#fake it until you dont make it

[mostlysignssomeportents]

You were promised a jetpack by liars

TONIGHT (May 17), I'm at the INTERNET ARCHIVE in SAN FRANCISCO to keynote the 10th anniversary of the AUTHORS ALLIANCE.

As a science fiction writer, I find it weird that some sf tropes – like space colonization – have become culture-war touchstones. You know, that whole "we were promised jetpacks" thing.

I confess, I never looked too hard at the practicalities of jetpacks, because they are so obviously either used as a visual shorthand (as in the Jetsons) or as a metaphor. Even a brief moment's serious consideration should make it clear why we wouldn't want the distracted, stoned, drunk, suicidal, homicidal maniacs who pilot their two-ton killbots through our residential streets at 75mph to be flying over our heads with a reservoir of high explosives strapped to their backs.

Jetpacks can make for interesting sf eyeball kicks or literary symbols, but I don't actually want to live in a world of jetpacks. I just want to read about them, and, of course, write about them:

https://reactormag.com/chicken-little/

I had blithely assumed that this was the principle reason we never got the jetpacks we were "promised." I mean, there kind of was a promise, right? I grew up seeing videos of rocketeers flying their jetpacks high above the heads of amazed crowds, at World's Fairs and Disneyland and big public spectacles. There was that scene in Thunderball where James Bond (the canonical Connery Bond, no less) makes an escape by jetpack. There was even a Gilligan's Island episode where the castaways find a jetpack and scheme to fly it all the way back to Hawai'i:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0588084/

Clearly, jetpacks were possible, but they didn't make any sense, so we decided not to use them, right?

Well, I was wrong. In a terrific new 99 Percent Invisible episode, Chris Berube tracks the history of all those jetpacks we saw on TV for decades, and reveals that they were all the same jetpack, flown by just one guy, who risked his life every time he went up in it:

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/rocket-man/

The jetpack in question – technically a "rocket belt" – was built in the 1960s by Wendell Moore at the Bell Aircraft Corporation, with funding from the DoD. The Bell rocket belt used concentrated hydrogen peroxide as fuel, which burned at temperatures in excess of 1,000'. The rocket belt had a maximum flight time of just 21 seconds.

It was these limitations that disqualified the rocket belt from being used by anyone except stunt pilots with extremely high tolerances for danger. Any tactical advantage conferred on infantrymen by the power to soar over a battlefield for a whopping 21 seconds was totally obliterated by the fact that this infantryman would be encumbered by an extremely heavy, unwieldy and extremely explosive backpack, to say nothing of the high likelihood that rocketeers would plummet out of the sky after failing to track the split-second capacity of a jetpack.

And of course, the rocket belt wasn't going to be a civilian commuting option. If your commute can be accomplished in just 21 seconds of flight time, you should probably just walk, rather than strapping an inferno to your back and risking a lethal fall if you exceed a margin of error measured in just seconds.

Once you know about the jetpack's technical limitations, it's obvious why we never got jetpacks. So why did we expect them? Because we were promised them, and the promise was a lie.

Moore was a consummate showman, which is to say, a bullshitter. He was forever telling the press that his jetpacks would be on everyone's back in one to two years, and he got an impressionable young man, Bill Suitor, to stage showy public demonstrations of the rocket belt. If you ever saw a video of a brave rocketeer piloting a jetpack, it was almost certainly Suitor. Suitor was Connery's stunt-double in Thunderball, and it was he who flew the rocket belt around Sleeping Beauty castle.

Suitor's interview with Berube for the podcast is delightful. Suitor is a hilarious, profane old airman who led an extraordinary life and tells stories with expert timing, busting out great phrases like "a surprise is a fart with a lump in it."

But what's most striking about the tale of the Bell rocket belt is the shape of the deception that Moore and Bell pulled off. By conspicuously failing to mention the rocket belt's limitations, and by callously risking Suitor's life over and over again, they were able to create the impression that jetpacks were everywhere, and that they were trembling on the verge of widespread, popular adoption.

