#first one published in the 90s

[echoesofdusk]

don't tell pokemon fans about this

[askyofexplodingstars]

"Cancelling plans is like heroin" - John Mulaney

(Sebatian x reader, they're married)

[reasonsforhope]

ETA: Article here (can't believe I forgot this rip)

A new study finds you can reduce the amount of microplastics you drink simply by boiling your water.

Scientists are just beginning to understand the health risks associated with microplastic exposure.

Nano- and microplastics are bits of plastic as tiny as one-thousandth of a millimeter in diameter.

Boiling and filtering your tap water may dramatically lower the amount of microplastics you drink, according to new research.

Recent studies have found that nano- and microplastics (NMPs), which are bits of plastic as tiny as one-thousandth of a millimeter in diameter, have been found in a host of products and even in tap water.

A new study, published February 28 in Environmental Science & Technology Letters, found that boiling mineral-rich water for just five minutes can reduce the amount of NMP you’re exposed to by up to 90%.

Scientists are just beginning to understand the health risks associated with microplastic exposureTrusted Source, but growing evidenceTrusted Source suggests the plastics can accumulate in the body and trigger oxidative stress, inflammation, insulin resistance, and liver issues.

Certain advanced water filtration systems can capture and help remove some NMPs from tap water. But researchers wanted to figure out other options to remove microplastics, especially since in poorer countries cheaper, more accessible solutions for clean water are needed.

Boiling water may be a safe, simple solution that can effectively decontaminate household tap water, the new findings suggest.

“Boiling water before drinking is a great example of an ancient cultural practice that can help reduce an environmental exposure,” Dr. Luz Claudio, PhD, a professor of environmental medicine and public health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told Healthline.

Claudio was not involved in the study.

How boiling water can help remove microplastics

The researchers found simply boiling water is the first step to removing NMPs from tap water.

The researchers collected multiple samples of tap water from Guangzhou, China and contaminated the samples with varying levels of NMPs.

Each sample was boiled for five minutes then left to cool for 10 minutes.

Boiling hard water that’s rich with minerals — such as calcium or magnesium — creates a chalk-like residue known as limescale, or calcium carbonate (CaCO3), which can trap the plastics.

That solid, chalky residue then had to be separated and removed from the water with a standard coffee filter or stainless steel filter, thereby removing NMPs.

The team found that the impact was greatest in harder water: In samples that had 300 milligrams of CaCO3, for example, nearly 90% of NMPs were removed.

In softer water samples with less than 60 mg of CaCO3, roughly 25% of NMPs were removed.

“What’s important to note here is that the effectiveness of trapping these micro/nano plastics in these mineral solids is tied to how hard the water is – the harder the water, the more solids are formed, the more microplastics are trapped,” Dr. Anja Brandon, PhD, the associate director of U.S. plastics policy at Ocean Conservancy and an environmental engineer, told Healthline.

Brandon was not involved in the study...

How to limit your exposure to microplastics 

Anyone who wishes to boil their water should do so in a glass or stainless steel pot.

After boiling the water for about five minutes, let it cool, and do not stir it, Claudio says.

The microplastics need to bind to the calcium and fall to the bottom of the pot so they can filtered or scooped out."

-via Healthline, February 28, 2024

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it

My next book is The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation: it’s a Big Tech disassembly manual that explains how to disenshittify the web and bring back the old good internet. The hardcover comes from Verso on Sept 5, but the audiobook comes from me — because Amazon refuses to sell my audio:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-internet-con-how-to-seize-the-means-of-computation

Amazon owns Audible, the monopoly audiobook platform that controls >90% of the audio market. They require mandatory DRM for every book sold, locking those books forever to Amazon’s monopoly platform. If you break up with Amazon, you have to throw away your entire audiobook library.

That’s a hell of a lot of leverage to hand to any company, let alone a rapacious monopoly that ran a program targeting small publishers called “Project Gazelle,” where execs were ordered to attack indie publishers “the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle”:

https://www.businessinsider.com/sadistic-amazon-treated-book-sellers-the-way-a-cheetah-would-pursue-a-sickly-gazelle-2013-10

[Image ID: Journalist and novelist Doctorow (Red Team Blues) details a plan for how to break up Big Tech in this impassioned and perceptive manifesto….Doctorow’s sense of urgency is contagious -Publishers Weekly]

I won’t sell my work with DRM, because DRM is key to the enshittification of the internet. Enshittification is why the old, good internet died and became “five giant websites filled with screenshots of the other four” (h/t Tom Eastman). When a tech company can lock in its users and suppliers, it can drain value from both sides, using DRM and other lock-in gimmicks to keep their business even as they grow ever more miserable on the platform.

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

[Image ID: A brilliant barn burner of a book. Cory is one of the sharpest tech critics, and he shows with fierce clarity how our computational future could be otherwise -Kate Crawford, author of The Atlas of AI”]

The Internet Con isn’t just an analysis of where enshittification comes from: it’s a detailed, shovel-ready policy prescription for halting enshittification, throwing it into reverse and bringing back the old, good internet.

How do we do that? With interoperability: the ability to plug new technology into those crapulent, decaying platform. Interop lets you choose which parts of the service you want and block the parts you don’t (think of how an adblocker lets you take the take-it-or-leave “offer” from a website and reply with “How about nah?”):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

But interop isn’t just about making platforms less terrible — it’s an explosive charge that demolishes walled gardens. With interop, you can leave a social media service, but keep talking to the people who stay. With interop, you can leave your mobile platform, but bring your apps and media with you to a rival’s service. With interop, you can break up with Amazon, and still keep your audiobooks.

So, if interop is so great, why isn’t it everywhere?

Well, it used to be. Interop is how Microsoft became the dominant operating system:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

[Image ID: Nobody gets the internet-both the nuts and bolts that make it hum and the laws that shaped it into the mess it is-quite like Cory, and no one’s better qualified to deliver us a user manual for fixing it. That’s The Internet Con: a rousing, imaginative, and accessible treatise for correcting our curdled online world. If you care about the internet, get ready to dedicate yourself to making interoperability a reality. -Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine]

It’s how Apple saved itself from Microsoft’s vicious campaign to destroy it:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

Every tech giant used interop to grow, and then every tech giant promptly turned around and attacked interoperators. Every pirate wants to be an admiral. When Big Tech did it, that was progress; when you do it back to Big Tech, that’s piracy. The tech giants used their monopoly power to make interop without permission illegal, creating a kind of “felony contempt of business model” (h/t Jay Freeman).

The Internet Con describes how this came to pass, but, more importantly, it tells us how to fix it. It lays out how we can combine different kinds of interop requirements (like the EU’s Digital Markets Act and Massachusetts’s Right to Repair law) with protections for reverse-engineering and other guerrilla tactics to create a system that is strong without being brittle, hard to cheat on and easy to enforce.

What’s more, this book explains how to get these policies: what existing legislative, regulatory and judicial powers can be invoked to make them a reality. Because we are living through the Great Enshittification, and crises erupt every ten seconds, and when those crises occur, the “good ideas lying around” can move from the fringes to the center in an eyeblink:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/12/only-a-crisis/#lets-gooooo

[Image ID: Thoughtfully written and patiently presented, The Internet Con explains how the promise of a free and open internet was lost to predatory business practices and the rush to commodify every aspect of our lives. An essential read for anyone that wants to understand how we lost control of our digital spaces and infrastructure to Silicon Valley’s tech giants, and how we can start fighting to get it back. -Tim Maughan, author of INFINITE DETAIL]

After all, we’ve known Big Tech was rotten for years, but we had no idea what to do about it. Every time a Big Tech colossus did something ghastly to millions or billions of people, we tried to fix the tech company. There’s no fixing the tech companies. They need to burn. The way to make users safe from Big Tech predators isn’t to make those predators behave better — it’s to evacuate those users:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/18/urban-wildlife-interface/#combustible-walled-gardens

I’ve been campaigning for human rights in the digital world for more than 20 years; I’ve been EFF’s European Director, representing the public interest at the EU, the UN, Westminster, Ottawa and DC. This is the subject I’ve devoted my life to, and I live my principles. I won’t let my books be sold with DRM, which means that Audible won’t carry my audiobooks. My agent tells me that this decision has cost me enough money to pay off my mortgage and put my kid through college. That’s a price I’m willing to pay if it means that my books aren’t enshittification bait.

But not selling on Audible has another cost, one that’s more important to me: a lot of readers prefer audiobooks and 9 out of 10 of those readers start and end their searches on Audible. When they don’t find an author there, they assume no audiobook exists, period. It got so bad I put up an audiobook on Amazon — me, reading an essay, explaining how Audible rips off writers and readers. It’s called “Why None of My Audiobooks Are For Sale on Audible”:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff

[Image ID: Doctorow has been thinking longer and smarter than anyone else I know about how we create and exchange value in a digital age. -Douglas Rushkoff, author of Present Shock]

To get my audiobooks into readers’ ears, I pre-sell them on Kickstarter. This has been wildly successful, both financially and as a means of getting other prominent authors to break up with Amazon and use crowdfunding to fill the gap. Writers like Brandon Sanderson are doing heroic work, smashing Amazon’s monopoly:

https://www.brandonsanderson.com/guest-editorial-cory-doctorow-is-a-bestselling-author-but-audible-wont-carry-his-audiobooks/

And to be frank, I love audiobooks, too. I swim every day as physio for a chronic pain condition, and I listen to 2–3 books/month on my underwater MP3 player, disappearing into an imaginary world as I scull back and forth in my public pool. I’m able to get those audiobooks on my MP3 player thanks to Libro.fm, a DRM-free store that supports indie booksellers all over the world:

https://blog.libro.fm/a-qa-with-mark-pearson-libro-fm-ceo-and-co-founder/

Producing my own audiobooks has been a dream. Working with Skyboat Media, I’ve gotten narrators like @wilwheaton​, Amber Benson, @neil-gaiman​ and Stefan Rudnicki for my work:

https://craphound.com/shop/

[Image ID: “This book is the instruction manual Big Tech doesn’t want you to read. It deconstructs their crummy products, undemocratic business models, rigged legal regimes, and lies. Crack this book and help build something better. -Astra Taylor, author of Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When Its Gone”]

But for this title, I decided that I would read it myself. After all, I’ve been podcasting since 2006, reading my own work aloud every week or so, even as I traveled the world and gave thousands of speeches about the subject of this book. I was excited (and a little trepedatious) at the prospect, but how could I pass up a chance to work with director Gabrielle de Cuir, who has directed everyone from Anne Hathaway to LeVar Burton to Eric Idle?

Reader, I fucking nailed it. I went back to those daily recordings fully prepared to hate them, but they were good — even great (especially after my engineer John Taylor Williams mastered them). Listen for yourself!

https://archive.org/details/cory_doctorow_internet_con_chapter_01

I hope you’ll consider backing this Kickstarter. If you’ve ever read my free, open access, CC-licensed blog posts and novels, or listened to my podcasts, or come to one of my talks and wished there was a way to say thank you, this is it. These crowdfunders make my DRM-free publishing program viable, even as audiobooks grow more central to a writer’s income and even as a single company takes over nearly the entire audiobook market.

Backers can choose from the DRM-free audiobook, DRM-free ebook (EPUB and MOBI) and a hardcover — including a signed, personalized option, fulfilled through the great LA indie bookstore Book Soup:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-internet-con-how-to-seize-the-means-of-computation

What’s more, these ebooks and audiobooks are unlike any you’ll get anywhere else because they are sold without any terms of service or license agreements. As has been the case since time immemorial, when you buy these books, they’re yours, and you are allowed to do anything with them that copyright law permits — give them away, lend them to friends, or simply read them with any technology you choose.

As with my previous Kickstarters, backers can get their audiobooks delivered with an app (from libro.fm) or as a folder of MP3s. That helps people who struggle with “sideloading,” a process that Apple and Google have made progressively harder, even as they force audiobook and ebook sellers to hand over a 30% app tax on every dollar they make:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-another-audiobook-that-amazon-wont-sell/posts/3788112

Enshittification is rotting every layer of the tech stack: mobile, payments, hosting, social, delivery, playback. Every tech company is pulling the rug out from under us, using the chokepoints they built between audiences and speakers, artists and fans, to pick all of our pockets.

The Internet Con isn’t just a lament for the internet we lost — it’s a plan to get it back. I hope you’ll get a copy and share it with the people you love, even as the tech platforms choke off your communities to pad their quarterly numbers.

Next weekend (Aug 4-6), I'll be in Austin for Armadillocon, a science fiction convention, where I'm the Guest of Honor:

https://armadillocon.org/d45/

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/31/seize-the-means-of-computation/#the-internet-con

[Image ID: My forthcoming book 'The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation' in various editions: Verso hardcover, audiobook displayed on a phone, and ebook displayed on an e-ink reader.]

