#convention theft

[onesaltyerik]

Friend's Art and Cash Box Stolen

Hey yall, my friend and DND buddy TheArtMoose, has had her car broken into and her cash box and all her remaining stock from selling at Palmerston Armageddon stolen. The thieves have not been found and she's pretty distraught and worried about selling her art at AuckGeddon now. If you can, could you drop a tip on her PayPal account? Or give her a follow on Instagram and share her work? She says pls don't tip if you can't afford it.

And this is her Instagram, she does very whimsical and storybook styled art and has been drawing the characters from our dnd campaign.

https://www.instagram.com/theartmoose/

[agentfascinateur]

Israeli attacks have damaged or destroyed:

• 380,000 housing units

• 412 schools and universities

• 556 mosques

• three churches

• 206 archeological and heritage sites

• knocked 32 hospitals and 53 health centres out of service

• 126 ambulances also targeted

All violations of the Geneva Convention

#NoOneAboveTheLaw

[cryptablog]

Just a reminder art fight is HAND DRAWN ART? ONLY. (or uh mouth if your cool/cool and disabled)

Ai "art" is NOT WELCOME AT ARTFIGHT.

-It can't be credited

-It isnt your own unique design

-and you cant draw other peoples characters with it without stealing their designs and putting them through an ai generator and making them worse!

ai "artists" are not and never will be welcome at artfight. Same as every other artist run convention thus far.

[magichats]

The Copyright Trolling that Nintendo was doing on Palworld makes so much more sense now, knowing some of the things that were just leaked with regards to upcoming Pokemon games.

Not to defend Palworld, Palworld is scummy, but it makes more sense if they were planning to release an online multiplayer game to try to kneecap the competition now if Palworld supposedly runs too close to that game (coincidentally or not).

[thirddagger]

Like I don't remember where I saw that video of many of the CR cast at a drag show and the drag queen took off Liam's shirt, but my lingering thought about the video has has honestly been that my social anxiety hadn't even Imagined that before. I don't even know what I'm missing out on, I could be in a loud, raucous party with flashing lights and a drag queen could take the shirt off my body. Do I necessarily want that, no not really at all thanks anyway, but gee, I Do live under a rock governed by my anxieties and sensitivities

[glauxgardenofchaos]

It's like people have forgotten that anything written, was once written by somebody. And that somebody may have opinions on what their writing is used for.

AI do not write. They cleverly copy-paste stuff based on an algorithm, from enourmous datasets scraped off the internet and other places. So anything produced by them is automatically plagiarised. There is no originality in AI. Everything is stolen.

Do not feed the plagiarism machines.

(for the record, do NOT feed by fics to any kind of AI. DO NOT)

oh I wasn’t aware it was feeding the ai. I’ve inserted hundreds of fics into chatgpt for their continuation or for a different plot within the same context just for fun and out of curiosity… but I’ve never posted any of them…

Indeed, anything that is given to AI it can use later to draw from. That's why it doesn't matter if you post them or not as it has now access to those writers' texts without their permission.

~Mod L

[immaculatasknight]

They just can't help themselves

[movingtothefarm]

"Billy Petherick, originally from Greenwich, and his French wife Gwendoline were found guilty on Monday at the criminal court of Rennes over the 2014 thefts in Brittany and Anjou, according to French newspaper Le Parisien.

The court found that Billy Petherick would enter churches and swipe objects such as chalices, ciboriums, patens or tabernacle keys and sell them back in the UK via Ebay, or to an old friend of the family who was a second-hand dealer in Retiers.

Mr Petherick and Gwendoline Mouchel are two of the hosts of a popular YouTube channel, 'The Pethericks', where the couple chronicle their adventures renovating properties in France to their 360,000 subscribers.

But Mr Petherick also hit the headlines in 2021 when it was revealed that he deserted the Household Calvary a decade earlier, and was only caught after he appeared on Channel 4 renovating the couple's £890,000 French chateau

According to Le Parisien, the court heard that she told investigators that when she heard about Petherick's actions, she was 'not shocked' because he 'did not have a high opinion of the Church'."

The Irony.... the couple bought an abandoned 18th Century French Convent to "renovate" on their YouTube channel. The Convent Sisters supported the community and hospital in Ernee from 1819 - 2010.

The channel's comment section is interesting. Many followers are highly invested in the daily videos and the cultivated personas. Followers partly live vicariously thru Petherick's wealthy lifestyle and talking about them as if they are real life friends. Participants on the vlog have spinoff individual YouTube channels - brother, sister, cameraman, British workmen/friends. Patreon and merchandise are promoted.

The channel is actively deleting any comments referencing the theft charges of Feb 5, 2024.

British YouTube property renovator is convicted in France

[sevenhundred721]

I need to read Herbert West: Re-Animator bc I have a few assumptions I've made about the cast, especially Herbert, that I'd like to see either confirmed or denied, or ideally, still ambiguous enough that I can keep believing without impediment of or confirmation from the source material.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Conspiratorialism as a material phenomenon

I'll be in TUCSON, AZ from November 8-10: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

I think it behooves us to be a little skeptical of stories about AI driving people to believe wrong things and commit ugly actions. Not that I like the AI slop that is filling up our social media, but when we look at the ways that AI is harming us, slop is pretty low on the list.

