says she felt like he was being genuine and nice again.)

He sends her a screen shot from when they first talked about the three way relationship of her saying she was going to trust her gut and hope for the best with everything.

She thanks him for understanding and says they are both kind and honest.

He says he’s not kind, just to her and a select few other people.

She tells him she appreciates it even though she doesn’t deserve it.

He brings up again she should have met them first before deciding they weren’t worth perusing. “You don’t know the people you’re giving up on.”

She defends herself, feeling would be hurt worse, didn’t want them to lead them on.

He says that’s cute but silly. Visiting as a friend would risk nothing. (She notes this is when he first offers friendship.) He asks if she’d be willing to make a collab video with Lainey. Explains she could be a “business friend” and the expenses could be tax deducible so it’s not as big of a financial loss. He sends her a link to a video with another girl as an example of the video they’d make.

She says if they wanted to, sure. Asks if they’re both ok with being friends.

He says yes until her gut tells her it’d be never.

She asks if it’s ok if it’s still never.

He says if she thinks there’s still a chance she’ll have a change of heart it’s worth a shot, but if there’s no chance Lainey probably would think it’s not worth it to risk falling for her. If she thinks there’s a chance and visits and it winds up she’s not into it at least she tried. Tells her to be “blunt raw” about the possibility.

She says the probably is very slim. Defends herself.

(She notes this is where more manipulation comes in.) He says it seems her heart has gone cold to Lainey.

She defends herself.

He says it’s ok. He just likes seeing Lainey happy in a trinity, since she’s bi so the best of both worlds is awesome to experience with her. If it’s less than a 25% chance don’t come, if more lets schedule flight and enjoy a couple days together as friends.

Someone comments and asks what Lainey was saying during all this. She said Lainey wasn’t talking to her during this. Only Greg.

She tells Greg she’s willing to have a friendship but understands why that wouldn’t be an option. Says her heart isn’t cold to Lainey, still genuinely likes them, but she can’t be what you guys want. Don’t want to give hope and cause pain. Lainey deserves the world. (She notes she didn’t want to kid herself and go there to make videos and lead them on, yet she was still made out to be someone that lead them on.)