[ms-demeanor]

Hey friend! So while I'm incredibly skeptical, I'm not strictly against alternative medicine, like you are. I saw you mention reiki, and thought you might geek out on this article like I did:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200308195914/https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/04/reiki-cant-possibly-work-so-why-does-it/606808/

It's called "Reiki Can't Possibly Work. So Why Does It?" and I highly encourage reading the whole thing. It first of all thoroughly debunks a lot of the claims reiki practitioners make but it also details all of the studies that have proven its effectiveness and provides what I find a pretty compelling explanation: that much of modern western medicine is stressful and traumatizing. Of course laying in a quiet room with the lights dimmed while a kind person sits with you and wishes for you to be well is effective. It reduces stress and all of the negative biological processes it triggers, which promotes healing.

The article mentions that for years we didn't understand the mechanism by which acetaminophen worked - we just knew it did. I knew a man who was really into "chakra therapy" in the 90s where he had a set of colored sunglasses that, supposedly, would rebalance one's out-of-whack chakras through light therapy. He found that attending to his throat chakra, yellow, helped him sleep better. Years later, formal studies found that yellow lenses filter blue light and can help regulate circadian rhythms.

When I was really little, my uncle sold magnet therapy products (which claimed to promote circulation?? I think??). I had a huge meltdown at a family reunion and no one could get me to calm down. My uncle put a blanket full of magnets on top of me, and I immediately relaxed. Imagine my surprise hearing that story for the first time as an adult who now uses a weighted blanket for stress.

I agree that people need to be really careful about these practices, about getting scammed, and especially about herbal supplements that can have dangerous interactions. I also think there's an extent to which you can analyze the risks and benefits and say, "Okay, I have no idea why this works but it does and there's no major downsides."

Hey so I get a bit heated in this response but I want you to know that I approached this ask in good faith because I know you and I know that we have a lot of the same values and interests and this touched a nerve that was not at all your fault and once I get past the direct response to the article I think I come off a little less. Um. Like the aggression there is not directed at you, it's directed at the article and at one person mentioned in the article specifically who is part of why my reaction to the article is so not good. But I promise after the last bullet point I come off as less reactive, I think. (I'm also publishing this publicly because I think it may be helpful for people to see how CAM stuff often gets away with a veneer of skepticism-that-isn't-actually-skepticism - the article claims to be skeptical but then makes a ton of assumptions and cites some truly mind-bogglingly bad sources that a lot of people won't recognize as bad if they don't have a hair trigger trained by far too much time on the bad CAM parts of the internet).

I've actually read that article a few time times, and would like to do a quick rundown on why I find it unconvincing:

She doesn't cite any decent studies on reiki; one that she does cite is just a self-reported questionnaire response from 23 people in 2002.

While we don't know the exact mechanism of action for acetaminophen, we do know that it does work - it measurably reduces fever and in double blinded RCTs produces reproduceable results in reducing certain kinds of pain. The Science Based Medicine authors cited in the article who called for an end to studies on reiki did so both because there is no plausible mechanism of action for reiki (specifically as energy work, not as 'being in a room with a patient person who listens to you') and because there is no good evidence that it works. (And they wrote a follow-up to the Atlantic article; I like SBM but it's quite sneery, as are most of their write-ups of reiki). When Kisner asks "why should this be different?" when comparing reiki and acetaminophen, the answer is: because there is not only no plausible way that reiki *could* work, there is not any good evidence we have that it works better than placebo.

"Various non-Western practices have become popular complements to conventional medicine in the past few decades, chief among them yoga, meditation, and acupuncture, all of which have been the subject of rigorous scientific studies that have established and explained their effectiveness." This one sentence needs probably twenty or so links in response, suffice it to say that western medicine has emphatically not established and explained the effectiveness of AT LEAST acupuncture and the casually credulous way Kisner accepts that acupuncture is effective (effective FOR WHAT?) throws some serious doubt on her ability to assess these kinds of things.

The title of the article is "Reiki can't possibly work, so why does it?" and that's probably the Atlantic's fault more than Jordan Kisner's fault, but she doesn't ever demonstrate that it works. She says she got a buzzy feeling after her training, she says that patients at the VA were asking for reiki as treatment for pain and sleep disorders, she says that people remembered "healing touches" from parents and loved ones and that the same mechanism might be what makes reiki 'work.' She says that reiki "has been shown by various studies that pass evidentiary muster to help patients in a variety of ways when used as a complementary practice" and the two studies that she includes that weren't just a questionnaire were 1) a non-blinded study of heart rate variability post heart attack where the reiki arm involved continuous interaction with a trained nurse and the other two arms involved resting quietly or classical music (so relaxation as a result of additional focused attention by attentive medical professionals could account for this? Why was the control for this study not having a med student sit and hold the patient's hand?) and 2) a study of patients who sought out reiki who were surveyed after treatment and noted improvement on one of twenty mental or physical markers (this study is like, GOLD for an example of a bad study; no control, self-selected participants who believe in the efficacy of the intervention, exceptionally broad criteria for a positive result - I find it really really really challenging to grant any credence to someone who confidently cited this as an example of reiki "working")

Near the end of the article she says "At the same time, this recalled the most cutting-edge, Harvard-stamped science I’d read in my research: Ted Kaptchuk’s finding that the placebo effect is a real, measurable, biological healing response to “an act of caring.” - if she read any of Ted Kaptchuk's research she didn't link to it; what she did link to was a 2018 New York Times profile of him and Kathryn Hall, researchers at Harvard's Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter program. Being any flavor of journalist and citing Ted Kaptchuk as your source for cutting-edge, institutionally-backed science is disqualifying.

I now need to do some yelling about Ted Kaptchuk.

For clarity: I have as much medical training as Kathryn Hall and Ted Kaptchuk, which is to say: None.

Hall is a microbiologist with a PhD in Public Health, so she at least a background in science. Kaptchuk is an acupuncturist with a BA in East Asian studies and a doctorate in Chinese medicine - notably NOT a medical degree; he was forced to stop calling himself a doctor and had papers retracted after enough people questioned whether the school he claimed he attended even existed and the documents he presented to claim that he was an "OMD" were conclusively translated and did not have any indication that the granted a medical degree of any kind - Science Based Medicine was involved in investigating this because they've been comprehensively anti-quack forever and Ted Kaptchuk has been a quack forever (after recieving confirmation from the government of Macau that Kaptchuk's alma mater was not a medical degree granting institution SBM STILL gave him the benefit of the doubt and had people translate his documentation for final confirmation).

He is also an author on of one of my most beloathed ever studies, which showed that sham acupuncture, placebo, and albuterol all produced the same effect on patient-reported well-being, coming to the conclusion that patient reports can be unreliable and that "placebo effects can be clinically meaningful and can rival the effects of active medication in patients with asthma." That fucking line, that stupid goddamned line, gets cited in every piece of woo bullshit about how acupuncture or chiropractic or some scam-ass diet all work, I've run into this study while looking through at least twenty bibliographies and it is one of the biggest, reddest flags that whoever is writing the paper you're reading is full up on some bullshit. Because, see, the paper found that "placebo effects can be clinically meaningful and can rival the effects of active medication in patients with asthma" in terms of *patient-reported* markers, but the fucking study found that only albuterol produced an actual effect in lung function. Here's the sentence BEFORE the one that gets cited all the time: "Although albuterol, but not the two placebo interventions, improved FEV1 [forced expiratory volume in one second - the measure for lung function used in the study and used to diagnose asthma] in these patients with asthma, albuterol provided no incremental benefit with respect to the self-reported outcomes." It doesn't matter if the patient *feels* better if they can't actually breathe! It doesn't fucking matter - feeling better but still having poor breathing leaves you more vulnerable to dying of a fucking asthma attack! I hate this goddamned study so fucking much and it's used all the time to claim that placebo can be just as effective as medicine for making people FEEL better but, like, they're still sick even if they feel better! I HAVE HAD PEOPLE CITE THIS STUPID FUCKING STUDY TO ME AS EVIDENCE THAT I DON'T CARE ENOUGH ABOUT TREATING MY FUCKING ASTHMA BECAUSE I DON'T GET ACUPUNCTURE TO TREAT MY FUCKING ASTHMA. If sham acupuncture makes you feel better when you've got the flu but doesn't lower your fever or make you less contagious, you shouldn't act like you don't have a fever or aren't contagious this study makes me INSANE.

Okay done yelling.

I think this look at placebo in the midst of her article about reiki is really interesting because it's very common for CAM practitioners to claim that it's as effective as placebo - which just means that it's not effective. This is a great explanation from The Skeptic on why placebo isn't and can't be what Kaptchuk, Hall, and the like claim. It's also interesting to me that Kisner didn't choose to link to a 2011 New Yorker profile of Kaptchuk that is somewhat less rosy about his placebo studies and includes this absolutely crushing statement: "the placebo effect doesn’t appear to work with Alzheimer’s patients. Trivers suggests that this is because most people who have Alzheimer’s disease are unable to anticipate the future and are therefore unable to prepare for it."

But to the actual point of the ask: I honestly think it's fascinating how much CAM success probably rides on "well did you listen to the patient and pay attention to what was wrong with them and sympathize with them and help them lay out plan that made them feel like they had some agency in this exceptionally frustrating situation (chronic illness, newly diagnosed issue, totally undiagnosed issue) that they're dealing with?"

I know part of why people with chronic illnesses turn to CAM is because they're ignored and dismissed by allopathic practitioners who are largely looking for horses, not zebras - this is one of the reasons that I'm really big on reminding people that (at least in the US) DOs are fully licensed physicians who use a holistic and patient-centered approach so if you are someone with a chronic illness who has had trouble getting diagnosed or had trouble getting doctors to believe you, swapping your MD for a DO as a primary care physician might be really, really helpful to you.

But the flip side of that is that is that I worry deeply about the question of where harm starts; the example with your uncle is really great because you do have a solid instance of something working but for totally the wrong reason (pressure being the mechanism that actually helped, versus magnets being the reason given by the person who did the treatment). Some of this stuff has very little likelihood of causing direct harm, but has the distinct possibility of having indirect harms, which people in the anti-CAM space generally divide into two categories, treatment delay and unnecessary costs (opportunity costs, monetary costs, wasted effort, etc.)

I'm going to step outside of your specific example and look at magnet therapy generally, which really is a spectacular thing to focus on because it honestly doesn't have any direct harms; nobody is allergic to magnets, the kinds of magnets used aren't strong enough to interfere with medical devices, it's even safer than the whole "well herbalism is sometimes just a cup of tea" thing because there are "safe" teas that can do real harm to large populations! But simply being around magnets is not going to hurt anyone (unless they're swallowed; nobody swallow magnets please).

One of the things that I think goes under-discussed when talking about placebo and CAM is that the people trying the alternative solutions desperately WANT the alternative medicine to work (I suspect that this is why the self-selected study of reiki patients has such a significant finding). They are pulling for it; they may be looking at it as a last resort, or they may be hoping that it will work to avoid a treatment that is more frightening, expensive, or inaccessible. I think this actually contributes a lot to the delay of care that we see with CAM.

The absolute worst case harm I can imagine from magnetic therapy is delaying treatment. Let's suppose we've got a diabetic patient with gradually increasing peripheral neuropathy; they have reacted poorly to gabapentin in the past and are looking for something more natural, and they hear from their chiropractor that magnet therapy can be used to treat neuropathy. They buy some compression socks with "magnetic and earthing properties" and sleep in the socks. Whether through the compression controlling some edema or through the simple desire for the socks to work, they feel some relief from the nerve pain they were experiencing and decide that this is a success. The socks work! They continue wearing the socks with occasional pain, but less than before. However, because they are focused on the lack of pain, they don't notice that it's accompanied by increasing numbness. The numbness significantly increases their risk of injury to their feet, which significantly increases their risk of amputation.

It probably sounds like catastrophizing to say "using magnets could lead to amputation" but honestly I don't think it's that far out of the realm of possibility (every time I post on this topic I get flooded with the saddest stories in the world about people whose loved ones died because of delayed treatment for cancer or heart disease).

The second category of harm is cost, which is honestly pretty minimal with magnet therapy, as long as you aren't spending $1049 on a magnetic mat

or paying a chiropractor to give you magnetic treatments. For some other medically harmless treatments like reiki, cost is the thing that I worry about - while I was looking up information related to the article I found that people are charging anywhere from $60 to $225 a session, and selling multi-session packages for thousands of dollars - and if someone thinks that something works, even if it only works by being in a soothing space where someone cares about you - they'll pay for it.

I'm aware that all of this is also extra complicated because of the cost and lack of access to allopathic medicine - a chiropractor broke my spine because I could pay her $60 per appointment but I couldn't pay $125 to see an MD when I didn't have insurance. People who are sick are going to look for treatment; people who have been denied treatment or dismissed by doctors are going to look for alternative treatments.

But man, I really wish I'd spent that sixty bucks on half of a doctor's appointment because the chiropractor didn't know about the benign tumor that I had that weakened the structure of that particular bone when she did her adjustment; it also didn't make the pain go away, it made a different pain start and get worse because it turns out I was having debilitating muscle spasms that then had a bone injury added in on top.

(Chiropractic, for the record, goes with chelation therapy and many many many many cases of herbalism where it's NOT just cost or delay; people claim these treatments are harmless and they are not. They can do tremendous harm).