The real AI harms come from the actual things that AI companies sell AI to do. There's the AI gun-detector gadgets that the credulous Mayor Eric Adams put in NYC subways, which led to 2,749 invasive searches and turned up zero guns:

https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nycs-subway-weapons-detector-pilot-program-ends/

Any time AI is used to predict crime – predictive policing, bail determinations, Child Protective Services red flags – they magnify the biases already present in these systems, and, even worse, they give this bias the veneer of scientific neutrality. This process is called "empiricism-washing," and you know you're experiencing it when you hear some variation on "it's just math, math can't be racist":

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/23/cryptocidal-maniacs/#phrenology

When AI is used to replace customer service representatives, it systematically defrauds customers, while providing an "accountability sink" that allows the company to disclaim responsibility for the thefts:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

When AI is used to perform high-velocity "decision support" that is supposed to inform a "human in the loop," it quickly overwhelms its human overseer, who takes on the role of "moral crumple zone," pressing the "OK" button as fast as they can. This is bad enough when the sacrificial victim is a human overseeing, say, proctoring software that accuses remote students of cheating on their tests:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/16/unauthorized-paper/#cheating-anticheat

But it's potentially lethal when the AI is a transcription engine that doctors have to use to feed notes to a data-hungry electronic health record system that is optimized to commit health insurance fraud by seeking out pretenses to "upcode" a patient's treatment. Those AIs are prone to inventing things the doctor never said, inserting them into the record that the doctor is supposed to review, but remember, the only reason the AI is there at all is that the doctor is being asked to do so much paperwork that they don't have time to treat their patients:

https://apnews.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-health-business-90020cdf5fa16c79ca2e5b6c4c9bbb14

My point is that "worrying about AI" is a zero-sum game. When we train our fire on the stuff that isn't important to the AI stock swindlers' business-plans (like creating AI slop), we should remember that the AI companies could halt all of that activity and not lose a dime in revenue. By contrast, when we focus on AI applications that do the most direct harm – policing, health, security, customer service – we also focus on the AI applications that make the most money and drive the most investment.

AI hasn't attracted hundreds of billions in investment capital because investors love AI slop. All the money pouring into the system – from investors, from customers, from easily gulled big-city mayors – is chasing things that AI is objectively very bad at and those things also cause much more harm than AI slop. If you want to be a good AI critic, you should devote the majority of your focus to these applications. Sure, they're not as visually arresting, but discrediting them is financially arresting, and that's what really matters.

All that said: AI slop is real, there is a lot of it, and just because it doesn't warrant priority over the stuff AI companies actually sell, it still has cultural significance and is worth considering.

AI slop has turned Facebook into an anaerobic lagoon of botshit, just the laziest, grossest engagement bait, much of it the product of rise-and-grind spammers who avidly consume get rich quick "courses" and then churn out a torrent of "shrimp Jesus" and fake chainsaw sculptures:

https://www.404media.co/email/1cdf7620-2e2f-4450-9cd9-e041f4f0c27f/

For poor engagement farmers in the global south chasing the fractional pennies that Facebook shells out for successful clickbait, the actual content of the slop is beside the point. These spammers aren't necessarily tuned into the psyche of the wealthy-world Facebook users who represent Meta's top monetization subjects. They're just trying everything and doubling down on anything that moves the needle, A/B splitting their way into weird, hyper-optimized, grotesque crap:

https://www.404media.co/facebook-is-being-overrun-with-stolen-ai-generated-images-that-people-think-are-real/

In other words, Facebook's AI spammers are laying out a banquet of arbitrary possibilities, like the letters on a Ouija board, and the Facebook users' clicks and engagement are a collective ideomotor response, moving the algorithm's planchette to the options that tug hardest at our collective delights (or, more often, disgusts).

So, rather than thinking of AI spammers as creating the ideological and aesthetic trends that drive millions of confused Facebook users into condemning, praising, and arguing about surreal botshit, it's more true to say that spammers are discovering these trends within their subjects' collective yearnings and terrors, and then refining them by exploring endlessly ramified variations in search of unsuspected niches.

(If you know anything about AI, this may remind you of something: a Generative Adversarial Network, in which one bot creates variations on a theme, and another bot ranks how closely the variations approach some ideal. In this case, the spammers are the generators and the Facebook users they evince reactions from are the discriminators)

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

I got to thinking about this today while reading User Mag, Taylor Lorenz's superb newsletter, and her reporting on a new AI slop trend, "My neighbor’s ridiculous reason for egging my car":

https://www.usermag.co/p/my-neighbors-ridiculous-reason-for

The "egging my car" slop consists of endless variations on a story in which the poster (generally a figure of sympathy, canonically a single mother of newborn twins) complains that her awful neighbor threw dozens of eggs at her car to punish her for parking in a way that blocked his elaborate Hallowe'en display. The text is accompanied by an AI-generated image showing a modest family car that has been absolutely plastered with broken eggs, dozens upon dozens of them.

According to Lorenz, variations on this slop are topping very large Facebook discussion forums totalling millions of users, like "Movie Character…,USA Story, Volleyball Women, Top Trends, Love Style, and God Bless." These posts link to SEO sites laden with programmatic advertising.