What's more, they played a double game: all the public enthusiasm they manufactured with their carefully stage-managed, canned demos was designed to help them win more defense contracts to keep their dream alive. Ultimately, Uncle Sucker declined to continue funding their boondoggle, and the demos petered out, and the "promise" of a jetpack was broken.

As I listened to the 99 Percent Invisible episode, I was struck by the familiarity of this shuck: this is exactly what the self-driving car bros did over the past decade to convince us all that the human driver was already obsolete. The playbook was nearly identical, right down to the shameless huckster insisting that "full self-driving is one to two years away" every year for a decade:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/23/23837598/tesla-elon-musk-self-driving-false-promises-land-of-the-giants

The Potemkin rocket belt was a calculated misdirection, as are the "full self-driving" demos that turn out to be routine, pre-programmed runs on carefully manicured closed tracks:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tesla-autopilot-staged-engineer-says-company-faked-full-autopilot/

Practical rocketeering wasn't ever "just around the corner," because a flying, 21 second blast-furnace couldn't be refined into a practical transport. Making the tank bigger would not make this thing safer or easier to transport.

The jetpack showman hoped to cash out by tricking Uncle Sucker into handing him a fat military contract. Robo-car scammers used their conjurer's tricks to cash out to the public markets, taking Uber public on the promise of robo-taxis, even as Uber's self-driving program burned through $2.5b and produced a car with a half-mile mean time between fatal collisions, which the company had to pay someone else $400m to take the business off their hands:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

It's not just self-driving cars. Time and again, the incredibly impressive AI demos that the press credulously promotes turn out to be scams. The dancing robot on stage at the splashy event is literally a guy in a robot-suit:

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musks-ai-day-tesla-bot-is-just-a-guy-in-a-bodysuit-2021-8

The Hollywood-killing, AI-produced video prompting system is so cumbersome to use, and so severely limited, that it's arguably worse than useless:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/expectations-versus-reality/

The centuries' worth of progress the AI made in discovering new materials actually "discovered" a bunch of trivial variations on existing materials, as well as a huge swathe of materials that only exist at absolute zero:

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

The AI grocery store where you just pick things up and put them in your shopping basket without using the checkout turns out to be a call-center full of low-waged Indian workers desperately squinting at videos of you, trying to figure out what you put in your bag:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins

The discovery of these frauds somehow never precipitates disillusionment. Rather than getting angry with marketers for tricking them, reporters are ventriloquized into repeating the marketing claim that these aren't lies, they're premature truths. Sure, today these are faked, but once the product is refined, the fakery will no longer be required.

This must be the kinds of Magic Underpants Gnomery the credulous press engaged in during the jetpack days: "Sure, a 21-second rocket belt is totally useless for anything except wowing county fair yokels – but once they figure out how to fit an order of magnitude more high-explosive onto that guy's back, this thing will really take off!"

The AI version of this is that if we just keep throwing orders of magnitude more training data and compute at the stochastic parrot, it will eventually come to life and become our superintelligent, omnipotent techno-genie. In other words, if we just keep breeding these horses to run faster and faster, eventually one of our prize mares will give birth to a locomotive:

https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

As a society, we have vested an alarming amount of power in the hands of tech billionaires who profess to be embittered science fiction fans who merely want to realize the "promises" of our Golden Age stfnal dreams. These bros insist that they can overcome both the technical hurdles and the absolutely insurmountable privation involved in space colonization:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

They have somehow mistaken Neal Stephenson's dystopian satirical "metaverse" for a roadmap:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/18/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video/

As Charlie Stross writes, it's not just that these weirdos can't tell the difference between imaginative parables about the future and predictions about the future – it's also that they keep mistaking dystopias for business plans:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tech-billionaires-need-to-stop-trying-to-make-the-science-fiction-they-grew-up-on-real/

Cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion. Please, I beg you, stop building the fucking torment nexus:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/torment-nexus

These techno-billionaires profess to be fulfilling a broken promise, but surely they know that the promises were made by liars – showmen using parlor tricks to sell the impossible. You were "promised a jetpack" in the same sense that table-rapping "spiritualists" promised you a conduit to talk with the dead, or that carny barkers promised you a girl that could turn into a gorilla:

https://milwaukeerecord.com/film/ape-girl-shes-alive-documentary-november-11-sugar-maple/

That's quite a supervillain origin story: "I was promised a jetpack, but then I grew up discovered that it was just a special effect. In revenge, I am promising you superintelligent AIs and self-driving cars, and these, too, are SFX."

