#eff reads: breaking time

[fae-fucker]

Breaking Time: Final Part

Remember when I said “I could get this done before the end of the year”? Last year? Anyway. This is it, lads.

Chapter 26

So Klara’s father confronts her about her lying to him, but he does it in the least interesting way possible, because Sasha can’t write. You’d think an actual parent would be, I dunno, worried?  Upset? But this guy is just so mild and understanding that it boggles the mind why this scene exists to begin with.

“I changed my mind about college. I thought I might get it back, or at least I was hoping to, but it just never happened. I wanted to tell you, but—” She paused. “It was Mom’s dream. I felt like I was crushing it by not wanting to go.”

Her dad’s brow furrowed in concern and in the next second, his arm wrapped tightly around Klara. “Her dream was for you to be happy, honey.”

Klara breathed out. Even though this wasn’t exactly her top concern right now, finally telling the truth felt like coming up for air. “And that’s not the only thing going on right now,” she added.

He was still nodding, still squeezing her with reassuring pressure. “Yeah, I kind of guessed that. Why couldn’t you tell me what was going on in your head? Did I do something? If I did—”

“No,” she said firmly, heart breaking that he could even think it was his fault. “I just—” She breathed, bracing herself. “Right now, I’m dealing with something else kind of...big.”

“You can always talk to me, kiddo. I know I’m an old fogey, but I have grown up before, you know.” He smiled down. “Or did you think I was born perfect?”

No, but with the way you’re acting right now, you’re clearly written to be perfect.

I’m in a fun position where I have one parent that sucks and one parent that’s good, so I can sort of compare and contrast. My mom is very understanding and tries her best, even if she fails a lot of the time. Point is, she trusts me and accepts most of my choices.

But do you think she’d be okay with finding 18-year-old me in a strange place with a strange man, after also figuring out I’ve preemptively dropped out of college? She’d freak the fuck out, justifiably. Ya know, because she cares about me? Not because she’s evil and or because she doesn’t understand or trust me?

I know what Sasha’s going for, that they’re so wholesome and understanding, but it’s just not realistic? If this has been his parenting style until this point, I’m surprised Klara gives a shit about him at all. She should be a spoiled brat with the way this man clearly sets no boundaries and offers zero discipline. The utter perfection of this relationship is saccharine and phony. I’m not asking for every parent-child relationship in media to be fucked up, but parents are people too? You could hint at some pain by just having the dad react differently, by letting him be upset at her sudden withdrawal. Now, with how unfazed he is, it both comes off as him not giving a fuck, and wastes the reader’s time because you’ve spent so many words forcing Klara to worry about hurting a parent who ends up being totally cool with everything.

They have some generic uwu wholesome child-parent banter that’s still deeply unfunny, they talk about Klara’s mother and he gives Klara her mother’s necklace for reasons, then the dad leaves the way he came, pleasant and understanding and not bothered by anything at all. Sasha, just make your protags orphans next time. Clearly you have no business writing parents if this is how you’re gonna waste their word count.

“I’m sorry for not telling you, Dad. I really I am,” [...] “I just—I need to do something, and I can’t tell you what. I’ll be back as soon as I can.” [...] Her father took a deep breath. “Everything within me is telling me to take you home with me but I know you. I trust you.”

Ain’t that fucking convenient.

Chapter 27

Time skip to the Samhain celebration. Because Callum reacting to seeing a parent and child have a heartfelt (well, supposedly) reunion would have no interesting effect on him, being an orphan and all. Gotta get to the good part!

Klara stopped. “Happy Samhain,” she said darkly, shifting the weight of the sword higher on her shoulder.

Callum looked at her, examining her face. Her lips glowed in the firelight, and in profile she looked like a Celtic warrior queen of Thomas’s tales. He tried to memorize every line of her lovely face—the strong line of her nose, the swoop of her jawline, the eyes which so often danced but now looked steady and serious.

Yeah I’m sure a lot of Celtic warrior queens looked like skinny upper middle class American YouTubers. This is so embarrassing. You’d have to pay me to write a self-insert this blatant and this girl did it for free and got (some) money for it? I’m being Jokerified.

Here’s an eyewatering exchange, and not because it’s emotional.

[...] “Do you really believe it could stop Llaw?”

Callum did not want to lie to her anymore, so he said nothing. The flames looked suddenly pale.

“Do you think anything can stop him?” she said.

“Ye can, Klara,” he said forcefully. It was the only thing he felt certain of. He put his palm over his chest and knelt to show fealty to her. “I swear it, with all my heart.”

“Oh my god, Callum.” Blushing, she grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him up to his feet. They stood chest to chest, just barely a hand’s length between them. “But—how do you know?”

“Because I believe ’tis your destiny,” he said softly. “My purpose is here, my heart is here.”

“I don’t want to be your purpose, Callum. At least not like this.” She looked up, into his eyes. “I don’t want to be the reason you get hurt, or worse.” Her eyes welled with water, glowed fervently like a candle burning low. “I want to be the reason you want to live.”

Wish I was Jared, 19. And what, do you think this is the end of the trite regurtitations of a talentless hack? Because it’s not! They dance in the light from the bonfire with all the other people there, there’s music and song and laughter and bla bla bla. Just imagine the totes emotional bonfire scene in any other piece of vaguely historical romantic media and you’ve got it. Except instead of maybe being good or fun, it’s heavily undercut by the two main characters declaring their love for each other after less than a week of knowing one another.

Instalove is a fundamentally flawed trope that takes a very skilled writer to make work.

...

I think I’ll leave it at that.

Now feast your eyes on this:

“Ye’re not going to die—”

YE’RE?! YE’RE?!

OH MY GOD.

Anyway, one moment they’re making out, the next ... a couple breaks them apart? Somehow? This also somehow knocks Callum on his ass? Bro aren’t you a bigstrong hunky Scot fighter? What’s happening?

I think I get what Sasha’s going for, that Callum loses Klara in the crowd, but they were literally making out. As in, occupying the same space. As in, holding each other tightly. You’d have to put conscious effort into breaking a couple apart like that. Granted, Sasha does try to make it work by saying a loud voice forces them to part first, but I call bull. Figure out a better way for Callum to get lost. Especially when he spots the bean-nighe right after this. Why couldn’t he just see her in the crowd and come up with an excuse to leave Klara? Whatever.

Callum runs after the bean-nighe. She’s all evil and mysterious and says some nonsense bullshit that’s supposed to mean something but won’t. Make up your own mysterious dialogue, whatever you come up with will probably fit in here because there’s no point to it anyway. Once Callum gets the strength of ten men, he runs off to find Klara, but she’s left without him. He runs off to the Ring of Brodgar, the final mystic center and sees Klara ... step ... into ... the mist? Idk.

It’s supposed to be dramatic and all, but I’m struggling with the sense of scale and distance in this thing.

Chapter 28

Klara hated this feeling.

It reminded her of visiting the pool with her family when she was young. She insisted on jumping off the tallest diving board with the big kids. With each step she took, the more frantic her heart beat, the rougher the board scraped the bottoms of her feet. At the top, the sun bore down on her from above. She wanted it to melt her on the spot.

All she had to do was get to the edge of the board and do it. Just do it.

“Can’t she just jump already?”

“Hurry up.”

“Loser.”

Oh great, is this where we find out Klara was bullied, too? This book is so fucking funny. Like a collection of a writer’s first mistakes. Klara was bullied but she has totally loving and understanding parents! She’s an awkward loner but had a boyfriend in high school and is gorgeous! She’s totally not rich but lives in a massive historic mansion and has never struggled financially in her life! Ok girl.

Klara enters the ring and takes out her Main Character Sword.

If she was going to win this fight, she would have to use her power, her wits. Her heart. There was no technical training for that. She closed her eyes, and focused on her heart—the string that had pulled her in the right direction every time before. Her gut, her intuition, her destiny, whatever it was, it would take her to what she needed to do.

The plot. Call it whatever in-universe thing you want, but functionally, that’s the plot. She may have the Main Character Sword, but she still can’t act for herself and has to wait for the writer to hold her hand.

She stabs the sword into the ground and a bunch of mist appears and is very mysterious. Not sure how it connects to the sword being stabbed into the ground, as the mist appears from the outside and in instead of pouring out of the earth, but ok. Missed an opportunity for a cool visual and some logic to Klara’s plot-demanded actions, there.

As this is going on, Klara’s narration keeps referencing Stephen King and horror movies. No, really.

The mist closed in on her and gathered around her feet. She took a step. The mist clung to her like a shadow, as if she were in a Stephen King novel.

Well, she didn’t like that. If you ended up in his books, you’d probably end up dead. Or worse, wishing you were.

[...]

There was a reason Klara hated horror movies. It was the suspense, the lead-up to a jump scare that always nearly killed her. She didn’t need to fear being murdered, because she would die of fright waiting for the killer to pop out from a closet or under the bed. Right now, she felt fear churning in the marrow of her bones.

It’s like Sasha knows that reading and enjoying other media will improve your writing, but took it to mean that you should just reference the material instead of learning from it.

Given the level of “analysis” in her book reviews, I’m not particularly surprised.

I know horror is hard to write, but maybe going “You know how scary those things are in other stories? Yeah, this is like that” is not the right way to go about it. Especially referencing movies in a book. C’mon. You’re a different medium.

Anyway, Klara finds her mom in the Otherworld.

Chapter 29

Callum is standing about when he hears a spooky howl in the distance.

Callum closed his eyes and let his senses focus. He had always been a decent tracker and patient hunter, perfecting his stillness while Thomas lazed about and sang songs, sometimes scaring a hare from its den with sheer luck.

Okay? Drop new info on us three chapters before the book ends, why don’t you?

Being a decent tracker and patient hunter doesn’t help Callum in this case, because Llaw shows up with four more scawy cweatuwes and hands Callum his entire ass. Again.

“Hellhounds,” said a familiar voice.

Callum whirled. Llaw. Smiling.

Such writing.

Alright I’ll give the guy some credit. Callum does take out the wolves before going for Llaw. But Llaw kicks his ass in the end anyway and Callum fucking croaks lmao.

He’s kind of useless for a bigstrong heartthrob Scot, isn’t he? It’d be endearing if it was intentional, now it just comes off as a bit embarrassing. All that bean-nighe angst only to get killed off almost immediately.

Now that I think about it, a lot of this book is characters worrying about shit that doesn’t end up mattering in the end or is resolved super quickly.

Moving on.

Chapter 30

So I won’t go too hard on the reunion of Klara and her mother because it reads pretty okay and feels disctinctly like a more genuine and less self-indulgent personal touch from Sasha. The need to connect with a dead loved one and get some closure is very human and I won’t harp on a person including that in their novel for some personal catharsis. That’s what art is for, after all.

However, everything after their heartfelt reunion and once Arianrhod crashes the scene? Free real estate, baybeeee.

Arianrhod explains that Llaw can’t enter here, aka the Otherworld. We knew this already, yet Klara reacts with surprise and relief. Then ...

Klara remembered Llaw’s speech. He talked about ushering a new age of gods and men, which she had scoffed at and dismissed. He yearned for a world that gave him power, though he didn’t deserve it. Not anymore, at least.

But the power had existed, Klara realized—it existed here, where she stood, in the Otherworld.

“That’s what he wants.” Klara shifted on her feet, growing eager as understanding dawned on her. She felt her mother’s protective presence next to her. It kept her bold. Safe. “He wants to walk among the gods as an equal—”

Y-yeah? I ...? Yeah?

I’m sorry, am I being gaslit again? How is understanding dawning on you when you’re repeating information that has been explicitly stated to your face multiple times at this point?

This book is a fucking fever dream what the hell.

Arianrhod says that Klara is safe here but that time is stagnant, and if she stays, decades will have passed by the time she returns. Meaning she can’t camp here and wait for Llaw to croak on his own time unless she wants all her loved ones to die, too.

Klara says that she came here in order “unlock her powers” and asks if Arianrhod can help with that.

“I am the Silver Wheel. The goddess of life, death, rebirth, with a throne in the stars.” Arianrhod stared at Klara. “It seems like there is something in you that needs to be born.”

Relief, along with fear, washed over Klara. She was pretty sure that was goddess for yes.

Well, I’m glad Klara could make sense of that, because it’s pure nonsense to me. It probably was nonsense, too, because Arianrhod does and says nothing else after this lol.

Her mom embraced her. “Sometimes I get really annoyed with myself for doing such a good job raising you,” she whispered [...]

Yeah, ya didn’t.

Her mother’s hands gripped her. They radiated warmth; the warmth spread through her veins, then grew hot—but this was not pain. Not at all. It was renewal.

The fire spread through her, washing her body clean of what was, replacing it with what is. And yet somehow, at the same time, it was only revealing what had always been.

For her whole life, she had been one of billions. But her true self—her secret—was hidden within. In that moment, Klara could see herself suspended in the space between worlds, hair blazing around her like a halo of fire. The dormant power fully awake, no longer buried and forgotten.

I’m so glad this wealthy, pretty cishet white girl finally feels as special as she thinks she deserves to be. Confirmed by a goddess, no less.

And she didn’t have to do anything to get there, either. It was just bestowed upon her by a higher power. Lifted above others by chance rather than merit or effort.

I guess Klara truly is a self-insert, isn’t she, Sasha?

You know what’s funny, though? This whole book was about Klara and Callum going to mystic centers to try to unlock Klara’s powers, which they sort of did, right? But in the end, all it actually took was asking Arianrhod to do it. There was no final trial or test, no character development to justify this power-up. Arianrhod didn’t even say anything about Klara finally reaching her potential or proving that she deserved to have her powers unlock. Even Klara’s little epic inner monologue comes after Arianrhod gave her the go-ahead. It’s a little sad, really. She didn’t do anything herself. Even her supposed specialness is only there because a goddess gave it to her for no apparent reason. And once again, it shows how much of this was a waste of the reader’s time. If all Klara actually had to do was ask Arianrhod for help, why did we bother watching her prance around Scotland with her boytoy?

Klara yeets herself back to the real world just in time for Callum’s dead ass to land at her feet. It’s very funny, but I don’t think it’s supposed to be.

Chapter 31

Klara collapsed over him, as if her body could shield him from the injuries that had already riddled his body. She placed a hand along his damp cheek, she could see the clammy beads of blood masking his face.

“I didnae imagine death would have such a sweet embrace.” He murmured from his bloodstained lips.

Oh god, kill him faster before he says more cringe shit!

It was then, at the final moments, that she realized, he was it for her. He was the man she loved.

And now he was gone.

[...]

She wanted to pinch herself and wake up from this nightmare, but she knew that this—this devastating, irreparable moment—was her reality. Nothing she could do would change it. It didn’t matter if she had a goddess’s blood running through her veins. She was alone, with a power she didn’t understand and the boy she...loved...dead.

So anyone else kinda rooting for Llaw? Hear me out. He’s evil, but he’s hot. And he wants to kill Klara and already killed Callum. That’s pretty sexy of him, I think. Sasha just hates to see a girlboss winning so that’s why he’s the antagonist.

Klara gets the random idea to try to summon Cernunnos because he said something about how he’s always there for her.

But instead, Llaw just ... materializes in front of her and shoves her to the ground with his boot? I genuinely don’t know, it’s so awkwardly written, especially when he says nothing and Klara barely reacts and instead seems to focus more on Callum. Either way, she’s on the ground next to Callum’s busted-ass corpse and with Llaw’s foot on her chest. That’s all you need to know.

The shadow of the waning eclipse acted like an extension of [Llaw’s] darkness. He tipped his head down to look at her. To her surprise, he did not look angry, nor did he glare at her with hatred. Instead, he smiled, as if bemused by the very sight of her. A slick of white hair fanned down to his shoulders. Behind him, the shadows seemed to darken, as if a mass of monstrous beasts waited just out of sight. The hem of his cloak swirled around her in waves.

Days ago, she might have said he looked godlike—but she would have been wrong.

He looked tired. His eyes were ringed with darkness, as if he had not slept in days. A shudder passed through her. How long had he walked the earth? Hundreds of years? Thousands?

His unkempt appearance gave her a sliver of hope. [...]

Me too, honestly. I think I could fix him.

Klara gets a power surge and throws Llaw off. He lands on the ground on the other side of Callum’s busted and borked Scottish remains.

The eclipse was almost total, as if a symbolic reference to Callum’s life. She wished it were not; the thought ruptured her soul.

Yeah, totally makes sense for her to be thinking this. Love how Sasha just states it’s symbolism instead of using symbolism. Chef’s kiss, truly.

And ruptured her soul? Really? Okay.

They exchange some “middle schoolers hopped up on shonen anime” type dialogue. Check a look.

“You find this funny?” [...]

[...] “A little girl, thinking she knows how to wield the strength of a god? If not comical, then it’s just pitiful.”

[...]

“You are pathetic,” she said. “Honestly, I almost feel sorry for you.”

“And why is that?” he said.

[...]

“Because I know what you want, Llaw, and you’ll never get it,” she taunted. “All of the lives you stole will have meant nothing. They’ll have died for nothing.”

“You know nothing, child,” he said. “Enough games.”

Klara scoffed. “That’s rich, coming from you .”

“Your blood belongs to me,” Llaw said.

