#but that's only possible with proliferate i think

[dravidious]

You're more amazing than ALL THE THINGS

Here's some cards inspired by my love of counting in rhythm to myself in daily life

With these I have an excuse to count "one, two, three" and "one, two, three, four" out loud in the middle of games!

[mariacallous]

This is a gift article

“In normal times, Americans don’t think much about democracy. Our Constitution, with its guarantees of free press, speech, and assembly, was written more than two centuries ago. Our electoral system has never failed, not during two world wars, not even during the Civil War. Citizenship requires very little of us, only that we show up to vote occasionally. Many of us are so complacent that we don’t bother. We treat democracy like clean water, something that just comes out of the tap, something we exert no effort to procure.

“But these are not normal times.”

I wrote those words in October 2020, at a time when some people feared voting, because they feared contagion. The feeling that “these are not normal times” also came from rumors about what Donald Trump’s campaign might do if he lost that year’s presidential election. Already, stories that Trump would challenge the validity of the results were in circulation. And so it came to pass.

This time, we are living in a much different world. The predictions of what might happen on November 5 and in the days that follow are not based on rumors. On the contrary, we can be absolutely certain that an attempt will be made to steal the 2024 election if Kamala Harris wins. Trump himself has repeatedly refused to acknowledge the results of the 2020 election. He has waffled on and evaded questions about whether he will accept the outcome in 2024. He has hired lawyers to prepare to challenge the results.

Trump also has a lot more help this time around from his own party. Strange things are happening in state legislatures: a West Virginia proposal to “not recognize an illegitimate presidential election” (which could be read as meaning not recognize the results if a Democrat wins); a last-minute push, ultimately unsuccessful, to change the way Nebraska allocates its electoral votes. Equally weird things are happening in state election boards. Georgia’s has passed a rule requiring that all ballots be hand-counted, as well as machine-counted, which, if not overturned, will introduce errors—machines are more accurate—and make the process take much longer. A number of county election boards have in recent elections tried refusing to certify votes, not least because many are now populated with actual election deniers, who believe that frustrating the will of the people is their proper role. Multiple people and groups are also seeking mass purges of the electoral rolls.

Anyone who is closely following these shenanigans—or the proliferation of MAGA lawsuits deliberately designed to make people question the legitimacy of the vote even before it is held—already knows that the challenges will multiply if the presidential vote is as close as polls suggest it could be. The counting process will be drawn out, and we may not know the winner for many days. If the results come down to one or two states, they could experience protests or even riots, threats to election officials, and other attempts to change the results.

This prospect can feel overwhelming: Many people are not just upset about the possibility of a lost or stolen election, but oppressed by a sensation of helplessness. This feeling—I can’t do anything; my actions don’t matter—is precisely the feeling that autocratic movements seek to instill in citizens, as Peter Pomerantsev and I explain in our recent podcast, Autocracy in America. But you can always do something. If you need advice about what that might be, here is an updated citizen’s guide to defending democracy.

Help Out on Voting Day—In Person

First and foremost: Register to vote, and make sure everyone you know has done so too, especially students who have recently changed residence. The website Vote.gov has a list of the rules in all 50 states, in multiple languages, if you or anyone you know has doubts. Deadlines have passed in some states, but not all of them.

After that, vote—in person if you can. Because the MAGA lawyers are preparing to question mail-in and absentee ballots in particular, go to a polling station if at all possible. Vote early if you can, too: Here is a list of early-voting rules for each state.

Secondly, be prepared for intimidation or complications. As my colleague Stephanie McCrummen has written, radicalized evangelical groups are organizing around the election. One group is planning a series of “Kingdom to the Capitol” rallies in swing-state capitals, as well as in Washington, D.C.; participants may well show up near voting booths on Election Day. If you or anyone you know has trouble voting, for any reason, call 866-OUR-VOTE, a hotline set up by Election Protection, a nonpartisan national coalition led by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

If you have time to do more, then join the effort. The coalition is looking for lawyers, law students, and paralegals to help out if multiple, simultaneous challenges to the election occur at the county level. Even people without legal training are needed to serve as poll monitors, and of course to staff the hotline. In the group’s words, it needs people to help voters with “confusing voting rules, outdated infrastructure, rampant misinformation, and needless obstacles to the ballot box.”

If you live in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin, you can also volunteer to help All Voting Is Local, an organization that has been on the ground in those states since before 2020 and knows the rules, the officials, the potential threats. It, too, is recruiting legal professionals, as well as poll monitors. If you don’t live in one of those states, you can still make a financial contribution.

Wherever you live, consider working at a polling station. All Voting Is Local can advise you if you live in one of its eight states, but you can also call your local board of elections. More information is available at PowerThePolls.org, which will send you to the right place. The site explains that “our democracy depends on ordinary people who make sure every election runs smoothly and everyone's vote is counted—people like you.”

Wherever you live, it’s also possible to work for one of the many get-out-the-vote campaigns. Consider driving people to the voting booth. Find your local group by calling the offices of local politicians, members of Congress, state legislators, and city councillors. The League of Women Voters and the NAACP are just two of many organizations that will be active in the days before the election, and on the day itself. Call them to ask which local groups they recommend. Or, if you are specifically interested in transporting Democrats, you can volunteer for Rideshare2Vote.

If you know someone who needs a ride, then let them know that the ride-hailing company Lyft is once again working with a number of organizations, including the NAACP, the National Council of Negro Women, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, the National Council on Aging, Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote, and the Hispanic Federation. Contact any of them for advice about your location. Also try local religious congregations, many of whom organize rides to the polls.

Smaller gestures are needed too. If you see a long voting line, or if you find yourself standing in one, report it to Pizza to the Polls and the group will send over some free pizza to cheer everyone up.

Join Something Now

Many people have long been preparing for a challenge to the election and a battle in both the courts and the media. You can help them by subscribing to the newsletters of some of the organizations sponsoring this work, donating money, and sharing their information with others. Don’t wait until the day after the vote to find groups you trust: If a crisis happens, you will not want to be scouring the internet for information.

Among the organizations to watch is the nonpartisan Protect Democracy, which has already launched successful lawsuits to secure voting rights in several states. Another is the States United Democracy Center, which collaborates with police as well as election workers to make sure that elections are safe. Three out of four election officials say that threats to them have increased; in some states, the danger will be just as bad the day after the election as it was the day before, or maybe even worse.

The Brennan Center for Justice, based at NYU, researches and promotes concrete policy proposals to improve democracy, and puts on public events to discuss them. Its lawyers and experts are preparing not only for attempts to steal the election, but also, in the case of a Trump victory, for subsequent assaults on the Constitution or the rule of law.

For voters who lean Democratic, Democracy Docket also offers a wealth of advice, suggestions, and information. The group’s lawyers have been defending elections for many years. For Republicans, Republicans for the Rule of Law is a much smaller group, but one that can help keep people informed.

Talk With People

In case of a real disaster—an inconclusive election or an outbreak of violence—you will need to find a way to talk about it, including a way to speak with friends or relatives who are angry and have different views. In 2020, I published some suggestions from More in Common, a research group that specializes in the analysis of political polarization, for how to talk with people who disagree with you about politics, as well as those who are cynical and apathetic. I am repeating here the group’s three dos and three don’ts:

•Do talk about local issues: Americans are bitterly polarized over national issues, but have much higher levels of trust in their state and local officials. •Do talk about what your state and local leaders are doing to ensure a safe election. •Do emphasize our shared values—the large majority of Americans still feel that democracy is preferable to all other forms of government—and our historical ability to deliver safe and fair elections, even in times of warfare and social strife. •Don’t, by contrast, dismiss people’s concerns about election irregularities out of hand. Trump and his allies have repeatedly raised the specter of widespread voter fraud in favor of Democrats. Despite a lack of evidence for this notion, many people may sincerely believe that this kind of electoral cheating is real. •Don’t rely on statistics to make your case, because people aren’t convinced by them; talk, instead, about what actions are being taken to protect the integrity of the vote. •Finally, don’t inadvertently undermine democracy further: Emphasize the strength of the American people, our ability to stand up to those who assault democracy. Offer people a course of action, not despair.

As a Last Resort, Protest

As in 2020, protest remains a final option. A lot of institutions, including some of those listed above, are preparing to step in if the political system fails. But if they all fail as well, remember that it’s better to protest in a group, and in a coordinated, nonviolent manner. Many of the organizations I have listed will be issuing regular statements right after the election; follow their advice to find out what they are doing. Remember that the point of a protest is to gain supporters—to win others over to your cause—and not to make a bad situation worse. Large, peaceful gatherings will move and convince people more than small, angry ones. Violence makes you enemies, not friends.

Finally, don’t give up: There is always another day. Many of your fellow citizens also want to protect not just the electoral system but the Constitution itself. Start looking for them now, volunteer to help them, and make sure that they, and we, remain a democracy where power changes hands peacefully.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

It’s been twenty years since my Microsoft DRM talk

On THURSDAY (June 20) I'm live onstage in LOS ANGELES for a recording of the GO FACT YOURSELF podcast. On FRIDAY (June 21) I'm doing an ONLINE READING for the LOCUS AWARDS at 16hPT. On SATURDAY (June 22) I'll be in OAKLAND, CA for a panel and a keynote at the LOCUS AWARDS.

This week on my podcast,This week on my podcast, I read my June 17, 2004 Microsoft Research speech about DRM, a talk that went viral two decades ago, and reassess its legacy:

https://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt

It's been 20 years (and one day) since I gave that talk. It wasn't my first talk like that, but at the time, it was the most successful talk I'd ever given. I was still learning how to deliver a talk at the time, tinkering with different prose and delivery styles (to my eye, there's a lot of Bruce Sterling in that one, something that's still true today).

I learned to give talks by attending sf conventions and watching keynotes and panel presentations and taking mental notes. I was especially impressed with the oratory style of Harlan Ellison, whom I heard speak on numerous occasions, and by Judith Merril, who was a wonderful mentor to me and many other writers:

https://locusmag.com/2021/09/cory-doctorow-breaking-in/

I was also influenced by the speakers I'd heard at the many political rallies I'd attended and helped organize; from the speakers at the annual Labour Day parade to the anti-nuclear proliferation and pro-abortion rights marches I was very involved with. I also have vivid memories of the speeches that Helen Caldicott gave in Toronto when I was growing up, where I volunteered as an usher:

https://www.helencaldicott.com/

When I helped found a dotcom startup in the late 1990s, my partners and I decided that I'd do the onstage talking; we paid for a couple hours of speaker training from an expensive consultant in San Francisco. The only thing I remember from that session was the advice to look into the audience as much as possible, rather than reading from notes with my head down. Good advice, but kinda obvious.

The impetus for that training was my onstage presentation at the first O'Reilly P2P conference in 2001. I don't quite remember what I said there, but I remember that it made an impression on Tim O'Reilly, which meant a lot to me then (and now):

https://www.oreilly.com/pub/pr/844

I don't remember who invited me to give the talk at Microsoft Research that day, but I think it was probably Marc Smith, who was researching social media at the time by data-mining Usenet archives to understand social graphs. I think I timed the gig so that I could kill three birds with one stone: in addition to that talk, I attended (and maybe spoke at?) that year's Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference, and attended an early preview of the soon-to-launch Sci Fi Museum (now the Museum of Pop Culture). I got to meet Nichelle Nichols (and promptly embarrassed myself by getting tongue-tied and telling her how much I loved the vocals she did on her recording of the Star Wars theme, something I'm still hot around the ears over, though she was a pro and gently corrected me, "I think you mean Star *Trek"):

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=4IiJUQSsxNw&list=OLAK5uy_lHUn58fbpceC3PrK2Xu9smBNBjR_-mAHQ

But the start of that trip was the talk at Microsoft Research; I'd been on the Microsoft campus before. That startup I did? Microsoft tried to buy us, which prompted our asshole VCs to cram the founders and steal our equity, which created so much acrimony that the Microsoft deal fell through. I was pretty bitter at the time, but in retrospect, I really dodged a bullet – for one thing, the deal involved my going to work for Microsoft as a DRM evangelist. I mean, talk about the road not taken!

This was my first time back at Microsoft as an EFF employee. There was some pre-show meet-and-greet-type stuff, and then I was shown into a packed conference room where I gave my talk and had a lively (and generally friendly) Q&A. MSR was – and is – the woolier side of Microsoft, where all kinds of interesting people did all kinds of great research.

Indeed, almost every Microsoft employee I've ever met was a good and talented person doing the best work they could. The fact that Microsoft produces such a consistent stream of garbage products and crooked business practices is an important testament to the way that a rotten organization can be so much less than the sum of its parts.

I'm a fully paid up subscriber to Ronald Coase's "Theory of the Firm" (not so much his other views):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm

Coase says the reason institutions exist is to enable people to work together with lowered "coordination costs." In other words, if you and I are going to knit a sweater together, we're going to need to figure out how to make sure that we're not both making the left sleeve. Creating an institution – the Mafia, the Catholic Church, Microsoft, a company, a co-op, a committee that puts on a regional science fiction con – is all about minimizing those costs.

As Yochai Benkler pointed out in 2002, the coolest and most transformative thing about the internet is that it let us do more complex collective work with smaller and less structured institutions:

https://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.PDF

That was the initial prompt for my novel Walkaway, which asked, "What if we could build luxury hotels and even space programs with the kind of (relatively) lightweight institutional overheads associated with Wikipedia and the Linux kernel?"

https://crookedtimber.org/2017/05/10/coases-spectre/

So the structure of institutions is really important. At the same time, I'm skeptical of the idea that there are "good companies" and "bad companies." Small businesses, family businesses, and other firms that aren't exposed to the finance sector can reflect their leaders' personalities, but it's a huge mistake to ascribe personalities to the companies themselves.