The funnel goes:

i. Create outrage and hence broad reach;

ii, A small percentage of those who see the post will click through to the SEO site;

iii. A small fraction of those users will click a low-quality ad;

iv. The ad will pay homeopathic sub-pennies to the spammer.

The revenue per user on this kind of scam is next to nothing, so it only works if it can get very broad reach, which is why the spam is so designed for engagement maximization. The more discussion a post generates, the more users Facebook recommends it to.

These are very effective engagement bait. Almost all AI slop gets some free engagement in the form of arguments between users who don't know they're commenting an AI scam and people hectoring them for falling for the scam. This is like the free square in the middle of a bingo card.

Beyond that, there's multivalent outrage: some users are furious about food wastage; others about the poor, victimized "mother" (some users are furious about both). Not only do users get to voice their fury at both of these imaginary sins, they can also argue with one another about whether, say, food wastage even matters when compared to the petty-minded aggression of the "perpetrator." These discussions also offer lots of opportunity for violent fantasies about the bad guy getting a comeuppance, offers to travel to the imaginary AI-generated suburb to dole out a beating, etc. All in all, the spammers behind this tedious fiction have really figured out how to rope in all kinds of users' attention.

Of course, the spammers don't get much from this. There isn't such a thing as an "attention economy." You can't use attention as a unit of account, a medium of exchange or a store of value. Attention – like everything else that you can't build an economy upon, such as cryptocurrency – must be converted to money before it has economic significance. Hence that tooth-achingly trite high-tech neologism, "monetization."

The monetization of attention is very poor, but AI is heavily subsidized or even free (for now), so the largest venture capital and private equity funds in the world are spending billions in public pension money and rich peoples' savings into CO2 plumes, GPUs, and botshit so that a bunch of hustle-culture weirdos in the Pacific Rim can make a few dollars by tricking people into clicking through engagement bait slop – twice.

The slop isn't the point of this, but the slop does have the useful function of making the collective ideomotor response visible and thus providing a peek into our hopes and fears. What does the "egging my car" slop say about the things that we're thinking about?

Lorenz cites Jamie Cohen, a media scholar at CUNY Queens, who points out that subtext of this slop is "fear and distrust in people about their neighbors." Cohen predicts that "the next trend, is going to be stranger and more violent.”

This feels right to me. The corollary of mistrusting your neighbors, of course, is trusting only yourself and your family. Or, as Margaret Thatcher liked to say, "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families."

We are living in the tail end of a 40 year experiment in structuring our world as though "there is no such thing as society." We've gutted our welfare net, shut down or privatized public services, all but abolished solidaristic institutions like unions.

This isn't mere aesthetics: an atomized society is far more hospitable to extreme wealth inequality than one in which we are all in it together. When your power comes from being a "wise consumer" who "votes with your wallet," then all you can do about the climate emergency is buy a different kind of car – you can't build the public transit system that will make cars obsolete.

When you "vote with your wallet" all you can do about animal cruelty and habitat loss is eat less meat. When you "vote with your wallet" all you can do about high drug prices is "shop around for a bargain." When you vote with your wallet, all you can do when your bank forecloses on your home is "choose your next lender more carefully."

Most importantly, when you vote with your wallet, you cast a ballot in an election that the people with the thickest wallets always win. No wonder those people have spent so long teaching us that we can't trust our neighbors, that there is no such thing as society, that we can't have nice things. That there is no alternative.

The commercial surveillance industry really wants you to believe that they're good at convincing people of things, because that's a good way to sell advertising. But claims of mind-control are pretty goddamned improbable – everyone who ever claimed to have managed the trick was lying, from Rasputin to MK-ULTRA:

https://pluralistic.net/HowToDestroySurveillanceCapitalism

Rather than seeing these platforms as convincing people of things, we should understand them as discovering and reinforcing the ideology that people have been driven to by material conditions. Platforms like Facebook show us to one another, let us form groups that can imperfectly fill in for the solidarity we're desperate for after 40 years of "no such thing as society."

The most interesting thing about "egging my car" slop is that it reveals that so many of us are convinced of two contradictory things: first, that everyone else is a monster who will turn on you for the pettiest of reasons; and second, that we're all the kind of people who would stick up for the victims of those monsters.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

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/2024/10/29/hobbesian-slop/#cui-bono

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[heritageposts]

By Haidar Eid, associate Professor at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza.