[...]

“You can’t have it!” she cried.

Truly some “mom said it’s my turn on the xbox” shit.

Klara taunts him that she was welcomed into the Otherworld, unlike him who can’t go in there because his presence “has no weight in the hearts of the dead or the eternal.” I’m confused. So is Klara able to go in there because of her super special blood, or her mother wanting to see her? This doesn’t make any sense.

Anyway, Klara chops Llaw’s hand off. He’s like “omg what” but then is all like “whatever, man” and tells her it’s not over yet before stabbing her sword into himself. It’s unclear whether he dies or not, I assume not because of his threat before, but either way, light bursts out again and Klara is yanked through time and space.

Chapter Epilogue

Klara lands in Rosemere, in the same spot where Thomas got shanked. Except Thomas is still alive, his wound wrapped in bandages.

She knew only a few things to be true in this moment, in her current reality.

Thomas was alive.

Callum was dead.

And somehow she had ended up five hundred years in the past without any clue how to get back home.

She’s a literal time traveller and doesn’t know how to get back home? Huh?

Yeah I ... don’t know, y’all. Nothing means anything.

Multiple reviewers complained about the random cliffhanger and I have to agree. It’s not even bad, it’s just ... confusing? Perplexing? Not even exciting, it feels like a non sequitur, like Sasha pulled it from her ass last minute.

Most importantly: Do we think this will get a sequel? Or has Sasha's pride been wounded by the paltry and mostly negative reception? I suppose only the sales will tell, and I have no way of checking those.

I’m conflicted. I don’t want there to be a sequel, because Sasha needs to learn how to write before trying to publish again and that’s clearly gonna take the better part of a century if this is what 6 years of work looks like. Buuuuut I also need to read the rest of this trainwreck.

Guess we’ll see!

Acknowledgements

I’m not gonna critique these, obviously, but her editor’s name is Kate Sullivan. Just uh ... putting it out there. For reasons.

As for my acknowledgements: Thank you everyone for your patience while life happened and I scraped together the time to write these. I hope you enjoyed this journey, and may we have many more in the future! I’ll be posting a review of this novel later, which will mostly be based on these posts, so that’s something to either ignore or look out for.

Thanks for reading!

[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

[dontexpectmuch]

masterlist:

generally, my requests are always open, however i do not write any smut, please respect this rule. thank you for reading :)

jude bellingham

the first „i love you“ pt.2

relationship habits pt.2 pt.3 pt.4

gossip queen judeth

road-trip

skincare time

break up

kisses all over you

after an argument with your parents

partner in crime, apple to my pie

silent treatment

dating someone that’s older pt.2

late night work

stay at home nurse

first snow

couple’s tattoo

sick judeth

moving on pt.2

a crush that isn’t you

after practice things

clingy judeth pt.2

sleep struggles

your own family

himbo bee eff

tea time

make out sesh

annoying jude

barbie time

sleepy s/o

bio lesson

kpop concert

rollercoaster

boba date

fair games

touches w jude

dance class

so sick

lego bouquet

exams

jungkook

calvin klein ad

jobes match

la liga campeones

f1 baddie

true crime

champions league winner

cooking buddy

lost in madrid - mini series

rúben dias

neighbors part two

flo wirtz

general hc

first loss

jamal musiala

couple’s yoga

clingy jamal

attending his game

crushing on each other but not being able to confess pt.2

dating someone that’s older

long distance relationship

studying for an exam

catching feelings

confessions

pedri gonzalez

meeting the family

cheater

pablo gavira

liking his arms

others

benjamin pavard - late night cuddles

benjamin pavard - late night dancing

erling haaland - relationship habits

mason mount - relationship habits

[hedgehog-troops]

"all generations of potters fall in love with blacks"

strap in, this is a long one

i propose to you euphemia black.

euphemia who took her little cousin, walburga, under her wing the moemnt she was born. they played together, effie was the situated babysitter despite being only 6 years older.

effie who walburga used to call eff all throughout.

effie when she went to hogwarts and came back to tell walburga tales of hogwarts, and walburga listened about the mystical and magical stuff.

walburga who wanted to get a job in the high ranks of the ministry and wanted to study hard for it. euphemia who would come back from hogwarts and teach her small stuff.

slowly as euphemia got older, she started to rebel a bit, hanging out with muggles and always with that blood traitor fleamont potter.

cut to walburga joins hogwarts and she's scared that no one will like her cz she's not cool like euphemia, she's just smart.

euphemia gives up time with her friends to stay with walburga, show her around, entertain her, tutor her and everything.

walburga when she goes home and get scolded by her parents and told to stop hanging out with euphemia and to hang around with her pureblood friend but walburga likes euphemia so she continues.

thats up until she comes back from her secodn year and her mother threatens her and walburga is like well im only hanging out with euphemia to gather info (in an attempt to save herself) and she rats out that effie is not only dating monty but also intends to elope with him.

effie gets disowned and theres a kind of target put on her and Monty's back. walburga writes and writes to her apologizing, but she doesn't accept.

walburga then has no choice but to play perfect daughter, to do as shes told, to marry young.

when walburga finds out that her son (sirius) and euphemias son would be going in the same year, she warns sirius, in her own sadistic manner, to never engage with him.

when sirius comes back yapping about the potter boy, she yells at him, but she just doesn't want him hurt as she was.

when james comes home talking about sirius black, euphemia has to close her eyes shut and remind herself that she promised herself she wouldnt meddle in her son's friendships.

when walburga tries her best to draw out information about sirius's friends out of him and he doesn't give out a word she knows that her son is stronger than she ever was.

she sees sirius rebel, again and again, despite her emotional, mental and physical torture and she hates him for being better than her, and yet she loves him all the same for that reason.

sirius runs away, and she could make the potters' life hell just like her family did with eff all those years ago but she doesnt. shes heartbroken, shes angry, shes sad, shes livid but a part of herself is proud of her son for doing what she never had the courage to.

when The Prank™ takes place and euphemia watches as it takes her son time, maybe a long time, but he still forgives sirius and they treat him as they did before, she realises that the boy she raised is a better and bigger person than she ever could be.

as walburga watches her younger son break under the pressure of one sharp look and a few loud words to reveal that sirius ran away, she hates regulus at that moment. hates him for not being like sirius, hates him for being a coward, but most of, she hates him for being herself, for being her mirror.

years go by, she leaves sirius' room untouched, shes not worthy enough to step in.

the war rages around them and euphemia, years later, opens one of walburgas letters. she reads the tear stained, smudged words as she takes in the sweet innocence of the letter. euphemia potter has always been a self assured woman, though at that moment she couldn't help but hate herself.

she hates how now she sees walburga in sirius, she sees sirius laugh with james and dance with remus and play with peter and wonders if walburga couldve had this life.

she welcomes death with open arms a monh later, but not before sending her own letter.

walburga watches the letter catch fire until all that's left of it is gray ash because she knows that euphemia all but did the same.

when walburga gets regulus' death letter, she, for the first time in years, breaks down.

she realises at that moment that she isnt a horrid person because of her circumstances, she just is.

[czteryd]

My guide to Internet warfare and taking back control

By which I mean minimizing screen time and wasting your life on making Zuckerber rich. Scrolling Instagram doesn't seem to be dangerous, but there is probably nothing less hurtful than wasting time of milliards of people on things they don't care about. Using willpower to work on this is a lie — you will need real weapons, technologies and strategy.

^this is the lost future you are fighting for. Technology can be good.

Remember, that wars are rarely won in a week, I am in trenches since last summer when i ditched my phone, when i say "It takes time" i mean 5–10 months. It is still hard, but the improvement is amazing.

This is a list of things I have been doing for more than a year that improved my life. Ranked with ease (EAS) + effectiveness (EFF) from 1 to 10.

It is still not perfect, but this is a warzone and you will adapt and not be allowed to surrender, soldier!

Remove the smartphone – 5 eas + 15 eff

Sorry. This is a military grade weapon that milliards of dollars are put into to make you waste your time as easily as you can. You can move forward with your phone, but nothing is as effective in taking control back during your commutes, breaks, walks and free time etc. and it is a very important part of learning to deal with stress without mindless scrolling and games. There is no real phone hacks to help you. We and the enemy know that timers don't work. If you can enable all enemy weapons with one switch it is not enough.

You will need a dumbphone or a custom rom to use this technique and stay in society.

It is not as hard as it sounds, actually you don't need it that much. Check out #dumbphone or r/dumbphones for inspiration and support. Me and many of my friends who done it as well don't look back.

Buuut i can't – 9 eas + 5 eff

Yes you can. But if you insist, still, buy a dumbphone or find one in the drawers and put your sim card there; carry them both. Now you can use the Internet only when you have wifi, but you can use offline maps, listen to downloaded music and watch downloaded movies, read pdfs etc. Check your email, bank, messages, memes at work or at home. You will regain control over walks, commutes and socialising. But if you still have any social apps, at home or during breaks, you are still cooked. It is still a very good first step to moving away from phone dependence.

Smartphone substitutes

Email, socials, work, school – all will now be done on a pc or a laptop. This is good. It allows you to distance yourself from stress, tiring family members, school, work and problems of others and engage with them only when you want to. It allows you to take a break. It is not your duty, to engage all the time and the ability to do so at your own pace is the biggest advantage you can get on the battlefield. If something important is going on — someone will call you, don't worry. Just inform others that WhatsApp is not a place to discuss emergencies.

Fun, music, reading – you will need to get a dumbphone that supports some music, pdf viewing, photos and maybe light web browsing, they do exist. Or just buy an mp3 player, some books and a notepad. An e-reader and a camera for the high tech soldiers. Y2K is back in fashion anyway, and you will be much cooler and people will start conversations. Having everything in one place was convenient, but, if it means having time–wasting hazards in your pocket, it is not worth it.

Libraries are here to support you on your journey.

Block the feed — 10 eas + 4 eff

Hopefully you got rid of your phone, the biggest danger now is your web browser.

Use LeechBlock to block or regulate access to the biggest dangers – youtube, instagram, fb, reddit. On the weak side it is no better than the timer in your phone, supportive, but not really effective and fills you with guilt. Guilt is bad.

On the strong side you will block all access, allow very rare and short usage, put as many defenses as you can, put blockades on your blockades. Your brain is very effective at overcoming barriers, but they need to be put in place.

It is the first step, but it is not enough to win the war. Real psychological effects will show only after months of usage and well adjusted settings that acknowledge how your brain works and as you adapt your barriers will need to adapt as well. On the flip-side it requires no real conscious work or wasting your willpower if your filters are good.

You will sometimes need to bend the rules, to fix something or watch a lecture or a tutorial or just for some well deserved Forgotten Vines Compilation. Remember to put them back in place later and spot the times where you never did — and do it then.

Warning: nerd shit! (3-6) eas + (7-10) eff

If your friends sent you a funny video — don't unlock the site to watch it. Use external software like MPV or VLC to watch this video using only the link, without getting rid of your defense line. This is easiest on a linux machine.

You also have the nuke – block websites on your router and gate settings. You will need the support of the rest of the war room members in your house to use it and it will cut access to actually useful things. But this is a war for your life and every sacrifice is worth it.

Block the biggest hazards — 6 eas + 9 eff

Sorry, but you will need to use some nerd tactics.

Shorts, reels, tik toks, explore, for you pages. They need to be blocked immediately and for good. No access, no overrides, no fiddling in options. LeechBlock browser addon will allow you to block specific pages with harder barriers. Do it and never change them.

They are the biggest danger and you know it. Your brain will not be mad if it won't get dopamine this way, it knows you would never find the perfect 1 minute video that would make you happy. The urge to scroll some shorts will go away real fast.

This will allow you to fight only the easier fights — against the normal infinite feeds.

UblockOrigin

Is a double edged sword. Removing ads makes your life on the internet easy and fun. It is only a good thing to a certain extent – our fight is to make some parts of the internet as hard and painful to use – but it will help you keep your sanity.

Use it to block the feed! Click on Ublock icon and use the little pipette to add a rule that blocks the infinite feed on webpages of your choice.

Select the area and click the blue button to create a rule on the main page. Now you will not be distracted with algorithmic content, but you are free to not block groups important for you or your work or still see notifications, messages and other functions.

Cons: sometimes your rules will break with time, you will need to make many of them. Removing ads from youtube is dangerous as the reward is easier to obtain, thus making the boobytrap more effective.

Don't use apps and don't use the browser. 10 eas + 6 eff

Minimize a chance of getting distracted while doing something else.

For messages, school and work remove the browser from the equation. Use desktop clients for messaging, microsoft office, Teams, email etc. They have exactly what you need and are often more convenient to use. No chance of opening Instagram in excel.

For social media and online entertainment use the browser, don't use the apps! You are going into the warzone, you will need the armor – Leechblock and other addons are here to help you. Time wasting apps are engineered to remove your personal defense – never use them.

No Screentime before coffee – 1 eas + 10 eff

This one is behavioral and requires actual brain work, but give yourself some time and it will give you great effects.

Do not check memes, messages, mail etc. before waking up. Easier said than done.

Going to school or work will be easier, waking up will be easier, you will start to eat and have more energy during the day.

It will require you to plan your day in advance, check the calendar and your plan for the day the night before. I never learned it as a child and it is very hard to work on it, but the effects on my psyche are immense.

If you got rid of your phone, you are halfway there. If you can remove your laptop from proximity of your bed — do it. If you have an ability to put your pc in a seperate room — it would be perfect, but not many are able to, including me.

Separate your working, from sleeping, from entertainment spaces, we worked on it during COVID soldier, don't forget your training.

Remove the noise — 1 eas + 4 eff

somewhat. You probably don't actually need podcasts and music to work, walk or sleep and regaining your ability to focus there is also important. Maybe substitute them with white/pink/brown noise at least sometimes, especially for brain heavy tasks this is very helpful to get work done in a reasonable amount of time. Blanket app is a good desktop noise generator that won't require the browser.

But I will not blame you if you won't, this is the least problematic part and humans have always met to do menial tasks while hearing others talk and many conditions are easier to live with some background noise.

Pick your allies

Internet is a meadow and a minefield. Place for art and support and knowledge filled with weapons designed to use you as an revenue generator. Watch content only from curated, quality places and people you follow. Never look at the algorithmic feed. Tumblr is a prime example of a site that can be your ally, but don't trust it – block the For You page.

don't lose your steam

Do not engage emotionally with things beyond your control. This was the twitter's weapon of choice. If you do not have the money or time to support a cause, you know about it and you know all your mutuals already support it – don't let the algorithm put it down your throat against your will.

Do not follow war hashtags, do not look at pages when you can see hate and violence against your will. Educate yourself, do as much as you can, follow people who inspire you and do real work, but allow yourself to move on if it is beyond your abilities or strength. Your local anarchist group will do more good in a month, than you reading political posts for years. If you honestly care – join them and focus on real work. If you can't contribute, just learn about it and move on. There will be more opportunities in the future and then we will need all your strength. This is the sad part of winning the war. Some sacrifices have to be made.

^you soon

Wish you luck soldiers. This is a fight worth fighting.

share your weapons of choice if you can and tell me about your experiences.

[rapha-reads]

IWTV rewatch

Season 1 episode 7 [The Thing Lay Still] - part 3/3

- Okay, the triple confrontation Daniel/Louis, Daniel/Armand and Louis/Louis is long but there's so much to say, I have to quote it entirely:

[Daniel] "Well, isn't that neat and tidy?" - THANK YOU DANIEL, I know I can always count on you to point out the flaws and holes in the fabric of Louis' recollection.

[Louis] "'There was a ship. We did get on it.'

[Daniel] 'Yeah, I read that, the first 50 pages. Not exactly the, uh, adventure-of-our-lives feeling I'm feeling.'

[Louis] 'It was a traumatic escape.'

[Daniel] 'Yeah, but she didn't say that explicitly. […] But, um… there's a feeling that she hated your guts there for a while. Why is that?'"

Trust Daniel to always see the little thing that would be inconsequential to anyone else.

[Louis] "'I was haunted by my brother's death, by the abandonment of my sister, by the murder of Lestat, I…'

[Daniel] 'Murder? What murder? It was an act of mercy. You didn't kill Lestat. You spared him out of some fucked-up idea you had about love.'

[Louis] 'Love? I bled him like a pig and waited for the death rattle.'"

Oh, Louis. You are so good at lying to yourself. Good thing Daniel's too much of an excellent investigative reporter to let you fool him like you're fooling yourself. Notice how Louis looks as Daniel undoes all his lies and smoke mirrors? Like he's still trying to cling so hard to the story he's told himself for the past 80 years, like the lie is the only thing that keeps him upright, like if he admits the love, admits he wanted to save Lestat, that would completely undo him and there would be no going back?

[Daniel] "You were shot point-blank by an alderman. You were dropped a thousand feet and survived. You torched Antoinette just to make sure. Where does the trash go, Louis? You take the trash down to the street, some guys show up in a truck and they throw it in the back, and then, they drive it out to the middle of nowhere, right? No. They take the trash to the dump. And having lived two blocks away from the dump just outside of Fishkill, New York, with my first wife, I can state, with authority, what else you'll find there. Rats. Big fucking rats, the size of Kevin Durant's sneakers. Enough blood in them to bring back the dead. Especially one in a trunk with locks on the inside. You knew it, Louis. You had to. The biggest rat eater of them all."