That's how you get foolish ideas like "Apple is a good company because they embrace paid service and Google is a bad company because they make money from surveillance." Apple will spy on you, too, if they can:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Disney and Fox weren't Romeo and Juliet, star-crossed lovers making goo-goo eyes at each other across the table at MPA meetings. They were two giant public companies, and any differences between them were irrelevancies and marketing myths:

https://locusmag.com/2021/07/cory-doctorow-tech-monopolies-and-the-insufficient-necessity-of-interoperability/

I think senior management's personalities do matter (see, for example, the destruction of Boeing after it was colonized by sociopaths from McDonnell Douglas), but the influence of those personalities is much less important than the constraints that competition and regulation impose on companies. In other words, an asshole can run a company that delivers good products at fair prices under ethical conditions – provided that failing to do so will cost more in lost business and fines than they stand to make by cheating:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification

Microsoft is a company founded and run by colossal assholes. Bill Gates is a monster and he surrounded himself with monsters, and they hired monsters to fill out the courts of their corporate palaces:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/14/patch-tuesday/#fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again

To the extent that good things come out of Microsoft – some of its games products, the odd piece of hardware, important papers from MSR – it's in spite of the leadership; it's the result of constraints imposed by competition and regulation – and that's why Microsoft pursued such an aggressive program of extinguishing its competitors and capturing its regulators.

In retrospect, I think one of my goals in that talk was to convince those people doing good work for a rotten institution to go elsewhere and do other things. Certainly, that's one of the goals I pursue in the talks I give today. At the time, some of Microsoft's highest-profile technologists were publicly resigning over the company's war on free/open source software, so it wasn't an unrealistic goal:

https://web.archive.org/web/20030214215639/http://synthesist.net/writing/onleavingms.html

What I did not expect what that publishing the talk on my site and blogging it on Boing Boing would spark a wave of public interest that would get its message in front of several orders of magnitude more people than I spoke to at Microsoft that day. Partly, that was because I released the talk into the public domain, using the brand-new Creative Commons Public Domain Declaration (which was later replaced with the CC0 mark, due to legal issues withBu its drafting):

https://web.archive.org/web/20100223035835/http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/

Some mix of the content of the speech, the spirit of the moment, and the novelty of that wide open license sparked a ton of interest. Jason Kottke recorded an audio version that Andy Baio hosted:

https://kottke.org/04/06/cory-drm-talk

My brutalist ASCII transcript was quickly converted to beautiful HTML by Matt Haughey and Anil Dash:

https://web.archive.org/web/20040622235333/http://www.dashes.com/anil/stuff/doctorow-drm-ms.html

For people who needed a hardcopy, there was Patrick Berry's printer-friendly stylesheet:

https://patandkat.com/pat/weblog/mirror/cory-drm/doctorow-drm-ms.html

Multiple people recorded (and sold!) audio versions, and then there were all the fan translations, into Danish, French, Finnish, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (both EU and Brazilian), Spanish and Swedish. I stayed in touch with some of those translators, and they helped me translate the position papers I wrote for UN WIPO meetings. Those papers were so effective that ratfuckers from the copyright lobby started to steal them and hide them in the UN toilets (!):

https://web.archive.org/web/20041119132831/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/002117.php

Re-reading the speech for my podcast on Sunday, I expected to be struck by the anachronisms in it, and there were a few of those to be sure. But far more clear was the common thread running from this talk to other talks I gave that took on a significant life of their own, like my 2011 "War On General Purpose Computing" talk for CCC:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/

And my work on Adversarial Interoperability:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

And my most recent work, on enshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/27/an-audacious-plan-to-halt-the-internets-enshittification-and-throw-it-into-reverse/

In other words, I've been saying the same thing – in different ways – for more than 20 years. That could be depressing, but I actually found it uplifting. Two decades ago, I was radicalized by a fear that the internet would be seized by corporations and governments and transformed into a system of surveillance and control. I found my way into a job at EFF, where I worked with colleagues across multiple disciplines – coders, lawyers and activists – to fight this force.

At the time, this was a fringe cause. Most of the traditional activists I'd come up with in the feminist, antiwar, antiracist, environmental and labour movement viewed digital rights as a distraction and dismissed its partisans as sad, self-obsessed nerds who mistook fights over the management of Star Trek message boards for civil rights struggles:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell

I thought I was right then, and I think history has borne me out. The point of waging these fights – both in the wide public sphere and within political movements – is to get people activated before it's too late. Every day that goes by is a day when the internet becomes more inhospitable to political organizing for a better world – more surveillant, more controlling. I believed then – and believe today – that the internet isn't more important that the other fights I waged as a young activist, but I think that the internet is fundamental to those fights.

Saving the planet, smashing patriarchy, overthrowing tyranny and freeing labor are all fights that will be coordinated – Coase style – on the internet. Without a free, fair and open internet, those fights are infinitely harder to win.

The project of getting people to understand, care about, and fight for digital rights is a marathon, not a sprint. When I joined EFF, it was already 12 years old. There were six people in the org then (I was the seventh). Today, there's more than a hundred of us, and we're stretched so thin! The 30+ year old idea that internet policy will intersect with every part of every fight has been utterly vindicated.

Back in 2004, I asked Microsoft why they were willing to fight the US government to the death over antitrust enforcement, but were such wimps when confronted with the entertainment industry's demands for DRM. 20 years later, I think I know the answer: Microsoft understood that DRM would let them usurp the relationship between creative workers, entertainment industry companies, and audiences. Their perfect instincts for seeking out and capitalizing on opportunities to seize monopoly power drove them to make deliberately defective products, in the belief that their market power would let them cram those products down our throats:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/01/27/protect-your-investment-buy-open/

Here's a link to the podcast episode:

https://craphound.com/news/2024/06/16/my-2004-microsoft-drm-talk/

And here's direct link to the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the Internet Archive; they'll host your stuff for free forever):

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_470/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_470_-_My_2004_Microsoft_DRM_Talk.mp3

And here's the RSS feed for my podcast:

https://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/18/greetings-fellow-pirates/#arrrrrrrrrr

[bits-and-babs]

𝐈'𝐋𝐋 𝐁𝐈𝐓𝐄 – 𝐌𝐈𝐆𝐔𝐄𝐋 𝐎'𝐇𝐀𝐑𝐀

↳ summary: Miguel, believing he understands the extent of his mutation, takes a bite. Only- you don't react the way he expects. At all.

↳ pairing: Miguel O'Hara x f!Reader

↳ content [4.2k]: 18+ MDNI. SMUT, literally 4k words of porn without plot with a little extra at the end. Miguel's venom is sex pollen (therefore DUB-CON by default), biting, blood drinking (I know he’s not a vampire, I don’t care), oral (f receiving), fingering, use of name mami because I am disgusting, unprotected p in v sex. Not proof read, possibly OOC, I haven't seen ITSV, I was forced to write this against my will (jk) ((but not really)).

main masterlist ୨୧ join taglist ୨୧ ask

Crimson burns itself into your retinas as Miguel steps into your line of sight, and the spider-skull hybrid symbol emblazoned across his vast chest swallows your vision. Brown locks of hair drape across his forehead, over his lashes, and frames the intense scarlet gaze he levels you with. Staring up at the impossibly tall man through your heavy lids, you catch the tick in his jaw, the muscle twitching when he reaches towards your neck and traces his fingertip across the length of your jugular vein with a delicate touch. It tickles, skittering across your goosepimpled skin above your bludgeoning pulse.

"Shut it," he speaks flatly, the quiet lilt of his tone amplified by the silence in the room. Your heart thuds painfully hard against your ribs at the sound of his voice, your toes curling when Miguel settles his thumb and forefinger under the curve of your jaw. His palm stretches the length of your throat, fingers splayed across your neck. You can feel the knuckles of his pinky dig into your collarbone, a reminder of just how massive the wingspan of his hand is. 

"I- I didn't-" you fumble, the words dissipating when you see the fleshy pink of Miguel's tongue drag over the enamel daggers that protrude from his lips. The slight squeeze of his hand across your throat impedes any attempts to regain your train of thought, blood rushing to your head as he applies pressure to the vital blood flow to your brain. 

"I can hear you," he insists, a snarl curling his lips as bitter irritation flashes across his face, burning in the carmine of his irises, "Can hear what you're thinking."

Heat floods your cheeks, prickling warmth proliferating and creeping down your throat. Miguel seems anguished by the sensation of your heart palpitations pounding against the fissures of his palm, his thick, dark brows pinching together as he wets his full lips with the flat of his tongue. 

"Stay still," he urges you, a twinge of something that sounded as though he was pleading sparking through your nervous system. Crushing your eyelids closed, red and navy rotate in kaleidoscopic swirls in your vision as you feel Miguel's hair brush against the curve of your cheek. You whimper softly and flinch at the sensation of the tip of his nose skirting the angle of your neck. You hear him inhale, drawing the intoxicating scent of you into his lungs before letting out a groan, the exhale fanning across your skin. 

"Just a taste," he husks, mindless as he squeezes your neck harder. The pad of Miguel's thumb probes your thrumming pulse, and he moans loudly when he feels your heart lurch at the soft drag of his fangs against your throat. 

"Miguel-" you choke out, his feral grip tightening at the sound of your voice. 

"Fuck," he whispers, whimpers, slowly sinking the point of his fangs into the delicate flesh across the nape of your neck. You cry out, the pain of the punctures pinching sharply, and bury your nails into the expansive muscle of his bicep. Miguel's chest heaves dramatically, brushing your arm with each shuddering inhale as your blood seeps across his tongue. 

It's an odd sensation, the suction of his lips as he draws your ichor into his mouth, but it simmers deep and low in your abdomen, the weird feeling made worse by the vibration of his delighted moan. The gulping sounds his throat made echo in your ears, and you can almost imagine the flutter of his thick lashes as he lathes his tongue over the puncture wounds. 

Miguel inhales deeply as though he's chugged a pint of water, his lips barely departing from your weeping wound as he mumbles to himself repeatedly; just a taste, just a taste–

His wanton tone dries your mouth, your head throbbing with a mind-numbing migraine as you feel the muscles in your body tense. Coated in blood, Miguel chases the blood that had settled into the cracks of his lips with his tongue and savours the last morsels he can find.  

You could cry. Could burst into tears on the spot because Miguel looks gorgeous. He always did, always made your stomach flip when he entered the room and cast his brooding gaze over you, but you felt breathless as you gazed at him now, weightless. 

Fuck, he's so beautiful. His rich, dark features all fight for your attention; the arc of his cheekbones, long lashes dipped low as he takes you in and the way his obscenely large muscles ripple as he leans back to look you in the eyes. 

Blinking slowly, you whine when Miguel leans back into your throat for another taste. Something warm pools in the depths of your stomach when his tongue drags over the chords of your neck. Fuck- are you turned on right now?!

"Hng-Hot," you mumble in embarrassment, feeling a prickling warmth creep over your body. The damp sensation of perspiration clings to your forehead, moistening your hairline as Miguel pulls away from your throat to look you in the eye with a hmm?

"Hot," you repeat, the simmering sensation rapidly roiling to a scalding temperature. "'S too hot, Miguel–"

The fabric of your clothes clings to your back, your fingers itching to rip the material from your body. Miguel looks perplexed by your sudden lack of composure, his eyebrows knitted together in confusion as his eyes flick between your own. 

"Your pupils," he assesses, tone clinical as he reaches to take your chin into his hand once more, "They're dilated– you look sick."

The instant his fingertips brush the skin of your cheeks, you flinch from the scorching sensation that sparks beneath his touch. You pinch your eyelids together, letting out a sob of his name as you frantically attempt to push him away. 

"Miguel, no!" Your voice strains, pleading that Miguel stays away from you despite the evident worry that curls his fingers into tight fists. Fuck, why are you thinking of jumping his bones? It's desperate, a carnal need to rip that stupid fucking fancy lycra suit from his enormous, sexy muscles. You could grind your hips across those abs, ease the sudden pulse in your clit-

You wheeze, the stifling temperature causing your body to shift to autopilot as you pinch the hem of your shirt between your trembling fingers. "Hurts–"

"I cannot help if you push me awa-" Miguel's vexed attempt to reprimand your childish behaviour does little to knock you back to your senses, your eyes dragging the length of his ridiculously formed body with a searing desperation that stops him in his tracks. "What are you doing?"

"Hot, it's too fucking hot, Migu– Shut up–" you beg him for silence, his voice only worsening the frantic, irregular thrum of your heart. It's fruitless, though, because the flitting of his eyes across your body is enough to arc the arousal that blooms through you. 

Concern finally begins to worm its way into Miguel's body language, his hands searching over the messy countertops. He clears his throat, attempting to maintain his composure. 

"Blood sample," he speaks with that air of finality he always led with, "I will take a blood sample. You may be having a reaction to somethi-"

Shame does little to reason with your wandering hands, yanking your t-shirt over your head as he speaks. You're following what he says, but your mind lags behind like a faulty video-call signal. Blood sample, mhm-hmm, yeah, god, you wanna fuck him so bad– reaction?