But yeah I'm not going to deny at all that all of this would be a hell of a lot better if people (especially marginalized people) didn't have to jump through hoops to prove to a doctor that something is wrong with them, and didn't have to do so in an appointment that attempts to cram whole person care down into fifteen minutes, and didn't have the possibility of bankrupting you. Interacting with allopathic medicine is a nightmare and I totally understand why people want to look outside of it for treatment.

I've just heard too many horror stories and seen too much predatory CAM to cut much of it any slack.

At the end of the SBM response to the Atlantic article, the author (I can't remember if it's Gorski or Novella) makes the point that reiki is a spiritual practice, and that we've known for a long time that spiritual practices can improve a person's well-being in a number of ways; they can reduce anxiety, they can provide community, they can give people a space to feel and express emotions that they certainly aren't going to be able to process in a doctor's office. Spiritual practices can be wonderful, and we know there are a lot of people who they can help. But they aren't medicine, and attempting to replace medicine with them (which I don't think that most reiki practitioners are trying to do, to be fair, but which Ted Kaptchuk DEFINITELY is in trying to 'harness the power of placebo') is a disservice to people who need an inhaler instead of acupuncture.

Also, and I know this was not your point but I have to bring it up because people ask about it whenever discussions of placebo come up:

The placebo effect is not treatment. The placebo effect, whether achieved through deception or when someone says loud and clear "this is a sugar pill" does not improve an illness, but it may improve how a patient *feels* about an illness. In some cases, this may as well be the same thing - if you're dealing with muscle pain because you're stressed and no matter what you do it doesn't go away because your shoulders are always up around your ears and you're grinding your teeth and you're sleeping poorly, then literally just talking to someone who is in an office and says "this is a sugar pill, go ahead and take it" may make your muscle pain feel better, but it isn't going to reduce your stress and it isn't going to last, and if your muscle pain is because you're feeling angina as a result of a partially blocked artery then it SURE AS FUCK is not going to make you better and may mask symptoms that were a warning sign of a much more serious problem. People who are sick deserve actual treatment, and placebo is not treatment, which is part of why Ted Kaptchuk makes me want to tear my hair out.

[rebelfell]

for your viewing pleasure┃vol. 1

pornstar!eddie x director!reader

all my pornstar!eddie blurbs together at last b/c I hated how I published them originally. the og posts are still here, but they have been edited/expanded somewhat, and I’ve included a “finale” of sorts that is new! index for this story is here.

cw: pornstar!au, so…porn. but it’s also a kind of fantasy porn company/industry, so not really at all based in reality or fact. sex work, oral sex (f & m rec), public-ish sex, piv sex.

18+, MDNI┃8.7k

special thanks to @urhoneycombwitch for helping come up with like 90% of this via mutual flailing in my inbox 🥰 ilyaaf

After dark thoughts about pornstar!eddie…who gets fired from his first job.

Because he’s great at sex, but bad at porn.

So, so, so bad. Like, he’s incredible at eating pussy, but incredible because he does it with his whole face completely buried in his co-star. We’re talking fully and wholly submerged in her folds, as though she’s his breathing apparatus.

And that’s great for her, but terrible for camera.

They keep stopping him, telling him he has to pull it back, that they have to see her pussy and they can’t with his big head and bigger hair blocking their view. But much like a dog that’s been told to leave a treat where it is, he keeps edging closer and moving back in little by little until he’s right back where he wants to be��and they’re yelling “CUT” and scolding him all over again.

And the girl is getting frustrated because, like, she’s about to actually come and she looks at the director with this look of pure desperation and ‘just do me this solid—please?’ in her eyes.

So he finally lets Eddie get her off and just films super tight on her face and her trembling legs so it’s really obvious how real it really is.

And so they can move the fuck on already.

Then they’re filming the fucking, and once again Eddie is fucking like he would fuck in real life and the way he fucks in real life is Not. Good. Porn.

He’s not just slamming into her without any care; he’s not using her to get off; he’s trying to make it good for her. And it is very, very good for her.

Like so good, she’s this close to giving him her number once they wrap for the day.

Her boyfriend of six years be damned.

And once they wrap, Eddie’s not exactly “fired” but he’s pretty sure he’s not getting called back.

Except then the movie comes out and BLOWS UP. People are obsessed. Women are buying it in droves (who knew women even watched porn??) and the VHS is back-ordered to shit.

So the production company is like, “We gotta lock this kid into a contract. Now.”

And just so we’re clear, he gets that contract. 

But he (rightfully) feels like he has a bit of juice behind him and refuses to work with that director ever again. And they agree to his terms, but that first guy is hardly an anomaly and Eddie is still butting heads with these other ass hats who keep trying to force him to do it their way.

“My buddy, my guy, my man, you’re fucking her like she’s a person and that’s not gonna sell. It may have worked for you before, but no way does lightning strike the same dick twice.”

So Eddie walks. And he’s ready to call it quits entirely…until you approach him.

Because you are former talent, trying to branch out and direct, but no one will take you seriously. So you went to the heads of production and told them even if all they gave you was a shoestring budget and one Eddie Munson, you can spin some gold. Spoiler alert—you do.

You come to Eddie with your vision of porn for women: story-based, more realistic dialogue, and real orgasms. Some of the same tropes, but done in a way that doesn’t feel so tired and gross and vapid and soulless. Something new.

Something different. Something special.

And, oh. He is so on board with that.

Meanwhile, back in Hawkins, the rumor mill is milling. Because how in the hell did Eddie “The Freak” Munson become a sex symbol overnight? It has to be a deal with the devil—that’s the only possible explanation, right? He clearly sold his soul for a magic cock and a porn career.

And Steve Harrington is LIVID.

He would have bet his entire college tuition Eddie was a virgin, but now every babe who comes into Family Video is renting that damn tape.

They’re literally pouring in looking for it, marching straight to the back, going behind that red curtain where normally only the creepers go. And they don’t so much as blush when Steve scans it.

Robin teases him about it mercilessly. Tells him maybe if he watches it, he’ll pick up some new moves. And, like, Steve has watched plenty of porn. He can’t imagine Eddie is doing anything that earth-shattering. There’s only so much to it, you know? People must just be caught up in the novelty of it being someone that they kind-of sort-of know. It will wear off, it has to.

Then he watches it.

And, oh…Steve has been doing sex all wrong.

For one, he wasn’t going down on girls. He just wasn’t. He’s not like…against it, or anything. But he sort of didn’t realize that was a thing? He lost his virginity in high-school for fuck’s sake—what did he know besides porn and magazines? And that was all the same, so wasn’t that what girls wanted? (Oh, you sweet summer dingus, Robin would shake her head and lament later.)

Secondly…the girls he was with never sounded like that. And he never realized just how fake all those other “orgasms” in porn sounded until he heard the real deal. Now he can’t un-hear it.

From that day forward, for almost two months, they are short one copy of Eddie’s tape because Steve snuck it home in his bag one night after closing. For research purposes only.

No, seriously.

Eddie is a fucking star. Literally.

The second you and he get together, (in a, ahem, professional sense) something shifts. It feels like a long-laid plan plotted from a distant corner of the vast universe has finally come to fruition.

Your first tape is a smash. The camera you get is barely a step up from a hand-held camcorder, but it doesn’t matter in the slightest. Even with a bare bones crew (you wind up doing a lot of the sound, the lighting, the editing yourself) and everyone doubting you from the jump, it’s a hit.

The concept isn’t anything crazy—Eddie shows up to deliver a pizza, and instead the girl accepts his delivery. But you add a twist: the pizza is for a poker game her boyfriend is hosting. He canceled date night for it and she’s been sitting out here all alone while they play in the other room.

Not on Eddie’s watch.

He goes to town on her, bringing her to the brink three or four times while her boyfriend’s pizzas go cold on the countertop. You push the camera in close on both of them, really trying to give the sense of Eddie as a person. So he’s not just another disembodied guy with a nice dick.

Although his is very, very nice.

His personality shines through when he does things like hike her leg up to fuck into her pussy deeper, chasing her pleasure like her high is his own; and when he grins down at her all devilishly as she tries to stifle her sounds so her “boyfriend” won’t hear; or when Eddie mocks her, making her own little whines and huffs and squeals right back at her in a way that is so infuriatingly hot.

He talks her through it, locking those big brown eyes of his on her, clutching the back of her neck while she tries to block her moans, until at last she can’t hold it back any longer and explodes.

And you have the sound guy stand off to the side and call out, “Everything okay in there, babe?” after she’s done. Nothing but a shuddering, trembling mess on a black leather sofa.

Cut. Print. That’s a wrap, folks.

Eddie is a dream to work with. He’s collaborative and creative; he communicates effectively and often. You guys are like two halves of the same brain, often anticipating what the other wants before they even know it themselves.

It’s alarming, almost. To be seen so clearly.

Even short on crew, equipment, time, money—you can’t seem to fail when you’re together.

The one thing you’re never short on is actresses. Ever since Eddie’s first tape came out, word of mouth (pun intended) has spread. Rapidly. And since you know most of them, you know who to hire. You know which ones are the flakes, which ones are divas, which ones will vibe best with the kind of set experience you’re trying to create. So Eddie trusts your judgment, completely.

He just waits for you to tell him who he’s fucking and then he does it. And he does it so well.

The fucker has chemistry with everyone—down to the guy who brings the sandwiches when you break for lunch. He’s so charming and funny and considerate practically to a fault. He’s fully dialed in from the moment he steps on set to when you wrap for the day. And afterwards, he’s checking in with you, making sure you got exactly what you wanted, asking if you want anything else, if you need him to stay because he’ll be happy to.

It’s…completely and utterly disarming.

He has every right to be a full blown asshole. This entire venture hinges on him and his magic dick, so his head should be as big as a hot air balloon. But he doesn’t ever stray from that unflagging decency that’s so rare in this industry. 

And you pray he never will.

It’s Eddie who pitches your next film.

He’s got this notion of a good girl—a cheerleader—who’s having a hard time and goes looking for weed from the mean and scary tattooed dealer.

(One guess who’s playing him.)

Except he’s not so mean and scary. He’s actually kind of a goof, mock-stabbing himself in the heart and flailing around like a clown, throwing himself off the picnic bench you and he dragged out to this clearing at the ass crack of dawn.

All part of the vision, he assured you.

They look great on camera. His dark, wild hair and clothes and everything in direct contrast to her sweet, round face and bright pastel hues and soft waves. Chemistry’s off the charts, as usual. She starts out really nervous and fidgety, but he makes her comfortable and flirts, offers the bud at a discount. And then her brow cocks daringly and she asks if he has anything…stronger.

Cut to her being eaten out like a banquet spread out on this table in the middle of the forest.

It’s oddly lush and romantic with the rich color of the leaves and the dappled sunlight that filters in through the branches—a foil to the lewdness of their acts and their wanton sounds. 

And when they’re dressed down to nothing, bare skin on bare skin on gray weathered wood, they look almost like forest nymphs or elves caught up in the throes of passion, secluded in the trees.

Especially with the leaves still clinging to Eddie’s hair from when he fell off the table.

Not for the first time, you feel a certain twinge of something that squirms low in the pit of your stomach while you watch them.

Except you’re not watching them…because you can’t take your eyes off of him.

After you wrap, he hangs back. Asks what you thought of the shoot while he helps break down the equipment. Blushes when you tell him you loved it and how good he looked. Explains how it was inspired by these daydreams he used to have about this one girl he knew in high-school.

And you almost, almost, ask him about her—but you’re cut off by a PA who runs up in a panic.

The studio is calling, and they’re pissed.

They’ve just gotten a look at the contract you had drawn up. Rights to a boutique company under their banner, unlimited use of their distribution channels. Full creative control and intellectual property rights to anything and everything.

Plus exclusive use of Eddie.

(Effectively nullifying that horseshit deal they originally gave him for a much, much better one.)

You know they’re gonna fight you on a lot of it—you swung big so you’d have plenty of room to negotiate—but it will all be worth it when they fold. Because you and Eddie have big plans.

You both know you’re onto something special and you’re in it together, to the end of the line.

Apparently, Eddie is also interested in editing.

He shows up to the production offices on a day he’s supposed to be off, but knows you have the editing bay reserved. Brings you coffee and an egg sandwich like a literal angel on earth.

An angel dressed like the devil, maybe. Because he’s got on this tank top with arm holes that’ve been stretched way, way beyond their natural elasticity, drooping down around his ribs and flashing glimpses of his tattoos and the tops of his obliques. And you aren’t entirely sure why you’re getting all hot and bothered over a tank top when there’s not a single intimate inch of his        body you haven’t already seen up close and personal through your viewfinder.

In fact, it’s the same body you’re watching fuck the shit out of that girl on the picnic table from a few days ago. And he’s wearing a whole lot less than a tank top.

You share a brief chuckle over it—the fact that his bare ass is flickering on three screens while you scroll through footage. And it’s not so much that it’s awkward, more like you’re mutually tickled by the fact that it’s not? There’s not an ounce of self-consciousness left between you two.

In a way, it’s like there never was.

He asks if you want any help, or if you mind him sitting in. He’s interested in the process, thinks it might help him on set too. There’s such a rich vein of enthusiasm and curiosity in him, a real thirst to be better and to learn. It’s ridiculous it took him three tries to graduate.