Thank you for bringing back Moonlight Sonata! Haven't figured out yet if it's intra or extradiegetic tho. I love its presence in this episode. It's my favourite piece of classical music (I know, very original) and it's so gothic par excellence.

Mention of the first wife, Alice/Armand, no, I will not get down from this hill.

I love how Daniel's theory posit Louis as having done some planning for himself outside of Claudia's and even Lestat's, with the trunks locking on the inside and the rats needed to revive.

[Rashid/Armand] "'This session is over.'

[Daniel] 'How many days in the Islamic year? How many names are there for Allah?'

[Rashid/Armand] '355 and 99.'

[Daniel] 'Why does a 200-pound bouncer pass out after he sucks him off, and you, a wet T-shirt away from 130, doesn't even blink?'"

Ha, Daniel said 'okay who the eff are you and why am I smelling bullshit'. Meanwhile Armand said 'oh shit we're getting too close to dangerous waters and Louis is about to lose it, better reassert control'. But also, Muslim!Armand. Definitely. Not a throwaway line, not just pretence. Rolin Jones I'm counting on you to not fuck this up.

[Louis] "'I couldn't burn him.'

[Daniel] 'But Claudia could.'

[Louis] 'No', she couldn't.'

[Daniel] 'She stuck a pen in his neck. She recorded his last words in his own blood. The girl did not have a fuckin' problem tossing him on the grill, okay?'"

And Louis' wall of lies is breaking and shattering… And the pebbles of the zen garden, his other big trauma, don't help either…

[Daniel] "You cursed her into the darkness. You chose Lestat over her time and time again. You don't need a memoir, Louis. You need a hundred sessions of EMDR. You know the shit they put soldiers through when they see one of their platoon buddies get blown up in front of them?"

Say it, Daniel! These messy vamps need therapy.

Making jokes to avoid the sheer anguish in Louis' face, voice and body language, both in the 1940 flashback (the image of Louis holding Lestat's body and yelling is tattooed on my eyelids) and in 2022 (Louis sitting in his zen garden hugging and rocking himself, eyes screwed shut, trying to block Daniel and Armand's voices and the memories lives rent free in my mind).

[Daniel] "'144 years and you're still Louis the Pimp, paying a whore to sit in a room and talk with you. 'Cause why? You got some story you wanna tell the whole world about yourself?'

[Rashid/Armand] 'When you hear it you'll be ashamed, ashamed of what you say to him now!'"

Please don't hold back, Danny, do tell us what you think exactly. But hey, Louis needs to hear it.

The fuck are you talking about, Armand… Also notice how agitated he is? Feeling protective of Louis, or feeling like he's losing control of the interview, the interviewee and the interviewer all at once?

Love Armand taking off is gloves in the background. So subtle, so crucial. And then the lenses.

[Daniel] "'This is the same shit that happened in San Francisco.'

[Louis] 'Not exactly.'

[Daniel] 'How is it any different, Louis?'

[Armand] 'This time I won't save your life. Louis can sometimes act out. I protect him from himself, always have. Stopped him that night in San Francisco.'"

Oh, hello, Armand's decided to play Superman. Aaaaah, Armand's orange eyes, I love them!!!

Can we talk about Armand's infantilisation of Louis? "He acts out, I protect him from himself"… Like a child that can't regulate his feelings and needs to be put on time's out. The manipulation is deep and multi-layered, it's not just the memory alteration. Notice how Louis is pretty much dissociating, staring at the grey wall, face slowly becoming inexpressive and voice returning to flat and empty, from the moment Armand started telling off Daniel?

[Daniel] "'You were there.'

[Louis] 'You don't remember.'

[Daniel] 'No, I don't remember.'

[Louis] 'What was that you said about memory? 'A monster', was it?'

[Daniel] 'But I saw you standing in the sun.'

[Armand] 'As we age, the sun loses its power over us. What's a mediocre star to a 514-year-old vampire?'

[Louis] 'Daniel Molloy, I'd like you to meet the vampire Armand, the love of my life.'"

One, don't be too cocky, Louis, there's plenty you don't remember about that night too yourself.

Two, and we've come full circle again, the monster memory making itself fully known after lurking all season long.

Three, shut up Armand, the Sun is not a mediocre star, it's part of the entire reason there's life on this planet, show some respect. Sun deities are some of the most frequent deities around the globe. You need to come back down to earth.

Four, all the books being out of reach to Louis, another way Armand's exerting subtle control.

Five, "love of my life", BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAGA *deep breath* HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAAA, that line kills me every time I hear time. Why you lying Louis, stop fucking lying all the time. Sorry, Armand.

Daniel seeing them side by side and hearing that stupid line after listening to Louis ramble and compose poetry on the spot about Lestat for the past week or so: "hm. I sense bullshit of the highest degree. Time to destroy that whole tower of lies one by one.".

Aaaaaaaaaah, that was such a rich and intense episode!!!! What a grandiose season 1 final!!! So many different elements that have got to be revisited by other perspectives to get the full painting. So many seeds planted for season 2 and even season 3!! The writing is flawless, the acting is exquisite, the music is gorgeous, the costume, set design and stage direction are masterful. I am in love with this show.

ep1 | ep2 | ep3 | ep4 | ep5 | ep6 | part 1 | part 2

[respectthepetty]

I will state this for every episode of Live in Love, but I love some good old fashion color-coding, where everyone has a color, the colors are obvious, and the wardrobe department is earning its paycheck.

Because now that the Pink Person is with the Blue Boy and the Cyan Cutie is with the Orange Oddity,

All I have to stress about in this show is these two female idiots!

And all the other girls who didn't get the memo that this is a color-coded BL!

Honestly, the real issue is Gina who does not understand that Kla is a “a disco-dancing, Oscar Wilde-reading, Streisand ticket-holding friend of Dorothy, know what I’m saying?”

She could flip the script, find her color, and make out with her rich and hot Pink Person best friend in the bed they share, but NOOOOOOO!!!!

Like, she already wears her color for queer's sake! Just taste her lips already!

Because I'm going to go out on a limb and state I don't believe Amp is part of the trolls that are stalking Cake.

I know the boy is a whole Red Flag, but . . .

The way he envisioned that fight was wildly hilarious!

As a fellow Slut for Christ, I need him to chill the eff out and quit being so true to his color for two seconds because I see some good in him . . . if I squint . . . and tilt my head a little.

Cake rejected him while wearing his boyfriend's blue clothing WITH his Blue Boyfriend sitting RIGHT THERE, yet Amp was still was in disbelief.

But because of that, I think this is a Red Herring.

I don't think Amp would go as far to hurt Cake, and honestly, unlike Amp and Cake's friends, I think Kla is being too casual about all of this because his boyfriend is being called a slut, whore, and a fugly skank, yet Kla is like "don't let it get to you"

Sir, your man is losing his color!!!!!

The boys can be in love like Kla and Cake's color-coded best friends.

And talk on the phone every minute of every day.

And let him spend the night in Kla's blue room in his blue pajamas.

And stare at him lovingly.

And let him wear Kla's blue clothes all the time.

And feel him up then run away.

But I need Kla to acknowledge that the pink is fading from his boy.

Quickly.

So good for him and his color-coded buddies trying to figure out who is behind all of this and planning a trip to Phuket,

Because Cake needs a break and his gray color proves it!

Oh, and another reason I don't want Amp to be the baddie is because of Cake's Green Guy brother Tim.

I truly believe he would be really good for my fellow Slut for Christ in more than one way. *wink*

So find the culprit (GINA!) and get our Pink Person's color back!

Because I need my color-coded boys in love to be strongly color-coded (DID YOU HEAR THAT, GINA!).

[kylobith]

The Little Tiefling (Gale of Waterdeep x Tav)

Word count: 2,955

One afternoon, as Tav takes a nap, Gale seizes the opportunity to bond with their three-month-old daughter by reading her a story.

Clad in his purple robes, Gale closes the bedroom door as softly as he can, wincing as the hinges and the wood creak. Before walking away, he perks up his ears, awaiting any grumble or moan from the other side. Nothing.

Relieved that he was gentle enough not to wake his partner, he tiptoes to the stairs, only to be interrupted by a loud cry. Months ago, he would have pictured himself whimpering and sobbing along upon hearing this sound so often in a row. Still, now that he was in the thick of it, nothing could eff the smile on his face. Sure, some days are more demanding than others, but he is more than grateful to any deity above to have been granted the privilege to experience it. It is a second chance, one most craved and prayed for.

So, Gale renounces the little free time he planned for himself rather gladly. He slithers towards the nursery at the end of the hallway, careful not to cause any more ruckus than the baby already does. Once inside, his face illuminates at the sight of the squirming little thing in her crib, grabbing at the air while screaming her lungs out.

‘Hey there, sunshine,’ he coos. ‘Awake already, aren't we?’

He bends over the cot and picks up his daughter, pressing a few kisses to her cheek before cradling her in his arms. In a mere instant, he is a man transformed. Tenderness and affection radiate from his twinkling eyes while the most beaming grin burns onto his cheeks. As he has so often done since he first beheld his partner, he cannot help but think that his arms were designed for two things: for holding his beloved Tav and for carrying his child.

Gale caresses the thick, feathery hair on the child's head, kissing her forehead while rocking her. Sooner than he anticipated, the baby calms down, but a nose scrunch remains on her little face. He walks out of the nursery and heads downstairs, momentarily setting her down into her lounge chair in the kitchen so he can prepare a bottle. He sings to the two of them all the while, occasionally spinning on his heel to coo the lyrics at his daughter while making silly faces. She watches her father with round eyes, drooling over her knuckles.

With a giggle, he picks her up and takes the bottle to the living room, feeding her on the couch.

‘Sorry, little one, it's just us this afternoon. Mum needed a break.’

His daughter eyes him again, her face finally relaxing now that she is eating. He chuckles and extends his index finger to poke her tiny nose.

‘But that means that you and I can catch up a little! So, tell me, how's life treating you?’

Silence. Of course, there would be.

‘Oh, I see! Many new things to explore, huh? Don't worry, that never stops. That's what’s so exciting about life if you ask me.’

The suckling noises fill the air, and he could not be more elated to have this quiet moment with his baby.

‘You know, adventures will await you at every corner of the world,’ he speaks fondly, already imagining her growing up. ‘It will be up to you to accept challenges or to deny them. Of course, you won't always do exactly what you like every time, and that's quite alright. You'll need that to evolve and enlighten yourself beyond books. But when you feel uncomfortable engaging in something, know you have the right to say no. It’ll spare you much heartbreak and pain, trust me. Promise you'll do just that?’

He stares at his daughter briefly before laughing to himself.

‘That's right, you're just a baby. I'll take your silence as a promise for now, though. Sorry that your old man needs a little reassurance now and then. He'll need much more once you grow up, especially if you dabble in magic. Don't want you summoning a bloodthirsty creature and unleashing it on the city, now, do we?’

Gale grins and gazes at the girl, remaining silent as she drinks the rest of the bottle. Once he finishes the feeding routine, he carries her around the house on a whim, showing her the view from each window and pointing at everything to be seen. He tells her about the bustling streets of Baldur’s Gate, the sweet smells whenever he passes the baker and how he always needs to restrain himself from heading inside to buy several pastries. He reminisces about strange encounters with locals and foreigners alike, those noteworthy enough for him to still grin whenever they cross his mind. He describes the hammering in the smithy in intricate detail, portraying it loud enough to resonate through the neighbouring streets.

When the baby fusses, he shoots glances around.

‘Oh, of course! Where's your owlbear, now?’

Before the child cries, he finds the little stuffed toy in the dining room, probably put away on top of the cabinet when Tav was too exhausted to think about where to put it. He grabs it and playfully rubs the toy's velvet beak against his daughter's nose, producing silly sounds he never thought he would indulge in when he was still single. The baby laughs, warming his heart and softening his traits.

‘How I love you, little one. Never doubt that.’

With another kiss on her forehead, he takes her to his library, which they now partly use as a playroom for the girl. The bottom shelves are long cleared of any of Gale's books, instead filled with baskets containing toys, games, emergency pacifiers, and bibs. It has become a new thing for Tara to nibble on the pacifiers as of late. It happens so often now that Tav has considered dedicating a separate budget for them alone.

A quilted throw lays on the ground, already dotted with stuffed toys and rattles. So much love has been woven into this blanket, skilfully created and sewn together by Tav during the pregnancy. Each square represents essential milestones in their lives, a work still in progress. A purple and black hole in a rock with a hand sticking out of it is embroidered on the first square, a playful nod to how Gale and Tav met. The following one pictures a serene scene by a campfire between the two, then the third shows them connected to the Weave. Tav's favourite square of all shows them under a colourful starry sky, the moment when she understood that she fell in love with the quirky wizard.

Other squares show Gale's proposal, their wedding, their new house, Tara, and her pregnancy. Another one features the two of them holding their newborn daughter, doting upon her. Possibly the most joyful event in their lives so far.

Gale gently places the child on the throw and sits next to her, not caring whether the belt of his robes is undoing itself, leaving the hems to gape around his torso. He shakes one of the rattles in front of her, but she seems more interested in nibbling the stuffed owlbear gifted by Karlach. He chuckles, knowing she would melt on the spot if she knew about it.

As father and daughter play and bond, it occurs to him that life could not improve from there. This is it, the pinnacle of his happiness. Teaching on weekdays while having enough time to coddle his wife and daughter, to study and read while petting Tara… No, it truly cannot get better than this.

When he senses that the child grows sleepy again, he puts down the toys and takes her in his arms.

‘Dozing off already? Am I this boring? Ah, I guess. One day, you will think that your mum and I are the dullest people you've ever met, but if only you knew why we became so…’

The girl yawns, and he giggles. No matter how often it occurred, it always filled him with such warmth.

‘But I think that your mum would kill me if I told you the story when you're not old enough. Or at all, actually. You need not be burdened with such things.’

Sitting her up on his hand, clutching her against his chest, he walks her over to a specific section of his library, making her look at the books.

‘Any favourite for today, duckling?’

Another yawn. Gale kisses the top of her head and finds his attention caught by a particular book in his collection. A beautiful edition, bound in green leather with gold embossings. It is one of the first books he purchased when Tav was expecting, in one of his many children's books rampages in the city. He wished to ensure that his child would never run out of stories to escape reality to, that their creativity would constantly be challenged and encouraged, and that the world would come to them when they could not take them into the world yet.

Sometimes, when the excitement or anxiety of becoming a parent seized him at night and ebbed him away from sleep's shores, he would pick one of the books and read to Tav's belly, caressing it with his fingertips lightly enough not to awake or disturb her. And just like that, fear would drift away, enabling him to swim back to the land of dreams.

‘How about The Little Tiefling, mh?’

Tilting his torso back, he reaches for the book and paces towards the armchair in the corner by the window. He sits down, propping his daughter against him and letting her curl up naturally, letting the sun filter through the windows onto her angelic face. His fingertips caress the embossed cover and flip it open to the first page.

‘The Little Tiefling,’ he announces with a hint of pride.

He clears his throat and adjusts his position to make them both more comfortable before starting to read aloud.

‘Once upon a time, there was a little tiefling named Yalaia. According to her mother, she had the most beautiful auburn hair, but according to her father, she had the cutest button nose in the realm. But there was one thing that Yalaia wished for above all else: horns.’

The door creaks open, and Gale's eyes dart to it, only to find Tara nudging it open and rubbing against the doorpost. With a grin playing on his lips, he beckoned her over with a nod.

‘Oh, hi, Tara! Come to listen to the story, too? Come in!’

The tressym, understanding her friend's every word, happily hops into the room. She comes to rub against his bare calves for an instant before leaping onto the armchair and sitting on top of it. Emitting a loud purr, she nuzzles his hair, earning a chuckle from the wizard. He balances the book on his knee for a second to pet her on the neck and wings. When the baby fusses, he kisses the girl's forehead and continues to read.

‘Her mother had elegantly curved horns, reminding her of fauns. Her father had proud and sturdy ones, making him look taller than he was. But Yalaia only had nubs above her brows.’

The baby yawns, and he gently strokes her bent leg with his thumb.

‘One morning, as she headed outside to meet her friends to play, she found with horror that they all had small horns protruding from their foreheads. But not Yalaia. As they played, she stared, wishing her turn would come. As her parents tucked her in that night, she wished to wake up with horns. And she did so every night that followed. Sadly, she woke up every morning with nubs.’

Above him, perched up on the backrest, Tara tilts her head to gaze at the beautifully painted illustrations.

‘When she saw that more of her friends grew their horns as if it was the easiest thing in the world, Yalaia felt rather sad. She felt that she did not fit in and was different from other tieflings. Now, as she prayed for horns every night, she did so with tears brimming her eyes. But it was not enough.’

Gale kisses his daughter's forehead again, seeing that she is nodding off.

‘As her favourite uncle came to visit with her cousins one day, she was shocked to discover that all her younger cousins already adorned shiny horns. So, between lunch and dessert, she snuck out of the house and ran away. It seemed that she did not belong. Perhaps she was no tiefling at all.