When you finally pull your head from the neckline of your t-shirt, you find Miguel rooted in place. A needle rests in his loose grip, and he holds it aloft as if ready to take the sample from your arm– but it appears his plan is obliterated as his eyes zero in on your tits, his usually stoic expression rendered astonished by the view in front of him.

"... It's the venom," he rasps, slowly, achingly slowly, dragging his eyes back to your face, "You're reacting to the venom." 

Perhaps it should be a relief that Miguel is a genius and that he'd managed to deduce the reason for your severe discomfort reasonably quickly, or maybe you should feel more concerned that you're experiencing a severe reaction to a venom that he held in his fucking teeth, but the sheer desperation to ease the arousal pooling between your thighs overtook any and all fear. Instead, you frenziedly shove your hand down the waistband of your jeans... Right in front of Miguel. 

"Aye- easy, easy–" he attempts to placate you, but once again, he finds himself lost for words as he watches you flop back into your desk chair, head lolled back and thighs spread wide as you undeniably rub at your clit beneath the denim of your jeans. 

"Ahaaa-" you wail, tears welling in your eyes and slipping down your temples as you rock your hips up to meet the friction of your fingertips, "S'not enough, Miguel- it's not enou- it hurts." 

It's disgusting; the wet squelch of your fingers entering your cunt practically bouncing off the walls. An anguished groan rattles in your chest as you cum. The sensation is as though your orgasm has been spoilt, the ecstasy that accompanied a climax instead curdling into a painful need for more. Slick weeps into the crotch of your panties and jeans, and you rip your hand from your jeans to tear the whole stupid item of clothing over your hips as they arch off the seat. 

"Cariño," you hear Miguel's soft voice urge you to look at him, and your vision blurs as you glance up with tear-soaked eyelashes. You sob when your eyes finally focus, observing the blackness of Miguel's eyes as he watches you get off. The wet sounds get louder, more hurried as you frantically rub your clit at the sight of him, the sound of his voice.

"I can help you," he promises, voice firm. The declaration pulls another devastatingly cruel orgasm from you, your back arching off the seat as if attempting to escape the brutally painful orgasm that does nothing to satiate the toxins Miguel had accidentally inserted into your bloodstream. 

"Yes," you pant loudly, tears streaming down your face as you nod your head wildly in agreement. The ethics of this agreement, sex with him, are lost on you at this moment, far too occupied with the notion of stopping the debilitating clench of your cunt and nerve-searing heat beneath your skin. 

Miguel says nothing as he strides forward, crossing the line of demarcation you had drawn between the two of you effortlessly with his broad stride. His hands immediately find the waistband of your jeans, where they settle just above your knees, and shucks them from your legs as you continue to appeal for mercy. 

"Please," you beg, grasping the arms of the office chair so hard that they threaten to splinter between your fingers. Miguel simply scowls at you from his position between your thighs, kneeling down on the floor and peeling back your drenched panties to gain access to your dripping, fluttering cunt. "Please, Migu-ughhh!" 

Miguel leads with his tongue, pulling the entire length across your engorged clit so slowly that your toes cramp when they curl. You sob loudly, fat tears streaking down your cheeks and throat as you rock your hips up against his face. It's rough and messy, and your clit bumps his nose each time you thrust upwards despite the vice-like grip that Miguel holds on your thighs. 

"Oh my god-" you keen, your fingers grasping onto the hair at the crown of his head to brace against the onslaught of pleasure that drenches you, "Oh fu-fuhuck- don'tcumdon'tcum-" you ramble, eyes rolling back into your skull as the tip of his tongue draws lazy circles around your clit.

"F-Fuck- fuck me-" you wheeze, expelling all the oxygen from your lungs when his fingers prod at the slick entrance of your pussy. 

"Shut up," he rasps, slowly sinking the first two joints of his index finger into your wet heat. He watches your hips raise, thighs spreading wide as you wordlessly whine. "Do not speak."

It's cruel, but there's no malice to his words because he shifts his wrist slightly and sinks the entire length of his index finger into you. You rock forwards to meet it, feeling yourself clench around the intrusion. Miguel can feel it too, you're sure of it, because he lets out a devastatingly sexy hum before dropping his head down to tongue your clit again. 

You try; you truly do, but the mixture of Miguel's tongue on your clit and his fingertip just barely missing a calamitous spot inside you launches the words from your throat before you can stop them. 

"F-Please-" you gasp, "Please let me taste you. Ohh- please don't stop- j-just put it in my mouth, I wanna feel the stretch of it in my thro–" 

"Quiet," Miguel snaps, his voice strained as he pulls back from your clit but hastens his finger's movements. It's there- it's right fucking there, that spot inside you that you know will eviscerate every atom in your body. Your head falls back again, your spine lifting from the chair as you brace against the rising threat of your orgasm. 

"I'm- Oh fuck, I-aham gonna cum-" you sob towards the ceiling, rocking your hips down and taking his maddeningly long digit even deeper. Miguel hums in acknowledgement, resting his still tongue on your clit for you to fuck yourself on. The barbarically wet sound of you sinking onto the length of his finger reaches your ears and–

Sudden, painful bliss bursts through you, a garbled slur of Miguel's name tearing through your throat as static rings in your ears. You feel yourself clench and flutter around his fingers, Miguel's tongue lapping at your pulsing clit and hurling you even further into the rapture that streams through your body. 

Your thighs tremble on either side of his head, knees draped over his robust shoulders. Miguel groans softly and licks and sucks on the mess you've made, slick smeared all over his mouth, chin and nose. You can barely move, your muscles screaming in exhaustion, but-

"M-Miguel-" you whine, shaking your head with tears in your eyes, "M-more, I need more-" 

"Dios mío, mami," he groans into your cunt, and you see white. His oddly affectionate name for you resets your orgasm, and you're teetering over it again. Your feet brace against his back, pushing your heels into the thick, chorded muscles to pull him impossibly closer to your pussy. It's as though your hips have a mind of their own, grinding feverishly against Miguel's pretty nose. 

Through the blur of your ecstasy, you see Miguel's brows lift in surprise in a wordless question of 'already?' It's all you need, euphoria smashing through every nerve ending and setting them ablaze. It soaks his face even more, you feel it gush, and Miguel rumbles with the most delectable groan. At the peak of your orgasm, he inserts a second finger. It brushes against that mind-bending spot inside you that makes your body writhe when the ridges of his fingertips tease the neglected pleasure centre. 

Strands of your hair cling to your sweat-damp face, dried tear tracks wetted again by the flow of more of the salty liquid from your eyes. You look absolutely wrecked; you feel it. So why did your clit still pulse with need when Miguel withdrew his cum-soaked face? 

"God, I wanna fuck you so bad," you ramble, voice stripped hoarse by your constant barrage of whines and moans. 

Glancing down, you note the tight pinch of Miguel's eyebrows. He's straining against the skin-tight material of the suit, the thin canvas clinging to his body so well that you see the lurch of his cock as he licks your cum from his lips. "We should do this all the time-"

Miguel rudely interrupts you, using his godlike strength to effortlessly hoist you from that stupid office chair. He doesn't bother taking you somewhere comfortable, your panting breaths and writhing hips evidence you wouldn't last the thirty-second walk to the sofa. Instead, he drapes you over his workbench, discarding the invaluable equipment over the table's edge and spreading your thighs wide. 

"Never again," Miguel insists, but he'd already revealed his weak constitution at the beginning of the ludicrous mess. Just a taste, he'd said, before leaning in for more of your blood. That same lack of self-discipline infects him now; you can see it in his eyes as he strips himself of the ridiculous spider suit and presses his cock against your fluttering cunt. 

You can feel it, the size of the bulbous head that sweeps through your slick folds. It brushes over your clit, the velvety skin rendering you helpless to the heavenly pleasure that bursts through you. But-

"It's not- it's not gonna go in-" you whimper softly, stretching your arms out to push his hips away desperately. "Oh god, Miguel- I can't take that-"

"You will," he nods firmly with a jut of his chin. He's determined; his eyes alight when you writhe beneath him. It's so loud, the sound of your leaking cunt soaking the underside of his cock in your slick. "You're drenching me, Cariño; you can take it."

Miguel notches at your entrance for emphasis, lightly pushing against where your flesh gives way to his adamant intrusion. The smooth, rounded head threatens to sink inside of you, stretch you impossibly wide. "Dios-" Miguel grunts, bowing his head low. His shoulders tremble, hips frozen in place as he takes deep, shuddering breaths. Wha-

"What's wrong?" You stiffen at the worrying body language he's displaying. Had you done something wrong? Did he not want to go through with it now-?

Another quivering exhale expels from Miguel's lungs, his huge hands gripping onto your hips as though they were the only thing preventing him from plunging from the side of a New York skyscraper. It's bruising you, ten sharp points jabbing into your skin, but the pain encourages the pleasure. It's too much. 

"So fucking tight," Miguel wheezes, rocking his hips forward slightly. He's met with resistance despite how your head hangs from the edge of the desk, wailing a mixture of profanities and his name at the ceiling. "It's too fucking tight, mami; you gotta relax-"

"Miguel!" You sob in anguish, tears sliding from the corners of your eyes settle in the hair at your temples. "It hurts- I need it so bad, c-can't wait- just fucki-" 

A snarl rips up Miguel's throat, using his grip on your flesh to pull your hips back onto his as he plunges forward. You see his nostrils flare, the flash of his fangs before the white-hot bliss rocks through you, his cock slipping past your walls and burying itself to the hilt in one heavy push. 

Your sharp inhale stretches the mass of your lungs as your fingers dig into the tanned skin of his forearms. Pain stabs through your abdomen, and the sudden thrust ripples pain through your expression before the excruciating arc of bliss surges when you feel the head of his cock nudge against your cervix. 

"Holy shit-" you squeak out, nails stabbing bloody crescent moons into the rippling muscles you hold onto, "I can-ahan't! Fuck, Miguel, you- hgnnnn fuck!"

It's as though Miguel loses control of his hips. He begins to ram into you, his flesh slapping against your own and echoing and ricocheting off the walls. Damp sweat already clings to his body from the exertion, each harsh slam into you pushing your trembling body up the length of his desk. 

"Hah," he gasps out when you involuntarily squeeze around the girth of his cock, Miguel's eyes snapping to your own in a frenzy, "So tight for me, Cariño. This little cunt's so greedy for me." 

The pistoning of his throbbing cock into your sickeningly wet pussy has your mind spinning, the velvet of his voice numbing your mind like some kind of neurotoxin. You're drenching the both of you, the thighs you'd locked around his waist slipping down his hips as you struggle to brace against the onslaught of your arousal. 

"M-Miguel-!" You croak, voice wrecked. 

His dark eyebrows pinch together as he continues his devastating pace. "So fucking greedy. Always looking at me with those eyes. You think I don't- fuck- don't hear your dirty thoughts about me?" 

Whining loudly, the embarrassment does little to quell the rising orgasm that prickles the edges of your body. It feels enormous, threatens to tear your body apart at the seams and stitch you back together all wrong. Like you'd never feel complete again without the delicious stretch of Miguel's cock.

"I can feel it," Miguel murmurs, voice uncharacteristically soft despite the way he's brutalising your cunt, "Can you? I can feel you squeezing me- fuck, you're so fucking wet, mami-"

"S-Shut up–" you hiccup, voice sounding distant to your own ears. It feels like your nails have burrowed down to the calcium of Miguel's radius and ulna, your grip vice-like as you steel against the terrifying sensation of a universe-altering orgasm quickly approaching. 

Miguel's neck flexes, veins bulging against his bronzed skin as the swell threatens to take over. 

"Come on. Ah, fuck- fuck, you're gonna cum again. Come on," he urges you, dark eyes flitting over you as Miguel reaches to push the pad of his thumb against your clit. 

It barely brushes the fraught nerves before ecstasy settles between each of your vertebrae. Your pussy flares, gripping onto the throbbing thickness of him. Shaking violently, your thighs squeeze Miguel's waist as everything tightens, pulses, spasms. Anguished, pained wails pour from your lips in a deluge, jaw slack, debilitating ecstasy rendering you utterly helpless to the instinctual motions of your body. You're rocking up against him while simultaneously attempting to escape the sensation. 

A rumble vibrates through Miguel's chest as he dips his head low, sweat-drenched ebony strands of his hair falling in his eyes as he focuses on how you tighten around him. 

"Oh fuck, yes," Miguel's voice pierces through your mind-numbing bliss, all lilted and pitchy, "That's it, mami, that's what I need- th-that- oh fuck–"

It's a heavenly sight, the way his body flexes and ripples above you as he buries his cock into you, down to the hilt. Miguel's dark, gorgeous eyes roll back in his head, eyelashes fluttering as his orgasm is pulled from him. You feel the hot, thick spurts of cum paint your walls as he empties his load over and over and over. You're exhausted, powerless to do anything other than bathe in the sensation of your cunt convulsing around Miguel's throbbing cock. 

A heavy exhale fans across your face as Miguel's hands settle on either side of your head, the two of you fighting to draw oxygen into your burning lungs. The blazing need that had charred your abdomen ebbs into smothered embers, and you peer up at Miguel with a mindless, dazed expression. 

He doesn't move, his softening cock still buried in your cunt as his hands tighten into fists beside your ears. Miguel opens his eyes, a heavy glare aiming at the corner of the room, at nothing in particular, as he attempts to come down from whatever height you'd thrown him to. 

"That-... That's not what's supposed to happen."