You think it’s a great idea…at first.

But then you’re watching him on the screen with him sitting right next to you. His earthy, woodsy scent layered with the smell of his soap in your nose; his recorded grunts and groans of pleasure in your ears coming through your headphones that are starting to slicken with the sweat.

It’s all wildly distracting. And you must be some kind of masochist, because (not for the first time) you can’t help but wonder how he makes all these women come the way they do.

“So, uh, what…what exactly are you doing here?”

You clear your throat, trying to cover the tremor in your voice as you ask. Eddie scoots in closer, his eyes darting between yours and the screen as he describes the way he’s using his tongue, swirling it around the edges of her entrance, plunging it deep inside her while his nose pushes firmly on her clit. Pretending not to notice your chest heaving with his every word.

“How do you even breathe?” you chuckle.

“I find my moments,” he says.

Smirks back. Winks.

And uh-oh. When did his hand touch your knee? When did he start to rub his thumb over your bare skin through the hole in your jeans? When did his long, ringed fingers start to curl under your thigh to squeeze it? When did he start to lean further into your space? When did you get so wet?

He’s close now. It wouldn’t take anything for you to bridge the gap and let your lips meet his. You can’t, though. You don’t. Because it would be so…stupid. It would be wrong and bad, and it could jeopardize both of your careers. Everything you’re working towards, totally gone.

You’re starting the porn for women movement, here. You can’t fuck your first star!

And you don’t. You keep it professional. You tell him you’re going to call it a day and head home so he’ll do the same. But later that night, when he calls with some new ideas for a script, asking if he can run a few lines by you (just to know how it sounds out loud, you know?), and you wind up having the most insane, mind-blowing phone sex of your entire life…Well, that’s different.

That’s totally and completely different.

The next time you see him, it’s business as usual.

You knew it would be. You two are nothing if not consummate professionals, fully committed to this endeavor. Neither of you would dare let your goals be derailed by a silly little crush.

And it is just a crush. It has to be.

Just the natural result of working so closely with him; of seeing him so completely in his element; appreciating his work ethic and his creativity.

Not to mention the fact that you are consistently watching him have the hottest sex you’ve ever seen in your life. But that’s unrelated.

The next shoot is your biggest yet. It’s at this massive mansion that you’re dressing to look like a spa with two massage tables set up by the pool that looks like something straight out of a resort.  Eddie is playing a masseur who offers a lonely, neglected housewife consolation in the form of his cock after her husband chooses work over their couples massage.

After the success of the pizza delivery tape, you think it’s best you lean hard into the “Eddie fucks it better” sort of storylines.

Because why not play to your strengths?

Except that the call time of your female lead has come and gone and she’s nowhere to be found. You know Trina, this isn’t like her, she’s never late. But you called and got no answer. Twice.

The light is perfect, everyone’s in place…but there’s no one for Eddie to fuck.

Even if you could get a replacement, it would take at least an hour for anyone to get out here and that was being generous. By then, the shoot would be way behind and you’ve literally only got today in this stupid model home before some fucking billionaire moves in tomorrow.

It’s gonna be a massive loss of time and money if you don’t think of something. Like, right now.

Eddie can see you’re stressed. He comes over and you huddle by your storyboards. And neither of you has to say it, but you both are thinking the exact same thing. As per usual.

You could do it.

You’re here, for one. And you’ve done this plenty of times. It just makes good business sense.

It’s been a while, and you’re not quite “camera-ready” after not having to be for the past couple of months, but you and Eddie have been talking about using more normal-looking bodies; bodies that jiggled and had hair where it grew naturally and are authentically real, regular bodies.

The camera guys know what sort of shots you want and you’ve got a bigger crew now—people who know your vision and can help bring it forth.

Plus, you’ll be with Eddie. You know he’ll take care of you. He’ll be sure that you get exactly what you need, no matter what. You’d bet your life on it.And, well…you and he did just rehearse your lines the other night.

The shoot is…interesting.

From the outside, it goes great. Perfect, even. Eddie looks all kinds of cute in his white polo and white pants. He’s got his long hair twisted up off his neck, a few loose tendrils framing his face. 

And you somehow forgot until he puts his hands on you the first time that the whole concept for this shoot was born out of the fact that he actually went to massage school for real.

Before you even get to the sex stuff, you’re putty in his hands. He moves them up and down your calves, slides his thumbs over your muscles in a dizzying pattern en route to your thighs. 

You’re not even faking the deep moans of relief you let out as he moves up higher and higher… arousal promptly pooling between your legs.

He starts going through his lines, striking that perfect balance between his casual, trying-to-be professional voice, while slowly getting more and more desperate and possessive. 

As if he’s constantly fighting the urge to take you right then. Right now.

Telling you how awful it is your husband chose work over you like this; how you should always be his number one priority; how Eddie would never let you out of his sight if you were his…

His hands reach your ass and he grips one round globe in each, spreading you apart so he (and the camera) can see how you glisten, the sunlight reflecting like it does off the water in the pool.

You wait for his next line—when he offers you a very ‘special’ massage with a ‘special’ technique he ‘doesn’t use on just anyone.’ 

But Eddie goes off script.

He licks a fat, wide stripe directly through your folds and your head pops out of the little headrest at the end of the table, the pure shock and delight on your face captured instantly by the camera.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he pleads, his tongue still swirling in between the words muffled by your ass cheeks, like he can’t stand to take it away, even to speak. “I had to taste you…”

“It’s okay,” you moan, voice nearly cracking in a dry sob, “It’s okay, just please don’t stop—”

And he doesn’t. He keeps going until you come, until you’re reaching back behind you to grip his hair as you push your hips back to meet every thrust of his perfect tongue. From there, it’s back to regularly scheduled fucking. He stays on script, peppering in the sort of ad-libs he knows from experience get a good reaction every time—

That’s it sweetheart, you’re doing so well for me.

Your husband doesn’t know what he’s missing.

This pussy is all mine now, you understand?

And, yeah, that stuff gets you off, no problem. But it’s the other stuff he does—the quieter, subtle things you aren’t expecting—that really push you over the edge again and again. And again.

It’s the things he whispers (actually whispers, not stage whispers) low in your ear so you’re the only one who can hear. You feel way too good/I gotta slow down or I’m gonna come/I know you faked that last one, gimme a real one now—

It’s…it’s almost too much. You knew he’d be good, you just didn’t expect how good. 

And you definitely didn’t expect to feel the way you do when he checks in between takes: asking if you want more or less of anything, making sure he’s not being too rough, telling you how great you’re doing, apologizing again for that initial snafu. It makes you all…fluttery.

But it’s not until after you wrap for the day, after you’ve gotten in the shower at home and start to wash off the massage oil spread all over your skin, that you realize Eddie never kissed you.

Not once.

When Eddie calls later that week, it’s to ask you out. Not on a date, though. 

Which is good. Really, it is. A relief, even. Because contrary to the way your heart leapt into your throat when he asked if you were busy this weekend, you absolutely cannot date him.

It doesn’t matter that you’re attracted to him. Or that you came out of your eyeballs multiple times with him the other day. Or that you haven’t been able to think about anything besides him since.

You. Can’t. Date.

You’re pretty much his boss, don’t forget. Maybe not technically, maybe not on paper—but if you start something up with him, it will be messy and complicated and it could put everything you and he have worked for in jeopardy. More than that, you don’t want anyone thinking he got where he is by any other means besides his hard work (pun intended). He’s earned everything he’s gotten.

And now that includes an award.

That’s what he’s calling about. He’s been nominated for what is essentially the porn equivalent of an Oscar for that first tape he made. And now he has to go to this ceremony, except he’s sort of freaking out because he’s never done anything like this before and he’s really nervous and he kind of needs you there because ‘you’re the only one I’m always comfortable with.’

So he asks if you’ll go with him. As friends.

And you say you will. And it’s fine. You can do this, you can do this, you can do this—FUCK. 

Why does he have to be so hot? Showing up in a black Prada suit with a sheer shirt underneath? Almost as bad as wearing nothing under it at all. Worse, maybe.

It’s unbuttoned nearly to the middle of his torso, layered chains dangling low, hanging around that tree trunk of a neck you can’t stop wishing you could sink your teeth into, wrap a hand around—

Nope. Nope. You’re not going there. The only place you’re going tonight is these awards.

Except when you get there, the organizers don’t want you photographed with Eddie. At least not arriving together. People still aren’t familiar with you as a director, and you haven’t starred in a project in months. That’s practically a century in porn time.

Plus, the tape Eddie is nominated for you didn’t even work on. It wouldn’t make any sense.

Eddie is immediately poised to protest, but neither of you is given much of an opportunity. While you’re shuffled into the long line of people already being photographed in front of the venue, he’s being whisked away so he can walk with the girl he starred in that very first film with.

You know her, sort of. You did a group scene once upon a time. She’s a biter.

They even sneak him into her limo so it looks like they came together. He gets out first and then holds out a hand to help her, a storm of flash bulbs going off, making her jumpsuit sparkle.

And you tell yourself not to watch. You try to smile pretty for your own pictures and look like you are having a good time. Or at least not look like you’re chewing on glass. But it’s…difficult.

Especially when you look up at the worst possible time—the exact moment she places a dainty hand on his chest and he turns his face toward hers, their lips meeting for a long kiss. 

Long enough for every camera there to capture it.And the very last shot they get of you that night is one of your back as you head inside to get a drink. Or ten. Trying not to think about this sour, putrid, inconvenient feeling in your chest.

Eddie should have walked with you. 

He should have done a lot of things, actually.

He should have told those uppity event coordinators to fuck off. He should have ignored that girl from his first film when she whispered under her breath for him to look at her. He should have dodged that sticky, tacky kiss she planted on his lips without any kind of warning.

He should have asked you out for real instead of hiding behind this ‘as friends’ bullshit.

Maybe if he had, he’d be tasting your lipgloss instead of the glittery mess he was wiping off his chin. Maybe it would be your hand in his as you walked the carpet. And maybe it would be him getting you a drink and clinking his glass with yours instead of the guy you’re with right now.

Eddie knows him. Well, he doesn’t know him, he recognizes him from a tape with some absurd name like Sex Kittens 4 that featured a surprising amount of doggy style, considering the title.

Plus you in a never-ending stream of animal-print bikinis.

(He definitely did NOT go looking for every movie you’d ever made. No, that would be ridiculous. He just sort of…happened across one. Or five.)

And it’s not that he’s jealous—because there’s nothing to be jealous of. You met him doing a job. A job very much like the one you did with Eddie. You’re just catching up with an old coworker.

It’s fine. Totally fine. Did he mention it’s fine?

But then Tom Wanks put his hand on your hip, and before Eddie can take even a second to think, or to rationalize his actions, he’s striding up to you and taking your hand to drag you away.

The beaded fringe on your dress swishes noisily as he brings you with him behind a curtain that was set up as a backdrop for more photos. In the shadows behind it, your eyes glint a little meanly and your voice is barbed when you ask what the hell is the matter with him.

And he’s really not sure.

Because much like you, he’s not used to this; he’s not used to not saying exactly what is on his mind at any given time; he’s not used to holding anything back—not when it comes to you.

“I should have stayed with you,” he blurted out at last. “That was messed up, I—”

Your face falls and you dodge his gaze. “It’s fine, Eddie. Don’t worry about it.”

“But I am worried about it,” he shot back. “I could have said something, I could have told them—”

“What for?” you mutter, arms crossing in front of your chest. You look at the floor, hurt. Not just hurt, disappointed. “I mean, what…what would be the point? It’s not like we’re…or that you’re…”

He watches the words stall behind your lips, all of them trying to fight their way out like people on a crowded bus. But in their efforts, they only wind up clogging the exit so nothing gets through.

“God, listen to me!” you laugh bitterly. “I sound like some crazy, jealous…something, and I don’t know why I’m getting this upset when you don’t even like me—”

“Wait, what? Who the fuck said that?”

He can tell you’re shocked by the panic that rises in his voice, staring back at him wide-eyed.

“Wh-when we were filming, you never kissed me. So I thought…”

You fell silent as Eddie’s hands covered the sides of your face. Softly cradling your jaw, his thumbs brushing over your cheeks, he stares straight into your eyes and determinedly holds your gaze. 

Your breath stuttered, so lost in those deep brown pools you could hardly recall your own name. And even if you could speak, you weren’t entirely sure what you wanted to say.

Luckily, Eddie gave you something better to do with your mouth.

His lips meet yours in a gentle brush. His hold on your face never tightens, but you can feel the way his fingers flex like he’s resisting the urge to grip you harder. There’s a tenacity in his kiss, as if he’s trying to savor the taste of you, but struggling not to devour you whole.

You break apart too soon for his liking. He easily would have stayed there forever. And he braces himself for whatever might be coming—a slap across his face, a knee straight to his balls.

He might deserve both, but receives neither.

You don’t pull back so much as an inch, happy to let him keep your face close to his. He inhales shakily, still breathing you in, “I didn’t want the first time I did that to be on camera.”