‘Worrying as soon as she left their sight, Yalaia's family relentlessly looked for her, calling her name. Neighbours and friends, shopkeepers and strangers joined the search, hoping to find Yalaia safe and sound and bring her home. They went through every house, every garden, every shop, every cellar, every attic, every chest and every barrel. They combed the streets, the hills, the riverside. When her mother ventured into the forest, calling out for her daughter, her cries were met by a whimper.

‘Huddled up by a rock in the middle of the woods, Yalaia sniffled and wiped her tears, relieved to see her mother. After running for hours to hide, she lost all sense of direction in the dense forest. She had turned and paced forever until she decided to remain by the rock. Whatever she was expecting to come for her was not her mother, so the joy to be found was only sweeter.

‘Yalaia’s mother cradled her in her arms, tears dripping onto her hair. What a fright it had been! She told Yalaia of everyone joining the family to search for her and how everybody was so concerned that all activity had ceased. The blacksmith had climbed the hills to see the landscape better in hopes of finding her, while her friends had retraced their paths to every place they explored together.

‘“Mama,” said Yalaia, “why would they look for me? I am different. I look different. Why were they not happy that I left?”

‘Yalaia's mother was saddened to hear such words from her daughter. But then, with the brightest smile only a mother can bestow, she replied, “Because you are one of us. You may think you are different, but we all are in our own ways. The baker does not always see eye-to-eye with the guard, yet when celebrations come, they dine merrily at the same table and share the same wine. Everyone has a place among us, and so do you, no matter who you are or what you look like. You are one of us.”

‘“But Mama, I don't have horns, and all my friends and cousins do!”

‘Her mother smiled and pulled her locket from beneath her dress, opening it to reveal two painted portraits. On the left, a young tiefling with orange skin smiled at the onlooker, while on the right, an even younger one with a reddish complexion did the same. Their pose was not their only common trait. Both children lacked horns.

‘“Do you see the girl on the left?” Yalaia's mother asked. “It was me when I was a bit older than you. I did not have horns yet, which made me sad, too. But I came to learn that everybody is different and evolves at their own pace. There is no wrong way to grow, no wrong way to belong to your people. All you need is to be kind and accepting. Everything will come in time, with a little bit of patience.”

‘And so, Yalaia hugged her mother, reassured her that nothing was wrong with her. Together, they left the forest and happily announced the good news of Yalaia’s return. Everyone was merry that day to know that the little tiefling was found. That night, she did not wish for horns, only for her kin to fare well. And when she awoke in the morning, two little horns were on her forehead.’

Gale gazes down at his daughter and smiles from ear to ear as he finds her fast asleep.

‘The end.’

‘Don't you think it's a bit of a complex story for a three-month-old?’

His eyes dart towards the door, only to find a dishevelled Tav leaning against the doorpost with a grin. Even with deep circles underneath her eyes and knots in her hair, she looks as radiant as ever to him.

‘There you are, my dear,’ he chimes. ‘Didn't you want to nap longer?’

‘Couldn't bring myself to it. I missed you both too much.’

‘I see.’

Gale laughs and puts the book aside, carrying the sleeping baby to Tav.

‘She and I had a lovely afternoon. She was an absolute sweetheart.’

‘That's good to know. How long has it been since you fed her?’

‘About two hours ago.’

‘Mmh. It's almost time again, then.’

She takes the little girl from his arms and props her up against her shoulder, cupping the back of her head and kissing her hair. Tav’s attention is drawn to a pile of boxes in a corner, and she sighs.

‘You still haven't dealt with those?’

‘I meant to do it this afternoon, but I got carried away playing with her and all,’ Gale admits, scratching the back of his head. ‘Don't worry, I'll get to it today.’

‘At least return Astarion's gift first. That's the first one I want out.’

Gale follows Tav out of the library, lovingly holding her by the waist.

‘My First Wine-Tasting Kit. Who even gives that to a baby?’

‘The question is: who sells that in the first place?’

Both chuckle and exit the room, closing the door behind them to return to their cocoon and family life, leaving Tara to curl up on the warm armchair.

Tag: @emmanuellececchi

[murfpersonalblog]

IWTV Ep3 Musings - Claudia & Louis (Spoilers)

I'm still teary & choked up while typing this. SUPER emotional episode. It's incredible how much they packed into one ep, too! But the second half of the ep was BY FAR the most emotionally impactful IMO. Jacob's acting is just WAY too good; he had me choking up something fierce.

Louis taking pictures of his food for no effing reason like all the social media girlies do; I love it.

Louis STILL tryna be Claudia's knight in vengeful black. U_U But just like before when he tried to save her from Lestat, he can't save her from Bruce or the Theatre or even his own eff-ups. DANG. 😔

YES YOU DO. If you wanna keep pestering her about trauma she doesn't want to think/speak about, then be prepared for the consequences.

AMC, you GOTTA kill Bruce on-screen for us, either in QotD during all the Burnings, or during the PL trilogy (Killer's death was GNARLY).

LOOK AT MY DAUGHTER ALMOST CRYING RIGHT THERE. God's strongest soldier, she's suffered more than Christ, JUSTICE FOR CLAUDIA. All rapists deserve the death penalty, IDGAF.

Understatement of the century.

I CACKLED at that literal DEMON TIMING. Armand was already AT the door while y'all were concocting your lies! Then he just strolls on in, uninvited! 😭

BULLSH!TE. Not that it matters, since vamps have SUPER-HEARING and can READ MINDS, you morons! Pack your bags and go back to America RIGHT NOW. 💀💀💀

Louis, beloved, bless your heart, but if you don't take your garbage attempts at lying back to NOLA and stop playing with this ANCIENT immortal dressed in all white like the effing BOSS PIMP you USED to be.....

Alpha DADDY Maitre Armand Sir, I take back every bottom Uke Omega joke I ever said about you~! 😍

Yeah, about all that.... 😬

Aaaaannnnnd THIS is where you effed up, Claudia.

And Armand heard the WHOLE THING. 😭

Look at her FACE. 😭😭😭😭

They KNEW she hated being treated as a child, and they KNEW her time was numbered cuz she lied about breaking their Great Laws, so they DELIBERATELY made the "Baby LouLou" role to humiliate her, and EXPLOITED her image to bring in extra revenue (how many BLACK actresses did they ever have in their coven/stage? ZERO); all while KNOWING they were gonna kill her and Louis ASAP.

I hate this Theatre coven with ever fibre of my being, Maitre.

Excellent point, Louis. Cuz I noticed in Ep2 that their apartment is kind of crappy--I assumed it was cheap & low class cuz of the tenants all being college students & sex workers, and I noticed a bunch of chipped paint everywhere; on the doors & walls.

They're slumming it in a studio, sleeping in the living room, as neither has their own room & she has to use a Murphy Bed. Major step below 1132; the exact opposite of how book!Claudia & Lou lived in Parisian opulence--highlighting my point that AMC!Claudia got NOTHING out out being a vampire.

But it's also pointing out how Louis covers all the cracks--in his MIND, in the lies he tells himself, just to live with the glaring problems he desperately wants to cover up & deny.

I'm finna yeet myself out the nearest window.

This is SO bizarre, cuz in this version Lou KNOWS Lestat's not really dead! In the book Lou set him on FIRE. So ofc he'd think Les was really dead. But here it makes no sense why he's carrying all this guilt!

Armand knew Lou & Claudia LIED, sure--but he SHOULD know Lestat's still ALIVE--he's probably chained up in the Theatre basement in one of those friggin "wet room burial vaults!"

THANK YOU.

The guilt is out of control. Louis, if Les couldn't tell you loved him after ALL OF THAT, then he's a effing fool who neither understands nor deserves you. Now go chop his d**k off!

Is that what you tell yourself when DreamStat's in bed with you every night? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

I haven't seen mental trauma treated so well in Horror media since Senua's Sacrifice; this is incredible. 👏

Lou, give yourself a bit more credit--you're doing the best you can! :( Even if your best is an entire travesty. U_U

NOBODY TALK TO ME!

Just when I thought she was having a breakthrough, she doubles down on thinking Lestat lied to them about Europe being terrible. 🤦

(The way Lou clutches his pearls like he's having a heart attack--STOP it, ma'am~! 👌) And YES, you should've told her that you folded and spilled the beans to Armand and that she was walking into a trap, WTF!?! 😡

Jacob, your GirlDad is showing; PLEASE have mercy on us! 😭

EMMYS. 👏 GRAMMYS. 👏 OSCARS. 👏 TONYS. 👏

[the-lady-general]

fic author q&a

@curator-on-ao3 thank you so much for tagging me! 💚✨ It's taken me a little to answer (almost) all the questions, but here you go:

1. Why do you write fanfic?

Sometimes I need to get an idea out of my head, sometimes I need to get an idea down on the page, sometimes I want to write for the sake of writing.

(The REAL real reason why I write fanfic instead of original fic is so that I don't have to come up with names and physical descriptions for a bunch of different characters. *shoves all-oc wip back under the floorboards*)

2. Which of your posted stories do you think about the most, even though the story is “finished”?

For now it's Change the World. That one was a lot of fun. I re-read it loads because it makes me laugh.

3. If you could give yourself fic advice from when you first started writing fic, what would that advice be?

You don't know English yet, but once you start learning: on eff eff dot net, cock means penis, not rooster. No advice on the writing, your Gerudo self-insert Mary Sue is already perfect. 💚

4. What’s your relationship to fic stats?

I don't care at all, unless I'm being sulky. I like to think that getting it out of my system relatively quietly makes me the charming ray of sunshine that you, kind and radiant reader, knows and loves. 😁

5. Is there a pairing or scenario or friendship you miss writing? If so, why? If not, why not?

I miss Joseph/Hemmer, that was fun to write. I couldn't stick the fix-it part of the fix-it fic, so I abandoned it in my wips, but I like coming back to it and rereading the more coherent scraps.

6. What motivates you to write?

Mostly jokes! My latest, Life, When It Gives You Lemons, is based on that genius Darmok and Salad at Tanagra pun.

(That's probably the reason why nothing ever came of my Joseph/Hemmer or Una prison break fics: there's enough dead kids and dead parents in SNW to stop me laughing.)

What motivates me for my current WIP is mostly "Can I do this?". The answer so far seems to be yes, provided I can string enough jokes together.

7. Why do you write for the fandom(s) that you write for?

For Star Trek it's mostly friends (hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii, hi! 👋🖖), for LotR it's because somehow, there's still not all the stories I want to read out there, and for 40k it's my desire to throw war dollies around without ever having to memorize a different codex every time I blink.

8. If you’re stuck writing a WIP, what do you do?

I give up and add it to my ~private library~ or I ask for help. The bragging rights of producing something of AO3 quality makes editing worth the hassle. That's my hoard, that is. 🐲

9. What do you wish people knew about comments?

I'm really bad at answering them, so if you, smart and elegant reader, want a reply, trick me into a conversation by asking me questions!

If I don't reply that means your comments ended up as a coal on the warm cozy fire in my heart that's keeping the "Not A Talentless Hack" feelings at bay and I never figured out how to adequately repay that kindness. Thank you. 💚

10. Maybe there’s a question you wish had been on here. What’s that question (and answer)?

I couldn't think of any since getting tagged, so in the interest of finally answering the other nine questions: No, but thank you for asking!

This was fun! I've lost sight of who's already played and who might like to join in, so without pressure: @cicaklah @ichayalovesyou @indignantlemur and anyone else who wants to give this a shot!

[hwaightme]

Your fan, San (part 2)

(part 1) (your fan ml)

💬 pairing: san x interpreter!reader 💬 genre: romance, fluff, mutual pining, drama 💬 summary: a bulletpoint-style wordstream of what it would be like if san was stanning you 💬 wordcount: 4.5k 💬 warnings/tags: language, conflict, two shy dorks, homie sabotage?, misunderstandings, love above all, touring, busy life, reader is a pro linguist, we stan simpteez, unedited oop- 💬 taglist: @acciocriativity, @doom-fics, @layzfeelit @jcngh0-hq @black--awsum @honey-lemon-goose @i-luvsang @jackinmyarea , @izuijin @justhere4kpop 💬 a/n: Hello there <3 here is PART 2 of YOUR FAN SAN!! Hopeless romantic? Check. Chaotic? Check... and the FINALE is coming soon??? ;~; P.S. that uni life do be getting wild so apologies if I'll be haphazardly uploading or if trains of thought are derailed~

'The Beauty of Falling in Love - a collection of short stories, poems and musings'

That was the title of the book you had to translate. And if you were not a (fully) sappy and sentimental mess before, you sure as hell were now. Because each little chapter, be it an anonymous recollection of favourite moments with a loved one, or a vignette dedicated to someone special, was some of the most heartwarming work you have ever read.

Each piece sounded so personal, so real, that you found yourself spending more time than usual on this commission. You had made an agreement with the client that they would be sending chapters out one by one, and prior to receiving one, you would send back a completed translation.

It was an easy enough arrangement, and was not too taxing when it came to your personal time. You could ruin your sleep schedule to your heart's content by watching dramas that you had missed whilst on tour, could make late night trips to the convenience store because you did not want to be caught in the businessperson rush, could catch up with people who you had inadvertently ghosted because of work and inability to find words when you wanted to.

Outside of your preferred mode of relaxation, you kept in touch with some of the members of ATEEZ, thanks to a group chat that San had created and 'simply had to add you' - at least that was how he had advertised it. The group chat consisted of him, you, Wooyoung, Yunho and Yeosang, who to you seemed like a random pick, since you did not interact with neither Yunho nor Yeosang as much.

But over a very short period of time this had changed for the better, and you had grown very comfortable, attached even, to the chaotic quartet. If anything this it was a top up vaccine for being able to keep up with the ATEEZ chaos - otherwise you would be familiarising yourself with it again for tour, as if it was the first day of work.

Little did you know, you were talking with the Operation ring leaders + Yeosang who was in it for the gossip, and to control the fire... in the way he wished. It was more or less a regular conversation, aside from San occasionally panicking and running up to one of the guys for advice.

"Yeo why did you write 'AMOGUS'?"

"Don't question me. This is art- ah see, Y/N sent the prayer hands emoji, she agrees." Yeosang responded, pointing at his phone screen.

"I feel like you guys are six parallel universes ahead of me and I don't like it."

"Make that ten, you boomer."

"This is an ancient meme you are quoting Yeo~" Wooyoung joined in, trying to poke fun at his friend.

"Say that again, the king of social boomers? Are you salty that I did not put hyung after AMOGUS because it's old?"

"What even is this chat-" Mingi, who was observing from his position lying across three dining chairs, threw the question out into the air.

"It is us trying to force San to dm Y/N by pushing them together like two dolls." Wooyoung, slightly irritated, explained.

"Man, you really are done." Mingi responded, chuckling

"I don't know, am I? San is breaking up with me so I am going through all stages of grief."

"Double u tee eff?" San raised an eyebrow and stared at Wooyoung, phone loose in his hands.

"How far along is she?"

"She isn't pregnant dude."

"Ugh you know what I mean."

"Like... a third of the way?"

"Damn you guys are slow as shit. We planned for this to take how long? You even have the confession already written up for the last chapter, this is kind of ridiculous. You know what, hold up."

Wooyoung tackled San, and thanks to the surprise nature of the attack, got the perfect opportunity to grab his friend's phone. After securing 'the bag', Wooyoung strode off to the other side of the room, clicking away, while San attempted to stand up, shouting.

Yunho seemed to have caught onto what the other was about to do, as he launched himself at the shorter man sat on the sofa and splayed himself right over like a blanket.

"No hard feelings bro this is necessary."

As San way trying to battle his way out, but was further restrained by Yeosang who had finally stopped taking photos, Wooyoung giggled deviously and locked the phone again, sauntering back with a devilish grin and handing it to San.

"It is done. You can thank me later."

"What did you do?"

"Something that you should have done like... a year ago."

"DID YOU TEXT HER?"

"Yeah. And don't worry, nothing Woo-style, you grilled me enough times for me to remember her preferences. Plus, I know how to text like you."

"And when did that come in handy?"

"Uh... I have to go water my fish BYEEE~" Wooyoung quickly departed from the living room sprinting back to the dorm, while San remained in shock, swiping at the screen to reveal the message that his friend had sent on his behalf.

Damn. It really was just like him.

The text came to you as a surprise. Though you have had some conversations over private message before, most of them had been in some way work related. Not San messaging you out of the blue to ask how you were and that you should catch up.

With the group chat all but abandoned, you happily launched into texting San. There was never any pressure for a phone call, which you greatly appreciated, and there was no specific guidelines that either of you enforced - without a care you double, triple, quadruple texted, abruptly disappeared only to reappear with a link or a photo... main things was that together, you kept your conversation alive and thriving.

You would have never, not in a million years, imagined yourself getting this close to San, or anyone with a celebrity status for that matter. Simply because you felt like they would need and deserve more than you could offer socially. You were all about human connection and uniting minds, but when it came to your own personal preferences, you would much rather write out your thoughts in astonishing detail and hit send, than say the same things out loud and to somebody in person.