Now that we have heard the interim judgement the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, we can confidently say a new world order is in the making. The World Court confirmed today that South Africa’s charge under the Genocide Convention that “Israel has engaged in, is engaging in and risks further engaging in genocidal acts against the Palestinian people in Gaza” is “plausible”. It has further ruled that Israel must “take all measures” to avoid acts of genocide in Gaza. The court has stopped short of calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire, which has already been demanded by an absolute majority of world nations. Still, most of the “provisional measures” called for by the Republic of South Africa have been endorsed by the court. It is difficult to see how Israel can implement these measures and fulfil its obligations under the Genocide Convention, without agreeing to a ceasefire. There is no indication, of course, that Israel has any intention of heeding the Court’s provisions. In fact, since the ICJ heard South Africa’s case two weeks ago, Israel has doubled down on its genocidal acts in Gaza. In the past 24 hours alone, it carried out 21 mass killings, murdering 200 and injuring 370 civilians. So Israel’s message to the Court, and the world at large, is clear: It does not care for the opinion, demands or “measures” of any international institution – legal or political. It will do as it pleases. [...] Israel may not heed the court’s rulings and provisions, but South Africa’s historic stance will still have consequences. As stated by the Department of International Relations and Cooperation of South Africa after the ICJ’s interim decision: “Third States are now on notice of the existence of a serious risk of genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. They must, therefore, also act independently and immediately to prevent genocide by Israel and to ensure that they are not themselves in violation of the Genocide Convention, including by aiding or assisting in the commission of genocide. This necessarily imposes an obligation on all States to cease funding and facilitating Israel’s military actions, which are plausibly genocidal.” With this case, South Africa has put not only Israel, but the entirety of the global justice system on trial. This case is a major turning point for humanity, because it marks the first time in history when a Global South country bravely crossed a red line drawn by the colonial West and demanded its favourite settler colony, Israel, be held to account for the crimes it has long been committing against an Indigenous people. Today, thanks to South Africa, the entire colonial West, and its centuries-long history of theft, dispossession, and injustice is on trial at the World Court. Future generations will remember January 26, 2024, as the day on which the world has finally decided to hold a genocide state, and its powerful backers, accountable for repeated, longstanding violations of international law. Yes, a new world order is in the making.

. . . full article on al jazeera (26 Jan 2024)

[wajjs]

Can we talk about how Gail Simone has (allegedly) ripped off a latine comic writer and artist with her latest addition to the X-Men?

A couple of days ago, a friend sent me this video:

Translation:

Yesterday I found out through Instagram that there’s an Argentinean X-Men. When I check out the news, I notice that the character is identical to one of my characters. The same hair, face, look, color. I keep looking into it and I can tell that the hand details, they have the same gloves, same accessories.

I also find out that the author (Gail Simone) has been to Argentina and that she was in the same convention I was part of. And after reading a bit more, I realize that the [character] origin is similar. So I tried to reach out to the authors, but I did not get any reply.

You can check out my social media, @/nncomics on Instagram or nncomics.com, where you’ll find my character Luc from my comic PETS that I’ve been working on for over ten years. You can download it for free to check this out [what he’s saying], and, if you want, to check out the story and read it.

Let’s hope that, well, with everyone’s help we can add pressure so that our creations being stolen without any kind of repercussions does not happen again to us Argentinean authors. So that this doesn’t happen again, and so that Argentinean culture remains where it should be, at the very top, but in the hands of its creators.

Martín Gimenez (the artist/writer for PETS) also shared this on Instagram.

To me, the side by side comparison really shows how similar the designs are. The fact that Gail was part of the same convention as Martin only makes this situation even more suspicious. I've been looking around a bit, and not only are the origin stories of both characters similar, but their powers are so similar, too. The only thing that is not identical is the hairstyle.

Latin american creators either get painfully overlooked, or they have to endure blatant theft. I hope one day both Marvel and DC start treating us better.

[yougavemeyourheartyouknow]

It wasn’t over, it still isn’t over. (Bandit cowboy! Miguel O’Hara x Fem! Reader) Part 2

Wake up babe, new cowboy Miguel fic just dropped! This part was heavily inspired by the notebook. Period pieces are not my strong suit so apologizes if it’s not good. Not proofread, enjoy!

(Y/N)-Your name.

Cursing, mentions/usage of alcohol, attempted robbery/theft, mentions of guns, Miguel jokes about manhandling you but nothing actually happens, mentions of sexual acts, but nothing happens.

Word Count: 2.3k

Part 1

Masterlist

—

Five years.

Five years since you had last seen the cowboy who had stolen your heart.

You had graduated college and moved out of your parents home, moving a few towns over, nowhere near a big city like you lived in during your youth in the East but a lot larger than the one you had lived during the whole Miguel incident. You lived in a nice home, gotten a job as a teacher for the younger kids in town and… you were recently engaged.

Your fiancé was a nice man, sweet, understanding, kind, easy on the eyes, you liked him a lot, the only problem is, you didn’t love him. You should feel bad about getting married to a wealthy man who you didn’t even see as more than of a friend, but at the same time, your mother thought it would be best to marry you off to her friend’s son that just so happened to be inheriting his father’s liquor business when he settled down. It was a marriage of convenience if anything, at least he was polite with you despite neither you or him having any romantic feelings, if anything it made the whole thing a bit easier for you. Growing content with the fact that this would turn into your future children’s definition of love.

Five years to grow from a silly lovestruck teenager into a young woman with responsibilities and a bright future ahead of her, and you still thought about him. You can't help but frantically Miguel’s name under the obituary section of the town’s paper, unknowingly breathing a sigh of relief when his name wouldn’t appear. Although it was foolish, and despite no longer living in the same small town as your parents, you couldn’t help but feel a bit bitter at the fact he hasn’t found you yet. Was he even attempting to look for you? With a reputation like his, you’re certain you weren’t the first girl he’s charmed to get under his sheets… or in your case, jail cell. So, eventually, you stopped hoping, if he hadn’t found you during the last five years, he surely wasn’t looking. Why should you?