You chuckle at him, dazed and grinning, trying to decide if this is a dream or not. If it is, you don’t ever want to wake up. You want to live in it. Your own hands creep up his stomach, tugging on his silky shirt, feeling the way he shivers in it when he feels the caress of your fingertips.

“What about the second?” you whisper.

And then he’s kissing you again.

Deeper. Hungrier. Messier.

He’s not kissing you like it’s his job; like he’s just doing what was written for him in a script—he’s doing it like it’s the only thing he’s ever wanted, desired, chosen to do. Like it’s all he needs.

Your bare back meets the cool wall as he pushes you up against it, sliding his hand inside the slit of your dress, hooking it under your knee to hitch your leg over his hip. He presses every single inch of himself against your seam, harder than he’s ever been in his whole fucking life.

The closest second being when you and he filmed just a few days ago.

You claw at him, pushing his suit jacket off his shoulders, pulling open more buttons on his shirt until the gossamer fabric tears and unravels.

“More,” he begs, kisses trailing down your neck. “Fucking please, sweetheart, I need more—”

Your hand takes on a life of its own, sliding down to cup his length through the luxurious suiting. It causes him to release a deep, desperate moan you can feel his lips spreading apart to let out. The sound of it ripples through your body like an electric shock in every extremity.

The dull roar of the crowd right on the other side of that curtain is only barely enough to cover the sound of you and Eddie’s passions. His touch is so enthralling, so engrossing, you are this close to letting him fuck you right there.

Room full of people be damned.

Eddie seems to have the same idea, his mouth blazing a trail down the middle of your chest and stomach as he drops to one knee, his other foot planted to support himself as he drapes your leg over his shoulder. A rush of excitement floods your body as you realize his intentions, fingers sliding into his unruly curls to grip them at the crown of his head.

But the very second his fingers pull your panties to the side and his tongue finds its home in your folds, a commotion breaks through your bliss.

There’s a loud crash as a cater waiter stumbles into the curtain obscuring your entangled bodies and drags it down with them as they fall.

Light floods the darkened space and a sound of collective amusement ripples through the crowd. No one is exactly surprised to see people hooking up—but it’s usually not until the afterparty.

Cocktail hour isn’t even over, for crying out loud.

Then they realize who it is.

The shutters of opportunistic photographers snap as you give Eddie’s hair a sharp tug. But he just moans loudly—too absorbed in what he’s doing to even realize what’s happened.

Finally, you pull him off your clit and he looks over his shoulder at the rest of the room.

Another round of snaps and flashes go off and his eyes return to yours, brightening when he sees the way you’re covering your mouth, fighting back laughter. His own lips, still shiny with your arousal, spread into a wide grin. His gaze lands on an emergency exit and he jumps to his feet, taking your hand in his and pulling you towards it tucked securely under his arm.

Flipping off the room behind him as you leave.

Together.

The trip back to your apartment is the longest cab ride of your life.

Whereas on the way to the convention center, you’d ridden mashed against your door trying to leave a respectable distance across the middle seat, Eddie practically has you in his lap on the way back. It’s like he thinks he’ll die if he stops touching you for even a second—lips on your neck, his hands roaming hungrily, whispering filth in your ear under the cover of the radio.

You do your best to catch the driver’s eye in the rearview, trying to shoot him an apologetic look or at least mouth a wholly insincere ‘sorry’ for the display. But he seems unphased.

Still, you stuff a wad of extra bills in his hand as you scramble out of his car. Unceremoniously crashing through the front door, you’re lucky not to break it down in your haste to get Eddie inside.

Of your apartment, that is.

Lips locked for every step across your cramped studio, you tumble to the bed and let out a soft grunt when a plastic hanger digs into your back. Hearing you yelp, Eddie pulls back and can see you’re lying on top of the ten or so discarded outfits you went through trying to decide on what to wear tonight. Sequins rustle under your bodies as the bed shakes with your gentle laughter, and Eddie drops a kiss to the tip of your nose before he climbs off you. Reluctantly.

He watches while you gather the dresses strewn across the bed, smiling when you try and stuff them back in your closet, fumbling with only the amber street light filtering through your blinds to see by. When you finally turn back to face him, he’s still smiling. Head tilted at you, eyes slowly raking over your form, heart rate picking up in his chest when yours do the same to him.

The pause is nice. It gives you both a minute to catch your breaths, for your brains to catch up with your bodies. Your steps turn careful and slow as you move towards him. With trembling fingers, he pulls open the last remaining buttons of his sheer shirt and lets it fall to his feet.

Remembering only just now that his jacket is still on the floor of that hotel ballroom.

You come to a stop in front of him and he closes the distance left. He reaches around you and pulls down the zipper of your dress, fingertips dragging lightly along your spine as he reveals it.

It’s the closest you’ve ever come to feeling like a gift someone is unwrapping.

With your dress pooled around your ankles, Eddie’s hands are free to wander. He runs them up and down your arms, sweeping them along the inside of your wrists to twine your fingers with his. He brings them to his lips to kiss and the sight of plush pink brushing your knuckles is bordering on being too much to handle—more erotic than anything you’ve ever filmed.

He’s going slow because it’s slowly dawning on him what you’re about to do. 

And how this time it’s not going to be for work or for a camera. It’s going to be real. 

Except…is it going to be real?

Should he do something different than what he did when you filmed? How can he, when he used all his best moves during the shoot? Shit…

He doesn’t want you thinking he’s just doing with you the same thing he does with everyone else; that this—that you—aren’t special to him.

Then suddenly, he’s not going slow anymore.

He’s stopped completely.

“You okay?” you whisper.

“Y-yeah,” he chokes out, like the word is made of sawdust. “I just, ahhh…I don’t know, I think I’m psyching myself out? Thinking too hard.”

“Thinking about what?” you whisper, your teeth tugging back your bottom lip.

His head just shakes, eyes still scanning your face while his thumb lightly strokes your jaw, until he lets out a sigh that’s heavy with fondness and whispers, “How I don’t want to mess this up.”

He takes another deep breath, letting his forehead rest against your own as his chest shudders. Confounded as to how something he’s done in front of a whole-ass camera crew could make him feel so self-conscious when it’s just you here with him. A few seconds of silence pass until his lips part in a smirk and his gaze cuts to the side, right to where a camera would be.

“Is it just me…or does it feel like something is missing?”

It takes a few minutes of digging to find your old camcorder buried in the depths of your closet. 

Eddie chuckles when you emerge, brandishing it with a flourish and a little ta-da! before you set it on top of your dresser pointed at the bed, angling it slightly to properly frame the shot.

The red light blinks as you hit ‘record,’ barely taking a second to check if there’s a tape inside. You let it run, capturing your figures half in shadows as he sits on the bed and pulls you into his lap. He helps you settle on his thighs, runs his hands up the backs of yours, slips his long fingers under the elastic band of your panties to rest on your hip. He pulls them back and snaps them softly on your skin, earning a hum of approval from behind your pressed lips.

You wriggle on top of him and delight in how it makes his chest reverberate with a low groan.

“That better?” you whisper, the answer to your question immediately stiffening underneath you. He nods fervently, his voice tight and strained as he struggles to keep his cool.

“Wanna taste you,” he grunts out roughly.

He moves his hands to grip your waist so he can flip you underneath him, but your hands find his shoulders and stop him before he can.

Big, doleful eyes look up at yours, his face etched with concern as you shake your head. His bottom lip wobbles as he searches your face for why.

In a reassuring press, you mash your lips to his and lace your fingers behind his neck. You kiss all the air out of his lungs, until his fingertips are digging into your flesh hard enough to leave ten tiny bruises. You kiss him like you’re trying to take the weight of the world off his shoulders, like you’re going to accept his every burden as your own so he doesn’t have to carry them alone.

There’s a quiet pop as your mouths separate and you press your chest flush with his, wrapping your arms around his neck so your lips find his ear as your nose nudges through his curls.

“Tell me you want me,” you whisper. “Tell me how much you want this.”

“I don’t want it,” he groans back, “I need it. I’ve needed it since I fucking met you.”

The heat in his voice, the rumble of it in your ear, causes a wave of arousal to rush through your body. You unwind your arms from around his neck and slip slowly, painfully slowly, from his lap to stand between his legs. You place a finger under his chin and tip his face up for him to look at you, your thumb settling in the tiny dip at its center. Too small to see, it could only be felt.

“Everyone always uses you,” you tell him softly, almost mournfully.

His eyes stay wide and hopeful, never leaving yours as you sink down to your knees. His long, dark lashes flutter as your hands run up his muscled thighs, the edges of your thumbs grazing the outline of his cock. He hisses through his teeth and you grin devilishly at the sound.

“I want you to use me,” you instruct him. “Take whatever you need, as much as you want.”

And you can literally see how your words affect him, his eyes bugging wide as the wheels in his head are turning behind them. He reaches out to touch your face and you turn it to kiss his palm.

“Sweetheart, I—oh, fuck,” he gasps, cut off with your sudden squeeze of his clothed cock.

“I’ll stop you if I need a break,” you reply firmly.

The muscles in his neck pull taught as he nods. He leans back on one elbow, reluctant to let his other hand leave your face. You kiss his bare stomach along the top of his waistband and he curls his hand around the back of your head, gripping it tighter when you tug down his fly.

And you knew Eddie’s dick well by now. You knew it inside of you as well as out. But there was nothing that could have prepared you for the sight of it tonight. Thick, and veiny, and weeping with pre that dribbles down its sides. He’s almost ashamed of it, almost embarrassed by how hard he is for you; by how close he is to blowing his load when you’ve not even gotten started.

It was practically a miracle he didn’t soil the inside of his suit when you pulled his hair earlier.

His pupils are blown out when your eyes meet his, your lips hovering so close to his cock he can feel your breath on it. Saliva pools under your tongue so rapidly, you almost feel like you’re at risk of it spilling out of your mouth and running down your chin when you speak.

“Fuck my throat, Eddie. Please.”

And he does. He lets you set the pace at first, still holding fast on the back of your head he watches your lips surround his tip. His chest heaves with deep, gasping breaths as you take him fully into your mouth and start to bob on his perfect cock. It’s almost too much, too perfect, the feeling of your warm, wet mouth and your soft tongue and, fuck, your hand—

He pants wildly as you cradle his sack, your fingertips stroking them and spreading the spit from your mouth that’s dribbling down his shaft to his balls. They tense in your palm and his stomach tightens the faster your mouth moves, the more your throat relaxes to take him in deep.

The man who gives the best head imaginable finally having the favor returned.

“Jesus Christ…”

Eddie's words are whispered like a prayer and you look up to take in the sight of him.

Eyes pinched shut, his brows drawn like he’s in pain even though the sounds he’s releasing are nothing short of euphoric. You tease all the most sensitive nooks and crannies of his cock, all the places that make his eyes roll back and his head loll on his shoulders and his chest heave. Every ridge, every vein, every muscle that twitches under the attention of your tongue.

“Oh, pl…p-please,” he gasps, tightening his hold on your hair to still your movements as his hips start to move in an instinctive and primal thrust.

He hits the back of your throat and you swallow more of him down, taking him deeper, deeper until your nose brushes the wiry hair at his base.

You groan around his length, enthralled by the exquisite ache of him hitting your soft palate, and the sound is Eddie’s undoing. He lets out a long, low moan and spills hot and thick down your throat. His arm trembles as he fights his own iron grip on the back of your head, forbidding himself from pulling your hair. You can feel the tremors of his fingers against your scalp.

His abdomen spasms as you stroke him through the aftershocks, flirting with overstimulation. Fucked-out eyes, heavy-lidded and sleepy, but nothing short of reverent, find yours and they’re wet—shiny, shimmering with tears that crowd their rims and threaten to spill down his cheeks.

Quick as you can, you’re on your feet cradling his jaw to ask if he’s okay. And Eddie can’t answer, can only nod as he kisses, kisses, kisses your palm, the heel of your hand, your wrist, down the inside of your arm all the way to your elbow.

He can’t kiss you enough, it seems. 

You giggle softly as you sit beside him and reach out to ruffle his bangs, tucking some of his hair behind his ear and letting your touch linger on his neck. With the pad of your thumb, you brush a tear that has leaked out of the corner of his eye. He looks back at you with a smile and swipes the pad of his thumb along the corner of your mouth to wipe away a drop of his spend.

And you know there’s still a lot left to figure out—damage control that will have to be done, difficult conversations that will have to be had. There will be whispers and rumors and sidelong glances.

Not to mention the firestorm those pictures of you two at the ceremony will undoubtedly stir up.

But none of that matters right now. Nothing does, beyond this bed and this night. Nothing else even exists outside the confines of this room.

All that matters is you and him.

You lay there for a while, just…being. Your fingers tracing his tattoos and the soft planes of his chest and stomach; his, the slope of your shoulders and the lines of your body he’s always wanted to know better. Quiet words pass back and forth, teasing jokes and soft confessions. Admissions of fears that held you both back and don’t seem so daunting anymore. Don’t seem so scary.

When he’s hard again, you pick up the camera and point it at him as you guide him to lay on his back. You push in close on his face when you sink down fully onto his length and start to ride him at an egregiously slow pace just so your shot holds steady. And because he looks so pretty taking it.