☆☆☆

Bright, florescent lights beat down on you in the doctor's office, and you squint against their intrusion in your eyes but also the dull, painful throb of your brutalised cunt. You should be curled up in bed, mortified by the mindblowing sex you'd just had with Miguel and drafting up a text message to tell him you will never be seeing him again due to the ruinous humiliation you felt every time you recalled the stupid shit you'd said. 

Instead, you were simmering in that very same awkwardness, but with Miguel settled back in the seat beside you. He's wallowing in his own form of abashed grief as he awaits the results of your blood tests from the man in the white coat across the table from you. 

"Aha, here we go!" The indecently cheery doctor cuts through the tense, funeral-like atmosphere that had settled between the both of you. The mouse in his hand clicks as he sorts through the file, reading it through. "They've just come in now." 

"Is it anything I should be worried about?" Miguel speaks before you can draw breath, and you don't fail to note the word I. Why is he worried?!

"No, not at all," the doctor smiles, glancing between the two of you as he taps the computer screen with his finger. You can feel Miguel settle, the tense energy that had been drawing his shoulders up tight seeming to dissipate with the threat of danger ruled out. 

... What? 

"Elevated heart rate, the sweats, shivers, flushed skin, pain," the doctor reads through your list of symptoms that Miguel had given before you'd even stepped into the doctor's office. Conveniently, he'd left out the more obvious traits that had taken precedence over the milder afflictions. "While these are all very scary, it's not much to worry about."

"So then, what happened?" Your voice is a mumble, hoarse from the strain of your activities with Miguel.

The doctor smiles, a shrug lifting his shoulders to evidence his lack of concern. "Says here you just have an allergy to spider bites."

Miguel, usually stoic and indecipherable, sinks into his seat with an expression that bleeds mortification.

... Oh. 

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[thecurioustale]

My Thoughts on Jenny Nicholson and the Star Wars Hotel

I watched Jenny Nicholson's four-hour "The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel" video essay that YouTube showed me recently but which till now I couldn't bring myself to construct a day around. She's in great form here, and I'm pleased to say I go back as a fan of her work all the way to her Friendship Is Witchcraft days. (Blows my mind that she voiced all Mane Six characters, and others, so well.)

Anyway, long story short, Disney built a Star Wars hotel at Disneyworld in 2022 that was themed as a voyage on a spaceship, then proceeded to charge thousands of dollars per person per night, the most expensive publicly-available Disney theme park hotel experience by miles and miles, and then closed the hotel in 2023 after having spent hundreds of millions of dollars. Jenny went into the experience as a member of the core target demographic and spent four hours talking about all the ways it was an underwhelming or outright disappointing experience.

Her video reminded me of Hasbro's own misadventures in corporate greed with Magic: The Gathering, which has suffered in recent years from price increases, disengagement from the fan community, and a huge proliferation of product spam—i.e. more products overall, more ways to buy a given product (e.g., the proliferation of different boxes, which eventually killed the original draft booster box that had powered Magic for 30 years), and more variants of individual cards within and between products.

Hasbro and Disney are very similar in the economic space they operate in, and also utilize similar business strategies. Disney is essentially the S-tier megacorporation to Hasbro's B-tier, and we have seen many of the same corporate trends play out in both companies.

When it comes to Disney theme parks, they have massively increased ticket prices over the years, well beyond the rate of inflation, and have also implemented advance-scheduling systems for faster access to rides that has made the process of exploring a Disney theme park much less spontaneous and a lot more regimented and stressful.

Disney realized, years ago, that their limited number of theme parks—they only really have two, not counting the various sub-parks: Disneyland on the West Coast and Disneyworld on the East Coast—together with Disney's entrenched status as a cultural icon with lots of goodwill and brand recognition among the public, are vastly underserving public demand, allowing them to inflate the price of a single trip almost arbitrarily, well into the four digits—or even the five-digits if you're taking the family and spending several days.

The Star Wars hotel was Disney's "Magic 30": a product so ludicrously expensive as to incur immediate and universal condemnation by their own fans. It's clear to me what Disney was doing: They'd happily turned the conventional price knob up and up and up for years. Now they wanted to experiment with a fundamentally more expensive product class, basically five to ten times more expensive. They wanted to see if the market could support it. Because the growing disparity of wealth in America, together with America's obscene wealth as a nation relative to the rest of the world, means that it's definitely possible: There are definitely millions of people out there who could book a stay at the Star Wars hotel if they wanted to. And Disney was like "Let's see if they will."

And you know what? I think it could have succeeded. Because there really is an obscene excess of wealth in this country, even though most of us don't have any access to it. And we are a culture whose zeitgeist is ever ravenous for the next big, flashy experience.

But instead the venture failed spectacularly. Why? Because such reckless corporate greed is, itself, usually a sign of deep organizational rot and incompetency among the board and executive leadership. In other words, their hotel failed for the same reason they tried building it in the first place: Disney has grown stupid.

The way it failed, going by Jenny's video, is down to two independent reasons:

An outrageous degree of "penny-wise, pound foolish" thinking;

A fundamental failure to anticipate the comfort and pleasure of the guest.

The former is the more obvious of the two, and what really stood out to me as emblematic of it in this whole boondoggle were two simple thing: 1) The hotel rooms didn't have complimentary Disney+; and 2) the free loaner umbrellas for hotel guests visiting the Star Wars Land in Disneyworld were either so worn-out or so shoddy to begin with that, unless it was a big coincidence, both Jenny's and Jenny's sister's umbrella failed while in use. This was in the context of Disneyworld's most expensive customer experience ever, by a lot, and Disney was nickel-and-diming them. Jenny's video goes into a great depth of detail on the dozens if not hundreds of corners they cut; it was basically everything but the food. The result was an antagonistic relationship between Disney and their hotel guests where almost everything interesting cost more money (usually a lot more money) while almost everything included in the main ticket price was of cheap quality or stingy in its allotment. Every aspect of the whole process, from the scammy vibes of booking a room in the first place, to the pathetic after-care for customers who reported a problem after their stay, was likely to leave a sour taste in the customer's mouth.

When you're paying the most expensive prices in the history of a product category, you really just need to be given an up-front price that includes all or nearly all of it. You'll know what you're in for, and you can make an informed decision, and then it's really just down to the host to provide an experience and level of service that matches those high dollar outlays. But instead, as Jenny pointed out, it's like you're dealing with Spirit Airlines, where you're gonna pay a fee for literally everything beyond sitting your body quietly on the airplane.

Mind-boggling hubris. Disney needs to be broken up for the monopoly that it is, and this is just one more example of how convinced of their own inevitability and supremacy Disney has become.

The other main failure on Disney's part is the subtler one.

Jenny focused on how the Star Wars themed choose-your-own-adventure game, which was at the heart of the hotels' central conceit of "live your own personal Star Wars story," was irreparably dysfunctional. Not only was the app, through which most of the "experience" was conveyed, horribly designed; and not only were the tasks delivered through this app mostly busywork to anyone other than young children, consisting of little more than walking around and scanning inanimate objects; but the storyline's entry points and decision points were completely impenetrable through reasonable means, to the point of seeming arbitrary. Jenny proactively tried and failed to get into her preferred storyline; then tried and failed to get into any storyline; then was automatically sorted into one the next morning; and ultimately ended up having only one (dubiously) interactive story experience over the whole weekend.

She talked about how the tightly-regimented and incredibly full schedule was so mentally and physically draining that on the final night she fled her dinner table fearing she would vomit and had to stand in her hotel room staring at herself in the mirror for a while, to understand her illness (which turned out to be stress-induced exhaustion) and center herself.

She talked about how she didn't get to see a much-coveted music show during dinner on her first night because she was seated behind a giant column.

Really, these things are manifestations of the larger and more fundamental failure on Disney's part to anticipate the comfort and pleasure of the guest, as I put it.

As I was watching her video, two thoughts came to me in this vein:

First was that this whole experience really needed to be "playtested," as we might say in Magic. I mean, I'm sure there nominally was, but whatever playtesting they did was completely ineffective. Good playtesting would have brought most of these issues to light.

Second was that the Disney of today has completely lost touch with the namesake of their industry: hospitality. This would never have happened at a new luxury resort by an established world-class hotelier a century ago. Because they understood the basics. Little things, like hot towels.

I could tell just from Jenny's video that this whole hotel was decided from the top-down by soulless, disconnected corporate suits who blatantly disregarded whatever good suggestions I'm sure the Imagineers® came up with. For the failures to be as expansive and ubiquitous as Jenny's video documented, no doubt the institutional rot extends down at least as far as the project manager level, if not down to individual Imagineers® and beyond, but there have to be at least some good ones, and clearly they were overruled early and often. Whenever Disney's leadership was faced with a decision between anticipating the comfort and pleasure of the guest, and saving a couple bucks on a guest who was literally laying out several thousands of dollars to be there, leadership chose the latter.

They were so arrogant that they believed, without noticing or questioning it (unless Disney's leadership is in fact cartoon evil), that they would tell the customer what constitutes a good experience, and the customer would pay top dollar for it. And so you get a guest experience where customers who are actively trying to pick a given storyline can't get any storyline and are later seated for the dinner show behind a giant fucking column.

It's sad, and we should all be glad that their hotel failed. Not that Disney is likely to learn the right lessons from their failure, but the long-term solution here is for leisure dollars to be directed toward other companies. For the several thousand bucks that Jenny paid, she could have had a true luxury vacation in most parts of the world—and for longer than two nights.

One thing that I noticed during the four hours of her video was that Disney, or at least the people in charge of developing this hotel, didn't seem to understand what constitutes an enjoyable story experience. I am forgiving of the low level of complexity in the various puzzles, since the public is famously stupid plus a lot of these guests are going to be children. But there was so little imagination in the actual plot beats: Chewie sneaks in, gets arrested, and busts out. You get to help some Resistance fighters smuggle their luggage. Like, it's insipid. I mean, ultimately, most pop storytelling is insipid, but what I mean is that the dressings were insipid too. Dressing a story up is what makes stories great, at least at the mainstream level. There was no pomp and flourish; no clever interweaving; no electric events that put people on the edge of their seats. Just walking around on your phone for two days scanning crates and occasionally being in the same room while somebody busts Chewie out of the clink—assuming you even make it to the story events in time, since they often fired early.

The whole thing smacks of rule by committee, too many cooks, and suits suits suits all the way down.

I think it's a sign of the times that this is happening. We are once again in Robber-Baron territory in this land. The big corporations and the oligarchs who run them have become so obscenely rich and so utterly disconnected from ordinary life, and their corporate cultures have become so masturbatory and so officious, that they are increasingly creating products for idealized, phantom audiences. They increasingly don't understand real people or real life.

And we can and should bring the weight of the government down on them, more to break up monopolies and allow new and established competitors to seriously challenge them than to actively punish these companies for making money, but even more so we just need to spend our dollars elsewhere. I mean, I'm speaking hypothetically here; I am poor so none of this even applies to me in the first place.

Hence why, even after inflation, this is still just my two cents.

[txttletale]

healed ive been doing some very basic communist readings lately and. how do you cope with the fact that none of it seems particularly possible. how do you manage to put any of this theory into practice when the only two parties out there seem to be the We’re Basically Demsocs Party and the Sexual Abuse League. how do you not let it crush you and what ways have you found to like… manifest these ideas in your life? i guess one could say i was “radicalized” by recent events but having done basic reading (just beginner Lenin and Marx) has made me feel so much more hopeless. there’s no vanguard party and i don’t see what I can actually tangibly do to help proliferate communism. and it’s making me feel guilty for living my life, too, for doing things that I find fun and beautiful and enjoyable - there’s just the guilt of “this is a time-waster, this is brainwashing you”. do you have any assurance at all

so obviously the role of a marxist-leninist in a revolutionary situation (ie, one in which the conditions are revolutionary, in which the current bourgeois state is no longer tenable) is to be in a vanguard party at the head of the organized working class. but these things don't appear from nowhere--i think it follows that if you are in much of the world, where a revolutionary situation is not imminent in any forseeable near future, then the role of a communist is to help organize the working class and raise class consciousness through class struggle so that when such a situation presents itself the working class is both radical and organized, or capable of becoming such in short order.

that means that working within non-party organizations (unions, activist and mutual aid groups, grassroots campaigns) with the intent of learning the tactics of organization and radicalising the people around you is a meaningful participation in the class struggle. as much as i say 'get organized' and believe that a proletarian party is the best and most powerful vehicle for revolutionary action, that latter belief is of course to be taken and adapted for the situation.

do not be hopeless because you have read lenin--instead, be aware that when lenin was writing much of what he wrote, the situation of socialist parties across europe was dire. criminalized, divided just as they are now, replete with the exact kind of reformists you're complaining about (as well as adventurists). what lenin wrote about was not just a theoretical ideal party that did exist in his time, but instead the blueprints for the party he had a hand in creating. realize that lenin genuinely believed during periods that he would not see revolution during his lifetime.

organize with whoever you can, in whatever arena you can, and participate in the class struggle. develop the skills and understanding of the methods of struggle, even if trade unionism or climate activism alone are not sufficient vectors by which the contradictions of capitalism can be resolved, they are avenues by which your class consciousness and that of those around you can be honed and sharpened. find the most radical body around you and join yourself to their struggle--a vanguard party should emerge from the struggles of the working class, it should be an organization that serves as a vessel for effective action. you do not have to tie yourself to the decaying and rotting shambling zombie parties of the 20th century to participate in the class struggle--we as communists owe these organs no loyalty if they are not equipped for the realities of class struggle.

i'm lucky in that there is a small but dedicated group of marxist-leninists i have been able to join up with and work with. if that's not the case for you, conduct the struggle within anarchist collectives or trade unions or solidarity campaigns, while always keeping your true goal in mind. the class struggle unfolds across a multitude of arenas--as long as there's someone you can organize alongside on something, you are not powerless in your capacity as a revolutionary communist. good luck, comrade.