And yet, contrary to your assumptions and what you could only say had been prejudice on your part, San was supportive of you and of your choices, saying he could 'imagine your voice well enough anyways'. He steered clear of pushing you to communicate in a style that was not yours; though you did enjoy hearing his voice, and would be lying if you said he was not a charmer, you could not bring yourself to reciprocate that approach. It was too overwhelming to do during the time that you had allocated for yourself as your regenerative state. And San made your heart melt by showing that he got that, without you having to tear yourself apart and explain.

To him it had been fairly easy to figure out that you were a text over call kind of person, and was something that he had advertised to the Operation Love Language squad. Given your notes app being packed, post it notes sometimes threatening to pour out of your bag, and him spotting you willingly sitting far away from any groups so you could watch something, earphones in, all pointed to that conclusion. And San found that he liked it more than he would have guessed.

Each text was like a memory, and an expression not only of something that they wanted to blurt out, but more often than not of a considered, weighed out opinion, even if it was onomatopoeia or a string of emojis. He would have never been able to get to know you like he did over text, and get so close to you that you were now happily discussing with him your own worries, and passions, and dreams, not just responding to his stream of musings and questions.

It was through one of these extensive texting sessions that you had revealed to San your endeavors as a freelance translator, and gushed about the commission you were working on.

This made San's thumbs freeze midway through typing. Carried away and impatient, he had tried to strike on all fronts, and now that he was in continuous communication with you, he regretted it. Deeply. Except he did not yet know just how risky the decision to parade as someone he was not could be.

After the first time you had mentioned your side work, he had begun to get progressively more quiet. Bit by bit. Until his responses to you turned almost into a conversation with a wall. You were unable to figure out just what had gotten into San, what had changed?

You turned to the work you were meant to translate as a distraction, expecting that the client would have shared the new chapter with you already... but no such thing.

Instead, there was an order cancellation, and a short apology.

What did you do wrong?

What happened?

Was there something that had not been quite right?

You looked over your already completed translations - you were searching for anything to suggest a reason for cancellation. The words appeared blurry, fading into one big mush. It was all terrible... wasn't it?

Who were you kidding you were probably rusty after not working with fiction for so long, and for not focusing hard enough. You had stopped paying attention to the craft. Who even were you? And interpreter, a translator, or a fraud?

You looked at the cancellation email again, knowing full well that it was pointless to try and reach the customer - they might have blocked you for all you knew. This hurt. This really hurt.

You saw that San had responded to your messages, again in a weirdly cheery tone, asking you how you are and what you have been up to? San would understand... right? San would listen to you...?

So you did something that you yourself did not expect, and pressed on the call button. He picked up on the first ring.

He sounded nervous, and almost tearful as you bared all and talked him through what had just happened. You needed him. He was the only one who had understood your language.

When you told him that you were probably over reacting and just humiliating yourself by being 'so deep in sad mode' over a whole lot of nothing, he instantly was there to catch you and call you out. He emphasised the importance of your work, of the beautiful job you had done so far... but then halted, unsure of how to proceed.

This left you confused. He then picked his words in a strangely careful manner, and almost beginning to side with the customer, saying how maybe it was for the better, and that now at least you could relax and find another project...

"San. This is really unlike you. What is up with that personality switch?"

"What do you mean Y/N? It's nothing-"

"I have an ear for speech, San, if there is anyone who could be a bullshit filter, it is me."

Silence.

More silence.

You were about to call out to him again, when you hear a muffled, barely there whisper:

"I'm sorry..."

You were sent reeling. What did he mean? Why was he sorry?

"I... it was me. Y/N. I am sorry. I really did not mean it to turn out that way I-"

"Okay first of all, why?"

"I..."

"Second of all, whilst I am grateful for your support and stuff, it does make me uncomfortable."

"I'm-"

"Thirdly, actually you know what focus on point number one."

When you did not hear an answer, you tried again: "Hello? I am waiting."

"I like you."

"...What?" you were left in shock.

You had suppressed your feelings for San in the deepest caverns of your soul out of the terror that it was bound to be unrequited, but here you were. Listening to that same man who had supported you from the beginning of your career to now (and exposing yet another ridiculous attempt at that), who had read your quirks and style and knew you better than most. Listening to him confess.

"I... how do I say this... it has been a while. A long while. I have been trying to approach you but... I was either too shy for it, or the attempts were just ridiculous. So we- so I came up with this idea, to try and tell you... this book right. The Beauty of Falling in Love. It is... it spoke to me. And I had planned to give it to you piece by piece until I could then reveal myself to you... but then we started talking outside of that and then I panicked and- yeah, I am... I am just so sorry, this is confusing as hell."

"Wait... wait wait... this is... so were you paying me to get me to like you? Was that what you were doing?"

"GOSH! NO! NO, DON'T MISUNDERSTAND!"

"Look. As much as I do like bringing joy to people through my work, this crosses a line. And it's not the fact that you ordered something from me - hell, support the artist right? It's the fact that you decided to be somebody else. You decided to conceal yourself to talk to me. Like you did not trust me. Even though you want me to like you.

I'll be returning the money to you shortly. M-kay? And... talk on stage, I guess."

Before San could respond, you ended the call sharply. No more phone calls. They were cursed, apparently.

With these thoughts, and a heavy heart, you departed for Japan.

---

"Maybe... just maybe if you had seen it through and not abandoned ship... your ship could have sailed?"

"Yunho just because it's your idea does not mean is good!" San retorted, having recounted the story to the members, gone into full crisis mode.

"Hello!? You agreed? I am just generating ideas here."

"I think we all blew this out of proportion and did not consider risks... at all." Mingi interjected, massaging his temples.

"You guys, I have an idea-" Wooyoung began, but was quickly cut off by San, who was already half way out of the door.

"You know what? I am done with the ideas. I will just do what I think is right."

---

You were conflicted. In a way, you had gotten what you wanted. A confession from your crush that you had been quietly keeping in the shadows. But at the same time, your anxiety spiked. Were you that unapproachable that San had to have twisted everything to get to you? Was your work more entertaining than you could ever be?

With these thoughts, and a heavy heart, you departed for Japan.

If your presence was not explicitly required at the venue, you would not go. Once an event ended, you would leave. If anything, you were acting just like any employee would.

You were trying to bury the conflicting feelings that you were experiencing. To an extent, you felt disrespected. Like you had been mistreated via the means of 'i am using your translation services so you should love me'. And it was one unpleasant thought.

So, you stuck to what you knew and were more or less confident in. Words that were not yours. ideas that were not yours. Feelings that were not yours.

In a matter of an hour after the first small event, however, you could not sulk in your room how you wanted, thanks to a random slip of paper being shoved under your door. You ran across the room and slammed it open in an attempt to catch the culprit, but there was no one in sight.

You gingerly picked up the papers, and read. It was unmistakable. It was the next chapter of the book, with an interesting translation on another sheet of paper, and an additional note.

"I am sorry, and I can only hope that you will read this and let me fight. <3 San"

As much as you were ready to forgive him then and there, you decided that you wanted to see just how far he was going to go.

The next morning - another letter had arrived. The next chapter, a translation, and another note.

During filming for a morning show, San had shot you numerous glances in an attempt to see whether you were even reading what he had been Amazon Priming to your room, but with a cheeky smile dancing on your lips, you let your fun continue.

Another package.

And another.

And another. Until, finally, the last chapter had arrived. At least that was what you thought right up until the evening of the same day. You had assumed that it was going to now be your turn to act, or at least to start talking again, but a loud knock jolted you out of your thoughts.

And another.

And another knock on the door. This man was an unstoppable force.

"I... I translated the last one. Well, tried to."

"But there were only eleven stories-"

"Nope, twelve. Here."

You saw a two pieces of paper appear from under the door, just like before. Except instead of the Korean page being a scan from the book, it was evidently a document that either San... or somebody else, had typed up, and then managed to print.

To be respectful, you attempted to read the Japanese, but soon enough gave up since the kanji somehow managed to look cursive, and instead took the Korean text in your hands.

You took a seat with your back against the door and knees almost flush against your chest, and began to read, your heart rate picking up pace as soon as you saw "Dear Y/N,".

It began as a little story. A re-telling of how both of you had met, and how you had come to own a little space in his heart, eventually leading to him simply giving it to you.

"Did you know that you look so beautiful in those moments when you don't think anyone is watching? The more I think about it, the more I feel like it has been what had drawn me in. How you typed and typed on your phone. If time allowed, I liked to try guessing whether you were going to switch the keyboard at some point or not. How you were and are in your element. And of course, how you are, simply, you."

He recalled the moments that you two had shared. The levels of pride and admiration he felt when he saw you being approached and congratulated by the fans, and when he could take a moment to just enjoy what you did.

San moved to explaining 'the plan' to you, and though you were ready to scold him then and there (especially since there was the door between you that made confrontation easier), you could not help but admit that the general notion (aside from making affection and crushing on someone a monetary exchange - better not put feels on Etsy) was heartwarming.

As it turned out, both of you were shy dorks who could not act on feelings. Admittedly, one of you was a LOUD shy dork and the other a 'language is life but still can't read between the lines' shy dork, but at least you made it here.

San was a nervous wreck, barely stopping himself from either pacing up and down the corridor or going into a meltdown and lying face down on the carpet. He already looked suspicious enough as is, just standing by a random hotel number like a vampire who had been refused entry.

Or perhaps more accurately, like a cat who had been shut out of the house and was now desperately trying to claw its way back in.

But that stress was quickly washed away when your form suddenly appeared before him, peeking out, drowning in an oversized hoodie. The papers were still clenched in your hand as you motioned for San to come in.

You waited until he was right in the middle of the room before closing the door. Part of you was afraid that he was going to nope out at any moment. You needed the reassurance. The confidence that was normally there when you were working. But every fiber of your being was screaming in protest, wanting simply to hide.

You observed him. He looked like he was barely breathing.

"I... really I am... so sorry... again... I know that it was so fooli-"

"私でもあなたのことが好きだ..." (I like you too)

"eXCUSEME?!"

"All this translating and you still can't process?" you joked, but began to pull on the drawstrings of your hoodie in an attempt to make your face disappear.

"ohHH NoONOOO I just want to hear you say it in every language that you know!!!" San exclaimed and in a matter of seconds was inches away, peeking at what was not yet concealed by the fluffy cotton.

As he leaned closer and closer, flustering you (and himself) in the process and took both of your hands in his, in the last leap of bravery you whispered:

"Well that, you'll have to earn, San. And I don't take traditional currency."

"You will never let that go."

"Never ever, Choi San, it's a core memory now."

"Well hey at least it means you are not letting go of me~"

"Oh the way you twist words..."

"Like you twist me around your finger, not to give you an ego trip or anything..."

"It's 'wrap'. The correct word is 'wrap' around a finger."

"Okay you know what how about I translate it to body language?" he puckered his lips, making you giggle.

"As long as I don't need to correct grammatical errors."

"Now now I'd say I'm fluent."

--

The habit of sliding notes under your door or passing them to you did not stop - it only got stronger and became an 'any location', Mission Impossible note transfer agreement.

It had become something of a game, muddling languages together and writing near-nonsense just to sit there almost crying, trying not to laugh.

Soon enough, the game spread to Wooyoung, who would on occasion intercept the messages and add in his own flair, and soon enough to a curious Yunho and Mingi, who then turned it into impromptu paper plane throwing tournaments.

Really, the only reason why Hongjoong did not intercept was because you managed to at least keep the messages under strict PG rating and had good aim - with a saving swoop you had managed to return one such airmail right into San's lap during a fan sign, leading ATINY to give you an additional "aimbot" title.

It did not matter what the schedule was, you left each other encouraging notes (and without the other knowing, stored them away in your luggage).

"Good luck being the first one to get hair and makeup done..."

"Good luck with the translation deal on the book <3" (after an entire evening of a pouting and pleading San, you had reached out to the editors of the romance book you had translated for him, and now were in very promising negotiations)

You raced ahead, in time with each other, creating your own language.

The extended time ATEEZ had spent in Japan was coming to an end, and in the blink of an eye, it was the final concert. The "closing remarks", the epilogue.

You were prepared to interpret in full, as always. One member down. Another... finally, it was only San left. The other members were looking at him expectantly, while some sent glances in your approximate direction.

You took Hongjoong's tranquility and him nudging San in the shoulder as a sign that no, you will not have to pretend he said something different and double speak it - whatever he was about to do was, apparently, captain certified.

At that moment, San pulled out a note from a pocket that you had no idea even existed. The action seemed to have the same effect on ATINY as they "oooohed" - Yunho fake whispered into the microphone that San was now a part-time magician, so these things were the norm.

You had your microphone at the ready. With bated breath, you waited for San to begin. And that, he did.

In Japanese.

Grammatically correct, coherent and well-delivered Japanese.

Even though some of the phrases were obviously not his style and word selection, leading you to imagine him poring over this text like he was writing the declaration of independence with the boys, it was him. It was his feeling. It was his message.

Your arm fell to your side with a thud, and you were grateful that your microphone had been turned off for the time being. You caught yourself gaping, and had to forcibly compose yourself to reveal only a soft smile, as you took the scene in.

San was not exactly trying to hide that he was paying special attention to a specific part of the arena, with his body turned almost completely in your direction and only a few glances off to the sides and at the note.

"...and I hope that we will always be together, as one, and share this world. sometimes there may be struggle, there may be darkness, but WE," he makes a grand gesture with his hand, as if highlighting the area in front of him, but really it was just to, again, symbolise that certain someone at the forefront of his mind, "will last, and be the light."

The crowd roared, and you could allow yourself to internally combust as you watched ATEEZ wave, bow and bid their farewells.

Some things did not need a translation to be understood, and some things were not up for interpretation.

Like how San sprinted to you as soon as he was out of public sight. How he swept you off your feet both literally and metaphorically.

How Jongho muttered 'get a room', but still smiled at both of you when he passed by.

How, upon your return to South Korea, he had practically made it his mission to dote on you, and any moment he got, show that you were together.

Matching plushies? Check.

Basically exposing you both on Late Night Dive (though there was not really anything to expose because the entire ordeal was almost a live streamed ATEEZ drama)? Check.

Happily chatting away with ATINY about love and about finding it, sending loving stares your way? Check.

This was the love language you shared. No hiding, no scheming. Two native speakers, who found each other in translation.

[fae-fucker]

Breaking Time: Part 4

Chapter 16: Klara

Klara has a little freakout about how she can't be the chosen one, et cetera. She's freaking out that she's not a murderer uwu while Callum insists they have to kill Llaw him before he kills her. Also, Arianrhod apparently told Klara that she could send Callum home, which is ... bad? Good? I can’t tell.

Klara says she hasn't slept in 24 hours but also that she needs to drive to distract herself from everything that's happened, which doesn't strike me as very safe.

“Where shall we go?” Her head ached. She hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours and she was beginning to feel it. “I don’t know yet, Callum, I just need to drive.” “But Llaw—” “You can’t just go around killing people, Callum,” she said, trying to force confidence into her voice. If anything had been true in her life until two days ago, it was definitely that. Callum didn’t back down. His expression softened. She swore she felt his heart beating, only inches away from her. “But you heard Arianrhod. This man will slaughter ye if we do nothing.” She turned and began to walk the way they had come. “I know.” “Llaw is coming for ye. To kill ye.”

So ... Does Sasha get horny for just the idea of a Scottish accent? Does she read a lot of romance novels with Scottish heroes and has the understanding that their accents are hot, but has never actually bothered to look up what they sound like?

Because a Scottish person wouldn’t say “ye” like this when they emphasize the word, they’d just say “you” like anyone else. Maybe like a “yew” if you still wanna be cringe and spell it out. Also, why did he say “you heard Arianrhod” but then immediately “this man will slaughter ye”? Did you forget, Sasha? Did you forget to add his “accent”?

Anyway, they drive away randomly, then Klara has another freakout because Callum is just so Intense, and leaves him in the car. She walks into a forest by following her super special instinct power or whatever, the same one that pulled her toward Callum for some reason.

“Not imagining things,” she said aloud.

Or was it something else—the powers flowing through her blood? Arianrhod’s words came back to her. A connection between worlds is created when divine energies, relegated to their realms, seek and find one another across an otherwise uncrossable chasm.

The planets and stars were held together or pushed apart by their smallest, invisible components—invisible to the human eye, at least—creating fields of attracting force that radiated from within. Klara thought of the earth below her feet, the planets and stars circling each other like hungry animals but never touching, just like the moon that Arianrhod governed, the same celestial body that caused the tides and so much more. With an invisible pull.

So ... I hate to be pedantic, but you’d think that a girl who was going to study astrophysics wouldn’t be mystified by this mysterious pull and call it what it is, aka gravity? I get Sasha’s trying to be all mystical, but why wouldn’t Klara, with her so-called “scientific mind” (ugh), describe it this way?

She stumbles around in the forest for a bit and finds a stag, then touches the stag, and ... teleports? Astral projects? To the Otherworld, where the stag is actually a super hot guy.

She watched in awe as the stag fell away, its body transforming until the only thing that remained of the beast were its antlers, velvet-covered angles sprouting from long yellow hair. The antlers crowned a man—he stood in front of Klara, proud in his nakedness, his golden body lean but muscled. His modesty, covered by a simple cloth.