In other words: "Die a disillusioned jetpack fan or live long enough to become the fraudster who cooked up the jetpack lie you despise."

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/2024/05/17/fake-it-until-you-dont-make-it/#twenty-one-seconds

[ganondoodle]

i am being so brave trying so hard to hold back writing a rant about that 'minimizing narrative noise' comment on totk sage concept art bc its actively flying around in my head like the worlds most annoying fly

[welcometoteyvat]

jing yuan and yanqing are giving zhongli and xiao if the latter’s canon relationship was Actually fanon’s made up father figure/adopted child dynamic

[good-beans]

(Milgram self-insert oc masterpost hehe)

Name: For the sake of posting online I’ll call her Rose!

Color: #E7355B [the pink in the art]

Age: I guess she’d be 20 given when Milgram started huh.

Status: Milgram Staff, Machine Technician

Symbols/imagery: ballet/musical theater, science experiments

Song genre: very similar to Mahiru's, something upbeat and extra pop-y

Tentatively she's number 011? She's not really prisoner but she's also not free to come and go, so I'm not actually sure if she'd get a number (Edit: I've decided she'll actually be 012. Staff is given the 01X range, and even though Es doesn't actively have a number they'd be staff member 011, making her 012.)

Story: Since the project is supposed to be realistic/present day, the mv machine would be brand new and unpredictable tech, so they’d want someone keeping up on maintenance and making sure the brain-invasive process won’t cause any harm to the prisoners. Rose was studying abroad in Japan working on some cool neuroscience tech (irl I know nothing about technology or brains but shh) and she stumbled upon some secret tech/plans from Milgram. Long story short, she was dragged into the experiment to make sure things ran smoothly.

Writer's Reasoning: She’s really fun for me to play around with, as she allows me to work with a character who has a tiny bit of pull over Es’ mindset in conversation but not the final decision (aka mirroring the voting system), and someone who is simultaneously trapped in the prison but has a reason to see all the canon content.* I really enjoy the character interactions and dynamics Milgram has set up so far, so it’s been super fun seeing how things change for better and worse when someone not quite aligned with either Milgram/the prisoners is thrown into the mix!

*As much as I love dramatic irony in fiction, it would drive me crazy if I knew every detail of of the vds/mvs but Rose didn't – and every single Milgram character is The Worst Communicator Ever so I couldn’t justify that she’d hear it secondhand from them...

Story roles:

She’s a bit conflicted -- she’s officially Milgram staff and knows she should remain neutral on the prisoners, since she won’t be allowed to interfere with the process/executions. At the same time, her job description is literally “make sure the machine doesn't hurt them and everyone's safe :)” and she's way too emotional to avoid getting hopelessly attached to everyone 😅

I really enjoy the theory that the machine extracts videos based off of priming, so one of Rose’s duties involves listening in on the interrogation and making sure there’s been enough material discussed/not too much time has passed overall (hence the ringing of the bell happening at different lengths for each vd -- That's her ringing it :3). She then watches the mvs along with Es to make sure there are no machine glitches, and know how to calibrate it better for next time.

(IEdit: I've since decided to add in official trial mvs, but before when I wasn't ready to tackle that:) She has to run some tests on the machine to make sure things are calibrated correctly, so she'd extract little things here and there. It gives me the opportunity to think up lyric snippets and recurring symbols for her without worrying about full encompassing music videos.