[thegreatpapaya666]

Hey so I was really curious because I was looking in your pinned post. Like a creep. I saw that you shipped...fresh x nightmare?? And like over my years in the undertale fandom I never even began to think of that..I'm. so curious why??? If you don't mind sharing? ??? Like I can ...kinda. maybe see it

LMFAOOO IT'S OKAY WE STAN CREEPY NERDS HERE (i'm one myself >:3

So I can't even begin to explain how much thought I've put into this silly goofy little crackship

And I have a bunch of different headcanons about it and it doesn't quite make sense but here you go! I love talking about this because I have wayyy too much knowledge of Undertale AUs XDDD

I like the headcanon of them both being somewhere on the aromantic and asexual spectrums. For Fresh, he's canonically said to be a parasite rather than an actual Sans, and since parasites proliferate asexually, he has no concept of what sex is. And because of this, he has no concept of gender, either. The only reason he uses he/him pronouns is because the first thing he possessed was male. Fresh is also emotionally stunted and has a limited understanding of people and how to navigate interactions with them. The creator of Fresh, LoverOfPiggies (formerly known as CrayonQueen) has even said that Fresh enjoys kissing because he thinks it's fun, but he doesn't understand why people make emotional connections because of it. As for Nightmare, he seems to have little to no interest in romance or sex. Since he feeds off negativity and both of those are generally associated with positivity, there's a low chance he'd want that kind of relationship with someone else.

Fresh is an intelligent, go-with-the-flow type parasite who struggles with empathy, receiving affection, and understanding other people's emotions, though the longer he stays in one body, the more human-like he becomes. The only emotion he can easily comprehend is fear, specifically the fear of dying, and when Fresh delivers this monologue, his need for survival, want to be entertained, and pessimistic outlook on existence are highlighted. Even the form he takes and the silly weapons he uses (like wiffle bats and furby bombs) are calculated moves meant to appear non-threatening and help make as little enemies as possible, all coming back to his need to survive. And being a parasite, he needs to harm others to live. He enjoys tormenting people, though he doesn't do it often because he wants to stay on as many people's good sides as he can. When addressing his point of view that everyone is selfish, the monologue touches upon his existential dread when he recognizes that his place in the universe is relatively meaningless. This shows that he wants to mean something and he wants to have more power and influence than he does, especially to secure an environment where he doesn't have to worry as much about death or eventually becoming bored.

Nightmare is the guardian of negativity and completely devoid of empathy. He only feels pure hatred and wants the entire multiverse to be subjected to eternal suffering, and he takes pleasure in other's pain. Due to his sadistic tendencies, his main goal is to take over the multiverse and inflict suffering on every AU in existence, corrupting positive AUs and subjecting them to eternal pain. The only obstacle standing is his way is his brother, Dream, who is the guardian of positivity.

Fresh and Nightmare have similar ideals and outlooks on life. They're also both sadistic in nature, take pleasure in hurting others, and feel little to no emotions, let alone romantic or sexual attraction. They also both have a limited understanding of other people's emotions and have no problem using others for their own benefit. In his monologue, Fresh states [I’m better and I deserve to get what I want, and I wanna mess with people and I want to hurt people, and since, ey, I gotta possess people to survive, I might as well ENJOY the process as well, ya know dawg? I wanted to take over the multiverse because yeah, it extended far beyond somethin so noble as ‘helpin’ people, I wanted to take over because I COULD, and because it was FUN, and because I couldn’t be STOPPED. I wanted the power to enslave E͏̷͏V̨̀͜E̸͠͠R̡̢͠Y̸͢͟T҉̢͠H͏͜͞Ì̴̕N̡̨̕G͡. The power to enslave everything. But. I can’t do that. Can I?] Keeping in mind that Nightmare is one of the most powerful beings in the multiverse, and his only opponent is Dream, and the Bad Sanses aren't quite enough to help him obtain complete control of the multiverse, if Nightmare and Fresh were to team up, that would greatly improve both of their chances of getting what they want. Fresh on a base level wants to survive, be entertained, and have unrivaled power. Nightmare on a base level wants to survive, subject the world to endless torture, and have unrivaled power. And because Fresh is a sadist, Nightmare's goal of subjecting the world to endless torture would be his idea of entertainment. So if Nightmare, Fresh, and the rest of the Bad Sanses had a shot at removing Dream as a threat to their plan (not necessarily killing him, seeing as Nightmare is the only one who can combat Dream's 'immortality' and there's a chance he may not be able to defeat Dream alone), they would have little to no setbacks in their pursuit of ultimate power.

So, all of this to say that Fresh and Nightmare's transactional relationship keeping them both alive, entertained, and unstoppable, would make them a good fit for a queer platonic relationship, or QPR. A QPR is a partnership between two or more people that exists in the gray area between a platonic relationship and a romantic and sexual relationship, which is very common with aroace people

And by "good fit," I mean the most toxic, hilarious, entertaining, confusing, and thought-provoking QPR in the history of the entire world.

Thank you anon for keeping me up until one in the morning because this ask interested me so much <3

This is usually where someone says "careful, papaya, your autism is showing," but oh well.

Anyway, I hope this character analysis gave you some insight on why I think this ship is cool! I spent three hours researching and finding credible sources, so I'm really pumped to be able to share my work with you!

Thank you so much for the ask this absolutely brightened my day ilysm anon

[river-in-the-woods]

i have a similar situation - i'm struggling to make my own correspondences, and i'm trying to draw from my pagan practices as well as my ancestral asian practice. i'm having a bit of difficulty with systematically going through a small dictionary, but maybe this can provide some ideas (and of course, if you have any critiques, i'm totally open to that as well!)

I usually just pick up any reference book and choose whatever I like the sound of and can get my hands on. I have a copy of The Encyclopedia of Natural Magic by J.M. Greer which I use a lot because it has minimal tangential waffle and is neatly laid out. I like Llewellyn's Charms, Spells and Formulas for the same reason.

For culturally relevant things, I like chinasage which has a symbol index of various flora and fauna. I'm not aware of similar resources for other parts of East Asia, apologies.

While I do think that different materials are endowed with particular virtues, I also think this is another area of magic where people get a little obsessed with categorisation.

It's not like Pokemon where lavender has +10 sleep magic points and chamomile has +12, or roses are exclusively for love and attraction and black pepper is only for cursing and banishing, and so on... It's a little more like cooking where there are many possibilities of creating a satisfying meal and yet it still depends on the individual tastes of who's partaking in it.

Cypress, yew and asphodel are strongly associated with the underworld; mugwort and wormwood are associated with night-time and dreams, but these plants will still die without the light of day. Sunflowers and oranges are very solar, but they still have roots that reach into the earth to anchor them. Chilli peppers are incredibly fiery, but they still die without water. Yarrow is for youth, love and beauty, except when you're allergic to it.

Every herb is a herb for protection, and wealth, and attraction, and fertility, and banishing – and so on, because every plant has its own strategy to survive, thrive and proliferate.

(And that's just plants, not even touching on the properties of minerals, animals, elements, colours and so on.)

They do have their specialisations, yes, and I wouldn't use mint to call on the element of fire, nor would I use coffee beans in a sleep spell... What I'm trying to say is: they're all multi-faceted, so set aside the reference books now and then, and just observe and make connections intuitively.

Reference books might tell you that basil or cinnamon or citrus (or whatever) have wealth-drawing properties.

But grass, plain old common grass, completely dominates the greenery of the earth. Crops like rice, wheat, barley and corn are staple foods that support the world's population. And dandelions, with their solar and ouranic qualities and how quickly they proliferate across an open field, are oft overlooked.

These never get listed in books, yet their literal and symbolic powers are undeniable.

Put these – grass seeds, rice grains and dandelion seeds – into a wealth working with a simple prayer. "Bless me with as much wealth as there are blades of grass on this earth, as there are grains of rice that sustain humanity, as there are dandelion seeds that fill the air in spring."

Correspondences are only part of what makes magic work. There's also your own ability and experience, the spirits you call and the relationship you have with them... I strongly favour the relationship part because reference books become less and less important, when you can just ask and the spirits will tell you what to use. Or even better when you don't have to do a spell at all, because you have spirits to take care of it in exchange for some cake.

It took me a long time to open myself up to receiving that kind of inspiration, but... honestly, don't overthink it. You know a lot of correspondences already because you interact with the world every day.

Good luck 🌿

[llyfrenfys]

On Cadi as the Welsh equivalent of Queer

(image: screenshot of the entry for Cadi in Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru)

Some of you may already know this, but for those who don't, Cadi is a Welsh word which is analogous to the word Queer in English. I say analogous, since their meanings aren't quite a 1:1 match. But for shorthand, Welsh equivalent of Queer sums 90% of it up.

It has been suggested tentatively by some to use Cadi as the Welsh translation of Queer. I'm going to explore arguments for and against, but ultimately the choice to use/not use Cadi as a 1:1 with Queer is entirely up to you. Warning that this post is quite long, but I do hope you'll stick with it- please let me know what you think in the notes!

Without further ado, let's get into it:

Definition of Cadi:

Cadi is a term which has existed in Welsh since the 17th Century (roughly) and generally refers to effeminacy in men (real or perceived). Over time, the meaning of the term has expanded to refer to other (Queer) things as well. But the term itself largely has been applied to Queer men and queer masculinities through time.

The term itself derives from the girl's name Catrin and you will come across women who call themselves Cadi as a shortening of their name (like Liz from Elizabeth and so on). In this way, there is a strong point of comparison to be had with the English queer pejorative Nancy, which also derives from a girl's name.

Can Cadi be considered the Welsh equivalent of Queer?

So now to the real meat of the post. Can Cadi be considered the Welsh equivalent of Queer? The answer to that is, unsurprisingly, complicated.

As described above, Cadi is a term which has had strong associations with male effeminacy (real or perceived) and has close parallels to the English term Nancy, which is also nearly exclusively applied to Queer men and masculinities. What this presents is a quandary and I'll explain what I mean by that. But first, we need to outline the history of LGBTQIA+ terminology in general (in the West).

LGBTQIA+ Terminology and the inclination towards cis gay language:

This is a huge huge topic which I cannot possibly do justice to here alone, so I'd highly recommend reading up on these topics when you have time, but for the sake of brevity, here is a tldr on the history of LGBTQIA+ terminology (slightly UK-centric but similar events also happened in the US and Canada, as well as other parts of Europe).

Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) is a British Lesbian and Gay rights organisation founded in the 1960s, during a time of great social and political change. The organisation's membership grew and grew well into the 70s before declining in the 80s. It was during this time that some lesbian members of the organisation left citing erasure of lesbian issues and misogyny in the movement. CHE and similar gay and lesbian rights movements in this period had been inclined to centre gay men's issues in their activism, which understandably led to many lesbians feeling alienated. Some lesbians left in the late 70s and early 80s and began to form their own advocacy groups. This indirectly fed into a wider feminist upheaval at the time and led to the rise of lesbian feminism, which aimed to centre lesbian issues within feminism, but unfortunately (for complex historical reasons) did then contribute to the proliferation of rad\ical femi\nism within the Queer community, which then unfortunately contributed to the rise of tra\ns exclu\sionary rad\ical fem\inism. Regardless of the unfortunate rise of transphobia within the lesbian feminist movement, the original catalyst for the formation of these groups was a sense of alienation from the rest of the Queer community because gay men's issues had been prioritised over lesbian issues, when both could have been tackled together, with each other. This alienation was echoed in the names of organisations and events- many early homosexual rights groups only had homosexual or gay in their group names. It took many years before advocacy groups started adding 'and lesbian' to their names and events.

(For further reading, I would suggest watching this video by Verilybitchie about the history of lesbian erasure in homosexual advocacy and how that led to (some) lesbian groups excluding bi and trans people in the same way they were excluded by gay men)

What does that history mean for Cadi?:

Because of a history of lesbian (and by extension, women's) exclusion from homosexual advocacy groups, is Cadi the best term to use as a catch-all given its strong associations with men's expressions of Queerness? (namely, that as a pejorative it is largely aimed at femininity in men and subsequent assumed homosexuality). It is important to consider if using Cadi as an equivalent of Queer would centre a (typically cis) gay experience/expression of Queerness and if that would alienate other members of the LGBTQIA+ community.

However, a counterpoint to this would be that there are variations of the term Cadi which do include other experiences of Queerness:

Cadi ffan (similar to just 'Cadi')- typically used to describe femininity in men and boys [N. Wales]

Cadi genod/ Cadi merched (similar to above) - effeminate man/boy [N. Wales]

Cadi bechgyn - Romping girl, tomboy [N. Wales]

Cati fachgen - (similar to above)- Romping girl, tomboy [S. Wales]

Cadi Haf - Male maypole dancer dressed as a girl

They are, however, somewhat limited for use in reclamation and have to be qualified by another noun to indicate diversion from the original term's meaning.