He was beautiful. Ethereal.

His what covered by a simple cloth? You could say his modesty was preserved by a simple cloth, but now it just sounds like this is Klara’s fun little nickname for penis.

Also it’s kinda weird to describe him being proud of his nakedness but then add that he’s actually wearing a loincloth. It’s like if one would describe a man to be both muscled and svelte. Which she did again with “lean but muscled.” Good grief.

Anyway, another scary monster attacks, Klara tries to call for help but decides to girlboss her way out. Nearly gets killed, but the stag impales the monster and as it does, she stops time for a moment, and she kills the monster with one of the stag’s broken antler pieces by stabbing it in the eye. For once, I actually quite like the gory description.

With the last of her strength, Klara grabbed the broken antler from the forest floor and rammed it into the beast’s eye. The black pupil sunk like putty around the shard, which shuddered violently in her hand the deeper she plunged it. Her fingers vibrated and the force echoed back into her body, but the more she shook the tighter she held on, refusing to let go until she was sure the thing was dead or disappeared, pushing until the antler burst through the creature’s eye cavity and into its brain. Or whatever passed for its brain, she thought with a lurch of her stomach.

So of course Sasha had to ruin it with a really stupid and pointless aside for no reason. Why does Klara seem more disgusted with the idea of the monster not having a brain than her stabbing it in the eye? Does Sasha just not think about the words she puts on the page? Who am I kidding, of course she doesn’t.

Still, I quite liked the concept of the fight scene. It’s creative and fits with the book, plus it gives us a fun proper introduction to how Klara will be using her powers from now on, and it lets her defeat the monster on her own in a realistic way as opposed to just giving her a sword and letting her become an expert with it out of nowhere.

Bonus points, Sasha! More of this and less of the everything else.

The end of this chapter (Klara falls unconscious onto the stag) marks the official end of the first section of the book. That’s irrelevant for us, though, so here’s the next chapter.

Chapter 17: Callum

Callum is all bummed out that he hasn’t been chosen by any higher being. Then he hears Klara shouting and runs into the woods. He finds her passed out and then she wakes up and tells him that he will have to drive.

You’d think this 16th century peasant would have some issue driving a car, but no, the next scene gives us a little quirky paragraph about how it was totally hard but he did it for Klara and oh thank god, they’ve arrived already, time to move on.

They get into an inn. Klara’s too tuckered out to get them a room, so she gives Callum a “thin, hard rectangle” and says the innkeeper will know what to do with it. 1) We don’t know what she just gave him, I assumed it was a phone at first but later it’s revealed to be a card? 2) Callum doesn’t actually give the card to the innkeeper, or if he does, it’s not mentioned?

The man raised his brows, angling his head toward Callum expectantly. “Can I help ya, son?”

“I hope so, sir,” Callum said. “Do ye have a room for the night?”

“Aye, lad.” The old man pulled skeleton keys from the wall behind him. He pressed them into Callum’s hand. “You’re in luck—there’s not many open sites around here, with Samhain comin’ up.”

Once inside the room, Klara collapsed on the bed, not even rousing as he lifted her legs to slide them gently beneath the blankets.

Sasha’s so desperate to get to the boning that she can’t be bothered to keep up with her own scenes. Also, why the fuck did that old man just give Callum a bunch of skeleton keys? “Here’s keys to open every room in my inn, just for you, stranger!” Is that what you guys do in Scotland? Or does Sasha just not know what a skeleton key is. Hint: they’re not just a fancy word for key, nor are they fun little bone-shaped keys. They’re keys meant to be “universal”/master keys and able to open a whole bunch of similar locks. You know, like the locks of an inn. Am I stupid or is Sasha?

Klara falls asleep and Callum mopes himself out of the room. He thinks about how he has to be strong enough to protect Klara, and remembers some old tale about how a guy caught a bean-nighe and got his wish granted. So he’s like “I’m gonna do that and wish for strength.”

As he goes to leave to go look for a banshee (just ... outside, I guess), the innkeeper gives the card back to Callum, and Callum correctly deduces that the card has money on it.

“Laddie!”

Callum whirled, one hand on the front door and the other immediately clenching into a fist. But it was only the man behind the counter calling to him. The generously browed gentleman held Klara’s card aloft. He waved the black card in the air.

By now, Callum knew better than to ask why his money was being returned to him—it was another part of Klara’s world he couldn’t hope to understand.

Ok, so Callum doesn’t know what the “thin, hard rectangle” is, but he does know it’s a card, and also that it somehow has money on it, and that this money is being returned to him, but not why or how. Furthermore, is this how Scottish ppl and/or Americans do things? Like, there’s usually a PIN you have to type in to approve a transaction. You know, to prevent stealing? Nowadays yes, there’s frequently a scan-and-pay type dealio, but you still do that yourself? Doesn’t the innkeeper find it weird that a barely conscious girl handed her card over to a guy and then to him? Does he often have customers fuck off and leave their credit/debit cards with him? Is this normal enough that he doesn’t even think to comment on it?

In order to get to the horny shit quicker, Sasha just made everything else more fucked up and confusing and unreal. Like a fucking meteor leaving the world’s largest impact crater.

Anyway, Callum asks the innkeeper to make a call to Aion, because, I dunno, Aion has to come back into the plot somehow and he’s the most mysterious guy Callum knows around here. He wants to ask him to find out how to find a bean-nighe. But when Aion picks up, Callum hear’s Klara’s voice mysteriously tell him “Don’t” and he hangs up on the guy.

Very mysterious.

Chapter 18: Klara

Klara is dreaming about the stag again. Except, gasp! It’s not a stag! It’s a really hot god!

[...] “Who are you? What are you?” “I am Cernunnos, to some, though I am many things to many people. What am I?” he asked thoughtfully. “That depends on who you ask.” “I’m asking,” she said simply. “Me, Klara.”

Okay, sweetie, you can girlboss your little ass all over this scene but it doesn’t change the fact that that’s not what he said. I know exactly what Sasha was going for and why (”uwu Klara is so no-nonsense and badass!”) but he said “who I am depends on who you ask” and Klara replied with “I’m asking.” Like? Okay? Who are you asking, though? That’s the important part, bitchtits. She should’ve said “I’m asking you” or he should’ve said “depends who’s asking” for this dialogue to make sense.

This reads like Sasha had an idea for a scene, roughed it in (you know, like a first draft) and then just didn’t bother reading it over or editing it. Which is exactly what happened. What the fuck was this woman doing for six years?

The bad dialogue continues. Cernunnos claims that Klara summoned him in the forest, that she was calling to him, but Klara says she didn’t know she’d done that. So neither of them knows why he’s here. Brilliant. 

Cernunnos says that he can’t kill the beast that Llaw keeps sending after Klara because he’s basically only a psychopomp, and can’t affect anything. Klara asks if he can help her talk to other Pillars, but he says no. She asks if he can send a message to Arianrhod, he says no. She asks if he can guide her to the Otherworld, he says no.

Klara is trying to figure out a way to defeat Llaw without killing him, while Cernunnos tells her he’s pretty much useless. He tells her that soon the solstice will come and the barrier between the worlds will be thin yadda yadda, look within not without. He’s telling her to fuck off and figure it out, essentially.

Then we get the actual reason for this scene to exist. Klara starts crying again because that’s all this silly bitch is good for, and Cernunnos touches her cheek.

His skin felt like a breeze against hers, hot and cold at once. Her body flared in response. She stepped away from him, taken aback. The man’s presence stirred something in her: a scorching desire, but not for the god. Instead, another face filled her mind. A man with midnight hair and eyes like the line between land and sea.

Klara’s cheeks blazed.

“Do not be ashamed, Klara. Such feelings are normal for humans when they encounter me in my true form. I am not only the god of nature, but of fertility and life. The earth resides in flesh, and flesh in earth—all is perfectly natural. But my presence does not inspire anything that is not already within you.”

Yes. This random new god was introduced in this scene basically just for this. To make Klara horny. To give her a reason to pounce on Callum’s sloppy ball of haggis. Because even Sasha realized that her self-insert and imaginary body pillow haven’t known each other long enough for this to happen naturally, so she had to find a magical justification.

Except Klara wanted to bang Callum when she first met him, when he was covered in blood and she suspected him for murder. Aka when it already didn’t make sense for her to be. Why not just let her be horny for him, instead of having some crap about how “uwu it was always in her, she just needed help realizing it.” Ok. This is so stupid and unsexy. SJM alumni should be legally prohibited from writing anything related to sexuality because they simply cannot do it.

Anywhoo, Cernunnos says he’ll be there for her but she doesn’t need his help, because of course. Klara wakes up and goes to find Callum.

“I didnae ken if I should stay in the same room with ye, alone.” His eyes darted to hers, shy and uncertain. “I didnae want my presence to dishonor ye.”

So here’s where I’ll be controversial and say that if a 16th century peasant dude first said this, but then immediately made out with me, I’d be pretty insulted. Like ... this would tell me he was saying this to make himself look better, and that he thought of me as a cheap lay. But no, to Sash- I mean, Klara, it just makes her hornier.

Then we get mentions of Klara’s “core” aching for his touch and yeah, I know it’s a pretty common substitute for when you want to describe a bitch’s pussy tingles, but to me, my “core” would be, like, my sternum or my solar plexus. Not my Virginia.

You guys can probably imagine how deeply generic and unsexy this makeout scene is. All our old pals are here: lips, tongues, shuddering, feeling every inch of someone, moans and pulling each other closer. We get it. What bothers me, however, is that this just sorta? Happens? And we don’t get any indication that this changes anything between them? Klara was horned up by a god, but what’s Callum’s excuse? Why is he not surprised at these things happening? Sure, he’s been horny for Klara, too, but she just shows up randomly and starts touching his hair and moaning when he touches her. Does this not surprise him at all? No thoughts, no questions asked? I know for a fact women didn’t do this in the 16th century, so why is he so unaffected? Again, I’d be insulted if I were Klara.

You’d think this type of scene would, like ... affect something. Change at least the way they thought of each other. That they’d see each other in a different light, now that the uncertainty is gone. But no. They just make out and that’s that. Everything’s the same. Once they get interrupted, they decide to stick around to see a band that’s performing at the inn. Back to the status quo.

Their first kiss doesn’t even get any special attention. In a PG-13 YA fantasy romance, the first kiss between two destined lovers is usually a huge deal, but it’s like Sasha couldn’t be bothered. But then, why did she write this? Why write a horny self-insert if you won’t get into the horny stuff at all?

Genuinely baffled by this.

Chapter 19: Callum

Does Callum have any thoughs on what just happened? Nope. It’s a slight time skip to them having put on new clothes they got from the gift shop. Don’t gift shops sell, like ... aprons? Hats and gloves. Not whole outfits. Ok, whatever.

Callum has some thoughts about their makeout session, but mostly about how it’s so much better than anything he’s ever experienced, because of course. We find out that he’s only kissed one girl before Klara, and for a moment I actually thought “Oh nice! A virgin hero! How refreshing!” but then right after he says he’s had “dalliances” with other women after that, but just ... without kissing them, I guess?

Callum insists what he feels for Klara is Deep and Meaningful, because Sasha can’t actually show us that so she has to reassure us.

Unfortunately, despite him insisting it’s deep and meaningful, all we get about their FIRST KISS AND MAKEOUT SESSION, YOU KNOW, THE WHOLE POINT OF A ROMANCE NOVEL, is this:

“After what happened outside...” She trailed off. He smiled knowingly, as his cheeks pinkened.

“Shall we?”

He offered his arm.

“Sounds good, my lady,” he said, tilting his head.

This confusingly written exchange is ALL the acknowledgement we get of them making out. That’s all the conversation they have. Or don’t have, as it were. Sasha just went “eh, I can’t be bothered with this aka the most important part of a romance novel, when the leads first KISS.” So why should we care, Sasha? Why should we give a damn if you don’t? Legit why did you make them kiss now if it wasn’t going to fundamentally change anything about their relationship? Oh my god.

Genuinely what was she doing for six years?

Then they go and watch the band, and we get a bunch of generic scenes again. Callum sings along with the lead singer (which seems very rude, but Sasha/Klara loves it), which makes Klara tear up because it’s so emotional, so Callum tries to cheer her up by making her line dance, and then the whole taven joins in, because of course.

Oh, forgive me, they do actually act differently around each other now. They flirt more openly, hold hands, and ... this.

Callum gave her a sweeping dip. Time seemed to slow as she leaned into his arm, tipping back on her heels until the only thing keeping her from falling was Callum. He leaned in, his lips hovering close, close, closer to hers.

When their lips connected...it was slow, meaningful.

He almost forgot they were surrounded by others. He felt her sharp intake of breath.

“I understand what energy is now,” he whispered against her lips.

And then, as he went back in for another mesmerizing kiss, the song came to an end.

Meaningful ... mesmerizing. Sure would’ve been nice to see that, to feel it along with Callum. You know, like a romance novel? No? Ok.

The generic, uninteresting, and insincere revelry gets interrupted because Callum spots Aion standing ominously in the doorway.

Chapter 20: Callum

Callum rushes out after Aion and tells Klara to stay put, which she does out of contractual obligation, I guess.

He shoves Aion up against a wall and punches him for reasons. I have no idea why Callum is being so violent towards a guy whose alliances he doesn’t yet know? Like, all Callum knows is that Aion dropped that hatch on his ass, but that’s it, and he wanted to go back to see Aion immediately after. Was he planning to beat Aion’s ass in the shop if Klara had agreed? Callum takes pleasure in hurting Aion and I’m wondering where this hostility even came from or what Callum knows that I don’t.

I have no idea what’s happening or why.

Aion acts all smug and mystical and says that he knows about Callum’s past in the past. Aion says that Callum summoned him, which Callum denies. He and Klara just keep summoning various magical guys, huh?

Aion mentions the fae again, because of course, and then he gives Callum instructions for how to summon the bean-nighe, which Callum doesn’t even consider asking why or how Aion knows this in the first place. I guess that’s another thing Callum must know that I don’t. Or, more likely, another thing where we’re supposed to wait patiently for the reveal Sasha has planned. So expertly weaved and foreshadowed that her characters have to be complete idiots for her to pull it off.

“I have already meddled with my fate and lost. Now, I have my part to play, so I will play it. I had to be certain to play it correctly,” [Aion] said. “This is the last time I’ll see you, lad, though the same cannot be said of you seeing me.”

Callum pressed him against the wall again and held him there. “Ye speak nonsense. What does that mean?”

“And if I don’t tell you?” The man interrupted. “Are you going to kill me, with her just inside?”

Callum faltered.

“I didn’t think so.” Aion laughed and wiped the trail of blood from his nose. Eyes twinkling again, he glanced toward the door of the pub. “Does she know what you want of the bean-nighe? The omen of death?”

Keeping Aion pinned with one arm, Callum followed his gaze. Klara stood a few paces’ distance away from them. Her brow was furrowed with worry, her arms slack at her sides, watching them.

Watching him.

“Dinnae concern yourself with us,” Callum said sharply.

Aion snickered. “If you seek out the bean-nighe, your lady will know and she will find you.”

He said it in a tone that puzzled Callum. Either with promise or pity. It unnerved him, but he pushed the feeling away...for now.

Yeah, as Klara pushes away important plot points, Callum pushes away even thinking about stuff that isn’t supposed to be thought about yet. They’re just so ... compelling and believable as protagonists, aren’t they?

Anyway, Aion winks out of existence before Klara can question him and we switch scenes to Klara questioning Callum. He lies to her and says Aion only wanted Thomas’s notebook.

“Okay, but...we’re not exactly supposed to be drawing attention to ourselves. Beating him up wasn’t the best move.” She lifted her hand from the bag of ice and pointed to herself. “Pillar of Time, remember? Big Bad ripping open space and time to murder me? Ringing any bells?”

Yeah, ringing the bell of unfunny.

Klara goes to bed, and Callum goes to summon the bean-nighe in a loch and/or stream. Confused? So is Sasha. Previously, we got this:

Aion glanced in both directions. “You must go to a loch or stream, where [the bean-nighe] is known to frequent. Strip a length of cloth from your shirt, soak it in your blood, and leave it to the waters. With it, you must swear to leave your life—if the bean-nighe would so choose to take it.” He tipped his head to the west. “There’s a loch not far from here. Ten minutes’ walk.”

Now, we get this:

Winding down the path lit only by moonlight, [Callum] passed into the trees and approached the loch that hugged the property.

He waded into the stream, until he stood waist-deep in the cold sting of the water.

Hate to say it, but I don’t think a loch and a stream are the same thing. You’d think Callum would know that, being a bigstrong Scottish kiltman, but what do I know about various bodies of water? A lake is a pond is a river is an ocean, right? It’s all wet anyway so what’s the difference?

Am I stupid? Am I wrong? I’ve never felt like I’m being gaslit by a book before.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Inkjump Linkdump

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

It's the start of a long weekend and I've found myself with a backlog of links, so it's time for another linkdump – the eighteenth in the (occasional) series. Here's the previous installments:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

Kicking off this week's backlog is a piece of epic lawyer-snark, which is something I always love, but what makes this snark total catnip for me is that it's snark about copyfraud: false copyright claims made to censor online speech. Yes please and a second portion, thank you very much!