—

“Darling.” Your fiancé, Austin, called out for you before rounding the corner that connected the living room into the kitchen. You hummed in response as you kept your eyes on the stack of papers you were currently grading for your students, a pen in your dominant hand as your free one tapped a mindless tone to help keep you concentrated. “Put the papers down and take a break will you? You’ve got all week to grade those tests.” You let out a huff and a whine as you put the pen down, he was right. Your eyes keep unfocusing and your wrist was being to grow sore, making your fiancé tsk. “I don’t understand why you don’t just quit, I make enough to support us both.”

“I should,shouldn't I…” You contimplacted with a weary chuckle, and although your tone was joking, you were seriously considering it. You adored your students with all your heart, you really did. But the school was putting so much pressure on you because they refused to hire another teacher to help lessen your workload. So you and two other teachers were juggling a handful of 300 seven year olds, it was a lot… to say the least. You picked yourself up from your seat to stretch your body out, before turning to Austin. “Now was that all you came to tell me?” You asked in a playful tone.

“No, actually… I came to ask for a favor.” He admitted, smoothing out the wrinkles in his shirt. “Ya know I’ve got that… liquor convention event out of town this weekend, right?” You nodded in confirmation, “well, I was wondering if you could do me the favor of just checking in on my office while I’m gone. I’ve heard a lot about break ins and whatnot during these times, just drop by for a few minutes for the 4 days that I’ll be gone.”

You tapped the nonsensical rhythm again as you thought about it, it wasn’t too much of an ask, you’d just drop by for a few minutes a day, you shrugged. “Sure. What’s the worst that could happen?”

—

Saturday afternoon, your first day off and your third alone. Grateful for the ability to sleep in and being about to eat a well rounded breakfast. After doing your usual morning routine, and having changed into one of your simpler dresses to go out and run some errands for the day.

Gone out to get groceries, send out a letter to your parents, went to the tailors to drop off some Austin’s shirts to be hemmed since you didn’t feel like sitting down all to do it yourself, even finished grading the last of the test all before noon ended. After tidying up your work from its usual spot from the kitchen table, you made yourself a quick lunch and went to read a few chapters of your book on the couch. Only to end up falling asleep, and once you woke up, you glanced at the clock-shit.

“It’s half past five?! I was supposed to go to his office an hour ago!” You yelled to no one but yourself as you quickly got up from your spot on the couch, fixing your hair quickly as you threw on your coat, and made your way back out the door.

—

“I told ya boys this heist would be easy… if we leave by dusk we could hit up that train that passes by el dorado tomorrow evening…” Miguel chuckled as he tossed his now full bag of valuables to his brother, who then passed it over Peter would load it to one of their horses that they had waiting for them around the back of the building.

After that night he had escaped, it took him about a month to find his partners in crime, following their trail through stolen newspapers from random porches and the knowledge of how their usual trail was, luckily they had kept his horse safe and well taken care of too.

“One more bag then we’re as good as gone.” Miguel said with a smirk, making Gabriel Let out a laugh and a clap. Right when Miguel was going to prep the last bag, the faint noise of rushing made all three men stop in their tracks. Before he sent his younger brother a glare and he hissed in a low tone through his teeth. “Pinche cabrón- I thought you said this place would be empty all weekend.” (Fucking dumbass)

“I thought it would!” He whispered-shouted back, before they heard the door creak open.

“Fuck-okay… um, go check if it’s the sheriff.” He quietly ordered Gabriel, before turning to Peter, “Get the horses ready incase we needa’ book It.” With a nob both males did as told, as Miguel quickly went to pack the last bag.

When his younger brother entered the front room, he swore he heard him mutter the words “hello pretty lady” before the muffle sound of rustling and some high-pitched yelping, but never was a shot fired, so clearly it couldn’t have been someone to play an immediate threat. Just as he was finishing tying up the bag, Gabriel came back into the room, but not alone.

“Look at what I found, it must be his little wife.” He said almost mockingly as he hazardly pulled you into the room and pushed you into the room in front of Miguel’s feet, but with your face being tilted down as you caught yourself from falling face first onto the wooden floor.

“Careful!” You yelled as you try to collect yourself, once you get yourself to look up at the bandit you were dropped in front of, your scowl immediately turned into once of disbelief, and it seems his expression matched yours.

You both seem to have froze up in time as you both did nothing but stare at each other, Gabriel just crossed his arms and raised a brow, Peter came jogging in to inform his friends the horses are ready when he saw the odd scene, opting to keep his mouth shut.

Finally, you came back to life as you blinked, as if expecting his to disappear right before your very eyes again, and when he didn’t, you finally whispered a faint. “…Miguel?”

“…(Y/N)…” You nodded your head, despite it not being a question, and he cleared his throat, not breaking eye contact with you as he spoke his next orders to Peter and Gabriel. “Unload all that shit and put it back.”

—

He had told Gabriel and Peter to go on to do the train heist without him, and that he'd meet up with them afterwards. Saying he had “unattended business to take care of”. So now here he was, in your kitchen, only being lightened up by a few candles as darkness overtook the sky. Both of you sharing drunken giggles over dinner. Miguel’s black cowboy hat that was certainly too big for you sitting on top of your head as you sip on your beer.