But when talking about the term Cadi, we often speak in the abstract- without the context in which the term is used. So here are a few extracts from texts which use the term Cadi (or variants). Since this is a mostly spoken slang term, it doesn't turn up in print often, but there are a few examples to draw on.

Examples of Cadi in texts:

Page 164- Cwm Eithin by Hugh Evans (1931):

"DAWNSIO HAF Ceir darnodiad o'r ddefod hynafol dawnsio haf yn Y Gwyl- fedydd, 1823, tudal. 306, gan un a'i geilw ei hun “ Callestrwr,” fel yr arferid hi yn Callestr (Fflint, mae'n debyg). Ym mis Ebrill arferai o ddwsin i ugain o bobl ieuainc ymuno i baratoi ar gyfer y ddawns. Gwisgai'r dawnswyr eu crysau yn uchaf wedi eu haddurno ag ysnodennau a blodau. Cariai'r arweinydd fforch bren ar lun y llythyren Y. Gwnïid lliain o'r naill fraich i'r llall, ac addurnid y fforch ag amryw lestri arian, tebotiau, llwyau, cigweiniau, efc. Byddai gyda hwy grythor yn ei ddillad ei hun, “cadi” mewn gwisg merch, ac ynfytyn mewn gwisg ryfedd â phlu yn ei ben"

[emphasis mine]

This extract is the author's account of Dawnsio Haf- a Summer dance held on May Day and his investigations into it. At his time of writing (1931) the practice has died out, but later in this chapter he interviews an old woman from the Conwy Valley who participated in the dances as a child. Evans draws upon a source from 1823 for his description of Dawnsio Haf. In it, he mentions that 20 young dancers meet up for the dance wearing shirts decorated with ribbons and flowers. A leader carries a fork in the shape of the letter "Y"- between each point on the "Y" a cloth was strung with silverware dangling from it to make noise. With the 20 dancers would be a crwth-player (crythor), a Cadi in women's clothes and a fool with a feather on his cap and odd clothes.

This usage is quite archaic and refers to a folk dance- much like mumming or morris-dancing. There is however, a picture in the People's Collection Wales titled 'Cadi'r Big' taken by the prolific photographer John Tomas c. 1875, near Y Ro-wen:

Which is very interesting as Cadi'r Big has dried flowers and ribbons attached to their clothes, much like in the description in Cwm Eithin. This is very likely a picture of a "Cadi" from a Dawnsio Haf.

Page 4- Y Ddraig Binc Issue 4 (1994):

Y Ddraig Binc was a Welsh-language Queer magazine published by CYLCH, a gay and lesbian rights organisation based in Aberystwyth. The term Cadi-ffan is included in an article about the commercialisation of Queer identity in the magazine's fourth edition.

"...Nawr te, medd wrtho’i hun, be’ gymera’ i’r mis hwn, copi o GQ ynte Arena neu ydw i, efallai, yn teimlo’n ddigon ifanc a trendi am Sky? Ond aros funud, beth yw hyn? Dau gylchgrawn steil newydd a gwynt digamsyniol cadi-ffan arnyn nhw?

Ydy, mae’r hyn a oedd y tu hwnt i ddychymyg wedi digwydd. Mae grymoedd y farchnad rydd a chystadleuaeth wedi cyrraedd y byd cyhoeddi hoyw - rhaid bod Lêdi T wrth ei bodd. Nawr fe gaiff llanc hoyw ddewis o ddeunydd darllen sgleiniog, llawn erthyglau a hysbysebion yn arbennig ar ei gyfer ef a’i rywioldeb. Hwrê! Fedr hynny ddim bod yn beth drwg. Neu a fedr o?..."

[emphasis mine]

This humorous article (dealing with an important topic, mind) pokes fun at the arrival of Queer commercialisation. The article opens by explaining that there's a ruckus in the gay world (and not two old queens getting into fisticuffs)- but that this ruckus is taking place at WHSmith (UK stationery shop and newsagents)- apparent winner of this year's most vulgar uniform award. The author goes on to describe a hypothetical situation in which a gay man walks into a WHSmith to buy a magazine. He wonders whether to get a copy of GQ or Arena (men's style magazines- remember this was published in Section 28 Era so explicitly gay magazines were not common) or is he trendy enough to read Sky? (film and tv magazine). But wait- what's this? Two new style magazines with a whiff of Cadi-ffan about them? The author explains that yes, the unimaginable has happened. The forces of the free market and competition have reached the world of gay publishing.

Now a gay youth has the choice of glossy reading material, full of articles and advertisements especially for him and his sexuality. Hooray! That can't be a bad thing. Or can it? Writes the author. The article is very witty and I recommend a read (find a pdf copy here). But the usage of Cadi-ffan here is very much in a reclaimed sense. Though it must be noted that the story is told through a stereotypical cis gay lens.

Conclusions:

As I said at the start of this post, you are free to claim or not claim Cadi as you wish. However, as awareness of Welsh LGBTQIA+ terminology increases, I wanted to raise important questions and start a conversation about the words we have, what we want them to be and how they have been used against us. I hope in any case that this post has been interesting to you. If it has, please reblog this or add any comments/thoughts in the notes, tags or in my asks.

Beth yw eich barn chi? I'd love to hear other's thoughts on this and start a conversation about it! Diolch am ddarllen

[s-che]

simplicity in design is a virtue, you cretins

i'm rereading Avery Alder & Ben Rosenbaum's Dream Askew / Dream Apart in preparation to finally do some serious editing of my game of intimacy, liberation, and faggots at sea Beneath Pirate Flags. among the billion other small things i'm reconsidering as i go over the bob/ndnm fundamentals, i'm really struck by how simple both these games are — elegant in a way i think i really failed to capture in the first public versions of bpf.

i have a theory about this, and it has to do with why i think the sprawling "always another sourcebook" approach taken by a lot of dungeons & drasprawling, commercially successful ttrpgs is fundamentally weak design — but first, here's one of them fancy 'keep reading' buttons you can click on to keep this post from being six and a half miles long.

hey, welcome back. lets get into the details:

bpf makes a critical break from the original ndnm games in the way its environmental playbooks work. mine are things like "the fort" and "the map" (see images) — individual iterations of broader concepts, much like the character playbooks ("legend", "dandy", "monkey" etc) are iterations of common pirate types. there are, almost certainly, multiple "monkeys" in one world — much as there are almost certainly multiple forts.

this contrasts with Askew / Apart's setting books — things like "varied scarcities," "society intact," and "goyishe world." these are intentionally broad environmental pressures. although "society intact" may be encountered different times in different places — with different names and different faces — it is, fundamentally, the same force.

2. this isn't necessarily a thing i want to change (although there are tweaks i'll be making to just about all the playbooks) but it is real interesting to think about how bpf got here, from a design perspective. the story is simple: bpf didn't start from playing either dream. it started with me reading wanderhome, and this design is borrowed (nearly) directly from there.

wanderhome, like bpf, has players create new environmental elements again and again over the course of a campaign — from the smallest kith to the largest citadel, you might be doing generation multiple times in a single session. wanderhome handles this by simplifying, simplifying, simplifying — a trait has one picklist, a nature two, and so the process of generation is quick and nondisruptive, and you're quickly able to create a populated world without losing yourself in any particular moment of generation.

(che, i hear you shouting, you baited us in with an inflammatory claim about d&d's bad design. get to the point already. ok. i will)

one of the things i like most about possum creek games as a whole (ha, got you again) is the way they can become sprawling without ever overwhelming players. this has been talked about a lot in advance of the yazeba's release — but it's true for wanderhome, too.

where both dream askew and dream apart have just six setting elements, wanderhome has (even if you disregard the seasons and holidays) a whopping forty-eight traits and thirty-six natures. it is — despite seeming small in the shadow of yazeba's — a sprawling game, and it's only through a tremendous efficiency and elegance in design that the whole thing doesn't come bursting apart at the seams. some of that is thanks to the ndnm token economy as a whole and some of it is good writing specific to wanderhome, but none of it is possible without an ethic that prioritizes simplicity — cutting the building blocks into their smallest fundamentals, so they can fit into something huge and, more importantly, comprehensible.

this all stands in sharp contrast to what seems to be the tendency in dice- and percentage- based games (told you i'd get there eventually), who — out of a need for a bespoke, simulationist tool for every situation, maybe — have a tendency towards appendices, supplemental books, and a proliferation of minutiae. i am talking about d&d here, although i don't think it's the worst offender — i still have nightmares about the hand-to-hand system from top secret, a game my dad only recently admitted he was "basically only pretending to understand the rules of" when he ran it for my friends and i when we were kids. i'm not saying all crunchy game design is like this — honestly, i think crunchiness is a totally different spectrum from rules-complexity — but i do think that, sometimes, in an effort to feel sprawling and more importantly substantial, games become inefficient and more or less illegible. it is hard to play d&d. it is hard to hold all those rules in your head. by comparison, dream askew, dream apart, and wanderhome can held pretty easily in your head. you could probably even reconstruct some of the playbooks from the design fundamentals (act weak = gain token, act strong = spend token, evocative picklist). the most important thing about these games is that the rules are evocative and they let you stay in the fun part of play for as long as possible, interrupted as little as possible.

let me make this totally clear: the fun part of a game can absolutely be tallying numbers and consulting armor ratings, but i don't think that's the reason some of these games get so big. the real answer is: cutting shit is hard! eliminating systems is hard! saying "this is not helpful, let it go" is really tough, especially when you're left with a design document that was shorter (and by extension, whispers the awful voice in the back of your head, worth less) than you were expecting. still, it's important to remember: 'good system design' is not the same thing as 'filling as many pages as possible.', even if that's hard to accept in an industry that feels like it has to be prices and paid by the page.

how does all this affect beneath pirate flags? well, that's simple — pretty quickly in my recent playtesting, i realized that pausing mid-session to create new maps, forts, ships, and so on sucks ass. it's fun to brainstorm with friends, but the environmental generation throws off the pacing of sessions in a way the wanderhome kith stuff just doesn't. why? there's too much shit in my environmental playbooks! wanderhome has two picklists per nature and one per trait. askew & apart have just one per setting element — and you only have to do it once per campaign. beneath pirate flags has five. five! it sucks! and cutting out that unecessary shit — even if i do want to straddle the middleground between dream askew & dream apart's simplicity and wanderhome's sprawling growth — is going to be the hard first step on the long road to getting this game where it ought to be.

[runwayrunway]

No. 1 - Lufthansa

We begin with a large fish even by the standards of the large pond in which we operate. A very intentionally chosen large fish. Deutsche Lufthansa is Germany’s flag carrier and the second largest carrier in all of Europe by passenger volume. In 2018, they unveiled a new standard livery for their fleet of airplanes, and it...well. It’s this. 

Even the presentation - good lord, is this an auto show?

My feelings on Lufthansa’s 2018 livery are visceral. There’s no mental evaluation required, no taking it in, thinking about the choices made - I look at the modern Lufthansa livery and immediately, profoundly know that I hate it. And that’s not just because of the specific choices made - which are bad - but because of the space they occupy amidst a creatively barren wasteland within livery design. This is going to be a very long post, which isn’t standard for this blog, but my goal for an introduction is to break down exactly the sort of design that made me feel the need to start doing this to begin with. 

But in reality that’s only the beginning. Yes, Lufthansa’s livery is specifically disappointing, but it is so much more than that. It is the purest distillation of the greatest challenge aviation faces today, far weightier than scheduling issues, outdated IT, and runway incursions. It is not the worst example of it, not in the slightest, but it is a large airline which has a very textbook presentation of symptoms and thus feels like a great example to describe exactly what I hate about this sort of design. Let me explain. 

Essentially, airlines have found a formula. It goes as such: 

Almost entirely white body. (There is a name for this trend: Eurowhite.) In some cases, there may be a colour on the underside, generally either a light grey or whichever secondary shade the airline has committed to. In the case of this Lufthansa livery, it is just white. 

Aside from the white body there will be either a single colour (generally some dark blue, or less often some sort of red) or a few colours, usually but not exclusively on flag carriers to match their national branding. (The proliferation of red, white, and blue flags out there means that a disproportionate number of airline liveries are these colours.) Unless it is literally just a white plane meant to be as generic as possible for short turn-overs when leasing, it will at least attempt to have some sort of design, but it will be minimal, and:

All of the detail will be on the tail. There may be coloured winglets or engine nacelles, but other than that it is only at the rear of the plane that you begin to see any interest. Usually this is just a logo, though it may be an abstract design which looks like a default tumblr header. It will often only be on the tail, with nothing at all on the body proper.

The name of the airline written in a sans-serif typeface which is set as default on at least one word processor. Rarely will anything creative be done with this. It will (usually, except in egregious cases) match the impotent attempt at graphic design which has been confined to the empennage and it will have all the charm of a large retail chain’s flyer describing the benefits you’ll definitely totally get if you work for them - sickeningly corporate. Low-cost airlines may slightly vary the theme by putting their website onto the livery, either towards the back or just instead of the airline’s name. The brave will also write it on the ventral fairing, but most don’t even bother with that simple act. Some airlines have their name written in the language spoken in the country they’re based in, usually beside the English text, but most are only in English despite operating in countries where this is not the most widely spoken language. 

Not every livery which has these features is badly designed, as seemingly small changes can make all the difference. There is the occasional livery that fits most, if not all of these features that has some clever tweaks or design choices which makes me actually think it’s fine, acceptable, maybe even decent. (I have taken the initiative of making sure a few of these are among my early posts, just to demonstrate that it can be done). And some airlines depart from this entirely and come up with something even more hideous. Yet I somehow find myself respecting even these more than I do Lufthansa. 