I'm not afraid to admit she can fall into Mary Sue territory every so often by being everyone's friend, because it's less about "aw everyone likes her" and more about "canon is too painful rn and I need a fix-it tool to take care of these guys and give them hugs and tell them someone forgives them and cares about them and unfortunately these characters wouldn't let anyone less than a friend do that." Rest assured she's definitely not perfect and will fuck everything up on occasion :3

Miscellaneous: Whenever I play around with normal au ideas she's still working on the machine (but in a public, more ethical setting), and she's Mahiru's roommate :) Her character isn't super focused on love, but if I had to pick a cover song it'd be Stickybug II. It's very much my vibe, the lyrics fit well enough (better than most songs, at least lol) and it's one of my favorites out of my limited knowledge of unchosen Deco songs! (Edit, I've actually given her non-deco cover songs hehe)

So yeah, I hope she's not too boring without a cool crime to decipher, but I wanted to share since I was really proud of her! It took a bit of tinkering to find a way to fit her into a perfect secret-third-thing role that runs very smoothly with all of canon, so I was very excited!

[sketchy-scribs-n-doods]

to add on to the philosophy of 'you're not unattractive you're just not your type' -

sometimes, you gotta see yourself in other people first in order to comprehend your own beauty

this works both in body positive and in gender affirming ways of course. who among us has not felt better about the things that cause us gender dysphoria after seeing someone else w the same features absolutely own it?

but today i'm mostly thinking about being at the grocery store and seeing the beauty in a stranger's exposed belly as their skin folds when they reach around for something and their croptop rides up, hips turning and revealing pale stretch marks.

like. oh. yeah my belly folds like that. my hips look like that. and they're beautiful.

or when a cashier at the gas station laughs at a joke you made and when they smile it's all pink gums and little peeking teeth.

and you think wow. what a lovely smile. i smile like that.

idk. i just think that falling in love with the mundane beauty of the people around you can sometimes help remind you of your own quiet beauty.

[sanguinewolves]

im so tired

[femmefaggot]

ok hi haha lol I dont rly feel like going in circles in my head forever trying to figure out whether, among other "smaller" things, being left alone in a room w only media as a child and not feeling like I had even a semblance of a personality for most of my life counts as "trauma"

a lot of these parts of me are new, I'm just recently putting names to them and it feels as though I'm developing facets of personalities in my mid 20s after a lifetime of either feeling like I'm basically just ADHD in a person, an amalgamation of kins shoved into a body, or something made of guilt Also shoved into a body.

I don't like, claim to know what this means. but I don't think a lot of my current mutuals would feel comfortable interacting w me bc I don't necessarily believe in the black and white of what plurality is. I'm not able or planning on getting any formal diagnosis and while I'm discussing this w my therapist they're very much not one to pathologize

I definitely don't feel like one person but I dont think id count for most of you as a "system" as the different parts of me feel as though theyre still developing. take all of this as you will, I'm not going to stress my body out more by trying to figure out "what" I am as I've been doing that my whole life and I'm kinda tired of it.

I know that I'm not entirely one thing and feel Enough like multiple things for myself, but blurred in a lot of ways. like some sort of gem with many different facets.

not sure where to go w this tbh take this how you will. im not comfortable saying I'm leaning one way or the other regarding system discourse, (<- not a phrase i want to use but the best shorthand i have) as I genuinely don't believe the human brain is nearly that black and white.

I'm both "me" and very much not "me" at times. idk what this means but ik I'm not comfortable saying im just pandora and im not sure im "allowed" to say im a system and im not sure if it matters, or should matter, regarding friends. im going to be like this regardless, id unfollow me if this grey area im likely to stay in bothers you

if you don't want me refollowing I'd probably block, too, as my memory is bad

[alebrijediscordico]

Hm. This last post somehow made me think about something, but i don't think i can fully speak it coherently, so to whoever is reading, i'm gonna take you to a little adventure.

We start in a white void, as many other written things. No scene to go off of, no characters, no thing to see here. Just words. Or maybe my voice, if that's how your mind works.

But then i'm going to tell you that you and me are now in a cluttered room. The door to enter is behind us as we walk in, close to the corner. It was probably heavy to move if we were to enter this place in a conventional way—the "this door was made on old wood" kind of heavy. In the center of the room are two furnished chairs, and a tiny round table. And if you thought of me walking to the chairs before you while i was narrating, it's probably not gonna be strange for me to pass my hand over the table for a moment right now.