This starts with the Cola Corporation, a radical LA-based design store that makes lefty t-shirts, stickers and the like. Cola made a t-shirt that remixed the LA Lakers logo to read "Fuck the LAPD." In response, the LAPD's private foundation sent a nonsense copyright takedown letter. Cola's lawyer, Mike Dunford, sent them a chef's-kiss-perfect reply, just two words long: "LOL, no":

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/04/19/apparel-company-gives-perfect-response-to-lapds-nonsense-ip-threat-letter-over-fuck-the-lapd-shirt/

But that's not the lawyer snark I'm writing about today. Dunford also sent a letter to IMG Worldwide, whose lawyers sent the initial threat, demanding an explanation for this outrageous threat, which was – as the physicists say – "not even wrong":

https://www.loweringthebar.net/2024/05/lol-no-explained.html

Every part of the legal threat is dissected here, with lavish, caustic footnotes, mercilessly picking apart the legal defects, including legally actionable copyfraud under DMCA 512(f), which provides for penalties for wrongful copyright threats. To my delight, Dunford cited Lenz here, which is the infamous "Dancing Baby" case that EFF successfully litigated on behalf of Stephanie Lenz, whose video of her adorable (then-)toddler dancing to a few seconds of Prince's "Let's Go Crazy" was censored by Universal Music Group:

https://www.eff.org/cases/lenz-v-universal

Dunford's towering rage is leavened with incredulous demands for explanations: how on Earth could a lawyer knowingly send such a defective, illegal threat? Why shouldn't Dunford seek recovery of his costs from IMG and its client, the LA Police Foundation, for such lawless bullying? It is a sparkling – incandescent, even! – piece of lawyerly writing. If only all legal correspondence was this entertaining! Every 1L should study this.

Meanwhile, Cola has sold out of everything, thanks to that viral "LOL, no." initial response letter. They're taking orders for their next resupply, shipping on June 1. Gotta love that Streisand Effect!

https://www.thecolacorporation.com/

I'm generally skeptical of political activism that takes the form of buying things or refusing to do so. "Voting with your wallet" is a pretty difficult trick to pull off. After all, the people with the thickest wallets get the most votes, and generally, the monopoly party wins. But as the Cola Company's example shows, there's times when shopping can be a political act.

But that's because it's a collective act. Lots of us went and bought stuff from Cola, to send a message to the LAPD about legal bullying. That kind of collective action is hard to pull off, especially when it comes to purchase-decisions. Often, this kind of thing descends into a kind of parody of political action, where you substitute shopping for ideology. This is where Matt Bors's Mr Gotcha comes in: "ooh, you want to make things better, but you bought a product from a tainted company, I guess you're not really sincere, gotcha!"

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

There's a great example of this in Zephyr Teachout's brilliant 2020 book Break 'Em Up: if you miss the pro-union demonstration at the Amazon warehouse because you spent two hours driving around looking for an indie stationer to buy the cardboard to make your protest sign rather than buying it from Amazon, Amazon wins:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/29/break-em-up/#break-em-up

So yeah, I'm pretty skeptical of consumerism as a framework for political activism. It's very hard to pull off an effective boycott, especially of a monopolist. But if you can pull it off, well…

Canada is one of the most monopoly-friendly countries in the world. Hell, the Competition Act doesn't even have an "abuse of dominance" standard! That's like a criminal code that doesn't have a section prohibiting "murder." (The Trudeau government has promised to fix this.)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-an-overhauled-competition-act-will-light-a-fire-in-the-stolid-world-of/

There's stiff competition for Most Guillotineable Canadian Billionaire. There's the entire Irving family, who basically own the province of New Bruinswick:

https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/dynasties-2-the-irvings/

There's Ted Rogers, the trumpy billionaire telecoms monopolist, whose serial acquire-and-loot approach to media has devastated Canadian TV and publishing:

https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/canadaland-725-the-rogers-family-compact/

But then there's Galen Fucking Weston, the nepobaby who inherited the family grocery business (including Loblaw), bought out all his competitors (including Shopper's Drug Mart), and then engaged in a criminal price-fixing conspiracy to rig the price of bread, the most Les-Miz-ass crime imaginable:

https://www.blogto.com/eat_drink/2023/06/what-should-happened-galen-weston-price-fixing/

Weston has made himself the face of the family business, appearing in TV ads in a cardigan to deliver dead-eyed avuncular paeans to his sprawling empire, even as he colludes with competitors to rig the price of his workers' wages:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-12/a-supermarket-billionaire-steps-into-trouble-over-pandemic-wages

For Canadians, Weston is the face of greedflation, the man whose nickle-and-diming knows no shame. This is the man who decided that the discount on nearly-spoiled produce would be slashed from 50% to 30%, who racked up record profits even as his prices skyrocketed.

It's impossible to overstate how loathed Galen Weston is at this moment. There's a very good episode of the excellent new podcast Lately, hosted by Canadian competition expert Vass Bednar and Katrina Onstad that gives you a sense of the national outrage:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/podcasts/lately/article-boycotting-the-loblawpoly/

All of this has led to a national boycott of Loblaw, kicked off by members of the r/loblawsisoutofcontrol, and it's working. Writing for Jacobin, Jeremy Appel gives us a snapshot of a nation in revolt:

https://jacobin.com/2024/05/loblaw-grocery-price-gouge-boycott/

Appel points out the boycott's problems – there's lots of places, particularly in the north, where Loblaw's is the only game in town, or where the sole competitor is the equally odious Walmart. But he also talks about the beneficial effect the boycott is having for independent grocers and co-ops who deal more fairly with their suppliers and their customers.

He also platforms the boycott's call for a national system of price controls on certain staples. This is something that neoliberal economists despise, and it's always fun to watch them lose their minds when the subject is raised. Meanwhile, economists like Isabella M Weber continue to publish careful research explaining how and why price controls can work, and represent our best weapon against "seller's inflation":

https://scholarworks.umass.edu/econ_workingpaper/343/

Antimonopoly sentiment is having a minute, obviously, and the news comes at you fast. This week, the DoJ filed a lawsuit to break up Ticketmaster/Live Nation, one of the country's most notorious monopolists, who have aroused the ire of every kind of fan, but especially the Swifties (don't fuck with Swifties). In announcing the suit, DoJ Antitrust Division boss Jonathan Kanter coined the term "Ticketmaster tax" to describe the junk fees that Ticketmaster uses to pick all our pockets.

In response, Ticketmaster has mobilized its own Loblaw-like shill army, who insist that all the anti-monopoly activism is misguided populism, and "anti-business." In his BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller tears these claims apart, and provides one of the clearest explanations of how Ticketmaster rips us all off that I've ever seen, leaning heavily on Ticketmaster's own statements to their investors and the business-press:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/antitrust-enforcers-to-break-up-ticketmaster

Ticketmaster has a complicated "flywheel" that it uses to corner the market on live events, mixing low-margin businesses that are deliberately kept unprofitable (to prevent competitors from gaining a foothold) in order to capture the high-margin businesses that are its real prize. All this complexity can make your eyes glaze over, and that's to Ticketmaster's benefit, keeping normies from looking too closely at how this bizarre self-licking ice-cream cone really works.

But for industry insiders, those workings are all too clear. When Rebecca Giblin and I were working on our book Chokepoint Capitalism, we talked to insiders from every corner of the entertainment-industrial complex, and there was always at least one expert who'd go on record about the scams inside everything from news monopolies to streaming video to publishing and the record industry:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

The sole exception was Ticketmaster/Live Nation. When we talked to club owners, promoters and other victims of TM's scam, they universally refused to go on the record. They were palpably terrified of retaliation from Ticketmaster's enforcers. They acted like mafia informants seeking witness protection. Not without reason, mind you: back when the TM monopoly was just getting started, Pearl Jam – then one of the most powerful acts in American music – took a stand against them. Ticketmaster destroyed them. That was when TM was a mere hatchling, with a bare fraction of the terrifying power it wields today.

TM is a great example of the problem with boycotts. If a club or an act refuses to work with TM/LN, they're destroyed. If a fan refuses to buy tickets from TM or see a Live Nation show, they basically can't go to any shows. The TM monopoly isn't a problem of bad individual choices – it's a systemic problem that needs a systemic response.

That's what makes antitrust responses so timely. Federal enforcers have wide-ranging powers, and can seek remedies that consumerism can never attain – there's no way a boycott could result in a breakup of Ticketmaster/Live Nation, but a DoJ lawsuit can absolutely get there.

Every federal agency has wide-ranging antimonopoly powers at its disposal. These are laid out very well in Tim Wu's 2020 White House Executive Order on competition, which identifies 72 ways the agencies can act against monopoly without having to wait for Congress:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

But of course, the majority of antimonopoly power is vested in the FTC, the agency created to police corporate power. Section 5 of the FTC Act grants the agency the power to act to prevent "unfair and deceptive methods of competition":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

This clause has lain largely dormant since the Reagan era, but FTC chair Lina Khan has revived it, using it to create muscular privacy rights for Americans, and to ban noncompete agreements that bind American workers to dead-end jobs:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/25/capri-v-tapestry/#aiming-at-dollars-not-men

The FTC's power to ban activity because it's "unfair and deceptive" is exciting, because it promises American internet users a way to solve their problems beyond copyright law. Copyright law is basically the only law that survived the digital transition, even as privacy, labor and consumer protection rights went into hibernation. The last time Congress gave us a federal consumer privacy law was 1988, and it's a law that bans video store clerks from telling the newspapers which VHS cassettes you rented:

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

That's left internet users desperately trying to contort copyright to solve every problem they have – like someone trying to build a house using nothing but chainsaw. For example, I once found someone impersonating me on a dating site, luring strangers into private spaces. Alarmed, I contacted the dating site, who told me that their only fix for this was for me to file a copyright claim against the impersonator to make them remove the profile photo. Now, that photo was Creative Commons licensed, so any takedown notice would have been a "LOL, no." grade act of copyfraud:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/the-internets-original-sin/

The unsuitability of copyright for solving complex labor and privacy problems hasn't stopped people who experience these problems from trying to use copyright to solve them. They've got nothing else, after all.

That's why everyone who's worried about the absolutely legitimate and urgent concerns over AI and labor and privacy has latched onto copyright as the best tool for resolving these questions, despite copyright's total unsuitability for this purpose, and the strong likelihood that this will make these problems worse:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand

Enter FTC Chair Lina Khan, who has just announced that her agency will be reviewing AI model training as an "unfair and deceptive method of competition":

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4682461-ftc-chair-ai-models-could-violate-antitrust-laws/

If the agency can establish this fact, they will have sweeping powers to craft rules prohibiting the destructive and unfair uses of AI, without endangering beneficial activities like scraping, mathematical analysis, and the creation of automated systems that help with everything from adding archival metadata to exonerating wrongly convicted people rotting in prison:

https://hrdag.org/tech-notes/large-language-models-IPNO.html

I love this so much. Khan's announcement accomplishes the seemingly impossible: affirming that there are real problems and insisting that we employ tactics that can actually fix those problems, rather than just doing something because inaction is so frustrating.

That's something we could use a lot more of, especially in platform regulation. The other big tech news about Big Tech last week was the progress of a bill that would repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act at the end of 2025, without any plans to replace it with something else.

Section 230 is the most maligned, least understood internet law, and that's saying something:

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/

Its critics wrongly accuse the law – which makes internet users liable for bad speech acts, not the platforms that carry that speech – of being a gift to Big Tech. That's totally wrong. Without Section 230, platforms could be named to lawsuits arising from their users' actions. We know how that would play out.

Back in 2018, Congress took a big chunk out of 230 when they passed SESTA/FOSTA, a law that makes platforms liable for any sex trafficking that is facilitated by their platforms. Now, this may sound like a narrowly targeted, beneficial law that aims at a deplorable, unconscionable crime. But here's how it played out: the platforms decided that it was too much trouble to distinguish sex trafficking from any sex-work, including consensual sex work and adjacent activities. The result? Consensual sex-work became infinitely more dangerous and precarious, while trafficking was largely unaffected:

https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-21-385.pdf

Eliminating 230 would be incredibly reckless under any circumstances, but after the SESTA/FOSTA experience, it's unforgivable. The Big Tech platforms will greet this development by indiscriminately wiping out any kind of controversial speech from marginalized groups (think #MeToo or Black Lives Matter). Meanwhile, the rich and powerful will get a new tool – far more powerful than copyfraud – to make inconvenient speech disappear. The war-criminals, rapists, murderers and rip-off artists who currently make do with bogus copyright claims to "manage their reputations" will be able to use pretextual legal threats to make their critics just disappear:

https://www.qurium.org/forensics/dark-ops-undercovered-episode-i-eliminalia/

In a post-230 world, Cola Corporation's lawyers wouldn't get a chance to reply to the LAPD's bullying lawyers – those lawyers would send their letter to Cola's hosting provider, who would weigh the possibility of being named in a lawsuit against the small-dollar monthly payment they get from Cola, and poof, no more Cola. The legal bullies could do the same for Cola's email provider, their payment processor, their anti-DoS provider.

This week on EFF's Deeplinks blog, I published a piece making the connection between abolishing Section 230 and reinforcing Big Tech monopolies:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/05/wanna-make-big-tech-monopolies-even-worse-kill-section-230

The Big Tech platforms really do suck, and the solution to their systemic, persistent moderation failures won't come from making them liable for users' speech. The platforms have correctly assessed that they alone have the legal and moderation staff to do the kinds of mass-deletions of controversial speech that could survive a post-230 world. That's why tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg love the idea of getting rid of 230:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/facebooks-pitch-congress-section-230-me-not-thee

But for small tech providers – individuals, co-ops, nonprofits and startups that host fediverse servers, standalone group chats and BBSes – a post-230 world is a mass-extinction event. Ever had a friend demand that you take sides in an interpersonal dispute ("if you invite her to the party, I'm not coming!").

Imagine if your refusal to take sides in a dispute among your friends – and their friends, and their friends – could result in you being named to a suit that could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to settle:

https://www.engine.is/news/primer/section230costs

It's one thing to hope for a more humane internet run by people who want to make hospitable forums for online communities to form. It's another to ask them to take on an uninsurable risk that could result in the loss of their home, their retirement account, and their life's savings.

A post-230 world is one in which Big Tech must delete first and ask questions later. Yes, Big Tech platforms have many sins to answer for, but making them jointly liable for their users' speech will flush out treasure-hunters seeking a quick settlement and a quick buck.

Again, this isn't speculative – it's inevitable. Consider FTX: yes, the disgraced cryptocurrency exchange was a festering hive of fraud – but there's no way that fraud added up to the 23.6 quintillion dollars in claims that have been laid against it:

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/US-v-SBF-Alameda-Research-Victim-Impact-Statement-3-20-2024.pdf

Without 230, Big Tech will shut down anything controversial – and small tech will disappear. It's the worst of all possible worlds, a gift to tech monopolists and the bullies and crooks who have turned our online communities into shooting galleries.

One of the reasons I love working for EFF is our ability to propose technologically informed, sound policy solutions to the very real problems that tech creates, such as our work on interoperability as a way to make it easier for users to escape Big Tech:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

Every year, EFF recognizes the best, bravest and brightest contributors to a better internet and a better technological future, with our annual EFF Awards. Nominations just opened for this year's awards – if you know someone who fits the bill, here's the form:

https://www.eff.org/nominations-open-2024-eff-awards

It's nearly time for me to sign off on this weekend's linkdump. For one thing, I have to vacate my backyard hammock, because we've got contractors who need to access the side of the house to install our brand new heat-pump (one of two things I'm purchasing with my last lump-sum book advance – the other is corrective cataract surgery that will give me lifelong, perfect vision).

I've been lusting after a heat-pump for years, and they just keep getting better – though you might not know it, thanks to the fossil-fuel industry disinfo campaign that insists that these unbelievably cool gadgets don't work. This week in Wired, Matt Simon offers a comprehensive debunking of this nonsense, and on the way, explains the nearly magical technology that allows a heat pump to heat a midwestern home in the dead of winter:

https://www.wired.com/story/myth-heat-pumps-cold-weather-freezing-subzero/

As heat pumps become more common, their applications will continue to proliferate. On Bloomberg, Feargus O'Sullivan describes one such application: the Japanese yokushitsu kansouki – a sealed bathroom with its own heat-pump that can perfectly dry all your clothes while you're out at work:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-22/laundry-lessons-from-japanese-bathroom-technology

This is amazing stuff – it uses less energy than a clothes-dryer, leaves your clothes wrinkle-free, prevents the rapid deterioration caused by high heat and mechanical agitation, and prevents the microfiber pollution that lowers our air-quality.

This is the most solarpunk thing I've read all week, and it makes me insanely jealous of Japanese people. The second-most solarpunk thing I've read this week came from The New Republic, where Aaron Regunberg and Donald Braman discuss the possibility of using civil asset forfeiture laws – lately expanded to farcical levels by the Supreme Court in Culley – to force the fossil fuel industry to pay for the energy transition:

https://newrepublic.com/article/181721/fossil-fuels-civil-forefeiture-pipeline-climate

They point out that the fossil fuel industry has committed a string of undisputed crimes, including fraud, and that the Supremes' new standard for asset forfeiture could comfortably accommodate state AGs and other enforcers who seek billions from Big Oil on this basis. Of course, Big Oil has more resources to fight civil asset forfeiture than the median disputant in these cases ("a low- or moderate-income person of color [with] a suspected connection to drugs"). But it's an exciting idea!