The Corporate Standard Livery Design (Lufthansesque design, if you will) is - and I do not think I am being dramatic at all here - an epidemic. Taxiing through most airports, you sometimes have to actually try to tell the planes parked around you apart in the sea of red, blue, and mostly white. And I spend a lot of time looking at planes.  

These liveries do not only fail to inspire me. They instill in me a profound disgust. They are not trying to be good. They are trying to be what I described earlier - decent, not worth complaining about, because that’s cheaper and easier than designing something good. Graphic design is not anyone’s passion here. They’re just trying to toe the line. They’re so poisoned by the modern minimalist-design brain virus that they don’t realise that to be acceptable a livery this simple needs to do something interesting. There must be a creative decision made somewhere, a compelling feature, or you may as well be flying an MLA-formatted plane. In their striving for adequacy they become not just ambient, but lukewarm. They are a bottle of water which has sat in the sun for so long that when you drink it, even though you’re overheating and parched, it feels only negligibly better than the air you’ve been breathing in. 

To be fair, I do not only hate the Lufthansa paintjob because it exemplifies whatever-ness. Even in an industry saturated with gross in-flight nothingburgers served with some stale biscuits and a paper cup of Lipton tea, Lufthansa manages to offend in specific and unique ways. 

Throughout its long history Lufthansa has had a handful of different liveries, but from 2018 onwards this has been the situation. They’ve never been brilliant, but it’s only gotten worse over time. I normally would commit to a separate post for historical liveries, but in a move that I don’t foresee becoming particularly common I’d like to talk about the history and evolution of Lufthansa’s liveries from the golden age to now - the fall, if you will. 

(image: lufthansa bildarchiv)

Their early liveries were already pretty much plain white or metal, but they still had a few features that made them seem a bit less like photocopy paper which was meant to be printed plain blue but only got through a tenth of the sheet before ink ran out. To begin with, they used a lighter blue and combined it with a vivid yellow to add some actual visual interest. The layering of the yellow over the blue where it curves around and below the nose and on the ends of the tailplane actually draws the eye. The font choice is nice and legible, spaced apart in the center of the fuselage. I imagine it was easy to read even from far away. (Shame it’s a bit blocked by the wings from some angles, though.)

(image: lufthansa bildarchiv)

This early 707 design keeps the cheatlines extending past the nose but makes them sharper than the ones on the Connie to match the sleek profile of the jet. Back when this plane was painted adding white to your plane was a choice rather than the thing everybody was doing, which allows me to respect it for the choice it was instead of considering it the factory default. The bottom half, denoted by the cheatline, is left unpainted, which only adds to the sleekness of the overall profile, and the text is clear and plain but still aesthetically pleasing. The 707 is by modern standards pretty antique-looking; you can take one look at one and tell it isn’t particularly streamlined. This paint scheme, though, makes the plane look sharp and aerodynamic, despite not being revolutionary. I would go so far as to say I like this particular livery. This is, unfortunately, as good as it gets. 

Oh. Oh no...

Let’s assess the damage here. The cheatlines now simply meet at the front without wrapping down to the belly of the plane and the nose is a simple black tip. I like it when airlines paint their planes’ radomes, and I wouldn’t mind it here if not for what it was replacing. The font has been replaced with a generic sans serif font which is closely spaced and put up into a corner, like the name on a homework assignment - it’s not really part of the total package, just there for administrative purposes. Most upsetting to me is the tail. While I wouldn’t say I love the little section on the old plane, it at least felt like it belonged there, creating a second blue-and-yellow layer above the white. Its placement on the fin above where it begins to taper gives the plane a bit of an aerodynamic feel. It’s certainly not changing the world, but it feels at home in the livery. 

The new fin is a sharp downgrade. With nothing to mark the transition the fin abruptly goes from the white of the upper fuselage to a shiny blue which contains an enclave of the only yellow to be found on the entire aircraft. This makes the yellow stand out, as it has nothing to tie it in with the rest of the plane, and the fin itself feels almost like it’s been Frankensteined onto the fuselage from a different plane by a different airline. There’s nothing to mediate the transition from a block of white to a block of blue, like how the cheatline separates white and grey. It just is blue now, stop asking questions. This also means that the only part of the plane that the eye is really drawn to is...the tiny portion of the whole that is the fin, which may as well be floating detached in midair. 

This is foreboding. Knowing what I know now, it feels like looking back at when a romantic partner began to act strange years later, after the divorce, as you walk by the house he bought with his mistress. 

(image: g najberg)

The most recent, and only, time I flew on Lufthansa was in 2014 and was aboard one of their 747-400s. (Actually, if you’d still like to fly on a passenger 747, Lufthansa is basically your only option.) At the time, they looked like this. This is...just sad. They got rid of the cheatlines, because that’s trendy now, and they painted the whole plane white and made an attempt at lip service to the old metal lower half by painting just a bit of the plane grey, like if a human stepped into a puddle of paint that only covered the very sole of their foot. And I’m being generous by showing a 747, a plane which inherently makes any livery look less boring by being interestingly shaped itself, instead of the classic slightly pointy single-decker tube. Not to mention the double-decker design makes the text vertically centered instead of the default Lufthansa look of awkwardly shoved nearly all the way up the fuselage. 

In defense of the modern livery, it’s possible to argue it’s an improvement on this. Honestly, looking at them next to each other, it’s difficult to pick out which one I find less defensible. 

But then you see D-AIDV, an A321 painted in a heritage livery, and you feel the immediate, visceral “no!!! no go back!!!” as you remember that this is a false dichotomy and we could have something so much better if they weren’t peer-pressured into generic modern design. 

And for what? For this?

(image: hvdfonts)

For the third time, I remind you of what we have been reduced to. We have achieved a state of reductio ad absurdum where this barely qualifies as a design. This plane is more or less a white blot. You can put as many insets as you want and it is still a white blot. 

I am relatively sure that the font used is literally Helvetica. EDIT: I have been informed that it is not, in fact, Helvetica, but a custom typeface that happens to look almost exactly like Helvetica. This is, in my own opinion, worse! They did apparently use Helvetica in the past, though. Here is a very detailed description of the design process of the font, which manages to contain a grand total of zero ideas. 

I would hate this on its own already, but it’s also so closely spaced and located so far up that it makes me feel like I’m suffocating. In my own experience as a dyslexic person, kerning is the single weightiest feature when it comes to if I can easily read something or not. While Helvetica, ugly though it may be, is generally considered a very legible font, any benefits from that are more than cancelled out by committing to making sure the entire name of the airline fits between the frontmost two doors with room to spare. It feels almost hostile.

Now, all given, I at least somewhat enjoy the shade of blue used for this livery, which is darker than the normal fare. I do miss the way the grey broke up the endless white space, though, and I mourn the yellow even more - in addition to being something to look at, losing it has also lost any visible reference to the flag of Germany, the country for which Lufthansa is the flag carrier. They don’t even have the black part of the German flag despite that being basically free. If they went for black instead of dark blue I would honestly respect this a hell of a lot more. One of the most recognizable flags in the world and instead your airline looks like a discount SAS.  

Yeah, I said it. If we want to go even further with comparisons by including airlines that aren’t Lufthansa, this is basically the SAS livery. Except not, because the SAS livery does a lot that this doesn’t. 

This is about Lufthansa, not SAS. I’ll look at SAS soon enough, because comparing their look to Lufthansa’s has made me appreciate it in a way I never used to. But I don’t think I need to elaborate too much for it to be clear why SAS’s livery works and Lufthansa’s doesn’t, despite the superficial similarities. SAS took their absolutely horrid previous livery and turned it into something which might not wow anyone but at least feels uniquely theirs, while Lufthansa had something which accomplished much the same and then diluted it into nothingness, Eurowhite writ large. Two washes and you’d wonder if your Lufthansa flight is actually a Smartlynx lease.  

The way that the blue slices into the bottom of the fuselage and doesn’t fully cover the tailfin is...something? It’s a design element. It’s not nearly enough to save it, but it’s a design element. However, this presents another issue specific to Lufthansa’s paint job, best demonstrated with a specific plane: 

(image: lufthansa)

Lufthansa is the world’s largest operator of the Airbus A340, a somewhat eccentric airplane which is perhaps best thought of as a four-engined A330. I love this airplane, and am delighted seeing it overhead on my walk home from work, because Lufthansa is kind enough to operate a daily service with it to my home airport, but that’s beside the point. The point is this: what I have pictured is specifically the A340-600, which is the world’s second longest in-service airliner. Yes, longer than the A380 and the 747-400, and, in fact, only shorter than the 747-800. With a plane this long, the Lufthansa livery creates an incredible look of rear-heaviness. This plane looks like it should uncontrollably pitch up until it’s perpendicular to the ground every time it takes off. Of course this effect is less pronounced on shorter aircraft, but it’s still there, and I dislike it. 

You can barely even tell there’s paint at all on a much smaller plane! And the white bit on the front of the rudder which looks okay on a conventional empennage looks downright horrible when it’s only on the very tip of the t-tail’s forward point. 

Oh, and when you take the windows out for a freighter conversion it gets even worse. 

This is a generic-brand airplane. It genuinely reminds me of generic branding. There is a specific brand that has this exact appearance and I can’t remember what it is but it’s right there and I’m fairly sure I’ve seen it at CVS. I don’t think that’s what you want to go for when designing an airline livery, especially for an airline representing a country, but if Lufthansa wasn’t going for that they’ve failed. 

                  __________________________________________

Overall, Lufthansa’s livery is superbly boring and not terribly well thought out. It’s not worth this absolute dissertation on its own, but I’ve singled it out to complain about general trends, and for that I probably owe it an apology. Said apology is predicated on the fact that it is still a very underwhelming and bad design which could have used a lot more thought. There are a million ways this could have been made decent, and none of them were implemented because that would have taken effort and time and creative vision. I think this post actually required more time and effort than Lufthansa put into designing their planes. 

That said, Lufthansa gets a final grade of D. It’s...bad, it definitely is. There’s the vague flavour of the start of something, like the very distant smell from a barbecue happening three blocks away, but is that really even a redeeming factor? 

No. The second-largest airline in Europe should be able to do better. If I have to stare at rows upon rows of their planes any time I’m at a German airport, they should have the decency to make them interesting to look at. 

[ingravinoveritas]

Thank you for having anonymous back up, (I understand why somebody would prefer not having it on but I am worried how people/friends would react to my following an rpfer).

Anyway, something you said once a while ago has stuck with me and if you're okay with answering, you said something along the lines of your 90% sure that Michael has read your fanfiction and I'm curious why you say/think that, or if it was just a joke I didn't pick up on.

Hi, Anon. I'd like to start by responding to the first part of this, as I have to admit I was slightly taken aback, and hopefully you will soon understand why. You may not have intended it, but your comment came across as a bit backhanded. I appreciate that you follow me, but it was kind of like someone saying, "I'll come to your house for a delicious home-cooked dinner, sure, but your car's a pile of junk and your furniture's ugly and I just hope I don't see anybody I know on the way over."

The whole reason I've preferred to not have Anon on for a very long time now is that I've been on the receiving end of libelous, hateful, defamatory attacks and harassment (in one form or another) almost every day now for the last seven months. So for the sake of my sanity--and as much as I didn't want to, because I do enjoy answering Anons--I had to close that avenue off. And part of the reason I think that harassment has proliferated in all this time is that the people engaging in it use words like "RPFer" or "tinhatter," which make it very easy to not see me as a person. While I do ship Michael and David, that's not the sum total of me--who I am, or what I blog about. You know?

But I think that you do see me as a person, Anon, which is why you follow me. So what I would say to you is to ask yourself: If the people you call friends are unwilling to see me as a person/would judge you so harshly for doing so, are those people you truly want to have as friends? It seems like it makes more sense to own what you enjoy, and to not have to hide parts of yourself just to make others happy. You can continue to follow me if you like, or you can unfollow me, and that's okay, too. I would just appreciate it if you refrain from implying (intentionally or unintentionally) that my blog is something embarrassing to follow. I also don't want you to feel embarrassed to be here, but that's entirely up to you.

To answer your question, though (which I certainly am okay with answering), I was indeed serious when I said that I thought there was a possibility Michael had read one of my fics. This was back in 2019, and to set the stage, Michael was heavily into the GO fandom at the time--interacting with fans on Twitter, retweeting/liking fanart, and lurking all over the place. The fic in question was my Michael/Female Reader fic, and what made me think he read it was an Anon that I received almost immediately after publishing it.

I had never received an Anon like that before, and to this day, I have not received one like it since. In no way am I saying that this is any sort of proof, but it was simply that I could hear Michael's "voice" in that Anon, because the way he talks and writes is so distinct. That, along with his intense engagement with the fandom/social media and the fact that he'd made no secret of his penchant for fanfic by then. And while Michael had only referred to Aziraphale/Crowley fics at that point, this is the same man who previously said he'd read Roy Orbison fanfic, so I don't think RPF would be remotely implausible...

In any case, I hope that helps to answer your question. Definitely one of the weirder occurrences in my time in this fandom, but then again, there's very little about this fandom that isn't weird these days, it seems...

[anarchistfrogposting]

There's something i'l have to deal with in the far-ish future and i'm curious about your opinion. I'm in the line to inherit a modest (as in like, 20 acres i think?) piece of agricultural land from my grandma. What do you think would be the best way to handle it when i inherited it? Do you think the only morally right thing to do would be to try to turn it into a co-op or something similar to that?