And now i'm sitting down already. Your chair is diagonal to mine. I'm on the chair with the backrest almost pointing to the window. Like i mean, if i put my left arm in the armrest of the chair to turn around, i would comfortably look out the window—which is one of those that are... could i say curved? Is more so a window with a nook. I've always liked those...

Anyway, now that you're seated, that i assume you are, because in the case you're still standing by the door, what are you waiting for? The warm drinks clearly in the table that i never described are waiting for us.

...There you are.

Now that we are sitting down, i'll describe the room further, because "cluttered" might've been enough other times, for when a book needs to progress a story—but here the focus is the little details.

There's two wall-bookshelves to the sides of us, full of thin and thick books; short and long, sometimes long enough to not really fit and so they're folded over other books. You'll see a few journals too—the big, long ones; the ones you'd see from sea captains—, notebooks, and the few spare spaces have trinkets. Colorful candles holding up books, ink bottles put conveniently over some dry splashed ink, a leaf or two, maybe a few wooden toys alongside puppets... dolls? Clown puppet-dolls. You know the ones. And in a few shelves there's little golden hooks from where tiny oil lanterns are hang up. Palm sized almost. Cute, isn't it?

Oh, and the shelves themselves are a brown-red wood. Carved with details i'll leave to your imagination. They're very fancy, almost like as it were shorthand.

I'm taking a sip, one moment.

...

Hmmm... This doesn't really work for the word "cluttered", right?

Let's, then, add the fact that whoever has these bookshelves has papers, files and documents that surely they must've been better kept somewhere appropriate, to keep them good and intact, but are instead... between books. Some are not even as well put between those books? Feels almost rushed. I really hope those are not important...

There's also other things hanging from the hooks, like resplendent ribbons, leftover party decorations, various mismatched holiday decorations in, not only the hooks, but the very few empty spaces left and hanging from the ribbons. One definitely doesn't need to move much around to be ready for the holidays in this place, isn't it? I mean, you'd only need to take out the non-appropriate decorations and colors that don't match the season and hide it somewhere. Maybe in the drawers in the wall to the opposite side of the window? And i mean in the wall, the drawers are the wall.

And now that we are looking at that wall, you'll notice the wood is that same brown-red. Some of those little thing-keepers are open, and... well, i'm not stopping you to go look at whats inside those drawers. Is a six by six wall full of them, and coming from the look of this place, there has to be something interesting there, right?

Let me just warn you about the floor before you stand up, which actually, did you enjoy your warm drink? Maybe it was your favorite, or maybe just the one you would think to be pleasant while warm.

I had some warm chocolate milk myself, if you were wondering.

Anyway, the floor. Under the table we have a circular carpet, yellow, with orange tones and a red ring almost on it's borders. It has a symbol in the middle, on deep blue, almost looks like a very elaborated snowflake... If you find a way to make them more elaborated than they already are, i mean. Is hard to see with how the leg of the table splits on four at the end.

The floor is wood too, light brown. It has very few holes, and from some little plants are starting to grow. It was a matter of time, honestly.

And around our chairs and just under the bookshelves? Piles of books. But specially piles of papers, tall enough to reach my waist. And maybe i'm fairly small, but that doesn't mean there isn't a lot of paper here—all of them are in different stages of use too. Some have things written over, from one single theme, but those are the ones under everything else, the ones in better order. The papers on top of everything, the most on hand, seem to have miscellaneous notes, and on the brink of falling. Maybe reminders, to-do lists, dreams scribbled with an still sleeping hand, or even the best effort of someone to note down the notes of a mental melody, for someone that has half the correct idea of music theory.

You try to not step on anything as you go to the drawers. You most be wondering by now what i wanted to say at the start, and why am i taking so long to tell you. And to that, i'll tell you not to worry. I mean, you were about to go investigate what were in the i-don't-know-how-many drawers, just to find that your hand landed in a ladder. One of those with wheels on the lower tips.

And now you look up. And realize i never told you if there was a ceiling over us.

This place is as much of a tiny library as is a memory. Maybe broken and mixed up, but still.