“Something wrong, Ed?” you goad him a smidge, toying with him in more ways than one when your pussy squeezes so tight around his cock it makes him lose his breath and pant out of control.

“F-fu…fuuuuuck meeee…” he whines and writhes, throwing his head back into the mattress.

“Oh,” you chuckle at him, speeding up just a hair, “I’m sorry, is that not what I was doing?”

His head jerks up, eyes ablaze as he stares you down through the camera lens. You peer at him over the top of the viewfinder and shiver despite the thin layer of sweat building on your skin.

Okay, yeah, that might have been a little too far. Or just far enough, you think, almost giddy.

“Nah,” he growls, the corner of his mouth curling up in a smirk. “Sorry is what you’re gonna be.”

A loud squeal bursts out of you as he rolls your bodies to the side and pins you underneath him, somehow managing to keep himself seated inside you the whole time. Breathless, you watch as he takes the camera from you and practically tosses it away so he can hold your arms over your head. For a while, all it captures is a blurry close-up of your duvet cover, the frame shaking in time with every deep, solid thrust of Eddie’s hips that rattles the entire bed and you in it when he gets going.

Your moans and his grunts mix in a symphony that will surely earn you some side-eyeing from your neighbors tomorrow, but you can’t bring yourself to give a single ounce of a shit.

The song that you make together swells to a crescendo as you topple over the precipice you’ve been dangling off the edge of practically from the moment you met him. Eddie fumbles like mad for the camera and picks it up, recording your blissful expression before he swoops in to press his lips back to yours. Kissing you like he’s trying to eat you, like he’s trying to fuse your faces.

You’re certainly not complaining.

And now that he’s the one with the camera, he’s eager to keep going. He pans it up and down your whole body, guiding you into every filthy position he’s been imagining all those long nights alone in his bed. Through his eyes behind the lens, there’s not a single angle on you that isn’t pristine. 

He gets you up on all fours, films tight on your ass as he squeezes it and cracks his palm down on it when he lets go. The sting makes you keen, your back arching as your hips thrust back—seeking more, more. His hand then smooths over your buzzing flesh, soothes the ache he’s made.

And even as you’re making it, you can tell this is not just another sex tape.

It’s a love tape.

thank you for reading — love you, mean it! 🏝️

[citrusdarling7]

The Bloodline

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description- as a highly trained sister of the Bene Gesserit, you were prepared to do your part in carrying on the selective genetic material of this generation. however, a change of plans are made, and you are told that you must secure the bloodline of the na-Baron Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, the dangerous young heir to Geidi Prime

warnings- unprotected intercourse, p-in-v sex, fingering (f! receiving,) sort of knife-play, blood, violence via gladiator fighting (but not too descriptive,) BG propaganda, slightly inaccurate Dune technology, feyd-rautha has black cum (credit to @valeskafics for that one<3)

word count- 1,857

a/n- wow, it's been a while. haven't published anything on this site in like over a year I think, but I hope at least someone will enjoy this sick little piece I wrote instead of doing my homework :)

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It was never supposed to be him.

You were supposed to be paired with the heir of Caladan, Paul Atriedes, and you had been told this since your first day of training. Yet, the Atreides' had all been killed on Arrakis at the hands of the Harkonnens, and your Reverend Mother decided that the duty of continuing another selective bloodline would fall upon you. The na-Baron Feyd-Rautha may have been the result of 90 generations of predetermined genetic material, but that didn’t make him any less psychotic. Nor any less intriguing.

The bright sun of Geidi Prime was high today, and the air was sticky with humidity. Cheers erupted from the crowds as a young Harkonnen warrior gutted a slave in the pit below, and you found yourself growing bored of the spectacle. One of the ladies to your right let out a shriek at the gruesome scene, drawing your attention.

“How is one supposed to stomach this brutality for an entire day?” She exasperated. 

“It is tradition for the Harkonnens’, Lady Clarissa. They value strength, and what better way to prove it than in the gladiator pits?” Your Bene Gesserit training consisted of much time studying the histories, and you pride yourself on your knowledge of the cultures of all the Great Houses. Lady Clarissa grimaced before adjusting her hairpiece and fixing her mouth back to a pout.

“It is deplorable, but I suppose you would have no issue with that sort of thing,” she remarked. You paid her no attention; the Bene Gesserit were not well liked by many nobles, Lady Clarissa’s family included. Her discontent mattered little to you, although you felt yourself wishing you had at least one other Sister here with you. 

Unfortunately, your Reverend Mother had sent you on this mission hastily, claiming that the upcoming celebration of the na-Baron’s birthday would be the perfect time for you to carry out the task. Coming from a Great House yourself, it was not abnormal for you to attend such an event, but the marks of the Sisterhood followed you wherever you went. Although controlling your mind was usually an easy task, you found yourself slightly anxious after waiting hours to finally get a glimpse of your target.

It felt as if years had passed before the announcer finally declared that the young na-Baron would now display his bravo in a fight against three slaves, supposedly the last remaining members of the Atreides household. You perked up in your seat, pulling the binoculars close to your eyes as the crowd bellowed. 

Feyd-Rautha strided out to the center of the pit and bowed before the Baron, giving you a good look at the young heir. He was pale, so pale that the sun seemed to reflect off of his skin. The black fighting suit he wore drew your attention to his muscled torso, his sculpted abs peeking out from beneath the hem. His face was stern, although a smile stretched from his lips as one of the slaves began to stagger towards him. As you watched him slice open the other man’s throat, you found your heartbeat begin to race. You were intrigued. 

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

The interior of the Harkonnen palace was grim, as you had expected it to be. You walked through the fortress slowly, counting your steps as a way to calm your breathing. After the spectacle in the gladiator pits, you were immeasurably more nervous than you had been when arriving on the planet. Feyd Rautha was brutal, vicious, and likely insane. Yet, you could not deny your attraction towards him. It was stupid, immature, and dangerous. You were a trained sister of the Bene Gesserit, and this was your duty. To conceive a child with the na-Baron, and ensure the bloodline is secure.

You were not supposed to be on this side of the palace, yet no one questioned as you walked by. Your gown swept across the floor as you moved and your hairpiece tickled your bare shoulders. The na-Baron’s chambers were ahead to your left, and you noted the absence of guards, as well as the faint sound of approaching footsteps. A rather ghastly portrait of a late Baroness served as an excuse for your attention, although you struggled to prevent your eyes from wandering to the dark form approaching. 

“Well, what do we have here? Are you lost, little pet?” His voice was deep and raspy, and you found your mind faltering once again. 

“ My Lord na-Baron.” You restrained from bowing your head as you turned from the painting, staring directly into the man’s eyes as you sweetened your gaze. “I believe I may have wandered too far from the guest’s hall. Mayhaps I have wandered into a trap?”

“You should not be here.” He stepped closer, and began to stride around you in a circular fashion, like that of a predator stalking its prey. He watches you with hunger in his eyes, imagining what pleasure it would bring him to tear the dress from your body and take you right against the wall.

The Reverend Mother had been right; sexually vulnerable.

“Perhaps, I am in exactly the right place. I wished to congratulate you on your triumphs in the fighting today, it was truly a spectacle to remember.” You approached him swiftly, and the smell of steel and musk filled your nose. “I have heard many tales of your strength and bravery, but none measure up to what I have witnessed today. You will be a fearsome Baron, just like your uncle.” At the mention of the Baron, Feyd’s eyes lit up and his hand snapped around your neck. 

“So you must be the gift my uncle has promised. He must have bought you Off-World, for I have never seen a Harkonnen slave as beautiful as you. I will enjoy ravishing you.” 

Your heart beat sky-rocketed as he tightened his grip on your throat, making you lose control.

“Release me,” you commanded with the Voice, out of instinct rather than fear. The words fall from your lips before you can stop them, and Feyd obeys. The grin on his face falters as you stumble backwards, realizing that you may have just destroyed generations of planning, with only two words. Thankfully, Feyd does not seem discouraged.

“Ah, not a gift then, but I will have fun with you all the same, witch.” With a sudden movement, he pushed you against the wall and captured your lips in a harsh kiss. Feyd’s hips pressed hard against yours as he claimed your mouth with his tongue. His scent was overpowering in a way that made your head spin and seemed to subdue your thoughts. Your thighs clenched in anticipation as the na-Baron grabbed at your neck once more.

“Tell me, witch, what do they say of me in your homeworld? Are all you little witches so eager to please?” Feyd’s threatening gaze made your knees falter as you looked up to him with a soft smile.

“Not all of us, my lord. But I must admit, I have found myself rather allured by the temptations of your beautiful planet.” His hand dropped from your throat, and vanished to his side before reappearing a split-second later, with a curved blade in his grip. The tip of the knife rested against your skin, the cold steel making you shiver. Feyd swiped his other palm across the wall, causing it to unlock in a strange clicking pattern. His eyes burning into yours, he led you backwards into what you presumed to be his bedquarters, the blade at your neck guiding you in the way he wanted. 

Your knees hit the edge of the bed, and you allowed yourself to be pressed onto it. His blade was thrown aside, allowing his hands to roughly tear at your gown, ripping the bodice straight in half. You let out a gasp as you felt cold fingers slip between your undergarments.

“What a brazen little slut you are, showing up outside my chambers so wet and wanting.” He thrust two digits inside of you, finally satiating the ache that had been present from the moment you laid eyes on him in the arena. He fucked you roughly with his fingers, setting an excruciating pace that had you whimpering and writhing against the bed in mere minutes. 

“Please, my lord. I want you inside of me,” you begged, reaching up to run your hand along his torso, stopping when you felt the bulge of his manhood straining against the confines of his pants. 

Feyd eagerly obliged, tugging off his pants and stroking his thick cock rapidly to prepare himself for you. He lined his tip up with your entrance and wasted no more time teasing you. The na-Baron thrusted into you, hard, making you clench at the bedsheets and thrash your head to the side in an attempt to stifle your moans.

“Fuck, you’re so fucking tight, little witch,” he grunted, grabbing at your wrists and pinning them above your head. His dark eyes burned into yours as you tried your very best to keep quiet, not wanting to alert any servant that might have been lurking outside. He met your lips with his once again, in a ravenous kiss that had your teeth clashing against his. Feyd bit down on your bottom lip, drawing blood that he hastily licked up before moving on to attack your neck. 

You were so full with his cock inside of you, and you had never been more aroused in your entire life. The metallic smell of blood seemed to radiate from the man, and his fingers left delicious bruises wherever they ventured. You felt your toes begin to curl and your stomach tighten; the agonizing pace at which he was fucking you had you close to the edge of bliss once again. He could feel you begin to clench around him, your walls gripping his cock like a vice.

“Is the little witch going to cum for me? Go ahead, you’re mine now,” He finally released your hands, and you immediately gripped at his muscled shoulders, nails digging into his skin. “My uncle may not have intended you for me, but fate has. No one else will ever have you.” You nodded desperately, not caring about the words coming from his mouth but rather the immense pleasure he was giving you. 

Finally, a wave of bliss overtook your body, making you shake and scream as Feyd continued to roughly fuck you. You lost control of your mind once again, seeing stars as you came.

Feyd was close behind you, and the aftershocks of your orgasm had him rutting his hips against yours, letting out a deep groan as he emptied his seed into you. 

It took you a few moments to regain your senses, to finally realize that you had successfully completed your mission. His black seed leaked out of you, a sickly sight that made your face flush. He had left his distinctive Harkonnen mark on you, and the bloodline was secure. It was never supposed to be him, but you were very pleased with the way things had worked out.

[reality-detective]

John Christie Electric Generator – Generates 24 Kilowatts Of Free Electricity

The John Christie Electric Generator was shown to the world in 2001 – a device capable of generating a full 24 kilowatts of electricity. In this article, I will tell you about John Christie, the inventor, and how he and his friend, Lou Brits, came up with the generator. I will also explain to you how free electricity works and how you too can generate your own electricity at home too.

John Christie And Lou Brits

Australian mechanical engineer, John Christie, and his electrician friend, Lou Brits, worked hard through the 90s to come up with their own version of the magnetic generator. In 2001, they launched it to the public as the Lutec 1000, a device capable of generating 24 kilowatts of electricity (enough to power a few houses).

The main claim to fame at the time was that the Lutec 1000 was “the first free energy machine to be developed to commercial stage anywhere in the world”. This was perhaps an exaggeration as, although the device worked, it was far from being full tested and developed to the point where you could buy one off the shelf in the marketplace.

How Does “Free Energy” Work?

Part of the problem lies in the name. “Free energy” sounds almost impossible to believe, I prefer to call this concept “zero point” as it is known in physics.

Zero point is an area of physics that has been studied for over one hundred years. Nikola Tesla, the man who is called by some the “grandfather of electricity”, dedicated half of his life to studying zero point. He even published his work and it met with great approval. Unfortunately, his legacy in this area did not live on after his death due to existing commercial interests using their power to bury it.

Zero point speaks of obtaining energy without fuel, from a source that is not widely acknowledged in conventional physics. It does this via the use of strategically placed magnets.