Obviously, there’s a lot you can do with a piece of land. This kind of question reflects a larger question about what the proper thing to do with a business inside of a capitalist economy is, given you come to own it.

I’m assuming by agricultural land, you mean you’re growing crops rather than putting animals to pasture.

There’s a quick answer which is basically yes, build a co-op with it. Even from a very narrow mindset (“how do I keep this business going?”), co-ops can be very successful businesses, as the fact that workers have a direct and proportional stake in the business means they are less alienated from their work. The proliferation of worker-owned co-ops are a pretty significant aspect of the economic preconditions of anarchist society, and integrating them into communities by making them a part of networks of communal development and aid is critical also. If you’re planning on hiring workers and forming a workers co-op, I’d look into ways of making your decision-making processes as democratic as you possibly can. I’m pretty sure @fuckyeahiww has good info on this. If they see this post I’m sure they can chime in about whether or not I’m right about that.

Given it’s agricultural land, I would also offer that you have the power to be a pretty significant player in some mutual aid projects in your local area, since even siphoning a small amount of your produce into something like a communal food aid project (or w/e) could feed a whole bunch of hungry folks. I’d also look into ways to distribute some of your food waste (like commercially unviable produce) into food banks and other projects that make use of food waste. This is also an environmental consideration.

There are accounts far better than mine for this kind of question. I’d personally recommend some of the more established solarpunks on this platform.

[blazinghotfoggynights]

Wank is definitely trying to infiltrate the fandom. The proliferation of posts aimed at the fans of specific ships, fans who do not like characters or character development, or fans who point out unrealistic situations and behaviors is definitely frightening. So, I will say a few things and keep going.

(Disclaimer: If you don't like my views, kudos to you. It's called free thinking and free will. Maybe if you explain why you don't agree, it will open a fun dialogue.

Saying I am wrong or I suck doesn't bother me and does not count as supporting your views. You can't leave anon comments. You can thank a few who can't act like civilized humans for that change. I am always open to discussion and debate, if it is respectful.)

Here goes some of my thoughts on current fandom war topics I have seen:

BuckTommy is gross/pointless/forced/not believable.

I don't think it is gross. Lou isn't my type, but I can tell he is a handsome man. So, I understand someone being attracted to him.

I think Buck needs to explore himself, not just his sexuality, outside the 118. As for not being believable, I think it is. And there are many interpretations, I believe, that could be correct.

I don't feel this is forced in the way most of the posts I've seen are implying it. I think Tommy was a convenient character and maybe TPTB are using this as a way to get that character, and possibly his unit, more exposure. Spinoff maybe? When you think about it, it would have been just as easy to create a new character and have him force Buck to look within himself.

I think the relationship is very believable, but not for the most common reasons.

This is organic attraction and a natural progression.

Maybe.

Maybe not.

I believe that even though we are in a new season, Buck is still traumatized by dying. I think he is hiding it well. I think throwing himself into a relationship with someone who was obviously only into him due to his brush with death distracted him. But I don't think Buck has dealt with dying and what that dream showed him. There is no way he does not have a lot of unresolved issues.

I think Natalia was a distraction that actually worked for a while. But, if you go back to the scene where he tells Eddie they broke up, he is obviously in need of attention. He is blatantly resentful after Eddie says he is unavailable due to Christopher's date but asked Marisol to help chaperone. (Eddie is no better. Listen to how he says Natalia's name.)

So, we have a man who died, didn't deal with that at all, threw himself into a relationship with a death doula, the relationship ended, his safe place was now taken by Marisol, whom Eddie was asking to fill a parental role that would have been Buck's before.

In that one scene Buck was slapped into a reality where Eddie is not always available when he needs him, he is no longer Christopher's de facto second parent, and Eddie is trying to move on a build a family with someone else.

We know Buck doesn't have the healthiest coping skills. I was waiting for him to go off the rails. He was drifting alone.

Enter Tommy. Tommy who is instantly drawn to Eddie. If you never find out that Tommy is into men, and look at the sparring, the fixing Eddie's car, the FLYING THE MAN TO VEGAS FOR A SOLD OUT FIGHT, the intense focus, amazing adventures, and acts to impress Eddie still seem like someone showing off for someone they like.

You can interpret the scene of Tommy, Eddie, and Buck separating after watching Bobby and Athena as Tommy being smitten with Eddie, watch how he stares at Eddie, and Buck trying to draw Tommy's attention away from Eddie, whom he is already seeing slip away due to Marisol.

(I will probably explore this in another post.)

In other words, I think Buck was experiencing a breakup, seeing Eddie as slipping away, still shaken by his death, and not dealing. Tommy could very well be Natalia 2.0, a distraction when he needed it. Tommy was into Eddie but Eddie was taken and wasn't giving him any signs that there could ever be more. Buck needed someone and Tommy saw an opportunity with a hot man.

Buddie doesn't make sense because Eddie is not gay.

May I remind everyone Buck was canonically straight for six seasons?

Eddie doesn't have to be gay. He could be bi, pan, demi, or whatever. I've touched upon Eddie Diaz's unusual behavior with and toward women in prior posts. I have been on this Earth long enough to know that Eddie Diaz does not behave like a typical heterosexual male.

I also know sexuality is not as concrete and clear as we always think it is. A lot of people have figured out in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and beyond the sexuality they genuinely believed they were was not quite accurate.

Eddie's relationships have all been based on what he feels he is supposed to do. That man has never once shown a genuine sexual attraction to any woman he has been paired with. He never looks at any of them with that gleam in his eye.

But you know who he does look at like that? Buck. He has done it many times throughout the series. (That will probably be a separate post, too.)

Eddie doesn't pursue women. He doesn't feel comfortable with relationships naturally progressing with those women. When he finds himself in a relationship that is moving to another level he panics, literally. He basically has kicked every woman out, yet he invites Buck over all the time.

Eddie Diaz is not straight. Eddie Diaz has never had a functional, stable relationship with a woman. Eddie Diaz is just as messed up and in need of thrice weekly therapy appointments as Buck.

BuckTommy and Buddie can't coexist.

Why not? How many people here have only had one partner in their lives? It happens but it is rare.

Many seem to overlook that Buddie can't happen right now anyway because Eddie is with Marisol. So, just as Eddie jumped at Marisol because Buck dove into a relationship with Natalia headfirst, why would it be such a stretch to consider that Buck is throwing himself into an opportunity with Tommy because Eddie is taken.

I keep pointing out those two are the poster children for unhealthy dynamics.

Some fans don't like Tommy Kinard.

What's wrong with that? I've seen many valid reasons fans given by the fans who don't like the character. I've seen some that are ridiculous, too, but I scroll quickly past those.

Tommy, canonically, was a terrible person but is now a fan favorite and suddenly redeemed.

I get it. He says he was struggling with his sexuality and trying to fit in and all is forgiven. 🙄 Personally, I don't know why the hell Hen would ever forgive him. I understand forging a positive working relationship with him, but as a woman, I have seen so many men treat us, I am a woman who has worked with people of all races and sexualities, badly in the workplace and a simple "I'm sorry" is supposed to be enough to erase the damage and anguish that casual misogyny, racism, and homophobia caused. It hurts when you are insulted, humiliated, and punished for something you can't control, such as your biological sex, race, or sexuality. He wasn't a dumb kid in junior high trying to impress some kids so he could be their friend. He was a grown ass man who chose to bully a woman due to her sex, race, and sexuality. What makes it worse is he is gay, too!

Some fans have said they see negative personality traits in the character. I didn't initially, until I rewatched his scenes after reading some posts on social media. I missed a lot of little things. He's older. He's experienced. He knows how to woo someone. But he also talks down to Buck. When he says Evan, it isn't warm and loving like when Maddie or Eddie says it. It is almost scolding and reproachful. I also concur with those who say he uses snark to put Buck in his place and Buck doesn't even notice. (Let me stop right here and state that if those traits are meant to be subtly conveyed, Lou Ferrigno, Jr is doing a damn good job.)

It's perfectly fine to dislike the character. There is no rule saying fans have to like every character on the show.

BuckTommy and Buddie can't coexist. If Buck is with Tommy, it is a slap in the face to Buddie. If Buddie happens, it is a slap in the face to BuckTommy.

Buck and Eddie have been with other people. If they ever get together, their pasts don't matter. I hate to be the one to tell you, but wedding night virgins? Not common anymore.

Buck is exploring man on man sex with a man who knows what he is doing.

Eddie is in a relationship, too. He's learning about himself. Catholic guilt. Not living for himself.

Every single relationship they have had has shaped them and taught them something.

I wouldn't even be upset if Eddie figured out he liked men, then spent time with an experienced man.

Everyone in the 118 needs to find outlets beyond that group if you ask me.

I admitted early on I am a Buddie endgamer, but I am enjoying seeing slutty Buck openly thirsting over Tommy. I would enjoy seeing Eddie openly thirsting over some sexy man for a while, too. Bring on the breathless begging for the D. I get it. I have been there, baby. When the D is good, you don't mind begging.

So, those are just some thoughts based on the state of fandom right now.

[supreme-leader-stoat]

Since this wasnt the point of the post, I'm actually going to mildly correct the thinking here. A lot of American protestant pastors get to "anything short of cheating means divorce isn't allowed" but that actually isn't what Jesus says. He says "unless it be unlawful" and he is talking about in exodus/leviticus where the Laws are talking about what other gentiles must follow while they live in the land of Israel. Mainly, that you can't marry someone related to you [sister, step mother] or the same sex as you [ei modern so-called gay marriage].

It is likely with this teaching in mind that the disciples/Apostles decided in Acts/the council of Jerusalem that gentile converts need only follow the gentile-pertinent laws found in the Scriptures, and not the whole of the Mosaic law. Because, essentially, that's what Jesus said the Jews should be following.

It is very recent in history that its been interpreted that adultery is viable for divorce and re-marriage, because while adultery is unlawful, it doesn't make the actual *marriage* unlawful. Because otherwise, the interpretation has to be "the person who was cheated on gets to get remarried, but the person who did the cheating is still married to their original spouse" which doesn't make a ton of sense.

While it is a Catholic source, I think the Shameless Popery podcast did a video about this topic and it's definitely worth the listen!!

I'll definitely have to do some more digging into the subject when I have some free energy for it. What you're saying doesn't match up with the way that I've always been taught the passage, but I'm open to hearing out other perspectives.

You're right that I technically paraphrased a bit. The full text of the verses (just for the benefit of anyone reading this without context), in the ESV translation I usually use, is

31 “It has been said, ‘Anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce.’ 32 But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, makes her the victim of adultery, and anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

—Matthew 5:31-32

The way I've always learned it is that the law given in Deuteronomy was addressing a culture where women were being cut loose by their husbands for petty reasons, and so they were being given legal protections in the form of a required certificate of divorce which would allow them to remarry and thereby regain the social and legal protections that came with marriage. The Sermon on the Mount then builds on that going "this is still a sacred institution, by continuing to divorce your wives (even if it's all formal and legal) over petty reasons, you're still missing the point and proliferating sexual immorality." And so the only time you should even consider divorce is when the marriage has already been broken by sexual immorality.

There's also the whole debate over how to approach the text in a time and place where either party in a marriage can initiate a divorce and how cases of spousal abuse and violence fit into things, but at that point we're getting into possible eisegetic readings.

[datamodel-of-disaster]

Ok, random soapbox time:

Elder care is a women’s rights issue, and a children’s rights issue, and a gay rights issue, and a disability rights issue.

I didn’t entirely realise this until I learned just how many places in the world, having children is essentially just a retirement policy, and a necessary one at that. I was in the Philippines earlier this year, and hearing my sister-in-law’s family talk about how “having an extra child late, when your other kids are getting to be independent already, is ideal to make sure you have a live-in caretaker when you age” was… disturbing.

The expectation that children will fully financially support and physically take care of their aging parents is a default setting in almost all of the world.

That’s shitty for the children, of course.

But it also means that not having children equals not having caretakers when you grow infirm, and more terrifyingly, not having any source of income when you can no longer work. (Do you know how many countries have *zero* pension regulation? It’s too many.)

This means that not marrying is probably not in the cards if you want to grow old. Infertility or inability to partner up means you better have gracious siblings with large families of their own who will take on the burden of your care. And want to escape an abusive marriage or family? Good luck with breaking ties with your only support network.

Additionally, when not having a wife and kids is essentially a matter of being denied survival when you age, shit gets murky really quickly m, resentment against women grows, and all sorts of horribly misogynist practices proliferate. Think families selling daughters into marital slavery, men kidnapping brides, practices of raping/“dishonouring” a girl to force her to marry you, etc. Clearly the elder care thing is only one of many factors feeding this shit, but it’s definitely tied into it.

The practice of arranging elder care through blood ties and informal relationships also traps people in their communities. If being yourself/coming out/speaking out against abuse/etc means ostracism from the network of people who will bring you food if you get sick or help you get around when you become less mobile… yeah. You see how that’s gonna be an issue. Not to mention that a society like this condemns those who fail to build these strong informal bonds (you know, like neurodivergent and disabled people) to poverty and lack of care as they age or their needs grow.

Social security, pension plans and state-funded elder care are fundamentally important to break the constraining grip of these communities-of-necessity and their social control. Freedom is only possible if it doesn’t mean death.