You go up the ladder to find yourself in a second floor like a balcony, looking down at me. And to answer your possible question, yes. That second floor is as messy as this one, but this time all walls are cluttered bookshelves only. Maybe less ribbons? And actually, is there more skulls in the free spaces between books...?

And what about the ceiling? Well. There's another floor to go to, with the help of another ladder, and then, a window just over the hole the balconies made, like a dome.

It starts raining as soon as you look at it. Odd. But is not much. From where i am, we would call it fool's rain. Or something like that. You'd only get wet with that rain if you were a dummy about it, it's what i'm saying.

Now look at this. I'm handing you a book from one of the bookshelves behind you, on the third floor. It has so many bookmarked pages, the pages are starting to turn yellow, and has a smell like an almost old paper, glue, and a barely noticeable hint of vanilla.

...Wait, how did i get here?

No matter.

I'm gonna rest my arms in the handrail while you look at the book, if you excuse me, and... there it is.

Is the same exact one as the first one from that post. Very pretty, right?

To think it inspired all of this.

Just as pretty as the rest of this place, if i must say so myself. But now tell me... would you want to know what's in the book, what the bookmarks are about, why there's just so many highlighted parts? The dried marked feels funny to the touch, right?

Again, tell me: Is there something in you that would wish to go floor by floor reading every single book, journal, notebook, file and document; look at each trinket, use a bit of that ink on a empty paper—because there must be some kind of quill or pen in those drawers—, and maybe make some of those puppet-dolls rest on each other, like friends?

And once again: what about maybe painting this place to a canvas? Taking a picture from different angles as the sun hits the bookshelves and anything gleaming. Or maybe just sinking in one of the chairs as the night makes this place glow...

If anything of that, or maybe even more that i hadn't thought of, appeals to you, i'm glad.

Because i know, maybe not you, but someone out there, wouldn't.

I've seen it a lot lately. With some very selected people that yearn for a place like this, with the books looking like variations of the one in your hands, with journals full of quotable words, and drawers full of useful things for each moment. But they don't really... want a place like this, at the same time. You know what i mean?

A horrifying thought is that the same people who would want a place like this just for the idea of what it is, a place of "intellect", after a while would try making it "better" by painting everything white, take out a good portion of these books, and leaving in just the necessary. Or less. The pretty to the eye. The minimum. Like the book i gave you, but only that one. Those same people would call this place dark academia and not even check a single book in here, just to be more direct.

Or in way less words, the people who want the image of a reader without reading.

And i mean... i can't blame them.

An aesthetic is formed with patterns, places and things that feel and seem similar and related, sometimes gaining a name. I also like how this place looks in the surface, dark academia as it is is wonderful, honestly. Like a living oil painting; is fascinating. But i worry for the people who chase after the image of things without actually seeing what makes them so magical.

More so since we all been there, in a way or another. Is part of growing up, and not from childhood to adulthood, if you were wondering. From yesterday to tomorrow.

I'm still there in some aspects, trying to get out of that hole.

Each word on every single one of these books... it reminds me of being little and passing my fingers over the many books we had in my house, but i was intimidated to read most of them because of how many words that meant i was gonna read, how many stories and how many concepts they had that i wasn't sure i would grasp. How long it would take to do all of that. If i was ever going to finish... And now i look at this place i made for this occasion (or... in a way) and i think of all the things listed in the files and documents; of reading the thoughts and feelings of other human beings, now pasted for the rest of the world in a journal or book; of all the notebooks with unknown things to be curious of.

And... well, even just looking at this place with a "It is that deep" attitude could tell you a story of it's own, don't you think?

I guess what i wanted to say is that... the world is bigger than people think. Which is scary, so we sit down with comfortable images instead of adventuring beyond into that massive place. I guess it would be also scary to think that when we come back from that world, if we ever do, we won't be the same...

And that will make us "other" to the people we care about.

And in an age where the self can feel so fragile in an ever changing world, where if you don't change fast enough with everyone else, or stay with everyone else...

Is absolutely hellish.

...And once again, if you're wondering how i ended up standing on the ceiling, i have no idea either. Things happen.