Fast forward around a century later and there has been a resurgence of interest in this area, especially in the last year or two. While Christie and Brits may have been a little premature with their “commercial” launch, real working generators are now being built by enthusiasts in their garages, right across the world, numbering somewhere in the tens of thousands and possibly more.

How Can You Generate Your Own Electricity?

The average home does not need 24 kilowatts. In fact, a basic motor is easily constructed for next to nothing that can generate a good 7 kilowatts of power which is more than enough for most households.

The basic electric generator is a rotor, some magnets and some electrical wiring. John Christie and Lou Brits made their own version but I suggest you keep things very simple. In fact, I strongly recommend that you spend a nominal amount of around 50 dollars on a good set of plans which will give you diagrams and step by step instructions on building your magnetic motor generator. Or you can try to do it for “free” which will see you spending several months on your motor, all the while still paying your monthly bill to the power company. 🤔

[funkopersonal]

Here's your daily reminder that...

Jews are only 0.2% of the worlds population but...

Jews make up 14% of the World Total and 38% of the United States of America total winners for the Nobel Prize for Literature (source).

Of the 965 individual recipients of the Nobel Prize and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences between 1901 and 2023, at least 214 have been Jews or people with at least one Jewish parent, representing 22% of all recipients. (source)

Jews make up 14% of the total winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 18% of the total winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; 53% of the total winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction (source).

Jews make up 39% of the total winners of the Antoinette Perry (Tony) Award for Best Play; 54% of the total winners of the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical (with 62% of all Composers and 66% of all Lyricists of Best Musical-winning productions being Jewish) (source).

Jews make up 40% of the total winners of the Academy Award (Oscar) for Best Original Screenplay; and 34% of the total winners of the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay (source).

Although Jews constitute only 3% of the U.S. population...

80% of the nation’s professional comedians are Jewish (source).

90% of American comic book creators are jewish (source)

38% of the recipients of the United States National Medal of Science are Jewish (Source).

Jews are very successful, with educational levels higher than all other U.S. ethnic groups with the exception of Asian Americans, and income levels the highest of all groups. Six out of ten Jewish adults have college degrees, and 41% of Jewish families report a household income of $75,000 or more” (source)

Jews are a minority across the globe. We've been historically opressed and hated. But these key figures from history are all Jewish and loved, yet many don't even know they're jewish (or they don't know these people in the first place!):

Stan Lee (birth name: Stanley Martin Lieber) - An American comic book writer and editor, Former executive vice president and publisher of marvel Comics, creator of iron-man, spider-man, and more.

Albert Einstein - a Theoretical physicist, Received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics, developed the theory of relativity and the "worlds most famous equation"  (E = mc^2), and more.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg - Former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, co-authored the initial law school casebook on sex discrimination, co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the ACLU in 1972, and more.

Jack Kirby (birth name: Jacob Kurtzberg) - an American comic book artist, co-creator of Captain America, one of the most influential comic book artists

Harry Houdini (birth name: Erich Weisz) - a Hungarian-American escape artist, illusionist, and stunt performer, noted for his escape acts.

Emma Lazarus - An American author remembered for her sonnet "The New Colossus," Inspired by The Statue of Liberty and inscribed on its pedestal as of 1903.

Julius Rosenthal, Lillian Wald, Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch, Stephen Wise, and Henry Moskowitz - Jewish activists that helped form the NAACP along with W.E.B. Dubois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Mary Church Terrell.

Mark Zuckerberg - Founder and CEO of Meta, a businessman who co-founded the social media service Facebook, and within four years became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire Harvard alumni.

Joseph Pulitzer - a politician and newspaper publisher, his endowment to the Columbia University established the Pulitzer Prizes in 1917, he founded the Columbia School of Journalism which opened in 1912.

Jacob William Davis - a Latvian tailor who is credited with inventing modern jeans and who worked with Levi Strauss to patent and mass-produce them, died.

Irving Berlin - drafted at age 30 to write morale-boosting songs for military revues (including “God Bless America”). Many Berlin songs remained popular for decades, including “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” “Cheek to Cheek,” “Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better),” “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” and two celebrating Christian holidays: “White Christmas” and “Easter Parade.”

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel - received his doctorate in Berlin. He was arrested by the Nazis in 1938, moved to the U.S. in 1940, and became an influential figure in the 1960s, marching with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Alabama, and speaking out against the Vietnam War.

Elie Wiesel - Romanian-American writer and professor, holocaust survivor, nobel laureate, political activist. Authored 57 books including Night, a work based on his experiences as a Jewish prisoner in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps

Bob Dylan - an icon of folk, rock and protest music, won the Nobel Prize in literature for his complex and poetic lyrics.

J. Robert Oppenheimer - ran the Manhattan Project, considered the "father of the atomic Bomb," presented with the Enrico Fermi Award by President Lyndon Johnson.

Betty Friedan - co-founded the National Organization of Women and became its first president, wrote The Feminine Mystique (1963) and helped spark the second wave of feminism.

Gloria Steinem - one of the most prominent feminists of all time, launched Ms. Magazine and co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus with Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm, Betty Friedan and Myrlie Evers-Williams, widow of Medgar Evers.

Sergey Brin - an American businessman best known for co-founding Google with Larry Page, president of Alphabet Inc.

Judith Heumann - a founder of the disability rights movement, led a 26-day sit-in at a federal building in San Francisco. The protest spurred implementation of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, a precursor to the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Larry Kramer - co-founded Gay Men’s Health Crisis in response to the AIDS epidemic but was soon ousted over his confrontational activism. He went on to help launch a more strident group, ACT UP, and wrote a critically acclaimed play, The Normal Heart, about the early AIDS years in New York City.

Steven Spielberg - released his critically acclaimed epic film Schindler’s List, based on the true story of a German industrialist who saved Jews during the Holocaust. The movie won seven Oscars and led Spielberg to launch the Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California, which filmed interviews with 52,000 survivors of the Holocaust and genocides in Nanjing and Rwanda.

Calvin Klein - made designer jeans and the infamous ad starring Brooke Shields revolutionized the fashion industry, sold his company to Phillips-Van Heusen (now PVH) for $430 million. Klein was the first designer to win three consecutive Coty Awards for womenswear.

Daveed Diggs - an American actor, rapper, and singer-songwriter. he originated the dual roles of Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson in the musical Hamilton, for which he won a 2016 Tony Award for Best Actor in a Featured Role in a Musical. Along with the main cast of Hamilton, he was awarded a Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album in the same year.

And so much more. (a pretty decent list is available here)

Not only that, but the following are all Jewish inventions...

The Teddy Bear - made by Morris and Rose Michtom in honor of Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt.

The Ballpoint Pen - *the first commercially sucessfull ballpoint pen was made by Lazlo Biro, a Hungarian-Jew, and his brother.

Mobile Phones - made by Martin Cooper, nicknamed the "father of the cellphone", and was born in Chicago to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants.

The Barbie - made by Ruth Marianna Handler, born to Polish-Jewish immigrants.

Power Rangers - made by Haim Saban, a Jewish-Egyptian

Video Games - made by Ralph Baer, a German-Jew

Peeps - made by Sam Born, a Russian-Jewish immigrants who came to the United States in 1909.

Cards Against Humanity - created by a group of Jewish boys from the same high school

Many Superheroes including Superman, Ironman, spider-man, batman, and more!

and more! (an illustrated list available here.)

Conclusion: If you're Jewish, be proud. You come from a long line of successful people. No matter what happened to them, Jews persevered, and they strived for sucess. Be proud of your culture, your history, these are your people. You're Jewish.

(feel free to reblog and add more, or just comment and i'll add it!)

Last Updated: June 25, 1:35 AM EST

[prokopetz]

Sooo out of curiosity, are you aware of any TTRPGs that use tarot cards for resolution without just using the raw numbers and leaning more into the symbolism of each one? I’ve been getting really into Eidolon: Become Your Best Self 2E lately, and my brain just cannot accept that this is the first published game to actually do that. (I’ve seen games that use the numbers of the major arcana, but the actual forecasts I’ve never seen used before?)

The way you've phrased this makes me suspect the real purpose of this request was to get me to front-page a plug for your new favourite game on my blog, but I'm in a good mood, so I'll play ball. =P

To the topic, tabletop RPGs implementing conflict resolution via interpreting the symbolism of cards isn't terribly common, but it's far from unheard of. The earliest published example I'm personally aware of is Jonathan Tweet's Everway (1995), though this one's arguably not an answer to your question because it uses a proprietary 36-card cartomancy deck rather than a traditional tarot; it depends on whether you mean interpretive cartomancy in general, or the tarot in particular.

If you meant the tarot in particular, I suspect you're not going to see one prior to the early 2000s because of how difficult it was to get your hands on tarot cards in the 80s and 90s – and the lingering spectre of the Satanic Panic, of course! – but I'd love to be proven wrong.

(If anyone wants to offer their own examples in the notes, remember the brief: we're talking about games which use interpreting the symbolism of cartomancy cards as their core conflict resolution method, not just games which have tarot cards in them somewhere.)

[adventures-in-mangaland]

Even More Dead Boy Detectives Fic Recs

I've discovered some amazing new authors since my last post! And writers I've already recced have published more great stories So here's another fic rec post!

Who? You mean your teammate in the Codependency World Cup? (series) by RoseGanymede95

I couldn't chose! They're all great! Basically a series of Edwin and Charles through the years and on cases pre-show. It scratches that adjusting-to-being-dead/newly-escaped-from-Hell itch and the authors writing is magic! It also fleshes out a really interesting conflict in the payneland dynamic: Charles' drive to protect Edwin at all costs clashing with Edwin's guilt over putting Charles at risk/depriving him of some ideal afterlife. Parts one and four also introduces Constantine/Johanna and part three revolves around an absolutely gut-wrenching temporary break-up. 😢

In Hell I'll Be in Good Company by laylabinx

Charles rescuing Edwin from Hell does not go smoothly. Just. Bucketloads of Trauma for both of them. And for you, the Reader. It's so good though!

your fangs in my neck (like an anchor like a vow) by shadowquill17

Vampire Edwin AU! It's great because it combines the (homo)eroticism of vampiric feeding with Charles' whole bisexual crisis and post-confession Edwin worrying about making Charles uncomfortable. Also Charles is some kind of demigod/immortal agent of divine vengeance which is an AMAZING detail and I desperately want to see some fanart!

The same author's ongoing story to the pain is also excellent though very angsty (cw temporary character death). I'm anxiously waiting for an update!

To Memory Now I Can't Recall by engineering_madonna

This is an amnesia fic and the most recent in an established relationship series. The first two installments feature the boys getting together and navigating their new relationship, so pulling the old 'character A forgets their whole romantic relationship with character B' trope hits especially hard! The whole series is lovely, but I am WEAK for temporary-amnesia.

Lemonade & Sunrises by paraph

A Quiet Place AU! The boys are alive, but they're the only ones. Very bleak but in a way that makes me want more!

1999 au (series) by websters_lieb

The boys figure their shit out in the 90s. Also, Edwin gets to read Maurice and queer theory. The cases in both stories are compelling and the author's writing and characterisation of the boys are excellent.

I also recommend offer me that deathless death which is about the boys' first meeting, Charles' funeral and the birth of the agency.

if I could reach the stars (i'd give them all to you) by ObsessedWithFandom

Charles falls first, Edwin falls harder. This is an AU of the author's excellent Charles' bisexual awakening fic, which I also highly recommend. It has lovely OCs and Charles having a sweet little friendship/romance with the boy he saved in canon, which actually makes his death a whole lot more tragic.

Came up from that lake of fire by ghostinthelibrary

Charles and Edwin get caught escaping Hell and promise to capture a demon-eating ghost called The Deathless in exchange for their freedom. With the added twist that they get to be alive again! An exciting case, high stakes and all the alive-again culture shocks and emotional/interpersonal drama you could ask for.

gig officially gigged by laiqualaurelote

Band AU! It shouldn't work but it does. Which might also be an in-universe review for the band tbh. Idk, I loved Edwin's massive obscure musical instruments and Charles being his unpaid roadie. Peak Found Family Feels.

No Rehearsing It, No Reversing It by DontOffendTheBees

Charles overthinks being in love with Edwin, my beloved. This time with increasingly flimsy pretexts for why they NEED to kiss. Just perfect Idiots in Love, no notes.

The Case of David Bowie's Made up Sexuality by williamvapespeare

The agency attempt to help a living lesbian couple deal with a haunting. Meanwhile, Charles struggles through his bisexual (re)awakening. With bonus past (living) Charles no-homo-ing himself to the nth degree. Pure of heart, dumb of ass, indeed.

The lamps are going out by CasiHuman

Vengeful Spirit Edwin AU! Has some interesting ghost lore and Edwin being convinced his touch is painful to Charles (love that trope!). Also features some of the author's adorable/hilarious fanart at the end.

just frame the halves (and call them brothers) by Anonymous

Crystal stumbles upon the ghost of Edwin's older brother, who hires the agency to free him and his platoon from the battleground they've been haunting. Case fic with interesting details about Edwin's family life and an awkward as hell family reunion.

the case of the very long ferry ride by obsceme

Sex pollen but with skin hunger, so it's more touching turned making out and hand jobs in a bathroom. Interesting use of ghost lore and it's cute and well written.