All right, the heat-pump guys really need me to vacate the hammock, so here's one last quickie for you: Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier's new paper, "Seeing Like a Data Structure":

https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/seeing-data-structure

This is a masterful riff on James C Scott's classic Seeing Like a State, and it describes how digitalization forces us into computable categories, and counts the real costs of doing so. It's a gnarly and thoughtful piece, and it's been on my mind continuously since Schneier sent it to me yesterday. Something suitably chewy for you to masticate over the long weekend!

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/2024/05/25/anthology/#lol-no

[teopatra]

✨🤭 BIENVENUE 👋🏽👋🏻👋👋🏿

Let me preface by sayin, I went on Google, found some images, saved these images, but I DO not own them and i am NOT citing my source 😆 BC I CAN *karlie red’s voice* teehee yes I did yes I did somebody plz tell ‘em who the EFF I IS 🤪 I’ll give updates if someone takes legal actions 🥳

♍️Pick a fictional Virgo♍️

Since it’s both Virgo season ANND mercury rx im going to be doing a lot of readings themed around this season for research 🧐 purposes 🤓

1. Rue (real life ♍️ Zendaya)

What do you need to work on?

Either you have an unhealthy addiction or attachment to something OR you need to be focusing more on something like your life depends on it due to either procrastination, laziness, self loathing/not believing in yourself ENOUGH OR just not dedicating enough time to something. If you have an unhealthy attachment to something like social media or video games, know that it’s okay to indulge in certain things but you have to have balance and know wen it’s time to take a break.. your screen time could be high but if that’s the case how are you using that time to create content or make that fun thing lucrative for yourself. You can make tiktoks even if you may think it’s stupid bc the views will bring more traffic to your page but only if the intentions are good and you aren’t harming anything or displaying inappropriate behaviors. Also if you play video games you can stream, if you like to read you can do voice memos and turn it into a podcast, reel, YouTube video and you don’t even have to show your face. I’m getting mercurial energy from this pile bc it’s something to do with your voice and hands .. maybe you build, play instrument, make beats, sing, do ASMR whatever ..

Additional Messages: while mercury is in retrograde this is a good time to work on your craft not perfect it just work on it.. beginning stages will not exhibit perfection so if that’s what you expect out of yourself there is where the shadow work needs to be done. You need to make a schedule; it doesn’t have to be time exact focused but you need to have better intentions for your day.. you need to strengthen your upper body especially the arms.. practice breath work and work on healing and or balancing your lower chakras: root chakra, sacral chakra and or solar plexus whatever one resonates with you..

2. Hermoine Granger 📚

What is holding you back?

Your mouth is holding you back because you don’t understand what it means to move in silence. Just because you didn’t tell people about it or show the internet doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Learn how to enjoy the beauty of life on your own. People will begin to see right thru you and not take you serious if you’re always posting every little thing. Know your own worth, other people see it but it doesn’t seem like you’re being authentic to your true self. Maybe you tried doing shadow work and wanted to reinvent yourself; but who are you trying to be like? If you’re not being you then you’re being a carbon copy and that will just lead you down a path of self destruction.

Additional Messages: I see you’re experiencing some type of food allergy maybe gluten or dairy and hormonal imbalances. You will benefit from journaling, sound baths, and meditation music. Gemini energy somewhere in your chart maybe your moon; if it’s difficult for you to quiet the mind rn maybe bc of issues within the family relating to health or finances then you have to unwind the mind. It’ll take time, (bars) maybe you want to write music is so then do it.. work on the crown chakra, heart chakra, sacral and solar plexus chakras, you really need to recalibrate cuz you’re out of wack and your body or tummy is stressed

3. Bella Swan 🦢

How can you hold yourself accountable?

You use other people’s problems as a way to distract yourself because you want to feel needed by other people. You refuse to do things for yourself or by yourself bc maybe you realize that wen you’re by yourself you’re really sad or lonely.. figure out the root of this sadness and loneliness and heal your trauma. Tell yourself that what happened to you is NOT YOUR FAULT. People will still love you even if you aren’t available for them at the moment, if they’re meant to be in your life they’ll understand. But you don’t want to accept the fact that the people you hold dear to you are probably not meant to be in your life at this time.

Additional Messages: are you using your financial status and material meals to define your happiness? Who would you be without those things? Who are you? Do you even know? You’ve been going thru the motions for so long, that you’ve put your true desires in life aside bc you feel guilty . Heavy guilt issues, check your sun sign and your Saturn and the houses they’re in.. Heal your root chakra and if you’re going thru a Saturn return you better understand what that means for you now since the start of it until the end or else you’ll have to wait another 27 years to really dive into what you love…

4. Frodo Baggins 🧝🏽‍♀️

Where you need to communicate better…

If you have a speech impediment or your first language is diff than those around you causing language barriers do NOT be afraid to express yourself. If anyone makes fun of you for the way you speak they’re a loser and work on your confidence so this doesn’t bring you down. You know what you’re trying to say so maybe work on how to express yourself better with words. You may deal with self doubt, insecurity, trauma, and you may shut down when you feel like others don’t understand you. It’s mercury retrograde and I see for the next 3 weeks people just may not listen , that doesn’t mean talk louder, that doesn’t mean argue, become a better listener and this will help you with your communication. I feel Aquarian energy like you’re different and the ones who know you understand when you speak but you have to have balance and be able to speak in all aspects don’t be afraid or shy it’s okay.

Additional Messages: check your 11th house, and aspects to your Aquarius house, work on your throat chakra and your root chakra. If you’re in school for psychology or you’re an astrologer then you already have the answers you seek you just don’t trust yourself so work on the heart chakra as well.. idk why you don’t trust yourself you’re actually very intelligent but you have some type of disability maybe, confidence and time will strengthen this

5. Jorah Mormont 🗡️

What isn’t working for you anymore?

other people opinions aren’t working for you; you keep allowing people to put their 2 cents in when you need to trust your gut. You have a very keen eye and people feel important wen you ask their input. It’s okay to ask advice from others time to time but ask the universe, the divine, your spirit team, and or your higher self to enlighten you. There may some evil eye around you in regards to your work, others see that your hard work will lead you to success but people feel left out and want to siphon all your energy. Insecure and low vibrational people aren’t working for you. Your challenge rn is to know wen is a good time to just put your phone on DND and do you whether it’s rest or meditation. Strong Leo energy, check your sun sign your 5th house and anything aspecting your Leo house.

Additional Messages: you may need more sunlight or you may need to use more sunblock so you don’t get radiation poisoning. Or some of you could be outside n the sun too much which is draining you in some way. Vitamins could benefit you or orange foods like oranges and carrots. Maybe try drinking smoothies, cut out carbonated drinks and snacks high in sodium, it’s causing brain fog and memory loss. Fatigue is happening to you bc you’re probably over worked and don’t drink enough water or the right type of water.

6. Neo 👽

How to be more productive?

Be more imaginative , be more delusional, exercise your neptunian or piscerian energy by making your dream or fantasy world reality. You need to strengthen your psychic abilities maybe by asking the universe or higher power to give you a sign.. work on your telepathy by imaging a certain object you want the universe to use to communicate with you to affirm. Stop doubting your intuition just because it may scare you. If you believe that we live in a simulation and nothing is real then why are you allowing this reality to bring you down. Pretend you’re in a video game or movie and you’re the main character or final boss. You may need to move your body more bc your blood isn’t circulating enough or properly esp if your body parts have been falling asleep lately

Additional Messages: it would benefit you to detox, drink more water and take on a healthier diet or lifestyle because something is clouding your judgement and intuition. Check your chart for what planets are in your 12th house or aspecting your Pisces placements. You’re in a self deprecating mode rn and you have to snap out of it. Eat less meat especially if you’re a water sign bc you’re taking on the energies of those unalive animals your eating you feel their pain.. also stop eating GMO food for 60 days…

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

3:03 on the clock

[wreckingtickles]

Link (Legend of Zelda) Headcanons

Cards on the table, I hoped against hope that Hard Time would do better than it did, though I'm really happy that many of the people whose support I value the most seem to have read it! So while I reassess, have some headcanons I didn't post before! Don't worry tho, Izuku is still getting it really soon :-P And I'm still holding out hope for the lees Kiri and Baku story (nearly 1/3rd of the votes in the poll!)

But now it's Leenk time!

Link is so cute I have been playing TotK without any armor just to gawk at him (why I do need to get out more, thank you).

With how much everyone's Link effs around Hyrule so much, Zelda should have him sent to the tickle dungeons and/or let the Gerudo take care of her punishment for an equal amount of time. Though I also kind of ship him with Sidon (yes, I know he's a breeder, and I hope it's clear I'm using that term for "edgy" humor).

By the way, if you haven't, check out @dokidoki-muffin's three Link pieces (some of which may be marked as NSFW) - I've seen very few pieces succeeding at capturing utter ticklish agony as well as this one, and the way the lers' fingers are animated really add to the verbal teasing, it really sells that Link is completely at their mercy and can't do anything about it! This is an incredible precursor and you're under the impression that there are even more hands tickling Link than are actually drawn, and again, it really sells that they're sadistically toying with him. And if you want head-to-toe tickles, there's this piece.

Oh, and how could I forget about our @lovelymessybubbly's own Leenk pieces! This one is a comic with lee Link at the end, but this one if my favorite full-body piece.

Anyway, here's our ticklish hero of Hyrule!

Since I included his ears, I left out a spot where he's not super ticklish imo, and since this headcanon isn't NSFW, you can probably imagine what it is lol

Smiling (4.5-5.5): Link's ribs are a pretty manageable spot, he's not every sensitive there. Light tickles with long fingernails work best here and will get him to scrunch up his face in an extremely adorable way.

Giggling (6-7): Tickling these spots for just a few seconds will force Link to make some kind of sound - generally, very cute titters.

Laughing (7.5-8.5): Link's ears, underarms, sides, hips, thighs, and feet are all pretty ticklish spots! And you may not expect it, but a hard touch works best, except on his ears. Tickling his ears too gently might result in... side effects.

Howling (9-10): Twink's worst spot that will break the silent hero in two seconds flat is his V-line, and if I latched on to those child-birthing hips of his, I wouldn't let go. Scribbling with your fingers tickles way more than he'd expect and results in an endless stream of high-pitched cackling, while digging your thumbs in and massaging the area causes him to freak out, bucking and screaming.

[4dkellysworld]

Hello kelly! 🫶

When i ask my mind "can I let go of this fear of XYZ happening to the body-mind" it often feels scared of doing so. The body starts reacting with anxiety about the thought of me letting go of the my fear of XYZ. There is this false sense of control telling me: "If you let go of the fear of XYZ, if you dont keep it in mind, you will not avoid the actions that may lead to XYZ and you'll end up experiencing what you fear, let me do this to prevent it from happening, let me affirm it wont happen, let me manifest somethimg that prevents it from happening etc".

I know it's a false sense of control, fear arises when I ask myself to let go of this anxiety about the future and this specific incident (XYZ) happening to this body-mind. Its been a few months of fighting this fear but it only grows. I think I tried everything that came my way.

Often I will try to observe and let the thoughts pass, is everything the mind thinks of so true anyways? I will experience a few minutes of peace before I'm caught up in the tangles of my mind again, before I'm again saying this and that and avoiding this and that to avoid a specific incident from happening to this mind-body.

I wanna calm my mind down and let my ego know that it's okay if I let go, sometimes I will feel like I need some conformation that it's safe to let go. That if I act however I want, let go of the fear and ignore all these "rules" I forced myself to follow that I will still be okay and that this body-mind will not experience what it fears in the future. I feel like the missing piece would be to actually understand the point of letting go of a problem, does this problem actually disappear when I stop giving attention to it? Will the body-mind actually not experience the fear when I as self let go or this fear and break all the rules that "keep me safe"? I know self would be okay in some sense but what about the body?

Or does it anyways happen to the body-mind and there is nothing I can do to stop it from happening to this body-mind and I'm just letting go for my own peace?

I'm kinda new to this (been 1.5 months of me reading and trying to apply, succeeding sometimes and failing sometimes), I'm still learning but I'm not sure if I really get the concept of "not giving so much attention to a problem"..does it then cease to exist? Or is it just so that it doesn't impact me mentally as much (I'm not belittling this outcome, I'd love to have this outcome anyways) I know its very foolish to only let go of fear out of hope that this is the way to prevent any incident from happening but a part of me asks for an obvious answer telling me that this body-mind will not encounter what I'm fearing if I let go of the fear.

I see this type of question often getting answered with "You're not the body-mind, whatever happens to it isn't happening to you" but what if i would prefer if the body-mind didn't experience XYZ, do I have any type of control over that? Will letting go offer safety for the body and will it help this body-mind not experience its fear with the senses/ "in the 3D" ?

If I let go of this worry and decide I don't even have to replace it with peace, if I choose to completely cut ties with how the body-mind is suffering with this and how it's very fearful and decide that I will treat this fear the way I treat the fear of a friend or a character in a movie I'm watching, with empathy but without dwelling on it, while being so grateful it isnt really my problem to deal with. Will I in some way prevent it from happening to the body-mind? I experienced freedom from this feeling for almost 3 times now, all lasted for only a few minutes..but they were a cool breeze I wanted to make my default state. I'm not sure how to however. And I'm also not sure if it could prevent anything from happening to this body-mind but I sure know I hope it does.

And generally do you have any advice for me other than to observe the thoughts and let them pass since this has a very temporary effect on me? Is there any other path I can experiment with to let go of my fearful thoughts?

Thanks in advance, I'd definitely appreciate it if you answered this since what you say often seems to be aligning with me/understandable the most but it's up to you if you didn't feel like you want to. Hope you're always well, Kelly :)

When i ask my mind "can I let go of this fear of XYZ happening to the body-mind" it often feels scared of doing so. The body starts reacting with anxiety about the thought of me letting go of the my fear of XYZ.

Two of my recent posts should help as other anons have similar concerns: here and here. Whatever I don't respond to in your ask has been covered by these.

Its been a few months of fighting this fear but it only grows. I think I tried everything that came my way.

So don't fight it. Let it be. Read the two posts I linked above and apply.

Often I will try to observe and let the thoughts pass, is everything the mind thinks of so true anyways?

No, none of it is true until you assign it truth. This is why sadhana is necessary, so you learn to separate yourself from your mind.

Your thoughts, beliefs and sense of identity are intangible, arbitrarily constructed and constantly changing. Yet they seem so very real and you invest them with a tremendous sense of ownership and 'my-ness'. In our minds we create a whole subjective world, which we then superimpose on the objective world and mistake for reality. Most people are unable to separate the objective world from their subjective interpretation of it. That's why identification with mind and thought can be even harder to break than identification with body. Mithya, which is simply a configuration of name and form, always relies upon satya for its existence. The ability to differentiate between satya and mithya is crucial to liberating the mind. Confusing satya and mithya is the root of all our sorrows. By a process of mutual superimposition, we superimpose the quality of satya (existence) onto an object, believing that the object itself possesses an inherent existence of its own rather than a temporary, borrowed existence. At the same time, we superimpose the qualities of mithya (name/form) onto satya (existence). That's why we take the body and mind's attributes to belong to the Self. Like the clear water which, due to its proximity to the red glass bottle, appears to be red, the Self then appears to possess the properties of the body and mind. That's why we say, "I am happy," "I am sad," "I am fat," "I am thin." This is an error of perception caused by ignorance. As Krishna said, the Self is free of all attributes, and without limit or objectification. If the Self is limitless and without attribute, how could it - how could you possibly be happy, sad, fat, or thin? As long as you identify with the body or mind, you are subject to its miseries. But the moment you shift your identity from mithya to satya, from the body and mind to awareness, you are freed of all limitation.

Does this problem actually disappear when I stop giving attention to it? Will the body-mind actually not experience the fear when I as self let go or this fear and break all the rules that "keep me safe"? I know self would be okay in some sense but what about the body?

Suppressing attention and ignoring something that you believe to be a problem will not make it disappear; you've just pushed it to the back of your mind. Actually letting go and no longer seeing it as a problem or fearing it will dissipate it - you cannot lie to yourself so be honest with yourself. The how-to is in the posts I linked above.

Will I in some way prevent it from happening to the body-mind? I experienced freedom from this feeling for almost 3 times now, all lasted for only a few minutes

You just answered your own question. Some people can do what you're describing and genuinely stop seeing it as a problem but you have already tried and it didn't last because you weren't able to truly let go and stop giving it truth and reality. So try letting go another way (linked posts above).

And generally do you have any advice for me other than to observe the thoughts and let them pass since this has a very temporary effect on me? Is there any other path I can experiment with to let go of my fearful thoughts?

Yes, read the two linked posts and apply. That's the advice I offer you and anyone else with similar concerns. Release the fears and see them gone. Free yourself.