But at least it stopped raining, so I'll be heading out from the little glass trapdoor conveniently put in the middle of the window-dome.

And if you want to follow me after thinking as long as you want in this place, remember: The world's a bigger place when each wall is a floor.

[somewhatgayerthanistypicalfurina]

Tbh the way people on this website(/presumably other websites too but this is the one on which I see strangers opinions most often) talk about twinks soooooo derogatorily really Does make me super uncomfortable. It feels really homophobic in a way I haven't been able to nail down precisely

But just like. Always using twink as a derogatory thing and undesirable both to be or to want. Not really outright saying twinks aren't real men but IMPLYING it through comparisons to Real Men that are Big and Strong And Hairy. Like okay? You want big muscle men? You and every mainstream media in existence...? Why are people pretending that hating twinks is subversive. Why are people pretending that twinks are widely seen as the best sort of man.

And like it's EXPECTED for men to be able to grow lots of body hair and to get lots of muscle and be thick and sturdy and strong. And men are shamed for not being hairy enough and they are shamed for being twiggy and WHY are you doing it MORE but using gay words. Saying bears are sooooooo great but twinks are sooooo icky doesn't magically make you Not body shaming a group of people for Exactly The Reasons They Are Already Bodyshamed

Idk. Bwah. This isn't even me being firsthand butthurt bc I don't actually think I would be seen as a twink? But I am so tired of feeling like a fake gay and looked down on for not really being very into the typical male beauty standards

[rearranging-deck-chairs]

if yaz hadnt said anything and just let her walk away at the end of 11x1, how long do you think it would have taken 13 to find a new outfit?

[fauvester]

ok, so. Since your adoption AU has quickly become my no. 1 new obsession, I would totally love to make some fanart or write some fanfic about it. Would you be okay with that?

If not, that’s totally fine! If yes, I’d really like for you to ramble to me about these questions I have (if you have time) because if I make fanart/fanfic I want it to be 100% accurate, because I’m a perfectionist. So, correct me if I’m wrong pls:

Elim “Lim” Junior likes to cook, was the first to get adopted, and is the oldest brother. He seems to me to be a calm kinda guy. Gives me safe vibes, like I would let him bear hug me. What does he do, I wonder? Like, for a living? Or what does he want to do when he’s older? Idan is the youngest, absolute cutie, I adore him. What does he want to do when he grows up? And what are his hobbies? Iskra is Garak’s little girl, except she’s not even that little and also she marries a Klingon doctor, am I right? Is she the one who tries out tailoring, do I remember that correctly? What does she do for a living? Or is she actually a professional tailor?? Then, there’s Jocasta. She’s older than Iskra, right? She’s a nurse. Does she work with Julian sometimes? What else does she like to do in her free time?

Yes, I’m interrogating you, yes I want to get to know them, I’m sorry if this is too many questions at once. Don’t feel obligated to answer all of this. Hope you have a great day! :)

Oh man I'd be so flattered!! come on into the sandbox!! I'm so chuffed that you like them as much as I do! Let me try to put stuff down that I've been carrying around in my head re: the kids -

Young Elim ("Lim" "Elim Garak, no relation") is of a very calvinist cut (always busy, always doing something useful, always sober, always parsimonious). Repairs, cooking, cleaning. Inclined to be grumpy. Phenomenally stubborn. Probably a good hugger but on the stiff side. Remembers the most about his family before the Fire, and for decades his grief manifested as anger and the most convenient subject for that anger was the Manifestation of the Old Cardassia, Garak senior. They had a contentious relationship with him until Lim got into his twenties and mellowed out a bit, but they had some bitterly cold grudge matches before then (Garak, beefing with a child? MUCH more likely than you'd think!)

He's a full time housekeeper, first for his Castellan father (he's the cardassian jackie kennedy. refurbishing the Castellan's home, overseeing the rest of the help, hosting events, etc) and then for his mayor wife (and their many future children). Nobody would suggest that it's an unmanly line of work, but they may privately think it. Lim was never a particular stand-out at school and decided to let Iskra be the ambitious one.