Form 239, Schedule L by sanctuary_for_all

Charles Rowland's Love Language is Acts of Service: The Fic. So many feels! Plus Afterlife worldbuilding and some quality Night Nurse rep.

don't go sharing your devotions (lay all your love on me) by Hephanna

The boys and Crystal accidentally summon an alternate universe version of Charles. He's very... handsy. Charles being jealous of himself is objectively hilarious and it looks like it could be heading towards throuple territory. Possibly even a foursome, if alternate Edwin figures out parallel universe travel. Which he probably will.

Still a Better Lovestory by Vamillepudding

Hanahaki disease! Charles is on the case but Edwin's being weirdly uncooperative about his own curse. I loved the worldbuilding (there's a whole sisterhood of washerwomen!) and the angst, plus the writing is excellent.

The author has also written Eternal Sunshine, in which Edwin is cursed to feel no love of any kind. It makes for an interesting character study, contrasting cursed Edwin, his public reserve and his actual personality.

[elfwreck]

I have a friend who isn't anti-porn but it makes her sad that fanfic has a reputation for being porny and usually not very good. I'm fine with both those things and my views mostly align with that of AO3. I disagree with the idea that porn and badness are treated as equivalent, but for most people that's just how they think. But I was wondering if youve ever written something about this?

There is a lot of smut at AO3.

There is a lot of bad writing at AO3.

There's a lot of badly written smut at AO3.

...None of those are problems except for the people who think there is something wrong with those existing, or that there needs to be some external value that "balances" those that make those acceptable to exist as unwanted side-effects of "the good stuff."

The badly-written smut is also "the good stuff."

It's part of the reason AO3 exists. It's not intended to be an archive for "the high-quality fanfic that could be published if it weren't about characters that someone else wrote first"; it's an archive for "what fanfic writers want to write." That makes the terrible writing and the tacky porn and the badly-written tacky porn part of the reason the archive exists.

Tangent 1 (I'll connect these points later): Theodore Sturgeon said "90% of everything is crud." He was more-or-less referring to the science fiction field in the 50s, but it definitely extended to politics, business, and writing outside of science fiction.

...He was talking about published books in the 50s. Turns out, a lot more than 90% of writing is crud when there aren't any gatekeepers between it and the readers. But also:

Tangent 2, from the book "Art and Fear":

[A] ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

You don't get to "quality writing" without going through a lot of crappy writing.

That doesn't mean the crappy writing is garbage to be thrown out. If you make 50 pots or bowls or vases, and only one of them is The Good One... most of the rest are okay. Maybe not sale-quality good, but your-kitchen-table quality good. Maybe some aren't that good and are kids-toy-in-the-sandbox level good.

Bad writing has a purpose for the writer: they can use it as practice to get better. It has a purpose for the reader: It can serve as inspiration ("I can do better than that") or grammatical instruction ("that...does not work; why doesn't that work?") or just as entertainment ("eh, so it's missing a few commas; I can still understand it").

Smut and porn writing works the same way. It's of some value to the writer, and some to the readers.

It's not of value to everyone. That's what tags and filters are for, and why there's a summary and list of stats (like word counts)--so you can figure out if you're one of the readers for whom this piece of writing is useful or interesting.

But AO3, like any library, is not there to take the top 5% of Excellent Writing and provide it a showcase. It is absolutely for all 50 lbs of pots.

If your friend wants to read the good stuff, there are rec lists and collections to help her find it.

If she already manages that, and is just annoyed at how much of the not-good stuff (however she defines that) exists... she's picked the wrong battle. She's arguing with the ocean that it has too many kinds of fish and some are poisonous a lot of them are ugly.

[gynandromorph]

my advice for people who want to start making comics:

make sure to draw your trilogy magnum opus first. you wouldn't want to go out like tezuka with your master work unfinished

if something in your panel isn't perfect, don't move on! make sure there isn't a single thing wrong! you wouldn't want to live with the embarrassment forever, once it's published it's forever

if you look at the pages you've already drawn and they look kinda bad now, definitely make sure to redraw them before you draw any more of the new ones

if you get to a part of your story that's above your artistic skill level, just stop drawing altogether until you're magically capable of doing that one part

ideally you'll want to draw hunched over your screen with your wrist and neck at a 90 degree angle. make sure to sit like this for as often as possible as long as possible every day. never stretch or you might hurt your hand

if you're having fun, you're probably not taking this seriously enough. try to think about all of the people who will hate you and your work regardless of what you do and make your comics for THEM

never move forward with a project that might be flawed somewhere to someone. remember, a bad comic you never actually made can never be put in your callout,

[reasonsforhope]

"The first new treatment for asthma attacks in 50 years has been tested by British scientists.

The injection is more effective than the current method of steroid tablets—reducing the need for further treatment by 30%, according to a new study.

Researchers say their findings could be “game-changing” for millions of people around the world with asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)—especially because the drug is already available on the market.

Asthma attacks and COPD flare-ups, also known as “eosinophilic exacerbations”, can be deadly—with dozens of people dying every day in the UK after experiencing serious symptom flare-ups, according to official figures.

These exacerbations include symptoms like wheezing, coughing, and chest tightness due to inflammation resulting from high amounts of eosinophils, a type of white blood cell—and they involve almost half of asthma attacks and up to 30% of COPD flare-ups.

Yet medical treatments have barely changed for over half a century, as steroid drugs remained the mainstay of medication.

The downside of steroids like prednisolone, which can reduce inflammation in the lungs, is that they have severe side-effects, such as diabetes and osteoporosis. The treatment also fails many patients who need repeated courses of steroids, or get worse and need hospitalization within 90 days.

Results from the recent clinical trial led by scientists from King’s College London revealed that a drug already available can be re-purposed in emergency settings to reduce the need for further treatment.

“This could be a game-changer for people with asthma and COPD,” said lead investigator Professor Mona Bafadhel, of King’s College.

The team studied Benralizamab, a monoclonal antibody that targets eosinophils to reduce lung inflammation, which is currently used for the treatment of severe asthma—and the trial found a single dose can be four times more effective when injected at the point of exacerbation compared to steroid tablets.

The study, which was published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, split people at high risk of an asthma or COPD attack into three groups. One group received benralizumab injection and dummy tablets, another received standard of care (prednisolone 30mg daily for five days) and dummy injection and the third group receiving both benralizumab injection and standard of care.

After 28 days, respiratory symptoms—like coughing, wheezing, and breathlessness—were reduced with benralizumab.

After 90 days, there were four times fewer people in the benralizumab group that failed treatment compared to standard of care with prednisolone.

Treatment with the benralizumab injection also led to fewer follow-up episodes that required seeing a doctor or going to a hospital. There was also an improvement in the quality of life for people with asthma and COPD.

“We’ve used the drug in a different way – at the point of an exacerbation – to show that it’s more effective than steroid tablets which is the only treatment currently available,” said Prof. Bafadhel.

“The big advance is the finding that targeted therapy works in asthma and COPD attacks.”

The researchers say the jab can potentially be administered safely at home, too.

“We hope these pivotal studies will change how asthma and COPD exacerbations are treated for the future, ultimately improving the health for over a billion people living with asthma and COPD across the world,” she added...

77-year-old patient Geoffrey Pointing, who took part of the study, called the injections “fantastic”.

“I didn’t get any side effects like I used to with the steroid tablets. I used to never sleep well the first night of taking steroids, but the first day on the study, I could sleep that first night, and I was able to carry on with my life without problems.”

“Honestly, when you’re having a flare up, you can hardly breathe. Anything that takes that away and gives you back a normal life is what you want.""

-via Good News Network, December 1, 2024

[komsomolka]

Since the early days of the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviks and later communist parties everywhere placed a great emphasis on culture and on the contribution cultural workers could make to the building of socialism. One of the first things the Soviet Army of occupation did at the end of the war, was attempt to resuscitate cultural activity in a war-ravaged and demoralised Germany. The one thing the Russians could never get their head around was how a country with such a high level of culture, a nation that had produced a Bach and a Beethoven, a Goethe and a Schiller could have carried out such barbaric crimes in other countries. The Soviet army had cultural officers attached to each battalion and the war had hardly ended before they began seeking out cultural workers and encouraging them to take up their batons, musical instruments, pens and paintbrushes again. Temporary cinemas were established, orchestras formed, theatres opened and publishing houses set up.

In contrast to West Germany, in the Soviet Zone and later in the GDR, there was also an early emphasis on making films about the Nazi period as a means of educating and informing a nation ignorant of or in denial about what had happened. [...]

The GDR had more theatres per capita than any other country in the world and in no other country were there more orchestras in relation to population size or territory. With 90 professional orchestras, GDR citizens had three times more opportunity of accessing live music, than those in the FRG, 7.5 times more than in the USA and 30 times more than in the UK. It also had one of the world’s highest book publishing figures. This small country with its very limited economic resources, even in the fifties was spending double the amount on cultural activities as the FRG.

Every town of 30,000 or more inhabitants in the GDR had its theatre and cinema as well as other cultural venues. [...] Subsidised tickets to the theatre and concerts were always priced so that everyone could afford to go. Many factories and institutions had regular block-bookings for their workers which were avidly taken up. School pupils from the age of 14 were also encouraged to go to the theatre once a month and schools were able to obtain subsidised tickets. [...]

All towns and even many villages had their own ‘Houses of Culture’, owned by the local communities and open for all to use. These were places that offered performance venues, workshop space and facilities for celebratory gatherings, discos, drama groups etc. There was a lively culture of local music and folk-song groups, as well as classical musical performance.

Stasi State or Socialist Paradise? The German Democratic Republic and What Became of It by Bruni de la Motte & John Green with Seumas Milne (Contributor), 2015.

[vintagegeekculture]

"The Ayla Descent Theory" of Mary Sues

"Children of the Earth," Luis Royo.

After the success of Jean M. Auel's stone age novel Clan of the Cave Bear, there was a very lengthy trend in the publishing world of stone age adventure novels aimed at women that lasted for a decade and only really fizzled out in the early 2000s. After all, "Ayla," the name of the main character of these books, was one of the top baby names of 1987.

The target audience for these books were weird midwestern aunts....you know, the Mists of Avalon and the Mercedes Lackey/Valdemar audience. Therefore, the Clan of the Cave Bear imitators also featured things of interest to the weird aunt audience: Scotland, redhaired women with sharp tongues, commanding wolves, Ireland, Feminism, riding herds of wild horses bareback in scenic locations, Wicca, matriarchial religions, swimming with dolphins....but above all else, American Indians (a culture this audience finds interesting, as anyone who has seen the home decor of a typical weird midwestern aunt can attest), with many novels set in Ice Age America, like Children of the Dawn, Reindeer Moon and the First Americans. Decades later, this audience would form the core fandom for Game of Thrones, and the character of Khaleesi Targaryen in particular.

These books almost assuredly still have a place of honor on the book shelf of the weirdest woman at your job.

Nearly all of these imitators have two of Clan of the Cave Bear's defining traits: 1) a supremely beautiful, usually blonde athletic and statuesque main character over 5'11" who does not realize that she is so beautiful and desirable, who is good at a variety of different skills and is friendly with animals like hawks, dolphins, or horses, and 2) a love triangle between this aforementioned blond but innocent Venus and two bodybuilder muscular he-men cave hunks, one of whom is a blonde guy with long rock star hair (it was the 80s), and the other being a buff black guy with dreadlocks (or otherwise ethnic in some way).

The heroine usually picks the blonde guy in the end, but the audience usually picks the ethnic guy.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, in the broader culture of fandom, it was fashionable to dump on "Mary Sues" (indulgent wish-fulfillment author personas in fanfiction) and the people who wrote them. Accusations of creating a Mary Sue approached a kind of hysteria. Even at the time, when everyone else was getting swept up in this, I thought that getting mad about aunties writing fanfiction showed a loss of perspective, and was a bit silly. Thankfully, we've benefitted from moral evolution: the consensus in fandom now is that writing aspirational characters is a harmless activity that tests a young writer's creative muscles, like the half-Vulcan pretty new ensign on the Enterprise that Kirk and Spock both fall in love with, or a new archer girl who Legolas falls in love with joining the Fellowship. This hate walked hand in hand with insecurities, in the exact same way that people worried about their appearance or concerned with their weight are often cruel to fat people, and there were frequent tests if this or that character in your writing was a Mary Sue.

There was a running joke in this 2000s culture of anti-self insertion called the "Ayla Descent Theory of Mary Sues." The joke was that Mary Sues came into existence because Ayla, the beautiful, athletic heroine of the Clan of the Cave Bear novels, was the ancestor of their entire lineage, as the first known Mary Sue to ever exist in the historical record, described as being a statuesque blonde who did everything right and was always at the center of love triangles, and who changed human history.

According to the running joke, Mary Sues everywhere were descended from Ayla from Clan of the Cave Bear, and she was the first to exist, and Ayla was the explanation of where all the Enterprise's new ensigns main characters fall in love with come from.