“That hat looks adorable on you.” Miguel chuckled, making you shake your head with a giggle, your free hand going to rest on top of the hat to help keep it stabilized.

“It’s so big!” You countered as you take the hat off and went to hand it back to Miguel, who grabs it and sets it back on his head.

“You know you shouldn’t be wearing just anyone’s hat. Ya know what they say about wearing a man’s cowboy hat.” He joked as he put down his now empty bottle, chuckling when he saw your face contour in confusion.

“What do they say?” You asked curiously, making Miguel’s smirk widen.

“Wear the hat…” he tapped the brim on the hat for emphasis, “Ride the cowboy.” He finished, making you gasp dramatically.

“Miguel! That’s inappropriate!” You pretended to be offended, but you couldn’t help but crack a smile near the end of you reprimanding him.

“Oh please, you act like you haven’t before, why not again? Unless you want me to come over then and manhandle you.” He was only joking of course, he may have been a thief and a murderer but he’d never hurt a woman, especially not you. You let out a faux gasp, playing along as your right hand goes to your chest for emphasis.

“You wouldn’t dare. I’m a married woman.” You said in a softer tone, going to sip your bottle to finish it off. You haven’t really told him you were going to be getting married soon, even though he knew you were in a relationship, he didn’t quite know how serious it was.

“Not yet.” He replied almost immediately, shaking his head as his playful tone dropped to a more serious yet still gentle tone. The soft smile stays on his lips but it didn’t meet his eyes anymore when you raised your hand to show off the silver band that decorates your ring finger, the diamond shining even only in the candlelight. It took you a moment too long to realize this.

“What? Why are you looking at me like that?” You asked, the start of a giggle comes out with your words but they quickly die down in your throat as the once playful atmosphere starts to turn more serious.Miguel just shakes his head as a hand goes to rub at his chin.

“Nothing nothing… just didn’t think you’d ever get married… thought what we had was something real.” He admitted, eyes casted downwards as he goes to fidget with a bent half beer bottle cap. You let out a scoff, offended by his words.

“Don’t try and think I just forgot about you the moment my father dragged me out of that door,” your brows furrowed and your arms crossed on the wooden table as you started to chastise him, “I was stuck on you for five years Miguel. Five. Years.” You emphasized the two words with taps on the table. “Don’t get me wrong, Austin is a great guy, but it was my parents' idea for me to marry him. They thought it was a good way to get me to stop thinking about you-“ You shouldn’t be admitting that outloud but the buzz made your mind hazy.

“Do you love him?” He interrupted you, eyes burning into yours, those same intense eyes you had dreamed about as you slept, you had to look away.

“It’s not that simple Miguel-“

“But it is.” He insisted, standing up from his seat, the chair screeching as it tried not to topple over. “You either love him or you don’t.”

“I’m not doing this with you Miguel.” You shook your head as you stood as well, going to clean up the mess you two had made, trying to erase any evidence you two were there.

“Too bad, I’m not just gonna drop this and let you disappear from my life, I’m not losing you again.” He declared, you weren’t going to justify his admission with a response, but as you go to pick up a few empty bottles, they slip from your hands, cracking into hundreds of small shreds as Miguel’s hands turn you around to face him. A shocked gasp begins to leave your lips before it is quickly swallowed up by his. You know you should push him off, but you couldn’t help but melt underneath his touch.

Miguel O’Hara was a criminal, a thief of many things and no matter how much you try to stop him, he’ll always find a way to steal your heart all over again.

—

Taglist: @famouscattale @strawberryjuice9 @loser-alert @maomaimao @franceseca-the-1st @xevita @marshhbs @inlovewithpandora @vera4luv @mcmiracles @eddieslooneymoonie @to-the-endoftheline

[now-you-sound-like-a-jedi]

Worst Crimes a Female Character Can Commit (By Order of Severity)

10. Theft

9. Tax Fraud

8. Murder

7. Terrorism

6. Violating the Geneva Convention

5. Being impolite (esp. to male characters)

4. Being feminine but in a way that is neither childlike nor sexy

3. Being even slightly "like other girls"

2. Being mildly annoying

1. Being the canon romantic interest of a male character who is more popularly shipped with other men

[carionto]

The duality of Man, or triality? quadrality?

Alien to Human about New Human: Correct me if I'm wrong, but they appear abnormally large for your species?

H: Yea, he's a biggun alright, even without the EV suit I'd say... 7'3'', 310 pounds, bet he power lifts.

A: Umm... not to be rude, but, uhh... he seems, well... how should I put this...

H: Intimidating? Terrifying? Evil? Yea, if this station didn't have high screening standards I'd be totally pissing myself if he started walking towards me. The mohawk and eye tat totally make me believe he could snap me in two with a single glare.

A: I feel ashamed that my instincts are telling me to flee. I wish nature were easier to change.

H (shouting at NH): Hey buddy! Could you come over here for a minute please? You look awesome by the way!

A (whispering nervously): what are you doing?!?

H: Gotta overcome those fears somehow, I believe the best way is a direct confrontation.