His wife is a lot. She REALLY wanted to marry into the Garak family for political cache and set her cap on him but he was NOT having it at first. She had to do a lot of courting. They get along just fine now. Iskra doesn't like her but maybe that's because they're too similar.

Idan is IN STARFLEET! The first Cardassian, and Cardassia isn't even part of the federation! By the time he was growing up, Bashir's disillusionment with the Federation softened enough to weave lots of tempting tales of adventure and discovery for his youngest.

Worf is his idol (first Klingon solidarity!) but where Worf recognized the "you have to decide whether to be liked or be respected" decision and decided to be respected at the expense of coming off as an unpleasant terminally humorless zealot, while Idan plays up his natural goofiness to keep his classmates from feeling threatened by their 6'4 appropriately strong, fast Obsidian Order/Starfleet Medical raised Scion of Cardassia classmate. He's actually very capable and very dangerous when he isn't pretending to be an idiot (or more of one than he really is, at least). Just wants to be liked. Kind of a jock, plays racquetball and does vulcan martial arts. Enjoys Romulan pop (rpop) like every other young Cardassian.

Has a tail. Accidentally trips people sometimes.

Iskra is for real that little. She's very short.

She gets along best with Garak, at least until Lim grows up-up. She was taught from a young age to memorize, recite and debate at length, and naturally did well in academics. She goes to some Federation planet (Andor?) to study comparative law, and then back to Cardassia to read Cardassian law as an apprentice. Through a combination of bald nepotism, personal charisma and actual merit, she snags a position as the attachè of Ambassador Lang to the Federation, where she spends a few years advancing her father's administration's diplomatic interests. Once he steps down and Lang takes his place she ends up... somehow... on a Starfleet mission......?...... and meets her eventual wife! She serves... some diplomatic purpose. Besides amusing herself. I just haven't decided what that would be yet.

Jocasta (oh sweet babbygirl I have not developed you much at all lol) gets along best with Julian because he does enough talking for both of them. She started out helping him with office work in the hospital, but she's the sort of person who Does Work when it Needs to be Done and took enough tasks onto herself that she's become indispensable. Bashir taught her what she needs to know about nursing, and she helps him with the cultural missteps he occasionally still makes. She's the last line of defense if someone's a particularly hard stick because she can throw a needle under tough scales like it's nothing (she could have been a good Obsidian Order torturer).

She would have been the Housekeeper of the family if not for Lim, so she does the decorative stuff that he doesn't - mending and eventually sewing, gardening, even a little art. It reminds Garak a little too much of Ziyal sometimes, but that's a kind of gift, too.

ANYWAYS THATS THE KIDDOOOOOOOOOS! I have a lot of stuff thrown in the #garashir adoption au tag if you're looking about for other tasty bits, it is all approximately Fauve-canon but feel free to play in this space however you like.. I love to talk about them! I'd be so tickled if you wanted to do something with them.

[orkpup]

want them to beat the shit out of me honestly

[dragons-and-yellow-roses]

.

[citrushomie]

I saw fanart of emu and mafuyu and it made me think of you. What are your thoughts on them?

silly answer: mafuyu is my poor ouppy and emu is like autism creature to me

/srs answer: im actively keeping up with whats happening to mafuyu and only mafuyu in jp events and i havent read a wxs event in like half a year but i like emu

[side-sidecast]

i like that there is an exclamation point in your signature in the final panel. i like that you radiate genuine excitement at hilarious engagement online. have a treat (like and reblog)

!!!! TREAT TREAT TREAT listen closely because i am about to disclose to you great wisdoms that have improved my life immensly.

there is no sense in having more grudges than i can hold (two, i have two hands!! for 2 grudges). there are very few things in this world that can only be approached with a mindset of pessimism and misery. almost everything you encounter is worthy of excitement, or at least curiosity. the world is out there and it's waiting to experience you go, go, go!!!

[the-gayest-sky-kid]

on another personal life anecdote you should really advocate for yourself i know it sucks but if you dont you will end up having to read a book where a core character kills herself in the end after a bunch of other shit anf end up in a horrible place afterwards because you were too scared to talk to your english teacher about how it was fucking you over mentally alongside your personal issues. or something