NH approaches, somewhat slowly, looking around at all the other aliens in the station that are chatting, waiting around, or doing some work. He finally approaches A and H, and in a very deep and husky voice says: Um, hi, hello. T-thanks for the compliment, I, uh, was a little worried I would stand out too much here.

H: Oh you totally do, my friend over here is practically about to pass out from how much like a gothic viking of death metal you look.

NH: Oh no, I'm so sorry, I-I just grew up in Sweden-Delta and both my parents were huge into classic local music, so I just, uh... it's complicated. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to scare anyone.

H: Hey, relax pal, we're all good people here. Anyway, what you here to do? I'm planning on starting a bakery, still testing out what kind of flour most species here can actually stomach. My friend here is on the team working on Moon theft preventative measures.

NH: Oh, that's cool. I'm here as an exchange student with the department of applied astrophysics. If all goes well, I can finish my Bachelors degree remotely and stay here as an intern with the head researcher.

H: Oooh, that's cool. (so cool yea that you're apparently half my age but oh well guess I'm a big fat time waster like my father before me and oh god change the subject before I get depressed in front of strangers) That's a real big bag you got there, carrying some super secret science things, eh?

NH: Oh, that... uhh... guess it can't hurt to tell, security vetted it already anyway.

NH proceeds to unzip the bag and hold up a large white piece of clothing with light blue rings and accents, alongside a strange white cap with what looked like small fins, and a curious little backpack.

NH: It's uhh... um... my... Ika... musume... cosplay.... (oh gods I can't believe I said it out loud again)

After a moment of awkward silence, NH slowly puts on the backpack and presses a button on it's strap, and suddenly numerous light blue colored tentacle-like appendages sprout out from the backpack and move in line with NH's movements.

NH: I, uh..., got my engineering friend to make them articulate and interface with my contacts. I can make them do all sorts of things, like make various shapes and animals with them, though works best as a shadow theater.

H:...

NH:...

A now frozen out of confusion than fear:...

H: That's so

NH: (oh I know it's so lame, but I love that show)-

H: COOL! I don't know what a ika musume is, but those things look amazing. You said articulate? How precise can they be? I'd love to have something like that instead of my useless assistant. Poor lad can't make a piece of toast if his life depended on it...

NH: Y-you like it?

H: I LOVE those things. My daughter does cosplay too sometimes, but she makes her Dreadnought suits herself from scraps. One time the military came to our house and installed a limiter on the gauss cannon she found in a crash site, said it would otherwise start to generate small doses of radiation if used too frequently. But she replaced it with a handmade rail gun before the next convention. Do you go to those? Did you see a 7 meter tall hulking metal monstrosity with a bunch of candles all over? That was her.

NH: Oh, I think I've seen video of that, but no, not in person, I go to smaller events. I don't really like big crowds.

H: Oh yea, I get ya, you do seem a bit on the shy side now that we've been talking for a bit. Hey, no worries, like I said, we're all good people here.

NH: T-thanks, but I think I should be going now, the teacher is calling me over.

H: Oh yea, go ahead, didn't mean to take up so much of your time. Have a fun stay and I'm sure you'll ace that paper or theory? Or whatever astrophysicists do, you seem like a solid kid.

NH: Oh, uh, thanks. Good luck with your bakery. And you with stopping those weird people from stealing more moons. Bye.

H: Bye bye, come visit, don't be a stranger now, I'm set up just a short bit from the main lift on floor 14.

NH: R-right, I'll, uh, be sure to stop by soon.

A is finally able to process what they just heard and says: What was all that just now?

H: What? Just a friendly chat with what is apparently basically a kid. Man, this kid's got so much going on, while I'm almost 50 and I have an oven. Life, man, it can go in so many ways. Anyway, let's go grab a drink, I'm parched.

[natalievoncatte]

“Careful with that! We have to assume everything here is dangerous.”

Lena would have preferred to be anywhere else. The last thing she wanted to occupy her afternoon was dealing with yet another reminder of her brother’s sprawling insanity. Every one of these weapons caches -he probably would have melodramatically called them “hideouts” or “secret bases”- was like a tombstone marking the grave of the only truly sincere, loving relationship she’d ever had in her life.

He hadn’t always been the slavering maniac with an incoherent obsession with killing a superhero. He’d been a protector and a benefactor, a chess opponent and a confidant, the only person in her life who presented an uncomplicated human connection, without any ulterior motives or conditions.

Everyone else wanted something from her. Money. Power. A competitive advantage. Technological secrets. Or just sex. Lena resented that most of all, the gray old men who saw nothing of her achievements or her intellect and regarded her as just another piece of ass with blue enough blood that they had to ask permission rather than simply grope.

Watching her crew load up the equipment in this sweltering heat made her physically ill, and she was glad she’d skipped breakfast. Kara would be upset if she knew.

She’s had to text Kara and let her know that she’d be out of the office and would have to skip their lunch plans. Kara was…

Kara was becoming a complication, because Kara was doing the one thing Lena wished she wouldn’t: She was giving Lena hope. She’d barreled into Lena’s life with an earnest intensity that had been bewildering at first and intriguing afterwards, with her insistence that they be friends, and constant reminders that they were friends, even as her eyes wandered to Lena’s cleavage or she unconsciously bit her lip and stared that smoldering stare just to look away at the last second.

Lena shook her head, clearing her thoughts of yet another Straight Best Friend taking her down that well-worn path of sapphic suffering. She had bigger fish to fry right now.

It was too bad that her relationship with Supergirl had been so chilly lately. It might have been easier to simply tip off the hero and the government agency she worked with and let them handle the clean up.

Lena was deep in reverie when one of the crates, a bulky reinforced one, dropped a good two feet from a forklift and the wood splintered as the locks burst free.

“Idiot!” Lena shouted at the driver. “This equipment is sensitive and potentially dangerous, and…”

“STARTUP SEQUENCE INITIATED.”

A metallic voice ground out of the crate and it shifted as something vast and bulky moved around inside. Lena stumbled back, glad she’d opted for a sensible set of flats for this, and turned to run.

A metallic claw crashed out of the crate, followed by an arm-mounted rotary cannon. The older model Lexosuit, one of the originals that Lex had planned to illegally smuggle out of the country in a fake theft scheme and sell to the Kasnians, stood up in its shaky, clanking way and took a few steps, shaking off planks and nylon straps the way a baby bird might shake off pieces of shell.

There was nowhere to go. The machine scanned the room, moving jerkily as it zeroed in on her.

Lex’s voice, a recording, boomed from its loudspeakers.

“Ah, dear sister, I see you’ve found another of my hidden fastnesses.”

You melodramatic-

“Oh well. I should thank you for setting off the security system. I won’t have to waste my precious time killing you myself. Au revoir, Lena!”

The suit spun its arm cannon and aimed at her. The barrels assembly made a half turn, the electric motor charging up as it cycled the first 32mm mass-reactive exploding shell into the chamber. Lex had once called it a masterpiece in the art of violating the Geneva Conventions. It was about to blow Lena inside out, and the subsequent shots reduce her to a the chunky consistency of a good bolognése.

But then there was a wind that was not a wind, and SHE was there.

Supergirl seized Lena with precision and grace, hands that could crush diamonds pressed just so over Lena’s ears to protect her from the roar of the guns. Lena wasn’t sure who screamed louder, her or Supergirl, as the revolving barrels ripped out their entire supply of ammunition in a few seconds, pummeling Supergirl’s back with explosions that could have shredded a tank, as the hero cradled Lena, sheltering her with her superhuman body.

When the hellstorm was over, the machine charged at them.

Supergirl did scream now, and fell upon the machine in a berserk rage. Lena had seen her in a fight before and knew she could be terrible to behold, but this was different. The empty suit was struck with such unending fury that she reduced it to shreds of metal and oil-spitting chunks of machinery in moments, spreading it halfway across the floor of warehouse.

When Supergirl rounded on her, Lena’s heart skipped. The hero’s chest was heaving, straining at the crest on her chest even as the bunching muscles on her arms and stomach pulled at the material, her perfect hair swirling around as she turned, that angelic face marred by a streak of oil and a sheen of sweat.

How dare she just look like that. It was incredibly unfair.

Before Lena knew it what was happening, Supergirl was lifting her into a heart-skipping bridal carry, pulling her much too close as she took off. On instinct, Lena pressed her eyes shut and buried her face in the Kryptonian’s neck, to hide from the heights.

Moments later they landed, and Supergirl threw Lena’s balcony door back and deposited her on her feet, leaving her stumbling back against her kitchen island in a daze. Supergirl stared at her, looming over Lena with the height difference increased by her stacked heels and Lena having lost her shoes at some point, so her stocking toes were left curling on the cold floor.

“That thing almost killed you,” Supergirl snapped. “If Is been a millisecond later you’d be dead.”

Her voice was tight with emotion, somewhere between anger, exasperation, and terror, and it felt like a fist closed in Lena’s chest.

“Are you sure you just weren’t there to make sure I wasn’t taking Lex’s old suit for a spin myself?” Lena spat, though her voice trembled. “You don’t seem to trust a thing I say lately. If I tell you the sky is blue you’ll go check.”

Supergirl’s face flushed and Lena braced for another booming, self righteous speech about trust or safety or the meaning of teamwork or some such heroic nonsense, but then her voice shattered into a million pieces and tears welled wet in her eyes.

“All I want is for you to be okay.”

A thousand thoughts danced in Lena’s mind. To ask her why, to defy her, to taunt her, to demand what exactly it was that made Lena so damned important that this woman was so intense about her safety one moment and so angry the next.

In the dance of all those thoughts, the more base instinct won out. Lena grabbed Supergirl by the neck of her suit, just below those delightful collarbones of hers, and used it as a handle to pull herself into a hard, aggressive kiss.

The world hung still for a moment, and Lena felt it all pivot around her. Something big was happening here. Something huge, something…

Something forgotten entirely as Supergirl’s tongue roughly claimed Lena’s mouth and her hands raked over Lena’s ass, dragging her skirt up.

Oh God, she thought, this is actually happening.

Lips pressed to her skin, the words burning hot into her flesh like an invocation.

“Is this okay?” Supergirl whispered.

“Yes,” Lena moaned, without hesitation.

To be continued…